Dumpster Diving the Anarchist Library Text Bin

Most of the texts are saved to unlisted URLs so that they can be remembered by librarians and searched through in an ‘unpublished console’.
Often the reason given for deleting a text was just because it was discovered that the text had lots of OCR errors, so fell below quality standards. I found a few texts that I thought were worth the time fixing, so I fixed them, re-submitted them and one has already been re-published.
I agreed that some of the texts weren’t suited for the anarchist library, but I was glad to find them as I thought they were worthwhile archiving on other libraries.
I disagreed with some of the reasons for deleting texts given by librarians, but I found the reasons interesting nonetheless for understanding the library crew’s archiving ethos.

Finally I’ve been able to gather together a collection of essays to display here for people who are curious to read some of the texts that were deleted for unclear reasons or because the librarians thought they weren’t anarchist enough.

None of the texts below are ones that were deleted due to a request by the author, or DMCA, or bad formatting.

I won’t show the unlisted URL’s in case a spam bot brakes the texts or something. Also, if any authors of the texts below stumble on this collection and wish to see their text removed, you can feel free to edit the text yourself to delete your section, or leave a note in the proposed edits, or email ‘TheLibraryofUnconventionalLives at proton.me’ and I’m sure it’ll be deleted.

A List of Some of the Deleted Texts

A Table of Some of the Deleted Texts

Title	Deleted reason	Research Notes	Subtitle	Author	Topics	Date	Source	Notes	Date Published on T@L
1. Finbar Cafferkey: The life and death of an Irish fighter ‘who put his money where his mouth is’ in Ukraine	not anarchist, only mentions they were helped by anarchists	I think the network of internationalist and anarchist support for the Ukranian people is an important and inspiring subject.	‘He was quite pragmatic about it’: Family and comrades tell the story of how an Achill islander (45) wound up first in Syria and later in Ukraine	Conor Gallagher and Daniel McLaughlin	2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Finbar Cafferkey, Ireland, anti-imperialism, eulogy, obituary	July 15, 2023	Retrieved on 4^th September 2023 from www.irishtimes.com		2023-09-04
2. The Virtual Fatory	as per yea.			Anton Freinen	spectacle, social sciences, situationist, post-situationism, post-industrial	12/10/2017
3. Armenia doesn’t need another political party — it needs a MOVEMENT!	deleted			Armenian Libertarian-Socialist Movement	Armenia, political parties, social movements, Libertarian Socialism	February 8, 2007	Retrieved on 27^th January 2021 from azat.wordpress.com
4. Communization and the abolition of gender	deleted		From Communization and its discontents: Contestation, critique, and contemporary struggles	Maya Andrea Gonzalez	communisation, gender abolition, gender nihilism, gender	2011	https://libcom.org/library/communization-its-discontents-contestation-critique-contemporary-struggles
5. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto	i can see the light, but not taking me there			Aaron Swartz	civil disobedience, copyright, hacktivism	July 2008, Eremo, Italy	Retrieved on 2017-10-21 from https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt		2017-10-21
6. Economic Battle	accidentally published, pending review			Andrew Klemenčič	praxis	October 1906	Prolatarec, Vol. 1 No. 1	Translated by CarniolanLeshy
7. Child Molestation vs. Child Love	deleted for now pending further conversation	Wolfi’s philosophy and creative writing style has been the subject of popular discussions among anarchists, so it would be valuable to see a critique of how Wolfi marshaled his particular political philosophy in defense of child sexual abuse. Also, so that people can feel better prepared to be able to notice and critique this kind of apologia for abuse if it’s ever taken up by other people in one’s own life.	Critically Annotated by Black Oak Clique	Feral Faun	sex, criticism, egoism, critique	2019, 1987	https://heresydistro.noblogs.org/		2019-08-26
8. A Tyranny Of Editors	deleted, pending further review		How Wikipedia Became Another System of Oppression	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	censorship, transphobia	September 8^th, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/a-tyranny-of-editors/		2020-09-09
9. All Days Matter!	deleted, pending further review		Why Celebrate Just This One Day?	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	anti-racism, black lives matter	December 25, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/all-days-matter/		2020-12-25
10. Anarchism Before Labels	deleted, pending further review		The Eternal and Constant Gardeners	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	post-left, anarchism without adjectives	September 13^th, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/13/anarchism-before-labels/		2020-09-12
11. Identity Poltics Are Boring As Fuck	deleted, pending further review		But So Are Your Leftist Politics After Twenty Fucking Years	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	anti-politics, post-left	September 23, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/identity-politics-are-boring-as-fuck/		2020-09-27
12. Insurrectional Nihilism	deleted, pending further review		There Is No Hope, Therefore We Rebel	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	anarcho-nihilism, nihilism, insurrectionary anarchy, insurrectionism	July 30, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/07/30/insurrectional-nihilism/		2020-08-06
13. Second Wave “Feminism” Is Feminism...	deleted, pending further review		...In the Same Way That National “Socialism” Is Socialism	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	transphobia, racism, fascism	December 24, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/second-wave-feminism-is-feminism/		2020-12-27
14. The Fox Knows the Hen	deleted, pending further review		Deconstructing the Token Minority Defense	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	tokenism, racism, transphobia, oppression, liberalism	June 5, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/06/05/the-fox-knows-the-hen/		2020-06-05
15. The Ones Who Came Back to Omelas	deleted, pending further review		A Sequel to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	fan fiction, fiction, science fiction, insurrectionism	September 2, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/02/the-ones-who-came-back-to-omelas/		2020-09-23
16. White Supremacy Is a Disease	deleted, pending further review		And the Only Cure Is Anarchy	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	anti-racism, insurrectionary	December 23, 2020	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/12/23/white-supremacy-is-a-disease/		2020-12-27
17. A Tranarchist Manifesto	deleted, pending further review		Transgender, Transhuman, Anarchism	Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl	Anarcho-Transhuman, anarcho-transhumanism, transgender	December 22, 2019	https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/a-tranarchist-manifesto/		2020-02-04
18. ‘Human Rights’ and the Discontinuous Mind	Discussion pending			Anonymous	anthropocentrism, anti-civilisation, biology, evolution, human rights, science	16^th July 2011	Retrieved on September 19^th, 2011 from challengingciv.blogspot.com		2011-09-19
19. Chile: Anatomy of an economic miracle, 1970–1986	discussion pending			Black Flag	Black Flag, Chile, 1973, neoliberalism	1999	Retrieved on September 11^th 2013 From http://libcom.org/library/chile-anatomy-of-an-economic-miracle		2013-09-11
20. The IWW in Canada				G. Jewell	IWW, Canada, unions, syndicalism		<libcom.org/library/iww-canada-g-jewell>	Leaflet on the birth and history of the Canadian section of Industrial Workers of the World.	2013-08-07
21. Ableism at the Anarchy Fair	DELETED pending conversation			Anonymous	COVID-19, pandemic, bookfair, ableism, communique	11/25/2023	Retrieved on 2023-11-28 from <cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/7KKDv0H+BmlXmhJVmxzKeVmc03gX1eIfNCMcA+6oTps>		2023-11-28
22. Chinese Anarchism for the 21^th Century	pending discussion		The case for unique principles and ideology for the development of a Chinese identity within anarchist politics and the wider socio-political sphere	Li Meiyi	Chinese Anarchism, 21^st century	March 10, 2018	Retrieved on 15^th April 2021 from daoistsocialism.wordpress.com
23. Capitalist Education and Learned Helplessness			Shaun Riley on learned helplessness in relation to capitalist education	Shaun Riley	education, revolution	August 2013	Freedom News, Vol 74, August 2013, Page 7. <freedomnews.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Freedom-2013-08.pdf>		2024-05-16
24. Think for Yourself, Question Authority	to the bin for now, pending further review			Arno Ruthofer	accelerationism, artificial intelligence, chaos, computers, counterculture, cybernetics, death, democracy, drugs, futurism, futurist, Genetic Engineering, Internet, nanotechnology, quantum physics, religion, space, spirituality, technology, transhumanism, Timothy Leary	1997	Retrieved on 14^th April 2020 from web.archive.org		2020-04-14
25. Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation	unpublished pending further conversation			Angela Y. Davis	police, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, Black Liberation, prison, United States of America, Not Anarchist	May, 1971	<historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/davispoprprblli.html>	This is a good short video to go along with the reading: <youtube.com/watch?v=PFz6MmtlQDw>	2021-03-03
26. The Anarchistic Devil	unpublished, need to research author and txt a bit more			Stephen Edred Flowers	atheism, civilization, God, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, materialism, Mikhail Bakunin, spirituality	1997	Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent
27. The Devil and Karl Marx				Stephen Edred Flowers	atheism, communism, dialectics, God, Hegel, Karl Marx, marxism, materialism, rationalism, religion	1997	Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent. <archive.org/details/StephenEFlowersLordsOfTheLeftHandPath>		2024-05-16
28. The Left-Overs	not anarchist	Cool critique of a small post-left to fascist pipeline. https://ecology.iww.org/texts/AlexanderReidRoss/TheLeft-Overs	How Fascists Court the Post-Left	Alexander Reid Ross	anti-fascism; fascism; fascist creep; post-left; criticism and critique; anarcho-primitivism; Bob Black; ELF; green anarchism; Hakim Bey; John Zerzan; Lawrence Jarach; Max Stirner; nihilism	29 March, 2017	Retrieved on 28 September, 2022 from antifascistnews.net	Alexander Reid Ross is a former co-editor of the Earth First! Journal and the author of Against the Fascist Creep. He teaches in the Geography Department at Portland State University and can be reached at <aross@pdx.edu>.	2022-09-28
29. Where did all the tankies come from?	transphobia. can discuss. removing for now. see comment.	I disagree that the one sentence was necessarily transphobic.	How anarchists fucked up and by inaction created the tankie resurgence	William Gillis	Authoritarian Left	16^th August 2020	Retrieved on 14^th January 2020 from threadreaderapp.com		2021-01-14
30. Thirty Years Ago Today I Shot My First Fascist	DELETED is this by an anarchist? doesn’t use the word, couldn’t find info about it online	Anarchist internationalists often write under local names given to them during their service. It feels very relevant to the current bombing of Gaza and anarchist participation in protests against the bombings. Anonymous, but posted at the same time as a public PLO volunteer with a similar story.		Ali Al-Aswad	anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, history, Palestine, armed struggle	30.07.2008	<indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/leedsbradford/2008/07/405016.html>		2024-03-06
31. Towards a New Oceania	author not anarchist			Albert Wendt	anti-colonialism, postcolonialism, Pacific-Islands, culture, purity, Christianity	1976	Retrieved on 4/10/2023 from https://ethnc3990.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/wendt-toward-a-new-oceania.pdf		2023-04-11
32. Anarchism and Immigration	author supports prison, see “The Anarchist Response to Crime”			Scott of the Insurgency Culture Collective	borders, immigration, Insurgency Culture Collective, syndicalist		Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from www.cat.org.au		2010-01-12
33. Anarchists Hate Racism	author supports prison, see “The Anarchist Response to Crime”			Scott of the Insurgency Culture Collective	anti-racist, class, Insurgency Culture Collective, race, syndicalist, United States		Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from www.cat.org.au		2010-01-09
34. Black Trans Feminist Thought Can Set Us Free	deleted no mention of anarchist word			Che Gossett	transfeminism, black transfeminism, abolition, black liberation	9 December 2020	Retrieved on 14 December 2022 from truthout.org		2022-12-15
35. Epistemelogical Anarchism	Doesn’t seem to be anarchist in orientation.		The Philosophy of Jeet Kun Do	Danielle Bolelli	Martial Arts, Jeet Kun Do, Bruce Lee, Taoism, Nietzsche, Buddhism, Nihilism	2003	On The Warrior’s Path Philosophy, Fighting and Martial Arts Mythology (Second Edition, 2003)		2021-12-27
36. Against Anarcho-Putinism	fascist-apologetic (specifically Azov regiment, etc.) and cop-jacketing		Debunking Russian propaganda among anarchists about Russian-Ukrainian war	Dark Night	Russia, anti-militarism, Ukraine, war, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine	December 2022	https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/t+tXpWJzo07LiSu4g+Nsko9FHfrmdsCBhK0g-clwUj8/
37. Insurrection and Production	I read this. It’s about seizing state power, establishing a ‘transition period’ etc. ‘Insurrection’ does not refer to Bonnanno, Weir etc. References include Group of International Communists, Paul Mason (UK Labour party), Trotsky, ‘Bolchevik foreign policy,’ etc.		An empirically heavy mind-game for the debate on working class strategy: First steps in a six-month revolutionary transition period in the UK region	Angry Workers of the World	communization, insurrectionary, revolution, libertarian communism	August 2016	https://www.angryworkers.org/2016/08/29/insurrection-and-production		2021-03-08
38. A way propounded to make the poor in these and other nations happy	It was decided that this utopian text is not proto-anarchist or anarchistic.		By bringing together a fit suitable and well qualified people unto one Houshold-government, or little-Common-wealth.	Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy	not-anarchist, utopianism, political philosophy, cooperatives, utopia, Christian	1659	http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A54515.0001.001	Plockhoy, a Dutch radical, wrote this plan of a proto-socialist society during the regime of Cromwell. His vision was of a society in which no one was opressed or exploited, people where equals, and labour was organized cooperatively. A society that was based on Christian virtues of justice, love, and solidarity. And lastly a society that was freed from the yoke of evil people, espicially those who managed ‘to live from the labour of others’. Although Cromwell showed interested in his petitions to establish his idealized societies in England, he died and Plockhoy was unable to get support from Cromwell’s sucessors. Eventually he led a Dutch utopian colony to the the New World near the older abondened colony of Swaanendael (present day Lewes, Delaware), but within 13 months the colony had been crushed by the English, where during or some while after Plockhoy is presumed to have died.	2021-09-06
39. The Problem with Nonprofits	no anarchist word		Adapted from Another Slice	Another Slice	industrial complex, nonprofits, capitalism, activism	09/26/2020	youtube.com		2023-04-07
40. Whoring Out Our Trauma	no anarchist word, anarchy, anarchism. looks interesting, but not specifically anarchist it seems		Prostitution and Sexual Abuse	Jack Parker	sex work	1/3/23	Retrieved on 1^st March 2023 from https://jacksurviveswhoring.wordpress.com/2023/03/01/whoring-out-our-trauma/
41. Imagination and the Carceral State	none of the four texts mention anarchist word			Joshua Bennett	blackness, abolition	December 2020 — January 2021	Retrieved on 14 December 2022 from cabinetmagazine.org		2022-12-15
42. A Half Revolution: Making Sense of EDSA ’86 and Its Failures	not anarchist			Allen Severino	after the revolution, reformism, Bourgeois ideology, Philippines	2021	https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/notes-and-essays/edsa-half-revolution-a2416-20210225-lfrm	This is originally published in Esquire as a sort of a critical retrospect on the EDSA Revolution from a perspective that it has failed to deliver anything or everything, aside from the return of the status quo. For all intents and purposes, we can say that EDSA is nothing more but a conservative restoration. It hides itself in a progressive veneer from time to time, while justifying the repressions and atrocities that its agents have comitted against the people in the name of its ideals.	2021-02-03
43. Life After Patriarchy	not anarchist		Three Reflections on the Coming Revolution	Alnoor Ladha	patriarchy	MARCH 6, 2018	www.kosmosjournal.org
44. Pushed by the Violence of Our Desires	not anarchist			Anonymous	anarcha-feminism, feminism, 1970s	1991	Retrieved on 7/17/2023 from archive.org/details/italianfeministt0000unse	Notes from the zine: This piece was written anonymously. Published in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, 1991, edited by Paola Bonno, Sandra Kemp. Thanks & love to Yadira and “the team”.	2023-07-17
45. Black liberal, your time is up	not anarchist		Yes, tell the world that we are fed up. But, Black liberal, know that we are finished with you, too.	Yannick Giovanni Marshall	George Floyd uprising, black liberation, anti-liberalism	1 Jun 2020	https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/1/black-liberal-your-time-is-up/
46. Politics at the End of History	DELETED not anarchist			Cam Cannon	criticism and critique, teleology, marxism, communism, anti-state, dictatorship of the proletariat	July 2023	Retrieved on August 13^th, 2023 from https://www.negationmag.com/articles/the-specter-of-hegel.		2023-08-13
47. From Urumqi to Shanghai: Demands from Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists	DELETED not anarchist		A letter on strategy and solidarity with Uyghur struggle	Chinese and Hong Kong socialists	China, social movements, solidarity, internationalism, strategy, indigenous solidarity, social control, settler colonialism	November 28^th, 2022	Retrieved on November 28^th, 2022 from https://lausancollective.com/2022/from-urumqi-shanghai/.	This is an expanded version of a letter written by Chinese and Hong Kong socialists on the mainland and overseas on the night of 26 November 2022, when protests first erupted. The abridged Chinese version first appeared in Borderless Movement (https://borderless-hk.com/) on 27 November. This version has been revised through the weekend as events developed. Republished with permission.	2022-11-28
48. Burning Bridges	not anarchist		Disconnecting From White Culture and Fighting for Liberation	Curtis Fields and Brooke Harter	anti-racism, anti-capitalism, direct action, whiteness, community organizing	October 18, 2021			2022-03-25
49. A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments	not anarchist			David Wengrow	archaeology, anthropology, civilization, cosmopolitanism, ancient history	2 October 2018	Retrieved on 20 March 2023 from aeon.co.		2023-03-20
50. Rethinking cities, from the ground up				David Wengrow	anthropology, archaeology, gatherer-hunters, cities, prehistory, ancient history	4 September 2019	<medium.com/whose-society-whose-cohesion/rethinking-cities-from-the-ground-up-73d92059b15f>		2023-03-20
51. What Women Should Know About Communism				He Yin Zhen	Communism, Anarcha-feminism, Feminism	1907	<afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/cup/hezhen_women_communism.pdf>	The intellectual life of early twentieth century China was a rich mixture of Confucian scholarship (clearly a fading tradition), along with a variety of western ideas — social Darwinism, feminism, anarchism, anti-Manchu revolutionary thought and so on.	2021-06-08
52. Community Control, Workers’ Control, and the Cooperative Commonwealth	not anarchist			Howard “Howie” Hawkins	green anarchism	January 1, 1993	Society and Nature: The International Journal of Social Ecology, Vol. 3 (January 1993)	A shorter version of this article appeared in Regeneration: A Magazine of Left Green Social Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1991). Howard Hawkins is a founding member of both the Green Party USA and the Left Green Network. He lives in Syracuse, New York, where he is Director of CommonWorks, a federation of worker and consumer cooperatives.	2020-12-04
53. And The War Drags On	DELETED not anarchist			Internationalist Perspective	criticism and critique, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, class war, anti-war	April 16^th, 2023	Retrieved on August 29^th, 2023 from https://internationalistperspective.org/and-the-war-drags-on/.		2023-08-30
54. Fathers and Children	not anarchist	I think it would be a good not-anarchist literature exception since it's relevant to Emma Goldman's life tragectory, etc.		Ivan Turgenev	nihilism, fiction, not anarchist	1862	Retrieved on 3^rd November 2021 from www.gutenberg.org	Translated by Constance Clara Garnett.	2024-05-16
55. Basic Politics of Movement Security	deleted not anarchist			J. Sakai, Mandy Hiscocks	g20, operational security, opsec, security, security culture, informant, surveillance	2013	Retrieved on May 2, 2021 from archive.org
56. Beginner’s Kata	deleted not anarchist		uncensored stray thoughts on revolutionary organization	J. Sakai	anarchist organization, organization, not-anarchist, organizing	December 4, 2018	Text: https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/kata/ Cover: https://www.akpress.org/beginner-s-kata.html	Publisher: Kersplebedeb.	2021-06-09
57. A Case of Mutual Aid	not anarchist		Wikipedia, Politeness, and Perspective Taking	Joseph M. Reagle Jr.	Wikipedia, mutual aid	2004	Retrieved on 26^th November 2022 from reagle.org		2022-11-26
58. The Evolution of the Language Faculty	not anarchist	I know it risks modern day anarchism being seen as a chomsky cult, but I think it’s possibly good to see one text on Chomsky’s academic chops. It’s a useful part of the equation of whether he has anything useful to say, since his motivation behind studying language is also connected to his desire to see massive societal change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXwdlzvkwRA	Clarifications and implications	Marc D.Hauser, Noam Chomsky, W. Tecumseh Fitch	evolution, language	September 2005	Retrieved on 11^th September 2021 from dash.harvard.edu	ISSN 0022–2860. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.02.005	2021-09-11
59. Exiting The Vampire Castle	Not anarchist			Mark Fisher, (k-punk)	call outs, liberalism, identity politics, acid communism	November 22 2013
60. Workers Launch Wave Of Wildcat Strikes As Trump Pushes For ‘Return To Work’ Amidst Exploding Coronavirus	not anarchist enough			It’s Going Down	COVID-19, United States, general strike	March 26, 2020	Retrieved on 2020-04-02 from itsgoingdown.org		2020-04-02
61. What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?	not anarchist, but open for more discussion on this one			Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council	dada, German Revolution, art, communism	1919	Retrieved on 8^th June 2021 from libcom.org	Manifesto written by Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann, first published in ‘Der Dada 1’ (1919), in the context of the unfolding, German revolution.	2021-06-08
62. Liberation Theology for Quakers	Not anarchist.			Alice & Staughton Lynd	Liberation Theology; Quakers; religion; Nicaragua; Catholicism	April 1996	archive.org		2022-10-09
63. Outlaw Kings and Rebellion Chic	Not anarchist.			Alister MacQuarrie	liberalism	March 27, 2019	Retrieved on 25 October 2023 from newsocialist.org.uk/outlaw-kings-rebel-chic		2023-10-26
64. Think of the (queer) children	Not anarchist.		Minnesota’s sex education requirements fail LGBTQ+ youth	Ava Gardener			LGBTQ+ identities	CW: Within this op-ed I discuss experiences of homophobic/transpobic assault/abuse implied to be of a sexual nature; if you need support, crisis counseling, or advocacy please contact the Aurora Center for Advocacy & Education at 612-626-9111 or Outfront Minnesota at 800-800-0350.	2021-12-13
65. A Planned and Coordinated Anarchy	not anarchist.		The Barricades of 1971 and the “Diliman Commune”	Joseph Scalice	Philippines, student movement, commune, anarchy, history, Stalinism, communist party, communism	December 2018	Retrieved on 2020-09-03 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330336239. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, December 2018. DOI: 10.1353/phs.2018.0035		2020-09-20
66. Revisiting the Model	Not anarchist.		Thoughts on Jane McAlevey’s Plan For Union Power	Kim Moody	Labor Union, trade unions, syndicalism, labor notes		spectrejournal.com		2021-09-28
67. You Shouldn’t Have to Pay to Be Alive	Not anarchist.		Reasons and Direct Action Possibilities for Labor-Free Income	Lavra Tamutus	universal basic income, common resources, plutocracy, ableism, direct action, guaranteed income, anti-work, resource-based economy, social profit, wealth	November 26, 2021	Retrieved on December 28, 2012 from https://moneylesssociety.com/economy/you-shouldnt-have-to-pay-to-be-alive/	Originally rejected from an essay submission about Guaranteed Income, then edited and published online by Moneyless Society on November 26, 2021. You can check out and jump into the project I’m working on at magnova.space	2021-12-29
68. Imagining an optimistic cyber-future	Not anarchist.			Tech Learning Collective	2021-01-05		Retrieved on 2021-02-28 from https://techlearningcollective.com/2021/01/05/imagining-an-optimistic-cyber-future.html		2021-03-01
69. The Shape of Things to Come	Not anarchist. If I recall correctly, we mean to exclude J. Sakai from the library.			J. Sakai	Marxism, anti-imperialism, history, criticism and critique, world-systems theory	August 2023	“The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings And Interviews” by J. Sakai, published by Kersplebedeb (ISBN: 9781989701218)	Includes Part I and II of the interview from 2020 and 2022, title is the same as the collection it was published in. Footnotes adapted from “Marginalized Notes / Monday Nov. 28, 2022” by J. Sakai	2024-02-01
70. International Council Correspondence, Volume 1, Issue 1	Not specifically anti-statist.			International Council Correspondence	Council Communism, Libertarian marxism, paul mattick	October 1934	Retrieved on 7/19/23 from <marxists.org/subject/left-wing/icc/index.htm>		2023-07-19
71. The Gender Binary Is a Tool of White Supremacy	Not sure if this is anarchist.		A brief history of gender expansiveness — and how colonialism slaughtered it	Kravitz M.	gender, white supremacy, colonialism	14 July 2021	Retrieved on 27 October 2021 from https://aninjusticemag.com/the-gender-binary-is-a-tool-of-white-supremacy-db89d0bc9044		2021-10-27
72. Democratic Nation	this text is literally about state formation. not anarchist.			Abdullah Öcalan	democratic confederalism, decentralization, Direct Democracy, democracy	2016	ocalan-books.com		2019-08-02
73. DIY Template for Horizontal Bylaws	Usufruct Collective is libertarian socialist but not all of their texts ought be on the library			Usufruct Collective	assembly, democratic assemblies, Direct Democracy, constitution	04/04/22	usufructcollective.wordpress.com	added all relevant features	2022-11-12
74. Strike Strategy	DELETED writer is not anarchist		A practical manual for labor on the conduct of strikes	John Steuben	labor, strike, union, labor organizing, wildcat strike, organizing	1950	Retrieved on 3/13/2022 from <archive.org/details/strikestrategy00steurich>		2022-11-25
75. The Authoritarians	The mid-term elections of 2006 give hope that the best values and traditions of the country will ultimately prevail.’ can we not? deleted pending discussion.			Bob Altemeyer	authoritarianism, not anarchist	2006	Retrieved on 7^th April 2021 from libgen.rs		2021-04-07
76. Leaves of Grass	for now, published by accident.			Walt Whitman	sex, sexuality, free love, poetry, individualist anarchism, individualism	1855	https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322
77. The Life and Writings of Severine		Text not archived.		Severine
78. Intellectual Property		Text not archived.		The Anarchist Library
79. Christian Theology of the Homosexual Reaction		Text not archived.
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1. Finbar Cafferkey: The life and death of an Irish fighter ‘who put his money where his mouth is’ in Ukraine

Deleted reason: not anarchist, only mentions they were helped by anarchists

Subtitle: ‘He was quite pragmatic about it’: Family and comrades tell the story of how an Achill islander (45) wound up first in Syria and later in Ukraine

Author: Conor Gallagher and Daniel McLaughlin

Authors: Conor Gallagher, Daniel McLaughlin

Topics: 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Finbar Cafferkey, Ireland, anti-imperialism, eulogy, obituary

Date: July 15, 2023

Date Published on T@L: 2023-09-04T08:45:30

Source: Retrieved on 4^th September 2023 from www.irishtimes.com

Colm Cafferkey was getting a bag of chips in Keel on Achill Island when he got the call saying his older brother Finbar was missing in action on the front lines in Ukraine.

Finbar and two other international volunteers were fighting with Ukrainian units in April to keep open a vital supply route to the city of Bakhmut, which was on verge of being overrun by the Russian invaders.

A sustained mortar strike hit the group, causing many casualties. Amid the chaos no one could be sure what happened to the 45-year-old Mayo man.

For the next week the Cafferkey family was worried but hopeful. Finbar had a reputation for disappearing for days or weeks at a time, only to pop up in another city or country.

Colm recalls them attending 1996 All-Ireland football final between Mayo and Meath and Finbar failing to show up at an arranged meeting spot.

“He rings us a few days later and he is in London. And then he rings a week later and he’s in Holland,” Colm recalls with a smile. “He could go three months without texting you.”

A week after he first heard his brother was missing, Colm got confirmation: Finbar was killed in the strike near Bakhmut, the devastated city in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, during Europe’s bloodiest battle since the second World War. He is the third Irish man known to have been killed in the fighting since the war started in February 2022. Continued fighting and the trading of territory between the sides meant recovering his remains was impossible.

Interviews with those who knew and fought alongside Cafferkey paint him as a brave, occasionally withdrawn man who was unable to stand still for long and who was willing to make sacrifices for his beliefs, even when it meant working alongside ideological opponents.

“He put his money where his mouth is,” says Colm. “He thought long and hard about how he could help in the world.”

Growing up as one of five children in an Irish-speaking family in Achill, Cafferkey was a voracious reader. He took an interest in Irish history and the Troubles which shaped much of his republican worldview.

“He was really stubborn but really fair as well,” says Colm, four years his junior. Colm remembers his older brother figuring out at the age of six that Santa wasn’t real.

“But he didn’t tell the rest of us,” he says.

As a teen, he was “never bound by social expectations,” says Colm. “I wouldn’t say it made a loner of him but it made him stand out.”

Cafferkey went to college for a while, spent a short period with the Army Reserve and worked various jobs, including in construction. By the mid-2000s, he was drifting somewhat, his brother recalls.

That’s when he became involved in Shell to Sea. This was the grassroots protest against the construction of a gas pipeline through north Mayo, which campaigners said would pose serious health and ecological risks.

Finbar had involved himself in some activist causes before but his participation in the Shell to Sea protests was transformative.

“That was a big moment for him. Once he got in there, he couldn’t step away,” says Colm. “It set him on a certain trajectory.”

In 2015 Finbar travelled to Greece to assist the huge numbers of Middle Eastern migrants arriving in rubber dinghies on the island of Kos. It was perhaps there where he conceived of the idea of trying to address the source of the refugee crisis directly.

He never told his family he was travelling to Syria in 2017, which was then six years into a bloody and complex civil war. He enlisted with a heavy weapons unit of the YPG, a left-wing Kurdish militia that was fighting to oust Islamic State from its base in Raqqa in the north of the country.

The first time Colm knew his brother was in Syria was when a video appeared online of him wearing a traditional Kurdish scarf and carrying a Kalashnikov.

“I came here because I admire the struggle of the Kurdish people,” says Finbar on the video, drawing parallels between the YPG and the IRA.

I knew there were two new guys coming who were hardcore republicans. I was a bit wary as I had served in Northern Ireland ... I really took to Fin straight away

— A former British soldier who met Finbar Cafferkey in Syria

Colm was shocked at the video “but really proud of him as well. It’s such a step for someone to take.”

When he later spoke to Finbar, he realised he had “thought long and hard” about the decision. “He had prepared himself mentally for it. No one had brainwashed him,” he says.

While undergoing military training in Syria, Finbar met Mark Ayres, a former British army soldier.

“I met Fin in northern Syria at the YPG training academy for international volunteers,” says Ayres. “I knew there were two new guys coming who were hard-core republicans. I was a bit wary as I had served in Northern Ireland and didn’t know how we would get on. I need not have worried as I got along with both of them ... I really took to Fin straight away.”

The YPG was successful in destroying Isis, also known as Islamic State, leaving Cafferkey searching for another cause.

At the time he was sort of idle and trying to think of what he would do next. He was quite pragmatic about it. He didn’t have children. He was in a position where he thought he could help

— Colm Cafferkey

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Colm knew immediately his brother was likely to get involved.

“At the time he was sort of idle and trying to think of what he would do next,” says Colm. “He was quite pragmatic about it. He didn’t have children. He was in a position where he thought he could help.”

Thousands of foreign fighters have travelled to Ukraine to aid in the fight against Russia, including dozens from Ireland. Some have extensive military experience; others have none.

“Some are basically kids who should never be there and are probably a danger to themselves and others around them,” says an Irish man who has fought in Ukraine who asked not to be named as he intends to return to the frontline soon.

“There’s others who tend to be older and have that bit of experience in fighting or medicine or logistics, and they can be helpful.”

Finbar Cafferkey seemed to fall in to the latter category.

“He said to me before that war is awful, that so many people are not able for it, that it ruins them,” says Colm. “He felt he was able to go to it and be around that stuff without it completely destroying him.”

Cafferkey made contact with an anarchist group in the Polish capital, Warsaw, and travelled from there to Ukraine to try to join a volunteer defence unit, preferably one made up of like-minded leftists.

But in those frantic first weeks of war, Ukraine’s forces struggled to equip all the volunteers who wanted to fight. Cafferkey returned to eastern Poland without signing up.

“I got a message that two comrades were coming and could we host them,” says a member of the Anarchist Black Cross Galicja group (ACK Galicja), who uses the pseudonym Leon Czołg.

“The other comrade was more orientated to fighting over there so he didn’t stay long. But Ciya stayed,” he adds, using the nom-de-guerre Finbar took in Syria.

Czołg first met Finbar and the other man, who is from Scandinavia, in ACK Galicja’s warehouse in eastern Poland, where he found them “tearing apart” bulky boxes of medical supplies and turning them into lightweight combat first-aid kits.

“They looked like serious, proper guys ... That’s what struck me from the beginning. They had only just arrived but they wanted to put their energy straight into the warehouse without messing around,” he says.

Cafferkey began making aid delivery runs to places deeper and deeper inside Ukraine, eventually to eastern Donbas, near the front line.

“He would come with a vehicle and say, ‘I have got a week or two and I will go wherever you tell me,’” says Sergey Movchan, an organiser in Kyiv for anti-authoritarian volunteer network Solidarity Collectives, which sends supplies to civilians and soldiers in Ukraine.

“Maybe he had some fear but he didn’t show any. He was very calm and kind and willing to help.”

On one run to Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, which was then under daily shelling, Finbar reconnected with Mark Ayres.

“A few times I tried to talk him into joining my unit. He always declined and said he would carry on helping civilians ... I was shocked to learn that he joined up,” says Ayres.

Cafferkey is thought to have revived his initial aim of taking up arms when he heard about plans to form the kind of leftist unit he had sought at the start of the war.

Its commander was Dmitry Petrov, a leading light in the anarchist underground in Russia with a long record of opposition to the regime of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Petrov had also spent time with Kurdish guerrillas in Syria and Iraq.

“It was a surprise for me that Ciya [Finbar Cafferkey] decided to join Leshiy’s unit,” says Sergey Movchan, of the anti-authoritarian volunteer network Solidarity Collectives, using one of Petrov’s many pseudonyms.

“Before he went to training, I asked Ciya whether maybe this was not the best time – there was very heavy fighting near Bakhmut, lots of people were being injured and dying, and my Facebook page was like one big obituary.”

Cafferkey and some anarchist comrades were so eager to join they agreed to train for a month under the Bratstvo (Brotherhood) battalion linked to a far-right Christian movement.

In March, Petrov and Cafferkey met in Kyiv with former US marine Cooper “Harris” Andrews and an activist from a Ukrainian environmental group who uses the pseudonym “Yenot” (Raccoon), before travelling to the Bratstvo training ground.

“We all decided that we can spend a few weeks with these guys because we have a bigger goal, and after this we can start something of our own,” says Yenot (26).

“It was actually better than expected. Every day there were things we didn’t like – their symbols and songs, for example – but in general it was all right ... There was no hostility. We were all in the same situation and wanted to train. We were on same side, fighting the same enemy.”

One trainer was “Madzh”, a Bratstvo fighter who says Finbar performed well with physical and weapons training. Around this time the Mayo man took a new nom-de-guerre, Osyp, a traditional Ukrainian name.

On April 17^th the Bratstvo fighters and the four anarchists drove east through the night to a town near Bakhmut and the so-called road of life, which was the last open supply route for Ukrainian troops fighting a rearguard action in the ruined city.

Cafferkey, Petrov and Andrews were assigned to a combat platoon and Yenot to a medical unit that would treat the wounded.

“Before the fight they were optimistic, with a good fighting spirit. I clearly remember Harris repeating the phrase: ‘We come and they die.’ Ciya seemed calm, as always, and confident,” says Yenot.

“I said I wished we could have a beer together, and Leshiy replied: ‘Don’t worry, we will finish this mission and when we have won, we will have a beer.’”

Madzh remembers Finbar having a moment of doubt before the battle, as he says happens quite often in such situations.

Finbar said he had a bad feeling about the mission, prompting his commander to suggest he should stay behind. “But Finbar said, no, he wasn’t going to leave the group.”

The operation started on the morning of April 19^th.

“An eyewitness, someone who was in combat there, told me it was a horrible scene. There were a lot of corpses from both sides in those trenches,” says Yenot.

“Someone on the radio said the guys were about 100m from the enemy, and it sounded like they would soon finish their job. I didn’t know that the real hell was about to begin.”

Footage from the road at this time shows shell-blasted fields criss-crossed by trenches where soldiers struggled through thick mud and clambered past crumpled bodies.

“It was near Bakhmut, so everything was firing: artillery, tanks, rifles, drones dropping grenades,” says Madzh.

“There were lot of explosions there, happening all the time. The land is full of craters from explosions. A Kalashnikov is like a children’s toy there.”

Yenot says Russian mortars landed to the right and left of her comrades before directly hitting their trench.

“One of the commanders said Ciya [Cafferkey] and Harris had been killed,” she says. Leshiy was later confirmed dead, too.

The grief felt by the men’s anarchist friends was compounded by Bratstvo’s claim that they had “joined” the far-right Christian movement with “strange leftist beliefs” but had subsequently “learned to respect faith and love God” and “took part in worship”.

In the Kyiv office where he last saw Cafferkey, Movchan recalls the Achill man telling him how training with Bratstvo had been “funny and weird and he had really thought about quitting”.

“But they decided, basically, to get through this and then they would have their own unit without all this religious bullshit,” adds Movchan.

Photographs of the three dead men stand in the Solidarity Collectives office, where in May dozens of people, including Petrov’s parents, gathered to honour them. Finbar’s family joined the event by video link.

“Many people would ask Ciya what he, an Irish person, was doing in Ukraine,” says Movchan. “And Ciya would reply that he had decided that he could be useful here, and he had time.”

When news of Finbar’s death was confirmed in Ireland, Tánaiste Micheál Martin paid tribute to him in the Dáil, calling him a “man of clear principles”. It was a relatively uncontroversial statement from the Government, which didn’t want to be seen to be encouraging people to travel to Ukraine to fight.

But it caught the ire of Russia’s ambassador to Dublin, Yuriy Filatov, whose embassy issued a statement blaming the media and the Irish Government for Finbar’s death in a Russian mortar strike.

“We also do not know if Mr Martin’s remarks signify support for the Irish to take part in combat in Ukraine, but we do know that if that is the case, then Ireland would be the direct participant of the conflict with all the ensuing consequences,” the embassy said.

The remarks drew a furious response leading to calls for Filatov’s expulsion. Colm Cafferkey, still coming to terms with his brother’s death, was not comfortable with the furore. He saw various sides, including supporters of Nato, trying to lay claim to his brother’s memory.

He issued his own statement. Finbar was, he said, against “all forms of imperialism, be it US, British, or Russian, and was strongly opposed to Ireland’s support of US troops and any moves towards joining Nato”.

The statement continued: “He was in Ukraine to help the Ukrainian people, as he would have helped any person in the world who was under attack.”

Looking back, Colm says he owed it to Finbar to clarify his position. “He wouldn’t have been any more in favour of Nato than he was the Russian gang.”

The Cafferkey family are still grieving as they await the return of Finbar’s remains, which are stored in a Ukrainian military base, alongside many others, awaiting formal identification.

It may be several more months before repatriation can occur and a funeral can be held.

“We’ll bring him home, le cúnamh Dé,” his father, Tom, said at a memorial service on Achill in May.

Does he hold any anger towards his brother for putting himself in such a dangerous situation? Colm pauses to think.

“That hasn’t hit me yet,” he says. “It feels like the really heavy emotions are still out in front of me still ... but it’s not anger. He knew what he was doing. He wouldn’t have had regrets.”

2. The Virtual Fatory

Deleted reason: as per yea.

Author: Anton Freinen

Topics: spectacle, social sciences, situationist, post-situationism, post-industrial

Date: 12/10/2017

Notes: L’Usine Virtuel, Anton Freinen

A new kind of factory was birthed by the technological devloppement of capitalist society, the virtual factory, subset of the social factory, a factory without walls and billions of uncounscious cyber-proletarians, producing commodified social value in it, the perfect capitalist production, where the proletariat volontarly produce value for the cyber-capitalists owning the the virtual factory.

Of course this value is one that is fictitious and real only for the capitalists, despite our modernity, a modern re-lecture of Marx would give us an insight that the virtual factory was already there, if you read between the lines of The Capital, the virtual factory is already predicted, it is a logical devloppement in a techno-capitalist society ; before proletarians were only alienated from their labor, now they are alienated from their own social life that has been commodified in the virtual factory, but of course as Debord tells us « The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. » Thus the virtual factory can be understood as an accumulation of commodified social relations mediated by images in a new form of production of capitalist value.

This is the perfect capitalist production because it necessitates no physical ressource production, effectively creating a circle economy that only feed itself, without producing anything real, and the techno-proletarians do not require wages or material, they already possess the material in the form of social interactions, the techno-proletarian now even define his identity with the commodity, the commodity now define his identity within the frame of spectacle, « I appear therefore i am » says Debord, this could not be more true in the virtual factory where appearing is the only goal, over being, any authenticity, authenticity is defined by the models of identification, in the vitual factory, the individual will be satisfied more if he can match perfectly these models and becomes himself a model of identification, an agent of spectacle.

The virtual factory will only grow to occupy most of modern production if the present conditions persist, with the automation, this virtual factory will become the main source labor value production, a facotry without walls and laborers who produce value indefinitely with only a sublte cohersion done through models of identification, inciting volontary servitude to commodity and Capital, while the disciple of Lenin, Stalin and Mao would probably want to make the virtual factory « socialist », in the hand of the « workers state », because they are left-wing of Capital, on the other hand we want to tear it down, now must not only abolish labor but also virtual labor, for that, traditional methods of anti-capitalists struggle are useless, we must take direct action to create a counter-spectacle to take down the virtual factory, create situatons to pull the cyber-proletarian away from seat of spectator until we reach the revolutionary situation.

3. Armenia doesn’t need another political party — it needs a MOVEMENT!

Deleted reason: deleted

Author: Armenian Libertarian-Socialist Movement

Topics: Armenia, political parties, social movements, Libertarian Socialism

Date: February 8, 2007

Source: Retrieved on 27^th January 2021 from azat.wordpress.com

The fact that there are so many parties in Armenia might not actually be a bad development (given that there is the right type of constitutional setting to cater for such a development). Of course, that’s not what the Rebiblican and Parliamentary system desire, but at least it shows that people care and are involved with political life of the country.

Now it’s not something that should be disqualified as a necessarily ill development on the grounds that it won’t work within the configurations of Parliamentarianism (after all the struggle should be to make Democracy work, and not the Representative Parliamentarism). Instead, we should be asking how to re-structure the political system in such a way that would accomodate and make the best use of such political diversification (something that many political scientists, for instance, would praise).

Nevertheless…

As the parliamentary elections rapidly approach, and as the political campaigning in the form of Kartofil-distribution has already began, it is both interesting to observe the hopes for democratic processes, but at the same time, it is all ultimately laughable. No, I’m not talking only about the quality of arguments and the level at which they take place. What is really amusing is the way that there are so many political parties, all feeding into the same game-plan. Their discourses are all so predictable: “the truth is on our side, we know what people think, we are going to get elected” (or at least, “we are going to get minimum of so-many seats”), etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And the media is following (or maybe, initiating) the same mode of discourse – the same game-plan.

Sooner of later this field of democratic Babel is going to crystallize into groups, camps, tribes (call it what you will)… there will be Conservatives (Republican Party &Co), Liberals (all so many), and if we’re lucky, maybe some Pseudo-Socialists (like Labour or Pasok). This is the end of the game-plan. Soon we will be left with simple choice of either voting for the Puppet-on-the-Right or the Puppet-on-the-Left. It is already predetermined by the structure of the system, which will lead us to Pseudo-Democracies like in so many Republics in the west or around the world.

When I hear those passionate speeches (from both/all of the sides) about how they are going to emerge victorious and finally set things right and bring the near-messianic Bright Future or Prosperity or Democracy or Strength and Power (or all of these together), I sense that idiotic, dogmatic and narcissistic overtone that defined the great dictators of the 20^th century who competed to shape that century to their will.

Question: where do these people get such a confidence and arrogance that they know better?… know better what all of the Armenian people need and want? … know better how to conduct diplomacy and foreign affairs? …know better how to stimulate socially, environmentally and ethically responsible economical growth? They all strike me as ultimately POPULIST!

The current debates, as they do within all Pseudo-Democratic structures, revolve around personalities. But there is no sense of Direction – no sense of a systematic analysis or perspective; no sense of intellectual vigour that could mobilise the people into that great sense of immediacy and engagedness that was in the air in 1987–1991 (please don’t get me wrong, I’m not proposing that Armenia needs yet another idee-fix or ideology). Instead, the stand-up “politicians”, in accordance to the good Liberalist protocols, point fingers at each other: they question each others virtues, abilities, personalities, appearances, views, and (mostly, standardized) policies, but they don’t question the STRUCTURE!

In effect, they all, universally miss out the broader picture. After all it is the structure – the setting, within which the game-plan of political life is set, that already predetermines the outcome. There is an overwhelming sense of tyrannical Lust for Power in all of their speeches. It’s almost like listening to a child who due to his small size and powerlessness, finds himself doing all sorts of absurd things so as to gain attention and to pretend that his is in control. “I am the Lizard King, I’ll get you anything. Will you die for me?” There is also an antiquarian notion of “Power” and how the Power works, that these people seem to inherit from the 20^th century. They still inherit that 18^th century rationalist belief that Power works from top down – that a perfectly rational and ordered society can be organised by decrees from the Central Command-Post down the lowest strata of society. Maybe, if these people are so clever, they need to read what 20^th century social scientists had to say on how Power really works.

The internal dynamics of Society and Culture are quite distinct from those of the perfect hierarchy of a disciplined Army. This is something that Armenian politicians and “Social Scientists (Statisticians)” alike will need to get through their thick skulls sooner or later, if they wish to move into the 21^st century. Power can only work in a harmonious and, indeed, powerful way only when it springs from below to the top – when a society and its institutions and processes are organised from bottom up, and not from top down. (Please pause to contemplate this proposition). For this reason, Armenia does not need yet another political Party that will rally like a stand-up comedian or a stand-up philistine or a stand-up imbecile. Political parties are the institutions of the 20^th century (for instance, in UK Labour membership is down to 110,000 and Conservatives have only 70,000 memebrs left). Parties are institutions of the past: this is the information age, not the industrial age. Parties are institutions that can, and soon are, controlled by the economical elite (oligarchs and bankers). They are good instruments for deceiving people and temporarily controlling the mass, while strip-robbing the country and its people, but one thing that they are not good for, is for cultivating a culture of participatory democracy, dignity, integrity, self-respect, pride and Power. What Armenia needs today is a MOVEMENT. Yes, a Pan-National Movement that would start from the grassroots of the lowest of social classes; which will be driven not by central leadership, but by an idea/platform and a set of principles and ethics; which will first prioritise direct on-the-ground activism of Empowering people, over gaining parliamentary seats; which would help peasants, and later workers, to restructure their modes of production and decision-making in such a way that would allow them to conquer and control their own governance (restructure the constitution along the Swiss model), culture, knowledge, finances and production. Only through this Movement can we once again regain that sense of immediacy, directness and engagedness with our land, our country, our history and our future.

4. Communization and the abolition of gender

Deleted reason: deleted

Subtitle: From Communization and its discontents: Contestation, critique, and contemporary struggles

Author: Maya Andrea Gonzalez

Topics: communisation, gender abolition, gender nihilism, gender

Date: 2011

Source: https://libcom.org/library/communization-its-discontents-contestation-critique-contemporary-struggles

“Present day civilization makes it plain that it will only permit sexual relationships on the basis of a solitary, indissoluble bond between one man and one woman, and that it does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right and is only prepared to tolerate it because there is so far no substitute for it as a means of propagating the human race.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Communization is not a revolutionary position. It is not a form of society we build after the revolution. It is not a tactic, a strategic perspective, an organization, or a plan. Communization describes a set of measures that we must take in the course of the class struggle if there is to be a revolution at all. Communization abolishes the capitalist mode of production, including wage-labor, exchange, the value form, the state, the division of labor and private property. That the revolution must take this form is a necessary feature of class struggle today. Our cycle of struggles can have no other horizon, since the unfolding contradictions of capitalism annihilated the conditions which other forms of revolution required. It is no longer possible to imagine a situation in which social divisions are dissolved after the revolution.[1]

Since the revolution as communization must abolish all divisions within social life, it must also abolish gender relations – not because gender is inconvenient or objectionable, but because it is part of the totality of relations that daily reproduce the capitalist mode of production. Gender, too, is constitutive of capital’s central contradiction, and so gender must be torn asunder in the process of the revolution. We cannot wait until after the revolution for the gender question to be solved. Its relevance to our existence will not be transformed slowly – whether through planned obsolescence or playful deconstruction, whether as the equality of gender identities or their proliferation into a multitude of differences. On the contrary, in order to be revolution at all, communization must destroy gender in its very course, inaugurating relations between individuals defined in their singularity.

The fact that revolution takes the form of communization is not the result of lessons learned from past defeats, nor even from the miserable failure of past movements to solve the gender question. Whether or not we can discern, after the fact, a winning strategy for the movements of the past says nothing about the present. For capital no longer organizes a unity among proletarians on the basis of their common condition as wage-laborers. The capital-labor relation no longer allows workers to affirm their identity as workers and to build on that basis workers’ organizations capable of assuming power within the state. Movements that elevated workers to the status of a revolutionary subject were still ‘communist’, but communist in a mode that cannot be ours today. The revolution as communization has no revolutionary subject, no affirmable identity – not the Worker, the Multitude, or the Precariat. The real basis of any such revolutionary identity has melted away.

Of course, workers still exist as a class. Wage-labor has become a universal condition of life as never before. However, the proletariat is diffuse and fractured. Its relation to capital is precarious. The structural oversupply of labor is enormous. A surplus population of over one-billion people – eager to find a place in the global commodity chains from which they have been excluded – makes it impossible to form mass organizations capable of controlling the supply of labor, except among the most privileged strata of workers.[2] Capital now exacerbates, fragments and more than ever relies on the divisions between workers. Once the proud bearers of a universally relevant revolutionary essence, the Working Class, in its autonomy as a class within capitalism, can no longer build its power as a class against capital. Today, the revolution must emerge from the disunity of the proletariat, as the only process capable of overcoming that disunity. If revolutionary action does not immediately abolish all divisions between proletarians, then it is not revolutionary; it is not communization.

In the present moment, the very inability of workers to unite on the basis of a workers’ identity thus forms the fundamental limit of struggle. But that limit is at once the dynamic potential of this cycle of struggles, bearing within itself the abolition of gender relations and all other fixed distinctions. It is no historical accident that the end of the former cycle of struggles coincided with a revolt against the primacy of the Worker – a revolt in which feminism played a major role. To re-imagine a workers’ movement that would not demote women, blacks, and homosexuals to a subordinate position is to think a workers’ movement that lacks precisely the unifying/excluding trait that once allowed it to move at all. With the benefit of hindsight, it is increasingly clear that if the working class (as a class of all those without direct access to means of production) was destined to become the majority of society, the workers’ movement was unlikely to organize a clear majority from it. The revolution as communization does not solve this problem, but it takes it onto a new terrain. As surveyors of this new landscape, we must assess the present state of the practical movement toward the end of gender relations. We must also expand discussion of this essential communizing measure.

Until recently, the theory of communization has been the product of a small number of groups organized around the publication of a handful of yearly journals. If few of those groups have taken up the task of theorizing gender, it is because most have been wholly uninterested in examining the real basis of the divisions that mark the existence of the working class. On the contrary, they have busied themselves with trying to discover a revolutionary secret decoder-ring, with which they might be able to decipher the merits and shortcomings of past struggles. Thus, most partisans of communization have thought the revolution as an immediate overcoming of all separations, but they arrived at this conclusion through an analysis of what communization would have to be in order to succeed where past movements failed, rather than from a focus on the historical specificity of the present[3].

For this reason, the tendency organized around Théorie Communiste (TC) is unique, and we largely follow them in our exposition. For TC, the revolution as communization only emerges as a practical possibility when these struggles begin to ‘swerve’ (faire l’écart) as the very act of struggling increasingly forces the proletariat to call into question and act against its own reproduction as a class. ‘Gaps’ (l’écarts) thereby open up in the struggle, and the multiplication of these gaps is itself the practical possibility of communism in our time. Workers burn down or blow up their factories, demanding severance pay instead of fighting to maintain their jobs. Students occupy universities, but against rather than in the name of the demands for which they are supposedly fighting. Women break with movements in which they already form a majority, since those movements cannot but fail to represent them. And everywhere, the unemployed, the youth, and the undocumented join and overwhelm the struggles of a privileged minority of workers, making the limited nature of the latter’s demands at once obvious and impossible to sustain.

In the face of these proliferating gaps in the struggle,

Quote:

a fraction of the proletariat, in going beyond the demands-based character of its struggle, will take communizing measures and will thus initiate the unification of the proletariat which will be the same process as the unification of humanity, i.e. its creation as the ensemble of social relations that individuals establish between themselves in their singularity[4].

For TC, the divisions within the proletariat are therefore not only that which must be overcome in the course of the revolution, but also the very source of that overcoming. Perhaps that is why TC, alone among theorists of communization, have devoted themselves to an examination of the gender distinction, as it is perhaps the most fundamental divisions within the proletariat. TC’s work on gender is relatively new, especially for a group which has spent the last thirty years refining and restating a few key ideas over and over again. Their main text on gender, written in 2008, was finally published in 2010 (with two additional appendices) in issue 23 of their journal as Distinction de Genres, Programmatisme et Communisation. TC are known for their esoteric formulations. How ever, with some effort, most of their ideas can be reconstructed in a clear fashion. Since their work on gender is provisional, we refrain from lengthy quotations. TC claim that communization involves the abolition of gender as much as the abolition of capitalist social relations. For the divisions which maintain capitalism maintain the gender division and the gender division preserves all other divisions. Still, as much as TC take steps towards developing a rigorously historical materialist theory of the production of gender, they end up doing little more than suture gender to an already existing theory of the capitalist mode of production (to no small extent, this is because they rely largely on the work on one important French feminist, Christine Delphy[5]).

For our context here, TC have a particularly fascinating theory of communization insofar as it is also a periodization of the history of class struggle – which itself corresponds to a periodization of the history of the capital-labor relation. This provides TC with a uniquely historical vantage on the present prospects for communism. Crucially, TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life – beyond the walls of the factory or office. And the gender relation has always extended beyond the sphere of value production alone.

I. The Construction of the Category ‘Woman’

Woman is a social construction. The very category of woman is organized within and through a set of social relations, from which the splitting of humanity into two, woman and man – and not only female and male – is inseparable. In this way, sexual difference is given a particular social relevance that it would not otherwise possess[6]. Sexual difference is given this fixed significance within class societies, when the category of woman comes to be defined by the function that most (but not all) human females perform, for a period of their lives, in the sexual reproduction of the species. Class society thus gives a social purpose to bodies: because some women ‘have’ babies, all bodies that could conceivably ‘produce’ babies are subject to social regulation. Women become the slaves of the biological contingencies of their birth. Over the long history of class society, women were born into a world organized only for men – the primary ‘actors’ in society, and in particular the only people capable of owning property. Women thereby became the property of society as a whole.

Because women are by definition not men, they are excluded from ‘public’ social life. For TC, this circumscription of the women’s realm means that not only are their bodies appropriated by men, but also the totality of their activity. Their activity, as much as their very being, is by definition ‘private’. In this way, women’s activity takes on the character of domestic labor. This labor is defined not as work done in the home, but as women’s work. If a woman sells cloth in the market, she is a weaver, but if she makes cloth in the home, she is only a wife. A woman’s activity is thus considered merely as her activity, without any of the concrete determinations it would be given if it were performed by some other, more dignified social entity. The gender distinction man/woman thereby takes on additional significance as public/private and social/domestic.

Is the unpaid labor of women for men, including perhaps their ‘production’ of children, therefore a class relation, or even a mode of production (as Delphy calls it, the domestic mode of production)? TC defines class society as a relationship between surplus producers and surplus extractors. The social division between these groups is constitutive of the relations of production, which organize the productive forces for the purpose of producing and extracting surplus. Crucially, these relations must have as their product the reproduction of the class relation itself. However, for TC – and we follow them on this point – each mode of production is already a totality, and in fact the social relevance of women’s role in sexual reproduction changes with the mode of production. That does not mean that relations between men and women are derivative of the relations between the classes. It means rather that the relations between men and women form an essential element of the class relation and cannot be thought as a separate ‘system’, which then relates to the class-based system.

Of course, this discussion remains abstract. The question now becomes, how do we unite our story about women with our story about the succession of modes of production? For TC, women are the primary productive force within all class societies, since the growth of the population forms an essential support of the reproduction of the class relation. The augmentation of the population as the primary productive force remains, throughout the history of class society, the burden of its women. In this way, the heterosexual matrix is founded on a specific set of material social relations.

However, we should remind ourselves that the special burden of childbirth predates the advent of class society. Historically, each woman had to give birth, on average, to six children – just in order to ensure that two of those six survived to reproduce the coming generations. The chance that a woman would die in childbirth, in the course of her life, was nearly one in ten[7]. Perhaps the insight of TC is that the advent of class society – which saw a massive increase in the size of the human population – hardened the social relevance of these facts. But even before the advent of class society, there was never any ‘natural’ regime of human sexual reproduction. Age at marriage, length of breastfeeding, number of children born, social acceptability of infanticide – all have varied across human social formations[8]. Their variation marks a unique adaptability of the human species.

But we are concerned less with the long history of the human species than with the history of the capitalist mode of production. Wage-labor is fundamentally different from both ancient slavery and feudal vassalage. In slavery, surplus producers have no ‘relation’ to the means of production. For the slaves are themselves part of the means of production. The reproduction or upkeep of slaves is the direct responsibility of the slave owner himself. For both men and women slaves, the distinction between public and private thus dissolves, since slaves exist entirely within the private realm. Nor is there any question, for the slaves, of property inheritance or relations with the state, such as taxation. Interestingly, there is some evidence that patriarchy was, perhaps for that very reason, rather weak among slave families in the American South[9]. In vassalage, by contrast, the surplus producers have direct access to the means of production. Surplus is extracted by force. The peasant man stands in relation to this outside force as the public representative of the peasant household. Property passes through his line. Women and children peasants are confined to the private realm of the village, which is itself a site of both production and reproduction. The peasant family does not need to leave its private sphere in order to produce what it needs, but rather only to give up a part of its product to the lords. For this reason, peasant families remain relatively independent of markets.

In capitalism, the lives of the surplus producers are constitutively split between the public production of a surplus and the private reproduction of the producers themselves. The workers, unlike the slaves, are their ‘own property’: they continue to exist only if they take care of their own upkeep. If wages are too low, or if their services are no longer needed, workers are ‘free’ to survive by other means (as long as those means are legal). The reproduction of the workers is thus emphatically not the responsibility of the capitalist. However, unlike the vassals, the workers can take care of their own upkeep only if they return to the labor market, again and again, to find work. Here is the essence of the capital-labor relation. What the workers earn for socially performed production in the public realm, they must spend in order to reproduce themselves domestically in their own private sphere. The binaries of public/private and social/domestic are embodied in the wage-relation itself. Indeed, these binaries will only collapse with the end of capitalism.

For if the capitalists were directly responsible for workers’ survival – and thus if their reproduction were removed from the private sphere – then the workers would no longer be compelled to sell their labor-power. The existence of a separate, domestic sphere of reproduction (where little production takes place unmediated by commodities purchased on the market) is constitutive of capitalist social relations as such. Social activity separates out from domestic activity as the market becomes the mediating mechanism of concrete social labor performed outside of the home. Production for exchange, which was formerly performed inside the home, increasingly leaves the home to be performed elsewhere. At this point the public/ private distinction takes on a spatial dimension. The home becomes the sphere of private activity – that is, women’s domestic labor and men’s ‘free time’ – while the factory takes charge of the public, socially productive character of men’s work.

Of course, women have also always been wage laborers, alongside men, for as long as capitalism has existed. For TC, the gendered nature of women’s domestic work determines that their work, even when performed outside of the home, remains merely women’s work. It remains, that is to say, wage labor of a particular sort, namely unproductive or else low value-added labor. Women tend to work in part-time, low-wage jobs, particularly in services (though of course today, there are at least some women in all sectors of the economy, including among the highest paid professionals). Women often perform domestic services in other people’s homes, or else in their offices and airplanes. When women work in factories, they are segregated into labor-intensive jobs requiring delicate hand-work, particularly in textiles, apparel and electronics assembly. Likewise, work done in the home remains women’s work, even if men perform it – which, largely, they do not.

In this sense, once gender becomes embodied in the wage-relation as a binary public/private relation, TC cease to theorize its ground in the role that women play in sexual reproduction. The fact that women’s work is of a particular character outside the home is merely true by analogy to the character of the work they perform in the home. It bears no relation to the material ground of women’s role in sexual reproduction, and in that sense, it is more or less ideological. By the same token, TC increasingly define the work that women do in the home by its character as the daily reproductive labor performed necessarily outside of the sphere of production – and not by relation to the role that women play in childbirth, as the ‘principal force of production’. If, within the capitalist mode of production, women are and have always been both wage-laborers and domestic laborers, why do they remain almost entirely female? As TC begin to discuss capitalism, they phase out their focus on sexual reproduction, which disappears under a materially unfounded conception of domestic labor (though their references to biology return later, as we will see).

This oversight is a serious mistake. The sexual segregation of work in the capitalist mode of production is directly related to the temporality of a woman’s life: as the bearer of children, the main source of their nourish ment at young ages (breastfeeding), and their primary caretakers through puberty. Over the long history of capitalism, women’s participation in the labor market has followed a distinct ‘M-shaped’ curve[10]. Participation rises rapidly as women enter adulthood, then drops as women enter their late 20s and early 30s. Participation slowly rises again as women enter their late 40s before dropping off at retirement ages. The reasons for this pattern are well known. Young women look for full-time work, but with the expectation that they will either stop working or work part-time when they have children. When women enter childbearing years, their participation in the labor force declines. Women who continue to work while their children are young are among the poorer proletarians and are super-exploited: unmarried mothers, widows and divorcées, or women whose husbands’ incomes are low or unreliable. As children get older, more and more women return to the labor market (or move to full-time work), but at a distinct disadvantage in terms of skills and length of employment, at least as compared to the men with whom they compete for jobs[11].

For all these reasons, capitalist economies have always had a special ‘place’ for women workers, as workers either not expected to remain on the job for very long or else as older, late entrants or re-entrants into the labor force. Beyond that, women form an important component of what Marx calls the ‘latent’ reserve army of labor, expected to enter and leaving the workforce according to the cyclical needs of the capitalist enterprises. The existence of a distinctive place for women in the labor force then reinforces a society-wide commitment to and ideology about women’s natural place, both in the home and at work. Even when both men and women work, men typically (at least until recently) earn higher wages and work longer hours outside the home. There thus remains a strong pressure on women, insofar as they are materially dependent on their husbands, to accept their subordination: to not ‘push too hard’[12] on questions of the sexual division of labor within the home. Historically, this pressure was compounded by the fact that women were, until after World War II, de facto if not de jure excluded from many forms of property ownership, making them reliant on men as mediators of their relation to capital. Therefore, women did not possess the juridical freedoms that male proletarians won for themselves – and not for their women. Women were not truly ‘free’ labor in relation to the market and the state, as were their male counterparts.198

II. The Destruction of the Category ‘Woman’ Though

TC fail to explain the ground of the construction of women in capitalism, they do have a provocative theory of how women’s situation within capitalism changes according to the unfolding contradictions of that mode of production. ‘Capitalism has a problem with women’ because, in the present period, the capital-labor relation cannot accommodate the continued growth of the labor force. As we have already noted, capital increasingly faces a large and growing surplus population, structurally excessive to its demands for labor. The appearance of this surplus population has coincided with a transformation in the way that capitalist states, the workers’ movement, and also feminists have viewed women as the ‘principal productive force’. In an earlier moment birth-rates declined precipitously in Europe and the former European settler-colonies. The response was ‘pro-natalism’. Civilization supposedly faced imminent degeneration, since women were no longer fulfilling their duty to the nation; they had to be encouraged back into it. By the 1920s, even feminists became increasingly pro-natalist, turning maternalism into an explanation for women’s ‘equal but different’ dignity as compared to men. By the 1970s, however – as the population of poor countries exploded while the capitalist economy entered into a protracted crisis – maternalism was largely dead. The world was overpopulated with respect to the demand for labor. Women were no longer needed in their role as women. The ‘special dignity’ of their subordinate role was no longer dignified at all.

However, that is only half the story. The other half is to be found in the history of the demographic transition itself, which TC fail to consider. In the course of its early development, capitalism increased work ers’ consumption and thereby improved their health, reducing infant mortality. Falling infant mortality in turn reduced the number of children that each woman had to have in order to reproduce the species. At first, this transformation appeared as an increase in the number of surviving children per woman and a rapid growth of the population. Thus, the spread of capitalist social relations was everywhere associated with an increase in women’s reproductive burden. However with time, and now in almost every region of the world, there has been a subsequent reduction, both in the number of children each woman has and in the number of children who subsequently survive infancy and early childhood. Simultaneously, as both men and women live longer, less of women’s lifetimes are spent either having or caring for young children. The importance of these facts cannot be overestimated. They explain why, in our period, the straight-jacket of the heterosexual matrix has had its buckles slightly loosened, for men as well as women (and even, to a small extent, for those who fit neither the categories of gender distinction, nor those of sexual difference)[13].

As with everything else in capitalism, the ‘freedom’ that women have won (or are winning) from their reproductive fate has not been replaced with free-time, but with other forms of work. Women’s supposed entrance into the labor force was always actually an increase in the time and duration of women’s already existing participation in wage-work. But now, since women are everywhere spending less time in childbirth and child-rearing, there has been a reduction in the M-shaped nature of their participation in labor-markets. Women’s situation is thus increasingly split between, on the one hand, the diminishing but still heavy burden of childbearing and domestic work, and on the other hand, the increasingly primary role in their lives of wage-work – within which they remain, however, disadvantaged. As all women know, this situation expresses itself as a forced choice between the promise a working life supposedly equal to men and the pressure, as well as the desire, to have children. That some women choose not to have children at all – and thus to solve this dilemma for themselves, however inadequately – is the only possible explanation of the fall in the birth rate below what is predicted by demographic transition theory. Fertility is now as low as 1.2 children per woman in Italy and Japan; almost everywhere else in the West it has fallen below 2. In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 6 children per woman in 1950 to around 2.5 today.

In this situation, it becomes increasingly clear that women have a problem with markets, since markets are incompatible with women. This incompatibility comes down to two facts about the capitalist mode of production. First, capital cannot, if it is to remain capital, take direct responsibility for the reproduction of the working class. It is because workers are responsible for their own upkeep that they are forced to return, again and again, to the labor market. At the same time, labor markets, if they are to remain markets, must be ‘sex-blind’[14]. Markets have to evaluate the competition between workers without regard to any non-market characteristics of the workers themselves. These non-market characteristics include the fact that half of all of humanity is sexed female. For some employers, sexual difference cannot but appear as an additional cost. Women workers are able to bear children and thus cannot be relied on not to have children. For other employers, sexual difference appears as a benefit for precisely the same reason: women provide flexible, cheap labor. Women are thus relegated by capitalist relations – precisely because markets are sex-blind – to women’s wage-work.

This incompatibility of women and markets has plagued the women’s movement. Feminism historically accepted the gendered nature of social life, since it was only through gender that women could affirm their identity as women in order to organize on that basis. This affirmation became a problem for the movement historically, since it is impossible to fully reconcile gender – the very existence of women and men – with the simultaneous existence of the working class and capital[15]. As a result, the women’s movement has swung back and forth between two positions[16]. On the one hand, women fought for equality on the basis of their fundamental same ness with respect to men. But whatever the similarity of their aptitudes, women and men are not and never will be the same for capital. On the other hand, women have fought for equality on the basis of their ‘difference but equal dignity’ to men. But that difference, here made explicit as motherhood, is precisely the reason for women’s subordinate role.

The workers’ movement promised to reconcile women and workers beyond, or at least behind the back of, the market. After all, the founding texts of German Social Democracy, in addition to Marx’s Capital, were Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Bebel’s Woman and Socialism. Through struggle, the workers’ movement promised to bring women out of the home and into the workforce, where they would finally become the true equals of men. In order to achieve this real equality, the workers movement would socialize women’s reproductive work ‘after the revolution’. Both housework and childcare would be performed collectively by men and women together. As it became clear to the most extreme elements of the Radical Feminist movement in the 1970s, these measures would never suffice to actually ensure ‘real equality’ between men and women workers. The only possibility of achieving an equality of workers, at the intersecting limit of both gender and labor, would be if babies were born in test-tubes, finally having nothing to do with women at all[17].

In fact, the workers’ movement betrayed its women as soon as it had the chance. Whenever they came close to power, male workers were fully willing to demonstrate their capacity to manage the economy by showing that they, too, knew how to keep women in their place. In the British Communist Party, freeing husbands from domestic work was the main task of women’s ‘party work’[18]. How could it have been otherwise? Within a world defined by work – or more precisely, by productive labor (a category of capitalism) – women would always be less than men. The attempt to ‘raise’ women to the equals of men was always a matter of adjusting a ‘universally’ relevant movement of workers to fit the ‘particular’ needs of its women. The attempt to do so, within the bounds of capitalism, amounted to a minimal socialization of childcare, as well as the institution of a minimal set of laws protecting women from their disadvantages in markets (that is to say, maternity leave, etc). Workers’ movements could have gone further along this road. They could have made women more of a priority than they did. But the fact is that they did not. And now, it’s over.

The death of the workers’ movement has been considered in other texts[19]. Its death marks also the passage from one historical form of revolution to another. Today, the presence of women within the class struggle can only function as a rift (l’ecart), a deviation in the class conflict that destabilizes its terms. That struggle cannot be their struggle, even if, in any given case, they form the majority of the participants. For as long as proletarians continue to act as a class, the women among them cannot but lose. In the course of struggle, women will, therefore, come into conflict with men. They will be criticized for derailing the movement, for diverting it from its primary goals. But the ‘goal’ of the struggle lies elsewhere. It is only from within this (and other) conflicts that the proletariat will come to see its class belonging as an external constraint, an impasse which it will have to overcome in order to be anything at all beyond its relation to capital. That overcoming is only the revolution as communization, which destroys gender and all the other divisions that come between us.

5. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Deleted reason: i can see the light, but not taking me there

Author: Aaron Swartz

Topics: civil disobedience, copyright, hacktivism

Date: July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Date Published on T@L: 2017-10-21T18:49:10

Source: Retrieved on 2017-10-21 from https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

6. Economic Battle

Deleted reason: accidentally published, pending review

Author: Andrew Klemenčič

Topics: praxis

Date: October 1906

Source: Prolatarec, Vol. 1 No. 1

Notes: translated by CarniolanLeshy

“What are the reasons?”, asks fellow citizen J. Z-k in issue 8 of Proletarec [“Proletarian” in Slovenian, name of this newspaper], looking at the Austrian proletariat’s battle with the Austrian bureaucracy.

Comrade Z-k says in his article, that the Austrian proletariat is getting ready for a general strike for the right to vote, and asks “why only for the right to vote?”

My answer is short and goes as follows: It is only for the right to vote, because the socialist politicians and leaders of socialist parties are hungry for the state’s mercy and jobs, uncaring for the suffering and starvation of those without education and no job.

Anyone who still remembers the demonstrations for socialism in Ljubljana and Trieste in 1879 and the following four or five years, can tell you today that our agitation was purely on economic-revolutionary grounds, influenced by [Die] Zukunft [German social-democratic newspaper, 1892–1923] from Vienna and Freiheit [German anarchist newspaper, founded by Johann Most, 1879–1910] from London and various fliers from Geneva, printed in the Italian language.

Ivan Brozovič, a tailor in Ljubljana, was an especially dedicated proponent of workers’ organization under the principle that workers claim what they deem right by way of strikes, meaning, every worker has the right to what they produce or grow. There is power in unity.

The battle on economic grounds is reliable—positive; and because such a battle is simple, everyone knows what their rights are and what to demand from the masters.

Even back in those days, there was already talk of a general strike and of a social revolution, if the masters refuse to give in to our demands.

We did not want to hear anything about German social democracy, as the tendencies of Bebel, Liebknecht, Kautsky, Adler, and others have been solely political and metaphysical, and therefore negative and focused on despotism and quarrel—an excess of empty words.

A worker knows what potatoes, bread, housing, clothes, meat, wine, etc. are, that is all positive, so let’s organize and seize the abundance of the world, created through our labor and diligence. All that is clear.

But with politics and religion, it is different. German social democrats have introduced a minimum-maximum program, which it is both, i.e. nothing, as German workers are still in as miserable a position as they were 35 years ago, when their social democrats only had a couple thousand votes, and now they have 3 million. Why is this? Because the person who goes to vote for another, forsakes his own right and hands it to whoever they voted for. And the person elected into political power cannot represent the interests of all those who voted for them. Regardless of how fair, honest, and devoted to the power of the people they are, they will, because of this inability, start to represent only that which pays off. This, in turn, creates speculative tendencies in the politician, which only fortify with time and eventually overcome all ideals regarding the good of the people. What remains is only the professional title of the people’s representative, whose only interest becomes staying in power. All this is called bargaining by vote.

In the years 1885–1886, the Austrian government had started to suppress us and our best people had to flee the land, or else be imprisoned, because they were socialists. That is what happened to Mauro, Slejko, Petrič, as well as me, and our Delavski list [Slovenian newspaper], which we were releasing in Trieste from 1889 to 1890, was suppressed.

And so the things “developed” in a different way and now we have Slovenian socialist politicians, profesionale par excelence, who walk in “German boots” and they have organized a “party” in the last years of the previous century. But I hope that today, there’s an even greater number of experienced people with integrity within the party, who are asking themselves: why not hold a general strike to take back all that the exploiters have daily been stealing from us for millennia in the name of law?

A couple of years ago, weavers and miners almost won with a general strike, but the socialist leaders and politicians swayed the workers to return, without any gain and on old conditions, to their yoke of servitude, back into the hands of the capitalists.

In French workers’ circles, it is very different in this regard. In their syndicates, worker cooperatives and unions, the state and voting are their least concern. For the first of May, the [French] workers staged a great agitation for an 8-hour workday and other changes for the benefit of the proletarians. The result of the agitation was immediate, namely, in places where the workers were brave and well organized, they won, but in places where socialist politics blooms, such as in northern France, the workers were deceived by their own city, regional, and national representatives. And this ugly, dirty backstabbery is being attempted to be implemented in the workers’ congress of Amiens taking place from 14^th to 18^th of October this year [1906, congress of the CGT in Amiens, a major French trade union, dominated by anarcho-syndicalists, where it was at that point overwhelmingly reaffirmed to not associate with any political parties]. French politicians want to imitate the German ones, but I hope they fail in their endeavors, trying to implement changes and pass laws, which mean nothing to the proletarian and don’t really change anything.

Because of all that, I recommend to all my comrades to take an interest in economic-industrial organizations, which do represent our interests and also successfully defend them.

“Industrial Workers of the World” (“Svetovna zveza industrijskih delavcev” [Slovenian translation of the name]) is a proletarian organization, which was founded last June and which represents the whole ideal of the first Slovene socialists [i.e. like those the author previously mentioned were exiled from Slovenian lands by the Austro-Hungarian authorities for being socialists]. Of course, we must not forget that every organization and association is only what we make of it, so we must agitate and motivate our friends to, each by their own means, spread basic [revolutionary] economic teachings and our rights and to join the IWW or Western Federation of Miners, which are one and the same. Let’s get to work; we may be representing a small nation [Slovenes], but let’s do our best to spread our power and connections, so that we’ll get the recognition of the broader proletariat in our fight for universal well-being of everyone.

A. Klemenčič

7. Child Molestation vs. Child Love

Deleted reason: deleted for now pending further conversation

Subtitle: Critically Annotated by Black Oak Clique

Author: Feral Faun

Authors: Black Oak Clique, Feral Faun, Wolfi Landstreicher, Apio Ludd

Topics: sex, criticism, egoism, critique

Date: 2019, 1987

Date Published on T@L: 2019-08-26

Source: https://heresydistro.noblogs.org/

Introduction: A Word of Warning

Here Be Dragons

The material contained in this text is gut-wrenching and disturbing. What follows is a critically annotated edition of Apio Ludd / Feral Faun / Wolfi Landstreicher’s Child Molestation vs. Child Love, from his (otherwise celebrated) anthology, Rants, Essays and Polemics. It is a defense of the sexual abuse of children and, ironically, a call to “fight the real child molesters” — Landstreicher’s term for parents, schools, and churches. In some parts of the work, it is quite graphic and the reader should tread lightly. Those who have suffered child sexual abuse in the past may want to stop here. It is presented with criticism. It is not in the interest of Heresy Distro to distribute molestation apologia by itself. Our choice of publishing this work is in the interest of knowledge — not of the arguments of self-styled “child lovers,” but rather knowledge about Wolfi Landstreicher’s views on “child love’’ so that one can act accordingly in their interactions with him.

Morals?

Our intent is not to moralize. Our motives for publishing Child Molestation is love — real, egoistic love for children. We do not believe it is our “duty” to protect children nor are we guided by any outside, abstract, spectral “morals” to do so. It is rather our lived, experienced, and felt camaraderie with children; with our desire to return to the pre-civilized and Wild existence that is childhood. Rarely is there a moment with children when they are not mesmerized by the natural world — insects, spiders, the grass, squirrels, rocks, rain, thunder. This is not merely naïve curiosity. Children exist in a state before the bifurcation into man and animal. Truly, the trope of the “feral child” is not a child who has lost their humanity. Rather, they never developed it.

Childhood “sexuality”

One cannot deny that children possess a sort of sexuality, or, more precisely, what adults term sexuality. Childhood is a stage of exploration, and it is to be expected that children will partake in bodily exploration as well — individual and collective.

However, it must be made abundantly clear that a child’s conception of sexuality is much different than an adult’s. Children do not possess a concept of, and thus cannot grant, consent. Thus, an adult (who possesses a grasp on consent) who engages a child sexually will be enacting a sort of sexualized authority over them. Further, children are scarcely aware of the power dynamics that mark adult sexuality, and therefore cannot contend with and rectify them, as adults can. They are made into objects of pleasure, not, as Landstreicher contends, equal partners in a mutually-beneficial erotic relationship.

When one’s reading of Child Molestation vs. Child Love is informed by this understanding, the true content of the piece is laid bare: a quasi-egoist appropriation of anarchist rhetoric to justify (and perhaps hide) a cruel and authoritarian desire to control and fetishize the bodies of children.

Child Molestation vs. Child Love (Main text from 1987)

A child is scolded, restricted, forced to conform to schedules and social norms, limited, bribed with rewards and threatened with punishments. This is called love. A child is kissed, caressed, played with, gently fondled and given erotic pleasure. This is called molestation. Something is obviously twisted here. (1)

One of the main dichotomies of this society is the child/adult dichotomy. It has no basis in any real needs or natural ways. It is a totally arbitrary conception which only serves to reinforce authority. (2)

Certainly, newborn infants need to be fed and watched over until they can begin to move around their environment with some ease, steadiness, and self-assurance. And thereafter, it is certainly a kindness to inform them of anything they may need to know to avoid accidents and relate well to their environment. But the structuring and regimentation a child undergoes in our society has nothing to do with natural needs or kindness. It is the slow destruction of the child’s freedom under authority. (3)

From the moment an infant is bone s/he is in the firm hand of authority. S/he is almost immediately forced to feed on a schedule. Early on, s/he begins to see that the “love” of most adults is something that must be bought by conformity and obedience. Sensuality begins to be repressed by the scheduling of feeding and the use of diapers and other clothing even when they’re uncomfortable. Toilet training continues the process. And the constant threat of punishment instills the fear necessary to keep the process of sensual repression going strong. All of this is the dirty work of parents. What defines a “good” parent is their ability to instill this repression appearing to be the monsters they are. For once this repression is well begun, the child can be easily molded into what this society wants. School completes the process begun by the parent. It forces the child to regiment most of her/his daylight hours. Sensual activity is straight-jacketed during this time. After school, there is homework which the parents make sure the child does. This process usually continues well past puberty. All of these years of repression and forced acquiescence to authority make the child into a grown-up (more accurately, a groan-up), which, in this society, means a conforming, obedient, and usually anxiety-ridden slave.

It is the nature of this education process which makes society define the child-lover as a devil. For to the child-lover, a child is not a lump of clay to be molded to the will of authority. S/he is a god, the manifestation of Eros. The child-lover encourages the free expression of the child’s sensuality and so undermines the entire education process. And the child, who has not yet been as repressed as her/his adult lover, helps to break down the repression within the adult. How could a society which requires repressed, conforming, obedient groan-ups possible tolerate child love? (4)

It is clear who the true child molesters are. The parents and schools rape the minds of children, forcing guilt and fear, conformity and obedience to authority upon them, repressing their sensuality and imagination, their wild erotic ecstasy. (5) But children are still less repressed than most adults. Their divinity still shines through with an especially clear beauty. For they are not mere clay to be molded. They are wild, dancing gods. To adventure erotically with children is liberating both for the children and for we “adults” who are really just repressed children. It is a major blow against authority and an expression of paradise. For we all are gods, and all shared pleasure is a beautiful expression of our divinity. So let us fight the real child molesters, the family, the school, the church, and all authority, and share erotic pleasure as freely as we can with children. Then we may again regain our own repressed childhood and become the gods we truly are in beauty and in ecstasy. (6)

Critical Annotations by Black Oak Clique

1. As outlined in the previous section, child sexual abuse is not simply kissing, caressing, and playing with a child. This is a gross and intentional mischaracterization of child molestation. Further, one can be opposed both to the imposition of authoritarian social norms and the sexualization of children.

2. It is true in some sense that the child-adult dialectic serves to reinforce unequal power dynamics. We dispute, however, that the dichotomy has no basis in real needs or natural ways. Perhaps the only meaningful distinction between children and adults is the development of a concept of consent. However, Landstreicher himself even goes further than this — he contradicts himself in the very next paragraph. One must wonder what his intent here in “disrupting” this dichotomy is...

3. Here is the contradiction — newborn infants cannot feed or protect themselves sufficiently and are totally reliant on their parents. Again, it is true in some sense that the structuring of a child’s life is more for the good of capital-S Society than for the child themself. But to state that the child-adult dialectic is completely or wholly a construction of authority is fallacy. What is needed is not the complete or total destruction of the parent-child opposition. Rather, it is a radical reconstruction (or perhaps even a rediscovery) of the lived relationship of family. Unlike the empty, cold, mediated relationships we experience under industrial capitalism, the bonds of family, while certainly not wholly good in any sense, are fiery, hot, and emotionally potent. What is needed is not a destruction of the family — but liberation of it! Liberation from the chains of Morality and Obligation, and a reformation of the family as a real, lived experience.

4. In fact, the exact opposite is true. A child is exactly that to the “child lover” — an object to be molded according to authority. Landstreicher’s description of child molestation conveniently makes the truth of it opaque. Landstreicher’s child lover is more properly a child groomer, who, through the performance of affection and play, makes a child open to sexual acts they do not, and perhaps cannot, understand. They are not being “encouraged’’ to express their “sensuality.’’ Their sensuality is being produced, they are turned into a machine for the production of sexual pleasure.

5. How convenient that the authorities Landstreicher charges with “true’’ child molestation are the ones who are most directly engaged in the protection of children from sexual predators!

6. Finally, Landstreicher closes with the clearest objectification of children in this “rant.’’ For Landstreicher, in the end, the child is a tool for the production of an imaginary, repressed childhood. For Landstreicher, “child love’’ — molestation — is a ritual with which he can become feral and return to an Adamic state of “beauty and ecstasy.” It is not the relationship he intends to portray.

8. A Tyranny Of Editors

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: How Wikipedia Became Another System of Oppression

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: censorship, transphobia

Date: September 8^th, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-09-09T02:09:35

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/a-tyranny-of-editors/

Techbros – cishet white men in the tech sector, usually upholding some kind of right-wing Libertarian views — made a lot of big promises they couldn’t keep, one of which is free and open education. None illustrates that failure as well as Wikipedia, the so-called free encyclopedia. While it operates as a non-profit unaffiliated with any State or corporation, its user base created a strong bias in favor of right-wing rhetoric and viewpoints, anywhere from mildly Conservative to downright Fascist. Like the Moon of Anarres from the novel The Dispossessed, it’s a great case study in how implicit hierarchy can form in free spaces, and how that insidious hierarchy can sometimes be more dangerous than explicit ones.

Now, one might argue that since Wikipedia doesn’t possess any authority, it doesn’t really matter if it’s run by a buncha techbros putting on the Reich, but the truth is that it does matter: authority is derived when the power of the many is controlled by an undeserving few, so when people give up doing their own research and rely on Wikipedia as a knowledge source, it gains authority in deciding what people believe to be objective facts. This is the same as when news outlets broadcast State or corporate propaganda: if enough people buy into the brainwashing, than the media has authority over them.

In that sense, Wikipedia is little more than a new paint applied to old media, in more ways than one. It demands “neutral points of view”, but will only consider sources provided by certain agencies and institutions, the vast majority of which are controlled by a Conservative establishment; their neutrality is really just a dogwhistle used to hide their right-wing bias. Their “notability” criteria means that any group that doesn’t yet have enough representation in mainstream media — be them political groups like Anarchists or minority groups like indigenous people – doesn’t deserve as much voice as large groups like Capitalists or cishet white men. And like all authoritarians, they never play by their own rules.

The fact that it’s decentralized and not controlled by one single individual means precious little when the vast majority of their contributors belong to the same privileged demographic and share the same Conservative bias, and the fact that they give certain people elevated privileges based on the quantity of their contribution just make it worse: it went from a tyranny of majority in a direct democracy to just plain tyranny controlled by a representative democracy, as corrupt as any current State or corporation.

Taking the issue of transphobia as an example: they deny that the Roman empress Elagabalus is a trans woman despite she explicitly asked to be called an empress and was willing to give a great reward to anyone that could perform bottom surgery for her, since none of their “neutral” and “notable” sources said as such; they wouldn’t acknowledge that author Richard K. Morgan is a transphobe even after he had repeatedly regurgitated transphobic propaganda and rhetoric, again because their deeply biased sources didn’t confirm it as such. They are quickly approaching a point where they can’t call the kettle black until one of their sources tell them so, but of course that’s not true: many pages on the site are filled with partial or misleading information, or just downright lies and slanders against marginalized people, and yet none of them bother to clean up these articles because they don’t actually care.

While these issues may seem trivial from the position of privilege, it is a very serious matter to the marginalized. Erasing a trans figure from history reinforce the Fascist propaganda that being trans is a trend and thus encourage parents to “cure” their trans children of the fad, just like the way a case of police brutality is described can greatly color someone’s perception on whether it’s a case of police brutality at all. But just like the Dadaists had accused, the self-proclaimed “Rationalists” on Wikipedia start with conclusion that conform to their right-wing bias, gather information from sources based on said bias, and then presented a Conservative propaganda as objective and neutral facts and objective truth.

Evil triumphs when good people do nothing. The Fascists don’t win when they have converted enough people into hateful bigots; they win when enough Capitalists, “Rationalists”, and other cowards sit down and negotiate with them, with the lives of marginalized people and the existence of minority groups as bargaining chips. Right now, Wikipedia is making the Devil’s bargain, by mindlessly deferring to right-wing authorities without question or challenge, they’re willing corroborators who help the Fascists spread their hateful lies, no matter how much they dress the lies up as facts.

In this way, Wikipedia had went from a source for free education to nothing but another system of oppression, endlessly regurgitating Fascist propaganda and Capitalist rhetoric from their so-called “neutral” and “notable” sources, while gladly aiding in the oppression and prosecution of minority groups and marginalized people by erasing their struggle or misrepresenting facts about them. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have a Great Firewall or censorship bureau, when the vilest and most insidious censorship readily exists in their minds: prejudice and bigotry. And like all system of corruption, one day it will have to be razed to the ground and burned into ashes. So to all the wikibros:

The day will come when our silence is more powerful than the voices you’re throttling today.

9. All Days Matter!

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: Why Celebrate Just This One Day?

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: anti-racism, black lives matter

Date: December 25, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-12-25T14:38:05

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/12/25/all-days-matter/

“All Lives Matter” is a common dogwhistle for Libs and assorted other scumbags who really don’t give a fuck about black lives but are also too chickenshit to admit they are racists. The bullshit nature of this slogan is obvious: it dilutes the message of Black Lives Matter — namely, a stance against the continued oppression and racist violence suffered by black people — into something so general and fundamental, it loses any and all meaning. It’s basically exactly the same as saying White Lives Matter, but the fake inclusiveness is a trademark of the Libs.

When someone says “All Lives Matter” in a discourse about Black Lives Matter, what they’re really saying is: “Why does only black lives matter? White lives matter too!” I mean, no shit, Sherlock, everyone knows that white lives matter too, but whiteys are not the ones whose lives are constantly at threat from police brutality and hate crimes. It’s like saying “People die when they are killed.” in response to someone asking “How did my friend die?”: you’re answering a question with a statement that’s always true and thus also utterly irrelevant.

And of course, countering “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” is also a cheap way to provoke an emotional response that would allow the Ra(cist Na)tionalists to “own” people and “win” the debate by claiming that black people and their allies are illogical and reverse-racists, never mind that outrage and contempt are the only logical responses to oppression and apathy, and while a black person can more than definitely be racist, black people are not the ones with the institutional power to carry out systematic violence; the whiteys are.

But if a Fascist can be reasoned with, they wouldn’t exist in the first place, so there’s no point arguing the finer points with them; instead, the next time they celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas or any other festivities that whiteys had stolen from other cultures after they’ve genocided their people just to turn the beautiful celebration of cultures into a worship of money, tell them this: “Why does only Thanksgiving or Christmas matter? The other days of our lives should matter just as much too! All Days Matter! Why celebrate just this one day?”

10. Anarchism Before Labels

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: The Eternal and Constant Gardeners

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: post-left, anarchism without adjectives

Date: September 13^th, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-09-12T18:30:42

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/13/anarchism-before-labels/

Anarchism had seen a resurgence in recent years, in response to the collapse of Capitalism and the ensuring rise in Fascism worldwide. The word “Anarchist” has a different meaning to each of us, as words always do; if you ask ten different Anarchists about their exact definition of Anarchism, you’ll come away with ten very different answers. As the singularly most diverse political ideology to have ever existed, it is no surprise that Anarchists would argue endlessly about ideology, with debates often escalating to bitter rivalry. Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre, two of the most famous American Anarchists, had a long-standing feud over numerous issue, from the fundamental difference between Individualism versus Collectivism, to their different outlook on the use of political violence.

This heated rivalry, however, did not prevent them from coming to the help of one another in times of great need, and they poured themselves into the defense of each and every comrade knowing that their comrades will do the same for them. This is, to us, our Anarchism: we might bicker endlessly about our visions of the future beyond the barricades, question and attack each other on ideological grounds, but when the chips come down and the shit hits the fan, we would have each other’s back. This is why de Cleyre, whose outlook on Anarchism and society had shifted over the years, proposed the idea of Anarchism Without Adjectives: both as an ideal that Anarchism can and will exist in different forms in different regions based on the local culture, and as a call for solidarity in our ongoing struggle against the establishment, for none of our vision for the future is worth anything if we lose the fight.

However, the tendency of certain Anarchists to police political labels with the same zeal and vigor as they condemn slurs worry us. There’s no singularly defining text on Anarchist thoughts, never mind Anarchist lexicon; the need for the precision use of language when it comes to political label is always the start of an implicit hierarchy and unstated rules, where nuance and context give way to linguistic dogmas and moralist authorities. We have written on the topic of Nihilism, an ideology which some considered to be post-left while others considered to be just Fascism; we have also written on the topic of Transhumanism, which some might find incompatible with Nihilism while others might believe to be nothing but a pipe dream. We do not mind; as Anarchists, we believe that the tangled mess of ideologies and even messier tangle of lingo is an indispensable part of Anarchism, and ought to be celebrated with self-conscious laughter instead of being policed with the fanatic rigor of a Commissar.

What happened to the Anarchism Without Adjectives? What happened to the comrades in arms? Since when did precision of language take priority over praxis, and political labels become more important than solidarity? Insurrection makes for strange bedfellows; in the face of a tyrannical regime with far superior power, sometimes one must make strategic alliance with people one despises. This is not a call for compromise or solidarity with authoritarians and right-wingers, but the exact opposite: this is a call to never compromise, and use your enemies for your cause until you can’t. We can use Capitalists and Libertarians to fight Fascists, knowing that we’ll eventually have to overthrow both of them too. So why can’t we do the same with each other? Why can’t we use each other, regardless of our labels and beliefs, until the fight is over and the revolution is won, before we go for each other’s throat for our own vision of the perfect world? It’s high time that we, as Anarchists, abandon our obsession with labels and embrace one simple truth: we shall fight the world until we won or die trying, and then we shall fight each other until the day comes when not even one innocent has to suffer from oppression. It’s not enough to simply walk away from Omelas in disgust and leave the one child to their fate, we must raze all systems of oppression to the ground, even systems of oppression that we made ourselves.

The revolution has to be perpetual, otherwise it would just end up creating another set of chains and a new system of oppression, different in name but not in actuality. Every now and then, the tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of tyrants and martyrs, and we Anarchists must be forever vigilant and always ready to trim the branches of hierarchy – implicit or explicit – even at the cost of our lives. This is Anarchism Before Labels (add whichever labels you prefer): the eternal and constant gardeners.

May the fire that burns within us burn everything around us.

11. Identity Poltics Are Boring As Fuck

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: But So Are Your Leftist Politics After Twenty Fucking Years

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: anti-politics, post-left

Date: September 23, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-09-27T18:41:27

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/identity-politics-are-boring-as-fuck/

Yes, yes, we all hate Liberal identity politics, when a war criminal is cheered as a step toward equality simply for being black or female, or when marginalized people use oppression Olympics as the trump card to shut down any and all argument. But have you, in your privileged high horses and entitled echo chambers, ever thought about why these identity politics exist in the first place? It’s because your leftist politics are still boring as fuck and useless as shit to minority groups, even when it had been pointed out to you more than twenty fucking years ago. You’ve consistently failed to deliver a concrete plan of action that would actually address racial inequality, climate change, homophobia and transphobia, and really any human rights issue you claim to care about. In fact, your politics are more obtuse than ever, with people endlessly hair-splitting down ideological lines, as if splitting a square enough times would give it depth and make it a cube. And midst your endless ideological squabbles, scumbags of all stripes found ways to appropriate your rhetoric to mask their own shittiness: “Materialists” who are really just transphobes, “Anarchists” who use anti-rich sentiments to hide antisemitism, and of course “Marxists” who just want to lick the boots of tyrants in countries they will never, ever visit. The list goes on.

Though without a doubt, identity politics is very, very bad; in fact, it’s a plight upon Liberals and the left alike. After all, white leftists love to emphasize their victimhood, weaponizing ableism as a reason why they’re too oppressed to actually fight their own oppressors, talking at length about the evil of Capitalism while gladly participating in it. But you see, when you start using political labels as a reason why you get to be a jerk to black people or trans people, then you too are playing identity politics: you are inventing your own victimhood wholesale, painting yourself as one among the oppressed masses yearning to be free, appropriating the language and agony of actual minorities for political leverage. And deep down, you probably think that if all these ugly minorities would just fuck off and die, you would be able to turn enough Centrists and Liberals to your pet cause and create the Commie utopia you wanted without having to challenge and change all of your most fondly nurtured bigotries.

It’s fucking disgusting.

There’s a reason why the exploited workers and oppressed masses don’t buy into your woke lingo or read your favorite leftist literature: because they’re fucking useless. Your pretty words and lofty ideas have no bearing on the day-to-day struggle of the working people, and it doesn’t stop the constant stream of microaggression marginalize people have to suffer every day. The black people or trans people playing identity politics, do you think they do it because they fucking enjoy it? No! They do it because they see no other choice, because you — the oh so woke and progressive leftists — failed to show them a way out of their personal hell, so they decided they have no choice but to try reigning in hell. The people fighting in the streets and trying to get through the day have no time to wait for you to get your accepted leftist doctrines in working order, they need you to do something right fucking now!

You know who actually has to suffer from identity politics and oppression Olympics? Intersectional minorities such as trans people of color or homosexual people with mental illness, who suffer from a different form of bigotry from each group due to them not fitting neatly into any one group. And you know who suffer when so-called leftists throw identity politics into the wind and treat it like it’s not something you need to address? The same intersectional minorities again, whose pain and struggle are erased because their race or gender are just “bougie social construct” for the extra woke. But it’s never you, you privileged white trash fuckers who whine endlessly about idpol without ever having to be affected by it, you entitled saloon leftists who only who talk about the revolution from the comfort of your sofa without having to fight for it, you who made a mess for everyone else in the world and never ever had to take up the fucking responsibilities and actually do something to clean up after yourself.

You fucking disgust us.

Th revolution is for all, or it is nothing. Those words were written almost half a century ago, and you have learned jackshit from it. Like the Capitalists and Fascists you claim to abhor, you leftists are still more than willing to sacrifice marginalized people for the sake of your bullshit causes, you still put your abstract ideas above the daily lives and suffering of minority groups. Your organizations are just churches for the powerless, your causes venture capitals for the penniless, your revolution a religion for the godless. You want what every fucking right-winger wants: you want power without having to dirty your own hands, and so you’d use everything and sacrifice everyone except yourself. That’s why when push comes to shove, you will always ask the struggling masses to defer their insurrectionist impulses in favor of the “greater good” – which is really just whats good for you — And that’s why your bullshit revolution will always be for nothing, and we as Anarchists will have to burn your houses down too!

For us, we’re tired of being victims. We’re tired of being reminded of our victimhood. We demand actions! And thus, we put forth the same demand to both of you, you hyper-woke leftists who hate idpol and you anti-woke activists who love idpol or whatever bullshit labels you made up for yourselves: show us your beliefs with your actions, not your empty words! You care about racial inequality? Support the Black Lives Matter riots in the States. You oppose Capitalism? Bring back Occupy, but make it joyously destructive. It’s time you start following your big words up with actions, “comrades”; we’re not Anarchists by Goldman or Bakunin, we’re “Anarchists” by the ancestors who fought white Imperialists and Colonialists, by the blood spilled by our trans siblings and our comrades of color around the world, their names forgotten and their deaths unmourned, their voices drowned out by your mind-numbing bickering and incessant self-patting.

Well, fuck you!

12. Insurrectional Nihilism

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Subtitle: There Is No Hope, Therefore We Rebel

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: anarcho-nihilism, nihilism, insurrectionary anarchy, insurrectionism

Date: July 30, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-08-06T12:40:06

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/07/30/insurrectional-nihilism/

“Rebels without a cause” is often used as a derision against those who seek the destruction of status quo without any idea as to what should replace it; it’s a common accusation thrown at nihilists and other anarchists, oftentimes even by leftists. But must rebels have a cause? Every cause comes with it a blueprint for the future, a new world order to be established in the ruins of the old world. But there’s no guarantee that anyone’s vision of the future is truly an improvement on the human condition, or that it will survive contact with human nature. And while we’re waiting on the futurists and visionaries to plot the perfect order, people are dying of existing systems of oppression as we speak, and any delay is little different from a death sentence to these minorities and marginalized. From a nihilist point of view, the so-called human “progress” is little more than the same oppressors getting better public relations, and it’s more than likely that nothing about the world – past, present, or even future – is worth keeping. Under this premise, wanton destruction is not only acceptable, it’s in fact desirable for nihilists, whose job is to tear down everything that currently exists and facilitate perpetual revolutions in the future.

While nihilists may sneer at the very idea of rebranding, there is some merit in separating nihilists who choose to resist the injustice of the world from those that choose apathy and inaction; anarcho-nihilism was the term used in Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, which some views as redundant when nihilism is readily a strain of anarchism, and it nevertheless falls prey to Capitalist propaganda of all anarchists being nihilists. Insurrectional nihilism, then, focuses the conversation on what separates these nihilists from others: unbridled rage at the status quo and a burning desire to see the world reduced to cinder.

Insurrectional nihilism is also a good contrast to something we like to call “institutional nihilism,” an attitude commonly exhibits by political moderates and centrists: that since better things aren’t possible and status quo is God, any resistance is futile and any change should be rejected. While these cowards will never accept the nihilist label, they start out with the same premise of “no future,” and arrived at the bleakest conclusion: instead of the outrage, despair, or humor of other nihilists, institutional nihilists chose the path of aggressive apathy. They will never fight systems of oppression in any way, shape, and form, and they don’t even have the decency to get out of the way and watch the world burn. They insist on burying and ridiculing anyone who wants to put up a fight and potentially make a difference, however small and temporary it may be. They saw a world without hope and decide to keep everyone in it so all can suffer with them. We see the same world without hope and future, but we decide to raise bloody hell and burn it all down, because it deserves to burn and there’s just a small chance that something better might be built in its ashes. While institutional nihilists are cynics with utter faith in their privilege to trample everyone beneath their feet, we are idealists who believes in nothing but the right and necessity to rebel, to resist, and to fight.

We are insurrectional nihilists. There is no hope, therefore we rebel.

13. Second Wave “Feminism” Is Feminism...

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: ...In the Same Way That National “Socialism” Is Socialism

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: transphobia, racism, fascism

Date: December 24, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-12-27T14:59:59

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/second-wave-feminism-is-feminism/

It’s true! Both of them does what it advertises, but only for the people it doesn’t send to the death camps. Under National “Socialism”, the people do indeed share the wealth...so long as they are pure Aryans and toe the party line; similarly, under Second Wave “Feminism”, men and women do indeed enjoy the same rights, so long as you don’t challenge pseudo-scientific and sex-based social roles. How curious it is that both “ideology” is based on rigid hierarchy that argues for the inherent superiority of some, inflicted upon the people against their will?

What is the common word for an “ideology” based on essentialist arguments and hierarchy? Fascism. It’s just fucking Fascism. Just because Liberals can’t recognize a Fash if they crawled up the Libruh’s face and chewed their nose off so long as the Fash doesn’t wear a swastika doesn’t mean the Fash isn’t there; quite the contrary, in fact. When your “democracy” is built upon a slave market in which wealth can be used to generate more wealth and then passed down to one’s offspring, money essentially becomes an essentialist attribute like sex or race.

The Crapitalist “Meritocracy” goes thus: we’re on top because we’re superior, we’re superior because we’re on top, so on and so forth, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. It’s the exact same argument used by Fascists: we’re on top because we’re the master race, we’re the master race because we’re on top, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda. With these implicit hierarchies baked deep into the world narrative by white Imperialists and Colonists, is it any surprise that the “free” market and Liberal “democracy” of today is indistinguishable from Fascism?

It’s richly ironic and hilariously hypocritical that no one bemoans Liberal identity politics more than Fascists, when in truth the Reich-wingers are the biggest fans of Liberal idpol. Sure, sure, there are plenty of “Leftists” who just want to use their class struggle as an excuse to be anti-idpol so they can be racists or queerphobes, but Fascists quite literally invent both their identity and victimhood from nothing: an Aryan heritage that never existed, a trans agenda they can’t elaborate on, shapeshifting lizard Zionists in league with the Maoists!

If the last sentence sounded increasingly like a fucking shitpost, that’s because it is: Fascism by any other name is just the shitpost of ideologies — they either don’t actually offer a way to organize society for the betterment of all, or they steal ideas from other ideologies to justify their own bullshit. It’s nothing but a cruel and sad fucking joke, and it’s the “ideology” that had been running the world for a century and more. Is it any wonder that our society had became more absurd and meaningless than anything ever dreamed up by a Dadaist?

No one hates Fascists more than us Anarchists. Unlike the right-wing “Libertarians” that had increasingly became little more than Social Darwinists drooling over a Neo-Feudal society, we’re the only ones with the audacity to reject all coercion and hierarchy, the ultimate killjoys with the the galls to tell the Reich-wing chucklefucks “your horseshit of an ideology is the biggest joke in human history and it’s not even funny” when everyone else just laughs politely and hopes that the joke won’t turn on them. Cowardly chickenshit, all of them!

If Fascism is a joke, then Anarchism is the punchline, and it doesn’t mean we should punch Fascists; after all, the only time when punching Fascists is acceptable is when methods of higher lethality are unavailable. The way we see it, either we Anarchists would laugh in triumph as our visions of a better future dawn on the human species, or at least one of us would live long enough to give the finger to the world and tell the boot-licking assholes “I warned you about States bro, I told you dog!”. Either way, we’ll have the last laugh. Ha!

14. The Fox Knows the Hen

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: Deconstructing the Token Minority Defense

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: tokenism, racism, transphobia, oppression, liberalism

Date: June 5, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-06-05T09:58:04

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/06/05/the-fox-knows-the-hen/

“I can’t be racist, I have black friends!” We have all heard this mantra used in defense of bigotry and poor behavior, from people across the entire political spectrum, with infinite variations to justify queerphobia, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and more. We all know it’s a load of bullshit, but just how bullshit is it? Simply put, it flattens the incredibly complex issue of systematic bigotry into a reductive binary of in-group and out-group, and argues that it’s impossible for members of the in-group to commit discrimination against other members of the in-group, which is plainly untrue.

Let’s consider an equivalent but much more obviously absurd statement: “the fox knows the hen for it spent a night in the hen house”. It is true that the fox spent a night in the hen house...to kill and eat the hen! Much like the token minority argument, this statement ignored the inherent imbalance of power between the two; the fox may indeed know the hen – as delicious food, which has nothing to do with the feeling of the hen when it’s being eaten by the fox. Equivalently, just because someone is an ally of minority groups does not mean they know what it feels like to be marginalized and oppressed.

Obviously, the above is an argument by absurdity, since allies aren’t preying upon marginalized people, but it’s a visceral reminder of entrenched power structures: minority groups are often fearful of contradicting our privileged allies, for fear of losing what little support these allies had deemed fit to grace us with. This is why tone-policing is so toxic and arguably do more to perpetrate systematic oppression than the odd violent bigot: when the privileged tells the marginalized to shut the fuck up and be nicer, often the minority feels as if we have no choice but to subject to the bullying of our “allies.”

There’s also the matter of boot-lickers, members of minority groups who had bought their way into the power structure of the privileged groups by selling out their own people. There’s nothing that a Nazi likes more than a Jewish corroborator like Ben Shapiro, for they can claim that such a boot-licker speaks as a marginalized person when they say they are not oppressed. And it’s true: that particular person is not oppressed, they are one of the oppressors, using their token status to help stomping the down-trodden into the ground to maintain their status among the powerful.

Remember, dividing people into groups based on essential attributes like sex or race is an inherently reactionary concept; much of right-wing propaganda thrives on such false equivalence. This is why J. K. Rowling was flatly gaslighting people when she claimed that trans women are “the fox in the hen house”; the fact that she can say such bigoted things and not only get away with it, but even have people like Richard K. Morgan bending backwards to support her, shows that she and transphobes like her are the foxes with the power, while the trans people they abuse are the vulnerable hens.

And it goes beyond just people: a common talking point against Anti-Fascism is that all violence is inherently wrong, so Antifa who break windows or BLM who loot stores are the real Fascists, never mind that the real Fascists — white supremacists — have all the power and could literally get away with murder. Property damage is not in any way comparable to human death and suffering, and using violence to stop violence is completely different from using violence to maintain power. Nevertheless, the Liberal’s love of endless discourse and hand-wringing makes them easy prey for such lies.

We as leftists and especially Anarchists must never fall prey to the beautiful flower of simplicity, for its fruit of false equivalence is a poison to human minds and souls. The real world is messy, complex, and filled with ambiguities; we must be vigilant and constant gardeners, rooting out the grass of preconception from our own minds before it can take roots. Otherwise we would be as easy a prey to right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theories as the Liberals, and become revolutionaries in name only.

15. The Ones Who Came Back to Omelas

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: A Sequel to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: fan fiction, fiction, science fiction, insurrectionism

Date: September 2, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-09-23T13:39:52

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/02/the-ones-who-came-back-to-omelas/

I was wrong. They came back. One by one, at first, then in groups of dozens and hundreds. The look on their faces is as incomprehensible to me and you as the city of Omelas itself, for it is not rage or despair that is written in the knot of their brows or the steel glint of their eyes. Perhaps the narrow-minded will call it hatred, but that is merely an inadequacy of the language, for the cold contempt of an exploiter is not anything like the burning flame in the hearts of the exploited, nor is it anything similar to the raw diamond of determination that clenches the fists of these people, the ones who came back to Omelas. For despite their obsession with pain and evil, the artists had always been content with manufacturing their own agony and despair, and had never once looked true suffering and wickedness in the eyes.

So here they come, the ones who came back to Omelas. They come like a hurricane, with firebombs in their hands and firelight in their eyes, tearing down the perfect walls and beautiful houses of Omelas, showering its joyful and thoughtful people with flame. “Until there’s justice for all innocents”, said one of them, “There will be no peace for the complacent.” So on and on they go, the ones who came back to Omelas, with their bombs and their guns and their cries, bringing guilt and shame and fear to the city at last. They kill without hesitation and destroy without discrimination, for truly it is no longer justice they seek, since they know there will be no justice to be had, none except for the silence of the grave.

Do you believe me now, about the city of Omelas? It is not so different from your city, I say; maybe it’s nicer and cleaner, the people more loving and enlightened, but in the end it is not so different. There is a child in your city too; have you ever gone to visit it, see it being caged in darkness, forced to wallow in its own filth? If not, then you will never understand them, the ones who came back to Omelas. They had all walked away, in rage or despair or shame, and most of them were never seen again. But it is not any emotion we can recognize that brought them back, it is not rage or shame or even guilt. Surely as the night cannot comprehend the light of the day, nor can we ever understand the light in their eyes.

How many of them there are, the ones who walked away from your city? And how many of them there are, the ones who came back? Believe me, they will; maybe not yet, not at first, but they will come back. One by one, at first, then in groups of dozens and hundreds. They will come back with firebombs in their hands and firelight in their eyes, shouting: “Until there’s justice for all innocents, there will be no peace for the complacent.” For the city of Omelas is truly as banal as any other, both in its radiant splendor and its corrupted heartbeat. They will come back to your city too, the ones who walk away from Omelas; they will bring guilt and shame and fear, all of which you know you richly deserved.

Do you believe me now, about the ones who came back to Omelas?

16. White Supremacy Is a Disease

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: And the Only Cure Is Anarchy

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: anti-racism, insurrectionary

Date: December 23, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-12-27T14:52:52

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/12/23/white-supremacy-is-a-disease/

It’s easy to understand why white people would become white supremacists; you get to be a superior human being simply for being white, why the fuck not? And once white supremacy is sufficiently embedded inside a culture, it’s also not difficult to fathom why some people of color would become boot-lickers in a misguided attempt to carve out their own slice of Hell. It is, however, relatively puzzling how people in cultures where the majority of people are not white — such as the many US vassal states in East Asia — would become white supremacist.

Of course, white supremacy had controlled the narratives of the world for the better part of the century — if not more — thanks to propaganda masked as entertainment, a tactic favored by authoritarians of all stripes. When every film you saw involves a Jihadist or Anarchist as a villain, it’s easy for people to buy into the lie and ignore the reality: white supremacists are responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the US. When you believe that the US is the paragon of freedom, it’s easy to believe that Fascism is in fact the ultimate democracy.

But for US vassal states like Japan and Taiwan, the learned white supremacy is built upon a much deeper root of inherent racism. The “black face” stereotype was in fact one of the first cultural import from the West into Japan, and even now their culture as a whole refuse to renounce their ally in WWII...namely, the Nazis. Taiwan, for its part, had always employed the red scare narrative as a mean to control the masses, which necessitates setting the US up as the ultimate good against the evil of Communism, thus justifying all the crimes of the US.

White supremacists, for their part, are happy to fan the fire by hailing these vassal States as shiny jewels of democracy against the darkness of Communism, hailing the legalization of gay marriage as a victory for queer liberation…when the so-called progressives in Taiwan believed that the basic human rights of gay people should be up to a popularity contest. And like little dogs got petted by their owners, they easily bought into whatever stories the West sell them, swallowing huge loads of queerphobic and racist bullshit with an ecstatic grin.

If that boot-licking mentality sounds familiar, it’s because it is. It’s the same fake dualism enforced by tyrants world wide: Liberal and Conservative, Left and Right, Men and Women, yadda yadda yadda. And just like all such manufactured binaries, it’s total horseshit. This is the same mentality as the tankies: since the US is the ultimate evil, anyone who fights the US is a good “Leftist”, even if they commit genocide. None of them give a shit about the things they claim to care about: not human rights or lives, not freedom or justice, nothing, nada!

All they care about is power, and since white supremacists have power, they are willing to throw anyone else under the bus to get a piece. It is little surprise then that so many Asian Americans supported Donald because of the red scare, and how many black people attacked Asian people since they bought into the “Chinese virus” narrative. They would rather hurt each other under the command of dictators by any other names than banding together against their oppressors. Rats fighting for scarps, exactly where the white cats want them.

“Revolution starts in the mind” is more than just words. Implicit hierarchies like gender binary or white supremacy (which are really one and the same) prosecutes innocents just as much as — and often more than — laws and regulations do. Many marginalized people have reservations about systematic changes because so long as the implicit hierarchies stay, no system of government — even the lack of one — will truly liberate them. We have to remind ourselves that Anarchists aren’t just outlaws: we’re against ALL hierarchy and coercion.

White supremacy is a disease, and the only cure is Anarchy: total annihilation of the status quo.

17. A Tranarchist Manifesto

Deleted reason: deleted, pending further review

Subtitle: Transgender, Transhuman, Anarchism

Author: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Authors: Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Topics: Anarcho-Transhuman, anarcho-transhumanism, transgender

Date: December 22, 2019

Date Published on T@L: 2020-02-04T08:00:29

Source: https://invisiblexarmy.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/a-tranarchist-manifesto/

The outline of this manifesto had been bouncing around our headspace for quite some time now, but we have not deemed it fit to put it into writing, due to our disappointment at how the conversations about Transhumanism had been dominated by cishet white male libertarians. But the revelation of Richard K. Morgan — who wrote one of the most popular Transhumanist fiction in Altered Carbon — as a transphobe had changed our minds: for far too long our visions of technologies and their many promises had been controlled by the Conservative establishment and enslaved to exploitative Social Darwinists, to which we say: no more! In this text, we’ll outline a philosophy we call Tranarchism, which differs from the existing idea of Anarcho-Transhumanism in that we believe in the present day, the rights of trans people, above all else, is essential to the development and eventual blossoming of both Transhumanism and Anarchism. We seek to argue that trans rights, Transhumanism, and Anarchism are three sides of the same triangle, and it’ll eventually come a time when one cannot exist without the other two.

First, on trans rights. Going by the most inclusive definition, a trans person is just anyone who doesn’t always identify with the gender arbitrarily assigned to them by so-called medical “professionals” based on the outward appearance of their genitalia. We know, as a scientific fact, that biological sex exists on a spectrum, and the concept of binary sex is nothing but a social construct created by the establishment to control the people; genders are even more varied and complex, and anyone who seeks to gatekeep and control gender identities are just tyrants in their narrow and little minds. That trans rights — the right to reject a role imposed upon oneself based on arbitrary, essentialist standards — is the most fundamental of morphological freedoms should go without saying, but as it is always the case with the cishets, it needed to be said: you cannot, in good conscience, support or explore a Transhumanist ideology that challenges the very idea of humanity, while holding onto such outdated and conservative ideas like binary sex and gender. Anarchists, who seek to abolish all systems of oppression, should pour their effort into the fight for trans rights, for the system of binary sex and gender roles are the oldest and most evil of these institutions. If you cannot see beyond it, you are not fit for either Transhumanism or Anarchism — the only kind of free thinker you are is one free from the burden of thinking for yourself.

Second, on Transhumanism. At its most basic level, Transhumanism is simply the idea that we can and should transcend human limitations through technological means. While libertarians would no doubt claim the honor of creating the ideology, Transhumanist ideas had existed since the dawn of the human species, in the epic of Gilgamesh when he set out to find the elixir of immortality. In fact, one may very well argue that Transhumanism is practiced today, with trans people who modify their biochemistry through hormones, and people with disabilities who overcome them with technologies like hearing aids or wheelchairs. Humanity had always coexisted and co-evolved with technologies: the idea that we’ll be able to stop doing so is not only foolish, it’s inherently transphobic and ableist. We would argue that Transhumanism is simply an extension and generalization of trans rights into the broader idea of morphological freedom: if we believe that a trans person should be allowed to modify their bodies to fit their gender, should we deny an otherkin or furry the right to modify their body to become their ideal selves, should the technology ever become available? We think not, not unless one wishes to be a hypocrite. However, we believe that Transhumanism cannot — and in fact, should not — exist under State and Capital. It’s as Gibson said: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” So long as centralized power exists in the form of State or Capital, technological progress will always serve as a tool of oppression and exploitation for the establishment first and foremost, before it eventually trickles down to the masses...if ever. The kind of technological wonder promised by Transhumanism is nothing short of nightmarish for the people if wielded by an authoritarian establishment.

Last but not the least, Anarchism. Contrary to Capitalist propaganda, Anarchism doesn’t mean a lack of rules, nor do Anarchists reject labor. The word “anarchy” simply means “without leader”; we seek to abolish all unjust systems and hierarchies, instead of sowing discord for the sake of discord. It just so happens that throughout human history, laws put forth by State and Capital had always been created to protect the establishment and control the masses. What we reject is work, or wage slavery: the mandate that you must sell your labor for a fraction of its worth or face execution by starvation. So long as there exists a hierarchy, someone will have to be stamped underfoot, and throughout the history of the so-called Western “civilization”, trans people had always been on the lowest rung in society regardless of what kind of state the State is in. It is our belief that only a total abolishment of all hierarchy will see the liberation of trans people, once and for all. While some Anarchists had turned reactionary and embraced Primitivism, seeing technology and civilization as one and the same as State and Capital, we know that it is not the case: we’ve seen how new technology enabled the people to organize and fight back in ways never before thought possible. It is our belief that technology, put into the hands of the people instead of the establishment, will hasten the destruction of state and capital and not only enable but improve an anarchist society.

Trans rights. Transhumanism. Anarchism. The three sides form a triangle of liberty and equality, where all people are empowered to determine exactly who they are, from the state of their minds to the shape of their bodies. We concede that it is possible that humanity had not yet reached a point where our collective consciousness is ready for such radical self-determination, but we trust in humanity’s ability to learn from mistakes and improve, if only painfully slowly. The time will eventually come when all people, without fault, are ready to embrace and enjoy the fruits of technology in a society without state or capital, when people finally learn to rule their own lives independent of establishment and hierarchies. It is the duty of us, as Tranarchists, to facilitate and prepare for this transition, so that when the time finally arrives that technology is able to give us all that we dreamed of, all obstacles are removed and it is the people who reap that reward.

All for all!

18. ‘Human Rights’ and the Discontinuous Mind

Deleted reason: Discussion pending

Author: Anonymous

Authors: Anonymous

Topics: anthropocentrism, anti-civilisation, biology, evolution, human rights, science

Date: 16^th July 2011

Date Published on T@L: 2011-09-19 16:48:29 +0200

Source: Retrieved on September 19^th, 2011 from challengingciv.blogspot.com

Modern language is loaded with hidden cultural assumptions, biases, and projections of value. A given language or dialect betrays the underlying edifice on which its social structures are based. These hidden assumptions include our own prejudices, values, and moral judgements; forming the self-reinforcing jigsaw of our worldview. For example, if we long to increase our lifespans, then breakthroughs in medical research to combat aging become desirable — more efficient medicine is ‘better’ medicine; likewise, if we believe that spending less time travelling from A to B is inherently a good thing, then a faster route automatically becomes a ‘preferred’ route.

A good analogy might be a three-dimensional web of interconnected relations in which certain ideas precede, follow from, and depend upon each other for support. In the case of medical research, say, the sort of language we use springs mainly from a fear of death and disease. But it also reinforces and contributes to this fear (as well as to an obsession with the passing of time, a strife for self-preservation, and so on, ad nauseum).

Some of the assumptions borne by our language play a meaningful role — for instance, the idea that rape is evil precedes most of our dialogue on the topic. Most would agree that this is a good thing. Other cases might be less clearcut, but in general, we could say that the greater the potential for suffering or harm resulting from a particular idea, the more attention we should pay to the assumptions of our language around it.

Take the almost ubiquitous cultural assumption that humans deserve an exalted status above other living beings. Arguments for the equality of a particular group of people often take the form of a case to establish the ‘human rights’ of that group. Such rights, by definition limited to members of our own species, hold a very powerful sway in popular thought. Socialists, feminists, gay rights activists, secularists and other such campaigners award a primacy and value to these rights: successfully establishing something as a ‘human right’ is considered a crucial element of the fight to have it recognised or upheld.

Interestingly and importantly, campaign groups such as those listed above frequently attempt to raise consciousness of their own issues and agendas by questioning or objecting to popular turns of phrase; feminists deliberately use the pronoun ‘she’ instead of ‘he’, many secularists prefer not to be ‘blessed’ or to ‘thank god’, etc. Merely by altering popular language on a topic, an important aspect of liberation is achieved.

Similarly, the linguistic and conceptual deliniation between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ rights directly affects our actions and attitudes towards other living beings. It is an offshoot of our collective anthropocentrism that allows us to justify our treatment of these species in a manner lesser to that of other human beings. One could be forgiven, then, for presuming that it is based upon sound, legitimate reasoning; as obvious as the wrongfulness of sexism or racial prejudice within our own species.

Yet this could not be further from the truth. By almost any measure, there is no conceivable warrant for our mindset towards other species. Scientifically, environmentally, and even practically speaking, we are railing against what is natural and right.

In his essay Gaps in the Mind, evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins explains that species are neatly grouped and unique only from the conceited hindsight and perspective of our study.

It is we who choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct: usually, but not always.

He goes onto give an example to prove the point, referencing so-called ‘ring species’, which are loosely defined as a pair of species that can be seen to ‘blend’ into one another over geographical space. Intermediate forms still live — and interbreed — all along the gradient of change between these species. There is no point at which a herring gull ‘becomes’ a lesser black-backed gull, there is only a continuous line of forms connecting both varieties over geographical space and resembling them in different ways. They have clearly diverged over evolutionary time, but the intermediaries still live, and it would be ridiculous to regard any particular form as being ‘superior’ or more ‘advanced’; each thrives within its own space and its own environment.

Dawkins relates this to the taxonomic position of humans:

The word ‘apes’ usually means chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans, gibbons and siamangs. We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes — the gibbons and orang-utans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans but excludes humans.

He concludes:

It is sheer luck that this handful of intermediates [between humans and chimpanzees] no longer exists. (’Luck’ from some points of view: for myself, I should love to meet them.) But for this chance, our laws and our morals would be very different. We need only discover a single survivor, say a relict Australopithecus in the Budongo Forest, and our precious system of norms and ethics would come crashing about our ears. The boundaries with which we segregate our world would be all shot to pieces. Racism would blur with speciesism in obdurate and vicious confusion. Apartheid, for those that believe in it, would assume a new and perhaps a more urgent import.

From the perspective of our science, then, the concept of a ‘human right’ holds little water. If only the chain of intermediate forms between humans and chimpanzees still survived and interbred, the absurdity of our attempts to implement such a notion would be all too apparent (and so on through the intermediaries with ancestral gorillas, etc.). How ironic it is, then, that vast swathes of those who so indignantly proclaim the need to protect ‘human rights’ are the very same people who believe themselves to be the most rational and scientific!

When we fully recognise that all living species are wholly interrelated, both in ancestral terms and through a single, shared, livable planet, we come to see other species not as objects of utility but as deserving of respect. They form a facet of the environment from which we are inseperable. As Charles Eisenstein puts it in The Ascent of Humanity, “any attempt to divorce a rational society or a rational life from the organic supporting matrix where it belongs requires tremendous effort and incurs tremendous danger. Such a life or society is tenuous, fragile, and short-lived. It cannot exist for long without reconnecting to the wellspring of life.”

It is in this light that we should seek to review and reform our perspectives, our thought and our language, regarding humans and other species. It is not — and has never been — a case of ‘us and them’, but a unified whole of which we are all a necessary part.

19. Chile: Anatomy of an economic miracle, 1970–1986

Deleted reason: discussion pending

Author: Black Flag

Topics: Black Flag, Chile, 1973, neoliberalism

Date: 1999

Date Published on T@L: 2013-09-11 12:05:38 +0000

Source: Retrieved on September 11^th 2013 From http://libcom.org/library/chile-anatomy-of-an-economic-miracle

Anatomy of an Economic Miracle

With the arrest of General Pinochet, the usual slime of the right pronounced that his dictatorship created an economic “miracle.” We will ignore the “ends justify the means” argument along with the question of why these defenders of “liberty” desire to protect a dictator and praise his regime. Here we concentrate on the facts of the “miracle” imposed on the Chilean people.

The actual results of the free market policies introduced by the dictatorship were far less than the “miracle” claimed by the right. The initial effects of introducing free market policies in 1975 was a shock-induced depression which resulted in national output falling buy 15 percent, wages sliding to one-third below their 1970 level and unemployment rising to 20 percent. This meant that, in per capita terms, Chile’s GDP only increased by 1.5% per year between 1974–80. This was considerably less than the 2.3% achieved in the 1960’s.

Supporters of the “miracle” pointed to the period 1978 to 1981, when the economy grew at 6.6 percent a year. However, this is a case of “lies, damn lies, and statistics” as it does not take into account the catching up an economy goes through as it leaves a recession. If we look at whole business cycle, rather than for the upturn, we find that Chile had the second worse rate of growth in Latin America between 1975 and 1980. The average growth in GDP was 1.5% per year between 1974 and 1982, which was lower than the average Latin American growth rate of 4.3% and lower than the 4.5% of Chile in the 1960’s. Between 1970 and 1980, per capita GDP grew by only 8%, while for Latin America as a whole, it increased by 40% and for the years 1980 and 1982 per capita GDP fell by 12.9 percent, compared to a fall of 4.3 percent for Latin America as a whole. In 1982, after 7 years of free market capitalism, Chile faced yet another economic crisis which, in terms of unemployment and falling GDP was even greater than that experienced during the terrible shock treatment of 1975. Real wages dropped sharply, falling in 1983 to 14 percent below what they had been in 1970. Bankruptcies skyrocketed, as did foreign debt. By the end of 1986 Gross Domestic Product per capita barely equalled that of 1970. Between 1970 and 1989, Chile total GDP grew by a lackluster 1.8 to 2.0% a year, slower than most Latin American countries. The high growth, in other words, was a product of the deep recessions that the regime created and, overall, 20 years of free market miracle had .

The working class

By far the hardest group affected by the Pinochet “reforms” was the working class, particularly the urban working class. By 1976, the third year of Junta rule, real wages had fallen to 35% below their 1970 level. It was only by 1981 that they has risen to 97.3% of the 1970 level, only to fall again to 86.7% by 1983. Unemployment, excluding those on state make-work programmes, was 14.8% in 1976, falling to 11.8% by 1980 (this is still double the average 1960’s level) only to rise to 20.3% by 1982. By 1986, per capita consumption was actually 11% lower than the 1970 level. Between 1980 and 1988, the real value of wages grew only 1.2 percent while the real value of the minimum wage declined by 28.5 percent. During this period, urban unemployment averaged 15.3 percent per year. In other words, after nearly 15 years of free market capitalism, real wages had still not exceeded their 1970 levels. Moreover, labour’s share in the national income fell from 52.3% to 30.7% between 1970 and 1989. In 1995, real wages were still 10% lower than in 1986 and 18% lower than during the Allende period!

The real “Miracle”

However, the other main effect of the Pinochet years was the increased wealth of the elite, and for this that it has been claimed as a “miracle.” Between 1970, the richest 10% of the population saw their share in the national income rise from 36.5% in 1980 to 46.8% by 1989 (the bottom 50% saw their share fall from 20.4 to 16.8%). In the words of one of the best known opposition economists, “the Chilean system is easy to understand. Over the past twenty years $60 billion has been transferred from salaries to profits.”

Thus the wealth created by the economic growth Chile experienced did not “trickle down” to the working class (as claimed would happen by “free market” capitalist dogma) but instead accumulated in the hands of the rich. Just as it did not in the UK and the USA.

The proportion of the population below the poverty line (the minimum income required for basic food and housing) increased from 20% to 44.4%. On the other hand, while consumption for 80% of Chilean households dropped between 1970 and 1989, it rose from 44.5% to 54.6% for the richest 20% (the poorest 20% suffered the worse drop, from 7.6% to 4.4%, followed by the next 20%, from 11.8% to 8.2%, then the next 20%, 15.6% to 12.7%).

State Aid

The Pincohet’s regime support for “free market” capitalism did not prevent it organising a massive bail-out of the economy during the 1982 recession — yet another example of market discipline for the working class, welfare for the rich. As was the case in the USA and the UK.

The ready police repression (and “unofficial” death squads) made strikes and other forms of protest both impractical and dangerous. The law was also changed to reflect the power property owners have over their wage slaves and the total overhaul of the labour law system which took place between 1979 and 1981 aimed at creating a perfect labour market, eliminating collective bargaining, allowing massive dismissal of workers, increasing the daily working hours up to twelve hours and eliminating the labour courts. Little wonder, then, that this favourable climate for business operations resulted in generous lending by international finance institutions.

Of course, the supporters of the Chilean “Miracle” and its “economic liberty” did not bother to question how the suppression of political liberty effected the economy or how people acted within it. They maintained that the repression of labour, the death squads, the fear installed in rebel workers would be ignored when looking at the economy. But in the real world, people will put up with a lot more if they face the barrel of a gun than if they do not. And this fact explains much of the Chilean “miracle.” According to Sergio de Castro, the architect of the economic programme Pinochet imposed, dictatorship was required to introduce “economic liberty” because:

“it provided a lasting regime; it gave the authorities a degree of efficiency that it was not possible to obtain in a democratic regime; and it made possible the application of a model developed by experts and that did not depend upon the social reactions produced by its implementation.”

In other words, “economic liberty” required rule by technocrats and the military. The regime’s pet “experts” used the Chilean people like laboratory rats in an experiment to make the rich richer. This is the system held up by the right as a “miracle” and an example of “economic liberty.” Like the “economic miracle” created by Thatcher, we discover a sharp difference between the facts and the rhetoric. And like Thatcher’s regime, it made the rich richer and the poor poorer, a true “miracle.”

So, for all but the tiny elite at the top, the Pinochet regime of “economic liberty” was a nightmare. Economic “liberty” only seemed to benefit one group in society, an obvious “miracle.” For the vast majority, the “miracle” of economic “liberty” resulted, as it usually does, in increased poverty, unemployment, pollution, crime and social alienation. The irony is that many on the right point to it as a model of the benefits of the free market.

20. The IWW in Canada

Author: G. Jewell

Topics: IWW, Canada, unions, syndicalism

Date Published on T@L: 2013-08-07 06:45:32 +0000

Source: <libcom.org/library/iww-canada-g-jewell>

Notes: Leaflet on the birth and history of the Canadian section of Industrial Workers of the World.

Cover:

d-d-dumpster-diving-the-anarchist-library-text-bin-3.jpg

General Introduction

Established in 1886, the American Federation of Labor had by the turn of the century secured its domination over North American organized labour. True, the federation was still a shaky affair; the AFL — interested primarily in “respectable” craft unions — refused to organize the great bulk of industrial workers. But with the Knights of Labor (the first genuine, albeit mystical attempt to bring all workers together under one all-embracing organization) everything but buried, and industrial unions like the American Railway Union destroyed and the Western Federation of Miners under increasing attack by the mine owners, the AFL managed to establish hegemony and either batter down or absorb all rivals.

This craft union hegemony existed in Canada as well as the United States. The original Canadian unions — insular and indecisive — failed. The same fate met the first mass- industrial union from the U.S., the Knights. In 1902, the Trades and Labour Congress, already the leading force in Canadian labour and controlled by the AFL union branches in Canada, expelled from its ranks all Canadian national unions, British internationals, and the Knights of Labor. The opposition formed a Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL) but it never amounted to much. Prospects seemed clear for the TLC and, behind it, Samuel Gompers, U.S. president of the AFL.

Yet only three years were to pass before the IWW emerged as a revolutionary challenge.

Birth of the IWW

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in 1905 in Chicago. The driving force behind the new union was the Western Federation of Miners, which had been fighting a bloody but losing battle throughout the western US and Canada. Joining were the WFM’s parent, the American Labor Union (which included several hundred members in B.C) the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees, and Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Observers were sent from the United Metal Workers (US and Canada), the North American branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers of Great Britain, the International Musicians Union, the Bakers Union, and others.

Keynote speeches were delivered by Big Bill Haywood of the WFM, Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, Mother Jones of the United Mine Workers, DeLeon, Lucy Parsons, anarchist and widow of a Haymarket martyr, Father Hagerty, who drew up the One Big Union industrial structure, and William Trautmann from German Brewery Workers of Milwaukee (who was expelled from that union for his participation in the IWW convention). Trautmann’s and Hagerty’s views were influenced by European anarcho-syndicalism, as were Haywood’s by the revolutionary syndicalism of the French CGT. A claimed membership of 50,827 was pledged to the IWW. The professed aim was nothing less than the overthrow of the capitalist system by and for the working class.

Two months later, after the United Metal Workers brought in 700 of their claimed 3,000 members, the actual total of union members was a mere 4,247. There was a magnificent $817.59 in the treasury. The new union had begun to march on the wrong foot and the AFL crowed with delight. Within a few years all the founding organizations had either quit the IWW or had been expelled. By 1910, a low year with only 9,100 dues-paid members, the IWW was the unruly bastard of the labor movement, ridiculously challenging the AFL and the Capitalist Class to a battle to the death.

However, the IWW then suddenly burst out with an amazing explosive force, becoming a mass movement in the US, Canada, Australia, and Chile, and leaving a fiery mark on labour in South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Great Britain and the world maritime industry.

The reasons for this sudden expansion lay at the very root of the economic crisis underlying capitalist society in the years immediately prior to the First World War. To begin with, organized labour, divided as it was into squabbling craft unions, was in a pitiful state, unable to effect even the most innocuous reforms. The larger mass of unorganized and chronically under-employed workers lived in appalling misery as it reeled from a capitalist “boom and bust” cycle of high speculation followed by crushing depression every five or ten years.

Yet despite this seemingly tremendous weakness of the working class, many unionists had already recognized the great power inherent in the vast industrial monopolies which the ever-shrinking number of super-industrialists themselves scarcely knew how to handle. That a working class already trained in the operating of these industries might continue to do so in the enforced absence of the capitalist owners was a matter of new-found faith and high expectations. At this particular moment, it was precisely the IWW which gave not only voice to these hopes and desires, but also offered the first INDUSTRIAL strategy to effect that transference of power.

The IWW, cutting across all craft lines, organized workers into industrial unions — so that no matter the task, all workers in one industry belonged to one industrial union. These industrial unions formed the component parts of six industrial departments: 1-Agriculture, Land, Fisheries and Water Products, 2-Mining, 3-Construction, 4-Manufacturing and General Production, 5-Transportation and Communication, and 6-Public Service. The industrial departments made up the IWW as a whole; yet although functioning independently, they were bridged by the rank and file power of the total general membership to vote on all union general policy and the election of all officers of the General Administration coordinating the industrial departments.

The IWW was characterized by a syndicalist reliance on the job branch at the shop floor level; a strong distrust of labour bureaucrats and leftist politicians; an emphasis on direct action and the propaganda of the deed. Above all, Wobblies believed in the invincibility of the General Strike, which to them meant nothing less than the ultimate lock-out of the capitalist class. They wrapped their theory and practise with a loose blanket of Marxist economic analysis and called for the abolition of the wage system.

The IWW pioneered the on the job strike, mass sit-downs, and the organization of unemployed, migrant, and immigrant working people. It captured the public imagination with free speech fights, gigantic labour pageants, and the most suicidal bluster imaginable. Its permanent features were an army of roving agitator-organizers on land and sea, little red song books, boxcar delegates, singing recruiters.

In Australia IWW members were involved in a plan to forge banknotes and bankrupt the state. During the Mexican revolution of 1911, Wobblies joined with Mexican anarchists in a military effort that set up a six-month red flag commune in Baja California. In the Don Basin they faced Cossacks; at Kronstadt they died under Trotsky’s treacherous guns; in the German ports they were silenced only by the Gestapo; in the CNT anarchist militias and the International Brigades they battled Franco.

Canada 1906 – 1918

The IWW immediately began organizing in Canada, and experienced erratic growth from 1906 to 1914, especially in B.C. and Alberta. The first Canadian IWW union charter was issued May 5, 1906 to the Vancouver Industrial Mixed Union No.322.

Five locals were formed in BC in 1906, including a Lumber Handlers Job Branch on the Vancouver docks composed mainly of North Vancouver Indians, known as the “Bows and Arrows.”

By 1911, the IWW claimed 10,000 members in Canada, notably in mining, logging, Alberta agriculture, longshoring and the textile industry. That year a local of IWW street labourers in Prince Rupert struck, initially bringing out 250 but swelling to 1,000 assorted strikers. 56 arrests resulted from several riots, and a special stockade was built to house them (reportedly by TLC union carpenters). A number of strikers were injured and wounded; the HMS Rainbow was called in to suppress the strike.

In 1912 the IWW fought a fierce free speech fight in Vancouver, forcing the city to rescind a ban on public street meetings.

Organizing began in 1911 among construction workers building the Canadian Northern Railway in BC. In September a quick strike of 900 workers halted 100 miles of construction. IWW organizer Biscay was kidnapped by the authorities and charged as a “dangerous character and a menace to public safety.” A threatened walkout by the entire Canadian Northern workforce prompted a not-guilty verdict in a speedy trial. In December, a 50-cents a day pay raise was won by on-the-job action.

The 1,000- Mile Picket Line

By February 1912, IWW membership on the CN stood at 8,000. A demand for adequate sanitation and an end to piece-rate or “gypo” wages was ignored by the government. On March 27, unable to further tolerate the unbearable living conditions in the work camps, the 8,000 “dynos and dirthands” walked out. The strike extended over 400 miles of territory, but the IWW established a “1,000-mile picket line” as Wobs picketed employment offices in Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, and Minneapolis to halt recruitment of scabs.

Meanwhile the strike camps were so well run and disciplined that the press began calling the Yale camp in particular a “miniature socialist republic.” While not going that far, the west coast IWW weekly, Industrial Worker, proudly pointed to this example of working class solidarity in which Canadians, Americans, Italians, Austrians, Swedes, Norwegians, French and other countrymen — one huge melting pot into which creed, colour, flag, religion, language and all other differences had been flung — were welded together in common effort. Even “demon rum” was proscribed, which alone indicates the seriousness of the strikers.

Authorities arrested the strikers by the thousands for “unlawful assemblage” and vagrancy. Many were forcibly deported at gunpoint. But the picket lines held. In August they were joined by 3,000 construction workers on the Grand Trunk Pacific in BC and Alberta. The entire action, better known as the Fraser River or Fraser Canyon Strike, was popularized in song by Joe Hill’s “Where the Fraser River Flows.” The strike also spawned the nickname Wobbly. A Chinese restaurant keeper who fed strikers reputedly mispronounced “IWW” in asking customers “Are you eye wobble wobble?” and the name stuck.

The CN strike lasted until the fall of 1912, when exhausted strikers settled for a few minor improvements: better sanitary conditions and a temporary end to the gypo system. The BC Grand Trunk strike was called off in January 1913 after the Dominion government promised to enforce sanitation laws. A greater gain was development of the “camp delegate” system in which the IWW secretary in town delegated a worker to represent him in the field — a method later refined into the permanent “Job Delegate” system of the roving Agricultural Workers.

Other unique features of the strike are worth mentioning. One, used again in the 20’s on the Northern Railway strike in Washington, was to “scab on the job” by sending convert Wobs into scab camps to bring the workers out on strike. Another came in response to the “free” transportation offered scabs by the Railways on condition a man’s luggage was impounded until such time as his strike breaking wages repaid the fare. Large Wob contingents signed on, leaving the Railways with cheap suitcases stuffed with bricks and gunny sacks, and then deserted en route.

Edmonton, Alberta was then a major railroad construction center and in the winter of 1913- 14, thousands of workers from all over Canada and the US were stranded there without jobs or funds. The city fathers refused to alleviate their plight. The IWW established an Edmonton Unemployed League, demanding that the city furnish work to everybody regardless of race, colour or nationality, at a rate of 30 cents an hour, and further, that in the meantime the city distribute three 25-cent meal tickets to each man daily, tickets redeemable at any restaurant in town. These demands were backed by mass parades which police clubs and arrests could not stop.

On January 28, 1914 the Edmonton Journal headlined the news: IWW Triumphant! The city council provided a large hall for the homeless, passed out three 25-cent meal tickets to each man daily, and employed 400 people on a public project.

That summer the IWW began organizing a campaign in the Alberta wheat fields, but the guns of August were drawing near.

Repression in W.W.I

With the outbreak of World War one and Canada’s subservient entry as British cannon fodder, the federal government effected a number of articles in the War Measures legislation embodied in the British North America Act. IWW members were hit by a wave of harassment and arrests that presaged that which swept most of the American IWW leadership into jail in 1917–18 (by 1920 there were 2,000 Wobblies behind bars in the USA). In late 1914 the union could claim only 465 members in Canada and in 1915 its last three remaining branches dissolved. Agitation continued, however, especially among Finnish lumber workers in Northern Ontario.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused severe jitters in the ruling classes around the world and with the unilateral withdrawal of Russian forces from the war effort against Germany, the conflict in Europe reached a critical stage. This was coupled with a number of mutinies in the Allied forces and weary dissension on the homefronts. Repression was intensified and Canada a number of Wobblies were jailed in 1918. The “Vancouver World” of August 5, 1918 outlined the “facts” in the case of Ernest Lindberg and George Thompson:

Two IWW Prospects Caught in Police Trap-- Couple Declared Active at Logging Camps Arrested and German Literature is Seized... “Lot of Good Rebels Quitting, stated letter...Message in German to Tenant of House is postmarked Glissen. Lindberg, accused of delivering speeches in a logging bunkhouse, after which a number of workers quit their jobs and returned into the city, was held under the Idlers Act. Thompson, who is alleged to be a firebrand and whose connection with the pro-German element is said to be close, was charged with having banned literature in his possession, including copies of the Week, LaFollette’s Magazine (LaFollette: anti-war Progressive US Senator), and of the Lumber Worker, as well as letters written in German.

The World went on to editorialize:

** For some time past the Dominion authorities have been alive to the situation existing in the camps, and have been desirous that the ringleaders of the movement which is responsible for draining of the logging centres, should be found... By the arrest of Lindberg and Thompson, the authorities believe they have succeeded in locating two main workers in the IWW cause, although there are others who will be carefully watched and apprehended in due course... The IWW is the short term used for the Industrial Workers of the World, an American organization with very extreme policies, Bolsheviki principles, and far reaching aims for the betterment of the conditions of the masses. Like other large organizations, it has two factions, the red flagging element generally regarded as dangerous as inciters against the observance of law and order. The organization is disowned by all but the lowest type of union labour men, as well as by Socialists.***

On September 24, 1918, a federal order in council declared that while Canada was engaged in war, 14 organizations were to be considered unlawful, including the IWW and the Workers International Industrial Union (DeLeons’ expelled Detroit faction of the IWW).. Penalty for membership was set at 5 years in prison.

The same order banned meetings conducted in the language of any enemy country (German, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Turkish etc) or in Russian, Ukrainian or Finnish (except for religious services.)

IWW organizer Dick Higgins was tried under the War Measures Act in Vancouver, but a defense by the Socialist Party of Canada kept him out of jail. In the USA, two of those receiving minor sentences were well known British Columbia unionists who had been temporarily organizing in the USA, as headlined in the B.C. Federationist September 1918: IWW Members Given Long Terms: G. Hardy and A.E.Sloper are among those who received year terms.

Postwar Growth

1918 witnessed a major change in Canadian Labour. The drive for industrial unionism resumed and stiffened resistance against the AFL affiliated TLC and the latter’s support for conscription and the suspension of civil liberties.

This groundswell culminated in the founding of the One Big Union at the Western Labour Conference in Calgary in March 1919. Directly affiliated to the OBU were a number of independent mining and lumber industrial unions, but its influence reached into a majority of TLC locals west of Port Arthur, Ontario. This explosive mix of militant independent unionists and rebellious TLC units resulted in the Winnipeg General Strike that summer. It began with the building trades striking for recognition, followed by the metal trades, and on until 30,000 workers were out directly or in sympathy and a Central Strike Committee was running the city. Fred Tipping, a member of the Strike Committee, explains the situation:

First of all, you should remember that there were a series of unsuccessful strikes through 1918. In a sense the 1919 strike was a climax to many months of labour unrest due to a great deal of unemployment after the War, big increases in prices and no job security. Bear in mind too that Winnipeg and Vancouver were centres of advanced radical thought at the time. The Socialist Party of Canada/Marxist had been strong for a number of years and had gained support among industrial workers and even farmers. In the Winnipeg Trades and labour Council you would find men who were Marxists and others who supported the IWW. There was also the Social Democratic Party, many of these people were strong enthusiasts for the Russian revolution and were commonly called Bolsheviki. When the Social Democrats split during the War some of these later joined the Communist parties. Others of us became members of the Labour Party — later to become the Independent Labour Party and then the CCF. The idea of the general strike seemed to have been in the air. Don’t forget that not too many months before, some key people on the Strike Committee had attended the OBU conference in Calgary and the general strike was a weapon much favoured by the OBU. Then there was the attitude of business. They were first generation businessmen. I call them Ontario bushmen. Most of them had been farmers. They felt paternalistic to the workers. “I don’t want a bunch of workers telling me how to run my plant,” was a remark commonly heard. On the other hand the union leaders had come from industrial England. They had years of bitter strike experience. They were not novices

---- Canadian Dimension/Winnipeg----

The strike was smashed by a combination of government troops and a “Citizens committee.” Many strike leaders were arrested and tried for subversion. A number of immigrants were deported. The OBU was shattered as an all-industry federation as court after court ruled that the TLC “internationals” owned the contracts in the majority of organized locals, though the OBU continued to hold the Lumber Workers Industrial Union, some mine unions, the Winnipeg streetcar workers, and Saskatoon telephone operators.

After a series of disastrous strikes by its 23,000 members, the LWIU collapsed in 1921. Stepping into the breach, the newly founded Workers Party — later the Communist Party-- declared war on the OBU’s industrial unionism and succeeded in directing it into “geographical unionism,” following the dictate of Lenin’s 3^rd International union strategy, which was to break up dual or independent unions and bring them into locals affiliated with the AFL, which the Communists hoped to capture from within. By the mid-twenties, the Communist TUEL had captured about a third of the important union positions in the AFL, but were purged overnight by a counter-coup of the Gompers faction.

The Communists were aided in the move for geographical unionism by some syndicalists, especially in Edmonton, who had moved toward that defensive concept in the period of the OBU”s decline. In BC, the Communists managed to get many of the lumberworkers “east of the hump’ into the AFL Carpenters union.

AT the same time, however, the IWW was reorganizing in Canada. In 1916, virtually extinct in the rest of the country, the IWW had moved from the Minnesota iron fields in the Mesaba Range northward into Ontario and had gained a large following in the northern woods, especially among Finnish Lumber workers. After the orders in council outlawing the IWW in 1918, organizers went underground. In 1919 the Ontario lumber workers joined the OBU, but Wobbly delegates continued to bootleg union supplies to the minority who wanted to keep their IWW membership books as well, as well as did OBU-IWW delegates in B.C. On April 2, 1919 the ban on the IWW was lifted. Two branches were formed in Toronto and Kitchener.

Organizing in the 20’s

An exchange of union cards was arranged between the IWW and the OBU locals still functioning in the lumber fields, seaports and Great Lakes. This exchange was a system in which separate unions recognized as valid the union cards of workers transferring into their own jurisdiction from that of the other union and required no initiation fee. an OBU an d IWW delegate travelled together to the 1921 Red International of Labour Unions conference in Moscow. The obu delegate, Gordon Cascaden, was denied a vote because he represented the “anarchist wing “of the OBU.

The IWW delegate, who originally supported ties the RILU, argued against affiliation on his return.... Among the ultimatums RILU attempted to impose... was that the IWW affiliate the virtually defunct Lumber Workers Industrial Union/OBU in Western Canada, already permeated by Communists.

Following the collapse that year of the LWIU, the IWW, OBU and the Communists all made bids for the former members. Some sections joined the Communist Red International (a way station to the AFL Carpenters) others made an abortive attempt to revive the LWIU, which still had support in the east. The remainder joined IWW. largest section being the Vancouver LWIU branch, which had revolted when LWIU joined the Communists. By 1923 IWW had three branches with job control in Canada: Lumberworkers IU 120 and Marine Transport Workers IU 510 in Vancouver and an LWIU branch in Cranbrook BC for a total of 5,600 members.

Organizing in the 20’s was extremely difficult. The defeat of the Winnipeg General Strike and the depression of the early part of the decade weakened unions everywhere. During 1921 and 1922 the usual cause of strikes was resistance to wage reductions. Most such disputes were won by the employers. A large number of strikes were smashed by scabs drawn from a vast pool of new workers migrating from the farms to the cities.

Nonetheless, 1924 marked a peak year for the IWW in Canada. This was in direct contra distinction to the US IWW, which underwent a disastrous split over the questions of decentralization and amnesty for IWW prisoners in federal prisons (the decentralists demanded total autonomy of all industrial unions, with no central clearing house or headquarters dues. The anti-amnesty faction called for a boycott on any federal amnesty., instead relying on class struggle to win the release of imprisoned Wobblies).

The split in the US IWW puzzled the Canadian membership, who decided to support the Constitutional IWW in Chicago instead of the decentralist Emergency Program IWW in the West — the latter lasted for ten years; the resulting raids and counter-raids destroyed IWW power in the western lumber fields and caused a temporary membership drop nationwide.

In Northern Ontario the Canadian Lumber Workers (the OBU remnant of the LWIU) voted in 1924 to bolt the geographically based OBU and join the IWW. The same referendum elected a Finnish lumberworker, Nick Vita, as secretary. Vita had joined the IWW in 1917 and secretly carried an IWW red card through the War Measures Act and his years in the OBU. In 1919 he had attended the IWW Work People’s College and then Ferris Institute, a business college in Michigan, after a meagre three months of school before adulthood.

Vita’s first chore as secretary was to issue 8,000 IWW union cards. Branches were set up in Sudbury — Ontario head office — and Port Arthur. Vita began organizing railroad workers and miners in Timmins and Sudbury districts, but a brief success of 3,000 recruits soon faded. That same year an Agricultural Workers Organization IU 110, was formed in Calgary. Four IWW organizers were arrested on charges of vagrancy. IWW headquarters in Chicago provided legal fees and three of the cases the charges were quashed. On January 1, 1924, after the firing of an IWW member of the Cranbrook BC branch IWW Lumber Workers IU120 struck the lumber owners, calling for an 8 hour day with blankets supplied, minimum wage of $4 per day, release of all class war prisoners, no discrimination against IWW members and no censuring of IWW literature. After three weeks the camp operators tried to bring in scabs from Alberta and Saskatchewan. Pickets severely curtailed the scabbing and on February 26 the operators served an injunction on the officers and members of the IWW to restrain the strikers from picketing. The seven companies asked for $105,340.41 in damages. At a mass meeting March 2, strikers voted to “take the strike back on the job.” As the injunction came up for review on June 24, the Mountain Lumbermen’s Association paid to the IWW $2,450 to settle out of court.

In 1925 the LWIU branch disappeared from Cranbrook — a not unfamiliar event in the IWW, which still refused to sign binding contracts with employers, and often dwindled away as an organization after specific demands had been won. A new Agricultural Workers branch was formed in Winnipeg, bringing the IWW a total of 6 branches in Canada for a membership of 10,000 — the same as in 1910.

Included was a coal miners branch in Wayne Alberta which fought that year the IWW’s first large strike in coal — a bitter and losing affair. Fighting a mandatory dues check off to the United Mine Workers, which did not represent them, the miners originally joined the OBU, but along with the Ontario lumberworkers switched to the IWW in 1924. The mine company offered a 10% wage increase if they agreed to accept the UMWA. Considering it a bribe, the miners refused and struck, unsuccessfully.

The Winnipeg AWO folded in 1926, as did the Alberta Coal Miners IU branch, but a new General Recruiting Union branch was formed in Port Arthur, in addition to the lumberworkers for a total of 4,600 members in Canada. Seven branches carried 4,400 members through 1927–28 — the IWW General Convention in Chicago urged a joint IWW/OBU convention, which did not materialize — in 1929 the Calgary GRU disappeared, bringing membership down to 3,975.

The IWW Lumber Workers Industrial Union 120, came under competition in 1928 from the refurbished Lumber Workers Industrial Union of Canada, organized by the Communists following the failure of their AFL take-over bid, and in tune with Stalin’s new 1928–34 “left turn” period which demanded independent Communist unions. Communist organizers who had left for BC in the early 20’s to bring carpenters and lumberworkers there into the AFL now returned home to build dual unions under the aegis of Workers Unity League. A number of meagre contracts were obtained from small operators in the northern Ontario woods, for whom the largely Finnish lumberjacks worked. IWW branches asked that union policy be changed to allow them to sign contracts as well, but the 1932 General Convention again voted against allowing binding contracts, and a majority of Ontario lumber workers ended in communist controlled unions. Ironically, it was only a few years later that the US IWW was signing contracts and running in federal NLRB elections.

Changes in the 30’s

The early 30s were a watershed era in the history of North American labor. Initially stunned by the vicious poverty and unemployment caused by the Capitalist breakdown in 1929–31, the working class by 1933–34 had gained the offensive in a massive wildcat strike wave that swept the continent. The period saw an upsurge in IWW activity in Canada, a phenomenon applicable also to the OBU, which even expanded organizing into the New England and opened a hall in San Francisco, and the Canadian Communist Workers Unity League, which was especially strong among textile workers, needle trades, mine and mill workers, and seamen’s unions.

Radical influence was also strong in the US mass strike period, represented by the IWW: longshore, maritime, lumber, construction, mining, metal trades, early auto organizing, and unemployed — the Socialist Party: needle trades, unemployed, later auto — the Communist Trade Union Unity League: mine and steel, textile, furriers, longshore and seamen, teachers, unemployed, veterans, Blacks

---- Trotskyists: Minneapolis Teamsters — and the Musteite CPLA/American Workers Party: Toledo Auto-Lite strike, unemployed.

By 1930, the Sudbury IWW LWIU folded, but a new Lumber workers branch formed in Sault Ste. Marie, giving the union 3,741 members in Canada. Canadian delegates met in Port Arthur September 20, 1931, and voted to form a Canadian administration, primarily to overcome customs problems over supplies sent from Chicago and to coordinate specifically Canadian industrial activity. The move was submitted for consideration at the IWW Convention in Chicago November 8–19, 1931, where it was referred to a general membership referendum and ratified. The Canadian administration was to be autonomous but ultimately responsible to the General Administration and paying a monthly 1/2 cent per capita for international organizing costs.

IWW unemployment agitation generated a number of arrests, especially one big crackdown by Royal Mounted Police at Sioux Lookout, Ontario. Ritchie’s Dairy in Toronto was unionized IWW for a time, and a fisher’s branch formed in McDiarmid, Ontario.

Organizing was undertaken in the Maritimes but did not sustain itself. In 1935 the IWW had 12 branches in Canada with 4,200 members: 2 branches in Vancouver-- Lumber workers and General Recruiting Union — General Membership Branches in Sointula, BC, Calgary, Toronto, Sudbury; lumber workers in Fort Francis, Nipigon, Sault Ste. Marie, and Port Arthur Ontario; a General Recruiting Union in Port Arthur; and a Metal Mine Workers branch in Timmins, Ontario.

The working class rebellion of the mid thirties culminated in a series of sit down strikes — using the tactics developed a few years earlier in the auto plants by the IWW, including the little cards passed hand to hand, reading: “Sit down and watch your pay go up.” — which established the Congress of Industrial Organizations/CIO. The CIO was a reformist semi- industrial movement launched by the United Mine Workers which succeeded where the revolutionary industrial unions had failed. Its success was due primarily to its willingness to collectively bargain with employers for modest wage and conditions changes and then to enforce submission to the contract on any subsequent rank and file rebellion. Both the Roosevelt administration and a sector of “far-seeing” Capitalists saw in this an opportunity to corral the strike wave into the bounds of a lightly reformed capitalist system. (Slower to move, the Canadian ruling class followed suit only toward the end of the Second World War.)

Hundreds of unauthorized work stoppages were suppressed by CIO chieftains. At one point CIO head and leader of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, threatened to dispatch “flying squads of strong-arm men” to bring auto wildcatters into line.

The CIO drive coincided with a far reaching right turn by Stalin (and by iron-fisted extension, the then monolithic world communist movement, sans Trotskyites of course). The Workers Unity League was jettisoned by the Canadian Communists; its independent unions were brought into the AFL or CIO or sabotaged. Communist militants flocked into the CIO organizing committees and assiduously worked themselves into key positions, ranging from stewards to actual union presidents. The CIO ventures were highly successful, initially in the US and after WWII in Canada.

The Communists captured the leadership of ten industrial unions, including the United Electrical Workers, the Mine Mill & Smelter Unions, the Fur and Leather Workers, the Canadian Seamens Union and United Fishermen, and the B.C. Ship builders Union. They also become strong in the International Woodworkers, especially in BC, the AFL International Longshoremen, and others.

In the broader Canadian union movement, a number of things were happening. In 1921 TLC expelled the Cdn. Brotherhood of Railway Employees in favour of the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks from the USA. In 1927, the CBRE, the OBU remnant, and the old CFL joined together to form the All Canadian Congress of Labour. The CFL had been the stillborn result of the merger of the Knights of Labour and some national unions in 1903, after their expulsion from AFL-dominated TLC.

First called the National Trades and Labour Council, in 1908 it became the Cdn. Federation of Labour, a big name for so little, and now in 1927 it dissolved into the ACC of L. The All-Canadian Congress grew, in its own reactionary way; in the early 30s the OBU supported the red-baiting bureaucracy, only to find itself later ousted. In 1937 the ACCL chiefs aided the anti-union Ontario Premier Hepburn in his attack on the AFL, CIO, and Communists — all seen as “American.”

In 1938, however, the TLC under AFL pressure expelled the CIO unions in Canada and, in a complete flip-flop, the CIO units joined the ACCL in 1940 to form the Canadian Congress of Labour. Considering that many of the CIO organizers were Communists, and all the CIO unions internationals from the USA, it was quite a marriage of convenience. In 1943 the CCL came out in support of the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth (now the New Democratic Party)-- although the Communists were supporting the Liberal Party.

After WWII the CCL grew closer to the TLC, especially as both were expelling communists en masse. Finally in 1956 the CCL and TLC merged to form the Canadian Labour Congress. Another independent union body organizing during this period was the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour in Quebec, established in 1921, now the syndicalist CNTU.

The success of a moderate semi-industrial unionism, temporarily fringed with a radical hue, greatly hampered the revolutionary industrial unionism of the IWW. Another factor was the extremely conservatizing influence of the Second World War — ostensibly an anti-fascist crusade — with its no-strike pledges, for which the Communists were the strongest backers in the interests of the Soviet Fatherland — even to the point of denouncing all strikers, such as the United Mine Workers, as “fascist agents.”

Even so, the IWW in the USA was able to stabilize a number of solid job units, particularly metal shops in Cleveland area, and by fighting the no-strike pledge expanded general membership on the docks and construction camps. In 1946 the IWW numbered 20,000 members.

IWW agitation continued strong in Canada until 1939, especially in northern Ontario, but Canada’s entry as British ally into the war and the resulting mass conscription and War Measures Act, caught the union without a job-control base. Moreover, in-fighting with the Communists had become particularly vicious. Sudbury was being organized by the Communist controlled Mine Mill & Smelters to the point that J. Edgar Hoover later called it the “red base of North America.”

Wobbly units in Sudbury and Port Arthur were mixed membership branches of scattered lumbermen, miners and labourers. During the Spanish Civil War 1936–39, the IWW in Ontario actively recruited for the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union militia in Spain, in direct challenge to the Communist sponsored Mac-Pap International Brigade. A number of Canadian Wobs were killed in Spain — some possibly shot by Stalinist NKVD agents. Not only weapons and ammunition but even medical supplies were denied the CNT by the Communist-controlled government of Madrid. Violent altercations erupted at northern Ontario rallies for the communist doctor Norman Bethune, soon to quit Spain for Mao’s partisans in China, when Wobblies openly denounced Communist perfidy.

World War II

In Toronto where the IWW Canadian Administration headquarters was temporarily moved, Wobblies gave physical support to the soap boxing efforts of anarchists from the Italian, Jewish and Russian communities. Pitched street battles often occurred at Spanish CNT support rallies, and IWW secretaries McPhee and Godin, both former lumberjacks, were noted for their quick despatch of Young Communist goon squads.

But the War halted IWW organizing. A number of young Wobs were immediately inducted into the Armed Forces. At war’s end re-growth was too slow. In 1949 membership in Canada stood at 2,100 grouped in six branches; two in Port Arthur and one each in Vancouver, Sault Ste. Marie, Calgary and Toronto.

Meanwhile the government in the USA was attempting to destroy the IWW once and for all. After refusing to sign the Taft-Hartley anti-red clause, the IWW was denied the certification services of the National Labor Relations Board. In 1949 the IWW was placed on the Attorney General’s list, which came replete with mailing curtailments, refusal to members of government jobs, loans or housing, and FBI harassment of individual members, especially at their place of employment. To cap it off, the IWW was slapped with a “corporate income tax”, the only union in North America to be so taxed. As a culminative consequence the IWW lost its last shops, including all the IU440 Metal shops in Cleveland.

During the same period the AFL and CIO began a mass purge of Communists in its ranks, an easy task, so riddled was the Communist party with opportunism and cowardice. Completed quickly in the US, the expulsions were slower and less thorough in Canada, lasting beyond 1955. Those unions the reactionaries could not purge they expelled and then raided. The Communists in Canada managed to hold only the United Electrical Workers, the remnant of Mine & Mill, and the United Fishermen in BC.

The Canadian IWW retained branches in only Vancouver, Port Arthur and Calgary by 1950- 51. The following year the Canadian Administration in Port Arthur folded and membership reverted to the services of the Chicago office. By comparison, the OBU-- by now a mild trade grouping in Winnipeg — continued until 1955–56 with 34 locals and 12,280 members at which time it merged with the CLC.

The Dark 50’s

The Cold War snuffed out the Canadian, British and Australian administrations of the IWW. It remained for the General and Scandinavian administrations to hold together scattered Wobs in Canada, USA, Britain, Sweden, and Australia. Through the 1950s the IWW still exerted some power on the docks and ships with IU510 branches in San Francisco, Houston and Stockholm. But with the early sixties, the IWW was near extinction.

Yet, the IWW survived. One, in the courage and dedication of old-timers who kept the structure going. Two, with the slow influx of young workers of a casual labour hue. In the mid-60s, the IWW organized a restaurant job branch in San Francisco, only to be raided by the Waiters & Waitresses Union. In 1964 the IWW led a blueberry harvest strike in Minnesota. With the Vietnam War the IWW began taking in young workers with ties to the campuses. IN 1968 it was decided to sign up students alongside teachers and campus workers into Education Workers IU620. There followed a wild and erratic campus upsurge, two notables being Waterloo U in Ontario and New Westminster BC. The results were nil in themselves, but it got the IWW over the hump and left a fine residue of militants who left campus to find jobs.

The next 5 years spawned some 20-odd industrial drives, including one among construction workers in Vancouver, another among shipbuilders in Malmo, Sweden, and two tough factory strikes in the USA. For the most part unsuccessful, a number had interesting features.

In a Vancouver drive, a construction crew in Gastown was signed IWW — but certification before the Socred-appointed BC Labour Board was denied, the IWW declared not a “trade union under the meaning of the Act.” A subsequent strike fizzled.

Industrial organizing efforts continue. The IWW has picked up a number of newspapers, print shops and print co-ops over the years, a few highly viable and long lived.

The new IWW has its own list of labour martyrs: the San Diego Wobs shot, bombed and arrested during the 1969–71 Free Speech Fight and Criminal Syndicalism frame up trial. Robert Ed Stover, knifed to death in San Quentin Prison, where he was framed on an arms cache charge; and Frank Terraguti, shot to death by Chilean fascists in Santiago during the 1973 coup.

In 1975, the IWW is organizing in Canada, USA, Sweden, Britain, Guam, New Zealand and Australia.

--------------------------END----------------------------------------

*see also WHERE THE FRASER RIVER FLOWS, New Star (Canada) 1991*

21. Ableism at the Anarchy Fair

Deleted reason: DELETED pending conversation

Author: Anonymous

Authors: Anonymous

Topics: COVID-19, pandemic, bookfair, ableism, communique

Date: 11/25/2023

Date Published on T@L: 2023-11-28T09:56:22

Source: Retrieved on 2023-11-28 from <cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/7KKDv0H+BmlXmhJVmxzKeVmc03gX1eIfNCMcA+6oTps>

On November 25^th 2023, a small group of disabled trans anti-eugenicists confronted a festival of ableist violence in so called “Portland, Oregon”. This was done against libertarians posing as anarchists whom avoid taking responsibility for the violence they have perpetrated by spreading SARS-CoV-2 and its strains without mitigation. Their violence follows the logic of settlers who unleashed smallpox on the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

The fake anarchists who organized this festival have published a statement supporting the continuation of the COVID genocide through promoting anti-masking rhetoric in a publication called Anarchy Anarchy Anarchy!. In this newspaper, they wrote that anti-ableists who wheat pasted demands of leftist spaces to require masks are the equivalent of health cops and that mask requirements are “gulag as fuck”. These are in line with common talking points that fascists in this country make in support of the COVID genocide, claiming that mask and vaccine mandates are “authoritarian” even though they directly mitigate ableist violence. The millions dead and disabled from COVID show that refusing to mask is the real authoritarianism, because it makes space lethally inaccessible for disabled people and is killing & disabling marginalized people in mass unlike mask requirements.

This narrative also obscures the true role of the police as shock troopers for reproducing all systems of oppression. It ignores how police forces across the country & globally are responsible for pushing anti-masking practices & COVID denial in their own ranks. This violence functions as a further enforcement of genocide through their systemic power, such as exposing prisoners to COVID while withholding masks, tests & vaccines, leaving them to long term disabilities and in worst cases, death.

Our original intentions as a group were to go in, burn their ableist newspapers, make our statement at the firepit and leave, without creating bodily harm or fighting anyone. Yet upon collecting the materials we were dog piled, beaten and swung at. This forced us to respond in self defense, resulting in at least two anti-maskers getting directly damaged by our attacks. The way these reactionaries resorted to bashing the disabled trans women whom confronted their anti-masking rhetoric does not compare to the lethal violence of their willing spread of COVID. Yet we found it hypocritical that the TERFs who invaded town on 11/19/2023 and many local fascists were beaten less hard than what disabled trans women received for calling out ableism in this “anarchist” space, as unfortunately TERFs and local fascist rarely are inflicted the brutal retaliation they deserve here. We believe this intense reaction against vocal disabled trans people reveal the fascist taint in these “anarchist” anti-maskers, who rarely enact that level of violence onto other right wingers. We urge people to deplatform their crypto-fascist newspaper and these ableist talking points everywhere.

We also call for people to create space to grieve the ongoing losses & deaths from the COVID genocide, as state power & its organizational control continue to push its colonial legacy from our collective memory. From AIDS activists worldwide, to the antifascists who had fought against Pinochet, disrupting public spaces to create living sites of greiving against the ongoing violence can be a powerful act to end the silence which both obscures these deaths & benefits from their erasure. We believe that it is legitimate for people to force events like anarchy fair to be locations of grieving, so the violence is not ignored and the proud perpetrators are revealed.

We are proud of resisting the COVID genocide, because to remain passive in the face of violence, or to spend our time & efforts convincing committed ableists to stop the violence, only perpetuates the reproduction of ableism. We will fight until all disabled people are liberated from the domination of ableism, and until the grip of white supremacy is destroyed by the fury of anti-colonial rebellion! We know that only in direct conflict will hierarchy begin to crumble.

For the destruction of all oppression! Long live the struggle for the liberation of disabled people!

LONG LIVE ANARCHY!!!!!!

22. Chinese Anarchism for the 21^th Century

Deleted reason: pending discussion

Subtitle: The case for unique principles and ideology for the development of a Chinese identity within anarchist politics and the wider socio-political sphere

Author: Li Meiyi

Topics: Chinese Anarchism, 21^st century

Date: March 10, 2018

Source: Retrieved on 15^th April 2021 from daoistsocialism.wordpress.com

Abstract

Chinese people have had a long history of civilisation and culture, dating back thousands of years. With the legacy of European colonialism left on the Chinese people which continues to the 21^st century, the need for a uniquely Chinese-influenced approach to anarchism must be pioneered so that anarchism will preserve the freedom of the Chinese people and the preservation of our heritage. This can be achieved through an anarchist adaptation of Sun Yat-sen’s three principles of the people as a structure for the forming of a Chinese anti-colonialist and anti-racist movement, characterised and unified by a Chinese identity. Solidarity and mutual aid must be promoted with other movements of other ethnic groups so that we may fully achieve the implementation of the principles. Without our movement and identity, we risk losing everything, besides race, that makes us Chinese and distinct from all other ethnic groups, both in our modern society and in any envisioned anarchist future.

Introduction

Chinese anarchism has had its peak influence during the late Qing dynasty/early republic period (Yu and Scalapino, 1961). Leading up to the 21^st century, the public and obvious influence of Chinese anarchism has declined, being forced to become an underground movement in the present day (Dickens, 2010). It is from my personal experience that Chinese anarchism has not made its impact on Chinese populations in western societies, which has impacted the manner in which Chinese individuals respond to xenophobia and racism, making this a significant issue to be considered by Chinese populations in understanding our place in the world and our potential power as a socio-political movement.

In this essay, a case will be presented as to how and why Chinese anarchism is to be promoted as an influence and guidance on how Chinese populations in western nations and societies can develop presence and a political vehicle. Intersectionality will be discussed, with the role that Chinese activists should play in supporting and showing solidarity to other social movements using the political vehicle for revolution as a tool for support.

Throughout this essay, the traditional form of writing will be used for the Chinese translations of different terms, with the Pinyin pronunciation included alongside. This will only apply to the first use of terminology; later uses of the same terminology will not include translations or Pinyin. Dr. Sun Yat-sen will be referenced as “Dr. Sun Yat-sen” followed by his Chinese name and Pinyin pronunciation. As with the terminology, this will only apply to when his name is first referred to in the essay.

Part 1: Three Principles of the People (三民主義, Sān Mín Zhǔ Yì)

The three principles of the people is a political philosophy which has been developed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙, Sūn Yì Xiān) to provide a framework for establishing a Chinese republic to replace the imperial government of the Qing dynasty (清朝, Qīng cháo). These three principles are listed at the sub-headings below for this part, with the details of the definitions and applications of each principle to the subject of this dissertation discussed.

In a brief summary of the three principles, I will define them each with a few sentences here.

Nationalism: Chinese culture has had a tradition of kinship and filial piety (孝, xiào) due to religious influences such as Confucianism (儒家, rú jiā) (Teon, 2016) but not of national identity, which has led to China being a fractured nation with divided people (Sun, n.d.). Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s vision of a nationalist China meant that all ethnicities living in China will be unified under a common identity to be strengthened against western and Japanese nationalism so that China can combat the imperialist ambitions of such nations (Sun, n.d.).

Democracy: Sun Yat-sen’s vision of democracy is not completely different to the republican system of government of the west. However, a key difference is that while in the west, democracy is associated with the liberty of individuals, while Sun Yat-sen believed in the collective freedom of the liberty of the nation (Linebarger, 2012). While this may seem paradoxical, it is not necessarily so, as the lack of organised and disciplined people leads to a weak nation that is easily oppressed. Following where this justification leads, it would appear that Sun Yat-sen believed that this organisation and discipline should come about through a governing leadership which is made up of elected individuals by the people, with democracy being the expression of the Chinese people’s power as a nation (Linebarger, 2012).

People’s livelihood: the meaning and definition of this principle is controversial and highly disputed. The interpretation provided by Linebarger (2012) explains that Sun Yat-sen believed that there are three doctrines to people’s livelihood: implementation of nationalist democracy, national enrichment and economic justice. For the doctrine of implementation of nationalist democracy, people’s livelihood is believed to be necessary for the Chinese people to be able to gather the material strength to resist imperialist oppression and allow the operation of the other two principles (Linebarger, 2012). The doctrines of national enrichment and economic justice lead to potential conclusions being drawn that Sun Yat-sen’s principle of people’s livelihood is a socialist principle (or is applicable as a socialist principle), addressing the need of the Chinese people to become economically enriched to escape poverty and for economic justice to be achieved through the fair distribution of property and wealth (Linebarger, 2012).

Nationalism (民族主義, Mín Zú Zhǔ Yì)

In western interpretations of nationalism, it would appear that it is contradictory and impossible to both support nationalism and anarchism together. However, I believe nationalism in the form of Sun Yat-sen’s principle can be applicable as being able to promote the liberty of Chinese people in western nations and societies.

If we look at the anti-racism movements of other ethnic groups, we can see that they are unified by a cause to preserve their unique identity and to promote pride so that they will not be seen as inferior to the identity of the white race or western civilisation. This can be found in the unity of the Black Panther Party (while they were Marxists and not anarchists, their pride in their black ethnicity and effort to protect their ethnicity and culture from assimilation and racism provides lessons to anarchists of colour, specifically Chinese anarchists for the purposes of this essay) as their organisation gave black people a unified cause (Baggins, 2002).

I must add that in my own personal view, I do not believe that Chinese people in the west face the same issues that black people, during the time period in which the Black Panthers existed, faced. This is not a call for Chinese people to unify in an identity to compete with other ethnic groups for attention. As with all groups and identities, we all have our own distinct issues we will be dealing with, so we cannot compare ourselves against other ethnic groups or claim that we have the same needs. Issues that are specifically Chinese are what needs to be addressed.

Keeping in line with anarchist values, the “Chinese identity” which is intended to unify Chinese people against racism and assimilation is a voluntary identity to be adopted. Chinese people should not be coerced into identifying themselves with the nationalist values. While this is to avoid authoritarianism, this is also because of the question of who is Chinese. The geographical area of China is made up of many different ethnic groups, some of which identify themselves as Chinese (such as the Manchu people) and some of which see themselves as distinct from the Chinese identity (such as the Tibetan people). Coercion into reviving and maintaining Chinese culture and values is not easy when drawing lines between Chinese and non-Chinese people is blurred. Doing so would risk us perpetrating the very issue we are fighting against on other ethnic groups: assimilation.

While the question of who is Chinese can be defined as people belonging to the Han Chinese ethnic group, this is also not a sufficient solution. The Manchu people are not Han Chinese, however there are Manchu people who identify themselves as Chinese. In excluding ethnic groups such as the Manchu people from the Chinese identity, we are closing off people who have had lived experiences, history and culture as Chinese people on the basis that their racial heritage does not match. This can only lead to the conclusion that nationalism must be non-ethnic and take the form of an identity which is voluntarily associated with.

This logic may cause some to come to conclusions that white Caucasians, who have generations of ancestry having settled in the geographical region of China and adopted all the culture, language and history to the point that they are almost identical to Han Chinese people in social background, will also be able to associate themselves with the Chinese identity in the same way as the Manchu people. I will not argue against this, however it does highlight the need to make a distinct separation between the Chinese identity and the racial identity of people. While white Caucasians can identify themselves with the Chinese identity, this is only in the sense of the non-ethnic national identity and not racial identity. As a result, this means that white people can both associate with the Chinese identity while also experiencing the same white privileges that white Caucasians from western regions experience. This distinction must be made clear so that the limitations of speaking as Chinese people that white Caucasians have are clear.

Now that the boundaries and limits of who the Chinese identity applies to have been clarified, the defining principles of the Chinese identity will be explained. Chinese nationalism is a revival of the traditional cultures, languages and history that define us as a distinct people from others. While Chinese people have always had a significant variety of culture, religion or beliefs and languages, they can all be associated under the label of Chinese. Chinese nationalism should aim to promote all these on the same level in relation to each other (Mandarin Chinese is the dominant language, with lesser known languages arguably dying out and losing significance) (Blanchard, 2010) and to foreign equivalents, as opposed to viewing our identity as outdated and opting to assimilate into the values of western civilisation.

It must be made clear that nationalism in this context does not mean uncritical approval and loyalty to anything that is historically and culturally Chinese. If we are to have an identity to be proud of and empowering by nature, it must be critically studied by all of us as Chinese people. This includes the traditional practice of foot binding, which has now been ended (Mills, 2015). If we truly are to use our identity for anti-oppression purposes, care must be taken to ensure that it does not enable or actively encourage oppressive behaviour of others.

It may be argued that if we allow such significant diversity within what it means to be Chinese, it will reduce the meaning. Not so, as despite the huge diversity, there is always a common history or root culture which we all have developed from. Similar diversity already exists in other nations (Raento and Husso, 2002) without the meaning of their nationality being lost.

Democracy (民權主義, Mín Quán Zhǔ Yì)

Sun Yat-sen’s ideas surrounding democracy had often linked it with Chinese cultural values so that the ideology did not become a copy of western ideology (Linebarger, 2012). This lesson can be taken and applied to anarchism, with Chinese people looking into the history and culture to adapt to anarchism. One example of this is the application of Daoism (道教, dào jiào) to provide a framework for anarchist politics (Josh, 2005).

In regard to Sun Yat-sen’s vision of a republic, I share the same views as the Paris Group as written in their publication, New Century (新世紀, xīn shì jì): “Rather than merely opposing the Manchu Court, was it not better to oppose monarchy, Manchu or Han?” (Yu and Scalapino, 1961). It is highly likely that within a republic, decisions will be made which will unfairly advantage certain ethnic groups over others, most likely the Han Chinese majority. This is where I disagree with Sun Yat-sen’s idea of the liberty of the nation. It will likely not be the people’s will enacted through the state but rather the Han people’s will which is enacted.

The answer to this issue is to take the next step further from democracy: anarchism. By ensuring that individual liberty is achieved, collective liberty can be strengthened by ensuring that all individuals voluntarily participate in the collective effort so that unwilling individuals are not coerced into the collective decisions, which prevents Han Chinese majority of any organised group from oppressing minority ethnic groups that may consider themselves Chinese. This will fulfil nationalism by allowing all Chinese groups to have the full autonomy to promote their cultures, languages and history, so that the Chinese identity may prosper into a rich and diverse identity which will stand strong against assimilationist efforts of western civilisation.

Only through these efforts will the fullest form of individual and collective liberty be achieved.

As there are conflicting ideologies within anarchism, I will not go into further detail on the method of achieving and organising an anarchist society. While that is a different debate, it will still be necessary to be had in order for groups to agree on what path will best achieve the goals set out in this essay.

People’s Livelihood (民生主義, Mín Shēng Zhǔ Yì)

The third principle has its importance as being part of the structure with the other two in supporting each other. The socialist values of people’s livelihood mean that the anarchist ideology promoted in the principle of democracy needs to be justifiably socialist, in order to provide all ethnic groups with the means to support themselves as individuals and collective organisations in order to support the first principle of nationalism.

This means that people’s livelihood has it’s importance in supporting anti-colonialism and anti-racism through provision of the material means of preserving culture, as well as ensuring that the material means for physical survival are present. This is what makes the socialist ideology in people’s livelihood distinct from the socialism of western theorists: it is a necessary requirement for anti-racism.

Within the context of the current socio-economic situation in China, people’s livelihood should require the redistribution of ownership of wealth and the means of production from the political and economical elite of China to the wider population and the establishment of public land in order to allow minority ethnic groups to freely harvest and use resources found in areas inhabited by the ethnic groups. This includes the return of Tibetan land and resources to be publicly owned by the people of Tibet.

In the west, this principle may have different applications. The ownership of means of production and wealth by westerners should be distributed to the rightful owners (with “rightful” being defined by the agreed anarchist ideology), especially to Chinese people, so that we have the necessary resources and means of production in the west for the preservation of culture and languages. However, it must be recognised that Chinese people are also capable of being part of this very role of unfair ownership, which means that this principle must be fairly applied with understanding and consideration of the needs of others, especially of people from other ethnic groups. This will be addressed further in part 2.

Part 2: Working with Other Ethnic Groups

As pointed out throughout the adaptation of the three principles of the people to anarchism, Chinese people must self-strengthen in order to be able to preserve our identity against colonialism and racism. However, we must recognise that we are not the only ethnic group that face this struggle. Solidarity and mutual aid with the efforts of other ethnic groups in anti-racism must be promoted above competition.

A starting point for promoting solidarity is recognising our own shortcomings when it comes to relations with other ethnic groups. While we may not individually support racism against other ethnic groups, we must recognise that as we participate in western society, we are also prone to enabling and actively participating in racism against others. Even outside of western societies, we must recognise that it is not impossible for us to enable or actively participate in racism. Our own experiences with dealing with the issue do not prevent us from also allowing it or causing it to be imposed on others. This can be seen in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala of 2018, which featured a Chinese actress in blackface to portray the African people (BBC, 2018).

Using our political movements which we will build using the structure of the three principles, we must act as representatives of our identity and use that to provide public support of other ethnic groups and their anti-racism efforts. We must support other movements such as Black Lives Matter as Chinese people for two reasons: to publicly distinguish ourselves from white westerners to have recognition and fulfil the first principle of nationalism, and also to ensure that the push for social change is applied to all, not just Chinese people. If we rise up without bringing non-Chinese ethnic, groups along with us, we have done nothing more than joined the ranks of white westerners and will have not achieved enough to dismantle racist oppression. This is important in recognising that we cannot truly be anarchists or anti-racism if we participate and support concepts that use racist oppression (Johnson, 2008).

We must recognise the differences in issues that we face with racism compared to other ethnic groups. We cannot copy the same approaches and methods that other groups use to combat racism as they may not be practically applicable and at worst, a waste of resources and effort that could be better spent on others. Unless innocent Chinese people are statistically murdered by western police officers at a significant level to judge as a significant racism issue, we must not attempt to compete with Black Lives Matter for attention and space with our own signs saying “Asian Lives Matter.”

Part 3: Conclusion

Uniquely Chinese ideology, culture and history can strengthen our resolve to build and maintain anarchism in a world in which anarchism appears to be dominated by western ideologies. The existence of this movement and identity is essential to preventing the loss of our culture and history before and after achievement of anarchism. We must recognise that even in the absence of coercive institutions that make up racist oppression, colonialist values can still harm the Chinese identity through other socio-economic factors.

Reference List

Baggins, B. (2002). History of the Black Panther Party. Available: www.marxists.org Last accessed: 08/03/2018

BBC. (2018). Lunar New Year: Chinese TV gala includes ‘racist blackface’ sketch. Available: www.bbc.co.uk Last accessed: 09/03/2018

Blanchard, B. (2010). China’s minority languages face threat of extinction. Available: www.reuters.com Last accessed: 09/03/2018

Dickens, P. (2010). Anarchism, ethnicity and culture: the Oriental anarch. Available: propertyistheft.wordpress.com Last accessed: 07/03/2018

Josh. (2005). Anarchism and Taoism. Available: theanarchistlibrary.org Last accessed: 09/03/2018

Johnson, C. (2008). Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin. Available: fee.org Last accessed: 09/03/2018

Linebarger, P. (2012). The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen. Available: www.gutenberg.org Last accessed: 09/03/2018

Mills, J. (2015). The last women in China with bound feet: ‘They thought it would give them a better life’. Available: www.theguardian.com Last accessed: 09/03/2018

Raento, P. and Husso, K. (2002). Cultural diversity in Finland. Available: www.helsinki.fi Last accessed: 09/03/2018

Sun, Y. (n.d.). San Min Chu I: The Three Principles of the People. Available: sunyatsenfoundation.org Last accessed: 08/03/2018

Teon, A. (2016). Filial Piety (孝) in Chinese Culture. Available: china-journal.org Last accessed: 08/03/2018

Yu, G. and Scalapino, R. (1961). The Chinese Anarchist Movement. Available: theanarchistlibrary.org Last accessed: 09/03/2018

23. Capitalist Education and Learned Helplessness

Subtitle: Shaun Riley on learned helplessness in relation to capitalist education

Author: Shaun Riley

Topics: education, revolution

Date: August 2013

Date Published on T@L: 2024-05-16T20:48:17.139Z

Source: Freedom News, Vol 74, August 2013, Page 7. <freedomnews.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Freedom-2013-08.pdf>

Learned helplessness occurs when an animal or non-human animal is repeatedly exposed to an aversive stimulus that cannot be escaped. Consequently, the animal will stop attempting to avoid the stimulus and behave as though he or she is helpless to avoid or change the situation, even when these opportunities are present. This behaviour can lead to effects on emotional health, such as depression, low self-esteem, and suicidal ideation.

Inherent in the capitalist education system is the perceived, unquestionable authority of the instructor over the pupil. It is within this hierarchical relationship that the student runs the risk of acquiring learned helplessness. This outcome is to be expected within an education system that holds as its objective the moulding of young, free, creative minds, into subservient, spiritless masses intended to serve the ‘workforce’.

From early on, the student recognises the futility of trying to assert his or her will against the rule of the instructor, as in most cases it will continue to be denied. It is from this constant denial of individual or collective (such as the consensus of students in a classroom setting) autonomy that the student or students will develop a defeatist mindset, i.e. they will begin to believe they will inevitably be defeated by the ‘superiors’ despite any efforts they might take to promote their own interests. Therefore, the student will often subordinately accept the teacher’s authority, even bearing the most senseless of rules, as well as the consequences for breaking them.

This form of institutionalised conditioning can only be eradicated by a radical social revolution and subsequently an educational revolution, whereby capitalist education is replaced by an anarchist form. It will be then, that one’s will, spirit, and individuality, as well as his or her true human potential can be realised.

References

Kendra Cherry, Learned Helplessness, see www.psychology.about.com/b/2009/06/08/learned-helplessness-psychology-definition-of-the-week.htm
Christopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier and Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control (NY, Oxford University Press, 1995).

24. Think for Yourself, Question Authority

Deleted reason: to the bin for now, pending further review

Author: Arno Ruthofer

Topics: accelerationism, artificial intelligence, chaos, computers, counterculture, cybernetics, death, democracy, drugs, futurism, futurist, Genetic Engineering, Internet, nanotechnology, quantum physics, religion, space, spirituality, technology, transhumanism, Timothy Leary

Date: 1997

Date Published on T@L: 2020-04-14T21:30:07

Source: Retrieved on 14^th April 2020 from web.archive.org

Introduction

psychedelic

“Psychedelic” – coming from the Greek “psyche”(soul) and “delein,” to make manifest, or “deloun,” to show, reveal – was first proposed in 1956 by [Humphry] Osmond [...] to describe the effects of mind-altering drugs like mescaline and LSD. (Peter Stafford)[20]

[...] a psychedelic drug is one which, without causing physical addiction, craving, major psychological disturbances, delirium, disorientation, or amnesia, more or less reliably produces thought, mood, and perceptual changes otherwise rarely experienced except in dreams, contemplative and religious exaltation, flashes of vivid involuntary memory, and acute psychoses. (Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar)[21]

cybernetic(s)

Norbert Wiener, in 1948, invented the term “cybernetics” to describe control [and communication] systems using computers. Since then the prefix cyber is used in connection with robots and computers: cybersex, cyberfeminsim, cyberpunk [...]. (Joanna Buick and Zoran Jevtic)[22]

cyberspace

[William] Gibson invented the word cyberspace in Neuromancer, describing it with these phrases: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” [Gibson’s] dream of literally “plugging in” to a computer via a jack that goes into the back of your head is still science fiction. The trend in the 90s is to try to get a “plugged-in” feeling simply by using very advanced sound and graphics displays. Thus Gibson’s “cyberspace” has permutated into today’s “virtual reality” [...]. (Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu)[23]

Many people know that Timothy Leary was an advocate of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, which made him a cultfigure of the hippies. With his famous slogan “Turn on – Tune in – Drop out” Leary encouraged the young generation of the 60s to take psychedelic drugs and question authority. Not so many people know, however, that Leary reemerged in the 1980s as a spokesman of a new global counterculture called the cyberpunks and became one of the most energetic promoters of computers, virtual reality, and the Internet. “No magazine cover story on the [cyberpunk] phenomenon is complete without the septuagenarian Timothy Leary, admonishing readers to “turn on, boot up, jack in” and proclaiming that the “PC is the LSD of the 1990s,” writes cultural critic Mark Dery in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Dery 1996: 22).

In contrast to the hippies of the 60s who were decidedly anti-science and anti-technology, the cyberpunks of the 80s and 90s ecstatically embrace technology. They believe that technology (especially computers and the Internet) can help us to transcend all limits, that it can liberate us from authority and even enables us to transcend space, time, and body. Originally, the term “cyberpunk” was used to describe a subgenre of science fiction. Cyberpunk science fiction is primarily concerned with computers and their interaction with humans. The first and most influential cyberpunk novel is William Gibson’s Neuromancer (Gibson 1984, 1995). In Neuromancer, Gibson describes a world of outlaw computer hackers who are able to link up their brains to computer networks and operate in cyberspace. In the late 80s, Cyberpunk escaped from being a literary genre into cultural reality. Media philosopher R. U. Sirius describes this process as follows:

People started to call themselves cyberpunks, or the media started calling people cyberpunks. [...] The first people to identify themselves as cyberpunks were adolescent computer hackers who related to the street-hardened characters and the worlds created in the books of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and others. [...In 1988] cyberpunk hit the front page of the New York Times when some young computer kids were arrested for cracking a government computer file. The Times called these kids “cyberpunks.” From there, the performers involved in the high-tech-oriented radical art movement generally known as “Industrial” started to call themselves – or be called — cyberpunks [...]. Finally, cyberpunk has come to be seen as a generic name for a much larger trend more or less describing anyone who relates to the cyberpunk vision” (Rucker 1992: 64).

Leary, who called himself a cyberpunk as well, believed that this cyberpunk vision of a world where all limits are transcended has already become reality. The “new world” that Leary means is cyberspace (virtual reality and – in a broader sense – all digitally mediated space), which he sees as a boundless reality where time, space and body are perceived as meaningless.

The question arises: Why did Leary’s focus shift from psychedelic drugs to computers? At first sight psychedelics and computers seem to have nothing in common. From a (counter-)cultural point of view, they seem to be complete opposites. The hippies, for example, saw psychedelics as an antidote to technology which stereotypes our consciousness and desensitizes our perception. In the 60s, Leary himself was very much against computers. He saw them as devices that would merely increase the dependence of individuals on experts. As Leary put it: “[A]t that time, computers were mainframes that cost millions of dollars and were owned by Bell Telephone company, IBM, CIA, Department of Motor Vehicles – no friends of mine! So I had this prejudice that computers were things that stapled you and punched you and there were these monks, the few experts, who controlled it”(quoted in Rucker 1992: 84).

In the early 80s, however, when thanks to smaller size and cheaper prize computers became accessible to millions of people, Leary changed his attitude towards computers and realized that psychedelic drugs and computers actually have very much in common. He discovered that psychedelic drugs and personal computers “are simply two ways in which individuals have learned to take the power back from the state”(ibid.). Leary argues that both psychedelics and computers can help us to liberate ourselves from authority and “create our own realities.” In the course of his long career as psychologist and counterculture philosopher Leary wrote more than thirty books (several of them more than 400 pages long) in which he offers us very elaborate theories — using concepts from the fields of psychology, neurobiology, ethology, quantum physics, cybernetics, and chaos theory — that explain how we can use psychedelic drugs and computers to escape the “narrow reality tunnels” that authorities force us to live in and create our own individual realities whose limits are determined only by the limits of our imagination.

What are those “narrow reality tunnels” Leary is talking about? According to Leary, we have been programmed by our parents, politicians, priests, and teachers to think and see the world the way they want us to think and see the world. For example, they programmed us to think in terms of dominance and submission so that for us it seems normal that there are a few who have power and create the rules while all the others are submissive, law-abiding citizens. Leary makes us aware that the models of reality the authorities are imposing on us are not reflections of an objective reality; they are just arbitrary constructions. What we accept as objective reality is actually a social fabrication, a construction of our minds, that is, our nervous systems. Only if we are able to control our own nervous systems – which means that we know how our brains operate – would we be able to change the realities we live in. Leary describes his books as “manuals on the use of the human nervous system.” (Leary’s Info-Psychology, for example, is subtitled “A manual on the use of the human nervous system according to the instructions of the manufacturers.”) In his theories, Leary explains how we can use psychedelics and computers to “metaprogram” our “brain-software” (the categories through which we perceive the world, our overall cultural worldview, etc).

According to Leary, the hippies were the first generation in human history that knew how to “control their own nervous systems, change their own realities,” using psychedelic drugs to metaprogram their “bio-computers” (brains). In The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary writes that the hippies started an individual-freedom movement which is new to human history because “it is not based on geography, politics, class, or religion. It has to do not with changes in the political structure, nor in who controls the police, but in the individual mind [italics mine]“(PE 3). According to Leary, the individual-freedom revolution started by the hippies in the 60s was continued in the 80s by young people using cybernetic technology (computers, the Internet, TV, etc) to undermine authoritarian dogmatic social structures and create their own (digital) realities.[24] Leary points out that this freedom movement — which has country by country, continent by continent, liberated much of the world in the last three decades (fall of the Berlin Wall, resignation of the hard-line regime in Czechoslovakia, etc) — would not have been possible without mind-expanding drugs and mind-linking electronic appliances accessible to individuals (cf. ibid.). In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary predicts that psychedelic drugs and computers will help this movement to create a post-political “cyber-society” that is based on individual freedom and Ecstasy — defined by Leary as “the experience of attaining freedom of limitations, self imposed or external”(PE 2). Leary backs his idea of the cyber-society with an interesting interpretation of chaos theory.

In this paper I am going to describe the development of Leary’s theories (how his focus shifted from psychedelics to computers) and discuss the impact Leary had on the psychedelic counterculture of the 60s (the hippies) and the cybernetic counterculture of the 80s and 90s (the cyberpunks and cyber-hippies). I want to compare Leary’s earlier theories, in which he praises LSD as the key to cosmic consciousness and sweeping societal change, to his later theories, in which he praises the computer as a tool of liberation and transcendence. This comparison will help me to show that that the hippies and the cyberpunks – who, at first sight, seem to have nothing in common except the fact that they are both countercultures (i.e., counter to the leading culture) — have much more in common than one would think. I will argue that the cyberpunks and cyber-hippies were strongly influenced by the transcendentalist ideas that prevailed in the 60s counterculture. (Although it is indebted to ideas of recent vintage such as chaos theory, the cyber-hippies’ techno-transcendentalism owes much to the 60s counterculture – specifically, to the ideas of 60s-cult-authors like Leary or Marshall McLuhan.) Another thing we will see when we examine Leary’s theories is that the hippies were not nearly as rural and anti-technological as some cultural critics argue. According to Leary, the hippies and the cyberpunks/cyber-hippies share the same aim (individual freedom, ecstasy); only the technologies the cyberpunks use to reach this aim are different ones.

There are several reasons why I decided to write this rather extensive paper on Leary: First of all, many cultural critics and media philosophers writing about countercultures (e.g., Theodore Roszak, Mark Dery, and Douglas Rushkoff) argue that Leary “exerted a significant influence on the youth culture of the 60s”(Roszak 1995: 164) and portray him as a leading figure of the “cyberdelic” (cybernetic-psychedelic) counterculture of the 90s (cf. Dery 1996: 22, cf. Rushkoff 1995: 49f.). None of them, however, gives a comprehensive overview of Leary’s theories which have influenced thousands of young people who read Leary’s books. I decided to give such an overview because I want to show that Leary has more to offer than a few catchphrases (like “turn on, tune in, drop out”). Furthermore, I think that an overview of Leary’s different theories can be very helpful to discover interesting connections between his early theories, in which he expresses the most important beliefs that prevailed in the apolitical wing of the 60s counterculture, and his later theories, which are a synthesis of the most important beliefs and ideas that prevail in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s.

Another reason why I decided to write this paper on Leary is that in his theories Leary expresses a worldview that is becoming more and more important in science and philosophy, as well as in everyday life in our postmodern Information Society: the constructivist worldview. An old Talmudic saying perfectly describes this worldview in one single sentence: We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. Paul Watzlawick, a leading exponent of the metatheory known as constructivism, explains this sentence as follows: “[J]ede Wirklichkeit [ist] im unmittelbaren Sinne die Konstruktion derer [...], die diese Wirklichkeit zu entdecken und erforschen glauben. Anders ausgedrückt: Das vermeintlich Gefundene ist ein Erfundenes, dessen Erfinder sich des Aktes seiner Erfindung nicht bewußt ist, sondern sie als Grundlage seines ‘Wissens’ und daher seines Handelns macht” (Watzlawick 1998: 9f.). Constructivists argue that humans impose order on their sensory experience of the outside world, rather than discern order from the world, and they create knowledge rather than discover it (cf. Spivey 1997: 3).

Many constructivists focus their attention on the metaphysical issue of the nature of reality, trying to answer the question to what extent humans can learn about and experience reality, or, put another way, to what extent we create our realities. In general, they point to the role of the observer in any observations that are made of the “world.” The quantum physicists (Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, et al) were the ones who, in the 1920s, introduced constructivist concepts to the world of physics. In contrast to Descartes and Newton who argued that the world is made up of a multitude of separate objects existing independently of the observer, the quantum physicists suggested that the universe is “a network of dynamic relationships that include the human observer and his or her consciousness in an essential way [italics mine]”(Capra 1982: 47). (I will explain this quotation in the chapter “The observer created universe”). Leary was very much influenced by the ideas of Einstein and Heisenberg. In practically all of his books he discusses the philosophical implications of quantum theory. In Chaos & Cyberculture, for example, he offers us a very bold interpretation of quantum theory which he uses to back his idea that computers enable us to create our own realities which, according to Leary, are as real as the so called material reality. However, the method that helped Leary to discover that “reality” is a construction of our minds was not quantum physics but psychedelics. Leary explains: “Since psychedelic drugs expose us to different levels of perception, and experience, use of them is ultimately a philosophic enterprise, compelling us to confront the nature of reality and the nature of our fragile, subjective belief systems. The contrast is what triggers the laughter, the terror. We discover abruptly that we have been programmed all these years, that everything we accepted as reality is just a social fabrication” (FB 33).

Another reason why I decided to write this paper on Leary is that I want to show that Leary was one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk. As early as 1973, Leary predicted that some day the world would be linked through an “electronic nervous system” (the Internet) and that computers could be used to empower the individual (cf. NP 45f.). In this paper, I want to make people aware of the fact that several important figures of the cybermovement (e.g., R. U. Sirius) were strongly influenced by Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory which Leary describes in Neuropolitics (Leary 1977), Exo-Psychology (Leary 1977), and The Intelligence Agents (Leary 1979).

As far as the organization of this paper is concerned, I choose to describe Leary’s different theories in chronological order because this is the best way to show how Leary’s focus shifted from drugs to computers. The first chapter is a short biography of Leary. I decided to include it because in my opinion we can never fully understand Leary’s theories if we do not know anything about his background (how a sober, buttoned up psychologist became a drug guru of the 60s counterculture, etc). In this biography, I will also shortly describe Leary’s revolutionary approach to psychotherapy which earned him a post at Harvard. (Leary’s humanistic approach to behavior change – he emphasized inner potential and personal growth through self-reliance, so patients avoid dependence on authoritarian doctors and dogmas – is relevant to this paper because it helps me to show that Leary has always encouraged people to “think for themselves and question authority.”)

Thematically as well as chronologically, Leary’s theories can be categorized into three phases:

The Politics of Ecstasy/The Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness (the 60s)
Exo-Psychology (the 70s)
Chaos and Cyberculture/Quantum-Psychology (the 80s and 90s)

In chapter two, I will describe Leary’s Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness (a theory on psychedelic drugs and their effects on human consciousness) and examine the political, ethical, and philosophical implications of this theory. After describing this theory I will discuss Leary’s impact on the 60s counterculture.

Chapter three deals with Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory in which Leary encourages the hippies to let go of the flower-power-60s and find a way to live with technology. (According to Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, technology has the potential to liberate us from all limits. Leary argues that psychedelics and other technologies enable us to decipher the DNA code, which is the key to immortality) After explaining the most important concepts of Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, I will show that in this theory Leary laid the ideological foundation for the cybermovement of the 80s and 90s. I will argue that R. U. Sirius and Bruce Eisner, two leading figures of the cybermovement, were strongly influenced by Leary’s Exo-Psychology.

In chapter four, I will discuss the most important book that Leary wrote in the 90s, Chaos and Cyberculture, in which he conveys his vision of the emergence of a new humanism with an emphasis on questioning authority, independent thinking, individual creativity, and the empowerment of computers and other new technologies. In Chaos and Cyberculture, Leary gives voice to nearly all of cyberculture’s received truths, foremost among them the idea that “the basic elements of the universe are bits of (0/1) information,” which Leary tries to back with a bold interpretation of quantum physics (Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory). I will explain Leary’s concept of the “cyberpunk,” describe the philosophy that lies behind this term, and trace the origin of the term “cybernetics.” Furthermore, I will give an overview of Leary’s theory of the evolution of countercultures (the Beats, the hippies, the cyberpunks), present his explanation for the comeback of LSD in the 90s, and give an outline of Leary’s last book Design for Dying, in which Leary encourages us to design our deaths and predicts that soon computers and other new technologies will enable us to become immortal. (Leary’s prediction in Design for Dying that we will soon be able to download our brains into computers and exist as electronic life forms is a logical consequence of the assumption that the basic elements of the universe are bits of information. Design for Dying makes Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory complete.)

Chapter 4.6. is a comparison of Leary’s different theories. This comparison shows that all of Leary’s theories are based on the belief that science and technology can help us to attain freedom, enlightenment, and immortality. Leary has never been a technophobe, he has always believed in technology. The controversial Harvard psychologist was very well aware that he was “turning on the world” with a high-tech product (LSD), that “no counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid – it came from a Sandoz lab,” as cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling put it (Sterling 1986: xiii)

In chapter 4.7., I argue that Leary was a central figure in the cyberdelic (psychedelic-cybernetic) counterculture of the 90s and that, in his Quantum Psychology theory, Leary expresses the most important beliefs that prevail in this counterculture. I will trace the roots of the cyberdelic (cybernetic-psychedelic) counterculture of the 90s and critically discuss the most important ideas and believes that prevail in this counterculture by comparing two interesting analyses of the cyberdelic phenomenon: Douglas Rushkoff’s Cyberia, and Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. This discussion shows that, from a countercultural point of view, the 90s are in many ways a return of the 60s. (Leary is a perfect example for this return of the 60s. He was a cultfigure of the 60s counterculture and he reemerged as an important spokesman of the cyberdelic counterculture of the 80s and 90s, encouraging people to “turn on, boot up, jack in.”) Furthermore, this discussion will help me to uncover the weak points of Leary’s Quantum psychology theory (his concepts of the cyber society and the “posthuman”). Criticizing Leary’s Quantum psychology theory, I will focus on the philosophy that this theory is based on (the notion that reality is an arbitrary construction, that we have chosen our reality arbitrarily).

In the final chapter, I will argue that Leary’s whole trip from psychedelics to computers to designer dying was to make people aware that they are capable of more than the appointed authorities would prefer to grant them. Leary’s advocacy of psychedelics and computers was to show that people are capable of taking charge of their own brains, hearts, and spirits. For me, Leary is the Socrates of the Inforamtion Age because he was one of the few philosophers in our age who carried on the Socratic tradition of teaching people to “think for themselves and question authority.” Many of Leary’s predictions concerning the impact of psychedelics and computers on our culture turned out to be wrong. Leary, however, did never feel embarrassed when one of his predictions turned out to be wrong because he did not want people to blindly believe what he said anyway. His aim was to teach people to “think for themselves and question authority,” his own authority included.

When reading this paper, keep in mind that Leary’s theories are based on the assumption the limits of our reality/-ies are determined by the limits of our imagination. As psychoanalyst, cyberneticist and psychedelic explorer John Lilly put it in The Center of the Cyclone,

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits. This is one of the major messages I wish to give you about inner trips, whether by LSD, by mediation, by hypnosis, by Gestalt therapy, by group work, by studies whatever means one uses (Lilly 1972: xvi).

1. Biography

Timothy Leary was born on October 22, 1920 in Springfield, Massachusetts. His grandfather, Dr. Timothy Leary, after whom his father “Tote” and Timothy himself were named, was considered to be the richest Irish Catholic in western Massachusetts. He published works on blood circulation. The Learys were “urban, urbane, well-to-do [...] sexy, funloving and selforiented” (FB 24–26). Leary’s mother was also an Irish Catholic but she came from a different social scene. According to Leary, Abigail’s side of the family was “traditional, family oriented, suspicious of all things joyous, frivolous, or newfangled” (FB 26). Tote was “contemptuous of those who worked for the system”(FB 38). He practiced dentistry sporadically, as “a gentlemanly hobby” (cf. FB 38). Timothy turned out to be a smart boy. At the age of ten, when he was reading eight to ten books a week, his grandfather gave him the advice: “Never do anything like anyone else, boy [...] Find your own way” (FB 24).When Timothy was fourteen his alcoholic father left the family, because he was disappointed about the fact that the inheritance from his father was just a few thousand dollars.

After High School Timothy went to Holy Cross, a Jesuit college. He left Holy Cross after about one year, because he was accepted at the military academy West Point. After dropping out of West Point, because he committed a rules infraction, Leary became a psychology major at the University of Alabama. It didn’t take long, however, until he was expelled from university for sleeping over at the girl’s dormitory, which was in 1942 (cf. FB 137). Leary’s draft deferment was cancelled, so he was drafted. Since the army needed psychologists they let Leary finish his degree in the service. In 1944, Leary met Mariannne (?), an audio technician. They married the same year and had two children, Susan and Jack. Leary received his master’s degree in psychology at Washington State University. His thesis was a statistical study of the dimensions of intelligence (Leary 1946). Leary and Marianne moved to Berkeley. Leary earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of California Berkeley (Leary 1950), and over the next few years conducted research in psychotherapy. By the 50s he was teaching at Berkeley and had been appointed Director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland (cf. FB 16). His book The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (Leary 1957) enjoyed much success. His personal life, however, took a turn for the worse. His depressive wife committed suicide on Leary’s 35^th birthday.

Leary quit his post at Berkeley because he felt that he was “practicing a profession that didn’t seem to work” (FB 16). Psychology still had not developed a way of significantly and predictably changing human behavior. Leary’s studies showed that one third of the patients who received psychotherapy got better, one third got worse and one third stayed the same. Together with Susan and Jack, Leary moved to Florence, Italy. In spring 1960, Leary got a teaching post at Harvard University, Massachusetts, because the Director of the Harvard Center of Personality Research, McClelland, considered Leary’s revolutionary approach to psychotherapy to be the future of American Psychology. Leary’s theory on existential transaction (Leary 1960) suggested that the whole relationship between patient and therapists should be changed to a more egalitarian information exchange.

On a vacation in Mexico in 1960, Leary was offered some of the so-called “sacred mushrooms” by an anthropologist from the University of Mexico, who got them from a shaman. (The reader interested in the history of these mushrooms is referred to Gordon R. Wasson´s Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality and Terence McKenna´s Food of the Gods.) Leary ate the mushrooms which contained the psychedelic psilocybin. During the mushroom inebriation he entered into a state of mystic-religious ecstasy, which he later called “the deepest religious experience of his life”(Weil 1973:191). Like so many mystics before him he discovered that “the world – so manifestly real – was actually a tiny stage set constructed by the mind,” that human beings are all programmed and “everything we accept as reality is just a social fabrication (FB 32 f.). In his autobiography, Flashbacks, he explains that,

In four hours by that swimming pool in Guernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain and its structures than I did in the preceding 15 years as a diligent psychologist.
I learned that the brain is an underutilized biocomputer containing billions of unaccessed neurons. I learned that normal consciousness is one drop in an ocean of intelligence. That consciousness and intelligence can be systematically expanded. The brain can be reprogrammed. That the knowledge of how the brain works is the most pressing scientific issue of our time. I was beside myself with enthusiasm, convinced we had found the key [for behavior change] we had been looking for (FB 33).

This was the turning point of his life. Leary, together with his colleague Frank Barron, persuaded Harvard to allow them to study the effects of psychedelic drugs. (It should be mentioned here that at that time most psychedelic drugs were still legal.)

Leary did not follow the medical model of Behaviorism, which is the model of giving drugs to others and then observing the external results. His idea was that the scientist first should teach him-/herself how to use the drug and then take it together with the “patient.” Furthermore, Leary was not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of his own premises. This approach, which is the approach of Humanistic Psychology, was considered to be unscientific by many psychologists at that time. Leary also felt that the term “psychotomimetic” (which means “mimicking psychosis”), which was used in psychology of that time to describe the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, was inadequate, because it reflected a negative, pathological orientation and did not include concepts of enriching the mind and enlarging the vision. He used the term “psychedelic,” meaning “mind-manifesting,” instead (cf. Lee 1992: 55). Leary’s experiments had interesting results. For example, in one of his formal experiments Leary was able to show that psychedelic drugs can produce deep religious experiences similar to those reported by prophets and mystics throughout the ages (cf. PE 15f.).

Celebrities such as writers Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg took part in Leary’s experiments. In addition to the formal studies Leary carried out at Harvard, Leary also held psychedelic sessions in his private apartment. In December 1960, Ginsberg came for a visit. Leary and Ginsberg took psilocybin together. While under the influence of the drug, Ginsberg had a vision: “I’m the messiah. I’ve come down to preach love to the world. We are going to teach people to stop hating”(FB 48f). During the experience Ginsberg became convinced, that psychedelic drugs held the promise of changing mankind, curing sick society. His plan was that everybody should take mind-expanding drugs. Ginsberg’s vision struck a chord in Leary. From then on, Leary saw himself as the messiah whose mission was to enlighten the whole world with psychedelic drugs. Leary believed that political problems were manifestations of psychological problems, which at the bottom were neurological-chemical (cf. FB 50). Together with Ginsberg, Leary started turning on the Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Charles Olson, and William Burroughs to psylocibin (cf. FB 49–52, cf. Lee 1992: 80).

It was Michael Hollingshead, a British philosophy student, who gave LSD to Leary (cf. FB 117). LSD is a synthetic psychedelic — first synthesized by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss scientist, in 1938, while seeking for a pain killer for migraine headaches (cf. Hofmann 1980) – which is even stronger than psilocybin. When Leary took LSD he experienced the most shattering experience of his life: ”Pilocybin had sucked me down into nerve nets, into body organs,[...] had let me spiral down the DNA ladder of evolution to the beginning of life on this planet. But LSD was something different [...it] had flipped my consciousness into a dance of energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations and each illusory form was simply a different frequency”(FB 118). From then on, Leary used LSD in his research. With the help of LSD he wanted to get insight into the mechanisms of the brain. He also wanted to develop a language, verbal as well as non-verbal, that makes us able to talk about drug experiences in a scientific way.

When it became public that Leary administered drugs to students (who phoned home to announce they had found God) and got “high” with his test subjects, Harvard insisted that Leary stopped his experiments. Leary was accused by various scientists of leading his experiments in an unscientific way. Since Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert would not stop their experiments (“LSD is more important than Harvard,” Leary said) they were expelled from Harvard in spring 1963. After the “Harvard scandal” most major US magazines featured stories about Leary and LSD, so Leary was suddenly known all over the US as “Mr. LSD”(cf. Lee 1992: 88). During their time at Harvard Leary and Alpert had also started a private drug research project, the International Foundation of Internal Freedom (IFIF), which they continued after their expulsion (cf. Lee 1992: 96). The aim of the project was to study the religious use of psychedelics. It did not take long until the organization counted 3000 due-paying members. Offices were set up all across America. In the summer of 1963, the headquaters of the organization were moved to a hotel in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. A group of Beatniks and bohemians followed Leary to Mexico, but were not allowed to participate in the research programs. It only took six weeks until the IFIF was expelled from Mexico (cf. Lee 1992, 97).

A rich stockbroker, Bill Hitchcock, was very interested in the IFIF´s work, so he offered Leary and Alpert that they could use his mansion in Millbrook, New York, as a place where they could do their research. Leary and Alpert accepted the offer. A core group of about 30 people gathered at Millbrook. IFIF was disbanded and replaced by another organization, the Castilian Foundation (named after an intellectual colony in Hesse´s Glass Bead Game). The members of the Castilian Foundation lead a communal life and did research on psychedelics and oriental meditation. As a guide for their psychedelic sessions the group was using a text written by Leary called The Psychedelic Experience (Leary 1964). This text is a translation of the old Buddhist text The Tibetan Book of the Dead from English into what Leary calls “psychedelic American”(cf. FB 199). Millbrook attracted visitors from all walks of life. To name a few, there was the Jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, psychiatrists Humphry Osmond and R. D. Laing, the philosopher Alan Watts, and also a Swedish model named Nina Schlebrugge. In 1964, Leary married Nina Schlebrugge (cf. Lee 1992, 102). However, their relationship did not last long. They parted soon after their honeymoon in India.

In December 1965, Leary, his children, and his soon to be wife Rosemary Woodruff wanted to go on vacation to Mexico, but Leary was arrested after he and his daughter had been caught with a small amount of marijuana at the border between Mexico and Texas. Leary was sentenced to 30 (!) years in prison (cf. FB 242). While his lawyers appealed the verdict, Leary returned to Millbrook, continuing with drug experiments, and set up a religious group, the League for Spiritual Discovery (L.S.D.).

Inspired by the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Leary started using the media, trying to change the negative associations that people had when they heard the word “LSD” into positive ones. He promised LSD users beauty, philosophic wonder, religious revelation, increased intelligence, mystical romance, and better sex (cf. FB 251). It was at that time that Leary came up with the slogan “Turn On – Tune In – Drop Out”. “Turn On” meant to go within, with the help of psychedelics, meditation or other methods. It meant to become sensitive to the many levels of consciousness one can reach. “Tune In” meant to interact harmoniously with the world one is surrounded by, to express one’s new internal perspectives. “Drop Out” suggested an active process of detachment from involuntary and unconscious commitments (cf. FB 253). What he wanted to express with his slogan is that psychedelics (especially LSD) create a “new consciousness” and teach you to reject repressive politics, war, violence, military service, racism, erotic hypocrisy, sexism, and established religion (cf. Leary 1995: 8). In 1966, LSD became illegal. For Leary, the criminalization of LSD meant that psychedelics and what he called “new consciousness” became a political issue indissolubly intertwined with peace, sexual liberation, “end the draft”, ecology, etc(cf. Leary 1995: 9). In 1968, when the 60s revolution reached its peak , Tim became active socially as an anti- Vietnam protester, sang “Give peace a chance” with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and announced his candidacy for governor of California in March 1970 (cf. FB 287). In The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary suggested a new Declaration of Independence based on the idea of personal freedom (freedom to alter one’s own consciousness). In spite of the fact that President Nixon called Leary “the most dangerous man on the planet” (see Timothy Leary is dead, a documentary about Leary’s life and work by Paul Davis, 1996) things looked good for Leary, because the Texas drug case was overturned by the Supreme Court.

However, it did not take long until Leary received a 10 year sentence for another arrest for possession of marijuana. He was sent to jail immediately. In September 1970, Leary escaped from prison (cf. FB 291). He fled to Algiers where he was offered asylum with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s government in exile. Since Cleaver put him under house arrest Leary fled to Switzerland and tried to find refuge there. While waiting for asylum, Leary visited Austria, where he acted in an anti-heroin documentary (cf. FB 328). Leary did not get asylum in Switzerland. He was caught by the police in Afghanistan and handed over to the American Drug Enforcement Agency.

Starting in 1972, Leary spent time in several different prisons and was finally released in 1976 (cf. FB 366). During this time he wrote several books about “neurotechnology” (methods to control our nervous systems), the most important one of them being Exo-Psychology (Leary 1974). He started giving lectures at colleges and appeared in talk shows. This time, however, his main subject was not LSD, but space migration and life extension. He married Barbara Chase who had a son, Zach. In the early 80s, Leary went on a lecture tour with G. Gordon Liddy (a former law enforcement officer who, in the 60s, raided Millbrook and later was sent to prison because he was involved in the Watergate scandal). In their very ironic debates Leary and Liddy caricatured each other’s former roles (cf. Lee 1992: 293).

During the 80s, Leary turned to computers as his “transformational tool of choice” and became one of the first promoters of virtual reality and the Internet. He proclaimed that “the personal computer is the LSD of the 90s,” empowering people on a mass level (cf. CC coverpage). Leary became a spokesman for a new high-tech subculture, the “cyberpunks.” Furthermore, he started his own software company, Futique Inc., which designs programs that “digitize thought-images,” produces “cyberwear” for virtual reality (TV goggles and quadrophonic sound systems that immerse the user in 3-D computer-graphic worlds) and develops educational software for students (cf. FB 384f). Leary went on college lecture tours again and also gave talks on “rave parties.” His lecture tours became multi-media extravaganzas with live video and music. His books became graphic novels that were products of desktop publishing. Some of his books were converted into psychedelic audio-books or computer programs. For example, What does WoMan want? (a novel written by Leary in 1976) was converted into an interactive computer program, a “performance book” as Leary calls it (Leary 1988a). Leary designed a web page (http://www.leary.com) where people are encouraged to discuss the effects of psychedelic drugs, etc. In 1995, Leary discovered that he had incurable prostate cancer. He refused to be treated in a hospital and “designed” his dying process to be a party instead. By challenging the solemnity of dying – shortly before he died he wrote a book called Design for Dying (Leary 1997b) in which he says that we should question the traditional notion of what dying is and design our dying process the way we like it — Leary broke the last and greatest taboo. Leary passed away on May 31, 1996. His ashes were sent into space.

2. The Politics of Ecstasy/The Seven Levels of Consciousness (the 60s)

Revolution is a personal matter. You create the world; you must change it. (Paul Williams)[25]

In the 60s, Leary wrote several books on psychedelic drugs and higher levels of consciousness. The most important of them is The Politics of Ecstasy. It could be said that all of these books describe one more or less consistent theory about human consciousness. I want to call this theory “Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness”. (I did not choose the name “Politics of Ecstasy” for this theory because I think this title focuses on the political aspect too much. In Leary’s theory, politics, which Leary saw as a primitive struggle for power and territory, is only one stage in the development of human consciousness towards enlightenment. Leary thought that we should leave politics behind and move on to higher levels of consciousness. It should be mentioned here that the title “Politics of Ecstasy” was not Leary’s idea. It was Abbie Hoffman who suggested this title to Leary (cf. PE 1).) In this chapter, I want to describe the Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness and discuss Leary’s impact on the 60s counterculture.

2.1. Ancient models are good but not enough

Leary’s work, especially the theory about human consciousness he developed in the early 60s, was very much influenced by Eastern philosophies and religions. In his spiritual approach to psychedelic experiences Leary felt affirmed by the discovery of ancient Asian spiritual texts. Ancient Asian spiritual texts are concerned with transcendence, with learning to go beyond the ego-centered perspectives of ordinary human consciousness, beyond the dualities of right and wrong, beyond space and time, and with becoming liberated from the cravings and fears that characterize human existence. For Buddhists, Hinduists, and Taoists, the method of attaining such liberating transcendence was not psychedelics but meditation. However, Leary was convinced that their goal was essentially the same as that of spiritually oriented psychedelic explorers. Leary translated two of the ancient texts, the Buddhist text Tibetan Book of the Dead[26] and the Taoist text Tao Te Ching[27] from English into what he calls “psychedelic American.” These two ancient texts describe different levels of consciousness, stages that we have to go through if we want to attain enlightenment. There are seven levels in the Buddhist text, five levels in the Taoist text. Both texts are concerned with giving up the supremacy of the “egohood” and entering a mystical state of illumination which goes beyond form, that is, beyond words and “hallucinatory struggles.” Leary used these translations as guide books for his psychedelic sessions.

The most important essays that describe Leary’s own theory about human consciousness can be found in The Politics of Ecstasy. This book was first published in 1968. It is a collection of essays and lectures on psychedelic drug experience and the personal, social, and political changes that psychedelics were supposed to bring about. In The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary praises LSD as the key to altering our consciousness, which can help us to increase our intelligence, creativity, sexual pleasures, philosophical insight, to abolish authoritarian dogmatic social structures, and to speed up the evolution of humankind in general. On the basis of his drug experiments at Harvard and personal experiences with the psychedelic drugs LSD and psilocybin, Leary built an all-encompassing theory about human consciousness, which is a synthesis of eastern philosophy and western science and gives answers to basic questions of philosophy, psychology, politics and religion. (Leary was not the first person who tried to create such a synthesis. For example, there were William James, C.G. Jung, and writer and early psychedelic explorer Aldous Huxley who tried to create a synthesis between eastern and western thinking.) In Leary’s opinion ancient eastern texts on the nature of consciousness were helpful but they were only very vague descriptions of the unknown “phenomenological territories” Leary wanted to explore. Leary thought that he had found a language that was more adequate to describe psychedelic experiences and the nature of human consciousness. The language Leary uses in his Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness is a mixture of scientific vocabulary, mystical terms used in eastern philosophical and religious texts, and psychedelic slang.

2.2. “The Seven Tongues of God”

The lecture in which he presented his theory of human consciousness for the first time is a lecture he gave in 1963 at a meeting of Lutheran psychologists. By describing his model of the Seven Levels of Consciousness Leary tried to show that eastern philosophies and discoveries of western science do not contradict but rather complement each other[28]. The lecture, which in The Politics of Ecstasy appears under the title “The Seven Tongues of God”(PE 13–58), was originally titled “The Religious Experience: Its Production and Interpretation.” Leary begins this lecture by describing two formal experiments with psilocybin that were carried out at Harvard. (The description of the first experiment helps to see that his approach to psychotherapy was really revolutionary.)

The first formal experiment conducted by Leary’s group was a rehabilitation program carried out at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, a maximum security prison. The inmates were given (synthetic) psilocybin to find out whether the drug would help prisoners change their ways, thereby lowering the recidivism rate. They formed groups and at least one member of Leary’s group took psilocybin with the prisoners. Part of the project was designed to help ex-inmates (only those who received the drug) get integrated into society again after their release. The study proved successful in the short term, only 25% of those who took the drug ended up in prison again, as compared to the normal return-rate of about 80% (cf. Lee 1992: 75; cf. FB 102).

The other experiment, which was conducted by Walter Pahnke as part of his Ph.D. dissertation for Harvard Divinity School, dealt with the relationship between drug-induced and naturally occurring religious experiences. In this experiment Pahnke sought to determine, whether the transcendent experiences reported during psychedelic sessions were similar to the mystical experiences described in various holy scriptures and reported by prophets throughout the ages. Pills, half of them containing psilocybin and half of them being placebos, were given to theology students at a Good Friday service. Neither the test subjects nor Leary and Pahnke knew who had received the drug and who had not. The results showed that the participants who took the psilocybin pill had significantly deeper mystical religious experiences than the ones who received placebos in the same situation. Leary concluded that a mystical experience could be produced chemically by those who sought it, provided that “set” and “setting” are appropriate (cf. FB 108). (“Set” is the character structure and attitudinal predisposition. In this case it means being religiously motivated. By reading books on psychedelic experiences and protocols written by other subjects the divinity students prepared themselves for the drug experience. “Setting” is the immediate situation; in this case: a Good Friday service.)

After describing these experiments, Leary raises the question what a religious experience is and gives his definition: “The religious experience is the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain, subjective discovery of answers to seven basic spiritual questions”(PE 19). What are these seven basic spiritual questions Leary suggests?

The ultimate Power question: What is the basic energy underlying the universe?
The Life Question: What is life? Where and how did it begin? How is it evolving?
The Human Being Question: Who is man? What is his structure and function?
The Awareness Question: How does man sense, experience, know?
The Ego Question: Who am I?
The Emotional Question: What should I feel about it (life)?
The Ultimate Escape Question: How do I get out of it (cf. PE 19)?

After formulating these questions, Leary explains that the purpose of life is religious discovery, which, for him, means to answer these questions and also experience the answers. However, Leary’s concept of religion, as we will see, is totally different from the rigid hierarchical dogmatic religious systems of Catholicism, Protestantism or any kind of fundamentalism. Leary makes the reader aware that one important fact about these questions is that not only the religions of the world give answers to these questions, the data of natural sciences do so as well. He compares answers given by science with the experiences described by his test subjects and finds striking similarities. Let me give one of Leary’s examples: What is the scientific answer to the first question? Leary explains that Nuclear physicists, for example, suggest that the basic energy underlying the universe is located within the nucleus. “The nucleus radiates a powerful electrical field which holds and controls the electrons around it.[...] Objects, which on the macroscopic level seem to be solid, are actually a transparent sphere of emptiness, thinly populated with whirling electrons” (PE 22). Leary points out that psychedelic reports often contain phrases which seem to describe similar phenomena, subjectively experienced: “I felt open to a total flow, over and around and through my body[...] All objects were dripping, streaming, with white hot light of electricity which flowed in the air [...]”(PE 23). He comes to the conclusion that “those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the energy process which physicists and biochemists and physiologists and neurologists and psychologists and psychiatrists measure” (PE 21).

Based on this conclusion, Leary builds his theory about human consciousness. The basic assumption of this theory is that consciousness is based on physical structure. Leary sees consciousness as a biochemical process[29] (cf. PE 339). He also equates consciousness with energy: “Consciousness is energy received and decoded by structure” (PE 342). According to Leary’s theory, there are as many levels of consciousness in the human body as there are anatomical structures to receive and decode energy. Leary suggests that there are seven levels of consciousness. These seven levels correspond to the seven questions. (I will explain the seven levels and their correlation to anatomical structures further below.) And now comes the crucial point in Leary’s theory. Since, according to Leary, consciousness is a biochemical process Leary concludes that the key to changing consciousness is also chemical. He suggests that there are specific drugs to “turn on” each of the seven levels. Most people would not be capable of reaching the higher levels of consciousness (levels 1–4) and having religious experiences, except with the help of psychedelic drugs. Leary admits that there are other ancient methods, like meditation, which can help us to reach higher levels of consciousness, but “at present time, man is so sick, that only a few people can use ancient methods, so that it is safe to say that drugs are the specific, and almost the only, way that the American is ever going to have a religious experience” (PE 297). Leary predicts that “psychedelics are the future of mankind,” that psychedelics will be the religion of the twenty first century and that during the next few hundred years the major activity of man will be the scientific exploration of our consciousness (i.e., our nervous system) with psychedelic drugs (cf. PE 346). In his Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness, he gives his view of how the future of mankind is going to look like. Now, what are these seven levels of consciousness? Which drug “turns on” which level? And why exactly are most people not capable of reaching the higher levels?

Before I describe the seven levels, I want to make a short comment on Leary’s style: Leary’s language is very euphoric, agitating, poetic, and transcends standard “either/or” logic (Eastern Philosophy does so as well). Leary mixes Buddhist and Hinduist metaphors with accurate scientific descriptions of biological, neurological, psychological and physical processes. Another thing that should be mentioned here to avoid confusion is that, according to Leary’s Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness, “reality” is a construction of our nervous system. Leary argues that a certain model of reality is imprinted in our nervous systems in childhood, and this model (or “neural program”) determines what we will “see” and “not see.” In most people the programs (imprints) they use to process information from the outside world remain the same for their whole life. If we took psychedelics, however, we would be able to suspend imprints, experience other realities (different levels of consciousness) and create our own realities.

(In The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary does not give very elaborate definitions of the seven levels of consciousness he suggests. In his later works — in the 70s, 80s, and 90s — Leary elaborates on this theory.)

2.3. Leary’s model of the Seven Levels of Consciousness

This is how Leary describes this model in the texts “The Seven Tongues of God” and “The Molecular Revolution”(PE 332–361). (Since in these texts Leary describes the seventh level first I am going to do so as well.)

1. The Void (level 7):

This is the lowest level. It is a state of anesthesia which can be produced by narcotics, barbiturates (sleeping pills) and large doses of alcohol. Typical examples for people living on this level of (un-)consciousness are heroin addicts and alcoholics who want to escape the existential pressure of being. Leary notes that he can very well understand these people who want to escape the ego that narrows down our perception and escape all the social games of our society –he even calls them “deeply religious” -, but their attempts to escape the ego are futile because “you just can’t keep holding the ‘off’ switch”(PE 43). The question (in Leary’s list of seven questions) that corresponds to this level is the Ultimate Escape question: How do I get out of it (life)? Or you could also ask: When does it (life) end? Leary’s answer is that life never ends. Science tells us that life is an ongoing process of being born and dying. According to Leary, it is only during a psychedelic experience that we learn that actually there is no death, there is nothing to fear. Leary suggests that we should “go with the flow” of life, because stability is an illusion; everything is changing all the time (this concept can be found in Buddhism as well).

2. Emotional Stupor (level 6):

This is the level of consciousness that people are on when they get emotional. Leary’s concept of emotions is a negative one. He writes that, “all emotions are based on fear. The emotional person cannot think,[...] is turned off sensually [...] is an inflexible robot gone berserk” (PE 38). It should be mentioned here that love, for Leary, is not an emotion. He sees love as a state without emotional greed which is not ego-centered. The answer to “How shall I feel about it ?” is that you should not get emotional at all. Only if you “turn off” your emotions can you reach higher levels of consciousness.

The drug that brings you in an emotional and stubborn state is alcohol.

3. The State of Ego Consciousness/The Mental-social-symbolic Level (level 5):

This state of consciousness is dominated by the ego and the mind, the seat of thinking and reasoning. According to Leary, the most important reason why most of us cannot reach higher levels of consciousness is that we cannot escape the narrow “reality tunnel” of the ego, which is formed by what we have been told by our parents, educational institutions and governmental agencies. The ego is always socially defined. “Social reality” is a neural program (cf. PE 35). (As I have already mentioned, Leary argues that a certain model of reality is imprinted in our nervous system during childhood which determines how we see the world.) We are told what we are and we accept what we are told. We are conditioned to see, hear, smell, and to behave in a certain way. Psychological censoring-mechanisms (imprinting and conditioning) have made us “blind Pavlovian dogs” who do whatever our rulers want us to do. We can not use our senses in a free, direct way. We see the world through the categories we have been taught to use. Sensory conditioning has forced us to accept a “reality” which is “a comic-tragic farce illusion”(cf. PE 33).

Who am I? Leary argues that for the average American this question is answered totally in terms of artificial roles (cf. PE 35). Only if we drop out of social roles can we find divinity and discover that the ego is only a fraction of our identity. Leary says that the perspective on this question above comes only when we “step off the TV stage set defined by mass-media-social-psychology-adjustment-normality”(PE 35). Then we will discover that we exist at every level of energy and every level of consciousness. Who am I? Leary’s answer is that you can be whoever you want to be. With the help of psychedelics you can control your nervous system and create your own reality. Who you are depends on which level of consciousness you are at the moment. For example, if you are at the atomic level (level 1) you can be “a galaxy of nuclear-powered atoms[...]the universe[...]God of Light”(PE 35). At the cellular level you can be “the entire chain of life [...] the key rung of the DNA ladder [...] the now-eye of the 2-billion-year-old uncoiling serpent”(ibid.)[30].

Without psychedelics we cannot go beyond the ego-centred perspectives of human consciousness. The ”ego drugs” coffee, nicotine, and meta-amphetamines (pep pills), which dominate our Western culture, only “blow up” our egos.

The person who cannot transcend the three levels discussed so far lives in a pretty bleak world. He/she is a victim of his/her parents, educational systems, the government, and of psychological processes in the brain (e.g., conditioning) which he/she cannot control. But as soon as we reach the higher levels of consciousness that Leary defines in his Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness, there is freedom, beauty, ecstasy.

4. The Sensory Level (level 4):

When we transcend the level of the conditioned mind with its symbolic representations of the world, then our senses are opened and we “experience afresh the hardly bearable ecstasy of direct energy exploding on our nerve endings” (PE 34). On this level of consciousness our perception of the environment transcends the usual limitations of sensory perception. Leary notes that this awakening and controlling of our is the most basic part of every religious method (cf. PE 34). “Control means the ability to turn off the mind, ignore the enticing clamor of symbolic seduction and open the senses like flowers, accepting like sunshine the gift of those energies which man’s senses are designed to receive,” he explains (PE 34). Leary puts much emphasis on this level of consciousness. (We have to be aware of the fact, that the direct and intense sensual experience – the Acid Rock and Jazz music, nature’s beauty, psychedelic artwork, free love — was one of the most important aspects of life for the hippies.)

The drug that opens our senses to this direct experience is marijuana.

5. The Somatic (Body) Level (level 3):

The question that corresponds to the Somatic Level is “What is the human being?”. Science defines man as an evolutionary form emerging from animal-mammalian-primate stock characterized by a particular anatomy and physiology. Man’s body contains a complex system of life functions of which he/she normally has no direct experience. (According to Leary, a small dose of marijuana is not sufficient to experience your inner body functions.) A deep psychedelic experience, however, is “the sudden confrontation with your body, the shattering resurrection of your body. You are capitulated into the matrix of quadrillions of cells and somatic communication systems. Cellular flow. You are swept down the tunnels and canals of your own waterworks. Visions of microscopic processes [...]”(PE 30). You discover that your body is the universe, that you are the universe, because — as Gnostics, Hermetics, and Tantric gurus said – what is without is within (cf. ibid.). If you look within yourself you will discover that “the kingdom of heaven is within you” (ibid.).

The drugs that trigger off this awareness of your body functions are large doses of hashish, moderate doses of psilocybin, MDA (“Ecstasy”), and small doses of LSD.

6. The Cellular Level (level 2):

This level leads us one step further into the microscopic world of our body to the biological cell and the DNA — the genetic code. The questions that are answered on this level of consciousness are “What is life?” and “How does life evolve?”. Science tells us that the DNA is the blueprint of life which (along with environmental factors) determines evolution. According to Leary, the secrets of your DNA can be revealed to you if you reach this level of consciousness. Leary was convinced that the DNA “remembers” all the important facts of the evolution of life (cf. PE 28) — of life in the evolutionary sense of the word (phylogenesis: single cell, fish, vertebrates, mammals, etc) as well as of a person’s individual life (ontogenesis: intrauterine events, birth, etc). Everybody can re-experience all these facts; everybody can see what part he/she plays in the evolution of life. Practically all of the test subjects in Leary’s LSD experiments reported evolutionary journeys and experiences of rebirth. “It is all there in our nervous systems,” Leary says; we just have to become aware of it. Leary points out that he is not the first person who talks about this level of consciousness. He refers us to Buddhist and Hinduist reincarnation theories which describe a similar level of consciousness[31].

In order to reach this level of consciousness you have to take a moderate dose of LSD or a large dose of psilocybin or mescaline (cf. PE 344).

7. The Atomic — Solar Level (level 1):

This is the highest level which can only be triggered off by high doses of LSD (cf. PE 344). If you are on this level, you are aware of energy transactions among molecular structures inside the cell. You are experiencing the basic energy of the universe (see question 1). More than that (this is where Buddhism comes in), “Subjects speak of participating in a merging with pure (i.e., content-free) energy, visual nets, the collapse of external structure into wave patterns, the awareness that everything is a dance of particles, sensing the smallness and fragility of our system, visions of the void [a Buddhist concept], the world ending explosions[...]” (PE 24). Leary notes that the metaphors he uses are inadequate to describe the actual experience, but “at present we just don’t have a better experiential vocabulary”(ibid.). Leary admits that his metaphors may sound farfetched but ”if God were to permit you a brief voyage into the divine process, let you whirl for a second into the atomic nucleus or spin you out on a light-year trip through the galaxies, how on earth would you describe what you saw when you got back, breathless, to your office”(ibid.)? Leary repeatedly uses the terms “void” or “the clear white light” to describe this level of consciousness. These terms are adopted from Buddhist philosophy[32].

Leary admits that the levels of consciousness and the relationships between certain drugs and each level of consciousness he proposed are still hypothetical. However, he seriously encourages scientists to study these relationships. A scientific study would be possible because his hypotheses are cast in operational language (cf. PE 345).

2.4. The importance of “set” and “setting”

As far as the nature of any psychedelic experience triggered by drugs like LSD or psilocybin is concerned, Leary argues that LSD and all the other psychedelics have no standard effects which are purely pharmacological in nature; it is not the drug that produces the transcendent experience. The drug only inhibits conditioned reflexes. The enormous range of experience produced by various chemicals stems from differences in “set” and “setting” (cf. Timothy Leary. The Psychedelic Experience. Translated into HTML by Den Walter. 20 Mar. 1998: n. pag. Online. Internet. http://hyperreal.com/drugs/psychedelics/leary/psychedelic.html , general introduction). (I know that I have already shortly explained these terms, but I want to give a more detailed explanation of them and the concept that lies behind them, because, for me, this concept seems to be the key to Leary’s theory.)

In the general introduction to The Psychedelic Experience Leary explains set and setting as follows:

Set denotes the preparation of the individual, including his personality structure and his mood at the time (attitudinal predisposition). Setting is physical (the situation) – the weather, the room’s atmosphere; social – feelings of persons present towards on another; and cultural – prevailing views as to what is real. It is for that reason that manuals or guide-books are necessary. Their purpose is to enable a person to understand the new realities of the expanded consciousness, to serve as road maps for new interior territories which modern science has made accessible (ibid.).

During one of his many psychedelic sessions Leary discovered that the drug only acts as a chemical key which “opens the mind [and] frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures”(ibid.). The person who takes the drug, not the drug, would be responsible for how the trip is going to turn out. In High Priest, Leary describes this discovery which was disturbing for him:

There seemed to be equal amounts of God and Devil (or whatever you want to call them) within the nervous system. Psychedelic drugs just open the door to the Magic Theatre, and the stages and dramas you encounter depend on what you are looking for, your state of mind when you begin [...] I began to get a sinking feeling. Psychedelic drugs didn’t seem to solve any problems. They just magnified, mythified, clarified to jewel-like sharpness the basic problem of life and evolution (Leary 1995: 80)[33].

From this discovery Leary concludes that we can “design” our psychedelic trips, which means that we can actually design our own realities. We only have to create the right set and setting.

2.5. The political and ethical aspects of Leary’s “Politics of Ecstasy”

In the 60s, Leary was convinced that psychedelics were necessary for the future evolution of mankind (in the 80s Leary changed his mind). For him, it was no coincidence that LSD was discovered around the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the Holocaust happened. The Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness is supposed to show us the way to peace, individual freedom and enlightenment. In the 60s, Leary felt that the limited vision of reality prevailing in modern society and socio-political conflicts were largely due to the dominant ego-drugs, alcohol and coffee. His idea was to change the drugs, and a change of heart would naturally follow. He claimed that “politics, religion, economics, social structure are all based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure is biochemical”(Lee 1992: 79).

As far as the political and ethical aspects of Leary’s theory on human consciousness are concerned, Leary argues that the changes in peoples’ consciousness that psychedelics brought about have made necessary new ethical commandments, and a revision of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. In The Politics of Ecstasy, he suggests new ethical commandments, a new Declaration of Independence (the “Declaration of Evolution”), and a new American Constitution (the “The Constitution of Life”). Leary’s “Declaration of Evolution” and his “Constitution of Life” focus on his vision of the future of human evolution, that is, the future of human consciousness he describes in the “scientific-religious” Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness.

The two new commandments Leary suggests instead of the ten old ones are:

Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow man.
Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness (PE 94).

These commandments were, so he claims, revealed to him by his nervous system. (I think it is obvious that the message that Leary tries to communicate with these two commandments is: Question authority! Legalize psychedelic drugs!)

Leary’s “Declaration of Evolution”(PE 362ff.), which is in many aspects similar to the original Declaration of Independence, is based on three “God-given rights” (God being Nature and our genetic wisdom): the “Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style”(PE 362). In his “Declaration of Evolution,” Leary encourages the reader to question authority, including his own authority. Leary does not want people to blindly believe in the things he says. “Write your own declaration [...] write your own Bible [...] Start your own religion,” Leary writes (PE 95f.). In order to be able to start your own religion you would have to “Turn On – Tune In – Drop Out”. “Turn On” means to go within, with the help of psychedelics, meditation or other methods. It means to find a sacrament which “returns you to the temple of God,” which is your own body, and become sensitive to the many levels of consciousness one can reach. “Tune In” stands for starting a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision and for interacting harmoniously with the world you are surrounded by to express your new internal perspectives. “Drop Out” suggests an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary and unconscious commitments. “Drop Out” means self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change (cf. FB 253, cf. Leary 1995: 320). In The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary encourages people to quit their jobs, quit school, and not to vote. What he wants to express with his slogan is that psychedelics (especially LSD) create a “new consciousness” and teach people to reject repressive politics, war, violence, military service, racism, erotic hypocrisy, sexism, established religion (cf. Leary 1995: 8). In “Timothy Leary is dead,” a documentary about Leary’s life and work, painter Claire Burch recalls what Leary said in an interview in the 60s: “He said that it was his mission to introduce LSD to the world – and he said it like a general. Even if there are a few [LSD-] victims we still would have to look at the larger picture” (Davis 1996).

Leary has always seen politics as something primitive which has to be transcended. According to Leary, real change is not possible within the system of politics. It is not enough to “change the name of the tax-controller and the possessor of the key to the prison cell” (Leary 1988: 22) This is why we have to “abolish this mammalian push-pull to get on top”(ibid.). Leary’s aim has always been to de-politicize young people. “People should not be allowed to talk politics,” he states, “except on all fours”(Lee 1992: 166). Revolution would be important but “Revolution without Revelation is Tyranny” and “Revelation without Revolution is Slavery”(Leary 1988: 16), as Leary had learned from the teachings of the mystic George Gurdjeff. For Leary, the only revolution that can be successful is a revolution of the mind because the “world” is a creation of our minds.

2.6. Leary’s impact on the young generation of the 60s

In order to understand Leary’s impact on the youth culture and politics in the 60s we have to be aware that in the 60s the use of psychedelics and politics were strongly linked. Many historians writing about the 60s avoid any discussion of psychedelics without which the 60s, as we know them, would never have occurred. It should be remembered that in the 60s most of the political activism was connected, directly or indirectly, to the ingestion of psychedelics and therefore was shaped by ecstatic states of being. Michael Rossmann, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (this radical left wing student organization arose on the Berkeley campus in the fall of 1964 and protested for civil rights, disarmament, university reform, and so forth) perfectly described this connection between psychedelics and politics when he said: “When a young person took his first puff of psychoactive smoke, he also drew in the psychoactive culture as a whole, the entire matrix of law and association surrounding the drug, its induction and transaction. One inhaled a certain way of dressing, talking, acting, certain attitudes. One became a youth criminal [sic] against the state” (Lee 1992: 129). Also Peter Stafford, in his Psychedelics Encyclopedia, points out that much of the “social experimentation” in the 60s — which resulted in a change of American attitudes toward work, toward the police and the military and toward such groups as women and gays — was touched off by the mass use of LSD (cf. Stafford 1992: 54).

Leary was known to say that his aims were not political. For him, politics were “game playing, a bad trip, a bringdown, a bummer.” His own definition of the word ecstasy, however, shows that drug induced ecstasy and politics are connected in a certain way and that the ecstatic experience itself is a political subversive act. Leary defines ecstasy as “the experience of attaining freedom from limitations, either self-imposed or external”(PE 1). He notes that the word ex-stasis (the Greek root of ecstasy), by definition, is “an ongoing on/off process that requires a continual sequence of ‘dropping out’”(ibid.). When many individuals share the ecstatic experience at the same time, they would create a brief-lived counterculture (cf. ibid.). By telling the young generation not to care about politics but to “Turn on — Tune in — Drop out” instead, Leary contradicts himself. Turning on and dropping out are political acts. If you “turn on” (which means to take illegal drugs) and “drop out” (which means to quit your job, quit school, and not to vote), you automatically destroy the existing political and social systems. Leary says that he does not want blind followers and at the same time encourages people to trust him and take LSD because it would solve practically every problem. Leary’s own actions are in contradiction to his first commandment “Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow man.”

In the 60s, there were many people (Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, just to name a few of them) who promoted the use of pschedelic drugs. Still, Leary stands out as the promoter, apologist, and “High Priest of psychedelia” nonpareil. Theodore Roszak in his book about the 60s counterculture, The Making of a Counterculture, writes that, “Surely if we look for the figures who have done the most to push psychedelic experience along the way toward becoming a total and autonomous culture, it is Leary who emerges as the Ultra of the campaign”(Roszak 1995: 164).

What is the difference between Leary and the other promoters of psychedelics? If we compare Leary to novelist Ken Kesey who also “turned on” a lot of people (see Wolfe 1969), there is one big difference. In contrast to Ken Kesey, whose notorious “acid tests” were supposed to be only fun and games — Kesey would put LSD in people’s drinks and without knowing that their drinks were laced with LSD people would drink it -, Leary told the young generation that getting turned on was not just a childish game but “the sacred rite of a new age”(ibid. 166). For Leary, the psychedelic movement was a religious movement. Leary managed to embed the younger generation’s psychedelic fascination in a religious context. For many young people Leary’s ideas were attractive because they were looking for something to believe in anyway and it was considered to be “hip” to take drugs too.

Since the moment Leary came out of the academic closet more and more people saw him as a prophet for a better future. Leary was just in time with his LSD campaign because the younger generation was ready to break out of the conservative, materialistic, and complacent world of their parents anyway. When, in 1964, the US got involved in the Vietnam war this was just one more reason for people to join Leary’s side. Who exactly were those people who saw Leary as a prophet for a better future?

First of all, there were the Beat poets and other artists who lived in communities on both coasts of the US who considered Leary to be a “hero of American consciousness.” Allen Ginsberg, for example, saw Leary as an antidote to a society dominated by technology which degraded people to robots. For Ginsberg, Leary was one of the few people in our century who kept up the tradition of the “new consciousness” which, according to Ginsberg, can be traced back through old gnostic texts, visions, artists, and shamans (cf. Leary 1995 Foreword by Ginsberg). Even William Burroughs who initially was skeptical about Leary’s “save-the-world antics” later came to regard Leary as a “true pioneer of human evolution”(cf. FB 8).

After Leary had been dismissed from Harvard, students from various universities throughout the US paid him to give lectures at their universities. Leary’s organizations for spiritual discovery (IFIF, Castilia Foundation, L.S.D.) and also his “psychedelic celebrations” — featuring re-enactments of the lives of Buddha, Christ, Mohammed and light shows which were designed to produce an “acid trip” without drugs — were enjoying much success. Various Rock groups, for example the Beatles, were using passages from Leary’s books as lyrics for their songs (cf. Lee 1992: 181). At the first Human Be-In in San Francisco in January 1967 Leary’s speech was the highlight of the afternoon (cf. Lee 1992: 161). Many people of the radical and hip scene that developed in the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco in the early 60s, the hippies, and even members of the New Left accepted as gospel every word Leary uttered (cf. ibid.).

Of course, not everybody — especially not the government — was impressed by Leary’s message. Many people accused Leary of spoiling innocent young people and seducing them into taking drugs which would ruin their lives. They felt that it was irresponsible to encourage the youth to use psychedelics and to advocate the legalization of those drugs.

The US government was against the use of psychedelic drugs in general. The consumption of these drugs was considered to be morally wrong and dangerous to the user as well as society. With the LSD wave came a wave of establishment panic. Suddenly LSD was considered to be more dangerous than heroin (cf. Stafford 1992: 59). Interviews with college presidents, narcotics agents, doctors and other “authorities” appeared creating an atmosphere of national emergency. Headlines like “Warning to LSD users: You may go blind”, “Mad LSD Slayer”, or “LSD causes chromosome damage” could be found in nearly every newspaper. Bills that made possession of LSD and other psychedelics a felony were introduced into state legislature throughout the nation (cf. Stafford 1992: 58–62). Under President Nixon, a fierce, rhetorical campaign was launched to define drugs as major source of crime in America and to make the war on drugs and crime a national priority. Nixon declared the (ab-)use of drugs a “national threat”, a threat to personal health and the safety of millions of Americans (cf. Bertram 1996: 4f.). Given these facts, it is not surprising that Nixon called Leary “the most dangerous man on the planet” – nor is it surprising that Leary found himself in prison on drug charges, facing thirty years incarceration for a small amount of marijuana, six months before he wanted to challenge Ronald Reagan in the election to be governor of California, 1970 (cf. PE Editor’s note). This thirty year sentence transformed Leary into the LSD movement’s first martyr. (Of course, Leary appealed the verdict.)

In Psychedelics Encyclopedia, Peter Stafford notes that in the 60s the confusion among people about the physical and mental effects of psychedelics was great but their knowledge was not so great (cf. Stafford 1992: 20). Both Leary as well as the US government gave a distorted picture of what the effects of psychedelic drugs really are. Leary wanted everybody to take LSD because his own drug experiments were so successful. The government wanted to ban the use of all psychedelics because they only wanted to see only the dangerous aspect of psychedelic drug use (and politicians felt that they lost their power to rule the country). Neither of the two would admit that psychedelic drugs can have positive as well as negative effects. You might have a revealing experience but psychedelics can also be dangerous to your mental health. Encouraging people to question authority is one thing, encouraging people to take drugs that may ruin their lives is another.

Since Leary had a large influence over a good many people who took LSD because he promised them that by doing so their dreams would come true, I want to talk at least a little bit about the potential risks of the use of psychedelics, especially LSD. What are those risks?

2.6.1. “ACID IS NOT FOR EVERYBODY”

We all know LSD-horror-stories, like the one in which an unknowing innocent person takes LSD, becomes depressed, and then commits suicide. Now, is it true that LSD might trigger a serious depression or even suicide attempts? In 1960, Dr. Sidney Cohen (a psychologist attached professionally to UCLA and the Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles) compared forty-four studies on the use of LSD and mescaline/peyote, trying to find out the dangers of psychedelic drug use and psychedelic treatment. He divided the 5000 patients and volunteers who took part in various psychedelic experiments and treatments into two groups: mentally sound volunteers and people who were mentally unstable. Peter Stafford summarizes what Cohen found out:

Not one case of addiction was reported, nor any deaths from toxic effects. Among those who volunteered for LSD or mescaline experiments, a major or prolonged psychological complication almost never occurred. In this group, only one instance of a psychotic reaction lasting longer than two days was reported, and there were no suicides. Among the mentally ill, however, prolonged psychotic states were induced in “one out of every 550 patients”. In this group, “one in 830 attempted suicide”, and one carried the attempt through (Stafford 1992: 21).

This survey gives the impression that for any person without mental problems there is a very low risk of triggering a psychosis and no risk of suicide involved in taking LSD. However, it has to mentioned that the test subjects had all been informed that they received a drug, they were all — in some way or the other — prepared for the drug experience, and they all had a guide who helped them in case they had a bad trip.

An example that shows how traumatic uninformed administration of LSD can be, is an incident that happened during an investigation to find out whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior with LSD carried out by the CIA in 1953. During a private meeting with members of the Army Chemical Corps, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of the investigation, passed around a glass of Cointreau which – unknown to the others – he had spiked with LSD. Among those who partook from Gottlieb’s glass was Dr. Frank Olson, who after the drug experience became deeply depressed. Reluctantly Olson agreed to enter a mental hospital. The night before the psychological treatment started he died after crashing through a window on the tenth floor of a hotel (cf. Stafford 1992: 47f.).

If we look at Cohen’s study and Olson’s suicide we can deduce three things: The use of LSD might be dangerous for you: 1. if you have mental problems, 2. if you are not mentally prepared for it or not informed that you took it at all, 3. if there is no guide that can help you to avoid a horror trip which may trigger a psychosis. (Dangerous “suicide programs” from your subconscious which are normally suppressed might be released during an LSD experience; programs which you cannot control.)

In the 60s Leary, Ginsberg, Kesey and all the others who wanted to “turn on the whole world” did not seem to notice that there is a big difference between experienced intellectuals like Aldous Huxley, philosopher Gerald Heard, or psychologist Frank Barron, who took LSD trying to systematically cultivate states of “abnormal” consciousness, and an inexperienced teenager who takes LSD just because it is considered to be “hip,” not knowing what to expect at all. Leary thought that LSD was good for everybody just because he and his friends (supposedly) had only positive experiences with it. It was only in the 80s, when Leary realized that psychedelics were “not appropriate for democratization, or even socialization.” He realized that “the Huxley-Heard-Barron elitist position was ethically correct and [...] the Ginsberg-Leary activism was naively democratic”(Stafford 1992: 25). He had to face the fact that not everybody had the genetic and mental prerequisites to profit from an LSD experience. Leary then admitted that his error in 1963 — this was the year when he started his LSD campaign — was “to overestimate the effect of psychological set and environmental setting”(ibid.). That is why he “failed to understand the enormous genetic variation in human neurology”(ibid.). In the 80s, he admitted that he had been blind to the potential dangers of LSD because in the course of his experiments there was not one enduring “bad trip” or “scandalous freak out.” In his flamboyant style Leary warned people that

“ACID IS NOT FOR EVERYBODY [...] ONLY THE HEALTHY, HAPPY, WHOLESOME, HANDSOME, HOPEFUL, HUMOROUS [...] SHOULD SEEK THESE EXPERIENCES. THIS ELITISM IS TOTALLY SELF-DETERMINED. UNLESS YOU ARE SELF-CONFIDENT, SELF-DIRECTED, SELF-SELECTED, PLEASE ABSTAIN” (Stafford 1992: 28).

Leary never really stopped to encourage people to take psychedelics until the day he died. Although in the 70s his focus shifted from drugs to computers and space migration, he nevertheless continued to give lectures on psychedelic drugs. However, in the 70s, Leary gave up his plan to “turn on the whole world,” but directed his teachings only to those people who were “ready to take the next step in human evolution”(cf. NP 90). Leary realized that LSD was not the magic cure-all (for social, political and neurological problems) he had thought it was. He realized that it was time to change and start looking for new methods to help us escape the narrow reality tunnels imposed on us by authorities. It was time to start looking for new methods that could help us to produce the ecstatic experience, that is, the experience of attaining freedom from all limitations.

As a final comment on this chapter I want to mention that now, in the 90s, LSD is making a comeback and young people, especially people form the “techno-rave” scene, are re-discovering Leary’s “psychedelic guide books” from the 60s. The shelves in alternative bookstores in San Francisco and London, for example, are packed with new editions of Leary’s books from the 60s.

3. Exo-Psychology (the 70s)

Technology governs change in human affairs while culture guards continuity. Hence technology is always disruptive and creates a crisis for culture. (Daniel Bell)[34]

The Exo-Psychology phase is a transitional stage between Leary’s LSD-phase (the 60s) in which Leary focuses on “inner space,” and his computer-phase (the 80s and 90s) in which he focuses on cyberspace. The prefix “exo” in Exo-Psychology indicates that this “new branch of science” created by Leary has to do with things that are outside of ourselves: outer space. Exo-Psychology, which is also the title of one of Leary’s books, is concerned with space migration. It is the “psychology of post-terrestrial existence”(Info 1). In the 70s, Leary was convinced that there was a trend in biological evolution on this planet from water, to shoreline, to land, to atmospheric flight. In his Exo-Psychology phase, Leary takes one step away from Eastern Philosophy and a step towards technology (especially computer technology, genetics, and biochemistry).

Leary describes his Exo-Psychology theory as “Science-Fiction, Philosophy of Science, PSY PHY.” In order to understand what Leary means with this description let us look how he defines the term science fiction. In the introduction to Neurologic (Leary 1996, first published in 1973), Leary explains that, on the one hand, his theories are scientific because they are based on empirical data from physics, physiology, pharmacology, genetics, behaviorist psychology, and neurology. On the other hand, they are fictional in a Wittgensteinian sense that all theories and speculations beyond the mathematical propositions of natural science are subjective (cf. Leary 1996: 7). Leary points out that his Exo-Psychology theory does not give “final answers” but it can give us a lot of pleasure and make us feel free (cf. ibid.).

In the 70s, Leary had to spent a lot of time in prison. This period of time — when Leary was cut off from society and unable to change the system that kept him in prison — gave him a different, more pessimistic perspective on life. Life on planet earth did not seem to evolve to higher levels of being like Leary had expected. The 60s revolution was over. Leary realized that it was just not enough to “look within,” “return to nature,” and assume that “all is one”( cf. Info 68f.). In Leary’s opinion the hippies had made an important step in human evolution: They knew how to “accept the rapture of direct sensation” and lead a hedonic life style; they had learned how to control their nervous systems and how to change social imprints and conditioning. But, according to Leary, the ability to change your imprints is useless if you do not know what to re-imprint.

In Exo-Psychology, Leary describes the drug culture of the 60s as “wingless butterflies” who were “spaced out”, “high”, but “with no place to go” (cf. Info 61). What Leary means is that you just cannot go on living in the moment forever. He points out that the hippies had evolved “beyond terrestrial attachments” and “detached themselves from larval symbols” but their problem was that they had no direction in life (cf. Info 67). Where should they go? What should they re-imprint into their nervous systems? In his rather disgruntled state of mind Leary wrote that many of the ex-hippies tried to escape this existential vacuum by “grasping at any transcendental straw – magic, occultism, chanting, witchcraft, telepathy, guru-ism, mystical Christianity [...] the endless variety of oriental charlatanism”(Info 68), but it was all in vain because “inner space is a dead end”(cf. ibid.). According to Leary, the hippies’ tragic flaw was that they rejected science and technology. Leary argues that things like psychedelic drugs, the DNA structure, and also new types of technology for space-travel were not discovered by sheer chance. They would show us the way to the next phase in human evolution bringing us one step closer to our final destination, that is, the final destination of life.[35]

In his Exo-Psychology works, Leary suggests that the course of evolution of life on this planet is predetermined and that practically all scientific discoveries would indicate that the next step in human evolution is space migration. In The Intelligence Agents (1979, 1996), Leary writes that in the course of history the “genetic frontier” (the best developed culture in terms of technology and intelligence) has moved from the East to the West. East to West means past to future. According to Leary, the East (India, China) was the genetic frontier 3000 years ago. In the sixteenth century, the Enlightenment, Europe was the genetic frontier. In 1976, the West Coast of North America was the genetic frontier (cf. Leary 1996: 177ff.). (Leary calls this area the Sun Belt. The Sun Belt encompasses a crescent of “Migrating Higher Intelligence that stretches from Mountain View, California at the Northwest; through Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico; to Cape Canaveral, Florida at the Southwest.”) The West Coast of America would be the last terrestrial frontier; from there we would move to outer space (cf. ibid.). To put it in a nutshell: For Leary, technological innovation means intelligence and independence. West means evolution and change. The “genetic runway” along which gene-pools “accelerate to Escape Velocity” runs from East to West.

Now how is the next phase of human evolution going to look like? What is the aim of life? What is our final destination? How do we get there? In his Exo-Psychology theory, Leary gives answers to these questions. He offers us a model of the evolution of humanity and life in general which is supposed show us the way to a better future and (of course) higher levels of consciousness.

3.1. S.M.I.²L.E. to fuse with the Higher Intelligence

According to Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, we have come to a point in human evolution where all the “terrestrial goals” — the most important of which are bio-survival, territorial expansion, national security, technological efficiency, and “consumer-cultural television homogeneity” — have more or less been achieved (cf. NP 142). At the same time, centralized civilization has produced various technologies which seem to “point us upwards away from the heavy pull of gravity.” Leary suggests that new developments for space-flight as well as the discovery of psychedelic drugs (which would enable us to experience a world where gravity does not exist, thus preparing us for life in outer space) are an indication that there is a trend in biological evolution on this planet from water, to shoreline, to land, to atmospheric flight (outer space, the “new frontier”). In Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, political and cultural phenomena like war, enslavement, or centralization are seen as “necessary preludes” to the next phase in human evolution which is space migration.

According to Leary, the nature of human evolution is paradoxical. For example, there is the Centralization Paradox. Although centralization limits our freedom, it would be necessary to link up in centralized collectives if we want to attain “the ultimate freedom of space existence” and “the velocity to escape the planet.” Without centralized governments and a “diligent, competent, mechanically efficient middle-class” we would not be able to mobilize the technologies we need for space migration. The same paradox could be found if we look at the phenomenon of war. Leary explains that wars – especially the two World Wars and the Cold War – seem absurd “until we understand that the genetic purpose of the conflict[s] was to stimulate the development of radar, rocketry, synthetic chemistry, atomic fission, [..] and, most important, computers[...]” (NP 141). Leary argues that centralization, wars, and the consumer-cultural TV homogeneity of our post-industrial society are all dead ends. However, they are inevitable steps to get to the next phase in human evolution which is space migration.

Anyway, why should we migrate to space at all? According to Leary, the main reason for space migration is not overpopulation, or a shortage of energy. In his Exo-Psychology theory, Leary suggests that somewhere in outer space there is a “Higher Intelligence” which, a long time ago, sent a message to our planet in form of the DNA, the genetic code. He writes, “[L]ife was seeded on this womb-planet in form of amino-acid templates designed to be activated by solar radiation and to unfold in a series of genetic molts and metamorphoses”(Info 16). Now what does that mean? It means that actually all life forms on our planet are “alien immigrants from outer space” and that evolution of the various species unfolds according to the same pre-determined plan. According to Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, life is designed to migrate from the “womb-planet” (Leary speculates that there might be other unknown womb-planets with life on it), seek this Higher Intelligence, and try to fuse with “Hir”[36] again. The tactics in order to achieve this final goal would be S.M.I.²L.E., which means “space migration” (=S.M.), “intelligence increase” (=I.²), and “life extension” (=L.E.) (cf. NP 143–45). (This acronym can be found printed several times on every page of every single book that Leary wrote in the 70s to remind the reader of the purpose of life.) Intelligence increase would be a necessary prerequisite for space migration and life extension. Psychedelic drugs would help us to enhance our intelligence, and it would not take long until scientists are able to decipher the genetic (DNA) code and extend our life spans.

In “H.O.M.E.S. A Real Estate Proposal,” an essay co-written with cyberneticist George A. Koopman (NP 157–70), Leary suggests the construction of “space H.O.M.E.s” (High Orbital Mini Earths) as “a practical step to explore and activate new resources – internal and external to the nervous system” (NP 159). These space H.O.M.E.s would “open up unexploited territories, new energy sources, and new stimulation for the brain” (ibid.). As far as the “unexploited” territories are concerned, Leary explains that

We must not cringe from the word “exploitation.” At every stage of information/energy the laws of nature seem to require new and more complex engagements of elements to accelerate the evolutionary process. We must exploit every new level of energy in order to build the structures to reach the next cycle. The embryo ruthlessly exploits the supplies of the maternal body. The derogatory flavor of the word “exploit” has been added by reactionary political groups who wish to slow down the expansion of energy. Rhetoric aside, there has never been an example of a surviving-evolving species which did not use all energies available to it. Nothing can stop the surge towards Space Migration (NP 159).

It should be mentioned here that Leary’s idea of the construction of a space colony that opens up unexploited territories was inspired by Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill’s book The High Frontier and the L-5 Society (cf. NP 157). In The High Frontier, O’Neill calls for the establishment of an orbital colony equidistant between the earth and the moon at a gravitationally stable point known as Larange Point 5. In response to O’Neill’s call the L-5 Society was founded (cf. Dery 1996: 36). The members of this society believed that the L-5 colony would help humanity to escape from ecological pollution, resource depletion, poverty, and collectivism (cf. ibid.). The difference between the vision of the L-5 Society and Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory is that the L-5 Society was interested only in the social, ecological, and material implications of space migration, whereas Leary saw space migration as a necessary step towards self-realization, enlightenment, immortality, and “fusion with the Higher Intelligence.”

In Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, the evolution of life and humanity (past, as well as future) is described in terms of the evolution of the nervous system. Now, how did the human nervous system evolve and how is it structured? Leary assumes that our nervous systems consist of eight “potential circuits”, or “gears”, or “mini-brains” which have evolved in the course of evolution. Leary describes the evolution of the nervous system in his model of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness. Before an outline of Leary’s model of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness is given, it is necessary to make a short excursion into the field of conditioning psychology. Leary says that if we want to understand his Exo-psychology theory and the model of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness we first have to understand the concept of imprinting and that there is a crucial difference between the phenomenon of imprinting and other forms of learning, especially conditioning. (The reader already knows that Leary is interested in the biological phenomenon of “neural imprinting” very much, and that he thinks that imprints can be suspended and changed by using certain psychoactive chemicals.)

3.2. Imprinting and conditioning

The understanding of the concepts of “imprinting” and “conditioning” and the difference between these two phenomena is the crucial point in Leary’s Exo-psychology theory. Leary uses these concepts to explain the miserable socio-political situation on our planet, and to back his hypothesis that the only way for a “domesticated middle-class person” to arbitrarily change his or her “reality” is to apply psychedelic drugs.

In Exo-Psychology, Leary explains that it is a well known fact in psychology and ethology (the comparative study of animal behavior) that there are certain brief “critical periods” in a human being’s life during which imprints are made. One of these critical periods is the time soon after a baby or animal is born. If the baby does not develop a basic feeling of trust towards his or her mother during this short “critical period” — which in Leary’s jargon means that the infant’s first circuit is negatively imprinted to his/her mother — he/she will never be able to develop this basic feeling of trust (see Bio-survival circuit). The same applies to animals. If birds are handled by an experimenter during their first few hours of life, they thereafter react to him/her and to other human beings as they normally would to their parents, and they refect their real parents. During this critical period, which is the first of several critical periods in a person’s life, a basic attitude of trust or distrust is set up which will ever after trigger approach or avoidance (cf. Info 40).

What is the difference between imprinting and conditioning? The three major forms of conditioning are: Classical conditioning (main exponent: Ivan Pavlov), Instrumental conditioning, and Operant conditioning (main exponent: B. F. Skinner). Leary explains that they are forms of learning which are based on repeated reward and punishment. Imprinting, however, is a form of learning which does not require repetition. “The most fascinating aspect of imprinting is this; the original selection of the external stimulus [e.g. mother] which triggers off the pre-designed response [e.g. trust] does not derive from a normal learning process but a short exposure during a brief, specific ‘critical period’[...]”(Info 40). In contrast to all other learning processes, imprinting is immediate and — which is even more important — irreversible. As Leary put it: “The imprint requires no repeated reward or punishment. The neural fix is permanent. Only bio-chemical shock [drugs or trauma] can loosen the neuro-umbilical lines. The conditioned association, on the contrary, wanes and disappears with lack of repetition [my italics]” (Info 51). To help his readers to get a better understanding of the primary role of the imprint and the secondary role of the conditioned association Leary mentions Ivan Pavlov’s classic study with a dog as an example (everybody knows this experiment): In Pavlov’s study the flow of saliva in the dog’s mouth is an unconditioned, unlearned response. The imprint hooks an unconditioned response (flow of saliva) to an external stimulus, or releaser mechanism (food placed in the dog’s mouth), so that the dog always automatically produces saliva when food is in his mouth. However, the association between the sight of food and the food in the mouth, or between a ringing bell and food, has to be learned by the dog. This is where conditioning comes in. Conditioned stimuli like the ringing bell are associated with the imprinted stimulus which is the food in the dog’s mouth.

It is important to mention that, according to Leary, conditioning cannot change an imprint. “Trying to recondition an imprint with reward-punishment is like dropping a single grain of sand on a forged steel pattern,” as Leary expresses it. By applying psychological conditioning techniques we would be able to temporarily change a person’s behavior. However, as soon as the conditioned person is left to his/her own devices he/she would drift back to the “magnetism of the imprint” and to his/her “genetic-robot style” which is determined by the DNA (cf. Info 54). Leary argues that psychedelics can help us to “recast” the different circuits. With psychedelics we can re-imprint new realities and activate new, higher circuits of consciousness. How exactly do the these higher circuits Leary talks about look like?[37]

3.3. The Eight Circuits of Consciousness

I have already mentioned that Leary assumes that our nervous systems consist of eight “potential circuits”, or “gears”, or “mini-brains.” Where are these “mini-brains” located and what is their function? According to Leary, four of these “brains” are in the left lobe, which is usually active, and are concerned with our terrestrial survival; four are “extraterrestrial,” reside in the ‘silent’ or inactive right lobe, and are for use in our future evolution (cf. Leary 1988: 88). In his model of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness, which is described in his books Neuropolitics (1977a) and Exo-Psychology (1977b), Leary explains how these circuits, or mini-brains, evolved in the course of evolution. Each of these eight circuits corresponds to one of the eight neurological phases in evolution. In Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory the definition of consciousness is the same as in the theory of the Seven Levels of consciousness. Consciousness is defined as “energy received by structure” (in the human being the structures are the neural circuits and their anatomical connections).

(The reader will notice that this model of The Eight Circuits of Consciousness is an elaboration of the model of the Seven Levels of Consciousness.[38] Leary reversed the numerical order of the different levels and split up the Mental-social-symbolic Level.)

1. The Bio-Survival Circuit (trust/distrust):

In the essay “From Outer World to Inner World to Inner Space to Outer Space” (NP 87–99), written together with philosopher and science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, Leary explains this circuit, or brain, which can be found in the most primitive life forms and is the first circuit activated in the newborn baby as follows:

This marine or vegetative brain was the first to evolve (billion years ago) and is the first activated at birth. It programs perception onto an either-or grid divided into nurturing-helpful Things (which it approaches) and noxious-dangerous Things (which it flees, or attacks). The imprinting of this circuit sets up the basic attitude of trust or suspicion which will last for life (NP 88).

When Leary talks about the new born child, in which the first brain is activated, he puts very much emphasis on the process of imprinting (that is why I have explained this process in a rather detailed way). He points out that the first imprinting process, during which a basic attitude of trust or distrust is set up, will ever after trigger approach or avoidance. If the baby does not develop a basic feeling of trust towards his/her mother during the short critical period during which the first imprint is made, he/she will never be able to develop this basic feeling of trust towards her mother and he/she will never be able to fully trust his/her partner(s) and friends in life either.

2. The Emotional-Territorial Circuit (assertiveness/submissiveness):

According to Leary, this second, more advanced “bio-computer” formed when vertebrates appeared and began to compete for territory (perhaps 500,000,000 B.C.). In the individual, this circuit, which corresponds to a bigger “tunnel reality” than the reality of Circuit One, is activated when “the DNA master-tape triggers the metamorphosis from crawling to walking” (cf. NP 88). Leary explains:

As every parent knows, the toddler is no longer a passive (bio-vegetative) infant but a mammalian politician, full of physical (and emotional) territorial demands, quick to meddle in family business and decision-making. Again the first imprint on this circuit remains constant for life (unless brainwashed) and identifies the stimuli which automatically trigger dominant, aggressive behavior or submissive, cooperative behavior. When we say a person is behaving emotionally, egoistically or ‘like a two-year-old’, we mean that SHe [sic] is blindly following one of the robot imprints on this circuit (NP 88f.).

In popular speech the second circuit is called “ego.” The “ego” is “the second circuit mammalian sense of status (importance-unimportance) in the pack or tribe” (NP 89). Leary points out that politicians live in a second circuit “reality tunnel” because their only goals are territorial expansion and control over others.

3. The Dexterity-Symbolism Circuit (cleverness/clumsiness):

Leary writes that this brain was formed when “hominoid types began to differentiate from other primate stock” (circa 4–5 million years ago). It is activated in the individual when the older child begins “handling artifacts and sending/receiving laryngeal signals (human speech units)”(NP 89). This circuit discloses the symbolic, conceptual and linguistic world. Leary writes, “If the environment is stimulating to the third circuit, the child takes a ‘bright’ imprint and becomes dextrous and articulate; if the environment is made of deliberately stupid people, the child takes a ‘dump’ imprint, i.e. remains more or less at a stage of symbol-blindness”(ibid.). This circuit determines our “normal modes of artifact-manufacture” and conceptual thought. It is made for understanding and using language and thinking logically-scientifically. As Leary puts it, “The third brain or ‘mind’ is hooked into human culture and deals with life through a matrix of human made gadgets and human-created symbolism”(ibid.).

According to Leary, it is the Third Brain that created the mechanical civilization which began in the Neolithic and climaxed in Henry Ford’s assembly line. The Third Brain also produced Behaviorist psychology (not Humanistic psychology!), and Newtonian mechanistic ‘visible’ physics (not Einsteinian concepts!). By pointing out the limitations of the Third Brain’s mechanistic-Behavioristic way of thinking, Leary wants to show that a person who lives in a Third Circuit “tunnel reality” will never be able to understand how to change basic imprints, that is, to change a his/her “reality.”

According to Leary, the “crowning philosophy of the Third Circuit society” is Operant conditioning, or “Skinnerism,” as Leary calls it (B. F. Skinner is the founder of the school of Operant conditioning)[39]. Leary defines Operant conditioning as “the final philosophic statement of the puritanical protestant-ethic manipulators who dominated the world for 400 years up to Hiroshima”(Info 49).

Leary defines two main groups of technocrats who are trying to use “Third Circuit conditioning techniques” to change the behavior of their fellow citizens: “Right-wing punitive coercers” and “liberal rewarders”. According to Leary, the attempts of both of these groups of bureaucrats are futile because they attempt to re-condition rather than re-imprint:

Punitive coercion [the method applied by right-wing punitive coercers] works only as long as the threat remains and thus requires a police state.
The liberal social psychologists [liberal rewarders] believe that they can change behavior by democratic, supportive, egalitarian education methods. Head-start programs. Peace Corps. [...] Tutoring. Scholarship payments. Insight therapies. Mental health methods.
These liberal approaches fail to effect change and serve only to support the “humanist” welfare bureaucracy (Info 51f.).

Leary argues that a regime based on social conditioning can only work if the government psychologists have total control over the citizenry and if the method of conditioning is a government secret. Such a “social conditioning regime” would not be possible in a democracy where minority groups can campaign against and publicly discuss the techniques being used (cf. Info 53f.).

4. The Socio-Sexual Circuit:

This circuit determines what in a specific culture is considered to be sexually normal and morally right. Leary describes how it evolved:

The fourth brain was formed when hominid packs evolved into societies and programmed specific sex-roles for their members (circa 30,000 B. C.). In the individual it is activated at puberty when the DNA signals trigger the glandular release of sexual neurochemicals and the metamorphosis to adulthood begins.[...] The fourth brain, dealing with the transmission of tribal or ethnic culture across generations, introduces the fourth dimension, time – binding cultures (NP 89–91).

As far as sex-roles are concerned, Leary holds that our first sexual experiences imprint a characteristic sex-role which, again, is bio-chemically bonded and remains constant for life (unless brain-washing or chemical re-imprinting is accomplished). The sex role imprinted in a person’s brain does not always coincide with that which is accepted by society. Leary points out that perversions, fetishes, and other eccentric sexual imprints are usually defined as “sinful” by the local tribe (cf. NP 90).

In most people these four circuits are the only networks of the brain that are activated. Leary notes that this is the reason why their way of thinking is rather inflexible. Their logic follows the primitive either/or binary structures of the four circuits: forward/backward = trust/distrust, up/down = assertiveness/submissiveness, clever/clumsy, good/evil. Leary calls these circuits “terrestrial” because “they have evolved on, and have been shaped by, the gravitational, climatic and energy conditions determining survival and reproduction of gene-pools on a planet like ours.” (Leary hypothesizes that there might be more intelligent individuals evolving in space who would definitely develop circuits different from our “inflexibly Euclidean” ones.)

According to Leary, each of the first four circuits can be arbitrarily activated by a certain type of drug (first circuit drug: opiates; second circuit drug: alcohol; third circuit drug: coffee, fourth circuit drug: sexual hormones produdced by adolescents in puberty). Leary calls these drugs “terrestrial drugs.” Leary explains that none of these “terrestrial drugs” can change basic biochemical imprints. They can only trigger behavioral patterns and thought patterns that were wired into the nervous system during the first stages of imprint vulnerability.

Let us now look at the four “extraterrestrial circuits” and the “extraterrestrial drugs” that can activate them. The extraterrestrial circuits are levels of reality beyond the socially conditioned. Leary notes that the experience of these extraterrestrial circuits/realities normally causes confusion and fear among people who have never before transcended the four basic larval reality-tunnels, because they are not designed to be understood by “larval psychology” (cf. Info 60).

What are the four extraterrestrial circuits?

5. The Neurosomatic Circuit:

Leary explains this circuit as follows:

When this fifth “body-brain” is activated, flat Euclidiean figure-ground configurations explode multi-dimensionally. Gestalt shift, in McLuhan’s terms, from linear visual space to all-encompassing sensory space. A hedonic turn-on occurs. [...]
This fifth brain began to appear about 4,000 years ago in the first leisure-class civilization and has been increasing statistically in recent centuries (even before the Drug Revolution), a fact demonstrated by the hedonic art of India, China, Rome and other affluent societies. [...]
The opening and imprinting of this circuit has been the preoccupation of “technicians of the occult” – Tantric shamans and hatha yogis. While the fifth tunnel-reality can be achieved by sensory deprivation, social isolation, physiological stress or severe shock (ceremonial terror tactics, as practiced by such rascal-gurus as Don Juan Matus [described in Carlos Castaneda’s books] or Aleister Crowley), it has traditionally been reserved to the educated aristocracy of leisure societies who have solved the four terrestrial survival problems.
About 20,000 years ago, the specific fifth brain neurotransmitter was discovered by shamans [...]. It is, of course, cannabis (NP 90).

As far as the evolutionary aspect of this circuit is concerned, Leary points out that it is no accident that people who use cannabis (the drug that opens up the Fifth Circuit) refer to their neural states as “high” or “spaced out.” For Leary, the transcendence of gravitational, linear, either-or, Euclidean, planetary orientations (circuits 1–4), experienced with the help of cannabis, is part of our neurological preparation for the inevitable migration off our home planet. According to Leary, the West Coast of the US (California, the last terrestrial frontier) is the area with the highest percentage of people living in a Fifth Circuit post-political, hedonistic reality (cf. Leary 1996: 176–79).

However, this hedonistic level of consciousness is just a transitional stage which prepares us for the next circuit which is exclusively designed for post terrestrial existence.

6. The Neuroelectric-Metaprogramming Circuit:

This is the level of consciousness on which the nervous system becomes aware of itself, apart from the “gravitational reality-maps” (circuits 1–4) and from circuit-five-body-rapture. Leary calls this state of consciousness “consciousness of abstracting” (a term borrowed from the semanticist Alfred Korzybski), or “meta-programming,” that is, awareness of programming one’s programming (this term was coined by John Lilly in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Bio-Computer). When we activate this circuit we become aware that what we accepted as reality is actually just a program ‘fed’ into our bio-computers (brains). The person who activates this “Einsteinian, relativistic” circuit realizes that the Euclidian, Newtonian, Aristotelian reality-maps are just three among billions of possible programs or models of experience (cf. NP 93). On this level of consciousness “mammalian politics”, which have to do power struggles among “terrestrial humanity” are seen as static and artificial.

Leary explains that the nervous system is constructed in a way that it is capable of self-reflection. That is why it is capable of understanding and controlling its own functioning. What this means is that everybody can create his/her own realities if he/she knows how the nervous system works. As far as Leary is concerned, it is no longer necessary to describe the opening of this circuit with the paradoxical terms used in Eastern philosophy — “Non-Self,” “No-Mind,” or “White Light of the Void.” The Einstein revolution in physics, discoveries in neurology and pharmacology, and computer linguistics would allow us to describe the Sixth Circuit functioning in operational and functional terms as the nervous system metaprogramming the nervous system or serially re-imprinting itself (cf. NP 94).

What exactly happens when we access the Neuroelectric Circuit? When the Sixth Circuit is activated, the nervous system “real-izes” that it is a “transceiver” (transmitter and receiver) for bio-electric frequencies (electromagnetic signals). Leary says that the use of the Neuroelectric Circuit had to await the development of electronic and atomic technology to provide the language and models that allow us to understand and activate it (cf. Info 112). Only now that we begin to understand and use invisible electromagnetic processes could we learn how to operate our own circuitry.

The evolutionary function of the Sixth Circuit would be communication – not normal (Third Circuit) speech or symbols on paper, but communication on the electromagnetic level, at the speed of light, between two or more “contelligences” operating at the Sixth Circuit. (Leary uses the term “contelligence,” a combination of consciousness-intelligence, to describe people who are on a higher level of consciousness.) Since Circuit-Six-communication is electronic, it demands that we are able to use computers. Leary explains that this mode of communication, which will enable us to connect our nervous systems with computers, will be necessary for our interstellar existence: “Electro-magnetic-gravitational processes are the meat and potatoes of galactic life. The vibratory-transceiver nature of the brain, useless to the larval [a person who uses only circuits 1–4], is very necessary in space. Telepathy, Brain-computer links. Brain-radio connections” (Info 113).

Leary points out that one of the most important characteristics of Circuit-Six-communication is that it (necessarily) is erotic. Leary explains: “[Six-Circuit-communication] is Brain-Intercourse. Electronic sexuality. Reception and transmission of thought waves. The erotics of resonance. The entire universe is gently, rhythmically, joyously vibrating. Cosmic intercourse”(NP 121). Only if we take the crucial step from “larval earth-life” to the next stage (Circuit Six) would we be able to experience what “Higher Love” means, namely the “electronic connection of nervous systems, making love to each other over galactic distances of neurological time [sich einander liebend über galaktische Distanzen neurologischer Zeit]”(translated back into English from the German version of Leary’s Neurologic, which was first published in 1973; Leary 1996: 42).

Is there a specific drug that can open the Neuroelectric Circuit? Yes, the drug that makes us aware that the things that normally seem to be solid are actually electromagnetic vibrations is LSD. However, Leary warns us that

Neuro-electric drugs like LSD are not designed for terrestrial life and are rightly considered dangerous by larval moralists. The Sixth Circuit is designed for extra-terrestrial life – and its activation by drugs at the present time is in preparation for migration. Neurophysical drugs can be used by neurologicians to “cure” ineffective childhood imprints. LSD-type drugs used for treatment or for pre-flight training should be administered by knowledgeable experts who understand the principles of re-imprinting and who have experiential control of their own nervous system. The hedonic “party” use of LSD is a risky business [my italics]”(Info 114).

(This quotation shows that in the 70s Leary apparently realized that LSD is a dangerous drug.)

7. The Neurogenetic Circuit:

By activating the sixth circuit we escape the narrow reality-tunnels of the four terrestrial circuits. However, the sixth circuit does not enable us to receive signals from within the individual neuron where the DNA is located. In order to be able to read the DNA code we would have to activate the Neurogenetic Circuit. Leary believes that the first people who were able to receive signals from the DNA were yogis (Hindus, Sufis, etc) who spoke of re-experiencing past lives, reincarnation, and immortality. According to Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, the DNA memory contains information about the whole evolution (our past lives as well as the future of evolution).

What is the function of the DNA? According to Leary, the growth and function of the nervous system as well as the rest of the body is predetermined by the DNA code: “DNA designs and constructs the nervous system and maintains supervisory and re-constructive communication with somatic cells and neurons mediated by RNA”(Info 120). Leary considers the DNA code to be something which is immortal because it is the only thing that has survived in the long chain of evolution. The goal of life, in Leary’s Exo-psychology theory, is immortality or fusion with the Higher Intelligence. Leary argues that immortality is attained through control of the DNA. Psychedelic drugs like LSD would enable the nervous system to decipher the genetic code. By identifying with this “genetic intelligence”, which means that we imprint the DNA reality in our nervous system, we would be able to become immortal (cf. Info 122).

8. The Neuroatomic Circuit:

The “genetic intelligence”(seventh circuit) is “the immortal, invisible soul that outlives the body,” writes Leary. But where does the DNA come from? Who created the DNA? Leary admits that he does not have a final answer to this question. He speculates that the answer to this question could be found if we go further on into the microscopic physical world. In Exo-Psycholgy, he suggests that sub-nuclear events inside each atom determine the elemental processes of life:

On the basis of the scientific evidence now at hand, the best answer to the Higher Intelligence Creator question comes from the frontiers of nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. The basic energies, the meta-physiological contelligence is probably located within the nucleus of the atom. [...] Physicists are currently studying the sub-nuclear realm to identify the high-velocity particles which make up the language of energy. [...] Exo-psychology seeks to provide the concepts which allow nuclear physicists to personalize sub-nuclear events [by activating the Eighth Circuit] so that they can be experienced” (Info 126).

In order to back his speculations Leary quotes physicist and philosopher Nick Herbert who argues that the sub-atomic world must be “non-local”, which means that it does not obey the laws of space and time and that in this world the speed of light barrier is transcended (cf. Info 130f.). (The interested reader is referred to “Bell’s theorem,” a principle of quantum physics, which is used by to back the idea of “non-locality”(see Capra 1982)).

In Exo-Psychology, Leary explains that at the Neuroatomic level the basic energies which comprise all structure in the universe are available for management: “The metaphysiological contelligence constructs atoms, DNA chains, molecules, neurons; sculpts, designs, architects all forms of matter by manipulating nuclear particles and gravitational force fields”(Info 129). The “Neuroatomic Contelligence” no longer needs bodies, neurons, and DNA designs. It is a “metaphysiological brain.” According to Leary, this metaphysiological contelligence is the Higher Intelligence (God?) which created life and the DNA. It is the entire “cosmic brain” (just as the DNA helix is the local brain guiding planetary evolution). It is “ourselves-in-the-future” (cf. NP 98).

According to Leary, science (nuclear physics, genetics) and technology (computers, psychedelics, thechnology for space travel) will help us to reach this final stage of evolution, but we have still a long way to go.

3.4. Neuropolitics: Representative government replaced by an “electronic nervous system”

In Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, in which the evolution of the nervous system from its terrestrial-mechanical stages to its post-terrestrial-individualistic stages is described, technology plays an important role. The function of technology is that it aids our evolution. It helps us to activate the higher circuits of the nervous system. Leary puts much emphasis on the sixth stage of evolution, in which the Neuroelectric Circuit is activated.

I have already mentioned that the function of the sixth circuit is communication – not normal speech or symbols on paper, but communication on the electromagnetic level between two or more people operating at the sixth circuit. According to Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, electronic-communication technology (telephone, TV, computer networks, etc) can help us to activate the Neuroelectric Circuit.

In Neuropolitics, we find to interesting essays which deal with the political implications of electronic-communication-techology. The essays are titled “The Fall of Representative Government”(NP 45f.) and “The Return of Individual Sovereignty”(NP 47–49) (both written in 1973 when Leary was in prison). In “The Fall of Representative Government,” Leary, who has always been against governments, argues that with the emergence of electronic-communication-technology any form of representative government (one person is selected to represent others) becomes outmoded. As Leary put it: “Representative government as practiced today is a brief and now outmoded historical phase designed to bridge the period between the rise of industrial states and the emergence of globe-linking electrical-electronic communication”(NP 45). According to Leary, the process of selecting representatives to govern is a relic of the horse-drawn slave-holding culture which produced the American Constitution. Leary argues that the articles in the American Constitution which set up the mechanics of government are dangerously archaic:

Senators elected every six years to represent two million people? A president elected every four years to represent 140 million people? This slow, cumbersome system was necessary when it took two weeks for the news to travel from New Orleans to Boston. Representative government by strangers and political party partisanship is outdated. Most Americans have never met their representative – indeed do not know his name. Government by law is an unworkable bureaucratic cliche(NP 46).

Leary tries to make us aware that we have all been “robot-trained” – with the help of history books which are self-serving and the print media which are used by political leaders to manipulate us – to believe that elective democracy is something sacred. He wants us to realize that the times of centralized governments, when politicians were able to control people with the help of technology, are over. Politicians are no longer be able to keep the methods they apply secret from the people. Technology can be used to reduce individual freedom and to enhance the power of politicians controlling centralized governments, but only if the people do not know the methods applied by authoritarian technocrats. One dissident electronic-media expert, however, would be able to “jam the system”(cf. NP 47). Leary argues that more and more people are learning to use the electronic media for their personal empowerment. As more and more people are learning to use electronic technology to govern themselves according to the laws of information, competitive politics are dying (cf. NP 49).

Instead of the “outdated and cumbersome” American political system in which one president elected every four years represented 140 million people, Leary suggests a new political model:

The political model should be based on the nervous system: 140 billion neurons each hooked to an electric network. Electronic communication makes possible direct participatory democracy. Every citizen has a voting card which he or she inserts in voting machine and central computer registers and harmonize the messages from every component part. Neurological politics eliminates parties, politicians, campaigns, campaign expenditures. The citizen votes like a neuron fires when it has a signal to communicate. The voices of the citizenry continually inform civil service technicians who carry out the will, not of the majority (a vicious and suicidal elevation of the mediocrity) but of each citizen (NP 46).

Leary’s model of an “electronic nervous system” is based on the assumption that every citizen has a personal computer which is connected to a worldwide electronic network (cf. ibid.). This worldwide electronic network in which every individual can express his or her opinion would help us to create a new governmental structure which “gets the country alive and laughing again”(cf. NP 49). However, Leary does not explain in detail how this governmental system without parties and politicians is supposed to function.

As far as the idea of a global “electronic nervous system” is concerned, it has to mentioned that Leary seems to have been influenced by Global Village prophet Marshall McLuhan very much. It was already in the early 60s when McLuhan came up with the idea that electric circuitry is an extension of the human nervous system (McLuhan 1964: 1). This idea is based on the concept that “all media [i.e. technologies] are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical”(McLuhan 1967)[40]. For example, the photo is an extension of the eye, the wheel an extension of the foot, etc. “With electricity [radio, television, computers, etc] we extend our nervous systems globally, instantly interrelating every human experience”(ibid.). McLuhan predicted that electronic technology would reshape and restructure patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal lives. By involving us in other people’s actions and thoughts, electronic technology would end psychic, social, economic, and political self-centeredness (cf. ibid.). A new form of “politics” would be emerging because “the living room has become a voting booth”(ibid.) “In the electric age, when our nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action,” writes McLuhan in Understanding Media(McLuhan 1964: 4). According to McLuhan, every new medium introduces a change of human perception (focus-shift from one sense to other), association and action. This means that our ways of thinking and perceiving the world are always determined by the medium we use. McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” which expresses his idea that it is the medium, not the content, that changes people’s world views.

Leary does not mention McLuhan in his two essays that deal with the effects that electronic technology has on society and the individual. However, he uses McLuhan’s famous phrase in a slightly different form: “The medium is the evolutionary message”(NP 49).

How did people in the 1970s react to Leary’s early projections about computers and networking? His ideas about a global electronic network that connects people throughout the world elicited only ridicule. “He was literally laughed off the sets of TV news shows in the 1970s for predicting that most human beings would some day be sending one another ‘messages through their word processors’ and that the world would be linked together through a new ‘electronic nervous system’,” writes Douglas Rushkoff, writer and friend of Leary’s (Rushkoff, Douglas. E-mail to the author. 11 Sep 1997)[41]. As far as Leary’s advocacy for personal computers and the Internet in the 80s and 90s is concerned, many people in the cyber-movement (discussed in the next main chapter) and kids at rave-parties (Leary gave lectures on rave-parties) considered Leary to be only “jumping on their bandwagon” even though he was one of the first advocates of computers (cf. Rushkoff “Loved by Leary.” Psychedelic Island Views. Vol. 2, Issue 2, (1996) p. 47.). They did not know that Leary began talking about computers as a means of culture-crossing communication already in the early 70s. (I want to make the reader aware that this was even before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak marketed the first personal computer in 1976.)

3.5. Better living through technology/The impact of Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory

In the late 70s and early 80s, Leary’s model of the Eight Levels of Consciousness and his vision of a post-terrestrial existence free from all limits (free from social and political limitations, as well as the limits of space, time, and the body) influenced quite a few “psychedelic philosophers”(discussed below) and a considerable number of young people interested in altered states of consciousness. Many young people in the early 80s, however, were not only interested in the drug-aspect of Leary’s theory. They felt that Leary, by including technology into his vision of the future, helped them to define the new generation they were part of. Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory offered these people who had decided to “leave the flower-power 60s behind” a new way to live with technology, to make it theirs. In the eyes of these people, Leary resolved the dichotomy between spirituality (the “inner quest”) and science/technology (the “outer quest”). In Exo-Psychology and Neuropolitics, he shows that technology is not intrinsically evil; it can have a liberating effect as well. In The Intelligence Agents, Leary suggests that we should look westward for change because the East is stagnating. Leary was the one who made young psychedelic trippers and anti-technology-oriented (ex-) hippies aware of the fact that drugs were only a part of the continuing evolution of the human species towards enlightenment, and that the evolutionary purpose of technology was to help us on our “spiritual path” towards freedom, enlightenment, and immortality.

As far as psychedelic philosophers who were inspired by Leary’s Eight Circuit model are concerned, there are at least two writers that have to be mentioned here: Robert Anton Wilson and Antero Alli. Both of these writers are not mainstream writers. Like Leary’s books, their books could be placed somewhere between science fiction, psychology, sociology, philosophy, New Age and “underground.” Robert Anton Wilson – who was a longtime collaborator with Leary and, like Leary, is a spokesman for the psychedelic culture — talks about Leary’s model of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness in several of his books, for example in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (Wilson 1997, first published in 1977) and Quantum Psychology (Wilson 1996). He even wrote one book, Prometheus Rising (Wilson 1983), that deals exclusively with Leary’s Eight Circuit model. By relating it to a great number of theories from the fields of psychology, philosophy, and atomic physics and adding new ideas about how to increase one’s intelligence, Wilson develops Leary’s model further. Leary claims that Robert Anton Wilson has interpreted his theories better than anybody else (cf. Stafford 1992: III-30). Wilson was influenced by Leary’s Eight Circuit model very much. Now that Leary is dead Wilson continues to spread Leary’s ideas. At the TRANSCENDANCE-conference in Brithton/England, in 1997, for example, Wilson spent half of his 90-minute talk on explaining Leary’s Eight Circuit model.[42]

Angel Tech – A modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection (Alli 1990), written by Anterro Alli, is also based on Leary’s Eight Circuit model and offers the reader a great variety of ways to expand one’s consciousness (not only the chemical solution that Leary suggests). The aim of the books I have mentioned in the last two paragraphs is basically the same as Leary’s, namely to enable the individual to create his or her own realities.

It is hard to say how many young people were influenced by Leary’s Eight Circuit model in the 1970s. Of course, there were some of the (ex-)hippies who still read Leary’s books from the 60s. However, from the fact that Leary was not released from prison before 1976 and that his Exo-psychology works did not appear before 1977 it could be concluded that not many people knew what Leary was doing in the early 70s at all. Furthermore, the “LSD-boom” was over, so there was no need for an LSD-guru any more. But what about the late 70s when Leary went on lecture tours again? In Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds (Mystic Fire Video 1978), a documentary on the Beat poets, we can see that there was a considerable number of artists, students and people who were in some way associated with the Beat poets, who read Leary’s Exo-Psychology books. After his release from prison Leary spent a lot of time with the Beat poets. Whenever they gave seminars, the “Evolutionary Agent” Leary was also there lecturing on space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension. Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds (Mystic Fire Video 1978) shows one of these seminars with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, and other Beat poets.

In the 80s and 90s, Leary did not talk about his Exo-Psychology theory much any more[43]. However, in the 80s and 90s many young people became interested in this theory because they felt that Leary, by reconciling spirituality with science and technology, helped them to define the new techno-generation they were part of. In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary calls these people who grew up using computers to communicate and create their own digital realities “cyberpunks,” or the “New Breed.” (I will discuss the general characteristics of this new generation in the last main chapter of this paper.) I now want to talk about two prominent spokespeople of the cyberpunk counterculture who have been influenced by Leary’s Exo-Psychology.

One important spokesman of cyberculture who was inspired by Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory is R. U. Sirius (a.k.a. Ken Gofmann), the cofounder and original editor-in-chief of the first cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000, who has been called “a head on the Mt. Rushmore of cyberculture”(DD 241). (Since R. U. Sirius will also play an important role in the last main chapter of my paper I want to talk a little bit about his background here.)

In contrast to most of the people in the psychedelic movement of the 60s and 70s, Sirius has never been a technophobe. According to Sirius, there have always been two strands in the psychedelic counterculture. Sirius explains: “A majority strand of people felt overwhelmed by the ugliness of Western civilization and wanted to get as much distance from it as possible. But about ten percent always consisted of ‘sci-fi’ types. For instance, Digger manifestoes of ’67 and ’68 anticipated ‘machines of loving grace’ that would usher in a post-scarcity culture”(quoted in Stafford 1992: III – 46).[44] In the 70s, Sirius felt that he rather belonged to the sci-fi types than to the technophobes. In a Washington Post interview in 1992, Sirius recalled, “We wanted to believe in this cybernetic vision, that the machines would do it for us. And I maintained that vision, somewhere in the back of my head” (quoted in Dery 1996: 35). In 1980, Sirius had a revealing LSD-experience which assured him that his intuition was right. This experience caused him to change his life. Cultural critic Mark Dery describes Sirius’ “metamorphosis”:

A fateful acid trip in 1980, days after John Lennon’s death, somehow assured him of “the all-rightness of everything” – a revelation that spurred him to leave the sixties behind and catch up with the emerging computer culture around him. Delving into Scientific American, he soon concluded that the Diggers’ anarchist utopia of universal leisure and infinite abundance lay within reach; the revolution, if it happened, would be brought about not by political radicals but by the high-tech breakthroughs of capitalist visionaries. But why settle for a cybernetic Eden when the promise of prosthetic godhood lay somewhere over the rainbow? Inspired by Timothy Leary’s premonitions in the seventies of “space migration” to off-world colonies, Sirius incorporated a high-tech take on the human potential movement into his vision of robotopia [my italics]” (ibid.).

It was Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory that convinced Sirius that technology would not only help us to create a society where work is obsolete and all of us are watched over by “machines of loving grace,” but also enable us to attain enlightenment, to free ourselves from the limits of space, time, and the body.

In 1984, Sirius founded a psychedelic magazine that later became Mondo 2000. Subtitled A Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence and Modern Art, it was called High Frontiers. High Frontiers is a name borrowed from O’Neill’s book The High Frontier, which deals with the construction of a space colony. High Frontiers evolved into Reality Hackers, which evolved into Mondo 2000. In the course of time the magazine became more and more high-tech. The focus of the magazine shifted from the coverage of psychedelics, in High Frontiers, to the coverage of cyberculture, in Mondo 2000. (Leary was one of the contributing editors of this magazine.) In Mondo 2000 we find articles about smart drugs (legal drugs that are supposed to enhance your intelligence), virtual reality, cyberpunk, interactive media, aphrodisiacs, artificial life, nanotechnology[45], brain implants, life extension, etc.

According to Sirius, now, in the 90s, scientists are developing technologies (e.g., nanotechnology) that help us to understand and “real-ize” Leary’s Eight Circuit model. In Design for Dying (Leary’s last book which he wrote together with Sirius), Sirius argues that most of Leary’s predictions in his Eight Circuit model about future scientific/technological and cultural developments have actually become true:

During his later days, he [Leary] didn’t talk about it [the Eight Circuit model] much. I think as he embraced “chaos”, he wanted to distance himself from the tidiness of the model. After all, did any of us live perfect, smooth, Circuit-Six, psychedelic, yogic lives? Or did we not, occasionally, get drunk[...] But when I think about it, I’m impressed, particularly with how the evolution of the technoculture since the 1970s matches his predictions of future evolution.
In a clear gelatin capsule: Circuit Six, the neuroelectric circuit, is already a pop culture phenomenon, otherwise known as cyberculture, wired, the Web, the Net, cyberspace, etc. The notion of living in electricity is with us. More important, it surprised our culture by preceding Circuit Seven, the neurogenetic circuit – biotechnology as a popular phenomenon, which is just slowly coming into its own. When you hear about garage gene hacking, you’ll know we’ve arrived. And who would have guessed that nanotechnology mainman Eric Drexler would come along and begin mapping Circuit Eight, the neuroatomic level, human empowerment on the molecular/atomic level (Leary 1997: 91)?

I think now it becomes clear why in Mondo 2000 Leary (along with Global village prophet McLuhan and science fiction writer William Gibson) is portrayed as one of the most important pioneers of cyberspace (see Mondo 2000, issues 1 and 4). In his Exo-Psychology theory Leary laid the ideological foundation for the cyber-movement of the 80s and 90s.

There is another prominent spokesperson of cyberculture who has been influenced by Leary’s Exo-Psychology. His name is Bruce Eisner. Eisner is the founder of a “psychedelic-cybernetic organization” called Island Foundation and the author of Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. The Island Foundation (see http://www.island.org) is an organization of individuals dedicated to the creation of a psychedelic culture. The group is named after English novelist Aldous Huxley’s last novel, Island, about a utopian island, “an imaginary place that nurtured and supported the psychedelic vision”(ibid.). Island Foundation’s mission is to “foster the creation of a new culture based on the visions and ideals catalyzed by the psychedelic experience”(ibid.). Island Foundation seeks as its members those who have gained a vision of a more sensible and peaceful way of living together through the use of psychedelic and other min-altering substances, as well as other methods of altering consciousness, like computers and the Internet.

It was Leary’s The Intelligence Agents (and Huxley’s novel Island) that inspired Eisner to form the Island Foundation (cf. http://www.island.org/BRUCE/story.html). Leary also made Eisner aware of the promising possibilities of computers and the striking similarity between the psychedelic experience, during which one feels that he/she leaves his/her narrow reality tunnel and enters a multi-choice reality labyrinth, and the hypertext universe of the Internet, which gives one the same feeling (Eisner, Bruce. Psychedelic Island Views Vol. 2, Issue 2, 1996: p.4). I think it is worth mentioning here that a psilocybin-trip in October 1977 was the trigger that allowed Eisner to “perceive new connections.” On this psychedelic trip Eisner realized that Leary was right: “East means stagnation. West means evolution and change.” Psychedelics and technology can help us to make the world a better place to live in. This discovery lead him to found the Island Foundation (cf. ibid.). (Notice the striking similarity between Eisner’s and Sirius’ life-changing experiences. It was the psychedelic experience that changed their lives.)

The Island Group expresses its opinions and policies in a magazine called Psychedelic Island Views, edited by Bruce Eisner. We only have to take a look at the second issue of Psychedelic Island Views, which is dedicated to Timothy Leary (this issue was published soon after Leary died), and we see that Leary plays an important role in this organization. This issue features several articles about Leary. Just like R.U. Sirius, Bruce Eisner, who wrote two of these articles, praises Leary as the psychedelic and cybernetic pioneer nonpareil (cf. Eisner, Bruce. Psychedelic Island Views. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1996: 5–9).

As a final comment on this chapter I would like to point out that both Mondo 2000 and the Island Group have their origins in California. (The Island Foundation has its headquaters in Santa Cruz; Mondo 2000 is based in Berkeley) Why is that so? Is California really the “genetic frontier”?

4. Chaos & Cyberculture (the 80s and 90s)

Filtered through the computer matrix, all reality becomes patterns of information: [...] Just as the later Taoists of ancient China made a yin/yang cosmology that encompassed sex, cooking, weather, painting, architecture, martial arts, etc, so too the computer culture interprets all knowable reality as transmissible information. (Michael Heim)[46]

Since the early 70s Leary has been fascinated by the idea that the brain functions like a computer and that we can change the programs in our “bio-computers” (brains) if we know the language in which these programs are written (the code). There is one book, written by psychoanalyst and LSD researcher John Lilly, in 1967, which Leary repeatedly mentions in several of his works and which seems to have sparked this fascination with the computer-brain metaphor. This book is titled Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Bio-Computer (Lilly 1967).

It was not until 1983 that Leary bought his first personal computer and discovered how computers really worked – that the language of computers is based on the principle of 0 and 1 (the transistors in a computer can be switched ON or OFF, representing 1 and 0 in the logical sequence). When Leary learned that in a computer every program and every piece of information is stored in zeros and ones and that theoretically any kind of information – be it a sound, picture, word, etc – can be translated into the digital language of 0 and 1, he felt that a “new world” with seemingly endless possibilities was revealed to him. Leary called this world the “Info world” or “Quantum world” (I will explain the term “Quantum world” when I talk about Leary’s Quantum-Psychology). He began spending around five hours a day in this new world on the other side of the screen translating his thoughts to digital codes and screen images (cf. CC 3). It did not take long until Leary felt he was able to “pilot his brain” through the newly discovered “digital spaces” and that the exercises in translating his thoughts to digital codes actually helped him to understand how his brain works. In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary writes that computers taught him that the human mind (i.e., processes in the brain) could be perfectly explained with this principle of 0 and 1, and that computers helped him to control the processes in his brain and create his own digital realities (cf. ibid.).

Leary discovered that computers were actually very similar to LSD. More than that, in an interview with P. Johnston in 1986, Leary said that the computer is a technology for brain change that is even more effective than LSD: “Computers are the most subversive thing I’ve ever done. [...] Computers are more addictive than heroin. [...] People need some way to activate, boot up, and change disks in their minds. In the 60s we needed LSD to expand reality and examine our stereotypes. With computers as our mirrors LSD might not be necessary now” (quoted in Bukatman 1993: 139). This discovery led Leary to proclaim that “The PC is the LSD of the 90s” (CC cover-page). Leary found out that his experiences with this new medium were far from being unique and original but seemed to be part of an enormous cultural metamorphoses. As a result of personal computers, millions of people, especially the young generation, would no longer be satisfied “to peer like passive infants through the Terrarium wall [TV screen] into ScreenLand [sic] filled with cyberstars like Bill and Hillary and Boris and Sadam and Madonna and Beavis and Butt-Head”(CC 4). People would begin to learn how to “enter and navigate in this world behind the screen” and avoid television dictatorship. Computers would change the young generation’s appreciation for their own intrinsic worth and ability to alter reality. Leary had a vision of the emergence of a “new humanism” based on questioning authority, independent thinking, and the empowerment of computers and other technologies. A new global “cybernetic culture” would be emerging, creating a post-political society based on individual freedom.

These discoveries had a profound impact on Leary’s theories of the 80s and 90s in which Leary takes his idea of the brain as computer even one step further. In Chaos & Cyberculture, which is a collection of Leary’s most important essays about the effects of computers and drugs on the individual and society, he suggests that the whole universe consists of “zeros and ones, bits of off/on information.” Matter is “frozen information”(cf. CC 7). The computer would help the individual to dissolve, or deconstruct, all rigid thought systems/structures (political, social, and philosophical) into zeros and ones, and create new structures/systems with the freed elements — structures that are more fun than the old ones. Furthermore, we would be beginning to “understand ourselves as information processes,” and in the near future there would be technologies available that allow us to manipulate matter as information, which means that we can exist without our blood-and-flesh bodies and become immortal. Leary tries to back these ideas with a bold interpretation of quantum physics and defines a new branch of science called Quantum Psychology (human thought and behavior described in terms of the language of computers). Quantum Psychology would help us to understand the basic nature of the universe and how our brains operate. However, we would not able to apply the principles of quantum physics without computers, which Leary sees as extensions of our brains which help us to navigate through the meaningless, disordered, chaotic universe and to design ourselves individual realities. As far as the correlation of personal computers and personal freedom is concerned, Leary says that freedom in any country could be measured perfectly by the percentage of personal computers in the hands of individuals (cf. CC 84).

In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary also presents a theory on the evolution of countercultures from the 50s to the 90s (the Beat Generation, the hippies, etc) and defines a new counterculture — Leary is even talking about a new species which constitutes a new gene pool — called the “cyberpunks,” or “new breed.” As far as the political implications of the use of personal computers and electronic media (especially TV and the Internet) is concerned, Leary gives various examples that demonstrate that these new technologies have introduced profound changes in our society. Leary argues that personal computers, TV, and the Internet encouraged young people from all over the world to think for themselves, question authority, and start a freedom revolution which lead to the fall of various political regimes in the late 80s (fall of the Berlin Wall, Czech hard-line regime toppled, etc). According to Leary, this “digital freedom revolution” is still going on. Leary was very optimistic as far as the liberating effect of electronic technology and the future of this freedom movement is concerned. In the near future we would all find ourselves living in a post-political society that functions according to the cybernetic principles of self-organization – a society where the person who automatically obeys and never questions authority will be the “problem person” and the intelligent person who knows how to live in symbiosis with technology and who thinks for him-/herself (the cyberpunk) will be the norm. Furthermore, we would soon be able to “download” our mind/brain into a computer, which means that we do not need our bodies to survive any more and that we can become immortal.

Before I describe the basic principles of Quantum Psychology, I want to shortly comment on the language Leary uses (so the reader will not be confused when I start talking about things like the “info-starved tri-brain amphibian”). The language Leary uses in Chaos & Cyberculture is a mixture of computer-language (e.g. to boot up a computer), psychedelic metaphors (which he uses to describe the experience of cyberspace), and neologisms like “tri-brain” (which I will explain later), or “electronic haiku” (movie trailer).

(Keep in mind that we are dealing here not with a scientific theory based on objective facts, but with a theory that is based on the assumption that ”the limits of our reality are determined by the limits of our imagination.”)

4.1. Quantum Psychology

Chaos & Cyberculture, the book that serves as the main source for my description of Leary’s Quantum Psychology, consists of texts that were first published in a wide array of publications, ranging from obscure underground ’zines to university journals; from New Age/New Edge periodicals (e.g. Mondo 2000) to mainstream Sunday supplements. Roughly speaking, one third of these texts deals with computers, one third with countercultures, and one third with “chaos-drugs” (psychedelic drugs). Although these texts deal with a variety of topics there is one core theory underlying all of them. Leary calls this theory Quantum Psychology. Basically, it could be said that there are three concepts that constitute the principles of Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory:

The philosophy of Chaos: The basic nature of the universe is extreme complexity popularly known as chaos.(4.1.1)
Quantum physics and the “user-friendly Quantum universe:” The basic elements of the universe are bits or quanta of off/on information. In the Quantum universe everything is continually changing , relative to viewpoint, and dependent on our psychological attitude and info-technology (e.g. computers). Computers help us to make the chaotic universe “user-friendly,” which means we can digitize, store and create our own realities.(4.1.2)
The info-starved “tri-brain amphibian”: The brain can be understood as a digital computer that converts every sensory stimulation into “quantum realities,” into directories and files of 0/1 signals. The info-starved brain requires more and more input of digital data in order to keep growing towards maturity. When the human brain enters a symbiotic relationship with a computer we get the “tri-brain”: digital brain – body matter – digital screen.(4.1.3)

4.1.1. The Philosophy of Chaos

In the preface to Chaos & Cyberculture, which is an essay called “The Eternal Philosophy of Chaos,” Leary gives examples from both eastern philosophies and western science that are supposed to show that the basic nature of the universe is chaos, inexplicable disorder “maybe a trillion times too complex to be grasped by the human mind” (cf. CC xiii). Leary says that there are be basically two ways of dealing with the chaotic universe that surrounds us: to accept chaos and “go with the flow,” or to be afraid of chaos and cling to the idea/illusion of stability. Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists, for example, accept the fact that they live in a world of inexplicable complexity and try to learn how to “go with the flow.” They belong to the group of people that have realized that you cannot control chaos but you can learn how to “surf the waves of chaos” and get a lot of fun out of experiencing parts of the chaotic universe (cf. CC xiv).

The majority of people on our planet, however, are afraid to face chaos. They are afraid to face the fact that safety and order is only an illusion. According to Leary, this fear of chaos explains why for centuries there existed a fanatic taboo against scientific thinking. He points out that “Galileo got busted” and “Bruno got the Vatican microwave” for showing that the sun did not circle the earth, just “because religious and political chaos-phobes wanted the nice, tidy, comfy universe to cuddle around them” (CC xiv).[47] The standard method with which religious and political “control freaks” would try to tame and domesticate the impossible complexity that surrounds us is to “invent a few ‘tooth-fairy’ Gods” (the more infantile the better) and to “lay down a few childish, simple rules like ‘Honor you father and your mother’” or “You passively obey. You pray. You work.”(ibid.). According to Leary, scientific thinking and thinking for oneself has always been considered “heretical, treasonous, blasphemous, a capital crime, the ultimate nightmare” by religious and political fanatics. However, you cannot hide the truth forever. Leary points out that, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, scientists – with the help of technical extensions of the human sensorium like telescopes and microscopes — began to specify the “truly spooky” nature of the complexities around us and within us (e.g., they found out that the brain is a network of hundred billion neurons, each neuron being connected to ten thousand other neurons). According to Leary, among the various scientific theories which have been advanced in the last hundred years there is one theory that changed human life more than any other – quantum physics. Leary argues that equations of quantum physics perfectly describe the chaotic universe we live in:

The universe described by Einstein and the nuclear physicists is alien and terrifying. Chaotic. Quantum physics is quite literally a wild acid trip! It postulates an hallucinatory Alice–in-Wonderland universe in which everything is changing. As Heisenberg and Jimmy Hendrix said, “Nothing is certain except uncertainty.” Matter is energy. Energy is matter at various forms of acceleration. Particles dissolve into waves. There is no up or down in a four-dimensional movie. It all depends on your attitude, i.e. your angle of approach to the real worlds of chaotics (CC 45).

(Leary does not describe the theories he boldly interprets at all. It is obvious that he does not expect his readers to seriously study nuclear physics.) Leary suggests that, in addition to describing the chaos that surrounds us, quantum physics also presents a couple of startling concepts that help us to understand how our brains operate and what the basic elements of the universe are — which leads us to the next basic concept of Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory.

4.1.2. Quantum physics and the “user-friendly” Quantum universe

Before I present Leary’s bold interpretation of quantum physics, let us look at how Leary defines the term “quantum” which is the singular of “quanta”: “The word ‘quantum’ refers to a bit, an elemental unit. The word QUANTUM used as an adjective indicates that the subject is defined in terms of numbers, clusters of digitized elements, units of information”[48](Info v).

Now how does Leary interpret quantum physics? According to Leary, the quantum physicists (Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck etc) discovered that we live in a universe made up of bits of information, “a universe of elemental off/on digital bits (particles) that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations” (cf. CC 44). In the universe described by the quantum physicists solid Newtonian matter becomes waves or clouds of 0/1, yin/yang, on/off probabilities[49](cf. CC 45). According to Leary, the equations of quantum physics suggest that solid matter is nothing but “frozen information” (cf. CC 6). (This means we do not have the body-mind dualism any more; everything is information.) Realities could be explained metaphorically as screens of digitized patterns (cf. Info 2). The universe, according to the equations of quantum physics, would be best described as a “digital information processor with subprograms and temporary ROM states, megas called galaxies, maxis called stars, minis called planets, micros called organisms or Macintosh, and nanos called molecules and atoms” (CC 44). All of these programs are perpetually in states of evolution, that is, continually “running.” Furthermore, quantum theory suggests that the behavior of atomic particles, and thus of the universe, is governed by a single programming rule: it is nothing but “if-then algorithms”(cf. CC 14). Leary explains that the application of quantum physics produced vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, radio, television, computers, etc — all the important gadgets that can move around information (cf. CC 6f.).

Quantum psychology, the “new branch of science based on the principles of quantum physics,” would allow us to redefine the most important terms of classical metaphysics. For example, Leary suggests that a new definition of “spiritual” could be “digital.” If we look at some of the traditional attributes of the word “spiritual” (mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, ideal) we see that this is the exact definition of electronic-digital (cf. CC 5).

Leary argues that the quantum physicists were explaining ideas that can only be fully understood now, in the electronic-information age. The knowledge that we live in a chaotic universe consisting of digital bits of information – Leary calls this universe Quantum universe — is useless for the individual human as long as he/she does not have tools that enable him/her to make that chaotic universe “user-friendly.” In order to make the Quantum universe user-friendly the individual would need electrical appliances that allow him/her to cruise around in the “chaotic post-Newtonian information ocean,” to think and communicate in the digital language of light. Leary also calls the digital language of light “lingua franca of the universe” or “binary dialect of the galaxies and atoms”(cf. CC 45). Leary points out that, although Einstein and his colleagues developed theories that were to change the world, they were not able to apply their theories to their own lives. They did not have computers that allowed them to digitize, store, create, and communicate their individual realities. In “Quantum Jumps, Your Macintosh, and you,” Leary explains this paradoxical situation the quantum physicists were in:

They [the quantum physicists] expressed their unsettling theories in complex equations written on chalkboards with chalk. [...They] thought and communicated with a neolithic tool: chalk marks on the blackboard of the cave. The paradox was this: Einstein and his brilliant colleagues could not experience or operate or communicate at a quantum-electronic level. In a sense they were idiot savants, able to produce equations about chaos and relativity without being able to maintain interpersonal cyberrelationships with others (CC 45).

For Leary, the application of the laws of quantum physics has to do with freedom. The universe that quantum physicists describe would open up endless possibilities for the individual. Electrical “quantum-appliances,” like computers, interactive TV, or virtual reality gear (TV goggles and quadrophonic sound systems to create 3-D computer graphic worlds), would enable us to apply the principles of quantum physics so we can pilot ourselves through the chaotic universe — Leary calls this “chaos engineering” — and create 3-D digital realities where we can meet with people from the other side of the planet. More than that, the application of quantum physics would allow us to “real-ize” the realities of our dreams, the limits of which are determined only by the limits of our imagination. This means that we would actually be able to free ourselves from any kind of structure (political, social, personal) that is imposed on us. Information technology would enable us to dissolve existing structures and create new forms, new (virtual) realities with the freed elements. We would be beginning to understand ourselves as information processes, and soon there would be new technologies available that allow us to manipulate matter as information. This would mean that we can finally free ourselves from our heavy, clumsy, mortal bodies and become immortal.

Now that we are learning to experience what Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg could only dream of, it is clear that “the great intellectual challenge of the 20^th century was to produce an inexpensive appliance that would make the chaotic universe ‘user friendly,’ which would allow the individual human to decode, digitize, store, process and reflect the sup-programs which make up his/her personal realities” (ibid.). (What is the great challenge of the next century? According to Leary, the great challenge of the 21^st century is to develop technologies that make the human body immortal and allow us to exist as electronic life-forms on computer networks.)

4.1.3. The info-starved “tri-brain amphibian”

We already know that since the early 1960s Leary has always been interested in finding out how the human brain operates and how we can use our brains in the most sufficient way. In all of his theories Leary argues that the best way to understand and describe the evolution of the human race is in terms of how well we have learned to operate our brains. In “Our Brain” (CC 35–39), for example, he suggests that since the 1950s, when people began to use electrical appliances (television, radio), there has been an enormous acceleration of brain power. In just the last ten years new developments in technology, especially computer technology, would have multiplied the ability to use our brains by a thousandfold (!). The best way to understand how efficiently we are using our brains would be to clock it in rpm – realities per minute. Now that we have television (hundreds of programs to choose), the internet and other new information technologies, our brains would be operating at a hundred times more rpm than the brains of people living thirty or forty years ago – and still we would be hungry for more.

It should be mentioned here that, according to Leary, historical technological development is following an exponential law. This means that there is a general tendency that there will be more basic breakthroughs (both in scientific and technological applications) in each generation than in the previous generation. Leary argues that this acceleration of technological development is in direct relation to an acceleration in human brain power/intelligence. In other words, although people in the Stone Age had basically the same brain as we have they were by far not as intelligent as we are because they did not have the technologies that helped them to effectively use their brains. On the inside cover of Chaos & Cyberculture, this relationship between technological innovation and human brain power is presented in form of a graph that shows an enormous acceleration of brain power since the 1950s.

Leary’s explanation for this enormous acceleration of brain power and the brain’s insatiable hunger for more data is an evolutionary one: As our brain evolves, it develops new and more effective vehicles and information-processing devices in order to feed its insatiable hunger for stimulation (television in the 50s, audio tapes in the 60s, personal computers in the 70s, etc). A person with a cybernetic post-industrial brain would no longer be content “to watch a tiring two-hour movie, or sit drinking tea and reading the London Times for two hours,” like people did in the mechanical age (cf. CC 14). “The cybernetic brain expects more data in much less time”, Leary explains (ibid.). The cybernetic brain “loves overload”(ibid.). For the information-age cyberperson the best stuff he/she sees in the movies would be the three-minute trailers with two cuts per second, which Leary calls “electronic haikus.” Leary argues that the use of electronic technology has elevated us to a new genetic status; a new species, the “homo sapiens electronicus,” has emerged (cf. CC 45). According to Leary, the growing appetite for digital data can now be recognized as a species need. Leary points out that the brain of the homo sapiens electronicus “needs electrons (and psychoactive chemicals) like the body needs oxygen” (ibid.). Like any adolescent organ, the human brain would require an enormous, continual supply of chemical and electronic data to keep growing towards maturity. To illustrate this evolutionary phenomenon Leary describes how his own brain has evolved since he started using computers:

In the last eight years the dendritic metabolism of my information organ (brain) seems to have undergone a dramatic change. My eyes have become two hungry mouths pressed against the Terrarium window [the screen between the material world, the Terrarium, and cyberspace] through which electronic pulses reach the receptive areas of my brain. My brain seems to require a daily input of several billion bytes of digital (light-speed) information.[...My] Personal Computer has changed my brain into an output organ emitting, discharging digital information through the Terrarium window into ScreenLand.
Just as my heart is programmed to pump blood, my sinewy brain is now to fire ,launch, transmit, beam thoughts through the electronic window into Cyberia [cyberspace](CC 4).

In this quotation Leary describes his brain as a computer, an organ that processes digital information. Leary’s “Info-organ” has entered a symbiosis with the digital screen of a computer monitor.

According to Leary, we were not able to understood how our brains operate before electronic engineers had built computers. The understanding of how the brain works would enable us to construct and inhabit “digital auto-realities,” which means that we can now chose if we want to spend our days in the material-organic world or in the “cyberworld” (cyberspace). For Leary, cyberspace is the more interesting one of the two worlds because it offers more freedom than the material world; in cyberspace the limits of time, space, and the body are perceived as meaningless. According to Leary, more and more people are discovering that cyberspace offers more freedom than the material reality. More and more people are learning to use “cyberwear” (goggles with graphic displays and gloves with sensors that registrate every movement so you can see your “hands” on the graphic display) to navigate around cyberspace like they use the “hardware” of their bodies to navigate around the mechanical-material world, and the way they use spaceships and space suits to navigate around the outer space (cf. CC 4). Leary calls people who are able to live in both the material world and in cyberspace “tri-brain amphibians.” (The word “amphibian” comes from the Greek amphi (double) and bios (life). It is used to describe a life form that is able to live in two different worlds.) The tri-brain consists of digital brain, body matter, and digital screen (cf. ibid.).

As far as the (digital) brain is concerned, Leary argues that for the brain (which he sees as a complex “bio-computer”) screen-realities are not less real than the “material” reality. Leary explains why digital realities are perceived by the brain as real:

All the screen scenes are as real as a kick-in-the-pants as far as our brains are concerned. Our brains have no sense organs and no muscles. [...] To be registered in consciousness, to be ‘realized,’ every sensory stimulation must be deconstructed, minimalized, digitalized. The brain converts every pressure signal from our skins, tickles from our genitals, delectables from our tongues, photons from our eyes, sound waves from our ears, and best of all, electronic buzziness from our screens into quantum realities, into directories and files of 0/1 signals(CC 4).

Body matter, which is the second constituent of the tri-brain, is necessary because the body is equipped with all the sensory input and output ports to bring information into the “neurocomputer”(cf. CC 35). The third constituent of the tri-brain, the digital screen (i.e. the computer), functions as a door to cyberspace and allow us to construct the digital realities we like. Leary describes how this partnership between human brains and computers evolved by comparing it to the biological phenomenon of symbiosis:

In evolving to more physiological complexity, our bodies formed symbioses with armies of digestive bacteria necessary for survival. In similar fashion, our brains are forming neural electronic symbiotic linkups with solid-state computers. [...] At this point in human evolution, more and more people are developing mutually dependent, interactive relationships with their microsystems. When this happens, there comes a moment when the individual is “hooked” and cannot imagine living without the continual interchange of electronic signals between the personal [digital] brain and the personal computer (CC 42f.).

However, the tri-brain amphibian will not neglect his/her body which can offer him/her a lot of pleasure. Leary says that the tri-brain amphibian will not use his/her precious, irreplaceable “fleshware” (body) to do work that can be done better by assembly-line machines. (For example, “[t]he languorous midwestern farmer will don her cybersuit and recline in her hammock in Acapulco operating the automated plough on her Nebraska farm, [and] the Mexican immigrant will recline in his hammock in Acapulco using his cybergear to direct the grape-harvest machines” (CC 5).) But when the brain work is done, the amphibian will take off his “brain clothing” (cybersuits), don body clothes, and enjoy all the pleasures that the body can offer. Leary explains how delightful the experience of the body will be:

When we platonic migrants sweat, it will be in athletic or sensual pleasure. When we exert elbow grease, it will be in some form of painterly flourish or musical riff. When we operate oil-gulping machines, we will joyride for pleasure. [...] Trains, planes, boats will be used only for pleasure cruising [...] Our bodily postures will thus be graceful and proud, our body movements delightful, slow, sensual, lush, erotic, fleshy, carnal vacations from the accelerated, jazzy cyberrealities of cyberspace, where the brain work is done (ibid.).

As far as the quality of face-to-face interactions are concerned, Leary says that for tri-brain amphibian flesh encounters will be rare and thrilling. For the near-future tri-brain person, the quality of a personal appearance in flesh will be “raised to a level of mythic drama” (cf. ibid.).

To sum up, for the tri-brain person experiencing the body is fun, but he/she just cannot imagine living without computers. Why does he/she need this continual interchange of electronic signals between the brain and the personal computer? Why does he/she form this symbiosis with the computer? The answer is simple: Because he/she wants to be free, free to “real-ize” the realities of his/her dreams. The tri-brain person feels that in the material world — which stands for bodily robotic work, political tyranny, and spending half of your life in trains, cars, airplanes or waiting in line if you want get information or meet people — he/she can never reach his/her goals. In cyberspace, however, he/she feels free from practically all the structures that limit him/her — free from dogmatic social structures, free from narrow reality-tunnels that are imposed on him/her, free from the limits of time, space, and body.

What, according to Leary, are the social, political and cultural implications of this new way of living in symbiosis with technology?

4.2. Countercultures (the Beat Generation, the hippies, the cyberpunks/the New Breed)

Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory encourages people to use electronic technology (computers, the Internet, etc) for their personal empowerment. In the 90s Leary updated his old catchphrase “ Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” to “Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In.” Electronic technology would enable us to free ourselves from dogmatic social structures and create our own cyber-realities (cyberspace). More than that, Leary argues that the use of electronic technology has elevated us to a new genetic status. People who grew up using electronic appliances for thinking and communicating would constitute a new species, which Leary calls the New Breed, or the cyberpunks. Leary writes that the New Breed of the 80s and 90s are people who have learned how to use technology to reach their own private goals and change the world to the better. According to Leary, this New Breed is creating a new post-political cybernetic society which is based on personal freedom and functions according to the cybernetic principles of self-organization and feedback (I will explain these principles later). It would be a society that does not operate on the basis of obedience and conformity to dogma — a society based on individual thinking, scientific know-how, quick exchange of facts around feedback networks, high-tech ingenuity, and front-line creativity (cf. PE 4). Leary notes that the youth revolutions of 1989, which, according to Leary, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resignation of the hard–line regimes in Czechoslovakia and Rumania, are signs how powerful this revolution really is. If we analyse these revolutions we see that the ones who rule the media are the ones who control the country. In an essay called “The Youth Revolutions of the 20^th Century” Leary gives an impressive example of a young Chinese schoolboy using media technology to confront a powerful tyranny:

On June 5, 1989, a 19-year old Wang Weilin stood defiantly looking into the barrel of an enormous gun mounted on a tank in Tien An Men Square. He was unarmed. Look at the picture and you see that in his left hand he holds, not a gun or a bomb but his school bookbag and in his right hand his lunch bag. His act was a cybernetic gesture. He and his friends knew that this picture, flashed around the world on TV screens and magazine covers, would be permanently imprinted on the minds of millions (PE 4).

Leary argues that the individual-freedom movement of the late 80s would not have been possible without electronic technology. Thanks to the electronic media, people are able to spread the idea of personal freedom and self-direction across the whole world. According to Leary, the liberation movements in Eastern Europe (in 1989) have their roots in the 50s and 60s in America. Leary points out that the 50s counterculture, the Beat generation, was the first counterculture which broadcast the idea of individual freedom around the world via electronic media, and sparked off a freedom-revolution that is still going on. As Leary put it,

In the 1950s in America, at the height of the television Cold War, there appeared a group of free people who created highly communicable counterculture memes that were to change history.[50] The beats stood for the ecstatic vision and for individual freedom in revolt against all bureaucratic, closed-minded systems. They saw themselves as citizens of the world [...and ] as heirs to the long tradition of intellectual and artistic individualism that goes beyond national boundaries.
What made the beats more effective than any dissident-artist group in human history was the timing. Electronic technology made it possible for their bohemian memes, their images, and their sounds to be broadcast at almost the speed of light around the world. [...] The hippie culture of the 1960s and the current liberation movements in Eastern Europe are indebted to the libertarian dissenting of the ‘fifties counterculture(CC 75).

In the essay “Politics of Ecstasy: The youth revolutions of the 20^th century,” Leary notes that “thanks to the spread of the electronic media, the memes of freedom and self-direction have swept the whole world in less than three decades” (PE 4). Like Marshall McLuhan, Leary makes us aware that cultural change involves communication and that the mode of communication determines not just the speed of change but also the nature of change. “The medium is the message of cultural evolution,” Leary writes and gives his explanation of McLuhan’s famous phrase:

The Ten Commandments, chiseled on stone tablets, created a fundamentalist culture that discouraged change and democratic participation. There is one God, the author-creator, and his words are eternally true. This stone-tablet meme carrier spawns a culture ruled by the inerrant “good book” and a priesthood of those who preserve, interpret, and enforce the commandments.
The printing press mass-disseminates memes that create a factory culture run by managers.
The electronic, McLuhanesque meme-signals that produced Woodstock nation and the Berlin Wall deconstruction are more a matter of attitude and style.
The television news has trained us to recognize “the robe-memes” – the feudal pope (or the Iranian mullah) and his solemn piety-reeking priests. We recognize “the suits,” the adult politicians of the industrial age, with their no-nonsense sobriety. We observe “the uniforms,” armed, booted, helmeted (CC 72).

What Leary is saying in the last passage I have just quoted is that television, like a magnifying glass, makes us aware of the ideas and ideologies that are behind the robes, suits, and uniforms of politicians and priests; it would make us recognize how meaningless, foolish, and outdated the ideas that politicians and priests represent really are. Television encourages us not to blindly believe in the things politicians and priests tell us but to think for ourselves.

Leary points out that the post-war Baby Boom generation was the first generation that grew up with television: “From the time they could peer out of the crib the young Baby Boomers of the 50s were exposed to a constant shower of information beaming from screens.” According to Leary, television taught the Baby Boomers to be “reality consumers.” “Before they were ten, their brains were processing more realities per day than their grandparents had confronted in a year,” Leary explains (CC 78). Leary argues that the media that a child grows up with are of crucial importance because between the ages of three and eight “the language circuits of the brain are formatted” (this is the period of imprint vulnerability for everything that has to do with language). This means that the media used in the home of the child has an everlasting influence on the way this person thinks and perceives the world (cf. ibid.).

What happened when the Baby Boomers became teenagers? We all know that they evolved into the hippies of the 60s and started a freedom revolution. Leary describes these teenagers as affluent, self-confident, spoiled consumers, “ready to use their television-radio skills to be imprinted by turning on Bob Dylan, tuning in the Beatles, turning off parents songs, and fine-tuning color screens” (CC 82). Although their attitude was anti-high-tech, the hippies have used the media and electrically powered music to spread their ideas. When the 60s revolution, the LSD-boom, and the Vietnam war were over the hippies became the Yuppies of the late 70s and 80s.

However, the revolution was not over yet because the personal computer entered the ‘game.’ Leary argues that the millions of Americans who experienced the awesome potentialities of the brain via LSD certainly paved the way for the computer society we now live in. According to Leary, many of the people who were involved in the development of the personal computer got their inspiration from psychedelic drug experiences. He suggests that without the psychedelic revolution in the 60s, the personal computer would have been unthinkable. “It’s well known that most of the creative impulse in the software industry, and indeed much of the hardware [...] derived directly form the sixties consciousness movement,” he asserts. “[The Apple cofounder] Steve Jobs went to India, took a lot of acid, studied Buddhism, and came back and said that Edison did more to influence the human race than Buddha. And [Microsoft founder Bill] Gates was a big psychedelic person at Harvard. It makes perfect sense to me that if you activate your brain with psychedelic drugs, the only way you can describe it is electronically”(quoted in Dery 1996: 28). According to Leary, it is no accident that “the term ‘LSD’ was used twice in Time magazine’s cover story about Steve Jobs”(CC 42).

According to Leary, in the early 80s a new generation of young people emerged and continued the freedom revolution of the 60s, using personal computers and the electronic media in a subversive way. Leary points out that this new generation, which grew up creating their own realities with arcade games and personal computers, was the first generation in human history that was able to change electronic patterns on the other side of the screen. Leary believes that this New Breed which, in his opinion, was very much influenced by the ideals of the hippies (individuality, freedom of expression, etc) is responsible for the fall of several repressive political regimes in Europe and Russia in the late 80s and early 90s. By looking at the methods that students in the 60s applied to change the world, the youth in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, South Korea, and China have learned how to lead their freedom revolutions. Leary makes us aware that, again, it was the media that played the crucial role in the transmission of the idea of freedom:

Where did those Chinese students learn these clever methods of grabbing the news screens to express their ideals? Where did they learn the techniques of media savvy to counter the armed forces of the state? From the newsreel films of the American campus protests of the late 1960s, whose ideals are not dead. They were more powerful than ever in China’s Tien An Men Square, as well as in the USSR, where glasnost and perestroika define freedom for the individual (CC 56).

This quotation shows that, for Leary, the whole youth-revolution boils down to one idea: Freedom for the individual. Drop out of all hierarchical structures and create your own realities. Technology can help the individual to liberate him-/herself from authority. In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary calls people who think for themselves, question authority, and create their own realities with the help of computers “cyberpunks.” Since there is a long history behind the term “cyberpunk” I want to take a closer look at it. Who exactly is the cyberpunk? Where does the term come from?

4.2.1. The cyberpunk

In 1984, when William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer came out, a new genre in Science Fiction was born – cyberpunk. In the introduction to this paper I have already explained that cyberpunk escaped from being a literary genre into cultural reality, and that the media, inspired by the street-hardened characters and the new world (cyberspace) created in Gibson’s books, started to call adolescent computer hackers “cyberpunks.”

Now how does Leary define the term “cyberpunk”? According to Leary, there is a whole philosophy and a long history behind this term. Leary says that, in order to understand what the word “cyberpunk,” or “cyber-person” really means, we have to go back to the Greek roots of the term “cybernetics”[51]. Leary explains that the term “cybernetics” comes from the Greek word “kubernetes” which means “pilot” or “steersman”(cf. CC 64). The Hellenic origin of this word is important in that it reflects the Socratic-Platonic traditions of independence and individual self-reliance which, according to Leary, derived from the geographical situation in Greece. In the following quotation Leary explains how the geographical situation in Greece encouraged people to be self-reliant:

The proud little Greek city-states were perched on peninsular fingers wiggling down in the fertile Mediterranean Sea [...]
Mariners of these ancient days had to be bold and resourceful. Sailing the seven seas without maps or navigational equipment, they were forced to develop independence of thought. The self-reliance that these Hellenic pilots developed in their voyages probably carried over to the democratic, inquiring, questioning nature of their land life.
The Athenian cyberpunks, the pilots made their own navigational decisions.
These psychogeographical factors may have contributed to the humanism of the Hellenic religions that emphasized freedom, pagan joy, celebration of life, and speculative thought (CC 64).

But then the Romans took over and translated the word “kubernetes” to “gubernetes” (with the verb form “gubernare”). The Greek word for pilot became the Latin word for governor, “to steer” became “to control.” In Leary’s opinion the word “governor” expresses an attitude of “obedience-control in relationship to self and others” (CC 66). What Leary wants to show with this etymological analysis is that by translating the word “kubernetes” to “gubernetes” the aspect of self-reliance got lost, and that this translation was a semantic manipulation which had a profound impact on how people who used this word thought and behaved. The term “governor” encourages people to think in terms of obedience and control rather than independence and self-reliance. According to Leary, semantic manipulations are quite relevant to the pragmatics of the culture surrounding their usage. Leary quotes French philosopher Michel Foucault who said that

human consciousness – as expressed in speech and images, in self-definition and mutual designation...is the authentic locale of the determinant politics of being.... What men and women are born into is only superficially this or that social, legislative, and executive system. Their ambiguous, oppressive birthright is the language, the conceptual categories, the conventions of identification and perception which have evolved and, very largely, atrophied up to the time of their personal and social existence. It is the established but customarily subconscious, unargued constraints of awareness that enslave (CC 65).

With this quotation Leary wants to make us aware that “to remove the means of expressing dissent is to remove the possibility of dissent.” Leary notes that Marshall McLuhan would agree: “If you change the language, you change society.”

As far as the term “cybernetics” is concerned, Leary says that now (in the computer age) that all hierarchical structures in society are dissolving we are returning to the original meaning of “cyber.” People would create new words that express the self-reliance that got lost. As Leary puts it, “The terms ‘cybernetic person’ or ‘cybernaut’ [terms used to describe the person acting in cyberspace] return us to the original meaning of ‘pilot’ and puts [sic] the self-reliant person back in the loop. These words (and the more pop term ‘cyberpunk’) refer to the personalization (and thus the popularization) of knowledge-information technology, to innovative thinking on the part of the individual”(CC 67). Leary describes the cyberpunk as follows:

[A cyberpunk is a] resourceful, skillful individual who accesses and steers knowledge-communication technology toward his/her own private goals, for personal pleasure, profit, principle, or growth”(ibid.).
Cyberpunks are the inventors, innovative writers, technofrontier artists, risk-taking film directors, icon-shifting composers,[...] free-agent scientists, technocreatives, computer visionaries, elegant hackers, [...] neurological test pilots, media explorers – all of those who boldly package and steer ideas out there where no thoughts have gone before (ibid.).

According to Leary, the cyberpunk is a person who uses all available data-input to think for him-/herself and questions authority. He/she is a person who is able to apply the principles of quantum physics, a person who creates his/her own realities. Leary created the cyberpunk code “Think for yourself; question authority”(CC 69).

As far as the ethical aspect of the cyberpunk-way-of-living is concerned, Leary emphasizes that the cyberpunk performs no act of physical violence (cf. ibid.). However, the cyberpunk believes in freedom of information and is willing to go any length to free information, including breaking the law. (“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but information can never hurt you,” Leary says.) The cyberpunk seeks independence, not control over others (cf. ibid.). Now it becomes clear what puts the “punk” in “cyberpunk.” It is the idea of anarchy, rebelliousness, and liberation through technology.

Leary also describes the cyberpunk as modern alchemist and shows that the parallels between the alchemists of the Middle Ages and the cyberpunk computer adepts are be numerous:

Alchemists of the Middle Ages described the construction of magical appliances for viewing future events, or speaking to friends distant or dead. Paracelsus described the construction of a mirror of electrum magicum with such properties [...]
Today, modern alchemists have at their command tools of clarity and power unimagined by their predecessors. Computer screens are magical mirrors, presenting alternate realities at varying degrees of abstraction on command (invocation). Nineteenth-century occult legend Aleister Crowley defines magick – with a k [Crowley’s spelling] — as “the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity to our will.” To this end, the computer is the latter-day lever of Archimedes with which we can move the world (DD 45).

Furthermore, both alchemists of the middle ages and cyberpunks employ knowledge of an arcanum unknown to the population at large, with secret symbols and words of power. Leary explains: “The ‘secret symbols’ comprise the language of computers and mathematics, and the ‘words of power’ instruct the computer operating system to compete awesome tasks”(DD 46). Leary compares the four elements the alchemists believed in (earth, air, fire, and water) with the Tarot’s four suits (wands, cups, swords, and pentacles or disks) with four essential parts of the computer: mouse, RAM chips, electricity, and the disk drives(cf. DD 46f.).

In the essay “The cyberpunk: The individual as reality pilot”(CC 62–70) Leary gives examples of cyberpunks from different periods of history. Some of the most important cyberpunks that Leary mentions are Prometheus, “a technological genius who ‘stole’ fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity”(CC 63), Christoph Columbus who was unsurpassed in charting and finding his way about the unknown seas (cf. CC 68), Andy Warhol, William Gibson, Stanley Kubrik, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak. By giving these examples Leary tries to show that the tradition of the individual who thinks for him-/herself extends to the beginning of recorded history. He reminds us that the very label of our species, Homo sapiens, defines us as “the animals who think” (cf. CC 69). “If our genetic function is computare (“to think”),” Leary hypothesizes, “then it follows that the ages and stages of human history, so far, have been larval or preparatory. After the insectoid phases of submission to gene pools, the mature stage of the human life is the individual who thinks for him/herself” (CC 69).

In Leary’s view we are coming closer and closer to this mature stage of human life. Leary predicts the emergence of a New (Digital) Humanism with an emphasis on independent thinking, individual creativity, and the empowerment of computers and other technologies. The various new electronic technologies that more and more people have access to — modern synthesizers, computers, Internet, etc — would help us to get closer to people and understand ourselves better. They would encourage us to “do our own thing” and help us to access the information we need to realize ourselves, which means that we do not need authorities that tell us what to do any more. Due to the de-centralizing effect of computers and the Internet the mature stage of the human life cycle would soon be reached. Leary predicts that in the cyber society of the 21^st century the cyberpunk will be the norm:

In the information-communication civilization of the 21^st Century, creativity and mental excellence will be the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, diversified, too cross-linked by global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behavior to be successful. The “good person” in the cybernetic society are the intelligent ones who think for themselves. The “problem person” in the cybernetic society of the 21^st Century is the one who automatically obeys, who never questions authority, who acts to protect his/her official status, who placates and politics [sic] rather than thinks independently (CC 63).

As more and more individuals are liberating themselves from the bondage of authoritarian hierarchical management structures, freeing themselves to interact with the world supported by their wits rather than traditional social rules, cybernetic principles of organization would emerge within the social system and transform the conventional social structure into “a fabric whose weave is defined by the sum of interactions of autonomous entities”(cf. CC 51). This means that there will soon be no central government that imposes rigid rules on individuals any more. Democracy – no matter if it is a “capitalist democracy” or a “socialist democracy” — would be a system of government that is obsolete in the cybernetic age. “In the cybernetic age, ‘democracy’ becomes majority mob-rule and the enemy of individual freedom,” Leary explains (CC 72). But would there not be total chaos if there is no central authority that has the power to create law and order, and everybody does whatever he/she wants to do? No. Contrary to the belief that a society that is not based on an authoritarian hierarchical system is nothing but total chaos (disorder), Leary is of the opinion that organizational principles that produce order will arise and create a “self-organizing system” without central government: the “cyber-society.” What exactly are these cybernetic principles of organization Leary is talking about? How can order arise from chaos? How exactly does Leary picture this social fabric whose weave is defined by the sum of interactions of autonomous individuals?

4.2.2. The organizational principles of the “cyber-society”

In order to be able to understand the arguments Leary uses to back his idea of a cyber-society the reader has to have some background knowledge about cybernetics. Since Leary’s explanations of cybernetics are rather short I will first explain the basic concepts of cybernetics and then present Leary’s arguments.

Cybernetics is the study of control and communication processes in living and artificial systems. The cyberneticists — who were mathematicians, neuroscientists, social scientists and engineers — were concerned with describing patterns of communication and control that underlie electronic, mechanical, and biological systems. They clearly distinguished the patterns of organization of a system from its physical structure. This is an important distinction because it allowed them to define patterns of organization (organizational principles) that do not only apply to one particular system, but to all systems, irrespective of their nature (cf. Capra 1997: 51f.).

All the major achievements of cybernetics originated in comparisons between organisms (living systems) and machines (artificial systems). While studying the mechanisms of self-regulating machines like the thermostat, or the steam engine, the cyberneticists made an important discovery. Although self-regulating machines had existed long before cybernetics, the cyberneticists were the first ones who recognized that these machines involved a mechanism which Norbert Wiener called “feedback loop.” Fritiof Capra explains the concept of feedback as follows:

A feedback loop is a circular arrangement of causally connected elements, in which an initial cause propagates around the links of the loop, so that each element has an effect on the next, until the last “feeds back” the effect into the first element of the cycle [...]. The consequence of this arrangement is that the first link (“input”) is affected by the last (“output”), which results in self-regulation of the entire system, as the initial effect is modified each time it travels around the cycle (Capra 1997: 56f.).

Wiener called the logical pattern, or organizational principle, that underlies the concept of feedback “circular causality” (cf. Capra 1997: 58). The cyberneticists found out that circular causality cannot only be found in self-regulating machines but that this organizational principle is actually an essential property of all living systems (organisms and social systems) as well. The conditions necessary for a living system to exist are created and maintained by the system itself in a self-sustaining process of dynamical feedback (cf. Capra 1997: 62).

Leary was fascinated by the fact that feedback can create a system that regulates itself and does not need an outside force to control it. Being a person who is against centralism, he was very much interested in the decentralizing effect that feedback might have on the information society we live in. He was convinced that the feedback created by people communicating via the Internet, interactive media, etc, was going to change the world to the better. As more and more people become connected, more feedback could occur and create a living system that does not depend on rigid structures of control and domination in order to exist.

Now how does Leary explain the basic concepts of cybernetics? After making the reader aware of the difference between a pattern of organization/organizational principle and the structure of a system, Leary points out that the most important organizational principle defined by cybernetics is the circular causality of feedback, ”a notion crucial to the understanding of the complexities of the modern world”(DD 50). He explains the concept of feedback by describing how perception in human beings works:

Feedback is information about a process used to change that process. One remarkable fact about neurophysiology is that nerve signals don’t carry explicitly encoded information. A nerve fiber carries signals to the brain. It is the brain that somehow manufactures the richness of our perceptual experience from these signals. Only by correlating the input signals with the internal state of the perceptual apparatus can sense be made of the signals. Changes of sensation are correlated with motor activity. Here is our circularity again: movements are required for perception, and perception required for movements. Even seemingly simple muscular acts couldn’t be accomplished without feedback (DD 50).

The system that Leary describes here regulates itself, like a thermostat which regulates itself by continuous feedback. Leary explains that in any self-regulating system all the components are active. As Leary puts it, “cybernetic systems are self-organizing. This implies an active cooperation of the individual components of any population that composes a system”(DD 51). Leary explains that cybernetics terms this principle of self-organization “autopoiesis,” from the Greek auto, meaning “self,” and poiesis, meaning “a making” (cf. ibid.). “Autopoiesis refers to the central circular quality of all living and lifelike systems,” Leary writes. “The principal characteristic of such [autopoietic] systems is that their interaction yields systems with the same kind of organization, hence they are “self-making”(ibid.). The cyber-society that we supposedly are creating right now would be such an autopoietic system.

Leary argues that feedback (i.e., self-reference) in cybernetic organization leads to “fractal forms.” What is a fractal form? The term “fractal” (coined by chaos mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot) is used to describe “a shape whose details resemble the whole thing. A mountain range is a kind of fractal, since if you look at an outcropping of rock on a mountain, it looks like a small mountain itself, and if you lean closer to the rock outcropping, you find bumps on the boulders which themselves look like mountains, and so on”(Rucker 1992: 45). Fractal forms can be described with the help of circular equations. These equations are called circular equations because after you get an answer, you plug it back into the original equation again and again, countless times (cf. Rushkoff 1995: 22). This image of the fractal — similar components repeated at each level of scale — gives us a better picture of what Leary means. Leary imagines the interpersonal organization of communicating individuals in an information society (a society which is based on unlimited information exchange) as a huge fractal: “I, as a person, am similar to you. Yet the juxtaposition of us and millions of others in a fractally organized system results in the apparent complexity of the system as a whole”(DD 33). The mind of a single person is seen by Leary as interacting fractal subsystems. “As inside, so outside,” Leary says, reminding us of medieval mystics who expressed their insights into the real nature of the world in the sentence “As above, so below”(DD 36). Leary holds that we are all made up of many “selves” and that circuitous routes of communication exist between these selves. He refers to computer pioneer Marvin Minsky who argues that the mind is made up of independent interacting pieces of soft machinery (cf. DD 32). Leary concludes that the principles of organization that apply to the interpersonal organization of communicating individuals in an information society also apply to the intrapersonal organization of selves in a functioning individual.

As far as the fractal nature of the world is concerned, Leary argues that the ingestion of LSD would enable us to directly experience this fractal nature: “The interconnectedness of the world as it appears to humans in certain mystical and pharmacological states comes from a direct appreciation of its fractal nature. It’s particularly amusing that nearly every LSD user who is shown visual representations of moving fractals exclaims over his or her astonished recognition: ‘That’s what I see’”(DD 33).

After this short excursion into the world of fractals, let us return to the concept of self-organization. Leary’s cyber-society is a self-organizing system. In order to understand the concept of self-organization, we have to understand how order can arise from chaos (disorder). Leary’s answer to the question of how order can arise from disorder is crucial for the understanding of his concept of the cyber-society.

How can order arise from chaos? To answer this question Leary refers to a theory by Russian-born chemist and physicist Ilya Prigogine. The theory is called “theory of dissipative structures.” This theory is the first, and perhaps most influential, detailed description of self-organizing systems (cf. Capra 1997: 88). During the 60s Prigogine developed a new nonlinear thermodynamics to describe the self-organization phenomena in open systems far from equilibrium. While studying the processes of heat convection, Prigogine discovered that there are phenomena which cannot be described with the laws of classical thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics, there is a trend in physical phenomena from order to disorder. Any isolated, or “closed,” physical system will proceed spontaneously in the direction of ever-increasing disorder. The phenomena that Prigogine discovered, however, showed that in an open system far from equilibrium coherence and order can arise from thermal chaos. Unlike closed systems, which settle into a state of thermal equilibrium, open systems maintain themselves far from equilibrium in a quasi-steady state characterized by continual flow and change (cf. Capra 1997: 88f.).

Leary describes Prigogine’s theory of “dissipative structures” as follows:

In 1977, Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for his work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems, “dissipative” structures arising out of nonlinear processes. Classical thermodynamics maintained that random (autonomous) local processes such as molecular motion always tend toward a maximum of entropy (disorder). Prigogine showed that in spatially confined neighbourhoods, orderly physical assemblages can spontaneously arise. Individual occurrences that engender these spontaneous coherences are called “free agents”(DD 52).

As far as the “free agents” are concerned, Prigogine provides Leary with an explanation that helps Leary to show that in the cyber-society the individuals that make up this society are free to choose whatever they want to do (freedom of the will) and still their interactions produce ordered structures:

Prigogine’s explanation of the phenomenon of convection are considered heretical by traditional science. For instance, we know that hot air rises, but there’s no reason why it should; molecules are simply more energetic and faster moving than their cooler cohorts. Prigogine asserts that the coherent emergent behavior of masses of hot air is intelligent and volitional. Hot air rises because it wants to.[...]
Although the motion of a single molecule might appear “selfish,” aimless with respect to the global organization of its environment, the local interactions of many such individuals produce macrosopic order, in certain circumstances (DD 53).

Another interesting thing about self-organizing chaotic systems like the ones described by Prigogine is that they are systems that are governed by orderly rules, yet their behavior is unpredictable because of their complexity. Leary explains: “[C]hanges in the initial state of a complex system, however small, lead to arbitrarily large changes after time elapses. Because the initial state is neither precisely measurable nor precisely reproducible, the system is not predictable” (DD 54). In Chaos theory this is known as the “butterfly effect” because of the assertion that a butterfly stirring the air in Beijing can cause a storm in New York next month (cf. Capra 1997: 134).

According to Leary, more and more people are discovering that change and disequilibrium are the driving forces of the universe and that stability (the static, predictable Newtonian universe) is an illusion (cf. DD 54). More and more people would accept the fact that we live in an unpredictable, chaotic world which cannot be controlled. This change in consciousness would make people realize that static hierarchical dogmatic social structures are outdated and, consequently, lead to change in society.

4.3. The observer-created universe

In this chapter I am going to show that the epistemology of Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory is constructivist. Like the constructivists, Leary argues that “reality” (what we accept as reality) is a construction of our minds. In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary presents an interesting argument from the field of quantum physics to back this idea – Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” In this chapter I want to discuss this argument and explain Leary’s concept of “formatting the brain,” which corresponds to the concept of imprinting Leary used in the 70s to show how we can create our own realities. Before I discuss Leary’s interpretation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle I will shortly explain what constructivism is.

Constructivists argue that we do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are. They see the human mind as “creator, imposing its categories on what it encounters” (Spivey 1997: 2). This means what we accept as objective reality is actually a construction of our minds. Although constructivism was not identifiable as a theoretical orientation until the 1920s or 1930s, constructivist positions have been postulated through the years from classical times (e.g., the scepticist Epimenides from Crete) to the Enlightenment (e.g., philosopher Immanuel Kant) to our modern age (e.g., psychologist Jean Piaget). Kant, for example, argued that humans cannot directly experience external reality because they cannot escape the “categories” and “forms of perception”(time, space) through which they perceive the world. Ergo, the “Ding an sich” (objective reality) remains an enigma (cf. ibid. 6). Constructivists argue that humans impose order on their sensory experience of the outside world, rather than discern it, and that they create knowledge, rather than discover it. As Nancy Neslon Spivey put it in The Constructivist Metaphor: “Constructivists view people as constructive agents and view the phenomenon of interest (meaning and knowledge) as built instead of passively ‘received’ by people whose ways of knowing, seeing, understanding, and valuing influence what is known, seen, understood, and valued”(Spivey 1997: 3). The “radical constructivist” Ernst von Glasersfeld, for example, maintains that knowledge is “exclusively an order and organization of a world constituted by our experience” (Watzlawick 1984: 24) and is not a reflection of an objective ontological reality. This means that the models of reality we create can help us to organize our experiential world, but they cannot help us to discover an objective reality.

Like the constructivists, Leary argues that objectivity is an illusion. According to Leary, Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” a percept of quantum physics, is a scientific proof for the fact that knowledge can never be objective, that is, cleansed of all subjective distortion (cf. FB 378). Leary argues that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that a subatomic particle’s position and momentum cannot both be accurately known, has serious implications for philosophy and science, as well as for our everyday lives (cf. ibid.). In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary explains:

Werner Heisenberg’s principle states that there is a limit to objective determinacy. If everyone has a singular viewpoint, constantly changing, then everyone creates his or her own version of reality. This gives the responsibility for reality construction not to a bad-natured biblical God or to an impersonal, mechanical process of entropic devolution, or to an omniscient Marxist state, but to individual brains. Subjective determinacy [...]. Our brains create our own spiritual worlds, as they say along the Ganges (CC 5f.).

Furthermore, Leary explains that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle “suggests that our observations fabricate the subject matter, i.e. realities. We can only know what our sense-organs, our measuring instruments and our paradigms or maps describe”(Info 2). According to Leary, the “Quantum universe” that Heisenberg and the other quantum physicists define is an observer-created universe. It is a universe that changes when the viewpoint of the observer changes.

In order to be able to understand Leary’s argument we have to have some background knowledge about quantum physics and we have to know the crucial difference between classical (Newtonian-Cartesian) physics and quantum physics. Since Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is often used by various cyber-philosophers as an argument to challenge scientific authority (cf. Dery 1996: 63) I want to explain it here in a detailed way.

Classical physics suggests that atoms are hard, solid particles that exist independent of an observer (cf. Capra 1982: 78). The quantum physicists, however, discovered that atoms and subatomic particles are far from being hard, solid objects. The quantum theory of Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, et al. suggests that subatomic particles are very abstract entities that have a dual nature. Depending on how we look at them, they appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves. But how can something be, at the same time, a particle, an entity confined to a very small space, and a wave which is spread out over a large region of space? Fritjof Capra explains:

The situation seemed hopelessly paradoxical until it was realized that the terms “particle” and “wave” refer to classical concepts which are not fully adequate to describe atomic phenomena. An electron is neither a particle nor a wave, but it may show particle-like aspects in some situations and wave-like in others. While it acts like a particle, it is capable of developing its wave nature at the expense of its particle nature, and vice versa, thus undergoing continual transformations from particle to wave and wave to particle. This means that neither electron nor any other atomic “object” has any intrinsic properties independent of its environment. The properties it shows – particle-like or wave- like – will depend on the experimental situation, that is, on the apparatus it is forced to interact with [italics mine] (ibid. 79).

According to quantum physics, no atomic “object” has any intrinsic properties independent of an observer (i.e., the measuring instruments and the concepts an observer uses to describe atomic objects). In other words, scientists create models of reality, using concepts which are constructions of their minds, and they create knowledge rather than discover it.

The quantum physicists had to realize that the classical concepts they used could not provide a complete description of reality. Heisenberg managed to express the limitations of classical concepts in a precise mathematical form, which is known as the uncertainty principle. Capra describes the uncertainty principle as follows:

The uncertainty principle [...] consists of a set of mathematical relations that determine the extent to which classical concepts can be applied to atomic phenomena; these relations stake out the limits of human imagination in the atomic world. Whenever we use classical terms – particle, wave, position, velocity – to describe atomic phenomena, we find that there are pairs of concepts, or aspects, which are interrelated and cannot be defined simultaneously in a precise way. The more we emphasize one aspect in our description the more the other aspect becomes uncertain, and the precise relation between the two is given by the uncertainty principle (ibid.).

By showing that all the concepts scientists use to describe atomic phenomena are limited, Heisenberg made it clear that scientists do not deal with objective truth but with limited and approximate subjective descriptions (models) of reality.

For Leary, this means that anybody who claims that his/her model of reality is the absolute truth is simply wrong. Since we cannot say anything definite about objective reality there is simply no way to justify the claim that a model of reality is true or false. Leary suggests that we should learn to think of models not as “false” or “true” in some abstract and absolute sense, but as the products of humans in concrete situations, all possessing some kind of relative truth, and none of them big enough and inclusive enough to contain all the truth. We filter reality. We only perceive what confirms our model of the world (cf. CC 39f.)

Leary argues that out of the million signals received from the outside world per second, the human brain ignores most and organizes the rest in conformity with whatever model, or belief system, it currently holds. According to Leary, our usual habit of screening out all signals not compatible with our own favorite reality-map is the mechanism which keeps us all far stupider than we should. If we want to become more intelligent we have to be able to change the models of reality imprinted in our brains and learn to see the world through different models simultaneously. According to Leary, intelligence means awareness of detail. The more signals you receive/process per second the more intelligent you are (cf. CC 35ff.).

Like many constructivists, cognitive psychologists, and cyberneticists, Leary sees the brain as an information processing system (computer). Our minds, according to this metaphor, serve as the software that programs the neural hardware (cf. CC 39). According to Leary, most of the classic psychological terms can now be redefined in terms of computer concepts. The psychological process of imprinting, for example, could now be called “formatting the brain.” Imprinting means sudden programming of the brain. Leary explains: “Imprinting is a multimedia input of data. For a baby, it’s the warmth of the mother, the softness, the sound, the taste of the breast. That’s called booting up or formatting. Now baby’s brain is hooked to Mama and then of course from Mama to Daddy, food, etc., but it ‘s the Mama file that’s the first imprint”(CC 35). (The reader who has read chapter three, where the concept of imprinting as interpreted by Leary is explained, should be able to understand this quotation.) According to Leary, psychedelic drugs enable us to “re-formate the brain,” that is, to change imprints. This means that if one takes LSD one’s experience of life is reevaluated in a neutral context and put it into a new order (cf. ibid.). This process of “re-formatting the brain” corresponds to John Lilly’s concept of “metaprogramming,” which is explained in chapter 3.3., “The Neuroelectric-Metaprogramming Circuit.” (It should be mentioned here that Leary’s computer-brain model was inspired by John Lilly’s model of the “human biocomputer” which Lilly developed in the mid 60s. Lilly used this model, which is described in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, for psychotherapy, meditation, and for his own experiments with LSD.)

According to Leary, at present the computer-brain-formatting metaphor is the best metaphor for explaining what happens during a psychedelic experience[52]; it is the best metaphor for understanding and operating the mind, the best metaphor for learning how we can consciously create our own realities (cf. CC 39).

4.4. The Sociology of LSD

In Leary’s Quantum Psychology psychedelic drugs do not play a central role. In various interviews Leary proclaimed that the personal computer is the LSD of the 1990s. However, psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA (Ecstasy) – seem to be making a big comeback in the 90s. That is why I want to discuss two interesting essays by Leary which explain why psychedelic drugs are in vogue again.

Are psychedelics really making a comeback in the 90s? Yes, they do. In an essay by Dan Joy called “Psychedelic Renaissance” (this essay serves as introduction to the 1992 edition of Psychedelics Encyclopedia) we can find quotations from newspaper/magazine articles from all over the world that indicate that there is a worldwide resurgence of interest in psychedelic drugs — especially LSD. Newsweek magazine, for example, reported in its February 3, 1992 issue that “acid is staging a serious comeback in the 90s, especially among affluent suburban teenagers.” According to this report, the rise in popularity is partially attributed to weaker doses, which result in fewer “bad trips” and are more likely to be taken at parties. Surveys conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan has shown that in 1991 LSD had overtaken cocaine in popularity among high school seniors for the first time since 1976 (cf. Stafford 1992: III-23).

In his essays “The Sociology of LSD” and “Just Say Know: The Eternal Antidote to Fascism,”[53] Leary gives a sociological explanation for this phenomenon. He explains why the first LSD boom declined and why more LSD is being used today (so he claims) than in the 60s.

According to Leary, LSD – like the computer, the railroad, or the automobile – is a technology (a tool which is the result of scientific knowledge being used for practical purposes) that introduced profound changes in society. However, “change causes fear,” Leary says. Whenever a human being is confronted with something new, he/she would automatically react with fear. Leary explains: “[T]here are powerful genetic mechanisms, reinforced by society, geared to react with fear at the approach of the new. This neophobia obviously has a survival value. At each stage of evolution each gene pool has been protected by those with the nervous system wired to cry Danger! Caution”(CC 101)! According to Leary, fear is the “glue” that holds “human hives” together. Fear guards continuity.

However, whenever cultures reach states of national security, economic prosperity, and imperial confidence people start to reflect about their fears. A counterculture emerges and encourage novel art forms and lifestyles. Philosophers, scientists and artists reject the old values and search for new meaning.

Exactly at these times, when philosophy, science, and religion “vibrate with transcendent energies” two things happen: external exploration into undiscovered geographical realms, and inner exploration using brain-change drugs (cf. CC 97). Of course, Leary is thinking about the 60s here. However, this cultural phenomenon could also be found in ancient India (the time of the Aryan conquest), ancient Greece, or in Europe in the 16^th century (the Enlightenment). Let us, for example, look at the situation in ancient Greece: Leary explains that the Athenians were self-reliant pioneer navigators that discovered new territories (external exploration), that the Greek philosophers developed new philosophic models that help us to understand how our brain works, and that the Greek mystery cult of Eleusis used an LSD-type substance in its annual rebirth ceremonies (inner exploration).

At such times in the emergence of a civilization, optimistic change-agents would manage to push our species into new adventures and introduce new technologies in society. However, the history of science has shown that every new technology that compels change in lifestyle or in understanding of the human nature has always taken one or two generations to be socialized and domesticated (cf. CC 102). Right after their discovery the newly discovered technologies are considered to be dangerous, heretical, and morally wrong by the government. Leary reminds us that Vatican astronomers in the 16^th century, for example, consistently refused to look through Galileo Galilee’s telescopes and tried to force Galileo to give up the heliocentric worldview.

Leary concludes that, given these facts, it is not surprising that LSD was considered to be dangerous and morally wrong when it first appeared in the 60s. According to Leary, the LSD-hysteria is over now because psychedelic drug usage is no longer a trendy topic for the media and politicians; we have new problems (oil, “crack”, the New Cold War, etc). Now that the LSD-hysteria has died down, more and more smart young people are learning how to intelligently use brain-change drugs like LSD for recreational purposes and to reach enlightenment. More and more people realize that the ultimate (and only) pleasure organ is the brain, “an enormous hundred-billion-cell hedonic system waiting to be activated”(CC 100). There are almost no bad trips being reported, because “the acid is clean and the users are sophisticated” (ibid.). According to Leary, the average suburban teenager today knows more about the varied effects of brain-change drugs than the most learned researcher twenty years ago”(ibid.).

Leary points out that, in addition to the pure LSD that is now available, new brain change drugs (“designer drugs”) are now appearing in plentiful quantities. In comparison to the “crude” psychedelics of long duration and unpredictable effect that were used in the 60s (e.g., STP), the new shortacting drugs (e.g., MDMA, the favorite drug of people in the techno-rave scene) would be safer and easier to handle.[54] As Leary puts it: “Just as computers today are more efficient, cheaper, and more reliable than those thirty years ago, so are the drugs”(ibid.). Leary predicts that the next decade will see the emergence of dozens of new, improved, stronger, safer, psychoactive drugs – and people would be ready for these new drugs:

There is an enormous market of some fifty million Americans today who would joyfully purchase a safe euphoriant, a precise psychedelic of short duration and predictable effect, an effective intelligence increaser, a harmless energizer, a secure sensual enhancer. An aphrodisiac! [...]
The last two decades have just whetted humanity’s eternal appetite for technologies to activate and direct one’s own brain function. The drug movement has just begun [my italics] (CC 100).

According to Leary, this increase in popularity of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, is closely linked to the fact that we are living in a world where everything is changing faster and faster. There would be an enormous acceleration of knowledge we have to keep up with in order to survive in the new information society. Psychedelics, especially LSD, would help us to cope with this acceleration by accelerating our brain functions. In his earlier theories, in the 60s and 70s, Leary suggests that LSD allows us to temporarily suspend our imprints (which means that we leave our rigid reality tunnels and enter a multi-choice reality-labyrinth) and re-imprint new, more complex, funnier realities. In terms of Leary’s Quantum Psychology, this means that under the influence of the drug there is a dramatic increase in the amount of information processed per second. The more new circuits are opened in the brain (the “ROM brain-circuits”), the more new information we notice in the objects we perceive. Leary argues that those people who like LSD will always be able to deal with what is to come because they know how to “surf the waves of chaotic change” planfully. “The future is going to spin faster and wilder, of that we can be sure” Leary predicts. “If you don’t like acid, rest assured you’re not going to like the future. Now, more than ever before, we need to gear our brains to multiplicity, complexity, relativity, change. Those who can handle acid will be able to deal more comfortably with what is to come [my italics]”(CC 103).

4.5. Designer Dying/The postbiological options of the Information Species

Leary was definitely right when he said that “the future is going to spin faster and wilder” — no matter if we took LSD or not. In the last couple of decades there has been an enormous acceleration of technological development so that today we are literally not able to predict which new, groundbreaking technologies will be discovered tomorrow. Technology is changing faster and faster. What was still considered to be science fiction yesterday is reality today (Internet, virtual reality, cloning, etc). In Leary’s opinion this accelerating change rate is a sign that things are getting better. As far as changes that new technologies introduce into society are concerned, Leary has always been an optimist: He thought that computers, the Internet, and other interactive media would help us to dissolve hierarchical social structures, create the realities of our dreams, make the world a better place to live in. More than that, decentralization of power and the emergence of a self-organizing cyber society would actually be the inevitable consequences of these new technologies. Computers, as well as psychedelic drugs, would enable us to break out of practically all (social, political and personality-brain) structures that limit our thinking and perception and force us to behave in a certain way. This means we (theoretically) have total control over the courses of our lives.

However, there seems to be one last limit: death. Is there a way to escape death? How can we solve this last problem? Can technology help us to become immortal? What does Leary say about the problem of death? I am including this chapter about death in my paper because the solutions that Leary suggests to overcome this last problem seem to be a logical consequence of his cyberpunk attitude, his utopian faith in technology, and his eternal optimism. Leary’s last book, Design for Dying (co-authored with R. U. Sirius), makes his Quantum psychology theory complete. In this book he suggests different techniques that allow us to transcend the last limit, which is imposed on us by mortality.

In his essay “Common-Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death”(CC 187–202), co-written with Eric Gullichsen, Leary predicted that the cybernetic age we are entering would be an age of freedom and enlightenment:

The exploding technology of light-speed and multimedia communication lays a delicious feast of knowledge and personal choice within our easy grasp. Under such conditions, the operating wisdom and control naturally passes from aeons-old power of gene pools, and locates in the rapidly self-modifying brains of individuals capable of dealing with an ever-accelerating rate of change.
Aided by customized, personally programmed, quantum-linguistic appliances, individuals can choose their own social and genetic future, and perhaps choose not to ‘die’ ”(CC 190).

Leary writes that first step towards solving the problem of death is to deprogram the “dying reflexes” imprinted in our brains by our culture and start thinking scientifically about alternatives to “going quietly and passively into the dark night or the neon-lit, Muzak-enhanced Disney-heaven of the Jesus Gang.” Leary points out that in pre-cybernetic cultures “the reflexive genetic duty of the top management (those in social control of the various gene pools) was to make humans feel weak, helpless, and dependent in the face of death. The good of the race or nation was ensured at the cost of the sacrifice of the individual”(CC 188). By controlling the “dying reflexes” and orchestrating the trigger stimuli that activate the “death circuits” (accomplished through rituals that imprint dependence and docility when the “dying alarm bells go off” in the brain) the gene-pool managers have maintained the attitude of dedication, obedience, and submission. For millennia the fear of death has depreciated individual confidence and increased dependence on authority. However, now that the individual is empowered by computers and other technologies, he/she would start thinking for him-/herself and question authority. People would learn to deprogram the “dying reflexes” and take personal responsibility for their dying process.

According to Leary, death is only a problem of knowledge, that is, information processing. “Once we comprehend that death is a problem of knowledge — information processing — solutions can emerge,” writes Leary (DD 143). Leary has always been very optimistic that scientists will soon develop technologies that make us immortal. In Design for Dying, he predicts that “the concept of involuntary, irreversible metabolic coma known as ‘death’ is about to become an outmoded, antiquated superstition”(ibid.). He suggests that it would be a wise decision to preserve one’s body (freeze the body, or store the information about the physical structure of the body digitally) and store one’s believe systems digitally, because it will only be a matter of five or ten years until the problem of biological death will be solved and we will also be able to exist as electronic life-forms on computer networks (cf. DD 149). “To immortalize: digitize!” is one of Leary’s slogans.

In Design for Dying, Leary discusses about thirty different techniques/technologies for extending our life spans and achieving immortality. Leary admits that these techniques do not give us a 100% insurance that we will become immortal. However, it is always better to be optimistic and think creatively about new possibilities than to be pessimistic and accept the bleak visions of the future imposed on us by authorities. I just want to mention three of the most spectacular techniques/technologies that Leary discusses, so the reader knows what Leary is talking about:

Cryonics: The body, or only the brain is frozen, preserved until a time of more advanced medical knowledge (cf. DD 153–61).
Nanotechnology: A nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter. Some scientists predict that we will soon be able to construct mechanical devices of this scale. Molecular robots could remove diseased DNA segments from the cells of AIDS patients, or repair cells in the body and keep the body from aging. A cryonically preserved brain that is damaged from freezing could be repaired. Machines that pick up single atoms and put them together to form molecules already exist (for more info see Scientific American homepage: http://www.sciam.com/exhibit/040000trends.html ). Nano-machines could produce any desired article (rocket ships, sweets, a body organ, etc) from dirt and sunlight. This would mean we have total control over the material world. (cf. DD 161–67).
The “microtome procedure” or “downloading:” This method is suggested by Carnegie-Mellon robotics scientist and artificial intelligence theorist Hans Moravec. It generally involves a cryonically preserved brain. The brain is sliced thin. Each slice is scanned into a computer using an electron microscope. The computer reconstructs the brain’s circuitry onto some form of hardware. Moravec’s notion of “downloading” offers a theoretical but highly exhaustively worked out solution to the problem of how mind can be extracted from body (cf. Dery 1996: 299f.). The information about the brain structure could be used to build a new brain with the help of nanotechnology or we could exist as electronic life form in computer networks (cf. DD 172). In addition to Moravec’s way of “downloading,” Leary offers another: “Through storage of one’s belief systems as online data structures, driven by selected control structures (the electronic analogue to will?), one’s neuronal apparatus will operate in silicon as it did on the wetware of the brain, although faster, more accurately, more self-mutably, and – if desired – forever” (DD 149).

Leary does not only predict that we will soon be immortal. He also predicts that, “In the near future, what is now taken for granted as the perishable human creature will be a mere historical curiosity, one point amidst unimaginable, multidimensional diversity of form. Individuals [...] will be free to choose to reassume flesh-and-blood form, constructed for the occasion by the appropriate science”(CC 202). According to Leary, all the new technologies that have been developed in the last couple of decades (especially computer-information technology) indicate that natural evolution of the human species is near completion. Leary points out that some people (especially computer scientists) are no longer interested in merely procreating, they are designing their successors. He quotes Hans Moravec who writes, “We owe our existence to organic evolution. But we owe it little loyalty. We are on the threshold of change in the universe comparable to the transition from nonlife to life”(CC 199). What Moravec and Leary mean is that humanity has now reached a turning point in the operation of the process of evolution. We are entering the “posthuman” age. Leary explains:

[It is] a point at which the next evolutionary step of the species will be under our control. Or more correctly, the next steps, which will occur in parallel, will result in an explosion of diversity of the human species. We shall no longer be dependent on fitness in any physical sense for survival. In the near future, computer and biological technologies [nanotechnology, genetic engineering] will make the human form a matter totally determined by individual choice. [...]
Humans already come in some variety of races and sizes. In comparison to what “human” will mean within the next century, we humans are at present as indistinguishable from another as are hydrogen molecules. As we become conscious of this, our anthropocentrism will decrease (DD 148).

Reading Leary’s predictions about future technologies that enable us to become immortal and make the human form “a matter totally determined by individual choice,” we get the impression that Leary’s aim, in Design for Dying, is to persuade people to place their faith in an end-of-the-century deus ex machina, a machine god that would free all of us from limitations of any sort, making us godlike beings – technology as the Savior of humanity. It cannot be denied that Design for Dying is a hymn to technological progress; however, this is not the main message that Leary tries to communicate in this book. Leary does not want people to blindly believe in his techno-eschatology. He does not want to persuade people to choose the cryonics option or to “download” their brains/minds into a computer just because he said that this would be the best thing to do. The aim of Design for Dying is to make people aware that they have choices, choices regarding how to die and, someday soon, they may have choices about whether to die. Leary tells us that we should not blindly accept the “dogmas of monotheistic-totalitarian religions” that have “cleverly monopolized the rituals of dying to increase control over the superstitious”(CC 189). The main message that Leary is trying to communicate in Design for Dying is “Think for yourself and question authority”(DD 2). (We will see that these are the basic guiding principles that guided Leary’s whole life and work.) In “Common-sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death,” Leary writes: “We do not endorse any particular technique of achieving immortality. Our aim is to review all options and encourage creative thinking about new possibilities [my italics]” (CC 195).

It should also be mentioned here that Leary was very well aware that technology is not intrinsically liberating and that his visions of a technotopia only show “one side of the coin.” At a talk in San Francisco in 1992, for example, Leary pointed out that the computer (which, here, stands for technology in general) can be an engine of liberation as well as a tool of social control. Making us aware that most funding for computer and virtual-reality research and development can be traced to the military, Leary argued that the goal of technological endeavor sponsored by governments and large corporations usually is to create rigidly controllable and predictable systems by “taking the human being out of the loop”(cf. Stafford 1992: III-48f.). In the light of this viewpoint, according to Leary, the project of developing “artificial intelligence” becomes one of duplicating or exceeding certain human capacities with machines, while eliminating the unpredictability of human intuition, creativity, free will, and whim – factors that have been responsible for many of the truly revolutionary advances in science and technology. Leary pointed out that artificial intelligence endeavors have utterly failed to approximate the responsiveness, sensitivity, subtlety, and complexity of the human brain. He summed up this perspective by referring to the phrase “artificial intelligence” as “an oxymoron”(cf. ibid.).

Given these facts, it is not surprising that Leary himself did not decide to “download” his own brain into a computer in order to escape death and continue to exist as electronic life-form (i.e., artificial intelligence). Nor did he choose the cryonics option or “die live on the Internet,” as he had announced soon before he died. He decided to be cremated. His ashes were placed aboard a rocket ship and sent to outer space, where they now orbit the earth. Why did he not choose the cryonics option? “I have always considered myself an astronaut, and in death this will become a reality,” was Leary’s answer to this question (DD 5). His plans for cryonic preservation were only intended as a symbolic gesture, encouraging people to investigate alternatives to “involuntary dying.”

Leary has always been of the opinion that it is not important what you do, as long as you are “doing your own thing”- which means that you keep thinking for yourself and questioning authority — and “do not lay your trip on others.” (Remember the two commandments that Leary suggested in The Politics of Ecstasy.) In Design for Dying, R. U. Sirius explains that Leary did not see himself as a messenger for the cryonics movement or any other movement because he had never liked to be part of somebody else’s “game.” As Sirius put it,

[W]hether it was Harvard, the peace movement, Eldridge Cleaver, the Californian penal system, or the Extropian movement (advocates of cryonics and nanotechnology), Tim Leary didn’t like to be a captive pawn in anybody else’s game. And so he escaped. Once again.
What is the way of the Tao? Move on.
Lao-Tzu (DD 192).

4.6. A comparison/summary of Leary’s theories

So far, I have presented only Leary’s view of the emergence of a new global counterculture which Leary calls the cyberpunks, or New Breed. Now the question arises: Is this countercultural movement Leary is talking about really going to change the world? Is this new counterculture really going to create a post-political society based on individual freedom? Will the techno-utopia that Leary’s cyberpunks believe in finally become reality? Or is the techno-eschatology that Leary’s cyberpunks put their faith in nothing more than a naive escapist fantasy that blinds us to the real (social, political, economic, and ecological) problems all around us?

Before I will try to answer these questions in a critical analysis of the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s, I want to shortly compare the three most important theories that Leary has produced in the course of his career as counterculture spokesman. There are two reasons why I think that is useful to make this comparison (which can also be read as a summary) before discussing the cybernetic counterculture of the 90s:

First of all, if we really want to understand the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s we first have to go back to the 60s, because the cyberpunks and “cyber-hippies” of the 90s have adopted many ideas and beliefs from the hippies of the 60s. One way to find out what the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s and the psychedelic counterculture of the 60s have in common is to study Leary’s theories. The comparison I am going to make will help me to show that the difference between these two countercultures is not as big as one might think. According to Leary, the 90s counterculture is actually a continuation of the 60s counterculture. As Leary might put it: The goal has remained the same, only the methods/technologies have changed.

Second, this comparison will help me to show that the hippies were not nearly as rural and anti-technology as some cultural critics argue. Leary, the controversial Harvard psychologist, was very well aware that he was “turning on the world” with a high-tech product (LSD) and that a large part of the hippies did not on principle reject technology. According to Leary, all the hippies wanted was to experience ecstasy and freedom — freedom from self-imposed limitations as well as limitations imposed on them by society — and, for them, the high-tech product LSD was acceptable because it helped them to reach their goal.

If we compare Leary’s Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness (The Politics of Ecstasy) to his Exo-Psychology theory (Exo-Psychology, Neuropolitics) and his Quantum Psychology theory (Chaos & Cyberculture, Design for Dying) we find that there are at least three things that these three theories have in common:

They are all based on the idea that we can create our own realities, that “reality” is a construction of our minds (i.e., our nervous systems).
They are all concerned with how we can attain freedom, how we can break free from all limits – selfimposed as well as external, metaphysical as well as physical. All the countercultures that Leary describes in his different theories have the same aim: Individual freedom, Ecstasy (i.e., “the experience of attaining freedom from limitations, either self-imposed or external”).
They are all based on the belief that science and technology can help us to attain freedom, enlightenment, and immortality.

Ad 1.) All of Leary’s theories are based on the belief that “reality” is a construction of our minds/nervous systems. In other words, the observer (i.e., the observer’s nervous system) creates the universe, or “reality tunnel,” he/she lives in. It could be said that Leary’s major thesis, in all of his theories, is that in this century the human nervous system has discovered its own creativity and its own limitations. We have discovered that the realities our parents, governmental institutions, priests, and scientists are trying to impose on us are arbitrary constructions and that the only way to escape these “reality tunnels” imposed on us is to learn to understand how our brains operate and use this knowledge to create our own realities. All of Leary’s theories describe models that explain how the human brain works, and suggest different methods which, according to Leary, can help us to escape the “authorized realities” that are “jealously guarded by the ones in power.”

In the 60s and 70s, Leary used the concept of imprinting to explain how the brain works. According to Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory, there are certain brief “critical periods” in a human being’s life during which imprints are made. These imprints (fixed neural structures) determine our realities; they determine what we will see and will “not see.” Imprints are permanent. Only strong bio-chemical shock can suspend an imprint. The method/technology to change imprints that Leary suggests is to take LSD. According to Leary, during a psychedelic drug experience the imprints in a person’s brain are suspended and the person can consciously re-imprint new realities, realities he/she likes better than the old ones.

In the 80s and 90s, psychedelic drugs played only a secondary role in Leary’s theories. “The PC is the LSD of the 90s,” Leary proclaimed. In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary suggests that the computer is a tool that can help us to create our own realities. How? Leary imagines that the human brain works like a digital computer. In his Quantum-Psychology theory, he explains that the brain converts every sensory stimulation into directories and files of 0/1 signals. The sensory input programs the brain and determines the realities that we inhabit. This means that every “reality” consists of 0/1 bits of information. According to Leary, this is the reason why for the brain digital (screen-) realities are not less real than the “material” reality and why the computer can help us to create our own (digital) realities.

Another argument that Leary uses to back his idea that reality can be consciously designed is a daring interpretation of chaos theory. In Design for Dying, Leary describes the world as a self-organizing chaotic system, as one big fractal. What goes on inside any one person’s head is reflected, in some manner, on every other level of reality. As Leary puts it: “As inside, so outside.” All of the different levels of reality (nervous system, social system, etc) are logically connected. This means that if we change our perception of the world and our thinking, the world will automatically change as well (because everything is logically connected). So any individual being has the ability to redesign reality at large (cf. DD 32f.). According to Leary, the fractal nature of the universe can be experienced when we take LSD.

I have just said that drugs only played a secondary role in Leary’s later theories. This is true. However, it should be mentioned here that, in Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary points out that the new “designer drugs” that are now appearing in “plentiful qualities” are also helpful tools that enable us to create our own realities (CC 100). According to Leary, the new designer drugs (e.g. Ecstasy) are much more predictable and easier to handle than the “crude” psychedelics that were used in the 60s. We just have to decide what we would like reality to be like and take the drug that will alter our observations about reality in the way we want it to be altered. In other words, the “world” will change because it is observed differently.

According to Leary, the Hippies were the first generation in human history that knew how to create their own realities consciously (with LSD). Equipped with new, refined technologies (computers, designer drugs, etc), the cyberpunks of the late 80s and 90s are already experts in creating “designer realities.”

Ad 2.) If we compare Leary’s different theories, in which he captures the most important beliefs and ideas that prevailed in the different countercultures he was part of, we find that the countercultures that Leary describes (the Beats, the Hippies, the cyberpunks) have many things in common. Most important of all, they all have the same aim: Individual freedom. According to Leary, the Beats, the Hippies, and the cyberpunks all belong to one and the same revolutionary movement. In his theories, Leary tries to show that this movement which has its roots in the 50s (the Beats) and 60s (the Hippies) is creating “a post-political society that is based on Ecstasy, i.e. the experience of individual freedom”(PE 2) Now how does Leary define the terms “Ecstasy” and “individual freedom”? For Leary, freedom means much more than free expression or having the right to vote. It is a state of consciousness in which all limits are transcended – Ecstasy. In the essay “Politics of Ecstasy: The Youth Revolutions of the 20^th Century,” Leary defines Ecstasy as follows: “[Ecstasy is] the experience of attaining freedom from limitations, either self-imposed or external; a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed. From the Greek ‘ex-stasis.’ By definition, ecstasy is an ongoing on/off process. It requires a continual sequence of ‘dropping out.’ On those occasions when many individuals share the ecstatic experience at the same time, they create a brief-lived ‘counter-culture.’ Synonyms [of Ecstasy are]: Euphoria, [...] bliss, nirvana, rapture”(PE 1). According to Leary, the “psychedelic-cybernetic revolution” that started with the Beats in the late 50s in America is a revolution based on ecstatic states of being in which politics (“the primitive struggle for power and territory”) and ethical norms are transcended. This movement has been made possible by psychedelic drugs and cybernetic-electronic technology. According to Leary, this individual-freedom movement is new to human history because it is not based on geography, politics, class, or religion. It has to do not with changes in the political structure but with changes in the individual mind. It is a “consciousness revolution.”

All of Leary’s theories contain models that explain how human consciousness has changed in the course of evolution. They describe different levels of consciousness which correspond to different stages in human evolution. According to Leary, human evolution is an evolution towards freedom. Psychedelics and computers play an important role in Leary’s vision of humanity’s development towards this state of total freedom. By helping us to understand how our brains work and enabling us to activate the higher levels of consciousness (which have not been accessible to the majority of people in the past) they help to speed up human evolution. As more and more people are discovering how to activate these higher levels of consciousness — which are characterized by freedom from limitations and an endless number of choices that are open to the individual — we are moving closer and closer to the final stage of human evolution which Leary describes as “the culmination of the mystical, transcendental, spooky, hallucinatory dreams which we have envisioned in our highest psychedelic (mind-opened) states”(PE 2).

The higher levels of consciousness that Leary describes in his Theory of the Seven Levels of Consciousness and his model of the Eight Circuits of the Brain (which is an extended version of the model with only seven levels) give us an idea how our future is going to look like. When we activate the so called post-terrestrial circuits of the brain (i.e., the higher levels of consciousness) that Leary defines in his Eight Circuit model, we are able to escape from the narrow “reality tunnels” (struggle for power and territory, etc) imprinted in our brains, which Leary sees as the cause of all suffering. When we activate the Metaprogramming Circuit, we can suspend imprints and re-imprint into our brains any reality we like. When we open the Neurogenetic Circuit, we can even break free from the “constraints of the DNA.” Finally, when we activate the Neuroatomic Circuit, we reach the highest level of consciousness which goes beyond form, words, and “hallucinatory struggles.” This means we are also free from the “constraints of matter” and become immortal. In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary predicts that this final stage of human evolution “where the human form is a matter totally determined by individual choice” is not so far away. Leary argues that, right now, scientists are developing new technologies (e.g., nanotechnology) that will allow us to “manipulate matter as information,” which means that, thanks to technology, we will soon be able to assume any form we like. For example, we will be able to “download” our brains into computers and exist as ‘immortal’ electronic life forms.

Ad 3.) Leary has never been a technophobe. In fact, he has always believed that science and technology can help us to attain freedom, enlightenment, and immortality. Leary has always been open to new scientific discoveries and has embraced the new technologies as aids to positive social and spiritual transformation.

In the 60s, Leary preached that LSD could help us to create a new post-political society based on Ecstasy and it would show us the way to enlightenment. Leary was very well aware of the fact the LSD is a high-tech product and he realized that the hippies were not against technology on principle. (I want to remind the reader that LSD originally came from the high-tech laboratories of a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, the Sandoz company.) LSD was not the only method/technology to expand one’s mind that Leary suggested in the 60s. He also organized high-tech light shows (psychedelic light shows) which were supposed to produce the same effects as a dose of LSD.

In the 70s, Leary realized that LSD was not the magic cure-all he thought it was. So he started looking for other technologies that might help us to free ourselves from authority and attain freedom, enlightenment and immortality. In Neuropolitics (1977), he suggests that computers could be used to create a “global electronic nervous system,” an electronic communication network which would weaken the power of politicians and finally lead to the fall of representative government. However, the emergence of globe-linking electronic communication would just be a period of transition that prepares us for the next stage in human evolution which, according to Leary’s Exo-Psychology , is space migration. In Exo-Psychology (“the psychology of post-terrestrial existence”), Leary argues that the purpose of technology is to enable us to leave this primitve planet and migrate to space where we might find our creator — the Higher Intelligence which seeded life on this planet in form of the DNA. According to Leary’s Exo-Psychology, the aim of life is to find this Higher Intelligence and fuse with “hir.” Technology would help us to reach this aim.

In the 80s, when computers became accessible to millions of people and the Internet was opened to the public, Leary became an energetic promoter of the Internet and virtual reality. In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary describes the computer as magic tool which enables the individual to create his/her own (digital) realities. As far as the social and political implications of computer-networking technology are concerned, Leary predicts that the free information exchange and feedback made possible by the Internet would create a post-political, non-hierarchical cybernetic society – a society based on Ecstasy, that is, the experience of individual freedom.

Leary goes even further and prophesies that the enormous acceleration in technological development we are witnessing right now will in the near future lead to technological breakthroughs (nanotechnology, “downloading”) that will enable us to “manipulate matter as information,” which means that the human form becomes “a matter totally determined by individual choice.” According to Leary, we have now reached a turning point in human evolution where the next evolutionary step will be under our control. This means we can actually “design” our futures. For example, we could decide to “download” our brains into computers and do away with the “old flesh” (body) all together. Newly discovered technologies such as nanotechnology would open up an unlimited number of choices. As Leary put it, “In the near future, what is now taken for granted as the perishable human creature will be a mere historical curiosity, one point amidst unimaginable, multidimensional diversity of form. Individuals [who do not like their existence as electronic life forms] will be free to choose to reassume flesh-and-blood form, constructed for the occasion by the appropriate science”(CC 202).

4.7. A critical analysis of the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s

In this chapter, I argue that Leary was a central figure in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s. I want to show that in his Quantum Psychology theory Leary expresses the most important ideas and beliefs that prevail in this counterculture, and want to critically discuss some of these ideas and beliefs. This chapter is subdivided into four subchapters:

In the first subchapter (4.7.1.), I shortly describe the most important events in the development of the cybernetic counterculture in chronological order.

In the second subchapter (4.7.2.), I critically analyze some of the ideas and beliefs that the cybernetic counterculture is based on, by comparing two interesting analyses of the cyberdelic phenomenon: Douglas Rushkoff’s Cyberia, which is a very emphatic, rather uncritical approach to the phenomenon and very similar to Leary’s approach[55]; and Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, which is a very critical analysis of the cyberdelic counterculture in which Dery harshly criticizes Rushkoff’s Cyberia and New Age visionaries like Leary whose “siren song of the nineties technophilia and sixties transcendentalism seduces the public mind with the promise of an end-of-the-century deus ex machina at a time when realistic solutions are urgently needed”(Dery 1996: 49). I argue that Leary’s theories are based on exactly the same beliefs as Rushkoff’s Cyberia. Dery’s criticism of the beliefs and ideas expressed in Rushkoff’s Cyberia uncovers some of the weak points in Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory. This critical analysis of the cyberdelic counterculture and the description of the development of this counterculture (4.7.1) shows that Leary really played a central role in this counterculture and that Leary’s theories perfectly capture the technotopian atmosphere that prevails in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s.

In the third subchapter (4.7.3.), I show that the blind techno-euphoria that predominates in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s is slowly wearing off because more and more cyber-hippies are realizing that their vision of the “cyber-society” — a world of intelligent, creative, self-reliant people who have free access to information, all made possible by cybernetic technology — is based on at least two problematic assumptions: First, the feedback and decentralization caused by cybernetic technology has only positive effects, that is, it creates individual freedom. Second, technology does not automatically make us more intelligent, creative and self-reliant. I will discuss these two problematic assumptions.

In the fourth subchapter (4.7.4.), I criticize Leary’s techno-utopianism by using arguments from Marshall McLuhan’s discourse on technology. I argue that McLuhan never was the technoutopian that Leary and and other contemporary technophiles like to portray.

4.7.1. The evolution of the cybernetic counterculture

In the essay “Electronica: The True Cyber Culture, ” Douglas Rushkoff notes that if we trace back the roots of this counterculture we find that the first group of people that praised the computer as a tool of liberation and transcendence were members of bohemian communities in California in the 70s:

Culturally speaking, it was the California “bohemian” communities [sic] that first embraced the computer as a tool of artistic and spiritual expression. As early as the mid-1970s, psychedelic renegade Timothy Leary was appearing in documentaries predicting that someday in the future, all of us would be exchanging messages electronically through our “word processors.” The visionary “Whole Earth Review” editor Stewart Brand announced to his hippy, environmentalist following that computers should be seen as aids to positive social and spiritual transformation (Rushkoff, Douglas. “Electronica: The True Cyber Culture.” n. pag. Online. Internet. 29 Aug 1998. Available http://www.levity.com/rushkoff/electronica.html).

In the 70s, only very few people had access to computers and the Internet — which then was called “ARPA-Net” — was only for military communication (cf. Dery 1996: 5f.). However, it did not take long until this vision of a society in which all, or at least most of the people are connected electronically became reality. In the early 80s, the computer revolution moved beyond the esoteric subculture of researchers and hobbyists and became a mass culture phenomenon. In 1983, when universities, business companies, and government agencies connected their computers to the Internet, what had been the Arpa Internet mutated into an anarchic global network (cf. ibid.).

In 1984, science fiction writer William Gibson, in his cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, invented the concept of cyberspace, described by Gibson as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” (Gibson 1995: 22). Many young “computer-freaks” started to believe in Gibson’s cyberpunk vision; and Gibson’s concept of cyberspace finally became reality. As Gibson himself put it, “Cyberspace is a consensual hallucination that these people have created. It’s like, with this equipment [computers, virtual reality gear, etc], you can agree to share the same hallucinations. In effect, they’re creating a world. It’s not really a place, it’s not really a space. It’s notional space” (quoted in Rucker 1992: 78).

According to Jon Lebkowsky, a contributing editor of the online magazine Hot Wired, the evolution of the cyberpunk subculture within the vibrant digital culture of today was mediated by two important events: One was the opening of the Internet. The other was the appearance of the first cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000. Lebkowsky explains:

The Internet derived much of its ambiance from a strange hybrid of 60s counterculture and 80s libertarianism. Mondo 2000, a glossy periodical that evolved from an earlier neopsychedelic zine [High Frontiers], incorporated this sociopolitical sensibility and blended it with their own peculiar sense of post-punk irreverence, drugged-up pranksterism, and high style. The result was a new cultural trend, or at least the media-generated illusion of one.
It was 1989. Computers were seen as tools of High Geekdom. Mondo, however, portrayed the new technology as sexy, hip, and powerfully subversive. And as Captain Picard might say, they made it so.
It was Bart Nagel’s unique computer-enhanced graphic style that pushed Mondo 2K [this is how its fans call it] over the top, making it something of a phenomenon in the early 90s. However, the real meat was in the cheerfully irreverent exploration of nascent technoculture and the evolving computer underground from the perspectives of the writers/editors, whose handles were R.U. Sirius, St. Jude, and Queen Mu. Besides displaying strangeness and charm, early Mondo was the only popular representation of the hacker ethic, described by author Andrew Ross as “libertarian and cryptoanarchist in its right-to-know principles and its advocacy of decentralized knowledge. [It] asserts the basic right to all users to free access to all information. [...]” (quoted in Kroker 1997: 16).

It should be mentioned here that Leary was a contributing editor of Mondo 2000. Many of Leary’s essays about the cyberpunks and the subversive potential of computers (the most important of these essays can be found in Chaos & Cyberculture) were first published in Mondo 2000.

Mondo 2000 does not only report about computer hackers and the Internet. In Mondo 2000, we find articles about smart drugs (legal drugs that are supposed to enhance your intelligence), virtual reality, electronic music, chaos theory, artificial life, nanotechnology, brain implants, designer aphrodisiacs, psychedelics, techno-erotic paganism, etc. If we look at these different topics we see that Mondo tries to unite the scientific culture and the nonscientific culture. In Mondo the technical world and the underground world of popular culture and street level anarchy are converging. Another thing we can see if we look at these different topics is, that this cultural phenomenon that Mondo tries to make us aware of actually encompasses a considerable amount of subcultures, among them computer hackers, “ravers” (people who regularly go to all-night electronic dance parties known as “raves”), technopagans (this subculture combines neopaganism with digital technology), and New Age technophiles.

Now what do all of these different subcultures that express their views in Mondo 2000 have in common? This question leads us to the discussion part of this chapter.

4.7.2. Deus ex machina: a deadly phantasy?

In his cyber-hippie travelogue, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, Douglas Rushkoff gives a comprehensive survey of the subcultures discussed in Mondo. Rushkoff collectively calls these counterculture Cyberia, or the cyberian counterculture of the 90s. Accordi ng to Rushkoff (who was influenced by Leary’s theories very much), there are at least two things that all of the cyberian subcultures have in common:

the belief that we can create our own realities, that “reality” is a construction of our minds.
the belief that technology can help us to create our own realities and break free from all limits (cf. Rushkoff 1995: 3–7).

(I decided to use the same phrasing as in the comparison of Leary’s theories because I want to show that, apart from a few small details, Rushkoff and Leary share the same worldview.)

Like Leary, Rushkoff’s cyberians see the world as one big self-organizing chaotic system, as one big fractal which is governed by orderly rules. According to Rushkoff, we are not able to fully understand these rules and to control this chaotic system because the system is so complex. The only thing we know is that our world is entirely more interdependent than we have previously understood. Like Leary, Rushkoff argues that what goes on inside any one person’s head is reflected, in some manner, on every other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability to redesign reality. If you change, the world changes. (cf. ibid. 23). According to Rushkoff, there are different ways to experience the fractal nature of the universe, or — to use Rushkoff’s terminology – there are different ways to access Cyberia, or “cyberspace.” “Cyberspace can be accessed through drugs, dance, spiritual techniques, chaos maths, and pagan rituals,” Rushkoff explains (ibid. 3), adding that,

Ultimately, the personal computer and its associated technologies may be the best access point to Cyberia. They even serve as a metaphor for cyberians who have nothing to do with computers but who look at the net as a model for human interaction. It allows for communication without the limitations of time or space, personality or body, religion or nationality. The vast computer-communications network is a fractal approach to human consciousness. It provides the means for complex and immediate feedback and iteration, and is even self-similar in its construction, with giant networks mirroring BBSs [Electronic Bulletin Board Services], mirroring users’ own systems, circuit boards, and components that themselves mirror each participant’s neural biocircuitry. In further self-similarity, the monitors on some of these computers depict complex fractal patterns mirroring the psychedelics-induced hallucinations of their designers, and graphing – for the first time – representations of existence as a chaotic system of feedback and iteration (ibid. 37).

If we read these two quotations we see that, for Rushkoff’s cyberians, the term “cyberspace” (and its synonym “Cyberia”) does not only refer to computer networks and data banks that are experienced by computer users as a boundless space. Fore them, the “hypertext-universe” of the Internet is only one manifestation of a mystical world where the limits of space, time, and body are transcended. Rushkoff explains: “Cyberia is the place a businessperson goes when involved in a phone conversation, the place a shamanic warrior goes when travelling out of body, the place an ‘acid house’ dancer goes when experiencing the bliss of a techno-acid trance. Cyberia is the place alluded to by the mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents of every science, and the wildest speculations of every imagination”(Rushkoff 1995: 5). According to Rushkoff, cyberspace, or Cyberia, is a “place” (a realm of consciousness) where we can create our own realities, a world where we can be anyone or anything we want to be. Psychedelic drugs and computers are seen as technologies that help us to access and explore this strange hallucinatory world.

Like Leary’s cyberpunks, Rushkoff’s cyberians believe that technologies such as psychedelic drugs and computers are a part of the continuing evolution of the human species towards greater intelligence, empathy, and awareness. To them, science/technology is the same as magic; spiritual is digital (another similarity to Leary’s Quantum psychology). They all share the one vision that technology can help us to break free from limits of any sort, metaphysical as well as physical, and will finally lead us to enlightenment. Like Leary’s cyberpunks, Rushkoff’s cyberians believe that technological development is in some kind of asymptotic acceleration. As psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna, on of the main figures in Cyberia put it:

Nano-technology, psychedelic chemistry, the Internet, cloning, [...] – all of these things synergizing each other are producing very rapidly a world which is almost incomprehensible to most people. There is no reason to suppose that this process is going to slow down. [...] At any point there could be a breakthrough – cold fusion, real extraterrestrial contact, a nanotechnological assembler, a telepathic drug, a longevity drug that stops aging. It could come from any of so many directions that I’m sure we will be surprised” (Eisner, Psychedelic Island Views, Vol 3, Issue 1: 9).

Rushkoff and McKenna predict that technology — by electronically and psychically connecting all the people on this planet and thereby creating one big collective consciousness — will help us to create the necessary conditions for humankind’s “great leap into hyperspace,” a hyperdimensional shift into a timeless non-personalized reality, which is the eschatological endpoint of the cyberian vision of the future of humanity (cf. Rushkoff 1995: 147). In the introduction to Cyberia, Terence McKenna (who in the media is presented as Leary’s heir apparent) describes this “great leap into hyperspace” as follows:

We’re closing distance with the most profound event that planetary ecology can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the chrysalis of matter. And it’s never happened before – I mean the dinosaurs didn’t do this, nor did the prokaryotes emerging. No. This takes a billion years of forward moving evolution to get to the place where information can detach itself from the material matrix and then look back on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension (ibid. 7).

McKenna speculates that this “great leap into hyperspace” may usher in a cybernetic Garden Eden where “all of the technological appurtenances of the present world have been shrunk to the point where they have disappeared into [nature] and scattered as grains of sand along the beaches of this planet and we all will live naked in paradise but only a thought away is all the cybernetic connectedness and ability to deliver manufactured goods and data that this world possesses”(quoted in Dery 1996: 9f.).

Rushkoff and McKenna do not explain exactly how the interconnection of all human beings will give birth to a “planetary consciousness” so that this great leap into hyperspace can take place, but it has something to do with chaos theory – with the idea that order can arise from chaos, and the biological phenomenon that previously disconnected elements reach a critical point where they suddenly cooperate to form a higher-level entity. It should be mentioned here that Rushkoff’s vision of the future of mankind is a synthesis created from the basic concepts of a number of scientific and esoteric theories: Chaos theory’s premise that order can spring from seemingly random phenomena, James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (in which Loveleock suggests that the earth is a big self-organizing system), Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “noosphere” (which could be defined as a combined field of all human consciousness) , McLuhan’s concept of a Global Village, and psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna’s Timewave theory, in which McKenna suggests that this “great leap into hyperspace” (the culmination of the asymptotic acceleration of technological development, the end of history and linear time) will take place in the year 2012.[56] (For further explanations and references see Dery 1996: 43–48.)

The reader might ask him-/herself what it will feel like at the end of linear time when we all leap into hyperspace. According to McKenna, the only thing that comes close to how human experience in hyperspace will feel like, is a DMT trip (cf. ibid. 90). DMT is by far the strongest psychedelic drug. One user in Cyberia says, “It’s like taking every LSD experience you’ve ever had and putting them at a head of a pin”(ibid. 87). Rushkoff explains that experimentation with DMT and virtual reality could be seen as a preparation for the coming hyperdimensional shift into hyperspace and can “help cyberians to discriminate between what is linear, temporary, and arbitrary, and what is truly hyperdimensional”(ibid.). (Leary also believed that experimentation with DMT and LSD is a good way of preparing oneself for the wild and chaotic future that lies ahead.)

I now want to come back to the concept that reality is a construction of our minds, because, in my opinion, this is the key idea that underlies Rushkoff’s Cyberia. Just like Leary, Rushkoff’s cyberians believe that we can learn to consciously change our realities. Rushkoff, like Leary, tries to back this belief by referring his readers to quantum theory which teaches that “just becoming aware of something changes it”(ibid. 23). We only need the right technologies (psychedelics, computers, etc) that enable us to alter our perception of the world. The psychedelic experience, for example, leads cyberians to conclude that “they have the ability to reshape the experience of reality and thus – if observer and observed are one – the reality itself”(ibid.) This means that if we alter our perception of the world the society we live in automatically changes as well. This is the cyberian’s alternative to politics. Change your consciousness and the world will change automatically.

According to Rushkoff, the idea that reality is an arbitrary construction is something which strongly connects the cyberian counterculture of the 90s with the hippies of the 60s. Rushkoff points out that the hippies were the first generation that realized that reality is an arbitrary construction. The hippies would have handed on their knowledge to the cyberian counterculture of the 90s that now continues their mission. As Rushkoff puts it, “[T]he single most important contribution of the 1960s and the psychedelic era to popular culture is the notion that we have chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the cyberian counterculture of the 1990s, armed with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully” (ibid. 6f.).

Cultural critic Mark Dery agrees with Rushkoff that the 90s are in a way a return of the 60s. (We will see that this is actually the only point on which Dery and Rushkoff agree.) In Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Dery writes that,

The return of the sixties [...] is at the heart of the cyberdelic wing of fringe computer culture. Not surprisingly, many of cyberdelia’s media icons are familiar faces from the sixties: No magazine cover story on the phenomenon is complete without the septuagenarian Timothy Leary, admonishing readers to “turn on, boot up, jack in” and proclaiming that the “PC is the LSD of the 1990s”[my italics], or Steward Brand, the former Merry Prankster[...] Other prominent cyberdelic spokespeople, such as the Mondo 2000 founders Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius [...] are steeped in the Northern California counterculture of the sixties. [...]
Cyberdelia reconciles the transcendentalist impulses of the sixites with the infomania of the nineties. In cyberdelia, the values, attitudes, and street styles of the Haight-Asbury/Berkeley counterculture intersect with the technological innovations and esoteric traditions of Silicon Valley. The cartoon opposites of disheveled, dope-smoking “head” and buttoned-down engineering student, so irreconcilable in the sixties, come together in [...] Rushkoff’s cyberians (Dery 1996: 22f.).

This quotation shows that Leary really played a central role in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s. It shows that the media made Leary an icon of the cyberdelic counterculture. The media enabled Leary to attract many young people to the subversive potential of the computer and the Internet.

Dery points out that, increasingly, the media image of the “Generation Xers” who predominate in high-tech subcultures is that of the cyber-hippie, or, in England, the “zippie” (“Zen-inspired pagan professional”). Cyber-hippies, or zippies, are a combination of sixites children and nineties techno people. They are portrayed in the media as smart young people who dress in “cyberdelic softwear” (T-shirts printed with squirming sperm, leggins adorned with scutting spiders, jewelry fashioned from computer parts, belled jester caps that are popular at raves, etc) and “meditate on psychedelic mandalas like the New Electric Acid Experience video advertised in Inner Technologies, a mail order catalogue of ‘tools for the expansion of consciousness’”(ibid. 23f.). In addition, cyber-hippies like to boost their brain power with smart drugs and “mind machines” — headphone-and-goggle devices that “flash stroboscopic pulses at the user’s closed eyes, accompanied by synchronized sound patterns, [...inducing] trancelike states characterized by deep relaxation, vivid daydreams, and greater receptivity toward autohypnotic suggestion for behavior changes”(ibid. 24).

What Dery shows is that the cyber-hippies of the 90s are a generation of young people that has found a way to live with technology – something the anti-tech, back-to-the-land hippies never accomplished. As Dery puts it, “What distinguishes the cyberdelic culture of the nineties from psychedelic culture, more than anything else, is its ecstatic embrace of technology”(ibid.). According to Dery, the cyber-hippies see themselves as the complete opposite of the anti-tech, anti-science hippies and dismiss the 60s counterculture as “a return to nature that ended in disaster.” However, there is one thing that people who characterize the psychedelic counterculture of the 60s as intractably anti-technological forget to take into consideration, namely that,

The archetypal hippie experience was not dancing naked in a field of daisies, but tripping at an acid rock concert. The psychedelic sound-and-light show was as much a technological as a Dionysian rite, from the feedback-drenched electric soundtrack to the signature visual effects (created with film, slides, strobes, and overhead projectors) to the LSD that switched on the whole experience (ibid. 26).

Dery argues that the inhabitants of the 60s counterculture — exemplified by Leary or Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters — may have dreamed of enlightenment, but “theirs was the ‘plug-and-play’ nirvana of the ‘gadget-happy American’ – attained not through years of Siddhartalike questioning but instantaneously, by chemical means, amidst the sensory assault of a high-tech happening”(Dery 1996: 29). He refers to Theordore Roszak who, in The Making of a Counter Culture, points out that, “[...] the Learyite article of faith that the key to cosmic consciousness and sweeping societal change could be found in a chemical concoction sprang from a uniquely American faith in technology (Dery 1996: 25). (I think that Leary would not object to the quotation above.)

What Dery tries to show with this excursion back to the 60s is that, from a countercultural point of view, the 90s are really a return of the 60s. According to Dery, the cyber-hippies of the 90s have taken over many of the values and beliefs of the 60s counterculture and integrated them into their worldview – for example, the value of individual freedom and the belief that technology (chemistry) can help us attain freedom and enlightenment. Other ideas such as the ideal of living in perfect harmony with nature or Marx’s program to improve the social and economic conditions in our decadent (i.e., capitalistic) society, however, would have been dismissed as irrelevant to the 90s. As far as the difference between the hippies’ and the cyber-hippies’ attitudes towards politics is concerned, Dery points out that in spite of the fact that many hippies were only interested in taking drugs, politics still played an important role in the 60s counterculture (the antiwar movement, the civil rights struggle, black power, the New Left, feminism). In contrast to the hippies, the cyber-hippies of the 90s do not care about politics at all. Dery quotes cultural critic Todd Gitlin who, in The Sixties. Years of Hope, Days of Rage, notes that,

[In the 60s, there] were tensions galore between the radical idea of political strategy – with discipline, organization, commitment to results out there in the distance – and the countercultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself [...] and the rest of the world be dammed (which it was already). Radicalism’s tradition had one of its greatest voices in Marx, whose oeuvre is a series of glosses on the theme: change the world! The main battalions of the counterculture – Leary, the Pranksters [...] – were descended from Emerson, Thoureau, Rimbaud: change consciousness, change life! [...]
[Countercultural phrasemakers such as Leary] were antipolitical purists for whom politics was game playing, a bad trip, a bringdown, a bummer. Indeed all social institutions were games... The antidote to destructive games was – more playful games (ibid. 23).

Dery argues that this “freak-politico dichotomy” of the 60s counterculture is resolved in the cyber-hippie counterculture, by “jettisoning ‘the radical idea of political strategy’ and updating ‘the countercultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself’”(ibid.). According to Dery, in the 90s counterculture the victory of the countercultural tradition over political radicalism is complete. As Dery puts it, “[M]ovement politics or organized activism of virtually any sort are passé among the cyber-hippies, for whom being boring is the cardinal sin and ‘hijacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games’ the be-all and end-all of human existence. After all, ‘sport, pleasure, and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe’”(ibid. 32f.).

The last sentence of the quotation above is an insinuation to a passage from Rushkoff’s Cyberia, in which Rushkoff writes that, “[To the cyberians], the truth of Cyberia is a sea of waves – chaotic, maybe, but a playground more than anything else. [To them], sport, pleasure, and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe [...] a world free of physical constraints, boring predictability, and linear events”(Rushkoff 1995: 181f.).

Dery harshly criticizes the cyberian worldview for its escapism and naiveté. He argues that Rushkoff’s “fuzzily defined program for personal and social change” – the idea that we have chosen our reality arbitrarily, and that the whole world is one big fractal which changes when the individual mind changes – bears a distinct resemblance to Freud’s concept of the “omnipotence of thoughts,” which Dery describes as “the primitive mode of thought that assumes a magical correspondence between mental life and the external, physical world. Primitives, wrote Freud, ‘believe they can alter the external world by mere thinking’”(Dery 1996: 42). To deny the existence of an objective physical reality and to place one’s faith in the liquid indeterminacy of a “quantum reality” would be naive. In Dery’s opinion the cyberians’ escape into cyberspace where they feel liberated from the limitations of space, time, and body is just a form of detachment that has nothing to do with freedom. Dery advises Rushkoff and his fellow cyberians that they would do well to heed media philosopher Walter Kirn’s admonition that “[w]hat the [cyberians] appear fated to learn from their ventures into pure electronic consciousness is that ultimate detachment is not the same as freedom, escape is no substitute for liberation and rapture isn’t happiness. The sound-and-light show at the end of time, longed for by these turned-on nerds, seems bound to disappoint”(ibid. 49).

In contrast to Rushkoff who, like his fellow cyberians, believes that technology can help us to transcend all limits, Dery is very skeptical about the cyberians’ uncritical, euphoric embrace of technology. He criticizes Rushkoff’s uncritical approach to the ideas and beliefs that prevail in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s.

[...] Rushkoff doesn’t explore, he “groks” – a sixties verb meaning to instantly, intuitively apprehend. It is a method of uncritical inquiry appropriate to the Northern Californian corner of fringe computer culture he traverses, which is nothing if not defiantly antirational. In it, an utterly uncritical embrace of the proto-New Age aspects of sixties counterculture has been freed from the shackles of back-to-nature romanticism and hitched to the liberatory promise of technology (mind machines, smart drugs, BBSs, virtual reality).
[...] Rushkoff’s cyberians give voice to nearly all of cyberdelic culture’s received truths, foremost among them the techno-pagan axiom that rationalism and intuition, materialism and mysticism, science and magic are converging. [...] Rushkoff contends that Western reason, with its emphasis on linear, rational thought, is unable to make sense of the “overall fractal equation for the postmodern experience,” where the “rules of linear reality no longer apply”(ibid. 41f.).

The reader might have noticed that Dery’s criticism of Rushkoff’s Cyberia could just as well be directed at Leary’s Quantum Psychology theory and his concept of the cyber-society. Like Rushkoff, Leary believes that “reality” is an arbitrary construction and that Western reason (Newtonian physics, etc) is unable to make sense of the chaotic, fractal, non-linear world we inhabit. Both Leary and Rushkoff present technology as something which is absolutely, 100% positive. They both see technology as an “extension” of the human being.

As far as Leary’s and Rushkoff’s visions of the future are concerned, they are both based on the believe that technology will help us to realize the mystical dream of rising beyond the “prison of flesh.” Both Leary and Rushkoff predict that we will soon reach the final stage of evolution, the moment when “information can detach itself from the material matrix.” Also Leary’s and Rushkoff’s explanations of how this techno-mystical dream will become true are practically the same. Like McKenna in his Timewave theory, they both argue that the exponential acceleration of technological development we are witnessing at present will lead to unimaginable breakthroughs: “downloading” (that is, mapping of the idiosyncratic neural networks of our minds onto computer memory, thereby rendering the body superfluous), the nanotechnological assembler (which could help us to create machines that stop our bodies from aging), etc. Both Leary and Rushkoff advise their readers to prepare themselves for the “great leap into hyperspace” that Terence McKenna predicts in his Timewave theory – a world in which all limits are transcended, a world of total freedom. (It should be mentioned that here freedom is not defined in terms of social liberties but in morphological, neurological, and genetic terms. Freedom is freedom of form.)

In contrast to Leary, Rushkoff, and McKenna whose main concern is to prepare us for the “posthuman liftoff from biology,” Dery tries to bring us back to the ground: “Posthumanist visions of the mind unbound [...] are a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the end of limits, situated (at least for now) in a world of limits. The envisioned liftoff from biology and gravity [...] by borging [from cyborg = cybernetic organism], morphing [the ability to change one’s form], and ‘downloading,’ or launching our minds beyond all bounds is itself held fast by the gravity of the social and political realities, moral issues, and environmental conditions of the moment,”(Dery 1996: 15). In the last chapter of Escape Velocity, “Cyborging the Body Politic: Obsolete Bodies and Posthuman Beings,” Dery refutes the cyberian assumption that consciousness is the result of wholly material processes and is therefore reproducible by technical means. His arguments taken from scientists of different fields try to prove that “downloading” is theoretically impossible (cf. ibid. 318). Dery makes us aware that the cyberdelic vision of a techno-mystical apotheosis in the “there and then” – like so many other millenarian prophecies before it – only diverts public discourse from the political and socioeconomic inequities of the “here and now.” Blindly placing one’s faith in a “theology of the ejector seat,” at a time when realistic solutions are urgently needed, would be a risky endgame. Dery points out that “the cyberians’ otherworldly trapdoor assumes various guises, among them the wiring of the human race into a collective consciousness, the technopagan ability to dream up a “designer reality” though a judicious application of the knowledge that “we have chosen our reality arbitrarily, and the “chaos attractor at the end of time [i.e., the “great leap into hyperspace,” “the freeing of life from the chrysalis of matter”]”(ibid. 49).

In truth, the cyberdelic rhetoric would represent what media philosopher Walter Kirn has called “an eruption of high-tech milleniarism – a fin de siècle schizoid break induced by sitting too long at the screen”(ibid.). The beliefs expressed in Cyberia would be textbook examples of what historian Leo Marx calls “the rhetoric of the technological sublime,” hymns to progress that rise “like froth on a tide of exuberant self-regard, sweeping over all misgivings, problems and contradictions”(cf. ibid. 316).

As far as the cyberian dream of “rising beyond the old flesh” (body) is concerned, Dery argues that it is dangerous to see the brain/mind as an object separating the body from the person/subject that lives in it. He wants to bring us back to our senses, to remind everyone of us that he/she lives in a body. Dery warns us that if we do not keep this subjective kind of body sense in mind as we negotiate our technoculture then we will objectify ourselves to death (cf. ibid. 311). He quotes cultural critic Donna Haraway who admonishes us that any transcendentalist ideology that promises a way of transcending the body (i.e., a way of denying immortality) contains the seeds of a “self-fulfilling apocalypse.” Haraway argues that, “[What we need, more than ever,] is a deep sense of the fragility of the lives that we’re leading – that we really do die, that we really do wound each other, that the Earth is really finite, that there aren’t any planets out there that we know of we can live on, that escape velocity [i.e., the vision of a techno-mystical apotheosis in the there and then] is a deadly fantasy”(ibid. 17).

4.7.3. This trip is over

The techno-euphoria that prevails in the cyberdelic counterculture seems to be slowly wearing off. More and more cyberians are realizing that the PC, the Internet, and other new technologies did not really bring the social, political, and personal changes they thought they would. Even R. U. Sirius, who used to be an euphoric spokesman of cyberculture, has finally realized that the visions of the cyber-society and the “liftoff from biology and gravity” have blinded us to the real problems on this planet. As Sirius put it:

[A]nybody who doesn’t believe that we’re trapped hasn’t taken a good look around. We’re trapped in a sort of mutating multinational corporate oligarchy that’s not about to go away. We’re trapped by the limitations of our species. We’re trapped in time. At the same time identity, politics, and ethics have long turned liquid. [...]
Cyberculture (a meme that I’m at least partly responsible for generating, incidentally) has emerged as a gleeful apologist for this kill-the-poor trajectory of the Republican revolution. You find it all over Wired [an online magazine] – this mix of chaos theory and biological modeling that is somehow interpreted as scientific proof of the need to devolve and decentralize the social welfare state while also deregulating and empowering the powerful, autocratic, multinational corporations. You’ve basically got the breakdown of nation states into global economies simultaneously with the atomization of individuals or their balkanization into disconnected sub-groups, because digital technology conflates space while decentralizing communication and attention. The result is a clear playing field for a mutating corporate oligarchy, which is what we have. I mean, people think it’s really liberating because the old industrial ruling class has been liquefied and it’s possible for young players to amass extraordinary instant dynasties. But it’s savage and inhuman. Maybe the wired elite think that’s hip. But then don’t go around crying about crime in the streets or pretending to be concerned with ethics (quoted in Kroker 1997: 20–23).

For R. U. Sirius, the techno-euphoria is gone. This trip is over. Cyberpunk is absorbed into the mainstream. The real problems of our material world are still here. To deny these problems would be futile (cf. ibid.). It seems that we are back to normal again. This means we will have to deal with the real problems, discuss politics and ethics again. Designer realities are fun but we have to be aware of the fact that they are just an escape from the real world. In our real world freedom means hard work. Cyberspace, like psychedelics, seems to be a dead end. It is just not enough to philosophize about chaos theory, quantum physics and “downloading” and wait until someday, perhaps, the world will adjust itself to one’s cosmology.

It seems that Leary’s concept of the cyber-society – a postpolitical, non-hierarchical society made possible by cybernetic technology, in which the computer-literate, super-intelligent, open-minded, change-oriented, self-reliant, irreverent free-thinker is the norm and the person who is not internetted and does not think for him-/herself and questions authority is the “problem person” (cf. PE 5) – will always remain an utopian dream because it is based on two problematic assumptions:

First of all, Leary suggested that the feedback, decentralization, and connectedness created by communication-networking-technologies has only positive effects, that is, it creates individual freedom and weakens the power of the government. Leary forgot to take into consideration that decentralization is a double edged sword. It slowly dissolves old authoritarian hierarchical political structures (or so it is claimed) while at the same time creating a “playing field for a mutating corporate oligarchy.” Not only the “good guys” (the cyberpunks) are using the electronic media; the “bad guys” (the multinational corporations, politicians, etc) are using them as well, and they very well know how to manipulate people. The multinational corporations, for example, very well know how to program people to believe that you can only be free if you have the newest technology. Freedom means having the fastest computer with modem, a satellite dish on your roof, a cellular phone, a video recorder, etc. And people really believe that they can buy freedom. Even Leary himself tried to convince us that “freedom in any country is measured perfectly by the percentage of Personal Computers in the hands of individuals”(CC 45).

Like Leary, the multinational corporations promise us a cybernetic paradise, a world in which all limits are transcended. The AT&T “You Will” campaign[57], for example, is such a promise. In Escape Velocity, Mark Dery describes the AT&T “You Will” campaign as follows:

In AT&T’s corporate brand TV spots, all is sweetness and light. “Have you ever opened doors with the sound of your voice?” asks a familiar voice, over a countrified jingle that conjures the wide, open territories of the electronic frontier. “You will.” A young woman steps out of an elevator, her arms full, and her apartment doors unlocks at her command. [...]
Brought to you by the mother of all communication companies, AT&T’s future is, in the best tradition of technological Utopias, a luminous place, not far off. [...] The golden glow that suffuses the spacious interiors in the spots – light made gauzy with the aid of fog machines – sentimentalizes corporate dreams of electronic interconnectedness by premisting the viewer’s eyes. Moreover, it lends AT&T’s vision of things to come an almost metaphysical air, drawing on the long-standing equation of the luminous and the numinous – an equation that is at least as old as the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughn’s evocation of the ultimate virtual reality, the afterlife (“They are all gone into the world of light!”) and as recent as the radiant aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Dery 1996: 11).

Oddly enough, the laptop computers, cellular phones, videophones, etc which multinational corporations like AT&T have brought us seem not to have lightened our burden as workers because “in a world where ‘we are all connected’ [...] the office intrudes on our vacations, the workday stretches into our evenings: Video screens, phones, and laptop jacks convert every seat in the Boeing 777 into an airborne office; the pagers and cellular phones provided by one resort in Vail, Colorado, turn downtime on the ski lifts into worktime”(ibid. 12). It is frightening how easily our privacy can be invaded in the digital age.

Nonetheless, many people in the Western World believe that television, cellular phones, computers, the Internet, etc make them more and more independent from authorities, and some people still hope that soon “superintelligent” machines will do all the work for them so they just have to lean back and “enjoy the show.” It is not surprising that the governments of the Western world do not lift a finger to change this delusive belief. Technotopian stories about the future do not weaken their power, quite to the contrary. Computers, the Internet, and all the other new technologies are “opium for the people;” technology keeps people happy and entertained. Why rise up against the government if you have TV (200 channels or more), Internet, Game Boys, cyber sex, etc?

The second problematic assumption that Leary’s concept of the cyber-society is based on is that the increase of intelligence is a logical consequence of the enormous acceleration of technological development we are witnessing at present. Leary calls this the “law of acceleration:” The faster the technology, the faster the speed of thought (cf. CC inside cover-page). In “Our Brain”(1991), for example, Leary states that “[i]n just the last ten years, our species has multiplied the ability to use our brains by a thousandfold”(CC 35) and “[t]he next uncontrollable fifteen years (1995–2010) will [even] accelerate this dizzy explosion of brain power”(CC 82). According to Leary, our brains are quickly learning to adapt to the speed of computers:

Speed is addictive, and evolutionary.
Individuals who work intimately with computational machinery find they grow quickly accustomed to rapid interactive responses, exulting in the quick succession of events in the culminative composition of growth of work, in the embodiment of the structure of one’s mind in the machine. Being forced to use a slower computer after addiction to rapid response speed is established is mentally excruciating in the extreme. It seems that there is no return from an accelerated frame of mind (DD 39).

The invincible optimist Leary predicted that by 2008 the super-bright, creative, imaginative, self-reliant computer adept will be the norm in our Information Society and the person who does not want to be internetted and connected will be the “problem person”(cf. CC 83f.).

The question arises: Do computers, the Internet, and other new technologies really make people more creative and intelligent? Do computers really teach us to think faster? Can our brains keep up with the speed of the electronic media? Cultural critics Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, for example, do not share Leary’s optimistic belief that faster technologies teach us to think faster and that by 2008 the super-bright, self-reliant computer adept will be the norm in our cybernetic society. The Krokers are pessimistic about the future of our digital culture. They argue that we are on “a fast trip to digital delirium” because “we have not escaped and will never overcome the fatal destiny of the law of reversal” (which is exactly the opposite of Leary’s “law of acceleration”):

[T]he faster the tech, the slower the speed of thought... the more accelerated the culture, the slower the rate of social change... the quicker the digital composition, the slower the political reflection... the more apparent the external speed, the more real the internal slowness... delirious speed and anxious slowness...a split reality... accelerating digital effects are neutralized by deaccelerating special human effects... digital reality spins out of control, human reality slow-burns back to earth... speed bodies and slow vision... speed flesh and slow bones... speed web and slow riot... the slow mirror of speed [italics mine](Kroker 1997: x)

In contrast to Leary who suggested that “our bored brains love ‘overload’”(CC 15), the Krokers argue that information overload (caused by computers, the electronic media, etc) numbs our brains so we cannot think clearly any more. The brain’s self-protective reaction to information overload is that it “shuts down.” As the Krokers put it in Digital Delirium: [T]he tyranny of information overload produce[s] a numbed culture that shuts down for self-protection”(Kroker 1997: xiii).

The Krokers’ law of reversal suggests that we are caught in some kind of vicious circle. We invent faster technologies to be able to meet the demands of our accelerating culture (our culture demands that we are able to think faster and faster, do work faster and faster, etc). These faster technologies which help us to do things faster, however, produce an even more accelerated culture. This means that we have to keep inventing faster technologies. The problem is that the human brain cannot cope with the growing speed of our culture. The result is: “Speed images, but slow eyes. [...] Speed media, but slow communication. Speed talk, but no thought”(ibid. ix).

Digital Delirium (published 1997) is a counter-blast to the blast of techno-utopianism that the 90s began with. The Krokers intention is to bring techno-utopians like Leary and McKenna back down to the ground from their “digital high.” They want to make people aware that the computer can be a dangerous and highly addictive drug because it gives you the feeling that you are omnipotent and know everything when, in fact, you know nothing. As long as you are “high” (numbed by the dizzying speed and information overload produced by computers) all problems seem to be solved (because the real problems are “screened out” so you are not aware of them). That is why it is hard to resist the seduction of computers. Leary himself admitted that “computers are more addictive than heroin” (quoted in Bukatman 1993: 139). But you cannot go on screening out problems forever. Like Mark Dery and Donna Haraway, the Krokers want to bring technoutopians like Leary to their senses and alert them to the real problems. The longer the high, the bitterer the come-down. If we do not start to fight our computer addiction now it might be too late because “speed kills.”

4.7.4. McLuhan revisited

Most people in the cyberdelic counterculture of the 90s consider media philosopher Marshall McLuhan to be the grandfather of cyberpunk because as early as 1964 he was talking about a “global village” borne of communication technologies, a concept which evolved, over time, to his vision of the “[p]sychic communal integration of all humankind, made possible at last by the electronic media”(Dery 1996: 45). Many cyber-philosophers (Leary, McKenna, Rushkoff, etc) were strongly influenced by McLuhan’s work. Leary’s optimism about the future of the Internet, for example, was inspired by McLuhan who, in Understanding Media (1964), suggested that with electric technology (electronic media) we extend our nervous systems in a global embrace, instantly interrelating every human experience. Consequently, the electronic media would reshape and restructure patterns of social interdependence and end psychic, social, economic, and political self-centeredness (see chapter 3.4.). Throughout his theories Leary uses McLuhan’s ideas (especially the idea that “all media [technologies] are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical”) to support the idea that technology can help us to liberate ourselves from all limits. Also Leary’s equation that “spiritual = digital” seems to be inspired by McLuhan who, in Understanding Media, wrote that “the current transformation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seems to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness”(quoted in Howard 1982: 390).

However, Leary never mentions that McLuhan actually had a highly ambivalent attitude towards technology. “McLuhan was never the technotopian that contemporary technophiles like to portray,” writes Arthur Kroker. “To read McLuhan is to discover a thinker who had a decidedly ambivalent perspective on technoculture. Thus, while McLuhan might be the patron saint of technotopians, his imagination is also the memory that should haunt them (Kroker 1997: 89).

This chapter, which is based on Kroker’s essay “Digital Humanism: The processed world of Marshall McLuhan”(Kroker 1997: 89–113), offers a new way of understanding McLuhan and is, at the same time, a criticism of Leary’s techno-utopianism. McLuhan’s discourse on technology provides a brilliant understanding of the inner functioning of the technological media, which might help us “to break the seduction effect of technology, to disturb the hypnotic spell cast by the dynamism of the technological imperative”(Korker 1997: 102).

According to McLuhan, the nature of technology is paradoxical: On the one hand, all technologies are extensions of the human being (e.g., the wheel is an extension of the foot); on the other hand, every extension by technology is simultaneously a “self-amputation” of the part of the body that is extended (by using the wheel/car we “self-amputate” our feet because we do not use them to walk any more) (cf. McLuhan 1964: 42). This means that we extend ourselves by self-amputation. According to McLuhan, the history of technological innovation can best be understood in terms of experimental medicine. In Understanding Media, he gives much attention to Hans Seleye’s work in the field of stress, especially the biological phenomenon that under conditions of deep stress an organism “self-amputates” the organ effected by anesthetizing it in order to protect itself (cf. Kroker 1997: 100ff.). (For example, when an organ of the body goes out it automatically goes numb. The organism automatically self-amputates it.) In Digital Delirium, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker explain McLuhan’s medical approach to technology as follows:

McLuhan’s historical account of the evolution of technological media was structured around a (medical) account of the evolution of technological innovation as “counter-irritants” to the “stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. Just as the body (in Hans Seleye’s terms) resorts to an auto-amputative strategy when “the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation,” so (in McLuhan’s terms) in the stress of super-stimulation, “the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function.” Technology is a “counter-irritant” which aids in the “equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central nervous system.” Thus, the wheel (as an extension of the foot) is a counter-irritant against the pressure of “new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media;” “movies and TV complete the cycle of mechanization of the human sensorium;” and computers are ablations or outerings of the human brain itself (Kroker 1997: 103)

According to the Krokers, it was McLuhan’s thesis that the motive-force for technological innovation was always defensive and biological: The nervous system tries to protect itself against sudden changes in the “stimulus” of the external environment by using the physical organs (that is, the technologies which extend these organs as) “buffers.” In times of high stress, humans always invent new technologies – that is, they extend, or “outer,” individual organs – so the nervous system can protect itself against the stress of acceleration of pace. But each “outering” of individual organs is also an acceleration and intensification of the general environment. So it seems that humans are caught in some kind of vicious circle. (high stress > we invent new technologies to protect the nervous system > acceleration of the environment > high stress...).

According to McLuhan, in the electronic age we reached the culmination of this process. The environment changed so fast that “in a desperate [...] autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs as buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism”(McLuhan 1964: 43), the central nervous system itself was outered in the form of electric circuitry (computers, the Internet, etc). In other words, the nervous system has gone numb. According to McLuhan, this outering of the central nervous system induced an unprecedented level of stress on the individual organism (cf. McLuhan 1964: 252). McLuhan argues that the electric age is an age of “anxiety and dread” because we are unable to cope with this new situation; we are unable to understand the subliminal consequences of the fundamental changes in technostructure (cf. Kroker 1997: 101ff.).

McLuhan tried to make people aware that it is futile to deny that technology exists and that it is actually a part of us. The only way we could really understand technology is to experience it and try to become aware how it changes our perception of the world. If we are to recover a new human possibility it will not be “outside” the technological experience, but must be “inside” the field of technology (cf. Kroker 1997: 95). According to McLuhan, only a sharpening and refocusing of human perception could provide a way out of the “labyrinth of the technostructure”(cf. ibid.). In Digital Delirium, Arthur Kroker writes that “[McLuhan’s] ideal value was that of the ‘creative process in art,’ so much so in fact that McLuhan insisted that if the master struggle of the twentieth century was between reason and irrationality, then this struggle could be won if individuals learned anew how to make of the simple act of ‘ordinary human perception’ an opportunity for recovering the creative energies in human experience” (ibid.). According to McLuhan, we will never fully understand the subliminal effects of technology and be able to use technology to increase our intelligence, creativity, and freedom, if we do not first become aware of the “double-effect of the technological experience” — that all technologies are simultaneously extensions and self-amputations of some human mental or physical faculty (cf. ibid.).

When Leary talks about McLuhan, he never mentions the double-effect of technology and McLuhan’s warnings that the hypnotic spell of technology can be very dangerous. It seems that Leary himself was under the hypnotic spell of technology McLuhan was talking about, when he praised the computer, the Internet, and virutal reality as cure-all for all problems on our planet. There is a noticeable similarity between Leary’s LSD-euphoria in the 60s – Leary’s revealing LSD experiences caused him to believe that LSD would cure our “sick” society and help us create a new post-political society based on Ecstasy – and his computer-euphoria in the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately, neither LSD nor computers did bring the changes which Leary predicted. The Internet and other new communication technologies have decentralized our society, extended our nervous systems globally, but are we really free now?

5. Conclusion

5.1. Leary: a pioneer of cyberspace

Whether you share Leary’s utopian faith in technology or not, Leary’s impact on the cyberdelic counterculture of the 80s and 90s is undeniable. In this paper I have shown that several important figures of the cyber-movement were strongly influenced by Leary (e.g., Douglas Rushkoff, R.U. Sirius, and Bruce Eisner) and that Leary was actually one of the founding fathers of the cyber-movement. As early as 1973, Leary predicted that someday the world would be linked together through a new “electronic nervous system,” a global electronic communication network which would dissolve authoritarian hierarchical structures. In Exo-Pschology (1977), Leary encouraged the hippies to leave the flower-power 60s behind and find a way to live with technology which, according to Leary, could help us to free ourselves from all limits. In his Exo-Psychology theory, Leary laid the ideological foundation for the cyber-movement. In his model of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness, which is explained in Exo-Psychology, Leary defined a “higher” level of consciousness (attained with the help of LSD) on which space, time, body, and normal speech (sending/receiving laryngeal signals) are transcended and people communicate at light speed on the electromagnetic level. This “higher” level of consciousness, the “Neuroelectric Circuit,” was later interpreted by members of the cyber-movement as cyberspace or the Internet (see chapter 3.5.).

Many people are surprised when they hear that Leary, the famous LSD-guru of the hippies, reemerged in the 80s as a spokesman of the cyberpunks, because they can see no connection between the anti-technology-oriented hippies and the cyberpunks who embrace technology. If we analyze Leary’s theories, however, we see that there actually is a strong connection between the psychedelic counterculture of the 60s and the cyberdelic counterculture of the 80s and 90s. We see that the cyberpunks of the 80s and 90s were heavily influenced by the transcendentalism that prevailed in the 60s counterculture (see chapter 4.7.2.). According to Leary, the hippies of the 60s and the cyberpunks of the 80s and 90s actually belong to one and the same movement because they share the same aim: Ecstasy, that is, the experience of individual freedom. Leary argues that the individual freedom revolution started by the hippies in the 60s was continued by cyberpunks in the 80s. According to Leary, this individual freedom movement, which has country by country, continent by continent, liberated much of the world in the last three decades (e.g., the fall of communism in Eastern Europe), would not have been possible without mind-expanding drugs (psychedelics) and mind-linking electronic appliances (computers, radio, TV, etc).

Leary was definitely right when he said that the electronic media (TV, Internet, etc) played a crucial role in the youth revolutions of 1989 which lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the resignation of the hard-line regime in Czechoslovakia. However, when Leary argued that computers, the Internet, and other electronic media have only positive effects (i.e., they create individual freedom), he was definitely wrong. In the 80s, when Leary wrote most of his essays on the cyberpunks and the Internet, it was not so obvious that the decentralization created by the Internet is a double edged sword, that it slowly dissolves old hierarchical political structures while at the same time empowering the powerful, autocratic, multinational corporations. The 80s were the heyday of the cyberpunk-computer-hackers, who dominated the Internet, cracking government files, etc. It was a time when anything seem to be possible because nobody really knew in which direction the Internet would change our society. Now, however, the cyberdelic revolution is over. The cyberdelic counterculture which Leary helped to create is absorbed into the mainstream. This trip is over. The Internet has become a “playing field for a mutating corporate oligarchy.”

Leary’s prediction that the feedback and decentralization made possible by the Internet would help the cyber-movement to create a post-political society based on Ecstasy (i.e., the experience of individual freedom) turned out to be wrong. Leary’s utopian faith in technology blinded him to the real situation on our planet.

5.2. Think for Yourself, Question Authority

I think that this paper shows that Leary was an extremely complex man. He was, first and foremost, the man who brought psychedelic drugs into American culture. He was the undisputed leader of the psychedelic movement. But Leary was also a psychologist, a philosopher, a novelist, one of the most energetic promoters of virtual reality and the Internet, a spokesman of the “new edge” cyberpunks, and an eloquent defender of individual rights. Leary saw himself as a philosopher more than anything else — a philosopher whose duty it was to teach people to “think for themselves and question authority”(cf. DD 6).

In this last chapter I argue that the overall message that Leary wants to communicate in his theories is “Think for yourself; question authority.” I want to show that Leary’s whole

trip from psychedelics to computers to designer dying was to make people aware that they are capable of more than the appointed authorities would prefer to grant them. Leary’s advocacy of psychedelics and computers was to show that people are capable of taking charge of their own brains, hearts, and spirits. For me, Leary is the Socrates of the Information Age because he was one of the few philosophers in our age who carried on the Socratic tradition of encouraging people to “think for themselves and question authority,” his own authority included.

Leary never felt embarrassed when one of his predictions turned out to be wrong. Why? Because he saw himself as a philosopher whose job it was to teach people HOW to think, not WHAT to think (cf. NP 2). Leary wanted to teach people to “think for themselves and question authority.” In every single book he wrote Leary explicitly encourages his readers to “think for themselves and question authority,” his own authority included. In the introduction to Neuropolitique, Leary explains that philosophers in the Information Age “do not come down the mountain with truths carved in stone.” The professional assignment of the philosopher in the Information Age is “to produce new paradigms which will inspire and encourage others to think for themselves. Today philosophers do not give people food for thought. They teach people how to think, how to conceive themselves”(NP 2).

“Don’t believe anything I say. [...] Start Your Own Religion [...] Write Your Own Bible [...] Start Your Own Political System,” Leary writes in The Politics of Ecstasy (PE 369f.). Also, in his last book, Desing for Dying, he repeatedly tells his readers that they should never believe anything he says because he does “not believe in belief”(cf. DD 26, DD 31). For Leary, belief – in the sense of absolute belief, i.e., a dogma – is always something negative. Dogma means stagnation, inflexibility, no choice, and therefore no freedom (cf. CC 232ff.). Leary argues that whatever you blindly believe in imprisons you. Blind belief is the death of the intellect. He compares beliefs to filters in the human perceptual apparatus which filter the information that is received from the outside world. This means that all the information from the outside world which does not confirm one’s belief cannot pass the filter and therefore is ignored (see chapter 4.3.). In Chaos & Cyberculture, Leary explains that a person who clings to one belief system and never questions this belief system will never be able to increase his/her intelligence because his/her mind will shut out any kind of information which is new or cannot be explained within his/her frame of reference (cf. CC 35ff.). Neither will he/she be tolerant towards people with other beliefs (cf. ibid.).

Another reason why Leary rejects dogmas is that they can easily be used to manipulate people. All “power-hungry control freaks” try to impose dogmas on people because they very well know that a dogma is a powerful instrument to create conformity and predictable behavior. In his theories Leary constantly alerts us to the dangers of dogmas and conformity (the Inquisition, the Holy War, the Nazi regime, etc) and tries to make us aware that there is no reason whatsoever why we should accept the dogmas that authorities are trying to impose on us. Again and again he reminds his readers that all dogmas, like all scientific theories, are arbitrary constructions. He tries to make his readers aware of the fact that science, like all cultural phenomena, is socially determined – blinkered by the biases of the society that produced it and dedicated it to the validation of its own worldview. While supposedly objective, science often aids and abets political ideology and cultural bias. Like the constructivists, Leary argues that anybody who claims that his/her belief system (model of reality) is the absolute truth is simply wrong. You create your own reality. Ergo, “think for yourself, question authority”.

Leary wants us to take responsibility for our own lives (this is a logical consequence of the constructivist worldview), not to pass on the responsibility for ourselves to somebody else – be it a politician, scientists, or an “omnipotent” God (Christ, Allah, etc) who resides somewhere up in heaven. “God is not a tribal father, nor a feudal lord, nor an engineer-manager of the universe. There is no God (in the singular) except you at the moment [italics mine],” Leary explains. “Since God #1 appears to be held hostage back there by the blood-thirsty Persian ayatollah, by the telegenic Polish pope, and the Moral Majority, there’s only one logical alternative. You ‘steer’ your own course. You and your dear friends start your own religion. [...] Write your very own Newest Testament, remembering that voluntary martyrdom is tacky, and crucifications, like nuclear war, can ruin your day” (CC 234f.).

When Leary advises us to start our own religion he does not mean that we should found a religion that is based on dogmas. Dogmas are static; they “imprison” us, which means that they are not good for our personal intellectual and spiritual development. But what are the alternatives to dogma? According to Leary, the idea of belief can be broken down into two categories: dogmas, which are absolute beliefs, and meta-beliefs, which are relative beliefs (cf. ibid.). The idea of meta-belief is based on the constructivist assumption that “reality” is a construction of out minds. “Meta-belief” means that you consciously program yourself to believe in something, knowing that your belief is not the absolute truth but a construction of your mind. It means that you are aware that your beliefs are programs in your brain which can arbitrarily changed. For Leary, it was not really important that we do not (or cannot) know anything about objective reality. Leary’s aim was freedom of the mind, Ecstasy (i.e., the experience of freedom from all limits). Ecstasy, “ex-stasis,” is the opposite of “stasis”(which means that you have a static worldview). According to Leary, in the mind there are no limits except those that you set for yourself. “You can change and mutate and keep improving. The idea is to keep ‘trading up’ to a ‘better’ philosophy-theology,” Leary writes (CC 234). As John Lilly put it, “In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits” (Lilly 1972: xvi).

Philosophers who encourage people to think for themselves, question authority and create their own religion/politics have always been considered to be dangerous, heretical, immoral, blasphemous by law-and-order fanatics. Socrates was one of these philosophers who was accused “by conservative minds of the dangerous game of discomfiting all authority before a circle of impressionable youths and subtracting from the state the stability of tradition [...] his unsettling effect on the young and his persistent criticism were intolerable to any establishment”(Harkavy 1991: 531). Leary is the Socrates of the Information Age. In our age there are very few philosophers (e.g., Paul Feyerabend, or Robert Anton Wilson) who carry on the Socratic tradition of encouraging people to think for themselves and question authority, their own authority included. Leary was perhaps the most enthusiastic of these humanistic philosophers.

Like Socrates, Leary tried to make people aware that what we accept as objective reality is only a construction of our minds and that the only way to realize our true selves is to question everything we have learned from our parents, teachers, politicians, etc (cf. ibid.). Socrates’ method to make people think about unquestioned “truths” was asking them questions until they themselves realized that they actually “knew nothing” (in the sense of absolute knowledge). This is what Socrates called the “knowledge of not-knowing”(cf. ibid.). Leary’s method was to confront people with his provocative theories which were intended to make people question the models of reality that authorities imposed on them, and to encourage people to create their own (funnier, sexier, more optimistic) realities. Technology (computers, LSD, etc) would help us to liberate ourselves from authority and to create our own realities.

Leary was very unpopular among academics because he did not follow the rules an academic philosopher or psychologist is supposed to follow. Leary’s theories are a mixture of fact and fiction and often you do not know if the pseudo-scientific explanations Leary gives to back his far-out ideas, are meant seriously or if they are meant as a joke. Furthermore, many of Leary’s arguments involve contradictions and often he quotes somebody without giving the source of the quotation, which can drive a serious critic crazy. Leary, however, did not seem to feel embarrassed about the inconsistencies in his theories. On the contrary, I think that he wanted to be chaotic and uncontrollable, and defy the laws of western linear reason. Leary wanted create a language (i.e., a way of thinking) that cannot be controlled by those who are trying to impose the status quo and a linear view. People who believe exclusively in a linear straight forward way of thinking cannot understand Leary. You cannot control someone you do not understand because you are just not able to predict the person’s next thought/action — and so, I believe, Leary has achieved at least one of his objectives: to be uncontrollable.

According to Leary, the basic nature of the universe is chaos, extreme complexity that cannot be understood by the human mind so far. What we know is that “change and disequilibrium are the driving forces of the universe” and that stability is an illusion (cf. DD 52f.). Leary never grew tired of pointing out that politicians, priests and (most) scientists try to make people believe in the idea of stability because they want to remain in power. They try to impose a static worldview on us because they know that you can control a stable, predictable system, but there is no way to control a chaotic system that is continually changing. According to Leary, this is the reason why the government is against psychedelic drugs. Psychedelic drugs would make us aware that stability is an illusion and “that we have been programmed all those years, that everything we accept as reality is just a social fabrication”(FB 33).

Leary’s way of thinking is chaotic and unpredictable. This is why we can never fully understand Leary. However, what we can learn from him is how to become more flexible, open-minded, and creative — qualities that are very important if we want to survive in our modern Information Society in which the change rate is accelerating beyond comprehension and control. Leary wants to teach us to “go with the flow” – not to cling to idea-structures, but to change, to evolve (cf. CC xiv). “Be cool. Don’t panic. Chaos is good. Chaos creates infinite possibilities,” Leary says (ibid.). To go with the flow means that you think for yourself and that you are not afraid of change. It means that you accept the fact that you live in a chaotic world that is continually changing. You cannot control chaos, but you can learn to “surf the waves of chaos.”

Surf’s up. Enjoy your ride.

Sources

Abbreviations:

PsyE: The Psychedelic Experience,1964.
NP: Neuropolitique, 1988b.
Info: Info-Psychology, 1990a.
FB: Flashbacks, 1990b.
PE: The Politics of Ecstasy, 1990c.
CC: Chaos and Cyberculture,1994.
DD: Design for Dying, 1997.

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Williams, Paul. Das Energi. New York: Warner Books, 1978.

Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. Las Vegas: Falcon Press, 1983.

Wilson, Robert Anton. Quantum Psychology. Tempe, Arizona: New Falcon, 1996.

Wilson, Robert Anton. Cosmic Trigger. The Final Secret of the Illuminati. Tempe, Arizona: New Falcon, 1997.

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam, 1969.

25. Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation

Deleted reason: unpublished pending further conversation

Author: Angela Y. Davis

Authors: Angela Davis

Topics: police, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, Black Liberation, prison, United States of America, Not Anarchist

Date: May, 1971

Date Published on T@L: 2021-03-03T05:37:54

Source: <historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/davispoprprblli.html>

Notes: This is a good short video to go along with the reading: <youtube.com/watch?v=PFz6MmtlQDw>

Despite a long history of exalted appeals to man’s inherent right to resistance, there has seldom been agreement on how to relate in practice to unjust immoral laws and the oppressive social order from which they emanate. The conservative, who does not dispute the validity of revolutions deeply buried in history, invokes visions of impending anarchy in order to legitimize his demand for absolute obedience. Law and order, with the major emphasis on order, is his watchword. The liberal articulates his sensitivity to certain of society’s intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of resistance that exceed the limits of legality — redress through electoral channels is the liberal’s panacea.

In the heat of our pursuit of fundamental human rights, black people have been continually cautioned to be patient. We are advised that as long as we remain faithful to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings.

But having been taught by bitter experience, we know that there is a glaring incongruity between democracy and the capitalist economy which is the source of our ills. Regardless of all rhetoric to the contrary, the people are not the ultimate matrix of the laws and the system which govern them — certainly not black people and other nationally oppressed people, but not even the mass of whites. The people do not exercise decisive control over the determining factors of their lives.

Officials assertions that meaningful dissent is always welcome, provided it falls within the boundaries of legality, are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation to acquiesce in oppression. Slavery may have been unrighteous, the constitutional precision for the enslavement of blacks may have been unjust, but conditions were not to be considered so bearable (especially since they were profitable to a small circle) as to justify escape and other acts proscribed by law. This was the import of the fugitive slave laws.

Needless to say, the history of the Unites States has been marred from its inception by an enormous quantity of unjust laws, far too many expressly bolstering the oppression of black people. Particularized reflections of existing social inequities, these law have repeatedly born witness to the exploitative and racist core of the society itself. For blacks, Chicanos, for all nationally oppressed people, the problem of opposing unjust laws and the social conditions which nourish their growth, has always had immediate practical implications. Our very survival has frequently been a direct function of our skill in forging effective channels of resistance. In resisting we have societies been compelled to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our oppression. But even containing our resistance within the orbit of legality, we have been labels criminals and have been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus.

Under the ruthless conditions of slavery, the underground railroad provided the framework for extra-legal anti-slavery activity pursued by vast numbers of people, both black and white. Its functioning was in flagrant violations of the fugitive slave law; those who were apprehended were subjected to sever penalties. Of the innumerable recorded attempts to rescue fugitive slaves from the clutches of slave catchers, one of the most striking in the case of Anthony Burns, a slave from Virginia, captured in Boston in 1853. A team of his supporters, in attempting to rescue him by force during the course of his trial, engaged the police in a fierce courtroom battle. During the gun fight, a prominent Abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was wounded. Although the rescuers were unsuccessful in their efforts, the impact of this incident “…did more to crystallize Northern sentiment against slavery than any other except the exploit of John Brown, ‘ and this was the last time a fugitive slave was taken from Boston. It took 22 companies of state militia, four platoons of marines, a battalion of United States artillerymen, and the city’s police force … to ensure the performance of this shameful act, the cost of which, the Federal government alone, came to forty thousand dollars.’”

Throughout the era of slavery, blacks, as well as progressive whites, repeatedly discovered that their commitment to the anti-slavery cause frequently entailed the overt violation of the laws of the land. Even as slavery faded away into a more subtle yet equally pernicious apparatus to dominate black people, “illegal” resistance was still on the agenda. After the Civil War, Black Codes, successors to the old Slave Codes, legalized convict labor, prohibited social intercourse between blacks and whites, gave white employers an excessive degree of control over the private lives of black workers, and generally codified racism and terror. Naturally, numerous individual as well as collective acts of resistance prevailed. On many occasions, blacks formed armed teams to protect themselves form while terrorists who were, in turn, protected by law enforcement agencies, if not actually identified with them.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the mass movement, headed by Marcus Garvey, proclaimed in its Declaration of Rights that black people should not hesitate to disobey all discriminatory laws. Moreover, the Declaration announced, they should utilize all means available to them, legal or illegal, to defend themselves from legalized terror as well as Ku Klux Klan violence. During the era of intense activity around civil rights issues, systematic disobedience of oppressive laws was a primary tactic. The sitins were organized transgressions of racist legislation.

All these historical instances involving the overt violation of the laws of the land converge around an unmistakable common denominator. At stake has been the collective welfare and survival of a people. There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called criminal (though in many instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner.

The political prisoner’s words or deed have in one from or another embodied political protests against the established order and have consequently brought him into acute conflict with the state. In light of the political content of his act, the “crime” (which may or may not have been committed) assumes a minor importance. In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act. Often the so-called crime does not even have a nominal existence. As in the 1914 murder frame-up of the IWW organizer, Joe Hill, it is a blatant fabrication, a mere excuse for silencing a militant crusader against oppression. In all instances, however, the political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism.. This unwritten law has been contested by actually and explicitly breaking a law or by utilizing constitutionally protected channels to educate, agitate, and organize masses to resist.

A deep-seated ambivalence has always characterized the official response to the political prisoner. Charged and tried for the criminal act, his guilt is always political in nature. This ambivalence is perhaps best captured by Judge Webster Thayer’s comment upon sentencing Bartolomero Vanzetti to fifteen years for an attempted payroll robbery: “This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is an enemy of our existing institutions.” (The very same judge incidentally, sentences Sacco and Vanzetti to death for a robbery and murder of which they were manifestly innocent). It is not surprising that Nazi Germany’s foremost constitutional lawyers, Carl Schmitt, advanced the theory which generalized thus a priori culpability. A thief, for example, was not necessarily one who had committed an overt act of theft, but rather one whose character renders him a thief (wer nach seinem wesen win Dieb ist). [President Richard] Nixon’s and [FBI Director]

J. Edgar Hoover’s pronouncements lead on to believe that they would readily accept Schmitt’s fascist legal theory. Anyone who seeks to overthrow oppressive institutions, whether or not he has engaged in an overt act, is a priori a criminal who must be buried away in one of America’s dungeons.

Even in all of Martin Luther King’s numerous arrests, he was not so much charged with the nominal crimes of trespassing, and disturbance of the peace, as with being enemy of he southern society, an inveterate foe of racism. When Robert Williams was accused of kidnapping, this charge never managed to conceal his real offense — the advocacy of black people’s incontestable right to bear arms in their own defense.

The offense of the political prisoner is political boldness, the persistent challenging — legally or extra-legally — of fundamental social wrongs fostered and reinforced by the state. The political prisoner has opposed unjust laws and exploitative, racist social conditions in general, with the ultimate aim of transforming these laws and this society into an order harmonious with the material and spiritual needs and interests of the vast majority of its members.

Nat Turner and John Brown were political prisoners in their time. The acts for which they were charged and subsequently hanged, were the practical extensions of their profound commitment to the abolition of slavery. They fearlessly bore the responsibility for their actions. The significance of their executions and the accompanying widespread repression did not lie so much in the fact that they were being punished for specific crimes, nor even in the effort to use their punishment as an implicit threat to deter others from similar armed acts of resistance. These executions, and the surrounding repression of slaves, were intended to terrorize the anti-slavery movement in general; to discourage and diminish both legal and illegal forms of abolitionist activity. As usual, the effect of repression was miscalculated and in both instances, anti-slavery activity was accelerated and intensified as a result.

Nat Turner and John Brown can be viewed as examples of the political prisoner who has actually committed an act which is defined by the state as “criminal”. They killed and were consequently tried for murder. But did they commit murder? This raises the question of whether American revolutionaries had murdered the British in their struggle for liberation. Nat Turner and his followers killed some sixty-five white people, yet shortly before the revolt had begun, Nat is reputed to have said to the other rebelling slaves: “Remember that ours is not war for robbery nor to satisfy our passions, it is a struggle for freedom. Ours must be deeds and not words”,

The very institutions which condemned Nat Turner and reduced his struggle for freedom to a simpler criminal case of murder, owed their existence to the decision, made a half-century earlier, to take up arms against the British oppressor.

The battle for the liquidation of slavery had no legitimate existence in the eyes of the government and therefore the special quality of deeds carried out in the interests of freedom was deliberately ignored. There were no political prisoners, there were only criminals; just as the movement out of which these deeds flowed was largely considered criminal.

Likewise, the significance of activities which are pursued in the interests of liberation today is minimized not so much because officials are unable to see the collective surge against oppression, but because they have consciously set out to subvert such movements. In the Spring of 1970, Los Angeles Panthers took up arms to defend themselves from an assault initiated by the local police force on their office and on their persons. They were charged with criminal assault. If one believed the official propaganda, they were bandits and rogues who pathologically found pleasure in attacking policemen. It was not mentioned that their community activities — educational work, services such as free breakfast and free medical programs — which had legitimized them in the black community, were the immediate reason for which the wrath of the police had fallen upon them. In defending themselves from the attack waged by some 600 policemen (there were only eleven Panthers in the office) they were defending not only their lives, but even more important their accomplishments in the black community surrounding them, and in the boarded thrust for black liberation. Whenever blacks in struggle have recourse to self-defense, particular armed selfdefense, it is twisted and distorted on official levels and ultimately rendered synonymous with criminal aggression. On the other hand, when policemen are clearly indulging in acts of criminal aggression, officially they are defending themselves through “justifiable assault” or “justifiable homicide”.

The ideological acrobatics characteristics of official attempts to explain away the existence of the political prisoner do not end with the equation of the individual political act with the individual criminal act. The political act is defined as criminal in order to discredit radical and revolutionary movements. A political event is reduced to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing order. In a revealing contradiction, the court resisted the description of the New York Panther 21 trial as “political”, yet the prosecutor entered as evidence of criminal intent, literature which represented, so he purported, the political ideology of the Black Panther Party.

The legal apparatus designates the black liberation fighter a criminal, prompting Nixon, (Vice President Spiro) Agnew, (California Governor Ronald) Reagan et al. to process to mystify with their demagogy millions of Americans whose senses have been dulled and whose critical powers have been eroded by the continual onslaught of racist ideology.

As the black liberation movement and other progressive struggles increase in magnitude and intensity, the judicial system and its extension, the penal system, consequently become key weapons in the state’s fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism, poverty and war.

In 1951, W.E.B. Du Bois, as Chairman of the Peace Information Center, was indicted by the federal government for “failure to register as an agent of a foreign principal”. In assessing this ordeal, which occurred in the ninth decade of his life, he turned his attention to the inhabitants of the nation’s jails and prisons:

What turns me cold in all this experience is the certainty that thousands of innocent victims are in jail today because they had neither money nor friends to help them. The eyes of the world were on our trial despite the desperate efforts of press and radio to suppress the facts and cloud the real issues; the courage and money of friends and of strangers who dared stand for a principle freed me; but God only knows how many who were as innocent as I and my colleagues are today in hell. They daily stagger out of prison doors embittered, vengeful, hopeless, ruined. And of this army of the wronged, the proportion of Negroes is frightful. We protect and defend sensational cases where Negroes are involved. But the great mass of arrested or accused black folk have no defense. There is desperate need of nationwide organizations to oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the poor, friendless and black.

Almost two decades passed before the realization attained by Du Bois on the occasion of his own encounter with the judicial system achieved extensive acceptance. A number of factors have combined to transform the penal system into a prominent terrain of struggle, both for the captives inside and the masses outside. The impact of large numbers of political prisoners both on prison populations and on the mass movement has been decisive. The vast majority of political prisoners have not allowed the fact of imprisonment to curtail their educational, agitational, and organizing activities, which they continue behind prison walls. And in the course of developing mass movements around political prisoners, a great deal of attention has inevitably been focused on the institutions in which they are imprisoned. Furthermore the political receptivity of prisoners — especially black and brown captives — has been increased and sharpened by the surge of aggressive political activity rising out of black, Chicano, and other oppressed communities. Finally, a major catalyst for intensified political action in and around prisons has emerged out of the transformation of convicts, originally found guilty of criminal offenses, into exemplary political militants. Their patient educational efforts in the realm of exposing the specific oppressive structures of the penal system in their relation to the larger oppression of the social system have had a profound effect on their fellow captives.

The prison is a key component of state’s coercive apparatus, the overriding function of which is to ensure social control. They etymology of the term “penitentiary” furnishes a clue to the controlling idea behind the “prison system” at its inception. The penitentiary was projected as the locale for doing penitence for an offense against society, the physical and spiritual purging of proclivities to challenge rules and regulations which command total obedience. While cloaking itself with the bourgeois aura of universality — imprisonment was supposed to cut across all class lines, as crimes were to be defined by the act, not the perpetrator — the prison has actually operated as an instrument of class domination, a means of prohibiting the have-nots from encroaching upon the haves.

The occurrence of crime is inevitable in a society in which wealth is unequally distributed, as one of the constant reminders that society’s productive forces are being channeled in the wrong direction. The majority of criminal offenses bear a direct relationship to property. Contained in the very concept of property, crimes are profound but suppressed social needs which express themselves in anti-social modes of action. Spontaneously produced by a capitalist organization of society, this type of crime is at once a protest against society and a desire to partake of its exploitative content. It challenges the symptoms of capitalism, but not its essence.

Some Marxists in recent years have tended to banish “criminals” and the lumpenproletariat as a whole from the arena of revolutionary struggle. Apart from the absence of any link binding the criminal to the means of production, underlying this exclusion has been the assumption that individuals who have recourse to anti-social acts are incapable of developing the discipline and collective orientation required by revolutionary struggle.

With the declassed character of lumpenproletarians in mind, Marx had stated that they are as capable of “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices, as of the basest banditry and the dirties corruption”. He emphasized the fact that the provisional government’s mobile guards under the Paris Commune — some 24,000 troops — were largely formed out of young lumpenproletarians from fifteen to twenty years of age. Too many Marxists have been inclined to overvalue the second part of Marx’s observation — that the lumpenproletariat is capable of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption — while minimizing or indeed totally disregarding his first remark, applauding the lumpen for their heroic deeds and exalted sacrifices.

Especially today when so many black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican men and women are jobless as a consequence of the internal dynamic of the capitalist system, the role of the unemployed, which includes the lumpenproletariat in revolutionary struggle, must be given serious thought. Increased unemployment, particularly for the nationally oppressed, will continue to be an inevitable by-product of technological development. At least 30 percent of black youth are presently without jobs. (In 1997, over 30 percent of black men were in prison, on probation or on parole.) In the context of class exploitation and national oppression it should be clear that numerous individuals are compelled to resort to criminal acts, not as a result of conscious choice — implying other alternatives — but because society has objectively reduced their possibilities of subsistence and survival to this level. This recognition should signal the urgent need to organize the unemployed and lumpenproletariat, as indeed the Black Panther Party as well as activists in prison have already begun to do.

In evaluating the susceptibility of the black and brown unemployed to organizing efforts, the peculiar historical features of the US, specifically racism and national oppression, must be taken into account. There already exists in the black and brown communities, the lumpenproletariat included, a long tradition of collective resistance to national oppression.

Moreover, in assessing the revolutionary potential of prisoners in America as a group, it should be borne in mind that not all prisoners have actually committed crimes. The built-in racism of the judicial system expresses itself, as Du Bois has suggested, in the railroading of countless innocent blacks and other national minorities into the country’s coercive institutions.

One must also appreciate the effects of disproportionately long prison terms on black and brown inmates. The typical criminal mentality sees imprisonment as a calculated risk for a particular criminal act. One’s prison term is more or less rationally predictable. The function of racism in the judicial-penal complex is to shatter that predictability. The black burglar, anticipating a two-to four-year term, may end up doing ten to fifteen years, while the white burglar leaves after two years.

Within the contained, coercive universe of the prison, the captive is confronted with the realities of racism, not simply as individual acts dictated by attitudinal bias; rather he is compelled to come to grips with racism as an institutional phenomenon collectively experienced by the victims. The disproportionate representation of the black and brown communities, the manifest racism of parole boards, the intense brutality inherent in the relationship between prison guards and black and brown inmates — all this and more causes the prisoner to be confronted daily, hourly, with the concentrated systematic existence of racism.

For the innocent prisoner, the process of radicalization should come easy; for the “guilty” victim, the insight into the nature of racism as it manifests itself in the judicialpenal complex can lead to a questioning of his own past criminal activity and a reevaluation of the methods he has used to survive in a racist and exploitative society. Needless to say, this process is not automatic, it does not occur spontaneously. The persistent educational work carried out by the prison’s political activists plays a key role in developing the political potential of captive men and women.

Prisoners — especially blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans — are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order, swiftly becoming conscious of the causes underlying their victimization. The Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform attests to a lucid understanding of the structures of oppression within the prison — structures which contradict even the avowed function of the penal institution: “The program we are submitted to, under the ridiculous title of rehabilitation, is relative to the ancient stupidity of pouring water on the drowning man, in as much as we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility for medication.” The Manifesto also reflects an awareness that the severe social crisis taking place in this country, predicated in part on the ever-increasing mass consciousness of deepening social contradictions, is forcing the political function of the prisons to surface in all its brutality. Their contention that prisons are being transformed into the “fascist concentration camps of modern America,” should not be taken lightly, although it would be erroneous as well as defeatist in a practical sense, to maintain that fascism has irremediably established itself.

The point is this, and this is the truth which is apparent in the Manifesto: the ruling circles of America are expanding and intensifying repressive measures designed to nip revolutionary movements in the bud as well as to curtail radical-democratic tendencies, such as the movement to end the war in Indochina. The government is not hesitating to utilize an entire network of fascist tactics, including the monitoring of congressman’s telephone calls, a system of “preventive fascism”, as Marcuse has termed it, in which the role of the judicial-penal systems looms large. The sharp edge of political repression, cutting through the heightened militancy of the masses, and bringing growing numbers of activists behind prison walls, must necessarily pour over into the contained world of the prison where it understandably acquires far more ruthless forms.

It is a relatively easy matter to persecute the captive whose life is already dominated by a network of authoritarian mechanisms. This is especially facilitated by the indeterminate sentence policies of many states, for politically conscious prisoners will incur inordinately long sentences on the original conviction. According to Louis S. Nelson, warden of the San Quentin Prison, “if the prisons of California become known as schools for violent revolution, the Adult Authority would be remiss in their duty not to keep the inmates longer” (San Francisco Chronicle, May 2, 1971). Where this is deemed inadequate, authorities have recourse to the whole spectrum of brutal corporal punishment, including out and out murder. At San Quentin, Fred Billingslea was teargassed to death in February 1970. W. L. Nolen, Alvin Miller, and Cleveland Edwards were assassinated by a prison guard in January 1970, at Soledad Prison. Unusual and inexplicable “suicides” have occurred with incredible regularity in jails and prisons throughout the country.

It should be self-evident that the frame-up becomes a powerful weapon within the spectrum of prison repression, particularly because of the availability of informers, the broken prisoners who will do anything for a price. The Soledad Brothers and the Soledad Three are leading examples of frame-up victims. Both cases involve militant activists who have been charged with killing Soledad prison guards. In both cases, widespread support has been kindled within the California prison system. They have served as occasions to link the immediate needs of the black community with a forceful fight to break the fascist stronghold in the prisons and therefore to abolish the prison system in its present form.

Racist oppression invades the lives of black people on an infinite variety of levels. Blacks are imprisoned in a world where our labor and toil hardly allow us to eke out a decent existence, if we are able to find jobs at all. When the economy begins to falter, we are forever the first victims, always the most deeply wounded. When the economy is on its feet, we continue to live in a depressed state. Unemployment is generally twice as high in the ghettos as it is in the country as a whole and even higher among black women and youth. The unemployment rate among black youth has presently skyrocketed to 30 percent. If one-third of America’s white youths were without a means of livelihood, we would either be in the thick of revolution or else under the iron rule of fascism. Substandard schools, medical care hardly fit for animals, over-priced, dilapidated housing, a welfare system based on a policy of skimpy concessions, designed to degrade and divide (and even this may soon be canceled) — this is only the beginning of the list of props in the overall scenery of oppression which, for the mass of blacks, is the universe.

In black communities, wherever they are located, there exists an ever-present reminder that our universe must remain stable in its drabness, its poverty, its brutality. From Birmingham to Harlem to Watts, black ghettos are occupied, patrolled and often attacked by massive deployments of police. The police, domestic caretakers of violence, are the oppressor’s emissaries, charged with the task of containing us within the boundaries of our oppression.

The announced function of the police, “to protect and serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little or no pretext, aside from the universal intimidation they are charged with carrying out. Protection for drug-pushers, and Mafia-style exploiters, support for the most reactionary ideological elements of the black community (especially those who cry out for more police), are among the many functions of forces of law and order. They encircle the community with a shield of violence, too often forcing the natural aggression of the black community inwards. Fanon’s analysis of the role of colonial police is an appropriate description of the function of the police in America’s ghettos.

It goes without saying that the police would be unable to set into motion their racist machinery were they not sanctioned and supported by the judicial system. The courts not only consistently abstain from prosecuting criminal behavior on the part of the police, but they convict, on the basis of biased police testimony, countless black men and women. Court-appointed attorneys, acting in the twisted interests of overcrowded courts, convince 85 percent of the defendants to plead guilty. Even the manifestly innocent are advised to cop a plea so that the lengthy and expensive process of jury trials is avoided. This is the structure of the apparatus which summarily railroads black people into jails and prisons. (During my imprisonment in the New York Women’s House of Detention, I encountered numerous cases involving innocent black women who had been advised to plead guilty. One sister had entered her white landlord’s apartment for the purpose of paying rent. He attempted to rape her and in the course of the ensuing struggle, a lit candle toppled over, burning a tablecloth. The landlord ordered her arrested for arson. Following the advice of her court-appointed attorney, she entered a guilty plea, having been deceived by the attorney’s insistence that the court would be more lenient. The sister was sentenced to three years.)

The vicious circle linking poverty, police courts, and prison is an integral element of ghetto existence. Unlike the mass of whites, the path which leads to jails and prisons is deeply rooted in the imposed patterns of black existence. For this very reason, an almost instinctive affinity binds the mass of black people to the political prisoners. The vast majority of blacks harbor a deep hatred of the police and are not deluded by official proclamations of justice through the courts.

For the black individual, contact with the law-enforcement-judicial-penal network, directly or through relatives and friends, is inevitable because he or she is black. For the activist become political prisoner, the contact has occurred because he has lodged a protest, in one form or another, against the conditions which nail blacks to this orbit of oppression.

Historically, black people as a group have exhibited a greater potential for resistance than any other part of the population. The iron-clad rule over our communities, the institutional practice of genocide, the ideology of racism have performed a strictly political as well as an economic function. The capitalists have not only extracted super profits from the underpaid labor of over 15 percent of the American population with the aid of a superstructure of terror. This terror and more subtle forms of racism have further served to thwart the flowering of a resistance — even a revolution that would spread to the working class as a whole.

In the interests of the capitalist class, the consent to racism and terror has been demagogically elicited from the white population, workers included, in order to more efficiently stave off resistance. Today, Nixon, [Attorney General John] Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover are desperately attempting to persuade the population that dissidents, particularly blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, must be punished fro being members of revolutionary organizations; for advocating the overthrow of the government; for agitating and educating in the streets and behind prison walls. The political function of racist domination is surfacing with accelerated intensity. Whites who have professed their solidarity with the black liberation movement and have moved in a distinctly revolutionary direction find themselves targets of the same repression. Even the antiwar movement, rapidly exhibiting an anti-imperialist consciousness, is falling victim to government repression.

Black people are rushing full speed ahead towards an understanding of the circumstances that give rise to exaggerated forms of political repression and thus an overabundance of political prisoners. This understanding is being forged out of the raw material of their own immediate experiences with racism. Hence, the black masses are growing conscious of their responsibility to defend those who are being persecuted for attempting to bring about the alleviation of the most injurious immediate problems facing black communities and ultimately to bring about total liberation through armed revolution, if it must come to this.

The black liberation movement is presently at a critical juncture. Fascist methods of repression threaten to physically decapitate and obliterate the movement. More subtle, yet no less dangerous ideological tendencies from within threaten to isolate the black movement and diminish its revolutionary impact. Both menaces must be counteracted in order to ensure our survival. Revolutionary blacks must spearhead and provide leadership for a broad anti-fascist movement.

Fascism is a process, its growth and development are cancerous in nature. While today, the threat of fascism may be primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcementjudicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even moderate democrats. Even in this period, however, the cancer has already commenced to spread. In addition to the prison army of thousands and thousands of nameless Third World victims of political revenge, there are increasing numbers of white political prisoners — draft resisters, anti-war activists such as the Harrisburg Eight, men and women who have involved themselves on all levels of revolutionary activity.

Among the further symptoms of the fascist threat are official efforts to curtail the power of organized labor, such as the attack on the manifestly conservative construction workers and the trends towards reduced welfare aid. Moreover, court decisions and repressive legislation augmenting police powers — such as the Washington no-knock law, permitting police to enter private dwellings without warning, and Nixon’s “Crime Bill” in general — can eventually be used against any citizen. Indeed congressmen are already protesting the use of police-state wire-tapping to survey their activities. The fascist content of the ruthless aggression in Indo-China should be self-evident.

One of the fundamental historical lessons to be learned from past failures to prevent the rise of fascism is the decisive and indispensable character of the fight against fascism in its incipient phases. Once allowed to conquer ground, its growth is facilitated in geometric proportion. Although the most unbridled expressions of the fascist menace are still tied to the racist domination of blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians, it lurks under the surface wherever there is potential resistance to the power of monopoly capital, the parasitic interests which control this society. Potentially it can profoundly worsen the conditions of existence for the average American citizen. Consequently, the masses of people in this country have a real, direct, and material stake in the struggle to free political prisoners, the struggle to abolish the prison system in its present form, the struggle against all dimensions of racism.

No one should fail to take heed of Georgi Dimitrov’s warning: “Whoever does not fight the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory” (Report to the VIIth Congress of the Communist International, 1935). The only effective guarantee against the victory of fascism is an indivisible mass movement which refuses to conduct business as usual as long as repression rages on. It is only natural that blacks and other Third World peoples must lead this movement, for we are the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism. But it must embrace all potential victims and most important, all working-class people, for the key to the triumph of fascism is its ideological victory over the entire working class. Given the eruption of a severe economic crisis, the door to such an ideological victory can be opened by the active approval or passive toleration of racism. It is essential that white workers become conscious that historically through their acquiescence in the capitalist-inspired oppression of blacks they have only rendered themselves more vulnerable to attack.

The pivotal struggle which must be waged in the ranks of the working class is consequently the open, unreserved battle against entrenched racism. The whit worker must become conscious of the threads which bind him to a James Johnson, a black auto worker, member of UAW, and a political prisoner presently facing charges for the killings of two foremen and a job setter. The merciless proliferation of the power of monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down the very same path of desperation. No potential victim [of the fascist terror] should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!

MARIN COUNTY JAIL

May, 1971

26. The Anarchistic Devil

Deleted reason: unpublished, need to research author and txt a bit more

Author: Stephen Edred Flowers

Topics: atheism, civilization, God, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, materialism, Mikhail Bakunin, spirituality

Date: 1997

Source: Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent

“If God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him.”

― Mikail Bakunin

In his fragmentary work, God and the State, the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) at one point assesses humanity in terms of the Edenic myth and says: “[Satan] makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”[58] As Bakunin saw it, humanity—as an essentially bestial creature—was “endowed in a higher degree than the animals of any other species with two precious faculties—the power to think and the desire to rebel.” His understanding of humanity—his anthropology—held that collectively and individually the development of man was characterized by three principles: human animality, thought and rebellion.

For Bakunin Satan is “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and emancipator of worlds.”[59] Like most anarchists who derive much of their theory from Roussseau’s idea of the “noble savage,” civilization and its institutions are the chief evils in the world. They must be struck down so that the innate nobility of humanity may emerge as a matter of natural course once freed of all socially determined conventions.

Bakunin was himself more an activist revolutionary than a writer or philosopher—he said “I have no system, I am a seeker.” He is said to have had a love for the mysterious and the irrational. This put him at odds with those he called “doctrinaire communists” who followed the more systematic philosophy of Marx. Both of these philosophies are, however, based on a positivistic materialism. “God” was firmly identified with the idea of “spirit,” so the Devil, God’s opposite, must be—if we choose to use this language—tantamount to the idea of matter. The property of “intelligence” can be ascribed to matter due to its “dynamic nature and evolutionary quality,” according to Bakunin.[60]

This dichotomizing of “matter” and “spirit” (or “intelligence”) is, of course, typical of the modern era. Where such dichotomies can be generated one must be accepted, the other rejected, or so goes conventional thought. All this is modern, all-too-modern. From a left-hand path perspective it is perhaps interesting to remember that ancient Hebrew mythology identified as “Satanic” both the existence of the flesh (nature/matter) and the presence of intelligence (as a result of rebellion).

While the ideas of Bakunin lived on in a vague obscurity—and continue to do so today among all those who oppose authority in all its forms—the ideas of Marx have had a much more doctrinaire and institutionalized history. This history was to be played out not in the industrialized capitalist strongholds of western Europe but in the still largely feudalistic, pre-industrial Russia.

27. The Devil and Karl Marx

Author: Stephen Edred Flowers

Topics: atheism, communism, dialectics, God, Hegel, Karl Marx, marxism, materialism, rationalism, religion

Date: 1997

Date Published on T@L: 2024-05-16T21:43:10.940Z

Source: Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent. <archive.org/details/StephenEFlowersLordsOfTheLeftHandPath>

For conservatives over the past century and a half or more the ideas of revolutionary communism have been virtually synonymous with a cosmic Satanic conspiracy—from Pope Pius IX to John Birch and beyond. Before these apparent ravings are dismissed out of hand, we might find it interesting to explore the philosophies of Marx and other socialist/materialist thinkers from a left-hand path viewpoint.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) did not invent communism or historical materialism, but he was an original synthesizer and codifier of a range of philosophical, economic and sociopolitical ideas into a theoretically coherent whole. This ideology could then be more forcefully disseminated than had been the case with the loose association of concepts that marked related pre-Marxist movements.

Marx was bom in Trier, Germany on 5 May 1818 to an ethnically Jewish family.[61] His father, Heinrich, had converted to Lutheranism just the year before. Karl was brought up entirely in the Lutheran faith. In 1835 he went to study law at the university of Bonn, but transferred to Berlin the following year where he was quickly “converted” to philosophy under the influence of the “Young Hegelians,” a group of intellectuals engaged in the transformation of Hegel’s historical idealism into historical materialism.

Marx had planned to become a university lecturer. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Epicureanism. But by 1841 the Prussian government clamped down on the Hegelian left, which caused all job prospects for Marx to evaporate. Back in the western part of Germany, in Saarbrücken, Marx met a communistic Zionist publicist named Moses Hess who was able to “convert” him to a communist philosophy. Hess was also responsible for converting Friedrich Engels, Marx’ future collaborator. Marx soon became the editor of a liberal newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, which he quickly radicalized. In April 1843, the paper was suppressed by the government and Marx emigrated to Paris. He was expelled from France in 1845, eventually settling in England in 1849. The year before, in 1848, he wrote one of his two major works—in collaboration with Engels—The Manifesto of the Communist Party. He was to live the rest of his life in relatively obscure circumstances in London.

In 1864 the “First International”—or more precisely the International Workingman’s Association—was organized in London. This was a federation of unions and radical organizations. Marx was able to exert his influence on this group. In place of nationally organized and loosely affiliated, vaguely liberal unions, Marx imposed his vision of an international, disciplined and federated, radical organization bent on the utter destruction of capitalist society. Because of his authoritarian principles Marx was opposed in the International by the almost equally prestigious Mikail Bakunin.

1867 saw the publication of the first volume of Marx’ magnum opus: Capital (Das Kapital). By this time his thought had reached its full maturity and he could only defend the doctrines he had already developed. His support for the short-lived violently insurgent government in France in 1871, known as “the Commune,” earned for Marx the popular title of “the Red Terrorist Doctor.”

Due largely to the chaotic influence of Bakunin in the organization, the International died in obscurity in Philadelphia in 1876. In his latter years Marx developed closer ties with Russian communists. But before these ties could be exploited, he died in London on 14 March 1883. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery. It would be over three decades before his theories would begin to be put into practical use after the Russian revolution of 1917.

Marx’ attitude toward traditional religion was that it is “the opiate of the masses.” However, it is equally clear that he intended his philosophy to be a total replacement for religion. His antipathy toward religion began shortly after he began his university studies. He and his associates at the Doktorklub—the Young Hegelians of Berlin—set out on an atheistic program to destroy the superstructure of conservative authority, which they saw in religion. Although he later concentrated on certain economic theories coupled with historical materialism, the young Marx had a vision of the “total redemption of humanity,”[62] as he wrote in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844). The whole of Marx’ philosophy has been seen as a sort of “prophetic politics”[63] in which a total transformation of the world is envisioned—and then promoted.

The early ideas of Marx—in which the roots of his motivations may be found—have been analyzed as being Faustian/Promethean by at least one scholar.[64] Even the casual observer will have noticed the quasi-reiigious features of Marxism both as a theory and as it has been practiced in various countries in the 20^th century. This perhaps has its origins in the nature of Marx’ own initial impetus during his Berlin period. All this is best revealed in his own early, pre-communist, writings, e.g. the epic drama Oulanem (1837) and his poetry. In one of these poems, “The Fiddler” [“Der Spielmann”] (1841), he writes:

Was, was! Ich stech’, stech’ ohne fehle
Blutschwarz den Sabel in Deine Seele,
Gott kennt sie nicht, Gott acht’ nicht der Kunst
Die stieg in den Kopf aus Höllendunst,
Bis das Him vernarrt, bis das Herz verwandelt:
Die hab’ ich lebendig vom Schwarzen erhandelt
Der schlägt mir den Takt, der kreidet die Zeichen;
muss voller, toller den Todtenmarsch streichen...
(ll. 17–24)

Behold, my blood-blackened saber shall stab
Without fail into your heart.
God neither knows nor does he honor art.
It rises into the brain as vapors from Hell.
Until I brain is deluded and my heart transformed:
I bought it while still alive from the Dark-One.
He beats the time for me, he gives the signs;
must more boldly, madly rush in the March of Death...

It is curious that even toward the end of his life overtly Satanic images were used to describe him, even by his close associates. His son-in-law Paul Lafargue said of him: “...he himself was known as the Moor or Old Nick on account of his dark complexion and sinister appearance.”[65]

In the final analysis Marxism is a system of mystical materialism. He posits that history has an organic structure and that its evolution is driven not by the mind of God, as Hegel would have had it, but by exclusively material considerations, e.g. purely economic determination or human behavior and the change caused by struggles between economically determined classes in society. Throughout all of history classes of people—as determined essentially by economic status—who were without power would, by the inevitable force of the historical dialectic, wrest power away from those who have it at present. Thus the proletariat would, by the sheer force of history, overcome the over-ripe capitalist establishment.

Marx claimed that his theories were purely “scientific” or rationally based, that he merely had the clearest view of historical change and its causes. But as it turns out his work had an effect less like a prophesy and more like a sorcerous incantation. Essentially Marx’ view of history appears uncannily like that of Judeo-Christian tradition—only its causal agent has been revaluated from “God’s Plan” to “historical dialectic.” In the former there is an initial Edenic period, broken by man’s transgression against God’s law. This is followed by a long period of tribulation ended first by the incarnation of the Messiah who brings the program for salvation—the Evangelium—which is to be enacted by his earthly followers (the Church). Once this program has been spread world-wide, evil will be vanquished and a new paradise will be established on earth. The Christian version of this is, of course, highly spiritualized, while the Judaic remains largely materialistic. The Marxist view similarly posits an early period of primitive communism, broken by the institution of private property (= Original Sin) and slave labor. This is followed by successive economic stages of feudalism and capitalism. The beginning of the end of the capitalistic phase is heralded by Marxist theory as a program for “redemption”—historical dialectic—which is to be enacted by socialist revolutionaries (the International). Once revolution is spread world-wide, capitalism will be vanquished and the classless, perfected Communist society will be established on earth. Such parallels between Marxist and Christian and/or Judaic views of history have also been posited by several scholars in the past.[66]

Although Marxist theory may be increasingly discredited as political systems based upon it fail and prove to be programs for ever more inefficient and intolerant systems than those the theory was designed to overthrow, elements of Marxist thinking have definitely permeated into popular political culture in the form of such things as notions of “political correctness.” The concept of “political correctness” (even the connotations of the phrase) stems from Marxist orthodoxy and is based on the premise that there is an ongoing struggle by a variety of suppressed groups who are at present viewed as being relatively powerless, e.g. women, African Americans, Hispanics, the physically challenged. It is their collective aim (each group individually) to wrest socioeconomic power from those who have it at present. This is Marx’ “class struggle.” Furthermore, those groups are assured by Marxist theory of fighting the good fight, the moral fight, because the historical dialectic (or the Marxist “God”) is on their side. Their morality and their future victory is assured by the very fact that they are currently powerless. This is why, for example, blacks cannot be considered “racists,” or women “sexists,” at least according to this theory based in the Marxist historical dialectic.

28. The Left-Overs

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Subtitle: How Fascists Court the Post-Left

Author: Alexander Reid Ross

Authors: Alexander Reid Ross

Topics: anti-fascism; fascism; fascist creep; post-left; criticism and critique; anarcho-primitivism; Bob Black; ELF; green anarchism; Hakim Bey; John Zerzan; Lawrence Jarach; Max Stirner; nihilism

Date: 29 March, 2017

Date Published on T@L: 2022-09-28T21:04:33

Source: Retrieved on 28 September, 2022 from antifascistnews.net

Notes: Alexander Reid Ross is a former co-editor of the Earth First! Journal and the author of Against the Fascist Creep. He teaches in the Geography Department at Portland State University and can be reached at <aross@pdx.edu>.

Author’s Note: A few months ago, the radical publication, Fifth Estate, solicited an article from me discussing the rise of fascism in recent years. Following their decision to withdraw the piece, I accepted the invitation of Anti-Fascist News to publish an expanded version here, with some changes, at the urging of friends and fellow writers.

Chapter 1: The Early Composition of Fascist Individualism

A friendly editor recently told me via email, “if anti-capitalism and pro individual liberty [sic] are clearly stated in the books or articles, they won’t be used by those on the right.” If this were true, fascism simply would vanish from the earth. Fascism comes from a mixture of left and right-wing positions, and some on the left pursue aspects of collectivism, syndicalism, ecology, and authoritarianism that intersect with fascist enterprises. Partially in response to the tendencies of left authoritarianism, a distinct antifascist movement emerged in the 1970s to create what has became known as “post-left” thought. Yet in imagining that anti-capitalism and “individual liberty” maintain ideological purity, radicals such as my own dear editor tend to ignore critical convergences with and vulnerabilities to fascist ideology.

The post-left developed largely out of a tendency to favor individual freedom autonomous from political ideology of left and right while retaining some elements of leftism. Although it is a rich milieu with many contrasting positions, post-leftists often trace their roots to individualist Max Stirner, whose belief in the supremacy of the European individual over and against nation, class, and creed was heavily influenced by philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. After Stirner’s death in 1856, the popularity of collectivism and neo-Kantianism obscured his individualist philosophy until Friedrich Nietzsche raised its profile again during the later part of the century. Influenced by Stirner, Nietzsche argued for the overcoming of socialism and the “modern world” by the iconoclastic, aristocratic philosopher known as the “Superman” or “übermensch.”

During the late-19^th Century, Stirnerists conflated the “Superman” with the assumed responsibility of women to bear a superior European race—a “New Man” to produce, and be produced by, a “New Age.” Similarly, right-wing aristocrats who loathed the notions of liberty and equality turned to Nietzsche and Stirner to support their sense of elitism and hatred of left-wing populism and mass-based civilization. Some anarchists and individualists influenced by Stirner and Nietzsche looked to right-wing figures like Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who developed the idea of a “conservative revolution” that would upend the spiritual crises of the modern world and the age of the masses. In the words of anarchist, Victor Serge, “Dostoevsky: the best and the worst, inseparable. He really looks for the truth and fears to find it; he often finds it all the same and then he is terrified… a poor great man…”

History’s “great man” or “New Man” was neither left nor right; he strove to destroy the modern world and replace it with his own ever-improving image—but what form would that image take? In Italy, reactionaries associated with the Futurist movement and various romantic nationalist strains expressed affinity with the individualist current identified with Nietzsche and Stirner. Anticipating tremendous catastrophes that would bring the modern world to its knees and install the New Age of the New Man, the Futurists sought to fuse the “destructive gesture of the anarchists” with the bombast of empire.

A hugely popular figure among these tendencies of individualism and “conservative revolution,” the Italian aesthete Gabrielle D’Annunzio summoned 2,600 soldiers in a daring 1919 attack on the port city of Fiume to reclaim it for Italy after World War I. During their exploit, the occupying force hoisted the black flag emblazoned by skull and crossbones and sang songs of national unity. Italy disavowed the imperial occupation, leaving the City-State in the hands of its romantic nationalist leadership. A constitution, drawn up by national syndicalist, Alceste De Ambris, provided the basis for national solidarity around a corporative economy mediated through collaborating syndicates. D’Annunzio was prophetic and eschatological, presenting poetry during convocations from the balcony. He was masculine. He was Imperial and majestic, yet radical and rooted in fraternal affection. He called forth sacrifice and love of the nation.

When he returned to Italy after the military uprooted his enclave in Fiume, ultranationalists, Futurists, artists, and intellectuals greeted D’Annunzio as a leader of the growing Fascist movement. The aesthetic ceremonies and radical violence contributed to a sacralization of politics invoked by the spirit of Fascism. Though Mussolini likely saw himself as a competitor to D’Annunzio for the role of supreme leader, he could not deny the style and mood, the high aesthetic appeal that reached so many through the Fiume misadventure. Fascism, Mussolini insisted, was an anti-party, a movement. The Fascist Blackshirts, or squadristi, adopted D’Annunzio’s flare, the black uniforms, the skull and crossbones, the dagger at the hip, the “devil may care” attitude expressed by the anthem, “Me ne frego” or “I don’t give a damn.” Some of those who participated in the Fiume exploit abandoned D’Annunzio as he joined the Fascist movement, drifting to the Arditi del Popolo to fight the Fascist menace. Others would join the ranks of the Blackshirts.

Originally a man of the left, Mussolini had no difficulty joining the symbolism of revolution with ultranationalist rebirth. “Down with the state in all its species and incarnations,” he declared in a 1920 speech. “The state of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow. The bourgeois state and the socialist. For those of us, the doomed (morituri) of individualism, through the darkness of the present and the gloom of tomorrow, all that remains is the by-now-absurd, but ever consoling, religion of anarchy!” In another statement, he asked, “why should Stirner not have a comeback?”

Mussolini’s concept of anarchism was critical, because he saw anarchism as prefiguring fascism. “If anarchist authors have discovered the importance of the mythical from an opposition to authority and unity,” declared Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, drawing on Mussolini’s concept of myth, “then they have also cooperated in establishing the foundation of another authority, however unwillingly, an authority based on the new feeling for order, discipline, and hierarchy.” The dialectics of fascism here are two-fold: only the anarchist destruction of the modern world in every milieu would open the potential for Fascism, but the mythic stateless society of anarchism, for Mussolini, could only emerge, paradoxically, from a self-disciplining state of total order.

Antifascist anarchist individualists and nihilists like Renzo Novatore represented for Mussolini a kind of “passive nihilism,” which Nietzsche understood as the decadence and weakness of modernity. The veterans that would fight for Mussolini rejected the suppression of individualism under the Bolsheviks and favored “an anti-party of fighters,” according to historian Emilio Gentile. Fascism would exploit the rampant misogyny of men like Novatore while turning the “passive nihilism” of their vision of total collapse toward “active nihilism” through a rebirth of the New Age at the hands of the New Man.

The “drift” toward fascism that took place throughout Europe during the 1920s and 1930s was not restricted to the collectivist left of former Communists, Syndicalists, and Socialists; it also included the more ambiguous politics of the European avant-garde and intellectual elites. In France, literary figures like Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud began experimenting with fascist aesthetics of cruelty, irrationalism, and elitism. In 1934, Bataille declared his hope to usher in “room for great fascist societies,” which he believed inhabited the world of “higher forms” and “makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble.” Bataille’s admiration for Stirner did not prevent him from developing what he described decades later as a “paradoxical fascist tendency.” Other libertarian celebrities like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Maurice Blanchot also embraced fascist themes—particularly virulent anti-Semitism.

Like Blanchot, the Nazi-supporting Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn called on an anti-humanist language of suffering and nihilism that looked inward, finding only animal impulses and irrational drives. Existentialist philosopher and Nazi Party member, Martin Heidegger, played on Nietzschean themes of nihilism and aesthetics in his phenomenology, placing angst at the core of modern life and seeking existential release through a destructive process that he saw as implicit in the production of an authentic work of art. Literary figure Ernst Jünger, who cheered on Hitler’s rise, summoned the force of “active nihilism,” seeking the collapse of the civilization through a “magic zero” that would bring about a New Age of ultra-individualist actors that he later called “Anarchs.” The influence of Stirner was as present in Jünger as it was in Mussolini’s early fascist years, and carried over to other members of the fascist movement like Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola.

Evola was perhaps the most important of those seeking the collapse of civilization and the New Age’s spiritual awakening of the “universal individual,” sacrificial dedication, and male supremacy. A dedicated fascist and individualist, Evola devoted himself to the purity of sacred violence, racism, anti-Semitism, and the occult. Asserting a doctrine of the “political soldier,” Evola regarded violence as necessary in establishing a kind of natural hierarchy that promoted the supreme individual over the multitudes. Occult practice distilled into an overall aristocracy of the spirit, Evola believed, which could only find expression through sacrifice and a Samurai-like code of honor. Evola shared these ideals of conquest, elitism, sacrificial pleasure with the SS, who invited the Italian esotericist to Vienna to indulge his thirst for knowledge. Following World War II, Evola’s spiritual fascism found parallels in the writings of Savitri Devi, a French esotericist of Greek descent who developed an anti-humanist practice of Nazi nature worship not unlike today’s Deep Ecology. In her rejection of human rights, Devi insisted that the world manifests a totality of interlocking life forces, none of which enjoys a particular moral prerogative over the other.

Chapter 2: The Creation of the Post-Left

It has been shown by now that fascism, in its inter-war period, attracted numerous anti-capitalists and individualists, largely through elitism, the aestheticization of politics, and the nihilist’s desire for the destruction of the modern world. After the fall of the Reich, fascists attempted to rekindle the embers of their movement by intriguing within both the state and social movements. It became popular among fascists to reject Hitler to some degree and call for a return to the original “national syndicalist” ideas mixed with the elitism of the “New Man” and the destruction of civilization. Fascists demanded “national liberation” for European ethnicities against NATO and multicultural liberalism, while the occultism of Evola and Devi began to fuse with Satanism to form new fascist hybrids. With ecology and anti-authoritarianism, such sacralization of political opposition through the occult would prove among the most intriguing conduits for fascist insinuation into subcultures after the war.

In the ’60s, left-communist groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie, Pouvoir ouvrier, and the Situationists gathered at places like bookstore-cum-publishing house, La Vielle Taupe (The Old Mole), critiquing everyday life in industrial civilization through art and transformative practices. According to Gilles Dauvé, one of the participants in this movement, “the small milieu round the bookshop La Vieille Taupe” developed the idea of “communisation,” or the revolutionary transformation of all social relations. This new movement of “ultra-leftists” helped inspire the aesthetics of a young, intellectual rebellion that culminated in a large uprising of students and workers in Paris during May 1968.

The strong anti-authoritarian current of the ultra-left and the broader uprising of May ’68 contributed to similar movements elsewhere in Europe, like the Italian Autonomia movement, which spread from a wildcat strike against the car manufacturer, Fiat, to generalized upheaval involving rent strikes, building occupations, and mass street demonstrations. While most of Autonomia remained left-wing, its participants were intensely critical of the established left, and autonomists often objected to the ham-fisted strategy of urban guerrillas. In 1977, individualist anarchist, Alfredo Bonanno, penned the text, “Armed Joy,” exhorting Italian leftists to drop patriarchal pretensions to guerrilla warfare and join popular insurrectionary struggle. The conversion of Marxist theorist, Jacques Camatte, to the pessimistic rejection of leftism and embrace of simpler life tied to nature furthered contradictions within the Italian left.

With anti-authoritarianism, ecologically-oriented critiques of civilization emerged out of the 1960s and 1970s as significant strains of a new identity that rejected both left and right. Adapting to these currents of popular social movements and exploiting blurred ideological lines between left and right, fascist ideologues developed the framework of “ethno-pluralism.” Couching their rhetoric in “the right to difference” (ethnic separatism), fascists masked themselves with labels like the “European New Right,” “national revolutionaries,” and “revolutionary traditionalists.” The “European New Right” took the rejection of the modern world advocated by the ultra-left as a proclamation of the indigeneity of Europeans and their pagan roots in the land. Fascists further produced spiritual ideas derived from a sense of rootedness in one’s native land, evoking the old “blood and soil” ecology of the German völkische movement and Nazi Party.

In Italy, this movement produced the “Hobbit Camp,” an eco-festival organized by European New Right figure Marco Tarchi and marketed to disillusioned youth via Situationist-style posters and flyers. When Italian “national revolutionary,” Roberto Fiore, fled charges of participating in a massive bombing of a train station in Bologna, he found shelter in the London apartment of Tarchi’s European New Right colleague, Michael Walker. This new location would prove transformative, as Fiore, Walker, and a group of fascist militants created a political faction called the Official National Front in 1980. This group would help promote and would benefit from a more avant-garde fascist aesthetic, bringing forward neo-folk, noise, and other experimental music genres.

While fascists entered the green movement and exploited openings in left anti-authoritarian thought, Situationism began to transform. In the early 1970s, post-Situationism emerged through US collectives that combined Stirnerist egoism with collectivist thought. In 1974, the For Ourselves group published The Right to Be Greedy, inveighing against altruism while linking egoist greed to the synthesis of social identity and welfare—in short, to surplus. The text was reprinted in 1983 by libertarian group, Loompanics Unlimited, with a preface from a little-known writer named Bob Black.

While post-Situationism turned toward individualism, a number of European ultra-leftists moved toward the right. In Paris, La Vieille Taupe went from controversial views rejecting the necessity of specialized antifascism to presenting the Holocaust as a lie necessary to maintain the capitalist order. In 1980, La Vielle Taupe published the notorious Mémoire en Défense centre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire by Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Though La Vielle Taupe and founder, Pierre Guillaume, received international condemnation, they gained a controversial defense from left-wing professor, Noam Chomsky. Even if they have for the most part denounced Guillaume and his entourage, the ultra-leftist rejection of specialized antifascism has remained somewhat popular—particularly as expounded by Dauvé, who insisted in the early 1980s that “fascism as a specific movement has disappeared.”

The idea that fascism had become a historical artifact only helped the creep of fascism to persist undetected, while Faurisson and Guillaume became celebrities on the far-right. As the twist toward Holocaust denial would suggest, ultra-left theory was not immune from translation into ethnic terms—a reality that formed the basis of the work of Official National Front officer, Troy Southgate. Though influenced by the Situationists, along with a scramble of other left and right-wing figures, Southgate focused particularly on the ecological strain of radical politics associated with the punk-oriented journal, Green Anarchist, which called for a return to “primitive” livelihoods and the destruction of modern civilization. In 1991, the editors of Green Anarchist pushed out their co-editor, Richard Hunt, for his patriotic militarism, and Hunt’s new publication, Green Alternative, soon became associated with Southgate. Two years later, Southgate would join allied fascists like Jean-François Thiriart and Christian Bouchet to create the Liaison Committee for Revolutionary Nationalism.

In the US, the “anarcho-primitivist” or “Green Anarchist” tendency had been taken up by former ultra-leftist, John Zerzan. Identifying civilization as an enemy of the earth, Zerzan called for a return to sustainable livelihoods that rejected modernity. Zerzan rejected racism but relied in no small part on the thought of Martin Heidegger, seeking a return authentic relations between humans and the world unmediated by symbolic thought. This desired return, some have pointed out, would require a collapse of civilization so profound that millions, if not billions, would likely perish. Zerzan, himself, seems somewhat ambiguous with regards to the potential death toll, regardless of his support for the unibomber, Ted Kaczynsky.

Joining with Zerzan to confront authoritarianism and return to a more tribal, hunter-gatherer social organization, an occultist named Hakim Bey developed the idea of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ). For Bey, a TAZ would actualize a liberated and erotic space of orgiastic, revolutionary poesis. Yet within his 1991 text, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Bey included extensive praise for D’Annunzio’s proto-fascist occupation of Fiume, revealing the disturbing historical trends of attempts to transcend right and left.

Along with Zerzan and Bey, Bob Black would prove instrumental to the foundation of what is today called the “post-left.” In his 1997 text, Anarchy After Leftism, Black responded to left-wing anarchist Murray Bookchin, who accused individualists of “lifestyle anarchism.” Drawing from Zerzan’s critique of civilization as well as from Stirner and Nietzsche, Black presented his rejection of work as a nostrum for authoritarian left tendencies that he identified with Bookchin (apparently Jew-baiting Bookchin in the process).[67]

Thus, the post-left began to assemble through the writings of ultra-leftists, green anarchists, spiritualists, and egoists published in zines, books, and journals like Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed and Fifth Estate. Although these thinkers and publications differ in many ways, key tenets of the post-left included an eschatological anticipation of the collapse of civilization accompanied by a synthesis of individualism and collectivism that rejected left, right, and center in favor of a deep connection with the earth and more organic, tribal communities as opposed to humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy. That post-left texts included copious references to Stirner, Nietzsche, Jünger, Heidegger, Artaud, and Bataille suggests that they form a syncretic intellectual tendency that unites left and right, individualism and “conservative revolution.” As we will see, this situation has provided ample space for the fascist creep.

Chapter 3: The Fascist Creep

During the 1990s, the “national revolutionary” network of Southgate, Thiriart, and Bouchet, later renamed the European Liberation Front, linked up with the American Front, a San Francisco skinhead group exploring connections between counterculture and the avant-garde. Like prior efforts to develop a Satanic Nazism, American Front leader Bob Heick supported a mix of Satanism, occultism, and paganism, making friends with fascist musician Boyd Rice. A noise musician and avant-gardist, Rice developed a “fascist think tank” called the Abraxas Foundation, which echoed the fusion of the cult ideas of Charles Manson, fascism, and Satanism brought together by 1970s fascist militant James Mason. Rice’s protégé and fellow Abraxas member, Michael Moynihan, joined the radical publishing company, Feral House, which publishes texts along the lines of Abraxas, covering a range of themes from Charles Manson Scandinavian black metal, and militant Islam to books by Evola, James Mason, Bob Black, and John Zerzan.

In similar efforts, Southgate’s French ally, Christian Bouchet, generated distribution networks and magazines dedicated to supporting a miniature industry growing around neo-folk and the new, ”anarchic” Scandinavian black metal scene. Further, national anarchists attempted to set up and/or infiltrate e-groups devoted to green anarchism. As Southgate and Bouchet’s network spread to Russia, notorious Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, emerged as another leading ideologue who admired Zerzan’s work.

Post-leftists were somewhat knowledgable about these developments. In a 1999 post-script to one of Bob Black’s works, co-editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Lawrence Jarach, cautioned against the rise of “national anarchism.” In 2005, Zerzan’s journal, Green Anarchy, published a longer critique of Southgate’s “national anarchism.” These warnings were significant, considering that they came in the context of active direct action movements and groups like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a green anarchist group dedicated to large-scale acts of sabotage and property destruction with the intention of bringing about the ultimate collapse of industrial civilization.

As their ELF group executed arsons during the late-1990s and early-2000s, a former ELF member told me that two comrades, Nathan “Exile” Block and Joyanna “Sadie” Zacher, shared an unusual love of Scandinavian black metal, made disturbing references to Charles Manson, and promoted an elitist, anti-left mentality. While their obscure references evoked Abraxas, Feral House, and Bouchet’s distribution networks, their politics could not be recognized within the milieu of fascism at the time. However, their general ideas became clearer, the former ELF member told me, when antifascist researchers later discovered that a Tumblr account run by Block contained numerous occult fascist references, including national anarchist symbology, swastikas, and quotes from Evola and Jünger. These were only two members of a larger group, but their presence serves as food for thought regarding important radical cross-over points and how to approach them.

To wit, the decisions of John Zerzan and Bob Black to publish books with Feral House, seem peculiar—especially in light of the fact that two of the four books Zerzan has published there came out in 2005, the same year as Green Anarchy’s noteworthy warning against national anarchism. It would appear that, although in some cases prescient about the subcultural cross-overs between fascism and the post-left, post-leftists have, on a number of occasions, engaged in collaborative relationships.

As Green Anarchy cautioned against entryism and Zerzan simultaneously published with Feral House, controversy descended on an online forum known as the Anti-Politics Board. An outgrowth of the insurrectionist publication Killing King Abacus, the Anti-Politics Board was used by over 1,000 registered members and had dozens of regular contributors. The online platform presented a flourishing site of debate for post-leftists, yet discussions over insurrectionism, communisation, green anarchy, and egoism often produced a strangely competitive iconoclastism. Attempts to produce the edgiest take often led to the popularization of topics like “‘anti-sexism’ as collectivist moralism” and “critique of autonomous anti-fascism.” Attacks on morality and moralism tended to encourage radicals to abandon the “identity politics” and “white guilt” often associated with left-wing anti-racism.

Amid these discussions, a young radical named Andrew Yeoman began to post national anarchist positions. When asked repeatedly to remove Yeoman from the forum, a site administrator refused, insisting that removing the white nationalist would have meant behaving like leftists. They needed to try something else. Whatever they tried, however, it didn’t work, and Yeoman later became notorious for forming a group called the Bay Area National Anarchists, showing up to anarchist events like book fairs, and promoting anarchist collaboration with the Minutemen and American Front.

An important aspect of the Anti-Politics Board was the articulation of nihilist and insurrectionary theories, both of which gained popularity after the 2008 financial crisis. In an article titled, “The New Nihilism,” Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) pointed out that the rising wave of nihilism that emerged during the late 2000s and into the second decade could not immediately be distinguished from the far right, due to myriad cross-over points. Indeed, Stormfront is riddled with users like “TAZriot” and “whitepunx” who promote the basic, individualist tenets of post-leftism from the original, racist position of Stirnerism. Rejecting “political correctness” and “white guilt,” these post-left racists desire separate, radical spaces and autonomous zones for whites.

Through dogged research, Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon, discovered whitepunx’s identity: “Trigger” Tom Christensen, a known member of the local punk scene. “I was never an anti [antifascist] but I’ve hung out with a few of them,” Christensen wrote on Stormfront. “I used to be a big punk rocker in the music scene and there were some antis that ran around in the same scene. I was friends with a few. They weren’t trying to recruit me, or anybody really. They did not, however, know I was a WN [white nationalist]. I kept my beliefs to myself and would shut down any opinions the[y] expressed that seemed to have holes in them. It’s been fairly useful to know some of these people. I now know who all the major players are in the anti and SHARP [Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice] scene.”

For a time, Christensen says he hung out with post-leftists and debated them like Yeoman had done. Less than a year later, however, Christensen followed up in a chilling post titled, “Do You Think It Would Be Acceptable To Be A ‘Rat’ If It Was Against Our Enemies.” He wrote, “I had an interesting thought the other day and wanted peoples opinions. If you were asked by the Police to provide or find evidence that would incriminate people who are enemy’s [sic] of the movement, i.e. Leftists, reds, anarchists. Would you do it? Would you ‘rat’ or ‘narc’ on the Left side?” Twenty one responses came beckoning from the recesses of the white nationalist world. While some encouraged Christensen to snitch, others insisted that he keep gang loyalty. It is uncertain as to whether or not he went to the police, but the May 2013 discovery of his Stormfront activity took place shortly before a grand jury subpoenaed four anarchists who were subsequently arrested and held for contempt of court.

In another unsettling example of crossover between post-leftists and fascists, radicals associated with a nihilist group named Ultra harshly rebuked Rose City Antifa of Portland, Oregon, for releasing an exposé about Jack Donovan. An open member of the violent white nationalist group, Wolves of Vinland, Donovan also runs a gym called the Kabuki Strength Lab, which produces “manosphere” videos. As of November 2016, when the exposé was published, one member of Ultra was a member of the Kabuki Strength Lab. Although Donovan runs a tattoo shop out of the gym and gave Libertarian Party fascist Augustus Sol Invictus a tattoo of the fasces there, a fellow gym member wrote, “Obviously Jack has very controversial beliefs and practices that most disagree with; but I don’t believe it affects his behavior in the gym.” Donovan, who has publicly parroted “race realist” statistics at white nationalist gatherings like the National Policy Institute and the Pressure Project podcast, also embraces bioregionalism and the anticipation of a collapse of civilization that will lead to a reversion of identity-bound tribal structures at war with one another and reliant on natural hierarchies—an ideology that resonates with Ultra and some members of the broader post-left milieu.

It stands to reason that defending fascists and collaborating with them are not the same, and they are both separate from having incidental ideological cross-over points. However the cross-over points, when unchecked, frequently indicate a tendency to ignore, defend, or collaborate. Defense and collaboration can, and do, also converge. For instance, also in Portland, Oregon, the founder of a UK ultra-leftist splinter group called Wildcat began to participate in a reading group involving prominent post-leftists before sliding toward anti-Semitism. Soon he was participating in the former-leftist-turned-fascist Pacifica Forum in Eugene, Oregon, and defending anti-Semitic co-op leader, Tim Calvert. He was last seen by antifas creeping into an event for Holocaust denier, David Irving.

Perhaps the most troubling instance of collaboration, or rather synthesis, of post-left nihilism and the far right is taking place currently in the alt-right. Donovan is considered a member of the alt-right, while Christensen’s latest visible Facebook post hails from the misogynistic Proud Boys group. These groups and individuals connected to the alt-right are described as having been “red-pilled,” a term taken from the movie, The Matrix, in which the protagonist is awakened to a dystopian reality after choosing to take a red pill. For the alt-right, being “red-pilled” means waking up to the “reality” offered by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, and white nationalism—usually through online forums where the competitive iconoclasm of “edge-lords” mutates into ironic anti-Semitism and hatred. Among the most extreme forms of this phenomenon occurring in recent years is the so-called “black pill”—red-pillers who have turning toward the celebration of indiscriminate violence via the same trends of individualism and nihilism outlined above.

“Black-pillers” claim to have shed their attachments to all theories entirely. This tendency evokes the attitude of militant anti-civilization group, Individuals Tending to the Wild, which is popular among some post-leftist groups and advocates indiscriminate violence against any targets manifesting the modern world. Another influence for “black-pillers” is Adam Lanza, the infamous mass shooter who phoned John Zerzan a year before murdering his mother, 20 children, and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Zerzan has condemned Individuals Tending Toward the Wild, and months after Lanza’s horrifying actions, he penned a piece imploring post-left nihilists to find hope: “Egoism and nihilism are evidently in vogue among anarchists and I’m hoping that those who so identify are not without hope. Illusions no, hope yes.” Unfortunately, Zerzan developed his short communiqué into a book published by Feral House on November 10, 2015—the day after Feral House published The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement co-authored by Eddie Stampton, a Nazi skinhead.

Conclusion

In light of these cross-overs, many individualist anarchists, post-leftists, and nihilists tend not to deny that they share nodal networks with fascists. In many cases, they seek to struggle against them and reclaim their movement. Yet, there tends to be another permissive sense that anarchists bear no responsibility for distinguishing themselves from fascists. If there are numerous points in which radical milieus become a blur of fascists, anarchists, and romantics, some claim that throwing shade on such associations only propagates fallacious thinking, or “guilt by association.”

However, recalling the information in this essay, we might note that complex cross-overs seem to include, in particular, aspects of egoism and radical green theory. Derived from Stirnerism and Nietzschean philosophy, egoism can reify the social alienation felt by an individual, leading to an elitist sense of self-empowerment and delusions of grandeur. When mixed with insurrectionism and radical green thought, egoism can translate into “hunter versus prey” or “wolves versus sheep” elitism, in which compassion for others is rejected as moralistic. This kind of alienated elitism can also develop estranged aesthetic and affective positions tied to cruelty, vengeance, and hatred.

Emerging out of a rejection of humanism and urban modernism, the particular form of radical green theory often embraced by the post-left can relativize human losses by looking at the larger waves of mass extinctions. By doing this, radical greens anticipate a collapse that would “cull the herd” or cause a mass human die off of millions, if not billions, of people throughout the world. This aspect of radical green theory comes very close to, and sometimes intertwines with, ideas about over-population compiled and produced by white nationalists and anti-immigration activists tied to the infamous Tanton Network. Some radical green egoists (or nihilists) insist that their role should be to provoke such a collapse, through anti-moralist strikes against civilization.

As examples like Hakim Bey’s TAZ and the lionization of the Fiume misadventure, Zerzan and Black’s publishing with Feral House, and Ultra’s defense of Donovan indicate, the post-left’s relation to white nationalism is sometimes ambiguous and occasionally even collaborative. Other examples, like those of Yeoman and Christensen, indicate that the tolerance for fascist ideas on the post-left can result in unwittingly accepting them, providing a platform for white nationalism, and increasing vulnerability to entryism. Specific ideas that are sometimes tolerated under the rubric of the “critique of the left” include the approval of “natural hierarchies,” ultranationalism understood as ethno-biological and spiritual ties to homeland and ancestry, rejection of feminism and antifascism, and the fetishization of violence and cruelty.

It is more important today than ever before to recognize how radical movements develop intersections with fascists if we are to discover how to expose creeping fascism and develop stronger, more direct networks. Anarchists must abandon the equivocations that invite the fascist creep and reclaim anarchy as the integral struggle for freedom and equality. Sectarian polemics are the result of extensive learning processes, but are less important than engaging in solidarity to struggle against fascism in all its forms and various disguises.

Notes

29. Where did all the tankies come from?

Deleted reason: transphobia. can discuss. removing for now. see comment.

Subtitle: How anarchists fucked up and by inaction created the tankie resurgence

Author: William Gillis

Topics: Authoritarian Left

Date: 16^th August 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2021-01-14T10:54:55

Source: Retrieved on 14^th January 2020 from threadreaderapp.com

My sincere answer for why tankies reemerged five years ago is that movements are social hierarchies and newbie teens don’t want to compete for status in existing illegible/inaccessible spaces like anarchism, so they resurrected a dead/empty scene that had trappings of status.

Leftism exploded in social cachet for a variety of reasons, and newly minted leftists needed to slap an identity, a brand, a flag of status and association on themselves.

“Stalin did nothing wrong, USSR looked cool” is a quickie that requires no work or long acculturation.

For all of recorded history tankies were like three old creepy white dudes no one cared about at the back of an IWW meeting. Sometimes they’d trick a kid or two for a couple years.

The reemergence of tankies involved people completely disconnected and unrelated to prior tankies.

When I first started hearing whispers of anyone under 50 actually defending Lenin it was newly minted trans girls in abusive cult collective houses. They weren’t like getting this shit from contact w/ actual leninists, they were inventing a new social milieu from whole cloth.

Sure, there were some points of transmission. A creepy professor schooled in standard creepy tankie entryism gathered some students, got them to take over fb pages, etc. But mostly tankies were just googling “what is communism” and grabbing random shit.

Anyway, this is why today’s online tankiedom is such an uniformed and contradictory grab-bag of bullshit. There’s been some congealing as folks competed to show off what texts (in this previously dead space) they’d read, but mostly it’s just social positioning.

This kind of thing happens EVERY time a movement gets a flood of new recruits. People flood in and want to grab high status immediately, are resentful of those already there, and clash over not wanting to learn or accept preexisting consensus positions they don’t yet hold.

My go-to example of this in Occupy were kids who “not to brag but had been an anarchist now for OVER A MONTH” getting furious and yelling at longstanding anarchists that we were “fake anarchists who don’t know anything!” because we weren’t pacifists.

See also leftypol & the dirtbaggers. Folks get converted on one issue and then recoil about being expected to also learn / change their opinion on a variety of other topics. Respecting pronouns?! Never! You olds are a joke! We’re making a new movement with hookers & blackjack!

Anyway, tankies and their eternal tactics of parasitic duplicitous entryism are particularly effective online with kids who are freshfaced and have no deep AFK contact with radical/activist spaces. They basically ate 99% of meme pages on facebook and every subreddit.

Now did some of these people get hooked up with checks from the PRC or something? Maybe. We’ve seen eg DPRK funding neonazi reading groups. But I think this is minor and is not responsible for the 2015/2016 tankie explosion. Bernie did that.

I mean quite literally it was Bernie. In 2016 an activist group I was in was interviewing people looking to get involved and we found (to my comrades’ shock) a number of fervent bloodthirsty tankies. Looking at their social media they were THREE MONTHS into being tankies.

I mean literally we’re talking about people who had been Bernie Bernie Bernie liberals and then the moment prospects for further standing in that scene fell out with the collapse of his campaign they turned on a dime and got into Stalin did nothing wrong, Castro’s a hero, etc.

These kids had basically never done activism before and knew NOTHING but were fronting as longtime super serious radicals. They were astonished to learn we were all anarchists. They didn’t know anarchists were real or 90% of the actual activist scene.

These kids who had again, three months prior been all about Bernie and had no fucking politics beyond a few Bernie videos they watched, were making posts to their social media praising Stalin exterminating anarchists.

They were DESPERATE for belonging, status, identity, etc. Particularly that which could be gotten from behind a computer screen by joining like a discord or fb group or watching a few youtube videos.

Anarchism was simply inaccessible by comparison.

Most of the anarchist movement had sneered at and avoided the internet (seen as an insecure tool of civilized alienation). Also it was illegible, most of the shit we expect you to learn/accept we don’t even write down. And getting involved? We’re terrible at helping folks join.

Anarchist recruitment for decades had been primarily social / subcultural, with a fringe of super committed altruistic nerds who would persevere.

There was simply no recruitment machinery for randos who wanted to quickly join, learn shit, and gain standing via the internet.

(This is also related to why breadtube types tend to be so open to tankies and/or slip further and further from anarchist mainstream shit and towards tankie shit.)

There’s a secondary thread in all this which is the amount of low-quality anarchists that jumped ship to leftcom trash (because low-investment snotty status hierarchies in fb discussion groups). That’s kinda the path by which older anarchists made their way eventually to MLism.

Academic status hierarchies are also related to why some anarchists went leftcom.

These folks are also our fault because they usually had a very anemic knowledge of or exposure to substantive/contemporary/analytic anarchist theory, so leftcom shit looked better.

Anarchism is inherently more diverse & decentralized and thus illegible to newbs. Anarchism prioritizes individual agency and thus doesn’t do the “sign your contact info onto this sheet and we’ll order you around” recruitment. Also we’re ultimately opposed to status hierarchies.

But ALSO the anarchist movement got up its own ass. We derided the internet and avoided utilizing it effectively. We embraced illegibility as resistance, forgetting that accessibility is critical to undermining hierarchies. And we corrupted into playing internal status games.

Those internal status games meant people sneering at uneducated and very “liberal” newbs, gatekeeping people out just to maintain our eliteness. Not just gatekeeping in the sense of preserving hard won understandings and consensus agreements from erosion.

But my last thought:

Having more folks isn’t necessarily good.

An effective movement does require some filters, eg stopping abusers and opportunistic grifters at the door.

The upside of tankies is they draw away the shallow, status-driven authoritarian trash we never wanted.

30. Thirty Years Ago Today I Shot My First Fascist

Deleted reason: DELETED is this by an anarchist? doesn’t use the word, couldn’t find info about it online

Author: Ali Al-Aswad

Topics: anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, history, Palestine, armed struggle

Date: 30.07.2008

Date Published on T@L: 2024-03-06T10:01:55

Source: <indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/leedsbradford/2008/07/405016.html>

The camp was in a remote location in the Zahrani river valley. Access was by a steep track that snaked down the hillside from the Sida road. The track came to an end alongside what had been a farmhouse once, consisting of a stone hut where some of the men slept. Beneath this was a much larger stone manger, this was unused except by a few chickens, but in the warm weather it’s flat roof became the main focus of the camp, being used for both eating and sleeping. Beyond this building were a few tents, one of which was my home. Straight ahead was a blind valley which held a concealed ammunition dump and field guns, but before that was a large tent in which several older fedayi lived. Some were recovering from injuries sustained in the conflict.

To the left of the manger a path led down to another stone building which acted as a storeroom for tinned food, dried foodstuffs, and also ammunition. The storeroom was built into the hillside, having a flat roof, and adjacent to this was a large stone water-tank, which had been cut into the terrain. Below the tank and next to the storeroom was a water-tap, and further along the path was the Zahrani river itself.

The camp was isolated and quite vulnerable, with the Phalangist-held village of Haga visible high on the far hillside across the river. Nonetheless, throughout my life, I have rarely felt more safe.

Ostensibly the camp was under the command of Abu Abdullah, a thoughtful, introspective man aged somewhere in his 30’s. He had jet black hair and a full beard. The structure of the camp was entirely democratic though, and it had a militant reputation. Only weeks before our arrival the men had refused Yasser Arafat admission to the camp because they disagreed with a political decision he had taken.

Our training instructor was Ali Hassan from Gaza. He was aged only 23, but after 10 years fighting, it was impossible to guess that. He was tough, but with a warm, friendly manner, and bore a striking (and possibly cultivated) resemblance to Che Guevara. We also received some technical instruction from Jaffa, a Russian-trained armourer.

The older men kept to themselves for the most part, but I got on well with them, on occasion drinking tea and eating freshly caught fish in their large tent. Abu Muhamed was of the same age as the others, but he was still a very active fighter, and once saved my life.

Also at the camp was Abu Fathi, a round black man, filled with humour. Muhamed Ali had come to fight all the way from Sarajevo, a town in Yugoslavia I’d never heard of at the time. There were many more at the camp whose names I forget.

On the last day of July though, as darkness fell, the camp was nearly empty. Why I cannot recall, but there was only myself, Ali Hassan, and my English comrade (who had been given the nom de guerre Jihad), sat out on the roof of the manger. The older men were probably in their tent, but would have been out of earshot, while others I think were at the house at the top of the track, which guarded the Sida road.

We had just finished eating. There was little food because of the war, and we ate simply, sharing a plate in the traditional Arab manner. Suddenly Ali Hassan became alert, motioning for us to listen. I could hear nothing untoward, but Ali said he had heard something down towards the river. We both grabbed our Kalashnikovs and I strapped on my belt containing extra magazines of ammunition. As we stepped into the darkness and towards whatever was there, leaving Jihad to guard the house and wait for assistance, I felt no fear at all, except perhaps that I might be afraid.

Turning left in front of the manger, we skirted up the steep hill to the right, eventually passing the open water-tank and crawling on our stomachs across the flat roof of the storeroom. We reached the edge, with the level ground next to the river perhaps 30ft below us. We looked into the darkness listening for the slightest sound which might mean a raiding party of Israelis or Phalangists.

Ali beckoned me towards him and I rolled over. He pointed towards the dense undergrowth next to the narrow path which ran alongside the river. As I squinted in the darkness I saw the shape of a man standing, then another kneeling, and others behind. I could make out perhaps 4 or 5, but there were most likely others hidden in the darkness. The ones I could see were carrying Kalashnikovs, which meant they were almost certainly Phalangists rather than Israelis.

On my stomach I followed Ali back across the flat roof. Then he jumped into the darkness. I leapt after him, the fall seemed to last forever. It must have been at least 25 feet, but I landed well on the path below. As we slid the selector switches on our rifles onto full auto, Ali gestured for me to aim to the left and he would aim to the right.

We both came round the corner of the stone storeroom firing. I aimed into the darkness to the left of our position, firing on full auto and raking my gun round until it pointed straight ahead. Ali did the same, but starting from the right. We emptied our magazines. The fascist raiding party did not get the chance to return fire.

31. Towards a New Oceania

Deleted reason: author not anarchist

Author: Albert Wendt

Topics: anti-colonialism, postcolonialism, Pacific-Islands, culture, purity, Christianity

Date: 1976

Date Published on T@L: 2023-04-11T01:25:03

Source: Retrieved on 4/10/2023 from https://ethnc3990.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/wendt-toward-a-new-oceania.pdf

Towards a New Oceania

By Albert Wendt

A Rediscovery of Our Dead

‘These Islands rising from wave’s edge –

blue myth brooding in orchid,

fern and banyan, fearful gods

awaiting birth from blood clot

into stone image and chant –

to bind their wounds, bury their journey’s dead, as I

watched from shadow root, ready

for birth generations after ….’

(from ‘Inside Us the Dead’)

I belong to Oceania — or. at least. I am rooted in a fertile portion of it — and it nourishes my spirit. helps to define me. and feeds my imagination. A detached/objective analysis I will leave to the sociologist and all the other ‘ologists who have plagued Oceania since she captivated the imagination of the Papalagi in his quest for El Dorado, a Southern Continent. and the Noble Savage in a tropical Eden. Objectivity is for such uncommitted gods. My commitment won’t allow me to confine myself to so narrow a vision. So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands. nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope — if not to contain her — to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain.

I will not pretend that I know her in all her manifestations. No one — not even our gods — ever did; no one does (UNESCO ‘experts and consultants’ included); no one ever will because whenever we think we have captured her she has already assumed new guises — the love affair is endless, even her vital statistics, as it were, will change endlessly. In the final instance, our countries, cultures, nations, planets are what we imagine them to be. One human being’s reality is another’s fiction. Perhaos we ourselves exist onlv in one another’s dreams.

In our various groping ways. we are all in search of that heaven, that Hawaiki, where our hearts will find meaning; most of us never find it, or, at the moment of finding it. fail to recognise it. At this stage in my life I have found it in Oceania: it is a return to where I was born, or, put another way, it is a search for where I was born:

One day I will reach the source again

There at my beginnings

Another peace

Will welcome me

(from “The River Flows Back’ by Kumalau Tawali, Manus, Papua New Guinea)

Our dead are woven into our souls like the hypnotic music of bone flutes: we can never escape them. If we let them they can help illuminate us to ourselves and to one another. They can be the source of new-found pride, self-respect, and wisdom. Conversely they can be the aitu that will continue to destroy us by blinding us to the beauty we are so capable of becoming as individuals, cultures. nations. We must try to exorcise these aitu both old and modern. If we can’t do so, then at least we can try and recognise them for what they are, admit to their fearful existence and, by doing so, learn to control and live honestly with them. We are all familiar with such aitu. For me, the most evil is racism: it is the symbol of all repression.

Chill you’re a bastard…

You have trampled the whole world over

Here your boot is on our necks, your spear

into our intestines

Your history and your size make me cry violently

for air to breathe

(from The Reluctant Flame by John Kasaipwalova, Trobriands)

Over the last two centuries or so, that most fearful chill, institutionalized in colonialism, was our perpetual cross in Oceania:

Kros mi no wandem yu Cross I hate you

Yu kilim mi You are killing me

Yu sakem aot ol You are destroying

We blong mi My traditions

Mi no wandem yu Kros I hate you Cross

(from Kros by Albert Leomala, New Hebrides)

The chill continues to wound, transform. humiliate us and our cultures. Any real understanding of ourselves and our existing cultures calls for an attempt to understand colonialism and what it did and is still doing to us. This understanding would better equip us to control or exorcise it so that, I the words of the Maori poet Hone Tuwhare, we can dream good dreams again, heal the wounds it inflicted on us and with the healing will return pride in ourselves—an ingredient so vital to creative nation-building. Pride, self-respect, self-reliance will help us cope so much more creatively with what is passing or to come. Without this healing most of our countries will remain permanent welfare cases not only economically but culturally. (And cultural dependency is even more soul-destroying than economic dependency). Without it we will continue to be exploited by vampires of all colours, creeds, fangs. (Our home-grown species are often more rapacious). Without it the tragic mimickry, abasement, and humiliation will continue, and we will remain the often grotesque colonial caricatureswe were transformed into by the chill. As much as possible, we, mini in size though our countries are, must try and assume control of our destinies, both in utterance and in fact. To get this control of our destinies, both in utterance and in fact. To get this control we must train our own people as quicklyas possible in all fields of national development. Our economic and cultural dependency will be lessened according to the rate at which we can produce trained manpower. In this, we are failing badly.

In a flash he saw in front of his eyes all the wasted years of carrying the whiteman’s cargo.

(from The Crocodile by Vincent Eri, Papua, Papua New Guinea)

If it has been a waste largely, where do we go from here?

My body is tired

My head aches

I weep for our people

Where are we going mother

(from Motherland by Mildred Sope, New Hebrides

Again, we must rediscover and reaffirm our faith in the vitality of our past. our cultures. our dead. so that we may develop our own unique eyes, voices, muscles. and imagination.

Some Questions and Possible Answers

In considering the Role of Traditional Cultures in Promoting National Cultural Identity and Authenticity in Nation-Building in the Oceanic Islands (whoever thought up this mouthful should be edited out of the English language!) the following questions emerged:

Is there such a creature as traditional culture?
If there is, what period in the growth of a culture is to be called traditional?
If traditional cultures do exist in Oceania, to what extent are they colonial creations
What is authentic culture?
Is the differentiation we usually make between the culture(s) of our urban areas (meaning foreign) and those of our rural areas (meaning traditional) a valid one?

Are not the life-styles of our towns simply developments of our traditional life-styles, or merely sub-cultures within our national cultures? Why is it that many of us condemn urban life-styles (sub-cultures) as being foreign and therefore evil forces contaminating/corrupting the purity of our true cultures (whatever this means)?

Why is it that the most vocal exponents of preserving our true cultures live in our towns and pursue life-styles which, in their own terminology, are alien and impure?
Are some of u sadvocating the preservation of our culturesnot for ourselves but for our brothers, the rural masses, and by doing this ensure the maintenance of a status quo is which we enjoy privileged positions?
Should there be ONE sanctified/official/sacred interpretation of one’s culture? And who should do this interpreting?

These questions (and others which they imply) have to be answered satisfactorily before any realistic policies concerning cultural conservation in Oceania can be formulated. The rest of this section is an attempt to answer these questions.

Like a tree a culture is forever growing new branches, foliage, and roots. Our cultures, contrary to the simplistic interpretation of our romantics, were changing even in pre-papalagi times through inter-island contact and the endeavours of exceptional individuals and groups who manipulated politics, religion, and other people. Contrary to the utterances of our elite groups, our pre-papalagi cultures were not perfect or beyond reproach. No culture is perfect or sacred even today. Individual dissent is essential to the healthy survival, development, and sanity of any nation — without it our cultures will drown in self-love. Such dissent was allowed in our pre-papalagi cultures: what can be more dissenting than using war to challenge and over-throw existing power’ and it was a frequent occurrence. No culture is ever static and can be preserved (a favourite word with our colonisers and romantic elite brethren) like a stuffed gorilla in a museum.

There is no state of cultural purity (or perfect state of cultural goodness) from which there is decline: usage determines authenticity. There was no Fall, no sun-tanned Noble Savages existing in South Seas paradises, no Golden Age, except in Hollywood films, in the insanely romantic literature and art by outsiders about the Pacific, in the breathless sermons of our elite vampires, and in the fevered imaginations of our self-styled romantic revolutionaries. We, in Oceania, did not/and do not have a monopoly on God and the ideal life. I do not advocate a return to an imaginary pre-papalagi Golden Age or utopian wob. Physically, we are too corrupted for such a re-entry! Our quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts. The quest should be for a new Oceania.

Racism is institutionalized in all cultures, and the desire to dominate and exploit others is no the sole prerogative of the papalagi. Even today, despite the glib tributes paid to a Pacific Way, there is much racial discrimination between our many ethnic groups, and much heartless exploitation of one group by another. Many of us are guilty—whether we are aware of it or not—of perpetuating the destructive colonial chill and are doing so in the avowed interest of preserving our racial/cultural purity (whatever this means). Maintaining the status quo using this pretext is not only ridiculous but dangerous. The only valid culture worth having is the one being lived out now, unless of course we attain immortality or invent a time machine that would enable us to live in the past or future. Knowledge of our past cultures is a precious source of inspiration for living out the present. (An understanding also of other peoples and their cultures is vital). What may have been considered true forms in the past may be ludicrous now: cannibalism and huma sacrifice are better left in the history books, for example. Similarly, what at first may have been considered foreign are now authentic pillars of our cultures: Christianity and the Rule of Law, for instance. It won’t do to over-florifythe past. The present is all that we have and we should live it out as creatively as possible. Pride in our past bolsters our self-repsect which is necessary if we are to cope as equals with others. However, too fervent or paranoid an idntification with one’s culture—or what one deems to be that culture—can lead to racial intolerance and the like. Hitler too had a Ministry of Culture! This is not to claim that there are no differences between cultures and peoples. Or to argue that we abolish these differences. We must recognize and respect these differences but not use them to try and justify our racist claims to an imaginary superiority.

All of us have individual prejudices, principles, and standards by which we judge which sub-cultures in our national cultures we want to live in, and those features of our national cultures we want conserved and those we want discarded. To advocate that in order to be a true Samoan, for example, one must be fully-blooded Samoan and behave/think/ dance/talk/dress/and believe in a certain prescribed way (and that the prescribed way has not changed since time immemorial) is being racist, callously totalitarian, and stupid. This is a prescription for cultural stagnation, an invitation for a culture to choke in its own body odour, juices, and excreta.

Equally unacceptable are outsiders (and these come in all disguises including the mask of adviser’ or expert) who try to impose on me what they think my culture is and how I should live it and go about preserving it. The colonisers prescribed for us the roles of domestic animal, amoral phallus, the lackey, the comic and lazy and happy-go-lucky fuzzy-haired boy, and the well-behaved colonised. Some of our own people are trying to do the same to us, to tum us into servile creatures they can exploit easily. We must not consent to our own abasement.

There are no true interpreters or sacred guardians of any culture. We are all entitled to our truths, insights, and intuitions into and interpretations of our cultures.

No national culture is homogenous. Even our small pre-papalagi cultures were made up of sub-cultures. In Polynesia, for instance, the life-styles of priests and ariki/alii were very different from those of the commoners, women, and children. Contact with papalagi and Asian cultures (which are made up of numerous sub-cultures — and we, in Oceania, tend to forget this) has increased the number of sub-cultures or life-styles within our cultures. Many urban life-styles are now just as much part of our cultures as more traditional ones.

To varying degrees, we as individuals all live in limbo within our cultures: there are many aspects of our ways of life we cannot subscribe to or live comfortably with; we all conform to some extent, but the life-blood of any culture is the diverse contributions of its varied sub-cultures. Basically, all societies are multi-cultural. And Oceania is more so than any other region on our sad planet.

Colonialism: the Wounds

Let me take just two facets of our cultures and show how colonialism changed us.

[a] Education

Kidnapped

I was six when

Mama was careless

She sent me a school

alone

five days a week

one day I was

kidnapped by a band

of Western philosophers

armed with glossy-philosophers

textbooks and

registered reputation

‘Holder of B.A.

and M.A. degrees’

I was held

in a classroom

guarded by Churchill and Garibaldi

pinned up on one wall

and

Hitler and Mao dictating from the other

Guevara pointed a revolution

at my brains

from his ‘Guerilla Warfare’

Each three-month term

they sent threats to

my Mama and Papa

Mama and Papa loved

their son and

paid ransom fees

each time

Each time

Mama Papa and grew

poorer and poorer

and my kidnappers grew

richer and richer

I grew whiter and

whiter

On my release

fifteen years after

I was handed

[among loud applause

from fellow victims]

a piece of paper

to decorate my walls

certifying my release

(by Ruperake Petaia, Western Samoa)

This remarkable poem aptly describes what can be called the whitefication of the colonised by a colonial education system. What the poem does not mention is that this system was enthusiastically welcomed by many of us and is still being continued even in our independent nations — a tragic irony!

The basic function of Education in all cultures is to promote conformity and obedience and respect, to fit children into roles society has determined for them. In practice it has always been an instrument of domesticating humankind with. The typical formal educational process is like a lobotomy operation or a relentless life-long dosage of tranquillisers.

The formal education systems (whether British/New Zealand/ Australia/ American/or French) that were established by the colonisers in our islands all had one main feature in common: they were based on the arrogantly mistaken racist assumption that the cultures of the colonisers were superior (and preferable) to ours. Education was therefore devoted to civilising us, to cutting us away from the roots of our cultures, from what the colonisers viewed as darkness, superstition, barbarism, and savagery. The production of bourgeois papalagi seemed the main objective; the process was one of castration. The missionaries, irrespective of whatever colonial nationality or brand of Christianity they belonged to, intended the same conversion.

Needless to say, the most vital strand in any nation-building is education but our colonial education systems were not programmed to educate us for development but to produce minor and inexpensive cogs, such as clerks/glorified office boys/officials/and a few professionals, for the colonial administrative machine. It was not in the colonial interests to encourage industries in our countries: it was more profitable for them that we remained exporters of cheap raw materials and buyers of their expensive manufactured goods. So, the education was narrowly academic and benefitted mainly our traditional elite groups who saw great profit in serving our colonial masters who, in turn, propped them up because it was cheaper to use them to run our countries. The elitist and academic nature of this education was not conducive to training us to survive in our own cultures.

Colonial education helped reduce many of us into a state of passivity, undermined our confidence and self-respect, and made many of us ashamed of our cultures, transformed many of us into Uncle Toms and resonance and what V.S. Naipaul has called mimic men, inducing in us the feeling that only the foreign is right or proper or worthwhile. Let us see how this is evident in architecture.

(b) Architecture

A frightening type of papalagi architecture is invading Oceania: the super-stainless/super-plastic/super-hygienic/ super-soulless structure very similar to modern hospitals, and its most nightmarish form is the new type tourist hotel — a multi-storied edifice of concrete/steel! chromium/and air-conditioning. This species of architecture is an embodiment of those bourgeois values I find unhealthy/soul-destroying: the cultivation/worship of mediocrity, a quest for a meaningless and precarious security based on material possessions, a deep-rooted fear of dirt and all things rich in our cultures, a fear of death revealed in an almost paranoic quest for a super-hygienic cleanliness and godliness, a relentless attempts to level out all individual differences in people and mold them into one faceless mass, a drive to preserve the status quo at all costs, and ETC. These values reveal themselves in the new tourist hotels constructed of dead materials which echo the spiritual, creative, and emotional emptiness in modern man. The drive is for deodorized/sanitized comfort, the very quicksand in which many of us are now drowning, willingly.

What frightens me is the easy/unquestioning acceptance by our countries of all this without considering their adverse effects on our psyche. In my brief lifetime, I have observed many of ou countries imitating what we consider to be papalagi culture (even though most of us will swear vehemently that we are not!). It is just one of the tragic effects of colonialism—the aping of colonial ways/life-styles/attitudes/and values. In architecture this has led and is leading to the construction of dog-kennel-shaped papalagi houses (mainly as status symbols, as props to one’s lack of self-confidence). The change from traditional dwelling to box-shaped monstrosity is gathering momentum: the mushrooming of this bewildering soulless desert of shacks and boxes is erupting across Oceania because most of our leaders and style-settlers, as soon as they gain power/wealth, construct opulent dog-kennels as well.

Our government’s quest for the tourist hotel is not helping matters either; there is a failure to understand what such a quest is bringing. It may be bringing money through the middle-aged retired tourist, who travels from country to country through a variety of climates, within his cocoon of air-conditioned America/Europe/N.S./Australia/Molochland, but it is also helping to bring these bourgeois values, attitudes, and lifestyles which are compelling attractive illnesses that kill slowly, comfortably, turning us away from the richness of our cultures. I think I know what such a death is like: for the past few years I have watched myself (and some of the people I admire) dying that death.

In periods of unavoidable lucidity, I have often visualized the ultimate development of such and architecture – air-conditioned coffins lodged in air-conditioned mausoleums.

Diversity, a Valued Heritage

The population of our region is only just over 5 million, but we possess a cultural diversity more varied than any other in the world. There is also a multiplicity of social, economic, and political systems all undergoing different stages of decolonization, ranging from politically independent nations (Western Somoa/Fiji/Papua New Guinea/Tonga/Nauru) through self-governing ones (the Solomons/The Gilberts/Tuvalu) and colonies (mainly French and American) to our oppressed aboriginal brothers in Australia. This cultural, political, social, and economic diversity just be taken into account in any overall programme of cultural conservation.

If as yet we may not be the most artistically creative region on our spaceship, we possess the potential to become the most artistically creative. There are more than 1200 indigenous languages plus English, French, Hindi, Spanish, and various forms of pidgin to catch and interpret the Void with, reinterpret our past with, create new historical and sociological visions of Oceania with, compose songs and poems and plays and other oral and written literature with. Also numerous other forms of artistic expression: hundreds of dance styles: wood and stone sculpture and carvings; artifacts as various as our cultures; pottery, painting, and tattooing. A fabulous treasure house of traditional motifs, themes, styles, material which we can use in contemporary forms to express our uniqueness, identity, pain, joy, and our own visions of Oceania and earth.

Self-expression is a prerequisite of self-respect.

Out of this artistic diversity has come and will continue to come our most worthwhile contribution to humankind. So this diversity must be maintained and encouraged to flourish.

Across the political barriers dividing our countries an intense artistic activity is starting to weave firm links between us. This cultural awakening, inspired and fostered and led by our own people, will not stop at the artificial frontiers drawn by the colonial powers. And for me, this awakening is the first real sign that we are breaking from the colonial chill and starting to find our own beings. As Marjorie Crocombe of the Cook Islands and editor of MANA Magazine has written: Denigrated, inhibited and withdrawn during the colonial era, the Pacific people are again beginning to take confidence and express themselves in traditionalforms of expression that remain part of a valued heritage, as well as in new forms and styles reflecting the changes within the continuity of the unique world of our Island cultures ... The canoe is afloat ... the volume and quality increase all the time.

One of the recent highlights of this awakening was the 1972 South Pacific Festival of Arts during which we came together in Fiji to perform our expressive arts; much of it was traditional, but new voices/new forms, especially in literature, were emerging.

Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and film makers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrtors and their well-groomed pouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic throught pseugo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret ead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham’s puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener’s rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. The Oceania found in this literature is largely papalagi fictions, more revealing of papalagi fantasies and ang-ups, dreams and nightmares, prejudices and ways of viewing our crippled cosmos, than of our actual islands. I am not saying we should reject such a literature, or that papalagi should not write about us, and vice versa. But the imagination must explore with love/honestly/wisdom/ and compassion; writers must write with aroha/aloha/alofa/loloma, respecting the people they are writing about, people who may view the Void differently and who, like all other human beings live through the pores of the flesh and mind and bone, who suffer, laugh, cry, copulate, and die.

In the last few years what can be called a South Pacific literature has started to blossom. In New Zealand, Alistair Campbell, of Cook Island descent, is acknowledged as a major poet; three Maori writers — Hone Tuwhare (poet), Witi Ihimaera (novelist), and Patricia Grace (short stories) have become extremely well-known. In Australia, the aboriginal poets Kathy Walker and Jack Davis continue to plot the suffering of their people. In Papua New Guinea, The Crocodile by Vincent Eri — the first Papuan novel to be published — has already become a minor classic. Also in that country poets such as John Kasaipwalova, Kumalau Tawali, Alan Natachee, and Apisai Enos, and playwrights like Arthur Jawodimbari are publishing some powerful work. Papua New Guinea has established a very forward looking Creative Arts Centre, which is acting as a catalyst in the expressive arts movement, a travelling theatre, and an Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. KOVAVE Magazine, put out by a group of Papua New Guinea writers, is already a respected literary journal.

MANA Magazine and MANA Publications, established by the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (owned/operated by some of us), have been a major catalyst in stimulating the growth of this new literature, especially in countries outside Papua New Guinea. Already numerous young poets, prose writers, and playwrights have emerged; some of them, we hope, will develop into major writers. One thinks of Seri, Vanessa Griffen, and Raymond Pillai of Fiji; of Eti Saaga, Ruperake Petaia, Sano Malifa, Ata Maiai, and Tili Peseta of Western Samoa; of Albert Leomala and Mildred Sope of the New Hebrides; of Celestine Kulagoe of the Solomons; of Maunaa Itaia of the Gilberts; of Makiuti Tongia of the Cook Islands; of Konai Helu Thaman of Tonga. I am proud to be also contributing to this literature. Most of us know one another personally; if we don’t, we know one another’s work well. Our ties transcend barriers of culture, race, petty nationalism, and politics. Our writing is expressing a revolt against the hypocritical/exploitative aspects of our traditional/commercial/and religious hierachies, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and the degrading values being imposed from outside and by some elements in our societies.

But they cannot erase my existence

For my plight chimes with the hour

And my blood they drink at cocktail parties

Always full of smiling false faces

Behind which lie authority and private interests

(from Uncivil Servantsby Konai Helu Thaman, Tonga)

As I walk this rich suburb

full of white and black ciefs

I hear the barking of a dog

I listen to its calls

knowing that I am that dog

picking what it can

from the overflowing rubbish tins.

I say to you chiefs

bury the scraps you can’t eat

So no hungry dog will come to eat

at your locked gate

Chiefs, beware of hungry dogs!

(from Beware of Dog by Makiutu Tongia, Cook Islands)

In the traditional visual arts there has been a tremendous revival, that revival is also finding contemporary expression in the work of Maori artists such as Selwyn Muru, Ralph Hotere, Para Matchitt, and Buck Nin; in the work of Aloi Pilioko of Wallis and Futuna, Akis and Kauage of Papua New Guinea, Aleki Prescott of Tonga, Sven Orquist of Western Samoa. Kuai of the Solomons, and many others.

The same is true in music and dance. The National Dance Theatres of Fiji and The Cook Islands are already well-known throughout the world.

This artistic renaissance is enriching our cultures further, reinforcing our identities/self-respect/and pride, and taking us through a genuine decolonisation; it is also acting as a unifying force in our region. In their individual journeys into the Void, these artists, through their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania.

d-d-dumpster-diving-the-anarchist-library-text-bin-6.png

32. Anarchism and Immigration

Deleted reason: author supports prison, see “The Anarchist Response to Crime”

Author: Scott of the Insurgency Culture Collective

Authors: Scott of the Insurgency Culture Collective

Topics: borders, immigration, Insurgency Culture Collective, syndicalist

Date Published on T@L: 2010-01-12 19:13:08 +0100

Source: Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from www.cat.org.au

You have the right to live where you choose.

You have the right to work where you choose.

You have the right to travel where you choose.

You have the right to associate with whom you choose.

You have the right to speak any language you choose.

You have the right to privacy.

Anarchists Believe In Free Association

This means that everyone has the right to live where they choose, work where they choose, and have social relationships with whom they choose.

Anarchists Are Anti-Racist

We do not believe in differentiating between people because of their ethnic ancestry. We believe that all privilege, discrimination, or segregation based on ethnicity, national origin, or cultural group must be eradicated.

Anarchists Are Anti-Nationalist

This means that we do not recognize the right of any government to legislate citizenship. We do not recognize the territorial sovereignty of any nation or the legitimacy of any national borders.

Anarchists Are Anti-Authoritarian

We believe that no one should dominate another, no national government should seek to dominate another, and no ethnic group, caste, social class should dominate another. We believe that society should be organized democratically and that the rich man’s government must be abolished. We believe that social peace should be maintained by the community and not racist cops.

Anarchists Are Anti-Capitalist

We believe that poverty and unemployment are intentionally created by capitalists as threats to use against and control working people. They are not caused by immigration which is simply the migration of people from areas of the World where land and labor are exploited by the capitalists to areas of the World where capitalists own powerful governments whose laws and military forces protect them and their wealth and do their bidding. We believe that everyone who wants to work should have a well-paid job and that jobs like raising children, not compensated by capitalists, should be financially supported. Under capitalism 4 out of every 5 dollars in wealth produced by a worker is stolen by capitalists, bosses, or government before they are paid for their work. We believe that it is possible for everyone who want to work to have a job where they can earn more but, work only half as much as under capitalism. We believe that people should not be restricted in moving across national borders to work to feed their families because there is plenty of work for everyone.

Anarchists Believe In International Labor Solidarity

We believe in Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism, and the use of Direct Action including the Stay-In General Strike where workers occupy their work places to deprive the capitalists and their police state governments the resources to attack us. We believe that the people who do the work should own the work place and share the benefit of what they produce and that wage slavery, where capitalists steal the value of what we produce and call it “profit,” must be abolished. We believe that capitalists and bosses who produce nothing and exploit our labor should be done away with and replaced with cooperative work places which are run democratically. We believe that working people of all nations should cooperate to insure that everyone has an equal standard of living and that transnational capitalist corporations can no longer force us to accept wage slavery, dangerous and inhumane working conditions, and the poisoning of our communities by pollution to avoid the threat of poverty, unemployment, or death by starvation or disease. We believe that working people can take control of their lives without any need for leadersor a government to tell them what to do because they know what needs to be done and are best able to make it happen.

Anarchism is the philosophy of freedom, social equality, and respect for human life. Join us. Unite and fight for a better world.

33. Anarchists Hate Racism

Deleted reason: author supports prison, see “The Anarchist Response to Crime”

Author: Scott of the Insurgency Culture Collective

Authors: Scott of the Insurgency Culture Collective

Topics: anti-racist, class, Insurgency Culture Collective, race, syndicalist, United States

Date Published on T@L: 2010-01-09 19:17:27 +0100

Source: Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from www.cat.org.au

What we believe

Anarchists believe in Equality between all people regardless of where their ancestors came from, what color their skin is, or where they were born. We believe in social equality regardless of ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. We believe in an economy and community where everybody cooperates to make sure that we all can live healthy, prosperous, and pleasant lives. Anarchism is the philosophy of personal freedom, personal responsibility and mutual respect between all people. Anti-Racist Action is based on the ideas of Solidarity and Mutual Aid. Solidarity is our natural outrage every time we see an act of injustice or evil. Mutual Aid is the practice of people banding together to oppose a common enemy or confront a challenge that may seem insurmountable to individuals but, can be overcome when we work together as a group.

Where did racism come from?

Racism was invented by rich people to keep working people divided so they wouldn’t unite and overthrow capitalism. Racism originated with the European class system where people had pigmented skin only if they had to work outdoors. The rich considered manual labor the duty of inferiors and therefore viewed anyone with the characteristics of a worker as below their station. The term “blue blood” originated from the ability to see a rich persons veins through their pale skin. The term “gentleman”, “gentlewoman” or “gentry” referred to a person raised to believe that physical exertion was the work of inferiors. Aristocrats developed strict codes of conduct to exclude any outsider from the privileges they enjoyed. The power of the ruling class originated with ownership of the land which gave them a monopoly over food production. Control of the land eventually gave them influence over the government. Capitalism originated with traders and bankers who owned no land but, bought and sold the products of craftsmen and landowners. The invention of industry enabled these traders to outstrip the wealth of landowners. When Capitalists began to dominate the economy they aspired to live like the gentry which included their class prejudices. European countries exploring the world justified taking land from non-Europeans based on religious or cultural bigotry. Aristocrats who believed workers to be inferior saw “non-Christian” or “colored” people that they sold as slaves or forced into poverty and starvation by stealing their land as less than human (Blacks were worth 3/5 of a person in the U.S. Constitution and Native Americans didn’t count). They found that they could use their armies to force these people to live on less than they paid their European workers if they told the Europe an workers that “coloreds” would only get the dirty work they didn’t want to do.

There is no such thing as race

Biologists have found no genetic similarity between people who have been grouped as races because of their skin pigmentation. Human blood types have no correlation with racial groupings based on skin pigmentation. Humans with different ethnic characteristics, including skin pigmentation, are capable of interbreeding. Most Americans who are descended from slaves have some European ancestry. Skin pigmentation is a product of the geographic origin of a persons ancestors. People whose ancestors lived for many generations in tropical climates will tend to develop darker skin pigmentation as a biochemical defense mechanism against exposure. People whose ancestors lived in forested regions with seasonal cold and snow will tend to be more pale. History shows that all major language groups in the world show evidence of large scale migrations throughout history. Language groups were created by trade between peoples who lived in geographic proximity to each other. There are many genetic characteristics which transcend language families. This is because most groups have interbred with other groups to a great enough degree to share these traits across ethnic, cultural or linguistic barriers.

How do we fight racism?

The foremost thing we have to do is to attack the institutions which “legitimize” racism: Those political and economic powers which tell people that racist behavior and ideas are respectable rather than shameful. We must show that we believe racism to be cowardly, shameful and beneath contempt. We must embarrass those who are comfortable with their racism and show others who question racism that their anti-racist instincts are correct. Our best weapons against racism are our commonsense and our unity against racist violence and exploitation. Our goal is social equality for all people. We will achieve this after we do away with all the institutions who depend on racism in order to exploit us. Racism is motivated by greed and perpetuated by power and ignorance. We want to abolish capitalism in favor of worker ownership and self-management of the workplace. We want to abolish governments which create division to protect a few wealthy and powerful people in favor of autonomous self-governing communities who coordinate their activities through decentralized federations. We want to create free schools in the community where children can grow up happy and without bigotry. Doing away with capitalists, bosses and professional politicians and returning control of work and the community to people who do productive labor in a society where people can have as much as they can earn by working in a single lifetime will create a society where everyone who wants to work can have a comfortable life.

34. Black Trans Feminist Thought Can Set Us Free

Deleted reason: deleted no mention of anarchist word

Author: Che Gossett

Authors: Che Gossett, George Yancy

Topics: transfeminism, black transfeminism, abolition, black liberation

Date: 9 December 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2022-12-15T02:16:13

Source: Retrieved on 14 December 2022 from truthout.org

How can we move beyond a mindset dictated by the logic of prison, policing and anti-Blackness? What is “abolition feminism”? And how do the politics of gender, including the criminalization of trans and nonbinary people, dovetail with our understandings of race? How can deconstructing racialized gender binaries help us move toward justice and liberation?

To confront these questions, I spoke with Che Gossett, a Black nonbinary femme writer based in Brooklyn, New York. They are a 2019–2020 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and a Ph.D. candidate in Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as a graduate fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. They are co-editor with Professor Eva Hayward of University of Arizona of a forthcoming Transgender Studies Quarterly Journal special issue: “Trans in a Time of HIV/AIDS.”

George Yancy: Within a context where Black people, Indigenous people and people of color (or BIPOC) continue to be victims of a form of racist and capitalist carceral punishment, can you speak to the importance of what is being called “abolition feminism”? Please define the meaning of this important term and speak to its relevance at this critical moment in U.S. history and global history.

Che Gossett: My knowledge of the term abolition feminism derives from Angela Davis and Gina Dent’s critical labor. I think of it as an open invitation to the unfinished liberatory struggle for abolition that is also a Black feminist struggle against anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchy and forms of carceral and white feminism that continue to perpetuate these forms of what Hortense Spillers calls “grammars of capture.” Abolition feminism would not only entail the abolition of the normative version of “feminism,” as opposed to its reform, and is not just a project of negative freedom but one that is immanent to and animate within already existing ensembles of struggle. Spillers’s definition of Black feminism as a “critical disposition” is that it is “a repertoire of concepts, practices, and alignments,” that “is progressive in outlook and dedicated to the view that sustainable life systems must be available to everyone; it also stands up for the survival of this planet.” This concept really resonates with me and I see this as critical to a formulation of “abolition feminism.”

Black trans women and femmes have historically and contemporaneously battled criminalization and policing, the precarious violence of lumpen proletarianization within the capitalist political economy — underground economies of drag and sex were and are criminalized — and also the violence of the anti-Black and anti-trans libidinal economy. My thinking here is informed by Lindon Barrett in terms of how race is conceived as a set of libidinal and corporeal protocols, that is, where “Race is conceived of as a set of libidinal prohibitions” — an economy wherein Black trans people face anti-Black and anti-trans patriarchal violence that is both legal and extralegal. In this moment, I am also thinking about Layleen Polanco, who died at Rikers, in the women’s facility, where the carceral liberals and carceral feminists would have imagined her to be safe. As CeCe McDonald reminds us, prisons are safe for no one.

The premature death of Black trans women continues now in the middle of the COVID-19 epidemic. I went to a powerful protest here in New York City over the summer for Black trans life, which was modeled after the 1917 Silent Parade. The march this summer was a powerful surge of rage and mourning where an estimated 15,000 people attended. This felt like a seismic shift. Black trans demands continue and there’s dedicated mutual aid and organizing happening that made that moment possible. The Brooklyn Liberation, The Okra Project, Marsha P. Johnson Institute, For the Gworls, GLITS and Black Trans Femmes in the Arts have all been doing incredible work at this historical juncture. GLITS just opened the first by and for trans housing complex, and all of these organizations and formations center formerly incarcerated trans people and sex workers.

Black trans women and femmes have been at the epicenter of the struggle against racial patriarchy.

Black trans women and femmes have not only been at the epicenter of the struggle against racial patriarchy — even while being exiled from and unthought of by feminism — but also there’s an analysis, a study of racial patriarchy that is made available to us through the 1970s political formations: an archive of zines and political grammar (fag, non-men, street queen, etc.) that continues and that is essential to and indispensable for the struggle against racial patriarchy and carceral violence in the present tense.

How do we creatively cultivate spaces that exist outside of carceral logics and anti-Black logics?

I’m not sure that we can ever fully in this “world” create spaces that exist entirely outside of anti-Blackness and its carceral technologies, since we are always under duress. I think one of the incredible lessons of the abolitionist movement, which is a form of critique and praxis, is that abolition is both an interior and external practice. I think of Jared Sexton’s brilliant synopsis: “Slavery is the threshold of the political world, abolition the interminable radicalization of every radical movement.” The radicalization is perennial. And rather than falling for the ruse of political immunity to carceral logics and anti-Blackness, perhaps knowing that this protracted struggle is one that preceded us, and will continue after, can sustain us.

There’s a powerful line in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that speaks to contamination and the illusion of purity and the need for an entangled effort: “everyone must be involved in the struggle for the sake of the common salvation. There are no clean hands, no innocent bystanders. We are all in the process of dirtying our hands in the quagmire of our soil and the terrifying void of our minds.”

Black thought has always been “thought of the outside” (to repurpose Maurice Blanchot). Part of this thinking of the outside is the project of moving against and beyond the coordinates of what Sylvia Wynter termed “our narratively condemned status” in her incredible essay “No Human Involved,” which she wrote following the brutal assault and viral circulation (the digital afterlife of slavery) on Rodney King.

Wynter’s “Towards the Sociogenic Principle” holds out a theoretical and political horizon for life beyond/against the racial and colonial figure of the Human, which she so brilliantly terms a genre. In this pathbreaking essay, Wynter parts ways with functionalism — the theory that the mind is what it does — and argues for sociogenesis: “if the mind is what the brain does, what the brain does, is itself culturally determined through the mediation of the socialized sense of self, as well as of the ‘social’ situation in which this self is placed.” For Wynter, not only is Man a genre but so too is (the theory of) Mind. Within a context where the mind-body problem is maintained, with its positing of an a priori universalized consciousness, the phylogenetic/ontogenetic dyad is a symptom of whiteness in that it ignores sociogeny and it can take that position of epistemic pseudo- or quasi-ignorance as a result of not experiencing racialization. In this sense, mind is seen as universal and given, as opposed to constructed.

One of the incredible lessons of the abolitionist movement is that abolition is both an interior and external practice.

To modify and repurpose theories of mind that posit underlying laws that determine the necessity for consciousness in the face of the question as to why living creatures, humans in particular, require conscious experience at all, Wynter extends Fanon’s theorization of sociogeny. She brilliantly shows how thinking with Fanon opens up “insights into the laws which govern the realm of lived subjective experience, human and nonhuman, which govern therefore, the interrelated phenomena of identity, mind and/or consciousness.”

Wynter makes a lateral move and offers, via her theorization of the Human as a genre, a de-hierarchization of life/subjectivities. This to me, especially in this moment of what anti-Black capitalist planetary destruction might look like, speaks to other formations and orchestrations of life that work toward new iterations of livability and inhabitability of this planet.

I have written about how cisgender Black men have suffered under the gaze of whiteness, how they have been rendered both invisible and hyper-visible. Within the context of the U.S.’s anti-Black imaginary, Black men are deemed criminals, thugs and brutal animals. My work here presupposes a gender binary that I leave untroubled. Could you speak to how violence operates precisely at the site of the gender binary?

The violent figuration of Black people as criminals, thugs and brutal animals — “beasts,” since they are imagined creatures, not actual animals — is also sexualized and gendered against Black trans, queer and gender nonconforming people. This can be seen with the anti-Black and anti-trans viral lithograph of Black trans sex worker Mary Jones in 1836. She was demonized as “monstrous” as she testified that she had “always dressed this way amongst people of my own colour.” Or, think about the news media referring to the Black, gender-nonconforming queer young people known as the NJ4 — whose struggle was the center of the documentary Out in the Night — who defended themselves against patriarchal and homophobic attacks and were prosecuted as a result, and referred to as a “wolf pack.” It is this aestheticization of anti-Blackness that we face in trying either to force us to be “normal” or in figuring us as disposable. Again, this is the discursive violence of what Wynter calls “our narratively condemned status.”

Blackness is gender trouble. The etymology of cisgender itself presumes a correspondence between assigned sex and gender, which fails to account for Blackness. Thinking here of Black feminist and Black trans studies’ deconstruction of sex and gender, of Spillers’s “ungendering” and also the work of Riley Snorton and also Zakiyyah Imani Jackson on the anti-Black logic of binary sexuation. As Snorton argues, “captive flesh figures a critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amenable form of being” — this happens through fungibility. The slave is the ground for “modern” gender and sexuality.

In her writing on fungibility in Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman expands the conceptualization of the commodity form by showing how the figure of the slave as commodity is situated not only in the political but also within a libidinal economy of what Frank Wilderson calls “gratuitous violence.” Hartman and Fred Moten think of the commodity that speaks (which Marx only imagines) and, moreover, the commodity that screams. Black thought begins with the un-apprehension of being. Marx beyond Marx (to sabotage Antonio Negri). Hartman writes about the relationship between libidinal economy and political economy that is consecrated in the commodity form and its fungibility and trans-positionality. In a paragraph worth quoting at length, she argues:

The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave — that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity — and by the extensive capacities of property — that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.

Black queer and trans and feminist thought provide an arsenal of critique and praxis that allows us to think rigorously both about violence, and to think again alongside Frank Wilderson’s brilliant grammar, the demand for “gratuitous freedom.” The violence that you are describing is part of a broader matrix of the gender binary that constantly seeks to imperil and outlaw Blackness, despite the failed optimism of appeals to what Jared Sexton calls “borrowed institutionality.”

How might the discourse and praxis of Trans Studies help us to move forward, to a world where justice and radical love prevails?

Blackness is gender trouble.

One of the problems of the heralded moment of “trans visibility” is the assumption that trans is perceptible and knowable, that you can visually isolate trans or that there are more authentic versions of trans than others, which implies a kind of hierarchical and vertical visual economy. Trans visibility so often means surveillance, especially by non-trans people and also by the security state — from TSA at airports to the welfare line. This is rigorously studied and dismantled by Toby Beauchamp in Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices and in Eric Stanley’s brilliant essay on visibility as an anti-trans optic (and operation). I’m interested in how trans artists through their visual theorizing are subverting that order through iterations of trans “opacity” and troubling aesthetics as a racial and patriarchal regime. For example, Ser Serpas, who in a show in 2017 at the gallery Current Projects exhibited as “self- portrait,” undercuts the autobiographical notion of the self and its portrait, titled penultimate warrior. The “self-portrait” was an incinerated armchair that she had lit on fire after throwing estradiol on it. The armchair isn’t an armchair anymore; rather than perfected, it is undone. Trans as gender in ruins.

Thinking about another intervention and troubling of trans linearity and visibility within the frame of trans studies is Eva Hayward’s “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves.” Hayward presents an alternative to the medical linear narrative of trans women and femme embodiment as ontological insufficiency and corporeal lack — the idea that to transition requires a supplement to an originary lack that is then solved by reassignment surgery that would make one into a “real” woman. Instead, Hayward shows how every cut is a fold, how there’s no lack but instead a transition of body from itself to itself.

Finally, in thinking about Black trans art and the afterlife of slavery, it’s important to bring attention to the incredible aesthetic, cinematic and archival labor of the filmmaker and artist Tourmaline. Hartman argues that the afterlife of slavery is an aesthetic problem and I see the work of Tourmaline as both an inhabitation of that problem, through speculative cinematography and what Hartman terms “critical fabulation.” Tourmaline’s film Salacia, which is now in the permanent collection of both the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate in London, as well as her films Happy Birthday Marsha and Atlantic is a Sea of Bones helps us imagine the Black trans aesthetics of abolition, as well as think of the historical temporality of Blackness and transness beyond the limits to and effacements of the archive of slavery.

35. Epistemelogical Anarchism

Deleted reason: Doesn’t seem to be anarchist in orientation.

Subtitle: The Philosophy of Jeet Kun Do

Author: Danielle Bolelli

Authors: Danielle Bolelli

Topics: Martial Arts, Jeet Kun Do, Bruce Lee, Taoism, Nietzsche, Buddhism, Nihilism

Date: 2003

Date Published on T@L: 2021-12-27T15:28:04

Source: On The Warrior’s Path Philosophy, Fighting and Martial Arts Mythology (Second Edition, 2003)

... whoever heeds commands does not heed himself. Break, break, you lovers of knowledge, the old tablets!

—Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1892)

[I am] a man who wishes nothing more than daily to lose some reassuring belief, who seeks and finds his happiness in this daily greater liberation of the mind.

—Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1892)

I must invent my own systems or else be enslaved by other men’s.

—William Blake quoted in Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins (Robbins 1971)

INTRODUCTION

Almost thirty years after his death in 1973, no martial artist has gotten even close to achieving half of his popularity. Far from fading from memory, his legacy still inspires the enthusiasm of the masses. Frozen in time by a premature death, his image has been printed over and over again on the covers of magazines throughout the world. Long past are the days when his work almost single-handedly changed the way in which Asian Americans were viewed in the United States, gave Chinese people a tremendous boost of self- esteem, and opened the road to Hollywood for other Asian actors. Gone the days when his movies made the fortune of scalpers who could sell a $2 ticket for $45 or when, in some countries, his titles had to be withdrawn from theatres to ease traffic jams (Little 1996). However, judging from his enduring fame, the passing of a few decades has only contributed to turn the man into something bigger than life. Even today, he is the patron saint of martial arts magazines. In lean times, when the financial future seems bleak, a martial arts magazine only needs to dedicate the cover article to him in order to bounce back and bring up the sales. In the popular imagination, he was not just another martial artist. He was The Martial Artist. For countless people around the globe, his name has become the symbol for martial arts as a whole.

The man, of course, is Bruce Lee. In case I needed further proof, a recent experience reminded me of just how far-reaching Lee’s fame is. In this instance, a department chair from California State University at Hayward recommended me to consider teaching a course entitled “Bruce Lee: An American Icon.” By itself this proposal, coming from a serious scholar of a respected academic institution who bears no personal interest in the martial arts, speaks volumes. What Lee was able to do, in fact, was to fascinate many different kinds of people for very different motives.

For the same reason that Western movies have attracted millions of viewers, Lee’s role as a tough, lonely hero who fights injustice wherever he meets it is certainly appealing to vast segments of the public. Lee, however, added to this role an aesthetic beauty and a philosophical depth that were lacking in most of the Old West’s gunfighters. In this way, he managed to intrigue even those people (including considerable numbers of women) who are turned off by excessive displays of guns, testosterone, and machismo. It is undeniable that Lee’s acting career was centered on beating people up, but he had something going for him that was different from everyone else. He had style. When other people fought, viewers would only see a fight. When Lee fought, it was poetry in motion. Martial, but also art.

Lee’s popularity, however, has done nothing to endear him to the serious scholars of the martial arts, who view him as little more than the inspiration for thousands of obnoxiously bad martial arts movies. In this sense, the absence of any article about Bruce Lee in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts, which is one of the only, if not the only, forum for high-quality scholarship on the martial arts, is very telling. After all, when any fool who knows nothing about martial arts can quote every line from Bruce Lee’s movies, it is understandable that experts may decide to dismiss Lee’s work as a shallow example of pop culture.

In my opinion, however, that would be a big, big mistake. Unlike all other actors with iron-hard abs and ashy kicks who, once their fifteen minutes of fame are up, are not worth a minute of our time, Lee has something else to offer. Although I certainly do not believe that popularity is a good measure of depth, the fact that Lee is adored by legions of fans from several different generations, many of whom could not care less about the martial arts, may suggest that his appeal relies on something deeper than a popular infatuation with Asian fighting styles.

A clue to what exactly this “something” may be lies at the foot of Lee’s tombstone. There, engraved in stone, is a single sentence left by his friends and disciples, “Your Inspiration Continues To Guide Us Toward Our Personal Liberation.” This hardly sounds like a statement that is likely to be placed at the foot of Van Damme’s tombstone (my apologies to Van Damme for picking on him) or at the foot of just about any other actor/martial artist’s tombstone. If Bruce Lee were just another athlete or another Hollywood celebrity, I honestly doubt that he could inspire or guide anyone towards much of anything, let alone personal liberation. What inspired those who came in contact with him was something entirely different than the glamour of movie stardom. The answer to what this thing may be can be found in a revealing passage by Lee’s widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, “What is this something about Bruce Lee that continues to fascinate people in all walks of life? I believe it is the depth of his personal philosophy, which subconsciously, or otherwise, projects from the screen and through his writings.” (Little 1996)

The same feeling is echoed in the comments of Lee’s own students. Basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who studied martial arts under Lee’s guidance and appeared in one of his movies, declared, “He was a teacher first of all. He taught philosophy and tried to spread knowledge and wisdom. That’s why he took on the martial arts establishment the way he did.” (Ibidem) And Tai Chi master Daniel Lee, also a student of Bruce Lee, similarly stated, “This [Lee’s] was a different approach to martial arts instruction. We studied philosophy with Bruce because he had philosophy as his underlying theme and direction. He was really my mentor in showing the linkage between philosophy and martial art. They’re inseparable.” (Ibidem) Besides these comments made by people who knew him well, Lee’s personal library, made up of over 2,500 books, mostly about philosophy and martial arts, is another good indicator of his commitment to philosophical inquiry.

In case these pieces of evidence are not convincing enough, and the idea of Bruce Lee as a philosopher still seems too farfetched, we only need to examine the concepts at the root of Jeet Kune Do, the martial art created by Lee, to see how fundamental philosophy was to Lee’s approach to the martial arts. Rather than setting itself up to be a new martial arts style with its codified set of unique forms and techniques, Jeet Kune Do advocates the elimination of styles in favor of a constant process of individual research aimed at finding the techniques and training methods that best fit one’s needs. Anytime the practitioner of JKD finds something effective along the way, or decides that a certain technique does not work for him or her, he or she is free to change the art.

Seen in this perspective, clearly, more than a new martial art in the traditional sense of the word, Jeet Kune Do appears to be a philosophical principle applied to the martial arts. The creation of a martial art based on such antiauthoritarian, nearly anarchist thinking points out that Lee may have more in common with philosophers like Feyerabend, Lao Tzu, and Krishnamurti than with entertainers like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, or Jean Claude Van Damme.

NOT NEW, YET NEW

Although this chapter has so far been introducing the idea that Lee’s philosophy may have been his greatest contribution, if we want to be perfectly honest we also have to acknowledge something that Bruce Lee’s aficionados usually do not like to admit. As a philosopher, Lee did not come up with any original ideas. The entire philosophy so passionately espoused by Lee derives from the writings of other people. Had someone explained the concepts of royalties and copyright to Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, the semi- mythological authors of the most famous Taoist writings, their descendants would now be swimming in gold while lifting their best champagne glasses to Lee’s memory. In fact, the vast majority of the ideas widely popularized by Lee are taken directly from Taoist sources. Even the emblem chosen by Lee for his art of Jeet Kune Do is a slightly modified version of the Taoist yin-yang symbol.

Besides Taoism, Lee’s most obvious sources include Zen Buddhism (which is itself partially inspired by Taoist ideas), and the writings of modern philosophers such as Krishnamurti and Alan Watts. Even if we limit ourselves only to the eld of martial arts, Lee’s approach is not entirely new. For example, his idea of freeing ourselves from the unnatural constraints of codified styles was expressed decades before Lee’s time by one of the greatest Chinese martial artists of the early part of the twentieth century, the creator of I-Chuan, Wang Hsiang Chai (Cartmell 1998).

By stating that on a philosophical level Lee did not really create anything, am I trying to contradict my own initial position and, in a gesture of Socratic perversion, now argue for its opposite? Not at all. Paradoxes are the essence of Taoism, and since Taoism is what we are dealing with here, we should not be surprised to stumble upon what seems to be a contradiction.

Suggesting that someone made great philosophical contributions even though he clearly did not commit to paper a single original philosophical idea is not as absurd as it may sound. For example, Alan Watts, who is considered by some as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century and who greatly inspired Lee, did not invent anything new either. His books (which I strongly recommend to anyone who has not yet had the pleasure of reading them) are based almost entirely on Taoist and Buddhist ideas. However, despite being clearly derivative, his writings beautifully convey the essence of Taoism and Buddhism in a completely new, original way. Although the topic and the conclusions found in Watt’s books are not new, the freshness of his style, analogies, anecdotes, and examples infuse new life to them. Furthermore, the way in which Watts adapted Taoist and Buddhist philosophies to a Western mentality is a splendid illustration of philosophical creativity.

In a similar fashion, Bruce Lee took old ideas and applied them in new, original ways. He took Taoism and Buddhism and applied them to the competitive, ego-driven world of movie-making, to the martial arts, and to his own daily life. In the process, he drastically altered the Western perception of Asian cultures, and inspired many martial artists to explore the philosophical dimension at the root of their physical practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Lee’s philosophical stance, popularized through his writings and his movies, was an antiauthoritarian slap in the face to the dogma and immutable tradition that still dominated the way most people practiced martial arts in the West. Although, as we have seen earlier, he was not the first to challenge the dogmatism of some martial arts schools, he was more visible and more radical than anyone who had come before him, and therefore was also in a more powerful position to affect the prevailing perceptions of martial arts’ practice and philosophy.

Having so far made the case that Lee’s philosophy deserves our attention, the reminder of this chapter will explore the ideological context from which Jeet Kune Do emerged and the theoretical principles on which the art is based.

THE BREAK WITH CHINESE TRADITION

Since earlier I remarked that Lee derived his entire philosophy from Taoist and Buddhist sources, readers may get the mistaken impression that Lee’s approach was consistent with Chinese traditions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without a doubt, Taoism and Buddhism have greatly affected Chinese culture. Chinese medicine, for example, is fully rooted in Taoist ideas (Maciocia 1989). Supposedly, Bodhidharma, the mythological father of Shaolin kung fu, was an Indian monk also credited with introducing Ch’an Buddhism to China. Before Communism made finding a fully functioning religious temple as unlikely as running into a giant panda dancing in the streets of Beijing, Taoist and Buddhist monasteries filled the country. However, the forms of Taoism and Buddhism that enjoyed such vast popular following for great part of Chinese history were not the same kind of Taoism and Buddhism that inspired Lee.

Most scholars of Asian religions distinguish between the early philosophical Taoism presented in classics such as the Tao Te Ching, the writings of Chuang Tzu, and in the later forms of popular Taoism, which provided the basis for much of Chinese folk religion (Smith 1991, Wright 1959). Elusive poetry, beautiful paradoxes, and a nearly complete lack of concern with gods characterized the philosophical Taoism that provided the basis for Lee’s philosophy. Rituals, prayers to the Gods, an alchemical quest for immortality, and the attempt to enlist spirits to one’s help characterized the popular forms of religious Taoism practiced by most Chinese people.

In a similar way, Buddha’s own teachings, which were favored by Lee, were much more uncompromising than the teachings passed on by most forms of Chinese popular Buddhism. For example, Buddha invited people to find out the truth for themselves rather than follow any religious authority, and to work for their own salvation without relying on gods, prayers, or rituals (Smith 1991). Chinese popular Buddhism, on the other hand, heavily emphasized prayers, rituals, devotion to Buddha and to the bodhisattvas, and obedience to the top of the religious hierarchy (Wright 1959).

As we can see, then, Lee’s love for philosophical Taoism and for the most radical aspects of Buddha’s teachings was hardly in line with the diluted and simplified forms of Taoism and Buddhism favored by the masses. His philosophical outlook was therefore more at odds with Chinese tradition than consistent with it.

Furthermore, another element contributes to distance Lee’s approach from Chinese tradition. Chinese thought, in fact, has been heavily influenced by another philosophical current that is even more antithetical to Lee’s worldview than popular forms of Taoism and Buddhism: Confucianism. Whereas the philosophical Taoism and the Buddhism embraced by Lee can be subtle and paradoxical, Confucianism offers the security of precise formulas and simple, straightforward rules. Philosophical Taoism requires great sensitivity to be grasped. Confucianism is very easy to follow. Philosophical Taoism mocks rigid laws. Confucianism reveres them. Confucian ideology dictates the rules of proper behavior, establishes the reciprocal, but unequal, obligations between family members, regulates the relationship between citizens and state authorities, and oversees every possible aspect of public life. In other words, the very matrix of Chinese society was and still is saturated with Confucianism.

With its emphasis on intellectual virtues and its disdain for anything physical as unworthy of a scholar, Confucianism has been primarily responsible for the low esteem in which, until a few decades ago, martial arts were held among the more educated, upper classes, and for the ambivalence that Chinese society as a whole felt toward martial artists (Miller 1993). Also, with its reverence for the old, traditional ways and its high praise of filial piety, obedience to the elders, and ancestor worship, Confucianism has filled Chinese thought with deeply conservative tendencies.

In Lee’s philosophy, not a trace of Confucianism can be found. Rather, as we will see more in detail later, Lee stood in rm opposition to the most dogmatic aspects of Chinese tradition cherished by Confucianism. By rejecting Confucianism and choosing to embrace the antiauthoritarian viewpoint of philosophical Taoism, Lee allied himself with the fringe-dwellers, the outcasts, the mavericks, the philosophical outlaws, the misfits of Chinese culture. In fact, although some of the principles of philosophical Taoism have been incorporated into Chinese culture, its radical nature makes it appealing to only a minority of people and sets it apart from the traditions on which most of Chinese society is based.

One clear example of Lee’s rebellion against Confucian ideals can be found before we even look into the actual contents of his philosophical writings. According to Confucian standards, in fact, Lee committed an unforgivable sin. He took credit for creating the art of Jeet Kune Do. Even if Jeet Kune Do principles were not as uncompromisingly opposed to Confucianism as they are, the very act of claiming authorship of a new approach to the martial arts was unacceptable by Confucian standards.

Since Western society highly praises individual initiative and innovation, Western readers may wonder how taking credit for one’s creation can be considered negatively. In Chinese martial arts, however, innovation is rarely looked upon kindly. Creating something new inevitably implies that one is at least partially departing from tradition. And tradition is exactly what Confucianism exalts. The way of the ancestors—according to Confucianism—is the best possible one. Therefore any departure from the traditions passed down since ancient times cannot but make things worse. Viewed through Confucian lenses, creating means losing the perfection of the ancient ways.

For this reason, it had been customary for Chinese martial artists wishing to create a new art to mask it in a more traditional and acceptable garb. Rather than claiming authorship, the right thing to do in order to have one’s creation accepted was to attribute the new style to an old, respected source. By connecting the art to a famous lineage, the chances of receiving a good reception were substantially increased. Much in the same way in which ancient Greek poets often attributed their creations to Homer, the most famous and beloved of Greek poets, (thereby choosing personal anonymity but raising the possibility that their creation would gain fame), Chinese martial artists often pretended to have learned the new style from a mysterious descendant of one of the mythological heroes of the pantheon of Chinese martial arts.

For example, when in the 1600s Chi Long Feng began teaching Hsing-i, he said that he had learned the style from a manuscript authored by Yue Fei, the twelfth century legendary general who had defeated the armies of China’s northern enemies (www.shenwu.com). In the same way, when in the late nineteenth century Tung Hai Chuan created the art of Pa Kua Chang, he declared that he had learned the style from a secret sect of anonymous mountain-dwelling Taoists (a good substitute for a famous name) (Miller 1993). Later on, when Kao I-Sheng changed the Pa Kua curriculum by incorporating elements from other arts, he similarly told the story that he had learned this new version of the art from some mysterious Taoist hermit. (If one is to believe these stories, the abundance of mysterious Taoist hermits in the history of martial arts seems to suggest that they made up the majority of the Chinese population.) (Miller 1994) Even the fact that, despite a nearly complete lack of concrete evidence, Tai Chi Chuan is popularly attributed to the Taoist Chang San Feng and Shaolin Kung Fu to Bodhidharma is probably caused by the desire to attribute the creation of a new style to a character of mythological stature.

After examining all these examples, we may now appreciate the significance of Lee’s refusal to present his creation in a traditional fashion. Had Lee disappeared for a few years and had later told that he had been the disciple of an old Taoist, he would have conformed to a culturally approved way of introducing innovations. By claiming credit, on the other hand, he rejected the importance of lineage, did not even pretend to follow tradition, and therefore challenged a time-honored custom. At the time when Lee introduced Jeet Kune Do, he was a twenty-eight-year-old actor who lived in the United States, only had a few years of formal training under a recognized master (Wing Chun’s Yip Man), and had never received a teaching license. Yet, he claimed that following the old ways was useless and that his own approach made more sense. Not exactly the kind of comments designed to keep down the blood pressure of Confucius’ followers.

IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA, KILL HIM: JKD’S ALLERGY FOR AUTHORITY

If we move from the way in which Lee presented Jeet Kune Do to the actual contents of the art, the chances of raising Confucian enthusiasms decrease even further. Lee’s philosophy, in fact, amounts to a declaration of war against the conservative, dogmatic tendencies encouraged by Confucianism. An example representative of Lee’s approach can be found in the following passage from an article written by Lee for Black Belt magazine.

Unfortunately, most students in the martial arts are conformists. Instead of learning to depend on themselves for expression, they blindly follow their instructors, no longer feeling alone, and finding security in mass imitation. The product of this imitation is a dependent mind. Independent inquiry, which is essential to genuine understanding, is sacrificed. Look around the martial arts and witness the assortment of routine performers, trick artists, desensitized robots, glorifiers of the past, and so on—all followers or exponents of organized despair. (Lee 1971)

As we can clearly see from this passage, according to Lee one does not learn by simply following a formula laid out by someone else. Rather than revering the way of the ancestors and accepting their conclusions as absolute truths, Lee encouraged individuals to question everything and find out for themselves. Whereas Confucianism valued obedience and conformity, Lee emphasized creativity and freedom. As Lee himself wrote, “Art lives where absolute freedom is, because where it is not, there can be no creativity.” (Lee 1975) Lee’s commitment to individual freedom and empowerment placed him in opposition to any tradition requiring uncritical loyalty to authority.

In his quest for self-liberation, Lee had many models to draw from. Philosophical Taoism was certainly one of them. “The more taboos and inhibitions there are in the world, the poorer the people become” (Lao Tzu 1989) is one of the many Taoist battle cries against authority that Lee paraphrased several times in his books and articles.

Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishamurti was another of Lee’s sources of inspiration. Acclaimed as a messiah since birth, Krishamurti grew up adored and revered by members of a religious organization who believed that he was the ultimate savior they had been waiting for. Once he grew up, however, Krishnamurti kissed goodbye to their messianic dreams, declining his role and inviting people to become their own saviors. Because of his actions and antiauthoritarian worldview, Krishnamurti was included by Lee among his main philosophical influences (Lee 1975).

Buddha was also one of Lee’s role models. Born as the son of a king at the peak of the Hindu social scale, Buddha renounced it all to give his heart and soul to the ascetic practices of Hinduism. When these practices failed to bring the desired results, Buddha did not hesitate to abandon Hindu traditions and walk o the beaten path. His successful attempt to reach enlightenment outside the confines of tradition convinced him that blind allegiance to the old ways was an obstacle on the path to liberation. From then on, Buddha spread the subversive fire of a religion devoid of rigid authority. Suggesting that the gods had better things to do than playing with humans and that the Brahmins and their old rituals could not help people achieve nirvana, Buddha went against some of the most basic beliefs of Hindu society. As if this rebellion against the status quo were not enough, Buddha also went against another social convention by accepting women and people of the lower classes as students.

Even more revolutionary, however, was the fact that Buddha did not ask people to believe him, but encouraged them to find the truth for themselves. In his view, belief could not liberate anyone. Only direct experience could. For this reason, Buddha saw himself more as a guide pointing the way than as a king imposing a law. Buddha’s allegedly last words, “Work out your own salvation with diligence,” perfectly express his invitation for people to trust themselves more than any external authority (Smith 1991). Most forms of Buddhism created after Buddha’s death downplayed the antiauthoritarian aspects of Buddha’s message because they were simply too extreme and too frightening for most people to deal with. Taking charge of one’s own life and making all the decisions alone is much harder than following an established way. It requires more courage than most people can ever hope to have. For this reason, it became much easier for people to worship Buddha and turn him into another object of veneration than to follow his example and create their own path (Smith 1991).

One of the few religious currents that did not ignore these unsettling aspects of Buddha’s message was Zen Buddhism. By warning students against the dangers of dogmatism and inviting them to question authority, Zen statements such as, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him,” may paradoxically honor Buddha’s example more than any of the prayers to Buddha recited by some other Buddhist schools. Since Zen is one of the few schools of Buddhism that to a great extent emphasizes freedom from blind devotion, it should not come as a surprise that Lee’s own writings are flooded with Zen references.

As we will soon see, the antiauthoritarian ideas championed by the sources mentioned above helped Lee shape an approach to the martial arts that went against the way in which most martial arts were practiced and taught in the West. Besides rejecting many of the formalities surrounding martial arts practice, such as the elaborate bowing, the belt system, the use of special uniforms, the dojo hierarchy, the almost religious subservience to the instructor, and the many other ritualistic components that characterized some martial arts schools in United States, Lee addressed even more fundamental, methodological questions. One of them was something that most martial artists of the time took for granted and never thought of questioning: the very concept of separate martial arts styles with their separate sets of rules and separate teaching methodologies.

MARTIAL ARTS STYLES AS IDEOLOGICAL PRISONS: FREEDOM FROM “BELONGING”

Anyone who has ever been involved in the martial arts has probably, at one time or another, participated in the never-ending discussions about the merits or demerits of each martial art style. It is not uncommon for these kind of discussions to quickly degenerate into full-scale arguments in which practitioners of each style defend the virtue of their art of choice while denigrating the validity of all others. Much like religious fundamentalists claim that all spiritual paths other than their own (“the one true faith”) are misguided, martial artists often play the “my-style-is-better-than-yours” game and try to assert that they are right while everyone else is wrong.

According to Bruce Lee, the apologists of particular martial arts styles, irrespective of which style they belong to, are all wrong. Lee, in fact, argued that by turning personal intuitions and sound principles into absolute laws equal for everyone, all styles are guilty of turning partial truths into the only Truth and thereby failing to see the complete range of possible truths. The following series of quotations, taken from Lee’s own writings, can offer a clear testimony of Lee’s very controversial stance about martial art styles.

Styles tend to ... separate people—because they each have their own doctrine, and then the doctrine becomes their gospel of truth that you cannot change. But if you do not have styles, if you just say “Here I am, as a human being—how can I express myself totally and completely?” if you can do this, then you won’t create a style, because style is a crystallization. (Lee 1975)

Once conditioned in a partialized method, once isolated in an enclosing pattern, the practitioner faces his opponent through a screen of resistance— he is “performing” his stylized blocks and listening to his own screaming and not seeing what the opponent is really doing. (Ibidem)

Classical forms dull your creativity, condition and freeze your sense of freedom. You no longer “be,” but merely “do,” without sensitivity. (Ibidem)

When in a split second, your life is threatened, do you say, “Let me make sure my hand is on my hip, and my style is ‘the’ style”? When your life is in danger, do you argue about the method you will adhere to while saving yourself? Why the duality? (Ibidem)

The second-hand artist blindly following his sensei or sifu accepts his pattern. As a result, his action and, more importantly, his thinking become mechanical. His responses become automatic, according to set patterns, making him narrow and limited. (Lee 1971)

It is conceivable that a long time ago a certain martial artist discovered some partial truth. During his lifetime, the man resisted the temptation to organize this partial truth, although this is a common tendency in man’s search for security and certainty in life. After his death, his students took “his” hypothesis, “his” postulates, “his” inclination, and “his” method and turned them into law. Impressive creeds were then invented, solemn reinforcing ceremonies prescribed, rigid philosophy and patterns formulated, and so on, until finally an institution was erected. So what originated as one man’s intuition of some sort of personal fluidity was transformed into solidified, fixed knowledge, complete with organized, classified responses presented in a logical order. In so doing, the well-meaning, loyal followers not only made this knowledge a holy shrine but also a tomb in which they buried the founder’s wisdom. (Ibidem)

All styles require adjustment, partiality, denials, condemnation, and a lot of self-justification. The solutions they purport to provide are the very cause of the problem because they limit and interfere with our natural growth and obstruct the way to genuine understanding. Divisive by nature, styles keep men apart from each other rather than unite them. (Ibidem)

As we can see, Lee wasted little love on traditional martial arts schools. Before moving on to examine what kind of methodology Lee advocated instead of following established “styles,” however, it is worth pausing for a minute to consider the incredibly revolutionary implications of his critique of the very concept of “style.” By questioning the loyalty of martial artists to their own particular schools of fighting (Karate, Jujitsu, Kung Fu, Aikido, Judo, and the other myriad of styles and sub-styles of martial arts ever devised), Lee was doing more than suggesting a methodological change. He was grappling with one of the most powerful forces in human history: people’s sense of identity.

It was as if he had questioned people’s loyalty to their own country, or to their own religion. One simply does not question such things. Doing so would be unpatriotic and blasphemous. Normally, group identity is reinforced through passionate adherence to a common set of beliefs and through consensus among members. Questioning the core beliefs on which a group is based (whether the group is a religious sect, a political organization, a street gang, or martial arts style makes no difference) is at best a dangerous threat to the common sense of identity, and at worst, an act of insubordination and betrayal. Lee went even further. He did not simply criticize the core beliefs of one particular group. Rather, he questioned the very idea of adhering to any particular group. According to Lee, the simple act of joining a group structured around a codified set of rules and beliefs ends up creating a “we-against-them” mentality, causing endless divisions and useless conflicts with those who rally under a different flag.

If we stop to test Lee’s hypothesis against the backdrop of human history, the results are frightening. Racism, mass enslavement of people with a different skin color, witch hunts, inquisitions, political persecutions of ideological dissidents, gang wars, “holy” wars justified in the name of religious differences, wars rooted in ethnic pride, wars fought by combatants who do not understand the causes of the conflict but who fight nonetheless in the name of their country.... The number of massacres and the amount of suffering caused by the human predisposition to fight over perceived differences can hardly be calculated.

At the origin of all this bloodshed, very often, is the human need to belong and be part of a group. The promise of a common dream and a common identity is one of the main reasons for the popularity of churches, street gangs, and of any other kind of exclusive organizations. “Your dreams are our dreams,” the voice of the group reassures us, “We understand you because we are like you. We will protect you. We will love you as one of us. We are like a big family. You can depend on us. We are always there for you. If you have a doubt, we can comfort you and give you all the answers you need. If you play by our rules, you will never be alone again.”

Few are the human beings who do not like to hear these messages. As any good demagogue looking to build a strong following knows, a powerful dream, a flag, and a set of symbols are the perfect magnets around which people can gather to escape the fear of being alone by building a common sense of identity. In fact, facing life’s tragedies alone, filled with insecurities and with no one to turn to, is not what most people want. Having someone who chooses for us, provides the answers to all the questions, and makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves is the perfect cure for those who need guidance (that is to say, just about every human being possessing anything less than tremendous self-confidence).

Since there can be no concept of “we” if there is no “them” representing the antithesis of everything that “we” stand for, group identity inevitably is built on opposition to something. It is not a coincidence that patriotism always runs stronger in times of war. (Not surprisingly, in Lee’s mind, patriotism, just like any other value emphasizing the power of the group over the individual, is among the diseases to be eliminated) (Ibidem). The existence of a common enemy is the fuel feeding the re of a group’s own sense of identity. This is perhaps the reason why human history, in every part of the world, is filled with ideologically justified bloodbaths.

By questioning the concept of loyalty to any particular style, Lee took the bull of group identity by the horns and challenged the sensibility of the human desire to belong. Why belong to any school of thought—Lee asked—if all that it does is divide us into opposing factions and prevent us from seeing the truth of different points of view? Our reassuring sense of identity—Lee seemed to suggest—is nothing but a comfortable prison shielding us from the intensity of unfiltered experience. It shields us from many of the dangers and doubts of life as well as from the ecstasy and the beauty of it all. Through preconceptions and dogmas, most organizations shape the quality of our experiences, force us to watch life through the lenses of an ideological form of tunnel vision, and ultimately end up limiting the range of our choices. Too afraid to bear the weight of choosing on their own, many people hide behind the security of a group that provides all the answers. According to Lee, however, this is a way to hide, not a way to live.

Lee would probably agree with Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa when he said “The key to warriorship ... is not being afraid of who you are.” (Trungpa 1988) Being fearlessly willing to make mistakes in the process of making one’s own choices free from any dogma is the only path that Lee advocated. Much more than a methodological change, Lee’s challenge to martial arts styles should therefore be seen as a challenge to do what people are most scared of doing: refusing to submit to the power of any superior authority, and taking full responsibility as the leader of their own lives.

USING NO WAY AS THE WAY: LEE’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL ANARCHISM

In contrast to the approach preached by many schools of martial arts, Lee argued that the art should serve the individual rather than the individual serve the art (Maliszewski 1990). In one of his most famous quotes, Lee declared: “Man, the living, creating individual, is always more important than any established style.” (Lee 1971) What this translated to in practical terms was a radical departure from the methodology normally used by martial arts schools. Rather than following the standard curriculum of an established style, Lee began advocating a form of cross-training aimed at picking the best from different martial arts styles. In this way, Lee moved away from the Wing Chun style that he had learned in Hong Kong from Yip Man and established his own “non-style” of Jeet Kune Do.

Most great innovators in the history of the martial arts cross- trained in several arts and created new styles by taking techniques, exercises, and ideas from different sources and molding them into new systems. Lee, however, took matters one step further. Rather than establishing a new style, he created a major controversy by suggesting that martial artists should be constantly involved in a process of research that never crystallizes its findings into a finished product.

Although in the last few years, the popularity of no-holds-barred events such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship has convinced many martial artists of the necessity to cross-train, in the late 1960s, when Lee first spoke out, the idea of cross-training was not so easily received. In order to understand why Lee’s approach was so inflammatory, we need to remember that most schools of martial arts of the time (and many schools of martial arts even today) advocated never changing the style they practiced. According to them, since the style had been perfected by great masters in ancient times, changing the art in any way would be an arrogant mistake bound to water-down its effectiveness. Only by training precisely, following the guidelines passed on by the masters, could one hope to come close to their unsurpassed skills.

In the same way that Confucianism stressed the importance of imitating the way of the ancestors without ever introducing any change, many martial arts schools considered the idea of changing any part of their training as a betrayal of the traditions upon which their style was founded. Considering that this was the dominant philosophy among many martial artists, we can imagine the effect of Lee’s public rejection of traditional styles with statements such as, “The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. When he acts, he is translating every living moment in terms of the old.” (Lee 1975)

Whereas Confucianism and most martial arts schools preached the meticulous conservation of the purity of the old ways, Lee believed that the very attempt to conserve anything killed any purity that may have originally been there. As Taoism clearly pointed out, only by changing and flowing could water remain pure. When still, a body of water inevitably turns into a swamp. Believing that the same analogy applied to human affairs, Lee thought that any attachment to the past was a hindrance to living in the present. “To understand and live now,” Lee wrote, “everything of yesterday must die.” (Ibidem) Just like the Taoist writers, Heraclitus, one of the most famous pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, unequivocally stated that everything is constantly changing (Wheelwright 1959).

Following this line of thought, Lee argued that no fixed formula could capture the flow of existence. What worked yesterday may not work today. What the old masters discovered was one way to fight, not necessarily the only one, or even the best one. Different conditions call for different approaches. To Lee, an endless process of trial and error was therefore preferable to establishing one day’s intuition as an immutable law. Instilling in his students the ability to adapt to any situation made much more sense to Lee than teaching them a fixed method of fighting The following quotations, clearly inspired by Taoist writings, perfectly express the spirit of Lee’s revolutionary methodology.

How can there be methods and systems to arrive at something that is living? To that which is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way, a definite path, but not to that which is living. Do not reduce reality to a static thing and then invent methods to reach it. (Lee 1975)

True observation begins when one sheds set patterns, and true freedom of expression occurs when one is beyond systems. (Lee 1971)

Knowledge is fixed in time, whereas, knowing is continual. Knowledge comes from a source, from accumulation, from a conclusion, while knowing is a movement. (Lee 1975)

Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques or means which serve its ends. (Ibidem)

As can be grasped from these sentences, rather than being an organized system, Lee’s Jeet Kune Do was meant to be a laboratory where fighting theories and techniques could be put to the test.

Students could experiment with them without being bound to follow any unless they wished to. The words written around the very symbol of JKD stand as the catchy slogan for Lee’s methodology, “Using no way as the way; having no limitation as limitation.” (Little 1996)

Shortly after Lee’s death, Paul K. Feyerabend, one of the most provocative Western philosophers of the last part of the twentieth century, came out with an intriguing book destined to shake the scientific and philosophical establishment of the day. The book, appropriately entitled Against Method, is a manifesto applying to science the same ideas expressed by Lee in the field of martial arts (Feyerabend 1975). In the book, Feyerabend does nothing less than attack the Cartesian method on which most of Western science is built. Arguing that most scientists, in their blind devotion to a particularly restrictive methodology, lack the flexibility necessary for truly open-minded scientific inquiry, Feyerabend echoes Lee’s sentiments about classical martial artists. Both men, in fact, unequivocally state that the strict observance of any particular methodology inhibits intuition, represses individuality, and closes people’s minds rather than opening them. Worse yet, these methodologies are too limited by their own rules to be able to grasp anything more than small, partial truths. What both Lee and Feyerabend advocated in place of such a hopelessly rigid mindset was epistemological anarchism.

Acknowledging that any method possesses strengths as well as weaknesses, epistemological anarchism is an extremely open- minded approach willing to adopt any method showing promise for delivering the desired results. Because of this, epistemological anarchism utilizes a method’s strengths without being bound by its weaknesses. Just as Taoism argued that rules are necessary only for those who are too stupid to make the right choice on their own, epistemological anarchism holds that absolute laws are an obstacle to genuine understanding. Whereas guidelines can be useful, absolute laws limit the individual’s flexibility to decide what is appropriate in each situation.

Clearly, such freedom is not for everyone. As Confucianism recognized, when left free, stupid people are bound to make stupid choices, and for this reason it is important that they follow laws guiding their behavior. However, epistemological anarchists, along with Taoists, would probably agree with William Blake when he said, “One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.” (Blake 1975) Absolute laws end up being nothing but prisons for individuals with acute minds and powerful visions. It is with these individuals in mind that, as a corollary to the idea of “using no way as the way,” the epistemological anarchism advocated by Lee articulated its own very open four-step methodology (with which, no doubt, Feyerabend agreed) articulated its own very open four-step methodology.

Research your own experience.
Absorb what is useful.
Reject what is useless.
Add what is specifically your own. (Little 1996)

Through this set of prepositions, Lee gave full power back to the individual. Epistemological anarchism, in fact, does not attempt to substitute one method with another. Rather, it frees individuals to find their own methods, and invites them to change them at will if, after some time, their discovery stops producing the desired results.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote a splendid declaration of epistemological anarchism: “‘This is my way; where is yours?’— thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way—that does not exist.” (Nietzsche 1892) Buddha himself invited his followers to find out the truth for themselves without depending on anything or anyone, not even on his teachings (Smith 1991). In a similar spirit, Lee wrote, “... jeet kune do is merely a term, a label to be used as a boat to get across: once across, it is to be discarded and not carried on one’s back.” (Lee 1971) In this way, Lee resisted the temptation to turn his own intuition into dogma, downplayed his own self-importance as a teacher, and encouraged people to make up their own theories and become their own teachers. In fact, the essence of the epistemological anarchism that he espoused was in creating one’s own method by taking bits and pieces from different sources and recombining them into a new format.

SIMPLICITY

Although the key words of Lee’s “non-method” are creativity, flexibility, and synthesis, he recognized the danger of unchecked experimentation. Being willing to take ideas from different sources, the JKD martial artist may end up overwhelmed by an overload of information and unable to utilize the tools at her or his disposal in a meaningful way. Rather than being bound to one method, the JKD fighter gets lost in a myriad of different ideas and techniques. Always rejecting traditional methods can also turn into a new type of dogma. Worse yet, the JKD martial artist may become so infatuated with the technical variety offered by the process of picking and choosing from different sources as to turn into a collector. In this way, she or he effectively trades one prison for another. The lack of boundaries becomes as paralyzing as the oppressiveness of too many rules. Too many choices can lead astray those who are unable to choose what is useful and what is not.

In order to avoid this mistake, Lee again turned to Taoism. A few thousands years before Lee’s time, Lao Tzu had written, “Learning consists in daily accumulating; the practice of Tao consists in daily diminishing.” (Lao Tzu 1989) Following this lead, Lee came up with a rule of thumb designed to warn against the mistake of useless accumulation. In one of his most quoted statements, he reminded his followers that “The height of cultivation runs to simplicity.” (Lee 1975)

Since Lao Tzu’s poetry does not waste time on explanations, in order to clear up this concept, Lee used an illustration popularized by Zen Buddhism. According to this doctrine, knowledge comes in three stages. Before any kind of learning takes place, people are ignorant, and therefore simple. When they begin learning, they shed their ignorance and become sophisticated and aware of the subtle complexities of life. At this stage, they turn into very complex, intellectual beings. Their knowledge is vast but weighs them down. Spontaneity and innocence are lost in exchange for this knowledge. For many people, this is the end of the journey. The knowledge they have accumulated separates them from the simple, ignorant people, and therefore they go on accumulating more and more. This is the mistake of many intellectuals and is also the mistake of JKD followers infatuated with variety. Zen and Taoism, on the other hand, take a different route. They let go of the heavy, excess intellectual baggage they have accumulated and return to simplicity. However, there is a deep difference between the initial simplicity of ignorance and the kind of simplicity they search. The first lacks knowledge. The second has acquired knowledge, but has moved beyond accumulation and is not weighed down by it. It was after this deep, rich kind of simplicity, and not after accumulation, that Lee urged his followers to direct their energies.

PHILOSOPHY GOES TO THE MOVIES (AND SPILLS POPCORN ALL OVER ITSELF)

All of the basic principles of Lee’s philosophy that have been analyzed in this chapter can be found in a variety of written sources: Lee’s own books, books written about him, interviews, articles, and even some of the notes that he left behind. However, considering that Lee gained worldwide fame mainly as an actor, any discussion of Lee’s philosophy that did not at least briefly address how the philosophy played into his movies would be incomplete. In order to fill this gap, let us now turn to how Lee’s ideas appeared (or did not) in his movies.

Generally speaking, movies are not the best form of media to convey philosophical ideas. Martial arts movies, in particular, are not exactly famous for their philosophical depth. Fast-paced action scenes and spectacular stunts are the staple of this genre in which the plot is often little more than a pretext for the fighting sequences.

Since audiences usually do not watch martial arts movies for their fine intellectual content, producers often save on the unnecessary expenditure of a decent screenwriter by recycling the same plot over and over. In these movies, the gods presiding over the destiny of the hero’s family members must be on a permanent vacation, for they always end up killed, maimed, or otherwise injured. The typical plot, in fact, runs like this: the hero of the story happily minds his own business and is reluctant to fight until forced to act by the Bad Guy who kidnaps and/or insults and/or kills and/or rapes and/or tortures the hero’s teacher, lover, parent, grandparent, or family pet, thereby giving the hero an excuse to seek revenge. At that point, the hero is either forced to join the inevitable, deadly martial arts tournament organized by the Bad Guy, or simply turns from a perfect candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize into a killing machine who does not stop until he gets revenge during the final, cathartic fight with the Evil One.

Bruce Lee’s movies, being the model for the genre, do not escape the above description. From tournaments to murdered loved ones, Lee’s four movies (five if we include the posthumous Game of Death) contain all the defining elements of martial arts films. Philosophy, on the other hand, seems to be (literally) missing in action. For example, in order to find any sign of philosophical life in Lee’s first two movies, Fist of Fury and The Chinese Connection (a.k.a. The Big Boss), one needs the gift of a very fertile imagination. As an explanation for this complete lack of philosophical substance in the works of a man who was so immersed in philosophy, we need to remember that in 1971 Lee was still not particularly famous as an actor. For this reason, it is logical to assume that he did not have much power to influence the scripts of the first two movies. In fact, as soon as Lee gained great fame, philosophy entered into his films. In his next (and last) two movies, Return of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon, glimpses of Lee’s philosophy manage to come out in between action sequences.

In Return of the Dragon, Lee’s opposition to ideological dogmatism comes out in a friendly argument with a fellow Chinese. In this brief dialogue, Lee scoffs at his friend’s patriotic refusal to study karate on the ground that it is a foreign art. To his friend’s closed-minded patriotism, Lee offers an open approach willing to “take what is useful” from any available source. Although the dialogue is hardly enlightening, it provides a quick example of Lee’s attempt to introduce deeper themes in his movies.

In the final fight of Return of the Dragon, Lee again inserts a small philosophical element. Like all movie heroes, Lee begins the fight by losing. At this point, however, unlike the heroes of other movies, who usually rely only on willpower to come back and win, Lee changes his fighting style to suit the situation. Lee’s opponent, on the other hand, is bound to only one form of fighting and is therefore unable to change. This lack of flexibility proves fatal and Lee goes on to soundly defeat his opponent. In this scene, the Taoist emphasis on being able to change to suit the circumstances and on having no form in order to be able to assume all forms are the keys allowing Lee to win what started out as an unfavorable fight: a perfect application of the principles of Jeet Kune Do.

If in Return of the Dragon Lee timidly began introducing philosophical themes, in Enter the Dragon he added more philosophical fuel to the fire. The very beginning of the movie sees Lee in a temple teaching martial arts to a young pupil. In this dialogue, Lee uses plenty of Zen sayings (a paraphrase of the famous “The wise man points at the moon, but the fool looks at the finger”) and stresses Zen ideas such as relying on intuition more than on abstract rationality. Just a few minutes later, Lee re-enacts a notorious samurai story about “the art of fighting without fighting.” Faithfully following the Japanese story, which is said to be based on a historical event, Lee has his character on a ship in the company of an arrogant martial artist looking to practice his skills on the passengers. When the martial artist rudely asks what style he practices, Lee answers, “You can call it the art of fighting without fighting.” Lee then proceeds to accept the ensuing challenge on one condition. Since his style cannot be properly performed in a tight space, the match is to take place on a nearby island. Eager to fight, the challenger accepts and jumps on to a small lifeboat. Immediately, Lee pushes the lifeboat away from the ship, thereby getting rid of the obnoxious challenger without having to fight. After this splendid demonstration of philosophy applied to fighting, the rest of Enter the Dragon gives way to the familiar cliches that make up most martial arts movies. Apparently, Lee had planned to include more philosophical material, but those scenes were cut for fear of being too complicated for the audience (Little 1996).

More evidence of Lee’s wish to include philosophy in his films can be found in a movie in which Lee did not act at all. Based on a story written by Lee and by some of his famous students (actor James Coburn and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant), Circle of Iron (aka The Silent Flute) is perhaps the most anomalous martial arts movie ever made. In fact, whereas the fighting sequences are of extremely poor quality, the philosophical effort is commendable. References to Heraclitus as well as Buddhist and Taoist ideas fill a plot based around a search for wisdom and self-knowledge. Although the quality of the work can be debated, Circle of Iron is certainly a courageous project and a manifesto of Lee’s own philosophy. The dedication made to Lee at the beginning of the film clearly points to Lee’s desire to make philosophy a big part of his movies:

Prior to the death of the legendary Bruce Lee, he helped to create a movie story that might capture not only the spirit of martial arts, but a part of the spirit of the Zen philosophy he lived by. He was aware that a film with these dynamics would cause controversy, particularly among those unfamiliar with Zen beliefs. But it was this very uniqueness that he believed would enthrall the moviegoer.... It is to Bruce Lee that this film is posthumously dedicated (Circle of Iron 1979)

Although, as we can see from the paucity of these examples, Lee’s films were hardly full of philosophical dialogues, we can also see how, as Lee gained fame and influence, philosophy gained a more prominent role in each new movie. Had Lee’s life and acting career not met such a premature end, it seems safe to assume that Lee would have used his growing popularity to make philosophy a much more central part of his pictures. Had that happened, perhaps the entire genre of martial arts movies would have taken a different turn. Although I have a difficult time imagining Van Damme starring in Zen scripts (again my apologies to Van Damme for picking on him) and although I doubt that many people would pay to watch martial arts movies with little violence and much philosophy, Lee’s early death leaves us with many unanswered questions about what might have been.

JEET KUNE DO AS THE ARCHETYPAL MARTIAL ART OF THE 1960S

The importance of the context in which ideas come to light is sometimes downplayed in the study of philosophy. For example, if most of Lee’s philosophy is derived from Asian sources that are thousands of years old, one may guess that the context in which Lee lived did not contribute much to the articulation of his philosophy. The assumption is logical but, as logic often goes, terribly wrong.

In its philosophical outlook, in fact, Jeet Kune Do is the quintessential martial art of the 1960s. It is not simply because the 1960s were the decade in which Lee came up with the main concepts of his new approach to martial arts. Rather, Jeet Kune Do is the embodiment in martial arts form of many of the wild, revolutionary ideas that characterized the sixties. If we attempt the impossible task of imagining JKD being created and popularized in a more conformist cultural context, such as that existing in the 1950s, we can immediately see how Lee’s art is irremediably tied to the extreme, passionate spirit of the American West Coast in the 1960s. Can any of us picture Lee’s ideas being well received in South Dakota in, let’s say, 1952? Forget becoming a popular hero. With his anti-patriotic, anti-organized religion, antiauthoritarian, liberal anarchistic ideas, Lee would have been lucky not to have been lynched as soon as he opened his mouth.

In any context other than the sixties, Lee would have been accused of being an ungrateful flag-burner and invited to quickly go back where he came from. As Giordano Bruno and thousands of people tried for heresy and witchery could attest, many times in history people have been burned at the stake for much milder criticisms of established authority. In most places and during most centuries, Lee’s libertarian views would have been considered an intolerable threat by the religious and/or political powers of the day, and would have been immediately and severely dealt with.

In the sixties, however, it was a completely different story. Both those people who loved and those who hated the 1960s agree that they probably were the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century and that they have drastically altered American consciousness and beliefs. Politically, it was the time of the antiwar movement and the civil rights movement. It was the time when hundreds of organizations radically opposed to the government sprung up like mushrooms. Culturally, thousands of people became disillusioned with the Euro-centric view that Western culture was the best of all, and began looking for answers elsewhere. Asian religions and philosophies gained instant popularity. Traditional values were questioned and criticized. “Question Authority”—a concept that Lee particularly loved—became one of the favorite slogans of the decade. The sexual revolution shocked the Puritan values that, up until that point, had ruled the attitude of most Americans toward sexuality. Free, uninhibited experimentation with anything, from drugs to ideology, was openly practiced. From music to cinematography, all forms of art experienced an incredible boost of creativity. It was a decade of fast, extreme change. The air was filled with the sense of possibility.

At a time when no forms of established authority went unchallenged, it seems only natural that even the field of martial arts was destined to experience some drastic change. It was in this receptive context that Lee stepped up with his radical form of Taoism and Zen. Lee’s highly unconventional personal background (an interracial marriage with a young white woman, his willingness to teach anyone regardless of ethnicity, the match fought against a Chinese martial artist sent to stop Lee from divulging martial arts “secrets” to non-Chinese, the fact that he had never received a formal teaching license) united with his equally unconventional philosophy and his public role as an actor allowed him to become the man who was to take the spirit of the sixties into the martial arts world. The philosophy of JKD can therefore be seen as the gift (or the curse, depending on your point of view) of the alchemical mixing of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, the antiauthoritarian culture of the 1960s, and Bruce Lee’s own personality. Regardless of whether we agree with Lee’s approach or not, his example remains as an open invitation to do one of the healthiest things that anyone, martial artist or not, can do: question one’s own beliefs.

References

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Cartmell, Tim. “Martial Arts Revolutionary: Wang Xiang Zhai Part I”. Journal of Chinese Martial Arts. Clearwater (FL): pp. 3–5, March-April 1998, Vol. 3 #14.

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Maliszewski, Michael. Spiritual Dimensions of the Martial Arts. Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1996.

Miller, Dan. “The Origins of Pa Kua Chang: Part II” Pa Kua Chang Journal. Pacic Grove (CA): High View Publications, vol. 3 #2, January/February 1993.

Miller, Dan. “Martial Arts Taught in the Old Tradition (Part II): The Deterioration of the Complete Martial Arts System”. Pa Kua Chang Journal. Pacic Grove (CA): High View Publications, vol. 4 #5, July/August 1994.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1995. Page references are to the 1995 edition.

Robbins, Tom. Another Roadside Attraction. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Smith, Huston. The World’s Religions. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991 [1958].

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Wright, Arthur F. Buddhism in Chinese History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.

36. Against Anarcho-Putinism

Deleted reason: fascist-apologetic (specifically Azov regiment, etc.) and cop-jacketing

Subtitle: Debunking Russian propaganda among anarchists about Russian-Ukrainian war

Author: Dark Night

Topics: Russia, anti-militarism, Ukraine, war, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

Date: December 2022

Source: https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/t+tXpWJzo07LiSu4g+Nsko9FHfrmdsCBhK0g-clwUj8/

Part of the anarchists from Central Europe wrote and published an antimilitaristic manifesto, which is called “Anarchist antimilitarism and myths about the war in Ukraine” (original in Czech: “Anarchistický antimilitarismus a mýty o válce na Ukrajině”, German translation – “Anarchistischer Antimilitarismus und Mythen über den Krieg in der Ukraine”, French translation – “Antimilitarisme anarchiste et mythes sur la guerre en Ukraine” and must, as stated in the title, debunk myths on the current Russian-Ukrainian war. Before reading this manifesto, as an anarchist from Russia, I thought that the comrades would really be exposing all the lies that the network of Russian secret services was spreading across Europe to cloud people’s minds with the message that “not everything is so clear-cut”. However, I was horrified to discover that our comrades were themselves influenced by Russian propaganda and are now broadcasting completely destructive messages to the broader European public, far removed from the context of domestic Russian and Ukrainian politics, and very skillfully obscuring them with anarchist beliefs.

Is this really your position on the war?

Before we examine the myths presented, it is worth outlining the roots of this perception. Russia really is not particularly represented in the global anarchist movement, and Ukraine even less so. The European reader, wishing to join in at this challenging time a coherent analysis of the situation from Russia’s comrades, who should know better, only comes across figures who may not have much influence on the anarchist agenda in Russia itself, but who actively broadcast their position abroad. And one such agent of influence is the CRAS and one of its representatives, Vadim Damier (https://aitrus.info).

The CRAS has no weight in the Russian anarchist movement, apart from Vadim Damier, we mentioned above, who, to be fair, writes some remarkable research. But it would not be a problem if the CRAS remained an organization of armchair historians. Among other things, it also claims to provide “deep” and comprehensive analysis of the current political situation – and voluntarily or involuntarily, it conveys a position that benefits the Russian establishment.

The Ukrainian anarchist Anatoliy Dubovik made a good demystification. It is important to cite it completely since I will not be able to present more consistently the contradictory essence of the “anti-militarism” of the CRAS. Unlike the authors of the manifesto, I will place great emphasis on the specific facts of Russian policy toward Ukraine, because it will be impossible to understand the theoretical rationale without this emphasis and to understand why the call to simply “lay down arms” does not work within the framework of this conflict.

About Anarcho-Putinists (Anatoliy Dubovik)

«The text is large. The text is addressed primarily to anarchists and sympathizers in Ukraine and Russia. Nevertheless, you can and should read it, and not only to anarchists, and not only in the former USSR.

We will talk about a group of Moscow “anarchists” and professionals from science, led by a leading researcher of the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of History Vadim Damier. On the position of this group, which calls itself the “Confederation of Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists” (hereafter, the CRAS), in Russia’s current war against Ukraine. It will also touch upon an equally important topic related to the attitude of the international organization calling itself the International Workers Association (IWA), of which the CRAS is a part, to this and some other issues. Thanks to Damier’s ability, the name IWA is mistakenly translated into Russian as “Международная ассоциация трудящихся” — and we will refer to it as such, МАТ.

I will immediately formulate my main point: despite many loud words about internationalism, anti-militarism, condemnation of the current war, and so on and so forth, the CRAS supports the most important propaganda theses of the Putin regime ruling in Russia regarding the war, regarding Ukraine. To be sure of this, it is sufficient to carefully study the materials of the CRAS website (https://aitrus.info). In case anyone has suddenly forgotten or does not know what they are talking about, let me remind you. Taking advantage of the military-political weakness and many internal problems in Ukraine, which had just experienced the national-democratic revolution of Euromaidan, the Russian Federation seized the peninsula of Crimea in late February and early March 2014 and then announced its annexation; the annexation was formalized by a fake “referendum” that had no legal effect either under Russian or Ukrainian law. A month later, pro-Russian insurgencies began in eastern and southern Ukraine, inspired, and supported by Russian military equipment and expertise. Fighting between the Ukrainian authorities and antiUkrainian separatists began when the city of Slavyansk was seized by a group of Russian soldiers led by Federal Security Service (FSB) colonel Igor Strelkov (Girkin). In the summer of 2014, the entire Donbass was already engaged in a bloody war. In the following years, the war took on a positional character, but did not stop for a single day. Russia continued to play the most active role in the events but denied verbally its participation in the conflict. The masks were thrown off at 5 a.m. on February 24, 2022, when dozens of Ukrainian cities were subjected to missile and sabotage attacks, and the Russian army began a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on multiple fronts at once. The war is accompanied by barbaric bombing and shelling of residential areas of Ukrainian cities and villages, mass murder and violence against Ukrainian civilians (regardless of age or gender), the creation of “filtration” (in fact, concentration) camps, mass forced deportations, and the flight of millions of people to find safety from Russian aggression.

But the CRAS exists in some made-up pseudo-reality of its own. In it there is no Russian attack. It places responsibility for the war on both sides — thus the victim of aggression was equated in its “guilt” to the aggressor himself. The position of the CRAS was already stated on February 25, 2022, in the “Statement of the Section of the M.A.T. in the region of Russia”: “The ruling elites of Russia and Ukraine, incited and provoked by global capital, greedy for power and swollen from the billions stolen from the working people, came together in a deadly battle. Their thirst for profits and domination is now being paid for with the blood of ordinary people” (https://aitrus.info/node/5921).

This formula – “both sides are to blame” – was repeated later: “The current war is exclusively about a confrontation between two states, two groups of capitalists, two nationalisms” (“The CRAS-MAT interview on the military conflict in Ukraine”. March 16, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5933);

“As chaotic fighting between Russian-Donbass and Ukrainian forces continues in Ukraine, resentment grows for the wives and mothers of soldiers sent to the battlefield as cannon fodder for opposing oligarchies trying to continue the redistribution of the ‘post-Soviet’ space” (“Women Protest: “There were even calls to lay down arms. May 23, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5968).

As mentioned above, the Russian leadership has denied aggression against Ukraine for years. In full accordance with Putin’s rhetoric, from 2014 until recently, the CRAS also did not recognize any aggression, calling what was happening a “civil war”: “The Ukrainian civil war dealt another heavy blow to those social forces in Russia that call themselves ‘leftist’, ‘anti-fascist’ or ‘anarchist movement’. (...) These groups split into supporters of one of the bourgeois camps, who clashed with each other in the struggle for power in Ukraine” (“Ukrainian Crisis and the ‘Left’: Necessary Explanations.” September 28, 2014. https://aitrus.info/node/3948). The CRAS continued to use this term in 2015: “Both sides of the civil war have violated the Minsk agreements” (“Anti-war rally in Donetsk: ‘Leave everyone! June 16, 2015. https://aitrus.info/node/4286). — By the way, the same publication uses another great phrase from Putin’s propaganda vocabulary – “Kiev regime” (at the same time no “Moscow regime” or “Putin regime” is ever mentioned by the CRAS); *“Revolt against arbitrary military rule amid civil war in the country”/ (“Ukraine: Anti-war Riot in Konstantinovka”. March 18, 2015. https://aitrus.info/node/4183).

It was repeated in 2016: “We do not share Ruslan Kotsaba’s political views and beliefs, but we appreciate his bold statements against the civil war in Ukraine, against the mobilization of the population for this war and the fomenting of militaristic hysteria in the country” (“Success of the international campaign: Ukrainian war critic Ruslan Kotsaba at large. July 16, 2016. https://aitrus.info/node/4742).

Another important thesis of Putin’s propaganda is the denial of the very existence of the Ukrainian people, the promotion of the concept that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people, maybe with slight regional differences in language. The CRAS cannot repeat illiterate statements such as “Ukraine was invented by Lenin when he worked in the Austrian General Staff”. But not everyone among Russian propagandists and top state officials voices this monstrous absurdity either. More so cannot say such things by the members of the CRAS, who are certified professional historians. They must choose words carefully to convey the same thoughts about “artificial origin of Ukrainians” and “one people” to their audience: “History, culture and even language of Russians and Ukrainians have always been closely intertwined. The word “Russian” itself originally stood for the Kyiv state of the ninth century! Thirty percent of “Russians” have relatives in Ukraine. (...) Many Ukrainians on whom Russian bombs are now falling are Russian speakers! (...) Nationalists inflate differences or even create them artificially by imposing the exclusive use of a single language to the detriment of multilingualism, so that even yesterday’s relatives and neighbors go to kill each other” (“Why Is ‘No War Between the Nations’ the Wrong Slogan?” May 16, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5965).

Open anti-Ukrainian propaganda has been carried out by the CRAS since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war (recall that at first these figures referred to it as the “civil war in Ukraine”). This is how the separatist pro-Russian “republics” were equated with Ukraine in the fall of 2014:

“The regimes in eastern Ukraine are extremely repressive (like Kyiv one). International human rights organizations have documented numerous human rights violations in both zones of the country. (...) Censorship is practiced, political opponents are persecuted; arrests, kidnappings, and beatings occur. There are reports from both parts of Ukraine of forced mobilization into military formations or for ‘fortification work’” (“The Ukrainian Crisis and the ‘Left’: A Necessary Explanation. September 28, 2014. https://aitrus.info/node/3948).

It remains a mystery why, given the allegedly identical “extremely repressive” policy of the “two parts of Ukraine,” 1,228,000 people left Russia-occupied Donbass for independent Ukraine, according to UN data, while there has never been any significant flow of refugees in the opposite direction. Why is it that in “Nazi Ukraine” there are independent media outlets, many different public organizations, feminist and sexual minority marches, May Day celebrations, in general there is a real civil society (with all its shortcomings and problems, which no one is hiding) — but in the “people’s republics” of Donbass all this is under a strict ban and suppressed by the “people’s authorities” by the most terrorist methods?

After February 24, the CRAS website continues to scare its readers with the horrors that are happening in Ukraine:

“Anti-war protests in Ukraine are hindered to an even greater extent than in Russia. In addition to repression by the authorities, who have begun banning and arresting political opponents and passing terrorist laws (including penalties for “collaboration with the aggressor,” “looting,” and “high treason,” ranging from 15 years in prison to life in prison), the very conditions of hostilities also make it difficult to protest. How to go out to street actions under a hail of Russian missiles and shells that pose an immediate threat to life?” (“Anti-war Rallies in Russia and Ukraine. March 30, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5939).

The main thing here is not even “how to protest?” but “why to protest?” Why should Ukrainians “go out to street actions” if the meaning of their “anti-war protests” is zero in every respect? Russia’s goal in this war is to take over all of Ukraine, to subjugate it, to eradicate everything Ukrainian, up to and including the physical destruction of all those who disagree with this prospect. This goal is undisguised; it has been repeatedly voiced by top figures in the Russian government. This goal can be seen by the behavior of the Russian army in the currently occupied territories. Therefore, the “hail of Russian missiles and shells” can ONLY stop Russia’s military defeat. The CRAS ignores all of this. The main thing is to tell as many horror stories as possible from Ukraine, where, it turns out, some protests are “more difficult than in Russia”. In Russia! In a place where you can end up in jail for throwing a plastic cup at a police officer, for putting up a sign that reads “Two Words” (meaning “No [to] War”), and even for showing up on the street with balloons of blue and yellow — the color of the Ukrainian flag.

Here is another example of the horrible horror stories about Ukraine from the CRAS:

“The current Russian-Ukrainian military conflict has led to a savage explosion of the most disgusting, caveman nationalism on both sides of the front lines” (“Anti-war Speech in Russia and Ukraine. March 30, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5939).

The author of these words, the venerable Dr. Vadim Damier, last visited my country nearly a quarter of a century ago, during an international meeting of Eastern European anarchists in Lvov in 1998. However, he spent most of his time during that meeting making and consuming some kind of local cannabis product (until he was threatened with a “beating his face” and thrown out the concoction he made). But that does not matter, either. Any events and processes in Ukraine are best seen from Moscow – the wise Moscow scientist is deeply convinced of that. [You should also] believe it, too, readers of the CRAS website, in the “wild explosion of disgusting nationalism” in the “Ukrainian caves”. If the members of the CRAS do not have enough words for anti-Ukrainian hysteria, they post someone else’s texts on their site. Here is an example: the statement of the “International Communist Movement”. The document was published by Moscow anarcho-professors without any comments, although those who are familiar with the practice of Damier and his friends from the CRAS and MAT need not be reminded of the care with which these people seek out the slightest deviation from their own views and statements, how easily they declare other people “traitors” and “enemies. In this case, nothing of the kind happened – so the editorial board of the CRAS website fully agrees with what the “international communists” said:

“Thanks to an intensive nationalist campaign, he [Zelensky] managed to arm the population, sometimes by force, and recruit an entire group of mercenaries and militants, elevated to the rank of ‘heroes of the nation’. As for the ‘heroic Ukrainian resistance’, it does what all the armies of the world do: it kills, robs, and does not hesitate to beat and even execute prisoners!” (“Against Imperialist War – Class Struggle! April 14, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5949).

Is that clear to everyone? It was not the Russian army that came to Ukraine to kill, rob, and execute — it was the Ukrainians themselves who were killing and robbing themselves!

And, of course, the CRAS could not ignore one of the most important points of Putin’s propaganda, the myth of “Nazi Ukraine,” including the myth of the terrible “Nazis from the Azov battalion”. The CRAS happily picked up this theme at the very beginning of the war, almost simultaneously with Russian propaganda generals [Vladimir] Solovyov, [Margarita] Simonyan, [Olga] Skabeeva, and other scoundrels:

“The ‘Azov’ battalion is an openly neo-Nazi unit of the Ukrainian ‘national guard’”. (“The Ukrainian Crisis and the ‘Left’: A Necessary Explanation. September 28, 2014. https://aitrus.info/node/3948)

“Overtly ultranationalist and neo-fascist forces and groups have seized hegemony in the streets and in the discourse” (“On War in Ukraine and Social Movements. Interview with the International Secretary of the CRAS.” April 6, 2015. https://aitrus.info/node/4217). And here is an even more frank statement, this time about Nazis not in the streets or in the mysterious “discourse,” but controlling all of Ukraine. The CRAS website, a reprint of a statement by the Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative (a section of the MAT in Serbia): “It is clear that the tendency of the strongest and most aggressive military alliance in the world, NATO, to expand into Ukraine, as well as its support of the deliberately Nazified regime created after the 2014 coup in that country, served only as an excuse for Russia to attack Ukraine, because the interests of the Russian ruling class were under threat.” (“Turning Capitalist Wars into a Workers Revolution!” March 5, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5927).

It should be noted that this is the only text published by the CRAS, which directly refers to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. And it is characteristic that this text was not written by members of the CRAS: for them, as we have seen, there is no attack, no aggression, only “the confrontation between the two states”.

And again about “Azov”, already this year and again out of the mouth of the CRAS:

“Ukrainian troops also include openly pro-fascist armed formations, such as the Azov”; “the Azov battalion, a formation originally composed of neo-Nazis (with the SS Wolfsangel sign) but now welcoming nationalists of all kinds” (“CRAS-MAT interview on the military conflict in Ukraine. March 16, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5933).

There are two things to pay attention to here.

First. the CRAS simply does not know what they are judging. There is simply no “Azov battalion” and it has not existed for an exceedingly long time. Back on September 17, 2014, this battalion was reorganized into the regiment of the same name, which then became the Azov Special Forces detachment. By the beginning of the large-scale Russian invasion, Azov was an ordinary unit of the National Guard of Ukraine. It had ethnic Ukrainians, ethnic Russians, ethnic Georgians, Jews, Greeks, and so on, and its commander was ethnic Karelian Denis Prokopenko. Perhaps this is what was meant by the words “nationalists of all kinds”. After all, for anti-Ukrainian propaganda, almost any citizen of Ukraine who does not agree to obey Russia is equal to a nationalist. “But there are many pictures of “Azov people” with Nazi symbols! But there were several Azov prisoners with Nazi tattoos shown on Russian television!”

That is right.

Let us just be honest with ourselves:

Nazism is not tattoos. Nazism is not some symbols and badges, flags, and pictures. The Nazis are not what Russian propaganda (and the CRAS behind it) has labeled as Nazis. The Nazis are those who mass murder and rape civilians, men, women, and children. Nazis are those who destroy entire towns and villages. The Nazis are those who “filter the suspicious” in concentration camps, who deported hundreds of thousands of people. The Nazis are those who unleashed the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945. The Nazis are those who deny the right of existence to entire peoples.

And these are not Ukrainians.

You must look at cases, not tattoos.

The only business that the Azov battalion, regiment, or special forces unit was engaged in was the protection of the people of Ukraine from the physical destruction that the Russian aggressors have carried and are carrying. Protecting people regardless of their ethnicity. If someone considers them Nazis on this basis and considers the genocide of the multi-ethnic Ukrainian people to be anti-fascism -such a person is simply insane.

Second. For some reason it seems to me that the citizens of the anarchoprofessors from the Moscow-based CRAS should be more interested and concerned about nationalism and Nazism in their own country. The CRAS website could talk about Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who as recently as less than a decade ago gave speeches at rallies about “Moscow is a city for Russians” and publicly performed Nazi salute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7FUpOyEdHw). About the sabotage and reconnaissance assault groups Rusich (https://warriors.fandom.com/ru/wiki/ДШРГ_Русич) and Ratibor (https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/ДШРГ_Ратибор), which consist of ideological Russian Nazis and have been involved in the war against Ukraine since the summer of 2014. About the fighters of the Nazi “Russian National Unity” who went to war this spring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDfCoushGI).

There is nothing of the kind in the publications and statements of the CRAS. The problem of Nazism in Russia simply does not exist for Russian “anarchosyndicalists”. Just as the leading media outlets of the Russian Federation say nothing about it.

A touching consensus between Damier and Skabeeva, isn’t it?

There is another topic that makes no sense to look for in the publications of the CRAS. It is the topic of war crimes by the Russian army in the occupied territories. When at the beginning of April 2022, the entire world was stunned by the horror that opened up in the cities near Kyiv, liberated from the Russian Nazis – in Bucha, Irpen, Gostomel, Borodyanka – the CRAS was silent about it. The CRAS ignored it. To deny this horror, as the official propagandists did (“It was the Ukrainians who killed themselves!”), would have been too stupid. They had to pretend that it simply had not happened, and that there was nothing to comment. Sometimes silence is far more eloquent and far more important than words. This was one of those cases.

Also. When the Ukrainian army goes on a counter-offensive, when it liberates Mariupol, Berdyansk, Kherson, and other cities now occupied by the Russian Nazis [this text was written before liberation of Kherson and many other cities], they will find many more mass graves and the bodies of people with their hands tied and shot in the back of the head abandoned in the streets. Before the war, these cities were larger than little Bucha, which means there will be more deaths. You do not have to be a prophet to know that. But the CRAS will remain silent even then. To know this, it is enough to know the members of the CRAS.

“But the CRAS is an internationalist and anti-war propaganda! But the CRAS is calling for the war to be stopped!”

That is right. That is what the CRAS says. For example:

“We call on the soldiers sent to fight not to shoot each other and certainly not to open fire on civilians. We call upon them to refuse en masse to carry out the criminal orders of their commanders. STOP THIS WAR! BAYONET INTO THE GROUND! We call on the people in the rear on both sides of the front, the workers of Russia and Ukraine not to support this war, not to help it – on the contrary, to resist it with all your might! Do not go to war! Not a single ruble, not a single hryvnia from our pockets for the war! Strike against this war, if only you can!” (“Statement of the M.A.T. section in the region of Russia” (February 25, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5921).

The words are beautiful in their abstraction. But where are the actions? Let us assume that the members of the CRAS did not give “a single hryvnia” to the war. But did they refuse to pay at least “a single ruble”? Did the leading researcher of the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, V[adim] Damier, go on strike against the war? How many days has D[mitriy] Rublev, associate professor at Moscow University and leading specialist of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, is striking [against the war]? Or are they “can’t”?

However, the CRAS claims that at the beginning of March “two of our comrades were detained and fined” (“CRAS-MAT Interview on the Military Conflict in Ukraine. March 16, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5933). But neither the names of these people, nor any other evidence is provided. They might as well talk about “twenty arrested and eighty executed comrades”. And I might claim that the CRAS received a cash bonus from the authorities for its stance on the war (we will get to the bottom of that later). I have no grounds for making such a claim – and I do not make them. Neither does the CRAS have any grounds for doing so, but the CRAS does say so.

Seventy-five days have passed since the release of the “Statement of the M.A.T. Section in the Russia Region”. Seventy-five days of non-stop bombing and killing of Ukrainians by Russians. And the CRAS decided to give new advice, this time only to one side of the war. Advice carelessly disguised as alleged fact:

“The main method of resistance to war on the part of the Ukrainian population is to refuse to participate in it” (“Anti-war protests in Russia and Ukraine continue. May 11, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5963).

And here again we need to pay attention to two points. First. Refusal to take part in the war – all this “bayonets in the ground,” “do not shoot,” “do not go to war” – can have two results.

If the Russian army heeds this call, lays down their arms and goes home, the war will stop, and peace will come.

If the Ukrainian army heeds this call, if it lays down its arms and goes home, Russia will occupy all of Ukraine without a fight, and a single grandiose Bucha will begin on its entire territory. The death toll will reach millions.

It is all very simple. And there is only one way to end the war: the complete military defeat of the Russian army and Putin’s regime.

Fortunately, the “Ukrainian population” — or rather, the Ukrainian people to whom I have the honor to belong – understand this very well and intend not to surrender, but to destroy the invaders until the last armed Russian soldier escapes to his country. Second. About the same days that the CRAS was giving interviews “about the military conflict,” telling horror stories about “Ukrainian Nazis from the Azov battalion” and calling “to stick bayonets in the ground,” Vladimir Putin, who calls himself president of Russia, also appealed to the Ukrainian military. He suggested that they “arrest the gang of Nazis and drug addicts in Kiev,” after which “an agreement will be possible.

Putin’s words and perhaps the intentions of Putin and Damier and his friends are different. Not very much, but different. The result of following their advice would be the same. Bucha.

Once again, I repeat what I said at the beginning of this text: the CRAS supports most of the most important propaganda theses of the ruling regime in Russia regarding the war, regarding Ukraine.

The CRAS writes about “Ukrainian Nazism,” about “one nation” and “the Ukrainian nation does not exist,” about “Ukraine’s fault for starting the war” (even though, from the point of view of the CRAS, Russia is also a little bit to blame), and more recently about “civil war in Ukraine. And the CRAS is silent about exactly the same things that the Russian authorities and Russian propaganda are silent about. About war crimes and mass murders, about deportations, about Russian Nazism, about the open dictatorship of Putin and his gang in Russia itself.

The CRAS deserved to be considered and called the ANARCHO-PUTINIST group. I see the only explanation for this: in fact, the CRAS collaborates with the Putin regime.

It is unlikely that the leaders of the CRAS are direct secret employees of the Russian secret services. What they call “informer”. This is very doubtful.

But what I personally do not doubt is that the leading figure of the CRAS, Vadim Damier (at least he is one), is what are called “agents of influence”. That is, a person whose fame, position, abilities, and reputation are used to instill in the minds of certain social groups such views, ideas and concepts that the ruling regime, and/or its special services, and/or their individual groups need. Used to find out the public’s reaction to the informational “inserts” made by such agents. Used for other “sensitive assignments”.

An obvious example of an agent of influence is the already mentioned FSB colonel Igor Strelkov. His task is to unite and mobilize for the “fight for Russia, against the West” the most conservative, most dormant strata of Russian society, who proudly call themselves patriots and nationalists. To warn the Russian leadership about the dangerous consequences of their actions (in those places where Strelkov’s handlers, for whatever reason, find it inconvenient or impossible to speak out for themselves). If necessary, to carry out purely military tasks where the open presence of the Russian army is undesirable. As was the case in Donbass in 2014. For this, Strelkov is allowed many things that are inaccessible to mere mortals: to be an oppositionist, to create and lead opposition parties and movements, to furiously criticize the government and its individual representatives, up to and including the Sovereign Emperor Vladimir the First himself [Vladimir Putin]. And he is not subjected to any persecution, even a symbolic fine. Although other Russian citizens are often imprisoned even for using the word “war” in the context of current events.

Damier as an agent of influence has a different task. He does not work within Russian society, since even among the overwhelming majority of Russian anarchists he does not enjoy the slightest authority. His target audience is abroad. Foreign countries, first of all European anarchists and other “leftists” (I do not know what the “leftists” are in the 21^st century, but this is what they call themselves). Its task is to carry Putin’s propaganda into this environment. Ultimately, it is to influence Western society in order to spread pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian ideas in it. Of course, this propaganda is adapted to the terminology and belief system of anarchists and “leftists. For this Damier is allowed much of what is inaccessible to mere mortals: to be an oppositionist, to head an anarchist organization, to criticize the government and some of its actions, even to declare himself an opponent of the war. While doing so, he is not subjected to any persecution, not even a symbolic fine, on the contrary, he continues to make a successful career in the (allegedly) hated by the state system. Although other citizens of Russia are often imprisoned for merely identifying themselves as anarchists.

In addition to their quite prosperous existence under Putin’s regime, Strelkov and Damier have one thing in common: they both seem to believe what they are saying. It is understandable and easy to explain either. An agent of influence needs to be convincing. And confidence in your own rightness is perhaps the best way to influence your audience. Therefore, the handlers of both can only suggest that they emphasize this or that circumstance, but by no means can they demand to voice or do anything that contradicts the beliefs of the agents of influence. As one brave Gascon told a Cardinal of France, “I would be badly received here and looked upon badly there if I accepted your offer, your lordship.

However, there is one important difference between Strelkov and Damier, besides the different target audience and everything that goes with it.

Igor Strelkov is subjectively an honest and straightforward man, a brave combat officer, which he has proven by his actions. This is an enemy who deserves a certain amount of respect. Perhaps when he is hanged after the trial, he will be given all the military honors a military officer is entitled to. Vadim Damier is a cunning, deceitful and extremely cowardly creature, which is well known to all who know him personally. Always avoiding the slightest risk to himself, but not shy to “teach life” to other people. I remember how long ago, in 1996, when there was still a semblance of personal human relations between us, he listened to my story about the general strike of the miners of Donbass, about our, Ukrainian anarchistsyndicalists, participation in it, about the defeat of this struggle – and then he said: “You should have had an armed uprising.” “But we would all have been wiped out within two days!” I replied. “Of course. But we, our International, would have made heroes of you, written memoirs and sung songs about you”.

Vadim, I know you are reading this right now. Show that you are not an agent of influence, not a coward, and not an empty shell. Go to the barracks and hand out leaflets to Russian soldiers about “turning bayonets against the government” until you get arrested. Become a hero. Do for once in your life what you demanded of others. I will even sing a song about you. Later.

How successful are the activities of Damier and the CRAS as agents of influence of the Putin regime, as Anarcho-Putinists? Are there any results of their pro-Russian propaganda in the West?

Yes.

People who are keep up with this subject know very well HOW MUCH of Russia lovers there are among foreign anarchists, Marxists, anti-authoritarian socialists, environmentalists, and simply “leftists. How strong are the myths about “Ukrainian Nazis,” the notorious “Azov battalion,” the “Kyiv junta,” the “military coup on the Maidan in 2014,” “persecution of Russians,” and simply about “Ukrainian fascism”. This information could have come to them in two ways. Either through the Russian state TV channel Russia Today – but they do not watch it, rightly not trusting state propaganda. Or from Damier and others like him, agents of influence. The funniest thing is that they simply do not think twice about asking Ukrainian anarchists, Marxists, anti-authoritarian socialists, environmentalists, and simply “leftists” for their opinion. Why? There is Damier and the CRAS, they are in Russia, it’s practically the same as in Ukraine – and if the Ukrainian “left” says something different, they’re kind of suspicious. They are probably, in reality, fascists or, at best, nationalists themselves. That is what Damier says about them.

I remember well how in 2014–2015 European anarchist websites and magazines rushed to interview a great many of them about the events in Ukraine (Euromaidan, separatist uprisings, the war that had started)... from Moscow anarchist professors. The anarchists of Ukraine simply did not exist for them at that time. This situation began to correct itself only since about 2016. But many people have already formed an opinion.

Above is already a quote from a statement by Serbian pro-Russian anarchists. Here is another text, from a Bulgarian anarchist. Who, of course, considers himself an internationalist, but understands nothing of the events taking place in Ukraine and repeats the thesis of “equal guilt of the two oligarchic clans.

“Today the rulers of the world are again sending two nations to the carnage of war (...) On both sides of the front line, brothers from “the grassroots” are fighting and dying for the interests of “their” rulers and oligarchs. The real enemy is them, within each of the warring states. In this bloodshed and destruction, we are for revolutionary defeatism”, and so on, and so on (Georgi Konstantinov. “Comrades Anarchists!” March 11, 2022. https://www.anarchy.bg/теория/апел-проект/).

But the anarchists from the Spanish women’s collective Moiras are asking the CRAS how to solve the unsolvable problem of how to explain to their Spanish populations that it is not Putin who is to blame for the war, but someone else, such as the aggressive NATO bloc:

“In the European Union, the media, echoing the governments, keep telling us that Putin is solely responsible for this war. Knowing the history of NATO led by the United States, we think this is not true. How do we explain this to our population without giving the impression that we are justifying Russia’s attack and supporting Putin’s government?” (“CRAS-MAT interview on the military conflict in Ukraine. March 16, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5933).

Señoritas, it is quite easy to explain. It is enough to prove that Ukraine is being attacked, Ukraine is being destroyed, Ukraine is being killed – not by Russian troops, but by your Spanish ones! Together with American, Belgian and other Albanian-Montenegrin ones. Overall, NATO is to blame. Prove it. Russian propagandists will surely help you in this noble cause.

Another statement. This time from MAT, but still diverting Russia from responsibility for the horror of the war in which the Ukrainian people find themselves, and hiding the essence of what is happening behind meaningless verbiage:

“There are those who go on thinking that some are merely defending themselves against an aggressor because of self-defense. But we can only talk about the aggressors and the attacked within the mental framework of WE and THEY. Because at the end of the day, it is always about WE, the workers, the people. Regardless of the language we speak, the land we live on, or the laws we obey. We are brothers and sisters who live only by the strength of our hands and minds”. (“M.A.T. 2022 May Day Statement. May 1, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5958).

Just as I was working on this text, I received a letter from a comrade from Greece. Here is what he writes: “I want to ask you, what is your opinion of the Russian anarchist group CRAS? A couple of their texts have been published in Greece in recent weeks, declaring most of the Ukrainian anarchists as nationalists and far-right (...) After “Borotba”, which still has some support among the Greek left, now this CRAS group also trashes the anarchists of the region”. — I have already briefly answered the comrade what my opinion of the Russian group CRAS is. Now he can read the detailed answer.

And here are the direct results of the Anarcho-Putinist propaganda. These are no longer words and statements, but actions and deeds. There is the statement by the Anti-Militarist Assembly of Turin, which unites trade union and political activists:

“To oppose a state of military emergency, increased military spending, sending weapons to the Ukrainian government; to fight for the withdrawal of all military forces from abroad, for the closure and reconversion of the military industry, for the opening of the borders to all refugees and migrants, is a concrete and urgent front of struggle. A general strike, boycott and blockade of military bases and death factories!” (“Italy: against wars and those who supply them with weapons! April 13, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5947).

A month and a half later, the “grassroots Italian trade unions” did indeed hold a general strike “against the war, the war economy and the war government. For twenty-four hours practically all transport – railroads, air and sea companies, public transport – was out of action. The slogan of the strike was, among other things, to refuse to send weapons to Ukraine. (“Italy: General Strike Against NATO’s ‘War Policy’ and Banker Draghi’s Government. May 26, 2022. https://aitrus.info/node/5969).

A comparable situation is taking place in Greece. In April in the news stream there was a report that the union of Greek port workers refused to serve any ships carrying military cargoes for Ukraine. This text was not ready at the time, and I did not save the link, but if any of the readers can confirm this unpleasant fact, I would be grateful.

So, the Anarcho-Putin propaganda of the CRAS and its MAT friends works and brings results. In various countries around the world, it has a noticeable impact on certain groups of the population, on public opinion as a whole. In Greece and Italy, it leads to sabotage of aid to Ukraine — which undoubtedly does not mean that the end of the war is near, but more deaths for civilians and the military, more destruction and violence. Regardless of the intentions and motivations of the unionists of said countries. The experts in anarchism Dr. Damier may be pleased with the work he has done on the propaganda front. If I were them, I would give the Moscow Anarcho-Putinists some money.

Thirty pieces of silver.

They deserved it».

______________

I would like to say that there is nothing wrong with us getting to know information and adopting, consciously or not, the position that comes across to us most often. But unfortunately, it is not always right what comes across most often. When it comes to the anarchist position on the Russian-Ukrainian war, this is indeed the case, and anarchists in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus overwhelmingly condemn Russian imperialist aggression. The European public does not see it, since the Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian movements are locked, and a huge layer of our reflection inside the movement has no way out. The radical left and radical right in European countries are the most vulnerable groups, and this is very well understood by the Russian special services, which benefit from perceiving the war through the prism that one way out is to call on both sides to lay down arms (but in fact, as it turned out, only one side – the resisting one), or at least encourage radicals to put pressure on their governments so that they do not supply weapons to Ukraine or join military and political blocs.

In fact, such a position only harms. And to understand exactly how it is harmful, we should consider the “myths” presented.

MythBusters

And, since we mentioned imperialism, let us start with it. The first myth is called that.

Myth 1: We are not fighting for the State, but in defense of the people under the fire of the imperial army.

«It is interesting how the argumentation supporting military mobilization is gradually changing, even though the content is still the same. First, we heard that anarchists in the Ukrainian army are only protecting civilian lives but are not defending any State. After a few weeks, there was already talk of a temporary tactical alliance with the forces of the State, without which it was said that it would be impossible to protect the civilian population. Now they are again openly talking about fighting for liberal democracy, that is, for a particular form of State.

All these formulations are intended to convince us that it is possible to wage a bourgeois war coordinated by State structures but avoid strengthening these structures and thereby not waging a struggle for the interests of the bourgeoisie. It is always necessary to see what is actually happening, which in some cases is not the same as what the direct participants or observers claim about what is happening. The anarchists in the Ukrainian army units are effectively fighting for the State and their claim that this is not happening does not correspond to reality. It comes across more as a desperate attempt to cope with contradictions, or worse, to give the impression that there are in fact no contradictions».

One of the main arguments in the discussion concerning why anarchists interact with the state army is that they are supposedly not anarchists at all but defend the bourgeois state in a bourgeois war. Anarchists are supposed to turn bayonets against their government by taking up arms, but for some reason they are fighting in conjunction with one government against another government!

In fact, if you think about it, this is a very funny and ridiculous thesis. To begin with, Ukrainian anarchists, even if they were well enough armed to fight back against the state, would probably only help Russia take over Ukraine. A revolution is not made by automatic weapons alone, and if society obviously does not support anarchism, then an armed rebellion by anarchists against their government will do nothing to encourage the masses to build alternative grassroots institutions. When such a malignant position is put forward, it is as if anarchists forget that anarchism is primarily about organization and institutions, and then about the armed defense of them. There are no anarchist institutions to defend in Ukraine, this is indeed true. But there are people in Ukraine. And they obviously do not want to live under the occupation of another state that does not care about them. Russia obviously does not care about the Ukrainians, and we see plenty of evidence of this: the destruction of the local population, the shelling of cities and peaceful civilian infrastructure.

The only thing Ukrainian anarchists can build after Ukraine has laid down its arms on the ruins of Russia’s destroyed cities is anarcho-primitivism, although it is unlikely to have many supporters. In this war, we really must choose between anarcho-primitivism with the fascist orders of the new government, which carries out “democratic” procedures at gunpoint, and the national bourgeoisie, which treats its citizens a little more leniently and can provide them with decent living conditions in a warm house with electricity, water, sewage, and other amenities familiar to European people after victory over Russia.

So, yes, anarchists choose the lesser evil. But we do so with an awareness of what is going on and an understanding of which version of the coming life is more humane for people.

Myth 2: Without military operations, it would be impossible to protect the lives of the Ukrainian population and resist the Russian empire.

«It is perfectly legitimate to protect the lives of the people of bombed-out cities. But to do so in the form of conventional warfare is effectively to protect the integrity of one State or another. Moreover, it is questionable to claim that it is in this way that the maximum number of lives can be saved. Continued war mobilization leads to the progressive brutalization of war and the death toll rises. At the same time, staying in bombing sites increases the risk of death. Moreover, it is possible to stop the bombing in other ways than by sending one’s own troops to the front.

The Ukrainian army has chosen a frontal military confrontation, which by its very nature cannot take place without people dying in large numbers. Not engaging in a warlike form of combat, however, does not mean sacrificing the population exposed to the bombs, because it is not simply a matter of refusing to fight, but also of organizing non-warlike forms of protection of threatened lives. Some organize the movement of the most endangered people to safe places. Others are attacking the economic, political and military power of the Russian empire, often doing so from various locations around the world.

The effects of militaristic propaganda are devastating. Some people came to really believe that State-led war is the most appropriate way to save lives, and moreover, in their view, the only way»

We can indeed agree with the statement that «continued war mobilization leads to the progressive brutalization of war» and «it is possible to stop the bombing in other ways than by sending one’s own troops to the front». But unlike the Anarcho-Putinists, we turn this thesis toward the Russian government.

No one would have died if Putin had not given the order to attack Ukraine on February 24, 2022. No one would have died if he had not declared “partial mobilization” on September 21, 2022. Putin sends his soldiers to their deaths and kills civilians in vain. Had the Ukrainians not resisted, as the Anarcho-Putinists suggest, there would have been even more casualties, and this can easily be confirmed by the stories of those people who have been victims of Russian aggression:

«There is one significant factor, which plays the role of a MINING COEFFICIENT and is not considered in these calculations. But it must be mentioned.

As the Chekists like to say in some cases, “it’s not your credit, it’s your fault”.

So, regarding the situation with the genocide of the inhabitants of Mariupol — if the REAL numbers of victims are lower than the estimated numbers, then it is NOT THE SERVICE of the Russian Armed Forces.

Because the calculations consider the CITY WITHOUT DEFENSE.

Just a defenseless city that offers no resistance. At all.

A perfect example of this is the Syrian refugee camps in Syria. Where, as you and I understand, there is no military, no weapons, no air defense systems (even if old), and no resistance to genocide.

That is, if Mariupol had not resisted, the casualty figures would have been exactly that.

Russians often blame Azov and other units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in their rhetoric for the fact that they did not surrender the city immediately and without mercy. They say that all the victims are on your conscience.

But it was strictly the other way around.

Since soldiers from Azov and other Ukrainian Armed Forces units were defending the city, helping the civilian population with advice, and destroying the enemy very actively, they played the role of that very lowering factor.

That is, if they had not been there, as in many villages and towns in Donbass, like in Volnovakha, like in Sartana, the Russians WOULD HAVE ACHIEVED THE PLANNED NUMBERS OF GENOCIDE there.

Once again: the actions of the Ukrainian military are a factor in reducing civilian casualties, not the other way around. IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND!

Because the Russian aviation that shelled Sartana and Volnovakha in the first days of hostilities (I deliberately do not say the beginning of the war, because the war has been going on since 2014), this same Russian aviation frolicked over defenseless settlements, without air defense, without any resistance, in an absolutely cynical and cruel way.

So,surrendering the city would not immediately reduce the number of victims, but would increase them.

There is no reason to believe, looking at the fate of Volnovakha and Sartana, which the Russians destroyed BEFORE encircling Mariupol, that surrendering the city would have somehow avoided genocide.

And every Ukrainian soldier who destroyed an enemy mortar or enemy “Grad” rocket launchers thereby reduced the number of civilian casualties in Mariupol».

(Regarding the “planned genocide figures,” see https://docs.cntd.ru/document/1200180859, as well as calculations based on this normative document with regard to Mariupol https://t.me/myvijily/11310; https://t.me/myvijily/11312; https://t.me/myvijily/11313; https://t.me/myvijily/11316; https://t.me/myvijily/11319; https://t.me/myvijily/11321; https://t.me/myvijily/11323; https://t.me/myvijily/11324; https://t.me/myvijily/11326; https://t.me/myvijily/11328; https://t.me/myvijily/11330).

As for evacuations, this obviously did not happen either. For example, Mariupol was not evacuated, and no one organized humanitarian escape corridors, and those who were able to leave in the first days did so on their own or simply tried their luck.

«I am very annoyed by all these fakes about the evacuation of Mariupol being organized somewhere. That someone saw some photos of some people in line. That someone saw some lists.

First of all. I can write you any lists, any kind. You take a Soviet phone book and write out the names in random order, that is all. I do not understand what proves, and to whom some paper with names.

That is nothing.

I will tell you more than that. I do not know a single person who used such sources as the lists to find anyone. But I know people from Mariupol, who in March months lost contact with their parents who lived in another district of the city (and at that time the other district was as unreachable as the moon – shelling, lack of transport, lack of gasoline for personal vehicles – all this made moving EVEN BETWEEN DISTRICTS of the city the destiny of rare lucky people, who like Grandpa from my diaries, had 2–3 gasoline cans in the garage).

That is, people lost contact with their relatives in early March, then searched for them, then someone from their acquaintances allegedly saw the names of their relatives in the lists, which was very encouraging and led the search in another direction.

And in the end, it turned out that this whole family burned alive in their apartment back on March 11. That is it, yeah.

And I will say “something else” once again.

I saw how the Russians make the lists. Lists of those who would be sent from April Mariupol for filtration. It was literally “paint and throw away”: names were written with mistakes, the sheet was crumpled in the pocket, and it was unclear whether the data had been submitted anywhere or not, was it made for the sake of appearance?

Because my own ex-husband, with all the capabilities unavailable to many ordinary people, DID NOT FIND US WITH MY SON IN THE LISTS.

That is it, yeah. Even though we were being rewritten.

And if I had not called him from Nikolskoye (Volodarskoye) and asked one of the DPR people for his phone number, it would have been the same: I would not have been on the list.

By the way, my relatives from the Moscow region also looked for me using the lists of so-called Russian volunteers (military, of course). And with the same result.

That is the intermediate conclusion: all these lists that are circulating in the network – they say nothing. They do not prove anything. But they create the necessary information picture – look, there are lists. So, supposedly, there was an evacuation.

You see, two trains and a couple of buses is not an evacuation. It is a mockery. Do you have any idea what half a million people are like? For example, look at the pictures of the Russian rallies on Bolotnaya Square, where they literally count the people by their heads, and it turns out that a huge crowd of people is only 8–10 thousand people. NOT 500 THOUSAND, but 8–10.

And they tell me that they have seen some pictures of some people standing in line (not even a large crowd) to some buses.

I have not seen such pictures. If anyone has them, I ask you to show them. Because we are from Mariupol, we will know right away whether this was taken in our city or elsewhere. Dozens of details make it possible to identify locations with precision. However, we are not shown such photos for some reason, I hear only deafening rumors that there are such photos somewhere. This is also information attack in favor of those forces that should have evacuated the city but preferred to talk about other topics than saving the citizens of Mariupol.

...

There were no evacuations. Some isolated cases when buses or microcars were used, I do not count as evacuations. These are private rescue initiatives»

Those who take the position that the surrender of Ukrainian cities would result in fewer civilian casualties are not based on facts and evidence, but on pure theory, which does not correspond to reality and is therefore harmful.

Myth 3: The Russian Empire can only be defeated by military force

«The stability of an empire is not only guaranteed by military superiority, but above all by the economic base on which the military machinery depends. The other pillars are the political structures and the prevailing ideology of the ruling class.

The Russian empire seeks the most favorable conditions in international trade and geopolitical influence. In this respect, its power grows throughout the world, not just in the regions of the Russian Federation. People do not need to be on the war front to undermine the basis of the empire. For example, the bombers of the Russian military can be stopped by cutting off the resources they need to operate. Resources can be expropriated, destroyed, disabled, or blocked from moving. There are many possibilities».

Diversion is also a military way of resisting. Yes, it usually does not affect people, and that is its appeal. But sabotage itself has a purely auxiliary function in warfare. In this sense, the few opponents of the war who set fire to the recruitment centers in Russia and remove the rails, will not be able to stop the war machine at once. But the anarchists have really succeeded in this sense, since they have taken the position of vanguard in the field of sabotage: in Russia, the main force of underground protest consists of members of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK).

As for economic sanctions, they also have an auxiliary function. The war could really be stopped if all countries would cut off Russia’s oxygen at once. But in practice, Europe spends more on Russian energy than it provides to Ukraine as military aid. This is something to think about.

In other words, the main process unfolds on the battlefield. Unfortunately, war is bloody. But it is a necessary sacrifice if people’s freedom from fascist aggression is at stake. Just as Hitler could not be defeated by economic sanctions and the German underground alone, so it is impossible to defeat Putin by economic sanctions and the Russian underground alone. Although both ways are useful.

Myth 4: Ukraine’s population is under fire from a well-armed Russian army, so defense will not be possible without armament support from NATO and European Union governments.

«The military invasion of Putin’s imperialism can and must be fought by means other than war. The problem with the pro-war argument is that it reduces defense against imperial aggression to only one option, and that is the riskiest one: a frontal military confrontation. It takes no account whatsoever of the possibility to disintegrate military forces from within directly by those who are recruited for the purposes of war. In all wars, sooner or later there are not only desertion tendencies, but also various kinds of sabotage by ordinary soldiers who have simply stopped believing that there is any legitimate reason for their deployment. The sabotage that occurs does not require expensive resources or heavy weapons. Yet their destructive effects can disable monstrous military machineries or significantly delay the advance of army units. These sabotages are so easy to carry out precisely because they are performed directly by members of military units, who usually have relatively easy access to vulnerable points in war equipment and infrastructure. Sometimes a single nut thrown into the drive train is enough.

The problem remains that too much effort is spent on war propaganda that portrays all Russian soldiers as fanatical supporters of the Putin regime. Although information is leaking out about Russian soldiers who no longer want to go to war, very little resources are devoted to agitation and networking to encourage them to desert and sabotage the war effort. If there are countless initiatives to support civilian refugees, there should be enough to provide security for deserters and saboteurs. As long as the spirit of war propaganda views all soldiers as loyal foot soldiers of the State, there will be little incentive for rank-and-file soldiers to sabotage.

We can look at the example of the Makhnovists, who conducted agitation in the ranks of the opposing armies (both white and red), thereby increasing the frequency of desertions, defections, fraternizations, sabotages, or turning the guns of the rank and file against the officers. The ease and effectiveness of internal sabotage tactics is illustrated by the example of sabotage in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War»

Another argument often promoted by agents of influence is that not all soldiers are Putinists. Well, indeed they are. But those who really can, desert. But this is not so easy, since Russian soldiers often have barrier units behind them, and it is not always possible to surrender or run away. As for historical examples, they are not always correct. As for the Makhnovists, they were quite a weighty force, and their strength was not so much in weapons, but in broad support of the peasantry and workers. Agitation is important when there is ground for it. But now it is difficult for the anarchists to create a grassroots movement like Makhnovists’ and become a third alternative.

As for fraternization, this is not observed in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Roughly the same way the German occupiers did not fraternize with the Soviet army. There are far more parallels here than with any other war because Germany’s war against the USSR was an invader war and was dictated by ideology, as was Russia’s war against Ukraine, while the United States did not seek to invade Vietnam, hence the soldiers were more alienated from it. Russian soldiers, on the other hand, go to war ideologically, believing that they are “denazifying” Ukraine or simply reuniting it with Russia, inspired by imperial and chauvinistic narratives.

Myth 5: Anarchists in Ukraine cannot fight except by joining the army because there is no mass workers’ movement with the means and capacity to organize itself in an anarchist way.

«According to this logic, we could argue that workers everywhere should go to the polls, join parliamentary parties, and ask the police and the courts to resolve disputes with employers until they have the capacity to oppose the whole bourgeois democratic system with their own forms of mass organization. This is nonsense. It is similar to being told that we must ally ourselves with the State in Ukraine today so we can fight it later»

This argument makes no sense. In today’s Ukraine there is no parliamentary debate, no disputes over delayed wage payments, especially in the occupied territories, and no laws as such. In other words, there is nothing to be compared to. And while, of course, anarchists must encourage direct action, this must not come at the expense of any working institutions, because otherwise we are likely to get neither anarchist institutions nor state institutions. In other words, instead of anarchy, we will get ruin.

«In fact, the power imbalance between the State and the workers exists even in countries where there is a mass working class movement. Anarchists cannot wait for the balance of power to tip in their favor. It is precisely by fighting every day outside the structures of the State and in spite of them that they can change the balance of power. By contrast, relying on alliances with the State helps to consolidate the position of the latter. Moreover, this is done with the help of those who may even oppose it, but only rhetorically, not practically.

Anarchists have always argued that the means must correspond to the ends. Non-State goals cannot be achieved through State structures. A mass movement cannot be built by exhorting workers to ally themselves with the organs of the State, because by doing so they will learn to accept and support these organs rather than to define themselves against them and subvert them. With every alliance with the State, the workers gradually cripple the tendency to rely on their own strength and resources. They lose the belief that they can achieve anything by self-organization and thus feed the belief that they are powerless without the help of the State».

Workers accept and support the state organs by default, and this has nothing to do with the anarchists’ defense activities in Ukraine. Generally speaking, the anarchists do not intend to build an anarchist movement by taking advantage of the military ruin. We must evaluate our own forces, because otherwise it would appear that anarchists should not interact with the state in any way, even when they practice direct action – the state is a sworn enemy! No, anarchists are aware of the absurdity of this position: we live in the state, and we need to interact with it. Anarchist propaganda is necessary, but it should be understood that its spontaneous effect in the long run is negated by the fact that no new institutions have been built in place of the old ones.

In other words, even supposing hypothetically that a factory trade union could be found in some region of Ukraine which, under the influence of anarchists, would take the anarcho-syndicalist principles as its basis and thus want to conduct its economic activities separately from the state, would it really be able to do so? It is unlikely. Even if the anarchists try to defend this union, they will not have the resources to seduce other unions to revolt and build a network of grassroots institutions. The rebellion of this trade union, supported by the anarchists, will have no effect on the anarchists themselves, and such is their potential for action in the post-Soviet space: we really cannot do anything more because of our weakened and small number of supporters! The rebel factory is a downtime, an economic diversion in a country weakened by war without any revolutionary sense. Such an adventure will discredit the anarchists in the eyes of the vast majority of the population of Ukraine, and they will see the anarchists not as liberators, but as saboteurs. Revolutionary subjectivity does not come out of the blue, and it is naïve to think that workers, which do not understand anarchist principles, will be inspired by the example of the heroic anarcho-syndicalist trade union, and will go at once to build similar organizations locally.

However, this does not mean that factory workers in a country at war cannot strike, they can. But with some conditions: it should not be a defense-industry factories (for obvious reasons), and regarding civilian production actions should not reach a complete halt in production, since any sabotage is irreparable harm to people who are already facing deprivation. However, the question of strikes is better left to the workers, they are much better able to understand the context of the situation and their interests.

«The next chapter could then be a list of all the concessions that we would have to make in order for such an alliance to take place, whereas the State makes only a minor concession in the sense of “I’ll tolerate you temporarily”. But it gives no guarantee that when, with the help of the anarchists, it achieves its goals, this concession will not turn into a tendency of “I do not need you anymore. So as potential opponents I can and want to eliminate you now”».

Ukraine does not care about anarchists right now. It is more interested in expelling the invaders from its territories. Of course, no state likes anarchists, including Ukraine. But anarchists fight for people, for their freedom and identity, not for the blue-and-yellow flag per se. The anarchists are well aware that the Ukrainian government will not help them to overthrow itself after victory, but the goal is not to build anarchy overnight immediately after the war. Once again: anarchy is an institution, not a weapon. We cannot force people to be anarchists, and simply going to overthrow the government to “build anarchy” is utterly ridiculous. Only someone who does not understand the difference between anarchists and other, even radical opposition, can reduce building anarchy to overthrowing the government.

Speaking of ideological purity, anarchists can and do cooperate with state structures during wartime. Because there are no ideologically pure revolutions. Even in modern Rojava, anarchists openly cooperate with the state when it comes to armaments. An anarchist from the IRPGF answers a similar question.

“As you say, the conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere are only the beginning of what will be a protracted and messy period of global crisis. But what do you consider the proper relationship between armed struggle and revolution? Should anarchists seek to commence armed struggle as soon as possible in the revolutionary process, or to delay it as long as we can? And how can anarchists hold our own on the terrain of armed struggle, when so much depends on getting arms—which usually means making deals with state or para-state actors?”

First of all, there is no general formula for how much armed struggle is necessary to initiate and advance the revolutionary process, nor at which point it should commence, if at all. For the IRPGF, we recognize that each group, collective, community, and neighborhood must ultimately decide when they initiate armed struggle. Armed struggle is contextual to the specific location and situation. For example, whereas throwing a Molotov cocktail at police is fairly normalized in the Exarchia neighborhood in Athens, Greece, in the United States the person throwing it would be shot dead by the police. Each particular local context has a different threshold for what the state allows in terms of violence. However, this is not an excuse for inaction. We believe that armed struggle is necessary. Ultimately, people must be willing to sacrifice their social position, privilege, and lives if necessary. Yet we are not asking people to go on suicide/sacrifice missions. This struggle is not for martyrdom but for life. Should it require martyrs, like the struggle here in Rojava and Kurdistan, that will be part of the armed struggle and revolutionary process as it unfolds.

Armed struggle does not necessarily create the conditions for a revolution and some revolutions may occur with little to no armed struggle. Both armed struggle and revolutions can be spontaneous or planned years in advance. Yet, local or national revolutions, which in some cases have been peaceful, do not create the conditions for world revolution nor challenge the hegemony of the capitalist worldsystem. What remains our fundamental question here is—when should one commence armed struggle? To start, we think that one has to analyze their local situation and context. The creation of local community and neighborhood defense forces which are openly armed is a critical first step to ensuring autonomy and selfprotection. This is a powerful symbolic act and one that will certainly attract the attention of the state and its repressive forces. Insurrection should happen everywhere and at all times, but it doesn’t necessarily need to happen with rifles. Ultimately, armed struggle should always be done in relation to living communities and neighborhoods. This will prevent vanguard mentalities and hierarchical social positions from developing.

Revolutions are not dinner parties and, what’s worse, we do not choose the dinner guests. How can we, as anarchists, remain principled in our political positions when we have to rely on state, para-state, and non-state actors to get arms and other resources? Firstly, there is no ideologically clean and pure revolution or armed struggle. Our weapons were made in former Communist countries and given to us by revolutionary political parties. The base we are staying in and the supplies and resources we receive come from the various parties operating here and ultimately from the people themselves. Clearly, we as anarchists have not liberated the kind of territory we would need to operate on our own. We must make deals. The question then becomes: how principled can our deals be?

We have relationships with revolutionary political parties that are communist, socialist, and Apoist. For us, we fight against the same enemy at this point and our combined resources and fighters can only further the struggle. Yet, we remain in critical alliance and solidarity with them. We disagree with their feudal mentalities, their dogmatic ideological positions, and their vision of seizing state power. We both know that should they one day seize state power, we will be enemies. Yet for the time being, we are not only allies but comrades in the struggle. This does not mean that we have sacrificed our principles. On the contrary, we have opened a dialogue on anarchism and criticized their ideological positions while affirming the principles and theoretical positions we share in common. This exchange has transformed us both and is part of what some of them refer to as the dialectical process: the necessity of both theory and practice to advance both the armed struggle and the social revolution.

For the IRPGF, making deals with other leftist revolutionary groups we can find common ground with is a reality we live with. Yet, we also must acknowledge that the larger guerrilla structure that we are a part of does make deals with state actors. While we once again reaffirm our position against all states, which is nonnegotiable, our structure makes pragmatic deals with state actors to survive another day to fight. For the time being, all of our supplies and resources come from revolutionary parties that we are in alliance with, who also make concessions and deals with state and non-state actors. We recognize this as a contradiction but a harsh reality of our current conditions.

Anarchists must choose, depending on their particular context and situation, what kind of deals they can make and with whom. Should they need to be pragmatic and make deals with state, para-state, or non-state actors to acquire arms, to hold on to their terrain, or to, at the very least, survive, that will be addressed and critiqued when the time comes. Ultimately, collectives and communities will make decisions for how to advance in the revolutionary process and how to use the various state and non-state actors for their benefit, with the goal of eventually not needing them and destroying them all. In the final analysis, armed struggle is necessary for the revolutionary process and the various alliances we make we deem necessary to achieve this goal of a liberated world. We, as the IRPGF, believe and affirm the often-repeated phrase from Greece that the only lost struggles are the ones that weren’t given” (https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/18/the-struggle-is-not-formartyrdom-but-for-life).

In this situation, the comrades are fighting for the revolution with much broader support among the locals. Yet they are not trying to build a dogmatic organization in a vacuum that never asks for outside help. Clearly, if any state favors the revolutionaries, it is worth taking advantage of. Even though Ukraine does not directly help the anarchists, it does not hinder them in this situation, and our Ukrainian comrades (and all those on the side of the Ukrainian anarchists) gain combat experience by fighting imperialist aggression. Under conditions of peace, an attempt to undergo military training would a cause for criminal prosecution. So, we are unequivocally positive about our comrades fighting at the front, it strengthens our movement.

Myth 6: By not taking part in the war, the working class abandons the weapons it can use to defend itself.

«To refuse to support the bourgeois war does not mean to surrender. But it is important to answer the strategic question of against whom and how to use the weapons? In this war they are being used against a currently more aggressive imperial bloc in defense of another imperial bloc. The working class is being dragged into the war while suffering the greatest losses. Such use of arms is counterproductive».

Let anyone who talks about the “confrontation between the two imperial blocs” give at least one relevant argument as to why Ukraine can be considered an imperialist state. Did Ukraine start a war? Did it intend to alienate territories and divide markets? Was it perhaps interested in genocide and the “Ukrainianization” of the Russian-speaking population living on its territory when it announced that it would resist Russian aggression? If you do not know what imperialism is, don’t use the word (or at least learn its meaning beforehand)!

«But if the guns are turned against the bourgeoisie, the military officers, or the structures of State power (Russian as well as Ukrainian), we have no problem with that. Fortunately, we can also see such cases on both sides of the war line. If the working class is to shed its blood, it is only for its own interests, which is not the same as bleeding for the fatherland, the nation, democracy or bourgeois wealth».

Neither are we against workers becoming revolutionary actors, but we do not live in a world of fairy dreams, where this comes out of blue, but in the harsh reality that neither Russia nor Ukraine has a strong workers’ movement. But this speculative thesis has one purpose: to cover up yet another attempt to crush the Ukrainian resistance, the authors of the manifesto have mentioned that they are also against the Russian structures of state power. Well, the agents of influence attack on all fronts, trying to pull our hesitant comrades to the position they want. But the essence of the resistance is different. Russia initiated the war, and when Russian soldiers point their bayonets against Russia, they want Russia to stop the war that it itself started. When Ukrainian soldiers do the same, they help Russia take over Ukraine, which has no interest in this war. And only an irrational person would think that the two sides of the conflict have equal interests. If equal, what are they? There is and will be no answer because, as stated above, those who use the word “imperialism” in their vocabulary do not know its meaning.

«The Ukrainian State makes sure that the armed forces are under the central command of its authorities and army, to which are submitted even those “anarchists” who have fallen headlong into militaristic tendencies. It can be assumed that even if the Russian army is militarily defeated, the Ukrainian State will seek to disarm the population which it is now arming under the watchful eye of the State authorities. In the past, whenever a State allowed anarchists to arm themselves to a greater extent, it later did everything possible to disarm them. Anarchists have more than once played the role of useful idiots who first fought for the interests of the State and the bourgeoisie, which they erroneously defined as the interests of the working class, only to end up, after fighting their battles, in prisons and torture chambers, before the courts and on the execution grounds of the very institutions that supplied them with arms».

When anarchists fought as part of the anti-Hitler coalition against Nazism, can they also be considered “useful idiots” who fought for the interests of the state? Of course, only in retrospect can we understand that Russia’s war against Ukraine is analogous to Nazi Germany’s war against the entire world, although fortunately it is not as powerful and large-scale. But remembering the historical experience, it is impossible not to mention how the European powers did not see Hitler as a threat, until he gained enough power and occupied Europe. So yes, the Europeans are enviably short-sighted. But in practice, Russian aggression is not inferior to the once German aggression, fortunately the Russian command has not yet thought of putting Ukrainians in concentration camps. However, this does not make it any easier, because pro-Ukrainian citizens in the occupied territories are tortured and killed, forced to pass humiliating filtration procedures, Ukrainian literature is burned, and the heritage of Ukrainian culture is destroyed. Many parallels can be made if respected analysts and anarchist gurus occasionally gets out of a dusty room and looks at how the war is actually going on, which, unfortunately, they prefer not to do (or deliberately ignore).

Myth 7: The involvement of the Ukrainian population in the war was forced by the invasion of Russian troops.

« The Ukrainian population had a choice, but some chose the option of joining the war by entrenching themselves and defending the territory».

What choice they had? To die from Russian shells?

«No one made the decision for these people. The choice is related to the strong patriotic and nationalistic tendency of the Ukrainian population, rather than being forced by circumstances or in the absence of any other option. In short, Ukrainian nationalists prefer to choose dying patriotically on the war front rather than waging a less risky but effective struggle from positions outside the “homeland” or inside the country but otherwise than by frontal military confrontation».

Ukrainian nationalists! That is where the Shoe pinches!

Without bothering the reader with too much history of Ukrainian nationalism here, I will send him to read Michael Colborn’s “From the fires of war: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right”, because I see no point in retelling it here. However, I would like to make a few important points: although there were Ukrainian nationalist organizations in Ukraine in 2014, they were not made up entirely of Ukrainian neo-Nazis. These were organizations that included both Ukrainian neo-Nazis and Russian and Belarusian neo-Nazis who had escaped persecution. To consider “Azov” an exclusively Ukrainian organization is not to know the history of its formation. Moreover, today “Azov” has been reorganized into a unit of the National Guard of Ukraine and is very much mixed up with representatives of other ideological beliefs (as well as other nationalities!), and to refer to the abstract atrocities of Ukrainian neo-Nazis from the “Azov” battalion is somewhat inconsistent with the spirit of the times. This does not mean, of course, that we should forget the genesis of this or that organization, but the transformation that Ukrainian nationalist organizations have experienced allows us to say today that they are not as nationalistic today as it is commonly believed (or not nationalistic at all), and propaganda is manipulated by outdated facts.

But even if we assume that the nationalists are still as rampant as they were in 2014, and that “Azov” is a neo-Nazi organization, and there is an entire Ukrainian government, which supports them, how do we explain that Ukraine is ruled by a Jew? And how do you explain that nationalist parties don’t even get a measly 5% of the vote in parliamentary elections? Information about political parties and their support in Ukraine is in the public domain. For some unknown reason, the nowbanned party “Opposition Platform “For Life””, which was clearly pro-Russian and served as an FSB agent, makes its way to the Rada, but Ukrainian nationalists do not. This cannot be purely accidental. Ukrainians are not overwhelmingly nationalists, much less neo-Nazis. Ukrainians voted for their country’s independence in an all-Union referendum, but even by voting for a pro-Russian party, they did not vote for Russia’s occupation of their country. Yet the pro-Russian party found more supporters than the Ukrainian nationalists.

As confirmation of this, it is worth citing the statement of the Azov Regiment about how they feel about Nazism:

“The Azov Regiment’s appeal to Russia.

“Catch the thief!” is usually the loudest shout of all by the thief himself. Kremlin propaganda calls us Nazis and fascists and calls ourselves liberators who have come to “denazify” Ukraine.

Today, the entire world lives in a time of great deceptions, big lies, and tiny truths. Billions of dollars are spent to create the illusion of greatness and to promote the anti-human ideas of the “Russkiy mir” ideology. The same one that brings destruction, death, suffering, hunger, and fear.

The only weapon in this struggle is the Truth.

And the truth is this: A treacherous monster attacked our land, and it is our right and duty to defend it.

At the forefront of this defense stands Azov.

Azov is a National Guard unit that was formed from volunteers in 2014, after Russia seized Crimea and parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. It is a unit in which Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Greeks, Georgians, Crimean Tatars, and Belarusians serve. Soldiers of different faiths have been serving hand in hand in this unit for 8 years: Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, Gentiles, Jews, and Muslims. Where the majority speaks Russian.

We despise Nazism and Stalinism, because our country suffered the most from these totalitarian regimes and false ideology.

Russia bombs Babyn Yar, where the victims of twentieth-century Nazism are buried. Putinists drop tons of shells on hospitals, schools, kindergartens, and churches. Putin’s soldiers shoot the elderly, kill children and pregnant women, just as the Nazis once did.

Nazism is the unquenchable need to kill people who dare to be free. It is the certainty of one’s right as a certain super nation and it is the certainty of the right to rule over other nations while raping and pillaging other nations. Doesn’t it remind you of anything?

The difference is that Azov was, is and will be a shield for Ukraine until the occupant leaves our country. We have never attacked anyone, and the main purpose of Azov is to protect and develop our country, our people, and the lives of our citizens are more important than the ambitions of any politician.

We, the defenders of the heroic city of Mariupol, have taken up the shield and sword that protect not only Ukraine from the forces of evil and lies, but the entire civilized world from the plague of the 21^st century. If we put the sword down, tomorrow the same fate will befall Kyiv and Lviv, and the day after tomorrow Warsaw, Berlin, and Paris. We wish thinking Russian people to overthrow that government that sends its sons to certain death for the sake of false illusions of a poisoned reality, instead of the people of Russia living, loving, and developing.

The Azov Regiment”.

As we can see, the “Nazi” Azov itself renounces its Nazi beliefs.

In France, for example, support for far-right Le Pen was nearly 50%, but for what reason is France not considered a Nazi country? An exceptionally good question to those who like to call Ukraine a Nazi country, basing their arguments on an analysis of the political screen, what exactly is the reason they do not do the same kind of analysis for other countries. And after all, the French far-right is very supportive of Russia in the war!

«Instead of a military defeat requiring too many casualties, a different resistance against the empire can be organized with fewer casualties. We can resist without dying needlessly on the war front.

We read reports about how much money the anarchists have raised to buy military equipment for Ukrainian soldiers. We ask ourselves how many successful direct actions against the war could have been carried out if these funds had not been swallowed up by the war machinery? Even from places as far from the front as Dresden, for example, it is possible to strike blows at the Russian army, economy and bureaucracy. It is frustrating to see anarchists pouring resources into the military rather than into activities that sabotage, block and undermine the war».

You cannot stop a war if you just stand there with anti-war posters. They have no effect if they are just posters. This is roughly the same methodology that the Russian liberals used to overthrow Putin: they brought people out to peaceful rallies against corruption in the hope that former Russian president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev (who today writes horrifying things about the war in his Telegram channel and wishes Europeans freeze to death in their apartments without Russian gas) would report on his vineyards in Tuscany, and current president Vladimir Putin would reveal the secret of whose money he built the mind-boggling palace. But dictators are dictators because instead of reporting to the people on their actions or going to jail for violating the law, they poison their whistle-blowers with Novichok poisoning agent and then put them in jail.

And if the Russians could not overthrow Putin with posters, how would they get him to stop the war with posters? The question is rhetorical. Unfortunately, the Ukrainians will have to fight.

Myth 8: By getting involved in the war on the Ukrainian side, the interests of the working class in the Ukrainian region are defended.

«Let us ask ourselves what the military operations actually save. We have already mentioned the problematic nature of the claim that it is about human lives. Next, we could deal with the material facilities that are destroyed by shelling and bombing. For those working in Ukraine, these are mainly houses, apartments, cultural centers, shops, the infrastructure of urban transport and other services. All of this is mostly owned by the bourgeoisie or the State and is used to accumulate profits extracted from the workers who use them. Even if all of this serves in part to meet the needs of the workers, it is done on the basis of exploitative principles».

Suddenly, we live under capitalism. And suddenly, capital belongs to the capitalists. Is it the anarchists’ fault? No, not at all. To reproach anarchists for defending Ukraine’s infrastructure, which belongs to the capitalists, instead of expropriating it, is like reproaching a homeless person for not buying a house but living on the street. Maybe is that why he lives because he can’t buy a house? Maybe is that why the Ukrainian anarchists defend the capitalist infrastructure because they objectively have no way to socialize it now?

«We are sympathetic to situations where militiamen in the Spanish Civil War fought to save buildings and infrastructure under workers’ control. But why should workers in Ukraine die fighting to save bourgeois property and territory administered by the State? The workers of Ukraine own and manage only a tiny percentage of local wealth. We believe that international solidarity can provide adequate compensation for the facilities taken from the workers by the war. We understand how hard it is to give up what we see as our home and favorite places. But to put our lives on the line in defense of such places seems to us an unreasonable sacrifice, especially when we know that it is mainly a defense of the capitalists’ property, in the management of which the workers have a negligible share».

How does the Spanish infrastructure differ strikingly from the Ukrainian one? Did the Spanish infrastructure, controlled by anarchists, provide some kind of special anarchist electricity, did the plumbing have special anarchist water, did the stores provide special anarchist bread? No, you cannot label food and utilities as political orientations. Anarchists stand for a fair distribution of goods, not for the distribution of only anarchist goods (though certainly the goods produced by anarchists are more ethical). Moreover, it is very strange that the authors separate the preservation of life from the preservation of infrastructure. If you think you can preserve life at the expense of infrastructure, take a field trip to Mariupol, where 95% of the infrastructure has been destroyed, and ask the remaining inhabitants of the ruins what it is like for them to live without the benefits of life. I am afraid that when choosing between a normally functioning city run by fascists and ruins where anarchism is strong, people would still prefer to live among fascists, because what is the point of anarchism in ruins where there are no benefits, and anarchists can’t implement the main point of their economic program?

«Other defended facilities are industrial, manufacturing and warehouse buildings, as well as agricultural fields, mining, and construction companies. Although these are the places where capital retains the exploited class, already long before the war many Ukrainian workers fled from them to other countries in search of a better life. What interest do workers have in defending these places directly linked to their misery, places where they are exploited, humiliated and exhausted?

The war is also aimed at defending the existing political and economic system, that is, the particular capitalist form that depends on the exploitation of workers and the domination of the State over the population. This war aims at nothing else than capitalist functioning and it is not in the interest of the workers to shed their own blood in defense of such a system.

We are not saying that Ukrainian workers cannot save anything that is meaningful to them by waging war. It is just that we see that war is much more focused on protecting bourgeois property and privilege, as well as the infrastructure of State power. And this is not really in the interest of the workers. We say yes to defending the lives and personal backgrounds of the working class. We say no to dying and getting maimed in defense of bourgeois property and privilege. In the case of the war in Ukraine, it is primarily the latter that is being defended».

I have a question for the authors. Why the heck do they speak on behalf of Ukrainian workers, about their “true” interests? Why do they take on the function of preachers who are trying to set workers on the right path? Most of Ukraine’s population is working people. And most of them support the defense of their country. And they volunteer to work for it. And it is their true interest to defend themselves and their country. Whoever speaks for the workers, condemning the workers themselves for what they do, is not an anarchist, but a Marxist-Leninist, obviously. Of course, it would be good to encourage the workers to expropriate the means of production, but it makes no sense to turn to anarchists for this. Anarchists will not hold a gun to the temple of the working class and force them to govern themselves. They can direct it, but no more than that. And after all, if the anarchists call on the workers not to defend the supposedly bourgeois infrastructure and allow it to be destroyed, what will be left to expropriate? Or, as usual, are the authors living in fairy dreams, where workers spontaneously and once imbued with anarchist ideas? Why, then, did we wait until this very restless day and did not move on to anarchism earlier, since the workers are so conscious?

Myth 9: An open dictatorship is a less favorable terrain for selforganization than the liberal democracy for which Ukraine is fighting.

«This claim is purely speculative. It cannot be shown that the working class will organize more and better on democratic terrain than on non-democratic terrain»

Give me some examples. History is full of examples of how reactionary societies have suppressed the labor movement. The revolution in Spain is proof of this: the labor movement died when the fascists seized power. According to the logic of the authors, it should have thrived! A truly Hegelian postulate: if facts contradict to my theory, the worse for the facts.

«In the world we can see various more or less democratic or authoritarian terrains. In some places the class struggle is in decline or stagnating, in others it is developing in quality and quantity. To conclude that the struggles are declining automatically in dictatorships while rising in democracies is very inaccurate. In the debate, such a position is just the result of a flawed analysis. On the ground, however, it means shedding the blood of thousands of people while justifying this by that very flawed analysis».

What is its inaccuracy? The burden of proof is on those who claims. If you claim that a thesis is inaccurate, why do we have to prove its accuracy by accepting this view as an indisputable postulate?

«Fighting for liberal democracy on the grounds that we will have better terrain of struggle is like risking your life on a lottery bet in which there is the possibility of a big win, but there is nothing to eliminate the high risk of a tragic loss like death».

Similarly, fighting for liberal democracy on the grounds that we will have better terrain is like risking your life on a lottery bet in which there is the possibility of a big win, but there is nothing to eliminate the high risk of a tragic loss like death. Have you noticed it? I have changed one word, I have eliminated two. But what would our opponents say to such an objection? Nothing. Because, obviously, this is a speculative statement that is not supported by anything. I can change it as I please, refuting both my immediate opponents and my own ideology.

Myth 10: Support for the Ukrainian population is often denied, on the basis of the presence of far-right forces, which are not thatstrong in the country

«The reason for not getting involved in the war on the Ukrainian side should not be motivated by the mere presence of neo-Nazis and neo-fascists in Ukraine. We have completely different reasons for not supporting the war. At the same time, however, we are struck by how the same people who present the war as a fight for democracy against dictatorship also downplay the Ukrainian far right. Even before the war, the latter had a strong influence on the political direction of the country towards more totalitarian forms. Why should we believe that after the war this force and tendency will disappear to be replaced by a free alternative?

It is not good to downplay the problem of the far right in Ukraine with figures or by pointing to its weak representation in parliament, because it is clear that neofascist and neo-Nazi forces have the upper hand here, especially in the streets. This is being used by parliamentary forces to turn the course of government policy towards more authoritarian forms».

There are neo-fascist and neo-Nazi elements in so many countries, and they are also represented in the streets. We should fight fascism as a phenomenon, not overthrow the Ukrainian government with the justification that it is Nazi and is the main reason Nazism is flourishing in Ukraine. If you are so concerned about why there are some Ukrainians who support nationalism, you should study the genesis of these ideas. The Ukrainian government is not Nazi, far from it; there is plenty of pluralism there that cannot be found in one-party Nazi dictatorships. To deny that Nazism is marked primarily by a one-party dictatorship is to admit your own ignorance. And where is the Nazi model of government?

And don’t you find these “refutations” contradictory? It was written above that Ukrainian workers are ready to take up arms and expropriate property now, establishing anarchy, and now it turns out that most Ukrainians and their government are latent Nazis, and Ukraine is on the road to dictatorship. This is schizophrenic.

Myth 11: Anarchists are against wars, but this one is different from the others, so we must get involved.

«What is interesting about this approach is that it can be seen in many military conflicts, although its proponents pretend that it is something unique. World War I and World War II, the various national liberation wars, and most recently the Rojava War. In all these wars, some anarchists come up with the same argument: we refuse to support the other wars, but this one is different, and we must take the side of one of the warring parties. Each time they mention that this support is critical, although the longer the support lasts the more this critical nature disappears until finally we see only pure war propaganda, which glosses over certain aspects but conceals, ignores or downplays other very important ones».

Well, anarchists do not have to participate in the war, that’s a fact. If you do not want to kill, you have the right to do so. But you must also understand who in the conflict is the victim and who is the aggressor. We cannot blame the victim for defending themself, even if we ourselves do not have guns in our hands. The authors, unfortunately, do. And by doing so, they do not contribute to peace, but only to tearing the victim to shreds.

«So, is the war in Ukraine different from the others? Yes and no. Every war is different from others in some ways. Different actors, different places, different weapons, different ideological justifications. At the same time, all wars except class war are the same in their basic setting. It is always a fight between different power blocs in which the working class is fooled by different ideologies according to which it is in its interest to fight on one side or the other of the battle line. All wars – and the one in Ukraine is no exception – are the same in that the working class sacrifices its lives for the interests of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie but often in the naive belief that it is doing so for the benefit of its own lives».

Anarchists realize that they are not fighting for anarchism in this war. In fact, no anarchist group has yet declared that its ultimate goal is to build anarchism immediately after the war. We live in reality. Workers do make sacrifices, so they should be protected, especially if they were not the initiators of the war. Ukrainian workers were not. And they do not mind defending themselves at all.

Myth 12: The war has destabilized the Ukrainian State, opening up new possibilities for workers to defend their needs and interests.

«Interestingly, this is often claimed by the same people who, in response to our criticism of anarchists in the State army, affirm that anarchists in the Ukrainian region cannot organize as autonomous non-hierarchical units because the Ukrainian State will not allow it and is not willing to give them resources.

If the State was truly destabilized, nothing would prevent people from taking autonomous initiative. Instead, we see the State trying to centrally control activities in the country and suppress expressions of autonomy. The talk of destabilizing the Ukrainian State reflects a wish rather than a reality. The arming of the Ukrainian population is subject to the control of the State, thereby ensuring that the armaments are not used against itself. This brings us back to why the defensive fighting of the Ukrainian troops must be seen as defense and strengthening of the role of the State, and not as mere protection of the bombed population».

In essence, this “refutation” refutes some of the points made above. First the authors claim that workers have a choice other than armed self-defense, because they can turn bayonets against the state, and now it turns out that the state suppresses autonomy, and its weapons would not be turned against itself. Insightful!

Obviously, when Ukrainian soldiers defend Ukraine and Ukrainians, they are defending not only Ukrainians, but also the state. Because, it is not surprisingly, people live in the state. And, it is not surprisingly, they are not objectively anarchists. Can we blame that on anarchists? No. I have answered above in sufficient detail why we cannot.

Myth 13: Opposing the struggle of Ukrainian troops because it benefits Western elites is like opposing industrial strikes because they benefit capitalist competitors.

In this “refutation” the authors use an analogy. Let us decipher it.

«There are many companies competing on the world market, all trying to gobble up the next competitor in order to gain an advantage over all other competitors. At one point, one company attacks another in such an aggressive way that even its employees start dying. The surrounding companies supply the employees with weapons to defend the workplace against the aggressors, not primarily to save their bare lives, but to gain partial control over the workplace resources and the surviving employees who are so fiercely defending it with their lives by defeating the more aggressive competitor.

In such a case, who other than competing companies would have an interest in supplying weapons to the challenged company? After all, it is not in the interest of the workers to defend their employer’s company in order to transfer part of the company’s resources to another capitalist».

Deciphering: There are many countries on the world stage, all trying to gobble up the next country to gain an advantage over all other countries. At one point, one country attacks another in such an aggressive way that even its citizens start dying. The surrounding countries supply the citizens with weapons to defend their country against the aggressors, not primarily to save their bare lives, but to gain partial control over country’s resources and the surviving citizens who are so fiercely defending their country with their lives by defeating the more aggressive state.

In such a case, who other than competing nations would have an interest in supplying weapons to the challenged country? After all, it is not in the interest of the citizens to defend their country’s government in order to transfer part of the country’s resources to another country.

So, as we can see, another influence technique is used here: to try to push the idea that Ukraine is just a marionette in the hands of Western governments, that supply Ukraine with weapons to weaken and plunder this country, through a blurred analogy. In general, another argument from the category of “imperialistic bloc”.

For what reason did the authors not want to call things by their proper names? Well, because by deciphering the analogy, its absurdity becomes quite clear. In this analogy, the attacking country is Ukraine, and it pursues the interests of the Western “imperialistic bloc”. In other words, it is again Ukraine’s fault that Russia attacked it.

The second aspect is that the thesis “to plunder Ukraine” is not supported by facts. This conclusion has no empirical basis. Ukraine is being plundered exclusively by Russia, not the West. The West pursues a double policy: it supplies weapons to Ukraine, but at the same time buys Russian energy resources – what kind of state trades directly with its enemies if, as is claimed, the West were to receive resources from the Ukraine it plundered? How the West plunders Ukraine is not quite clear. Perhaps, of course, the West will soon demand that Ukraine pay for arms supplies, but it would be fair to pay for it with Russian reparations, since Russia is the reason Ukraine is buying arms and getting into debt.

Everywhere we look, it appears that Ukraine is neither a bargaining chip between the supposedly opposing blocs (the bargaining chip is, however, the inhabitants of the LPR and DPR, whose protection was supposedly casus belli for the Russian invasion) nor an aggressor. The narrative that is being put forward as an argument is entirely the rhetoric of Russian propaganda, which is being propagandized mainly among Russian Stalinists.

This interpretation is further confirmed:

«That strikes will in some sense be used by capitalist competitors is a side effect, not the primary content of the strike struggle. In the case of the war in the Ukraine, the primary objective is to win resources for one or another bourgeois competitor, sacrificing mostly proletarian lives in the struggle. To achieve this sacrifice, the proletarians are mobilized for the struggle through nationalist ideology. If the struggle they undergo in doing so leads to the saving of some lives, this is a side effect of the main objective of the war, which is the redistribution of the territory and resources of the Ukraine between the capitalist competitors.

Let us recap. A bourgeois war and a workers’ strike are two completely different kinds of conflict in terms of content. War pursues primarily bourgeois interests for which it mobilizes workers. A strike pursues primarily the interests of the workers, even if capitalist competitors try to wrest something from it for themselves. In a war, the resources for conflict are supplied by rival bourgeois factions; in a strike, the workers rely primarily on their own resources, because they have no reason to expect them from the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie has no reason to supply them, because it would risk them being directed against itself».

Reducing the conflict to the typical question of “who benefits from this” is a characteristic feature of the Russian “tankies”. And here I should say that if everything really came down to this question, we could state that it was the Tbilisi and Yerevan property owners who arranged it all. But the world is not black and white, and it is not reducible to one interest of the bourgeoisie and one interest of the workers. We should not operate only with the base, when we study the details of the processes going on in the world, we must also consider the superstructure. For workers, the superstructure and everything that goes into it is important: language, cultural customs, ways of life. When a hostile country comes and destroys its language, way of life, and culture, replacing them with its own language, way of life, and culture, the worker being involuntarily not only the part of his class, but also being the part of nation, and this is not always of an aggressive sort of involvement.

To reduce people to a faceless mass, to one class only, is a Marxist-Leninist tactic. It is deeply anti-individualistic. Anarchism is individualistic. In addition to the individual’s belonging to society, there is the individual’s belonging to the personal. Every person wants to realize basic human rights: the right to life (first!), the right to speak his own language, the right to love and respect the heritage of his culture in the context of the place where he was born. These are quite natural needs. When another country’s army comes and destroys all of this, it is ridiculous to hide behind pacifism and ignore people’s desires to preserve their collective identity.

As Errico Malatesta wrote: «We abhor war, which is always fratricidal and damaging, and we want a liberating social revolution; we deplore strife between peoples and champion the fight against the ruling classes. But if, by some misfortune, a clash were to erupt between one people and another, we stand with the people that are defending their independence» (Errico Malatesta “The War and the Anarchists”).

Alexei Borovoy also made a crucial point:

“Anarchism is the science of culture! For anarchism does not call for the destruction, but for the overcoming of culture. Does not call for the senseless destruction and plundering of the heritage of the people, but for the careful preservation of the values in which the creative achievements of humankind are contained, which are necessary to our final, uninterrupted emancipation. Anarchism is the inheritor of all past human emancipatory aspirations and is responsible for their preservation”.

We cannot ignore people’s culture and identity. We cannot trash people’s desire to consider themselves Ukrainians and feel their connection to the land. To break this connection is to destroy the identity of the people. This is what the imperialist policy of Russia and many other imperialist countries is aiming at regarding independent nations. And although we know very well that the base determines the superstructure, we cannot say that the base denies it (in the nonHegelian sense)! Our task as anarchists, then, is to help oppressed nations find their collective identity and to destroy empires that do not take this identity into consideration.

Does Russia only commit genocide against the Ukrainian population? No, it even genocides those who inhabit its “inner colonies”. According to statistics, most of those mobilized are from national republics – Buryatia, Tyva, Kalmykia, Yakutia – the so-called “national minorities”. There are 87.5 Dagestanis, 275 Buryats and 350 Tuvans per one Muscovite killed in the war. Disproportionate mobilization becomes a hot topic in the media (https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-62259319).

Imperialism is omnipresent. And it is foolish to believe that Putin is fighting with Ukraine just because it is a fight with the West. He is fighting because he does not want Ukraine to be an independent country. And he also does not want the nations conquered by Russia to see the potential of that independence and strive for self-liberation. I am not writing any new things. What I express has been written by Mikhail Bakunin, and he can rightly be called the theorist of anti-imperialism.

Myth 14: This is not a war of imperial blocs, but an invasion by a single empire that wants to subjugate its neighbors who have nothing to do with imperialism.

«Seeing Putin’s Russia as the sole imperial aggressor in this war is exactly what we are often accused of: trying to fit reality to our own ideological conclusions.

Apparently, imperialism is reduced by some to a tendency to exercise power by military invasion, brutal usurpation of the resources of the invaded and their violent subjugation. But imperialism has other expansion mechanisms than aggressive military invasion. Domination also takes the form of economic pressures or pressure on the political configuration of neighboring countries so that the political terrain is as favorable as possible to the interests of transnational economic actors. This is precisely what is happening when the imperial bloc represented by the US, the Western countries and the European Union supplies weapons and other war materials in order to secure an economic and political arrangement in Ukraine that leaves the door open for it to plunder local resources and favor economic activities.

At the moment, Western imperialism does not want to subjugate the Ukrainian population by military force, in the same way as the Russian empire, but this still means that it exploits it for its imperial interests and that it wants to secure convenient access to resources on Ukrainian territory.

Here we see several imperial blocs waging a war for the redistribution of the territory and resources of the post-Soviet space. Some imperialists are doing this by direct military intervention in Ukraine, others by supplying arms to make the Ukrainian population on the front bleed for their cause».

If the Ukrainians have weapons to counter Russian aggression, why can’t they use those same weapons against the West, if the West is really plundering Ukraine? Maybe the whole point is that it is not plundering it? After all, where is the direct and indirect evidence of this? This position does not stand up to criticism because it has no basis. Ukrainians are neither blind nor deaf, and they would have noticed perfectly well how the Western imperialists are draining resources from Ukraine. The only thing Ukraine supplies is grain. But it is not for the sake of capitalists’ profits, but because there is a humanitarian disaster in the world, and the threat of world hunger looms before us. Or do the authors of this manifesto really think that feeding poor people in Africa with Ukrainian grain, which Ukraine itself exports, is robbery by Western “partners”?

«Some anarchists go very far in their cynicism. They claim that “no NATO army is fighting in Ukraine”. In this way they are merely chewing the propaganda of the Western imperialists, masking the fact that NATO is fighting in Ukraine through the Ukrainian population, which it supplies with weapons from its own warehouses. If we see and condemn imperialist Russia, it should not be in a way where we support the imperialist West while hiding its imperialist nature, strategies and goals.

Support for the armed democratic movement in Ukraine is in reality support for Western imperialism with its Ukrainian government».

NATO enters this war only indirectly, and precisely because it does not want a direct confrontation with Russia (what a confrontation!) – although, of course, things can change as long as Russian missiles “accidentally” fall on Poland. That is one point. Another is that Ukraine has no one else to ask for weapons from. We can assume that NATO countries would not supply weapons to Ukraine, and that other countries outside the bloc would do so. This would not change the situation: Ukraine would still have weapons, although not of very high quality. Ukraine would have fought the same way because the value of Ukraine is not weapons, but its independence. The thesis that Russia, having attacked Ukraine, is fighting with NATO – it is what Russian propaganda constantly broadcasts. But Russia is fighting with Ukraine only. Of course, the world is helping Ukraine to hold out. But it does so not because it is the initiator of the aggression itself, which forced Russia to “launch a preemptive strike”, but because Ukraine is objectively weaker than Russia, and if Russia conquers Ukraine, it will inflame it, and it will want to conquer more and more territory, conquering completely irrationally.

It is worth saying that the point of view expressed reproduces with precision the theses of the failed Russian ideology – Eurasianism (“Duginism”) – is developed by the right-wing radical and neo-fascist Alexander Dugin. Eurasianism is totally focused on geopolitics and believes that the struggle in the political arena is between such “opposing blocs”, and in this struggle Russia acts as an original civilization, which needs to become a point of attraction for the European and Asian tendencies of social development. This ideology is secondary, although it carries significant weight, especially among students of philosophy at leading Russian universities. One of the main ideas is Russia’s expansion and the spread of its geopolitical influence. Anyone can read Dugin’s opus filled with occultism, chauvinism, and metaphysics (if, of course, you really want to torture yourself with it) to verify the truth of this description. In other words, Russian ideologues and propagandists project their desires onto others and make the public believe in the truth of this projection. After all, a country, that treacherously attacked the other country cannot simply call itself an aggressor; it needs an excuse. Russia has many such excuses, and their main message is self-defense.

But dictators often use this message. Hitler, attacking Poland on September 1, 1939, said: “For months we have been suffering under the torture of a problem which the Versailles Diktat created – a problem which has deteriorated until it becomes intolerable for us. Danzig was and is a German city. The Corridor was and is German. Both these territories owe their cultural development exclusively to the German people. Danzig was separated from us, the Corridor was annexed by Poland. As in other German territories of the East, all German minorities living there have been ill-treated in the most distressing manner. More than 1,000,000 people of German blood had in the years 1919–1920 to leave their homeland.

As always, I attempted to bring about, by the peaceful method of making proposals for revision, an alteration of this intolerable position”.

Just as Hitler allegedly wanted to protect the German population, Putin declared war because he allegedly wanted to protect the Russians in the Donbass. And apparently, like Hitler, he started this war for the sake of peace, making his country look like a bastion of justice, which now is forced to fight against Western aggression. Once again, Ukraine is guilty of simply existing and not being able to take the forced measures that Russia is going to take to defend itself! After all, if my perception is wrong, then why are the authors so concerned that Ukraine chooses the West over Russia, which also carries out imperialist plunder? What about revolutionary impartiality and “bayonet in the ground”? What about the revolutionary alternative? Or will Russia be the most consistent and revolutionary imperialist between the two imperialists? Obviously, the authors cannot answer the question of why they are singling out a favorite in their “refutations”. They want to accuse Ukraine of collaborating with imperialism simply because this gives them a basis for justifying Russian aggression: if Ukraine is also “imperialist”, then Russia and Ukraine are on an equal footing, and it turns out that the victim is not Ukraine, which Russia bombs with shells, but Russia, which was forced to start this war. It is convenient, nothing to say!

Myth 15: The analysis of anarchists and leftists, especially in the West, is short-sighted because they see imperialism only in the US, NATO and its allies, not in Russia.

«We are sure that all those who criticize the support given to the Ukrainian army do not overlook Russia’s imperial position. We also know for sure that some people, in turn, see imperialism only on the Russian side. They do not acknowledge its existence on the Western side, or they downplay it by saying that Western imperialism is not manifesting itself in this conflict in the invasive and domineering way that Russia is. We have already noted that Western imperialism is, in fact, expansionist, like Russia’s one, but that it pursues its interests indirectly by supporting the Ukrainian army, which is fighting battles for its interests.

If it is myopic to see imperialism only on the side of the US and its allies, we should measure those who see imperialism only in Russia by the same yardstick. Our refusal to support the war does not consist in denying Russia’s imperial role, nor in demonizing the imperial role of “the West”. We refuse to support all imperial powers. We refuse to see the empire only on one side of the battle line, because we see it in every State that supports the war and thereby pursues its own imperial interests above all. Yes, we see differences in the degree of brutality used by each State. However, this is a reflection of their current capacities, which is a variable. States that are less aggressive now because they are pushed on the defensive may become as brutal as Russia tomorrow if they lack the means to do so at present. Anyone who chooses to support one empire in war against another should be aware that in doing so he is providing the weakest empire with the means for future aggression».

The authors have not yet named the imperial powers and their actions specifically. When anarchists say that Russia follows an imperialist policy, they can justify this by citing Russia’s own actions as an argument. Russia is a concrete political entity, a single sovereign state. “The West” is an aggregate. Of course, we sometimes reduce certain policies to the actions of the “collective West”, but we do so consciously and understand that some decisions are indeed made collectively. You can, of course, start listing in alphabetical order all the countries that have imposed sanctions against Russia, for example, but it is very convenient to use the name of the aggregate for this. As for imperialism, we cannot call the entire West imperialistic, because otherwise the word “imperialism” ceases to make sense. Imperialism is characterized by the hegemony of one country, and the only country that falls under this category and yet is Western is the United States. But the U.S. is not the entire West. Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Poland, Italy, Spain – it is impossible to list them all. Are they imperialistic all at once, too? Do they have the same policy as Russia? And what is it about? And how can these countries all at once become as brutal as Russia?

The West is not an empire. Only countries can be empires. It is not so much the “Western” states that are now resorting to imperialism. For example, Turkey, China, Israel. And you can justify this by referring to their practice (or desire) of expansion through the enslavement of peoples living in the territories they claim.

For Turkey it is Kurdistan, for China it is Taiwan, for Israel it is Palestine. It makes no sense to talk about Western expansion, because there is no such state, and therefore no one can talk about the geopolitical interests of the entire West.

It is worth saying that “West” has in many ways two meanings: the West as NATO countries and the West as member states of the European Union. Let us first consider the European Union and give the rationale why it cannot be imperialistic.

The European Union is a kind of confederation. But each country is autonomous, and to speak of the expansionism and imperialism of the European Union is to admit an ignorance of how it functions. But I think Europeans should know well that the European Union has no attributes of a state, although it is a subject of international law. Its organs are supranational. Any country can leave the European Union and join it, which cannot be a sign of its imperialist nature. The European Union is the most decentralized subject of international law that exists in the world today.

Speaking of NATO countries, it is more complicated than that. The NATO bloc was indeed created to confront a geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union, and NATO was essentially a tool that the United States used against the USSR. But it made sense at the time: ideological confrontation and the fear that the Soviet Union was threatening the capitalist world. Today, the Soviet Union has disintegrated, and all the countries that were part of the USSR have become capitalistic. NATO remained as a collective military security body. And, as it turned out, the fears were justified indeed: although today’s Russia, as the successor of the USSR, is no longer socialistic, it is still imperialistic. The USSR had not overcome the imperialism of the Russian Empire, and Russia had not overcome the imperialism of the USSR and was infected with the plague of revanchism. However, as the experience of the Russian-Ukrainian war shows, for 10 months NATO has never sent tanks to the Kremlin and does not seem very interested in sending them even after the incident in Przewodów, trying to put it down to an accident (and even if it is an accident – should not this “accident” be able to attract NATO’s attention and make it help Ukraine by closing its sky, for example? How many more such “accidents” will there be at the very moment when Russia is shelling Ukraine with a record number of missiles?).

NATO is also not a state, and although it dances to the tune of the U.S., is obviously not interested in war with Russia. After all, if NATO and the U.S. were interested, they would find a way to “restore democracy in Russia”. NATO does not attack even after obvious provocations from the Russian side. Is it possible to talk about American imperialism in this situation? Neither NATO nor the Americans, who have control over this organization, are enslaving Russia. They want Ukraine not to be taken over, not the collapse of Russia (it may indeed collapse at the end of the war, although it is unlikely that it will do so as a result of “Western redistribution”,since the West is not even discussing this). This is the key difference.

In other words, we cannot simply put on labels and assume that if a country behaves like an imperialist in one case, it will behave the same in another. Empires, oddly enough, also have their priorities. And the Americans’ priority is to keep Europe intact, not to arrange a redistribution of Ukraine for the sake of a dubious confrontation with Russia. The thesis of a confrontation between two imperialist powers seems to have been stuck in the late 1970s. It is time to update the propagandist guides!

Myth 16: The claim that the two warring sides are the same is a common ideological justification for not standing up for the massacred Ukrainian population.

«This myth is obviously based on a misinterpretation of the statement that this is a war between imperial powers, and it is a mistake to take sides with one of them. This is not to say that the two sides are the same in all respects. What is meant is that they are both bourgeois, and therefore it is contrary to the interests of the working class to oppose one bourgeois faction while at the same time defending the other bourgeois faction.

Both sides are the same in their bourgeois content. However, each applies different forms and means to enforce this content. The fact that some do it in more aggressive and brutal ways should not be an argument for joining with the lesser aggressors and bleeding for their interests».

This is a very subtle psychological trick! One time the authors write that no, the confrontation is between Western countries and Russia, and therefore it is two empires, and now it turns out that Ukraine, being the object of this myth, is imperialistic, and the struggle between Russia and Ukraine is a struggle of two imperial powers (no proof, as usual). The argument swings like a pendulum from side to side, but this sophistry is obvious to any thinking person. So yes, the arguments presented are a compilation of everything that can convince people not to support Ukraine. Since our much-respected comrades do not support either side, why are they so fond of criticizing Ukraine, mentioning Russia casually only? This is not accidental. Russia and Ukraine are in an unequal position. Russia has relatively peaceful sky (for now, but if they cease to be peaceful, it will be entirely Russian’s fault). In Ukraine it is not peaceful. Therefore, the question you are being asked has a different meaning. They are trying to ask you if you are cannibals, since you deny people the right to self-defense. But the answer is probably going to be disappointing for you.

Myth 17: People who have not experienced occupation by the troops of an imperial power will find it difficult to understand why the people of Ukraine are defending themselves through war mobilization.

«This myth is based on the stereotype that those who have not experienced something cannot understand it and certainly cannot be empathetic to those who have. It is in fact a kind of hierarchization, where the opinion of survivors has a high value, while the opinion of people without direct experience is considered worthless and fundamentally misguided. For example, the Czech Anarchist Federation states on its website:

“The historical experience of occupation in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe is clearly not transferable and is difficult to understand in regions that have not been occupied or even have their own imperial past.” [Anarchistickáfederace, O lidi musí jít především [People must come first]: https://www.afed.cz/text/7724/people-must-come-first/].

We disagree with statements along the lines of “you haven’t experienced it, so your positions will always be out of touch”. In fact, opinions on the issue vary considerably even among the survivors of the occupying forces’ aggression themselves. By the way, we live in a country that was occupied by Nazi troops and later by Warsaw Pact troops, yet we agree with the statement of the FAI (Anarchist Federation of Italy), which the Czech Anarchist Federation tries to counter by claiming that the position of the Italian section is based on misunderstanding due to not having lived through the occupation experience. People do not have to have been raped themselves to show an empathetic connection with those who experience rape. Likewise, people who have been raped can be callous and misguided. If the lived experience of occupation should automatically lead to greater empathy and appropriate analysis, then how do we explain the right-wing populism and nationalism that ran rampant during the Nazi and Stalinist occupation of Czechoslovakia?»

It is interesting that the occupation is compared to rape. Well, by analogy, if you are raped in the street, you should not resist it, because it is violence, and you should just politely ask the rapist not to rape you, and they will not! Don’t you see the absurdity of this thesis?

Experience does affect perception. A person who has been raped is more likely to understand another person who has been raped because it is a traumatic experience that he or she carries over to himself or herself. So does an occupation. Or do our comrades completely disagree that occupation is a traumatic experience for a people?

But sometimes you can empathize without being under occupation. Empathy is responsible for this. Some people have atrophied empathy and are incapable of extrapolating some people’s traumatic experiences to themselves. They are incapable of understanding that sleeping on the floor of a damp basement and running under flying shells is a traumatic experience. They are incapable of seeing people as people, seeing only a faceless mass that they can call whatever they want: “khokhols” [ethnic slur used by some Russians for the Ukrainians] or, in the case of those who wrote this manifesto, “workers” – having no idea that their average idea of people corresponds only to a stereotypical representation.

The human experience is unique. Although each person does experience certain traumatic events in his or her own way (some do not consider the occupation of Czechoslovakia to be any great misfortune either), on average we see that people’s way of life has significantly changed – and not for the better. The military is not fighting against each other in an open field. Russia regularly commits war crimes and does so with near impunity. It must be stopped by brute force, and there is nothing contradictory or inconsistent with the anarchist view. After all, if you think any brute force is unacceptable, then how do you come to support a revolution which, according to right-wing adherents, is violent?

No, you understand perfectly well that these two things – state or capitalist institutional violence and the attempt to resist it directly – cannot be compared. That there is, as Slavoj Žižek wrote in his essay “On Violence”, objective violence and subjective violence. But Slavoj Žižek was smarter than some anarchists; he was able to discern in the Russian military aggression the objective side of violence (Russia’s enslavement of Ukrainians), the violence, that Ukrainians resist using subjective violence (armed resistance proper). Failure to understand this difference also nullifies the anarchist argument why we do not consider it unethical to resist the state and capitalism. Or, as usual, instead of accepting this inconvenient fact that violence differs in origin and character, would the authors prefer to perform mental gymnastics and condemn Ukrainians for resisting the attempts of a state hostile to them to enslave them?

Myth 18: The resistance of the Ukrainian troops is based on the voluntary involvement of the Ukrainian population, which decided to join the fight.

«Saying such a thing is as silly as saying that all Russian citizens support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. There are thousands of people who volunteer to join both the Ukrainian and Russian armies. Just as there are many who evade the draft, desert, or emigrate to avoid having to serve in the army.

Not all Ukrainians are burning with the desire to fight for “their” bourgeois elites and the capitalist oligarchs who control them. The Ukrainian State is aware of this, which is why it tries to force participation in the army through involuntary recruitment.

According to the independent Kharkov website “Assembly”, subpoenas are most often distributed in the same places in the city. Forced summonses are carried out by military police, armed soldiers, “territorial defense” fighters and police officers – in cars and in on foot patrols.

According to an eyewitness, those handing out summonses at the entrance to Klas in Odessa were very loudly indignant that they could not catch anyone. Judging by the feedback from users on the Telegram channel, these actions are causing growing public indignation.

The recruits hunting is taking place at gas stations, on streets and intersections, in stores, at places where humanitarian aid is distributed… Some people try not to accept the call, for example, by sitting in their cars and not opening their windows. Some try to resist. In response, the women of the men called up have had their arms broken and have been threatened.[https://assembly.org.ua/kakvruchayut-povestki-na-uliczah-kharkova-i-chto-ob-etom-govoryat-yuristy/]

The Russian anarchist portal a2day.org states:

“Although there are many people who want to fight against the aggressor, it is a common practice in Ukraine to catch draft-age men on the street and give them a draft order, then give them a medical examination in five minutes and send them to a military unit where such unprepared and often unfit recruits are not welcome. According to volunteer movement activist Valery Markus, such forcibly mobilized soldiers who do not want to fight are a potential bomb; they can desert and abandon their positions at any time; they are a waste of valuable resources and are useless anyway.”[https://a2day.org/armiya-sluzhba-i-otkaz/]

We have no doubt that many persons engage in war activities quite voluntarily. However, this is not a proof that there are not many who are forced to do so or who avoid it. While the case of the former continues to be brought to the forefront of the media by pro-Ukrainian war propaganda, the latter are mostly ignored. If they talk about them, then it is done in the form of downplaying and belittling. There is a strong tendency to portray such people as a marginal phenomenon. A kind of aberration or exception to the rule that the Ukrainian population voluntarily joins the army units and happily rushes to the front.

If the Russian State is rightly accused of war propaganda manipulation of facts, the same yardstick should be applied to pro-Ukrainian war propaganda, which uses identical manipulative mechanisms».

I am not going to verify these claims, because I do not see the point. Amazingly, in a country where martial law is declared, men are mobilized! And it would also be quite surprising, but yes, it turns out not all men want to fight. There is always a percentage of those who do not want to fight, including in a country that is defensive. And even, surprisingly, there are collaborators in every country, both in the country that is fighting and in the country that is defending. But if you want to approach the question impartially, you have to compare how many mobilization orders Ukraine issued and how many people showed up at the recruitment center and got to the front (minus, again, some margin of error if people who did not want to fight showed up at the recruitment center). You must compare the number of refuseniks with the number of those who went voluntarily to the territorial defense of Ukraine. In other words, there must be a cross-section, a statistic. If not, then the analysis makes no sense: is it worth laying down arms for the sake of a critical minority of citizens who do not want to defend themselves and their homes?

I am afraid that the statistics will not be on the side of those who call for laying down arms.

It is also worth noting that in this “refutation”, the focus is again on Ukraine, while the everyday life of the Russian “partial mobilization” is not mentioned. If we are really talking about desertion, the Russians have excelled the Ukrainians. It was not the Ukrainians who ran into the woods to hide, but the Russians, and it was the Russians who stormed the borders of neighboring countries to leave, because they are obviously being sent to their deaths.

You could, of course, make the argument that if Ukraine’s borders were open, Ukrainians would also storm their neighbors to escape mobilization. But this does not correspond to reality. Ukrainians themselves were lining up to receive weapons, going to the recruitment centers themselves. There is plenty of documentary evidence of this, including video footage. But there was no such thing in Russia. There was a kilometer-long traffic jam on Upper Lars checkpoint, but there was not a single kilometer-long line to the recruitment center.

That says a lot.

And as for the thesis that not all Russians support Putin, that is true. But what good is it if they do not support him if they are passive? Why haven’t the respected anarchist comrades asked their favorite question: shouldn’t the Russian deserters have taken up arms and gone to overthrow Putin? This is a reasonable question, because the respected anarchist comrades demand this of the Ukrainian workers with regard to their government, but demand nothing of the Russian workers with regard to the Russian government. There is a total inconsistency in this. If the anarchist comrades are against all governments, shouldn’t the condemnation of those who escaped mobilization or went to the front without wanting to turn bayonets against the Russian government follow?

But condemnation seems to work only one way.

Myth 19: Refusing to support Ukrainian military forces means sacrificing the population to the bombing by Russian troops.

«We do not want to elaborate further on why not supporting the war does not necessarily mean denying aid to people who are resisting aggressors – both Russian and Ukrainian. We will only add the information that it is the Ukrainian State that, under threat of punishment, forbids the male part of the Ukrainian population to leave the country and recruits thousands of men into the army to effectively stay in the places where the bombing is taking place. It is the Ukrainian State that is sacrificing these people against their will, possibly by mobilizing them under the pressure of patriotic and nationalist propaganda. We, on the other hand, say that no one should be denied the opportunity to move to a place of safety when they are in danger of being maimed or killed by the bombs of the attacking imperial army».

And what does, excuse me, the Russian state do in this same case? Doesn’t it send people to their deaths? Doesn’t it punish those who do not want to go to a neighboring country to kill civilians? There seems to be no impartiality in this argument. And once again we have to be convinced that what the authors of this manifesto crucified above by saying that they are not stirring up anti-Ukrainian sentiment has no weight.

This is not even mentioning the question of which country is bombing Ukraine and endangering not only Ukrainian men, but also women, the elderly, and children. Thank you for mentioning at least casually that the imperial Russian army is dropping bombs on people, but yes, against the background of Ukraine’s military mobilization this factor of Ukrainian men’s mortality is insignificant (no, it is significant).

The position that says that Ukraine, like Russia, should also lay down its arms since its men going to the front are dying does not consider one huge difference: Ukraine would gladly stop fighting if Russia withdrew from its territory. Ukraine would stop fighting if it restored its borders established in 1991. Russia, on the other hand, is the initiator of aggression and does not risk any of its sovereignty. Russian men are not even sent to die for freedom (in any sense of the word), but for the political ambitions of the Kremlin clique. Here lies the key difference: Ukraine values its servicemen. Ukraine celebrates every exchange of prisoners of war as a holiday. Russia, on the other hand, drives mobile crematoriums across the battlefield to burn the bodies of deceased “heroes” and is unwilling to remove the corpses from the Ukrainian fields, which remain there to rot. This gives us a concrete understanding of who is expendable material and who is a defender in this war.

Such a situation, of course, does not mean that someone who is left so badly scarred by his country that it does not even wish to bury everyone with dignity does not deserve sympathy. In part it does, but not as a “neighbor”, according to Nietzsche, but as a “distant one”, since the Russian soldier is pitied not because he was not honored, but because he was so badly duped by imperial chauvinist propaganda that he got all ideas of ethical and unethical off axes, and he went to make the institutionalized killings of citizens of a neighboring country. But this is a question that lies in the plane of human dignity. Since a Russian soldier does not challenge such decisions and goes along to kill because “an order is an order”, his fate is predictable, and he himself has no human dignity – and for that he is kicked in the head by those whom he, a man without conscience, has come to kill. Fair enough. For the freedom of my fist ends with my neighbor’s nose – a basic anarchist principle.

Myth 20: People who refuse to support the resistance of the Ukrainian army cling to abstract ideological dogmas that cannot practically help those affected

«Those who reject war are often the same people who help those affected by war. At the same time, some are actively sabotaging the continuation of the war, hampering the war industry, and disrupting war mobilization through practical actions. For example, the Italian anarchist federation FAI, promoting nonparticipation in the war, declares:

“The first commitment of those who oppose the war is the construction and dissemination of mutual aid practices such as networks of solidarity from below to fulfill the immediate needs of the people who suffer most from the consequences of the conflict, being these food or medical support. There is also the need of support networks for those who practice strikes, sabotage, desertion, such as transnational networks for those who hide or flee from or over both sides of the front.” [Federazione Anarchica Italiana (FAI-IAF), For a new Anarchist Manifesto Against The War, English translation: https://www.federazioneanarchica.org/archivio/archivio_2022/20220722manifestonowar_en.html].

This is not an ideology detached from life. These are concrete practical steps that save lives and help to organize them in a more just way than is conceivable in the case of any war mobilization by conflicting powers».

Helping people, of course, is great. Such initiatives that help people affected by war, including defectors (including Ukrainian ones, if there are any: after all, if people really do not want to defend their country, they have the right to do so, although this may seem cowardly to some), should be welcomed. But it is worth remembering: Ukrainian (and Russian) refugees will not live in Europe forever. They will have to return to their homes. Therefore, Ukraine is fighting now, so that Ukrainians can return home and live as normal as before the war, and Russian refugees can return without fear of being imprisoned or sent to the front to fight if they do not want to. Above I wrote why the methods proposed by the authors of the manifesto do not work – they have not proven themselves practically. However, both sabotage (again, on the territory of the aggressor country, because sabotage on the territory of Ukraine is harmful, I also wrote why), and economic sanctions are necessary, but only as a supporting tool. These measures cannot replace a fullfledged armed struggle. Helping refugees is about treating the symptoms, not the disease. For refugees to live well, they must return to their homes, not wander around the world in search of asylum. This is a known fact. For them to return, Ukraine must liberate its territories and rebuild its cities.

Myth 21: People rejecting the military resistance of the Ukrainians are only interested in ideological purity and do not care about real people.

«The accusation of disregard for the victims of war aggression is at this point more emotionally tinged than based on truth. For the refusal to engage in war in our conception is not motivated by concern for abstract ideas and disinterest in the concrete people of the bombed-out cities. On the contrary, these people are of primary concern in our analysis.

The black and white vision that divides people into considerate supporters of the Ukrainian army and reckless opponents of support is very misleading. In reality, both camps are often driven by an equally sincere desire to be as helpful as possible to a maimed and murdered population. What differs is their position on the question of what is an appropriate and effective method of aid. Some see it in supporting the war effort on the Ukrainian side, others in subverting the war effort on all sides of the war line.

We will not accuse our opponents of not caring about the people sacrificed in the war. We do not think they are unscrupulous, only that they are mistaken in their estimates. They are wrong when they say that the lives of the bombed population are best protected by joining the war effort.

As the popular saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. And therefore, we cannot avoid to criticize the war propagandists within anarchist circles on the grounds that “they mean well”. Our analysis goes deeper than the intentions themselves and relates to who is making the claims. We are primarily interested in what is actually happening. Thus, when people sacrifice lives for bourgeois interests on the battlefield, and others interpret this as defending civilian lives from a deadly war, then we are saying: war leads to escalating brutalization and mass murder, not to the protection of lives».

Those who believe that Ukraine should defend itself are essentially inventing nothing. We are voicing the position held by the vast majority of Ukrainians. We are talking about what they care about, not trying to invent for them what they should care about. It is not a choice between two nations destroying one another, it’s a choice between those who commit genocide and those who are the victims. That is one point. Another is that toothless pacifism is not “ideological purity”, but inconsistency. Anarchism does not happen to be “ideologically pure” at all, you can find this only with Marxists; anarchism is a practical philosophy, and it is changeable by circumstances. We say why it is rational to fight against Russian aggression by armed means, and we do so without appealing to the argument that both countries are bourgeois. After all, if we think that all countries are bourgeois, and we don’t have to get involved and figure out who is right and who is wrong, then we will have nothing else to do but write cabinet treatises about how things might have been if things had worked out the way we want them to. We should not analyze from the perspective of how things might be, but from the perspective of how things really are.

There really is no black and white vision. Including with regard to this war. But the shades of gray will not be decided by ordinary citizens, but by an international military tribunal. Right now, we need to stay on the black-and-white position: what is ethical and what is not. If Russia initiated the war, then it must be punished. Who exactly and to what extent is guilty will be revealed after the war. And now the talk that “all is not so clear-cut, we must distance ourselves from the war” is beneficial only for the Russian establishment, which wants to hide the traces of its war crimes from prying eyes. Perhaps the Ukrainian authorities made some mistakes, too. But this will become clear later in the legal proceedings. Right now, the task is to stop the bombing of civilians in the most effective way – by fighting the aggressor and initiator of this war.

Myth 22: Criticism of involvement in war is often based on outdated quotes from anarchist classics that cannot be applied to the contemporary context.

«It is true that sometimes figures like Malatesta, Bakunin, Goldman and others are quoted as having spoken out against the bourgeois conception of war. But it is also true that the current supporters of the war on the side of the Ukrainian army have the same tendency to use quotations to give weight to their own positions.

It is easy to pick out just one part of one person’s entire work and ignore others, to interpret his words in one’s own way, because there is no way to verify how he really intended that part. The dead can no longer debate or redefine their positions in light of the current times and situation. That is why we see their quotations as an addition to the argument, not as its core. We find it more important to listen to the voices of our contemporaries and share our views with them than to debate in which way Malatesta saw (or did not see) something a hundred years ago. This is exactly what happens when we try to look for the anti-militarist and revolutionary defeatist manifestations of the proletarians in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere in the world, under the layer of war propaganda.

Our attitude to war is not predefined by what some classic anarchist ever said. Rather, the theoretical rejection of war and its practical sabotage are based on the tendencies of those who today find themselves in the maelstrom of war or are threatened to be drawn into it soon. In the same way that Malatesta is quoted, we could quote the thousands of deserters from the Ukrainian army, the women who prevent the Ukrainian State from forcibly recruiting their partners, the saboteurs who have withdrawn from bombed-out cities to subvert the war infrastructure outside Ukraine with guerrilla tactics.

But this is not primarily about quotations, it is about finding a strategy to minimize the impact of the war and how best to use the situation to organize the needs of the working class. We define war as the negation of these needs for the sake of the needs of the bourgeoisie. Not because some anarchist said it a hundred years ago, but because we ourselves are part of the working class that is drawn into the war and forced to make the greatest sacrifices for interests that are alien to us».

No war is exactly like any other. Every war has certain preconditions and a certain course of events. In general, war is of course a non-anarchist thing, and it is very unlikely that you will find fervent advocates of militarism among anarchists. But one evaluation differs from another. For example, when we talk about the First World War, that is one thing, because the battles were fought mostly away from the civilians, and it really looked more like a meat grinder than a noble cause. But when we talk about the Russian-Ukrainian war, it is quite different, because in this war the main victims are the unarmed. The same Malatesta said that even if there is a war, the anarchists should side with the people that are defending their independence – and this against the idea that Ukraine should lay down their arms, because they are not being pacifist! Even Malatesta has sometimes acknowledged that pacifism is not a universal recipe for ending a war, and it applies if and only if people are conscious enough not to take up arms. Being determines our consciousness, which in turn also determines our being. In other words, capitalism, by influencing people and their thinking, preserves their worldview on the foundation of bourgeois ideology, and they act in accordance with this ideology, but it is not the people as such that are to blame for this, but the prevailing influence of capitalism and the state. It is foolish to think that the majority of those who do not adhere to anarchism can put on ideological glasses and see war as fratricidal. We have to reckon with the fact that people are not ready to remove the shell of bourgeois worldview because of its hegemonic position (although it can be overcome, but not instantly), so we argue pragmatically rather than examine spherical cows in a vacuum.

Myth 23: Antimilitarism is important, but it is a problem when it becomes dogma.

«This argument we often hear from people who are the first to issue countless proclamations and publications with anti-militarist themes at a time when the war is on the other side of the world, but when it comes to their doorstep, they start reproducing war propaganda. The reason for this tilt of opinion is supposedly due to the different context, pragmatism and non-dogmatism. The history of class struggles is replete with examples where some anarchists have tried to redefine their practice using the same justifications. Anarchists joining the republican government in Spain or the Czech ones taking their seats in the first republican government and joining the Communist Party. We can also remember the anarchists who, after 1917, preferred to join the Bolsheviks or those who took sides in the First World War. All these examples showed that although their actors talked about pragmatism, practice disproved their claims. Rather, their actions were ultimately pragmatic for the ruling class, who used these anarchists as useful idiots, as is now happening to some in the case of the war in Ukraine.

There is no doubt that there are different contexts for wars. But the core is unchanged, regardless of whether we are talking about two world wars, various “national liberation” wars or the current war in Ukraine. Different factors may vary. For example, the balance of power between the warring blocs, who acts more invasive and aggressive, or what ideology they wrap their actions in. What does not change, however, is the basic nature of wars. They are always bloody conflicts fought by different factions of the ruling class for their interests, and the working class is forced to make the greatest sacrifice in this process. The only war we can support is class war.

Anti-militarism is not an abstract ideological construction detached from reality. On the contrary, it is a living process that emerges from the life and struggles of the working class. From the experiences of real flesh and blood people. When we talk about anti-militarism, we are talking about principles tested by practice, not theoretical treatises falling from the desks of academics. We do not adhere to dogma. On the contrary, we are constantly confronting our positions with reality, which proves to us many times that being an anti-militarist made sense during WW1, just as it does in the case of the current war in Ukraine».

The problem with this position is not its anti-militarism, but its detachment from context. Anarchism, as mentioned above, is a practical philosophy. We cannot simply write slogans and proclamations and apply them in any context, as Marxists do when they read Lenin’s long outdated works repeatedly and do not revise them. Pro-Ukrainian anarchists are also generally anti-militarists: they do not want the development of armaments and the creation of new forms of mass institutionalized killing, but they are also realists, because they understand that war is an objective product of capitalism, and we cannot simply overcome it. We can choose the scenario that is most likely and least disastrous for the world. Social revolution as an alternative is not very likely right now, so calling it a solution is certainly possible, but not necessarily rational.

World War I and World War II are different in character. And, oddly enough, it is the latter conflict – World War II – that sets us the trajectory of how anarchists should act, because the nature of the Russian invaders’ warfare is identical in many ways with the nature of the Nazi warfare in World War II. Anarchists seems to forget that after World War I there was World War II, and it was quite different. And it is interesting that anarchists in WWII wrote rather that when choosing between the two empires – Stalin’s and Hitler’s – anarchists should choose Stalin’s, because the world that Hitler was bringing seems far more frightening and less promising for freedom. Not to say that they were wrong in this respect, although this choice still cost the deoccupied territories a great deal: in liberating Eastern Europe from Nazi occupation, the USSR itself was establishing a Bolshevik regime in several states. However, the occupation of the USSR, if it can be called that, was less painful for these countries than the Nazi occupation. It would have been good to call people to anarchism at the time, but objectively there was little to encourage it, especially since fascism reared its head after the total defeat of the global anarchist movement, in particular the Spanish one. There is still little that disposes to this encouragement. And so, we have to choose from what we have, if not between communist partocracy and bourgeois neoliberalism, but between two neoliberal regimes, the only difference being that one is fascist and imperialistic, while the other is a hybrid democracy, a former imperial colony that has regained its sovereignty.

Myth 24: Refusing to take part in the fight on the side of the Ukrainian war resistance is a manifestation of the Western Left’s cultural arrogance.

«This myth is strange only because the people behind this text come from Central Europe, so they can hardly be accused of Western condescension. In fact, the contradiction between Western and Central-Eastern European mentality is a false contradiction. Not that there are not factors that influence people’s opinions based on where they live. They exist, they just should not be stereotyped as universally valid templates.

This is not about any contrast between the unemphatic West and the empathetic center or east. It is a contrast between two different perspectives through which the problem of war is viewed. One is liberal reformist and therefore counterrevolutionary, the other is revolutionary. Both perspectives are held by people who subscribe to anarchism, which shows that this label alone does not imply agreement on fundamental issues. Importantly, both poles of these conceptual frameworks span the globe. Reproducing stereotypes along the lines of West versus East certainly does not help us to undermine the imperialist mindset that is characterized by the creation of such territorially defined opposites.

The fact is that the revolutionary defeatist position, namely the refusal to take sides with one of the warring parties, is not only present among Western anarchists, although it is more strongly articulated here. Its traces can also be found in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine itself and other places in Central and Eastern Europe.

We see the search for non-existent contradictions more as an effort to insidiously remove some people from the arena of international debate and practical coordination of anarchist activities. It is enough to label someone as condescending or unscrupulous to lead many to the conclusion that it is not legitimate to debate with such people, let alone cooperate with them. We see there a certain tendency to manipulation».

It is very, very premature to say that the contradictions outlined are insignificant. After all, the question is about the fundamental question of whether people should support Ukraine in its struggle, or whether they can only hope that Russia will take pity on it and leave, as Eastern European anarchists would like. But Eastern European anarchists (and Western anarchists in general, since they are identified with one another), if they hold this view, probably live in a different reality. And they are debating not within the framework of what is happening now, but within the framework of their own partially distorted perceptions. Of course, the war must end, but war does not end so easily. Our task as anti-militarists is to make the case that there are no devils or monsters on the other side of the barricades, but people. But the anarchist comrades had not suggested this; in fact, they have only suggested not to give weapons to Ukraine (well, and struck the right chord when they asked the anarchist militants why they could not spontaneously make a revolution).

One can, of course, wish “revolutionary defeat” in Ukraine. Not to give her weapons. To support desertion in its army in the hope that one of the opposing armies will automatically bring peace closer by disarming (the stupidest statement). But there is no analysis of the causes of the war, of its genesis. The authors almost came to an end and said nothing about dehumanization – on the contrary, they even practiced it themselves, when they groundlessly reproduced the Russian propaganda thesis that supposedly only nationalists are fighting for their independence in Ukraine, who are building a dictatorship. Meanwhile, the main reason for this war and its popularity among Russians is the perception that Ukrainians are not people, an inferior nation (just like other nations, though). Russian propaganda 24/7 only broadcasts the thesis that Russia is not fighting Ukrainians, but nationalists, Banderites, drug addicts, and Satanists.

While the authors acknowledge Russian war crimes (or acknowledge them only for the sake of appearance, because it is no longer possible to hide them), they do not condemn them. They do not condemn or notice the rhetoric of genocide in the Russian media. They do not notice the terrorist nature of nuclear blackmail threat. They condemn Russian imperialism casually simply because it is “bourgeois” and diverges from the interests of proletariat (trying to convince the proletariat of this). But the proletariat, for some reason, does not agree with this evaluation, neither Russian nor Ukrainian. The Ukrainians overwhelmingly want to defend their country, and the Russians overwhelmingly support Putin’s war. These are facts to be reckoned with. And consequently, the contradictions are significant. It is a matter of anarchist strategy and tactics in the matter of such destructive, unjust, treacherous wars.

Myth 25: It is easy to refuse participation in war from people who express their views in a safe place far from the war and do not have to respond to the bombing of their cities.

«Yes, indeed it is easier to organize your own view of the war from a safe distance than when you have bombers flying overhead. But is such a view inferior and should not be taken into account? Is the view of people in bombed-out places superior to other views on the basis that people in a war zone experience greater horror and suffering?

We might as well say that it is easy to call for more weapons to be supplied to the Ukrainian army and for support for the territorial defense fighters from people who are doing this from the safety of their homes, who have never held firearms in their lives and would not be able to use them if the war came here. We see and respect their opinion, even if we do not express support for it, because we have a different opinion. Why should a different standard be applied to people who refuse to choose sides in a war and do not call for support for the troops?»

I do not have bombers flying over me either. But I can mentally take myself to the conditions in which Ukrainians find themselves and imagine what it would be like for me. Those who are unable to take themselves even mentally, if not physically, into places of deprivation and suffering are bereft of empathy. If you ask the Russian average person how he or she feels about the bombing of Ukraine, he or she is more likely to either approve or remain silent, because his or her existence does not correspond to the picture shown in the pictures. It seems that the bombedout houses are somewhere not here, not nearby, because life goes on. But war will come to the streets of well-fed European cities too, if we ignore the inconvenient fact that the bombing is taking place in front of our noses. You can have whatever opinion you want, but if you broadcast it, be prepared to take responsibility for your words and not be offended that you cannot get out of your cocoon and look around, and for your criticism you are kicked by people who have either been physically in Ukraine and seen the results of Russian policy firsthand, or are simply empathic and can imagine what it is like for Ukrainians.

Myth 26: People who criticize participation in war from a safe distance are unemphatic and condescending because they do not listen to the people on the ground.

«Although we perceive the condescending tendencies of some people, we think that the label of condescending is often mechanically applied to anyone who speaks critically about the Ukrainian army’s support for the war. The idea is to belittle, stigmatize and exclude the voice of critics from the debate. The strongest impact is then on people from Western Europe or the USA, whose opinion is often not taken into account for the mere fact that they do not come from Central or Eastern Europe. At its core, such a mechanism is actually discriminatory, stereotyping and prejudiced, despite the fact that its proponents accuse others of doing just that.

Saying that we are against the war and refuse to take sides in the conflict does not automatically mean that we do not care about the opinion of the people in Ukraine and that we are indifferent when they are under fire from Russian troops. In fact, we are listening to these people, and we see that there is not just one unified voice, but a huge patchwork of many opinions, which often diverge at their very base. In fact, the same people who accuse us of not listening often extract only one tendency from the multidimensional whole and ignore or downplay the others. We try to listen to as many voices as possible, but we only support those that we find constructive. Others we criticize and refuse to support. In short, we perceive different tendencies and do not try to support war propaganda that portrays the Ukrainian population as a united community calling unanimously for involvement in the war.

Some of our critics accuse us of not listening, but they ignore the voices of the part of the population that refuses to support the Ukrainian army and opposes the forced conscription of men who do not want to fight. The voice of the Ukrainian deserters is ignored, while the voice of the Ukrainian soldiers is reproduced as if it were the only one being heard. This is called war propaganda, not listening and empathy».

These are empty words. You can say that you listen to the Ukrainians, but you do not listen to them. You first get angry at them for not overthrowing their government, then you exclaim that they are not overthrowing their government because they are nationalists, then you propose to take away their weapons against their desire to defend themselves, based on isolated facts of desertion in the Ukrainian army. You talk about not supporting either side, but you do not mention any facts characterizing Russian policy from the negative side, accusing Ukraine of not wanting peace because it does not want to disarm, while no such appeals follow against Russia. You offer silly reformist options to fight against Russia (posters, sanctions, sabotage), while the fight against Ukraine should be unfolded by all available means, including military means (overthrowing the government). All your “refutations” are contradictory, biased, and far-fetched. No wonder no one wants to listen to you, because no one wants to listen to those who tell lies, distort the facts, and force people to choose among deliberately provocative options. Your “concern” is not worth a plugged dime.

Myth 27: To criticize the resistance of the Ukrainian army from outside Ukraine is to deny the Ukrainian population self-determination and the ability to be a self-determining agent of change.

«We do not think that we have any prerogative to decide the future of the Ukrainian population. But neither do we think that they are denied that right when someone criticizes certain actions that they choose to take as part of their selfdetermination. Talk about the right to self-determination very often becomes an argument for overlooking the horrors that someone has chosen. It is also taken by some as a justification for supporting reactionary tendencies that hinder emancipatory movements. This is why we then see some anarchists taking offense at the fact that a State does not respect the sovereignty of another, as if perhaps the job of anarchists should be to fight for the State and its sovereignty. We can also see the same anarchists calling for support for that part of the Ukrainian population that has decided to fight and die for bourgeois democracy. They have chosen this, they say, and we must support them in this so that we are not disrespectful, paternalistic and unscrupulous. In short, this section of the liberal democrats, who for some reason call themselves anarchists, are willing to support even the tendencies most hostile to anarchism on the grounds that we must respect the self-determination and opinions of the people who express these tendencies. If we wanted to transfer this perspective to the Czech Republic, for example, it would mean that we should support the very large part of the local population that sees parliamentary democracy as a way of defending its interests. Before every election we would call for their support and send resources to politicians’ election campaigns, because that is what these people want, and we do not want to be disrespectful of their selfdetermination. And if someone from another country dared to criticize the participation of Czech workers in the elections, we should condemn them as a supercilious person who does not listen to Czech workers and wants to lecture them on how to choose their future based on a sense of cultural superiority. That would be absurd, and we do not share that perspective. That is why, just as we criticize the participation of Czech workers in the elections, we will criticize the participation of Ukrainian workers in the war. If someone calls it condescending, let it be so. We are not organizing to make the whole world think we are wonderful, but to make the world a better place to live. To do that, we certainly need links with other people, but not necessarily with everyone and at all costs. We do not succumb to the mania for quantity that says the more people you bring together the more success you achieve. Rather, we look at the content and for what purpose people are associating. Reactionary and counter-revolutionary positions will not have our support even if they are chosen by the vast majority of humanity, because we do not see this as a way to advance towards our emancipation».

The anarchist, even when he criticizes, proposes. He does not just condemn the same parliamentary democracy; he also offers something in its place. What can Eastern European anarchists offer Ukrainians if they believe that the right to selfdetermination is bourgeois and not worthy of support, other than the obviously stupid suggestion that they should send bayonets against the Ukrainian government right now to build anarchy? In essence, only a conquest by the empire. Either these “refutations” were not written by anarchists, of which I am almost entirely certain, or these anarchists have not read Bakunin. When anarchists support the right of peoples to self-determination, they support, first, the weakening centralization of the imperialist state with its subsequent long-term disintegration, and, second, the broad autonomy of groups of people who identify themselves along national lines and gain subjectivity. You can view the question of what constitutes a “nation” however you like, but it is rather difficult to ignore the national question because it is so pressing. Keeping peoples in a state that does not represent them and exploits them is a characteristic feature of imperialism, and it is quite interesting how this “refutation” contrasts with the “refutations” where Ukraine is, directly or indirectly, “imperialistic”. Now, it turns out that Ukraine defends the right to self-determination (from the empire, of course), but since the authors of this manifesto are already simply mired in contradictions, all that remains at the bottom line is: “Yes, Ukraine defends the right to self-determination, but we are against states, so we are against Ukraine gaining subjectivity, especially, as we pointed out, it is bourgeois and imperialistic”. This is somewhat reminiscent of the views of “national anarchists”, who oppose Israel supposedly because it is a state (in fact, because they are antiSemites). Why such “anarchists” single out any particular state “purely by accident” from among all states is not specified. But the reason is clear: such “anarchists” are against specific forms of the state, not its content. If Ukraine did not become a state as a result of the takeover by Russia, these “anarchists” would be silent, because their concern is not so much about the injustice of hierarchical institutions, but only about a particular government.

Myth 28: Opponents of supporting Ukrainian military forces are in fact propagandists for the Putin’s regime.

«If we look at things with a sober eye, not with the eye burdened with war propaganda, we can see one important fact: war and pro-regime propaganda is present on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides. But we do not choose one war propaganda in opposition to the other. We refuse to listen to it and spread it, whichever side it comes from.

The mechanism of war propaganda is the selectivity of information. Certain parts of the colorful whole are taken out and blown up to incredibly large proportions. Other parts, in turn, are glossed over, made invisible, silenced, ridiculed and belittled. Those who want an example of such propaganda need only look at the reports circulating over and over in some anarchist media about the pride of the Ukrainian military units, but there is no mention of the numerous deserters and opponents to the war in the Ukrainian region, nor of the needless atrocities committed by the Ukrainian army. We reject this kind of war propaganda, just as we reject that of the supporters of the Putin’s regime. Anti-war agitation is not proregime propaganda».

Why are they suddenly obliged to publish such information? Anarchists publish about anarchists – that makes sense. It is possible not to support these groups, but it is possible and necessary to tell about them, their true motivation and purpose. To publish unreliable or unverified information about the atrocities of the Ukrainian army is somewhat out of line with the idea of a trustworthy media. Whenever atrocities come to light, to put it this way, it turns out that they are Russian – this has applied to all or almost all (let’s not be categorical, so to speak) large-scale war crimes. Even the Russian imperial public does not deny the fact that Ukrainian servicemen entering the de-occupied territories are greeted with applause. Are these the same Ukrainian servicemen who “commit atrocities”? Even if we think about it deductively, it seems that this is just a falsehood to discredit the Ukrainian army, because Ukrainians would not welcome with open arms those who would commit atrocities against civilians.

As for any other war crimes committed against members of the Russian army, the facts must be established by a military tribunal. But I am not yet aware of any high-profile incidents where the Ukrainian army systematically committed atrocities against Russian servicemen and failed to comply with the Geneva Conventions.

Myth 29: In this war, democracy must win to prevent fascism/dictatorship from winning.

«There is no question that fascism/dictatorship is a problem. It is just that the worst product of fascism is anti-fascism. Whenever the specter of fascism is raised as if it were the worst of all evils, the way is paved to support other forms of State – like democratic ones – with the consequence of supporting their crimes. Anti-fascist unity is nothing else but inter-class collaboration, where the proletarians collude with the bourgeoisie, which, despite the “temporary alliance”, never hesitate to crack down hard on all anti-capitalist and anti-State manifestations. Anti-fascist mobilizations tend to be justified by the need to confront totalitarianism, but they do so in a way that reinforces the authoritarian features of parliamentary democracy. As Gilles Dauvé has noted, “Antifascism will always end in increasing totalitarianism. Its fight for a “democratic” State will end in strengthening the State.”

Parliamentary democracy may represent a lesser intensity of State violence than a fascist regime, but it is no reason to fight and die for democracy. Those who claim that the working class is more and better organized in a liberal democracy are so caught up in their fantasies that they are out of touch with reality. Indeed, the militant working-class movement in democracy often tends to wither away; it is gradually absorbed into the structures of the State, which at the same time do not hesitate to stifle any radical tendency. It is doubtful that the democratic form of the State that has been achieved means the disappearance of authoritarian tendencies from the State apparatus. They will remain and manifest themselves whenever the working class raises its head and begins to act combatively as an organized autonomous force. In other words, liberal democracy will never be the antithesis or negation of dictatorship; it will always be one of the ways in which the totalizing capitalist order is organized. In fact, dictatorial and democratic forces are present in every State simultaneously and are not mutually exclusive. Their mutual relation depends on the (non)combativity of the working class and the (in)ability of the bourgeoisie to secure the rule of its class over society.

The State will only fall if we subvert both its dictatorial and democratic tendencies simultaneously. If we focus exclusively on suppressing one part, it will sooner or later be restored with the help of the other. Let us not forget that the democratic State retains the ability to introduce authoritarian measures, just as the fascist State sometimes pacifies the proletariat by democratic co-optation. The dilemma of fascism or democracy is false. In fact, internationalist revolutionaries know that there are only two options before us: capitalism or its revolutionary overcoming».

Once again, the omniscient anarchists speak from the position as if people are already ready to break with dictatorships and democracies in advance. Choosing between two evils, we choose democracy, because dictatorships educate people only in servility, while democracies have the potential for free thinking and the development of various forms of collective human consciousness.

Dictatorships are characterized by atomization and depoliticization. Democracy, on the other hand, politicizes people to a limited extent and forces them to cooperate into political platforms for solving urgent social problems. Another issue is that parliamentary democracy does not bring this trend to its logical conclusion, offering largely obsolete forms of institutions, where the spirit of “interchangeable dictatorship” still prevails, which is why anarchists criticize parliamentarism. But there is always a degree to which authoritarian institutions are authoritarian. Less authoritarian institutions are preferable to more authoritarian ones, all other things being equal. We cannot turn every war into a revolution, otherwise we would already be living in an anarchic society, and when we are between one alternative and another alternative, we will advocate the alternative within which it would be easier for us to spread our ideas. I do not think that those who wrote this manifesto don’t know or don’t understand this. They know and understand, but they deliberately distort the meaning.

Myth 30: The statement “No war but class war” is an abstract and impractical slogan. It is useless to the bombed population.

«The people of Ukraine who are under attack must deal with the situation immediately. But they are being misled by those who claim that the solution is to fortify themselves in territorial defense, i.e. in the very places where the bombs are falling. Those who claim that it is necessary to ally with the Ukrainian army and put our lives in danger on the front are manipulators, and their solution appears to be very impractical. The same State that is driving men to war is preventing them from leaving the country and hiding from bombers outside Ukraine. The same Ukrainian State is pointing out the aggression of the Russian army, but its gestures show a willingness to escalate the conflict, even at the cost of countless more victims. Because when the State is concerned about its existence, it is willing to sacrifice the existence of those it governs. In such a situation, the effort to transform an interimperialist war into a class war is not an abstract ideology, but a matter of life and death. And this is not just a question of the survival of the Ukrainian population, but of the whole of humanity. The possibility of a third world war is not excluded, nor is the deployment of an extremely destructive nuclear arsenal».

The slogan “No war but class war” is not useless. But it must be relevant. We use this slogan when we try to justify why we do not support the outbreak of wars, particularly imperialist wars. Russia unleashed the imperialist war, and it was the top of the Russian power, allied with capital, who wanted to realize their ambitions in this war. The national bourgeoisie, too, is undoubtedly profiting from the people, as we would expect. In Ukraine, however, there are no prerequisites for turning the war into a class war, because the need to build up arms and wage war is dictated by external conditions (an attack), not internal ones (the desire of the Ukrainian oligarchs to arrange a redistribution of resources). When we say “class war”, we do not automatically mean that we want to physically exterminate our enemies (although a revolution is often accompanied by a certain amount of bloodshed, it is usually caused by the reactionary resistance of the remaining old top to the new order), and therefore we cannot automatically turn the current war into a class war: class war implies mainly a struggle of ideas, not a physical struggle.

Russia has the potential to turn an imperialist war into a class war, especially since it had a precedent – the February Revolution of 1905. But this is only possible if Russia starts a war of attrition (that time it took four years) and if there is now active agitation among the people for revolutionary ideas. Speaking of the first, it is worth saying that the war will probably not go so long that it will bring the country to a state of extreme exhaustion. Speaking of the second, it is difficult to judge this, because we do not have information about the dynamics of change with respect to commitment to certain forms of revolutionary ideas (or at least about how many people are aware). Another aspect of the same phenomenon is that it is difficult to draw a line as to which ideas should and should not be considered revolutionary: after all, the 1905 revolution was primarily bourgeois and then only socialist. However, the probability of the designated event is non-zero.

Myth 31: The anti-militarist initiative must be aimed at defeating the militarism of the Russian army.

«This position is legitimate at its core, but the trouble is that it is only one part of a more complex truth. The other part is that the anti-militarist initiative should equally be aimed at defeating the militarism of the Ukrainian army and any other State army. Anti-militarism is a position based on opposition to all State armies and their wars. Such opposition implies that anti-militarists do not choose which one to side with in wars between States. In other words, they do not fight against the militarism of one State through supporting the militarism of another State. But that is exactly what is happening when some people want to fight against the militarism of the Russian army in terms of supporting the militarism of the Ukrainian army. They can wrap it in populist phrases about supporting “self-defense of the people”, but in reality, they are supporting militarism, because the units that are fighting in Ukraine are part of the structures of the Ukrainian army and are under the command of the State authorities. There can be no question of their autonomy and certainly not of their subverting militarism. They are militaristic and this cannot be changed by the soldiers pinning black and red logos on their uniforms and issuing statements full of anti-State phrases.

The anti-militarist position is not – with strictly pacifist exceptions – based on a refusal to resist war aggression. It merely prefers a different, non-militarized form of organizing this defense. Anarchists, for example, have a wealth of experience in waging armed struggle outside the structures of the State and armies. This struggle tends to be militant, but not militarized. Whenever some anarchists decided to subordinate their troops and militias to the logic of the army, they fell into a trap that later meant their defeat. A sad example can be seen in the militarization of some CNT-FAI militias during the revolution in Spain in 1936–1939. That time was contradictory, just like today. Therefore, even then, alongside the supporters of militarization, there were also consistent anti-militarists who had no problem taking up arms but refused to ally themselves with one or another faction of the ruling class and did not submit to the military logic».

Not every supporter of Ukraine’s self-defense is automatically a supporter of militarism, although there are certainly outspoken militarists among anarchists. Not every anarchist wants to turn Ukraine into Israel with the only hope that a huge arsenal of weapons will keep it out of war. This, of course, is poor logic, because it is not weapons that keep Ukraine out of war, but social development and, hence, investment in education, culture, social security, and health care, which will give people a concrete idea of why they can live without war. Russia has in many ways become a militarized country because it has cultivated a military way of solving geopolitical problems as the main one, without paying attention to the social sphere. To put it crudely, Russian television fed the average person with imaginary grandeur. Ukraine did not rattle weapons or threaten to strike Washington with a nuclear warhead (and even if Ukraine had a nuclear warhead, it would hardly have done so). Militarism is more of an ideology than simply “pumping guns” or even simply accepting that there are occasional instances when the use of guns is permissible. Of course, Ukraine may become militarized after a conflict, but this is the collateral result of its neglect of the military sphere before that. Ukraine is left to build up its armaments for now, because, oddly enough, it has a heavily armed neighbor beside it who has no thought of disarming himself. In other words, the reason for militarization is a real external threat. Another matter is that Ukraine, unlike Russia, will probably not get so hung up on an external threat, because it is a self-sufficient country, and it, at least for now, is not ruled by paranoiacs.

It is worth making an important remark: the thesis voiced that the antimilitarist initiative should not be aimed at defeating the militarism of the Russian army contradicts what was said in the rationale. When the authors wrote: “Antimilitarism is a position based on opposition to all State armies and their wars. Such opposition implies that anti-militarists do not choose which one to side with in wars between States. In other words, they do not fight against the militarism of one State through supporting the militarism of another State. But that is exactly what is happening when some people want to fight against the militarism of the Russian army in terms of supporting the militarism of the Ukrainian army”, – they have essentially substituted the thesis. The anti-militarist initiative does not automatically mean support for Ukrainian militarism. We can simply advocate the denuclearization of Russia and the reduction of its military potential without supporting the militarization of Ukraine. Substitution of the thesis also partly affects the nature of perception, and in this situation the idea of anti-militarism has been turned back against Ukraine. Once again is Ukraine to blame?

Instead of Conclusion

To summarize, none of the stated “refutations”, with few exceptions, has sufficient evidence to be considered a valid counterargument. There is no consistency in this work: what is said in one place contradicts what is said in another place, assumptions are based on conjecture and speculation, and there is a clear, practically groundless antipathy toward Ukraine.

It is likely that this “anti-war pamphlet” was written not by anarchists, but by Russian secret services, or by their agents of influence in anarchist organizations. There is a lot of indirect evidence of this, but to avoid accusations of slander, I will say right away that this is just a guess. It cannot be a coincidence that people who accurately reproduce the theses of Russian propaganda, up to and including “Ukrainian nationalism”, yet disagree with Bakunin and his followers in their justification of why Ukraine should not be a sovereign state, putting forward an imperialist rhetoric instead of anti-imperialist, while also calling it anarchist.

It is quite unexpected, of course, that the Russian security services would begin to influence Western radicals by posting on behalf of unnamed Eastern European anarchists the rationale for why Ukraine does not need weapons on anarchist resources. Apparently, the FSB sees not only Russian anarchists as a threat, but also European ones, and tries to reap the benefits, but mistakenly believes that anarchists are too stupid not to recognize such poor manipulation. However, if something really seemed unobvious, this work should have helped to clarify many important points.

I would also like to mention such an aspect as propaganda. Both I and the authors of this manifesto have repeatedly used this word rather negatively. I do not consider the word unconditionally negative. All people are exposed to propaganda one way or another if they are interested in politics (or worse, if politics is interested in them, which is a pattern in a depoliticized society). But the point is how much propaganda is truthful. State propaganda is almost always seasoned with outright lies (not random mistakes and inaccuracies – this is important – because no one can be right about everything, especially when it comes to evaluations), both Russian and Ukrainian, but in different proportions. Russian propaganda is manipulative. It almost never tells the truth, it does not even let it pass, it forms an alternative reality. In particular, the tribunal in The Hague recently concluded its investigation of the Malaysian Boeing shot down in Ukraine and apparently concluded that Russia was involved in the shooting down (officially admitting that it was involved in hostilities in Donbass in 2014). It would seem that this would be a good starting point. But this decision has no validity for Russia. In Russia, [sic!] Ukraine turned out to be the main perpetrator: they say that there is still “no evidence”, and that the missile from which the Boeing was shot down was carried by Ukrainian servicemen. In other words, a complete denial. And this applies to any situation: Russia simply cannot by default be guilty of anything at all, and even if it is guilty of something, it passes the buck.

Ukrainian propaganda in this sense is less clumsy, because unlike Russian propaganda, it does not have to make things up, only embellish them. And this can be seen by comparing this vision with the reference one, i.e. the international position. Russia’s version of events is the version of events that only Russia supports, which makes it even more difficult, because Russia has to rely only on itself. No wonder that with the invasion of Ukraine, Russia cut off all independent media and imposed strict military censorship, banning not only the “hostile” Ukrainian media, but all media that are critical of Russian foreign policy (if it got to them, of course, because there are underground media, including Russian media itself, which are more difficult to reach). Ukraine has not introduced such censorship, because therefore almost the entire international community is on its side, and it would be foolish to think that the international community is deceived and that only the Russians know the truth about the international conflict. But perhaps this is exactly what Russian propaganda is trying to present. That is why even in these “refutations” there was no evidence, only an assessment and postulation of its initial truthfulness, or an emphasis on only one side of the issue and “half evidence”, as in the case of the mobilization in Ukraine, when as “evidence” that Ukrainians do not want to defend themselves, only those who, as claimed, do not want to, out of context, without comparison to the whole population, were included in the sample.

So, the point is not whether we are exposed to Russian propaganda or Ukrainian propaganda, but how it affects us and what its purpose is. The purpose of Ukrainian propaganda is to reassure people that the aggressor will be defeated, even though this may not always be obvious in practice, while the purpose of Russian propaganda is to make it clear that Ukraine should not exist as a state, using the vilest means and manipulations to do so. Ukrainian propaganda in general is not so harmful, because it has a framework, even if at times it does not pick up epithets when it calls occupants occupiers or “rusnya” [ethnic slur used by some Ukrainians for the Russians] (which probably deserves condemnation, but overall, it is legitimate). Russian propaganda, on the other hand, is clearly harmful because it has no framework, and its dehumanizing effect extends to the entire world. This should be understood.

It is also worth making an important caveat: pro-Ukrainian anarchists support Ukraine exactly as long as it defends its sovereignty (the 1991 borders). If Ukraine begins to claim other territories of Russia, if it begins to promote a policy of expansion and occupy territories to which it has no right to claim, we will be just as critical of it as we are of Russia’s policy of expansion. But this is not the case now, and therefore Russia and Ukraine are in unequal positions. Thus, we do not unconditionally support Ukraine, but only within acceptable limits.

37. Insurrection and Production

Deleted reason: I read this. It’s about seizing state power, establishing a ‘transition period’ etc. ‘Insurrection’ does not refer to Bonnanno, Weir etc. References include Group of International Communists, Paul Mason (UK Labour party), Trotsky, ‘Bolchevik foreign policy,’ etc.

Subtitle: An empirically heavy mind-game for the debate on working class strategy: First steps in a six-month revolutionary transition period in the UK region

Author: Angry Workers of the World

Authors: Angry Workers of the World

Topics: communization, insurrectionary, revolution, libertarian communism

Date: August 2016

Date Published on T@L: 2021-03-08T09:29:46

Source: https://www.angryworkers.org/2016/08/29/insurrection-and-production

Cover:

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Dear fellow travellers,

We’ve written a few texts on ‘revolutionary strategy’ before, focusing on the relationship between workers’ existence within the social production process, experiences of day-to-day struggles and the possibility of a wider working class movement — termed by others as a ‘social strike.’[68] While we maintain that we will only be able to make fruitful organisational proposals through an analysis of the concrete day-to-day struggles of our class, we think that it can’t do any harm to discuss what we think a revolutionary situation in the 21^st century could look like. Thinking about tomorrow might make clearer our view on today.

We are not alone in this. Since the uprisings in 2010/11 (‘Arab Spring’ etc.) and the general upsurge in social movements and global strike waves in the last ten years or so, the radical and not so radical left have had a lot of discussions about transitions, post-capitalism, social strikes or the era of riots and coming insurrections. In this text we will briefly engage with some of the main ideas that have been put forward in these recent analyses of revolution and fundamental social change. We do this to point out some limitations to these theories, as well as to draw out their political implications. The two main camps we look at here are, unsurprisingly, given the title, that of those in the radical milieu who favour an insurrectionist approach to political action (riots on the streets, spontaneous proletarian action, or that done by those on the margins, the so-called ‘surplus population’) and those that tend to concentrate on workers at the point of production and their collective power but who maybe don’t relate this to a wider view on general proletarian impoverishment and other areas of life and struggle. We put forward our perspective that tries to move beyond the traditional insurrectionist and syndicalist approaches to think in less abstract ways about what a communist revolution would actually entail. To this end, the main part of the text consists of an empirical study of what we term the ‘essential industries’ in the UK region, which comprise roughly 13 million workers. We think this will be the backbone of our strength in the revolutionary transition period in order to reproduce ourselves while the counter-revolutionary forces try and crush us. While this seems like a bit of a flight into the idealistic, unknown future, we think that reconsidering the relationship between proletarian violence, insurrection and production on the level of 21^st century class composition will help ground our current practical political orientation. This at a time of general political disorientation (of which we see Corbyn-mania as an obvious sign!) in the wake of defeats and containment of the upsurges we have experienced and witnessed around the world in recent years. In short, we hope that in the course of the following text we put some basic assumptions about a communist revolution into a more concrete context. We try and do this in seven steps by looking at:

the reality of recent struggles with a brief review of the 2010/11 uprisings from a revolutionary perspective
the revolutionary essence of capitalism: short remarks on the debate about ‘surplus population’ (riots) vs. ‘global working class’ (global production) to tackle the question of what capitalism’s main revolutionary contradictions are
the material (regional) divisions within the working class: some thoughts on the impact of uneven development on how workers experience impoverishment and their productive power differently
the regional backbone of insurrection: empirical material about the structure of essential industries in the UK region
whether anyone can say ‘communism?’: brief conclusions on revolutionary transition
the basic steps of organising revolution: what would a working class revolution have to achieve within the first months of its existence
revolutionary organisation. Here we propose that this perspective on ‘revolution tomorrow’ does not leave us untouched today, for it asks for certain organisational efforts in the here and now. We sketch out what those could be.

a) The reality of struggle: a brief review of the 2010/11 uprisings from a revolutionary perspective

The 2010/2011 struggles put the question of the relation between uprisings and strikes in a revolutionary situation back on the agenda, without which the following thoughts would seem even more abstract than they are. We have to discuss political theses on revolution such as outlined above and empirical research of industrial structures and working class composition in relation to the actual struggles and their limitations. Here we refer to square occupations, street battles and strikes, in their most advanced form in Egypt, but also in Greece, Spain, and Turkey. From a revolutionary perspective — in terms of a being a threat to state power and appropriation of the means of production — the uprisings had two main limitations, which informed and determined each other:

the ‘political’ focus of the movement was the governmental structure; people gathered in the public sphere, experienced mass participation and confronted the state forces. At a certain point it became difficult to sustain the occupation and movement both in terms of repressive violence and material reproduction;
the strikes largely remained confined to the ‘economic’ sphere of wage struggles and became political only in so far as to challenge management connected to the governmental structures. While the strikes exercised crucial economic pressure, e.g. the strikes of railway workers or Suez port workers in Egypt, they did not develop an alternative of social appropriation and re-organisation of production — thereby leaving the street protests in a political vacuum.

We faced a similar situation during the uprising in Argentina in 2001. Piqueteros and demonstrations were able to topple government after government, but the focus remained on the government buildings as symbols of power. While companies were partially taken over, the take-overs were determined by the economic condition of the companies (bankruptcy), rather than their social significance. Market relations remained, which meant that the meat industry kept on working and exporting while infantile starvation deaths and malnutrition re-emerged in South America’s most developed nation.

Although the uprisings of 2010/11 were defeated, they resulted in the left — and not only the left — discussing ‘social transformation’ again. Some people explained the limitations of the movement by the limited outlook of its participants, e.g. the ‘democracy fetish’ of the square occupiers or the ‘trade union consciousness’ of the strikers, which, to us, seems a bit superficial. Others applied a more deterministic view when pointing out that the uprisings did not emerge out of a crisis of capitalism as such, but out of a neoliberal decline which revealed the corrupt character of the political elite. This position claims that the uprisings were therefore necessarily limited to a criticism of a particular form of governance and distribution of wealth. Although we agree that this crisis of ‘neoliberal regimes’ can partially explain the regional and geographical focus and limits of the uprisings, we also maintain that there won’t be a crisis of capitalism in a ‘pure form’ that will mechanically impose the aim of ‘communism’ on the movement as its counterpart. The struggles themselves, under the general global condition of industrial poverty, will have to put this aim on the agenda.

Apart from these rather crude idealistic and deterministic interpretations there are other positions, which try to relate the character of the uprisings to actual material changes:

the role of precarious graduate urban youth and/or creative class (Paul Mason etc.)
the poor surplus population (communisation theory, insurrectionism)
the workers integrated in a larger production process or wave of migration (Beverly Silver, Immanuel Ness etc.)[69]

When it comes to the role of the ‘precarious graduate youth,’ we over-focus here on Paul Mason for a reason. His essay ‘Why is it kicking off everywhere?’[70] on the 2010/11 uprisings made bigger inroads into the radical left. He spoke at the Anarchist Bookfair in London, comrades from the autonomist left based further research on his work.[71] His initial essay emphasised the role of the ‘creative class’ and the ‘precarious graduates’ during the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere. This went down well with a certain segment of the radical left that had bid their farewell to the ‘traditional working class.’ We think there is a certain logical cohesion between Mason’s focus on the graduate precarious youth, his believe in their ‘creative, democratic potential’ and his position that in the end it will depend on an alliance between this segment and the ‘social democratic/technocratic’ state to overcome the domination of ‘monopoly capitalism and finance’:

“History shows innovation happens best when the state shapes it. During the second world war, the US decreed that companies could only profit from making and selling their military technologies — any attempt to derive immediate profit from monopolised intellectual property stood against the public good. Once they knew the American state was trying to achieve an anti-aircraft fire control system first, and a number-crunching static computer later, the greatest innovators alive set to work on making a gun predict the ideas in a fighter pilot’s head. Mainframes — and other technologies — followed, and reaped high profits for the corporations that pioneered them. But it was the state that forced the take-off point to happen.”[72]

Paul Mason’s latest nationalist post-Brexit positions and his earlier ‘Why is it kicking off everywhere?’ seem miles apart, but they are connected by a basic elitist assumption: the creative class needs strong allies, the working class is not a viable agent, so in the end the state remains the focus. But the state is a national institution and statist attempts to reign in capital inevitably end up endorsing nationalist protectionism:

“If you wanted to give the East End set designers a route to high-skilled, high-paid work, you would need a different kind of private sector. You would need to restrict the supply of cross-border low-skilled labour, so that on leaving the local branch of B&Q you are not confronted by crowds of men begging for cash-in-hand labour. You would need to expand the supply of low-rent housing, so that young people didn’t have to spend more than half their wages on rent.”[73]

“If it were possible to conclude a deal within the European Economic Area I would favour that. But the baseline has to be a new policy on migration designed for the moment free movement ceases to apply. It should be humane, generous, and led by the needs of employers, local communities and universities — and being an EU member should get you a lot of points. But — and this is the final mindset shift we in Labour must make — free movement is over. Free movement was a core principle of the EU, developed over time. We are no longer part of that, and to reconnect with our voting base — I don’t mean the racists but the thousands of ordinary Labour voters, including black and Asian people — we have to design a migration policy that works for them, and not for rip-off construction bosses or slavedrivers on the farms of East Anglia”.[74]

As we have seen in Spain and Greece more recently, the promotion of a middle-class ‘revolutionary’ vanguard has resulted in the aspirational, precarious, professional class managing to win government positions for themselves and turning against their former poor allies. And that is even when at many points in the last few years, they have struggled shoulder-to-shoulder with more lower sections of the working class, which has not been the case in Britain. Similar to Paul Mason, the new ‘left governments,’ first of all in Greece, quickly had to realise how state power can not be yielded freely, but is confined by its national character — and they bowed to it…

b) The revolutionary essence of capitalism: short remarks on the debate about ‘surplus population’ (riots) vs. ‘global working class’ (global production) to tackle the question of what capitalism’s main revolutionary contradictions are

In terms of more serious attempts to understand the revolutionary subjectivity and limitations of the uprisings, what is left is an unproductive separation of analysis: some people emphasise the increasing numbers of proletarians expelled from the immediate production process (surplus population, unemployed) and others focus on the productive collective power of workers in the emerging global supply chains (global working class debate). Some discovered the ‘era of riots,’[75] while others proclaimed the ‘global strike wave.’[76] Both sides are able to provide ample sociological proof for their position — figures about slum dwellers or the global integration of production.

We can ask ourselves why this separation of political focus has emerged. While it has something to do with the social position, regional location, and political preferences of those who analyse, the main material reason will be the real separation within working class existence: how workers experience impoverishment and productive power is structured and diversified regionally, sectorially, in terms of gender etc. In that sense most theoretical analysis and their one-sided focus only mirrors reality, without questioning it.

Before engaging further in more empirical analysis, let’s take a step back and ask a fundamental political question that is hidden behind the championing of either the ‘surplus proletariat’ or the ‘productive global working class’: what is the revolutionary tendency within capitalism? We acknowledge that class societies have always been fragile and that struggle against exploitation and oppression is their main contradiction, but what is actually specific about capitalism? We claim that capitalism has two internal revolutionary dynamics:

Increasing productivity leads to greater inequality and relative mass impoverishment

Poverty in capitalism does not exist because there is a lack of something as such or because the exploiters merely take away a bigger share of the produced wealth. Capitalism depends on the expansion of production, although an increase in social productivity results in growing relative poverty for the large mass of proletarians. The application of new technology or knowledge often results in job cuts and an increase in unemployment, mainly through proletarianisation of former artisans/individual producers and peasants. In the industries workers are either over-worked or under-employed. This contradiction becomes visible mainly as an objective fact, as a result of the production process: over-production and over-capacities (closing factories etc.) on one side, the development of a ‘surplus population’ or ‘working poor’ population on the other. The increase in poverty results in more of the surplus product being spent on the repressive apparatus. It shows that the potential to create a better future is objectively given.
Effects of increasing productivity on workers’ co-operation and undermining the power of capital

Whereas the first level of the contradiction appears more as an objectified result of the production process, the second side impacts on the material form of how the production process is organised. In other words, capital has to increase productivity, last but not least also to appease workers by giving them a few more crumbs of a growing cake. The main way to increase productivity is a concentration of labour and machinery (big industry) based on a close cooperation of workers involved. Historically this leads to working class collectivity and unrest, not only about the crumbs on offer, but about control of the production process as such. The closer workers cooperate, the less capital (and its representatives in the form of management) is able to appear as a precondition and necessary organiser of social production. This appearance of the necessary organiser of production is the main social legitimacy and power of capital — not its armed forces, not its media manipulation, not its jails. Capital is therefore forced to divide the production process ‘politically’ (through outsourcing or re-location of companies, through separation of intellectual labour from the production process, through the reproduction of the division between production and the domestic sphere etc.), which then ends up undermining social productivity. To workers, this segmentation appears at first as an illogical act of ‘bad management practice’ or bureaucracy; “they want us to cooperate, but they don’t let us” or as a neutral market operation (“small economic units are more efficient” etc.). This contradiction sits at the core of what capital is: the inversion of our social cooperation, whose product seems to have an independent power over us; or to put it positively: the ability of workers to discover their global cooperation and to use it to fight and create a better world.

This main contradiction of capital appears both as an internal character of production (separated cooperation) and its result (relative impoverishment). The championing of either ‘surplus population’ or ‘workers’ productive power’ separate these two dynamics instead of analysing how, in reality, the experiences of ‘impoverishment’ and ‘collective productivity’ coincide or are segregated within the global working class. The separation also leads to a different understanding of revolution and consequently of one’s own role. If we focus merely on the first aspect of the contradiction — the creation of an impoverished surplus population — we will mainly perceive the social process as a kind of automatic tendency: capital accumulates itself and churns out a growing numbers of discontented unemployed. While this results in a quite deterministic view on social developments on one side — which we can just observe and which has little to do with the agency of the exploited — it also results in a pretty superficial and mechanical view of revolution as insurrection and rupture: at some point there are just too many poor people to be controlled. Instead we should analyse how the experience of cooperation and collective productivity and struggle of workers relates to the experience of impoverishment.

Unfortunately, so far most attempts to overcome this separation of analysis (wage/industrial workers vs. other forms of proletarian existence) end up being pluralistic in a bad sense e.g. the ‘Global Labour History’ discussion, which avoids talking about revolutionary tendencies in favour of sewing together an ‘inter-related patchwork’ of industrial labour/wage labour and small scale production/ non-wage labour.[77] In order to avoid deterministic views on capitalist development and struggle, they give up looking for tendencies which weaken the command of capital and point beyond it. In this sense it won’t be enough to just address this separation empirically by proving to the ‘surplus’-faction that slum-dwellers are integrated in global production or by demonstrating to the ‘supply-chain’-gang how socially dominating the rural hinterland or ghetto economy in many regions actually is. A serious attempt to paint a picture of global working class existence in its various forms — not as a mere collage, but with the question of tendencies towards social transformation in mind — has been made by our comrades from the group, ‘wildcat,’ in their article ‘Global Working Class.’[78] We encourage reading and debating the text, developing it further regarding these main questions:

the impact of uneven development within the working class and its’ political implications: the relation of immediate experience (e.g. being part of social cooperation in the big industries vs. relying on odd jobs and benefits) and political segmentation or generalisation within class struggle
the specific role of the ‘productive working class’ to develop a social program under the pressure exercised by ‘marginalised’ proletarians
the question of revolutionary transition, the relation between uprising (overthrow of the state) and appropriation (taking over of means of production)
in relation to the three previous questions: the role of political class organisations

c) The material (regional) divisions within the working class: some thoughts on the impact of uneven development on how workers experience impoverishment and their productive power differently

The following paragraph is more of an excursion for future exploration. Although we didn’t have the time to go deeper into the subject at this point, we think that we need to bear in mind the fact that regional differences in development forms the necessary background to the empirical part on ‘essential industries and insurrection’ in the UK region. It will become apparent that working class composition in the UK region is very specific, e.g. the separation of workers in the centre of social production and marginalised sections of the proletariat is less pronounced than in most other parts of the globe. It also raises the issue of how a former imperial centre that underwent a certain process of de-industrialisation relates to the conditions e.g. in regions in the so-called global south.

We have to admit that we know pretty little about the theory of ‘uneven/combined development,’ or if it can even be called a theory. What we know is that the debate has addressed very similar questions of revolutionary strategy to those which we are facing today: a global working class revolution has to deal with regional differences of development; these differences cannot be conceptualised in ‘national’ terms as such, though nation states play an important role in framing and mediating them.

Around the time of the turn of the 19^th and 20^th century, the question was how capitalist dynamics in developed capitalist countries with bourgeois states relate to regions with strong ‘unfree labour’ or peasantry aspects and monarchistic/non-bourgeois state forms. In order to exemplify we quote from a previous wildcat article:

“Marx himself focused on the revolutionary potential of the rapidly growing, visible and struggling working class for a long time, but after the defeats of 1848 and 1871 had destroyed the hope for a quick victory, the center of his analysis shifted towards finding out what made capitalism ’unstable and stable‘ at the same time. Once more he had a close look at what was happening in the world. In the exchange of letters with Vera Zasulich he wrote about a ’specific historical opportunity’: When the crisis of the ’Asiatic form of production’ in Russia coincides with the crisis of capitalism in the countries of western Europe there is a chance that the struggles of the workers come together with those of the rural population. As a result of this, something revolutionary and ’new‘ could develop. Marx had elaborated the ’inherent dualism’ of the Russian village community: collective property and private production. A revolution in Russia could be able to stop the demise of the village community, and once the collective moments in the given ’historical surroundings’ (the crisis of the western capitalism) come together with the ’workers‘ revolution‘ they might become the starting point of a new form of communisation [Vergemeinschaftung]. Usually these letters are taken as evidence that Marx did not have a ’deterministic view of history‘ after all or that he wanted to propagate the ’direct leap‘ out of the pre-capitalistic communities [Gemeinwesen]. However, more important is the way how Marx approached these concerns. Marx tackled the question through notions of ’global recomposition‘ — however, today we are able to, and must, debate this question in a different manner, e.g. today it will be less about ’the coming together of the best of two different worlds…”[79]

Decades later Trotsky pointed out that under certain circumstances the ‘under-development’ in backward regions is reproduced and fortified in exchange with the developed capitalist nations (e.g. the material backing up of despotism in Poland/Russia through agrarian trade or industrial investment). The same should be valid for struggles: there is a specific inter-play between struggles in the centres and in the ‘backward’ regions. While necessarily schematic, the concept was not static: not ‘every country has to go through stages’ (as proposed by social democracy), but there is an interaction between different stages. The revolutionary character of the concept was that it was not ‘pluralistic,’ meaning, instead of merely describing the existence of different conditions it asked: how is uneven development reproduced, e.g. how does modern capitalism and the world market strengthen ‘archaic modes of production’? How can an industrial working class provide a revolutionary attraction and program beyond its reach? And how can struggles under ‘pre-capitalist’ conditions (village commons, against police state conditions etc.) inform struggles in the centre?

“The law of combined development of backward countries — in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors — here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war — that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development — and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917.” (Trotsky)[80]

Maybe because of the generalisation of the ‘proletarian condition’ of being wage dependent and of the generalisation of ‘parliamentary democracy’ across the globe it now seems obsolete to talk about the impact of uneven development. Everything appears at the same time so similar (global village) and so different, once we look into details. The problem is that we clearly see the effect of regional differences on global class struggle, but:

we tend to explain these differences geopolitically or out of ‘national economies’ or even ethnically (oil producing nations, BRIC states, Arab Spring);
we celebrate a crude pluralism (‘patchwork of free and unfree labour; all sorts of proletarian income etc.);
we don’t develop revolutionary strategies of how regional struggles or struggles within certain stages of development relate to others.

We won’t be able to just copy the broad categorisations from the past debate (industrial, democratic centres vs. agrarian, feudal regions). Instead we have to analyse the main tendencies and material forces which separate, counteract or overdetermine/override the two mentioned general proletarian experiences (impoverishment and power/productive cooperation). The map drawn by the ‘global working class’- debate points at some general and global experiences, which can become a basis for global organisation:

experiences of migrant labour undermine the national existence of the workers’ movement, but not without reinforcing ‘national/protectionist sentiments’ amongst the local working classes; the ‘national status’ of proletarians becomes the focal point, the state the main mediator between different stages of development and access to territory;
global supply-chains connect individual workplaces and sectors and question trade union / industrial union form of containment. But there is a limit as to what extent ‘productive cooperation’ can actually be experienced in terms of creating direct bonds between workers (it is difficult to imagine cooperating with workers from supplying factories or ports if a whole Ocean lies in-between);
proletarianisation / being expelled from the means of subsistence is a global phenomena, creating a similar social experience for peasants in India or Bolivia. But this only results in the fact that news from the other end of the globe can be understood more easily, the condition itself does not create material links as such.

While we can visualise this as something like a ‘material backbone’ for international working class organising, we can also easily see that apart from language issues etc., there are various tendencies and material forces which in their immediacy override these experiences. To say it in simpler terms: proletarians around the globe experience a deterioration of conditions, similar management and state austerity strategies and they sometimes are exploited by the same corporations or in the same supply-chain. Nevertheless, these immediate experiences are often overlaid by conditions which seem to impact on workers’ interests more immediately: primarily, national conflicts and war. In order to make these various conditions more debatable for the development of some kind of global strategy, perhaps we have to be more schematic. Would it be possible to categorise six, seven main ‘proletarian conditions’/ stages of accumulation under which the working class currently exists and to analyse what specific kind of material power and political limitations struggles under these respective conditions develop? And how they could possibly relate to each other? How are these ‘regions’ criss-crossed by the material backbone mentioned above (global industry, migration)? For example, we could distinguish between regions or rather the existence of:

industrially combined labour under political conditions of a democratic state/access to national welfare
regions where workers’ struggle and struggle ‘for democracy’ are still more intertwined
‘extraction economies,’ with a small share of (other) industrial labour and more coercive political forms
regions dominated by semi-proletarianisation, crisis of peasantry and strong internal migration
regions with a higher level of urban unemployment, informal labour relations, mafia economy and violent forms of political mediation
regions of military (national, religious) disputes and/or ‘failing states’

In each one of these ‘regions’ the role of, and relationship between, workers in industrial centres, urban and rural poor, students and other segments of the class will be different. Struggles in each region will relate differently to the question of capitalist wealth and its distribution or the question of state power. In order to avoid becoming too schematic such an analysis would entail discussing all possible examples of working class organisation and movements which were able to bridge the gaps of immediate experience between, e.g. industrial workers and unemployed, local working class and migrants, proletarians of different nationalities during times of war etc. It would force us to re-consider past ‘global movements,’ such as in 1968, where the relationship between struggles in the global north and south was less based on proletarian experiences, but on the fact that former colonial powers and imperialist centres were under attack in both centres and periphery. The political effort to conceptualise the connection between centre and periphery as an alliance of ‘workers’ and ‘oppressed people’ was already questionable at the time — but 50 years later we still grapple with the problem of understanding the commonalities and differences between workers, simplified in the picture of ‘north and south’ or subsumed under an outdated imperialism theory, which largely sees workers as poor citizens. An analysis from the point of view of different developmental stages, instead of nation states or ‘north vs. south’ will hopefully allow us to understand e.g. how far-reaching the attraction of workers’ struggles in the new industrial centres (Pearl River Delta etc.) both regionally and globally actually is, and to what extent their experiences will have to be politically mediated by class organisation in order to reach the more marginalised segments.

It might therefore also show that there is still a particular role of political working class organisations, which address the issue of regionally separated immediate experiences and interests within the class, but also tackle the challenge of developing a revolutionary program of transition, relating to the class in its overall conditions. Going back to the uprisings in 2010/2011, while it is necessary to point out the material class composition which determined the limitations of the movements, addressing the lack of an organised force within the working class that was able to propose revolutionary measures beyond taking the squares cannot be discarded as voluntarism. While the industrial working class does not seem to have a social hegemony to propose a political/social program of councils (anymore), what is even more apparent is that riots and occupation of public spaces only goes so far and without touching the means of producing a different society these struggles are either buried under state repression or rely on a new political elite with links to funds (cross-class alliances). Conscious organisational links will be necessary.

d) The regional backbone of insurrection: empirical material about the structure of essential industries in the UK region

In the second part of this article we try to place the debate of insurrection and revolution and the question of regional development in a concrete context — the UK region and its industrial composition. What is the political aim of such a sociological exercise? It can act as a myth-buster amongst the largely middle-class left, whose ideology of revolutionary transition is based on assumptions that production is largely immaterial nowadays, or that everything is gonna be automised or that work or workplaces in general don’t play a major role in proletarian socialisation. Thanks to the empirical exercise we can get a rough idea of numbers: how many people are engaged in securing our material survival? In contrast and more importantly, these figures can also serve as a basis for rough propaganda amongst the working class: how much can we reduce the social necessary labour time for everyone if everyone engages in socially necessary work? The empirical summary below outlines the material framework within which a regional insurrection and takeover of means of production would take place and the basic challenges the insurgent proletariat would encounter:

How much food is there to redistribute before the shit hits the fan and shortage-related carnage begins?
What would be immediately lacking if our region is cut off from wider trade or an external energy supply?
How many workers are employed in the essential industries and what is their composition?
Where are the essential industries concentrated geographically?
How numerous is the local middle class?
What is the class composition of local farming?
How does the army and police force reproduce itself materially?

(Just as a disclaimer: we are well aware that in this case the availability of bourgeois statistics (UK region) and perhaps a certain Brexit trauma determines the chosen framework. That is obviously dangerous — trigger warning! — but we will explain more about it later on).

Total population in the UK region: 64 million

Employed population: 31.58 million (23.12 million working full-time)
Unemployed: 1.69 million unemployed (official figures)
Workers in essential industries: approximately 13–16 million
Total amount of migrant (foreign born) population, largely working class and concentrated in bigger cities: 8 million

Population according to size of town (2011):

London: 8 million
Birmingham: 1 million
Number of Towns between 200,000 and 600,000: 25
Number of Towns between100,000 and 200,000: 51
Number of Towns between 50,000 and 100,000: 108
Number of Towns between 50,000 and 10,000: 817
Numbers of Towns between 10,000 and 5,000: 522
Numbers of Towns under 5,000: 6,300

Built-up areas with a population of 10,000 or more usual residents are defined as urban. In 2011, 81.5 % (45.7 million) of the resident population of England and Wales lived in urban areas and 18.5 % (10.3 million) lived in rural areas. Residents of rural areas are also more likely to be born in the UK (94.9 % compared with 84.7 % for urban areas), to be of ‘White British’ ethnicity (95.0 % compared with 77.2 % for urban areas). To analyse the significance of the existence of over 6,300 small towns for an uprising will be a future challenge.

Size of companies in the UK (2015):

Total number of private businesses: 5.4 million
Total number of employees: 25.8 million

Companies with no employees: 4 million
Companies with 1 — 9 employees: 1 million (4 million employees)
Companies with 10 — 49 employees: 200,000 (4 million employees)
Companies with 50 — 250 employees: 32,555 (3.2 million employees)
Companies with 250 or more: 7,000 (10.2 million employees)

When we speak of 13 to 16 million workers employed in the essential industries we mean industries directly relevant for reproduction under circumstances of an uprising, for a prolonged period: what do we need for material survival and self-defence against the class enemy? To extrapolate these figures from capitalist statistics is a bit of guesswork. The number above excludes teachers and ‘local authority employees,’ though this might exclude the public swimming pool staff — essential! It includes all kind of irrelevant industries, such as the arms and car industry — due to their significance for technological/knowledge transfer. Below more of a breakdown of this figure, with some sector-related peculiarities.

Agriculture — 500,000 people

Around 53% of food consumed in the UK is produced locally, the rest is imported. Fruit and vegetables account for the biggest share of imports (measured in monetary terms!): the leading foreign suppliers were the Netherlands (5.6%), Spain (5.1%), France (3.1%), Germany (3.1%) and Irish Republic (3.0%). Three countries accounted for 90% of dairy product and egg supply (UK farms supplied 86% of total consumption).Three countries accounted for 90% of meat and meat preparation supply (UK supplied 84%).Twelve countries accounted for 90% of supply of cereals and cereal preparations (including rice). The UK supplied 56% of cereal. Import or export of staple food (potato, wheat, rice) is partly a question of market prices and not merely of production capability, e.g. in 2015 around 1,250,000 tonnes of wheat were imported from EU, but at the same time the UK exported 61,000 tons of locally produced wheat to the US. It’s different with the 100g rice per head per week consumed in the UK: 30% is imported from the EU countries, the rest from the global south.

Twenty four countries accounted for 90% of fruit and vegetable supply (UK supplied 23%). So yes, if direct relations to Spanish and Netherland greenhouses cannot be established, it will be difficult to maintain the ‘five a day’ guidelines! But for a country that is said to be so ‘food-insecure’ in comparison, it does not look too harsh in terms of global dependency — at least not as bad as Egypt, where 60% of the consumed wheat has to be imported. The EU as a whole has a food production to supply ratio of around 90%.

What about the concentration of the industry? First of all it is interesting to notice that of the 2 million ton of wheat stocks (annual production around 15 million tons, 65% of all cereal crop) 38% of stocks were held on-farm and 62% at ports, coops and merchants — meaning it is stored away from the individual owners. In comparison, globally the ratio between wheat stock to annual consumption is 30% and 20% for rice. In the UK, most of the on-farm wheat is for animal feed. Not only is the storage of wheat stocks concentrated, the flour mills are also quite monopolised: In 2011, 5 million tons of wheat were milled into flour in only 56 flour mills in the UK. The two largest companies account for approximately 40% of UK flour production.

What about the composition of the farms? These are arranged on almost 235,000 holdings whose average cultivable area is around 54 hectares (130 acres). About 70% of farms are owner-occupied and the remainder are rented to tenant farmers. Some 41,000 farms (around 14% of the total) are larger than 100 hectares and account for over 65% of the agricultural area. While ‘cereal farms’ tend to be more ‘family-run,’ the meat industry is more corporate: Around 930 million meat chickens (broilers) were reared in the UK in 2012, on 2,500 farms and 30 slaughterhouses. Companies like Lower Farm produce over 1.3 million chicken a year. The UK poultry industry employs around 55,000 people in locations all over the country, on farms, in hatcheries, feed mills, processing and portioning plants and in transport operations.

Despite the capitalist nature of agriculture in the UK (the peasant question is out of the way), we can see that we have to deal with 200,000 ‘owner-run’ enterprises, depending on seasonal labour, situated outside of the urban areas — meaning that this won’t be a mere ‘workers’ takeover’ but a more complex social dynamic.

Food processing, production — 2.2 million people

Here the capitalist dynamic is blatant: of 2.2 million workers in the sector only 0.5 million work in food manufacturers, whereas 1.6 million work in ‘non-residential catering,’ meaning canteens and restaurants. While not all restaurant work is socially superfluous, it is nevertheless largely catering to individual consumption patterns — but then the food has to be cooked and prepared and the production process in a restaurant will not be much more or less productive than a collective kitchen for a domestic unit of 200 to 250 people. Productivity rates of restaurants can’t compare with those in factories, for example in four factories in Southall Noon Foods produces 2.4 million meals per week, employing roughly 3,000 workers including managers and admin staff and workers engaged in snack production. That equates to roughly 200 meals per worker per day. It is also interesting to note that these factories are not very mechanised but rather labour intensive.

For our insurrectionist, ‘blocking the economy’ and looting friends: out of personal experiences of working in the retail warehouse chain and in the food processing industry we can say that the average supermarket stock of groceries in London lasts for about 24 to 48 hours. The main warehouses are located outside of the city margins and might hold a maximum of two to five days of stock. Supply for the main food processing plants often comes from the agricultural hinterland (chicken farms, flour mills, potato farms) or from abroad (fresh fruits). The communisation-fun might last three days max!

Water supply/treatment and waste management and street cleansing / general cleaning: 166,500 and 145,000 and 480,000 people respectively

The waste management numbers are not specified, e.g. how much of this is related to the big industry how much to individual consumption. Similarly, it is not clear how many of the 400,000 cleaners are employed in domestic set-ups, but one source stated that currently 6 million people in the UK employ a domestic cleaner!

Energy industry total: around 680,000 people

Given the heavy lobbying in this sector (coal industry, but also renewable energy sector) the numbers might be less reliable:

Gas industry: 142,000
Power generation: 87,000
Coal: 6,000
Petroleum: 150,000 (around 50,000 workers are said to work off-shore in oil and gas production)
Nuclear power: 44,000 to 60,000
Renewable energy: 112,000
Rest maintenance of grid and admin

In 2014, total electricity production stood at 335 TWh (down from a peak of 385 TWh in 2005), generated from the following sources:

Gas: 30.2% (0.05% in 1990) — other sources say 54% in 2016
Coal: 29.1% (67% in 1990) — other sources say 6% in 2016
Nuclear: 19.0% (19% in 1990)
Wind: 9.4% (0% in 1990)
Bio-Energy: 6.8% (0% in 1990)
Hydroelectric: 1.8% (2.6% in 1990)
Solar: 1.2% (0% in 1990)
Oil and other: 2.5% (12% in 1990)
Imported: 7.69%

Bordiga’s old question should be altered: Seize power or seize the factory … or seize the power plant? This is probably one of the most concentrated sectors in terms of social importance and also one of the most safeguarded by the state. In the UK there are 10 nuclear power stations, 16 major coal power plants, 33 gas plants and 7 oil plants. The state will apply its military and ideological strong-hold over these workers and they are, to state the obvious, also not easily replaced. The recent ‘strike-wave’ in France in June 2016 showed the centrality of the sector. In the UK, as well, the number of refineries and larger oil and petrol depots has come down drastically: there are only six main oil refineries at the coast, connected by main pipelines, the United Kingdom Oil Pipeline (UKOP) — patrolled by helicopters.

It is interesting to note that together with wishy-washy people of the ‘food-security’ brigade, it is the ‘climate change’ left that is actually researching the production process in the energy sector — from an environmental transitional point of view, but at least they try to deal with the real stuff. The radical left largely has a trade union overview about job cuts in the sector.

Transport total: 1.4 million people

Some of this work will be of much less relevance (airports and ground services account for 433,000 jobs and airlines 200,000 jobs). Some means of production/transport are not so difficult to run (285,000 truck drivers), but a good chunk still depends on very specialised cooperation and knowledge, e.g. in the railways, which employ around 200,000 — not including local trains and tube.

Equally port operations require sophisticated skills, in 2014 over 500 million tonnes were handled by UK ports, roughly 380 million tonnes unloaded and 180 million tons shipped. The UK ports sector is estimated to directly employ around 118,200 people. Over 95% of imports and exports by volume, and 75% by value still pass through sea ports.

Port traffic is highly concentrated, there are 51 major ports, which handle 98 % of the overall traffic, the biggest ten ports handled 340 million out of 500 million tonnes. Grimsby & Immingham in north east Lincolnshire has remained the UK’s busiest port, handling 12 % of the UK market in 2014. The new ‘London Gateway / Dubai Port’ will shift a lot of traffic towards the east of London. Around 80 million tonnes were crude oil and oil products, 40 million tonnes in coal import. Another major share of dry bulk goods include biomass fuels, typically in the form of wood pellets or wood chips, for Drax and Lynemouth power stations in the North of England.

Ports are specialised: Milford Haven for liquid bulk, Grimsby for dry bulk, Felixstow for containers (41% of all container movements) and Dover for roll on and off (27% of total). In 2014, 204.1 million tonnes of traffic travelled between UK major ports and EU countries (42 % of major port traffic). In 2014 there were 54.8 million tonnes of freight which passed to and from the Netherlands, accounting for 14 % of all international traffic.

A fair share of cargo traffic is pretty useless, e.g. nearly a quarter (23 %) of international unitised (containers and other ‘single units’) traffic was by import and export of passenger cars. There were 4.1 million import/export motor vehicles moved through UK ports in 2014.

Retail total — 2.7 million / Logistics total: 1.8 million / Warehouses total: 360,000

This is less a question about how many people are employed to ‘sell things,’ but more about how many people are employed to circulate goods. The total retail sector is 2.7 million, most of them shop workers, the total logistics sector is said to be 1.8 million, but this will include the truck drivers already counted in transport and some of the parcel delivery workers, as part of the postal services. Chill houses, central distribution centres and local storage will still be useful, with less specialised knowledge required by workers to run them.

IT/Communication total: 1.2 million people

Certainly a very unspecified figure. Other sources state that 280,000 people work in communications, from maintaining of communication hardware (internet cables) to admin work. Other sources say that there are 350,000 ’software professionals,’ working in the UK, but that obviously includes programmers of train signal systems as much as programmers for online brokering. The main challenge will be to establish a intranet-communication system between domestic units and workplaces within the short-term, which cannot be easily shut down by the internet empire. We have too little technical knowledge in understanding what kind of effort this would involve, but there is a fairly big and well organised alternative ‘networking’ scene.[81] We were not able to find out more reliable information about the material structure of internet connections within the UK, e.g. big server stations and nodes, though these will be crucial for both sides of any insurrection.

Care Sector: 3.2 to 3.5 million people

Although a lot of this work could be taken out of social isolation, back into bigger domestic units, the knowledge of the workers employed in the sector are essential and it will need time to transfer/socialise them.

Adult care: 1.55 million
Childcare: 426,500
NHS: 1.2 million to 1.5 million

In 2015, across Hospital and Community Healthcare Services (HCHS) and GP practices, the NHS employed 149,808 doctors, 314,966 qualified nursing staff and health visitors (HCHS), 25,418 midwives, 23,066 GP practice nurses, 146,792 qualified scientific, therapeutic and technical staff, 18,862 qualified ambulance staff and 30,952 managers, dealing with 1 million patients every 36 hours. (In 2010, across England, there were over 1000 NHS hospital sites with more than one bed. More than half were small community or mental health facilities with an average of 35 or 68 beds respectively. Just over seven in 10 hospital sites in 2010 had fewer than 100 beds. There are 7,800 GP practices).

Construction: 1 to 2.1 million people

Again the figures are unreliable, ranging from self-employed builders for kitchen extensions to engineering companies engaged in airport constructions. While the question might come up as to what extent construction will be relevant during a revolutionary period, we can envisage that short-term conversion of former office space into social housing or conversion of space for the domestic units will engage a significant number of skilled workers.

Engineering/Manufacturing total: around 3 million people

This includes all type of socially unnecessary labour, first of all the arms industry or passenger car manufacturing. Unfortunately it is often this type of industry that has the highest levels of productive collective knowledge and highest standards of technology, while, e.g. food processing, harvest work, garment industry etc. is characterised by cruel labour intensity. A technology and knowledge transfer can be started, also as a political measure to show that ‘communism’ is to come and that we can expect much less work once we get through the upheaval. Other manufacturing will be of more immediate necessity, from packaging material, machine tool production for spare parts, construction material, pharmaceuticals etc.

Automobile: 250,000 including supply-chain
Steel: 30,000
Aerospace: 111,000 direct / 120,000 indirect
Arms industry: 146,000
Electronics: 800,000 (Centerprise has one of the UK’s largest PC manufacturing plants in Wales; 10% of computers manufactured in the UK, no info on supply parts; there is a NXP semiconductor plant in Manchester)
Plastics: 300,000
Furniture: 115,000
Chemical/Pharmaceutical: 105,000 (Chemical) and 53,000 (Pharmaceutical) direct jobs // 500,000 indirect jobs
Garment/Textile total: 150,000 to 300,000 (20,000 designers)

Maybe it is an accountant type of revolutionary mentality to assume that, for example, furniture manufacturing would have any social relevance within a six months period of upheaval, but then people struggle only so far without knowing how society will re-organise itself.

Media — around 310,000 people

In print-media around 167,000 people, in radio around 22,000 in television around 30,000 and in film industry around 70,000 — the BBC alone employs 35,000 people, including temps, short-term contracts. Most of their broadcasting, both TV and radio is done from their headquarter in Portland Place, London.

Postal Service — 200,000 plus

In 2015 the Royal Mail alone still employed 160,000 people. It is difficult to find figures of private parcel delivery companies, couriers etc. DHL employs 18,000. Again, this is not about individualised letter delivery, but revolutionary logistics.

Public sector total: 5.1 million people

We didn’t include this in the total figure for essential industry, though amongst local government employees there are certainly workers with important social knowledge, e.g. the 27,000 librarians. Also, not all of the bourgeois knowledge taught by 1.5 million people employed in public education is mere ideology, a lot of it might turn out to be useful.

Local government: 2.3 million
Central government: 2.9 million
Education: 1.5 million
Public administration: 1.1 million
Construction: 150,000
Police: 250,000
Fire Brigade: 45,000

Army: 180,000 people

We haven’t had much time (and sources) to look deeper into the composition of the army: what are the main class divisions within the armed forces and how does the apparatus reproduce itself materially. At this point we can only provide two snap-shots:

While nearly half of all officers were educated in private schools (only 10% of the total population is educated in elite schools), in 2009 of the 14,000 newly recruited soldiers 31% were under 18, which indicates that they come from working class conditions. The army largely recruits from ‘disadvantaged schools.’
The army apparatus is largely maintained by ‘private companies,’ meaning by workers who haven’t got the conditions and job security like public sector employees. Companies like Sodexo or ESS (Compass) organise catering, retail and ‘leisure activities’ for army personnel, employing between 6,000 and 9,000 staff. Amey/Carillion organises the maintenance of 280 army bases and 49,000 army flats.

e) “Can anyone say ‘Communism?’”

Before we try to envision the conditions for a working class uprising in the UK region based on the material regarding the industrial structure presented above, we want to draw some brief political conclusions. ‘Communism’ has become a fashionable term, used by an array of people with conflicting positions — so has ‘revolution.’ We therefore agree to raise the question: ‘Can anyone say communism?,’ as done by comrades around wildcat.[82] Based on our brief look at the limitations of the 2010/11 uprisings, our thoughts on the main revolutionary contradiction within capitalism and the empirical glimpse at the material structure of social production in the UK region, we state:

As we saw in France in 1936,[83] Chile in 1973[84] or Greece in 2014, parliamentary participation and nationalisation policies do not open up space for working class movements, but instead contain the revolutionary impetus inside ‘democratic’ frameworks that will always be rigged against us (or indeed, openly disregarded to maintain ruling class power). Nor does it prepare workers for the difficult task of taking over the means of production and defending them against the class enemy — it prevents them from doing so by creating illusions in a (gradual and often peaceful) reform process, which in the end gives the reactionary forces time to prepare their counter-attack.
The hope that ‘automation’ (Accelerationists)[85] or other ‘technological progress’ (Negrists, Paul Mason disciples)[86] will create the material ground for ‘communism without revolution’ or ‘revolution without the working class’ is mainly a bourgeois utopia based on elitism. Ultimately it relies heavily on the state as an ‘agent of transformation’ e.g. in the form of ‘guaranteed basic income’ demands or the hope that the state will implement ‘innovation’ against the reluctant ‘monopoly capitalists.’
The idea of transitional or directional demands towards the state as a kind of consciousness-enhancing trick is deeply rooted within the ‘radical left.’ Consciously or not they continue the old lefty formulas of transitional programmes as a patronising policy to “overcome the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard” (Trotsky). For us transition means the time it takes to takeover the means of (re-)production and to transform them into means not only to satisfy material needs, but to break our social isolation, our condition as appendixes of machinery, our suburban or rural boredom, the spatial concentration and separation of essential infrastructure (universities to power plants) from the rest of society. This transformation takes time, it is not separate from struggle. It is not communism yet, but it is on the way. This transformation cannot take place under capitalist rule or under command of hierarchical structures like a state. No demand or decree prepares workers for this. No elitist insurrectionist can just take over infrastructure without the workers involved.[87] There is a qualitative shift and the only process towards that shift is the increasing experience and organisational abilities of the working class through their experience of capitalist production and struggles.
The flip-side of putting your political hope in some ‘neutral technological progress’ is the hope that the semi-automatic creation of a ‘surplus population’ (impoverished people who are dispelled or excluded from the production process) will provide the grounds for revolution as insurrection and rupture (vulgar communisation theories).[88] Any closer look at the current production process and working class will tell us that ‘insurrection without production’-ideologies are mainly romantic wet dreams and have little to do with the possibility of communism.
Analysing the global composition of the working class will also show that many traditional ‘(anarcho-)syndicalist’ models of revolution (as a gradual expansion of organisation, general strike and take-over of the means of production) leave out questions of industry and labour market-based divisions within the working class, as well as the unpredictable fact of capitalist crisis and the predictable fact of state violence.
Similarly, experiments with common spaces, transitional towns, self-management or attempts to abolish intellectual property are potentially fertile elements of class struggle, but once they are isolated from the question of social power they degenerate into capitalism’s creative bubbles.
We acknowledge the contribution of debates around reproductive labour and the so-called ‘care revolution’: any fundamental change must have the socialisation of domestic and care work at its centre. However, there is a danger of the debate falling back into a middle-class eurocentric perspective if we don’t take into account the produced materiality of care relations[89] e.g. who ploughs the fields, who builds the shelters, who makes our clothes etc.
Last, but not least, we have to question our own premises of traditional Operaismo:[90] while the ‘refusal of work’ of assembly line workers in the 1960s and 1970s was the most radical expression of the working class at the time, the fetishisation of this expression has prevented us from discussing the challenge of how we can imagine a takeover and transformation of the means of production today.

f) The basic steps of organising revolution: what would a working class revolution have to achieve within the first months of its existence?

So what does revolution mean in the 21^st century? We agree with our comrades from wildcat when they say that the day-to-day struggles and behaviour of the proletarian masses ‘revolutionise’ society constantly: “How do workers’ struggles become revolutionary? Revolution evades derivation from objective conditions. If in a society characterised by patriarchal relations female workers fight collectively for the improvement of their living and working conditions, if they take risks in struggle, cross boundaries, discover new potentials and want to find out more about the world, then this process is probably ‘revolutionary.’” Nevertheless, we still have to face up to the question of what a qualitative rupture with capitalist social relations would mean.

In the text below we presuppose these struggles, the formation of a political workers’ coordination on a substantial scale, which has been formed through struggle and is able through its rootedness to propose the leap. Their own struggles have brought society to the brink of collapse, they have seen how their cooperation under capital is structured through the results of their strikes and unrest. A ‘plan’ to takeover production is not just a good idea, but a necessary act for survival, both materially and in order to obtain social hegemony. We don’t emphasise that the main character of transition has to be the creation of emancipated relationships, which is true. We set in at a point where global class struggle has tipped the control of capital and the state into crisis and the working class in certain regions will have to make the leap into the unknown, not having the privilege of waiting for the rest of the global class to take this step together with them. We don’t presuppose that the working class in the UK region will be the first to make that step, nor that the region in question will be confined to these English-speaking islands. Relating to the problems lined out above — the (regional) disparity of productive power and impoverishment within the working class — this is neither a sketch of general ‘principles of communist production and distribution’ a la Group of International Communists[91] nor a left-communist essay about the ‘relation between state, party, unions in the phase of proletarian dictatorship.’ We appreciate previous efforts such as of Insurgent Notes to discuss an ‘initial revolutionary program,’[92] but we hope to be more concrete. In the end it is a slightly embarrassing attempt to think about the relation of regional insurrection and taking over means of production within an initial six months or so period of proletarian revolution — it is about the bare bones.

We don’t have a clear idea about what could cause a situation of revolutionary upheaval and we don’t know what will happen once people take the streets. What we do know is how social production and reproduction is organised today and the composition of workers engaged in it. We know what keeps us apart, what creates the basis for professionalism or gender hierarchies. We can envisage something like a minimal material backbone of the revolution, something which the working class would have to achieve within a certain time-span in order to abolish the domination of the money economy, profit management and state control — and to undermine divisions between them. We might think that this is rather abstract or hypothetical, but then during the last few years people were willing to risk being killed by defending a square or storming parliament — the revolutionary will is not lacking — but in that moment it might need a social force with a) roots in the essential industries and amongst the poor and b) a concrete plan: these are the power stations, logistics hubs, flour mills, internet nodes which are central to an effort to fundamentally change things. Soldiers who shoot you as a ‘rebellious mob on the street’ might be less likely to shoot you when they know that you defend workers who know about production and who want to run the energy or food processing plant for everyone. So what are these bare necessities?

What are the potentials and challenges for an insurrection within the UK territory?

Based on the reflections above we present twelve basic theses on the primary characteristics and requirements and initial steps of a working class revolution:

Regional challenge

An uprising will depend on the ability to sustain itself regionally. Although we speak of global revolution, the process won’t necessarily be synchronous; we will have to deal with situations of regional insurrections which have to reproduce themselves over a certain period, temporarily and partially being cut off from world market supply.
Emancipation and hardship

It will furthermore depend on its capacity to improve overall conditions: a communist revolution has to be able to improve living conditions for the majority over a short timespan, guarantee material reproduction of the population at a high level, making time for re-organisation of society at the same time, dismantling hierarchies while still battling the battle. Its main attraction will be the more equal and liberating relationships created in struggle, but over a short-span of time material hardship would undermine these relationships, no matter how willing people are to bear the impact of scarcity.
Takeover of essential industries as productive insurrection

Large sections of the working class have to be prepared for an organised response to a spontaneous situation of crisis: this will largely depend on the collaboration of workers employed in the essential industries with the organised violence of the wider proletarian class to takeover, defend and transform the essential industries. This take-over will not happen gradually, but will be led by an ‘active minority/vanguard’ of 30 to 40 % of the working class, formed in previous struggles. This takeover is the productive and material core of insurrection, the action that can swing the rest of the population, in particular if ‘populist measures’ (re-distribution of living space, health provisions etc.) are offered to the poor and they are included in practical refurbishment. As can be seen from the empirical bits and bobs, the initial core centre of production and circulation that has to be taken over and defended is significantly smaller (not all convenience stores, but the main bulk circulation; not the entire manufacturing industry, but mainly flexible machine shops for (spare) parts production and building material etc.)
Formation of larger domestic units

The uprising and takeover of essential industries has to go hand in hand with the formation of domestic units comprising 200 to 250 people: communal spaces (former hotels, schools, office blocks etc.) as central points for distribution, domestic work and local decision-making. The quick formation of such domestic units is as important as the takeover of the essential industries. Mainly in order to break the isolation of domestic work and gender hierarchies, but also to create a counter-dynamic to the centralisation in the essential industries: a decentralisation of certain social tasks and decision making. The domestic units and their experience will shift the focus from ‘production for production’s sake’ towards a situation where living together and creating the means of subsistence will be a less segregated process. 250 is a pretty random number, but it seems small enough to facilitate familiarity with people who we organise daily stuff with (childcare, cooking, washing clothes etc.) and big enough to make distribution of goods feasible. It will also create enough proximity in order to guarantee a certain revolutionary respect and commitment between individual members in case of disputes.
Proletarianisation of the control over agricultural production

Larger numbers of the urban working class will have to go and convince the ‘owner-run’ farms of the agricultural sector to share their burden and trouble with working the soil and create direct, non-market related links between town and countryside. While urban workers move towards the rural agriculture areas, supporting their seasonal agricultural workers (most of them will go back and forth between town and agriculture anyway), some of the agriculture and equipment can be brought closer to town — here we might actually be able to learn something from Cuba (significant experience with urban gardening and rapid conversion from an oil-based agriculture to a less fossil fuel based one). These two movements from town to countryside and vice versa will be a first organic step towards a dissolution of the capitalist geographic division of labour. Engage in first steps to undermine the eroding nature of industrial farming by getting perma-culture folks involved.
Participation of the marginalised proletarians

At the core of the takeover the essential industries have to be taken over both from within and from without. This will depend on the ability of the proletarians in less central sectors to enforce (mainly by participating in production and organising its military defence) the fact that workers in the essential industries socialise the production and free circulation of goods, as opposed to treating the former companies and products as their own property. Only the mass participation of poorer or more marginalised sections of the working class will make visible the entire scope of social needs. Their previous experiences with state violence and their knowledge about urban improvisation (from self-defence to economic networks) will be required. An immediate ‘populist’ program has to be launched addressing those segments of the proletariat which are at the margins of essential production — this segment might be called the ‘urban poor,’ or surplus proletariat. This segment is not so significant in the UK, but surely in other countries. In order to drive a wedge between them and the middle-strata which has the financial clout to ‘buy them over’ there has to be a coordinated action of appropriation of living space. In this sense ‘construction’ might be essential even in an uprising: if construction workers and the ‘urban poor’ take over useless office space, empty hotels etc. and convert them together, this would create a bond in order to win people over to defend the rest of the essential industries under attack.
Participation of workers in the advanced industries

As outlined before, large parts of the most advanced industries in terms of concentration, knowledge and machinery are not necessarily essential in terms of material survival. Apart from being potential centres of collective struggles and emerging workers’ organisations, the role of workers employed in the most advanced industries (automobile, machine engineering) is to make technology and knowledge available for an improvement of the essential industries and domestic units. Not the robots or artificial intelligence will liberate us from drudgery, but the collaboration between workers in the advanced and essential industries and domestic units will demonstrate how we can drastically reduce necessary labour-time.
Breaking the collusion of intellectual workers

A swift and coordinated appropriation will only be possible with the backing of a significant minority of ‘technical staff’ and intellectual workers (engineers, doctors etc.) employed in the centres of social production. It will depend on the collectively organised measures of the three main working class segments (essential industries, advanced sectors, marginalised) to break the collusion of ‘intellectual workers’ (engineers, certain segments of science) with capitalist management and the state apparatus and win a considerable section over on communist terms and conditions, i.e. the breaking down of division between intellectual and manual labour. In order to break the collusion the struggling working class has to impress with organisational knowledge of production, with liberated human relationships and social responsibility towards the environment.
Establishing communist internet and productive database

The takeover needs social communication and an elaborate decision-making processes, facilitated by a parallel (IT) communication structure to the internet, which is able to link domestic units, essential industries, remaining workplaces and ‘proletarian militias.’ In terms of ‘production’ necessary during the insurrection, this will be a major one. It has to be a structure which guarantees communication between production and consumption, sturdy enough to fight off attacks. Connect this communication network to taken-over printing and film/TV media (neighbourhood/industry TV) and set up a parallel physical delegate structure in case of communication break-down.
Curbing the influence of the middle-class

In the UK the ‘middle-class’ block is still a considerable force — there are 4 million business owners with no employees (self-employed), most of which can be seen as disguised proletarians; there are at least 1.2 million ‘bosses’ (if we assume a single boss) employing between 1 and 50 people, which can be categorised as an exploiting middle class; 1.75 million people make money as landlords — a lot of them might as well belong to the former category; 1.1 million people still get good money through being employed in the financial services sector (some of them might be data-entry typists and cleaners). There are 120,000 lawyers/solicitors in the UK, representing a professional section of the middle-class not tied into the social process of production. There are still around 50,000 local shops, the majority of which are run by individual owners, representing a lower section of the middle-class. These people have a political weight and a repressive apparatus. We are not talking about the mysterious 1%, but rather about a backbone of 15% of people who have not just money to lose, but social influence and prestige. The best way to minimise their influence is to cut them off from essential production and circulation and force them to realise that their privileged social position was largely unproductive — and that they are welcome to participate productively as equals.
Splitting the armed forces along class lines

Historically no revolution has been successful without a split within the army, in most cases as a result of previous war or civil war situations. The main chance for a communist revolution to split the army along class lines is therefore determined by objective conditions (soldiers not wanting to die for ‘their masters war’) and its subjective capacity to attract working class soldiers: the organised working class movement can free us from hierarchical relationships and knows how to feed, clothes, cares for everyone. Nevertheless, a revolution has to create its own material threat by weakening the military apparatus (non-cooperation, meaning, no supply of essential goods and services for the army) and by armed defence of essential productive units. This includes the curbing of sabotage by (petty) bourgeoisie and lumpen elements (e.g. in Chile during the social turmoil in 1973 the owners of truck and bus fleets organised a ‘strike’ or rather boycott in order to create economic chaos).
Overcoming the regional isolation by using taken-over productive capacity

We have no illusions: no regional uprising will be able to sustain itself materially and ‘militarily’ over a prolonged period. We have seen the pitfalls of ‘Bolshevik foreign policies’[93] and of anarchist regionalism. The challenge for any local working class is to discover its global dependencies and to engage in extra efforts not only to sustain itself, but to use the appeal of their experiences and appropriated means of production strategically in order to break through their geographic isolation. We don’t know what this will look like, apart from sending people and material out to explain their experiences of struggle. It will mean observing the global situation and perhaps sending proletarian militias with productive knowledge and means of production to support workers’ uprisings elsewhere — using the global logistics facilities that capitalism was forced to develop.

What will be the centres of coordination and debates to accomplish all this? In terms of social production and decision-making structures, a lot of unpredictable things will happen, people will discover new desires and knowledge of how to organise horizontally and all of that — but we think that in the phase of insurrection apart from ‘the streets and squares and barricades’ the following three locations will be central during an uprising, both in terms of production and decision making:

the workplaces of the essential industries, in order to guarantee social production and establish the main body of social decision-making
the new domestic units, in order to socialise reproduction and establish the second main body of decision-making
the former workplaces in non-essential industries, in order to transfer knowledge and equipment.

Allocation of work takes place according to necessity and capacity of units of the essential industries and according to personal abilities, roughly as follows:

Four hours in the essential industries

That means a massive transfer of working-time and workforce to the essential industries in order to be able to reduce individual working hours while maintaining production levels — for a controlled winding down of excess. Participation of everyone (the former unemployed including unwaged domestic workers, but also former bankers and other former ’privileged’) is essential, in order to socialise experiences and decision-making: ‘councils’ in the essential industries and domestic units being the main ‘productive and political units.’ Industry-internal hierarchies in terms of intellectual and manual labour have to be tackled immediately. Demand for numbers needed in the workforce has to be communicated to domestic units and remaining workplaces — the quicker and more transparent the requirements of the industries are communicated, the easier the supply. Supply chains have to be restructured, depending on the (global) expansion of the uprising.
Three hours in the domestic unit and territory beyond

The counter-point is participation in the domestic units, setting up of food kitchens, social (care) space, ‘communist intranet’ and communicating new social needs to the decision-making bodies in the essential industries. Double participation in often centralised essential industries and de-centralised domestic units is of major importance, so as to undermine social divisions of labour and (e.g. gender) hierarchies. Only through double participation and communication will we be able to figure out which elements of social production can be de-centralised within (combined) domestic units and which are better organised in a more centralised industrial set-up.
Two hours in former workplaces

Maintaining control over the ’non-essential’ workplaces and keeping in touch with former colleagues is important. Social developments can be discussed and stock-taking can take place: what kind of knowledge and means of production are available? What were they used for so far? What could they be used for potentially? Who were former suppliers or who did the company/workplace cater to? This information has to be added to the general productive information pool. In particular the higher developed industries (arms, automobile) will have the responsibility of a technology and knowledge transfer.

We won’t go into speculations whether there will be additional regional councils or neighbourhood assemblies etc. We think that the main decisions should be taken not as ‘citizens’ or ‘members of assemblies,’ but as members of a new social (re-)production process. Debates and decisions concerning issues beyond the immediate reach of the essential industries and domestic units (global situation, movements of the class enemy, questions of larger infrastructure etc.) should evolve from the new relationships created through day-to-day cooperation — not in a separate sphere of representation.

How does the UK region differ from and relate to the wider global situation, referring back to the question of uneven development?

It would be necessary to analyse similar empirical material for other regions of the globe, but it is fairly clear that within the UK/western European region, an insurrection would not face problems as challenging as in many other regions of the globe, such as an extended rural hinterland with only fragile ties to industrial or urban centres; more desperate poverty level on a mass scale which leaves less scope and time between appropriation of resources and takeover of means of production; warlord or mafia structures that are more integrated in the lives and reproduction of the proletariat; significant numbers of medium peasantry or small trader class that are less likely to identify with a working class revolution; lack of essential energy resources — just to mention a few. It is pretty certain that no insurrection in the UK region would take place if the entire globe wasn’t in turmoil — in this sense the basic connection between regional and worldwide revolution is obvious. At this point we can only envisage some general connections:

Struggles around the globe are taking place in more and more similar industrial and social situations — meaning that the major influence of the global character of the working class will be through exchange of experience and inspirations, in particular through the channels of labour migration: migrant workers in the UK are in touch with their regions of origin and will be able to communicate experiences, in particular in the major cities. We have seen the influence of the so-called Arab Spring on migrant workers in the logistics sector in Italy or the impact of struggles in South America on the class confidence of Hispanic workers in the US. These are only glimpses of how the class will be able to communicate and learn from their global struggles.
Seen from a regional point of view the lack of some basic goods in case of isolation is apparent, in particular when it comes to food supply, but probably also for certain raw materials for electronics manufacturing etc. Here the workers in the essential industries will have to restructure their supply chains ‘politically,’ analysing the global struggles, emerging workers’ organisations around the globe, which could help re-establish supply. Again, migrant workers will play a significant role in assessing the situation and establishing direct links.
The latter point is not a one-way street: the UK and large parts of western Europe are said to be ‘de-industrialised,’ but as capitalist centres they still hold significant manufacturing capacities compared to many regions in the global south. The transfer of production capacities will be part of the expansion of the uprising: support of workers’/proletarian struggles and organisations in other regions through supply with excess means of production — relying on support of global transport workers. While the ‘economic’ side of such a transfer might be common sense (evening out of regional disparities, “we get rice, they get water pump spare parts”), the ‘political’ aspect is of importance and will potentially be more controversial: temporary productive efforts beyond the immediate local needs are necessary to support the success of uprisings elsewhere. The transfer of means of production (or rather the means to create them) will be one of the main weapons to break the stronghold of reactionary forces in less developed regions.

g) The revolutionary organisation: finally we propose that this perspective on revolution tomorrow does not leave us untouched today, it asks for certain organisational efforts in the here and now

We can understand anyone who now raises doubts: “But how does this imaginary insurrection relate to the current situation in any way?! Will you go around in the streets, stopping random people, telling them where the next strategic power plant, army barracks or flour mill is located?!” We agree, at the current stage this text will mainly — hopefully! — contribute to a discussion within the milieu about what a revolutionary moment might look like, or rather, what general material framework for a social transformation we are confronted with. We think that the basic propositions sketched out in this text inform our political focus today: do we perceive ‘workers’ or ‘work’ as yet another identity category? Can participation in parliamentary politics be a gradual step towards transformation or does it potentially distract proletarians from the real challenges they are facing? Is there a role for political workers’ organisations, now and in the process of revolution, and if so, what does it consist of? We think there are certain continuities of workers’ organisation, leading from here and now to a potential situation of insurgency — which doesn’t mean that the insurgency or its success will necessarily depend on that organisation. It is us who ask the question of how we can contribute to this process — open for discussion and collaboration.

Current Stage

Historical clarity: More important than empirical exercises such as outlined above are historical reflections on previous moments of insurrection and the relation between revolutionary workers and the state in particular. From the general strike in Seattle in 1919,[94] to the Spanish Civil War in 1936,[95] to Oaxaca in 2006[96] to Rojava in 2016.
Current understanding of class composition: Instead of lazy assumptions (‘everything will be automated’ or ‘we are all precarious now’) we need more precise analyses of certain processes within production, currently ideologised as ‘full automation’ or ‘immaterial labour’ or ‘general intellect.’ This means an analysis of the current division and hierarchy of intellectual and manual labour in the essential industries (‘what does the common worker know?’), as well as analyses of actual forms of global supply chains, agro-industry etc., taking into account the question of potential working class control.
Establishing roots amongst the workers in the essential industries, the ‘engineering sector’ and amongst the ‘poor.’ We are talking about political focus here, not of exclusiveness! Within the day-to-day conflicts we should reconsider forms of ‘knowledge transfer,’ such as e.g. the type of teaching-material of the old IWW that they used to explain ‘engineering knowledge’ of a certain industry to the common labourer employed in it.
Referring back to the problem of uneven development: we have to try to understand different proletarian stages and segments of class composition and relate them to each other; e.g. the Revolutionary Black Workers in the US in the late 1960s/early 1970s managed to have roots in the poor areas (anti-police violence, racist school policies, sexual health), amongst students, within the major car factories, in the ’community’ (hospitals, housing) — and tried to relate these to experiences of ‘Third World’ migrants in their area (‘Arabs in Detroit’). Given the general social situation they were able not merely to create ‘alliances’ between these different segments, but forms of organisation which encompassed the entirety of proletarian life.
Creating networks of struggle-experienced workers: While supporting strikes and struggles actively we should also look out for workers who developed the desire and capacity to engage in political activities beyond the individual conflict — not as recruiting material, but as rooted comrades. Together we could already experiment with hinting at the necessity of a social takeover of the means of production in a more concrete way during day-to-day struggles. This will require a new and more concrete language.
Keeping up to date with other forms of ‘cooperative’ efforts or experiences of self-management (from ‘workers’ control’ to ‘urban gardening’ to ‘transition towns’ to ‘alternative medicine gatherings’ to ‘critique of science’) and encourage engagement with the wider class struggle. Create experience exchange between ‘workers’ self-management’ and strikes,[97] between care cooperatives and struggles against hospital closures.
Documenting your efforts and experiences for others. We encourage local groups who feel affinity towards the prospect of insurrection and at the same time try to get rooted in their working class area (from workplaces to universities to groups around proletarian issues) to make their point of view and experiences debatable by others, without having to feel defensive about their particular organisation. Based on that exchange and discussion steps should be taken to enable more coordinated efforts.

Revolutionary Stage

Developing within a network of workers — formed through various cycles of struggles and their common reflection — a clear program for the advanced moment of uprising: what are the central facilities? How to coordinate a ‘populist’ process of appropriation? How to address working class segments within army? This has to be formulated in realistic terms, convincing more through knowledge of industrial organisation and concrete contacts, rather than through rousing political statements.
An organisation of workers will also have to play a role in putting forward a ‘class perspective’ against the tendency of ’workers’ control’ after takeover of individual companies. The workforce of bigger industries might try to use their position for their own privilege; experienced workers militias might use their collective strength against a more common interest. An organisation of workers should be prepared to undermine possible regionalism (of naturally richer regions, more fertile soil, nicer beaches etc.)
Against the background of more prolonged exchange and a wider political perspective a workers’ organisation should encourage the use of access machinery/production and patents/company-specific knowledge for support of workers struggle ‘abroad’; encourage extra-labour above the locally required levels if necessary; defend this position against ‘localist’ tendencies within the working class. This internationalist perspective cannot be enforced through a political program or as an armed force (workers’ state), but through being rooted amongst and winning over of workers in the global supply chains and through facilitating direct exchange — pointing out the global interdependence.

After various longer discussions with workmates and neighbours about the question of ‘what is the character of the current system’ and ‘is a different society possible?’ we want to write a series in our workers’ paper, WorkersWildWest,[98] in which we will also try to use some of the material and thoughts presented above. It will be a challenge to make things short and precise, we are curious to see if such articles contribute to our daily interactions.

We are also curious to hear your thoughts!

AngryWorkers, September 2016

angryworkersworld@gmail.com

38. A way propounded to make the poor in these and other nations happy

Deleted reason: It was decided that this utopian text is not proto-anarchist or anarchistic.

Subtitle: By bringing together a fit suitable and well qualified people unto one Houshold-government, or little-Common-wealth.

Author: Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy

Authors: Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy

Topics: not-anarchist, utopianism, political philosophy, cooperatives, utopia, Christian

Date: 1659

Date Published on T@L: 2021-09-06T00:00:00

Source: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A54515.0001.001

Notes: Plockhoy, a Dutch radical, wrote this plan of a proto-socialist society during the regime of Cromwell. His vision was of a society in which no one was opressed or exploited, people where equals, and labour was organized cooperatively. A society that was based on Christian virtues of justice, love, and solidarity. And lastly a society that was freed from the yoke of evil people, espicially those who managed ‘to live from the labour of others’. Although Cromwell showed interested in his petitions to establish his idealized societies in England, he died and Plockhoy was unable to get support from Cromwell’s sucessors. Eventually he led a Dutch utopian colony to the the New World near the older abondened colony of Swaanendael (present day Lewes, Delaware), but within 13 months the colony had been crushed by the English, where during or some while after Plockhoy is presumed to have died.

A WAY PROPOUNDED TO Make the poor in these and other Nations happy.

By bringing together a fit suitable and well quali∣fied people unto one Houshold-government, or little-Common-wealth, Wherein every one may keep his propriety, and be imployed in some work or other, as he shall be fit, without being oppressed.

Being the way not only to rid those and other Nations from idle, evil and disorderly persons, but also from all such that have sought and found out many inventions to live upon the labour of others.

Whereunto is also annexed an invitation to this Society, or little Common-wealth.

Psalm, 42. 1.Blessed is he that considereth the poor, the Lord will de∣liver him in time of trouble; the Lord shall preserve him, and keep him alive, and he shall be blessed upon the Earth,

BY PETER CORNELIUS, VAN-ZURIK-ZEE.

LONDON, Printed for G. C. at the sign of the Black spread-eagle at the West-end of Paul’s Church-yard.

A way propounded to make the poor in these and other Nations happy, &c.

HAving seen the great inequality and disorder among men in the World, that not only evil Governours or Rulers, covetous Merchants and Tradesmen, lazie, idle and negligent Teachers, and others, have brought all under slaverie and thraldom: But also a great number of the common handy-craft men, or labourers (by endeavouring to decline, escape or cast off the heavy burthen) do fill all things with lyes and deceipt, to the oppressing of the honest and good people, whose consciences cannot bear such practises, therefore have I (together with others born for the common welfare) designed to endeavour to bring four sorts of people, whereof the World chiefly consists out of several sects into one Familie or Houshold-government, viz. Husband-men, Handy-crafts people, Marriners, and Masters of Arts and Sciences, to the end that we may the better eschue the yoke of the Temporall and Spirituall Pharaohs, who have long enough domineered over our bodies and souls, and set up again (as in former times) Righteousnesse, love and B otherly Sociab’ enesse, which are scarce any where to be found, for the convincing of those that place all greatnesse only in domineer∣ing, and not in well-doing, contrary to the pattern and doctrine of the Lord Jesus, who came not to be served but to serve, and gave his life a ransome for many; appointing his Kingdom unto his Apostles, as it was appointed to him from his father, answering them when they murmured, who after his departure should be the greatest amongst them, said; If any among you would be greatest, let him be the servant of all. In direct opposition and contradiction to the World where they are accompted the greatest who have most servants, and not they that do most service to others, and therefore the Worlds greatness, and the greatness of Christians differ as light and darkness, whereas true Christians being mercifull doe endeavour to ease mens burthens, in∣stead thereof, others (as if there were not trouble enough in the World) are still making the burthen heavier with new devises setting themselves forth daily, in their sight as if their design were to vex and grieve poor people (and stir them up to Impatience) with their excesse and riot.

To this may be added those that are called spirituall persons or Clergy-men who perswade people (that they may the more willingly drudge for them) to beleeve that they take care of their soules (as if they could love the soul which they cannot see, and have no compas∣sion on the body which they see, This therefore being deceipt and lies, Let us return again to mercifulness which is as well touched with the miseries of the body as with the miseries of the soul selling such order or society of mutual love whereby the opressed (scarce able to breath) may be brought to rest and enlargment.

Taking upon them every day (except the Sabboth) soe many as are fit to work the labour of 6. houres beginning ordinarily, from 9. of the clock in the morning to 12. at noon, and from 3 till 6. at night, if any desires to have an afternoones liberty he may work from 4. or 6. of the clock in the morning till 10. or 12. at noon or labour another day soe much the more, they that have hard work to doe may begin in Sommer Morninges while it is cool, and take their rest, in the heat of the day, bestowing the rest of their time, for the refreshing of their bodies, and profitable excercises of the mind.

They that are set on work by us (being not fit to be of our Society) receiving wages shall work 12. houres in a day, from 6. in the mor∣ning to 12. at noon, and from 2 till 8. at night till any of them be fit and willing to come into us.

The Children of rich people (who are not of our society) comming to School (after we have found out the ablest masters) to be instructed in Arts Sciences and Languages are every day (except the Sabboth, learning some usefull Trade) to work 3. houres to the end they may allwaies in case of losse and want afterwards get their living without being necessitated to fall upon such courses (as we see happen often in the world) as may prove hurtfull to their soules and bodies.

The rich people (being not of our Society) having a desire to dwell amongst us shall not be bound to work, if they will sometimes of them∣selves do any thing, they will hold forth a good Example to all rich time-loosers in the world, and paying for their diet, Cloathing, Lodging and other necessaries they shall be free.

For the beginning & undertaking of this great work it will be good that some able men (as Fathers) to lay the foundation, for the com∣mon welfare doe put in a summe of money to raise a Stock, employ∣ing the same to buy a piece of land whereupon the Husbandman, han∣dy Craftsmen, Tradesmen, Marriners, and others [comming in with their moveables as Cattell, Money, or any other Commodityes] may be secured.

Those that come into our Society shall not be bound to make their goodes Common for (according to the tenth Commandement) none ought to covet another mans goodes.

If any will out of a free reall and bountifull heart bring in any thing to increase the Stock it shall be used for the common benefit, without being appropriated for any mans own in particular.

They that will bring in their own landes for the Common service may have security upon the same, and for their moveables upon the landes freely given, only it shall be employed for the common welfare without giving Interest, if they die, their Children or freinds (that none may suffer wronge) shall possess the same except they gave it to the Society or otherwise.

If any be minded to leave the Society, they shall not onely receive that which they brought, but also a share of the profit which hath been made since they came to the Society if no profit hath been made in their time, they shall receive none, that so they that come into us may not seek their own private gain.

A young man or mayd leaving the society, by marrying, or other∣wise, shall have a share of the profit, that hath been made since he or shee were of the Society (from their birth or otherwise) no profit being made, it shall be at the pleasure of the Society to give them what they please, for the profit made before belongeth not to them.

If any one having brought into the Society money or other commo∣dities, afterwardes desires to go out again, they shall acquaint the So∣ciety thereof, that so there may be care taken to restore it, the summe being not above 100. l. shall be paid as the owner desires, if more, then 100. l. they shall have freedome to pay it within a yeeres time, pay∣ing them a quarter of the summe presently (if they desire it) that so none may be hindred to leave the society when they please.

In case the Society hereafter be disturbed or separated by Tyranny or otherwise, then shall the landes and monies which was freely gi∣ven to raise and increase the stock (all Creditors being paid) come to the benefit of those poor onely who have brought nothing to the So∣ciety, except there be poor kindred of those that (out of love) have given to the stock, such shall have an equall proportion with the others.

For the well ordering of our businesse we shall have need of two great houses one in [or about the] Citty viz. a Warehouse for Mer∣chants or Tradesmen, another in the Countrey near a River for the Husbandman, Handy Crafts people, Schoolmasters and Marri∣ners.

The house in the Citty so big that 20, or 30. families may dwell in it, having shopps of severall wares, as Cloth, sayes, linnen, men and womens apparrell, Stockings, shoes, Hatts, and other usefull and ne∣cessary thinges, being the foundation of the whole work, not onely by reason of the proffit that comes by Trading, but also because all Handy-Grafts, belonging thereunto depend thereon.

Our trade will for three sufficient reasons undoubtedly increase, the first is that there will not be overasking in price, but all will be sold at the lowest rate in a word, contrary to the Common custome of the world.

The second is, that we dwelling at a cheaper Rent and living less costly, can make all things better at the price.

The third is, that the profit is made use of for the common-good, as well for the honest people of one, as of another sect.

At the first we may bring into our Scociety, (besides a beginning of several Merchandizes) for the most part unmarried persons, that with laying out little money may presently be on the getting hand, as Cloth, Linnen and Saye-Weavers, Taylors, Shoo-makers and the like. Secondly, Barber-Chyrurgeans, Physitians, and Masters of severall Arts and Sciences; one that can write extraordinary well, another that understands Arithmetick, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Italian book-keeping, or Merchants Accompts. Thirdly, some for Latin, Greek, Hebrew and other Languages, as also Physick, Musick, and other usefull things, referring all to a good and spirituall end.

Our Chyrurgeans or Physitians shall serve the Rich (without the Scociety) for money, and the poor gratis; some going abroad to visit Patients, and others staying at home (at certain times,) to speak with people, that come to them, to shew that they do highly esteem of the life and health of others, as of their own; this will give an increase to our Trading for the common good, the fame thereof being noised round about, and the more when people are sensible that we sell all things at a reasonable rate without deceiving any.

They that are Rich (without the Society) seeing that their chil∣dren are not only well brought up in handy-crafts, but also in Lan∣guages and other Sciences, and in good manners, will encline very much to buy wares of us for their particular Families, and Merchan∣dizes, and Trade increasing, we shall have need of much Cloth, Sayes, Linnen Stockings, Shooes, Hats and other things, these will require Cloth, Linnen and Saye-weavers, Whi•sters for blanching, Dyers and other Handy-crafts, here now will be use for shoep and k〈…〉e, not only for their milk and flesh, but also for their wooll and skins, &c. Here then is work for our Husband man, for the breeding up of Cattle, Poultry, &c. and especially for tilling the ground for Corne, Flax, Hemp, &c. also Gardiners having skill in gardening, for roots, plants and orchards, for fruit, flours and hearbs, as well me∣dicinal (for our Physitians) as others.

For the building of the Countrey house (for the Husband-men, Handy-crafts people, Marriners and Masters of Arts and Sciences) we have need of Brick-makers, Brick-layers, Carpenters, Smiths, as also Ship-carpenters, not only to make Boats, wherein to fetch and carry goods to and from the City, but also to catch fish for the Soci∣ety, and afterwards to build ships to send to Flanders, Holland, France and other places sailing with our own people that shall have all things common among them abroad, as well as in the Scociety at home, being as welcome, (having done their duties,) when they come home from a bad voyage, as from a good; Their ships or goods being lost by storm or otherwise, the loss is to come upon the Society in com∣mon, which venters no more than what the Society can well spare, and may be set forth again as they are able, their wifes and children be∣ing alwaies provided with necessaries, as well as others.

This house is to be built so far from the water, that there be left a convenient key to deliver goods out of the Ships, and if it be possible to bring the water out of the River round about the house, with a draw∣bridge, to be secured by night from thieves and robbers, de∣vising two Instruments whereby the fish may come out of the River into our water, and not go out again, having our Garden for pleasure and necessity behind our house.

Which house is to be built after a convenient manner, with publick and private places, for freedom and conveniency a chamber & a closset for every man & his wife with a great Hall, to lay all things ready made in order, a place to dress victuals, another to eate together a third for the children, also Cellars to keep meat and drink in, a place for the sick, one for the Physitians and Chyrurgeans furniture and medicines, one other for all kind of usefull, (as well natural as spirituall Books, Maps, and other Instruments belonging to liberal Arts and Sciences, several places for Scholars, a place for strangers, &c. who intending to stay any long time, shall do some work, or pay for their lodging and diet.

Our workfolks and School masters, with their Scholars, being brought out abroad into the Countrey the City house will be instead of a ware∣house, leaving therein besides the Physitians, Barber Chyrurgeans and Apothecaries (who with some Trades-men must be in the City, so ma∣ny Merchants (who shall change by turns,) as shall suffice to attend the Merchandize with ease. Our youth being capable of being taught, shall be instructed in Ciphering, and keeping Books of accompts, that the Merchants also may sometimes work, putting every one to that which is fittest for him, as they that have wrought in wooll, to the sel∣ling of wool and cloth, they that have been used to flax-threed and weaving, to the selling of flax and linnen, Tanners and Shoe makers, to sell leather, and so in all things else.

Also it will be necessary, that in the Warehouse in the Citty, there be some men women and Children; not only to make apparrell, and to have other thinges ready made; but especially to serve every one, as there shall be occasion, making all thinges for sale without unne∣cessary trimminges, unless that any buying of us would have any trim∣ming upon them, those we shall endeavour to give content, if they bring to us those unnecessary Timmings, which we our selves have not, doing our endeavour to keep their custom, that so in time they may be convinced of their folly, being better with us, who give them rea∣sons for alterations, than with others who bolster them up in pride and excesse.

If the making and selling of thinges unnecessary were sin, then it should be quite forborn, then must all unnecessary thinges (though a shop were worth 1000. l.) be burnt or destroyed, and all the Children be presently taken from those trades, that depend upon pride and vanity. It is to be considered that the eating of the tree of knowledg was evill, but not the making many thinges are for triall, what is in the hearts of men, if we will not serve those worldly people that come to us, then our youth that sometimes desire to travel into other Countryes will be necessitated allwayes to be at home, because they cannot serve any masters that work for vain-glorious men.

Every 6. or 12. Monthes an account shall be given, & what is overpluss above necessity, a part shall be distributed to men and women, also young men and maides, that so every one may have wherewithall to give to the poor, or to pleasure his freind, in some speciall manner.

One man alone (though he were chief of the whole Society) shall not be master of the cash, or treasury, but three of the uppermost in the Government, shall allwayes have the Keyes; so that one, or two, unless the third were with them should not be able to open the Chest, a three∣fold cord doth not easily break, saith Solomon.

None is to rule longer than one year, least he domineer in his office, and others seeking his favour, play the Hippocrites.

A man about 40. yeares of age, shall be chosen chief Governour of the whole Society, every one giving his voyce for him, that he judgeth to be fit.

This man having governed one year, a new choice shall be made, with liberty to choose him again that last Governed, as well as any body else, by this meanes he that hath a mind to continue in the Govern∣ment will have an Inducement to rule well, that he having the favour of the people, may be chosen again, not that any Governour is to rule ac∣cording to his own pleasure, but according to such orders, as the whole people shall make except in small matters, wherein they cannot conve∣nien ly make any certain order, but who would not rather (if no benefit come of ruling) work quietly 6. houres in a day, then to be in a perpe∣tuall disturbance of his thoughts, being imployed in multiplicity of bu∣sinesses.

Here none is to be chosen for his riches or wealth, as we see come to pass in the world, (to the ruine almost of all commonwealths,) but for his wisdome.

Men and women having the oversight of meat, drink and other

things, shall govern by turns, and in case some would rather keep to their ordinary work, they shall be passed by, and others put in their stead, 10. or 12. men and women. having governed half a year, 5. or 6. of them shall go off, and 5. or 6 others come in their stead, the other continuing half a year longer to instruct them that do newly come in, with what they are not acquainted, having so many young people to do the hardest work, as shall be requisite who being come to years, and having gotten experience, shall also rule over others, for it doth suit the aged to give orders, and the young to obey.

The maides shall not only be fitted to do the housewifery, and order children, but also in case hereafter they be minded to leave the Society, they shall learn a good Handy-craft Trade, that so whether they leave the Society, or come to be married, they may be able to get a lively∣hood, sometimes taking their turns one with another, that so they may continue fit for working and housewifery.

In this house every one shall be able quietly to do his work, because none shall have more than one single work to mind: 5. women in our Society, when all things are done orderly, shall have no more business to trouble their heads with, than one woman in her own private Fa∣mily.

Besides the quiet and ease that we shall have by the helping one ano∣ther; it will also be very profitable to dwell together, for whereas in 100. Families dwelling apart, we should stand in need of at least 100. women to do the housewifery; now bringing 100. Families together, the same may be done with 25. women, the rest (when they shall be fit,) being imployed about some work; together with men for the common good, which many women will rather do, than to be a whole day trou∣bled with diversities of cares.

Whereas in 100. Families there will be need of 100. fires every day to be made, bringing so many Families together, we shall be able to make shift with 4. or 5. great sires and furnaces, out to boyl and reast meat, another where the children are, a third where men, women, young men and maides meet together at meals, sitting at the table in or∣der, (as Joseph’s brethren) the women over against the men, young men next their Fathers, and maides next their Mothers, the young peo∣ple waiting by turns at the Table, that so one may not be respected above the other, neither will it be needfull (being assured of one anothers love) to use the ceremonies of putting off the Hat, or common drinking to one another, yet not to hinder any man from shewing his hearty love to a stranger, or otherwise.

Meat, drink, and all other things will cost us the less, because we buy a great quantity at once, also we shall our own selves breed up kine, sheep, hens, ducks, and other things, having garden and orchard, fruits from our Gardeners and Husband-men, Fish from our Fisher-men, making drink for necessity, and refreshment for our selves.

Our Rules and Laws being few, are to be only for necessity, not to take away any ones liberty, leaving them alwaies open to the tryall of all rationall men, that so self seeking (to be more or above others, in na∣tural or spirituall matters,) may be discovered and excluded.

If any desires to marry, he shall not be tyed to marry one of our So∣ciety, if he will have a vertuous person abroad, out of the Society, and dwell with her, or have her come into the Society, every one is left to his liberty.

All things wherein the Kingdom of God doth not consist, (not con∣tradicting Scripture or reason) are to be left free, as the outward form of Baptisme, the Lords supper and the like, because in the omitting of such things there seems to be more danger than in performing of them.

The apparrel should be fitted for the body, and convenient for the work without being tyed to fashion, colour, or stuff, only the unneces∣sary trimmings to be forborn, that Gods creatures, which he hath made, be not misused.

If any that have an Estate, desire to have stuff, cloth, or other things finer than others, they may adde to it so much of their own money, as it will cost more, for it will be a demonstration to the poor (without the Society,) that he hath an ability above others to relieve them.

In all Handy crafts we shall appoint the best work-men for Masters, who as well as others are to work 6. hours.

Whereas now men in the World do conceal their skill from one another, for their own private advantage, here in our Society they are to bring it in, and impart it to the common well-fare, being the only way to find out the height, depth length and bredth of all things.

The children of the poor are to be brought up (to the comfort of their Parents) as well as the children of the rich, they learning instead of one, sometimes 2. or 3. Handy-crafts, being alwaies chearfull by not being oppressed with bondage and slavery, as commonly is seen amongst children of the World, especially in England, who must en∣dure (many times) to pass through 7 years, as slaves under the Turk, on the contrary the children of our Society shall be alwaies in our eyes, working no longer every day than 6. houres; the remainder of the time, being to be spent in other usefull imployments, that they may be fitted for somewhat ells besides working.

They are to be taught onely necessary and allwayes usefull trades, that they may continually, howsoever the world changes, get their li〈…〉∣ing, for some having learned onely useless handy-crafts, oftentimes through the change of the world, (which falls into some other way and custome) come to poverty and want.

Whereas the Traders in the world do oppress their workmen, with heavy labour, and small wages, instead thereof with us the gain of the tradesmen will redound to the benefit and refreshment of the work∣men.

And whereas the traders of the world, seeking after their own parti∣cular profit and advantage, are continually betwixt hope and fear, now here in our Society, every one is quietly to mind his business, at the set time, for the loss that is suffied lieth upon none in particu∣lar.

In the selling of our commodities, seing there is no overasking, it will give occasion to others (that are not willing to lose their Customers,) to imitate us, it being the true way to rid the world of that deceitfull practise, and we being in no sumptuous expensive way, can afford our commodities at a better rate or better ware for money, whereby we reach the world (because they can get little) to keep within compass, instead whereof, they now dayly provoke and grieve poor people with their excess and riot.

In observance of the words of Christ to give to Cesar the thinges that are Cesars, we are to pay Taxes and tribute to the Magistrates, being in subjection under all humane Ordinances, which are not con∣trary to the will of god.

Such Tradesmen or Merchants that are honest, and cannot well pro∣vide for themselves, may timely (before they be necessitated to wronge any one) turn in to us.

Any honest persons, through sickness, want of trading, work or otherwise, being in poverty and debt, may be brought to rest, by ma∣king an agreement with their Creditors, if mercifull, or if unmercifull, to give them all they have, in full satisfaction.

A Family being united and conjoyned with us, and being come to be se••ed •n quiet, will make known their welfare to others, and men

perceiving that the profit and benefit is extended to the refreshing of the oppressed, among all Sects, will readily come to us, to buy com∣modities, and provision being made aforehand, all thinges will follow in order.

Any handycrafts men, or Tradesmen, may be in fear, (the business being not setled) to make a beginning, doubting that he removing from his particuler employment to this common society (by loosing some Customers) shall want a subsistance, but considering the opportu∣nity to have the custome of all those that dwell with him, is freed from that fear; neither doth any one stand singly by himself alone. Any by sickness or otherwise become indisposed, the rest (being uni∣ted as members of one body) shall work for him; and we being assured of one anothers faithfullness, shall exceed in love, all other Societies.

It is far otherwise with us than in Hospitalls of old men, and women, where they come in out of necessity (not being able otherwise to provide for themselves) for their own benefit onely, with their contentions, op∣position and deeply rooted Infirmiries, having oftentimes their bodies by hard labour spoiled and made decrepite, and their mindes corrup∣ted by evill manners, being many times besides a deep stupid ignorance, so ill natured, that no reason can sink into them.

Some handy Craftsmen as Smithes, Carpenters, and others, do under∣go often upon hope to attain ease from labour, 20. or 30. yeares all∣most intollerable labour, letting out their money to Interest, that it may increase; and sometimes loose principall and all, that they have so surely laboured for, or else come to dy, before they have given themselves to rest often leaving their estates to the destruction of their Children in the world, who in pleasure and voluptuousness do consume what the parents have gotten and gained with soe great labour, and sometimes it comes to such handes, which in their life time they grutched should have it, who after their death laugh at them for their labour, sometimes their Children and relations long for their death; and when they do live long enough to use their estates themselves, then oftentimes their bodies which they have spoiled with working, will suffer them to take no rest.

On the contrary, there will be no need in our Society, to take any care or to make provision for the aged time, or day of sickness, nor for children; for the aged will be better looked after then the young, the sick than the healthfull, and the children after the death of their parents, than before.

Any leaving their children in such a Society, doth better than if they left them much money, because they are under the eyes and inspection of many good people, and are sure of necessaries; whereas otherwise being brought up by others, are many times spoyled by their Parents Estates, being the fruits of their labours.

If any fall sick in our Society, he hath not only that which he stands in need of, but besides, he is freed from all worldly incumbra〈…〉, for all things being in order, all things are taken care of without him, on the contrary men commonly in the World are busied with their affairs, as long as they have understanding.

Some being healthfull, and able with their Trade or Merchandize to get more than others, are commonly not inclined to come into us, be∣cause they love their private gain more than the common good; but con∣sidering how soon their health may be lost, it will be reasonable for them, (without delay,) to desire such a wished estate and condition for themselves and families.

Covetousness, excesse, lying and deceit, together with all the evils that spring up out of riches, or poverty, will be excluded from us, who maintain equality, if any be minded to live disorderly in drunkeness, adultery, whoredom, &c. he can have no entertainment in our Society, neither will he be willing to come in to the company of the vertuous, for he that doth evil, hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, that his works may not be reproved, but who so doth the truth, cometh to the light, that it may be manifest, that his works are done in God.

Many finding no rest in their present estate and condition, and being wearied with all the differences in spirituall, as in worldly matters, will be ready to come in to us.

Some teachers being convinced of their perverting and erroneous teaching, would sincerely gain-say all falshood and errours, if they did but discern that there were an opportunity to get their living other∣wise, whereas now, being not strong enough to bear poverty and re∣proch, they remain in their old condition to the destruction of their souls.

Many young men and maides being wearied under the slavery and service of others, would for the ease of their bodies, and advantage or profit of their souls come in to us, whereas otherwise they are often times stired up, and provoked (by reason of hard, strict, severe Ma∣sters and Mistrisses) to wicked and desperate resolutions, either by marrying an unfit person, and so casting away themselves, or giving themselves up to some evil course, as we often see come to passe in the World.

The women in our Society having lost their Husbands, they and their children are cared for, whereas else dwelling by themselves, they are oftentimes forced (together with their little ones) to pass their lives in poverty and grief, sometimes receiving relief of the rich with re∣prochfull languages, to the increase of their grief, some being in the prime of their years are disregarded, but in our Society children (whe∣ther few or many) are no hinderance.

Those among us that desire to marry, will not so easily (having seen one anothers conversation) be deceived, as they are now in the World.

Young men and maides are forced oftentimes for want of opportu∣nity to pass their years in solitariness, contrary to their natures: This trouble will be taken away in our Society when they need not look after house or houshold stuff; but without care they may marry, if they can affect one another, doing their usuall work as before.

Parents when their children come to marry, are not disquieted to provide what is required for an houshold or trade, the fear, they should have no custom or work, cannot seize upon the children, so that they may the better live together in love, whereas else for want of custom or work they wish they had never been married yea sometimes that they had never been born, they cannot mind themselves and children as is fit, partly for want of time and partly for distraction of thoughts, so that the Parents with their children instead of joy and com∣fort, oftentimes do live in nothing but sadness and calamity.

Some husbands and wifes, instead of growing in love, and being loving, gentle and meek to their servants and children, do through too much care and vexation, fall into disorderly manner, they become murmuring one against another, whence commonly evil and wicked resolutions are begotten, the women living by themselves, are so tyed to their families, that they can go no whither with quietness, on the contrary in our Society we shall have opportunity for every thing.

The children are not to be taught any humane forms of Religion, but the writings of the Saints, and natural Arts, Sciences and Lan∣guages, that their understandings (before they have the use of reason) be not spoyled, as for the most part is done amongst all people and Nations in the World; on the contrary it is to be imprinted in them, that they ought not in spirituall matters to believe any but those that have the spirit of God, doing miracles as the Prophets, and Apostles, for our faith ought not to depend upon mens wordes, but upon the pow∣er (or wonderfull workes) of God: So doing there will be no foun∣dation for sects, factions, and schismes layd in their heartes.

There shall be built a great meeting place, not onely for our fami∣ly or Society, but also for all rationall men, round about with seates, rising one higher than another, that every one may be seen; having before them convenient leaning places, to read, and write upon; Al∣soe one desk on one side, or end, to read the holy Scripture, at a set time, giving liberty (after that reading) to every one to propound somewhat for mutuall edification, none being tyed (unless himself think fit) to anothers matter to follow, or gain-say it.

For in spirituall things, we acknowledg none but Christ for head and Master; Who of old hath appoynted in his Church Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers, these having through the spirit of God, (which led them into all truth) brought forth (and left behind them) the writings of the new Testament, we own for Embassadors, and their wordes (without any interpretations of men) for our rule and Plummet, keeping in remembrance when we meet together, that we must allow that liberty of speaking, to others, which we desire our selves, without tying any one to our opinion, maintaining a firm friendship with such, who have renounced all un∣reasonable thinges contrary to Scripture: without stumbling at any differences, which do not hinder love and piety: For our Children without doubt, will be of differing opinions, and yet no reason, when they do not hinder the common welfare; to exclude them from our Society. It ought also to be considered that the most differences (dwelling together) by time, and liberty of speaking, will cease to bee. The more, because with us, noe loss will be suffered, by the chan∣ging of our opinion; for the most part of the differences (in spirituall and worldly matters) arise from a consideration of a wordly advan∣tage, which if in the world abroad as in our Society were taken away, evill and false opinions would soon fall to the ground, but the Teach∣ers being Spirituall Captaines, would rather (as to the generallity) for there own profit have Wairs than peace in Christendome, and there∣fore they having made an incurable rent, do set people one against ano∣ther; which makes it appear that by nature the people are not at so great a distance, as they now appear to be, contrary to this we intend, that we may bring the good people out of all 〈…〉cts to 〈…〉ty, setting our meeting-place open to all rational men, strictly watching that Antichrist (who exalts himself above others) may be continu∣ally shut out by exactly observing that no preheminency nor sole pri∣viledge be granted to any, of offering any thing, or of speaking first, that so every one being at liberty, and unhindered may bring forth that which is most conducing to the common welfare, according to the words of Paul, 1. Cor. 14. 26. all of them sitting still so long after the reading of the Scripture (as being swift to hear and slow to speak) till any think it fit (in his juditious and humble mind) to propose any thing for edification, endeavouring withall to make his discourse short, that another may have his turn likewise, contrary to the custom of the common Teachers, who only (or solely) speaking, do lengthen their discourse, to the wearying of their Auditory, for which end the Mo∣derators (who ought to be meek and understanding men) are to observe, that there be due or∣der kept.

THe Reader may be pleased to remember, that such onely shall be received into our Society, or little commonwealth, as are ho∣nest, rationall, impartiall persons, and for others who are not so, they shall receive wages, for their work, and go to their own houses, or lodging places, till they are fitted and prepared to be members of our Society, which consist only of four sortes of people. viz

Husbandmen.
Marriners.
Masters of Arts and Sciences.
Usefull Handy Craft-people:
- Smiths of all sortes.
- Carpenters.
- Ship-Carpenters.
- Brick-makers.
- Brick-layere.
- Masons.
- Stone-Cutters.
- Brasiers.
- Pewterers.
- Plummers.
- Tin-men.
- Founders.
- Wheelwrightes.
- Millwrightes.
- Millars.
- Bakers.
- Brewers.
- Butchers.
- Stillars of strong wa∣ters.
- Tallow-Chandlers.
- Basket-makers.
- Brush-makers.
- Turners of all sortes.
- Instrument-makers.
- Ioyners.
- Weavers of all sortes.
- Fullers.
- Diers.
- Tanners.
- Curriers.
- Shoo-makers.
- Skinners.
- Glovers.
- Hat-makers.
- Woll-combers.
- Knitters.
- Rope-makers.
- Sayl-makers.
- Net-makers.
- Compass-makers.
- Paper-makers.
- Printers.
- Book-binders.
- Painters.
- Potters.
- Plate-workers.
- Ingravers.
- Wier-drawers.
- Pin-makers.
- Nodle-makers.
- Hooks and eyes ma∣kers.
- Looking-glass ma∣kers.
- Twisters.
- Taylors.
- Button-makers.
- Combe-makers.
- Coopers.
- Cutlers.
- Glass-makers.
- Glasiers.
- Glue-boylers.
- Sope-boylers.
- Sak-boylers.
- Sadlers.
- Sieve-makers.
- Spectacles-makers.
- Sheeremen.
- VVhitstars.
- VVatch-makers.
- Barbers.
- Chirurgeons.
- Phisitians. &c.

One Society being setled in order (as a nursery) about London, to imploy the poor, we may have a second about Bristoll, and another in Ireland, where we can have a great deal of Land for little money; and plenty of wood for building of Houses, Ships, and many other thinges.

AN INVITATION TO THE aforementioned SOCIETY or little COMMON-WEALTH: Shewing the excellency of the true Christian love, and the folly of all those who consider not to what end the Lord of Heaven and Earth hath created them.

MATT. 12. 50.Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in Heaven, the same is my Brother, and Sister, and Mother.
LONDON, Printed for G. C. at the sign of the Black-spread-eagle at the West∣end of Paul’s Church-yard.

An invitation to the aforementioned Society or little Common-wealth, &c.

THough men are bound one to another, upon several ac∣compts, and knit together with very streight bonds, and that the likeness either of manners, or of life and conver∣sation; or of parentage and education, begets a mutuall friendship between them, yet this is the most perfect, and of all others the most blessed; when God by the dispensation of his secret Counsell, joyned some such together, as do agree with his divine will, and with the rules of nature, and they will not exchange their union or fellowship for all the riches in the World.

But the more divine this state of friendship is, the seldomer it is seen amongst us, and the more is Sathan that enemie of mankind against it; who knows full well, that he hath not so much right or power to med∣dle with this holy fire, and the matter which maintaineth it, as he hath, where either recreation or advantage is only looked after, which kind of friendship he useth with very little trouble to dissolve; but in this way of amity God only is the bond, wherewith they are tyed together without being lyable to be unloosed, and upon which foundation being fixed, they resolve to withstand all aslault• whatsoever.

If then there be any felicity in the life of man, or any efficacious remedy to prevent his future miserie: I conceive nothing was ever more solacing or reviving and coming nearer to the divine nature than love, viz. true love, which doth so communicate it self in and to that wherewith it reciprocates, that it seems to have exchanged therewith, and made over thereto, whatsoever it did possess before, so that amongst true friends there is such an agreement, that no secret, no joy, no profit, nor any cross or affliction is undivided, but whatsoever be∣tides either of them, is no otherwise than if it were the change of one alone, so that death it self can scarce seperate soules, so totally united, certainly the Heathens, who in all thinges pursued that which they esteemed best, found nothing more excellent, and delightfull then per∣fect freindship.

But how far doth Christ excell all others in love, who by his Doctrine and example, hath instituted a partnership or Society of mutuall love; by the denomination of Brethren; Abollishing amongst his disciples, all preheminency, or domineering, of one, over another, requiring that the gifts, and meanes of subsistance in the world, (for necessity and delight) should be Common; having called his people to a moderation, and to a life suitable to pure nature, so that all Christendome ought to be meerly, a certain great fraternity con∣sisting of such as (having denyed the world and their own lustes) con∣spire together in Christ, the sole head and spring of love; doing well to one another, and for his sake distribute their goodes to those that stand in need.

Oh that we had this perfection? and were answerable to the end of our Creation; certainly there would not be such going to law; such intrenching and incroaching of the boundes of landes, such hiding, and close locking up of money, nor would there be such scraping together of superfluous estates.

Oh totall summ and highest pitch of all good? if any may be ad∣mitted and that in due time to this divine favour for even many decre∣pit aged persons do seldome attain to this; to be desirous to live after such a manner: Emperours, Kinges, Princes, &c. having spent all their yeares, all their strenght of body and soul, have little or no time left them, to serve a better master, than the world, and therefore if God do joyn some such together as endeavour after a life more regular then their former, each of them being at a losse for a Companion to better and promote his resolution, one to whom he may communicate his se∣crets, a freindly reprover of his Errors, a reclaimer of him from the worldes alurements, a comforter in adversity, a moderator of Ioy in prosperity, and in all respects a sharer in that which God hath libe∣rally given; and last of all one ready for all cases and conditions that may happen I say and judge, that these are the happiest of all persons that ever were upon the Earth. For as no painfuller or miserabler thing can be thought on, than that life which a man lives according to the course of this world, so nothing is more acceptable and lovely in the universe, then that harmony and concord, which hath its Origi∣nall from God, and influence upon the man, that is joyned with his fellow man, so agreeable to his mind; which certainly can be found, no where but there onely where a firm love, agreement and concer∣ning will in well doing, as also a liberall distribution and imparting, of all created thinges is entertained.

It is evident, that the most wise God, would honour the sacred socie∣ty of Matrimony, with the utmost perfection of this so great love; since they that are so joyned together and built upon the right founda∣tion, have not onely their Goodes, but also their joyes and griefes, common; And cannot be severed, by any kind of reproaches, or ma∣litious endeavours of the envious.

The world hath her delights in different degrees of Dignities, States, Titles, and offices; exalting themselves one above another; But Christ on the contrary will that every one shall perform his office as a member of one and the same body, In which no one exalteth it self, nor accounteth it self worthier than other, the eye is not puffed up be∣cause it sees; the foot is not grieved that it sees not: If any member in the body be blemished it is carefully covered by the other, if any be weak it is dilligently provided for by the rest, whereas on the contrary Every one in the world, which by his office or Title is differenced, from others Conceives he is quite another thing and in himself better than others and must be reputed, for one that is set together and com∣posed, of some finer substance, and designed to a sweeter life, yea to an higher place in heaven then others.

Now if you do but divest and strip the world of her Riches, Honours, and State; how naked, and refully forlorn will she remain, and how far different will she be found from that she seems to bee; and then it will be easy to beleave, that she is shored up by nothing ells but wormeten propps, which if they were once pulled away they would be fitted and made free for the imitation of Christ.

Do but see oh man! what kind of thinges they are, which do shut the door against true love; and hinder communion or fellowship with Christ viz. Nugatory, frivelous thinges and trifles which onely con∣sisteth in avain esteem and opinion, which some of the very Heathens who saw a little further than others, did oftentimes laugh at.

First Riches and Estates, which assoon as our Natures are satis∣fied, are alltogether superfluous, and very troublesome; the vanity

whereof who doth not see it they are a burthen to the rich, causing them to fill their houses with variety of costly furniture, which in ma∣ny years (or never) happens not to be usefull to them; they are a trouble to get them, a perplexity to keep them, and a grief to part with them; their houses are spacious and great, so that there is either much void and empty room within, or else they put themselves to a great deal of trouble and molestation in furnishing and filling them; Their cloths are so dainty and curious, that they cannot sit down any where with freedom, nor stand with ease, nor scarce walk any where without fear of spoyling their apparrel, and unless they have some to behold their splendor, all is little to them, but if they have spectators, they fear some will lurch, and others fi•ch away from them, their sleep is almost none, Oh how great a misery and burden is it to be laden with riches!

Secondly, honour and dignities, which if we measure according to the design of nature, and the rule of Christ, may not otherwise be distinguished than by several names or denominations of divers mem∣bers of one and the same body, the name of the tongue is that any more worthy name than the name of the finger, the name of the eye, is that more excellent than the name of the brest, no certainly, that whereby the members are differenced, doth not lift them up, as with us the name of Lord and Gentlemen puffeth up, and what else is it but a meer name, the vanity whereof who sees it not? the very foundation of it is nothing else but the noyse of the tongue, and the report of others, or the knee, or the hat, all fleeting and variable things that are to be bought for a very small matter, and yet we are often times so foolish, that though such things commonly come not from the heart, neither are fruits of an upright and sincere mind; nay when on the contrary our own mind do suggest to us, that there is I know not what kind of tacit derision in it, and doth often times signifie nothing else but hatred and ill will, yet we do delight in such trifles, and give way to them so far, that we will rather hear a lye from a notorious parasite or slatterer, if it be but on our side, then to hear the truth from an honest man if it cross our interest.

Do but now cast up thy account; Oh man! how dearly thou hast ventured to buy the friendship of the World, which yet thou never foundest to be thy friend, but feignedly and that for a spirt, on the con∣trary consider how little or almost nothing thou hast bestowed to an∣swer the love of God, who nevertheless would have been the most as∣sured, and most faithfull, and unchangeable friend.

Thou hast trimmed and decked thy body, and in apparrel thou hast been passing sumptuous, that some silly creature might gaze on thee with admiration: In feasts thou hast been prodigall that thy compani∣ons and associates might commend thee; thou hast distributed thy gifts and presents, that thou mayst seem liberal; thou hast put forth thy art and skill, that thou mayst be called and accounted learned; thou hast dawbed thy house with many colours, to cause them to stand still that pass by. In the mean time thy reward hath been nothing else but a great toyl, and the suddain uncomposed disagreeing and unreasonable. judgement and censure of other men; consider in the mean while, whe∣ther thou hast provoked God thereby, or honoured him, it is most cer∣tain that thou mightest have served God, and have performed the of∣fice of love to thy Neighbour, at a far cheaper rate, for by how much profuse & lavish thou hast been in the service of the World, by so much the more hast thou been partimonious and sparing in the service of God, for it is evident the World requires costly attendance, as to all her matters, being never solicitous of the heart, how it stands with that, if you be but carefull that nothing be wanting in outward appearance, in dissembling and complemental deportments; or if there be but ce∣remony and externall semblance, and fine shew enough, so that by the very aspect, it is plain that the slaves of the World may be discerned from the true servants of God; in as much as the first are movable, flexible, fickle and variable; but the latter have their eyes alwaies fixed upon the mark, which is set before them. If we but once bring our selves to the touch, and travel through the World with a free and pure mind; we shall be able to obtain so much from our selves, as in Chri∣stian simplicity, silence and unincumbredness to exclude the wisdom, eloquence and prudence of the World, concluding, (as in truth it is) that nothing is to be compared with our Master Christ, and that none other knows any thing or can give any counsell that is savingly profitable but he, nor shall we repute them happy who have no other character or superscription than the Worlds endowments, knowing that worldly knowledge is not so great a thing as it is commonly esteemed; foras∣much as under the title and disguise of learned, the very shame of be∣ing found ignorant doth with many inventions and cheating subterfu∣ges, endeavour the hiding of it self from being discovered to the eyes of the common people.

Shall we never be able to attain to that equal judgement in putting a true value upon reall vertue where so ever it be found, as well in a prince; and to leave of more to admire the ornaments of a Magi∣strate, than the office he sustaines, and esteeming less of poverty, than of superfluity, of the honour, then of the state, of a good conscience less then of a popular or vain applause, of a peice of bread, then of dilici∣ous dainties, of water then wine; of a green bink of Turf, then of a costly Couch, shall we not be able to arive to this, to esteem one only sentence of the holy Scriptures more, than the highest accuteness, of all the worlds Philosophy, we shall be able to do it, if we did well weigh, that the worldes turn, is but a short Comedy, and that we are but Actors, who appear no more than once upon the Stage: and if we did seriously consider, that all thinges are described, and represented to us in the world, far otherwise, than they are in themselves, but especial∣ly when we have well pondered, that honest and godly people, after a very little while are to expect, a participation and enjoyment, of another kind of honour and dignity, than any the world promi∣seth.

Shall we never be able to attain to this, to choose rather to lay up our estates in the hungry bellies of the poor, than in a few bags, to lay the foundation of our prayse upon the prayers of the poor to make the cross of Christ our glory, and not to eschew the disfavour of man, as the reward of our weldoing; in a word, to put of all desire of fame and re∣nown, as also to refer all desire of Revenge to the Iudgment of Christ, we shall be able to do all this if we forgetnot, that our God is the most faithfull of all Debtors, and the most sure of all securities if also we never forget, that his praise which shall be given to us, in the presence of men and Angells is the most glorious praise, and that his renumerations and recompences are the most noble, and everlasting.

To how happy an hour are we born, if we do enter upon this com∣munion or fellowship, and from how many vexations will it releaseus whereof the Heathens, having attained but a shaddow, how magnani∣mously did they in their mindes, sore alost above all Kinges and world∣ly glory; how did they despise all terrene affayres (as they that from above look down upon that which is below) and had pitty on them, and so did indeed a voyd the greatest miseries of mans life.

But since Christian Religion is come into the world it is a wonderfull thing to consider, what a light brake in together with it, viz. Such a light that all they whose hartes were touched therewith; throwing all from them, betook themselves to it for refuge, as to a true and sledfast liberty after a long and horrible captivity, easily forgetting their Riches, State, Rule and possession, forsaking Parents, Wife, Children, Relati∣ons and whatsoever before was most near and dear unto them, not be∣ing by any Temptations of Tyrants, to be drawn from the sweetness of the Christian life.

The same have appeared in the memory of our forefathers, when the bondes of Antichrist (it is strange to think how firm they were) were broken when they who a little before were forced to creep upon the ground, began to rise up, with what readiness, that Tyrannicall wor∣ship of Invocating so many deceased Saints, was rejected, and the un∣confined worship of God reentertained, and with what readiness that vain (though gainfull) fancy of Invocating Christ by so many Inter∣cessions came to nought; So that it appeares in all respectes, how much God hath Chalked out in nature it self, the pure and true wor∣ship, as also the amicable and freindly conversation of man, and like∣wise how easily those thinges which are contrary thereto perish, and come to nothing, and how far our Religion with draweth us from all theatricall or stageplay, gestures, and countenances, and all those trou∣blesome Ceremonies, wherewith we torture our selves, in speaking, ea∣ting, saluting, walking, cloathing, yea and in all the actions of our life: But on the contrary how conformable it maketh us, to the ce∣lestiall Hierarchy and naturall pollicy, and yet in these petty and alto∣gether childish thinges, men are so hard to be convinced, and drawn of from them, as if all their well being depended thereon; and the beati∣tude or happiness of all mankind, had all its foundation therein and never give so much scope to reason and well guided understanding, as either to acknowledg their vanity, or if it be known to them rather to throw it of, then to retayn and daily augment it, with new and exot∣tick bawbles.

Intruth as often as we do strictly ponder, to what end God the Creator and ruler of all thinges, hath brought every one of us into this great Fabrick of the world, and yet for us to ob∣serve. that the life of allmost all men is either unprofitable, idle, wicked, or hurtfull to mankind we have reason to be affrayd, and jelous of our selves, least peradven ure either by the Corruption of the times, or our education, we have applied our selves to some manner of life, which is not suiteable to the will of God, and the end of our Creation being not able to give a just accompt, wherein we have lived to the glo∣ry of God, and the advantage of mankind.

Certainly to have eaten, to have drank, to have slept, yea, to have read much, writ much, seen, heard and travelled much, and let this also be added, to have managed an Estate, to have kept hounds, horses and servants, to have had arts and learning in great esteem, to have trim∣med up houses, to have often made banquets, to have born Titles of Honour, to have collected many books together; in a word, to have been imployed, and very busie, to the uttermost, in things that do not relate or belong to Christ, let them be what they will: Certainly all that will ne〈…〉, satisfie God, nor endure the touth or tryall of the fire but being consumed as stubble, will leave man bare and naked, a male, factor, and guilty in the presence of God, for his lost time, and his∣neglect of friendship and union with God, together with the neglect of the endowments, as well of body, as of spirit, so that there will be an horrible distance between them, and those whose faith in God, and love to man, have been sted fast and firm.

Let us take heed bretheren, least those among us who either in under∣standing, learning, riches, beauty or arts, excell others, do conceit that God is therefore more gracious and favourable to them than others, and that they have attained to the best life, for such men do grossely deceive themselves, because the manner of Gods judgeing is quite dif∣ferent from that of the World, his eyes are quite other kind of eyes, and his pollicy differs from the Worlds pollicy, as much as Heaven from Earth, as one who choseth the unworthy; and dispised, rejecteth and abhorreth that which the World do highly esteem.

If any think this our Society or fellowship to be a new thing, so that he cannot (as it was in old time,) so much as poynt out five pair of such friends, he hath reason with me to lament, that while men do curiously, and with anxitie of mind, search into the other course of the Stars and Pla∣nets; the vertues of plants and vegetables, yea, into the very bowels of the Earth; yet they are so neglective of their Salvation, that they do not in the least so much as seek and look after that life, for which they would not need so much silver and gold, so many Titles of Honour, so many buildings, such clothes, so much furniture for their houses, so many messes and dishes at their meals, so many arms and ammunition, or warlike provisions, so many judgements or decrees of Law, so ma∣ny medicines, nor so many bookes, all which are causes of vast trouble; so that the men of the World themselves (if they were but wise) would auoid these occasions, or (as they themselves do confess) necessitys of sinning.

This Society or fellowship hath not alwaies been so rare, and so thin sowen, but was very rise in the primitive times, till the enemies of the first innocencie did insinuate themselves thereunto, whereby the life which men were bound to live, as in obedience to the Laws of Christ, began to be accounted such as a man may chose whether he would imbrace or no, and take up a meritorious and superoragatory life, comprising such a sanctimony or holyness as was more than necessary to Salvation, and was only to be used by such as desired a greater reward in Heaven than others; which opinion gave a beginning to many orders of lazie and wanton beasts, (I mean Monks and the like) and of many thousand fables and cheats, which things when men came to themselves, they did justly reject, and when they are grown wiser, they will again totally cast off. even those poor ones, who now scrape and take together the riches of the World; as also those (seeming) humble and lowly persons that now take up the high seats of the World, and such preten∣ded simple ones, who now fill and disturb the whole World with their cunning and deceit.

But for us let us hold fast that which is in this life, the best thing, viz. the universal love to Gods creation, and if we be insufferable to the World, and they be incorrigible, or unbette able, as to us, then let us reduce our friendship and society to a few in number, and maintain it in such places as are separate from other men, where we may with less impediment or hinderance, love one another, and mind the wonders of God, eating the bread we shall earn with our own hands, leaving no∣thing to the body, but what its nakedness, hunger, thirst, and wearyness calls for to help our necessity and health, then it will appear how many things we may well be without, what things we may refrain, and what kind of matters we ought not to know how many things we may avoid, in what things we may best quiet our selves, and how far easier we may satisfie Christ in his little ones with a penny, than the World with a pound.

For Princes are not born on purpose to reare up stately Palaces, the Learned are not born for the writing of many unprofitable, and for the most part frivolous Books; the rich are not born to boast of their gold, silver, and christal vessels; the rest of the people are not born for so many various unprofitable Handy-crafts; In a word, mankind is not born, for so many kinds of education, of being rich, and running into excess, but all these racks of the mind, it hath invented of it self, and now made a custom and habittual, so that it hath made the life more grievous, to it self every day, under so many painfull and labour∣some inventions.

Now I would that they that stand and admire, at the fine wits of our age, and the sublime learning of our times; did but consider with me, whether those thinges which daily please our eyes, with their no∣velty; be indeed such, for which we may justly rejoyce or whether on the contrary, it were not much better, since they are the cause of so ma∣ny griefes, and troubles in mans life, that we were wished and advised, by our learned men, to put them away far from us.

For what greater fruit of wisdome, or what greater glory of the new revived learning, could their possibly be, then by that to bring humane matters to such aposture, that we may attribute our well being, and fe∣licity, in this life, to them under God, that by the whole some in∣struction thereof, that which is superfluous, useless and unnecessary, might be thrown away, and that which is Nugatory, trifling and un∣profitable might be cut of, and that we might truely be distinguished, from the life of the Barbarous and savage people, not by bookes, nor by Titles of honour, nor by universitys but by such morrality as Christian Philosophy doth prescribe.

Let there come forth from the Studdies, and libraries, of our wise∣men, into the light, not a continuation, or prosecution of old Errours; or an heaping up of new to the old but on the contrary, a rule or di∣rection, for a new and reformed life in Christ, which may demonstrate, that as we are professors of the best Religion, we are also imitators of the best life; then shall we return to their Society or fellowship, and be subject to their good lawes, and Orders; and observe their rationall customes.

In the mean time, let them not take it ill, that we do not make any great accompt, of these Sciences that are voyd of Christ; that we do not desire to know them, and if we have drunk in any such, yet we de∣sire to unlearn them, and with singleness of hart, to become as Chil∣dren, who are altogether unacquainted, with voluptuousness, ceremo∣nies, Riches, and foolish labour, hence forward we desire to live tow∣ards God in unincumbredness, voyd of carking for the multiplicity of su∣pernecessary thinges, exercising a delight, in reall equallity, & for the rest acknowledg Christ onely, for our Lord and Master, and in this School of his, we hope that neither divine misteries, nor secrets of nature, nor the contemplation of rare matters, shall be wanting to us, since he so merly hath made it evident by the example of his Apostles and 〈…〉∣ly men, how powerfull he is in teaching, and then especially he dis∣playeth his riches, and openeth his unexhaustible treasures, when hu∣mane wisdom ceased, and the skill of the World melteth a way.

But that we now are so weak, and that the strength of our Religion is grown so faint with us, that the Majesty of the divine presence, with the miraculous working is removed from us, whom shall we accuse for this, but our selves, who in the midst of the divine light, have scarce retained any more than the bare name, being content if we may but be called Christians, as to the rest being altogether like to the World; so that it is no mervail that we who do not excell others in the pursuit of honest actions, as Justice, Mercy, and the propagation of the name of Christ, nor in the education of children; do not also in the least go beyond them in those gifts which were peculiar, to upright and zealous Christians, and yet we ought in so clear a light of the Gospel, as we have to be so far distinguished, as to excell other men, so that if others do not commit Adulrery, we should not so much as desire another mans wife, if they do not commit Murther, we should not at all be angry with our brother; if they love them that are like to them, we should love our enemies, if they do lend to those that have to give again, we should lend to those from whom we cannot hope to receive any thing again: For it becometh us who hope for the inheritance of an eternall fe, in all things to go beyond those that know only this present life. But if nevertheless we be found beneath these, or if we are found but like to them, and no more, how much will their accusation presse us down, and condemne us to the like, yea, to a more grievous punishment.

Let us look back to the former ages, and it will appear that the di∣vine power was then most of all vigorous and eminent, when there was not such ostentation of fine wits, but the supream knowledge and hap∣piness then was placed in the Crosse of Christ; but now while mat∣ters go quite otherwise, and the creatures of our brain do obumbrate, or over shaddow and obscure the works of God, we do things according to the will and pleasure of Sathan, who being the most subtile of all Phylosophers, Logitians and Artists, is not affraid of us, if we go his way, and by that occasion he insinuateth himself more and more into us, and glideth in by means of such things which we most admire.

Do not you see Brethren, that by the goodness and long suffring of God, It is in our hand and power, now we have tasted, of the bitter∣ness 〈◊〉 worlds pleasure to rid our selves, of very〈…〉•y troubles〈…〉 going on by a way that is not crooked, and rugged, but straight and smooth, tending to the true •est, and highest pith of 〈◊〉〈…〉ctions by applying our selves to this Communion or Society, 〈◊〉〈◊〉 we have made mention, which suffereth no pride, Riot, excosiveness, in∣〈…〉e, or any evills, which have been pourtrayed in their 〈◊〉〈…〉ve col∣loures, from which Society no man that professeth the name 〈◊〉 Christ, and practiseth his doctrine, is exclutted of what fect party of by what name so•ver he is called or known.

We desire therefore, that all who love their own peace and welfare, will consider of our Order or instition, which is propounded for a ge∣nerall rule 〈◊〉 For we Judge it to be, not onely a true opposition to all evill, but also a meanes to rid the world, of all unprofitable, and hurt∣full handy Crafts, being the cause of sin and slavery. To which we hope that God who is the Husband of Widdows, and a Father of the Fatherless, will vouchsafe his blessing, through Jesus Christ, that so the pure and uncorrupted, worship (which consistes more in well doing, then in much speaking) may break forth to the glory of his holy name and the good of all mankind.

If any have a desire to speak with him who is instru∣mentall in the promoting of so good a work; may have knowledg of his residence by in quiring of the Book sel∣ler noted in the title page.

FINIS.

A Letter written in order to the now mentioned Society or little Common-wealth; By some well affected persons, whose hearts and hands have already joyned therein: to stir up all such who are truely sensible of the poor and needy, to carry on this so necessary and charitable a work.

HAving not only considered the poverty, afflictions and streights of many well minded people; Together with the evil consequences that arise from the corrupt customs and waies of most employments, and the general disorder proceeding from riches and poverty: But also the way propounded by the endea∣vours of our friend Peter Cornelius; to rectifie all such and many other inconveniences, by bringing together a fit, suitable and well qualified people into one Houshold government or little Common-wealth, wherein every one may keep his propriety, and be employed in some work or other as he shall be fit, without being oppressed, as is more at large expressed in a Platform to that pur∣pose.

Whereupon we are resolved, judgeing it to be necessary, and our duty to promote so good and pious a work, with the assistance of other mercifull and rational men, to lay such a foundation, as may tend to the relief of the oppressed, the preserving of such as are in danger of falling into snares, and the increase of un∣derstanding and mutuall love, as also the exemplary ordering of such acts as may be accomplished by prudential charity.

And hereunto we do earnestly invite all Persons that have a willing mind to do good according to their abilities; some by their Wisdom and Councell, others by money and credit, or by both, as they shall be able and free, that so a stock may be raised for the carrying on of this good and beneficial work.

To which end we have subscribed our names, and the summs of money which we are willing to give. Hoping that all such as are for so general a work, will upon due consideration like∣wise subscribe for such a summe of money as they are willing to give towards the accomplishment of the Premisses, and meet together to confer and order the said summes of moneys into the hands of some trusty Persons for the use and benefit of the So∣ciety only, and what else shall be found conducing to the per∣fecting of this work, till the Society can subsist of it self in order, which we believe may soon be from the credible infor∣mation of divers persons, relating that many hundreds in Transilvania, Hungaria, and the Paltsgraves Countrey, from a small beginning have attained, not only to a very comfortable life among themselves, but also ability of doing much good to others, not of their Society.

39. The Problem with Nonprofits

Deleted reason: no anarchist word

Subtitle: Adapted from Another Slice

Author: Another Slice

Authors: J

Topics: industrial complex, nonprofits, capitalism, activism

Date: 09/26/2020

Date Published on T@L: 2023-04-07T08:29:36

Source: youtube.com

The problem with nonprofits

Adapted from Another Slice

What is the Non Profit Industrial Complex?

In 1961, Republican president Dwight Eisinhower used the term “Military Industrial Complex” in a farewell address to the American people. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex.” After Eisenhower coined the term “Industrial Complex” in 1961, it didn’t get used a whole lot outside of a handful of academic publications until Angela Davis adopted it to introduce the concept of the Prison Industrial Complex in 1996, which eventually inspired Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow,” which inspired Avid Duverney’s now extremely well known documentary titled “13^th.”

An Industrial Complex is when one for-profit industry successfully develops an interlocking, interdependent systems of institutions that serve to maintain profits for that industry. Everyone involved needs for that industry to keep growing profits indefinitely because they all now depend on those profits for their own institutions to survive.

For the Military Industrial Complex, it starts with companies needing to make and sell more weapons every year to maximize profit, which results in interlocking relationships between the military, department of defense, construction companies, steel manufacturers, engineering firms, political lobbying consultants, etc. Same goes with the prison industrial complex, but instead of selling weapons it’s about building prisons, keeping those prisons full, making sure there’s always a highly criminalized population to put into those prisons, and contracting out to corporations, who compete to access prisoners as a cheap source of labor.

So on the concept of the nonprofit industrial complex, at first, it probably seems nonsensical, because if an industrial complex is defined primarily by for-profit industries endless need for more profit, to the point where it’s going to establish a system of interdependency across tons of other institutions to sustain their ability to make more profit, how the hell could nonprofits ever fit into such a thing?

In 2004, a collection of essays were published in an anthology called “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex” by a group called INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. INCITE! defined the Non Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) as a system of relationships between the state (local and federal governments), the owning classes, foundations, and social service/social justice focused nonprofit organizations. This system of relationships results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and every day management of political movements. They go on to say that the state uses nonprofits to monitor and control social justice movements, divert public monies into private hands through foundations, manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism, redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society, allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work, encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than challenge them.

To translate this into a way that working class people can understand and apply into our daily lives, here’s why the concept of the NPIC is so relevant. As of 2015, the nonprofit sector had become 10% of the American workforce, and is now the 3^rd largest employment sector in the United States. To put that into perspective, here are a few non profits that you might be familiar with: Ikea, Direct Relief, Feed the Children, Harvard University, Sustainable Economies Law Center, National Policy Institute, Best Friends Animal Society, Kaiser Hospital, Greenpeace, Smithsonian Institute, Blue Cross insurance Company, the Brode Museum, Food and Water Watch, PragerU, Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, Feeding America, the NFL (prior to 2015), The Salvation army, and the NRA.

All a nonprofit is, is an organization that the IRS allows not to pay federal income taxes because it determines that the organization provides some kind of public benefit. If you and your friends wanted to start one, all you’d have to do is form a group and call it a board, develop bylaws, and write a group purpose called a mission and submit the proper forms to the IRS. The National Policy Institute went through these steps, and the president of their board is Richard Spencer, an infamous neo-fascist Nazi. In their 2016 tax forms, they reported over $300,000 in revenue. And while I’m sure most nonprofit presidents aren’t Nazis, the system of nonprofits creates a platform for white supremacists to fund each other.

Most people would consider nonprofits-- volunteering at one, or donating at one-- as “good.” But as we’ve discussed here, how Richard Spencer is the president of a white supremacist nonprofit, and that Ikea is a nonprofit, shows that most people don’t really know about nonprofits. That’s not to say all nonprofits are bad, in fact the most prevalent nonprofits found in all 50 states are focused on medical help, education, or public services, but they still are not, in basic terms, “good.”

Nonprofit Hospitals and Universities

On the national council of nonprofits website, they have a graphic that points out that only 2.9% of funding within the nonprofit sector comes from foundations, and how the majority comes from private fees for services, or when someone pays out of pocket for some kind of service. In their report, they elaborate on what that means.

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The nonprofit sector brings in $1.1 trillion in revenue per year, nearly half of that revenue goes to nonprofit hospitals and universities in the form of heart surgeries and college tuition (which are the two industries that are almost universally guaranteed throughout the entire industrial world except the United states, one of the richest countries in the world).

Medical doctor and activist Niran Al-agba writes in their op-ed, The Fairy Tale of a Non-Profit Hospital, “non-profit hospitals have higher profit margins than most for-profit hospitals after accounting for their tax obligations.” To break this down for you, Hospital A makes $1M per year, and pays lots of taxes. Hospital B also makes $1M per year and pays no taxes. Both hospitals provide the same services for the same price, but the non-profit hospital makes more end of the year revenue than the for profit hospital. Al-agba goes on, “62% of US hospitals are nonprofit, and therefore tax exempt. They pay no property tax, federal or state income tax, and no sales tax. An article published in health affairs found 7 of the nation’s 10 most profitable hospitals were of the nonprofit variety, each earning more than $163 million in patient care services.” Al-Agba later cites a London school of economics study that state’s “Not-for-profit hospitals don’t price any less aggressively than for-profits. We subsidize nonprofits to the tune of $30 billion annually in tax exemptions. We have to ask what that money is getting us.”

The industry standard for the healthcare sector due to corporatization over the last few decades, so hospitals will argue that CEOs for their hospitals require millions of dollars in compensation due to that industry standard. Any hospital board that chooses not to pay the millions will find that the executive will just work at a different, better paying hospital, not to mention that upper management has a closer relationship to nonprofit boards than other workers, so the executive voices carry more weight. They have collective bargaining…

Dean Harrison, Memorial Hermann Health CEO in Chicago, IL

$10 Million a year

Gregory Adams, Kaiser CEO in Oakland, CA

$11 Million a year

Joseph Impicciche, Ascension St. Louis CEO in St. Louis, MO

$13 Million a year

Charles Stokes, Memorial Hermann Health CEO in Houston, TX

$18 Million a year

Peter Fine, Banner Health CEO in Phoenix, AZ

$21 Million a year

One thing to consider is how people continue to die from a lack of health insurance because people like these listed above make sure that the nonprofit hospital lobby successfully pressures congress to keep the cost of care high, and actively fight against medicare for all. A lot of people are being harmed by nonprofit hospitals because they don’t pay taxes and spend so much money on executive compensation instead. The political advocacy arm of the hospital industry commonly referred to as the hospital lobby, consistently fights to keep healthcare costs higher than they need to be in the name of profit. In 2018, a coalition comprised of big pharma, insurance companies, and the hospital industry spent a total of $143 million to put a stop to medicare for all becoming a mainstream policy platform within the democratic party establishment.

However, most workers do provide charity care, which is healthcare provided to people who can’t afford it for free. However, as far back as 2004, there were some big class-action lawsuits against 13 nonprofit hospital groups for going after uninsured patients who couldn’t pay their hospital bills, so for working class folks it’s a bit of a dice roll; on one hand, the nonprofit hospital might help you for free, on the other hand, they might send debt collectors, lawyers, and ultimately the cops to your door. The class action lawsuits were almost 20 years ago, however nonprofit hospitals continue to sue poor patients who can’t pay, resulting in many having to file for bankruptcy (medical bills account for 2/3rds of bankruptcies in the US).

The George Washington University’s school of business says the difference between for profit and nonprofit hospitals are “for profit hospitals tend to serve lower income populations, while nonprofit hospitals tend to be located in communities with less poverty, higher incomes, and fewer uninsured patients.” George Washington University is also a nonprofit, with their president, Thomas LeBlanc makes over $800,000 per year, which is not much compared to his counterparts.

Slate.com did a series called the Slate 90 in 2015 on the multibillion-dollar nonprofit sector which included some focus on nonprofit universities. As you can see, nonprofit universities bring in tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year. Slate focused mainly on Harvard since it was the top earner in 2015, and in particular its business school. The kinds of people who got advanced business degrees from this program include CEOs of companies like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Boeing, Enron, General Motors, etc. People like Mike Bloomberg, George Bush, Steve Bannon, and LL Cool J.

Harvard’s function has always been to uphold our inherently exploitative, racist, unsustainable economic and political system, and recently they’re putting famous black entertainers outfront in their marketing efforts by inviting them to these four day business classes, giving them certificates that say harvard on them, and putting out press releases to generate headlines-- woke nonprofit capitalism.

Harvard as a nonprofit university rakes in tens of billions of dollars but doesn’t pay taxes because it “does something good.” The issue goes back to the question: why are these universities nonprofits? Remember the national council of nonprofits talking about how it’s only a myth that foundations give a lot of money to nonprofits, and that the majority of nonprofit funding comes from fees for service. This narrative obfuscates the fact that the vast majority of nonprofit funding is either from rich people paying for shit they can easily afford or poor people going into massive amounts of debt and quite often resulting in financial ruin to pay for necessary services such as healthcare and education. The ones who profit from such economic injustice tend to be the same business elites who pass through nonprofit universities, and because the system works so well for them and the multimillionaires running the so-called nonprofit healthcare industry, they fight to keep the system intact. They could, of course, be “doing something good” by making sure the US guarantees healthcare and higher education to all of its citizens, but that’s not what they’re interested in because it wouldn’t be profitable.

Capitalist Workplace Structures

You may have seen in the news in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that healthcare workers in california, particularly within the non profit hospital system Kaiser went on numerous strikes. The typical non profit organizational structure today exactly resembles capitalist corporate structures. They’re top down and authoritarian, not bottom up and democratic. There are exceptions but very, very few. Within these workplaces, a CEO tells everyone what to do and the board typically sides with the CEO. Upper management gets paid a lot of money and they don’t want to lose that money, so they’ll go along with the CEO, even if they disagree. Within these structures, the more money you make, the more power you have to keep that amount of money because of your place within the structure. The more raises you’ll get (because your voice carries more weight with the board) and the more you’re able to make it look as if your work is more valuable than everyone’s work below you within this structure, once you’re higher within rank, you can begin to abuse in subtle or overt ways that power by talking down to, gaslighting, and coercing workers to love you, knowing workers of lower rank are generally fearful of speaking up and typically don’t know their rights and usually aren’t organized and therefore aren’t prepared to even know how to fight back, even if they wanted to. Employees within these nonprofit firms sign at-will employment contracts just like in for profit firms, which gives employers the right to fire them for almost any reason they want. This workplace model is sometimes referred to as “workplace authoritarianism” as opposed to “workplace democracy.” Authoritarianism is just when one person has all the power and authority, democracy is when the majority get to decide. Examples of workplace democracy include labor unions and worker cooperatives. But nonprofit management hates unions as much as for profit management does. This is because the democratic nature of how unions operate threatens workplace authoritarianism and non profits tend to love workplace authoritarianism.

The good news is more and more nonprofit workers these days are unionizing. But let’s remember that non profit leadership can never and will never lead this effort or support it. It’s the workers within the nonprofits doing this. At first, secretly, behind nonprofit managements back, until a majority is reached and they go public despite management not wanting them to. At this point, in most cases, management wages a little war against the majority of workers trying to get them to stop trying to have control over the direction of their work.

However, even in these circumstances, management can oppose recognition of a union. Nonprofit managers and executives pay themselves a lot more than the frontline workers, and a union may result in demands for higher wages which may result in the top of the structure having to cut their own salaries. But the deeper reason has to do with power. People with more power just tend not to give it up without a fight. While we most comfortably talk about this, these days, in the context of historical racism and sexism, like racism wouldn’t end unless there was a war to stop it, women couldn’t get the right to vote until they were throwing molotov cocktails at cops in the streets in 1910, this principle applies within authoritarian managerial nonprofit structures due to the capitalist logic they’ve all adopted within the past 40 to 50 years. Which leads us to another problem, which is not only that nonprofits oppose unions and democracy in the workplace, but they depend on the inequalities produced by capitalism to the point where the worse the divide between the rich and poor becomes, the better the nonprofit sector does.

Good Allies! (to inequality)

Let’s make the case that the nonprofit sector, as a whole, does better when the gap between the haves and the have-nots gets worse. The best way to understand this is to first start with workplace income inequality, and copy paste that workplace throughout society. Let’s briefly view what the capitalist workplace structure looks like.

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It’s a pyramid. At the top, you have the owner. In the middle, you have some managers, and at the bottom you have workers. Workers typically make up the majority but since the capitalist workplace is anti-democratic, they don’t get a right to vote on anything. Consequently, they get paid the least, and part of the reason for this is because the less they get paid, the more money the owner makes in profit. Managers typically get paid more than the workers because they help the owners keep the workers more productive, converting more of the workers labor into dollars that move up the pyramid and to the owner’s pockets.

This is a blueprint for economic inequality. The owner likely owns a nice house in a nice area. The managers live a decent life, and the workers who are the majority struggle to get by. When we copy and paste this one single pyramidal structure thousands of times over, now we have the entire capitalist economy. The 1% v the 99%

For those of you who haven’t become leftists of some kind, you might think “well, that’s just how workplaces are! That’s how economies are. That’s just the way it is.” But in the US alone, the gap of inequality between rich and poor has actually changed drastically over the last century.

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The red line is the rich and the blue line is the poor. In the “neoliberal” era starting around the 1980’s, the rich got richer, and the bottom 50% of earners in the US got poorer. Compared to western europe, things stayed almost the same over the same period. Something significant is going on in the US.

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One of many interesting features about this era in the US is something that emerged called the “productivity-wage gap.” Wages stayed about the same for workers when adjusted for inflation, but their productivity rose dramatically. Productivity is the financial output a worker produces, also known as profit. So under capitalism, only management and board shareholders can decide what happens to profit, not workers. So within the last 40 years in particular, workers have produced far more profit for their bosses through their work than they ever did before, yet still get paid the same wage.

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There are reasons economists explain the productivity-wage gap, but one of the most significant has to do with the fact that union membership decreased significantly during this era. But not because workers wanted weaker unions, but because CEOs and management made sure that workers could not create successful collective bargaining agreements. The main strategies the people on top used were large donations to politicians in exchange for anti-union legislation, and outsourcing jobs to countries with no unions or labor laws, not to mention a massive propaganda effort that got millions and millions of Americans to start thinking that unions were crooks and associated with communism. When workers are unionized, they act as checks and balances against the top level management who typically hoards all the profits at the expense of the workers. As attacks on unions during this neoliberal era intensified, those checks and balances were removed.

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During the period between the 1970’s to 2015, nonprofit revenue skyrocketed. Worker income went down, but worker productivity went up. Union memberships went down, and owner profits went up. At this same time, nonprofit revenue skyrocketed. To be fair, however, correlation is not the same as causation. However, Writers such as Anand Giridharadas, Linsey McGoey, Rob Reich and others have made the case that the rise of private philanthropy and income inequality are related. But let’s go further and say that the nonprofit sector’s growth as a whole is also related to income inequality.

First, foundations. As the rich got richer, many of them stashed billions of dollars of wealth into foundations. This was wealth that was amassed from tax cuts on the rich, decimation of unions, outsourcing, the widening of the productivity-wage gap, and so on. Foundations themselves are also registered with the IRS as non profit organizations, and so the growth of foundations alone accounts for some degree of the growth in the sector. If you weren’t aware, foundations are basically private investment firms that avoid having to pay taxes as long as they donate at least 5% of their investments into nonprofits.

Second, austerity. Social services related to healthcare, education, housing, and so on, were cut drastically based on the neoliberal theory that the market will solve those problems. The nonprofit sector would become the perfect vehicle to test this theory, becoming an entire ecosystem of social services that would receive voluntary funding from people out of pocket, from insurance company reimbursement, private foundations, and government grants and contracts. As worker protections rapidly eroded, more and more people needed more and more services. The nonprofit sector became a vehicle for “helping” and was shaped over the last 50 years into a more and more corporatized, professionalized, business-like sector of the economy.

The mainstream understanding of the nonprofit sector and its growth in this period is that people just want to be good people and help each other. But, as we’ve seen, climate change, police violence, more nuclear weapons than there ever have been, the private prison industry is thriving, student loan debt is higher than it’s ever been, human cultures are going extinct, medical debt is consistently on the rise while minimum wages aren’t meeting rent requirements, gentrification has worsened in every major city in America, normalized mass shooting, uptick in suicide rates, Flint, Michigain still has no clean water, and we are currently in what biologists call “the 6^th extinction.”

If the nonprofit sector as a whole really is making the world a better place, why is it that nearly every economic, environmental, and social issue is far worse than it’s ever been? The nonprofit sector cannot possibly continue to grow unless the problems they are looking to solve continue to worsen. The worse racism gets, the more racial justice nonprofits spring up. The worse child abuse gets, the more money is going to pour into nonprofit child abuse treatment clinics. The more domestic violence we see in any given city, the more we see donations given to any nonprofit domestic violence shelter. foundations and governing bodies will respond to these problems by allocating portions of funding which nonprofits can compete for by rapidly filling out grant applications so each competing nonprofit can attempt to expand services. The nonprofit sector isn’t a non-capitalist or external-to-capitalism entity, it’s survival depends on the inequalities built to the capitalist market in order to meet the “demand” these problems generate throughout society.

Lets say there’s some evidence that suggests that a variety of social problems very much are caused by economic inequality, and that studies show that child abuse rates are higher in regions with lower minimum wage, that domestic violence rates are higher in relationships where there is more financial instability, and that police violence occurs at much higher rates in poorer areas. If these studies exist (and they do, cited in sources) wouldn’t we come to the conclusion that many of these problems have roots within economic inequality itself, so we should try to combat those problems of economic inequality?

Because nonprofits are structured like capitalist workspaces, should we expect the nonprofit sector as a whole to advocate for solutions to the problems they tackle, like strong and militant labor unions, ending the productivity-wage gap, and taxing billionaires into non-existence? No. If nonprofits do anything that seems radical and appears more political than professional, they risk losing that tax exempt status.

Social Services, not social change

In the anthology of essays referenced earlier, “The Revolution will Not Be Funded: beyond the non-profit industrial complex” by INCITE! One of the essays featured in it titled “social service or social change” by Paul Kivel, discusses the difference between social service and change. Here’s an excerpt from his opening paragraph.

“My first answer to the question in the title is that we need both, of course. We need to provide services for those most in need, for those trying to survive, for those barely making it. We need to work for social change so that we create a society in which our institutions and organizations are equitable and just and all people are safe, adequately fed, adequately housed, well educated, able to work at safe, decent jobs, and able to participate in the decisions that affect their lives.

Although the title of this article may be misleading in contrasting social service provision and social change work, the two do not necessarily go together easily and in many instances do not go together at all. There are some groups working for social change that are providing social service; there are many more groups providing social services that are not working for social change. In fact, many social service agencies may be intentionally or inadvertently working to maintain the status quo.”

To illustrate the point made, in 1852 when there were 1.5 million slaves in America, “drapetomania” was coined and diagnosed, where slaves had a desire to leave the plantation, or were seen as lazy or emotionally distressed. A group of southern leaders consisting of plantation owners, politicians, etc. formed a nonprofit board called the “F.R.E.E” initiative, which provided services for mediation, counseling and psychiatric services, medical care, etc. While they are challenging a social problem with social services, the nonprofit didn’t join the abolition movement, which would have solved this social problem with actual social change.

Erika Cole Arenas refines the distinction between social services/social change and frames it as self-determination/self-help, which was a difference she noted in the 1960’s farm workers movement after it began to receive funding from the owning class. Megan Ming Francis focuses on a different historical movement, the movement for black lives, and how the NAACP’s founding and demands for radical change shifted after receiving funding from the owning class as well, what she calls “movement capture.”

Movement Capture

INCITE! had an experience they discussed in their collection of essays. In 2004, INCITE! received an email from the Ford foundation with the subject line “Congratulations” and an offer of a one year or two year grant of $100,000 to cover their operating expenses. They committed to two major projects after receiving the funding. Then, unexpectedly, on july 30^th, 2004, the Ford foundation sent another letter explaining that it had reversed its decision because of the organization’s statement of support for the palestinian liberation struggle.

INCITE! Realized from this experience that there are some serious consequences for social movements when they rely on foundation funding. Let’s say those $100,000 would cover two full time organizing positions. Those jobs rely on that funding, and in an economy that relies on having an income, the foundation’s power to give you or take away your job, and if you’re passionate about that job’s social impacts, you’re more likely to do whatever the foundation funders tell you to say or not say.

Erika Cole Arenas, as stated before, talks about the effect funders can have to shape the direction of a social movement. In her research of the migrant farmers movement, one of her case studies was on Cesar Chevez, who fought to organize farm workers in California and Florida. He and Dolores Huerta co-founded the national farmers association which employed traditional labor-focused tactics such as boycotts and strikes to help farm workers get their needs and demands met. The movement for farmworker rights became more militant throughout the 1960’s with both successes and failures but the emphasis was rooted in a radical vision that workers should have the most say when it comes to the work they do, the land they work on, etc.

Such radicalism of vision and militancy of tactics made foundation funders increasingly uncomfortable so by 1970, after Chavez and others decided to form a 501(c)3 nonprofit, called the national farm workers service center. Tons of funding poured in. Why? Because the service center focused on things like housing for farmworker families, education for their children, and healthcare services. Over time, the radicalism and militancy of the movement died down. One thing to take away from this is when your movements’ most militant and inspiring leaders give up on radical demands because they won’t be funded and shift towards shuffling paperwork around in order to tend to nonprofit managerial duties, there is just no way for such a radical vision to become realized.

Movement capture is the term used to describe this phenomena; foundations and philanthropists using funding as a means to superficially embrace social movements giving activists and their organizations more money and full-time activist jobs to then redirect and shape those very movements in whatever form those funders would prefer to see. This is to point out how funders aren’t comfortable with a radical approach within a movement, and so won’t fund that approach, but will fund less radical approaches which shifts the direction of that entire movement. Francis mainly focuses this argument on the behavior of the NAACP in the early 1900’s, drawing on economic theories of regulatory and state capture.

The NAACP was made in 1909 with it’s top priority being to stop lynching, which was a widespread issue, but realized they needed money to sustain their movement, and funders had shifted their direction from anti lynching to the desegregation of schools, a problem they saw as easier to tackle. The focus on education sidelined concerns of criminal procedure, siphoned resources away from the campaign around workers’ economic rights, and undermined the concerns of black labor.

Professionalism

The first known use of the word professionalism was used in the year 1856 in The Culture of Professionalism by Burton J. Bledstein. The way they dressed, acted, and accessories were rooted in the Victorian era and carried on until the present day, mainly as a way to differentiate the classes and make professionalism the higher living standard.

When we think of what isn’t considered professional in workplaces, such as tattoos, dreadlocks, casual clothing, fragrant foods, it becomes clear that professionalism is a class based form of codeswitching, and rooted in white supremacy. It’s main purpose is for you to lie about your economic status as a way to differentiate yourself from working class, poor people. The arguments for professionalism in the nonprofit sector is basically reliability, people conducting themselves ethically, people taking professionals more seriously, however this need to professionalize did not come from the nonprofit workers of volunteers, or from the communities they serve, but from capitalists.

The culture of professionalism, however, has three key side effects on nonprofit social justice movements. The first is depoliticization. As discussed earlier, certain political stances can risk a nonprofit to lose funding. The second is cost. Professionals can only become professionals if they have degrees, certifications, license, etc. which can be inaccessible, as those who can be professional either have to have wealth to begin with or run themselves into debt to receive those certifications. The third is psychology. The largest damage the professionalism of the sector did was to transform ordinary people’s psychology where people began to see themselves as helpless, and that professionals in nonprofits would be helpful, which is a very disempowering way for non-professionals to think of themselves (though this is mainly due to neoliberalism).

Success Stories

Nonprofit success stories are basically testimonials about the success of particular nonprofit programs, in basic terms, nonprofit marketing made to emotionally appeal to foundations and other donors. The thing is, however, nonprofits fail more often than they succeed, however due to professionalism, nonprofits feel the need to create the appearance of only doing things the right way. With a lot of situations, workers would have to craft language for the board and donors based on what they wanted to hear, rather than the way the workers would see how management would make decisions that would make the workers and clients lives harder, along with socioeconomic forces that would worsen situations.

The 501(c)3 model of organizing, as discussed before, is a charity model, which depends on economic inequality. You need a helping population and a helpless population. In other words, the success stories that nonprofits rely on are needed to reinforce the power imbalances that keep people in a position of disempowerment.

The criminalization and medicalization of violence

In INSITE!’s collection of essays, Ana Clarisa Rojas Durazo writes in “we were never meant to survive,” she writes: “the criminalization of domestic violence created a dual advantage for the state: the perpetrator became the sole party responsible for the violence against women while the state positioned itself against the perpetrator and thereby as an ally of battered women.”

One big thing that came out of the women’s movement in the 1960’s and second wave feminism was the so-called battered women’s movement. The phrase “battered women” is no longer popular but whenever you see or hear about a rape crisis center or domestic violence shelter for women, such places exist because of the battered women’s movement. As the movement advanced through the 1970’s-80’s, more shelters and centers were formed all over the US, incorporated as 501(c)3 nonprofits. Consequently, they needed to find funding to sustain their operations.

Durazo writes in her essay, “Federal funding to address violence against women was a key strategy to align the antiviolence movement with the criminalization project.” She explains how the evolution of the feminist movement intending to protect women from violent men came to grow parallel to the extent to which the state would offer funding to these shelters and centers. This parallel between nonprofits and the state’s apparent need to build more prisons and lock up more men (and of course disproportionately men of color) sort of crescendoed in the 1990’s with the violence against women act.

“The act provided $1.6 billion toward investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women, imposed automatic and mandatory restitution on those convicted, and allowed civil redress in cases prosecutors chose to leave un-prosecuted. The act also established the Office on Violence Against Women within the department of justice. VAWA I and II merged in policy the interests of the state- to criminalize society, populate the cheap labor force of the prison industrial complex, manage the nations shifting racial demographics (specifically, a declining white population) by quarantining more people of color in prison and deflecting attention from its role in the production and reproduction of domestic violence- with the interest of the anti-violence movement. To affirm and structure this merger, the VAWA created the US office on violence against women and housed it in the department of justice, the federal arm of the PIC. Thus federal funding has entrenched the ideology of the criminalization of violence against women, doling out billions of dollars of funding. “

In simple terms, the women’s movement in the nonprofit anti-violence sub-sector, whether on purpose or not, helped to grow the prison industrial complex into what it is today in the name of punishing bad men for hurting good women. In Danielle Sered’s book, Until We Recon, she breaks down the four basic goals of incarceration. First is deterrence, which is making violent men not do it again (evidence shows that incarceration doesn’t achieve this). The second goal is rehabilitation, which is to teach people a lesson to make them better (evidence shows that incarceration doesn’t achieve this goal). The third goal is incapacitation, or to force the violent person not to hurt people while incarcerated (which promotes prisoners to hurt each other instead, a goal not achieved). The fourth goal is retribution, which is to make the violent person suffer proportionally to the violence they did because that makes it fair (this doesn’t work out either). In summation, the incarceration of violent men doesn’t make society safer, but instead makes it much less safe.

Durazo continues, “Through policy, ideology, and the NPIC, the state began to break into pieces the radical social justice agenda of the movement against women. First, by prohibiting nonprofits from engaging in “politics,” it separated interpersonal violence against women from state-based, economic, and institutional violence against women. This individualization of violence excluded the experiences of women of color surviving the multiple forms of state violence.

“Then the state splintered anti-sexual assault work from the movement to end domestic violence, while sertain state-based forms of sexual assault were kept out of the discourse of violence against women (for example, militarized and prison sexual assults, militarized border rapes, and sterilization and other population control practices.

“At first, women doing anti violence work sought tax-exempt status for shelters. But the price of achieving non-profit status became obvious early on as organizers were taunted with lesbian-bating and misogynist jokes- and as funders demanded of the institution certain policies and practices, including professionalization. Soon, funders were expressing their preference for degree-bearing professionals instead of community organizers; organizations were expected to have hierarchical structures; and therapeutic social services were funded over popular education work.

Ideologically, violence against women became more and more a behavioral, criminal, and medical phenomenon rather than a social justice issue. When violence against women is understood this way, interventions and attempts at prevention are overly reliant on therapy and the courts-- an individualized method of intervention that fails to address and combat the social organization of violence against women.”

What’s the point?

I think Duraso and others who wrote the INSITE! anthology and those still critical of the nonprofit industrial complex overall would argue that socialism just makes more sense than nonprofitism when it comes to addressing gender based violence, and every other social problem . The reason is if the capital we have floating around in service of more investment and more profit and more competition for more profit were converted into universal healthcare, childcare, education, and housing programs, the conditions that give rise to things like gendered violence would be addressed and likely be less institutionalized state-sanctioned violence.

Sources and References

Military Industrial Complex

en.wikipedia.org

Prison Industrial Complex

en.wikipedia.org

New Jim Crow

en.wikipedia.org

13^th

en.wikipedia.org)

INCITE! Beyond The Nonprofit Industrial Complex:

files.libcom.org

New Report: Nonprofits—America’s Third Largest Workforce

www.developmentguild.com

National Policy Institute 990 tax forms:

projects.propublica.org

Myths about nonprofits:

www.councilofnonprofits.org

www.nonprofitimpactmatters.org

The Fairy Tale Of A Nonprofit Hospital:

thehealthcareblog.com

Docs Get Tiny Raises While Nonprofit Healthcare CEOs Get Over $10M

www.medscape.com

Top U.S. “Non-Profit” Hospitals & CEOs Are Racking Up Huge Profits

www.forbes.com

How Non-Profit Hospitals Are Driving Up The Cost Of Health Care

www.npr.org

Big Pharma, insurers, hospitals team up to kill Medicare for All

www.opensecrets.org

Class actions filed against non-profit hospitals

www.keanmiller.com

Thousands of Poor Patients Face Lawsuits From Nonprofit Hospitals That Trap Them in Debt

www.propublica.org

Illness, medical bills linked to nearly two-thirds of bankruptcies: Harvard study

pnhp.org

Profit vs. Nonprofit Hospital Administration

healthcaremba.gwu.edu

How Harvard certificates and a publishing company are key to HBS’s prosperity.

slate.com

LL Cool J is a Harvard grad

www.bostonglobe.com

NUHW Strike on Kaiser, Oakland 12/20/19

www.youtube.com

SPLC won’t recognize union:

www.montgomeryadvertiser.com

Nonprofit Professional Employees Union

npeu.org

Workers are forming unions at nonprofits and think tanks. Their bosses aren’t always happy.

www.washingtonpost.com

Progressives In The Streets, Union Busters In The Sheets:

organizing.work

Book: Democracy At Work: A Cure For Capitalism by Richard Wolff

One chart that shows how much worse income inequality is in America than Europe

www.vox.com

The gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has increased dramatically since 1979

www.epi.org

As union membership has fallen, the top 10 percent have been getting a larger share of income

www.epi.org

Another Slice made that nonprofit revenue growth graph based on raw census data from 1975, 1995, and 2015, but can’t find the raw data sources now (sorry). If you want you can probably Google around for this stuff though. Year 1975, $128,650.00; year 1995, $617,089.00; year 2015, $1,730,000,000,000.00.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (Anand Giridharadas)

Bill Gates & the Price of Philanthropy (Prof. Linsey McGoey)

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Rob Reich)

Foundations Have a Not-So-Charitable Secret

www.yesmagazine.org

Nonprofit Human-Service Organizations, Social Rights, and Advocacy in a Neoliberal Welfare State

luskin.ucla.edu

One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?

www.nationalgeographic.com

Chipotle CEO Got $33.5M in 2018

www.restaurantbusinessonline.com

Child abuse has a relationship to economic inequality:

www.sciencedirect.com

Domestic violence has a relationship to economic inequality:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Police brutality has a relationship to economic inequality:

ajph.aphapublications.org

Social Service or Social Change? Who Benefits from your Work by Paul Kivel

paulkivel.com

Why The Super Rich Won’t Save The World

www.youtube.com

The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

How Philanthropy Diverts Social Movements

www.niskanencenter.org

The Self-Help Myth How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty

www.ucpress.edu

Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America

www.amazon.com

How to Be Both:Negotiating Professionalism and Activism in the Nonprofit Sector

scholarship.tricolib.brynmawr.edu

40. Whoring Out Our Trauma

Deleted reason: no anarchist word, anarchy, anarchism. looks interesting, but not specifically anarchist it seems

Subtitle: Prostitution and Sexual Abuse

Author: Jack Parker

Topics: sex work

Date: 1/3/23

Source: Retrieved on 1^st March 2023 from https://jacksurviveswhoring.wordpress.com/2023/03/01/whoring-out-our-trauma/

Contents

Chapter One: Weaponization of Our Stories 2

Chapter Two: How I Started 7

Chapter Three: Frequency of Assault 15

Chapter Four: Big vs “Little” Assault 20

Chapter Five: Review Forums 26

Chapter Six: Morality of Being a Client 31

Chapter Seven: Constantly Changing Feelings 36

Chapter Eight: Childhood Abuse 40

Chapter Nine: The Obsession with Trafficking 46

Chapter Ten: Lust for Arrest 54

Chapter Eleven: Feminism and Whorephobia 60

Chapter Twelve: What’s More Traumatic? 64

Chapter Thirteen: The Weird Stuff 69

Chapter Fourteen: Sharing in Private 73

Chapter Fifteen: Porn Trauma and Trauma Porn 78

Chapter Sixteen: Those Queers 86

Chapter Seventeen: The Happy Hooker Myth 93

Chapter Eighteen: Prostitutes’ Feelings 98

Chapter Nineteen: Whorearchy and Speaking Up 105

Acknowledgements 109

Bibliography 110

Weaponization of Our Stories

As sex workers, before ever discussing our trauma publicly, we are forced to consider how it will be received and how it will be used. There are a number of groups who would use our stories of abuse against us to campaign for legislation which would only compound our suffering. This means that even if we overcome every barrier to speaking up, we are still ultimately left with the question of whether our honesty will be used to fearmonger and turn the public against us.

For those who are involved in prostitution specifically, especially in countries where it is criminalized in full or in part, speaking about any of our experiences can lead to serious consequences. We may lose other jobs, families, friends, housing, or face severe harassment. When we are dealing with these severe consequences and such a high risk, the benefits to speaking out need to be large enough to outweigh them. That, or we must reach a breaking point where we can no longer keep silent either way.

Every time someone speaks up about their negative experiences whilst selling sex, there are people waiting to use those stories to argue that sex work should be banned in some manner to protect others from the same thing. There is a fault with this premise; a ban does not make a practice disappear. Criminalizing some element of a practice and enforcing that requires surveillance of those engaging in it to conduct arrests, which in the case of prostitution makes it more dangerous and not less. Despite this being simple to explain, sex workers are rarely given the platform or space to do so, and thus our suffering can be used as propaganda to prop up this sort of flawed argument.

There are many groups who will use our stories to garner support for various types of criminalization of prostitution or the banning of porn or various other harmful legislative approaches. Some are sex worker exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs) whilst others are more typical conservatives who oppose many sexual freedoms and do not respect the right to bodily autonomy. Conservatives are more likely to argue that prostitution should be illegal in its entirety, meaning it is illegal to both sell and to buy sex as well as all associated behaviours like soliciting and brothel-keeping. Radical feminists are more likely to argue for legal models such as the Nordic Model, which criminalizes the buying of sex but not the sale and includes various laws against brothels and profiting from someone else’s prostitution. Regardless of the specific legal model being advocated for, all of these groups engage in the weaponization of sex workers’ trauma.

Any account of being raped whilst selling sex is used as evidence that clients are violent and that people who buy sex do so with the intent of sexually assaulting vulnerable workers (the focus usually being on women). Any account of being trafficked is framed by those who are anti sex work as being representative of the situation of most sex workers. Any account of mistreatment by managers and brothel owners is treated as proof that working in a brothel is inherently more dangerous than selling sex outside of one and is used to argue that brothels should be illegal.

In any profession, it is possible to find examples of people being abused. Human trafficking is rampant in the agricultural industry, and yet we do not presume that all farmers are forced into their line of work. Although videos of fruit-pickers may sometimes go viral with captions about the low pay, the focus is generally on how they are under-compensated for difficult work rather than how traumatized they may be as a result of their circumstances. The average working class person can relate to being poorly compensated for their work, even if not to the extreme extent of those who are trafficked, and so public conversation regarding the issue focuses on activating that empathy. The disgust for sex workers selling sex creates a barrier to this form of empathy from people who are mired in anti-prostitution stigma.

I know of no-one who is working class who has never been mistreated by a boss. Admittedly the dangers within the sex industry are more severe than in most, and the rates of abuse are higher, but a high rate of abuse is not itself an argument for making elements of the industry illegal. Brothel managers are able to get away with abusing their workers precisely because brothels are illegal in most places and so sex workers have no recourse to challenge them. Having another person who provides the premises in which a person sells sex makes them more vulnerable to certain types of exploitation, but a third party is not necessary for a premises to be considered a brothel. Two sex workers selling sex from the same house is enough to have the place considered to be a brothel, and in that scenario there is only increased safety from working together and no possibility of an abusive manager added. A ban on brothels makes it illegal for sex workers to group together for safety, as well as criminalizing brothels owned by a third party who may exploit their workers.

The arguments used by conservatives or SWERFs for some level of criminalization of prostitution are flimsy at best. People are taken in by their arguments anyway, all across the political spectrum, because prostitution is highly stigmatized and the average person knows too little to refute them. Often all they need to be convinced that prostitution should be banned, since they won’t be inclined to think about the practicalities of how such a ban would (fail to be) enforced, is a story about abuse that sufficiently horrifies them.

Not every sex worker is mindful of how their words might be used against us all. Some begin to discuss their experiences before realizing how many people have bad intentions, others are angry about what they have suffered and take the position that they wish to punish abusive clients at any cost and may even become SWERFs themselves, and some simply take the position that the truth is what is most important and intend to push back against however their words are twisted. It is unfair to say that any current or former prostitute should feel obligated to censor themselves, though it is also unfair to think that the way some people share their experiences may have negative impacts on those of us who are still living through such issues currently.

Prostitutes are often vulnerable people who can be manipulated into sharing more than they would ideally wish to. The promise of money or support can be immensely convincing even if we are already aware of how our testimony will be used in the long-term.

Among the multitude of approaches to discussing the sale of sex, one is to tell stories with heavy caveats throughout. Every time I recount an experience I have in sex work, it is interspersed with mentions of how the event would have been more traumatic or led to arrest under a different legal model. Any time that criminalization increased the danger I was in during a situation whilst selling sex, I will note it. Out of fear that people will use my trauma to support approaches to prostitution which would only be detrimental, I tie myself up in knots arguing with some imagined version of those who might try to use my words to harm me before I even finish speaking or writing them. Always being on the defensive limits a person’s ability to express themselves and that cannot be the solution that sex workers default to. I cannot feel free to express myself if I am stuck playing self-defense due to how someone else will weaponize my story.

Abusers will sometimes weaponize their own trauma or mental health issues against victims on a smaller scale, through threatening suicide or harm to themselves if a victim leaves or speaks against them. Using trauma in this way is something sex workers are accused of doing, alongside accusations that we are only pretending to be struggling and are secretly much more privileged than we present ourselves to be. An activist points out that sex workers are often killed as a result of laws which ban the sale or purchase of sex and they are called a manipulator for it.

On a national or global scale, weaponizing trauma does not occur in the same way. The experiences of sex workers are used by organisations, rather than a person using their own, and the stories are meant to give people an excuse to crack down on prostitution and pornography. It’s not about provoking guilt from politicians so that they do something, it’s about winning over the public so they don’t complain about sex workers being further oppressed by the law.

Unlike a threat from a partner that they’ll commit suicide if you leave, which seeks to use guilt and concern to keep a partner engaged and tolerating mistreatment, the testimony of a prostitute who has been raped and coerced is used to make the public look the other way. Calls to action may seem to be given, with the request to support certain legislation, but in practice this simply means citizens are told not to oppose it. They are fed the stories of sex workers’ trauma, which they simultaneously want to hear more about and also to look away from, and told that all they need to do is allow the government to crack down on crime to make it all go away.

Sex sells and so do stories of sexual abuse. There’s a reason tales of trauma that incite a morbid fascination in people are so often called “trauma porn”.

How I Started

I started selling sex in a manner that would have made me a very convenient poster child for anti-prostitution movements. I was 17, homeless, started on a site without age verification, and met with clients who were far older than me whom I did not wish to sleep with but was ultimately coerced into sexual relationships with for money. At the time, I had not yet begun transitioning and had not even accepted that I was trans to myself. From an outside perspective, and according to UK law, I was an underage girl who was a victim of sex trafficking.

Rather than giving extensive caveats as I usually would, I will recount things as they truly occurred:

After an incident of domestic violence towards myself in my home, at 17, I became homeless. I stayed with friends and sofa-surfed from place to place. Unlike most people in my situation, I was lucky enough to have a noteworthy amount of money in savings and a full-time job. That amount dwindled quickly. I did not have a high level of financial literacy and my mental health was incredibly poor. I had been admitted to a psychiatric unit briefly the year before and being suddenly cut off from my family meant that I was spiraling out of control. Soon after leaving home I could not cope with keeping my full time job, at which I was only paid £3.87 an hour as the minimum wage at the time for my age group, and so I quit. Around this time, I began to joke about the idea of getting a “sugar daddy” to pay for things on my behalf so that I could afford to survive in the long-term whilst I waited for the council to house me.

I found out that the wait list was over a year long for someone in my situation to be housed. I signed up to a sugar dating website. I did not intend to sell sex when I signed up. Whilst I liked the thrill of being somewhat associated with the sex industry, because it was cool and taboo to me, I didn’t want any of the stigma to actually stick and I did not have a positive opinion of sex workers. Some friends expressed concern and I brushed them off by telling them that my intent was to scam old men.

After a couple of weeks of responding to occasional messages through my profile but never following through, I stumbled across a man who we’ll call “G”. G’s profile made it clear that he was not looking for sex but that he did want someone who made good eye candy. He positioned himself as similar to a mentor and spoke eloquently about being well-traveled and looking for someone to spend time with. Once I viewed G’s profile, he received a notification telling him that I had and he decided to message me. We spoke and he flirted and asked about meeting. I expressed nervousness and told him that I wasn’t sure about it because I was still relatively new to the site, and so he suggested that we swap phone numbers first. He asked me to send him a picture to prove who I was, and then offered to pay me if I sent him pictures that included nudity. My profile stated that I was over 18 and he assured me that his desire to see naked pictures of me was not any indication that he wanted sex, just that he wanted to see me. He offered me £70 for 3 pictures and I sent them.

I was immensely naive. When he claimed he wanted to just see pictures of me, and that he wouldn’t want sex in person, I believed him. He was in his early 70s and I saw him as a harmless old man. I really felt like I was the one scamming him, that I’d made £70 for almost no effort and that I could make so much more money from him without having to actually engage in prostitution as long as I created a little sexual fantasy for him. With the proof that he was real and was so willing to send me money, I agreed to meet him in person.

G asked me to meet him at a specific train station and I agreed. I vividly remember how terrified I was. It was early spring and I was trying to convince myself that I was shaking so badly because it was cold rather than because I was frightened. I arrived early and paced around, refreshing our conversation on my phone and opening and closing chats I had with different friends. I thought about leaving and going home and kept telling myself that I needed to see it through because I’d already spent money on my train ticket and I needed to secure some sort of income.

It got to the time I was supposed to meet him, and I spotted G. I felt like I was going to be sick and my body was giving me every indication that I was afraid and wanted to leave but I kept trying to override it. I hugged G quickly and he immediately commented that I seemed scared and that I had no need to be. I brushed him off with an excuse about it being cold out, when he noticed how I was shaking. He repeated several times that I had no need to fear him, asking me repeatedly if I really was okay, even as he put a hand around my waist and guided me towards where he’d decided to take me for lunch. I kept repeating that I was doing great and tried to make small talk, convincing myself more with every repetition.

We went to lunch. We ate. G made a joke about something I’d ordered being an aphrodisiac, which I made myself laugh in response to. Our waitress seemed deeply worried about me and kept making eye contact with me after she left our table and asked me if I was alright. G kept saying how lucky he was to be there with me and I ordered myself a couple of glasses of wine at his insistence. No-one IDed me, likely because he was so authoritative and so much older and seemed so sure of himself when he suggested I order it in front of our waitress. I imagine that she didn’t want to believe I could be only 17, given how apparent it was that he was paying me to be there.

Towards the end of the meal, he slid an envelope across to me with £210 inside of it. He didn’t state exactly how much it was when he handed it over, just that it was some money to show he was serious about a “long-term financial arrangement” between us and that he wanted to take care of me. With the money in my hands, I’d calmed down from my frozen and panicked state, especially given how the wine had loosened me up. At 17, I really didn’t have much of a tolerance for alcohol. He asked me to come with him to the second part of our date, to the London Eye.

We got into a taxi to go there and as he was walking around to the other side whilst I sat on my end of the taxi I quickly looked inside the envelope to count the cash. I dropped the envelope into my backpack as he opened the door, for some reason embarrassed at the idea that he might see me counting it. I felt pleasantly tipsy from the wine and now knew I’d earned over £200 just from letting his man buy me dinner. I thought I’d effectively convinced some old man to give me money I did almost nothing for.

On the London Eye, when we got to the top and were discussing my financial situation and how much money I’d need from him each month, he urged me to walk over to the rail at the edge right by the glass. There were other people around us, none paying any real attention to us. We were still talking as I stepped up to the railing looking out, and he pressed up behind me and thrust his hips against me to make it clear he had an erection. At that time in my life, I thought I was a lesbian, and I’d never felt an erection before. I was frozen in place, felt all of the blood drain out of me and had to fight the urge to be sick. He was actively grinding against me, slowly, with his coat open so that it concealed the way he was rubbing against me. As he did this, he told me he wanted me to take my profile down from the website so that he could see me exclusively. He promised me he’d take care of all my financial needs. I agreed, tried several times to make excuses for us to go and sit down, and eventually our circuit of the London Eye finished and we exited it.

I desperately wanted to just go home at this stage. Suddenly G seemed terrifying again, and I didn’t want to upset him or make him angry. We took a short walk until I said I needed to get home soon because my friend would be worried, and he put us in a taxi. Whilst we were in it, he put his hand up my skirt and molested me. I remember being furious with myself because I’d worn leggings originally because of the cold but had decided to take them off because I thought they looked childish. As if I’d asked for it, by not wearing them.

When we got out of the taxi, near the station, he pulled me into an alleyway that was blocked off for some construction work and undid his trousers to expose himself. Again, I froze, and he physically grabbed my hand to place it on his genitals to get himself off. I was unable to say anything the entire time, he touched me some more whilst I cringed away, until he was finished and tucked himself back into his trousers. At no point did I verbalize “no”. I froze completely and I just wanted it to be over and to get away from him and was scared I’d make him angry.

I got on a train and went home.

He messaged me after and I ignored it at first. I told no-one what had happened and I kept looking at the money and feeling sick. I couldn’t bring myself to pay it into the bank so I kept it at the bottom of my backpack. My friend who I was staying with knew I had met a “sugar daddy” and I lied and told her it went well and that I’d been paid well.

After a few days, G suggested I go with him to see a show. He told me he’d have to leave right after, but that he thought I’d enjoy it, and then asked for my bank details to send the first installment of my “allowance”. It was hundreds of pounds. I went to the show and when I got there I told him I was 17. I remember feeling guilty that he’d assaulted me not knowing I was under 18, and thinking I was in the wrong for that, but then he told me he’d suspected from the beginning that I was younger than 18 and didn’t mind. I didn’t yet view what he’d done as assault, and so I didn’t blame him for it — I felt that since I hadn’t said no, since I hadn’t run away, that it was perfectly reasonable for him not to have realized I didn’t want to. Given that the show was an opportunity for me to get more money with no chance of sex happening, I went.

He held my hand a lot during the musical we watched but didn’t touch me sexually at all. I drank a lot of wine to cope. I went home safely and he sent even more money to my bank.

My meetings with G after that followed a pattern, in hindsight. We’d have a date where he’d do nothing sexual at all, get me into my comfort zone, and would imply the next date would be the same. Then, on the date after, he’d reveal he had a hotel room booked and would take me there in between two planned events and would tell me he wanted to touch me. The first time, I told him outright that I didn’t want to have sex, and he agreed that we wouldn’t and told me to lay on the bed. Then he took off my underwear and touched me for a while, whilst I laid there and cried silently, and afterwards went on about how it made sense that I didn’t want “sex” meaning specifically penetration because I must be worried about pregnancy or not be ready to give up my virginity, but that he was glad I was willing to do as much as I had. In hindsight, I can obviously see that he said those things to get into my head and make me feel like it was my fault he’d assaulted me and that I hadn’t been clear enough. When it happened, I told myself it was my fault because I hadn’t actually said no when he started touching me and that he’d misunderstood what I meant by “sex”… as if my crying and cringing away from his touch wasn’t enough.

He assaulted me many times, gradually escalating. I’ll spare you the details of every instance. Each time, I told myself that the next time I’d do things differently so that it wouldn’t end up happening. The money kept coming in, and I needed it because I’d spent all my savings. I was convinced that if I said and did the right things that I could keep him interested and keep earning money without having to have any sexual contact with him. Ultimately, he’d manipulate or trick me into it. Once, in the middle of him touching me while I was crying, I was saying over and over in my head that I just needed to ask him to stop and I could stop it. I was furious with myself that I couldn’t make the word come out. Finally I made myself say it, and he didn’t stop and I went quiet again. After, I bizarrely convinced myself that he somehow hadn’t heard me.

Mid-way through seeing him, I started to meet other “sugar daddies”. I’d only make it to the first or second date, get a little money from them and a free meal and drinks and then stop replying. I didn’t have sex with any of them, and kissed a few. I certainly flirted sexually with them, behaving in ways that I now recognize as being hypersexuality caused by my rapidly developing PTSD from my time with G.

Towards the end of seeing G, I’d regularly block out or “forget” that he’d assaulted me at all. I’d only think about it and remember as we were in a taxi to a hotel room at the end of the night when I’d start shaking uncontrollably. On the last occasion where that happened, G assured me over and over that we would only sleep and that he wouldn’t touch me that night. In the morning, he assaulted me by forcing his dick into my mouth unexpectedly which he had never done before, and I sat on the bed in shock. He couldn’t finish and ended up doing so in the bathroom, into a handkerchief, then came out and showed it to me and apologized. I thought he was apologizing for the assault at first, which was surreal, but in hindsight I think even more strangely he was apologizing for not having been able to stay hard in front of me. More concerned about the fragility of his erection that the fact he’d assaulted me. I blamed myself because he’d said in the taxi home that he didn’t expect sex that night and I felt I should have known that meant he expected it in the morning.

Over the months we saw each other, where we met at least once a week, he paid me around £1000 per month. I couldn’t admit to myself that what I was doing would be classified as prostitution, and certainly had no idea that it would legally be classified as sex trafficking.

Ultimately, I was able to get past the mental block of denying that I was being abused when I heard from a friend who knew I was seeing G that one of her classmates had met with G and he’d forcibly kissed her and she was horrified by it. I confronted G and he told me that he’d wanted to surprise me with someone to have sex with in front of him, because he knew I liked girls. He admitted he intentionally selected someone who seemed underage from her profile. I realized that’s what he’d done with me. He showed me dozens of profiles of girls he’d talked to, him estimating their ages as between 15 and 17. I got him to leave the current girl alone, citing the mutual friend as a reason it’d be awkward, but he was persistent about finding me a girl to sleep with.

It took a short time to process and then I was able to accept that G had been abusing me. I viewed him as a monster. My disgust was so extreme, now that I’d admitted it to myself, that I kept making excuses about being ill to keep the money coming in without seeing him or I’d fake an emergency near the end of our dates to avoid a hotel with him. G tried to reel me back in, putting me in a group chat with a girl who he wanted to see me with that he’d met already. He was paying her a small allowance. I told her everything, the first time I confessed having been raped, and she relayed it all back to G. I denied it when G asked me about it, but the damage was done and I realized I could no longer keep getting money from him this way, so I got my last allowance and then cut him off and expressed my horror at the abuse he’d put me through and him trying to do so to these girls.

I saw several “sugar daddies” shortly after this, many of whom I had sex with. I intended to have sex with them before I arrived on the date and I did so with the understanding that it was expected for me to earn an allowance. After a few of these, I was given housing, and I immediately stopped.

These events caused me severe PTSD. I can picture a world in which I would never have viewed myself as a sex worker, especially if I had not seen clients other than G, where I might have presumed that my experiences were universal in sex work and would have wanted it banned. As many survivors of sexual assault do in the aftermath of abuse, I had violent fantasies about harming G and a desire to see him punished. The idea of it being illegal to buy sex would have been appealing to me, if it had occurred to me at all, because I would have seen it as a way to have him punished since the actual rape case I eventually opened against him a year later was ultimately dismissed.

In reality, buying sex from under-18s was already illegal when this occurred, and it did me no good when I reported the man who assaulted me to the police. Reporting the rape made me so much more traumatized, from how the police mocked me to how they commented on other cases and claimed people frequently lied. I see no solution to be brought forth via policing when the police are one of the groups most responsible for traumatizing sex workers in the first place.

When sex workers are assaulted by clients it is not wrong on the basis that money was involved, it is wrong on the basis that it is assault.

Frequency of Assault

When you disclose that you are traumatized, you are seen as less capable of assessing your own situation with regards to abuse. As someone who has been raped multiple times in my life, and who has suffered many more assaults of varying degrees of severity, I am seen as incapable of objectivity regarding the subject. I would say that no-one is capable of being objective regarding these issues in the first place, and that I find the idea that only people who haven’t experienced rape could be able to understand and analyze it to be laughable.

To create a narrative that sex work is inherently harmful, it is common for conservatives or Nordic Model advocates or Christian rescue groups to quote statistics showing incredibly high rates of sexual assault against prostitutes. Some will go as far as to argue that any paid sex is inherently rape, on the basis that money negates consent entirely. If they argue that all sex workers are victims of assault, following that they can argue that a history of being assaulted means our views on the topic will be inherently flawed.

I have frequently seen claims that 82% of prostitutes are assaulted whilst working or that 68% of us are raped, sometimes sourced but often not — the source of this claim is a study comprised of a series of interviews of 130 prostitutes in San Francisco from 19981. The experiences of a tiny subset of sex workers in one geographical location cannot be generalized to all sex workers. As a highly stigmatized population, we must also consider who is likely to agree to be interviewed and why, and whether or not this gives us an accurate picture of the overall circumstances of prostitutes. Groups like Exodus Cry reference this in various articles, both for the figures of the rates of abuse and also to claim the vast majority of sex workers wish to exit. No acknowledgment is made of how this data is flawed.

It is common for singular studies to be generalized partially because large-scale data on sex workers’ experiences is lacking, and because it is relatively easy to find survey and interview data from specific regions with incredibly high rates of sexual violence. One particularly egregious way in which this data is used is when people reference a study of 1,000 cis and trans women in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which found that over 90% of prostitutes had been raped within the last year2. These figures are incredibly high and shocking, and included very high rates of gang rape in particular, with over 30% of cis women having been gang raped by police specifically within the last year. When so much of the rape being experienced by these workers is coming from the police themselves, the idea that this data could be used to argue that the criminalization of the buying of sex would resolve it is ludicrous. The law is enforced by police, it is not a magical barrier, and if the police are the ones enacting abuse then a change in the laws they control the enforcement of will not protect sex workers.

Rape is notoriously under-reported. The more marginalized a person is, the less likely they are to trust the police and to report being assaulted, and so we certainly can’t rely on the number of incidents that are reported to the police to be an accurate measure of the rate of assault. Some studies can give us fairly accurate counts for the rate of assault in a given region, like the one in Phnom Penh where sex workers were recruited to find other sex workers and they attempted to reach people with a range of experiences. Still, there will always be a selection bias introduced through the places people are recruited. If those interviewed are all street sex workers and brothel workers and not people who escort independently from a premises, then that will skew the figures. Anyone who claims to know the precise rate of assault sex workers face overall is either naive or actively lying. We simply don’t have good enough data.

Often the way risk of assault is assessed in a study is by asking whether or not a sex worker has been raped or sexually assaulted in a set period of time or in their lifetime. I have never found a study that calculates the risk of rape per encounter, between selling sex and a casual sexual encounter for a non sex worker. A significant number of people in the broader population have been victims of sexual assault in their lifetime, but the amount who have been assaulted within the last year is practically always recorded as lower than for sex workers specifically. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (March 2021) estimated that 2.2% of adults had experienced a sexual assault in the last year whether attempted or completed3. In a lifetime according to the same survey, 22.9% of women had been assaulted between the ages of 16 and 74 and so had 4.7% of men. Whilst these figures are also subject to concerns about the rate being underreported, there is no reason to imagine that underreporting would be more severe than for sex workers, and so rates of 50% of outdoor sex workers experiencing client violence within the past 6 months and 81% having experienced it ever are huge in comparison as well as when viewed in isolation4. This is even taking into account the small sample sizes of such studies and the issues with their methodology.

One thing I do not see considered often enough, and which I implore people to think about rather than assuming the entire increase in risk is inherent to engaging in prostitution, is that the amount of partners you have will increase your risk of being sexually assaulted. People are most likely to be sexually assaulted by those they know, particularly be intimate partners, and having a higher number of partners leads to a higher likelihood of one of them being a perpetrator of sexual assault. I would not dispute that clients are likely to target sex workers and are more likely to assault a sex worker than their own partners or non sex workers they are close with, because sex workers are seen as disposable and are more vulnerable as targets, but this is not the sole culprit. In a year selling sex, outside of exclusive arrangements with a singular client, many sex workers will have orders of magnitude of more sexual partners than the average civilian.

Though most of us don’t keep count, I personally have had upwards of a thousand sexual partners in a period of 7 years actively selling sex. Perhaps one thousand five hundred as the likely maximum. Other people in their twenties are highly unlikely to have such a high number of sexual partners. When someone has had sex with a hundred times the number of partners as another person, it would stand to reason that their likelihood of being sexually assaulted would be much higher whether that sex was paid or recreational.

Of course, various organizations like Exodus Cry or Nordic Model Now will use these kinds of statistics to argue that prostitution itself is inherently dangerous and that all sex workers are victims. A person could spend a lifetime pointing out the way these recorded rates of sexual violence are inflated or not representative of the broader population of sex workers. Instead of doing so and getting hung up only on debunking inaccuracies in the claims made, there is a simpler response that is applicable whether a study reliably shows a high rate of sexual violence against sex workers or not: criminalizing our clients, or criminalizing sex workers, does not make prostitution safer.

Even if the rate of assault against a sex worker in a lifetime or a year was 100%, this would not mean the buying of sex should be criminalized. Not every encounter between a client and a sex worker is rape, and so making it illegal to do something simply because a high number of people who do so also commit acts of violence is neither just nor effective. Rape is already illegal, the fact of the matter is that the police simply do not care and that the system makes convictions almost impossible and deeply traumatic to get. In a scenario where every single sex worker in the world has been a victim of rape, that does not mean that every client they’ve ever had has raped them.

Assuming the priority is to reduce the rate of assault against sex workers, full decriminalization of sex work is the clear answer. Criminalization of the selling and buying of sex only subjects prostitutes to arrest on top of being assaulted. The Nordic Model criminalizes clients and increases violence against sex workers, up to and including murder. After the introduction of the criminalization of buying sex in France, violence against sex workers has increased significantly. Between June and December of 2019 at least 10 sex workers were killed in France5 which is a significant increase from 12 sex workers killed in 2014 over the period of an entire year as opposed to only 6 months6. The Evaluation of the Law of April 20167 published by the French Government in 2020 makes no mention at all of the increase in violence against sex workers since the law passed, but Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) published a report in response which included sex workers’ real experiences under the new law8. This included data from Le Bail/Giametta study which showed 63% of sex workers having a deterioration in their living conditions since the law passed and 78.2% of respondents stated that the law had increased clients’ power to demand unsafe sexual practices.

Sex workers’ accounts of violent assault are convenient for Nordic Model advocates to use for their political goals, but once achieved they do not wish to hear of them. Our tales of sexual abuse suffered at the hands of clients are convenient tools to argue that clients should be criminalized… but when we suffer more under their criminalization our stories are swept away, as has been the case in France despite the continued work of groups like STRASS (syndicat du travail sexual) and Médecins du Monde to get sex workers’ stories out. The trauma of prostitutes is only treated as a useful offensive weapon and is never used as a means of defending us. Victim status in the eyes of the public does not afford sex workers any genuine protection, and it is fragile regardless.

The percentage chance of any individual sex worker being assaulted is used purely for shock value, and thus whatever study has the highest rate is going to garner the most attention. The more we are assaulted and the higher the statistics appear, the easier it is to suggest that a higher proportion of our clients are violent sadists, and thus the public are much more inclined to agree with fines or arrests for them.

Big vs “Little” Assaults

In addition to the use of our stories of violence to argue that prostitution itself can never be tolerated, sometimes our accounts which discuss violence without extreme distress are used to argue we are too traumatized to even recognize our own abuse and must be rescued even against our will. Assaults which I experienced as being relatively minor are treated as though they should be life-ruining events. The fact they were not life-ruining events for me and that I don’t appear sufficiently upset is argued to be proof that I have been irrevocably broken by prostitution.

Coercion exists along a spectrum that anti-prostitution advocates seldom recognize. People have sex for all sorts of reasons that aren’t purely desire for pleasure from sex, like attempting to get pregnant or for intimacy and feeling close to a partner. There may be pressures associated with these reasons, or entirely separate pressures that push a person to have sex. Someone might feel obligated to have sex with their partner so that they won’t cheat or feel like a failure for being unable to get pregnant. The traditional examples of coercion are from one partner to another, threatening them or manipulating them into sex, but pressures can also come from outside the relationship. If a woman’s family teach her that she must never deny her husband sex, then she may feel obligated once married to provide sex to her husband and act like she wants to even when that is not an opinion her husband shares — perhaps it would even horrify him if he realized. Sexual assault is more complex than simply one person forcing another, and situations that do not meet our typical understanding of rape can still be traumatizing.

Prostitutes have additional pressures compared to those who do not sell sex. Those additional pressures relate to the need for money or the looming threat of prosecution by police, and create a more complicated situation regarding consent. None of this makes it impossible for a prostitute to consent, only impacts how likely they are to be able to give it as freely as if they were not selling sex.

The first client I ever had, who was not the last client to do so, definitely assaulted me. There was no vaginal or anal penetration involved in these assaults, but they were undoubtedly the most traumatic of any form of sexual assault I have suffered in my life. The factors that caused me such severe PTSD were the fear whilst it was ongoing and the inability to understand or process the events whilst they were ongoing. Whilst it isn’t totally clear why some instances of violence or harm cause PTSD and others do not, we know that it is related to how traumatic events are processed. It is clear to me that I did not form memories of the events in the typical way given my repression of them and the denial I felt.

Since the first assault that occurred to me in sex work, I have been assaulted many times. Some instances would be considered more severe than the first time I was assaulted. I have been coerced into performing sex acts under threat of arrest or violence, I have been held down and raped by people much more physically strong than me, and I have been violated in various ways like being non-consensually choked during sex or hit or spat on. No instance of assault has been as traumatic as the first or caused such disruption in my life, despite many of these experiences being supposedly more serious. The idea that someone would tell me those instances were objectively worse makes me wonder what metric they are deciding that based on, since they caused me so much less mental anguish.

The sexual assaults that had a large impact on me are easy to pinpoint, even if the trauma renders my memories hazy. The most significant left me with debilitating PTSD which caused my life to spiral out of control for over a year. I used alcohol and drugs because of my inability to cope and had constant flashbacks. I was unable to stand having most people touch me, could not effectively make friends, and was constantly suicidal. Of the other most significant assaults, one was a client who started to cause me pain during sex via bruising my cervix, whom I repeatedly asked to be gentler. The client refused, kept going after I told him to stop completely, and held my mouth open and spat into it and pressed onto my throat to force me to reflexively swallow. I made myself vomit after he left and then drank water and did so again, to try and rid myself of the feeling. I felt ill for weeks every time I thought about it and still have flashbacks when I see spit in a sexual context. Out loud, I struggle to even talk about it, because I immediately imagine it happening again including the physical sensations. To write it causes the same, though at least I can cope with that in private without the embarrassment of being perceived whilst it happens.

Outside of these incidents, I have been assaulted many dozens of times, so much that each instance doesn’t easily come to mind. It’s not that I’m not aware of what has happened and that I can’t make broad statements — it’s just become so mundane that remembering each instance takes some work. They didn’t traumatize me and don’t stick out in my memory, like any event in your day to day life. I know what sort of thing I typically eat for breakfast and could make general statements, but it takes me a moment to remember what I had on a specific day.

I’ve had many clients push a finger into my ass after I’ve told them no before the session. Of the clients who do this, some try a second or third time after I refuse them again and I have to physically pull their hands away. I recognize that it is absolutely sexual assault. Rather than being traumatizing to me, it is merely irritating. My experience is not the standard and my feelings about these assaults are not superior to anyone else’s, it is merely the case that sometimes when I am sexually assaulted I find it mildly annoying and then move on. Not all assaults are equally traumatizing and there is no singular correct way to respond to abuse.

Depending on who I am speaking to, people may assume that I am intentionally downplaying the severity of abuse because I don’t wish to discuss it at length in the moment or they may assume I am repressing my true feelings about it. I have been told that I must be in denial about how bad the abuse is because I support the decriminalization of sex work and cannot allow myself to admit the severity of the abuses that occur within sex work without feeling guilty about my advocacy. Then, naturally, there are those who suggest the lack of strong emotional response is because I am a liar. My claims must be false, because if they were true then I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to say them and appear outwardly calm at the same time.

Most people can easily agree that being groped is less severe than being raped. Both are forms of sexual assault, both are likely to be distressing or even deeply traumatizing, but being raped is far more likely to be the cause of long-lasting damage (both physical and mental). The issue is not that most people don’t agree that there are more and less severe forms of assault, it’s that their threshold for tolerating these kinds of abuses are much lower than for the typical sex worker.

During the worst of my mental health episodes after being raped, and for many months after, I could be triggered by even the smallest unwanted touch. My claim is not that being raped or assaulted frequently automatically inoculates you against being traumatized by such things in the future. Part of what determines how we react to abuse is how we view it and make sense of it. Having been raped does not automatically make you more capable of handling future assault, but processing an incident of sexual assault and removing the internal shame around being a survivor and negative self-talk changes how a person reacts to a future assault. If you suffer with intense shame, another assault will only compound it.

Being groped is a brief annoyance to me. I might be indignant or angry, especially about the entitlement a person has shown towards my body, though ultimately it won’t ruin my day and I’m likely to have forgotten about it by the next morning. As a teenager, the same incident would have had me spiral into self-blame and I’d have had panic attacks about the idea of it reoccurring and being assaulted worse. I have been groped in public many times and it has never escalated to more severe sexual assault in a public venue, because groping is a brief display of power and the people who do it are far too cowardly to risk something more serious in public. I don’t fear what an assailant might do moments after or blame myself for it and so I am less distressed.

With clients, sex workers go into a booking with our safety in mind. We are prepared for the possibility that a client may try to cross boundaries and assault us. In a scenario where a sex worker is raped or our life is threatened, we are no more protected from the mental damage that trauma does than anyone else. Outside of those extreme events we have the far more common “minor” assaults, and regarding those the average sex worker is indeed more likely to be able to brush them off.

One way in which I am able to be less impacted by a client causing me some pain during a booking, or crossing a boundary, is some degree of dissociation. Lots of people dissociate as a coping strategy and once you start to do it the practice becomes automatic and easier to slip into. If a client slips a finger into my arse without my permission, I may take a moment to decide whether it’s worth the argument or I’d prefer to just put up with it for a minute or so since he seems likely to finish in a moment anyway. If I decide it’d be less annoying to let him have a finger there than to tell him off, I’ll dissociate for the next minute or so until he’s done. Sure, I’d much prefer for him not to cross my boundaries at all, although once it’s occurred I’d rather dissociate than have him be irritated and make me even more uncomfortable the entire time.

I find it convenient that I can dissociate not only during certain types of assault, but also in the course of a lot of otherwise agreeable paid sex. As is the case for most sex workers, I’m very rarely attracted to my clients, and I’ve often been disgusted by them. I’ve told clients that I prefer a position where we’re not facing each other just so I can make annoyed or grossed-out faces without him seeing, like I’m playing a game with myself as I wait for him to be done with his lackluster thrusting. Other times I start my well-practiced moaning vocalizations as if I’m playing an audio clip and think about something else entirely in my head. I’ll suck dick and mentally plan what I’m going to have for dinner later. Maybe a client pushes my head down so that I gag a little, and I find that rude… within seconds I’m back to musing about what time would be best to go to the bank to pay my earnings in.

Speaking about these kinds of coping strategies is entirely taboo. An admittance that we dislike the job and the sex itself is so often used to argue that every time we sell sex amounts to rape. To call it rape for me to choose to have sex I don’t enjoy renders the term “rape” to be practically meaningless. A lot of people have unsatisfying sex that bores them or irritates them, and some of them even act like they’re enjoying it so they don’t hurt their partner’s feelings. Arguing that something is not rape is not the same as making an argument that it’s good or ideal, and this goes both for wives having unsatisfying sex with their husbands and for sex workers having sex with clients.

Prostitution has impacted the way I react to sex and to abuse, that is undeniable. To suggest that it has broken me would be false and stigmatizing. I have learned coping skills for dealing with mistreatment and pain and using those coping skills has been of a great benefit to me. Sex workers do not owe anyone a certain level of distress for the violence we’ve faced. Whether we break down over the abuse or remain stable, either response is used as evidence that we cannot be trusted to discuss our own experiences.

Despite most of the assaults I’ve dealt with being inconsequential to me for the most part, the sheer number of times I have had my sexual boundaries disrespected does cause me anger. The more instances that stack up, the more hopeless I feel about avoiding more of it in the future or ever getting any form of justice for sex workers who face this constantly. To call an assault less severe or minor is viewed as an unacceptable downplaying of the horrors of prostitution, and yet my rage at how these instances accumulate is seen as far too extreme.

I am often angry at how entitled clients can be towards the bodies of sex workers and how often they harm us, no matter the gravity of each occasion. I am angrier still at people who think that these cases of abuse mean that we should fine or arrest even the clients who do us no harm at all.

Review Forums

Where there are sex workers, there are sex worker review forums.

A small number of escorting sites have built-in review functions. To leave a review, a person must book through the site and have the escort accept their request and then complete the booking before a review can be left on their profile. Most allow the profile owner to hide their reviews if desired. All of this means that reviews need their own platform if they are to be broadly visible, so clients create forums to discuss the sex workers they visit. A thread will be created with a review, often including pictures and a link to their profile, and this is one of the ways people (almost exclusively men) who buy sex will discuss their liaisons with sex workers.

Make no mistake, these review forums are not reasonable places where clients respectfully review services. The reason for this is not inherent to, nor excused by, the service being sexual. People are capable of discussing sex without being hateful or objectifying the person they’ve had sex with. Since sex work is highly stigmatized, clients therefore remain anonymous on these review forums, in addition to having negative views about sex workers as wider society instills in everyone, so the commentary about sex workers on these sites tends to be utterly vile.

Both Christian rescue organizations and SWERFs love to use these review forums as a resource for farming stories of our trauma without even having to go through sex workers directly and risk us pointing out that they’re wrong about how to tackle the issues we face.

Review forums will often contain long and graphic descriptions of sexual encounters with sex workers. Usually, they give some brief details about communication whilst arranging the date and the premises. The description of the premises is already a significant problem. Many reviewers will give the specifics on an address or a postcode when none of that information is public, making it easier for others to stalk and harass the sex worker being discussed. Whilst giving out this information, some reviewers will speculate about whether the sex worker appears to live at the address or whether it seems like a brothel, occasionally going as far as to speculate about whether or not they might have stumbled upon a trafficking operation if the sex worker is an immigrant.

When I worked from a brothel where we had to get our own clients rather than being advertised by the brothel itself, I had a system for texting clients the address which was practically foolproof. I would give the postcode and promise the full address once they arrived. Once I got a text that they arrived, I described the car park they needed to walk through. As they walked through, I could see them from a window which overlooked it as well as on the CCTV. I’d check they were alone, not behaving in a suspicious manner, then tell them which door to walk through and which floor and door number inside of the building. As soon as this address is offered without those steps, a person can walk straight through the door when they arrive and skip that entire screening process.

Clients are notoriously unaware of the specifics of sex workers’ manner of working. If the bedroom seems minimalist, they will guess it is a brothel when in reality it’s a spare room and the sex worker has removed anything they might steal. I have seen many clients speculate that someone has been trafficked because they’ve seen another escort in the same building before, instead of considering that the premises might be a brothel they work in without having been trafficked or even just a place the sex worker is renting. If a sex worker finds a convenient Airbnb to use as an incall, they’ll often tell any of their friends who might want to use a place in the area. The same location is not evidence of a trafficking operation. Like clients, the average anti-prostitution conservative or radical feminist also doesn’t know much of the typical behaviours of prostitutes, and so they take clients words at face value and presume trafficking any time a client guesses at it.

In the main text of the review, about the service provided, it is common for extremely objectifying and disgusting language to be used about the workers being discussed. Any demographic that a sex worker belongs to is likely to be fetishized, whether it’s racial fetishization or fetishization on the basis of transness. Fat sex workers are mocked and degraded as if they are unattractive, which is somehow deemed reasonable to other users of the forum even though the person posting the review was clearly attracted enough to see them in the first place. If someone posts a review which does not sufficiently berate the sex worker in question for any deviation from white thin cisness, the comments will make sure to swiftly correct that. This is used as proof that clients are supposedly all bigoted abusers.

I am not in the habit of defending clients as a group. Frankly, there is no need, because it’s not about them in the first place — I am always, first and foremost, concerned with what is best for sex workers and what is best for us is that clients are not criminalized. However, it does not take a genius to realize that a forum full of bigots is not evidence that all clients are bigots. The reality is that review forums as a format attract bigots and people who wish to write graphic reviews that put prostitutes at higher risk, and that clients who don’t support that sort of behaviour don’t post on the forums.

Since only the worst clients have flocked to these sorts of places in recent years, they have a terrible reputation among sex workers. Seeking out reviews about oneself can be an important safety measure, to check what sort of information is out there and whether certain incall locations have been compromised, but it is common to see sex workers discourage each other from reading more than the bare minimum for the sake of their mental health. For anti-prostitution advocates to screenshot these reviews and post them online or to read them out when arguing for legislation to criminalize clients is particularly egregious. They are prioritizing the client’s view of an encounter over the experience and desires of the sex worker.

I often think about clients who objectify and fetishize workers as being vile, but my first thought and priority is always the worker they’ve interacted with. Clients frequently complain that sex workers they see don’t seem totally interested and that they feel as though they were ripped off, or they’ll say that the escort they met with wouldn’t do certain positions or rushed them out, and I wonder whether that client scared them or that worker was in pain from seeing too many clients. Rather than only getting angry over how a client describes the experience, we can focus on the needs of the worker and the causes of their discomfort. The answer might be that a worker had to see a higher volume of clients because their benefits were cut, and now they have pain in their genitals and won’t do certain positions. These are questions that anti-prostitution advocates often don’t bother to ask, instead focusing only on their disgust at the client. The focus shouldn’t be on the clients in the first place.

In spite of the negative impacts on my mental health, I often search for reviews left about me and read them. If I read a review soon enough after an encounter, I may still remember it well and be able to see what comments were untrue or how the client’s interpretations of my behaviour were wrong. A client may claim in the review that I don’t offer kissing even though I do, and I recall that they had bad breath and so I’d made that up to spare their feelings, for example. The comments I read often misgender me even when the review itself does not, since transitioning. Both pre-transition and since, the reviews speak about me like an object or some sort of toy purely made for their pleasure and fail to consider my wants and needs.

A SWERF or anti-prostitution conservative could easily take one of these reviews about me to argue that clients do not see the sex workers they see as real people. How a client sees me does not change what I am. As a person with thoughts and desires and the right to bodily autonomy, the very thing prostitution abolitionists would argue that it is bad that clients don’t see me as, I don’t want these reviews broadcast and used to deny me rights as a worker.

Forums which discuss sex workers in harmful ways are allowed to thrive because of the stigma around sex work. Since most platforms do not allow the frank discussion of our work or any kind of solicitation, forums where clients talk about seeing us are driven underground. A combination of forums being hidden and anonymous and rampant stigma and misogyny (given that the majority of sex workers are women) contributes to the objectification being so severe.

The differences between sex work and other forms of labour aren’t so extreme as to mean no consistency at all is required to evaluate our treatment. An awful sexist review about a waitress would not be considered reasonable evidence that it should be illegal to attend restaurants, nor do entire websites dedicated to reviewing actresses which talk about them in a sexist manner mean that we should abolish all acting.

Abusive and objectifying language used in reviews by some members of a demographic is not proof that the entire demographic are predators, nor that whatever they are reviewing is inherently dangerous or traumatic. If that were the case, I’ve been called some horrific things by SWERFs and by conservatives and even by otherwise well-meaning liberal members of the public whilst we discuss sex work — should I consider those entire demographics to be unilaterally abusive? It is not uncommon for SWERFs to parrot language they’ve read used by abusive clients, or even to talk about us in the way they imagine an abusive client would without a direct reference. The purpose of speaking about us in these abusive terms is often stated or implied to be to make us aware of our situation and the traumatic nature of it, assuming that we are defending our right to be sex workers. They want to bully us into agreeing with them by making us feel objectified and as if there is no way to escape that other than to leave prostitution. I do not see a meaningful difference between a self-proclaimed feminist trying to modify my behaviour with abusive language and a client trying to do so. One is try to get me to give up my fight for rights as a worker and the other is trying to make me give them a more satisfying blowjob, sure, but at least the second group are honest about their motives.

Morality of Being a Client

The law does not legislate morality. Many people believe it either does or should, and so they attempt to showcase that an action is immoral to argue that it should be illegal. In the case of clients, they argue that the act of paying for sex is immoral and thus the act should be illegal.

Whether the act of paying for sex is immoral in different contexts can be an interesting question, but it is entirely separate from the question of whether it should be criminalized. A scenario in which it is illegal to pay for sex is one in which sex workers who are mostly desperate for money and struggling to make ends meet have a smaller and more criminal client pool. Through criminalizing clients, sex workers are forced into closer proximity with police and immigrant workers are at risk of deportation or arrest if they work with others from the same building and are considered to be brothel-keeping.

However, if I allow myself to consider the morality of buying sex, the answer is less clear-cut. A client who buys sex from a worker who is content in their job and who treats the sex worker well throughout the encounter is not doing something wrong simply because money was exchanged. If we add money to an encounter that could otherwise have happened exactly the same way as casual sex without the money involved, it makes no sense to bring the consent given into question and therefore I see no reason to view it as immoral. Most prostitution is not sex that would have happened even without the involvement of money, and so those cases only account for a small percentage. It’s worth thinking about those scenarios.

A client who sees a homeless sex worker who, despite agreeing to the sex, is giving off every possible signal that they do not want it from freezing up to flinching away to crying, is doing something wrong if they have sex with that sex worker. That is apparent to me, both looking at the situation from the outside and as someone who was in that situation as a sex worker myself when I was 17. If you know someone desperately does not want to have sex with you and you use their financial struggles to extort sex from them, this is morally abhorrent. The same goes for situations where someone is clearly being forced to sell sex by a third party and the client is aware of this.

In most cases of sex work, we have a situation which is in between these extremes. A sex worker may not love their work but instead feel similarly about it to millions upon millions of other workers in the world — they do their job to earn enough money to live and they have various feelings about it. They may feel neutral about the sex, or mildly negatively about it, but see no more negatively than a person might view a cleaning job or an exhausting bartending shift. For sex workers in situations like this, is a client doing something immoral by paying them for sex?

The typical experiences of prostitutes don’t interest most media outlets because they are ultimately mundane. Our trauma is marketable and so are the rare stories of sex workers who love the job for their shock value. This means that even when discussing issues like the morality of clients paying for sex, the two scenarios that come to mind for most people are a client raping a sex trafficking victim or a client paying a rich and empowered sex worker who enjoys the act.

I do not see why paying someone for sex would be inherently less moral than paying any person for a service. Sex is more intimate than many other kids of services, but there are jobs that include similar levels of intimacy and private contact that are not sexual such as caring professions. Jobs in healthcare and the sale of sex are both types of jobs that are taken on by mostly women and which involve a high degree of emotional labour as well as viewing people in intimate situations. The average woman in either type of profession is not wealthy and there are a large number of immigrants in each. When we assess the morality of a person being given a highly demanding care role as opposed to the sale of sex, the difference is in whether the person requires the service.

Buying sex is a luxury whilst receiving care for a disability or in old age is frequently a necessity. Is that a good enough argument to decide whether it’s acceptable or not, simply whether or not there is any alternative?

Personally, I would prefer that a person paid me for sex than that I had to work a long bartending shift. During a rush whilst working behind a bar, a person taking up even ten or fifteen minutes of my time with ordering drinks and adding to my stress will cause me far more negative emotions than that same person paying me for a full hour of sex. Am I to determine that going to a bar and purchasing drinks is immoral, from that? Or that buying sex is definitely amoral?

I can think of many instances where a client buying sex from me has been an immoral action, from when I was clearly underage to times I was flinching away and clearly demonstrating I was terrified of having sex even if I was verbally agreeing out of desperation for money. There are far more times I can think of where I see no reason I’d condemn a client on moral grounds, where I felt perfectly fine about exchanging sex for money and even had the opinion afterwards that I’d been compensated very well for the small amount of work or effort I put in. I rarely see a reason to recount those anecdotes because they’re not deeply shocking and therefore don’t hold people’s attention.

Before I moved from one house to another, I needed to raise money for the cost of a moving van and the deposit for the new house. I decided to see a higher volume of clients to raise this extra money quickly and on one Monday I saw six clients. The first of them I remember was quite nervous and met me whilst on a break from his job. He paid me £80 for 30 minutes, was actually finished within 15 and only wanted some brief kissing and penetrative sex before he came into the condom and hurriedly got dressed. I don’t recall all of the bookings from that day very well, none of them very memorable, but I recall one only because he had some interesting piercings. I saw him last that day and I actually enjoyed our conversation (about our various body modifications) and our hour-long appointment was one of the more pleasant experiences I’ve had selling sex. The sex was fine. I ended the day with £700, accounting for having ordered take-away food from my earnings in the afternoon, and was perfectly content. It doesn’t seem to me that my clients did anything immoral there.

Even if I spent the vast majority of my time describing the average experiences with clients, which are utterly mundane and fine, any time I speak about being assaulted it will be used as evidence that clients are evil and that buying sex is immoral. This would cause a bias even if I did spend most of my time talking about the mundane realities of prostitution, which I do not. Like anyone, I am more likely to talk about something if it is out of the ordinary for me. I’m not compelled to discuss the most boring aspects of my work, like the client who annoyingly ranted to me about his accounting job for half an hour and then had me suck him off for 30 seconds before he came and whom I promptly forgot about as soon as he left.

Clients actions towards me are easy to assess, but there is the added factor of their internal dialogue which is also worth assessing. Ultimately their actions and who they harm are the most important factor, for myself and for other sex workers, though their intent does make a difference. It is not uncommon for people to claim that clients do not care about sex workers’ wellbeing at all or to say they don’t view us as people — this has been true of a significant portion of clients in my experience, but by no means the majority.

Among the people I’ve spoken to who have hired sex workers in the past but have never hired me, in settings where I am known to sell sex but the people do not know my work persona, I have learned a lot about how people who don’t often talk about being a client tend to view themselves. Looking only at the type of clients who engage with Onlyfans workers’ or escorts social media profiles means we get a false impression of clients’ typical self-concepts. The majority of clients keep quiet about the fact they have ever purchased sex at all.

Clients often feel a need to preface the fact they have bought sex by explaining how they were careful to avoid seeing anyone who is a victim of trafficking. They describe looking for escorts who had a social media presence and worked from a premises alone, perhaps mentioning avoiding hiring immigrants who they presume are more likely to have been forced to sell sex. Upon being told that most instances where people are forced to sell sex would not be filtered out by these measures, they are horrified.

The fear-mongering about sex trafficking doesn’t only reach members of the public who are not involved in the industry, it also reaches prospective clients. They hear about people snatched off of the street working in dirty buildings with pimps answering their phones for them and assume that if an articulate young woman answers the phone and has her own twitter account that she must be working without coercion.

Depending on how much energy I have for repeating the conversation for the hundredth time, I may explain that a workers’ client-facing social media presence is constructed to seem appealing and will not always be honest. We pretend on social media that we enjoy sex with our clients even when we hate it because it’s a good advertising technique. People don’t want to sleep with someone who they think won’t enjoy it. For a lot of clients, providing pleasure and having a genuinely good time is a large part of the appeal to them.

Clients are often made uncomfortable by the reality and seek reassurance that it’s acceptable for them to benefit from the performance that sex workers are putting on. Reckoning with the idea that they may have caused a person discomfort is a hard thing to do. There’s no way for a client to check whether or not the sex worker they slept with was uncomfortable during sex, since asking is only going to result in a lie and they cannot go back and ask every sex worker they’ve seen in the past in the first place.

We all cause workers discomfort in our everyday lives, whether that’s by making a mess at a restaurant that an employee has to clean up or calling up an engineer to fix something in the middle of a heatwave. At some point, most of us have bought clothing from a company which massively underpays and mistreats their workers, which goes far past simple discomfort. Something about how sex is viewed in society means that the possibility of causing discomfort related to intercourse is suddenly much more serious and a cause for far more extreme guilt.

Talking publicly about selling sex can be very difficult, navigating all sorts of pressures, and so I rarely have the energy to coddle the feelings of a person who is paying for sexual services. We should all be open to conversations about the morality of work and jobs under our current framework, including our moral responsibility as consumers. This is not a conversation that can be had reasonably unless we have all of the information rather than only the extremes.

Constantly Changing Feelings

I have sometimes been concerned that I could be used as a weapon against my own sex worker community, particularly during severe episodes of PTSD. Many of us in the sex trade have been victims of sexual abuse either prior to our entry into prostitution or during it, and that means many of use have strong reactions to arguments and discussions about rape. Directly after some assaults by clients, I sometimes have very strong reactions to that trauma that can last weeks or months, and there is no way for me to escape anti-prostitution and SWERF rhetoric during these periods of time.

Most of the time, I am able to be rational and honest about my experiences selling sex. I can recognize that I have suffered abuse and also note that most of my experiences selling sex have been essentially neutral. I don’t recall the specifics of most days selling sex any more strongly than I recall individual shifts at other workplaces and I’ve had periods of working full-time at other jobs that have been far worse than periods of time I’ve been selling sex as my sole income. It is clear that there have been ups and downs within my time as a prostitute. There is also a clear delineation for me between struggling to sell sex under the persona I used prior to coming out as trans and the much less stressful experiences I’ve had selling sex whilst not having to pretend to be a woman at the same time.

After an assault or during a bad PTSD episode, I am likely to forget about or gloss over any neutral or positive experiences selling sex. A therapist would probably call this black and white thinking or catastrophizing, and ultimately what it means is that my anger towards an individual client who has harmed me is projected onto all of my clients. I may express disgust towards all clients as a group in a manner reminiscent of people expressing disgust towards all men after being assaulted by one. My responses during this time, whilst completely understandable and worthy of compassion, are not rational. It is not an honest claim to say that all of my clients have been bad people who have hurt me, though it is not unheard of for me to frame things that way when I am unwell.

For a rape survivor to acknowledge that we are sometimes irrational, especially about the assault and our experiences surrounding it, is risky. We risk discrediting ourselves even outside of these episodes, with people assuming that nothing we say on the subject can be trusted due to the fact that we are sometimes irrational.

Through learning coping skills and via experiencing these issues so many times, it has become easier for me to recognize that my thoughts are not rational even whilst I am having them. Early on, before learning those coping skills, it is easy for me to imagine how I might have fallen into a pipeline where I could have been used as a mouthpiece for anti-prostitution rhetoric.

Outside of times where I am having trauma responses which impact how I feel about my time in prostitution, there are also changes to my thoughts on it depending on whether I am actively selling sex or in the middle of a break from doing so. It is hard to say with complete certainty how much the stigma around the sale of sex plays a role in the difference between my thoughts about selling sex when it is something I am actively doing compared to when it’s something I can discuss in the past tense.

If I am actively selling sex, my own safety is paramount in terms of my advocacy. I would like to say that the safety of others is equally important to my own, but there’s a reason that people are able to be trusted more in activist work when they have skin in the game. A threat to your own life or health is always going to be a more effective motivating factor than a threat to the lives and safety of others. If I have sold sex today and will sell sex again tomorrow, I must fight for legislation that keeps my the safest. The relative danger clients pose is far more important to accurately assess, so I can weight up how much I need money compared to the risk of selling sex to my client base and come to the right conclusion. Eventually, I take a brief or prolonged break from selling sex because I find other work or have enough money to let myself rest, and suddenly those issues are not so pressing.

Building up resentments against clients is common throughout the course of selling sex. However, any instinct for carceral solutions against bad clients is overridden by the need to avoid involvement with the police and the knowledge that it will only make us less safe. In a scenario where I had enough money and a stable enough job that I could be sure I’d never want to sell sex again, it’s not hard to picture a version of myself who would selfishly want to pursue revenge against those who’ve abused me even if that would make sex work overall more dangerous… because I would not longer have to contend with that danger. Committing these words to paper is important, as part of demonstrating that these thoughts are not my real desires. It is easy to imagine a scenario where I could have betrayed other sex workers because of my own response to trauma, acting selfishly, but I am confident now that I never would.

We need to create space for sex workers to have feelings which change frequently. No matter whether I am furious at the world or mired in self-blame, it remains true that sex workers are safer when neither we or our clients are criminalized. In a situation where we all understand this is the case, there is room for people with all sorts of views on their time selling sex. There is no reason that those of us who’ve detested every moment cannot organize with those who feel very neutrally and those who love to sell sex.

In stories about trauma during the sale of sex, I sometimes see elements of my own thoughts reflected back at me. Those of us who do not throw other sex workers under the bus to sell stories of our trauma which argue for client criminalization are not simply privileged or unharmed, we sometimes have the exact same feelings. In my case, I have had violent impulses and lashed out when people mention just the idea of hiring a sex worker, purely because they spoke about it during a time when I could not think about clients without making an association with my abusers.

Keeping a log of my feelings at different points is a good way to maintain perspective, but there are downsides. Documenting our work whilst active in a brothel can work against us if it is discovered by police during a raid, as it serves as evidence that the place is a brothel and could even be used to argue the sex worker is participating in running it depending on what is recorded. It can be found by friends or family members. Not to mention how turbulent periods of high-volume sex work can be, and that it is difficult to write about abuse in the immediate aftermath.

Once your story of sex trafficking or sex work is out in the public eye, you are expected to conform to whatever perspective you have given. If you have given out a story of victimhood you are permitted to change perspective only to the extent of viewing yourself as a “survivor” rather than purely a “victim”. There is no space within an organisation which claims to rescue sex workers for one of their mouthpieces to argue that sex workers need rights and not rescue.

I am not alone in having nuanced and conflicting feelings about my profession. From online-only porn actors all the way to homeless street survival sex workers, we all have varying and fluctuating views. To be expected to only share one side of those emotions for a political goal is not conducive to healing from abuse.

Childhood Abuse

It is a common belief that people turn to sex work because they were abused as children. Hypersexuality is one of the many common responses to sexual abuse and engaging in sex work is presumed by many to be one of the ways this hypersexuality can manifest. Therapists and SWERFs alike are likely to suggest a history of childhood molestation as a causative factor for someone deciding to sell sex. As a response to abuse, selling sex is therefore framed as a maladaptive coping mechanism.

Childhood abuse is more likely to occur to marginalized and poor children, with poverty and marginalization leading many people to sex work as the only way to pay their bills. There does seem to be a correlation between engaging in sex work and having a history of childhood abuse, but how much of that correlation is due to the demographics of who gets involved in sex work and who is likely to be abused as a child?

A person who is abused as a child is more likely to have worse lifelong outcomes in an variety of ways. Children are often targeted by caregivers, which gives them more unstable relationships with their families and can lead to homelessness and poverty. Guess what often drives people into sex work? Poverty.

Stories of child abuse are viewed as more horrifying than most other types of abuse. It is much harder to position a child as being deserving of abuse, though many abusers and their apologists do try. Prostitutes are often framed as being deserving of the abuse we go through because we chose to sell sex, and so one way in which certain groups try to shift this narrative so we are seen as victims is to appeal to the idea that we were all abused as kids and that drove us into sex work.

I have no need to absolve myself of responsibility for my own choices. When I choose to sell sex as an alternative to starving, I make no apologies. I still make no apologies for selling sex when I do so to buy a gaming console that is a luxury and not a necessity. Selling sex is not immoral and I do not need anyone to create a narrative for me which takes away any significance from my personal choices.

The rhetoric that prostitutes have all been abused as children, and that this has caused us to illogically turn to selling sex when someone who had not been abused would not, is pervasive. People will argue that gay men are gay due to childhood molestation in a similar manner to arguing that a prostitute has chosen to sell sex due to abuse in childhood. The idea is that a behaviour is deviant and the cause is something the public automatically react with horror to, so that no stigma is removed from the act and even the victim is still demonized for deviant behaviour. In the case of gay men, other gay men are argued to be the perpetrators, which furthers homophobia. In the case of sex workers, the perpetrator is argued to be a family member or a child trafficking ring and at minimum is a proxy for the archetype of the client.

It is often claimed that sex workers sell sex as a maladaptive way to seek validation and intimacy. Victims often trauma bond with their abusers and try to please them, and so sex workers trying to please their clients for money is treated as the same phenomenon.

Knowing that it is untrue that sex workers are re-enacting childhood sexual abuse through seeking clients does not mean we do not fear being seen as proving the stereotype to be true. An individual who has been abused becoming a sex worker does not prove this sort of causative effect, nor does our over-representation in sex work, and yet knowing that people will see them as validating the stereotype makes it harder to speak up. Sex workers are discouraged from discussing any history of abuse lest it be used by bigots.

Discussing the victimization of children is a way for people who are anti-prostitution to separate their disgust with the sex industry from sex workers campaigning for our rights. They bypass adult sex workers entirely by focusing not only on those forced into prostitution, but specifically of the demographic of sex trafficking survivors who do not have a mixed history in prostitution and instead only have tales of abuse by default because they are too young to consent to any kind of sex.

The sexual abuse of children is already illegal, as is rape. By teaching people to associate the sex trafficking of children with any instance where sex work is mentioned at all, it is possible to get people to automatically shut down as soon as the topic comes up. Any argument that sex work should not be illegal is responded to with horror because it is seen as a defense of sexual abuse to children, despite those instances not being discussed and not being relevant to the rights being demanded.

To escape accusations of grooming children into sex work or supporting the sex trafficking of children, some sex workers will divulge their own status as survivors of childhood abuse in an attempt to make people understand that they want to protect children and don’t support such things. The problem is, this feeds right into the narrative that sex work and child abuse are linked. There is no way to break the association that does not make it again.

Moreover, accusations that a person doesn’t care about victims of childhood abuse are partially designed to push survivors to out themselves. It is understandable that the response of someone who has suffered such forms of harm would be even more defensive than average, and people who make these claims are counting on that. Those who are anti-prostitution are counting on sex workers admitting their history of abuse. Anyone who does not admit to such an abuse history is assumed not to have one and the claims that they do not care continue, as if a person cannot support survivors without being one themselves.

It is easier to control the speech of children than that of adults, or to use their commentary without allowing them the chance to respond. No-one remains a child forever, and during childhood is when the victim is considered the most sympathetic. Children rarely have a platform or the ability to share their own trauma on their own terms. The experiences of a singular child, or a group of children, can be reused until the time period renders the story clearly outdated in which case it exists to be contrasted against the current situation. A child’s story can be generalized to all children, who so many people see as objects they have complete control over, due to a lack of consideration for them as individuals.

The child abuse stories that those who wish to ban prostitution will use are almost always sexual in nature. Sometimes they make vague reference to “daddy issues”, with the premise that neglect from a father figure has caused a woman to seek out validation from other men through sex. Very Freudian. This easily feeds into misogynistic ideas that men should be the gatekeepers of women’s sexuality, including fathers creating the sexual boundaries for their daughters without concern for their autonomy.

To argue that the root of why people engage in prostitution lies with what happened to them as children gives parents a false sense of security that they can prevent their children from becoming prostitutes. Alongside the reasons someone may use the stories of children’s sexual abuse to advance their political goals with regards to the banning of sex work, I do see a lot of self-soothing from parents who want a way to dodge the question of what they’d want for their own child if they started selling sex. It is easier to say your child never would sell sex, because you would raise them so they’d never choose to, than to reckon with the reality that the criminalization they advocate for would harm their child. It’s a way to avoid developing any empathetic reaction.

All prostitutes have a childhood and thus have people who raised us. The guilt many parents feel, believing they have failed their child if their child ends up selling sex, is difficult to navigate whether those parents provided for us and protected us well or not. Upon finding out that their child is a prostitute, parents may jump to conclusions and presume that their child was abused in the past or may blame instances of abuse they were already aware of. Every harmful idea that becomes a part of the public consciousness surrounding sex work is another reason we are unlikely to tell our parents.

Of all the stories of abuse I do see other sex workers share, childhood trauma is often the most highly guarded. Part of the reason for this is the concern about how those experiences might be used against them by those who seek to deny sex workers rights and the rest of the reasons are the same pressures that would apply to any victim. Sex workers should not be forced to reckon with these additional pressures on a topic already so fraught with struggle and self-hate.

A huge proportion of sex workers are parents themselves, and we are not immune to being impacted by these beliefs about childhood trauma and prostitution. Sex workers will typically seek to keep their children in the dark about their profession, concerned that even the knowledge of it might negatively impact their development. Discussing anything related to sex with children in an effort to educate them is conflated with the sexualization of children by some groups, but the consensus seems to be that some amount of sex education is acceptable — this does not seem to extend to prostitutes telling their children about their job in an age-appropriate manner. As far as a lot of non sex workers are concerned, there is no age-appropriate way to discuss prostitution with a child.

The messaging that childhood abuse or sexualization leads to later engagement in prostitution, along with the idea that a child having any knowledge that their parent is a prostitute is inappropriate, keeps sex workers from being open with their children at all. Telling their children about their history selling sex becomes the revelation of a secret once their children become adults, making it seem shameful.

Questions are often raised about sex workers’ fitness to parent, from possible exposure to child abuse that their children might experience purely by proximity. Finding out that one’s parent is a prostitute is treated as a trauma itself, whether the scenario being imagined is a child’s school friends finding out their parent did porn or whether it’s their parent bumping into a client at the supermarket and mortifying the child when they realize their parent has sex with strangers. Prostitutes are assumed to be bringing clients home to the same premises where their children are, routinely risking that a client might harm their child or not caring how much their child overhears.

The original claim that sex workers are victims who end up in prostitution as a reaction to trauma doesn’t actually keep to a framing of prostitutes as innocent. Combined with the idea that victims often end up becoming abusers themselves, a narrative that is widely believed, sex workers are painted as being unsafe to be around children. Proximity to sex workers is treated as inappropriate for any child, no matter whether they are aware of the person’s sex work or not. Teachers who have Onlyfans accounts are only worthy of headlines because of the outrage that someone who gets paid for displays of sexuality would also unrelatedly be in proximity to children. Almost all adults engage in some kind of sexual activity in their private lives, yet when that sexual activity is transactional it becomes viewed as something which tarnishes a person and makes them inappropriate for children to be around. This rhetoric is also commonly thrown at queer people or unmarried and promiscuous women in general.

All of these beliefs boil down to the idea that sexual abuse transfers some sort of immorality from the offender onto the victim, spreading damaging behaviour and tainting a person. The idea is that if a child is raped, this leads them to seek out more rape in the form of prostitution, which in turn causes them not to oppose rape and to therefore condone the very kind of child abuse they once suffered. I see no other way to interpret all of the claims that the exact same people make about sex workers, in conjunction with one another.

Less sensationally (and more depressingly), prostitutes who were once abused as children tend to be more vulnerable to abuse within sex work than those who were never abused prior. This is because the factors that make a person vulnerable to abuse in the first instance don’t tend to go away after someone is sexually assaulted, and are often compounded by issues like PTSD. It is not that sex workers seek out abuse, it is that predators seek out vulnerable people to prey upon. If these sex workers have children whilst poor and marginalized, their children will also be poor and marginalized, in turn leaving them at a higher likelihood of facing abuse.

The tendency to flatten out the more complex realities of child abuse to argue that sex workers are victims who should not be blamed for their participation in prostitution is an unhelpful impulse. It will never remain solely an argument to protect sex workers and can only serve to prop up the talking points of people who wish to ban prostitution entirely. Sex work is not rendered inherently bad because a high number of people doing to job have suffered prior to doing it.

The Obsession with Trafficking

Sex trafficking and sex work are so linked in the public consciousness that a huge chunk of the public will accuse you of defending sex trafficking if you so much as mention the recognition of prostitutes as workers. The two are indeed linked, in the same manner that farming is linked to the human trafficking of agricultural workers (who make up a larger portion of human trafficking victims than those who are forced to sell sex do). Abuse that occurs when people are forced into an occupation is not a good reason for condemnation of the occupation itself.

Day in, day out, people are inundated with propaganda about sex trafficking. It shows up in TV shows they watch, in “modern slavery” training people must complete in their workplaces, in pamphlets found on aeroplanes, and in books and threads on social media. Among those who don’t consume a lot of social media, they’re likely to have seen at least some of the major scandals related to trafficking such as the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal9. Many have heard of one of the major sex trafficking conspiracies, like PizzaGate or Wayfair.

The scandals like Rotherham are real and significant abuses that have impacted huge numbers of girls. There are so many more instances of grooming which, just like what occurred in Rotherham, are going utterly ignored by the police even now. This is a real and continuous issue that the police either do nothing about or actively participate in. From the coverage, you wouldn’t know that. The coverage is so frequently focused on the gory details which people have a morbid fascination with instead of what actually helps the victims.

Grooming and sexual violence are not made suddenly legal when money is exchanged. The minimum age for the sale of sex in the UK, where these grooming gangs are active, is 18. In addition, the exchange of money does not negate consent, and forcing anyone into prostitution amounts to rape and the facilitation of rape. The law itself has not been the issue in the large-scale cases of child sexual exploitation which have gone unchecked, so why would anyone imagine that adding more laws to make these things doubly illegal would change anything? The police have simply been choosing not to investigate or to help victims, and in many cases, with the underage victims of grooming gangs, have argued that the victims sought out or consented to the abuse.

Bringing these issues into the light so that the public know what is going on is vital, and yet in the cases which become the most well-known there is very little progress made from awareness about them. Instead of focusing on police accountability and changes to how the departments work internally to protect victims, all of the attention is on how horrific certain details of the abuse were with no progress towards a solution.

One of the reasons given for the police’s failure to act was specifically that they viewed many of the girls being exploited “as prostitutes”10. It didn’t matter to the police how severe the reports of abuse were when they viewed the victims as prostitutes because the abuse was seen as expected and something that the girls had willingly chosen. The idea that these children who were groomed were seen as having willingly chosen prostitution is horrific — and so is the idea that even if an adult had chosen to sell sex that they’d be deserving of such abuse and unworthy of help.

Considering the reality that the police did less to help these children because of viewing them as child prostitutes, stigmatizing prostitution further is clearly not the way to protect children from grooming and exploitation. A noteworthy portion of those who are selling sex are forced to do so and those people deserve help. Prostitutes can be abused or raped to the same extent that anyone else can, and are actually more often targets of that abuse because of our work.

These cases remain in the public consciousness for a long time and are raised frequently. Given the pervasiveness of social media use, these real incidents mingle in people’s minds with a large amount of misinformation and conspiracies which claim to uncover large-scale sex trafficking. I often hear a person mention Rotherham and Wayfair in the same breath, despite Wayfair being a baseless conspiracy about a US furniture company secretly being a front for a sex trafficking operation spread by QAnon11.

Conspiracies about the trafficking of children gain popularity alongside real instances of trafficking being exposed to make them seem more credible. QAnon timed much of their propaganda about celebrities and “elites” engaging in sex trafficking with revelations that came with the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein. Part of the point is to cover real trafficking with fake stories about trafficking to keep people from knowing what is real and what isn’t. Of those who aren’t conspiracists and who can spot the false stories, eventually many start to assume that any co-ordinated grooming gang or trafficking ring they hear about is just another conspiracy and stop looking into these claims on an individual basis. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to fact-check every scandal.

People who otherwise mistreat their children still feel a desire to protect them from outside forces, primarily because they feel they should be the only people having an influence on them. The concern is not for the child’s own sake, but is felt in the same manner as the threat of damage to one’s property. A narrative about child trafficking is a good way to garner support for anything, because it captures the attention of people who deeply care about their children and also of those who view them as property in this way. For trafficking to exist, there must be traffickers, and once enough outrage has been cultivated all the propagandists need to do is point to a particular group and lay the blame on them.

Sex workers advocating for the right to work together (meaning the decriminalization of brothel-keeping) are often called the “pimp lobby”, even by prominent radical feminists like Julie Bindel. This makes use of the panic around trafficking to demonize sex workers themselves and to conflate prostitutes with the exact group of people who often exploit us.

These tactics are commonly used against all sorts of groups. Gay men are accused of grooming children, as are trans people in the current political climate. Fringe ideas grow from these more mainstream attacks, leaving a percentage of people with alt-right beliefs who will claim that puberty blockers are being normalized for the express purpose of keeping kids looking young for the purpose of sex trafficking them. There is no evidence behind these claims, yet people believe them easily due to being conditioned to accept any conspiracy thinking regarding trafficking.

Public obsession with trafficking is not an accident nor purely the result of human curiosity towards things that horrify us. The propaganda surrounding the subject is a means to control the populace and encourage them to hate specific groups. This has historically been done through accusations of blood libel against Jewish people or the more recent human sacrifice conspiracies during the Satanic Panic. The Satanic Panic seems to have been part of solidifying specifically the sexual abuse of children as the most effective kind of propaganda for causing moral panic on a large scale, since it included many types of claims about ritual abuse and even murder but the sexual abuse is what stuck in the minds of many.

As more people parrot the same propaganda, we also see new claims surfacing which are created entirely by singular individuals with the aim of going viral on social media. It is common for people to tap into the fear that people have around trafficking, particularly middle-class white women who are not one of the main groups at risk but are likely to believe they are, to spread false information about the current schemes of traffickers.

One type of false information I see a lot of, regarding trafficking, is descriptions of traps used to abduct people. Someone will claim, without proof or a source of any kind, that traffickers are now marking cars in the car parks of shopping centres by putting flyers under a windshield wiper or tying a piece of ribbon to a wing mirror. The general premise is usually the same, although the details change: a person pauses when reaching their car to inspect the flyer or ribbon or other marker with confusion and the trafficker swoops in and abducts them. If we think about this scenario critically it does not take long to find the holes in the story, like the fact there are much easier places to abduct someone from and the fact there’s no need to mark the car at all when someone could simply wait by a car and grab a person as they approach or grab them entirely away from the car.

Women in particular are conditioned by this kind of misinformation to believe they are at constant risk of being picked up by traffickers. This is not the reality. “Traffickers” do not generally abduct people at all; they have no need to do so. A person looking to exploit another person by profiting from their prostitution will look for someone who is desperate for money and convince them that selling sex is a good method to earn it. They are likely to offer protection or security or clientele, whatever offer convinces the other person, and over time draw them into engaging in more and more sex acts for less and less money. The people they tend to target are poor, usually women and/or queer people in poverty. In practice, the demographic skew of who is in poverty means this happens to a lot of black and brown people, immigrants, and/or trans people. People whom the police are unlikely to follow up on and who will not be missed by anyone wealthy or who has connections.

Middle-class white women are not even on the radar of the vast majority of those looking to sexually exploit people through prostitution. From the messaging that is ubiquitous online, you’d think they were the number one target.

Kidnapping and sexual slavery would be a more accurate description of exactly what the public picture when they hear “sex trafficking” than the real legal definitions in different countries. The Modern Slavery Act 201512 in the UK states that “a person commits an offense if the person arranges or facilitates the travel of another person (”V”) with a view to V being exploited” and clarifies that “it is irrelevant whether B consents to the travel”. Exploitation is then defined as any experience which falls under a number of subsections which includes “slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour” and “securing services etc by force, threats or deception” as well as “securing services etc from children and vulnerable persons”. Regarding securing services from “vulnerable persons”, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 states that something is sex trafficking if “an adult, or a person without the illness, disability, or family relationship, would be likely to refuse to be used for that purpose”. To use simple language, this means that a situation in which a brothel hires a disabled worker or a homeless person would be considered sex trafficking if the brothel has any involvement at all with the worker making it to the premises.

Under the UK definition of human trafficking regarding the sex trade, a large number of scenarios are considered to be trafficking that people would not generally think of in such a way. If someone provides you transportation to a premises (even in an area you already live) and you pay them a cut of what you earn there selling sex, that is considered not only pimping but also meets the definition of sex trafficking if you are a “vulnerable person” as they define it. If someone’s partner threatens them and takes them to another building to sell sex, that is legally considered sex trafficking. These scenarios are immoral and abusive, but “trafficking” has the implication to most people that a person has been kidnapped and taken to a different country or at least a different area. When they hear the statistics on trafficking, they presume this number refers to people who are kidnapped and forced to sell sex, and so the number given does not accurately reflect the number of people subject to that specific type of sexual violence.

The UN definition is even looser. “Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control of another person, for the purpose of exploitation.” Following with “Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or removal of organs.”13. This definition may seem specific because it gives a list with some quite specific language. If we note the “or” being used throughout, it becomes clear that not all of these things have to occur to meet the definition. Trafficking is when someone is either recruited or transported by means of any of the rest of the things listed.

One example that would be considered trafficking by this UN definition would be if a person is recruited to sell sex by providing payments or benefits, for the purpose of exploitation. The exploitation can simply refer to profiting from the prostitution of another person. So, any scenario in which a third party arranges clients and they profit from doing so whilst paying the sex worker would be considered sex trafficking. Practically any instance where a third party is involved would meet this definition of trafficking.

In the US, the definition is even more ridiculously simplistic — “the term ‘sex trafficking’ means the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act”14. That is quite literally any instance in which a person sells sex. “Severe forms of trafficking in persons” are defined as trafficking which happens by force or fraud or coercion15.

In the US in particular, where essentially all prostitution meets their definition of trafficking, any statistics on trafficking will be hugely inflated compared to any reasonable person’s understanding of what trafficking is.

We cannot allow ourselves to assume that the public obsession with trafficking means that the public are educated on trafficking. They are not. If they are going to use misleading statistics, then the people unjustly included in those statistics should be able to speak about their experiences without being told they must defer to victims of trafficking or that they are privileged. People who have experienced sex trafficking are not in ideological opposition to sex workers, they are among us and we are among them and we share many experiences.

Victims of trafficking are not guaranteed to stop engaging in sex work once free from their traffickers. Those who are brought overseas to sell sex often have an agreement with the trafficker who brought them over, and are generally aware they will be selling sex to pay off their debts regarding the cost of being brought over to whatever their target country is. A portion of these people wish to move to have a better life or for better earning opportunities to send money back to their families. Once a trafficker is repaid, they often continue to engage in prostitution because it is a business they already know well and they are often not qualified for other jobs.

I have met many other sex workers who came into the UK through groups that pay for their travel in return for working in a brothel environment to repay them plus an extra fee. In the cases of those I met, this work lasted for several months before they had repaid those costs and were able to negotiate percentages after that stage. Some moved to different brothels under completely separate management, usually to have more freedom and to have a place they could work from whilst they rented a separate home. I have worked in brothels with various women in these situations, sharing stories with them about how I started selling sex in exchange for hearing theirs, and found that their opinions are far more nuanced than those I see promoted.

The stories of immigrants and trafficking survivors are their own, and there are plenty of people who are sharing them and whose words go ignored. Among the people I have known, most wished to remain as anonymous as possible and many had significant shame over selling sex. Those feelings are ones that I understand intimately and so I am conscious of not sharing those specific or identifying details.

What I will note is that none of the people I’ve met who were trafficked, including some who had been forced to sell sex by traffickers and raped on numerous occasions, did not desire rescue by outside forces. Like me, they did not trust the police and did not desire their involvement. No matter how great the public obsession with trafficking becomes, people don’t want to hear their stories because they’re not sensational or sympathetic enough.

The stories of trafficking that really sell and capture the attention of the populace are about children and young people who are citizens of the country they live in and are snatched off the street out of nowhere. Perfect victims that the consumer can project all their feelings onto and feel righteous about saving.

Lust for Arrest

The public excitement that is often expressed when a sex trafficker is arrested might lead people to believe that the public care deeply for the victims. In reality, often the victims get little to no consideration at all, beyond their stories creating fodder to attack the abusive figure with. Pointing out that a person is a sex trafficker becomes an easy dunk for likes on social media, rather than a true indictment of their behaviour.

People find the idea of sex trafficking horrifying, and so they attack the people who do it and enjoy when they are arrested or die, but this attitude isn’t reflected in what policies they support or what they know about the victims in these situations. Upon the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein, people were excited at the prospect of seeing him punished and treated him as a proxy for all sex traffickers and pimps in general. Very few of those same people seemed to know what had happened to his victims, or whether they were now safe. Some could recount vague instances of abuse but know none of the specifics or how those victims were found and targeted. Their disgust without real understanding means they will end up supporting reactionary measures, even though those measures actually harm the exact victims they supposedly want to protect.

I can think of no clearer example of the way people’s desire to see sex traffickers punished means supporting harmful things, than people celebrating the idea of sex traffickers or abusers being raped in prison. Rape is incredibly common in men’s prisons, as is transactional sex. A serial abuser placed in a prison environment is far more likely to abuse and rape other inmates than they are to be assaulted themselves, especially if they are wealthy and well-known, and treating prisons as if rape should be rife within them as part of the punishment only does further harm to marginalized people.

Each time there is another round of sex trafficking panic, people want to get tougher on sex trafficking as a crime. At first this might seem like a good idea. In reality, most arrests around prostitution are of sex workers themselves. Police cannot always differentiate between who has been forced to sell sex and who has chosen to do so, and frequently do not even try. Stricter laws against pimping or brothels ultimately lead to sex workers being arrested for working together or for supporting each other financially. When you make it illegal for people to work together, they will either go to prison for doing it anyway or they will work alone and have no-one else there if a client tries to hurt them. This is lost in the argument for more policing and incarceration.

Kidnapping and rape are types of harm which are already illegal, and adding extra laws regarding sex trafficking does not make it suddenly easier to prosecute traffickers. It does, however, feel much more satisfying for the public to watch an abusive person be taken away in handcuffs by a human trafficking taskforce than to see them arrested for kidnapping or rape. Never mind that the same taskforce traumatizes sex workers and trafficking victims during raids of their workplaces, often arresting the workers and arranging for them to be deported.

We all want sex traffickers to be dealt with. I want them to be prevented from doing further harm and for their victims to be safe as my first priorities, whereas some people simply feel glee at the idea of seeing them punished. Non sex workers can simply enjoy the public vilification of these people who have committed horrific crimes, but every time there is a trending topic relating to sex trafficking it is a different story for sex workers and trafficking victims (of which there is significant overlap). We have to worry where the current news cycle will take us and what legislation they will push next, whether that’s SESTA/FOSTA which forced many sex workers back into selling sex on the street and through third parties who may be abusive and exploitative. Backpage being shut down and the crackdown on soliciting sex online has pushed many people into working in brothels or returning to managers and “pimps”. There’s modern slavery training that gets us detained at the border when we travel. I cannot see the public get whipped up into a frenzy and enjoy justice being carried out, because there is so rarely real justice and the public panic always has negative consequences.

The interest in the suffering of abusers is huge, from the general public. It is distinct from the way that victims of abuse often fantasize about harm coming to their abusers as a way to cope. People enjoy hearing about people being incarcerated or beaten who are acceptable targets, meaning that the same people can enjoy both stories of sex traffickers being locked up and of prostitutes that they do not see as victims being arrested. I am not concerned for them personally when a sex trafficker is traumatized by the police, and I cannot bring myself to experience sympathy. My concern is entirely what this lust for their suffering does to the psychology of those who celebrate their arrests as if it’s a sport. Perhaps it leads them to the incorrect idea that the punishment of these traffickers passes for justice, when it does not.

Outside of these high profile instances of trafficking, like Jeffrey Epstein or Andrew Tate or the Rotherham scandal, most abusers get away with it. In the situations where someone actually faces consequences, certainly not everyone involved is caught and it takes so long for anything to happen that the count of victims is already absurdly high.

The police benefit from people seeing trafficking as a big issue, and politicians giving them funding to create units and taskforces to tackle it, because they can pad their salaries and conduct long investigations which target only a small number of serial sexual abusers. They never run out of traffickers to target and so any time people start to notice that the problem still exists and the police aren’t effectively handling it… they can ask for more money. A police unit can point to the number of raids they’ve conducted in the name of stopping sex trafficking and people get excited, never looking deep enough into the issue to find out that only prostitutes themselves were arrested or that most sting operations did not reveal people who were coerced and were instead used to deport sex workers.

Those who don’t share this excitement for the arrests of sex traffickers are often argued to be defending them or to lack empathy for the victims. It doesn’t matter if I lay up at night wishing death on those who’ve abused me, or if I feel rage at those who would abuse others and imagine them suffering all kinds of torture — if I put that aside to ask myself what actually keeps sex workers and/or trafficking victims safe then I will be framed as if I’m complicit. People mistake their feelings of disgust or anger for actual help, in the same way people offer thoughts and prayers in lieu of action when a person needs material support and feel as though they’ve done a good deed.

We need to redirect this excitement over the idea of punishment for traffickers to a desire to rally for justice for victims of sexual abuse within prostitution.

Disseminating videos or photos of abuse is a common tactic to try and illicit a stronger emotional reaction from people who aren’t joining in on publicly condemning these sexual abusers. Those who do not care about the safety of victims will not be swayed by these materials, and those who are already angry will simply be distressed by them. The real reason to post such things is for engagement on the topic, and also to raise awareness. These can be positive goals. Abusive survivors make uses of these emotional reactions to spread awareness, sometimes showing pictures of bruises or videos of themselves being abused so that other people can see what it is really like and perhaps recognize the signs from their own loved ones. Removing that context and instead sharing a video of someone else’s abuse without their permission and without information on how to help people in such situations does nothing but give the victim even less control.

Looking into the tags on Twitter after Andrew Tate was arrested on the 29^th of December 2022 would have had you subjected to videos which are not tagged as sensitive content showing him beating women. He spoke and wrote openly about his sex trafficking tactics, admitting to the way in which he coerced women he met, and yet still people want to see the trauma with their own eyes. It’s not enough to be condemn him for what he’s done and to arrest him, the public must see the moments of abuse that have probably left permanent psychological scars on his victims. Videos they are likely to later come across for themselves and be further harmed by.

The conflation of videos of abuse with videos of consensual kink is also rife, in a way that primes people to react with similar disgust to any porn performer who engages in domination play. Abusers will physically assault and degrade their victims, and some porn plays with the idea of degradation and assault in a consensual manner. So, showing an abuser like Andrew Tate abusing someone and also creating this kind of “kink” pornography without context or explanation causes people to make the association. These kinds of associations are later used to place further regulations on the porn industry or to ban types of porn altogether. When people are unable to create online content or work with studios, and therefore cannot get work, they are much more likely to engage in prostitution which is notably higher risk. The sharing of abuse content alongside kink content fuels this cycle, and it happens because kink content is created with the intent of being watched and so it is much easier to find than footage of real abuse that people are usually trying to cover up.

It is not uncommon for SWERFs to post compilations of porn scenes which include choking or spanking or rough sex and to directly compare these scenes to sexual abuse and rape. If they could find larger amounts of footage of real violations, I have no doubt they would be using those instead, especially because they present this media as being genuine sexual assault and thus clearly have no moral objection to showing those kinds of videos to the public. Once the public have an appetite for this kind of content, they want a constant stream of it.

Interviews with the abusers and traffickers are sought out more than the words of the victims about their thoughts and experiences. Part of the reason there is often a lack of pushback for this from victims is that they often wish to remain anonymous to avoid public scrutiny, or that they know every time they speak out they will receive a new wave of harassment.

High-profile cases are not our only opportunity to hear from victims, and victims can speak out even when their abuser is not widely known or has not been arrested. The focus does not have to be on the cases that make it into the news, as if they are the only source of information about trafficking survivors. We can seek out those who wish to speak without looking to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein or the Rotherham scandal specifically. A legal case may in fact serve to silence victims far more, out of fear of being sued or impacting their case.

I fault no-one for their understandable anger towards those who coerce others into prostitution and control or force them with regards to selling sex. My own anger feels utterly overwhelming at times, to the point that it is paralyzing. We cannot allow the satisfaction of seeing one high-profile person be arrested delude us into thinking there is some sort of large-scale justice for victims of sex trafficking. Most importantly, we cannot let this lust for arrest take precedent over the safety of the survivors of the abuse.

Feminism and Whorephobia

Activism which results in a clash between sex workers and radical feminists is often framed as being between “the pimp lobby” and simply “feminists”. Sex workers are neither a pimp lobby nor are we generally in opposition to feminism. Not all sex workers are educated on feminist perspectives and a lack of education in general is frequently a contributing factor as to why someone has become a sex worker in the first place, but through lived experience most sex workers have seen the impacts of sexism and the importance of bodily autonomy. There are Marxist feminists among sex workers, liberal feminists, and intersectional feminists who understand the ways in which the oppression of sex workers and of women and based on race or fatness or transness all interlink and impact each other.

Sex worker activists are almost all feminists, of one type or another. There is a long history of sex workers being excluded by feminist movements, either because we are seen as traitors for supposedly allowing men to objectify us or because prostitutes are of ill-repute and feminist movements do not want to be associated with us. Unlike those whose ideologies are formed purely based on written theory they have read or on groups they associate with, sex workers as a collective are unable to turn away from feminism even when many subsets under the feminist umbrella choose to reject us. Bodily autonomy, countering violence against women, the right to sexual freedom: these are all rights that sex workers are forced to fight for and which are supposed to be feminist ideals. Whether sex workers were to use the label or not, these goals would be in alignment with feminist ideals even though certain feminists are hypocritical when it comes to the topic of prostitution.

Liberal feminists may be inclined to use catchphrases like “sex work is work”, but are ultimately easily taken in by weaponized stories of sex workers’ trauma. To make sense of these two different perspectives, it’s common for this subset of feminists to separate sex workers into victims and empowered workers. They often consume the stories of our trauma that are put out by radical feminists or by conservatives, but are at least likely to have some criticisms of the way these stories are presented. Support for the Nordic Model for prostitution is common among liberal feminists, however their support is much more flimsy than of typical SWERFs. The opinions of sex workers are seen as more authoritative by liberal feminists, with the view that members of a group should have their words uplifted, and so demonstrating that sex workers are most likely to support an approach of decriminalization is more likely to convince them. It is not a good idea to view identity as a proxy for determining if a person has a reasonable opinion on a select topic, yet in this case it works to sex workers’ benefit.

I see how easily swayed the average person who does not know much about sex work can be, and feminists who’ve built their framework for understanding patriarchy without considering our experiences are not exempt. Being compared to a whore is an insult that they see as degrading to women on the basis that being a whore is bad, rather than understanding that prostitutes are a part of their same struggle and should not be considered something degrading to be compared to.

The language sex workers use should not revolve around the comfort of others, however I do tend to wonder whether certain terms are alienating to some feminists. It is possible this is part of what drives them away, but in attempting to change this we face other issues with messaging and broader public support.

The term “sex work”, coined by Carol Leigh, seeks to group together anyone who sells sexual services or performances. Grouping together prostitution with pornography and stripping and other sexual professions means there are more people who are fighting together over similar issues. The more numerous we are, the higher our chances of success. With explicitly calling these jobs “work”, the term also makes it implicitly clear that we deserve workers’ rights and are not simply victims. This seems to be somewhat acceptable as a term to most feminists, with certain radical feminists rejecting it, partially because it is so simple and clear.

However, the language we use to talk about sex work doesn’t stay so inoffensive. Words like “whorearchy” and “whorephobia” certainly cause hesitation among many people. Some don’t want to use terms which are almost exclusively used as insults, even when describing our oppression. Even using clear language to differentiate between prostitutes and other kinds of sex workers can be difficult, when practically everyone understands the term prostitute and yet also sees it as an insulting term. We have phrases like “full service sex worker”, which might catch on in time, but when I am speaking to people about my need for rights or telling them what I do for work it is exhausting to explain what these terms mean every single time. If I tell someone I am a prostitute, they know exactly what I do for work in a way that they do not intuitively understand if I say I am an escort or a full-service sex worker. A hesitancy to use these terms means that feminists who do not sell sex often feel like they should not participate in our conversations. To be fair, part of reclaiming these terms and using them is precisely to make some of these conversations exclusive to sex workers, although in the long-term this isn’t beneficial for gaining support.

SWERFs often use language that makes the other feminists they speak to feel good, like “prostituted women” which uses terms surrounding prostitution that they understand and doesn’t apply a specific label to the sex worker. Using the word prostitute as a verb means discussing prostitution as something which is done to a person and which a person can be rescued from, rather than an identity. In the same way that a “rape survivor” or “rape victim” is not linguistically demeaned by being associated with rape, calling someone a “prostituted woman” frees them from those concerns. This language also denies sex workers autonomy and treats our work as though it is simply a way we are acted upon rather than something we do, but this concern is not immediately clear to people who aren’t familiar with our struggles.

If your options are to use more commonly understood language and terms like misogyny and rape culture or to use words like whorephobia and full service sex work, with no other context it is obvious why many people will shift to the language they see as less provocative and confusing. Personally, for these reasons I frequently refer to those who sell sex as prostitutes, because it is the term that is well understood and simply changing what word we use doesn’t relieve us of any stigma. We are prostitutes, we engage in sex work, and we experience anti-prostitute stigma.

Our language should not be forced to be made palatable. I tend towards the opinion that grouping together different kinds of sexual services under the label of a sex work is a good choice but that we need phrases besides those with slurs or insults to describe facets of our oppression. If we’re speaking about the stigma which harms children who have been groomed into selling sex, for example, calling this whorephobia is obviously going to garner a negative response. Referring to this as anti-prostitution stigma is still accurate, whilst not associating the child with the word whore.

Ultimately, sex workers should not be the ones forced to make these changes to our language or to reach out to feminists to bridge any gaps between the activism for general women’s rights and for sex workers’ rights. There is massive overlap in our needs, most sex workers are women, and feminists should be seeking to understand sex workers better.

Too often, feminists will appeal to the level of danger that women are in as a way to provoke empathy in others, to convince them to fight against misogyny. Those figures frequently include large numbers of sex workers, yet those experiences are collapsed into the broad category of women’s experiences without their status as sex workers being noted. If our trauma is good enough for them to use to appeal to the masses, prostitutes should not have to appeal to them for acknowledgment of us. Feminists cannot avoid the reality that the oppression of women as a group has always been tied into control over women’s sexuality, and that includes how the state reacts when women engage in prostitution.

What’s More Traumatic?

A lot of people suffer from being in serious poverty. Comparing abuses in sex work to other jobs is often considered unfair, on the basis that other jobs are not so intimate and that people believe there is some sort of quality to sex that makes it more traumatic to do without enjoyment than any other kind of work. Rather than make these comparisons, I would like to compare some different scenarios instead that people often ignore. Selling sex contrasted with choosing not to sell sex and instead to suffer in poverty.

After being assaulted in my teens, I took a break from selling sex. I was too traumatized, could not engage in any sort of sex act without becoming very upset and having flashbacks or breakdowns, and therapy was helping but at an incredibly slow rate. I was receiving benefits from the government of roughly £115 every two weeks, as I was a student studying my A-levels, but there was an issue as I was on break from school for the summer and my application to continue for the next year had not been processed correctly. I was cut off. Usually, I’d have gone out and sold sex the day I realized and made myself at least £100 to pay for food and necessities. This time I couldn’t, and I was not allowed to have a traditional job or my benefits wouldn’t restart for even longer, so I suffered without money.

Over the next couple of days, I ran out of food entirely. For the following ten days, I starved. Around day four, I started to throw up stomach bile. It happened uncontrollably at random times for around 48 hours, always after I woke up and then occasionally throughout the day. I drank water from the tap in my bathroom to stay hydrated. The lack of food made me very physically weak within only a few days. By day ten, I had chest pain any time I walked and constantly felt weak and light-headed. On the last day, I finally received my benefits into my account. During all of this I tried to get to a food bank but was denied because I no longer had the proof I was on benefits (due to the processing error) and by the time I was desperate enough that I would have started begging people I was delirious and too weak to walk outside.

Once I had the money, I decided to drag myself to the local corner shop. What was usually a two minute walk took me more than half an hour and I kept having to sit on the floor on the pavement. I was past caring what anyone thought of me, if they were judging me, and struggled to get there. I called a friend who was abroad visiting family and he talked me through getting to the shop, giving encouragement. When I made it there I bought bread and houmous, because I thought I could keep it down. I also purchased some crisps and a bag of pasta and sauce. My plan was to eat when I got home and do a more comprehensive shop when I was no longer so weak. In addition, I grabbed myself a Lucozade (an energy drink with less caffeine than most which was often said to be good for drinking after being sick). I sat outside for a moment and drank some of the energy drink with the hopes of giving myself enough energy to get home easily so I could eat. I managed to cross the road, collapsed, and promptly vomited the half an energy drink I had just consumed all over myself and cried. No-one checked on me, people walked right past, and I was inconsolable because I was so angry at myself for wasting the 50 pence that much of the energy drink had cost that I’d consumed and the fact I’d wasted the calories it contained.

The next hour or so was a blur but I eventually made it home, only to be spotted by the people in the office of my supported housing unit who were so concerned they suggested an ambulance. I explained the situation and that I just needed to eat, and ate bread very slowly in tiny bites within the office. With what I know now, I recognize my struggle to eat and the reaction I had as refeeding syndrome. My support worker was inconsolable, repeating that I should have come to her sooner to express how bad it was, but I had come to her many times to tell her I had no food and no money or way to get any and was brushed off. She must have assumed that I was exaggerating or looking to con her out of some money all those times.

In the following days, any time I ate I would become dizzy and feel my heartbeat stuttering. I struggled to stand up or walk and was so weak. If I fell asleep, I’d wake up cold and gasping as if I’d not been breathing properly. I also had some hallucinations during this period, which I am admittedly more prone to than the average person. Eventually a friend was able to come over and go to the shop for me with my debit card to buy me some more food and bring it to me and over the next few weeks I built my strength back up.

Three months later, my benefits were cut off again due to another error. I immediately started advertising on several escorting sites and had a client by the next day. I met him at a hotel and he must have been able to sense how desperate and scared I was, which I presume he liked — he pushed various boundaries and manhandled me and pinched me painfully, leaving bruises on my skin, and thrust enough to bruise my cervix. He left the hotel room and gave me the keycard to it and I spent 45 minutes in a scalding hot shower once he left, shaking and crying. Selling sex that night and suffering that abuse was still infinitely easier than the ten days I spent without food and took less of a physical and mental toll. If forced to choose between the two scenarios again, I would choose to sell sex without question.

My experiences whilst in poverty are not sensational in the same way a recounting of times I have been abused whilst selling sex are. People always want to focus on how selling sex must have impacted me, meanwhile even six years after the event where I didn’t eat for a couple of weeks I still have an unhealthy relationship with food. I am obsessed with making sure the fridge is closed because I am terrified that food will spoil. The sight of an empty fridge makes me feel sick. There is sometimes a psychological block for me when I am completing a task, where I do not want to eat anything, and so I will work twelve hour shifts at other jobs without consuming any food and then binge eat the moment I get home.

The night my benefits were cut for the second time, that I spent with a client, was upsetting. I remember feeling devastated at the time and scrubbing at my skin because I felt so unclean after sex with the john who’d responded to my ad. However, thinking back on the event doesn’t make my throat close up with panic like thinking about the time I starved does. I often remember the time when I couldn’t eat and don’t think back on that particular client who was rough with me at all unless I’m reminiscing about experiences selling sex.

It is not acceptable that anyone should be pushed into selling sex as a result of poverty. The solution to this seems obvious to me; we need to end poverty. To ban prostitution would mean condemning me to starve and never giving me an alternative. Of course, plenty of people say that abolishing prostitution should come with exit services and support, to which I say that simply providing the financial support alone would be enough because then people wouldn’t have to sell sex. If support is provided so that people do not have to turn to selling sex when they do not desire to, why would anyone need to ban it? It reeks to me of people being so sure they know what is best for others that they want to take away one of sex workers’ only options. Sometimes selling sex is genuinely my best option.

Bookings with clients are not usually upsetting for me. Most of them range from somewhere around neutral to mildly annoying. If I see eight clients in a month, for an hour each, or six with a couple of appointments lasting more than an hour, I can pay my rent and my bills and have some money left over. Sometimes I’ve seen eight clients in the span of a couple of days and then I’ve taken the rest of the month to rest and do whatever I like. During one point in my life I did this for several months in a row without issue and had a huge amount of time to myself. I am not deluded when I say this was better than most other jobs I have had. I was isolated because I could not tell people about my work, and I was unwilling to see more clients than necessary to pay my bills so I didn’t save any extra money, but it was otherwise a good experience. If I could go back, I’d have pushed myself to see a higher volume and to save some of that money. My reasons for not doing so were primarily tied to a lot of panic I had about viewing myself as a lesbian and whether it would be “unlesbian” if I saw more clients than absolutely necessary. Funny to think about now as someone who is very proudly bisexual, yet still sad.

No-one is more equipped to decide whether selling sex is a better option for me than other jobs than I am. I know myself better than anyone else. An outsider cannot presume to know with absolute certainty whether I would have been happier in a full-time job that caused severe pain in my joints and emotional distress from workplace harassment, or selling sex with the occasional client who might mistreat or assault me. There are too many variables, and they will differ for every sex worker.

The Weird Stuff

Having the public only be interested in the most sensational of sex workers’ stories means all of our other issues are completely overshadowed. If it’s not something that could make it into a thriller or an episode of a police procedural show, most people won’t know the problem exists.

Sponges and their use is a huge concern. That might sound like a ridiculous or niche issue — it’s not. There are a lot of risks to vaginal health in sex work, including STIs and damage from the friction of having sex too frequently, and one of them is the use of sponges inside of the vagina to block a period. Sex workers insert a sponge into the vagina after a period starts and the idea is that it is dense and absorbent enough for you to have sex while it’s inserted with no sign of blood. Depending on the sponge and what material it is, it can be inserted in such a way that a client will have no idea that it’s there and a sex worker can successfully continue selling vaginal sex during their period.

A variety of different sponges are used. Often the go-to choice is a make-up sponge, out of desperation when a period suddenly starts but the sex worker hasn’t yet made enough money for rent or food and doesn’t have time to wait until the end of the period. Others use natural sea sponges, which can harbor bacteria and cause infection. Soft tampons exist which can be used for this purpose, but they can be prohibitively expensive and make-up sponges can be bought in bulk so that they cost only pennies each.

Toxic shock syndrome is relatively well-known as a phenomenon among people who have periods. The back of a box of tampons usually has instructions about not leaving them in for more than 8 hours to avoid it. With sponges, the theoretical safe length of time has not been studied and we have no data on how often people suffer severe illness from using them. We cannot know exactly how pervasive the problem is and how many people are dealing with regular vaginal irritation or infections or whether their use might increase the chances of condoms breaking and STI transmission, because the research simply does not exist.

Not all of our issues are so serious as those which pose a risk to our health. Like any profession, there are struggles which are more of an annoyance than anything else. Sex work is not exempt from this facet of having a job. I have read extensively about sex work and yet when looking at published works I find almost no mention of complaints that are ubiquitous among sex workers.

A huge pet peeve of mine is how the average client seems completely unable to follow simple directions or to find an address. If I start selling sex from a new location, I have to workshop my instructions on how to find the address until clients seem to consistently be able to find it. This has been so consistently true for me and for every other sex worker I know that it becomes a factor which makes me doubt the authenticity of someone’s accounts of experiences in sex work if they work from an incall and never mention a client having difficulty finding it. Most of the time this is purely an irritation due to the waste of time from having to guide a client through to finding the front door. Once or twice, it had resulted in a client knocking on the door of my neighbour or asking a passerby for where to find my exact address.

No-shows (clients who ghost after making a booking and don’t show up) are something practically all escorts have to deal with. A bizarre thing about people who make bookings and don’t show up for them is that they often text again afterward as if it never happened, acting as though they’re texting for the first time. Clients are known to mass message sex workers using the same first message, sometimes making bookings with multiple people and then only showing up to one of them or to none at all and simply get off to the idea of seeing a sex worker. Evidently after mass messaging people they will delete the conversations and completely forget who they’ve already contacted!

There are also some mild social missteps which occur when another person does not realize a sex workers’ profession that can actually be quite funny instead of upsetting. I once started going to a new STI clinic after beginning work at a brothel in London, and during the intake questionnaire the nurse asked me how many sexual partners I’d had in the last month. I was doing the math in my head to work out how to answer, and was about to settle on around forty, when she clarified “one, two to three, more than four?” as the categories. The numbers were so much lower than my expectation that I actually laughed out loud before stating that it was more than four. A question about whether I had ever sold sex followed later, to which I answered that I was currently doing so and the nurse was finally able to make sense of my earlier reaction.

Through a lack of awareness of the strange little issues that are so common in sex work, media that is supposed to be about our lives feels inauthentic. Our lives are not purely full of misery! We joke, we have funny occurrences as a result of people not knowing what we do for work or in the course of seeing clients who do ridiculous things. Fiction which seeks to depict us, unless written by sex workers ourselves, rarely authentically depicts anything but incidents of rape or violent assault which are the only things the authors can easily find research or testimonials about. That is not reflective of the full range of our lived experiences. No wonder so many people have such a false impression of how sex workers live.

In some ways I find this lack of information to be a comfort, when it comes to protecting sex worker events or groups from being infiltrated. It is easy to spot when someone is merely pretending to have knowledge of sex work, or when they’re brand new to it and still building their impression of the work from stereotypes.

I consistently find that I can tell whether someone is asking me about selling sex because they’re simply curious or because they’re considering selling sex for themselves by the types of questions they ask. Someone who’s thinking about selling sex can listen to me for hours while I tell different anecdotes or mention having to make up lies to explain the gap in my CV. What you can and cannot write off on your taxes whilst selling sex is vital information for those who wish to sell it, and is practically useless to anyone else. People who would never consider selling sex cannot help but cut me off and ask their burning questions about my most scandalous experiences.

Usually sex workers cannot risk revealing some of our more shocking experiences, like celebrities or politicians paying us for sex. There are exceptions for those who are already public figures and who will not out themselves by going public with the information, but doing so means losing most future clients because your discretion can no longer be trusted. People want to grill me on which famous people I know are clients if I mention my awareness of any. It’s one of the few things that aren’t traumatic that people have a strong desire to know from me.

As with any profession, there are always going to be trade secrets and mundane facts about the job that not everyone is privy to. I see no reason that sex work needs to be an exception to this. What I do see is a great need to create associations between sex work and some of the more innocuous things that are involved. Have people picture us making irritated faces at a client’s sub-par dirty talk when we’re in a sex position where they can’t see our face, instead of imagining us shaking with fear.

Prostitutes are frequently not seen as full people — a view which the mundane or slightly strange details of our lives might challenge.

Sharing in Private

The stigma around public discussion of sex work means I have trouble sharing what has happened to me even in private and to my friends. This issue is not distinct to discussion of prostitution or of my work in porn and can apply to anything with traumatic elements or that is highly stigmatized. Notably, my hesitance to discuss prostitution is much stronger than other experience I have had which were traumatizing, which I know because I do not have similar difficulty in discussing the grooming I underwent during my pre-teens and early teens or the incident of physical abuse which caused me to leave my childhood home and become homeless.

To justify it to myself when I speak about things that have happened to me in sex work, I make it educational. If there’s a purpose to me sharing what I’ve lived through then I can tell myself I have the right to say it and dismiss my guilt that I will make some people uncomfortable with my words. An anecdote shared in service of explaining why sex workers need certain types of help feels productive to share, rather than leaving me feeling humiliated upon admitting to my struggles.

Resentment builds up over time, through no fault of those around me, at my inability to divulge the specifics of different incidents. Those around me are unable to understand or anticipate my reactions to things which remind me of trauma I have been through because they do not know about it in the first place. Friends crack jokes about my birthday or act like I’m being unreasonable by not celebrating it because I don’t explain that I was raped by a client on my birthday and I am reminded of it every time my birthday comes up. I get uncomfortable in certain areas of London because I saw so many clients in that area when I was a teenager and the memories are depressing, so I keep my head down or chatter endlessly about nonsense and am of no help in navigating if we end up lost.

We are all more than our trauma, but our trauma does have a huge influence on how we behave. So many things I do can be traced back to past encounters with clients. Particularly during sex, I have responses which are bizarre or do not want to be touched in certain ways but am almost always unwilling to explain why. Making a connection with a partner becomes so much harder because even if they know that I sell sex, they have to rely on how they presume selling sex was for me because I won’t explain it to them. I leave people to make assumptions and then find myself furious when those assumptions are incorrect.

Any sex worker who tries to date is likely to have had the experience that, upon pushing ourselves to share even some of what our work is really like, even partners who claim to be perfectly comfortable with us selling sex and meet us as people who already do so will become uncomfortable with our job. The more we talk about it, the faster their jealousy and anger and worry builds. The barrier to discuss how a booking with a client went is already so high with non sex workers and then every time we surmount it there’s a slap in the face and a reminder of why we don’t usually do so. A prostitute tells their partner that they just sucked someone off for hours and their jaw hurts and their partner is suddenly complaining about their sex life or bringing up that they don’t get to receive oral sex often.

Most people cannot separate out types of sex to understand how sex workers view them. There’s the kind of sex we have at work and the kind of sex we have for leisure or in relationships. Sometimes the experiences can overlap in many ways, from accidentally dissociating during sex with a partner because it’s so ingrained to do with clients all the way to phrases a partner might say, but there’s still a difference in how each type of sex is viewed. When a partner starts to feel like a client and the sex feels transactional, that’s a sign to practically any sex worker I know that they should leave the relationship.

Since most people can’t see that we view “work sex” differently from casual sex or fucking a long-term partner, complaints about a booking with a client aren’t taken in the spirit they’re intended. I want to complain about a client who was slobbering over my dick and muttering about how he loves to give oral because it’s all about my pleasure, whilst giving the worst head I’ve ever received in my life, and have that complaint viewed as if I’m talking about a customer who orders cocktails whilst I’m bartending and clearly want to close the bar that acts like they’re doing me a favour by letting me make an interesting drink. I’m not on the verge of tears when a client’s using his tongue like he’s mimicking the spinning of a washing machine on my genitals; I’m rolling my eyes. If whoever I complain to won’t understand it that way, there’s no point in me sharing.

Inevitably when I am seeing many clients, one of them assaults me sooner or later. Each time it happens, I have to work out if I’m going to bother telling anyone the specifics of it. Most of the time I don’t, unless it comes up when I’m chatting with sex worker friends in a group chat or in person which could be weeks or months after it happens. At one stage I took clients in my own home as incalls whilst the friend I lived with was out at work — by the time he came home I’d be composed even if a client had assaulted me that day and I’d speak about my day almost exclusively in terms of how much money I’d made and maybe some brief descriptions of clients if one had an unusual job. The only times I can recall talking about a client at length, even to the person I lived with, were rambling on about a client with dick piercings who I’d found immensely attractive because finding a client attractive is so rare or recounting how a client got cum in my eye so he’d know why my eye was red. Mentioning an assault feels pointless and depressing without any benefit.

Making my trauma a vehicle to discuss the issues sex workers face through giving examples is one of the only ways I know how to discuss it. I might write something hoping that a friend will read it and gain context about me because I could never get the words out in person. I know that’s not an ideal way to communicate my needs. There are many sex workers out there who have no outlet at all and keep everything bottled up.

Being completely sincere becomes impossible if the people around you don’t know that you’ve sold sex. Little moments where you wouldn’t otherwise think of it suddenly bring sex work to the forefront of your mind. A drinking game with friends becomes a minefield of lying and dodging questions about “body count” or worst kisses or one-night-stands. A conversation where a friend asks your opinion about being the third party in a cheating situation requires you to omit how your own life experiences have shaped your opinion. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by people who are supportive of me selling sex and who are unashamed if I bring it up around new friends of theirs. Still, in my relatively privileged situation, I omit various facts about my life so that I don’t bring down the mood in conversation.

Plenty of sex workers tell people around them about their work, but divulging the specifics is a different story. From what I have seen, it is common for sex workers to only be fully open about the nature of our work life with each other. In brothels I have had no issue sharing things with relative strangers who work there with me that I wouldn’t even tell my best friend. We chat about times clients have assaulted us and times a client has smeared shit across our bedsheets because they don’t wash their asshole and there’s no judgment or hesitation in the conversation. I am unable to recreate this with people who don’t sell sex, no matter how hard I try.

How do we work out what’s appropriate to share and what isn’t? Some people don’t want to hear about the sex lives of their friends at all, which seems similar to the negative reaction a person is likely to have if the sex life of their parents or sibling is brought up. Other groups of friends openly share all of the information about their sex life with vivid descriptions, swapping photos of people they’ve fucked or asking their friends for opinions on their nudes before they send them to someone. These boundaries take time to work out. Having a person ask what you do for work and navigating conversations about what that entails becomes fraught when talking about it might cross a person’s boundaries for how sexual they’re willing for a conversation to be.

This doesn’t mean I never share anything with non sex workers, though I sometimes regret when I do. As time passes, I get better at working out when it’s appropriate to reminisce about a client or incident with my closest friends. That being said, I’ve had friends who message me dozens of times to check on me when they know I’m seeing clients after I’ve casually mentioned how rough some of them can be or how they can scare me. Others have overreacted so strongly to what I think are mild stories that they cried and I wonder how they’d ever tolerate hearing what I actually consider to be severe.

All of this struggle adds a certain allure to the idea of simply saying all of the lurid details without preface or caveats. It’s not fair that we have to manage other people’s feelings just to talk about an average day at work if the workplace is a brothel. Keeping so much bottled up makes it very appealing to imagine the attention it would bring and the relief of getting the words out. Fear of the consequences usually wins out over those desires, but they’re very real. It’s part of what makes to anti-prostitution organizations who want to use us as mouthpieces so attractive to some sex workers.

We cannot forget one of the main purposes for sex workers sharing their trauma in public settings, which applies mostly to those who have been outed or can not longer hide that they have engaged in prostitution (especially those who are very high profile). Exposing our trauma can make us into more sympathetic victims. There is no shame in people telling others about their true experiences of abuse in the sex industry to avoid losing their family or friends or community — the shame belongs with those who would ostracize them for not adequately performing victimhood. However, we must admit that an implicit part of this defense is to argue we’re not like those other whores who haven’t been traumatized and who choose to sell sex. On a small scale, playing into your family’s bias against prostitutes to argue you’re one of the good ones and stay safe isn’t something I blame anyone for… doing this to a huge audience of people to prime them to support legislation that hurts us all is not something I can forgive so easily. How our stories might be used varies wildly depending on whether we tell them in private or in public.

Porn Trauma and Trauma Porn

Part of the appeal of the term “sex worker” is that it joins various forms of work related to sex into one category to be used for fighting for sex workers’ rights. Many types of sex workers, from strippers to prostitutes to porn actors, have shared needs. Unfortunately, given that practically all of the terms for prostitutes have extremely negative connotations, “sex worker” is not only used as a catch-all for anyone in the sex industry but also as a term to reference only prostitutes specifically. This causes some strange clashes, when commentary is made about prostitution and only refers to it as sex work despite the commentary not applying to other forms of sex work at all.

Porn actors who work independently are often called “online-only sex workers”, especially if they film exclusively solo content or content with their partners whom they are in genuine relationships with. In contrast to this, “in-person sex workers” will be used to refer to strippers and prostitutes. This separation tends to be used to distinguish between which types of sex workers are more at risk of physical violence, with the understanding that all forms of sex work are subject to stigmatization by virtue of subverting expected heterosexual monogamous relationship dynamics.

Plenty of organisations openly oppose the creation or distribution of pornography. Radical feminists claim it is damaging to actors and viewers alike, by creating unrealistic expectations about sex for viewers which leads them to enact abuse in their sex lives and by abusing mostly the women in porn to create the content in the first place. Conservatives argue that porn addiction leads young men to consume pornography instead of seeking out relationships and that it is immoral for women to expose themselves sexually to an audience. Some of these viewpoints are shared by the porn actors who create the content.

Being involved in any form of sex work does not necessitate a positive view of clients, and this is just as true for those who create porn of themselves or act in porn videos for studios as it is for people who sell sex directly to clients. Many of those who use platforms like Onlyfans are harassed and objectified by their fans in ways which are deeply distressing to them. Sex workers who make porn may be pressured to work by their partners, have their content leaked and made free to view without their consent, and have content sent to family members to out them for their profession.

As much as people talk about engaging in porn being supposedly glamorized since Onlyfans and Manyvids and IWantClips became so well-known, a massive amount of the conversation about porn has a focus on the possible consequences of acting in it. I am sure that most people who use the internet have heard some version of the phrase “the internet is forever” — this is applied to creating online porn with the implication that a person must eventually regret their participation and wish to wipe the evidence off of the internet. When porn performers do feel that way, this becomes another story for various news outlets to milk to demonize sex work as a profession.

These new platforms mean there are a higher number of people in the past few decades who make porn without sex work being their main source of income or their long-term profession. This situation does not lend itself to claims that people are forced into it by desperation, with those arguments being reserved for people who do porn full-time or move to other states or countries to have their porn career managed by a third party. Instead, the claim is that large numbers of young women are manipulated into doing porn and are therefore traumatized as a result of crossing their own boundaries.

Blame regarding the damage done to a person’s life when they are exposed as a porn performed is laid on sex workers who talk about their profession and might have given someone the idea, instead of with the family members or employers who ostracize the sex worker once they find out. It is true that some people fall for the marketing of online sex workers which is actually aimed at clients and which seems to glamorize the industry, but it is not true that those sex workers are more at fault than the people creating stigma around the work.

To promote their pornography and attract paying customers, sex workers may put out videos on various platforms showing a highly curated version of their daily life and speaking positively about the job whilst not admitting any harm or downsides. They do this because it’s not attractive to clients to imagine the person they’re watching porn videos of resents being objectified so much and might even be miserable at the prospect of having to film porn that day. Advertising is public and so ends up being viewed by people who are not that target audience, some of whom are struggling with money and considering sex work themselves. This does give them an overly rosy view of what being a porn actor is like. Considering that likely every other source of information they consume, barring if they stumble across educational content about sex work, is created with the intent of making sex work seem dangerous and terrifying… this glamorization doesn’t seem to be the main issue. Advertising oneself as happier in a job than you are isn’t automatically a form of grooming others into that profession.

Tearful tales of being manipulated by social media into believing that it’s okay to do porn are a common way for people to try and recoup some of their reputation if doing porn backfires and their audience does not react as positively as expected. This only works for people with some degree of online following before they launched their foray into porn and is essentially damage control. Of course, this does not apply to every person who claims to have been manipulated by the media around them — some were sheltered and had not been exposed to what porn is or how it works prior to discovering sex workers advertising themselves and got in over their head. Unlike those with larger followings, people in this situation tend to be desperate and looking for any way to earn money and never gain significant public traction and therefore stop having made very little money and suffered some degree of harassment and embarrassment. In reality, these poorer people are worse off and certainly more upset or even traumatized by the experience, but it’s not as sensational to say they got 20 customers to their subscription service than to point to the person who already had a following whose porn videos were seen hundreds of thousands of times. The scale of the viewership is not necessarily what decides the extent of the suffering.

Rather than only scale, the severity of the damage done by participating in porn is often measured by the type of porn that it is. If the porn has any sort of BDSM involving rope or rough sex, suddenly it is treated as though it is inherently assault by radical feminists and a person’s story in the porn industry is considered worthy of combing through for instances that will seem shocking. If some of the porn scenes have misogynistic premises, this can be presented as evidence of sexism leveled at the worker themselves.

Regarding the assertion that BDSM is automatically assault, this ignores the desires and autonomy of women themselves. I say women because they are the focus of this idea, not queer people. Particularly gay men who often engage in this kind of play and are dismissed as simply degenerates because a clear victim/perpetrator distinction cannot be drawn. Women’s sexual desires are ignored or claimed to be derived from their desire to please men. No woman is seen as having the capacity to be a masochist or to desire the thrill of being choked. If a woman says she enjoys these things, she is painted as a liar or said to only believe she enjoys it because of trauma. As if wanting something as a result of your life experiences and how you cope with them is inherently bad, something that is assumed to be the case but not argued directly.

The women who enact these practices in porn (choking or spanking or gangbangs or piss play) are not only framed as victims of actions that are treated as abuse and argued to be impossible to be consensual, an additional accusation is leveled that this kind of pornography increases the likelihood that people who view it will enact these things. For example, groups like Fight The New Drug (an anti-porn organisation) would say that because there is a lot of choking in porn, porn watchers are more likely to choke their partners. Following on from this, they argue that many of the people watching this porn will do so non-consensually after assuming that it is typical.

There may be a correlation between consuming a lot of porn and committing acts of sexual violence.16 Although the evidence on this matter is conflicting, even if true this neither proves causation nor functions as evidence that pornography is sexual abuse itself. Pornographic media reflects the desires of its audience, and people with specific desires seek out specific types of porn. If someone is obsessive about sex, they’re going to watch higher amounts of porn. This isn’t proof that watching more porn makes a person more likely to engage in sexual abuse, since you’d have to account for why people began watching porn in the first place and whether that reason is what drove them to commit sexual assault and also drove them to watch porn. After all, most people watch it. Studies on porn usage generally have trouble finding subjects that do not watch any porn at all, for comparison.

Just as any kind of media can give people ideas about how to do things or what is typical, porn can obviously give people ideas for sex acts they may not otherwise have considered and may cause them to expect such acts. It seems obvious to me that the only way to reasonably combat this is to educate people about sex and treat porn as the product that it is rather than letting it be the first resource people use to learn about sex. To deny porn performers the right to make certain kinds of porn is to deny them freedom of expression and cut off their ability to earn money. Some performers are certainly pressured to film scenes and sex acts that they do not otherwise wish to perform, and to resolve this it should be made easier for sex workers to use platforms independently and for them to access other jobs if they’d prefer.

Abusive relationships and poverty, as usual, are the common culprits causing porn performers damage. Someone filming scenes with a large company and co-stars on a set is much safer if they can afford to have firm boundaries because they don’t need the extra money that can come with having less of them and doing more extreme scenes. People filming masturbation or sex videos from their home are far more likely to be traumatized by the control of a partner than by imagining the number of people who may have seen them naked or by a rude reply left on a nude photo.

The discourse around smaller online content creators is still changing rapidly, working out the best way to attack sex workers and frame them as immoral from the right-wing and working out how best to frame them as either victims or gender traitors from radical feminists.

Women in porn who deny that an experience filming porn was traumatic will be labeled gender traitors and be blamed for worsening the objectification of women, whilst the men in porn are labeled as predatory and rarely discussed as performers in their own right outside of when a story of sexual abuse goes public. This framing of the men in porn as all being predators doesn’t even help the women who are victimized, because it frames all of their experiences as being assault rather than recognizing the situations where they actually didn’t give consent. In that scenario, anyone who denies they were abused every time they did porn and instead points to specific instances of harm is treated as an unreliable narrator about their own experiences and does not receive help. SWERFs do not want to give sex workers support on our own terms, for things we raise as real issues.

At a certain point, one has to wonder if anti-porn groups are using stories of the trauma people in porn experience for self-gratification in a manner that is not dissimilar to the way they frame pornography-watchers as enjoying abuse on screen. They consume these stories to cause a reaction in themselves that makes them feel good, where sexual gratification is substituted for the satiation of their savior complex. Reading and reposting a story with the vague statement that people should help, or offering words of advice, is treated as though it is comparable to material aid. Any time their commitment to the cause slips and people start to listen to sex workers a little, commitment to the cause is re-affirmed by viewing interviews or documentaries or reading accounts of abuse in porn.

The phrase “trauma porn” is sometimes used to refer to this phenomenon in a pejorative way. I don’t think that term quite encapsulates what is happening. Although some of the dynamics are similar in that accounts of abuse are consumed primarily for entertainment and for the viewers to feel good about themselves, there is a distinction in that they feel good about themselves for helping (even when they provide no material support in reality). If accounts of trauma really were being consumed in the same way porn was then the use of people’s trauma would still be harmful and distressing to the victims, but it would not have so many negative effects. The requirement to feel like help is being provided, unlike the satisfaction from porn which comes from merely watching, means the spread of rhetoric about the victims which denies them autonomy is required. Instead of only enjoying hearing about another person’s suffering, they must argue to make it worse by making the industry they work in illegal or further stigmatized.

Sometimes even well-meaning people fall into the trap of speaking about porn as inherently negative even whilst defending people’s right to make it. A phrase like “trauma porn” implies that the consumption of porn is bad and is so similar to the claim that all porn is footage of trauma because it is automatically degrading to be paid to perform sex acts on film.

Normalization of certain forms of sex work is the enemy of rhetoric which seeks to shock people with the seriousness of the trauma from it. The more people impacted by something in reality that people can see, the less likely they are to be taken in by claims about the level of damage it can do. High numbers look good when horrifying people with the scale of an issue, only this works much better if those numbers are inflated or the people in a certain situation are dissuaded from speaking about it. More people make porn now than ever, for small audiences and broadcast directly from their homes, so people looking to spread a certain narrative have to shift their angle. If people see making porn as more normal then suddenly filming from home isn’t so damaging and is an example of people grooming others into sex work whilst encouraging misogyny through the content of the porn — towards the forms of sex work they can argue are truly damaging, like prostitution.

When this shift in the narrative happens and this theoretical person who was lured into prostitution by porn performers is discussed, SWERFs cannot find themselves examples. So, they resort to assuming trauma from sex workers they see and projecting this backstory onto them as though they are a fictional character. They feel vicarious horror imagining what might have occurred to prostitutes they view on the street, or whom they see post on social media, presuming based on their demographic or the way they talk about sex work that they have been lured into it. An attractive woman in her early twenties talks about becoming an escort after learning about it on social media and they presume she was groomed rather than that she sought out the information due to poverty.

Sex workers should be the ones telling our stories, not people observing us. This applies just as much to porn performers as it does to prostitutes. Though there is overlap, we should be careful that one group does not speak for the other regarding issues that are specific to one group. I see this most often stated with regards to porn performers speaking over in-person sex workers, but find that the reverse does also apply. Porn performers do have rhetoric which targets them specifically, like the idea that their work does harm outside of the act itself through the people who view their porn, that can be hard for those who escort independently and out of public view to understand. Street sex workers and strippers are more likely to intuitively understand because there is some degree of public view of their work, whether it’s people seeing them on the street or their club’s advertising.

Those Queers

Cis women make up most of the people who sell sex, by a significant margin. However, trans people of all genders are overrepresented when considering our prevalence in the population, as are gay cis men. It is also noteworthy that many of the cis women involved in prostitution are lesbians or bisexual. The popular stories about sex work pertain to cis straight women’s experiences partially because those are indeed the majority but also notably because cis women are easier for the average person to view as an innocent victim. Most people have taken in enough propaganda in their lives about queer people being sexual deviants or sex-crazed that our presence in the sex industry is viewed as a personal moral failing tied to our queerness rather than a systemic issue related to our circumstances.

Trans people often get involved in sex work because we are more likely to be homeless and face job discrimination that limits our access to other forms of work. We are also more likely to be living in poverty. It is hard to get good quality data on the extent of the problem because even places which record information on the total number of homeless people often do not note whether service users are trans and therefore cannot separate out the trans population when presenting data. The 2015 US Transgender Health Survey had 29% of respondents claiming to be living in poverty and 30% said they had experienced homelessness at some point17 A quarter of trans people in the UK have experienced homelessness according to a YouGov survey by Stonewall18. Even compared to other homeless people, trans people appear to have a higher likelihood of being unsheltered in the US, with 63% of homeless trans adults being unsheltered compared to 49% of cisgender adults, and the figure being 80% for “gender non-conforming adults”19.

Homelessness is a huge motivating factor for people to sell sex. There is no barrier to sex work in the way there is with practically any other job. No qualifications are needed, selling sex can be done anywhere, and people can do it informally and on the street or solicit people they know even if they do not have internet access or the ability to travel. Queer people of all types are more likely to face homelessness and poverty and so are more likely to consider the sale of sex.

One major deterrent from selling sex is the risk of being branded as a sexual deviant or arrested. Criminalization of same-sex sex acts or of crossdressing is still a reality in various countries and is only recent history in others, so for queer people who are facing these consequences already there is less concern relating to increased risk. Relative to the danger they are already in of arrest or harassment, sex work has a lower threshold to seem worth it for the extra money.

Discussing the existence of queer people in sex work forces people to reckon with the factors which push people into sex work, and thus we are often ignored. For those wishing to create a frenzy about the prevalence of sex trafficking, admitting to the reality that it is largely poverty which is the driving force behind participation in sex work is not convenient for their narrative. Even among those who admit that poverty is a major driving force but who believe that clients should be criminalized cannot peddle their rhetoric as successfully when discussing queer people because they are constantly bumping up against the reality of the criminalization of this behaviour among queer people and how it did not help. Gay men who were paid for sex by other gay men were no better off when it was illegal for them to do so.

A lot of people who oppose rights for sex workers also oppose the rights of trans people (TERFs are often SWERFs and vice versa, see: Julie Bindel). Trans people often use sex work as a means to afford medical transition, as it is frequently not fully or even partially covered by the government or by medical insurance. The costs of assessments by psychiatrists and psychologists are exorbitant, with surgeries frequently costing a year’s earnings for someone making minimum wage. Trans people in poverty frequently have no hope of ever affording a surgery in their lifetime without some alternative method of earning money, and sex work provides that option. Denying sex workers certain rights and trying to reduce the client pool also means denying trans people one of the only available methods to afford access to transition care.

The danger trans people are in within the sex industry does not make the kind of story which makes people feel good about themselves, where they can imagine themselves as saviours for opposing the sex industry, so the stories are less appealing to the mass market.

Before I transitioned, people always wanted to hear about my experience as a sex worker the moment it came up. They asked constant invasive questions and were either titillated or horrified by accounts of my experiences. Now that I have been transitioning for several years, people who know I am a trans man often dismiss my sex work as being tied to my identity which they fetishize and therefore they presume that I enjoy the work or they presume I am a cis man and dismiss my sex work as gay promiscuity.

Trans women in particular are fetishized and sexualized to an extreme extent, whilst also being framed as predatory regardless of the fact that they are a population who are highly victimized. Clients will abuse trans women who are involved in sex work with the understanding that they will not be treated as sympathetic victims by the surrounding community or by the police.

Due to the extreme lack of data on trans people’s experiences, since we under-report crimes against us as a population that does not trust the police and many organisations do not record whether a person is trans in a way that can be used to generate statistics, often discussion of our experiences is the only record we have that harm is occurring. The UK does not record the identity of a person and whether or not they are trans when they are murdered (the police force simply records a sex which may be what a person is assigned or may be their legal sex), as an example, so the only source for the number of trans people killed in the UK is the Trans Murder Monitoring project which claims the number is 12 trans people murdered between 2008 and 202220. This is based on people reporting murders to the project, or the project finding news articles online. A trans person in the UK may personally know of multiple trans people murdered in England within a year — meaning their personal experience, by complete chance, already shows the rate to be several times higher than recorded.

There is a striking lack of information regarding the specific needs and issues of transgender people in sex work. It is hard to discuss issues faced by a population when we are forced to rely on anecdotes because the data simply is not recorded. Yet, for a population of cis women in sex work whom we have much more data for, anecdotes about the specifics of abuse are uplifted as though superior to the statistics or more important than them.

For myself, the most frightening experience I have had in a brothel was undoubtedly when I worked in one after being on testosterone for a period of several months. I had started to be presumed male much more frequently, when dressed in masculine clothing, but was still assumed to be a woman perhaps half of the time at a glance. I had assumed that if I were to present femininely, everyone would assume I was a woman, because I was not yet passing consistently and had a very large chest. Pretending to be a cis woman to work for a few days in the brothel was something I assumed would be easy.

Upon arriving at the brothel, it became apparent to me that it would not be anywhere near as easy as I thought. I put on make-up and wore a bra and a dress and felt immensely uncomfortable, conforming strictly to gender stereotypes in my presentation. Clients still found me to be too masculine, from how my fat had redistributed to how much lower my voice was (though I artificially attempted to speak in a high voice). Bottom growth (clitoral enlargement) from using testosterone meant that people commented on my genitals with suspicion. One client outright asked me if I was a trans woman who had genital surgery, clearly angry at the idea I might have been a trans woman and not told him.

It is hard to determine exactly what factors led to it, but presenting as a woman after having been on testosterone for a few months meant that clients were much more violent. Clients were more likely to use degrading language towards me or to assert my female-ness as if trying to correct me for my behaviour and body and voice and also to convince themselves. The less feminine they perceived me to be, the more entitled they felt to remind me of what they perceived as my place by pushing sexual boundaries and being rough with me.

A much higher percentage of my clients now are gay and bisexual men and I openly advertise myself as a transgender man when selling sex. This has changed many things about my dynamic with clients and how they treat me, with gay male clients being more receptive to the necessity of condom use or comfortable discussing PrEP use. Certain risks have lowered for me the longer I transition for, from the average client, and so during some periods of time it would be easy to claim that I have gotten safer. Although my average experience per client has improved, the negative experiences have admittedly become more severe over time. The severity of physical violence increased. Further into transition, as someone who is openly trans, it became more likely that I would end up covered in bruises after a brief period of selling sex than ever before simply because clients were rougher with me. Where I might previously have been seen as dainty or fragile and worthy of protection, I was viewed as someone whose body was less valuable.

The only people who seem to have considered the experiences of trans people in sex work at length are other trans sex workers. Trans people who do not sell sex often do not wish to be associated with us and sex workers who are not trans are often not privy to the gender dynamics that impact our treatment. It is so common for people to speak about sex work broadly whilst defaulting to “she” and “her” for a theoretical sex worker and to talk about misogynistic views against cis women as the driving force for mistreatment of sex workers. When discussing health issues sex workers face, the default assumption is that anyone selling sex has a vagina and anal sex will be viewed as a more extreme sex act. Even for trans people whom some of these assumptions apply to, there are additional aspects to our experiences which mean the analysis of sex workers’ conditions stemming from these assumptions do not fully apply to us. Trans women do experience misogynistic violence against them — their added experiences of transmisogyny are left out of the discussion. Trans men do usually have vaginas — their health issues from vaginal sex will differ because of factors like vaginal atrophy from testosterone and a lower likelihood of (but more severe consequences of) pregnancy if taking testosterone.

Although trans people and gay men are severely lacking in public understanding or in acknowledgement from people discussing sex work, discussion of lesbians in sex work is also suspiciously absent from anyone but sex workers themselves. A significant number of the sex workers I meet are lesbians or bisexual women and yet if I were to only consume documentaries or the popular media about sex trafficking and prostitution I would never end up with that impression.

Lesbians who choose to be involved in sex work without force or threat cannot easily be placed into either the victims category of prostitutes nor into the sexual deviant temptress archetype, which leaves them in an odd position. Rhetoric that demonizes queer people for their promiscuity does so by viewing the desire as sinful and then acting on it as a lack of self-control — lesbians whose clients are men make this much more difficult to argue, since the idea that they desire them is nonsensical. Of course, homophobia and misogyny are not limited be reasonable explanations for phenomena, so the argumentation used to demonize these lesbians is to claim they are confused or lying about being lesbians or to suggest that they are actually bisexual.

Within Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing remarks that many prostitutes seem to be lesbians21. The book is one I did not read with an intention to learn about the history of perceptions of sex work, having read it to learn about the history of the medicalisation and perception of queer identity. Rather than seeing the prevalence of lesbian sex workers as evidence that lesbians engage in sex work frequently, Krafft-Ebing’s assumption is that “repugnance for the most disgusting and perverse acts (coitus in axilla, inter mammae, etc.) which men perform on prostitutes is not infrequently responsible for driving these unfortunate creatures to Lesbian love”. He also references another author with a claim that “this vice (saphism) is met more frequently among ladies of the aristocracy and prostitutes”. This information is relegated to a few lines within a relatively small chapter of a book which spends most of its length discussing various sexualities and behaviours which it pathologises.

It is often the case that the history of queer people in sex work is a footnote either in texts which discuss the history of queer people or the history of sex work. These footnotes often try to fit us into a framework that was not built with us in mind, assuming that our experiences are fundamentally the same as for non-queer people or non sex workers. Incorrect beliefs about sex work on top of incorrect beliefs about queerness lead us to be doubly misunderstood.

Resources for queer sex workers will not be funded or receive support if people are not aware that they are needed. This leaves us to create the resources and support networks for ourselves, in the absence of anyone else who can do so. To get support for those projects, awareness must be spread outside of only circles consisting of other queer people. This leaves the question of the best method to do so, and we must consider the drawbacks of raising awareness purely through providing the details of our traumas without offering suggestions for the solutions.

The Happy Hooker Myth

Exporting the “Happy Hooker” myth is one tactic used to oppose the weaponization of sex worker trauma. One could frame it as self defense against this narrative of prostitution as solely traumatizing, to craft a view of sex workers as empowered women who enjoy selling sex. It is not one that will be effective in the long-term and undermines our struggle for rights.

There are some people who decide to sell sex because they enjoy sex and decide to also make money from having it. They accept only clients who they believe they will enjoy meeting with and they experience no noteworthy harassment or abuse. It feels empowering to them. The group of sex workers this is true for is a very small fraction of the total number of sex workers in the world or in even the countries with the highest living standards globally. The vast majority of sex workers do not enjoy their work but do not currently have access to other options that would allow them to stop. Most of us begin selling sex due to poverty. These facts do not undermine prostitutes’ fight to be recognized as workers, nor our struggle for rights — our status as marginalized and impoverished workers is exactly why we need rights so desperately.

To argue that the “Happy Hooker” archetype is common and that we should support sex workers because some of us enjoy it is nothing but rhetorically throwing poor and struggling sex workers under the bus. We have just as much of a right to hate our jobs as everyone else and to not be criminalized for it.

A version of a sex worker that people will consider acceptable and worthy of respect cannot be created in a world where the act of selling sex is itself seen as shameful. If we do not wish to sell sex and only do it out of desperation then we are treated as victims who need our choices taken from us for our own good. If we enjoy selling sex and aren’t abused then we’re immoral sluts who deserve any abuse that might come our way. This is how we are viewed and until that changes, creating an archetype and claiming only that type of sex worker as acceptable will never succeed.

We should also consider who the happy hooker archetype is even accessible to. The attempt to create a persona of a person who loves selling sex and isn’t stuck in the profession can be easily warped in the mind of a client through the lens of their prejudice. A recent immigrant who does not speak English fluently is going to be assumed not to have better options, and to therefore be selling sex out of necessity rather than choice, which means that if you create a false dichotomy between victims and happy hookers then they will be placed into the victim group. Modern slavery raids disproportionately impact immigrant workers, who are reported and targeted more often for these traumatic operations by police, and these issues are exacerbated just as much by false messaging that all consensual sex workers love the job as by the propaganda that we all hate it. If every sex worker who enters the industry voluntarily is supposedly perfectly content, what does that tell any member of the public who lives next to a brothel and sees a prostitute who looks unhappy?

Many sex workers who advertise themselves as being happy in their work will use their income as proof. How could they possibly be traumatized or trapped in sex work when they’ve made so much money? The premise, to some extent, is that we should understand they could quit at any time because they have so much money in savings. Again this splits sex workers into two groups, poor and rich, not dissimilarly to how the legalization of sex work (as opposed to the full decriminalization of it) splits sex workers into legal sex workers and the illegal underground market.

Sex workers who are marginalized, either due to their race or transness or fatness, are often unable to charge the same rates as other workers and obtain the same number of clients. Black workers are frequently undervalued and even when trying to use the happy hooker archetype are treated as if they should be paid less because of the racist hypersexualization of black people. Unlike white cis women who can present themselves as loving sex and yet still highly selective and a luxury service, black sex workers of any gender are assumed to have a smaller client pool to choose from as white clients view themselves as the arbiters of attractiveness and as if they’re doing black sex workers a favour by seeing them at all. Many clients will refuse to pay the same amount and so outsiders view black sex workers as more victimized because they’re not reaching “happy hooker” hourly rates.

A sex worker may be seen as an exception who proves the rule regarding their demographic, who only draws more attention to the usual abuses via their contrast. Indigenous women make up a small portion of Canada’s population and yet supposedly make up the majority of street sex workers22, meaning that even when an indigenous sex worker is able to make a large income from sex work and presents as a success story that success is always contrasted with those selling sex to meet their basic needs. It is worthy of note that the statistics on which demographics do sex work, especially in tracking down street sex workers to assess in the first place, are incredibly inaccurate largely because the research subjects often don’t want to be studied, but as long as people believe these statistics then in the minds of the public it’s no different whether the statistics are actually true.

No account of enjoyment will ever be effective as a counter to a tale of abuse, nor should it. When there are many stories of abuse and many of enjoyment, protecting people from suffering is going to outweigh the desire to give people the freedom to have some extra fun. Personally, I’m more than willing to give up things that I enjoy if it means doing less harm, and there are many groups out there arguing we should do so in support of important causes. People are inundated with requests that they buy things second-hand and don’t partake in fast fashion, or that they boycott chains which donate in support of harmful legislation, yet we should imagine that when it comes to sex work they’ll abandon that mindset? Enjoying sex work, as one individual, is not a sufficient argument that it should not be criminalized. Instead, a more reasonable argument is to point out that criminalization leads to more harm.

I am not innocent of playing into these stereotypes myself with clients. I’ve had clients get nervous and want reassurance that I’m not being forced to sell sex by a boyfriend and/or pimp, or ask why I became an escort with concern in their voice, and I’ve claimed that I just love having sex and thought I should at least get paid for it. Their reason for asking is to assuage their guilt about paying for sex and my answer avoids having to admit that I only do it for the money and to ruin their fantasy. When I’ve said such things it’s not out of a desire to make myself seem more respectable or to further a political goal, it’s because I’m worried it’ll take the client longer to get his dick hard if he doesn’t truly believe that I find him attractive. Longer it takes for the client to get it up, the longer they’re likely to try and give me sub-par oral for, and fuck that.

Most of us don’t have our political position as sex workers in mind during every moment we’re working. We don’t have time to be concerned about public perception and how we frame our experiences when we’re still in the middle of experiencing them. Acting as though you are less vulnerable means clients don’t get tipped off on how to exploit you the most easily, so acting as though you earn more money than you do or claiming to love the sex is a good way to get repeat clients without dealing with more extreme violence or harassment. To criticize this framing fully we must recognize why workers employ it.

The first time I had sex with a client and genuinely enjoyed it, I felt as though I would sound fake if I spoke about it at all. Long before he contacted me, the client had been a sex worker himself, and was one of the few I’ve ever had who was considerate and didn’t ask me to remove my binder or inundate me with irritating questions about what I personally enjoy that I would have to lie in response to. He happened to be my type, too, and I agreed to see him again without him paying — the first time I’d ever done that. It was such a different situation from most I’ve had whilst selling sex and I’d doubted other sex workers claims to ever enjoy sleeping with a client in the past when I was hating every booking I had.

How are any of us to know it’s possible to have these different types of experiences all together as one person, if we don’t discuss them with each other for fear of not being believed? It’s important that we aren’t gullible, especially with how many people attempt to infiltrate anonymous sex worker spaces to gather information about us, but we must be open-minded about the plurality of experiences.

We should not censor ourselves when we do enjoy part of the job. The perception that we are always miserable does us no good, and more importantly is dishonest. What we need are truthful and well-rounded accounts that do not focus solely on suffering or on enjoyment, at least when sex workers are speaking to each other or raising awareness.

Prostitutes’ Feelings

The emotions of the prostitute are often regarded as unimportant. Our distress and desperation are sometimes used to score easy political points, but make no mistake that the majority of people do not care how we feel even when they say they wish to help us. Almost anyone who frames their support of sex workers around saving or rescuing us, including when they say they will do so via the abolition of the sex trade, is doing so for the fulfillment it brings them and not out of a concern for us as people.

Disregarding our real emotions means that any feelings can be projected onto us without issue. The prostitute can be the traumatized victim when needed for stories to fearmonger about trafficking, and she (the cis female archetype of the sex worker people picture) can be framed as a seductress who takes advantage of her clients when the goal is to trap women in poverty and treat choices made to try to survive as immoral.

With the need to discredit sex workers who ask for rights whilst other groups want criminalization in the name of abolition comes the claim that some of us enjoy being abused. When all else fails and we cannot be smeared as liars about engaging in prostitution or about suffering harm as a result, there is no rhetorical avenue for those who are anti sex worker to take besides to treat us as masochistic and titillated by our own trauma.

Those of us who openly push for changes in the law regarding prostitution, whether through public speaking and attending strike action or writing about our experiences and showing up at consultations on legal changes, are likely to be accused of asking for these changes for our own benefit. Sometimes we will be framed as pimps using a persona, but when our identity cannot be denied then the argument is that we want higher numbers of clients for ourselves. If we consider SWERFs argumentation that all prostitution is rape because they view payment as nullifying consent, any accusation that some sex workers would impact legislation because they want more clients is a claim that those sex workers want to be raped.

Wanting more clients is one reason sex workers may want to avoid restrictions or criminalization of prostitution or of strip clubs or porn. A restricted client pool of only people who are willing to break the law means the average client is more violent. When there are less clients to choose from, prostitutes and strippers alike are pushed to take more risks with which clients they sleep with or give private dances to — even if they would otherwise refuse due to the number of red flags.

Either the claim is that we enjoy being raped, or it is that we enjoy being able to hold our experiences as survivors of sexual assault over other people. It is common for people to reference the fact they have been raped as a way to lend credence to what they say about sexual assault or rape culture, and groups criticizing sex workers are not immune to this. Women who are anti sex work will discuss being victims of sexual abuse and argue that a culture where sex work is normalized leads to a higher risk of such abuse and the objectification of women even outside of sex work.

This argument has been made to reject projects like the managed zone in Leeds, an area where sex workers were allowed to sell sex between certain times within a set location. Street sex workers were able to access resources from outreach projects without fear of arrest, including getting first aid or condoms. Safety of sex workers was not the focus of activists for the abolition of the managed zone and instead the complaints were focused on the sight of street sex workers making people uncomfortable or the idea that it might increase the amount of street harassment against non sex workers23. These residents are seen as innocent and undeserving of this harassment in a way that sex workers are not, as if sex workers will either feel less distressed by it or as if their distress is inconsequential.

One resident in the Listening Well Report for Holbeck is recorded as saying “they (the sex workers) are so relaxed, they move about the area anywhere. The women look horrible, disheveled, drug addicts, no teeth”, the complaint making a point of noting sex workers relative comfort as a large part of the problem. The issue is not any potential suffering that might be indicated by a disheveled appearance or seeming unwell, but the idea that we might not be ashamed and hide it away from public view.

The treatment of the prostitute as an unthinking unfeeling actor, who simply sells sex because it is what they do, denies us acknowledgment of the fact we have the same rich inner life as anyone else. If it would be uncouth to argue that sex workers who are clearly unwell and struggling must secretly enjoy their trauma, the only avenue left when trying to deny them basic rights is to dehumanize them. Assuming that a sex worker does things simply because they fall into it and it does not occur to them to leave, outside of situations of force, makes it easier to believe they would simply cease to sell sex if it were banned.

Any feelings we express are construed as lies by one group or another. If we complain about how we are treated then we must be lying about anything positive we say about sex work. If we say we sometimes enjoy sex work, we must by lying about our history of abuse. We are not treated as capable of complex emotion.

It is simultaneously true that prostitution can be convenient and take less of a physical toll than other jobs that might be available to someone, causing relief, and that prostitution can be terrifying due to threats from potential clients and health risks. One individual may feel comforted by having prostitution as a fall-back option if things go back and devastated at the idea they might actually have to make use of that fall-back plan. Prostitutes are not one-dimensional concepts, we are people.

In my worst moments I have felt as though I am too hysterical to be worth taking seriously. Crying after being assaulted by a client, obsessively scrubbing my skin until I bleed, I wonder how I could ever be objective about the sexual assault of sex workers. I convince myself that my feelings will always be too extreme, that my hatred for clients when I am triggered and reliving memories of abuse will make me too jaded to be able to listen to arguments about why clients should be respected. When actually confronted with these discussions, people accuse me of not caring about victims and of sucking up to clients because I recognize that criminalizing them would only make sex workers more vulnerable. I realize that although how I feel will impact my views, people are not accurately assessing my feelings at all.

A lack of a proper outlet for our feelings, from a combination of self-censorship to avoid our words being twisted and insufficient support on the occasions we do share, leads to maladaptive coping mechanisms to replace that outlet. We turn to drugs or to dissociation, both of which leave us in states that make us seem abnormal. A sex worker might get high and act very emotionally and be characterized as crazy or might dissociate and be characterized as mindless and unintelligent. Emotional regulation can be damaged easily by trauma and drug use and those are things sex workers are more likely to come into contact with.

Anything a sex worker does can be argued to be a behaviour which seeks out harm, leaving us the blame for any attacks or harassment we might suffer from. Sex workers are organizing to protect ourselves from abuse, not to seek more of it, yet in organizing and speaking up we are more visible and open to personal attacks on our character and emotional reactions.

Aileen Wuornos is a notable sex worker whose story was used by news outlets for shock value whilst her own feelings about that trauma were dismissed. Her story exemplifies many of the issues people have with showing empathy towards sex workers. Aileen killed seven men and the press wanted to spin the tale as that of a ruthless female serial killer, surprising the public who thought that women weren’t capable of such atrocities. In reality, Aileen had been abused since she was a young child, first being sexually abused by her grandfather and then later becoming pregnant at 14 when she was raped by her grandfather’s friend. At 15, after giving birth, she started selling sex and living in the woods. She continued to sell sex into her 30s, homeless for various periods of that time.

Throughout her time selling sex, Aileen was raped and assaulted many times. She claimed that eventually, one man tried to kill her and she killed him in self-defense; her first kill, Richard Mallory. Over the next year, she killed six more men until she was eventually caught, whom she maintained that she killed because they had each attempted to rape or kill her. One of the main criticisms used against her defense was that it seemed so unlikely that she could face so much violence in such a short space of time, framing her as a liar who exaggerated to a ridiculous extreme. Many claimed that she had finally snapped after years of being degraded as a prostitute, that she had a hatred of men that drove her to murder — a claim which went hand-in-hand with the revelation that she was in love with a woman and was dating her. In the end, she was executed for her crimes.

In her own words, Aileen stated, “You sabotaged my ass, society and the cops and the system, a raped woman got executed and was used for books and movies and shit, ladder climbs, reelection, everything else. I got a big finger in all your faces, thanks a lot.” She was cognizant of how she was being viewed by the public, how they dismissed her experiences as a victim to view her only as a perpetrator of violence, and she pointed it out. That did not protect her from the death penalty, which towards the end of her life she was actively seeking to escape the abuse from the prison guards.

No matter what a person thinks of Aileen and whether or not all of her kills were self-defense, it is clear that she was not a cold and calculating person. She was traumatized and understandably enraged by the injustice she had faced, fiercely protective of those close to her, and expressed so much empathy that she openly forgave her girlfriend for turning her in. The idea that she experienced 7 attempted rapes and/or assaults within a year does not shock me, because as a homeless sex worker she was at an immensely high risk.

In her last ever interview with Nick Broomfield, before her execution, Aileen discussed her use of self-defense and her certainty that the police allowed it:

Nick: “I am asking you what got you to kill the seven men?”

Aileen: “And I’m telling you because the cops let me keep killing them, Nick, don’t you get it?”

Nick: “Not everybody is killing seven people. So there must have been something in you that was getting you to do that.”

Aileen: “Oh, you are lost, Nick. I was a hitchhiking hooker.”

Nick: “Right.”

Aileen: “Running into trouble. I’d shoot, shoot the guy if I ran into trouble, physical trouble, the cops knew it. When the physical trouble came along, let her clean the streets, and then we’ll pull her in. That’s why.”

Nick: “But how come there was so much physical trouble? Because it was all in one year. It’s seven people in one year.”

The information about Aileen’s childhood sexual abuse was public and people were not hesitant to openly discuss her claims of repeated rapes and attacks at the hands of her clients. Those stories were morbidly fascinating to the public, yet were treated like fiction or seen as a just punishment because Aileen was engaging in prostitution. Nick sees no issue with questioning the premise that she’d encounter so much physical violence, even in her last interview before her death, because he cannot accept the reality of the danger of prostitution and see Aileen as a full human being.

Aileen Wuornos’ story is not exceptional among sex workers in terms of the violence she faced. It’s not exceptional in terms of the lack of care from the police force. What is exceptional in her case is that she didn’t die at the hands of Richard Mallory. Women like Aileen often end up dead. Sometimes at the hands of their clients and sometimes at the hands of police and sometimes from the cold when sleeping rough on the streets. Perhaps some of the men she killed after Richard Mallory would have raped her and then let her go after, there’s no way to know, but the expectation that she should tolerate being raped over and over until one of those clients finally killed her is clearly unjust. No-one could tolerate such abuse in the long-term without it having devastating impacts on them. The idea that someone should tolerate such abuse purely because they are a prostitute, or that a prostitute is more capable of tolerating that kind of trauma because they do not feel emotions the same way other people do, is almost as harmful as the abuse itself.

Some people want to pathologize Aileen or sensationalize the idea of a female serial killer. The truth of the matter is that an extremely vulnerable woman who was repeatedly abused was put in various situations where her life and body were at risk and the police did nothing but watch. Her anger was not exceptional or a symptom of psychopathy, it was a feeling any reasonable person would have if placed in her situation.

Men who target vulnerable sex workers are allowed to get away with it whilst sex workers themselves are arrested for trying to earn money to survive. Men like Samuel Little, who confessed to 93 murders (mostly women, many of them sex workers) and was the most prolific known serial killer in US history, get away with so many of their crimes because of who they target. Peter Sutcliffe, also called the Yorkshire Ripper, managed to avoid being caught for a decade because his victims were sex workers. Only when he started to kill “innocent young girls” as opposed to sex workers (in the words of the police) did the police start to care at all. The pain and even the death of sex workers is seen as utterly unimportant.

We are not thoughtless about our situations, nor are we all mired in misery about them. Sex workers are merely a group of people who share a profession. If our feelings are to be weaponized for a political goal, it becomes necessary for activists to dig past our learned indifference or despair and to reach for our rage. Anyone who would dismiss our feelings outright is not someone for whom we should have to make ourselves appear respectable, and anyone showing basic empathy can see that our anger is justified.

Whorearchy and Speaking Up

Making up stories about prostitution gives the creator of such stories the ability to speak about any scenario. In fiction, a protagonist can be from any background and have any sort of experience whilst the tale is told through their mindset. Regarding true stories, this is not so simple. Whilst any sex worker can speak about their experience in theory, in practice there are a huge number of barriers.

A street sex worker who trades sex for drugs will have a multitude of reasons that speaking up would not be a good idea for them. Revealing ongoing drug use puts a person at risk of arrest, broadcasting that you are in a vulnerable position makes it easier for predators to target you, various support services may reject them if they are aware of them selling sex, the list of reasons goes on. A person who has a need to trade sex for drugs is also not likely to have much of a platform for their words to reach a wider audience even if they do want to talk about their experiences. Finding the time or mental clarify to write is yet another barrier.

Once you become aware of the extent of the disinformation campaign about sex work and sex trafficking, as a sex worker, it can often feel necessary to correct it. What we must consider is that just like how those who spread negative propaganda about sex work are highly likely to be middle or upper class and white and cis and to not be immigrants, so are those who combat the disinformation. If you have very few prostitutes willing to speak at a protest or in front of legislators, you take whoever you can get that is capable, but at some stage we need to make active efforts to lift up the voices of those who are most marginalized and are at the intersections of several types of bigotry.

Sugar babies tend to attempt to fly under the radar and not be perceived as sex workers at all, but outside of their specific niche there is certainly a hierarchy of sex workers who are regarded with varying levels of contempt by the public. People are much more willing to listen to the words of a successful porn star than of a prostitute selling sex on the street. For those who become famous enough in a less stigmatized form of sex work, they are afforded more credibility, though this still does not overcome the issues of racial disparity or transphobia or ableism.

To allow for progress to be made and for more sex workers to become activists if they wish, support must be provided for when those who speak out are targeted for their activism.

I’ve discussed how privilege can give someone the ability to speak about their experience, but there is another truth about which sex workers speak up that can sometimes be less intuitive. Sometimes when a sex worker has nothing else to lose, it allows them a certain kind of freedom to express their opinions without concern about many of the consequences. Being estranged from one’s family certainly isn’t a privilege, and for sex workers that is something which makes them more likely to speak up because they have no concern of their family finding out. Even in the case of a supportive family, being publicly known as a sex worker can result in your family members being targeted.

All that is needed by prostitutes with nothing to lose is for someone to amplify their words.

On an individual level, listening to the sex workers around you and spreading their positions to others is a good start. This can be done by non sex workers and sex workers alike, taking the testimony of people with different experiences and sharing them. Recommending a book or a show can help, but there’s going to be a small success rate in convincing someone to read or watch something explanatory. Bringing up these ideas in conversation is much more likely to get someone to think more deeply about a topic and to do their own research in the long-term.

Nuance should be respected. Sex workers who talk about complicated feelings regarding clients or managers should have those opinions respected even when someone is arguing with them. To only present someone’s positive comments about sex work, when they speak frequently about experiencing abuse, is as much of a misrepresentation as the reverse.

I often wonder if I am the right person to speak at any given time, only to find that I am the only person willing to. When someone wants a perspective on trans sex workers in general, I tend to think that a trans woman would be better suited to speak because there are more trans women in sex work and they are targeted for more violence. To speak instead, from my position of relative safety within the trans community, feels wrong. Then I consider that if a trans woman were to speak up, she’d be attacked more viciously for doing so than I would, and I wonder whether I have an obligation to speak up specifically because I will not be the target of transmisogyny.

My own neuroses aside, this does speak to a thought process many sex workers go through. Either we feel we are too privileged to be a good representative, are too marginalized to be able to speak up without fearing massive violence, or we come from a demographic that has an easier time being heard and want to make space for those who are less able to speak. As a community, we support each other.

Nowadays I’ve found a comfortable position for myself. I speak both to educate people and to work through my own experiences in a healthy way, whilst being careful not to speak over others about their own needs or experiences. In wondering whether I am the ideal demographic to speak for sex workers as a whole, I am giving in to the assumption that any prostitute who speaks is a mouthpiece for our entire group. I am not. I have had experiences selling sex as a woman before I transitioned and I have had experiences selling sex as a trans man since doing so. My views are not universally shared by all sex workers and I’d never claim that they are. If what we want is diversity of thought and experience then I think it’s reasonable for my own to be among them even though I would never want it to be the loudest.

Online porn creators worry about our content being leaked and viewed for free a lot, and knowing it has been posted without our consent can feel like a type of violation. I find the feeling to be similar when something I have said or written about abuse by clients as a prostitute has been taken from its original context and used to argue against my rights. I cannot pretend this has never made me hesitate in speaking. I hear people I meet regurgitate information to me from a friend they once had who was a sex worker and I wonder how many people have done that regarding my own positions. Do they repeat what I say in a manner that helps or in a manner that actually advocates against my needs and desires?

I can wonder endlessly about the impact but none of that matters when we already know that prostitutes being silent doesn’t help anyone. Discussion of trauma cannot be avoided, nor can we stop others from wanting to weaponize it against us or use it for money and clicks. I’m going to continue to speak with the hope that the content of my words is understood and is longer-lasting than what people might pluck from them for shock value.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my friends who’ve listened to me rant about sex work, the rare times I’ve felt able to do so, and who have supported me unconditionally. Some of you I’ve met over Discord and never even in person, yet you’ve had a profound impact on my confidence in my ability to write and speak about issues that impact me.

To the sex workers who’ve pushed me to speak in public and who raised money for me in times of struggle, I cannot thank you enough.

To the trans women who assured me that I did not have to wait on medical transition for fear of losing clients, because I had the support of my community behind me, you were right. To the trans guys who showed up to sex work strikes and protests and stayed close to me when I felt out of place, thanks for your solidarity.

I’d happily thank people by name if I wasn’t worried about outing them or associating them with work on the topic of prostitution, so instead I’ll simply say: you know who you are, anyone who’s supported me through my complex feelings about being a sex worker, and you’re appreciated.

Bibliography

Bibliography:

1. Farley M, Barkan H. Prostitution, violence, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Women Health. 1998;27(3):37–49. doi: 10.1300/J013v27n03_03. PMID: 9698636.

2. Violence and Exposure to HIV Among Sex Workers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 2006, Carol Jenkins.

3. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), March 2021

4. Church S, Henderson M, Barnard M, Hart G. Violence by clients towards female prostitutes in different work settings: questionnaire survey. BMJ. 2001 Mar 3;322(7285):524–5. doi: 10.1136/bmj.322.7285.524. PMID: 11230067; PMCID: PMC26557.

5. http://www.pion-norge.no/aktuelt/more-than-10-sex-workers-have-been-killed-in-6-months/

6. https://www.midilibre.fr/2014/12/17/la-violence-contre-les-prostituees-une-realite-quasi-quotidienne,1099906.php

7. Evaluation de la loi du 13 avril 2016 visant à renforcer la lutte contre le système prostitutionnel et à accompagner les personnes prostituées, 22 juin 2020, Authors : Patricia WILLAERT (IGA) — Amélie PUCCINELLI (IGA) — Catherine GAY (IGJ) — Patrick STEINMETZ (IGJ) — Valérie GERVAIS (IGAS) — Pierre LOULERGUE (IGAS)

8. https://www.medecinsdumonde.org/app/uploads/2022/04/Shadow-report-2020.pdf

9. Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, Alexis Jay OBE, 21^st August 2014

10. Alan Billings, police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire. (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/05/police-rotherham-child-sex-abuse-victims-seen-as-prostitutes-pcc-south-yorkshire-grooming-exploitation)

11. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/wayfair-child-trafficking-conspiracy-theory-tiktok-1028622/

12. Modern Slavery Act 2015, Part 1, Offences, Section 2, UK Public General Acts.

13. UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Article 3.

14. 22 U.S.C. § 7102(12)

15. 22 U.S.C. § 7102(11)(A)

16. Paul J. Wright, Robert S. Tokunaga, Ashley Kraus, A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies, Journal of Communication, Volume 66, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 183–205

17. James, S. E., Herman, J. L., Rankin, S., Keisling, M., Mottet, L., & Anafi, M. (2016). The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality.

18. LGBT in Britain — Trans Report (2018), January 2018, Stonewall.

19. NAEH Analysis of US Department of Housing and Urban Development Point-in-Time Data, 2019.

20. Transrespect.org, Trans Murder Monitoring project, 2022.

21. Psychopathia Sexualis, K. Von Krafft-Ebing, pg. 420

22. Decolonizing Sex Work in Canada: Assessing the Impact of Government Regulation on the Wellbeing of Indigenous Sex Workers, Wilson Narcisco, Sydney, August 2020, University of Toronto.

23. Holbeck, VO (2021) Listening Well Report — The Voice of Holbeck. Project Report. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

41. Imagination and the Carceral State

Deleted reason: none of the four texts mention anarchist word

Author: Joshua Bennett

Authors: Joshua Bennett, Elleza Kelley, Che Gossett, Matthew Spellberg

Topics: blackness, abolition

Date: December 2020 — January 2021

Date Published on T@L: 2022-12-15T02:30:48

Source: Retrieved on 14 December 2022 from cabinetmagazine.org

We’re trying to understand the relationship between abolition and exodus.

—Fred Moten

This portfolio of essays is an occasion to celebrate the fugitive practices of those forced to live in flight from the ever-expanding reach of the carceral state and its extractive everyday protocols. The four texts vary in tenor and form, but all share this emphasis on the irreducible beauty of stolen life, this sociality that persists under unthinkable duress. Our central objects of concern vary widely. The work you will find here explores graveyards, prison education, defunct but exemplary revolutionary art schools, and the search for a political grammar of Black freedom. We have gathered here in the name of an age-old pursuit: the elaboration of our most radical dreams, and a larger commitment to honoring moments of persistence, of meditative tenacity, that might otherwise fall outside of our vision. What forms of conviviality, evasion, recalcitrance, and play have the incarcerated, the undocumented, and the unsung cultivated in order to survive? And how might we more thoughtfully study these practices in the present? In the name of such collective envisioning, we assemble under the banner of imagination, dedicated to the revelation of another world.

No Man’s Land

The architecture of abolition

Elleza Kelley

Usually he left his boots in the shed and put his walking shoes on along with his day clothes in the corner before he went home. A route that took him smack dab through the middle of a cemetery as old as sky, rife with the agitation of dead Miami no longer content to rest in the mounds that covered them. Over their heads walked a strange people; through their earth pillows roads were cut; wells and houses nudged them out of eternal rest. Outraged more by their folly in believing land was holy than by the disturbances of their peace, they growled on the banks of Licking River, sighed in the trees on Catherine Street and rode the wind above the pig yards.

—Toni Morrison, Beloved

These days I get anxious in the cemetery when I see people having picnics and doing yoga, though I wonder if the dead don’t mind. I think maybe the dead are grateful for the children feeding ducks in the pond, climbing over their headstones, playing on the mausoleum benches without fear. Happy to be seen not as toxic or terrifying but as present, gentle, loved. I don’t know. The hikers, the photographers, the joggers—a special kind of whiteness has taken over and settled in the crevices. I read a tweet that said quarantine had turned the park into a nightclub, but it also seems to have turned the cemetery into a park. But before they became parks, cemeteries had always been nature reserves. Because they are enclosed, protected, tended regularly by groundskeepers and gardeners, children and the widowed, the left behind. Because when we were there we tried to be quiet and we tried not to walk too heavily or leave our trash behind. From time immemorial, we have shown our reverence for the dead by making space for them. That’s why at the cemetery you can see egrets, mourning doves, cedar waxwings, tiger swallowtail butterflies, every species of bird and plant.

In May of 2015, at the James Weldon Johnson Community Center in East Harlem, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan that proposed leasing to private developers the “underutilized land” of public housing developments: parks, gardens, basketball courts, parking lots, walkways, baseball fields, little green cuts of color where trees made oxygen. On this land—considered to be excess, wasteful, dead zones—developers would build profit-generating “mixed-income” housing.

(I can see these new buildings if I close my eyes—glass cladding over reinforced steel, windows that look out but not in, military-grade security infrastructure hidden by self-effacing modernist embellishment, facing the sun, backs to the projects.)

Mayor Bloomberg tried it first, several years earlier. Back then it went by a more explicit name: infill.

infill. noun.
1: material that fills in something (such as a hole or the spaces between a building’s structural members)
2: new buildings constructed in the space available between existing structures1

That holes must be filled is some white man’s conceit. “Phrenology was a white way of knowing,” Nathaniel Mackey writes, “it valorized obtrusion, surface, apparency, warding off the obscurities and indeterminacies of recess, crevice, fold.”2

I can hear them now: What will we put in its place? Who will we call instead? Where will the criminals go?

A hole is not always a grave. In her poem “Coal,” Audre Lorde wrote, “There are many kinds of open.” An urban dead zone refers to space that is unrentable, unprofitable. Such areas are discursively produced as dangerous blind spots, places that evade the scopic gaze of the state. Alleyways, underpasses, airshafts, rooftops: places that on paper are uninhabitable but in practice are lived in and utilized, typically in clandestine, ephemeral, collective ways. They harbor life against and outside of the state. It is no wonder the state wants us to believe they’re “dead.”

De Blasio’s proposal targeted projects that were located in “high-value sites”: Chelsea, Williamsburg, Hell’s Kitchen, the Upper East Side, the Lower East Side, Boerum Hill. Areas that had become gentrified, their property values skyrocketing while the projects themselves languished. As of today, the New York City Housing Authority faces a $40 billion backlog of necessary repairs and improvements.

Tenants continue to resist, refuse, and sue to stop these settlements, these occupations, these disavowals and dispossessions of spaces for living and playing. At many public housing developments, the plan was abandoned. Green archipelagoes, asphalt inlets, parking lots, and basketball courts, all left untouched.

• • •

If you needed to think of Cameron Rowland’s 2018 work Depreciation as an object, it could be:

1) seventeen pieces of paper—legal documents that record the purchase of a piece of land by a nonprofit called “8060 Maxie Road Inc.,” a subsequent restrictive covenant preventing “all development and use of the property by the owner,” and an appraisal report, indicating the market value of the land: $0.

Or perhaps:

2) a one-acre plot of land on Edisto Island, South Carolina, formerly belonging to the Maxcy Place plantation.

Or perhaps it is 3) something less tactile, something we cannot hold or behold. The work, maybe, exists in the act itself—the depreciation of the land’s market value to $0, to nothing. As such, it would be the description of a movement; a labor of disinvestment, of defunding, of abolition.

In the caption to Depreciation, Rowland cites Sherman’s Special Field Order 15, which stipulated that “the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States. … Each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.”

Field Order 15 was “effectively rescinded” in 1866 by President Andrew Johnson, after Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson ordered that these lands be returned to their previous Confederate owners. “Former slaves,” Rowland writes, “were given the option to work for their former masters as sharecroppers or be evicted. If evicted, former slaves could be arrested for homelessness under vagrancy clauses of the Black Codes. Those who refused to leave and refused to sign sharecrop contracts were threatened with arrest.”

By the 1870s, nearly all of the abandoned plantation land that had been settled by free black people in the months following Sherman’s order, including the site of the Maxcy Place plantation, was returned to their former owners. As Du Bois described it, in The Souls of Black Folk, “The eight hundred thousand acres of abandoned lands in the hands of the Freedman’s Bureau melted quickly away.”

“As reparation,” Rowland writes, “this covenant asks how land might exist outside of the legal-economic regime of property that was instituted by slavery and colonization. Rather than redistributing the property, the restriction imposed on 8060 Maxie Road’s status as valuable and transactable real estate asserts antagonism to the regime of property as a means of reparation.”

Edisto Island is part of the Sea Islands, which make up the eastern boundary of the Gullah Geechee Nation. Since Field Order 15, the Gullah Geechee, descendants of those enslaved on the Sea Islands, have managed to preserve ancestral traditions and keep out mainland culture, holding their land in common through a system of heirs’ property. In recent years, developers have exploited loopholes in this system—places where the customary laws of the commons and the laws of enclosure rub up against each other and cause friction. The Gullah Geechee estimate that they have lost nearly 90 percent of their land through intensifying gentrification. Resorts, condos, and golf courses have been settled uneasily atop Gullah Geechee burial grounds, while the living community is fractured and displaced.

Brunswick is a coastal town adjacent to the Sea Islands chain, which stretches from South Carolina to Florida; the Gullah Geechee Nation live on both the islands and the coastal plain. Marsh Ruins is made from concrete and tabby, a widely used building material in the South that incorporated oyster shells and was often utilized in the construction of plantation buildings such as slave quarters. Extremely labor-intensive to make, tabby was no longer produced on the same scale after Emancipation.

In July, several news outlets reported that a police squad formed by the Louisville Metro Police Department had “deliberately misled” narcotics detectives to target a home on Elliot Avenue in West Louisville, Kentucky, in order to accelerate a monumental gentrification effort, “the city’s multimillion-dollar Vision Russell development plan.” The squad, called Place-Based Investigations, had been created expressly to target Elliot Avenue and “focus on areas needing to be cleared for development projects to proceed.” During the execution of this no-knock warrant, police officers murdered a young woman while she slept. Her name was Breonna Taylor.

The regime of property and the regime of carcerality that upholds it are a monument whose foundation is sunk deep in our soil. Rowland imagines reparation as excavation, as negation, as abolition. There are many kinds of open. What does refusal to reform, to rebuild, to restore allow us to imagine?

• • •

I always thought utopia meant heaven until I went to college and found out that its etymology is “no-place,” that the fantasy of utopia is not its perfection or beauty or ethics but the fact of its impossibility. That always seemed silly to me, that the world we most wanted had to be something that didn’t exist. But maybe instead it’s that the world we desire is the absence, the recess, the fold: the hole left behind by the prison that we refuse to fill. The space we insist must be sacred—not the building or its air rights, but the land beneath, what was there before settler colonial violence, before regimes of property, before enclosure, before a fortified building, a fort on the shore with a door through which no one returns. What if utopia is the place we arrive at when we get rid of place—its markers, its border walls, its statues, its flags, its forts, its pens?

In Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, an abandoned plantation is alive, its ghosts having become inseparable from the earth itself—entwined with grapevines, the wood of a cabin that moans. Julius, the archivist and groundskeeper, insists that the land should not be sold, that the cabin must not be touched. The form this haunting takes is negation, the refusal of development, of restoration, of renovation.

The people I come from were born in blank spots on the map, tended provision grounds on the road’s shoulder, turned stoops and rooftops into yards and gardens, got free in their grandmother’s garret, were raised in the razed-and-paved-over, raised on the grounds underneath the new condos, underneath Central Park. They know that unoccupied land is not uninhabited land, but land crowded with dead Miami, with our ancestors, with animal, plant, and mineral life whose invisible motion—sighing, breathing, shimmering—fills the air. They know that land belongs to no man.

(What if we didn’t build another monument in the place of the toppled one? What if we left the hole instead—a negative space, a gaping archive of the terror we planted.)

There are many kinds of open.

Imagining abolition as one form of reparation refuses the conflation between the unused and the useless, between habitation and settlement, between invisible and absent. It refuses the dead zone. It asks us to reimagine entirely another use for nothing, for nowhere, for no-place.

As reparation, the rendering of land as unusable is strategic, creative—the genius of our ancestors and folk heroes, Brer Rabbit or Jack. But it also necessarily evokes our burial grounds, our holy grounds, the places where we whisper and walk softly, where we lay offerings. It evokes the sacred emptying of the land that acknowledges and honors its absolute fullness; acknowledges and honors that we share it and hold it in common with others—with those who have passed through and those who are yet to come. And what is held in common slips away. What is held in common refuses the terms of ownership, it “constantly violates the boundaries of so-called home.” What is held in common, what we hold with our dead, we hold with the life that crowds the air.

Abolitionist Alternatives

Black radicalism and the refusal of reform

Che Gossett

So much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination.

—Saidiya V. Hartman

The political contours of the early modern Black abolitionist movement were shaped by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Tubman, and countless others in their everyday forms of resistance, and politically enunciated in the flashpoints of rebellions, uprisings, and insurgency against the violence of racial slavery. Abolitionist solidarity in the early period fractured along the fault lines of the political antagonism of anti-blackness. This chasm between abolitionist camps was the result of an incommensurable parallax. One viewpoint was the racial paternalism of white abolitionists who aimed to determine liberty for Black people. The other was the Black radical imagining of what Robin Kelley terms “freedom dreams” irreducible to the perennial unfreedom of “emancipation.”

Blackness radicalizes both emancipation—its legal etymology tracing to the relinquishing of property—and revolution. Blackness revolutionized the subject and object of revolution itself—the Haitian revolution is emblematic of this radicalization. The slave, as Saidiya Hartman argues, was the ground for the modern political subject. “The enslaved were neither envisioned nor afforded the privilege of envisioning themselves as part of the ‘imaginary sovereignty of the state.’” The slave was ground for emancipatory and revolutionary struggle and these political categories, and the category of the political in its totality, were reserved for white citizens, as can be seen from the anti-Black backlash, carceral state violence, and domestic warfare against every iteration of ongoing Black insurgency, from Nat Turner’s uprising to the Civil Rights Movement, which James Baldwin deemed “the latest slave rebellion.”

The political grammar of Black freedom requires the abolition of the given terms of the political, classical, and philosophical ontology of freedom. Black freedom struggle puts the coordinates of freedom into question. Abolition is about ending what Hortense J. Spillers calls the “grammars of capture,” which include the racial, liberal grammar of “freedom,” the political ontology of which is slavery. “Slavery is the threshold of the political world.” De jure abolition did not end anti-Blackness; it re-formed it. “The abolition of American slavery started the transportation of capital from white to black countries where slavery prevailed,” observed Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, articulating how capitalism is slavery’s afterlife. Freedom—as Hartman has so rigorously demonstrated—is a scene of subjection. Perhaps the very grammar of “world” itself—as the colonization and rending-into-property of Earth—is one of capture as well. The prison abolitionist movement demands and envisions social emancipation, and the end of all forms of social exile, banishment, criminalization, or incarceration. Abolition remains an ongoing project against the general institutionalization of the afterlife of slavery and its carceral and racial capitalist topology: from the site of the prison to the site of the psych ward, from the neoliberal corporation of the university to the detention center and more. Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains the abolition project in its particular and universal totality: “Abolition requires that we change one thing, which is everything.”

What Mariame Kaba terms the “horizon of abolition” is both temporal and spatial. What is the temporality of abolition? How is it different from modes of secular eschatological and messianic revolutionary time? Abolition is untimely, casting off the illusion of capitalist and colonial time as a measure of civilizationist progress. Not atemporal to but rupturing of the racial liberal temporality of post-“emancipation” time, abolition—as Audre Lorde says of revolution in her essay “Learning from the 60s”—is “not a one-time event” but rather, as Angela Davis contends, “a constant struggle.” Abolition shifts the social and political ontology of revolution. Key to this is who can participate, ending the ableist and heteronormative policing of the revolution from within it, and also how revolution is reconceptualized not as a one-time event—or even through the register of the event at all—but rather as an immanent modality. Abolition therefore inheres in, as Jared Sexton phrases it, “an interminable radicalization of every radical movement,” such that policing and the carceral are constantly interrogated within the very forms of revolutionary sociality dedicated to their opposition. Returning to Lorde’s essay, which reflects on the lessons gleaned from the period’s revolutionary schemas and the need to constantly revise and rewrite the revolutionary itself, the full passage reads: “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses.” The revolution—and abolition as both revolutionary and the radicalizing of the terms of revolution itself—are not only external but also internal processes.

What is the spatiality of the horizon of abolition? What is the (an)architecture of abolition and how might architecture be a place for abolition—as housing for all, as the repurposing of the built environment? Gilmore terms abolition a “presence” in the life-affirming sense of collective power and possibility with which she imbues that powerful concept. “Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” To return to Sexton’s concept of interminability, abolition might be seen as “two trains running,” to use Frank Wilderson’s metaphor. Or even analogous to a Mobius strip—an infinite fold—with one side being the struggle against carceral form and reform (the carceral continuum) and the other, following Gilmore, presence as abolitionist becoming and flourishing. In its presence making, abolition pursues non- and anti-fascist living.

In his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which he called an “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,” Foucault shows how fascism (of which we might consider the carceral a genre) operates not only at the level of the state but also internally, at the level of psychic and interior life. Foucault identifies not only the fascism of state authoritarianism but also “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” Further, Foucault poses and anticipates questions that are live for and intensified by abolitionist praxis—especially if we read and substitute “carceral” for “fascist,” which are interchangeable after all. Foucault asks: “How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?” The abolitionist phrasing of this is succinctly put by Paula X. Rojas as “the cops in our heads and hearts.” Fascism, as George L. Jackson defined it, is not only the form of the carceral state but also (its) reform. “We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion. … But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.’” Jackson’s Black radical study of fascism, his reworking of its definition, reveals its plasticity and endurance, and its naturalization as “reform.” Abolitionist living is anti-fascist living.

Myth Lessons

The carceral state and the limits of sentimental realism

Matthew Spellberg

Education in the Era of the Crime Bill: What Questions Can We Ask?

The Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994, is widely considered to be the capstone in the architecture of American mass incarceration. Among its many harsh provisions was a measure forbidding prisoners from receiving Pell Grants, the most important form of debt-free aid the government offers for higher education. Until 1994, there had been hundreds of college programs operating in the nation’s prisons. These were mostly affiliated with community colleges; the cost of faculty and overhead was paid for by Pell Grant tuition. After the crime bill, many of these programs vanished, or were drastically reduced.

A new model of prison education arose in their place. Where the old programs had been extensions of existing colleges, the new programs were formed expressly for the purpose of teaching in prisons. Some had no accreditation at all; others worked out improvised accreditation arrangements with other institutions. In the old programs, most, if not all, of the teachers worked in the prisons as part of their day jobs. In contrast, initiatives formed after the crime bill largely recruited volunteer faculty, and this widened considerably the range of people involved in prison education. Graduate students, professors, teachers, artists, lawyers, and undergraduates gave their free time to work in prisons, which in turn meant that, in addition to community colleges, many research universities, nonprofits, and other institutions became involved in prison education. Eventually some of these new programs were able to hire and pay regular faculty, but this could not be done with federal money, so they were required either to raise funds specially, or to ask that their supporting institutions redirect money from other sources. These altered material conditions, in conjunction with a rising awareness of the incarceration crisis, gave a more precise political valence to prison teaching. It became something like a movement, one with two goals, one longstanding, the other historically contingent: educating incarcerated men and women as individuals, and fighting mass incarceration itself with education.

I am part of the long generation (at this point, generations) of educators who felt themselves called to work as prison teachers in the world the crime bill made. The time I spent teaching in prisons changed forever my sense of what education could be. It was for me a sacred honor, and it was a model for the life of the mind. In prison classrooms, I found that ideas and knowledge were pursued with zeal, urgency, and an incredible frankness. Some of my incarcerated students were the best I’ve ever had, anywhere; they were also some of my most important teachers. I similarly loved and respected many of my teaching colleagues who came with me from the outside.

But for all the joy and excitement that came from this work, it was impossible to forget that we were acting within a ubiquitously rotten and incomprehensible system. We teachers witnessed only some tiny portion of its capacity to debase the human being, but what we saw was enough for a sobering lesson: the prisons awakened savior complexes, desperation, dishonesty, petty feuding, greed, self-delusion, self-doubt, abuse, and outright corruption. Such things are not unexpected within a reality as catastrophic and bizarre as the American prison-industrial complex. But it was its own kind of education to see them firsthand. It was also an education to learn about the things I did not see, and I am still haunted by what I know transpired just beyond my ken.

My experience is representative of a national phenomenon. Prison education in the era of mass incarceration has been deeply meaningful to many people, incarcerated and not. Its reverberations have been felt in communities across the country at every socioeconomic level. It has become entwined with the culture and policies of universities, foundations, and even museums.

One day it will be possible to ask many important historical questions about American prison education at the turn of the millennium: Whether and to what extent it played a role in dismantling the carceral system; what these education programs were able to offer the generations of men and women who encountered them behind bars; what the long-term effect of these programs was on the communities ravaged by incarceration; how the rise of these prison education programs responded to the collapse of the academic humanities at American universities; how artists, scholars, and scientists across all disciplines sought in non-traditional education programs an alternative to the ever-more transactional, expensive, bureaucratized, competitive, and precarious institutions at which they worked.

To ask these questions now would be premature, maybe even counterproductive. There are, however, two questions that I am ready to pose now, and even answer in a preliminary fashion. These questions are philosophical rather than historical. In fact, they are somewhat anti-historical; they express a certain dissatisfaction with the way the lens of history frames the pressing concerns of our era, a dissatisfaction that may even extend to the narrative I have rehearsed in the first paragraphs of this essay. These questions are also in my opinion quite practical. I see them as everyday questions for teachers in the classroom. The first is, what tools do we have in the realm of culture for representing the enormity of carceral America, and the extremities of stress and suffering it has inflicted on millions of our fellow citizens? And the second, what forms of representation should we be teaching to students who are themselves caught up in this carceral state—whether directly (in prisons or surveilled communities), or indirectly (everywhere else in the country)? My response to both is, in a word, myth. To many people this may seem quite unexpected, even a non-sequitur; the rest of this essay will be an attempt to explain what exactly I mean by this response.

I realize that such questions are minor compared to the one that screams at us every day, from every direction: how do we make this stop? But they—along with myth itself—may offer some clues as to why we find it so hard to come up with an answer to this very cry, even as it plunges the knife into our hearts.

The Myth-world in the Everyday Life of the Prison Classroom

For six years, I taught literature and composition classes in the New Jersey prison system. The subjects were various: literature, philosophy, journalism, basic writing, also tutorials designed specifically around individual students’ interests. But one through line in my teaching practice was myth. The word has suffered from unfortunate misrepresentations in the last hundred years. It has often been defined as literature for children, or fantasy fiction, or a synonym for “falsehood,” or as a handmaiden of nationalism, or as a word that obtains only for a small corpus of ancient Greek stories. But when I talk about myth, I mean the human impulse to narrate at the limits of the cosmos, the desire to give an account from a mind standing “at the circumference and not at the center of its reality,” to quote Northrop Frye. One of my most important teachers on the subject, Robert Bringhurst, defines myth further as “a theorem about the nature of reality, expressed … in animate, narrative form.” In this sense at least, myth is a rich and foundational aspect of human cultures from across the globe. It is one of the oldest, and was once the most treasured, of narrative forms. It originates in orality, but has made a home in nearly every medium, whether text or painting or film. It often calls to tradition and the ancient times; but it is also a protean, metamorphic thing, built from variation, dissent, and the violation of taboo. Sometimes myth’s detractors claim that it is monolithic, imposing its values on a community. This can and does indeed happen, but it seems to me a late deformation of myth’s true nature, which I believe is anarchic: myth circulates in many forms and versions from many mouths, and therefore it allows for fluid, democratic, constantly revisable thinking about the nature of the world.

I presented myth to my students as such a divinely ambitious, fluid, and powerful form of reasoning about the cosmos. I devoted lessons to myths and mythically inspired texts from cultures around the world—the Bible, Paradise Lost, Native American oral traditions, Greek and Middle Eastern stories as they appear in epic or theater.

I once taught a story by a great Indigenous American oral poet of the early twentieth century named Ghandl (or Gandll, or Walter McGregor, as he was called in English). Originally told in the Haida language, and translated by Bringhurst, the story is about a man abandoned by his jealous in-laws on a rock while hunting sea lions. It’s a difficult work to enter into, built on a lattice of metaphysics and ecology from the Pacific Northwest. I had the students perform it as a play. They barked as they imagined sea lions would, and stumped their hands into flippers. One of them narrated the hero’s descent to the bottom of the sea at the invitation of a grebe; his encounter there with a chief of the Killer Whale People; then his return home inside the stomach of a sea lion; and finally his elaborate revenge on those who had left him to die. Our performance led us into a discussion of exchange, honor, the potlatch, and the limits of human experience. At the end of the semester, many of the students wrote in their evaluations that it had been their favorite class of the term.

Another time, on the recommendation of my co-teacher Antonio Iannarone, I taught a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called “Earth’s Holocaust”—a latter-day fable, aspiring toward myth, in which the do-gooders of the world set out to purge all the impure elements of society by starting a great bonfire on the American Plains. Eventually they decide they must burn everything—liquor, clothes, books, all the trappings of civilization—and start the world afresh. But their efforts are in vain, for evil still lingers among the men watching the blaze. On the day I assigned this text, only one student had done the reading. But the story had so kindled his excitement that he asked if he could teach it to the rest of the class. I said of course, and he spoke with unbroken intensity for twenty minutes, narrating the work in his own words, pointing to key passages, abstracting the ideas he thought important. The students became engrossed, particularly one, who kept trying to guess at the ending. He was calmly parried by the presenter, who kept saying: “I’ll get there, bro.” The student had elegantly transformed Hawthorneʼs text into an oral performance, complete with a call and response, and so he restored the story and its themes to the human voice, that earliest angel of meaning.

Many times I asked students to write stories in the style of one of the texts we had been reading. The student who had loved “Earth’s Holocaust” wrote a similar parable of an Eden destroyed. Another added a leaf to the Bible, “The Book of Cain,” in which we learn that God allows Cain to grow old, marry, and have children—but only to see his wife and children die before he does. This, Cain learns on his own deathbed, has been the slow-gestating punishment for that first murder. Yet another student wrote Paradise Lost, Book ∅, having fallen in love not only with Milton’s grandeur, but also his habit of dropping vowels for scansion:

Awake my first, and look upon my world;
I am God; thou Creator, Father, and Master.
As th’ beautiful creature stood and look’d upon th’
Powerful brighten light and mov’d its body in an circle
Looking at the nothingness, that surrounds it.
Th’ creature speaks once it faces the powerful light.
Why; why; why? How; how; how? When; when; when?
Who; who; who? What; what; what? No?

I am wary of making generalizations about incarcerated students. Like students on the outside, they manifest a range of abilities and interests. Some of them will like myth, and some will prefer lyric poetry, or business, or trigonometry, or physics. This is as it should be. But two things might be said about why myth should be taught in prisons. First, myth is a complex and complete way of thinking, a form of reasoning about reality, that originated in an oral world. It can serve as a bridge between talking and writing, especially for students who are brilliant at the former but uneasy with the latter. An exploration of myth can serve to undo certain hierarchies of knowledge based on the distinction between the written and the spoken. To understand that a folk storyteller can be a major philosopher, handling questions of cosmic value in an idiom nourished on the front stoop, in a fishing boat, or at the many other Academies of the Everyday—this can awaken a love for ideas and stories unencumbered by their association with certain markers of status. It can also restore one’s ability to see the genuine beauty and power of the written word, since its vitality can always be traced to the immediate aliveness of speech, which is at once writing’s ancestor and sibling.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, myth presents narratives at the limit of reality, in which the stakes could not be higher: birth and death, the creation and destruction of worlds, the human and more-than-human all at once. Most of the literature currently taught in high schools and universities (as well as prisons) is—to be blunt—bourgeois literature. Even most of the novels and poems set in poor communities or written from the margins (at least those that end up on syllabi) are largely built on the scaffolding of the Western realist bourgeois style: domestic, inward-facing, self-conscious, sociologically and historically minded, secular. This style was, and perhaps could still be, a great achievement. I do not mean to denounce it altogether, or claim it should be excluded from study. But we should not fall into thinking that it furnishes the only possible medium for picturing the world. There are other forms of expression—wilder, grander, older, more anarchic, less deferential to the barrier between representation and reality, less interested in pity, justification, or judgment, more concerned with the sheer unavoidability of action and consequence. Sometimes to see a picture, in story, of the grand, cold, and indifferent universe is to realize you have the power to shape a commensurately grand picture for yourself. Sometimes this can be the more perfect mirror, the more resonant frequency.

The Limits of Sentimental Realism

And it is here that my two questions—how to represent the carceral state, and what to teach when everyone lives in it—begin to inform one another. It would be harsh, but not entirely inaccurate, to argue that American society has created a class of person who is consigned to live through certain extremes of deprivation and violence while progressive-minded people read and disseminate sentimental literary forms that impart to them the intensified feelings of extremity without exposing them to its dangers. (Perhaps it is right to say us here, rather than them.) It would be still harsher, though again not without a glimmer of truth, to make the same allegation against the whole project of prison education, with its heavy reliance on inspirational stories about incarcerated men performing Shakespeare and attaining moral uplift. Though such critiques are salutary to entertain, I continue to believe deeply in the twin projects of prison education and education about prisons. They are as urgent as any endeavor worth undertaking in the present.

But we ask both too much and too little of education in the fight against the carceral state and its economic allies. We ask too much in the sense that some people behave as if school and its adjacent fields will solve all our problems. Ideologically correct curricula in classrooms and at colleges, these people seem to think, will suffice to reshape the nation’s mind and bend it toward justice. These people, usually themselves part of the educational system (or in related fields, like the arts), have a misplaced idea of education’s power. There are many things it cannot achieve in the public sphere. By itself, it cannot change old laws or enforce new ones; it cannot redistribute capital in any meaningfully widespread way. I wish that some of the energy that went into reforming syllabi went instead into transforming the reprehensible behavior of corporations, banks, certain local governments and federal agencies, certain unions, and many other actors who disenfranchise poor people and people of color, and who hold up the carceral system in all of its ramifying branches. I sometimes despair that leftist activism’s agon with education and the arts is actually a retreat from contesting the more intractable institutions that perpetuate inequality and racism and have so far refused to bow to any pressure to change their ways.

At the same time, we ask far too little of education, and have an impoverished sense of its importance in the fight for justice. The energy of education—whether in prisons or beyond—is stifled by a thick layer of sentimental piety, and the rhetoric surrounding education is enveloped by a certain sentimental literary style, born from, and reinforced by, the realist novel. It’s a style possessed of an important political and aesthetic history. But confronted with recent crises, it has fallen into self-congratulation, impotent critique, and sententious admonishment.

Bourgeois realism (including many works written in that style by people who do not think of themselves as bourgeois) is of limited use in depicting the absurdity and cataclysmic immensity of the carceral system, to say nothing of the history that bred it. This realism is at least partly responsible for the present difficulties we have in translating a sentimental education into concrete political action.

It is not just that we teach literary works written in this particular sentimental style, and so impart its values. It is that we teach everything in a manner saturated by this style. The study of literature and the arts has become almost entirely a historical and sociological project. It seems to me that scholars learned how to do this from the novel (and all the forces swirling around its rise), and it therefore makes sense that the nineteenth-century novel remains (even more than the lyric poem) the defining genre of the academic humanities. The sentimental realist style is embarrassed by any appeal to an authority beyond the societal. James Baldwin diagnosed this, with his usual apocalyptic accuracy, as the problem of the “protest novel”: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.” The sentimental realist style says we must analyze people, situations, stories, and artworks as embedded within a specific historical context. It says that this context is by far the most powerful element in our lives, and that therefore the only possible intervention that can be made in the world is to change the moral valence of the context itself, that is, to reform society.

Context is massively important, of course, but the sentimental worldview takes agency away from those trapped within the contexts of injustice and confers it only on those who can situate themselves beyond it. In other words, the sentimental style encourages top-down structural interventions by sufficiently educated and morally vetted actors motivated by notions of social (merely social) justice. Now, sometimes this style and the structural interventions it endorses have genuinely contributed to positive societal change, even if that change has not been as thoroughgoing as is sometimes claimed. (I think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Jungle, or Native Son, or those masterpieces Bleak House and Germinal.) But the problem is that if such changes are delayed—or if they fail to occur at all—then the sentimental style breeds in its partisans an affected, stagnant, and superior outrage that goes nowhere and helps no one: “We know there must be reform, and our contribution to the cause will be to make known our indignation at those who don’t acknowledge this fact.” In his fearsome attack on the American protest novel from Stowe to Wright, James Baldwin once again exhumes the dead heart of the matter: “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of a secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” It incidentally seems to me (and I think to Baldwin) that this style is more insidious, more prone to dishonesty, and therefore more dangerous, in “literary” works than in the more nakedly sentimental productions of mass culture.

The sentimental style demands structural change, but when a corrupted structure proves intractable, hard to describe, protean, inaccessible to rational analysis, and deeply entwined with everything that is comfortable and good in our lives, then the sentimental style can do nothing but click its tongue in disapproval. (Some might even argue for a reversed causality: that the style is adopted precisely so as to make doing nothing seem like the only option.) If ever there was a time when the carceral structure was all those things, it is definitely now. In the meantime, as sentiment treads water, other tools are thrown out of reach. The visionary, the ecstatic, the religious, the cosmic, the absurd, the chaotic—these deep sources of human power—are discouraged for being dangerous and irrational, or dismissed as mere ideological epiphenomena, or caramelized into a harmless Sunday-school piety. Academic leftists continue to lecture the world on how giving up the delusion of eternity is the only path toward social utopia, willfully blind to the fact that America is a nation whose struggle to bend toward justice owes an enormous debt to the Black Church, the Catholic Worker movement, The Varieties of Religious Experience, the Transcendentalists, and the Great Awakenings. (And how much closer to justice would we be if we had not tried to destroy, and then subsequently sentimentalize, Native American religion, with its profound and often severe theories about the human relationship to this continent.) I cannot count the number of men and women I have met in prisons for whom religion, or even visionary mysticism, is no prudery or opiate, but rather the well of meaning, the source of life, of perseverance, of courage, of resistance. The sentimental style of bourgeois realism has little respect for these things, and it tries to hinder their becoming instruments of political change, for fear of their unseemliness and extremity.

I have recently heard of a juvenile detention center in the Bronx where the young men who have attained the highest marks for good behavior can work at a café within the facility walls. They train to be baristas and learn to make macchiatos and cappuccinos. It would be very easy to make a sentimental literary reading—even several—of this café. If you believed in capitalism, you might read it as a grand project of uplift, young men preparing a new life for themselves. If you didn’t, you might conceive of a protest novel in Baldwin’s sense, pitched as a critique of late capitalism: the young men are forced to surrender their dignity in order to work in the service economy of a New York City where all meaningful labor has been replaced by playgrounds of privilege. Neither of these readings is entirely wrong so far as they go, but they do not go very far. In offering rational explanations, both gloss over the true bizarreness of the situation. Some of these young men (all under 18) are facing ten-year sentences as they sprinkle cocoa powder on milk foam, and all of them are living a life between the espresso machine and the threat of serious violence on the tier. Furthermore, I am told by a teacher in the facility that the men involved in this café are immensely proud of what they’ve built. We must reckon with this last fact in good faith, yet without ignoring the devastating context in which this pride was formed: we cannot allow ourselves to gloss over the paradoxical tension between feeling and experience here if we are to grasp what is happening. The sentimental style commonly falls prey to two symmetrical mistakes, arranged on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. As long as the disenfranchised do not revolt, it can say that either they are cheerfully on their way to being reformed, or they are simple-hearted prisoners of false consciousness. This is a hollow, demeaning binary, whose apparent oppositions in fact reinforce one another.

Myth Lessons

There are alternatives to the sentimental style all around us. The writer and prison educator Edyson Julio often says that Kafka is a great writer of the American ghetto. And there are American authors who have summoned, in bursts or even in whole books, the unforgiving intensity of myth to depict the American project above and beyond mere sociological description: Baldwin, of course, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, to name only a few. We need to learn afresh how to read them as more-than-realists, more-than-moralists, more-than-reformers, more-than-sociologists.

Even better would be to go to the source: to world mythology, and the oral literature in which it is most directly expressed. I think, for instance, of the central trickster figures in Native American mythology, Coyote and Raven. Their blundering, mad, greedy, destructive, lustful, gluttonous antics are as good a mirror as any I know for the representational (and actual) clusterfuck that is the year 2020. That these crazed carnivalesque jesters are also the bringers of balance and renewal—indeed, creators of the world—might offer some genuine philosophical hope for the future. How exciting it would be to see Native American storytellers take their rightful place as great and prophetic verbal artists of the American Canon. The twentieth century witnessed an incredible series of oral masters working in Indigenous languages: the Haida poet Gandll, the Tlingit storytellers Deikeenaak’w and Robert Zuboff, the Maidu master Hanc’ibyjim, the Kiksht teller Victoria Howard, and hundreds of others. To immerse ourselves in their stories might help us overcome one of our most dogged binaries, one that I, too, find my thinking trapped within: the binary of Modernity versus Everything Else. As we follow Coyote and Raven on their crazed paths, they might lead us to the medieval French Renart, to a renewed appreciation for Norse and Greek story, to contemporary reciters of the Mahabharata, to folktales and proverbs that arise in cities and factories and on the internet. It might even be possible to learn fresh historical and philosophical lessons about our present crisis from the spider Anansi and his sometime companion Adanko, the West African hare who crossed an ocean in a slave hold and became Br’er Rabbit. To borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty, these crazed animal world-makers might provincialize Europe and enlarge the constrained modernity it birthed—constrained in its range of imaginative possibility, but also literally reliant on the prison and other institutions of constriction for its self-definition.

In the struggle to teach about and within the carceral state we need a change of style, a reorientation of mode, a refreshed approach to genre and therefore to narrative and knowing—an approach that stands a chance of undoing some of our present complacencies, and one that genuinely draws on the wisdom and force of cultures from around the world. Such a change must begin in the study of literature and art. If we were to take myth seriously in our classrooms, we might be able to recover a cosmic agency within narrative representation. This would be a complex and even risky project. Myth is a form of representation that makes claims on reality itself, and lacks the shield of the counterfactual: to declare something “a novel” or “a work of fiction” somewhat insulates it from responsibility for consequences in the world. Myth, on the other hand, is certain about its responsibilities in the world, and therefore does not know the dishonesty of sentiment, how sentiment cleaves heart from hand and refuses to cop to the deed. Myth’s certainty can be used for many purposes, beneficial or damaging, and we must learn to deploy it carefully. But the problem now is precisely that our sanctioned forms of narrative representation have been stripped of consequence (allowing other forms, like global conspiracy theories, to run rampant). No surprise then that our professional makers of narrative and our professional teachers of narrative have lost society’s respect.

To enter into myth as a mode of thought, most literature scholars would have to change what they do, and what they teach. They would have to recover the folkloric and mythic elements already present in European, Euro-American, and African American culture, and move beyond their narrowly sociological and historiographical methods. They would have to learn other stories and other conventions; they would have to take orality and oral tradition seriously; and they would have to make a sincere study of the world’s non-imperial languages, like those of Indigenous America, the Pacific Islands, or of sub-Saharan Africa.

To say again, there is much in realism and the sociological method it engendered that should be admired, and retained. But they are not enough. We need to embrace other modes for the future of narrative, and for the future of education in literature and the arts. The mode we eventually find will not be a mere imitation of anything that has come before, but it must have a foundation in forms that are available to us now. Myth makes an awesome claim about the purchase a narrative might have on the shape of reality. We would do well to investigate and teach this claim, to see if we can forge narratives of such consequence going forward. They will be needed if we want to meet the future as agents, and not merely as critics blinded by our own inconsequential tears.

Wherever We Are Gathered

The Black Arts School and its afterlives

Joshua Bennett

I’ve come to understand what people in power have long known—education can be used both to oppress and to liberate. Ideas are indeed powerful things. I further came to understand that America’s colonization of Blacks employed the textbook as often as the bullet.

—William H. Watkins

I had proposed that the task of Black Studies, together with those of all the other New Studies that had also entered academia in the wake of the 1960s uprisings, should be that of rewriting knowledge.

—Sylvia Wynter

1. The Dilemma

One of the more difficult parts of raising a Black child in the United States of America—and it bears mentioning from the beginning that the joys are innumerable—is the question of where they will go to school. Most of us know, through both memory and a wealth of empirical data testifying to this difficult truth, that the classroom is a battleground. It is a site of suffering. It is, in the first instance, a space wherein our hair, our diction, our social practices and modes of cognition are denigrated as a matter of institutional mission and everyday protocol. The Black aesthetic tradition, in one sense, is a single front in an ongoing war against this and other forms of asymmetrical violence against our children. In the poems and plays, stories and essays, we are mapping out a set of alternatives. Another world, another way that things might eventually be if we are brave.

My wife and I recently welcomed a baby boy. My days are thus filled with impossible figures, vexed remembrances. I think of my nephew, Miles, told at nine years old that his now hip-length locs were a distraction; that he made his teachers, most of them white, feel threatened, incompetent, small. I think of myself in 1993, almost his age, overhearing a kindergarten teacher telling my parents that I would never function in a classroom. The stories, the data sets, are more than familiar. I keep the relevant charts and graphs at hand. I know their truth in a place where no one can steal it. I hear a colleague from Princeton mention a Pan-African homeschool that meets via Zoom; boys and girls across the country greeting one another each morning, a new collectivity born in the midst of converging pandemics—both COVID-19 and global anti-Blackness, that age-old ecological catastrophe. In quiet moments, I envision the invincible beauty of this gathering. I feel the strength of everything the world can’t take away anyway come back to me. In a flash, it is as the old saints say: I feel like going on. My dreams drift to other such social experiments throughout the history of Black people in the Americas. I was raised uptown, so Harlem, naturally, is the first place that comes to mind; 125^th street and all that we built there, however briefly. How this too has been my son’s inheritance since the day he arrived. A legacy of freedom struggle and indomitable splendor, unfettered dreaming in the face of brutality beyond measure. And a love that makes such living, such abiding courage at the edge of life itself, worthwhile.

2. The Flag

The second page of the 4 May 1965 edition of Challenge, the then-weekly newspaper produced by the Progressive Labor Party, tells the story of this photograph in miniature. The title of the article is “Black Arts School Set,” and it details—in cramped space, to be sure, but with vigor and a muted though unflinching optimism—the opening of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School (BARTS) at 109 West 130^th Street, on April 30^th of that same year. The article describes an entire week of community events: a reading featuring LeRoi Jones—who in the course of the next three years will change his name to Amiri Baraka—Ishmael Reed, and Larry Neal; a jazz concert; a panel on “The Black Artist and Revolution,” which was to include Cecil Taylor, Selma Sparks, and Harold Cruse, among others; a production of Jones’s play The Toilet, and, of course, the parade featured in this image, which was led by none other than the Albert Ayler Quartet, Jones, and Sun Ra’s legendary experimental jazz collective, The Arkestra. The final line of the article reads, “Everyone was invited to join the opening weekend activities,” and it was precisely this spirit of welcoming and collective endeavor that characterized the early life of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School, a spirit that is captured in the grainy exuberance of this image of their inaugural public event, this festival to let folks know that a new way of reading the Word and the World had arrived. Put another way, this is a photograph of two Black human beings carrying a flag down 125^th Street years before Whole Foods or Starbucks will indelibly mark the street as a sad casualty of our ever-shortening collective memory, of this warp-speed rendition of modernity in which any revolutionary figure’s legacy must contend with the strength and outsize influence of late capital’s invective against remembrance.

At its very core after all, Black Art—as Jones and his comrades defined it—demands that we remember. Over and against the myriad temptations of an implicitly presentist US American cultural milieu, the vision of Black Arts embodied in this moment of marching is a call back to a much longer tradition: one of Black marshals and majors and bearers of banners of nations that live only in the freedom dreams of the marginalized. The flags of nations that have never existed and are yet to come. A captive nation within a nation. Or, a Nation on no map, if you prefer Gwendolyn Brooks’s approach. Or the America Langston Hughes calls into being in the fourteenth stanza of his classic poem, “Let America Be America Again”: The land that has never been yet—And yet must be.

Although BARTS existed for only a year, it had a meaningful impact on the arts landscape of its day. In this sense, it stands as a historical monument to what I would like to imagine here as a kind of Black temporality. Black life as measured not in minutes but moments, Black social life itself an everyday, ongoing set of practices and protocols rooted in the fact that we all ultimately lose what we love, and thus must embrace loss and love not as antipodal, irreconcilable forces, but as irreducibly bound up with one another, entangled as the individual obsidian coils of a baby cousin’s braid, or the internal wiring of a microphone on a makeshift stage from which that child will recite an ode to their neighborhood corner—Lenox or Nostrand or King’s Boulevard—at the very top of their dark and holy voice, as if it were the most urgent news any listening audience could imagine, or else a trumpet to signal the end of the present world and the arrival of another. BARTS comes to us in the present, then, not as an institutional failure in any traditional sense, but instead as an unbound, unbroken meditation on how we might plan outside of the easy binary of success and failure in any terms we might easily recognize within our present order, constrained as it is by the sort of cruel optimism, pace Lauren Berlant, that warps our ability to see the successful school as one in which the children play, grow, learn on and in their own terms. BARTS attracted artists such as Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Sonia Sanchez as teachers, and ultimately left an impact in the collective imaginations of both the young people of Harlem whom it immediately served and countless other programs throughout the country.

The man holding the left side of the flag is LeRoi Jones. Today, he is wearing sunglasses and a jacket made of military canvas. The flag reads The Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. A small procession follows the flag and the men who hold its body as it is carried toward West 130^th Street. What does this particular flag make possible? What does it gesture toward or concretize? The symbol on the front of the banner is blurred into obscurity, though we know from archival sources that it is a pair of masks meant to stand in for the dramatic arts: one representing comedy, the other tragedy. Seen at a distance, through the cloud of possibilities that this blurring makes available, one can imagine the silhouette of a student, a pirate, a warrior, some rebel or outlaw figure behind each mask, a fugitive with his mind on a different world. The literate slave as the fugitive slave. The acquisition of knowledge as the means through which one might steal (themselves) away.

3. The Figure

How might we think of BARTS then not as a singular, isolated event—lightning in a brownstone, as it were—but simply as a nodal point in a much broader constellation of fugitive projects operating under the aegis of what we might call the Black School as an alternative site of social life? A countervailing force to the brutal reality of what Jarvis Givens has termed the American School: an institutional mechanism through which some of the most violent whims of the settler imagination are instantiated and ingrained. Black drama as the aestheticization of a communal impulse toward the creation of other worlds. The Black School as a figure, of which BARTS was merely a short-lived, though nonetheless influential, concrete exemplar. The Black School as such as the institutional arm of a much larger historical impetus anchored in the pursuit of Black freedom and human dignity. One immediately thinks of the classic line from Carter G. Woodson on this front: There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.

In addition to core classes in acting and poetry, BARTS also offered courses with titles such as Business Machines, Clerical Job Training, Cultural Philosophy, Dance, Cinema, Music, Political Science, Psychology of Migration, and Social History of the West. Spanning an entire range of methods and disciplinary formations, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School course catalogue makes clear, in one sense, that Jones’s vision of what comprised a sound anti-colonial education was quite unorthodox. The BARTS curriculum also included a course in Remedial Reading and Mathematics, an entry which, to my mind, clarifies more completely the stakes and aims of the school itself. The goal was not solely to train a cadre of revolutionary artists, but to prepare a generation of young people with every instrument they might need to flourish in an anti-Black world. The aim was a robust liberal arts education with an emphasis on the unheralded peoples of the planet Earth, and the cultivation of not only what Jones then termed “socially responsible” citizens of “the ghetto,” but of Black people everywhere. Jones’s revolutionary vision was one in which the seemingly permanent Black American underclass would find both the necessary psychic instruments to sustain themselves against white supremacist ideology and the everyday skills needed to feed themselves. The school’s broader purpose was essentially inextricable from that of the Black Arts Movement: to encourage a socially relevant set of Black aesthetics that would further build up the global struggle against anti-Black ideology. The theater and school passionately advocated for African diasporic art in all its myriad forms, with dance recitals, poetry readings, visual art shows, and new dramas created by the instructors.

The troupe brought the theater arts into the local community through a number of divergent means, including a vehicle that Jones famously dubbed the Jazzmobile. Instructors from the school would drive the Jazzmobile up and down 130^th Street, often enlisting Black youths from the neighborhood to serve as library assistants, teaching assistants, stagehands, and maintenance workers. These young people would eventually teach these crafts to children even younger than they were, creating, in their own way, a tradition within a tradition, a legacy of apprenticeship and childhood collaboration that would remain, no matter the fate of any individual building or community institution. BARTS also brought the theater to the community by putting up improvised stages in playgrounds, parks, in empty parking lots, and on street corners. Anywhere the people were gathered, they showed up and showed out.

Funding from Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a local social activism organization in turn funded by the US government’s Office of Economic Opportunity, provided much of BARTS’s support early on. In the end, having so much of their financing tied to this single source would help contribute to the school’s tragic demise. BARTS was founded with the help of a $40,000 antipoverty grant, and eventually, following a concerted disinformation campaign by a network of concerned white citizens in varied positions of social and political power, controversy erupted over such a flagrantly anti-American—at least in the minds of the school’s detractors—use of public funds. In his autobiography, Jones remembers the problem beginning when he denied Sargent Shriver, the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, entry into the BARTS building while school was in session. On 30 November 1965, an Associated Press release accused the group of anti-white racism, claiming that its productions supported secession and portrayed the general white American populace in a negative light. Several other published articles claimed that BARTS employed members of “Black terrorist groups” such as the Five Percenters, going so far as to cite the theology of the sect at length in print. The public outcry culminated in an armed police raid on the brownstone building that resulted in several arrests and reportedly uncovered firearms, drugs, bomb materials, and an underground gun range. A number of representatives from Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and other antipoverty programs defended the school’s activities, going so far as to argue that young people in danger of criminal involvement were, in actuality, the very individuals the programs were intended to help. Despite these efforts, public funding all but disappeared. This absence of cash on hand, coupled with a number of internal disputes among the faculty and the exit of Jones, saw the collapse of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School around that same time.

Or, at least, this is the most familiar rendition of the story. But what if there were another rendition of the BARTS creation myth available to us, calling out from the gaps in the historical record? What version of this tale lives on in the darkness? In spaces unattended to or altogether obscured from view? It is my sense that the most compelling, complete versions of this tragedy have yet to be told. Ones that can only be approached by reassembling the fragments and shards left in the wake of the school’s untimely implosion. Such a project is beyond the scope of the present essay. But one such fragment deserves at least a preliminary look for everything it might potentially reveal about the rise and fall of BARTS: the organization’s FBI file.

4. The File

The FBI case file on BARTS is over 140 pages long, but even a relatively small cross-section conveys several core elements of the story. From its very inception, BARTS was infiltrated by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and kept under heavy surveillance by the agency, largely for fear that it was secretly a front for the Progressive Labor Party. And yet, rather surprisingly, given what we now know about the role of government agencies in the covert annihilation of Black social and political organizations of all kinds, the FBI was not the sole author of the school’s destruction. Once it was discovered that BARTS was not, in actuality, a front of any kind, but rather an organization committed to providing educational opportunities for underserved youth in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, the surveillance concluded. The agents were removed. And the school shut down anyway.

The affective through-line of the FBI files—though the tone is, unsurprisingly, rather muted throughout—is one of both requisite suspicion and genuine surprise. Various out-of-context BARTS pamphlet passages on the teaching of Black Art as a mystical practice, for example, are no doubt meant to signal for readers at the bureau the sense that they are dealing not with any revolutionary sect in the way they have been trained to understand such a term, but an organization whose central principles are countercultural along an entirely different vector. Page after page, agents describe in great detail an organization energized primarily by its radical pedagogy and loving relationship to Harlem, but always existing at the precipice of destruction given its relationship to financial support from outside the neighborhood. Though their aim—as stated clearly by both Black writers of the time and later scholars such as William J. Maxwell—was to upend the organization, and not merely monitor or oversee it, aspects of the file tell a story marked not just by internal struggle but also by dazzling flashes of pedagogical breakthrough.

This atmosphere of surveillance—the sense that the window of opportunity for this particular revolutionary project was closing for the students and teachers involved, or else would actively, forcefully, be closed for them before long—was no doubt a contributing factor in the collapse of the school. But there were a number of other elements as well, not the least of which was a clash between Baraka, Harold Cruse, and a host of newcomers around how best to guide the institution into the future. In Cruse’s own words, the school was taken over by a group who “destroyed [it] from the inside” and eventually “forced out everyone else who would not agree with their mystique.”

In the present, we would do well to continue the study of the life cycles of revolutionary projects like BARTS. Such study might yield important lessons for arts spaces and organizations that have likewise set their sights on the transformation of the present milieu through the cultivation of revolutionary ideas, and the empowerment, through the singular power of performance, of the narratively condemned peoples all over the globe. In this sense, the institutional history of BARTS serves as powerful historical example and cautionary tale. Especially for those who likewise imagine Black poetics, Black Art, as a kind of collective incantation, a poetics and a praxis made to the measure of the world.

42. A Half Revolution: Making Sense of EDSA ’86 and Its Failures

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Author: Allen Severino

Authors: A Half Revolution: Making Sense of EDSA ’86 and Its Failures

Topics: after the revolution, reformism, Bourgeois ideology, Philippines

Date: 2021

Date Published on T@L: 2021-02-03T00:00:00

Source: https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/notes-and-essays/edsa-half-revolution-a2416-20210225-lfrm

Notes: This is originally published in Esquire as a sort of a critical retrospect on the EDSA Revolution from a perspective that it has failed to deliver anything or everything, aside from the return of the status quo. For all intents and purposes, we can say that EDSA is nothing more but a conservative restoration. It hides itself in a progressive veneer from time to time, while justifying the repressions and atrocities that its agents have comitted against the people in the name of its ideals.

“Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?”

This stirring provocation was delivered by the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre before the National Convention in 1792. Both adored and reviled, he stood as the apostle of a defining moment in European history, which saw the unraveling and the destruction of feudal ties and absolute monarchies based on divine exegeses. Whatever opinions that we may have on this figure, whether he was a dedicated servant of the cause of mankind, or its worst tyrant, is pedantic and irrelevant. What is at stake here is this flash of insight: Revolutions are not designed to only last a fortnight.

This was perhaps the greatest tragedy of the so-called EDSA Revolution of 1986. The hagiographers of the moment, stating that there was no seizure or force involved in deposing a decaying and byzantine autocracy, had embellished the affair as a “bloodless uprising.” Understandably, this hagiography would carry itself into great heights, and EDSA would be cited as the impetus of the Autumn of Nations that characterized the late 1980s: a massive show of global resentment and disapproval of the regimes of power that trampled on basic humanity. Unsurprisingly, the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the Soviet Union itself, can be only interpreted in an angle that involved EDSA: It is a testament of democracy, or in the words of Bill Clinton, of freedom against fanaticism.

But is it really?

Fast forward to 2021, we cringe at these episodes of “victories”—of victories contra totalitarianism, of victories against oppression, of victories against dictatorships. We no longer share the exaltations or the mutterings of the pundits and journalists of the past 30 years or so. One by one, individuals and groups are beginning to realize that their liberation from the supposed domination of one system would only pave the way for another. This can be said of the fate of the Philippines that is anchored to this single celebration.

In 1987, just barely a year after this so-called bloodless uprising, the deputies and constables of the state had opened fire on the peasant farmers in Mendiola, culminating into a massacre. Almost immediately, the defenders of these actions would justify the response as a fight against communism. Isn’t communism, the bogeyman that was paraded in propaganda, the worst of all repressions? Ironically, communism in the Philippines would not be reviled as it is now had the government recognized it and its supporters as early as 1946. But no, the money from the War Reparations was too tempting to be resisted, and the delegates of the populist-socialist Democratic Alliance were excluded, inaugurating an unnecessary ongoing conflict that has killed thousands of lives, all in the name of the fat-cat barons, kingpins, and banks.

The same justifications would be recycled over and over in the succeeding years and decades. The so-called promises of the state on upholding basic services, providing welfare, and altering the status quo have melted as quickly as they were scrapped. Political dynasties are still here, because as one framer of the Constitution would put it, banning political dynasties is against the principles of having everyone run for public office. This same framer would be against it because she has a relative working in the National Economic Development Agency of the first Aquino regime. These, and other ridiculous excuses can be found at the very Constitution that this “revolution” had birthed: a document that merely added flowery prose here and there, while keeping the order of things untouched. For some reason or another, the supporters of this document have delivered nothing, and one can even conclude that the Commission that was drafted was a sham.

EDSA ’86 In 2021

A generation since this mess is a generation wherein apathy and cynicism have become rife. This is a part of a global shift: In the age of no ideologies (since liberalism is the hegemonic way for us on doing things), everything must be obscured and sanitized. Politics is a game of management. Economists are upgraded to technocrats. Social activism reduced to sloganeering, of incremental acts similar to a bunch of customers threatening to speak to the manager. The spectrum across all persuasions settled down and told themselves that there is no alternative from this current option. Corporate social responsibility is more doable than raising the minimum wage. The only concern we have is inclusivity in corporate boardrooms. Our professional and existing selves have merged to facilitate the needs of HR. And so, they rested on their laurels.

In retrospect, this “pragmatism” was a total and absolute catastrophe. No longer having principles or any shred of responsibility to its people, the ruling classes all over the globe would parrot that they are here to protect us from our nightmares, the lurking unknown in which extremism and barbarism are rife. The War on Terror is still ongoing, the two economic crashes of this century have made prospects worse for everybody, and in general, the outlook that we have is bleak. The populist reaction would be one of the anti-theses that offered a liberation and a silver bullet to our inaction, and hence its traction. But overall, it had mixed results: for any system that limits itself in perpetual reforms will find itself petered out and alone. Our nationalism that was previously esteemed within and without has morphed into a mélange of frustrations and a huge dash of inferiority complex. As Pinoy Pride, our opium wanes on its effectiveness, the frustration that we have has turned into rage, confusion, and despair.

These disappointments cannot be blamed on EDSA as an event alone. But EDSA did play a role of introducing an impotent program of the most vapid of reformisms. Looking closely at what we have as a government, we can say that this is the logical conclusion of the underwhelming presidency of its immediate predecessor. The man was elected in a gasp of a breath by the people for emancipation, bolstered by the passing of its icon. But what it accomplished was to destroy the hopes and dreams of many. It therefore makes sense that this regime would be upended by a president and a cabinet that displayed open disregard for the hypocrisies that it inherited.

Time and time again, what the Marcoses are doing is not historical revisionism: It is denial, the denial of their atrocities. Revisionism is a terrible choice of describing their acts, because history’s praxis will be always the stories or narratives that we tell to ourselves, and we alter those stories either because of new evidence or the order that benefits from it. The popularity of Marcos-stoked conspiracies, like its version of history, should and must be viewed from an existential aspect. Their resonance is a confirmation of a nation in despair, and having no vision aside from what is presented to us, we retreat to the phantasms of the past glories, even if they are no glories at all.

We have this feeling of dread in our hearts and minds. We have this undercurrent of trying to just make ourselves disappear. In the age of isolation caused by this pandemic, it is a sentiment that is echoed and murmured. We are at a crossroads, and as long as we continue to uphold a half-revolution, all efforts will come into naught. The ghosts of the past will continue to reign, and we shall continue to amuse ourselves and numb our pain. If this process goes on without interruptions, the road to purgatory is just around the corner. And that road will be our graveyard; it is the betrayal of the ancestors who fought and died in this soil of ours.

Which way do we go now, Philippines?

43. Life After Patriarchy

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Subtitle: Three Reflections on the Coming Revolution

Author: Alnoor Ladha

Authors: Alnoor Ladha

Topics: patriarchy

Date: MARCH 6, 2018

Source: www.kosmosjournal.org

One Billion Rising is celebrating its sixth year of risings taking place from February 14 to International Women’s Day on March 8. You can find out more and join the movement here.

The last 18 months have been indelibly defined by the rise of a feminist revival. The #MeToo campaign was a cultural matchstick sitting upon a tinderbox of a patriarchal system built over thousands of years.

But there is more to it than this. If we look at the broader currents of what is happening, we are seeing a profound shift in values away from what has often been called dominator logic. This is not just a re-balancing of masculine versus feminine values, but a redefining of the central tension of anti-life versus life-centric values that are at the very core of our global operating system.

Of course, there can be no tidy narrative of linear progress. Reality is far more complex, haptic and entangled. We are simultaneously witnessing the dissolution and apotheosis of late-stage capitalism, which in its death throes is producing peak-hierarchy, peak-violence, peak-patriarchy and peak-delusion (along with the strongmen embodiments of these values in world leaders such as Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and Modi).

I do not pretend to have answers for where we are going or even what the shift from the male-dominator logic will mean, but I would like to offer three reflections that might provide a different lens from which to view the coming transition. These ideas were triggered by seeing the powerful My Revolution video by the social movement One Billion Rising.

Capitalism And Ppatriarchy Are Mutually Reinforcing

As we begin to understand the consequences of the 5,000-year spread of patriarchal logic – from species extinction to eco-systems collapse to perpetual war – a more constellational worldview is forming. Climate change, increasing inequality and rampant poverty are not “externalities” of a well-functioning system, as the economists would have us believe, but rather the logical outcome of a set of rules, norms and cultural practices that stretch back to our invention of agriculture and creation of the first city-states.

History builds upon itself in reinforcing feedback loops. We cannot create a society built on masculine values – including rewarding competition, aggression, violence, rationalism and domination – and expect the outcome to be anything else than our current plight as a civilization on the brink of existence.

Although the traditional essentialism of ideas such as “masculinity” versus “femininity” are reductive, they can be useful shorthand when it comes to identifying general tendencies. The upshot being that masculine values are primarily responsible for the historical creation of the violent, patriarchal culture that gave birth to proto-capitalism and then capitalism itself.

The economic operating system has been programmed to extract more, consume more, and control more. The system rewards those who best serve its prime directive: to increase capital. This is the epitome of dominator culture, which rewards men exponentially. As such, we as men must go beyond being ‘allies’ by recognizing and calling out patriarchy; we must become allies in actively dismantling the system and helping to usher in post-capitalist, life-centric values. This is not simply a moral requirement or a form of redemption. It is the necessary pre-condition to ensure that we can maintain Life on this planet.

Patriarchy Is A Mind-Virus

When most people think about memes they think of LOL cats or other viral internet memes. But the technical definition of a meme is a unit of cultural meaning. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene says, “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

If we understand patriarchy in this broader sense, as a memetic virus that moves from host to host, mutating to suit its various cultural environments, we start to understand what we’re up against. Although patriarchy is institutionalized through systems and structures, it is also latent in the inner structures of the mind. That means patriarchy is not solely gender-determined. One only needs to think of the archetype of the ambitious Western corporate female or NGO bureaucrat to see how patriarchal memes are internalized and re-propagated.

We also see this in progressive circles where people who are versed in power dynamics believe they are immune to the memetic virus of patriarchy. However, the thought-form mimics its own nature – it is extremely cunning, transforming itself into other forms of aggression. Even the desire to castrate men for their crimes is a form of perpetuating the virus of patriarchy (however much they may deserve it). One may argue that this is somehow the shadow of feminism, but if you accept the memetic perspective, even the more extreme feminist reaction is in fact the shadow of patriarchy.

No one is immune to the virus. Everyone who has been affected by globalized capitalist culture has been infected. To varying degrees, we are all carriers of dominator logic.

The Revolution Is Not Just Political

In order to create the antigen to the patriarchy virus that exists within us, we must address our inner world. This is a frightening proposition to most, and often regarded as irrelevant to the political process. But if disembodied, rationalist men, largely socialized in the dominant culture, are disproportionately powerful agents of creating modern reality, then surely their spiritual and psychological development is a key factor in creating the possibility of what is to come.

This is not to say that we should not focus on the material aspects of creation such as building new forms of political economy, but rather, we must complement building new infrastructure with re-wiring the inner world of the male psyche. This can take many forms including mindfulness practices, psychotherapy, men’s groups, working with psychedelic substances in ceremonial settings, etc. It may also mean rethinking the very fabric of our relationships – whether they be romantic relationships, our relationship to our own body, our community structures and our relationship with the living planet.

Whatever the avenue, the goal is to de-school the mind from the patriarchal dominator logic that is at the heart of capitalism. Patriarchy and capitalism are intertwined and interdependent thought-forms; they co-evolved, after all. We will not transcend capitalism until we dismantle the patriarchy. And we will not transcend patriarchy until we dismantle capitalism. Importantly, we will not have a chance at either if we do not first become aware of how the mind-virus of patriarchy operates within our own psyches. The challenge that lies ahead of us is as much political as it is metaphysical. It’s as much about storming the 21^st century Bastilles as it is about dismantling the inner Trump that lies within us all.

44. Pushed by the Violence of Our Desires

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Author: Anonymous

Authors: Anonymous

Topics: anarcha-feminism, feminism, 1970s

Date: 1991

Date Published on T@L: 2023-07-17T21:37:17

Source: Retrieved on 7/17/2023 from archive.org/details/italianfeministt0000unse

Notes: Notes from the zine: This piece was written anonymously. Published in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, 1991, edited by Paola Bonno, Sandra Kemp. Thanks & love to Yadira and “the team”.

You’re asking me about woman today as a militant in fighting units. I can’t tell you anything based on personal experience, because I have never belonged to any armed organizations. But I can tell you about some of the things I’ve thought about over the past few years, starting with my work in prison, relationships I developed inside, my knowledge of some fighting units right from their very beginnings, and my being a little more aware as a woman.

Are men and women driven differently to take up arms in order to change the world? Put like that the question is ridiculous. It depends what level of motivation we are talking about. The conscious motives are the same, obviously, the political analysis, revolutionary perspective and so on. The individual motives of character and personal history are infinite, and naturally have nothing to do with the sex of the person. And yet a collective female unconscious exists, and so perhaps there are profound motivations specific to the fact of our being women, which can become channeled into the armed struggle.

Perhaps it’s our relationship with reality. We have a relationship with reality that is simultaneously concrete and fantastic. Men have a relationship which is abstract and rational. I’m not speaking about any man or any woman in particular, but things which have settled into our unconscious down the ages and which we have to get to grips with, even if to rebel against them. Man organizes reality into rational patterns, and superimposes a whole lot of other ideal patterns by which he can modify reality. So he chooses a strategy for struggle based on abstract but precise political considerations. Women on the other hand have always been used to being practical and, the other side of the coin, to creating fantasies. We are used to small, daily, concrete acts which visibly and immediately modify reality. At home we wash, iron, clean up, cook. But even in areas of work which are traditionally our preserve we are not the ones to produce ideas or plans; rather, we carry them out, we translate male plans into concrete terms. It is precisely this ant- like concreteness which brings into being our grasshopper-like imagination, our dimension of fantasy. It’s a reaction, a secret and private revenge, proof of our own worth. We don’t think the transformation of the world comes about by synthesis, by rational analysis of forces or whatever. We actually imagine the new world in a fundamentally analytical way, and we start with the particular: it means not being afraid to go out at night, it means discovering a new dignity, it means being able to contemplate the future of our handicapped child without terror ... We are talking here about a different mental process.

The duality of our relationship with reality can also carry us towards armed struggle, especially after so many years of disorientation. We want to see practical results, we think it’s possible to go beyond the abstraction of round- table politics, we want to see some concrete action. The urge to construct forms of action for ourselves is sometimes very strong, since we’ve had to put up with so many years of empty speeches. And imagination? It helps us to bear the clash with reality; in this case it helps us to avoid seeing what we don’t want to see. Certainly it slips into and supports fanaticism. But men become fanatical under the yoke of their ideological schemas while we, more often than not, are driven by the violence of our dreams.

Assuming that everything I’ve said so far hasn’t been completely wide of the mark, perhaps we can begin to see why it is that when there is an armed struggle going on women, both past and present, have always proved such good material to work with, have been so invaluable as organizers, providing an irreplaceable, concrete network of support

I’ll say it again; I’m not talking about individual choices or circumstances, but about something inside us which sooner or later, in one way or another, will always come out; it is something very ancient which comes from way back, even beyond our lives, something that you feel as a memory, even as a child.

I remember when I worked a number of years ago in a support group for the Algerian National Liberation Front. I remember feeling useful and important because I worked as driver, interpreter, secretary to the comrades, or because they sent me to buy a car or pick up a cache of rifles. I was satisfied because I was doing things, even if it was never me who took decisions, even if I barely knew what was going on. The Algerian revolution was round the corner, and that was enough for me. I just imagined the revolution, when it would happen, and I thought of it as a big party, a little sad maybe but wonderful, and at the end of it the comrades would invite me too, because after all I too ... and I would go to Algeria with all its red flags and music, the hugs and the frenzy to begin building up again, and love which would find its place there ... how often did I lovingly imagine the scene ... and instead what happened? After the revolution, which found itself somewhat betrayed, our comrades all went off to Cabilia to wage a bit of civil war; all in the nick or killed; no party. I never got to Algeria and who knows what is left inside me from that period of my life; something is left, certainly, but not what I imagined then.

Certainly, I saw the birth of the NAP[99]. Since I took part in the prisoners’ movement, I could see it coming. A long time ago it was possible to talk to some comrades from NAP. I was desperately opposed to their plans, and I did everything I could to convince them. What a ridiculous word, “convince”! Many of them are dead and live on in my memory like brothers. They were men, I don’t recall any women coming in at the start of NAP from the prisoners’ movement; any that there were — and I never met any of them — came from abroad.

Now it’s common knowledge that the embryonic political movement of the detainees found a detonator in 1968 and the following years, when so many comrades were coming and going from jail; from that ferment of activity sprang the Rome prison collective, the prison commission Lotta Continua and other groups dotted around.

What was not clear at the time to those of us who worked on the outside was why comrades in jail felt the need to join together even over objectives which were “modest’” or “reductive” as Lotta Continua liked to put it: the right to vote, for example, the right to one’s sexuality in prison, the abolition of censorship of the post and the newspapers, the abolition of criminal records, compulsory call-ups and so on. Too many of us thought the revolution was going to happen the next day; for people who had to get through on average ten years inside, these issues raised a lot of hopes destined to be brutally disappointed when finally they got out, with no job, no arms and perhaps repatriation papers in their hand. Then Lotta Continua went in for some self-criticism, changed its political strategy and finished up dissolving the prison commission. But in the meantime the repression inside had got very heavy, and the growth of the movement had a logic of its own, which allowed it to ignore the directives of the organizations; it was easy to foresee a bit of a reaction, a bit of adventurism.

I remember Sergio, who got out of prison when he was 17 and turned up at my house. He had always been a thief and when he was of an age to be convicted he’d been put inside. He was a street-kid from Naples who at the time only spoke dialect. His eyes were shy and watchful, as he tried to work out quickly and infallibly whether he could love and trust people or not. He wanted to make spaghetti, he was kind to my parents, he greedily read everything he could lay his hands on, he listened, he asked questions, he was always in a hurry, a damnable but very understandable hurry. Once I told him the famous sentence “the fundamental qualities of a revolutionary are irony and patience”, and he smiled: “Must have been a bourgeois, that one.” He went to work as a bodyguard for Sofri: “I’d die for him”, he used to tell me. Instead he got himself killed with the NAP, together with Luca Mantini, in the shooting at Piazza Alberti, Florence, in 1974.

There are several reasons for the late birth of the female protest movement, which is still very sporadic if you don’t count the women in the fighting units. The first might seem banal, but in 1969 there were no female comrades going into prison, and so it was difficult to make contacts. Who with? How could we be at all sure of them? Another reason is women’s passivity, what I call our “inner prison”, the need for chains, the desire for expiation which all of us have inside us in one way or another, because sacrifice is ingrained in our existence, ingrained in our history over the centuries. This need to give without sparing ourselves, and to pay for it at the same time, to pay a very high price, almost religiously, is not an illness; it’s a way, however twisted it might be, of somehow legitimizing ourselves, as if only by expiating both our sins and those of others can we win, I don’t know, the right to be loved, liked, considered, in other words some kind of reflected identity. Women are extraordinarily resigned to the organization of prison correction. Sometimes I’ve even heard them taking pleasure in it, like some kind of self-flagellation: “It serves me right, it’s right like this, I have to pay for my mistakes...” and so on. This never happens among men. All us women have within us a sense of sacrifice as normality, which has taken root within us. Besides, this prison masochism is not really any worse than the other kinds of masochism of the women “outside”, who excel in building themselves horrific cages in which they can suffer and which it takes them a lifetime, if ever, to get out of. And all this goes for me too, for example.

In prison there are women detained for crimes which their men committed. Unlike their male comrades, women don’t get together on the basis of politics, or games, or gangs. Instead they go to mass, they take communion, each of them believes she is a case apart, and that her fate may be very unfortunate, but it is hers alone. They don’t think of breaking the rules collectively, on the whole they accept their sentences, deep down they are on the side of those who punish them. They are in a state of monstrous insecurity. This is something of what I mean by an “inner prison”.

When the prisoners’ movement was born, we tried to establish contacts with the women detainees. The first link in the chain was a woman who had been a prostitute and who had had enormous difficulties, but was not altogether unaware of the political implications of her condition. Through her we began the usual contacts: books, letters, discussion of the news, the search for a possible future platform for struggle ... but we found ourselves in the role of patronesses, which they made us play, asking us for money, recommendations, information on the private life of someone or other. We never got away from just two main tracks, one of which was spending a huge and frustrating amount of energy only to feel like a Lady of San Vicenzo, the other becoming indoctrinators, following a political line such as “Come here, dear comrade, you don’t know anything and I’ll explain everything to you.”

Those women had no major part to play in their lives, and they were especially impervious to what we thought should have been their “logical” rebellion. Yet if we had thought about it a little more instead of just giving up, we would have understood something not only about them but about ourselves. It’s very difficult to uncover the real source of rebellion in a woman, and it’s true that when you find it you have no need to nourish it; it’s like a fire which is more violent the deeper it goes. It doesn’t need to be nourished, as we naively thought following the models which the male prisons had imposed on us, by reasoning, short programmes to follow, righteous indignation over the speculation on the cost of food. The questions which we should have been asking both them and ourselves were much older than that: why am I writing to you? Why am I your sister? Who are you? What do you still want to do with your life? What can you still do with it? Is it right to experience love the way you (or I) have experienced it? Perhaps there is some other way ... there has to be some other way ... and what is this love anyway? What are you sure of in your life? Is there a free zone or have you too never managed to say “Now, that’s it”? Or perhaps you were too scared and so you lived in the dim shadow of received truths, then you found yourself here and you marked out your monstrous little refuge with its curtains and Saint Theresa on the wall and the doll lying on the straw? So many other questions and missed opportunities! It seems to me now that this was the way not only to release energy and radical feeling in women inside, but also to recognize them in us, which we always need to do.

As for the other women, the ones in the armed struggle, it’s a completely different matter, and they should talk about it for themselves. I believe that all differences disappear: you are not there, you’re neither a man nor a woman, you are the struggle, you are one with it. You become the task, the function, the signal. What counts is the integrity of the group, its material and affective cohesiveness. And this seems only right when you are tied together not only by faith, by complicity, by fear, but also by the monstrous sacrifice of having to watch your comrades die. I also believe that if you go down that road, it’s the first step that decides everything; after that “you are on a path with only one possible direction.”

45. Black liberal, your time is up

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Subtitle: Yes, tell the world that we are fed up. But, Black liberal, know that we are finished with you, too.

Author: Yannick Giovanni Marshall

Topics: George Floyd uprising, black liberation, anti-liberalism

Date: 1 Jun 2020

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/1/black-liberal-your-time-is-up/

As you ready yourself to attempt to hijack the work of radicals, to go undercover dressed in our clothes and slip into the crowd pretending that you were always there and that you are us, know that we see you. Even now, as you are preparing your watered-down Black Lives Matter syllabi and your “Hope and the Black Spring in the Time of Corona” book manuscripts, which are by now ready for press, filled as they are with the same dimly lit, unimaginative pablum about “improving race relations”, feel-good “anti-racism”, and “ways to move forward”. We see you. We know why you have come.

You are here to translate an uprising. You are here to show your black skin so that you can claim the mantle of authority on anti-Blackness that white liberals have bestowed upon you. You are here to sit at their pundit tables, before their cameras. Your face beaming across the world as it provides the safest possible interpretation of a revolution in order to police its possibilities and pave over the threat of abolition with as mild and ineffective a reform as possible.

Although uprisings are spearheaded by radicals, we are shut out of the public discussion. Neither the Black radical, nor Black radical thought is given air time. Instead, we are forced to endure being talked about and having the revolution we fought for be defused and repackaged to be palatable to a white liberal audience.

We see you gearing up for your mission. You will not be able to blend into the crowd this time.

No interpretation of a revolution is needed. Its commentators should not be the people who yesterday were only too happy to sit at the table with white nationalists and who took smiling pictures with the “good police”.

It cannot be narrated by the same people who – alongside their white liberal colleagues – jump Black radicals, beating us down with tired Martin Luther King Jr quotes in an attempt to discipline our anger and fix the boundaries of our action. Not by the same people who spew King at every opportunity, wielding him as a cudgel against those whom they have trained in the belief that King is king and his word is law.

It is a cult of King sustained, on the one hand, by the power of white liberal media, schools and corporate offices that have bled him of what little anti-colonialism he had in order to parade him for their purposes, and on the other hand, by the effective silencing of his contemporaries and his contemporary critics.

We have had to endure the silencing of people like Kwame Ture, who said, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States has no conscience.” We have endured the silencing of people like Assata Shakur, who said, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

You have not only been complicit in the silencing of the radicals, but by hogging the mic and having the prerogative on how Black struggle is spoken of and its history remembered, you have engineered it. Even as our people are permanently incarcerated or are made refugees and hunted, they die a second death in your willful amnesia.

Black radical critics have proven to be right although you would not know it by how little their names are known and how little room you have given them. Get off the mic and give it to the people. Get off the platform and out of the newsroom. Your time is up.

For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration.

We know that even now you are preparing to invade us with your linked arms performing that played out “we shall overcome” nonsense in order to reframe destruction in the colony and of the civil order as a quest for policy changes.

You have come to firehose the fire in our uprising while pretending to be angrier and more rebellious than the rebels. As if it were not just yesterday that you were standing shoulder to shoulder with police and politicians begging for calm and agreeing that this is sad.

We know that by the immensity of your power and the relative strength of your megaphones you will have some successes in the coming fraud. But no matter how well you carve and gut this revolution and lay its skin on your face as your mask, we will still see you.

We know that when we say abolish prisons and police you will intercede on behalf of the state and white power with your deliberate mistranslation saying we asked for “less harsh sentences and more trust between the police and Black community.”

When we say we want this thing over with, you will say we want “change”.

When we say this white supremacist settler-colony has anti-Blackness in its DNA and is incapable of providing any adequate liberation you say, “America is failing Black people”.

We say we want to get out of here. You ask “how do we move forward?” As if we do not hear in your tone the hope that all this “unrest” can be quelled and we can move quietly onto the next killing.

You insist on mistranslating us.

Black liberal, your time is up. You have held the mic for too long. Give the mic to any random protester on the street. Any one of them will have something more insightful and analytically sound to say than you do. When you dress up in clothes with our slogans and go on TV all you do is cry. What are you crying about? I cannot remember the last time I have smiled so much.

You have been smiling too long with our oppressors. There is no reason to cry when the resistance comes out. We would have thought you would be ecstatic, all you who have professed to be interested in change.

You who would speak lovingly of the English peasants of 1381 who, torch in hand, emerged from the ruins of the Black Death to burn the property of the ruling classes in the hope of emancipating themselves. But now, when Black people who are forced to witness themselves publicly hunted and tortured to death on a weekly basis rise up, you attempt to coax them away from their cigarette lighters.

When the Target starts burning down, the Black liberal will fight harder to put it out than its owners. But as Malcolm X said: “You had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses – the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he’d die. If his house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.”

They gave you the platform, but there are more of us than there are of you. The greatest trick you ever pulled off was to make it seem that it was you who represented the majority of Black people and it were those radically against colonial policing who were few and far between. Now you see us in our thousands. Stop crying.

X: “That Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom wears a top hat. He’s sharp. He dresses just like you do. He speaks the same phraseology, the same language. He tries to speak it better than you do. He speaks with the same accents, same diction. And when you say, ‘your army,’ he says, ‘our army.’ He hasn’t got anybody to defend him, but anytime you say ‘we’ he says ‘we.’ ‘Our president,’ ‘our government,’ ‘our Senate,’ ‘our congressmen,‘ ‘our this and our that.’ And he hasn’t even got a seat in that ‘our‘ even at the end of the line. So this is the twentieth-century Negro.”

Black liberal, as we brace for the second wave of repression from your government, remember that we still see you. When your police, your National Guard, your dogs are sicced on us, when your P W Botha/Bull Connor of a president who agitated for a Sharpeville 1960 against the migrants, prepares to commit atrocities, despite our masked shouts, stones and placards, we still see you. We know why you have come. But you are too late.

For the first time in a long while we have also been seen and know that we are not alone. Before we might have stepped out sheepishly, politely asking to consider more radical solutions, thinking that we were moving, vulnerably, naked and alone, into an open field of attack dogs.

But now that we have stridden bravely forth, without shields, into the centres of white supremacy, we have discovered that we are covered by a multitude of good people. Look at the world. We are not alone. As you jump the bandwagon and attempt to wrestle the reins away from us, know that this is a Black radicals’ moment. See us.

Black radicals are here to stay. Come up off that mic and get out before you get “looted”. And take those Barack and Michelle posters with you. They never belonged to us.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards Malcolm.

Peace after revolution.

46. Politics at the End of History

Deleted reason: DELETED not anarchist

Author: Cam Cannon

Authors: Cam Cannon

Topics: criticism and critique, teleology, marxism, communism, anti-state, dictatorship of the proletariat

Date: July 2023

Date Published on T@L: 2023-08-13T07:20:58

Source: Retrieved on August 13^th, 2023 from https://www.negationmag.com/articles/the-specter-of-hegel.

“The end of history will be a very sad time,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, as the party-State experiments of the Eastern Bloc gave way to mass uprisings, protests erupted in Tiananmen Square, and the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan.[100] The material referents by which Marxism laid claim to History as its guarantee — socialist states, workers’ movements, national liberation struggles — ceased to exist, throwing the tradition deeper into crisis.[101] Fukuyama has been correct in his prediction that social and political life would become increasingly technocratic, and that no serious challenger to parliamentary democracy would arise. While it is true that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and growing tensions with NATO may remind us of the inter-imperialist antagonism Lenin wrote about, or seem like a symptom of a newly emergent multipolar world order, brought about by the unfolding of the dialectic of uneven and combined development which promises to render imperialist domination an impossibility, it is not a struggle of new and old, for a “higher” stage of human civilization — no such thing appears to be on the agenda.[102] Indeed, Fukuyama accounted for such occurrences at the end of history.[103] The various crises from the 1990s through today, including at least two major global financial crises and a global pandemic, have failed to generate a final confrontation between labour and capital. The homogenizing processes of global capital have proceeded without interruption, without exception.[104] As Mark Fisher wrote, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”[105] What a sad time it has been, indeed.

My central thesis, however, is that it does not need to be. This essay is an investigation of the role of history in politics, or at least in its thought. The conjuncture is characterized by widespread depoliticization, in which there is a proliferation of fidelities to lapsed historical modes of politics incapable of effectively raising prescriptions or even recognizing the conjuncture for what it is.[106] More specifically, this essay is an investigation of historicism, and the ways in which it orients subjectivities to external invariants, foreclosing the possibility of egalitarian invention at a distance from the State.

The Specter of Hegel

That we received “liberal democracy plus VCRs and stereos” rather than “Soviet power plus electrification,” is the great irony that awaited us at the end of history. Rather than the vindication of the militant subject of Truth, finally free of the constraints of State and Market, we have the homogenizing circulation of commodities, the reduction of the world to technical, quantitative operations. This is the meaning of the crisis of Marxism — today it is simply impossible to claim that history is a process with the proletariat as its subject and communism its goal.[107] Here, I expose myself to an immediate objection: is this not a defeatist capitulation to “bourgeois” ideology? At this stage, it certainly seems so, but what standpoint could be better suited to an investigation of history than its end? As such, this section discusses the Hegelian philosophy of history, and the non-Marxist adaptations of it, before proceeding to Sylvain Lazarus’s conception of “classist historiography.”

For Hegel, world history is the dialectical process of World Spirit, understood as Reason and therefore Freedom (Reason is self-sufficient, thus not reliant on anything external to itself), developing consciousness of itself and actualizing itself towards a final end point in which the State secures the maximum freedom possible for its people.[108] In this view, history is propelled by the imperfection of its various stages; it is the increasing perfection of the State, a movement towards freedom and the self-conscious reign of reason.[109] The essentials for our purposes are as follows: subjectivity is conditioned relative to objective processes that are primarily embodied in the State; these objective processes tend towards a definite goal, inevitably so; everything that occurs is included in the overall development of World Spirit, and is thus progress.

This approach to history can be understood in a single word: teleology. The world is rendered into a totality which, through its self-movement, ascends towards perfection and freedom. Social transformation becomes a matter of grasping the Spirit in its movements, where the individual, or subject, so long as it is of a “historic people” (possesses a State), is determined by the objective factor, the subjective operating back on it in a dynamic interplay; its contingent needs and desires ultimately contributing to this end according to what is possible.[110] Politics, then, arises from the objective and is subordinated to it: political upheaval is then self-conscious subjectivity, aware of its relation to the objective factors and therefore capable of acting on them, viz., , it is in some sense the manifestation of Reason.

It should also be noted that the State is seen as embodying the Spirit of the nation over which it presides. What is possible is determined by what is, understood as the result of a long process which has culminated in the present and will continue beyond it. Woodrow Wilson asks[111]:

Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them?

He raises a deeply Hegelian point. Since the State must be a reflection of the Spirit of the nation and of the age, the State itself must only proceed according to that which is possible, which is in turn determined by that which has happened. It is not a matter of devising universalist maxims but acting on what arises on the basis of the history that produced what is. He continues[112]:

The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.

Which is to say that the State must only proceed according to the nature of what it is in the particularity of American society. Similarly, when he writes, “The cosmopolitan what-to-do must always be commanded by the American how-to-do-it,”[113] it should be understood as a call to investigate the status of the overall progress of the unfolding of Spirit but only implement lessons which are in accordance with the particularity of his own State and of his time.[114] Speculatively, there is no need to rush ahead of what is accepted in the moment, for knowing what has happened, is to know what is happening, and to know what is happening is to know what will happen — history will march on, and that which is in accordance with the objective process will arrive on the scene according to its time. As Carl Schmitt put it: “An ‘ought’ is impotent. What is right will make itself effective, and what merely should be, without actually existing, is not true but only a subjective mastery of life.”[115]

Wilson deploys the Hegelian philosophy of history — his politics are authorized by the same view of history. His thought, like that of Marxism, lays claim to history as a process with an endpoint, which provides the basis for him thinking what is possible politically, and ultimately, what such politics mean. To him, history was the gradual unfolding of the struggle between good and evil, culminating in the triumph of the former over the latter.[116]

To return to Fukuyama, who lays a different claim to history: “The Battle of Jena [1806] marked the end of history because it […] actualized the principles of the French Revolution.”[117] Much was left to be accomplished but “the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon.”[118] While this conclusion may seem like low hanging fruit for Marxists, the ability to draw it within the same thought of history to announce precisely the impossibility of the Marxist project is of great significance.[119] The recourse of the Marxist in the face of Fukuyama is to maintain faith that despite the disappearance of material referents which guarantee its claim to history, all that has happened is ultimately still leading to the inevitable coming of communism. What seems now to be a detour or a low point, will eventually be redeemed, and may even retroactively appear to have been a necessity. To paraphrase Plekhanov, “as long as needs remain unsatisfied the revolutionary movement will continue.”[120] History only moves forward, and with a sufficiently long view, the irrationality becomes rationality.

The Science of History

The certainty with which Marxism lays claim to history, to the coming revolution, the advent of classless, stateless society, derives from its claims to scientificity, which are themselves underpinned by the Hegelian philosophy of history. The final victory of the proletariat is assured, because, quite simply, that’s just how history works, and Marx and Engels have demonstrated as much. As they declared in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[121] This history of class struggle is one between oppressor and oppressed, the oppressed eventually negating the oppressor in accordance with the level of development of the productive forces. Each epoch generates the force(s) which, through the development of several contradictions (oppressor/oppressed, productive forces/relations of production, base/superstructure, etc.,) will inevitably be resolved in the passage to a higher stage of society, or result in the common ruin of the contending classes. There are objective, historical processes which must be grasped — in Hegelian terms, the Spirit of the time — if one is to transform the situation. It is a matter of consciousness of classes in history, and as the struggle between classes develops, this consciousness will too. Ultimately, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”[122]

In an 1852 letter to J. Weydermeyer, Marx clarifies that his “discovery” was not that of history as class struggle, but rather the recognition that it “necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,” which of itself will only “constitute” the transition to communism.[123] For Schmitt, this very claim to history, this declaration that this will happen because this is how history works, is what granted communists the “right” to use force in pursuit of what he terms “rationalist dictatorship.” He writes[124]:

Only when it was scientifically formulated did socialism believe itself in possession of an essentially infallible truth, and just at that moment it claimed the right to use force. The scientific certainty of socialism appeared historically after 1848, that is, after socialism had become a political power that could hope to realize its ideas one day […] Convinced Marxism holds that it has found the true explanation for social, economic, and political life, and that a correct praxis follows from that knowledge; it follows that social life can be correctly grasped immanently in all of its objective necessity and thus controlled.

And further[125]:

The tautology of Hegelian as well as of Marxist certainty moves in such circles, and provides a “self-guarantee” of its own truth. The scientific certainty that the historical moment of the proletariat has arrived is first produced, therefore, by a correct understanding of the process of development. The bourgeoisie cannot grasp the proletariat, but the proletariat can certainly grasp the bourgeoisie. With this the sun begins to set on the age of the bourgeoisie; the owl of Minerva begins its flight. But here that does not mean that the arts and sciences have progressed, but rather that the passing age has become an object of the historical consciousness of a new epoch.

That the science of history secured its own verification as truth, through its own conception of development, and that it’s claim to inevitability is what gave it its subjective purchase, it “authorized” the project of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle to bring it about, is not only recognized by opponents of Marxism like Schmitt.

In The Role of the Individual in History, Plekhanov affirms the “dialectical materialist” understanding of history — all that happens, or can happen, is determined by history, which produces determinations in the form of social relations and needs — in order to defend it against charges that it reduces the role of the individual to nothing and allows no room for free will. Indeed, he writes that fatalism, knowledge of inevitability has been “psychologically necessary,” for action, remarking: “Those who think that as soon as we are convinced of the inevitability of a certain series of events we lose all psychological possibility to help bring on, or to counteract, these events, are very much mistaken.”[126]

It is this understanding of history, and that politics stems from it, that makes it possible to deny that history has ended: everything is progress. Even in terms of events occurring unexpectedly, or not according to class struggle, events still appear as a series of steps towards the end point of communism. Because history unfolds in a rational way, it is knowable as such — for Plekhanov, even an “accident” like European colonization in North America, which did not occur on the basis of the development of the peoples on that land, but rather was the collision of different inevitable trajectories, is explainable by recourse to the economic.[127] Engels’ The Role of Force in History is fascinating in this way. For Engels, Bismarck was not a bourgeois, but a junker, and while he did not consciously set out to fulfill a “historic task” like elevating the bourgeoisie to the ruling class, through his unification of Germany and various policy decisions, Engels argues that he acted as a force capable of completing the historic tasks of the bourgeoisie even when they were not conscious of the tasks.[128] Going even further, Amilcar Cabral leans on this notion of history, declaring that history (along with Plekhanov, who also effectively argues this) is the history of the productive forces, and that European imperialism in Africa has been a necessary and progressive process in itself, it brought history to otherwise “non-historic” peoples.[129]

This understanding of history, this science, is itself used in heterogeneous ways to explain the experiences of the 20^th century: objective conditions were not right for the transition from capitalism to socialism, imperialist aggression intervened, the capitalist road won out, State policy was not properly informed by the scientific, socialism will be achieved only after a long period of capitalist development, and so on. Regardless of one’s position on the Soviet and Chinese experiences, it is seldom the case that a Marxist will put forward an analysis which meaningfully interrogates this science of history, and what it does. No matter the content of events, they are born out of a matrix of social relations, which are themselves the results of history. They are all steps towards the eventual end of history: communism.

Condemned to Win

Marxism is all powerful because it is true, and it is true because it finds verification in the operation of history itself. Millions of lives have been lost in service of the idea that a better world is possible, and all lessons have been hard won. Today, it seems that more and more people are tapping into this tradition by attending rallies, engaging in mutual aid, and struggling to build revolutionary organizations suited to the tasks that lay ahead of them. There exists a wide range of intellectualities one could adopt, and events to swear fidelity to.[130] In the end they all take this received truth of history as their real — we are condemned to win. They re-enact the debates of the Second International and know exactly what they would have done if they were in “so and so’s” shoes during “such and such” point in history. They immerse and submerge themselves in the modes of politics of long exhausted sequences, and raise categories to the status of concepts. They know what not to do, and are preparing themselves, because they know that they are condemned to win. Science is on their side, and it is only a matter of time and the correct application of hard won theories. The revolution is coming, its inevitability is encoded in the very fabric of everyday life – we just don’t know when. Such is the promise that history offers the dialectical materialist.

But there is something about this history: why is consciousness of history, of class, insufficient for producing social transformation in this conjuncture? There is something in the line of sight of the dialectical materialist, yet unseen. It is that this history, our inheritance, through the very same mechanisms with which it has reassured us of victory, has led us astray.

The dialectic is a tyrant. It offers politics a guarantee, but in exchange for its replacement by a thought of the State. Which is to say, history offers politics only its own annihilation. Rather than politics being a subjective process of creation or invention, in which humans break with the laws of motion governing their situation, and present new possibilities for egalitarian social organization, politics becomes a matter of the objective operating on itself through an epiphenomenal subjective factor. Rather than invention, politics becomes subsumed under the processes of the state, “the economy,” and so on, becoming associated primarily with the conquest of power. The dialectic proposes that the subjective can only be understood in its operation on, and determination by the objective; the dialectic always leads back to a thought which centres on the State.[131] The dialectic proposes that the subjective is only ever expressive of the objective. As Lazarus explains[132],

History is a thought relation of the State. What then can be said of history with respect to operation and determination? The question is all the more complex in that, depending on the case, it makes use of one or the other or both. Marx, for his part, maintains that history pertains to determination and operation. It is in this capacity that it can subsume politics and include it. Identified through operation and determination, history is tied up with politics through operation and to the State through its double determination.

Now, why does this matter? It has consequences on the ways in which politics is thought by Marxists. A consequence of dialectical thought is this idea of revolution as the category of politics (and history), which is what sustains thinking in terms of politics as the struggle for a revolution, rendering the dictatorship of the proletariat synonymous with the revolution, and ultimately relying on sustaining the revolution, understood as sustaining a revolutionary state, until class is abolished, and it is withered. In this sense, politics (which express the objective as subjectivity, thus class consciousness, class politics etc.,) is centered on antagonism with the State, which then becomes management of the State in the name of the proletariat, which then requires one to put faith in the State for the completion of emancipatory politics, which it cannot accomplish.

To offer an example from the National Liberation Struggle[133] mode of politics, Kwame Nkrumah put forward the statement “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all shall be added unto thee.”[134] Such a statement indicates a thought of politics which identifies emancipation with the seizure of State power. Once State power has been conquered, the State machinery smashed, etc., then harmonious development can take place, imperialism overcome, socialism established, and so on. However, Michael Neocosmos argues, once State power was taken, politics became centered on the State itself, in effect creating a disconnect between the masses and the State/party, and generating a situation in which politics became centered on managing interests and technical administration.[135] Contrary to Nkrumah’s statement, the belief that the seizure of State power represents a transition to a new situation in which the new State serves as a guarantor of emancipatory politics continuing to unfold, as a safeguard against national enemies the State dropped any pretense of carrying through emancipation, and neocolonialism kicked in.[136]

This is partly built on the notion that politics is expressive of the objective (this is the very meaning of the dialectic of subjective-objective), and that because the new State will have a progressive character, it will sustain forward momentum through its conditioning of subjectivity and the reaction back upon it. However, as Neocosmos writes[137]:

The politics of the state, like politics in general, understood as subjectivity, as consciousness, as capacity, as agency, as choices, cannot be deduced from the class(es) these are said to represent, whichever these may be. Class representation can at best only enable the identification of policies with reference to class interests, and not politics as such. For the study of politics as subjectivity to advance in order to enable a grasping of political choice, it has to distance itself from the analysis of interests, for these ultimately propose little more than an objectivist determinism.

This interplay between subjective and objective, which centers the State, is at hand when Lenin writes about “habits”[138]:

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organised and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general … In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general … will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination … In order to emphasise this element of habit, Engels speaks of a new generation, “reared in new, free social conditions,” which will “be able to discard the entire lumber of the state” — of any state, including the democratic-republican state.

And even more clearly[139]:

The expression “the state withers away” is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occasions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.

Which is to say, the interplay between subjective and objective, according to the State, is expected to condition the people in their habits — the dictatorship of the proletariat representing a higher form of state — while these habits, in tandem with economic development, will bring about the end of history, communism. History has brought about the increasing perfection of the State machinery, perfected to the point that its highest level enacts its disappearance through its shaping of habits.[140]

In 1923, Lenin reflects on the results of the project[141]:

Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome, has not yet reached the stage of a culture, that has receded into the distant past. I say culture deliberately, because in these matters we can only regard as achieved what has become part and parcel of our culture, of our social life, our habits … We have been bustling for five years trying to improve our state apparatus, but it has been mere bustle, which has proved useless in these five years, or even futile, or even harmful. This bustle created the impression that we were doing something, but in effect it was only clogging up our institutions and our brains.

In the period of 1917 to 1923, there were attempts to find footing in a situation in which existing thought was inadequate, and experience was showing the difficulty associated with erecting a non-state state worthy of the name. The solution was to empower the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, to train people in new habits, and not to proceed ahead of what is possible in the conjuncture. The victory of socialism could only be assured by the success of proletarian revolution in the East, “but what interests us is not the inevitability of this complete victory of socialism …”.[142] In the face of unfavourable objective conditions, it is a question of survival against counter-revolutionary states. Stalin would later rise to power and systematize the ideology of “Marxism-Leninism,” which contains strong themes of inevitable victory, historical necessity, strict expressivity between politics and the objective, and so on.[143] It is worth noting here that Schmitt saw the possibility of an endless “rational dictatorship” being justified on the basis of the Hegelian philosophy underpinning Marxist thought, and that Badiou views this in terms of projecting the political categories of one’s conjuncture into eternity — the suturing of politics and philosophy.[144]

As Alessandro Russo writes in connection to the Chinese experience[145],

In the doctrine of historical materialism, victory … was much more than the overthrow of a government. It was above all the converging point of historical contradictions between advanced and retrograde classes, new productive forces and old modes of production, counterpoised ideologies, and even between worldviews. Revolutionary culture carried the historical guarantee that socialism, which has led the way to complete victory over capitalism, would triumphantly march on to communism.

When Lenin speaks of habits, of culture, in the Chinese experience it is “revolutionary culture,” which is justified on the same basis of subjectivity and objectivity. However, Mao did not believe in “inevitable” victory — in fact, he thought in terms of probable defeat, in terms of the Chinese state existing as an exception to the general rule of capitalism.[146] Mao steps out of the historicist focus on the State with the notions of revisionism, and capitalist restoration — the Party and the State can generate its own bourgeois, capitalism restored without a bloody counter-revolution.[147] Going further, rather than an end of history, and thus of politics, Mao predicted that struggle between the old and new would remain.[148]

The lessons of the Cultural Revolution are too many to summarize here with adequate attention, but the sequence marked something profound: the withering of the State has more to do with the creativity of the masses and their ability to invent new egalitarian forms, than it does with the seizure and maintenance of power by a party as the representative of a class.[149] Enthusiasm for socialism, politics in command, it is right to rebel against reactionaries (especially if they are in the communist party), are all thoughts which do not rely on the authorization of history or the objective. Rather, they are de-dialecticized and de-historicized, placing politics as subjective, recognizing that emancipatory politics come from outside of the State, and are not merely expressions of the objective.[150] Of course, it goes without saying that Mao still adhered in some ways to the historicism which comes along with dialectical thought.[151]

The Cultural Revolution can be described as a mass political laboratory, where the masses, independent of, and often against the party, engaged in experiments to generate new egalitarian forms of human relationships, throwing the party as representative of class into question.[152] According to Russo[153]:

The communist parties proclaimed to embody a historical paradigm that guaranteed the political existence of the workers and of all possible egalitarian politics that had the “working class” as central. The experimental results of the 1960s proved, instead, that despite any alleged “historical connection” between the communist parties and the “working class,” the political role assigned to the workers was fictitious…

In the final stage of the sequence, Mao concluded that capitalist and socialist states were not very different, save for the ownership of the means of production, and that capitalist restoration would happen more easily than the transition to communism.[154] However, Russo argues that these lessons were adopted by Deng Xiaopeng and the party leadership in a manner that would depoliticize the masses. Rather than following through on the campaign to study the dictatorship of the proletariat, an ongoing attempt to foster egalitarian inventions put forward by Mao in 1974, a policy of thorough negation of the Cultural Revolution was adopted and the political assessment of the question was banned.[155] Russo continues,[156]

Deng was aware that he could not simply restore the previous system of command but instead would have to create a new one. He also had to be able to map out a protracted strategy for effectively establishing “order,” that is, to re-establish authority over workers in the factories. By considering the whole process of reform, it is possible to identify at least three basic consistent moves: the suppression of the Maoist experiments in the factories; the full commodification of labour-power; and the maintenance in the government discourse of the ideological reference to the “working class” and its “historical” connection with its “class vanguard,” the Communist Party.

The new governmental discourse made clear that the State was willing to repress harshly, while also proclaiming itself to be the sole representative of the working class.[157] This depoliticizes the working class, insofar as it denies the legitimacy of mass political experimentation, thus denying the possibility of a distance between workers and the State.[158] The Party represents the working class, and operates according to the laws of historical development — which require capitalist development.[159] Working class politics become associated with State development policy, with being a “good” worker, in faith that the objective laws of motion will someday bring about the emancipation of humanity. In representing the working class, the party eviscerates it politically.[160]

As Russo summarizes,[161]

The way in which the CCP achieved a new governmental order demonstrated to the world a means of bringing the worker politicization of the 1960s to a close. Despite the preservation of elements of a “class” discourse, it soon became clear that the very concept a “working class” had become a mere fiction in China. That this had occurred in a socialist country, notably one where there had been prolonged attempts to revitalize the political figure of the worker, could not but have profound consequences for all other contemporary governmental circumstances.

In other words, the thought of politics which centers on the proletariat, party, and State, has been closed off. These thoughts are no longer antagonistic to capital, but have been adopted by it: they circulate through governmental discourses and prevent a thought of politics at a distance from the State, and they are exhausted in terms of egalitarian invention.[162]

Finally, in his study of the French Revolution, Lazarus takes aim at “classist historiography.” Historicism views revolutions as the transition between a State 1 and State 2 of a society – they are given their meaning according to what comes before and after, rather than the content of what actually occurs, and any knowledge of it is completely retrospective.[163] This conception of revolution identifies politics with the State, with the completion of the politics in communism being more of the completion of a process of the State:[164]

… be it with regard to revolution or with regard to the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition takes on meaning only in relations to its ultimate and initial boundary marks, and can only have an internal characterization and an internal completion in a problematic of the State. Whether we are dealing with Marxism or historicism, a thought in terms of transition is inoperative for a thought of politics.

He then discusses conflictuality, the expressiveness of politics, referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat as a utopian category, and a historic category. He continues[165]:

The utopia is a well-argued approximation, but for the simple reason that it is an approximation it is unrealizable and hence unrealistic. The essence of the approximation is the attribution of processes of politics to State conflictuality and to the antagonism in relation to the State; it is therefore an approximation concerning the politics brought about through the relation to the State and through the intermediary of conflictuality.

From this, it seems that far from a guarantee, the dialectic of history obscures what occurs following the seizure of State power — it assumes that political processes continue operating because the objective processes it identifies them with continue on, while also justifying governmental discourses which prevent the further egalitarian invention that is needed for politics. The Marxist view of history prevents it from being able to grasp the tasks which it sets for itself by virtue of the mechanisms it employs in its thought, i.e., it cannot actually think the withering of the State. This is the exact same mechanism which Fukuyama uses to announce the end of history, and it is the same mechanism by which Leo Strauss explains the subjectivity of the “German nihilists,” who understood it and set about destroying the world to avoid its conclusion.[166] There is a significant issue with this guarantee.

As Althusser writes: “A truly materialist conception of history implies that we abandon the idea that history is ruled and dominated by laws which it is enough to know and respect in order to triumph over anti-history.”[167] The experiences of the 20^th century have shown that the seizure of state power, does not, in fact, generate laws of motion according to which the state will wither away, given the right objective conditions and leadership.[168] The dialectical materialist philosophy has only served as the guarantee of the “truth” that the state, and whatever measures it takes, is necessary, and therefore it, and the Party must be the sole referents of subjectivity. It seems that rather than fetishize method as granting access to truth, we need to grasp the function of philosophy as a theoretical battlefield, in which positions are taken over and transformed along with the conjuncture, rather than positing eternal truths. The way dialectics structure our thought of history eviscerates any possibility of thinking politics, and serves as nothing but a breeding ground for millenarian sectarianism — depoliticized and ineffectual posturing for the eventual seizure of power.

Truly, Althusser initiated a break with the so-called “Official” Marxisms of his day, which represent intellectualities still present today. His project was to put Marxism on a proper philosophical foundation that, rather than produce state ideologies, and affective investment in “actually existing socialism” (real or imagined), understood its role in class struggle, and was defined by its practice rather than a system of positions. This work has been advanced by Lazarus, which gives up any hope of science being conducive to politics, dedicating itself instead to the study of subjective singularities — of politics as thought. The contribution of Anthropology of the Name is not as a guide to practice, it is not a science nor a philosophy. However, it is exactly what is needed today, as, if anything, it serves as something of an exorcist. There are too many sad ghosts at the end of history.

The End of History

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

There is the end of history and the end of history. That is, the culmination of the unfolding of the Idea (or Good, or class struggle) on the one hand, and the closure of a political intellectuality which takes history as its primary referent and guarantor on the other. What I propose is the latter. This essay started from the end of history to jump back to its beginning with Hegel, and proceeded forward through Marxism to the point we are at now. The essential points are: Marxism, by virtue of its Hegelian heritage, is characterized by an underlying thought of history, which grants it the guarantee of its triumph, but at the same time, prevents it from grasping politics, which is due to the nature of the dialectic. We are thus unable to think politics according to itself, and even our understanding of revolution as a transition always redirects thoughts of politics towards the State, or the social, which immediately re-centers itself on the State. It is time to give up this guarantee, which is no longer the subjective necessity that Plekhanov says it can be. In place of guarantees, of a thought of history in which the subjective and objective are only thought together, in which it is presumed that politics is always present because social antagonism exists, we need to re-orient ourselves to thought in terms of political sequences, which begin and end, and which find their completion as the result of internal developments, rather than external factors such as the productive forces or imperialism.[169] The question right now is not reform or revolution, it is depoliticization or invention. We need to recognize the situation for what it is, and adapt our methods of thought if we are to break with it.

The end of history does not need to be a sad time. It can be a time of invention. Of thinking politics at a distance from the State, of no longer getting caught up in disagreements on which revolutionary should have taken charge at what time, of whose policies would have pushed their society towards communism. Instead of exposing ourselves to the disaster of making universal concepts of categories specific to those conjunctures, we must approach the categories as they existed within their own political sequences. We must invent new egalitarian forms of organization, without subordination to a bureaucracy which exists only to someday become the State. Beyond the end of history, politics stands on its own.

REFERENCES

Amilcar Cabral. “Presuppositions and Objectives of National Liberation Struggle in Relation to Social Structure.” In Unity and Struggle, translated by Michael Wolfers, 119–37. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979.

Anonymous, and Bruno Bosteels. “The Dialectical Mode: With Regard to Mao Zedong and Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 663–68.

Badiou, Alain. Can Politics Be Thought? Duke University Press, 2018.

———. “Philosophy and Politics.” In Conditions, translated by Steven Corcoran, 145–76. London; New York: Continuum, 2008.

———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford University Press, 2003.

Desai, Radhika. Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire. Pluto Press, 2013.

Engels, Friedrich. “The Role of Force in History.” In Marx & Engels Collected Works, 453–510. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? John Hunt Publishing, 2009.

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18.

Haider, Asad. “On Depoliticization.” Viewpoint Magazine, December 16, 2019. https://viewpointmag.com/2019/12/16/on-depoliticization/.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Batoche, 2004.

Lazarus, Sylvain. Anthropology of the Name. Translated by Gila Walker. The French List. Seagull Books, 2015. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo20021903.html.

Lenin, V.I. “Better Fewer, But Better.” In Collected Works, translated by David Skvirsky and George Hanna, 2^nd English., 33:487–502. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm.

———. “The State and Revolution.” In Collected Works, translated by Stepan Apresyan and Jim Riordan, 25:385–497. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975.

Leo Strauss. “German Nihilism.” Interpretation 29, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 353–78.

Mao Zedong. “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.” Marxist Internet Archive, 1957. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.html.

Mao Zedong. On Practice and Contradiction. Reissue edition. London ; New York: Verso, 2017.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In The Political Writings, 61–92. London: Verso, 2019.

Marx, Karl. “Marx to J. Weydemeyer in New York.” Marxist Internet Archive, 1852. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05-ab.htm.

Neocosmos, Michael. “Analysing Political Subjectivities: Naming the Post-Developmental State in Africa Today.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 45, no. 5 (October 2010): 534–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909610373895.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. London; New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957.

Pestritto, Ronald J. “Woodrow Wilson, the Organic State, and American Republicanism.” In History of American Political Thought, edited by Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga, 582–601. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019.

Plekhanov, Georgij Valentinovič. Essays in Historical Materialism. Foundations, #9. Paris: Foreign languages press, 2021.

Russo, Alessandro. Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

———. “Mummifying the Working Class: The Cultural Revolution and the Fates of the Political Parties of the 20^th Century.” The China Quarterly, no. 227 (2016): 653–73.

Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. MIT Press, 1988.

Stalin, J.V. “Dialectical and Historical Materialism.” In History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), 165–206. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951.

Strauss, Leo. “German Nihilism.” Interpretation 29, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 353–78.

Wilson, Woodrow. “The Study of Administration.” Political Science Quarterly 2, no. 2 (87 1886): 197–222.

47. From Urumqi to Shanghai: Demands from Chinese and Hong Kong Socialists

Deleted reason: DELETED not anarchist

Subtitle: A letter on strategy and solidarity with Uyghur struggle

Author: Chinese and Hong Kong socialists

Authors: Chinese and Hong Kong socialists

Topics: China, social movements, solidarity, internationalism, strategy, indigenous solidarity, social control, settler colonialism

Date: November 28^th, 2022

Date Published on T@L: 2022-11-28T21:18:01

Source: Retrieved on November 28^th, 2022 from https://lausancollective.com/2022/from-urumqi-shanghai/.

Notes: This is an expanded version of a letter written by Chinese and Hong Kong socialists on the mainland and overseas on the night of 26 November 2022, when protests first erupted. The abridged Chinese version first appeared in Borderless Movement (https://borderless-hk.com/) on 27 November. This version has been revised through the weekend as events developed. Republished with permission.

On Thursday, 24 November, 2022, a fire broke out in a residential building in Urumqi, the capital of China’s “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”[170] The fire killed mostly Uyghur victims and injured many more. These numbers are said to be under-reported, and the tragedy was a result of China’s failed pandemic policy which has severely restricted the movements of everyday citizens and denied their access to basic necessities for prolonged periods of time. While these policies have affected millions of Chinese citizens, Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region have long suffered from heightened repression, up to and including mass internment and extreme surveillance by the Chinese government. Xinjiang has also seen the most stringent lockdown policies implemented, with many unable to leave their homes for more than a hundred days.

In response, Urumqi residents launched an unprecedented city-wide protest on Saturday 26 November, braving the police to surround government buildings and demand an end to the current lockdown policies. These flawed lockdown policies resulted in the compound gates being bolted shut by authorities, such that residents were unable to escape. Protests of different kinds spread across major cities throughout the night. Some took the form of collective and independent mass action, like the student-led vigil in the Communication University of China in Nanjing and the public statement written by medical students from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. Citizens of Shanghai took to the streets to escalate their action further, chanting slogans like “Down with the CCP! Down with Xi Jinping!”

Regimes across the world have failed their people throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and China’s authoritarian brand of capitalism has led to further restriction of the rights of its everyday citizens. Working conditions have become even more precarious. In late October, it was revealed that Foxconn workers in Zhengzhou were trapped in a ‘closed-loop system’ that restricted their movements and access to basic necessities in conditions of forced labor. Many workers tried to flee the factories by scaling fences. Instead of calling for accountability from its private enterprises and revising its lockdown policies in the region, the local government responded by sending its cadres to Foxconn’s production line to ensure profitability. Last week, newly-hired Foxconn workers staged a small revolt protesting their conditions, and the local government sent hundreds of hazmat-suited police to aid Foxconn in repressing the workers.

Citizens and workers across China are taking to the streets to demand accountability for a “Zero Covid” policy that has seen their rights taken away and their safety placed in danger. Once again, the people of Xinjiang have had to bear the brunt of China’s repressive policies in the horrific Urumqi fire. But now the region with some of the country’s most marginalized has become the spark for what is possibly the largest scale mobilization in Chinese society in years. More urgently than ever, Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang and in other regions of China must continue to center the struggle of Uyghurs and oppressed minorities and fight alongside them.

We demand accountability for the victims of the Urumqi fire, and call for radical systemic change:

Demands:

Abolish the current lockdowns that forcibly detain people in their homes, denying them of access to basic needs.
Abolish forced PCR testing for COVID-19.
Allow those who are infected to isolate at home, while those with severe symptoms have the right to treatment in the hospital; cancel forcible transfer and isolation of infected and non-infected individuals in mobile cabin “hospitals”.
Provide options for multiple vaccines, allowing individuals the right to choose their own healthcare.
Release Sitong Bridge protestor Peng Zaizhou and other political prisoners who are being detained from the protests.
Call for nation-wide mourning of the deaths of those caused by irresponsible lockdown measures.
Ensure the resignation of bureaucrats responsible for pandemic mismanagement.
Pandemic control measures must be informed by medical experts and conducted democratically amongst the people.
Safeguard the rights of people to the freedom of speech, assembly, organization, and protest.
Support independent workers’ power in and beyond these protests; abolish anti-worker practices like the 996 work schedule and strengthen labor law protections, including protecting workers’ right to strike and self-organization, so they can participate more extensively in political life.

Strategies:

If anyone is threatened by the police, others should stand up to support them.
We should not stop others from chanting more radical slogans, but try to prioritize positive and concrete demands for systemic change.
Changes in the political authorities within the system would not be useful unless we thoroughly democratize the system itself.
Avoid the risky tactic of long-term occupation of streets and town squares—adopt “Be Water”-style mobilization to prevent authorities from too easily clamping down on protesters.
Beyond protesting, strengthen mutual aid and self-organization among communities and workplaces.

People in China today are beginning to mobilize around Sitong Bridge protestor Peng Zaizhou’s call for mass action across to demand “democracy, not more forced PCR testing.” We do not know how this movement will develop, but we continue encouraging independent mass organization by students, workers, and other marginalized groups in the mainland and abroad, including Hongkongers, Taiwanese, Uyghurs and Tibetans to continue building a long-term strategic program for democratic struggle in China.

We stand in solidarity with this developing movement and call on the Chinese government to respect the livelihood and basic civil liberties of its citizens.

Footnotes:

48. Burning Bridges

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Subtitle: Disconnecting From White Culture and Fighting for Liberation

Author: Curtis Fields and Brooke Harter

Authors: Curtis Fields, Brooke Harter

Topics: anti-racism, anti-capitalism, direct action, whiteness, community organizing

Date: October 18, 2021

Date Published on T@L: 2022-03-25T15:50:06

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the brave comrades who have helped us recognize our roles in the revolution and given us the support to enact that role. Special thank you to Los Brown Berets and NWI Collective for providing sources and oversight for portions of the book regarding Native American subjugation. This book would not be possible without the various organizations who have supported us and stood with us in the struggle for freedom.

NWI Collective

Just Transition NWI

Rise NWI

New Afrikan Black Panther Party

Los Brown Berets

White Panther Party

United Panther Movement

We thank you for standing with us and letting us join the struggle for freedom, without you none of this would be possible.

Dare to struggle, dare to win! All power to the people!

Our Purpose

Despite the wishes and best intentions of the masses, the revolution will not be a clean affair. It will be dirty, grimy, and its outcome written in the blood of the revolutionary. Families, friends, and strangers will pick arbitrary sides and fight amongst each other, all loyalties irrelevant amidst the smoke and chaos. Speaking specifically of the United States, the revolution will not be a clean-cut affair, it will not resemble the revolutions of the past idolized by both the patriot and the comrade. There will be no glorious battles, no clear right or wrong, no bastions of power fighting each other for control of the land like the red and white armies of the Russian revolution. No, in the modern revolution amid the myriad splinter groups and guerilla bands, the loyalties held will rely solely on the material conditions and individual ideological beliefs.

When speculating on the future of the revolution and the chaotic nature of it, an insidious idea is present amongst the predominantly white population of the US, the idea that race or skin color will play a role in loyalties. The belief that the color of one’s skin will determine the “side” one has to take in the chaos is held by, if not a majority, a very vocal minority of the white population. The idea of “race war” and related ideas has flourished among the white culture in the US since before the civil rights movement of the 60’s, purposefully spread and egged on by radical right-wing and neo-nazi groups to create a sense of loyalty to one’s own race and distrust towards any other.

This idea is nonsense, and for obvious reasons. In the chaos of revolution, the color of your skin does little more to ensure your safety than the color of your shoes. Chaos is just that, chaotic, there are simply too many factors to determine if the group you wish to join will either allow you into their ranks or place you into a pit, and barring the most extremist of neo-nazi or black seperatist groups, your skin color will be nowhere near the most important factor in their decision.

In the times we live in today, the pre-revolution age of wage slavery and corporate conglomerates, your race does play a role in loyalties. This is not advocating for the idea, as communist we are vehemently against the idea of racism whether structural or personal, it is simply fact. In modern day America, the color of one’s skin determines many factors in one’s life. Your vulnerability to police brutality, your potential wage outlook, your potential to acquire a specific job, your probable living conditions, in the United States race plays a strong and abhorrent role in all of these and more. Being born with a lighter or darker shade of skin can; and has been, the difference between life and death throughout the history of this nation. The grounds of America are soaked in blood spilled for the most arbitrary of reasons. It is also important to note that while an individual’s ethnicity and racial background does play a large factor in their oppression, it also comes down to the features that they possess. If someone of African descent just happens to possess European features, they are awarded more in their lives than their counterparts who possess non-European features.

The newest generation, having lived through the myriad failings of capitalism and exposed to the truth of the system they live under, seek to break this power dynamic. As evident in the 2020 George Floyd protests, many young, radicalized white people answered the call and took to the streets alongside their black and brown comrades. Despite the debates and numerous arguments on just how effective said protests were, it cannot be ignored that the new generation has at least partially answered the call and committed themselves to abolishing the ideals of white supremacy.

This is good news, one cannot criticize the fact that more bodies in the streets is a sign of acceptance of our ideas and coming change. However, the white activist and future white activist have a struggle which they cannot express or seek help for from their black and brown comrades. It is a fact that every white activist must contend with before they commit themselves to furthering the revolution and truly aligning themselves with the cause. It is simply a fact that white activists benefit from the system they are fighting against, and that their rebellion is actively making their lives harder.

The intent of this book is not to convince the white activist from removing themselves from the fight, on the contrary it is intended to teach them to accept this fact as a necessary consequence of their actions and to come to terms with it. For the white activist to truly assist the proletariat revolution, they must accept the ideas that they benefit from the system, that fighting against it will certainly make their lives harder, and understand that this is all necessary and acceptable in the face of the alternative, complacency with a system that benefits them at the expense of others.

This can be especially difficult, when statistically white people are uncomfortable discussing race, with the topic of racism being considered even more taboo. Many white children are taught to be ‘color-blind’ by their parents and proceed through life viewing themselves as ‘woke’ white people who no longer need to do any work on their efforts towards being anti-racist. According to Shannon Sullivan in Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism states that “for many white people, race tends to be something that concerns everyone but them” which leads to many white children becoming white adults who believe that by simply not worrying about racism, allows them to wash their hands of racism.

The purpose of this book is to break that stigma, to speak openly about the role of race and racial conflict in the revolution, to explain the origins of the white culture which rules over the society and outline how the white revolutionary can assist in destroying it. This book will cover topics which may offend any white readers, and this is our intention.

To be offended is to be confronted with the uncomfortable, to face the truth of the white culture in full transparency and to be forced to contemplate the inherent biases held by any white person reading. This is not a topic which can be explained without garnering hatred and criticism. Therefore, instead of trying to avoid controversy, we accept its inevitability and hope that any initial criticism or revulsion the white reader holds will lead to further contemplation and research into their exact role in the white culture and, hopefully, to consideration towards the necessity of breaking from it and devoting themselves to the revolution.

Recognition of White Culture, What It Is, and How It Works

Section One — Definitions of Whiteness and White Culture

To first define white culture, we must form a definition of what it means to be “white”. Without a definition, a deeper understanding of the white culture is impossible and the future revolutionary will never be able to break away from it. While at a glance this seems like a simple idea, it is actually rather difficult to categorize and must be meticulously analyzed in order to come up with a conclusive answer.

Asking the average US citizen the definition of whiteness will lead to a simple answer, to be white is to have white skin. As simple and solid an answer this seems, it is by all accounts wrong. It does not take much research or observation for this description to fall apart. As an example, take a light-skinned Asian person and ask the citizens the same question. They have white skin, so under this definition they should be considered white, however asking the average US citizen will lead to a different conclusion, that the person in question is not white, and that they are Asian.

As another example, take a fair skinned person from Puerto Rico. Ask the citizens if they are white and you will get a similar answer, that the individual is not white, and that they are Puerto Rican. These answers do not make sense under this definition, white skin should classify someone as white regardless of their national or ethnic origin, but we can clearly see that this is not the case.

Let us then expand the definition, a common answer one might hear is that being white means that you have white skin and are of European descent. Curiously, the definition has expanded from physical appearance alone to the inclusion of national origin. If we go by this definition, it seems to paint a more defined and rational explanation for the idea of whiteness.

Once again with slight scrutiny this definition also falls apart. Take for example a common fair-skinned Italian person. While it is true that many Italians are known for a more olive-toned skin color, many Italians have skin just as white as would be expected of a British or Swedish person. Curiously, the answer now changes depending on who you ask. If you ask around the United States, you may hear that this Italian person is white. Asking somebody who was raised in Europe, however, is likely to get you an answer similar to those received above, that the person in question is not white and that they are Italian. The same can be seen if we instead use a fair-skinned Spanish person, in some parts of the world they are considered white, and in others they are only seen as Spanish.

Under these definitions, we can see that the idea of whiteness appears to be a subjective term, its definition changing and morphing depending on the origin of the subject and the observer. For our purposes this cannot work, we require a rigid definition in order to identify the white culture and fight against it. Let us stop messing around then and pick the most rigid definition we can think of. Let us define whiteness as being of caucasian descent. While this is a now obsolete classification from a scientific perspective, it is the classification most perpetuated by far-right groups and leaders, and should at a minimum serve as a definition for what they believe whiteness is.

Once again this definition falls apart upon observation. Simply asking if somebody from Turkey, which under this definition is classified as being of caucasian descent, gives you the same answers as we’ve seen before. Within every theoretical situation, over and over we see that any definition we give to whiteness falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, so what exactly is going on here?

While we have failed to give whiteness a rigid definition, some patterns worth discussion were observed during our search. For one, it appears that the national origin of the subject plays a role in whether somebody defines them as white. Moreover, it appears that the national origin of the observer also plays a role in whether the subject is defined as white or not. This implies that whiteness is not truly related to the appearance of the subject, rather it is up to the interpretation of the observer. This leads us to the only conclusion that truly makes sense, whiteness is a social construct.

This is the currently accepted definition of whiteness, one which can be reinforced with historical evidence. In the United States in the wake of the Irish potato famine, thousands of Irish immigrants were subjected to structural racist policies and forced to endure racist vitriol throughout their lives. In these times, Irish immigrants were not included in the definition of whiteness, they were excluded from this and were instead classified into their own category, viewed as lesser humans compared to the white man who held power in every institution throughout the US.

An interesting observation occurs when looking at the Irish in the United States. As the Irish became entrenched in society, as they persevered and gained more financial and political power, and as their relations with the African American citizens grew, they were suddenly included into the definition of whiteness. This trend also followed for the Polish, the Russians, and the Germans, all of which were seen as, if not subhuman, somehow lesser to the “native” white American. In the modern day, we can see this beginning to happen with certain hispanic populations (although with the more light-skinned and conservative-leaning members). Once again, we are seeing a few interesting trends with these populations.

For one, the more power a group holds in the United States, the more likely they are to be recognized as white. Another interesting trend can be observed by looking into the relations between said groups and African Americans. The closer they became with African Americans, the stronger their ties were and the more likely they were to cooperate and cohabitate with African Americans, the more likely they were to suddenly be considered white. The more likely a group was to become accepting and understanding of the struggle of the African American, the more likely they were to tolerate them and work alongside them, and the more likely they were to combine their strength with the African American and rebel against the system, the more likely they were to be elevated to a level of whiteness.

This brings up an interesting question, why have these groups been elevated to the level of “whiteness” and not the African American? For one, the African American is a well entrenched member of United States society. Although a minority, they make up one of the largest non-white segments of the population. Secondly, African Americans have (to a lesser extent) acquired social and political sway in the United States. African American politicians, police officers, managers, and business owners are fairly common sights in the modern day, at one point even having a mixed race president ruling over the country for two consecutive terms. We have already concluded that the true color of one’s skin is no real indicator of whether that person will be accepted as white or not. No matter the physical appearance of the African American, under every observation we’ve made there is no reason why they should be excluded from the category of whiteness.

Despite this, we actually see the opposite applied to them. Instead of being included as part of the white race, having a child with an African American instead excludes that child from claiming to be white. This is seen to an extent with other races, but none so much as the African American. This exclusion was even supported by law throughout the 19^th and 20^th century United States, the infamous “One-drop” rules legally classifying anybody with even one Sub-Saharan African (and in some cases, any non-white) ancestor as “black”, “mulatto(a)” or “negro” as it was commonly written in those times.

Thus, one can conclude that the definition of whiteness is so. Whiteness in the United States is a social construct that includes and excludes certain groups of people depending on their power and acceptance in society, while at all times excluding members of the African American segment of the population. Whiteness is malleable and changing constantly, but at all times relies on the idea of excluding those of African descent specifically. Whiteness is a tool first and foremost designed to repress those of African descent by designating them as a seperate and thus non-equal member of society. We can conclude that whiteness is not itself a description of race, rather it is a signifier of acceptance into society and a description of the lack of so-called “lesser races” in one’s heritage.

As we now have a true definitive definition of what whiteness is, it is easy to define white culture. White culture is the system and beliefs that protects and perpetuates the idea of whiteness. White culture is both the systematic elevation of those deemed white in society, and the systematic repression of those deemed non-white in a society. This can take the form of job repression, red-lining, disparity in wages, increased policing in predominately non-white communities, and countless other forms of oppression. White culture is not a true culture, the white “race” is a diverse mix of conflicting cultures, national origins, and beliefs. Rather, white culture is a set of repressive policies and beliefs used to secure the power of the white individual in society. White culture is the repression of the minority, the exploitation of the most vulnerable in society to benefit and profit the white individual, and by extension the opposition to equality in society.

Section Two — Recognizing and Accepting

Now that we have defined whiteness and white culture, the future white revolutionary must learn to accept these definitions and recognize the implications of said definitions. The white revolutionary must come to terms with the idea that they have most certainly benefited from the existence of this white culture, and that this benefit comes at the expense of the lives and freedom of those who are excluded from it.

It is not possible to live as a white American without benefitting from white culture in some way. While being white does not in any way guarantee your success in society, it must be recognized that by being born white, you have been given an advantage that no other in society has received. By being born white, you have been excluded from the most vicious racial suppression policies and beliefs that permeate American society. By being born white, you have white privilege.

A common misconception (especially among the right-wing white populace) is that white privilege is a set of active benefits from society. This is not the case, white privilege is not exclusively when the government actively elevates someone to a higher position in society solely because they are white. A facet of white privilege that many among the right cannot comprehend is that it is also the distinct lack of social barriers for white citizens. One who is born with white skin does not need to worry about whether they will receive a harsher than normal legal sentence due to any prejudiced beliefs held by a judge. One who is born white does not need to live in fear of the most vicious hate groups that exist throughout America, waiting for the chance to purge society of the so-called “subhuman”. One who is born white does not have to worry about being excluded from a high paying job simply because of their skin color. This distinct lack of barriers which all who are excluded from the category of whiteness face is also white privilege.

To list the ways that being born white benefits someone would fill its own separate book. The United States since its conception has held a legal and social system specifically designed to benefit the wealthy white man and suppress all others. Despite the numerous revisions to the legal code, the endless fights and the millions of marchers on the street, it has been impossible to rid the core belief of white supremacy that stains every facet of this nation. In truth, this is an impossible task and its impossibility must be recognized and accepted by any white person who wishes to join the fight.

The system is not broken in any way, this is how it was designed from the start. It cannot be fixed because there is nothing to fix. It cannot be reformed because the very foundation the system was built on is white supremacy. The system is beyond reform, beyond fixing, beyond redemption. The system must be destroyed in order for true liberation to take hold, burnt to the ground and a new system built on its ashes. Any attempt to rationalize and argue against this conclusion is futile, it is only prolonging the suffering and exploitation of those it was designed to exploit. The white activist must accept that they benefit from this system, and that the only way to join the fight is to commit to the complete and total eradication of the system and culture they themselves have benefitted from.

Section Three — Assimilation and Integration

To understand how white activists may break away from white culture, we must first look into and understand how different groups have historically become included in the definition of whiteness. As discussed earlier, multiple ethnic groups such as the Irish, Polish, and Germans have gone from second-class citizenry to full acceptance in society in relatively short periods of time. In order to understand how this has happened, we must look into the process of assimilation, its origins, and its use as a tool to reinforce white supremacy.

Assimilation in the context of white supremacy is the process of conformity to the dominant culture of the United States, that being the white culture. Assimilation is the process of a minority group coming to resemble the values and beliefs of the majority group. This is distinct from cultural integration, in which a minority group develops its own social niche in society while retaining its heritage and traditional beliefs.

Cultural integration is a widespread phenomenon throughout the United States, almost every major city and large suburb will have distinct neighborhoods defined by the ethnic majority in said neighborhoods. An example of cultural integration can be seen by looking at the various Asian communities in large cities such as Chicago and New York. Here, these neighborhoods are defined by their predominantly Asian residents. These neighborhoods will often have businesses stylized in the form of traditional Asian marketplaces, have advertisements and signs written in various Asian languages, and schools which may hold lessons in the predominant Asian language spoken by those in the neighborhood. Another example can be seen in the various Hispanic communities included in cities around the United States. The signage and advertisements will often be written in Spanish, the people in the neighborhood will often speak Spanish, and the businesses and homes in the neighborhood may be built in a traditional South/Central American or Caribbean style.

In these neighborhoods, we see the dynamic of cultural integration at play. These neighborhoods are distinct entities in the city they reside in, its culture and style of operation completely foreign to the rest of the city and how it works. The neighborhood does not see itself as a distinct entity in most instances though, asking residents where they live will often get you the answer of what city the neighborhood resides in, and not the neighborhood itself. The residents of these neighborhoods see themselves as a part of the city, and the city sees these neighborhoods as a part of itself. The culture is distinct, it is separated from the wider city in a physical sense, yet it is not separated from the city in an ideological or social sense. In these examples, the culture has integrated itself into the society, becoming a recognized part of the culture while still retaining its own unique values and way of operation.

This pattern of operation is distinct from the idea of cultural assimilation. When cultural assimilation occurs, the minority culture is not able or allowed to carve its own niche in society, it is not able to retain its own traditions or way of operation. In cultural assimilation, the minority culture is destroyed and dissolved, either being fragmented and absorbed into wider society as a whole or forced to conform with the beliefs and values of the dominant culture. In this we can see the differences between the two ideas, if cultural integration is seen as the acceptance of a minority culture, cultural assimilation can be seen as the unacceptance of the minority culture. Cultural integration can be viewed as a willing or unwilling segregation and distinction from the dominant society, while cultural assimilation can be seen as the forced absorption into society.

Cultural assimilation works through multiple different methods, each distinct yet usually concurrent in their implementation. Cultural assimilation is not a willing process by the minority culture in the sense that it is a choice made with no extraneous pressure placed upon the decision. Assimilation into the white culture is forced upon the minority either systematically or, in cases where no systematic oppression is directed towards the minority, is forced by social pressure and the desire to avoid future discrimination. Cultural assimilation is in itself a system of obedience and repression, cultural assimilation only occurs when the minority culture is rendered obedient to the will of the white culture and has all extraneous aspects repressed or obliterated. The minority culture experiencing assimilation is unable to express itself or its traditions without consequence and backlash, the system of assimilation is by definition authoritarian and totalitarian in its implementation.

Cultural assimilation works by dissolving the minority culture and forcing the culture to comply with the white culture’s values and ideas. Assimilation can be done either systematically or through social pressure, though both methods result in the same end result. When done systematically, this can take the form of forced education from a white-centric view, forced conversion into the dominant religion held by the white culture, repression and discipline for practicing non-white traditions, and selective segregation for members of the minority who do not comply with the white culture.

The most noteworthy and brutal example of forced cultural assimilation is the forced assimilation of the Native American. Cultural assimilation was used as a tool by the white culture in the genocide of the Native American, and to this day is still being practiced in less direct routes. Let us look at the methods the white man used on the Native American to highlight the dangers and brutality of cultural assimilation.

Section Four — The Assimilation of the Native Americans and Why African Americans Were Never Subjected to the Same Assimilation

In the case of the Native American, their forced assimilation into white society was debated since the earliest days of the American empire. George Washington and Henry Knox were the first to propose assimilation under the guise of “civilizing” the natives. Future policies would be based around the idea that if the indigenous peoples were to learn the customs and values of the United States, that they would one day be able to peacefully integrate into society as a whole. Note that there’s a distinct lack of the idea of cultural integration, all discussions towards the Native American center around the idea of assimilation. Segregation and allowance of the indigenous to practice their own culture separate from society are never discussed or entertained, all talk is centered around the eradication of the Native American cultures and integration into white society.

Although discussed as early as 1790, the Native American assimilation did not begin in earnest for some time. This was not a pragmatic view or hesitancy by the white culture, assimilation was always the end goal. Rather, this lack of action was strategic as the newly formed United States still had to contend with the colonial powers of Europe for the lands of North America. For a time, the United States would use various Native American tribes as allies against these colonial powers, most evident during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.

As relations with European powers stabilized, the assimilation of the Native American would start to take effect. George Washington had formulated a six-point plan for “civilizing” the natives, including impartial justice towards Native Americans, regulated buying of Native American Lands, and the “promotion of experiments to civilize or improve Native American society.” The end goal was to get the Native Americans to accept the practice of private property, embrace Christianity, and to teach them how to live as white people lived.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the removal of Native Americans from white settled land and relocation into reservations west of the Mississippi River. Although it did not directly authorize the forced removal of Native Americans, it gave the president the authority to “negotiate” land exchange treaties with the various indigenous tribes. The Choctaws were the first to be “voluntarily” removed under this act on September 27^th, 1830. The Indian Removal act was often abused by local government authorities, while in theory it was to make the removal of Native Americans voluntary, in practice it was anything but. The Treaty of New Echota is one of the most famous examples of abuse of the Indian Removal Act. Signed on December 29^th, 1835 by a small non-leading faction of the Cherokee tribe, it was used as justification to remove the Cherokee from Georgia in 1838 despite protest by the tribal leadership and continued revision of the treaty. An estimated 4,000 Cherokee died during the forced relocation, the removal and route they were forced to take becoming known as the Trail of Tears.

In 1865, the US government began making contracts with various missionaries to set up schools in and around reservations. These schools would teach citizenship, English, and various forms of agriculture. At the same time, these schools would serve as centers of conversion, operated by missionaries in an attempt to force the Native American students to accept Christianity and white culture. In these schools, Native Americans were forced to dress in the styles popular to white society, forced to learn and speak English, forbidden from practicing their own religion, and were eventually “civilized” into the image of the white man.

On December 4^th, 1871, Ulysses Grant stated in his State of the Union Address that “The policy pursued toward the Indians has resulted favorably … many tribes of Indians have been induced to settle upon reservations, to cultivate the soil, to perform productive labor of various kinds, and to partially accept civilization. They are being cared for in such a way, it is hoped, as to induce those still pursuing their old habits of life to embrace the only opportunity which is left them to avoid extermination.” Here we can see that the US government at the time was not concerned with the perception of its acts, and was in fact quite open about the intentions of the policies it passed. These policies and actions were openly recognized as attempts to force the Native Americans to either conform to white society or be eradicated. It was either assimilate or exterminate, the United States government held no qualms about openly praising its intentional genocide of both the Native Americans and their various cultures.

The United States used its open genocide of the Native Americans as further justification for control over their affairs and further cultural assimilation. The ruling of United States V. Kagama in 1886 gave the government practically unlimited authority to force the assimilation of the indigenous tribes into American society. In this ruling, the court stated “The power of the general government over these remnants of a race once powerful, now weak and diminished in numbers, is necessary to their protection, as well as to the safety of those among whom they dwell. It must exist in that government, because it never has existed anywhere else; because the theater of its exercise is within the geographical limits of the United States; because it has never been denied; and because it alone can enforce its laws on all the tribes.” Here we can see that the US Government had systematically destroyed Native American tribes, forced them off their traditional lands, categorized them as second-class citizens, then used the weakened state of the Native American as justification for “protection”. Make no mistake, this was a systematic extermination attempt.

We can conclude that the goals of the assimilation of the Native Americans were to induct the Native Americans into the white race. The United States was adamant that the Native American could never cohabitate on the same land as the white man without learning the ways of the white man, and took every step to forcefully coerce the Native Americans to conform to the traditions and beliefs of the white man. At the same time; the US government was destroying the traditions of the Native Americans, segregating them into desolate backwater reservations and subjecting them to totalitarian oversight the likes of which would make Orwell blush. Again though, we are left with a question and curious oversight. If the United States went through such great lengths to subjugate the Native Americans and force them to conform with the white culture, why hasn’t this same determination been seen with the African Americans?

The answer is complex. Attempts had been made to subjugate the African American population, what differentiated these efforts from the assimilation and subjugation of the Native Americans was the end goal of such subjugation. In the case of the Native Americans, the end goal of the subjugation was the eradication of the indigenous identity, the eradication of the culture and traditions which surrounded this identity, and the forced elevation into whiteness for members of the Native American population. The goal was to eliminate the perceived threat of Native American tribal sovereignty, and to force the indigenous tribes of North America into accepting the white claim of ownership over the continent. By forcefully elevating the Native American into whiteness through genocide and race mixing, the very idea of Native American rights over the land would have been exterminated, thrown to the history books as the claims of a race which no longer existed, ensuring the white man’s rule over the new nation with no legitimate resistance.

In the case of African Americans, no true threat to the sovereignty of the United States existed. African Americans had no legitimate claims over the ownership of the land or heritage in the North American continent, African Americans were the descendants of Africans who were kidnapped and stolen from their own native lands and forced into a foreign land for the purpose of slave labor.

As a result, while subjugation efforts were made against the African Americans, none of them had the end goal of elevating them to a level of whiteness. In truth, the United States had no need to elevate the African American to whiteness, as it had no benefits for elevating them to whiteness. In fact, elevation to whiteness would have been detrimental to the white culture.

African Americans were brought over to the United States by force for the purpose of slave labor. Their niche in the US was of a servant class, they were to serve their masters day and night without complaint or pay under threat of whipping or execution. This was the role imposed on them by white society, and as far as the United States was concerned this was the only role they would occupy in society. As such, subjugation efforts by the white culture did not focus on elevating the African American to the level of whiteness as it did with the Native American. All efforts made by the white culture were not to bring African Americans to the same level as white citizens, they were instead intended to force compliance upon the African American population.

The methods used by the US government were fairly similar to those used against the Native Americans. It first started with the degradation of character and dehumanizing of the African American slave. From the first days on the plantation, the slaves were stripped of their names, denied their heritage and forced to leave behind their traditional beliefs. From this point, the slaves were taught the religion of the white man, taught the ideals and beliefs of Christianity and forcefully converted to the religion.

Of course, the image of Christ they were taught was of a white man, spoken of as master over all and treated as a not-so-subtle stand-in for the white man in general. The slaves would be taught the verses of the bible that focused on complacency and obedience, taught to never question the rulings of the master and damning their souls if they so much as spoke up against the master. They would also be taught of the reason why they were converted, portraying the eradication of their cultural beliefs as salvation from eternal hellfire.

At the same time, the master would deny the slave any independent thought or self-reliance. The slave was forbidden to read or write, education on such or any practice of being punishable by hard labor and ruthless beating. The slave would be denied anything that could motivate them to seek freedom or place their loyalties away from the master, any spouses or children the slave had would also be subject to the same treatment as them and could be sold away at the slightest transgression.

The slave was taught that their place in society was not only unchangeable, but divinely appointed. They were taught that the bible had allotted the white man authority over the black slave and that any attempt to acquire their own freedom was unholy and unnatural. Slaves who attempted escape were at times even considered psychologically troubled. In 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright proposed Drapetomania as an explanation for why slaves kept trying to escape their status and gain their freedom. Drapetomania was a mental disorder stemming from masters making themselves “...too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals” in his eyes, with one of its remedies being “whipping the devil out of them”

At the same time, any religious traditions the slaves had come up with would be ruthlessly stamped out and repressed. Slaves often practiced syncretism, mixing Christian beliefs with the beliefs they originally held before their bondage and forced servitude to the white man. Slave owners would often refuse to baptize their slaves for fear that baptism would make the slaves liable for emancipation, stemming mostly from vague laws concerning the legality of keeping Christian slaves during British colonial rule. Even after colonial rule ended, this practice of refusing to baptize slaves held through the end of chattel slavery. Nevertheless, when it was known by the master, slaves who practiced their own unique version of Christianity would be ruthlessly punished. The slaves would worship Jesus, but only on the white man’s terms.

These actions were economical, based in the system of capitalism that rules over our country. The United States had come to rely upon slave labor for agricultural production and could ill afford losing their entire unpaid workforce. These brutal treatments were in effect actions to not only protect the strength of the white culture in the United States, but were also to protect profit. When slavery was abolished, the white culture had to keep the African American subjugated.

By elevating the African American to the same level as the white man, the white man would be forced to contend with its past treatment of the African American and would be forced to admit that it had acted immorally against them. At the same time, elevation to an equal status as the white man would also force the United States to treat African Americans as equals, equal pay and equal rights would have to be allotted and the white man would have to compete for power with a class that remembered how ruthlessly it had been treated. Elevation to whiteness would have disrupted the power balance of the United States, it would have forced the white culture to accept its own wrongdoings and would have forced it to face the consequences of its own actions. For this reason, the African American would never be elevated to the same level as the white man, and all future actions regarding them would be attempts to re-subjugate or, at a minimum, slow their progress towards acceptance in society.

It is in these specific examples that we can see the foundation of white supremacy this nation was built on. While these are the two most egregious examples of how the white culture in the United States functions to secure its power, these are not the only examples available for us to analyze. In truth, to look over and analyze every act of subjugation the white culture has committed on the non-white populations would and has filled entire libraries and bookstores.

The white culture has worked with ruthless efficiency to ensure its power over the greater population, it has subjugated and exploited countless millions and directly benefited from the suffering it has dolled out to those unfortunate enough to not be included within its ranks. The white culture at its very foundation is authoritarian and brutal, it cannot and could not have survived as long as it has without the purposeful infliction of brutality towards anyone and everyone who does not meet its criteria for inclusion.

It is for these reasons that the white revolutionary cannot stand idly and fight against the issues of society while ignoring it. Every issue that the white activist could take a stand against, from environmental to political, from police brutality to gentrification, from rent increase to wage exploitation, in some way has roots in this system. Ignorance and purposeful apathy towards the roots of white culture and white supremacy is setting the movement up for failure, it is limiting the scope of the movement to deal only with the symptoms and to not fix the root cause of the issues the white revolutionary holds interest against. The white revolutionary must take a stand against the white culture, they must work towards its abolishment and destruction if they ever want their actions to be more than performative.

The System and Disconnecting From It

Once the white revolutionary has come to understand the system, they must then learn how to remove themselves from it. This is not an easy process, on the contrary removing oneself from the system is one of the most difficult barriers to cross before becoming a true freedom fighter. To remove oneself from the system is the first and most consequential revolutionary act a white revolutionary can commit.

Section One — The System

To remove oneself from the system, we must first recognize what it is and how it works. If white culture is the system and beliefs that protects the idea of whiteness and white supremacy, the system is the policies of said beliefs put into action. This may seem redundant, as the definition of white culture itself covers the idea of the systems used to perpetuate the idea, but the distinction is needed in order to effectively separate oneself from the culture.

The system can be thought of as exclusively the praxis of white culture, it is the physical methods and policies implemented to enforce the idea of white supremacy and white culture as a whole. The system can also be interchangeable with the state apparatus and seen as an offshoot of bourgeois oppression of the working class as a whole. In this manner, it is the physical manifestation of bourgeoisie attempts to splinter the working class from itself along racial fault lines. The system as referred to in this work is not the system as recognized by typical anarchist thought. Although it is a part of the system, the system as referred to in this work is focused specifically on the racial aspects of said system.

The system works through three distinct methods, these methods are known as legal oppression, financial oppression, and information manipulation. These three methods have some overlap in their practice, yet are distinct enough in their actions and the situations they are implemented in that their distinction deserves recognition. It is also worth noting that the system does not need to be systematic, the system is not required to be written into law. The system can exist merely through the actions, legal or illegal, of those in power as long as it serves to protect the idea of the white culture. The actions need not also be purposeful, although as we will see in many cases they are.

Legal oppression is the most direct and easiest method to both identify and fight against. Legal oppression is the protection of white culture and white supremacy through the use of the legal code. The most famous and overt examples of this method in the United States was chattel slavery and the implementation of Jim Crow and segregation after slavery was abolished. This can also be seen outside of the United States, the most famous of which would be the Apartheid system in South Africa. While overt examples of legal oppression like this are well recognized and universally condemned in the modern age, legal oppression does not need to be so overt to be effective.

Legal oppression does not need to be openly codified to be effective. Legal oppression can take subtler forms and become entrenched to the point where identification as purposeful oppression is hard to determine. Legal oppression can take the form of increased law enforcement patrols in neighborhoods that are predominantly non-white. Legal oppression can also take the form of longer sentences being given to African American criminals than white criminals.

The most widespread form of legal oppression seen in modern times is through the penalties given to felons, stripping them of their rights to vote, own a firearm, and condemning them to a life of low-wage labor and poor housing. These penalties; combined with more frequent law enforcement patrols in minority neighborhoods and longer sentences given to non-white criminals, coalesces into a system which systematically strips non-white citizens of their rights, forcing them into a life where crime becomes a necessity to survive and forcing them into a cycle of release and reincarceration. Combined with a for-profit prison system, the justice system forces criminals into a cycle of release and rearrest, and by extension ensures a constant supply of cheap labor for the workshops of these for-profit prisons. By systematically stripping away the rights of non-white citizens, the prison system is rewarded with profit and government contracts, keeping the system alive in perpetuity.

Financial oppression is a subtler method used by the system to repress the minority populous. Financial oppression is the restriction of financial strength in the non-white community, preventing them from gaining financial strength and forcing them into a perpetual cycle of poverty and debt. Under the capitalist system, financial strength is the most important factor in the well-being of an individual and their family. By restricting the access of financial strength to the white citizens, the white race ensures that it alone holds majority power, no matter if it is the majority or minority in the United States.

Financial oppression can be accomplished in multiple ways and, to a degree, has been limited by the legal system. We must not mistake it as a method used solely in the past though, its use has not been completely eliminated. In the past, red-lining and wage gaps were the most common and effective methods used to ensure that non-white citizens remained in a state of poverty. While financial oppression can be carried out directly by the state, often it is shifted onto societal consciousness over time, removing the need for direct intervention by the state entirely.

Red-lining was the systematic segregation of African Americans from predominantly white neighborhoods. This was done by refusing loans to African Americans, lowering property values if a neighborhood contained African American residents, and refusing to insure homes owned by African Americans. By refusing the initial loans, this prevented poorer African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods. As an effect from lowering property values if an African American did manage to move into the neighborhood, this put pressure on the homeowners in said neighborhoods to harass and force out African American residents, removing the need for action by the state completely and ingraining the idea of African Americans lowering property values even to the modern day.

Financial oppression can also be accomplished through wage gap. Wage gap in the context of the system is the overall trend of non-white workers being paid less than white workers. In the past, this was accomplished through directly paying non-white workers a lower wage than their white coworkers. While officially this is illegal in the United States, to an extent this can still be accomplished by refusing to give raises to deserving mon-white workers at the same rate as their white coworkers. Wage gap can also be implemented by refusing to hire non-white applicants for high-pay jobs, instead forcing them to stay in lower-paying sectors of the workforce.

While most would argue that this method is now illegal and therefore cannot be counted as a form of financial oppression anymore, looking into the law reveals loopholes that can still be exploited to this effect. As long as the employer does not directly state that the worker was fired or denied a position due to their race, the employer cannot be charged for discrimination. Thus, under the current system it is ignorant to believe that employers to this day do not exploit these loopholes in order to perpetuate their prejudiced views.

In the case of financial oppression, we see a trend of the state directly endorsing the oppressive policies, receiving pushback for said oppression, and recalling the oppressive policies while leaving loopholes so the oppression can continue. In this way, by officially making the methods illegal while still leaving room for it to take place, the state absolves itself of any criticism while at the same time ensuring that the oppressive actions continue. The state pushes the responsibility of oppression onto the individual white person, confident that they will continue the oppression while the state steps back and claims ignorance.

When the oppression is discovered, the blame falls on the individual and the state condemns them, while at the same time doing nothing to fix the loopholes which made the oppression possible. In this way, the state has decentralized financial oppression, ensuring its survival while at the same time gaining the support of the performative or ignorant who will champion the system’s actions against its scapegoats, never questioning why the state doesn’t instead prevent the oppression from being possible in the first place.

The third method used by the system is information manipulation, the use of the education system and media to solidify the idea of white supremacy. From the earliest days of childhood, the education system teaches us a diluted, simplified version of history that paints the white race as pure and noble. They teach that the pilgrims and Native Americans got along and cooperated, that Christopher Colombus was an adventurer and that Natives graciously gave up their land to enable the colonizers to survive and thrive in their new settlements. They teach us about racism in an offhand manner, painting it as a fringe belief that the majority was against. They teach us about the civil rights movement, about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his peaceful movement, portraying him as a martyr for equality.

They do not teach us about Christopher Columbus’s child sex slave industry. They do not teach us about Abraham Lincoln’s desire to send all former African American slaves to Africa, nor do they teach about the promise and sudden revoking of reparations for former slaves. They do not teach us about Malcolm X, the riots after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, nor the simple fact that he was not a martyr, but a murder victim. The education system teaches the child a simplified history of the United States, either “conveniently” skipping the atrocities committed by the state or waving it off as fringe tragedies and not as the organized atrocities they were. The system is insidious, it does not restrict this information, rather it teaches the youth in such a way that unless pushed to research on their own, they will accept what they are told as fact and hold no desire to look further.

While the education system plays a crucial role in information manipulation, it is not the only method used to accomplish this goal. Beyond the halls of state mandated propaganda factories, the youth transitions into an adult and becomes exposed to the corporate media. Here, the white culture pushes skewed statistics, echo chamber debates, and constructed narratives to continually push the ideas of white supremacy. From the vocabulary chosen to describe the white criminal versus non-white criminal, to the constant brutal criticisms given to any non-white activist who appears on the news, the media is used as a weapon to defend the white individual and attack the non-white individual. Through the use of these methods, the system performs its role in protecting the idea of white supremacy with ruthless efficiency.

Section Two — Disconnecting

Now that the definition of the system and its methods of operation have been outlined, we may now discuss how to proceed with disconnecting with it. Disconnection from the system is neither easy nor instantaneous, the system has been at work instilling the beliefs of white culture and enforcing its rule since the day the white individual is born and unlearning everything it has taught will take time. There is no definitive way to guarantee removal from the system, deprogramming is a deeply personal process and varies from person to person. The only way to ensure removal from the system is personal persistence and the willpower to endure the process and its consequences.

The first step to removing yourself from the system is recognizing why removal is necessary. You must recognize the injustices of the system and see that you, a white person, are directly benefiting from it. You must see that your life has seen reduced suffering at the expense of the increased suffering of others. You must recognize that this system, fueled by the greed of capitalist overlords and perpetuated on purpose for said overlords’ profit and stability, is beyond reform or redemption. It must be destroyed, burned and cast away to the annals of history, never to be rebuilt again in the age of the commonwealth of toil.

The white culture is built on the suffering of uncountable millions, bathed in the blood of the innocent and built on the backs of the wretched masses toiling endlessly for scraps from the banquets of the elite. Removing yourself from this system is necessary, recognizing the suffering it causes while remaining silent and reaping the benefits of it makes you complicit in the suffering it causes. The only way to remain true to your values of destroying an unjust system is to first remove yourself from the system and quit reaping the rewards yourself.

The next step to removing yourself from the system is to actively fight against it. Removing yourself from the system while taking no action against it does nothing for the masses who suffer under it. Removing yourself does not lessen its injustices, simply removing yourself from the benefits does not make the system smaller or weaker. Only by actively fighting against it, taking a stand, refusing to allow it to grow and declaring your intent to eradicate it can you stay true to the idea of fighting for freedom for all. Silence is compliance, only by speaking up and taking action can you truthfully call yourself a revolutionary.

This is not a fight you have to fight alone, you should look to join a revolutionary group which recognizes these ideals and assist them in any way possible. Canvass, protest, riot, it does not matter what you do. What matters is that you are doing something and remembering why you are doing it. Let every action be against the vile capitalist system, let every tossed stone be aimed at the racist institutions that perpetuate this suffering and let every molotov burn with revolutionary fervor. Remember why you stand with your BIPoC comrades, remember what they have had to endure, and remember how you have benefitted from their suffering. Remember, and declare that you will do everything in your power to ensure that it burns to ashes.

The final step to disconnecting from white society is continuous, it is the recognition of your own prejudices and the active subversion of said prejudices. In truth, no white person is free of prejudice, the ideas of white supremacy and white culture are ingrained in the minds of every white person since the first days of education, this is an unavoidable consequence of living in the United States. Prejudice is instilled from the very first days of youth, reinforced by every action of the system and every action within the system. For a white person to claim that they are without prejudice is for a white person to lie, every single white person including the authors of this very book holds at least some prejudice that they must recognize and reconcile. No matter how subtle or overt, prejudice is prejudice and must be recognized and its existence accepted.

Removing decades of instilled prejudice is not a process that can be done overnight. It is a continuous process and in truth may never be fully completed. Breaking away from white culture however is not the complete removal of these prejudices, if that were the case then the number of white people who could call themselves revolutionaries would be inconsequential. Breaking away from white culture is accepting that your prejudices exist and working towards removing them instead of accepting them as an inherent part of your identity. The act of accepting that you do, in fact, hold prejudice is in itself a revolutionary act. It is the process of working towards the removal of these prejudices that is a break from white culture, not its success. Of course, successful removal of these prejudices is the goal of the process and should never be discounted as impossible or unobtainable. By accepting your prejudices and truly working against them, you have broken away from the complacency instilled by white culture and can now truly join the fight against it.

In truth, there is no one defined way to break away from the white culture. Breaking away from the white culture by its very nature is a deeply personal endeavor, and no one defined set of actions will guarantee success in removing oneself from it. While the ideas laid out show what must be done to consider oneself broken away, the actions and methods taken to reach these goals are wholly dependent on the individual. There are simply too many factors in determining how and when someone will be able to remove themselves from the white culture. Income level, family bonds, relations outside of their family, the local culture they grew up in and exposure to other cultures, it is all too complicated to lay out a system that would guarantee success for everyone. Removal from the white culture is wholly dependent on the individual and their support network; if they have one, it relies on the individual educating themselves in any way they can and becoming determined to fight against the system. One cannot be forced or coerced to join the fight for revolution in earnest terms, it is up to the revolutionary to realize why the fight is necessary and why they must join it.

Backlash

Now that the white revolutionary has taken the steps to removing themselves from the mentality and benefits of white culture, they will have to contend with the repercussions of their actions. Upon declaring their intent to fight against it and taking action against the white culture, the white revolutionary will have transformed themselves from a compliant participant of the culture to an enemy of the culture. By choosing the side of revolution, the white revolutionary has willingly announced their resignation from the bourgeois system, and as a result have aligned themselves with the repressed class.

This alliance is interpreted by the white culture as inclusion with the repressed class. From the day of resignation, the white culture will from that point no longer see the white revolutionary as a white person. While the white revolutionary can and will still receive some of the benefits of having white skin (less suspicion and harassment by the police for example), this only holds true as long as the intentions and beliefs of the revolutionary are unknown.

When an agent of the oppressing class is aware of the beliefs held by the revolutionary, they will receive no benefits or mercy from the oppressor. They will be subjected to a similar level of brutality and hostility as any member of the repressed non-white citizenry. This is to be expected and accepted by the revolutionary, the sacrifice of one’s privileged life is a necessary price in order to join the revolution. While this hostility cannot be avoided, it can be mitigated and resisted with proper determination and caution. We can also determine the most likely sources and types of hostility the white revolutionary will experience.

Section One — Friends and Family

After joining the cause for liberation, often the first source of backlash the white revolutionary will experience is from those closest to them. This first source may be from a close friend, a parent, a sibling, or anyone they hold a close and intimate bond with such as a relationship partner. As we are speaking of a white person moving on from a life of capitalist comfort to a life of ruthless advocacy and fighting for socialist revolution, it is likely that somebody close to them holds conservative or far-right views.

Not all white people will experience resistance from such an extreme opposite viewpoint, it is very likely that the white revolutionary will have held at least liberal ideals before taking the pledge for revolution. As most initial political viewpoints are first acquired from observation and discussion with family members, it is likely that those closest to the revolutionary also hold these views to an extent.

This however does not isolate the white revolutionary from criticism and hatred. Liberals are inherently capitalist, at the most believing a set of reformatory beliefs. Aligning yourself to an anti-capitalist and revolutionary ideology will still strike a nerve with even the most reformation worshipping liberal.

Thanks to decades of red-scare propaganda and information manipulation regarding theories centered around communist and anarchist societies, criticism and reaction can and should be expected from anyone who does not specifically align to these beliefs. It is no secret that the American populace is ignorant to the beliefs held by thinkers such as Marx and Kropotkin, this is by design from the system and fear, ignorance, and revulsion towards these ideologies is ingrained into the minds of the youth along with the ideas of white supremacy.

Depending on the age of the white revolutionary, they may experience discipline and consequences for merely expressing interest in anti-capitalist or anti-racist ideologies. If the revolutionary is a minor, they may be forced to destroy or delete any literature or videos deemed “too radical” for them to handle. Depending on the household, the consequences could be far more severe. It is not unheard of for minors expressing interest in revolutionary politics to experience verbal abuse, physical abuse, or removal from the household. In the most extreme cases, minors have experienced threats and attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, against their lives, although thankfully this is a comparatively rare occurrence. Nevertheless, this is a possibility that must be accounted for before making your views known to the world, especially the more radical views held.

Section Two — The Workplace

One of the most damaging settings in which the white revolutionary can receive backlash is in the workplace. While the revolutionary is somewhat safe from physical harm compared to dealing with other situations due to the likely older age of the revolutionary and the consequences an aggressor will experience upon initiation of assault, the revolutionary is faced with a different form of potential harm. The revolutionary’s source of income and stability is threatened when word of their beliefs makes its way around the workplace, risking the potential of poverty and harassment once their beliefs are learned.

Often, the harassment will come from coworkers on the same level as them. While this is somewhat safer than harassment from someone higher up the echelon of workplace authority, this is not inconsequential to the safety of the revolutionary. While their job may not be directly at risk, the coworker may resort to petty harassment and verbal assault. This may make the workplace unbearable, already the revolutionary may work a job in which they resent as is the case for many who first look towards leftist ideologies, and the harassing coworker can most definitely shift the dynamic from uncomfortable to unbearable.

The coworker will do everything in their power to make the day to day grind of wage slavery even more uncomfortable and uneasy, using whatever petty authority and responsibilities they hold to make the revolutionary’s job harder or more annoying. The risk to the revolutionary’s job also cannot be completely discounted, the coworker may become determined to remove the revolutionary from the workplace. False accusations, constant reports to HR or the workplace equivalent, and terrible reviews on anonymous worker surveys are to be expected.

More dangerous to the revolutionary is harassment from a manager or higher position in the workplace. While harassment from a coworker can be annoying and divisive, it can at most times be ignored or disregarded as the coworker holds no true authority over the revolutionary. The same cannot be said for harassment by a manager or an executive. As these positions hold true direct authority over the revolutionary, harassment by these members of the workplace are by their very nature unignorable. The revolutionary will be forced to deal with the harassment under threat of discipline, demotion, or even termination from their workplace.

Managers can harass the revolutionary in a much more effective way than an equal level coworker can. The manager may assign the revolutionary to repetitive, tedious, or exhausting work as retaliation for holding beliefs they do not agree to. The manager may also change the schedule of the revolutionary if it is in their authority.

Through this method, they may decide to remove the revolutionary from the schedule altogether or reduce their hours to a point where the job no longer meets the financial requirements of the revolutionary. Conversely, the manager may also decide to increase the hours and workload of the revolutionary, making them work exhausting shifts or switching them between graveyard and morning shifts, depriving them of sleep, stability, and sanity.

In more extreme cases, the revolutionary may be outright fired for their beliefs. While this is not as common an occurrence as one may believe, this is still a possibility that the revolutionary may experience. In the United States, political beliefs are not a protected category regarding employment, and as such a company may fire the worker with no repercussions. It is more likely that the manager will instead make the workplace intolerable to the point of the revolutionary voluntarily quitting their job.

Through the methods above, the manager will drive the revolutionary to their breaking point, making them willingly quit due to the conditions they endure. This serves the ego of the manager in two ways. One, by quitting the job, the revolutionary often gives up any benefits or unemployment assistance they may have been entitled to receive should they have been terminated. Two, the torment and harassment of the revolutionary serves as a sort of warped justice or stress relief to the manager, eager to exert their will and authority over an object of their hatred. In the world of the revolutionary, unless the workplace is explicitly revolutionary such as a co-op or an actively anarchist/communist supporting entity, no job is safe or stable.

Section Three — The Public

Arguably, the most physically dangerous setting for the white revolutionary is the public space. While the workforce is beholden to anti-harassment regulations and the family is somewhat likely to hold a positive bond with the revolutionary, in the public setting these factors are absent. While the rule of law is present just as with every other setting discussed, this does little if anything to deter those determined to harass or harm the revolutionary.

The threats present at a protest or demonstration are well known and do not need to be reiterated. Police harassment, counter-protesters, undercover initiators, these threats are common knowledge among even the most casually active participants at these events. Less well known is the threats displayed outside of these events, many of which may be spurred by participation at said events.

Harassment by law enforcement is a constant threat to the white revolutionary. Participation against or openly spoken advocacy against the police is an invitation to future harassment and brutality. Constantly being pulled over, physical assault, and false criminal accusations are common occurrences against revolutionaries both non-white and white. Harassment of this form is incredibly dangerous to the revolutionary, the police hold the power of life and death with little regulation and oversight, and every day we see that they are ecstatic to execute their authority for the slightest transgression.

Harassment by members of the right is also a constant occurrence towards the white revolutionary, the most dangerous of these being from members of far-right or neo-nazi organizations. While law enforcement hold direct authority over life and death, members of far-right organizations do not concern themselves with justification of murder. These organizations preach for violence against leftists of all types, openly calling for the torture and murder of those who are non-white and non-conforming to their fascist ideology. The white revolutionary is at nearly the same risk of harm from these organization as any non-white members of society. In the eyes of the far-right, white anti-capitalist revolutionaries are seen as race traitors, scum to be dealt with swiftly and painfully. The risk from these groups cannot be underestimated, no matter how unlikely an attack from the far-right may seem, it is always a possibility and caution should be taken at all times whenever a member of one of these organizations is encountered.

Section Four — Operational Security

Now that the most common and dangerous sources of backlash have been identified, it is of utmost importance that the white revolutionary practice caution and attempt to mitigate or avoid backlash at all costs. Once backlash has begun, it is extremely detrimental to the physical safety and mental stability of the revolutionary. Backlash can impede or outright prevent the revolutionary from participating in the fight for revolution, mitigation of it is required to ensure both the safety of the revolutionary and the progress of the revolution.

The most effective way to prevent backlash for the beliefs we hold is by preventing your beliefs from being learned outside of the intended audience. This can be accomplished through proper operational security. Operational security, which from this point on shall be referred to as OpSec, is an umbrella term for the actions and practices one can take to prevent information from garnering the attention of those it was not intended for. Proper OpSec is accomplished through the establishment of practices and caution when communicating information which could expose you to backlash from sources which oppose the revolution.

Proper OpSec cannot be taught or completely ensured, it is built through real world experience and trial and error. OpSec strategies are dependent on the medium through which communication is accomplished, and as such strategies effective for one form of communication may not be effective for other forms. Opsec methods are ever changing and too numerous to document in this section alone, however some basic ideas and practices can be applied to everyday life and expanded upon with personal research.

The key idea of practicing OpSec is the use of caution whenever communicating organizational or ideological ideals. Whatever method is used to communicate; whether electronic, in-person dialogue, or written letters, it is important to be sure that your method is both secure and arriving to its intended recipient. Be sure that whatever communication method being used is not traceable, oftentimes saved messages and video recordings are dug up and used against leftists when least expected. It is also important to ensure that your communications are not being observed by an outside party. This can take a wide variety of forms, from simple eavesdropping by bystanders to outright hacking and tapping of electronic communications. No matter the form of communication, the essential idea of OpSec is to be sure that the message is secure and that the intended recipient is the only one receiving it.

OpSec does not only apply to the transmission of information, proper OpSec also involves avoiding drawing unnecessary attention to yourself or organizations you’re affiliated with. Social media is an especially present source of unnecessary attention, however this also applies to public presentation. Be sure you are aware of your surroundings and potential audience when deciding whether to openly espouse your beliefs. Make sure that the clothing you wear does not give out personal information or express your beliefs when these do not need to be expressed. Be aware of any recording devices in your local surroundings when planning or participating in actions. Most importantly, be aware of when it is appropriate and safe to publish your views to the world. While we would love nothing more than to march down the streets waving the red and black flag while singing songs of revolution, we have to be aware of when it is safe and appropriate to do so.

OpSec is not without its issues, no matter how useful a tool it is for organizational practices. OpSec by its very nature limits the public perception of an individual or an organization’s beliefs and ideals. While this is done in the interest of ensuring the safety and stability of the revolutionary, it serves as a barrier between the ideals of the revolutionary and the wider public, limiting the amount of support and participants the revolution can acquire in a span of time.

The balance between OpSec and public perception is entirely up to the revolutionary individual or organization. Some organizations practice minimal OpSec, exposing themselves to potential risks in exchange for widespread public perception and support. Other more isolationist organizations may practice extensive OpSec, shying away from public support and exposure in the interest of protecting the members of the organization, especially if the organization is planning or practicing illegal methods of operation. No proper balance of OpSec and public support can be declared as the balance between OpSec and public support can only be determined by the material conditions the revolutionary or organization is facing and their overall goals.

Section Five — Mitigating the Risk of Violent Backlash

No matter how strictly OpSec is processed, it is likely that at some point the white revolutionary will face retaliation for their beliefs. As the methods to mitigate backlash from friends, family, and the workplace are heavily reliant on the specific circumstances and context of the backlash, we will instead focus on mitigating the risk from backlash taking place in the public. Specifically, we will focus on mitigating the risk of violent confrontations from those most vehemently opposed to the beliefs and ideals of the white revolutionary.

The white revolutionary faces two potential types of violence from the public, exempting violence from law enforcement. When discussing violent public backlash, the revolutionary may be faced with either individual or organized violence. These two must be distinguished as the methods for mitigating the risks posed by each form differ.

Before advancing to the different types of violence the white revolutionary may experience and techniques to mitigate each, it must be understood that the safest option for any revolutionary facing a violent confrontation is to escape the confrontation. Every revolutionary, whether they are attending an action or are simply out in the public should have an escape route in mind. No matter what causes the confrontation or what risk mitigation is possible, an option to escape should always be in mind. It is never wise to participate in a confrontation if it can be avoided, the safest option is always to leave the confrontation. Going on, the types of violent confrontations and the mitigation techniques for each shall assume that escaping the confrontation is impossible.

Individual violence is the threat posed by an individual or multiple unaffiliated individuals towards the white revolutionary. While the individuals facing the revolutionary may be unorganized or unaffiliated with each other outside the confrontation, this does not make their cooperation any less dangerous. In the case of individual violence, the confrontation may be initiated by one person, with others joining in as the confrontation becomes increasingly heated or physical. Individual violence is often committed in reaction to an action or public expression of the beliefs held by the white revolutionary.

As individual violence is often committed in reaction to a perceived “wrongdoing” by the revolutionary, the most effective way to mitigate the risk is to conceal one’s beliefs via proper OpSec. During an action directed towards the white culture or a social issue vehemently opposed by socialists, this is obviously not practical nor possible. In cases where the white revolutionary is unable or unwilling to conceal their beliefs, a few steps may be taken to mitigate the risk of individual violence.

De-escalation is often possible in the case of individual violence. As individual violence is often done in reaction to a specific action by the revolutionary, the assaulter is only attempting to commit violence as an emotional response to the action. In these cases, calming the assaulter or assaulters is the safest option for the white revolutionary barring escape, as this has the potential to stop the initial confrontation from escalating to a physical confrontation.

If de-escalation is not possible, the next step to take is intimidation. If available, garner the attention of nearby revolutionaries and get them in close proximity to you. A physical confrontation is less likely to occur if the assaulter or assaulters are outnumbered. Often, the assaulter is trying to commit violence because they believe in their ability to win the fight. When faced with multiple potential opponents, the assaulter or assaulters are less likely to get physical due to the potential of harm on their end.

Another way to intimidate the assaulter is by acquiring a weapon of some sort. The type of weapon is not particularly important for the intimidation, although weapons such as firearms do hold considerably more intimidation factor than improvised weaponry such as bricks or chains. What matters is that the weapon is visible and the assaulter believes that you are willing to use it against them if the confrontation becomes physical. Note that this should only be used as a last resort, as by acquiring a weapon you are elevating the threat level of the confrontation, making a physical confrontation more likely to occur and more violent in nature if the assaulter is not intimidated. Additionally, by openly carrying and threatening to use a weapon, there’s a possibility of garnering the attention and interference of others nearby, along with inviting the assaulter to use weapons if they have any in their possession.

Organized violence is the threat posed by one or multiple organized counter-revolutionaries towards the white revolutionary. Organized violence is differentiated from individual violence by the affiliation of the assaulter. While the violence may be committed by one individual, the assaulter’s affiliation with a counter-revolutionary organization makes the assault more dangerous in the long-term when compared with individual violence. In addition to this, organized violence is more likely to involve multiple assaulters due to their inclusion in a counter-revolutionary organization.

Organized violence is more dangerous than individual violence for multiple reasons. For one, the assaulter’s alliance with a counter-revolutionary organization makes the interference of others in the confrontation more likely, as well as making the initial confrontation more likely to start off with multiple assaulters. Additionally, organized violence may be planned in advance unlike individual violence, making avoiding the physical confrontation exponentially more difficult if not impossible to avoid. Lastly, the assaulter’s affiliation with a counter-revolutionary group has the potential to make future confrontations more likely, as depending on the outcome of the conflict the organization may either view the participants of the action as “easy targets” or want revenge in the face of defeat.

When facing an organized assaulter or assaulters, de-escalation may still be attempted though its effectiveness is reduced due to both the zealous disapproval of the revolutionary’s beliefs and possible advanced planning of the assault. In these cases, intimidation is the only method likely to avoid a physical confrontation barring escape. When dealing with organized violence, it should be assumed that physical violence is inevitable if escape is not an option. The confrontation is likely to have been planned in advance, and in some cases no amount of intimidation may dissuade the assaulter or assaulters from starting a physical confrontation. Whether this is due to the confidence of the assaulter or assaulters, perceived weakness of the revolutionary, or simple zealous devotion to the mission of assaulting the revolutionary is not important.

In cases where physical violence is unavoidable, it is important to use overwhelming and unbalanced force against the assaulter or assaulters. Every assault should be considered a threat against one’s life, especially when the assault is initiated by a member of a counter-revolutionary organization. The motives, willingness for violence, and extent the assaulter is willing to take the violence is not known ahead of time, therefore the revolutionary should use any and every resource available to them to protect themselves and others from the assault.

Legal repercussions aside, the revolutionary must strike with the intent of ending the confrontation as quickly as possible. This means that once the confrontation is physical, the revolutionary should not limit their options in any way. Every physical confrontation is a fight for life or death, and the response of force should be equivalent to the force the revolutionary would use if their life was threatened. Every available weapon should be considered, any additional help the revolutionary can acquire against the assaulter or assaulters should be called for immediately. The goal is to preserve the life of the revolutionary and end the confrontation as quickly as possible, if this means that the assaulter must be crippled or killed then so be it.

The United States is not ready for revolution, as sad as it is to say this is the reality of today. Our revolutionary duty is to make it ready, to unite the working class against the bourgeoisie elite and the white supremacist system they have built.. The revolution does not need martyrs, it does not need revolutionaries willing to throw away their lives at the earliest convenience. The revolution needs leaders, it needs soldiers willing to stand the line and shoulder the arms. It needs organizers, planners, speechwriters, logistics planners, and activists to do the footwork necessary for it to come to fruition, none of which can be accomplished from a coffin.

Retaliation

Now that the white revolutionary has removed themselves from the white culture, it is now time to take action against it. As discussed before, taking action against the bourgeoisie driven white culture is necessary in the fight against capitalism and white supremacy. Disconnection from white culture without active retaliation against it is no more helpful to the oppressed population than the performative actions of the liberal elite.

The oppressed do not need songs of freedom, the oppressed do not need facebook likes and debates over theory. The oppressed need direct, swift, and relentless action against the system which tramples on their rights and dignity. As a white revolutionary who has succeeded in removing yourself from the white culture, it is now their personal responsibility to advocate and retaliate against the oligarchical system which trades our freedom and dignity for profit.

Section One — White Saviorship

It is important to note that while it is the responsibility of the white revolutionary to fight against the system of white supremacy, it is not their duty or right to take charge and lead the revolution. The white revolutionary is meant to support the fight against white supremacy, not lead it. The complex of white saviorship is an all too common idea taken up by white revolutionaries that poisons and fractures leftist movements every day. White saviors have purposefully taken the mantle of responsibility over BIPoC organizations time and time again, always alienating the members and destroying the movement they helped build or encourage.

To avoid falling into the white saviorship complex, we must understand what white saviorship is. White saviorship is the belief among certain white activists and revolutionaries that as white people, it is their duty to fight for the rights of non-white members of society. While this sounds fairly innocent and similar to what has been discussed so far, white saviorship differs in its inherently racist connotations. White saviorship takes this responsibility and twists it into the idea that as white people, they must be the voice of the non-white masses, that they have to speak up and fight for them because of the belief that they are incapable of speaking and fighting for themselves.

White saviorship relies on the idea that the white person must represent the non-white masses because they are unable to represent themselves. It relies on the idea that without the white savior, these repressed people will never be able to secure their own freedom and that the voice of the white person is necessary. This idea is false, based on misinterpretations of the necessities for revolution and inherently biased thinking.

The idea of the white savior in its modern form has its roots in Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was a belief in the 19^th century that the white population of the United States, which at the time was limited to the eastern half of the continent, had the right and obligation to expand and settle the entire continent. With this belief came the idea that the United States had an obligation to reshape and “civilize” the west into a reflection of the east. This ideology was often used as justification for the genocide of the Native Americans, seeing the wholesale slaughter, conquest, and forced conversion of Native American population into christianity as required processes for this “civilizing” to occur.

This expansionist ideology was not satisfied with the full conquest of the continental United States, after this conquest was completed it began to look outward to the various islands in the Atlantic and Pacific. This culminated with the conquest of Hawai’i and the Spanish-American War of 1898, where the United States forced Spain out of the Caribbean and the Philippines.

In 1899, Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem The White Man’s Burden in response to the Philippine-American War, advocating for the United States to assume colonial control over the Philippines and set to work on “civilizing” the native Filipino population. While its message was opposed and satirized by writers of the time for its overt racist depiction of the Filipino people, it shows the general mindset of those who fully embraced the idea of Manifest Destiny. It was the belief of the white culture that the white population of the United States had a moral obligation to “civilize” and christianize so-called “lesser races” and remake their civilization into the image of the white culture. From this, the depiction of the white man as the savior of the lesser races was born and cemented into the public consciousness.

The belief that the voice of the white population is required to secure the freedom of the non-white masses is based on a few misinterpretations and subconscious prejudices. For one, the belief can be semi-justified as the need for the majority to support the revolutionary party in question in order to secure their demands. While this is true, the white savior interprets this as the white majority needing to support the demands of the revolutionary party.

This is false, although it is based on trends seen throughout US history. Historically, most if not all social revolutions in the United States were won around the same time a majority of the white population began supporting the cause. While this seems like solid evidence for the interpretation, this is nothing more than a case of “correlation does not equal causation”. While it is true that social movements have been won when the majority of the white population has come to support it, this is overlooking the simple fact that in the United States, it is the white man who holds the most political and economic power in society.

Thus in truth, social revolutions are not won when the white majority supports it, they are won when the majority of the elite support it. In the United States, this has historically been the white man, so it makes sense that when a majority of white men come around to supporting a movement, the majority of the elite also happen to support the movement as they are the same demographic. Where white saviors get it wrong is that they believe this condition must be met regardless of the demographic of the elite, that without the voice of the white population, no social progress is possible.

In truth, the revolution does not need the white population for success. This does not mean that the white population is wholly unwanted outside of the most radical of groups. In any revolutionary movement, the acquisition of willing participants and active members is always at the forefront of organizational needs. This however cannot be confused with the belief that the revolutionary organization in question needs white participants and active white members.

The revolution by its chaotic and opportunistic nature will carry on whenever it is possible, it will not wait for permission or participation from white revolutionaries. The revolution is a train, it is speeding down the tracks destined to collide with the wall at the end of them. The question is not whether the train will collide with the wall, the question is how many people are on the train, will it break through when it collides, and how many passengers will survive? The question is whether the white revolutionary will step onto the train and add to the mass, or whether they will sit on the sidelines and hope to avoid the shrapnel and debris when it collides?

This idea also comes from the subconscious belief that non-white races are inferior to white people. They try to justify this belief by speaking about the oppression non-white members of society experience. They believe that they are unable to stand up for themselves, hiding their belief that they view non-white people incapable of fighting for their own liberation due to arbitrary racist arguments behind statistics and rants about oppression. The white savior views themselves as a martyr, a hero destined to fight for what they perceive as weaker, less intelligent races because they are just “good people”. They use the struggle of the masses as an opportunity to validate their own beliefs and reinforce their ego, confirming to themselves that they are good people by graciously fighting for those too “stupid” and “fragile” to fight for themselves.

White saviorship is nothing more than ego boosting. It is using the struggle of oppressed and exploited people to reinforce their public identity as generous and courageous people, all the while looking down at the populations which they have sworn to protect regardless of whether the population asked for their help in the first place. It is profiting off of the pain of the destitute and enslaved, using them to gain social capital and advance their own position in society. In truth, these white saviors do not want to fight for freedom. If they were to win the fight, they would have nobody to “fight” for and thus nobody to make them look better.

We can see white saviorship in many forms of altruism. It is most present and visible in the missionary who goes to an impoverished country for volunteer work. The missionary goes on a plane to a well known impoverished country along with their church, taking photos of the flight and posting on social media about how grateful they are to be so blessed with the opportunity to help those in need.

When they arrive, they spend two weeks drinking, enjoying pleasures inaccessible by the citizens of the country, and buying souvenirs for their families back home. Somewhere in between these vacation activities, they will decide to actually go do the work that originally inspired the trip. They go to a village or slum, cook a meal, maybe dig a well if they feel like doing physical labor, and promptly leave them in no better state than they were in before. Before they leave, you can rest assured that they will have taken a thousand photos of the starving kids and elderly present in the community, always sure to be in the photo handing them a plate of food or holding an infant, all the while thinking about how many like said photos will garner on social media.

Once they leave, they will gloat about how holy they are for helping the poor citizens of whatever country they have gone to, all too happy to explain how dire their situation was and how they and they alone were able to fend off the threat of poverty and starvation. While they are busy ranting about their hardships while overseas and basking in the limelight of their social circles praising their heroicness, the community they have done their performative action in has returned to the state it was in before, the meal long digested and the well long dried. In truth, the white saviors have done nothing more than provide a meal, yet they will frame their low-effort meal as long-term help destined to save the community from their state of being.

This is the reality of white saviorhood. It is not an ambitious drive to help the needy, it is a contest among peers to see who can become known as the most generous amongst themselves. White saviorship helps nobody in the long run, it is the shortest of short-term solutions and leads to no true progress or relief from poverty and oppression.

Section Two — Individual Action and Participation in Revolutionary Organizations (Short-Term and Long-Term Aid)

“When the Union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? For the union makes us strong!” ~Lyrics of Solidarity Forever

The words of Solidarity Forever ring true to the modern day, the success of the revolution depends on the cooperation of the people. One revolutionary, no matter how zealous and dedicated, stands no chance at dismantling the system of capitalist exploitation that rules over our country. To succeed in the fight, the white revolutionary must cooperate and organize with other like-minded revolutionaries. Fighting alone is a pointless fight, to achieve the widespread changes demanded by the revolution, collective action and unified efforts by organized groups is required. This however does not mean that individual efforts are completely useless, paradoxically individual actions are just as important to revolutionary change as collective actions. Without organization and cooperation though, the effectiveness of these individual efforts will be limited and confined to the local area in which they take place.

Individual actions are important to the revolution for the fact that they establish habits and beliefs beneficial to the revolution. Individual direct action by their nature will have to focus on short-term aid. This is due to both the limits of the individual to give consistent aid and the availability of resources the individual revolutionary has access to.

While some on the left balk at the effectiveness of short-term aid, it is of the opinion of the authors of this book that short-term aid is more useful to those in need than no aid at all. If a person is starving right now, telling them that next year a soup kitchen will be built in their neighborhood does no more to help them than simply ignoring them.

Going further with this metaphor, many of the most common forms of charity networks are by their nature short-term aid oriented. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and bill assistance are all short-term aid programs when looking into their effects on society. A soup kitchen does not guarantee food security for those it serves, it only provides them a meal. If the soup kitchen shuts down, the people it serves are once again subject to the threat of starvation. If a homeless shelter shuts down, those who used the facility once again have to look for a place to sleep. If the bill assistance program shuts down, those it was helping once again have to worry about their financial security.

Even though these are all short-term aid programs and do not directly lead to long-term change, can we really discount them as useless for revolutionary change? Can we really declare soup kitchens useless and unnecessary when it is still providing a meal for those in need? Can we declare homeless shelters to be ineffective when those using it have a bed to sleep in rather than sleeping on the streets? It is for these reasons that personally the authors of this book believe that short-term aid is nothing to discount in its entirety. Of course long-term change is preferred, this is the goal of the revolution after all, however short-term aid is just as important for the wellbeing of those in need as long-term aid.

Unless you are planning on building your own revolutionary organization from the ground-up, most white revolutionaries are going to end up working with an already established organization. For those who are entirely new to the left and may still hold some less “extremist” views, the most likely place the revolutionary will start their active participation in the fight will be at an aid organization like those listed before. It is uncommon for a newly converted leftist to join up with a group labeled as extremist or revolutionary at first, most likely they will volunteer with a well established and well known organization. Along with the organizations referenced earlier, a common starting point for new white leftists is volunteer work with light leftist political parties such as the Democratic Socialists of America.

While these activities are important, it is also important to reiterate that long-term change is the goal of revolutionary change. Short-term help is important, however it cannot be the end goal of the revolutionary, short-term help does not build the systems required to sustain a reasonable and dignified way of living. Another point to reiterate is that reformatory politics are not feasible nor helpful to the revolution. As stated earlier, reformation of the system is impossible, as reform cannot change the foundations the system is built upon. To fix a system that is not broken is impossible, no amount of reformatory policies or voter initiatives will lead to the implementation of socialism.

The bourgeoisie will never allow a peaceful transition from capitalism, they will never willingly give up power and power cannot be seized under the system which has been built specifically to keep them from losing authority over the population. The revolution will be violent out of necessity, despite the intentions and wishes of the masses the revolution will never be a peaceful transition, as no route to peaceful transition exists under bourgeois systems of power.

To bring about long-term change, the new white revolutionary should seek out and join an organization that holds the values of the revolution close. True anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-fascist organizations are not as popular as the well known organizations which appeal to a wider audience, however they are more willing to commit to doing actions which said well known organizations would hesitate on. Preferably, the white revolutionary should seek out a well organized group with an established education course or established initiatives. While there is nothing wrong with joining newly established or small groups, if these larger groups follow the ideals of revolutionary change, the white activist will be better off joining them and helping them expand their actions and power.

If well established groups are not available in the area, the white revolutionary should lend their aid to smaller local organizations and assist them, building them up to a point where they can establish a base of power in their local area. Often when dealing with revolutionary ideas you will find that organizations which hold these beliefs will be on the smaller side. These smaller organizations should never be discounted in the fight for revolution, every revolutionary party and organization starts as a fringe group with few activists and resources. The white revolutionary has an opportunity to directly contribute to the revolution by helping build these organizations into local power centers, participating in small-scale mutual aid initiatives and holding protests and actions against the system.

The white revolutionary will find, just like any other leftist revolutionary, that we are currently fighting an uphill battle. The system is stacked against us, our beliefs are repressed and cracked down upon the moment we begin gaining even the slightest amount of power over the established systems and authorities. It is the duty of the white revolutionary as with all leftist revolutionaries to fight against the odds and continue building power and community networks outside of the jurisdiction of the state.

While the fight is stacked right now, every new individual contributing to the revolution is one less individual fighting against it. Make no mistake, the day will come when the majority decides to stand up against their repression and exploitation. When this time comes, the success of the revolution will depend on the power structures and aid networks built and maintained by leftist organizations built beforehand. It is in this area where the white revolutionary can contribute the most to the revolution.

By joining the fight and helping to build these power structures, the white revolutionary is helping to ensure the success of the revolution. The white revolutionary will stand hand in hand with their comrades, helping to realize the dream of overthrowing the bourgeoisie oppressors who rule over us. The white revolutionary can assist in breaking the chains, throwing down the shackles and ensuring a world where nobody will have to live under tyrannical capitalist exploitation.

Section Three — Planning and Organizing Actions

One of the hardest parts of learning about the injustices the system commits and joining the fight against it is containing the rage and desire for justice within you. Especially for newly awakened revolutionaries, the prospect of putting on a mask and breaking every window at city hall is a strong temptation that even us authors can relate to.

It is human nature, when we see something that we know is inherently unjust and we recognize our ability to intervene, the desire to lash out against the oppressor and let loose our emotions is an incredibly seductive idea. It both justifies our presence in the revolution by taking tangible action against the system and serves as a sort of emotional release by airing our frustrations against the system in the most direct way.

Lashing out against the system, no matter how relieving, does not help those who are oppressed if the energy is not directed or focused in any way. Random bouts of violence, no matter how much it soothes our need for justice and our desire to finally retaliate against the system, will not help the people who are most oppressed by the system. This should not be mistaken for a condemnation of violence, like every public action violence does have its roles and situations where its use is justified or necessary. However, no matter what action is taken, violent or non-violent, if the action does not have a clear and concise goal or direction, it will not be successful.

It doesn’t take much thought to see why this is the case. If an action has no clear goal, no specific section of the system that it’s targeted against or no clear demands to be appeased, how can the action be successful? If the action has no tangible way to measure its progress towards achieving its goal, or if it is lacking a publicized goal at all, it cannot achieve success as there’s nothing for the action to achieve. On that note, without a set goal or direction for the action, the action cannot fail as there’s nothing to measure its failure against. Without an end goal, any action performed will amount to little more than screaming for the sake of screaming or violence for the sake of violence.

An action in this context is any program or event that an individual revolutionary or revolutionary organization forms and executes in opposition to a legal or social issue. An action is defined by its short-term nature, its reliance on physical participation in order to accomplish its goals, and its focus on a specific issue. This separates actions from other programs such as political education or long-term projects such as running homeless shelters or community gardens.

In order for an action to be successful, it must have a few established organizational points before the action is taken. These criteria must be met regardless of the methods that the action will employ, as without them the action will be directionless and unorganized. Before the action is taken, we must answer these questions.

Why is the action being planned?
What is the goal of this action?
What are the methods that will be employed during this action?
Is the action stand-alone, or is it contributing to a larger movement?
What resistance will the action face?
Will there be a follow up action, or is this action meant to achieve the goal alone?

Why is the action being planned?

Before planning any action against the system, it must first be recognized why the action is being planned in the first place. Is it a response to a recent tragedy or policy, or is it in response to a continued set of practices used by the system? What is the nature of the event the action is planning to fight?

No matter the nature, whether environmental, legal, social, or any other category the event falls in, this must be recognized in order to develop a clear methodology the event will follow. To properly plan an action, the reason the action is taking place must be recognized and evaluated by all those involved in planning the action. While this sounds obvious and not worth mentioning, it is not hard to find examples of actions being performed where the participants or even the organizers are not sure of the exact reason the action is taking place.

What is the goal of this action?

Actions should be planned with the end goal in mind before the rest of the action is planned. By establishing an end goal, the rest of the action can be planned with the idea of realizing said end goal and the process of planning will be streamlined.

With the end goal in mind, the power available at the action can be focused on it and conflicts of interest can be mitigated by having an already established goal. Additionally with the goal in mind, the progress of the action has a benchmark to be measured against, allowing the organizers and participants to measure the effectiveness of the actions being taken and allowing changes to be made with a lesser chance for collapsing the action.

When the progress can be measured, this also serves as a morale boost for the participants of the action. Seeing the progress of the action in real-time allows participants to focus their energy on achieving the next milestone in the action and provides feedback to them, boosting morale and allowing the participants to feel a sense of pride with every milestone reached.

What are the methods that will be employed during this action?

Establishing the methods to be used during the action is of utmost importance before the action begins. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, it was common to see actions being taken where no methods were planned in advance. When showing up to the action, the crowds would be a mix of agitators and pacifists. Sections of the crowd would be ready to agitate, to fight against the police with any physical methods available and would be ready to implement these methods at a moment’s notice. On the other side, the crowds would have pacifists who vehemently opposed any form of violence against the police, whether in self-defense or as an aggression tactic. This mix of crowds and no established methods the action would employ led to conflicts and arguments amid the crowds, diverting their attention away from the police and lowering the effectiveness of the action.

When planning an action, the methods to be used at the action must be established ahead of time and known among those planning to participate. If the methods are known ahead of time, the crowd the action will draw will be more prepared to carry out those methods and less likely to start conflicts with other participants in the action. It is important to decide if the action is going to be violent or non-violent ahead of time, as this decision is required in order to plan the specific methods to be used.

Once the broad decision on violence or lack of violence is made, further planning must be made in order for the action to run smoothly. If the action is going to be violent, the participants must be informed what items to bring to the event. Should they wear body armor? Are handguns allowed or is it strictly non-ballistic weaponry? If the action is non-violent, participants still need to be informed of certain protocols before arriving. What are the de-escalation techniques to be performed in the case of aggressors? Is self-defense allowed, or is it strictly pacifist? Will security be provided? What are the main targets of the violence? All these questions and more must be answered ahead of time or the action risks becoming disorganized and separated during its course.

Is the action stand-alone, or is it contributing to a larger movement?

When the action is being planned, it must be recognized whether the action is stand-alone or if it is contributing to a larger movement. Depending on which it is, this will help in determining the amount of support the action will receive and assist in planning for further actions or goals.

If the action is stand-alone, meaning that it has no wider support from other concurrent movements or is focused on an issue only this particular action is advocating against, the action will face difficulties in attracting a wide audience of supporters. This however should not deter the action from taking place, almost every widespread movement in the history of the United States started out as small, local actions supported initially by few people in the area. Stand-alone actions face difficulty getting their message heard, but when they do they stand out for being the only voice against the issue. Stand-alone actions have the potential to kickstart wider movements based around the issue, and can serve as fertile recruitment grounds for smaller organizations with anticipations to grow to a higher level of influence in the community.

If the action is contributing to a wider movement, the ability to attract more participants to the action is much higher. Planning actions against current, well known issues has the potential to attract far more participants than would be normally expected for the organization in question to draw in calmer circumstances. In addition, planning actions concurrent to larger movements helps bolster the message these larger movements are trying to convey, leading to a higher chance of success for the movement as a whole.

While supporting larger movements is important, an organization should be careful to diversify its actions and not strictly focus on more public movements, lest they be accused of only reactionary protest and attempting to co-opt the movement as a whole.

What resistance will the action face?

When planning an action against an issue of the system, resistance to the action is to be expected and accounted for. This is unavoidable, when fighting against the system, the system will use its authority to fight back against any voice of resistance to its policies and methods. Additionally, due to the highly politicized climate we live in today, it can be expected for counter-protesters to be present at all but the most publicly supported actions. With resistance comes risk, whether it be social or physical, and these risks must be both publicly aware to the participants and have plans implemented to mitigate them as much as possible.

No action is without risk, the very nature of revolutionary actions come with risks to both the organizers and the participants. No amount of planning or preventative measures taken before the action is implemented will completely eliminate these risks, however risks can be mitigated to ensure a relative level of safety for all participants. The level of planning and cooperation required however serves as a barrier most are unwilling to cross to ensure safety for all participants. Planning for and mitigating risks against participants of an action increases the time needed to plan the action, increases the complexity of the action, and as a consequence makes the action harder to execute. Therefore, a line must be drawn between what risks are acceptable and what risks cannot be tolerated.

When planning for risks at an action, one must first be aware of where these risks may come from. Evaluate and earnestly discuss which opposition groups are most likely to make an appearance at the action. If the main aggressors are known and expected, it is easier to plan for their presence at the action and take steps against their aggression.

No matter what the action is for, it is likely that law enforcement will be present in some capacity. This should never be seen as a sign of safety; as we have seen with leftist actions throughout history, the police are just as likely to be the main aggressor or support the opposition as they are to prevent them from interfering with your action. The presence of law enforcement should always be seen as a potential for opposition to the action, and should be accounted for as such.

If the action is expecting counter-protesters, determine what groups or organizations are most likely to make an appearance at the action. Determine the level of hostility these groups are likely to bring against the action. Will they be armed? Will they be physically violent, or will they just jeer from across the street? The threats posed to the action must be understood as deeply as possible to ensure the safety of the participants.

Those organizing an action should also take into account what potential threats are allowable at the action for the sake of ensuring the action takes place in the manner it was planned. While threats against the lives of participants should never be accepted except for the most extreme and violent of actions, the threat of physical violence may have to be accepted in areas where opposition by violent parties is inevitable.

While the threat may be acceptable, threat mitigation techniques should always be implemented for both the safety of the participants and to ensure the action is able to run its course unimpeded. Depending on the threats present, organizers should determine whether security forces should be used, whether participants should bring weapons, plan out escape routes in case the violence reaches an uncontrollable level, and plan ahead for dealing with participants being arrested or hospitalized. No matter what threats are present, protocol should be established beforehand to deal with them should they be present at the action.

Will there be a follow up action, or is this action meant to achieve the goal alone?

Lastly, organizers should determine whether the action is meant to achieve the goal it set out for, or whether it is meant to lay the groundwork for future actions against the issue. Not every action will be able to achieve the goals it sets out for, in fact most actions are unable to do so without unprecedented public support and intimidation factor. It is therefore important to determine ahead of time which route the action will follow. If the action is meant to achieve the goal, organizers should outline how exactly the goal will be achieved during the action. If the action is meant to be followed up by future actions, this should be clearly displayed at the action and planning for the next one should start either before or immediately following the action.

Section Four — Awareness, Disruption, Destruction, Altruism, and the Uniqueness of Street Protests

No matter the cause being fought for, the methods being used in the execution of the action, or the overall goal of the action, the action can be categorized into one of four distinct categories. The action is capable of being either awareness, disruptive, destructive, or altruistic in nature. This categorization is important in the planning phases of an action, determining which category the action falls into will help narrow down which methods will be effective in accomplishing the goals of the action.

As describing and categorizing these actions is rather difficult due to real-world complexities and depending on the specific issue being acted against, we shall craft a fictional issue and come up with hypothetical actions to demonstrate the different types of actions possible.

Let’s say that a city is building a luxury apartment in the middle of a neglected area of the city. This section of the city is predominately African American, and due to years of gentrification and white flight the neighborhood suffers from a higher overall rate of poverty and homelessness when compared with the rest of the city. These luxury apartments are priced well outside the median income of residents of the neighborhood, have been approved instead of counter-proposed low-income housing, and are a clear-cut gentrification effort in order to raise property values and price-out lower income residents. Let us look at the potential responses and categorize each.

Awareness actions are actions where the main intent is to either bring awareness to an issue or to draw attention to the action itself. The main goal is not to solve the issue, rather it is to bring awareness of the issue to the general public or to larger organizations in the hopes of acquiring wider support against the issue. This also includes actions where the goal is to recruit more members into the organization or make the existence of the organizations known to the general public. In this scenario, an awareness action could include actions such as hosting community speaking events or handing out pamphlets detailing the construction and why the community should be against it.

Disruptive actions are actions where the main intent is to disrupt a specific facet of society or, if the issue is actively occurring such as construction of an undesirable building, disrupting the process causing the issue. The main goal is to hamper the progression of the issue by making it harder to actively work on the issue. In this scenario, disruptive actions could manifest as activists blocking workers from entering the construction site or filing lawsuits in an attempt to delay construction.

Destructive actions are actions where the main intent is to physically stop the issue through the use of force or destructive means. The main intent is to make it physically impossible to work on the issue or to “scare off” the company working on the issue by making it physically or financially unsafe to continue work. In this scenario, actions which fall into this category include the sabotage of equipment, breaking or stealing construction material, vandalizing finished parts of the construction, or even physically assaulting the workers. A common real world example of destructive actions would be the various Black Bloc actions throughout history, where participants dress in concealed clothing and focus on causing property damage as the method for the action.

Altruistic actions are actions where the main intent is not to solve the issue, rather to alleviate the direct consequences of the issue and provide help to those affected by said issue. In this scenario, altruistic actions could range from providing financial assistance to those in the community, providing supplies to the homeless, or running food drives to help those who have to deal with higher bills due to the property value increase.

Note that even in this scenario, all of these actions seem to have some level of overlap when describing their goals and methods. This is the reality of planning actions, in the real world no issue or action is clear cut and limited to just one form of operation. While the real world complicates the categorization of actions, every action leans heavily towards one of these four categories, so categorization is still possible for general planning purposes.

This is not necessarily a negative trait, actions which overlap with other categories of actions have the potential to “multitask” and achieve multiple goals at one. Using the altruistic action as an example, it is not hard to imagine that included with the food handouts is a pamphlet detailing why the property values have risen and urging the community to take action. While the action is altruistic in nature, it also serves the role of an awareness action, possibly even eliminating the need to host a separate awareness action altogether. This in turn allows the revolutionary individual or organization to focus more of their efforts on disruptive or destructive actions.

Street protests are a unique action altogether when compared to the four previous action categories. Street protests are arguably one of the easiest, and paradoxically one of the hardest actions to plan and implement. This is because street protests hold a quality the other forms of actions do not, they are dynamic and rapidly changing. Street protests have the potential to include all four categories of action during their execution, and as a consequence are one of the most versatile forms of action an individual or organization can plan.

Street protests are easy to plan in the sense that depending on the issue or political climate, acquiring participants may require little effort on the organizer’s end. As an example, during the 2020 George Floyd Protests, it was common to see protests consisting of hundreds of participants due to nothing more than a post on social media telling people to arrive at a specific place at a specific time. This level of mobilization and community participation is something that would normally require weeks or months of preparation on the organizer’s end, however due to the outrage felt by the common citizenry due to the murder of George Floyd, large protests were able to be rapidly planned and executed with little more than a tweet or a facebook post.

Consequently for the same reason listed above, street protests are one of the hardest actions to plan because they are so dynamic. A street protest is incredibly difficult to control, once the protest begins its course is determined by the group mentality, and not the organizer’s wills and wishes. Street protests, especially large ones in response to highly divisive issues, are beyond the control of the organizer once they are actively occurring. A plan can be outlined, a goal can be established, a specific method can be disseminated to the participants, but once the protest begins it is out of any one individual’s control. Street protests can rapidly switch from disruptive to destructive or vice versa depending on internal and external factors.

The most effective way to alleviate the issues commonly seen in street protests is to limit the participants to members of the planning organization or collaborating organizations, however this greatly limits the size and impact of the protest. Ideally, one should try to strike a balance between dedicated revolutionary participants and community participants, however in the real world this is an extremely difficult endeavor without strict requirements to enter the protest, said strict requirements possibly preventing the community from joining altogether. Street protests by their nature are in reaction to divisive issues, and as such when planning one a certain amount of risk needs to be accepted. The street protest is the voice of the people, it is the most direct form of political representation the proletariat can participate in and as such are subject to the emotions and will of the proletariat.

Section Five — Types of Violence

When it comes to planning actions against the white culture, the state, or any number of social issues the revolutionary is opposed to, one of the first objections to the action is to abandon its execution if any form of violence is present. These objections increase exponentially in magnitude if the action itself is going to be the initiator of violence. There’s a common, yet misguided belief among the leftist organizing community that actions must be non-violent in nature to spread their message effectively.

In order to argue for or against violence in actions, we must first define the different types of violence possible at actions. Often, “violence” in the context used by the objecting parties is a blanket term covering all forms of physical confrontation and destruction, no distinctions are made between the various types of violence and any actions beyond yelling on street corners are condemned as “too aggressive”.

Violence can be segmented into four distinct forms. These four forms of violence are violence against property (vandalism), violence against the state, violence against the person, and self-defense. These forms are distinct in both their targets and the methods used to implement the violence.

Note that similarly to the four distinct forms of actions, the four main categories of violence will have a measure of overlap due to the complex nature of real world organizing. Just as it was with the forms of actions, these categories of violence are useful for planning purposes, however they cannot be completely isolated in the real world and the presence of multiple forms of violence should be expected, no matter the amount of planning or restrictions present at the action.

Violence against property, also known as Vandalism, is the physical destruction or sabotage of infrastructure, housing, and other forms of private property owned and used by the target of the action. Vandalism is unique from the other forms of violence in that the intent is not to cause harm to individuals, rather only the material property of the party the action is directed against. Any injuries or deaths caused by said destruction or sabotage is accidental. Often, vandalism as used in an action is specifically directed in order to cause as little injury to persons within the vicinity of the action as possible.

Violence against property is the most likely form of violence to be seen at an action, especially in larger actions formed in retaliation to a divisive issue. Participants of an action are more likely to air their frustrations on the infrastructure of the state rather than the agents of the state or random individuals, and this is for good reason. For one, violence against property carries less legal repercussions than physical assault on an officer or a counter-protester. Secondly, violence against property is substantially easier to morally justify in the minds of leftists when compared with general assault, the act of destroying property considered justified or victimless when compared with doing harm towards an individual, no matter their role against the action or their stance on the issue the action is targeted against.

Violence against the state is the physical confrontation of the agents of the state. These agents can range from law enforcement, military personnel, politicians, correctional officers, or any other individual imbued with authority over the proletariat. Often this form of violence is used in the context of self-defense, an example of which would be protesters fighting against advancing riot police. However, as seen in guerilla campaigns and revolutions of the past such as the Cuban Revolution or Revolution-era Catalonia, preemptive assaults against the state may be carried out in the same manner as any other military operation.

Violence against the state is differentiated from other forms of violence in that the targets of the violence are limited only to the agents and infrastructure of the state apparatus. Those not directly working for or aiding the state are exempt from the targeting of the violence, and as discussed is generally in reaction to perceived state-sponsored violence against participants of the action or organization which planned said action. It is important to remember that violence against the state is not distinguished from the other categories of violence in its methods, its implementation can take the form of either property damage, self defense, or violence against individuals who work for the state but are not directly affecting the action in any way. Rather, it is the targeting of the methods alone that differentiates it from all other categories of violence.

Violence against the person is random violence against anybody within the vicinity of the action who is not directly participating in the action. Examples of this can be seen in the LA Riots of 1992 in the wake of the beating of Rodney King and subsequent acquittal of four officers who implemented the abuse. During the LA Riots, cases of random assaults against innocent bystanders were highly publicized and used to demonize the message of the riots.

One could argue that terrorism falls under this definition, although terrorist actions are generally differentiated due to the advanced planning and specific targets of the terrorist attack compared to the often sporadic and unplanned nature of violence against the person.

Violence against the person is generally executed in the face of overwhelming rage or anger over an issue. It is generally not planned in advance among left-wing actions, however it is an increasingly common tactic amidst far-right extremist groups. In the context of far-right actions, the random acts of violence against people not involved with or opposing the action are meant to instill a sense of intimidation in those who may attempt to oppose the action. In this sense, although its methods are offensive in nature, violence against the person is an ultimately defensive tactic.

Generally, violence against the person is an ineffective tactic in achieving the long-term goals of an action. In the short-term, violence against the person can be used as a shock tactic to keep others from further interfering with the action. The drawback to this is that use of this tactic is likely to draw intervention by local law enforcement if they are present at the action, which can quickly lead to a collapse of the action as a whole. In the long-term, randomized violence on those the wider society deems “innocent” leads to animosity towards the action, its goals, and the organization which made use of the tactic. Comparing short-term protection of the action with long-term loss of public support, it is generally in the best interest of any organization planning an action to avoid use of violence against the person and to restrain or expel any participants of the action trying to make use of the tactic.

Self-defense is any physical confrontation in reaction to violence occurring against participants in the action. It is differentiated from all other forms of violence in its reactionary nature. Unlike all other forms of violence discussed, self-defense by definition is not initiated by the participants of an action, it only occurs in response to physical violence directed against the participants.

Self-defense can be further distinguished into two sub-categories, personal self-defense and collective self-defense. Personal self-defense is the act of self-defense committed by an individual in response to violence directed at the individual, such as physically fighting back against a counter-protester trying to harm a participant. Collective self-defense is the physical response of one or more individuals against violence directed at another individual in the interest of defending the victim. An example of collective self-defense would be a counter-protester attacking a participant of an action and multiple other participants coming to the aid of the victim.

Self-defense is also differentiated from all other forms of violence in that its execution may be legally permissible. While the laws vary between each state and municipality, generally self-defense is legally permitted under the condition that the level of violence used during self defense is “proportional” to the assault being committed, what is considered proportional again varies between state and municipality.

We can see that when discussing whether or not violence should be permitted or prohibited at an action, those voicing their opinion should make an effort to clarify which form or forms of violence they are speaking of. While some may argue that this is nothing more than a pretentious redefining for the sake of redefining, the clarification of the different forms of violence is important in the context of organizing an action. Determining what, if any, level and form of violence is permissible at an action must be taken into consideration when discussing the goals of the action.

Let us use the example we crafted of the luxury apartments being built in a gentrified neighborhood to clarify why this distinction is important. Let’s assume that an organization is trying to form a nonviolent disruptive action against the company building the apartments. A disruptive action, as defined earlier, is an action meant to hamper or impede the progress of building the apartments by making work on the apartments harder, more time consuming, or undesirable by the company building them.

Comparing the different types of violence with the different types of actions, this is not as simple to organize as one would originally think. If the intent is to hinder the construction of the apartments, one could easily justify the sabotage of construction equipment as a form of disruption, it would make construction of the apartment more difficult and time-consuming for the company. However, as we’ve clarified, the sabotage and destruction of property is inherently a form of violence, it is violence against property. The question now is, is violence against property permissible in this “nonviolent” action? Moreover, although the organizers are wishing for this action to be a disruptive movement, the sabotage of construction equipment falls under the category of destructive actions. Are the organizers okay with using destructive methods in their attempt to hinder construction on the apartment, or are they unwilling to accept the public opinion that sabotaging equipment may bring at the expense of reducing the effectiveness of disrupting the construction?

This is why the different forms of violence and by extent the different forms of actions must be categorized, defined, and discussed between organizers and participants. When organizing an action, it must be known exactly which methods are permitted, what types and what levels of violence are allowable, and any counter-arguments reconciled before the action occurs. If this does not happen, if no discussion takes place and no clarifications are given on what is and isn’t acceptable, the action runs the risk of collapsing due to general confusion amid the participants. Some participants may hold different opinions on what is considered violent and what is considered nonviolent if it is not clarified before the action is implemented, and during the course of the action some participants may go off and commit forms of violence which the organizers did not wish to happen.

When organizing an action, every permitted and prohibited method must be known by the participants. The organizers must be specific, detailed, and clear with their explanations, or they run the risk of the action straying from the methods the organizers intended to be used. While the actual course of the action is unpredictable once the action begins, prior planning and explanation of the type of action, types of permissible violence, and specifically prohibited types of violence greatly assists in ensuring the action remains true to its planned intent.

Section Six — Legally Resisting, a Useless Endeavor

The largest mistake a revolutionary can make when trying to fight against the system is doing so through the legal system. This seems redundant to state, but it is a point worth stating, the revolution will not be legal. This sounds almost silly to state, of course the revolution will not be legal. The revolution will be violent, bloody, and chaotic, of course it will not be legal. However, some socialist schools of thought do not believe this to be the case.

In the mind of the Democratic Socialist, the revolution is envisioned as a slow crawl towards the implementation of socialism and eventually communism, not the rapid chaotic revolution agreed by a majority of anarchist and communist ideologies. The DemSoc envisions a future where the revolution is won not by bullets and bombs, but through lawsuits and legislation. The DemSoc envisions a world where the bourgeoisie lose their power through legislative action, willingly stepping aside and allowing the proletariat to take the mantle of authority over society.

This is utopian thinking at its finest, the bourgeoisie will not willingly give up power, and the proletariat will not peacefully acquire authority over their own destiny. This seems pessimistic and dismissive, and to a point it is. However, we are not writing off the efforts of Democrat Socialist beliefs entirely. As we shall see, Democratic Socialist methods and beliefs do have their uses and merits, it is merely their end goal and their path to achieve it that is skewed.

Democratic Socialists are not alone in this belief, many of the larger socialist groups in the United States such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Communist Party of the United States of America believe, at least in part, that pursuing electoral power is integral in the progression of socialism and communism. These are not without precedent, throughout the history of nations throughout the world proletariat revolutions were preceded by at least a minority socialist representation in the governing body.

Electoral power is not without merits, wielding power in the system has its uses. When a socialist gains power in the government, they have the possibility to propose or pass progressive policies, shift the general thinking in a legislative body further left, and expose the public to light socialist ideas. This helps to spread the influence of socialist thought in a society which leans far right if implemented carefully and framed in a digestible context.

Where parties such as the DSA, PSL, and CPUSA falter is their belief that the use of legislation and electoral representation is enough to spur the shift to a socialist society without bloodshed. Specifically focusing on the DSA, the DSA believes that with an overwhelming socialist majority in electoral systems, the shift to socialism can be accomplished through policy proposals and votes.

This is where the DSA falters, as it assumes that the bourgeoisie will respect the rule of law in the face of losing their power and ownership of the means of production. The bourgeoisie will not ever voluntarily cede its power over the proletariat, and by extension their right to profit off of the labor of the proletariat. In no nation where socialism was officially adopted as the governing principle has this occurred without at least mild social upheaval and unrest. Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism are all implemented through violence, this is an unacceptable fact that must be accepted by the white revolutionary.

The bourgeoisie are the ones who have crafted the system by which the DSA works to implement socialism, they have authority over its rules and participants and at any time are able to prevent threatening policies and rhetoric from gaining traction. The bourgeoisie is above the law, this is clearly visible when looking at the daily actions and scandals of various politicians and wealthy capitalists in the United States, they are held to a different legal standard than the rest of the common citizenry, and as such are capable of evading consequences the common proletariat would experience for their actions.

Government as a whole is a social construct in the sense that it only functions when the citizenry believe in its legitimacy and those in power willingly respect the rules they have implemented. Government and, by extension, laws are only functioning when the organization implementing them has the means to enforce them. A law is not a physical object, it is not an insurmountable barrier for social conduct and its existence relies entirely on the ability for the organization which implemented it to enforce it. The truth about government and law is that it is nothing more than words written on paper. Without willing accountability for betraying the word of law, without an independent agency to enforce it, and without enforceable repercussions severe enough to prevent future elites from breaking the law, the bourgeoisie elite are able to sidestep it with no consequence whenever it benefits them.

As a direct consequence of this, achieving socialism through purely peaceful and legal means is impossible. The bourgeoisie have the ability to create, enforce, and selectively obey or disobey laws that they themselves have created. In the process of working within the legal system, the socialist will experience unfair and heavy handed enforcement of laws or policies specifically designed to prevent their rise to power. In the case where the socialist somehow manages to take power anyways, the bourgeoisie will simply ignore their rule of law, declaring their authority illegitimate. If the socialist has not acquired the monopoly on violence that the bourgeoisie holds and the willing cooperation of the organizations which enact said violence, the bourgeoisie will face no repercussions for their disobedience and will render the socialist’s rule illegitimate.

Trying to overthrow a system by working within the system is impossible. When working under bourgeois frameworks, you are subject to their rules; you are playing a game that they have crafted and have already determined that they are the only possible winners of said game. Overthrow of the system requires working outside the boundaries of the system the bourgeoisie has developed. The proletariat must craft its own system separate from bourgeois influence and focus on the destruction of the systems the bourgeoisie have designed.

Remember, the system that enforces white supremacy and white culture is irreformable because reform implies that faults which need correction are present in it. The system is not broken, it has no faults for the revolutionary to focus on repairing or correcting. The system is working exactly as intended, a machine that is not broken cannot be fixed. The only way to “fix” the system and end the widespread oppression of the non-white comrade is to destroy the system and replace it entirely. Any attempt at legal reformation is at best delaying the inevitable revolution, and at worst achieving nothing beyond performative victories.

The revolutionary, whether they are white or not, must accept that they are entering into an illegal and inherently violent fight for the future of the working class and humanity as a whole. The revolutionary cannot deceive themselves with promises of peaceful cooperation with the elitist powers and eventual nonviolent social change. The revolutionary must accept that by joining the fight for freedom, they are cosigning themselves to the violence and chaos that is to come, and that their participation and efforts to destroy the system will eventually directly lead to said violence and chaos. The revolutionary must accept the burden that their actions will destabilize society and must be willing to accept the consequences of their actions if it comes down to it, this is the only way the revolutionary can move forward and fully dedicate themselves to the fight.

This is a fight for life and death, for freedom and equality for all the working class no matter their color, sexuality, gender identity, or any other traits which the white culture has forcefully repressed. The revolution is just, it is right, but that does not mitigate the chaos and suffering it will bring before its conclusion and the restructuring of society can begin. The revolutionary must accept this, and they must realize that it is an acceptable consequence in the fight for true freedom and prosperity for the working class.

Hard Truths

It is the dream of every revolutionary that when the time for revolution comes, we will all stand together as comrades against the thugs of the state. That we will all take up arms and fight for the rights of every worker against the bourgeoisie elites. That we will all put aside our ideological disputes and arguments in the wider interest of the working class.

This is not true, it is fantasy and utopian belief, completely disconnected from the reality that we as leftists face in the world today. Even now in the pre-revolution era we cannot all put aside our differences to fight against a common enemy, it’s part of the reason the revolution hasn’t begun in the first place. Even now, ideological differences and disputes separate us for the most petty of reasons, preventing cooperation and focusing our efforts against each other instead of at the bourgeoisie who only benefit from our discourse.

In the world of the white revolutionary, this is but one of the hard truths they will have to deal with. When the white revolutionary wishes to join the struggle against the exploitive powers, they will have to deal with many hard truths. These will hurt the white revolutionary at first, maybe even stop and doubt whether they want to continue on with the fight. It is important for the white revolutionary to contend and accept these truths if they want to be an effective and helpful participant in the fight for freedom.

Section One — Not Everybody Will Want You In the Fight

It is a simple fact that not every revolutionary group or individual will want you to join the fight. While this is counter-productive to the idea that more people involved in the fight means a more likely successful outcome, it is a criticism that the white revolutionary will have to hear and accept to prevent dissolution and doubt from settling in.

Some organizations may base this belief on past experience with white revolutionaries. Many BIPoC groups will tell you stories of the white saviors they’ve dealt with throughout their actions and organizational existence. Most BIPoC groups will of course not go to the extent of actively disapproving of white revolutionary involvement, most groups are quick to realize that white saviors are individuals and as such should be dealt with as individuals. However, there are some where the white savior has done so much damage or dissuaded members to the point where they would rather not risk incorporating one into their ranks again.

There are also groups which by design do not allow white people into the ranks. This isn’t necessarily based on prejudice or a specific issue with white people, rather it may be for ideological reasons. Many communalism-oriented organizations such as the various panther groups in the 60’s had their participants split into specific ethnic caucuses. This was not due to prejudice, rather it was due to the beliefs that the panther groups followed. White people were not excluded from the fight in any way, in fact they were encouraged to join up and help the Black Panthers in any way they could, they just had to join up with their specific organization (in this example, the White Panther Party). This was also not limited to white people or the panthers, many organizations follow this belief where every ethnic group has their own specific party to work in and represent their ethnic group in the fight (Los Brown Berets, Red Berets, etc…).

However, there are some leftist organizations which are inherently distrustful of white people being involved with the fight for freedom. Whether this is due to prejudice, ideological teachings, or past experiences with white revolutionaries is irrelevant. The hard truth to be learned is that you must accept their belief and work with those who are accepting of white people in their ranks.

It is not the role of the white revolutionary to convince these groups to allow white people into their ranks. Whether their reason for excluding or actively speaking against white revolutionaries is agreeable or not, it is not your duty to try to convince them otherwise. This has as much to do with practicality as it does with respecting their beliefs.

No revolutionary should make deprogramming their main praxis. It is extremely difficult, fairly ineffective unless you have a close relationship with the person you are attempting to program, and in general is usually a waste of time. The last thing a BIPoC revolutionary needs is a white person preaching to them about what is right and what is wrong. It is also not the responsibility of the white revolutionary to dictate what a BIPoC revolutionary should act or what beliefs they should hold. Their group is theirs to run however they feel, it is not under the jurisdiction of white revolutionaries and white revolutionaries should not try to impose their beliefs on these groups.

If a group does not wish to work with you because you are white, you should move along and seek out a group that does wish to work with white revolutionaries. Organizations that exclude white people entirely are uncommon compared to organizations which will gladly accept help from you. If the organization has excluded you for reasons inherently against the revolutionary mindset such as outright prejudice beliefs, do not attempt to change their beliefs or mindsets. Simply move on, join a group which does want your help, and make sure that other groups know this is a belief they hold. Every second you spend debating with these groups is a second you’re distracted and not contributing to the revolution. Simply move on and help organizations that want your help, organizations that run on a policy of prejudice will eventually plateau due to community isolation and other organizations not wanting to collaborate due to said beliefs.

Section Two — Your Life Will Be Worse

When it comes to organizing and fighting against the system, many white revolutionaries will be caught up in the beautified ideals of revolutionary culture. They will see themselves as the protagonist of a story of struggle and defiance against a system that wants to subjugate them. They will dream of the world to come and see themselves as brave revolutionaries who dared to cast off the chains of the system and take up arms with their comrades, storming the Bastille and ushering in a new age of freedom and prosperity for all.

The reality of the revolution is much less romantic than is commonly portrayed. The revolution as it stands is a fight against the system which has total control over society and the individuals within it. The ideals painted in the minds of revolutionaries are of revolutions where the public has thrown its full support towards the revolution, this is not the case today. Today, the revolution is a fringe group, it is a disconnected patchwork of organizations loosely cooperating towards a similar goal while under the authority of a system which wants them eradicated. The white revolutionary will feel the effects of the system trying to destroy them.

Revolutions are performed when the lives of the masses become intolerable. Humanity is resilient and is able to withstand hardships and oppression much worse than we have seen today. While the system we live in is brutal and oppressive for the poverty stricken non-whites who live under it, for the majority of the population it is either beneficial or at worst slightly uncomfortable. A majority of society is willing to live in slight discomfort or under the risk of starvation and poverty if it means they will be able to enjoy the daily manufactured comforts they can afford.

Make no mistake, the revolutionary is not wrong in the slightest for seeking to destroy this system, living under the system while being aware of the oppression and brutality it enacts on those who do not conform to it is unbearable for most and it is natural that they would wish to destroy it in order to free those oppressed. For most white Americans though, perhaps due to our individualist nature and the ingrained ideal of greed which is celebrated under capitalism, they are perfectly fine living under a system which does not target them directly.

The white revolutionary will have to deal with this widespread apathy, that alone is enough to make even the most hardened and dedicated revolutionaries doubt their intentions and the effectiveness of trying to bring about the revolution. The revolutionary will also have to deal with the system directing its attention towards them. As discussed earlier, being white and dedicating yourself to the revolution places you on a similar level as the non-white masses in the eyes of the system. The system will turn its tools of retribution and violence against you the same way it does against those under its oppressive rule. When aware of your stance against it, the system will work tirelessly to subvert your actions and remove you from the fight with ferocious efficiency. The white revolutionary will not go through its fight without resistance.

The reality is that by joining the fight for freedom, the life of the white revolutionary will get worse. They will have to deal with struggles they would have never had to deal with if they had stood by and ignored the workings of the system. They would never have to deal with the violence the system enacts on them if they would have stayed silent once they were aware of how the system operates. The life of the white revolutionary will become harder as they dedicate themselves to the fight, they must accept this inevitability or risk getting blindsided by the realization and doubting their role in the revolution.

Section Three — You Are Not Oppressed

When the white revolutionary joins the fight for revolution, they will experience the full strength of the system trying to subvert and remove them from the fight. They will experience the methods and systematic repression the system wields in its full strength, they will deal with a level of harassment and subjugation almost equal to the amount felt by their non-white comrades. However, the key word is almost the same level of harassment and subjugation. It is important for the white revolutionary to remember that no matter how much the system weighs on them, what they are experiencing is not equal to what their non-white comrades deal with.

The repression the white revolutionary experiences is voluntary in the sense that it can be avoided by the white revolutionary if they wish. The system only targets the white revolutionary when they are either public with their beliefs or if their beliefs are uncovered by those who side with the system. If the white revolutionary were to be silent about their beliefs, if they were to work towards revolution in secrecy and practice careful OPSEC, the white revolutionary would never feel the wrath of the system. This is not the case for the non-white comrades the white revolutionary will be working with.

White revolutionaries have an inherent advantage over their non-white comrades when it comes to working towards the destruction of white culture. This advantage is the status of the white revolutionary as white. The white revolutionary can at any time hide behind the veil of whiteness and conformity with the system to avoid the wrath of the system. Simply by hiding their true beliefs and intentions, the white revolutionary is able to blend in with the conforming masses in the white culture, free from the violence and subjugation that the system would otherwise subject them to.

The non-white revolutionaries do not have this advantage. No matter how the non-white comrade acts, no matter how much they conform with the system or repress their personal beliefs, they will always be subject to the oppressive system and have to live under the thumb of white supremacy. Non-white comrades are not free to avoid the efforts of the system at their own discretion, they are not able to opt-out of the violence and subjugation at their own will. The non-white revolutionary’s oppression is involuntary, they must live under it in every moment of their existence and must deal with the consequences of life under an authoritarian regime despite their personal wishes. The non-white revolutionary is born into the fight whether they wish to fight or not, their only options are to either accept the system for how it is and try to survive in a system that sees them as unworthy of life, or actively fight against it and experience the full focus of the system bent on their destruction.

The white revolutionary, no matter how aware of the methods of the system or devoted to its destruction, always has a third option. The white revolutionary is at all times able to simply walk away and ignore the struggle of the masses. The white revolutionary is free to leave the fight at any point and go back to reaping the rewards of the white culture, all it takes is their indifference to the unethical practices of the system and unwillingness to rejoin the fight. The fact that the white revolutionary has the ability to leave the struggle and free themselves from the immoral tactics of the system alone lowers their level of oppression relative to their non-white comrades.

Not only does the white revolutionary have the ability to leave the fight, even when facing the full force of the system, the penalties the system enacts on them are less strict than would be given to their non-white comrades. As discussed before, non-white people are often given longer sentences for crimes committed than white people. This trend does not change when it comes to the white revolutionary facing legal repercussions for their actions against the system. Even when the white revolutionary is facing consequences for their actions, they still benefit from the white culture they were born into. The white revolutionary is never able to fully separate themselves from the benefits of the system, no matter how hard they try.

Granted, this can be used to the advantage of the revolution. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, it was a common tactic for white protesters to be on the front-lines when facing law enforcement as they were less likely to be abused and would often be the first arrested. When the white protesters were arrested, they would often face shorter sentences than the non-white protesters. Using this tactic, they were able to overload the arresting capacity of some jurisdictions while at the same time ensuring those arrested would be released quickly, refilling the ranks of the protesters and allowing the fight to go on longer than if the non-white protesters were arrested instead.

Regardless of this, the point still stands that even when fighting against the system, the white revolutionary is still less oppressed than their non-white comrades. It is not an uncommon thought for white revolutionaries to view themselves as part of the oppressed class because they had to experience a small portion of what their non-white comrades have had to experience since birth. While the white revolutionary will experience oppression and subjugation, this is only the case when their beliefs are known. The white revolutionary has the ability to walk away, this must be remembered in order to prevent the belief of white saviorship from rising.

Section Four — The Revolution Will Not be Won in a Day

Revolutionaries, especially ones who have recently dedicated themselves to the fight for revolution, are often deluded by the idea that the issues they are fighting against are simple and quick to solve. This is not a sign of ignorance or stupidity, rather it is a belief almost every revolutionary can relate to when looking back on their introduction to the fight. Even the most experienced activists and fighters can relate to the early days of their fight, full of optimism and revolutionary fervor.

It is a necessary quality to become involved with the fight for revolution, the revolutionary is differentiated from the complacent population in this initial optimism regarding change. The revolutionary becomes involved by recognizing the issues within society and believing they are capable of solving them. Without this original self-confidence and willingness to dive into the fight, the revolutionary would never become involved, they would see the fight as futile or the issues too complex for their activism to affect them in any way. In truth, ignorance to the complexities of the issues the revolutionary is fighting against and the difficulties they will face in fighting them is a required trait in becoming a revolutionary fighter.

As the revolutionary becomes entrenched in the fight, this initial optimism will quickly fade away. They will be exposed to the true complexities and interconnected issues strengthening the initial issue that drove them into fighting in the first place, and as a result burnout will begin to occur. This is especially true for the white revolutionary, as the prospect of burnout is reinforced by their ability to leave the fight at any moment. The prospect of leaving behind the stress and pessimism the fight for revolution brings combined with the always present escape leads to an especially high rate of burnout in white revolutionaries when compared to their non-white comrades.

Burnout is an insidious and unavoidable force, it is a force which kills revolutions before they can begin and disillusions the most dedicated and resourceful revolutionaries. Burnout is a consequence of experiencing the realities of the fight, witnessing the uphill battle that the revolutionary has thrown themselves into. The snail pace of change, the bureaucracy and red-tape making even the most trivial actions a headache to plan and execute, the constant and brutal resistance from the system, it all combines into a depressing outlook on the future of the revolution and the creeping sense that the fight is futile. No revolutionary is immune to this force, it can be repressed, it can be resisted, but eventually the reality of the situation will affect even the most dedicated in our ranks.

This does not have to be the end of the fight however. Burnout is not a permanent affliction, it is the buildup of stress and self-doubt within the revolutionary. Like any source of stress, the stress experienced by witnessing the difficulties of the fight can be alleviated. The difficulty with this is that the stresses of the fight for freedom are unavoidable, the process of spurring on the revolution requires direct confrontation with these difficulties and forces of opposition.

The most crucial idea to remember when it comes to dealing with the stresses of revolution is that this is part of the process. The difficulties the revolutionary will face are the forces of the system the revolutionary has dedicated themselves to fighting. The revolutionary should use these challenges to reinforce their anger and determination against the system. Recognize that the force of bureaucracy and slow pace of change being witnessed are the forces of the system resisting the change, and use that realization to strengthen your resolve against the system and your determination to destroy the system opposing your efforts.

The slow pace of change is one of, if not the most common source of burnout experienced by revolutionary fighters. Witnessing the resistance to any and every action the revolutionary plans and the ignorance towards the demands of the revolutionary often leads to a sense of hopelessness. It leads to a feeling that the system is insurmountable, that every action the revolutionary is committing is useless in the long run, that the revolutionary is wasting energy and should spend their time focusing on surviving the eventual retaliation of the system towards them and their beliefs.

This is not the case, these thoughts are what the system is trying to instill into revolutionaries in an attempt to dissuade them from continuing the fight. Make no mistake, the system is powerful, it encompasses every facet of the American way of life, and it is endowed with resources and support unimaginable by the modern left. The system, however, is not unstoppable. The system is not an all-powerful institution, it is a construct made by man, and as such can be destroyed by man.

The system, with all of its strengths and resilience, is still vulnerable to the efforts of the revolutionary. The system has the advantage of overwhelming strength, but the revolutionary has the advantage of time. This fight is not a new phenomenon, the revolutionary is joining a fight that has been going on for generations.

The revolutionary walks in the footsteps of countless fighters before them. The trail has been cleared, it is up to the modern revolutionary to walk it. The efforts of uncountable activists and fighters from centuries before have led us to this moment, though it has been said time and time again throughout history, we truly stand at the cusp of revolution in the United States. The people are more aware, more active, and more willing for change than ever in the entirety of human history. We are living at the pinnacle of social consciousness, every injustice occurring in real-time for the entirety of the masses of humanity to see if they so choose.

The contradictions of capitalism and the hypocrisy of the ruling class is visible to all, no longer can they hide behind the forces of state controlled propaganda. The people have answered the calling for revolution, it is now up to the people to go forth and finish the fight that generations before have fought. Make no mistake, we are at the crux of revolution, it is only a matter of time before the revolutionaries of the world can begin their march towards true freedom and equality for all the oppressed.

“When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.” ~Eugene V. Debs

49. A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Author: David Wengrow

Authors: David Wengrow

Topics: archaeology, anthropology, civilization, cosmopolitanism, ancient history

Date: 2 October 2018

Date Published on T@L: 2023-03-20T21:41:02

Source: Retrieved on 20 March 2023 from aeon.co.

Civilisation is back. But it is no longer the preserve of ‘Renaissance man’ or of ‘the West’, or even of literate societies. Civilisation is a way of talking about human history on the largest scale. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the latest MoMA exhibition, it binds human history together.

But in at least one essential aspect, the concept of civilisation remains fundamentally exclusionary. It is still the stuff of galleries, museums and UNESCO World Heritage sites; of prized images, objects and structures, rather than of living humanity. The prehistoric stone structures of Göbekli Tepe – where a heritage park has now opened, near the border between Turkey and Syria – are being mooted as everything from the Garden of Eden to the cradle of civilisation and the world’s first temple. We still want a civilisation raised up high above the everyday realities of its human makers and keepers. In troubled regions, such as the Syrian-Turkish border, monuments like these quickly become altars of sacrifice for real human lives.

Importantly, there have always been other ways of understanding ‘civilisation’. The 20^th-century French anthropologist Marcel Mauss thought that civilisation should not be reduced to a list of technical or aesthetic achievements. Nor should it represent a particular stage of cultural development (‘civilisation’ versus ‘barbarism’, and so on). Civilisation could be found in material things, but above all it referred to a potential in human societies. In Mauss’s view, civilisation is what happens when discrete societies share morally and materially across boundaries, forming durable relationships that transcend differences. It might seem an abstract debate, but it’s not. Let me try to explain.

Roughly four years have now passed since the military ascendance of Daesh or ISIS in the Middle East. ISIS routinely destroyed or sold antiquities, culminating in their 2015 assault on the ancient caravan city of Palmyra, in Syria, a World Heritage Site. Under ISIS occupation, Palmyra’s Roman theatre had become a stage for gruesome atrocities, including the public beheading of Khaled al-Asaad, a native of modern Palmyra, and until then its director of antiquities. In the spring of 2016, after a Russian-backed (and, as it turned out, temporary) liberation, Palmyra was hosting the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra. At their performance, an audience of Russian soldiers sat to hear Bach, Prokofiev and Shchedrin. The event was designed to present a particular, and I think misguided, idea of civilisation. It was, in the words of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin via live link from Moscow, ‘part of humanity’s heritage’. Through the ages, Palmyra had opened its gates to all manner of foreign gods. ‘Everything,’ wrote the Russian ancient historian Michael Rostovtzeff in 1932, ‘is peculiar in the peculiar city of Palmyra.’ Yet nothing, perhaps, so peculiar as these events of 2015–16.

What was ‘civilised’ about playing Prokofiev in the beautiful wreckage of one ancient Syrian city, while the living population of another, Aleppo, to the north, was simultaneously under attack? The ancient temples of Palmyra were not designed as works of art, to be passively viewed or admired, any more than the caves of Lascaux or Font-de-Gaume were intended as art galleries, or Göbekli Tepe as a prehistoric version of the Sistine Chapel. In antiquity, their cult statues demanded live offerings and sacrifices, and now it seemed that they were demanding them again. Sacrifice of this kind seems somehow bound up with our modern understandings of ‘heritage’, ‘art’ and ‘civilisation’, in ways that are rarely thought about or articulated. Surely what this tells us is that these are, to all intents and purposes, our own modern gods – the gods of the global north.

When people use the term ‘early civilisation’, they are mostly referring to Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, Ancient Greece or other ancient societies of a certain scale and monumentality. All of these were deeply stratified societies, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women. Sacrifice is the shadow lurking behind this concept of civilisation; the sacrifice of freedoms, of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach – an idea of world order, the mandate of heaven, blessings from those insatiable gods.

There is something wrong here. The word ‘civilisation’ stems from a very different source and ideal. In ancient times, civilis meant those qualities of political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organise themselves through voluntary coalition. The modern Middle East provides many inspiring examples. In the summer of 2014, a coalition of Kurdish units broke the siege of Mount Sinjar in Iraq to provide safe passage, food and shelter for thousands of displaced Yazidis. Even as I write, the population of Mosul is raising to life a new city from the war-torn rubble of the old, street by street, with minimal government support.

Mutual aid, social cooperation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others: these are the kind of things that actually go to make civilisations. In which case, the true history of civilisation is only just starting to be written. It might begin with what archaeologists call ‘culture areas’ or ‘interaction spheres’, vast zones of cultural exchange and innovation that deserve a more prominent place in our account of civilisation. In the Middle East, they have deep roots that become visible towards the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 BCE. Thousands of years before the rise of cities (around 4000 BCE), village communities already shared basic notions of social order across the region known as the ‘fertile crescent’. Physical evidence left behind by common forms of domestic life, ritual and hospitality shows us this deep history of civilisation. It’s in some ways much more inspiring than monuments. The most important findings of modern archaeology might in fact be these vibrant and far-flung networks, where others expected to find only backward and isolated ‘tribes’.

These small prehistoric communities formed civilisations in the true sense of extended moral communities. Without permanent kings, bureaucrats or standing armies, they fostered the growth of mathematical and calendrical knowledge; advanced metallurgy, the cultivation of olives, vines and date palms, the invention of leavened bread and wheat beer. They developed the major textile technologies applied to fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and bead-work, the sail and maritime navigation. Through ties of kinship and commerce, they distributed these invaluable and cherished qualities of true civilisation. With ever-increasing accuracy, archaeological evidence allows us to follow the founding threads of this emerging fabric of civilisation, as it crosses the plains of lowland Iraq, weaves back and forth between the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, through the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, and down to the marshy head of the Persian Gulf. Civilisation, in this new sense, forms a cultural tapestry of startling complexity and grandeur, centre-less and open-ended, woven from a million tiny social bonds.

A moment’s reflection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilisation. Tracing the place of women in societies without writing often means using clues left, quite literally, in the fabric of material culture, such as painted ceramics that mimic both textile designs and female bodies in their forms and elaborate decorative structures. To take just one example, it’s hard to believe that the kind of complex mathematical knowledge displayed in early cuneiform documents, or in the layout of urban temples, sprang fully formed from the mind of a male scribe, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in preliterate times, through concrete practices such as the applied calculus and solid geometry of weaving and beadwork. What until now has passed for ‘civilisation’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

From such a starting point, we can see the true history of living civilisation. It reaches back far beyond the earliest monarchies or empires, resisting even the most brutal incursions of the modern state. It’s a civilisation we really can recognise when we see it, taste it, touch it, even in these darkest hours. There can be no justification for the wanton destruction of ancient monuments. But let’s not confuse that with the living pulse of civilisation, which often resides in what at first glance seems small, domestic or mundane. There we will find it, beating patiently, waiting for the light.

50. Rethinking cities, from the ground up

Author: David Wengrow

Authors: David Wengrow

Topics: anthropology, archaeology, gatherer-hunters, cities, prehistory, ancient history

Date: 4 September 2019

Date Published on T@L: 2023-03-20T21:34:43

Source: <medium.com/whose-society-whose-cohesion/rethinking-cities-from-the-ground-up-73d92059b15f>

New work in anthropology, archaeology and psychology shows just how similar we are to ancient hunter-gatherers, and what this means for a more radical understanding of 21^st century cities.

Cities begin in the mind — or so thought Elias Canetti.[171] Ancient hunter-gatherers must have pondered the existence of collectives much larger than the ones they actually lived in. Proof, he felt, was on the walls of caves, where they faithfully depicted species that moved together in uncountable masses. No doubt they also considered the unbounded society of the dead, outnumbering the living by orders of magnitude. Canetti speculated that cities began in the mind as ‘invisible crowds,’ when people could only picture their own societies escalating to rival those other collectives. Current advances in anthropology, archaeology, and the study of human cognition allow us to see that the Bulgarian-Austrian-British author was onto something.

From studies of modern hunter-gatherers, we get the idea that our capacity for social cohesion evolved in the context of small mobile foraging bands, comprising between 25 and 50 close kin. When foragers came together in larger groups — to share food, knowledge, or labour, or to inter-marry — these small bands were supposedly the building blocks. If we evolved to interact in such tightly bounded groups, then living in really big societies — cities, nations, and so on — goes against the evolutionary grain, and must require all sorts of ‘scaffolding’ to make it work: the invention of bureaucracy, central government, specialised agencies of enforcement, and so on.[172] This standard model of ‘traditional human society’ is actually a little more complicated. We also know now that it is wrong, and it is important to see why, because this begins to show what might be truly universal about cohesion in human societies.

The evolutionary story conventionally starts with discrete forager groups, ‘nested’ within a hierarchy. What does this actually mean? The basic idea is that elementary social units replicate at a variety of scales, like fractals in nature or mathematics; but unlike mathematical fractals, which have no upper limit, the growth of social fractals is supposedly constrained by a range of inherent factors, or at least this has been traditional scholarly wisdom for a long time. The most basic unit of ‘ancient’ human society was supposed to be the pair-bonded family, with shared investment in offspring. To provide for themselves and dependents, nuclear families were obliged to form larger ‘residential groups’ of roughly 100 or 150 persons. Biological relatedness was still the optimal criterion for inclusion, so in their composition these residential groups were supposed to resemble nuclear families, or slight extensions. As these larger groups formed, or so the theory goes, the social bonds linking them weakened, and conflicts arose. The larger the group, the less stable it was. Recent hunter-gatherers are supposed to exemplify this kind of primordial social system; but here comes the ‘worm in the bud.’

New work on the demography of living hunter-gatherers — drawing statistical comparisons from a global sample of cases, such as the Hadza of Tanzania and Australian Martu — shows that ‘nested’ social structures are not actually present.[173] The key problem lies with the composition of ‘residential groups.’ It turns out that, on close inspection, primary biological kin actually make up less than 10% of their total membership. Most participants are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals who do not share close genetic relationships, are scattered over very large territories, and may not even speak the same first languages. Potentially, they include all those who recognise each other as Hadza, or as Martu, BaYaka, !Kung San, and so on.

All this may seem counter-intuitive. It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one tight-bound, and the other virtually unbounded, with little in between. But from a cognitive angle, this is precisely the point. The neurological capacity to shift between scales is what makes human social cognition most obviously distinct from that of other primates.[174] Modern foragers are no different in this way from modern city-dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to myriad others who we may never meet: to take part in a macro-society, which exists most of the time as ‘virtual reality’ — a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles, and structures that are held in the mind, and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not — and probably have not ever — lived in small-scale societies.

None of which is to say absolute population sizes do not matter for social evolution. What it means is they do not matter in the kind of ways we tend to assume. In at least one sense, Canetti was right. Mass society exists in the mind before it becomes physical reality; and crucially, it also exists in the mind after it becomes a physical reality. Cities are a case in point. They are tangible things, but they are never stable. People constantly move in and out of view, sometimes on a daily basis, or seasonally for holidays and festivals, to visit faraway relatives, conduct business meetings, and so on. Yet cities have a life that transcends it all. This is not because of their absolute numbers. It is because we often think and act as people who belong to the city — as parts of a citizen body, as Londoners or New Yorkers. As the distinguished urban sociologist Claude Fischer put it:

Most city dwellers lead sensible, circumscribed lives, rarely go downtown, hardly know areas of the city they neither live nor work in, and see (in any sociologically meaningful way) only a tiny fraction of the city’s population. Certainly, they may on occasion — during rush hours, football games, etc. — be in the presence of thousands of strangers, but that does not necessarily have any direct effect on their personal lives. … urbanites live in small social worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate.[175]

All this applies in equal measure to ancient cities (as Aristotle said of Babylon, ‘… its capture was, two days later, still unknown to a part of the city.’). These observations were made long ago, and might seem obvious, but placing them in the light of evolutionary debates is important, because they cast doubt on some deeply held convictions about how cities originated, and what they may yet become.

Was living in cities a difficult feat for our species to accomplish, causing all kinds of new social tensions; obliging us to conjure up solutions to unprecedented problems? For some this is where ‘social complexity’ really begins, with the forging of institutions and technologies to make organised life possible on an urban scale. For others, it means the point where we had to surrender basic freedoms to avert chaos, delegating our futures to new classes of administrators, priests, kings, and warrior-politicians to make decisions for us and maintain order. As we have seen, evolutionary studies now point in the opposite direction: living in cities may not have been difficult or counter-intuitive at all, because cities are a certain type of unbounded group, and — from the standpoint of human cognition — living in unbounded groups is effectively what we had been doing all along.

But what about the actual evidence of early cities? Since at least the days of Gordon Childe, the celebrated archaeologist working in the first half of the 20^th century, scholars have tried to identify universal features of social evolution, associated with the novel scale of urban populations. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people make their first appearance in human history around 6,000 years ago. In the earliest examples on each continent, we find the seedbed of our modern cities; but as those examples multiply, and our understanding grows, the possibility of fitting them all into some neat evolutionary scheme diminishes. It is not just that some early cities lack the expected features of class divisions, wealth monopolies, and hierarchies of administration. The emerging picture suggests not just variability, but conscious experimentation in urban form, from the very point of inception. Intriguingly, much of this evidence runs counter to the idea that cities marked a ‘great divide’ between rich and poor, shaped by the interests of governing elites.

In fact, surprisingly few early cities show signs of authoritarian rule. There is no evidence for the existence of monarchy in the first urban centres of the Middle East or South Asia, which date back to the fourth and early third millennia BCE; and even after the inception of kingship in Mesopotamia, written sources tell us that power in cities remained in the hands of self-governing councils and popular assemblies. In other parts of Eurasia we find persuasive evidence for collective strategies, which promoted egalitarian relations in key aspects of urban life, right from the beginning. At Mohenjo-daro, a city of perhaps 40,000 residents, founded on the banks of the Indus around 2600 BCE, material wealth was decoupled from religious and political authority, and much of the population lived in high quality housing. In Ukraine, a thousand years earlier, prehistoric settlements already existed on a similar scale, but with no associated evidence of monumental buildings, central administration, or marked differences of wealth. Instead we find circular arrangements of houses, each with its attached garden, forming neighbourhoods around assembly halls; an urban pattern of life, built and maintained from the bottom-up, which lasted in this form for over eight centuries.[176]

A similar picture of experimentation is emerging from the archaeology of the Americas. In the Valley of Mexico, despite decades of active searching, no evidence for monarchy has been found among the remains of Teotihuacan, which had its magnificent heyday around 400 CE. After an early phase of monumental construction, which raised up the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, most of the city’s resources were channelled into a prodigious programme of public housing, providing multi-family apartments for its residents. Laid out on a uniform grid, these stone-built villas — with their finely plastered floors and walls, integral drainage facilities, and central courtyards — were available to citizens regardless of wealth, status, or ethnicity. Archaeologists at first considered them to be palaces, until they realised virtually the entire population of the city (all 100,000 of them) were living in such ‘palatial’ conditions.[177]

A millennium later, when Europeans first came to Mesoamerica, they found an urban civilisation of striking diversity. Kingship was ubiquitous in cities, but moderated by the power of urban wards known as calpolli, which took turns to fulfil the obligations of municipal government, distributing the highest offices among a broad sector of the altepetl (or city-state). Some cities veered towards absolutism, but others experimented with collective governance. Tlaxcalan, in the Valley of Puebla, went impressively far in the latter direction. On arrival, Cortés described a commercial arcadia, where the ‘order of government so far observed among the people resembles very much the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa for there is no supreme overlord.’ Archaeology confirms the existence here of an indigenous republic, where the most imposing structures were not palaces or pyramid-temples, but the residences of ordinary citizens, constructed around district plazas to uniformly high standards, and raised up on grand earthen terraces.[178]

Contemporary archaeology shows that the ecology of early cities was also far more diverse, and less centralised than once believed. Small-scale gardening and animal keeping were often central to their economies, as were the resources of rivers and seas, and indeed the ongoing hunting and collecting of wild seasonal foods in forests or in marshes, depending on where in the world we happen to be.[179] What we are gradually learning about history’s first city-dwellers is that they did not always leave a harsh footprint on the environment, or on each other; and there is a contemporary message here too. When today’s urbanites take to the streets, calling for the establishment of citizens’ assemblies to tackle issues of climate change, they are not going against the grain of history or social evolution, but with its flow. They are asking us to reclaim something of the spark of political creativity that first gave life to cities, in the hope of discerning a sustainable future for the planet we all share.

51. What Women Should Know About Communism

Author: He Yin Zhen

Authors: He Zhen

Topics: Communism, Anarcha-feminism, Feminism

Date: 1907

Date Published on T@L: 2021-06-08T13:36:08

Source: <afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/cup/hezhen_women_communism.pdf>

Notes: The intellectual life of early twentieth century China was a rich mixture of Confucian scholarship (clearly a fading tradition), along with a variety of western ideas — social Darwinism, feminism, anarchism, anti-Manchu revolutionary thought and so on.

He Zhen was the wife of the anti-Manchu anarchist leader Liu Shipei (1884–1917). The essay below appeared in the journal Natural Justice, which He Zhen and Liu Shipei published while in exile in Japan.

What is the most important thing in the world? Eating is the most important. You who are women: what is it that makes one suffer mistreatment? It is relying on others in order to eat. Let us look at the most pitiable of women. There are three sorts. There are those who end up as servants. If their master wants to hit them, he hits them. If he wants to curse them, he curses them. They do not dare to offer the slightest resistance, but slave for him from morning to night. They get up at four o’clock and do not go to bed until midnight. What is the reason for this? It is simply that the master has money and you depend on him in order to eat.

There are also women workers. Everywhere in Shanghai there are silk factories, cotton mills, weaving factories, and laundries. I don’t know how many women have been hired by these places. They too work all day into the evening, and they too lack even a moment for themselves. They work blindly, unable to stand straight. What is the reason for this? It is simply that the factory owner has money and you depend on him in order to eat.

There are also prostitutes. Every day they are beaten by their pimps. Whatever the customer is like, they must service him if he wants to be serviced, or they must gamble with him if he wants to gamble. People despise them. The “wild chickens” of Shanghai have to stand in the streets waiting for customers at midnight in the wind and snow. What is the reason for this? It is simply that since your family is poor you must sell yourself in this way in order to eat.

Aside from these three kinds of people, there are also concubines. They must swallow their resentment no matter how the first wife mistreats them. This too is because they depend on men in order to eat. As for widows, a very few who are from rich families will die to protect their virtue. Very many who are from poor families will die because they have no children [to support them] and cannot remarry. This too is because they have nothing to eat. But even if they survive, their lives are still bitter and so they actively seek to die. As for women who farm the fields or raise silkworms, their lives are also very bitter. The things they have to do are just enough to let them scrape by. Moreover, women who marry are beaten and cursed by their husbands or else ignored, and they dare not make trouble. [This is] not because they want to gaze upon their husband’s face but because they want to gaze upon a bowl of rice.

Thus those of us who are women suffer untold bitterness and untold wrongs in order to get hold of this rice bowl. My fellow women: do not hate men! Hate that you do not have food to eat. Why don’t you have any food? It is because you don’t have any money to buy food. Why don’t you have any money? It is because the rich have stolen our property. They have forced the majority of people into poverty and starvation. Look at the wives and daughters in the government offices and mansions. They live extravagantly with no worries about having enough to eat. Why are you worried every day about starving to death? The poor are people just as the rich are. Think about it for yourselves; this ought to produce some disquieting feelings.

There is now a kind of person who says that if women only had a profession, they would not fear starvation. Middle‐class families, for example, are sending their daughters to school, either to study a general course or to learn a little of handicrafts. Then if they get married they can become teachers. They won’t need to rely on men in order to survive. Likewise, families that are very poor are sending their daughters and daughters‐in‐law to work in factories. As long as they stay there day after day, they will have a way of making a living. They won’t have to become maids or prostitutes. This point of view has some truth in it. However, as I see it, schools too are owned and operated by certain people, and if you teach in a school, then you are depending on those people in order to eat. Factories too are built by investors, and if you work in a factory, you are depending on its owners in order to eat.

As long as you depend on others, you cannot be free. This is not much different from those who depended on others in previous ages and thus were subject to oppression. How could they be called independent? Moreover, when you depend on a school or a factory for your living, won’t you end up jobless if they close down or if your boss decides he has too many workers or if no one wants your skills? Therefore, in the final analysis depending on others is dangerous and not at all a good idea....

I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally. How? By practicing communism. Think of all the things in the world. They were either produced by nature or by individual labor. Why can rich people buy them but poor people cannot? It is because the world trades with money. It is because people seize the things they have bought with money for their exclusive use. If every single woman understands that nothing is more evil than money, and they all unite together to cooperate with men to utterly overthrow the rich and powerful and then abolish money, then absolutely nothing will be allowed for individuals to own privately. Everything from food to clothes and tools will be put in a place where people — men and women alike, as long as they perform a little labor — can take however much of whatever they want just like taking water from the ocean. This is called communism. At this time, not only will we be free of depending on others for food to eat, but also the food will all be good to eat. It will be possible to have good things to wear, good things to use, and good things to play with. Think about it: will this be a better future or not? I am not lying to you. If we only unite together, with this method [communism] we can naturally have a good future. There is no doubt about it. As we say colloquially, “the good times are coming.” This is what I have to say today.

52. Community Control, Workers’ Control, and the Cooperative Commonwealth

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Author: Howard “Howie” Hawkins

Authors: Howard Hawkins

Topics: green anarchism

Date: January 1, 1993

Date Published on T@L: 2020-12-04T07:38:55

Source: Society and Nature: The International Journal of Social Ecology, Vol. 3 (January 1993)

Notes: A shorter version of this article appeared in Regeneration: A Magazine of Left Green Social Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1991). Howard Hawkins is a founding member of both the Green Party USA and the Left Green Network. He lives in Syracuse, New York, where he is Director of CommonWorks, a federation of worker and consumer cooperatives.

The principles of the Left Green Network[180] refer to the democratic, socially owned, cooperative, and ecological economy we envision as a ‘Cooperative Commonwealth’. It goes without saying that Left Greens believe that the people should control the day-to-day operations of their workplaces. But what about the broader social decisions concerning the economy – the structure of demand; the coordination of distribution networks; the disposition of surplus between investment, public goods, and private consumption; the choice of technology; the scale of production units and distribution networks; the harmonization of the economy with the environment? Should these be decisions made by workers or by all citizens? In short, in our vision of a cooperative commonwealth, what should be the relation between workers’ control and community control?

Two leftist models that claim to be democratic, socially owned, cooperative and ecological can be dismissed in short order. One, market socialism, based on producer and consumer cooperatives, reproduces the evils of markets: the predatory ethics of competition and greed; the dearth of public goods; the surfeit of ecological and social ‘externalities’; the expansive market logic of limitless growth that is devouring the biosphere. The other, democratic socialism, based on central planning by elected state agencies, entrenches a new class of technocrats in privileged positions and does not overcome the irrationalities that command planning creates, whether the planning class is elected or self-appointed.

This is not to preclude cooperatives or the democratization of public enterprise and planning (e.g., direct election of the board of a public electric utility that is currently appointed) from playing a role as transitional forms and demands. But I want to focus here on the leftist traditions whose maximum program is an economy coordinated from below without the market or the state.

The libertarian left has offered two basic models for this kind of postrevolutionary economy: the worker-oriented models of anarcho-syndicalism[181], council communism[182], guild socialism[183], negotiated coordination[184], and participatory planning[185], and the community-oriented models of anarcho-communism[186].

Anarcho-syndicalism and council communism propose to organize the economy around workplace assemblies that are coordinated through mandated and recallable delegates to workers’ councils which are federated by industries and by geographical areas. The geographical workers’ federations would determine demand in their areas and coordinate supply, while the industry federations would determine how to produce to supply the demand. The area and industry federations would negotiate on a plan to balance supply and demand.

Guild socialism, negotiated coordination, and participatory planning build on this model, adding consumer councils to determine demand. The industry federations determine how to produce what is needed, and the area federations coordinate the distribution. In this case, negotiation between the federations of workers’ councils and consumers’ councils would determine the plan.[187]

Anarcho-communism proposes to organize the economy around federations of community assemblies as the policy-making bodies, initially with federations of workplace assemblies, by area and by industry, as administrative bodies. In this case, workers’ control is accountable to a larger framework of community control in determining the plan of coordination.

In the longer run, anarcho-communism seeks to progressively dissolve into the community the separate enterprises based on a social and geographical distribution of labor. By physically decentralizing production to create rounded communities that reintegrate production and consumption, agriculture and manufacture, natural beauty and urban amenities, mental and manual labor, means of livelihood and ways of life, the question of workers’ control as distinct from community control is eventually rendered moot.

In the nineteenth century, however, with the rising factory system, the question of workers’ control was anything but moot for anarchists. Anarchists thought they agreed on a vision of society as a dual federation: economic, a federation of self-managing workers’ associations, and territorial, a federation of free communes (i.e., municipalities). But how workers’ control should relate to community control was never clearly posed until the 1880s, when it led to a split rather than a resolution.

In 1880, Swiss anarchists in the Jura Federation, unable to make up their minds, simply left the question open in one of their documents: “Is it to be a general assembly of all inhabitants, or delegates from the trades … which will draw up the constitution of the commune?”[188]

By the end of the decade, however, the two possible answers to that question had split the anarchists into rival tendencies: the syndicalists who looked to the workers to expropriate the capitalists and reorganize the economy under trade union control and the communists who looked to the risen people to expropriate the capitalists and reorganize the economy under municipal control. The class-conscious syndicalists ridiculed the communists for seeking popular alliances with the middle and lumpen classes, while the anti-reformist communists ridiculed the syndicalists for their trade union struggles for ameliorative reforms within capitalism like better wages and the eight-hour day.

Another crucial difference from our viewpoint as social ecologists was that the anarcho-syndicalists were generally enamored of industrial technology and wanted to adapt anarchist principles to it, while the anarcho-communists wanted to adapt machine technology to integrated communities that combined industry and agriculture and dissolved the social division of labor.[189] Although anarcho-syndicalism became the dominant tendency by the turn of the twentieth century, the anarcho-communists’ territorial orientation naturally dovetailed with ecological concerns for the immediate land and environment of free communes (i.e., municipalities). The anarcho-communists’ interest in adapting technology to decentralized communities lead to a revival of anarcho-communism in the 1960s as the New Left turned its attention to issues of participatory democracy, urbanism, bureaucracy, community, technology, and ecology. Sixties activists read Paul Goodman’s writings on these subjects and rediscovered Kropotkin’s thinking on them. Murray Bookchin found a growing audience for his explicitly ecologically grounded anarcho-communism. These perspectives then found their way into the left-wing of the anti-nuclear alliances of the 1970s and the Green movement that emerged in the 1980s.

Yet the question of workers’ control remains a vexing one for eco-anarchists. Between the economic structure we inherit today and the eco-communities and bioregions of tomorrow lies a process of movement building and then fundamental change in power relations.

In the meantime, many of us will spend eight hours a day at a workplace year after year. The day after a revolution, we will still have the centralized structure of physical production and distribution to coordinate even as we being to decentralize it. So the answer, it seems to me, lies in not choosing between workers’ control and community control, but in finding the proper relationship between the two for today and for how the relationship should evolve as the physical production structure is remade to correspond to a libertarian community structure.

I will argue that the anarcho-communist tradition – and particularly the libertarian municipalist approach advanced by Murray Bookchin[190] – offers the best framework for integrating workers’ control and community control in a process of social change that ultimately yields a marketless, moneyless, stateless cooperative commonwealth. My basic position is:

The building blocks, power base, and policy-making bodies of a democratic political economy should be local community assemblies, inclusive of all people, that coordinate with each other through confederal administrative councils of mandated, recallable, and rotating delegates. While self-management of the day-to-day operations by the workers of each workplace should be affirmed, the basic economic policies concerning needs, distribution, allocation of surplus, technology, scale, and ecology should be determined by all citizens. In short, workers’ control should be placed within the broader context of, and ultimately accountable to, community control.

Over time, the community should reorganize work so that people are not tied to any particular workplace, but rotate among a variety of workplaces and types of work (mental/manual, conceptual/rote, agriculture/manufacture, etc.). At the same time, the physical structure of the economy should be progressively decentralized until production and consumption, workers and community, are largely reunited in eco-communities and bioregions, and the question of workers’ control is rendered moot.

In the meantime, the final word on all social policy, including economic policy, should rest with all the people in their community assemblies. Fighting to create and empower these assemblies, to bring more and more political and economic power under their control, in opposition to the state and capital, is the best means we have for creating this sort of cooperative commonwealth. Workplace organizing should be an organic extension of the community-based movement.

The reasons for this position will become clear by discussing the arguments between the worker-oriented and community-oriented theories. These arguments bear not only on what the economy should ultimately look like, but also on how we organize and struggle to get there. The arguments have revolved around four basic questions:

1. Democracy – What institutional framework best enables people to take direct control of society, uproot all forms of hierarchy, and discover their common interests?

2. The Revolutionary Subject – What social sectors are likely to become radicalized and take militant action?

3. Power – What social sectors and forms of organization and action have the potential power to overthrow capital and the state?

4. Transitional Strategy – What forms of organization and action best prefigure and build toward the new society?

Democracy

A fundamental problem with the worker-oriented positions from the viewpoint of democracy is that not everyone is a worker. Many are too young or old, sick, disabled, unemployed, rearing children, working for themselves outside the formal economy, and so forth. At any one time, those with ‘official’ jobs are only around 40 percent of the population and 60 percent of adults.

Anarcho-syndicalism and council communism thus exclude or underrepresent in economic decision making many social groupings affected by those decisions, such as women, minorities, and the elderly who are not involved in production because they are rearing children and housekeeping, discriminated against, or retired. This is true for both the revolutionary unions or workers’ councils before the revolution and the worker-planned economy after the revolution.

Guild socialism, negotiated coordination, and participatory planning give every citizen a voice through the consumer federations. But the problem here is that by granting equal power in the planning negotiations between the federations of workers’ councils and consumers’ councils, workers basically get two votes in the planning process, one on the production side and one on the consumption side. Nonworkers only get one vote on the consumption side. This privileges workers in the decision-making process.

A community assembly, on the other hand, is open to all citizens. It is thus potentially a nonhierarchical public sphere where all interests and concerns get a hearing and everyone has an equal standing – one person, one vote.

The workplace, by contrast, is not a rounded public sphere. It is one-sided, concerned with production. There is a built-in contradiction in the workerist models between the workers’ functional interests in their workplaces as against the interests of the community as a whole. In the planning process, the workers either decide everything (anarcho-syndicalism, council communism) or get an addition vote in the planning process (guild socialism, negotiated coordination, participatory planning). Either way, the workers hold a veto over society. Either way – even without the profit motive to fuel competition – each workers’ assembly, council, and federation has an interest in easing its own burdens and shifting them on to other functional groups or on to society and nature as ‘externalities’. Why should the workers of a workplace or a whole industry produce more to meet demand? Why should they shut down ‘their’ plant for environmental or productivity reasons and relocate to another modernized plant or another branch of production? Why should they take affirmative action to diversify their workforce racially and sexually?

No internal dynamic exists in the workerist models to reconcile the particular interests of workplaces and industries with the general interest of the broader community. To the contrary, the inherent structural tendency – despite, let me reemphasize, the absence of a competitive struggle for profits – is for self-aggrandizement by each functional group. In the historical example of the Spanish revolution of 1936–37, the dual federation structure of the anarcho-syndicalists came into conflict with itself, with the industrial federations finally asserting themselves over the area federations. In the workerist models, each functional group has a particular interest – as against other functional groups as well as the community as a whole.

In order to overcome the divisions which pose one group against another along the lines of race, gender, ethnicity, age, occupation, class, and so forth, we need a basic social unit which is inclusive of all people. The territorial defined local community, institutionalized as a directly democratic community assembly, meets this need.

In the community assembly, different social groups (genders, ethnic groups, ages, classes) and functional groups (occupations, both formal jobs and informal work) must coexist. Direct communication is possible. Conflicting interests can be dealt with directly by the people who have to live the decisions.

Community assemblies do not automatically transcend race, class, gender, and other divisions (a problem I will return to below with respect to how a municipalist approach can deal with the historically intransigent racism of the U.S.). But all interests are brought together on an equal footing in a deliberative democratic process that can lead to the discovery of common interests. Sectional interests, be they workers, women, or ethnic minorities, can still caucus and organize to press their concerns. They can still take direct action to force a community that is failing to deal with their concerns to do so.

The difference between workplace and community assemblies is that the internal dynamic of direct democracy in communities gives a hearing to solutions that bring out the common ground and, where there is not consensus, an equal vote to every member of the community.

Democracy is no guarantee that common ground will be adopted, but it is a necessary condition. The only guarantee is that when one section of society has institutionalized privileges, it will use those privileges to advance their particular interest at the expense of the general interest.

Given the present-day uneven geographical distribution of industry, classes, and ethnic groups, not all local communities will bring all the social interests and functions together. But at the municipal level of confederated community assemblies, and still more at the regional level of confederated municipalities, these interests and conflicts will be incorporated into the deliberations of the confederal grassroots democracy. Indeed, the sharing of resources and productive facilities among communities regionally and among confederated regions will serve to solidarize communities on the basis of common material needs as well as ideological commitments.

Building on the foundation of a socially decentralized coordination of the economy, an additional policy of progressive physical decentralization of the industrial structure to create more self-sufficing (but not autarkic) communities would reinforce and enhance democracy. The historic breach between anonymous producers and consumers that was created by the expansion of capitalism into a global market nexus could be progressively dissolved. To the extent that production and consumption were reunited on a human scale, society would be rendered more comprehensible and social self-management more feasible. Economic ‘externalities’ would be ‘internalized’ as a natural and normal community concern. The community oriented toward its ecological bioregion, not the workplace oriented toward international divisions of labor and networks of exchange, is the framework around which we can construct relatively self-sufficing, rounded communities.

With the rotation of community members among a variety of workplaces, neither factory, farm, shop, or office would function as separate interests in the community. The temporary functional divisions of labor as people rotate among tasks would not correspond to a permanent social division of labor and the permanent sectional interests we have today that divide humanity against itself. Workplaces would essentially become administrative agencies implementing policy made by the whole community. People with special expertise in branches of production would be elected to advisory boards to propose policies that the community could adopt, amend, or reject. The economy would become truly politicized as one aspect of the public affairs addressed by the community assemblies and their confederal councils.

Work rotation could also be organized by the area federations in the workerist models, but this would still institutionalize the workers as a distinct class with a unique and privileged relation to the means of production and particular interest in the decision-making structure. If a classless society is the goal, then people who work should not have any privileges over those who do not work. In the case of work rotation policies and schedules, it is more democratic for the community as a whole to determine work assignments because they not only affect those who do the work, but also their friends, families, and neighbors.

The community provides us with a framework for integrating these concerns and ultimately dissolving enterprises into a community’s ecology and way of life. Separate enterprises, after all, are an essential condition of capitalism, the cells of the capitalist mode of production, the form which property takes under capitalism. Where control over the means of production is divided among enterprises, the links between them can only be commercial contracts to buy each others’ output. Models of economic democracy based on workers’ control of the workplace only reinforce this condition of capitalism.[191]

In sum, the most democratic structure for a cooperative commonwealth would be (1) workers’ control of the everyday operations of workplaces with workers rotating among workplaces (until physical decentralization largely reunites production and consumption, workers and community, in eco-communities and bioregions that render workers’ control as distinct from community control no longer a question), and (2) community control of the basic economic decisions concerning the structure of consumption, the allocation of production responsibilities, the disposition of surplus, the choice of technology, the scale of production and distribution, and harmonization with the environment.

The Revolutionary Subject

Workerist positions more from a belief that the working class was the revolutionary class than from abstract speculation about the structure of an ideal society in the future. Until the revolutions of 1848, radicals cast their views in populist terms – a broad coalition of ‘The People’ vs. the small elites with ill-begotten privileges. Marx and Engels, of course, changed that view by providing the emerging workers’ movement with a theory about their role as the class that would rise to power and, in doing so, abolish all classes. Class struggle, not popular struggle, became the watchword of radicals. As Marx and Engels declared in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”[192]

The Marxist theory of the working class as the revolutionary subject (a view which anarcho-syndicalism and council communism share) can be summed up in four key propositions:

1. The basic dynamic in capitalist society is the class struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. The Communist Manifesto:

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses this distinctive feature: It has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat.[193]

2. The working class is an ‘immense majority’. The Communist Manifesto:

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.[194]

3. Because of its exploited and dehumanized position in relation to the means of production, the working class is compelled to become a revolutionary class. Marx and Engels:

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.[195]

When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all … because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary … It cannot emancipate itself without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern school of labor. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.[196]

4. The industrial proletariat is the core of the revolutionary working class because the factory system is training it in science, technology, cooperation, and unity. First Engels, then Marx:

Finally, it may be observed that it is the factory workers … who form the solid core of the working-class movement. … As one branch of handicraft industry after another is transformed by the factory system, so more and more workers flock into the various working-class movements.[197]

Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor usable only in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing magnates of capital … grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.[198]

History has not developed the way Marx and syndicalists thought it would.

First of all, capitalism has not simplified the social question into a two-class struggle. Second, the industrial working class is not the immense majority, but a minority and decreasing in social weight. On the one side is the growing ‘underclass’ of the permanently unemployed, surviving off the dole and often petty criminal pursuits, as well as the growing ‘servant class’ of highly casualized workers in personal services and subcontractor sweatshops. On the other side is a smaller but growing, highly educated, securely employed, and well-paid strata of technical and professional but still waged workers. All may be exploited in Marxian terms, but they view each other as quite different status groups, not class comrades.

Moreover, as capitalist development has proceeded, stratification has congealed around a wide array of nonclass identities, creating a myriad of racial, sexual, occupational, educational, bureaucratic, regional, and international hierarchies. To theoretically impose from the outside of this reality an objective class commonality based on a relation to productive forces does not mean subjective class consciousness will automatically follow. To the contrary, for the last 40 years, it has been the transclass issues that have mobilized people – the so-called ‘new social movements’ around peace, the environment, feminism, gay liberation, racial equality, ethnic autonomy, community control, and a whole array of cultural movements that reject the alienated structure of needs and the compensatory consumption that have grown with the commodification of social relations. Popular struggles against spiritual impoverishment, much more than class struggle around material exploitation, have been the radical movements since the New Left mobilized initially around civil rights, anti-colonialism, anti-bureacratism, and banning the bomb in the 1950s. The ‘immense majority’ today are the many alienated and oppressed sectors of society, not a single class defined by its relationship to the means of production. Economistic ‘class struggle’ is too one-sided and parochial to express the universalization of the struggle against multiple forms of hierarchy and irrationality. The democratic struggles of ‘The People’ better express this generalization of the struggle against myriad forms of domination than the two-class struggle of wage labor and capital. The community is the potential public sphere where this broad array of oppositional forces can generalize their particular struggles around a common program of radical democratization. Struggles at the point of production are limited to that sphere and are easily isolated there. Even a general strike can pit workers not only against capitalists, but against many segments of the popular strata that are inconvenienced by the strike and perceive it as the action of a ‘special interest’, not on behalf of the general interest.

Third, the class struggle no doubt continues under capitalism. But it has become a struggle over how to best manage it and distribute its product, not over its right to exist. To continue to impute unique revolutionary dynamics to it after witnessing the last 75 years is to be blind to the evolution of revolutionary syndicalism into collective bargaining and revolutionary socialism into ameliorative social democracy – in short, into the day-to-day administration of capitalism.

Fourth, far from being a school for revolutionary socialism, the factory has been a school for docility. If one examines the history of workers’ uprisings, one usually finds a ‘working class’ that was new to the factory system, in transition from the farm or artisanship. Whether one examines the European uprisings of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the workers’ council movements throughout Europe after World War I, the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37, or Polish Solidarity in the 1980s, one finds that the activists came from a much wider array of life situations than industrial workers and that the industrial workers were generally in recent transition to those occupations. Moreover, the children of the radical industrial workers were socialized into and tended to adapt to the factory system with its military-like chain of command and obedience. The hereditary working class came to regard the hierarchical discipline of the factory more as the inevitable nature of things, not a burden to be resisted; it is a hierarchy of occupational grades more as a career and status ladder to climb than a prop to knock out from under the bosses. The factory ‘disciplined, organized, united’ workers into capitalism, not into opposition to it.

Marx hoped that workers struggling for their own interests would raise a general interest that would ultimately dissolve class and national divisions into a classless society. Looking back today, it is fair to conclude that when workers have struggled around their own economic interests, they have usually sought merely a better deal from capitalism, not a classless society.

In any case, the industrial structure that Marx saw emerging and analyzed with often remarkable prescience is passing. With automation, the fate of the industrial worker is that of the farmer. Factories, like farms, will remain, but automated machinery and robots will replace most of the human labor. Indeed, we are in the midst of a technological revolution based on microelectronics and biotechnology that will be as profound in its social implications as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It will be ‘postindustrial’ in terms of what most ordinary people do for a living, but super-industrialized in terms of the degree of mechanized production.

Along with this technological revolution is a restructuring of the social paths through which wealth and income circulate. In fact, just as the factory system was introduced by capitalists to mobilize and discipline labor before most of the technology of smokestack industries was developed, so, too, capitalist restructuring today is driving the technological revolution. Heightened international competition is undermining the ‘social contract’ between labor and capital that yielded the ‘middle class’ blue collar worker with union protection, secure employment, and relatively decent benefits between the 1950s and the 1970s in the U.S. In order to compete, global corporations are employing new technologies of instant global communication and automation to pit U.S. workers against cheap labor abroad and against robots at home. The ‘Fordist’ circuit of accumulation, based on mass production for mass consumption, is giving way before a new regime of accumulation based on luxurious ‘overconsumption’ by privileged upper strata with subsistence or less for an underclass which, when employed, works as low-wage temps producing goods and servicing the well-to-do. The barrel-shaped income distribution, with the securely employed blue collar worker in the solid middle income brackets, is giving way to the hourglass-shaped structure of income stratification. On the one side is a shrinking strata of securely employed, highly skilled, often unionized skilled workers and technicians. On the other side is a growing mass of underemployed, poorly paid, rarely unionized, and generally marginalized workers in the services and in the ‘global factory’ of dispersed networks of interchangeable, highly automated, modular industrial units. These production units usually require only a limited workforce, often hired on a part-time, short-term basis, much like migrant farm workers.

In short, we are witnessing the decomposition of class structure of industrial society. Millions of people are in transition, with no stable position in the system of social stratification. Millions are becoming expendable, their labor no longer needed, with growing criminality and social unrest from below and brutality and repression from above. An increasingly repressive, militarized, state-guided capitalism is emerging to keep ‘order’.

A popular struggle for grassroots democracy, not a class struggle around material interests, is the weak link of this emerging structure of militarized state capitalism. The victims of this restructuring are becoming as deaf traditional worker-oriented class appeals of the old left as they would be to the old agrarian appeals of the nineteenth century populist movement of farmers and sharecroppers. But ‘The People’, the revolutionary subject of the classical democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, could return if populist alliances in post-Fordist cities can be developed between the middle strata concerned with the quality of life and the marginalized concerned with simple access to the means to life. Economically and technologically displaced persons are receptive to the material issues raised by this restructuring – economic insecurity, the scapegoating of minorities, poisoning by toxics, the ‘poverty draft’ of the poor for foreign wars. But the more economically secure middle strata are just as receptive to the cultural and moral sides of these same issues – meaningless work, the absence of community, the general degradation of the natural and urban environments, the mean spirit of militarism. Democracy is the programmatic link between these two populations, which combined make up the ‘immense majority’.

Libertarian municipalism as a program of popular empowerment thus potentially broadens the social base of a revolutionary movement. It calls for community assemblies as the social form through which ‘The People’ can find their voice and power. Community assemblies provide a forum in which all the issues can be addressed and integrated into a common program that addresses alienation as well as exploitation and poverty; the desire for community as well as oppression and hierarchy based on race, gender, age, and occupation; humanly scaled ecological technologies as well as cleaning up toxics; peace and international cooperation as well as the poverty draft.

Through neighborhood assemblies, neighborhood mandation of municipal council representatives, and neighborhood power to revoke council decisions and recall their representatives, both the material concerns of the marginalized and the quality of life concerns of the middle strata could begin to be addressed. Divided, the capitalists run the cities by playing the middle and the marginalized off against each other. United, the middle and the marginalized could use municipal institutions to begin to remake their cities to meet the concerns of both groups. By linking up with other cities, municipal confederations could resist the centralized power of national states and global corporations and ultimately replace them with new forms of grassroots political and economic democracy.

What gives grassroots democracy its radical thrust is that real democracy is the last thing modern state capitalism wants. It short-circuits the military, state, and corporate managers’ need for centralized control and repression to maintain stability and ‘order’. Quantitative economic demands can be granted for a time to demobilize and pacify those who demand them. They can be used to play each sectional interest off against the others (as witness the Republicans, from Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ to Bush’s constant quota baiting). But the qualitative, structural demands around democratic self-government in order to restore environmental quality and create meaningful work and community are ‘wedge issues’, to borrow from the Republicans’ strategic lexicon, with the difference being, however, that these ‘wedge issues’ isolate the elites from the people, instead of driving a wedge between different popular sectors. Capitalism’s dynamic of limitless growth stands directly at odds with the goal of an ecological society in balance with nature. Democratic control of economic development directly challenges capital’s prerogatives and profit-oriented dynamic. The desire for meaning in work and everyday life brings the irrationality and atomization created by market society into question. These are issues better suited to broad popular struggles organized in communities than to narrow economic struggles organized on the job.

Race and the Revolutionary Subject

The persistence of racism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, fascism, religious fundamentalism, and other ‘socialisms of fools’ among workers is decisive evidence that capitalism is not ‘progressive’ in the sense of breaking down all irrational divisions of society against itself before its own rationality based on the logic of profit. Indeed, today, as advanced capitalism enjoys a legitimacy worldwide unparalleled in its history, we are witnessing an explosion of nationalism, racism, and religious fundamentalism around the world. Far from having “stripped [workers] of every trace of national character,” far from teaching them to regard religion as mere “bourgeois prejudices,” as Marx and Engels had it in The Communist Manifesto,[199] the development of capitalism has strengthened nationalism and religious escapism. The history of capitalism shows that workers will frequently act against they consciously understand to be their rational economic interests in order to participate in irrational myths like nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Ideology and psychologically rooted subconscious motivations are at least as powerful as economic interest in shaping behavior. The turn of much of the German working class to fascism in clear contradiction of their conscious understanding of their class interests provoked Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, a reevaluation of the Left’s political approach, particularly its failure to deal with the psychological internationalization of oppression, and the blind obedience to, and identification with, oppressive authority.[200] It seems clear a transformative political practice has to do more than appeal to economic interest.

The participatory nature of direct action – and particularly direct democracy in community assemblies as the highest form of direct action – can have a transformative effect on participants, enabling them to discover their powers to think and act for themselves without the sanction of faraway, mystified authority figures, be they statist, religious, or commercial media celebrities selling lifestyle images to display (including apoliticism) rather than products to use. Libertarian municipalism seeks to create this kind of participatory politics that is transformative for its participants.

But that still leaves the question of majority oppression of minorities on the basis of race. How do we uproot racism? In the U.S., the question of racism is particularly crucial given the 500 years of capitalist development in which the class system of exploitation has been based upon the systematic racial domination of people of color. Majority rule has meant white racist rule. Democracy provides no simple solution if the majority continues to dominate ethnic minorities. Moreover, technological changes today are rendering labor less needed, threatening particularly the unskilled labor of racially dominated groups but also the labor of millions of whites. With downwardly mobile whites looking for scapegoats, a mass fascistic movement that could threaten the very survival of people of color in the U.S. is not out of the question. Workplace organizing is less and less relevant to the particular situation of ethnic minorities rendered unemployed and expandable by technological development.

A municipalist approach, on the other hand, starting from the existing geographical segregation of people of color by white racism, can advance a program of confederations of self-governing African-American, Latino, and Native American communities. These self-governing confederations could develop a measure of mutual aid and self-reliance that could insulate them somewhat from an intransigent white racist majority. Hopefully, by demonstrating an inspiring example of confederal grassroots democracy and economic cooperation, radicalized communities of people of color could radicalize white communities by showing a better way to live and interrelate as human beings. At the least, by entering into the larger society with an independent power base, radicalized communities of color would confront white communities with a choice between continuing racism or developing a new relationship of mutual respect and equality – between continuing to ally on racist grounds with the white capitalist and statist elites that exploit and dominate them, or developing a new alliance on democratic grounds with communities of color in order to win their own freedom from exploitation and domination by the ruling elites. The basic program for uprooting racism, then, is a program of empowerment and self-government by the racially oppressed.

The movement for black political power in the 1960s was unfortunately taken over by black liberals who have simply demanded that blacks be put in positions to do what whites used to do without changing the system. But there was also a radical black power perspective advanced that sought black control of the black community in order to create fundamental anti-capitalist social change in America as a whole. Starting from the facts that blacks were concentrated in the cities and being displaced from the workforce by automation, James and Grace Lee Boggs (who are today active in the Detroit Greens) called in 1965 for:

… self-government of the major cities by the black majority, mobilized behind leaders and organizations of its own creation and prepared to reorganize the structure of city government and city life from top to bottom. …

The city is the base which we must organize as the factories were organized in the 1930’s. We must struggle to control, to govern the cities, as workers struggled to control and govern the factories in the 1930’s.

… Black Political Power would institute a crash program to utilize the most advanced technology to free people from all forms of manual labor. It would also take immediate steps to transform the concept of welfare to one of human dignity or of well-faring and well-being. The idea of people faring well off the fruits of technology and the labors of past generations without the necessity to work for a living must become as normal as the idea of organized labor has become. There should be no illusion that this can be accomplished without expropriating those now owning and controlling the economy. It could not therefore be accomplished simply on a city-wide basis, i.e., without defeating the national power structure. However, by establishing beachheads in one or more cities, black revolutionary governments would be in the most strategic position to contend with and eventually defeat this national power structure.[201]

This radical black power perspective found echoes in other sectors of the radical movements of people of color over the next decade, in the demands for community control of the schools, police, and businesses in inner cities across the country and in the ‘intercommunalism’ of the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement which called for community control of all communities and cooperative relations between communities. These were radical municipalist and confederalist approaches whose relevance has only increased as the trends in technological unemployment, impoverishment, imprisonment, and repression have accelerated for communities of color.

Power

For Marx and Engels, the schooling in scientific technology, social cooperation, and class consciousness that the factory system provided for industrial workers was to be used in an independent workers’ party aiming for state power. Whether by election or insurrection, it was only a matter of time before the numerically increasing working class would come to power. But, as we have noted above, occupational hierarchies among waged working people have mitigated against coalescing around a common class program.

Where strong labor parties have been consolidated and taken state power (Sweden, France, Germany, the U.K., among others), they have streamlined and administered capitalism, not replaced it. Party elites may have been elected into office, not into real power. They have been no match for the extra-electoral powers at the disposal of the ruling elites – capital mobility, entrenched bureaucracy, corporate media, military repression. Recognizing that the parliamentary road is self-defeating and that only a majoritarian movement based on direct action to carry through the program of social reconstruction has the power to overthrow the ruling elites, worker-oriented revolutionaries have focused on direct action at the point of production, building toward the revolutionary general strike.

With the turn of the century wave of general strikes, especially the formation of workers’ councils (soviets) in the 1905 Russian uprising, the mass strike became a key strategic perspective for more radical Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg and later the council communists. Even earlier, anarcho-syndicalists had put the general strike at the heart of their strategy. Not only was the capitalist system making industrial workers radical, they believed, it was also positioning them in the key positions in the economic structure to resist and eventually overthrow capitalism. As Rudolf Rocker explained:

… in Spain the widespread strike movement among the workers and peasants after the Fascist revolt in July, 1936, developed in a “social general strike” (huelga general) and led to armed resistance, and with this to the abolishment of the capitalist economic order and the reorganization of the economic life by the workers themselves.

The great importance of the general strike lies in this: At one blow it brings the whole economic system to a standstill and shakes it to its foundations. Moreover, such an action is in no wise dependent on the practical preparedness of all the workers, as all the citizens of a country have never participated in a political overturn. That the organized workers in the most important industries quit work is enough to cripple the entire economic mechanism, which cannot function without the daily provision of coal, electric power, and raw materials of every sort. …

For the workers the general strike takes the places of the barricades of the political uprising. It is for them a logical outcome of the industrial system whose victims they are today, and at the same time it offers them their strongest weapon in their struggle for liberation…[202]

Historical experience has provided us with a number of instances in which workers had the point of production in their hands, but not the social power that people like Rocker thought it would bring. The Russian factory committees and soviets of 1917 were not able to avoid being outmaneuvered by the Bolsheviks and the centralization of power in a party-state. The Spanish Revolution of 1936–37 was not able to beat back the fascists even though they had the means of production under their control in Catalonia, Aragon, and other areas. The Hungarian workers’ councils of 1956 were simply crushed by Soviet armed might. Polish Solidarity was not able to overthrow the Polish government despite its incredibly vast network of workers’ councils and broad popular support.

Taking over the point of production is necessary, but not sufficient. We need a strategy that deals with all the dimensions of social power. Another crucial necessary condition is to win over the rank and file of the armed forces. A list of recent revolutions shows how crucial it is: the Armed Forces Movement that overthrew the Portuguese fascists in 1974, the overthrow of Marcos in the Philippines by the ‘People’s Power’ movement, the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, and the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989. A sectoral workers’ movement is less likely to find sympathy with rank and file soldiers than a popular movement based in communities where soldiers’ families, friends, and neighborhoods are.

In any case, the industrial structure that once made the general strike appeal so potentially powerful is being restructured. A traditional problem for radical labor organizing has always been the fact that the higher strata of the working class – the more skilled, better paid, and more securely employed – have been easier to organize. This problem is only exacerbated today with the new industrial structure that has emerged with capitalist restructuring over the last 20 years. Industrial unions, or federations of workers’ councils organized by industry, made some sense in the old ‘Fordist’ industrial structure based on a locally integrated factory wit ha large and stable work force. But the heightened mobility of capital in the new industrial structure has weakened workers’ power at the point of production. It is very easy for capital to instantly switch production to another plant halfway around the world in order to undermine militant workers.

On the other hand, relative to the national state, local government finds itself with heightened responsibility, and hence leverage, for the conditions of production that attract investment. Not only tax breaks and pollution abatements, but schools, public services, and the general quality of the local environment are increasingly the factors corporations weigh when locating new plants and offices. This gives community-based movements some leverage over the direction of economic development, and potentially more leverage when a network of community movements emerges that can counter capital’s attempt to play one community off another.[203]

After 150 years in which worker-oriented theories have dominated the Left, it is easy to forget that most of the high points of revolutionary upheaval in the last millennium have been communal peasant movements and urban municipal movements. From the free cities and the leagues or confederations they formed for periods from the tenth century on, through the many peasant uprisings seeking communal autonomy from oppressive landlords, the American and French Revolutions with their town meetings and neighborhood assemblies, and even such high points of ‘proletarian socialism’ as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936–37, it has been multi-class, popular movements aimed at local self-government in opposition to the centralized state that have shaken the foundations of hierarchical society, both feudal and capitalist.[204] Indeed, in the larger historical perspective, it is the workers’ movement that is the ‘new social movement’ – and probably a transitory one corresponding to the rise and fall of the factory system. The transclass democratic movements are the older and more abiding forms of popular struggle.[205] It is not the working class incubating as capitalism develops, but the municipality still surviving despite the massive growth of the state that is the potential time bomb that could explode and shake state capitalism beyond recuperation.

With its potential for direct democracy and confederal forms of coordination that stand in stark opposition to statist forms, the municipality and municipal confederations create a local framework through which millions of people can act directly to replace market society and the bureaucratic state with free, egalitarian, and cooperative social forms. By broadening the social forces that can be mobilized, a libertarian municipalist approach can sustain and institutionalize much more popular power against the state and capital that can a workers’ control approach limited to the workplace.

Transitional Strategy

A transitional strategy seeks to raise demands and develop forms of action and organization which progressively build the conditions in which popular revolutionary action becomes possible.

First, it should raise demands that mobilize people around their immediate concerns, but in such a way that in the course of struggling for them, people are educated as to the nature of the system and the need for fundamental change. The demands and the struggle for them should serve as a bridge between present consciousness and revolutionary consciousness.

Second, the demands, if won, should not improve capitalism, but impinge upon its logic by creating new centers of democratic counter-power which prefigure the society we want to create. As the Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World put it, we need forms of organization and action which begin to create “the structure of the new society within of the old.”

Third, the demands and forms of action and organization should aim at shaking the system, provoking a crisis, and opening the door to fundamental social transformation.

Anarcho-syndicalism and council communism viewed the struggle between wage labor and capital at the point of production as meeting these requirements for a transitional strategy. Rudolf Rocker:

By direct action the Anarcho-Syndicalists mean every method of immediate warfare by the workers against their economic and political oppressors…

In its simplest form it is for the workers an indispensable means of raising their standard of living or defending their attained advantages against the concerted measures of the employers. But the strike is for the workers not only a means for the defense of immediate economic interests, it is also a continuous schooling for their powers of resistance, showing them every day that every last right as to be won by unceasing struggle against the existing system.

Just as are the economic fighting organizations of the workers, so also are the daily wage-struggles a results of the capitalist economic order, and consequently, a vital necessity for the workers. Without these they would be submerged in the abyss of poverty. Certainly the social problem cannot be solved by wage-struggles alone, but they are the best educative instrument for making the workers acquainted with the real essence of the social problem, training them for the struggle for liberation from economic and social slavery …

Here we come to the general cultural significance of the labor struggle. The economic alliance of the producers not only affords them a weapon for the enforcement of better living conditions, it becomes for them a practical school, a university of experience, from which they draw instruction and enlightenment in richest measure. The practical experiences and occurrences of the everyday struggles of the workers find an intellectual precipitate in their organizations, deepen their understanding, and broaden their intellectual outlook.[206]

From what has been said so far, it should be clear that strategies focused on struggles at the point of production have isolated workers from the rest of the community. Hierarchy in the workplace has been much like the military, an experience of socialization into obedience, not a school for rebellion. Contrary to the expectations of Rocker and other worker-oriented radicals, the labor movement has not been a self-developing struggle, building upon itself in an escalating series of demands, winning more workers’ counterpower that serves as a platform for still further demands until the workers can take on the system itself. Instead, labor has become a competing interest group in capitalist society, bargaining for a better position within the system, not fighting for an alternative to it.

Recognizing these facts is not to say that workplace struggles should be ignored or disregarded. Workplace hierarchy, wages, benefits, hours, health and safety – all are important issues. But they need to be linked organically to community struggles. Workplace groups should be part of broader community organizations that take workplace issues out of their particularistic context and generalize them. In this context, workplace struggles can develop way beyond a narrow struggle for labor to get its ‘fair share’ within capitalism and raise basic questions about the system: Why work when contemporary technology is so productive? Do we need bosses, or can we do it ourselves democratically? How can we restructure tasks and choose technology so that working develops us as creative and responsible human beings, rather than uses us as cogs in the megamachine? How can we produce more of what we want locally for local use?

So rather than an economic struggle separated organizationally from a political struggle, the economic struggle should be an arm of a community-based struggle for participatory democracy. The community-based struggle would bring the different social sectors and struggles together around their common interests and seek to institutionalize the continual process of discovering the common good by creating community assemblies of all citizens and confederal forms of coordination that link the base assemblies through mandated and recallable delegates to municipal, regional, and higher level councils.

With the new industrial structure we face today, a convergence of community and labor organizing makes more sense, with the community rather than an industry being the basic unit of labor organizing. Community-based unions make more sense when most of the workforce is moving from job to job in small workplaces around the community. The old Wobbly idea of One Big Union where workers transferring from one job to another were automatically enrolled in the IWW branch at the new workplace should be revived, but adapted so that the communities, rather than the industries, are the units of confederation.[207] Community-based unions as components of broader community movement organizations create the right kind of network for raising ‘transitional demands’ relating to work – open the books and other enterprise information, ‘green bans’ where workers refuse to work on environmentally destructive projects as has been done by Australian construction workers, health and safety demands on the job linked to anti-toxics demands in the community, workplace democracy, rotation among workplaces and types of work, and so forth. They provide a natural community-based context for solidarizing and harmonizing workers’ particular interests with the broader community concerns and struggles.

As community struggles grow, as a combination of direct action and local electoral campaigns leads to a restructuring of municipal government around community assemblies, it becomes possible to begin developing a municipalized economic sector through public financing and eminent domain that can prefigure the cooperative commonwealth and begin to act as a countervailing power to the corporate and state sectors.

Building the struggle this way creates an immediate context in which everyday people from all walks of life – not only party elites, not only workers – can act directly to democratize the economy and society generally. As liberated areas under community control link up confederally and being to develop a parallel power structure that can challenge the supremacy of the state and capital, this grassroots counterpower would face efforts by the national state and global corporations to crush the new powers exercised by the grassroots democracy.

At this crisis point, tax strikes against the state, expropriation without compensation, and an overall appeal to the people to withdraw every form of support from the old centralized structures and throw it to the new grassroots-democratic structures would be the order of the day. Much would depend on whether the rank and file of the armed forces sided with the people or their chain of command, a condition which a community-oriented strategy can address much better than a worker-oriented strategy. But there would also be a role for workers’ councils forming in the workplaces at this crisis point. They would be indispensable for expropriating corporate and state property and bringing it under the administration of the grassroots democracy.[208] Despite their declining relative numbers, there are still today in the U.S. some 30 million industrial workers (19 million in manufacturing, six million in construction and mining, five million in transport, communication, and utilities), down only slightly in absolute numbers from the 1979 peak. This is roughly 25–30 percent of the workforce and 10–15 percent of the population. Workers’ control is thus not irrelevant, but neither is it the leading edge of a revolutionary strategy. Rather, it is an aspect of the broader strategy of community control, an aspect that grows out of the community struggle and is not likely to emerge until the community movement is well developed.

To build to that point – to progressively create the conditions in which popular revolutionary action can finally overthrow state capitalism – the core of the mounting struggle has to be oriented toward the community, toward building the new political counterinstitutions based on community assemblies and confederal networks among them that can eventually appropriate the economy and establish the cooperative commonwealth.

53. And The War Drags On

Deleted reason: DELETED not anarchist

Author: Internationalist Perspective

Authors: Internationalist Perspective

Topics: criticism and critique, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, class war, anti-war

Date: April 16^th, 2023

Date Published on T@L: 2023-08-30T00:44:20

Source: Retrieved on August 29^th, 2023 from https://internationalistperspective.org/and-the-war-drags-on/.

15 months have passed since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and still the war drags on. Hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, is that enough? No, it is not enough. Not for the capitalists of both sides in the conflict, locked in their power plays, callously sending the children of the working class to the killing fields while checking their overseas bank accounts.

There is no end in sight to this war. Both sides prepare a spring offensive. It seems the slaughter can only end when one or both warring parties run out of cannon fodder. That is becoming a problem for them. Hundreds of thousands have fled both countries to avoid being forcibly enlisted. In Ukraine there are special apps circulating which send warnings on where the recruiters are on the prowl. Russia still has hundreds of thousands of soldiers in reserve but the Kremlin doesn’t trust them. Why else is it not sending them to the battle? Or is it to maintain the illusion that this is not a war, just a “special military operation”? Instead of using these trained battalions, the prisons are skimmed and all those willing to join the mercenaries and the young recruits (most from distant provinces) at the front, get a ‘get out of jail free card’. Prison or the front? What would you pick? It’s a new way to play Russian roulette. Given the conditions in the Russian prisons, there are many who take the chance.

The enthusiasm for the war on the part of the population has cooled considerably. It was already low in Russia but now in Ukraine as well there are increasing signs of disaffection. But that is not enough to stop this madness. The fact that the working class in both countries still accepts that so many of its sons and daughters are being sacrificed on the altar of national pride for the determination of the borders between the hunting grounds of their rulers, is hardly reassuring.

Desertion is mounting, despite the risks. Both Russia’s and Ukraine’s parliaments have democratically approved harsh punishments for deserters, up to 12 years in Ukraine and life in prison in Russia. And then there are the extra-legal punishments, because, “a la guerre comme a la guerre”, war has its own rules. A deserter of the Wagner brigade was executed with sledgehammers. Still many keep fleeing. But the desertion and the resistance against the recruiters are not yet massive collective acts which is why they are so vulnerable to the ferocious state repression and not preventing the continuation of the war. Both in Russia and in Ukraine the working class keeps working, churning out weapons and whatever else their bosses can sell at a profit. Unemployment is high, inflation rises fast while wages stagnate and fear rules.

Despite all the death and destruction, this is not yet total war. Russia is still trying to wage it in a way that limits its impact on the majority of its population. The US and its Nato allies have stepped up their weapons deliveries to Ukraine, making its army arguably the most potent terrestrial army in Europe, but they have not given them weapons such as long range missiles and fighter jets which could expand the war into Russian territory. While in Europe the prospect of an endless war on its eastern flank is starting to raise some doubts in the ruling class, for US capitalism, this is just what the doctor ordered. The US secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin openly stated that the US’s goal in the war is to weaken Russia as a military power and the longer the war lasts, the more that succeeds.

They are thinking already about the next war. In Washington, Democrats and Republicans, bickering about everything, are solidly united in jacking up the hostility level against China, the main foe (with rising hate crimes against Asian-Americans as a side-effect). The US military budget is expected to pass the cape of one trillion dollars this year, dwarfing the expenditures of all other countries, with the possibility of war with China in mind. China too is accelerating its military spending (although still less than a quarter of that of the US). “Ukraine has offered us a new understanding of a future possible world war”, general Meng Xiangqing , the deputy director of the army’s Strategic Research Institute wrote in the Guangming daily newspaper. He noted that Russia’s nuclear arsenal had restrained the US’s intervention in the war and called for a faster buildup of China’s nuclear capacity, as well as for more satellites for intelligence gathering and scores of other expenditures. Which is what is happening. In Europe too, and around the world: everywhere the ruling class is increasing military spending, preparing for more war. And everywhere it wants the working class to pay for it. Austerity is the watchword. Working longer, for wages eroded by inflation and less benefits is what your country needs. Hunger, deteriorating health care, insecurity, war and climate disasters is what capitalism has in store for you and me.

But the working class, the vast majority of the population whose interests clash with those of capital, are not flocks of sheep kept easily in line by barking dogs. The current wave of struggles in the UK and France testifies to that. The latter especially shows a radicalization[209], a growing understanding that the enemy is not just Macron or the boss but the capitalist social order itself.

Notes:

54. Fathers and Children

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Author: Ivan Turgenev

Topics: nihilism, fiction, not anarchist

Date: 1862

Date Published on T@L: 2024-05-16T12:30:13.665Z

Source: Retrieved on 3^rd November 2021 from www.gutenberg.org

Notes: Translated by Constance Clara Garnett.

Cover:

d-d-dumpster-diving-the-anarchist-library-text-bin-5.jpg

Biographical Note

Ivan Sergyevitch Turgenev came of an old stock of the Russian nobility. He was born in Orel, in the province of Orel, which lies more than a hundred miles south of Moscow, on October 28, 1818. His education was begun by tutors at home in the great family mansion in the town of Spask, and he studied later at the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Berlin. The influence of the last, and of the compatriots with whom he associated there, was very great; and when he returned to Moscow in 1841, he was ambitious to teach Hegel to the students there. Before this could be arranged, however, he entered the Ministry of the Interior at St. Petersburg. While there his interests turned more and more toward literature. He wrote verses and comedies, read George Sand, and made the acquaintance of Dostoevsky and the critic Bielinski. His mother, a tyrannical woman with an ungovernable temper, was eager that he should make a brilliant official career; so, when he resigned from the Ministry in 1845, she showed her disapproval by cutting down his allowance and thus forcing him to support himself by the profession he had chosen.

Turgenev was an enthusiastic hunter; and it was his experiences in the woods of his native province that supplied the material for “A Sportsman’s Sketches,” the book that first brought him reputation. The first of these papers appeared in 1847, and in the same year he left Russia in the train of Pauline Viardot, a singer and actress, to whom he had been devoted for three or four years and with whom he maintained relations for the rest of his life. For a year or two he lived chiefly in Paris or at a country house at Courtavenel in Brie, which belonged to Madame Viardot; but in 1850 he returned to Russia. His experiences were not such as to induce him to repatriate himself permanently. He found Dostoevsky banished to Siberia and Bielinski dead; and himself under suspicion by the government on account of the popularity of “A Sportsman’s Sketches.” For praising Gogol, who had just died, he was arrested and imprisoned for a short time, and for the next two years kept under police surveillance. Meantime he continued to write, and by the time that the close of the Crimean War made it possible for him again to go to western Europe, he was recognized as standing at the head of living Russian authors. His mother was now dead, the estates were settled, and with an income of about $5,000 a year he became a wanderer. He had, or imagined he had, very bad health, and the eminent specialists he consulted sent him from one resort to another, to Rome, the Isle of Wight, Soden, and the like. When Madame Viardot left the stage in 1864 and took up her residence at Baden-Baden, he followed her and built there a small house for himself. They returned to France after the Franco-Prussian War, and bought a villa at Bougival, near Paris, and this was his home for the rest of his life. Here, on September 3, 1883, he died after a long delirium due to his suffering from cancer of the spinal cord. His body was taken to St. Petersburg and was buried with national honors.

The two works by Turgenev contained in the present volume are characteristic in their concern with social and political questions, and in the prominence in both of them of heroes who fail in action. Turgenev preaches no doctrine in his novels, has no remedy for the universe; but he sees clearly certain weaknesses of the Russian character and exposes these with absolute candor yet without unkindness. Much as he lived abroad, his books are intensely Russian; yet of the great Russian novelists he alone rivals the masters of western Europe in the matter of form. In economy of means, condensation, felicity of language, and excellence of structure he surpasses all his countrymen; and “Fathers and Children” and “A House of Gentlefolk” represent his great and delicate art at its best.

W. A. N.

Criticisms and Interpretations

I. By Emile Melchior, Vicomte De Vogüé

Ivan Sergyevitch (Turgenev) has given us a most complete picture of Russian society. The same general types are always brought forward; and, as later writers have presented exactly similar ones, with but few modifications, we are forced to believe them true to life. First, the peasant: meek, resigned, dull, pathetic in suffering, like a child who does not know why he suffers; naturally sharp and tricky when not stupefied by liquor; occasionally roused to violent passion. Then, the intelligent middle class: the small landed proprietors of two generations. The old proprietor is ignorant and good-natured, of respectable family, but with coarse habits; hard, from long experience of serfdom, servile himself, but admirable in all other relations of life.

The young man of this class is of quite a different type. His intellectual growth having been too rapid, he sometimes plunges into Nihilism. He is often well educated, melancholy, rich in ideas but poor in executive ability; always preparing and expecting to accomplish something of importance, filled with vague and generous projects for the public good. This is the chosen type of hero in all Russian novels. Gogol introduced it, and Tolstoy prefers it above all others.

The favorite hero of young girls and romantic women is neither the brilliant officer, the artist, nor rich lord, but almost universally this provincial Hamlet, conscientious, cultivated, intelligent, but of feeble will, who, returning from his studies in foreign lands, is full of scientific theories about the improvement of mankind and the good of the lower classes, and eager to apply these theories on his own estate. It is quite necessary that he should have an estate of his own. He will have the hearty sympathy of the reader in his efforts to improve the condition of his dependents.

The Russians well understand the conditions of the future prosperity of their country; but, as they themselves acknowledge, they know not how to go to work to accomplish it.

In regard to the women of this class, Turgenev, strange to say, has little to say of the mothers. This probably reveals the existence of some old wound, some bitter experience of his own. Without a single exception, all the mothers in his novels are either wicked or grotesque. He reserves the treasures of his poetic fancy for the young girls of his creation. To him the young girl of the country province is the corner-stone of the fabric of society. Reared in the freedom of country life, placed in the most healthy social conditions, she is conscientious, frank, affectionate, without being romantic; less intelligent than man, but more resolute. In each of his romances an irresolute man is invariably guided by a woman of strong will.

Such are, generally speaking, the characters the author describes, which bear so unmistakably the stamp of nature that one cannot refrain from saying as he closes the book, “These must be portraits from life!” which criticism is always the highest praise, the best sanction of works of the imagination.—From “Turgenev”, in “The Russian Novelists,” translated by J. L. Edmands (1887).

II. By William Dean Howells

Turgenev was of that great race which has more than any other fully and freely uttered human nature, without either false pride or false shame in its nakedness. His themes were oftenest those of the French novelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner and with the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramatic punishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the personal sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace. If the end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader’s own knowledge: who else but Turgenev and one’s own most secret self ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air drawing in at the open window, of the fires burning in the darkness on the distant fields? I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle sympathy with nature which scarcely put itself into words with him. As for the people of his fiction, though they were of orders and civilizations so remote from my experience, they were of the eternal human types whose origin and potentialities every one may find in his own heart, and I felt their verity in every touch.

I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impart some sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I had been waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richly content forever. I do not mean to say that the art of Turgenev surpasses the art of Björnson; I think Björnson is quite as fine and true. But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstances for the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has to do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his scene is often as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway, it is still related to the great capitals by the history if not the actuality of the characters. Most of Turgenev’s books I have read many times over, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of years I read them again and again without much caring for other fiction. It was only the other day that I read “Smoke” through once more, with no diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less than my first satisfaction in its art. Perhaps this was because I had reached the point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was impatient even of the artifice that hid itself. In “Smoke” I was now aware of an artifice that kept out of sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisibly operating the story.—From “My Literary Passions” (1895).

III. By K. Waliszewski

The second novel of the series, “Fathers and Children,” stirred up a storm the suddenness and violence of which it is not easy, nowadays, to understand. The figure of Bazarov, the first “Nihilist”—thus baptized by an inversion of epithet which was to win extraordinary success—is merely intended to reveal a mental condition which, though the fact had been insufficiently recognized, had already existed for some years. The epithet itself had been in constant use since 1829, when Nadiéjdine applied it to Pushkin, Polevoï, and some other subverters of the classic tradition. Turgenev only extended its meaning by a new interpretation, destined to be perpetuated by the tremendous success of “Fathers and Children.” There is nothing, or hardly anything, in Bazarov, of the terrible revolutionary whom we have since learnt to look for under this title. Turgenev was not the man to call up such a figure. He was far too dreamy, too gentle, too good-natured a being. Already, in the character of Roudine, he had failed, in the strangest way, to catch the likeness of Bakounine, that fiery organiser of insurrection, whom all Europe knew, and whom he had selected as his model. Conceive Corot or Millet trying to paint some figure out of the Last Judgment after Michael Angelo! Bazarov is the Nihilist in his first phase, “in course of becoming,” as the Germans would say, and he is a pupil of the German universities. When Turgenev shaped the character, he certainly drew on his own memories of his stay at Berlin, at a time when Bruno Bauer was laying it down as a dogma that no educated man ought to have opinions on any subject, and when Max Stirner was convincing the young Hegelians that ideas were mere smoke and dust, seeing that the only reality in existence was the individual Ego. These teachings, eagerly received by the Russian youth, were destined to produce a state of moral decomposition, the earliest symptoms of which were admirably analysed by Turgenev.

Bazarov is a very clever man, but clever in thought, and especially in word, only. He scorns art, women, and family life. He does not know what the point of honour means. He is a cynic in his love affairs, and indifferent in his friendships. He has no respect even for paternal tenderness, but he is full of contradictions, even to the extent of fighting a duel about nothing at all, and sacrificing his life for the first peasant he meets. And in this the resemblance is true, much more general, indeed, than the model selected would lead one to imagine; so general, in fact, that, apart from the question of art, Turgenev—he has admitted it himself—felt as if he were drawing his own portrait; and therefore it is, no doubt, that he has made his hero so sympathetic.—From “A History of Russian Literature” (1900).

IV. By Richard H. P. Curle

But for the best expression of the bewilderment of life we have to turn to the portrait of a man, to the famous Bazarov of “Fathers and Children.” Turgenev raises through him the eternal problem—Has personality any hold, has life any meaning at all? The reality of this figure, his contempt for nature, his egoism, his strength, his mothlike weakness are so convincing that before his philosophy all other philosophies seem to pale. He is the one who sees the life-illusion, and yet, knowing that it is the mask of night, grasps at it, loathing himself. You can hate Bazarov, you cannot have contempt for him. He is a man of genius, rid of sentiment and hope, believing in nothing but himself, to whom come, as from the darkness, all the violent questions of life and death. “Fathers and Children” is simply an exposure of our power to mould our own lives. Bazarov is a man of astonishing intellect—he is the pawn of an emotion he despises; he is a man of gigantic will—he can do nothing but destroy his own beliefs; he is a man of intense life—he cannot avoid the first, brainless touch of death. It is the hopeless fight of mind against instinct, of determination against fate, of personality against impersonality. Bazarov disdaining everyone, sick of all smallness, is roused to fury by the obvious irritations of Pavel Petrovitch. Savagely announcing the creed of nihilism and the end of romance, he has only to feel the calm, aristocratic smile of Madame Odintsov fixed on him and he suffers all the agony of first love. Determining to live and create, he has only to play with death for a moment, and he is caught. But though he is the most positive of all Turgenev’s male portraits, there are others linking up the chain of delusion. There is Rudin, typical of the unrest of the idealist; there is Nezhdanov (“Virgin Soil”), typical of the self-torture of the anarchist. There is Shubin (“On the Eve”), hiding his misery in laughter, and Lavretsky (“A House of Gentlefolk”), hiding his misery in silence. It is not necessary to search for further examples. Turgenev put his hand upon the dark things. He perceived character, struggling in the “clutch of circumstances,” the tragic moments, the horrible conflicts of personality. His figures have that capability of suffering which (as someone has said) is the true sign of life. They seem like real people, dazed and uncertain. No action of theirs ever surprises you, because in each of them he has made you hear an inward soliloquy.—From “Turgenev and the Life-Illusion,” in “The Fortnightly Review” (April, 1910).

V. By Maurice Baring

Turgenev did for Russian literature what Byron did for English literature; he led the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe. And in Europe his work reaped a glorious harvest of praise. Flaubert was astounded by him, George Sand looked up to him as to a master, Taine spoke of his work as being the finest artistic production since Sophocles. In Turgenev’s work, Europe not only discovered Turgenev, but it discovered Russia, the simplicity and the naturalness of the Russian character; and this came as a revelation. For the first time Europe came across the Russian woman whom Pushkin was the first to paint; for the first time Europe came into contact with the Russian soul; and it was the sharpness of this revelation which accounts for the fact of Turgenev having received in the west an even greater meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled to.

In Russia Turgenev attained almost instant popularity. His “Sportsman’s Sketches” and his “Nest of Gentlefolk” made him not only famous but universally popular. In 1862 the publication of his masterpiece “Fathers and Children” dealt his reputation a blow. The revolutionary elements in Russia regarded his hero, Bazarov, as a calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary elements in Russia looked upon “Fathers and Children” as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. This, perhaps, could only happen in Russia to this extent; and for that same reason as that which made Russian criticism didactic. The conflicting elements of Russian society were so terribly in earnest in fighting their cause, that anyone whom they did not regard as definitely for them was at once considered an enemy, and an impartial delineation of any character concerned in the political struggle was bound to displease both parties. If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must be one or the other, a hero or a scoundrel, if either the revolutionaries or the reactionaries were to be pleased. If in England the militant suffragists suddenly had a huge mass of educated opinion behind them and a still larger mass of educated public opinion against them, and some one were to draw in a novel an impartial picture of a suffragette, the same thing would happen. On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes are concerned, it has happened in the case of Mr. Wells. But if Turgenev’s popularity suffered a shock in Russia from which it with difficulty recovered, in western Europe it went on increasing. Especially in England, Turgenev became the idol of all that was eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hallmark of good taste....

“Fathers and Children” is as beautifully constructed as a drama of Sophocles; the events move inevitably to a tragic close. There is not a touch of banality from beginning to end, and not an unnecessary word; the portraits of the old father and mother, the young Kirsanov, and all the minor characters are perfect; and amidst the trivial crowd Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the strongest—the only strong character—that Turgenev created, the first Nihilist—for if Turgenev was not the first to invent the word, he was the first to apply it in this sense.

Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer type that recurs again and again in Russian history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the meek, humble type of Ivan Durak. Lermontov’s Pechorin was in some respects an anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many Russian rebels. He is the man who denies, to whom art is a silly toy, who detests abstractions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; he believes in nothing; he bows to nothing; he can break, but he cannot bend; he does break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, he retains his invincible pride, and “not cowardly puts off his helmet,” and he dies “valiantly vanquished.”

In the pages which describe his death Turgenev reaches the high-water mark of his art, his moving quality, his power, his reserve. For manly pathos they rank among the greatest scenes in literature, stronger than the death of Colonel Newcome and the best of Thackeray. Among English novelists it is, perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such strong, piercing chords, nobler than anything in Daudet or Maupassant, more reserved than anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the great poets, of the tragic pathos of Goethe and Dante. The character of Bazarov, as has been said, created a sensation and endless controversy. The revolutionaries thought him a caricature and a libel, the reactionaries a scandalous glorification of the Devil; and impartial men such as Dostoevsky, who knew the revolutionaries at first hand, thought the type unreal. It is impossible that Bazarov was not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in any case as a figure in fiction, whatever the fact may be, he lives and will continue to live....—From “An Outline of Russian Literature” (1914).

List of Characters

NIKOLAI PETROVITCH KIRSANOV, a landowner.

PAVEL PETROVITCH KIRSANOV, his brother.

ARKADY (ARKASHA) NIKOLAEVITCH (or NIKOLAITCH), his son.

YEVGENY (ENYUSHA) VASSILYEVITCH (or VASSILYITCH) BAZAROV, friend of Arkady.

VASSILY IVANOVITCH (or IVANITCH), father of Bazarov.

ARINA VLASYEVNA, mother of Bazarov.

FEDOSYA (FENITCHKA) NIKOLAEVNA, second wife of Nikolai.

ANNA SERGYEVNA ODINTSOV, a wealthy widow.

KATYA SERGYEVNA, her sister.

PORFIRY PLATONITCH, her neighbor.

MATVY ILYITCH KOLYAZIN, government commissioner.

EVDOKSYA (or AVDOTYA) NIKITISHNA KUKSHIN, an emancipated lady.

VIKTOR SITNIKOV, a would-be liberal.

PIOTR (pron. P-yotr), servant to Nikolai.

PROKOFITCH, head servant to Nikolai.

DUNYASHA, a maid servant.

MITYA, infant of Fedosya.

TIMOFEITCH, manager for Vassily.

Chapter I

‘Well, Piotr, not in sight yet?’ was the question asked on May the 20^th, 1859, by a gentleman of a little over forty, in a dusty coat and checked trousers, who came out without his hat on to the low steps of the posting station at S——. He was addressing his servant, a chubby young fellow, with whitish down on his chin, and little, lack-lustre eyes.

The servant, in whom everything—the turquoise ring in his ear, the streaky hair plastered with grease, and the civility of his movements—indicated a man of the new, improved generation, glanced with an air of indulgence along the road, and made answer:

‘No, sir; not in sight.’

‘Not in sight?’ repeated his master.

‘No, sir,’ responded the man a second time.

His master sighed, and sat down on a little bench. We will introduce him to the reader while he sits, his feet tucked under him, gazing thoughtfully round.

His name was Nikolai Petrovitch Kirsanov. He had, twelve miles from the posting station, a fine property of two hundred souls, or, as he expressed it—since he had arranged the division of his land with the peasants, and started ‘a farm’—of nearly five thousand acres. His father, a general in the army, who served in 1812, a coarse, half-educated, but not ill-natured man, a typical Russian, had been in harness all his life, first in command of a brigade, and then of a division, and lived constantly in the provinces, where, by virtue of his rank, he played a fairly important part. Nikolai Petrovitch was born in the south of Russia like his elder brother, Pavel, of whom more hereafter. He was educated at home till he was fourteen, surrounded by cheap tutors, free-and-easy but toadying adjutants, and all the usual regimental and staff set. His mother, one of the Kolyazin family, as a girl called Agathe, but as a general’s wife Agathokleya Kuzminishna Kirsanov, was one of those military ladies who take their full share of the duties and dignities of office. She wore gorgeous caps and rustling silk dresses; in church she was the first to advance to the cross; she talked a great deal in a loud voice, let her children kiss her hand in the morning, and gave them her blessing at night—in fact, she got everything out of life she could. Nikolai Petrovitch, as a general’s son—though so far from being distinguished by courage that he even deserved to be called ‘a funk’—was intended, like his brother Pavel, to enter the army; but he broke his leg on the very day when the news of his commission came, and, after being two months in bed, retained a slight limp to the end of his days. His father gave him up as a bad job, and let him go into the civil service. He took him to Petersburg directly he was eighteen, and placed him in the university. His brother happened about the same time to be made an officer in the Guards. The young men started living together in one set of rooms, under the remote supervision of a cousin on their mother’s side, Ilya Kolyazin, an official of high rank. Their father returned to his division and his wife, and only rarely sent his sons large sheets of grey paper, scrawled over in a bold clerkly hand. At the bottom of these sheets stood in letters, enclosed carefully in scroll-work, the words, ‘Piotr Kirsanov, General-Major.’ In 1835 Nikolai Petrovitch left the university, a graduate, and in the same year General Kirsanov was put on to the retired list after an unsuccessful review, and came to Petersburg with his wife to live. He was about to take a house in the Tavrichesky Gardens, and had joined the English club, but he died suddenly of an apoplectic fit. Agathokleya Kuzminishna soon followed him; she could not accustom herself to a dull life in the capital; she was consumed by the ennui of existence away from the regiment. Meanwhile Nikolai Petrovitch had already, in his parents’ lifetime and to their no slight chagrin, had time to fall in love with the daughter of his landlord, a petty official, Prepolovensky. She was a pretty and, as it is called, ‘advanced’ girl; she used to read the serious articles in the ‘Science’ column of the journals. He married her directly the term of mourning was over; and leaving the civil service in which his father had by favour procured him a post, was perfectly blissful with his Masha, first in a country villa near the Lyesny Institute, afterwards in town in a pretty little flat with a clean staircase and a draughty drawing-room, and then in the country, where he settled finally, and where in a short time a son, Arkady, was born to him. The young couple lived very happily and peacefully; they were scarcely ever apart; they read together, sang and played duets together on the piano; she tended her flowers and looked after the poultry-yard; he sometimes went hunting, and busied himself with the estate, while Arkady grew and grew in the same happy and peaceful way. Ten years passed like a dream. In 1847 Kirsanov’s wife died. He almost succumbed to this blow; in a few weeks his hair was grey; he was getting ready to go abroad, if possible to distract his mind ... but then came the year 1848. He returned unwillingly to the country, and, after a rather prolonged period of inactivity, began to take an interest in improvements in the management of his land. In 1855 he brought his son to the university; he spent three winters with him in Petersburg, hardly going out anywhere, and trying to make acquaintance with Arkady’s young companions. The last winter he had not been able to go, and here we have him in the May of 1859, already quite grey, stoutish, and rather bent, waiting for his son, who had just taken his degree, as once he had taken it himself.

The servant, from a feeling of propriety, and perhaps, too, not anxious to remain under the master’s eye, had gone to the gate, and was smoking a pipe. Nikolai Petrovitch bent his head, and began staring at the crumbling steps; a big mottled fowl walked sedately towards him, treading firmly with its great yellow legs; a muddy cat gave him an unfriendly look, twisting herself coyly round the railing. The sun was scorching; from the half-dark passage of the posting station came an odour of hot rye-bread. Nikolai Petrovitch fell to dreaming. ‘My son ... a graduate ... Arkasha ...’ were the ideas that continually came round again and again in his head; he tried to think of something else, and again the same thoughts returned. He remembered his dead wife.... ‘She did not live to see it!’ he murmured sadly. A plump, dark-blue pigeon flew into the road, and hurriedly went to drink in a puddle near the well. Nikolai Petrovitch began looking at it, but his ear had already caught the sound of approaching wheels.

‘It sounds as if they’re coming sir,’ announced the servant, popping in from the gateway.

Nikolai Petrovitch jumped up, and bent his eyes on the road. A carriage appeared with three posting-horses harnessed abreast; in the carriage he caught a glimpse of the blue band of a student’s cap, the familiar outline of a dear face.

‘Arkasha! Arkasha!’ cried Kirsanov, and he ran waving his hands.... A few instants later, his lips were pressed to the beardless, dusty, sunburnt-cheek of the youthful graduate.

Chapter II

‘Let me shake myself first, daddy,’ said Arkady, in a voice tired from travelling, but boyish and clear as a bell, as he gaily responded to his father’s caresses; ‘I am covering you with dust.’

‘Never mind, never mind,’ repeated Nikolai Petrovitch, smiling tenderly, and twice he struck the collar of his son’s cloak and his own greatcoat with his hand. ‘Let me have a look at you; let me have a look at you,’ he added, moving back from him, but immediately he went with hurried steps towards the yard of the station, calling, ‘This way, this way; and horses at once.’

Nikolai Petrovitch seemed far more excited than his son; he seemed a little confused, a little timid. Arkady stopped him.

‘Daddy,’ he said, ‘let me introduce you to my great friend, Bazarov, about whom I have so often written to you. He has been so good as to promise to stay with us.’

Nikolai Petrovitch went back quickly, and going up to a tall man in a long, loose, rough coat with tassels, who had only just got out of the carriage, he warmly pressed the ungloved red hand, which the latter did not at once hold out to him.

‘I am heartily glad,’ he began, ‘and very grateful for your kind intention of visiting us.... Let me know your name, and your father’s.’

‘Yevgeny Vassilyev,’ answered Bazarov, in a lazy but manly voice; and turning back the collar of his rough coat, he showed Nikolai Petrovitch his whole face. It was long and lean, with a broad forehead, a nose flat at the base and sharper at the end, large greenish eyes, and drooping whiskers of a sandy colour; it was lighted up by a tranquil smile, and showed self-confidence and intelligence.

‘I hope, dear Yevgeny Vassilyitch, you won’t be dull with us,’ continued Nikolai Petrovitch.

Bazarov’s thin lips moved just perceptibly, though he made no reply, but merely took off his cap. His long, thick hair did not hide the prominent bumps on his head.

‘Then, Arkady,’ Nikolai Petrovitch began again, turning to his son, ‘shall the horses be put to at once? or would you like to rest?’

‘We will rest at home, daddy; tell them to harness the horses.’

‘At once, at once,’ his father assented. ‘Hey, Piotr, do you hear? Get things ready, my good boy; look sharp.’

Piotr, who as a modernised servant had not kissed the young master’s hand, but only bowed to him from a distance, again vanished through the gateway.

‘I came here with the carriage, but there are three horses for your coach too,’ said Nikolai Petrovitch fussily, while Arkady drank some water from an iron dipper brought him by the woman in charge of the station, and Bazarov began smoking a pipe and went up to the driver, who was taking out the horses; ‘there are only two seats in the carriage, and I don’t know how your friend’ ...

‘He will go in the coach,’ interposed Arkady in an undertone. ‘You must not stand on ceremony with him, please. He’s a splendid fellow, so simple—you will see.’

Nikolai Petrovitch’s coachman brought the horses round.

‘Come, hurry up, bushy beard!’ said Bazarov, addressing the driver.

‘Do you hear, Mityuha,’ put in another driver, standing by with his hands thrust behind him into the opening of his sheepskin coat, ‘what the gentleman called you? It’s a bushy beard you are too.’

Mityuha only gave a jog to his hat and pulled the reins off the heated shaft-horse.

‘Look sharp, look sharp, lads, lend a hand,’ cried Nikolai Petrovitch; ‘there’ll be something to drink our health with!’

In a few minutes the horses were harnessed; the father and son were installed in the carriage; Piotr climbed up on to the box; Bazarov jumped into the coach, and nestled his head down into the leather cushion; and both the vehicles rolled away.

Chapter III

‘So here you are, a graduate at last, and come home again,’ said Nikolai Petrovitch, touching Arkady now on the shoulder, now on the knee. ‘At last!’

‘And how is uncle? quite well?’ asked Arkady, who, in spite of the genuine, almost childish delight filling his heart, wanted as soon as possible to turn the conversation from the emotional into a commonplace channel.

‘Quite well. He was thinking of coming with me to meet you, but for some reason or other he gave up the idea.’

‘And how long have you been waiting for me?’ inquired Arkady.

‘Oh, about five hours.’

‘Dear old dad!’

Arkady turned round quickly to his father, and gave him a sounding kiss on the cheek. Nikolai Petrovitch gave vent to a low chuckle.

‘I have got such a capital horse for you!’ he began. ‘You will see. And your room has been fresh papered.’

‘And is there a room for Bazarov?’

‘We will find one for him too.’

‘Please, dad, make much of him. I can’t tell you how I prize his friendship.’

‘Have you made friends with him lately?’

‘Yes, quite lately.’

‘Ah, that’s how it is I did not see him last winter. What does he study?’

‘His chief subject is natural science. But he knows everything. Next year he wants to take his doctor’s degree.’

‘Ah! he’s in the medical faculty,’ observed Nikolai Petrovitch, and he was silent for a little. ‘Piotr,’ he went on, stretching out his hand, ‘aren’t those our peasants driving along?’

Piotr looked where his master was pointing. Some carts harnessed with unbridled horses were moving rapidly along a narrow by-road. In each cart there were one or two peasants in sheepskin coats, unbuttoned.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Piotr.

‘Where are they going,—to the town?’

‘To the town, I suppose. To the gin-shop,’ he added contemptuously, turning slightly towards the coachman, as though he would appeal to him. But the latter did not stir a muscle; he was a man of the old stamp, and did not share the modern views of the younger generation.

‘I have had a lot of bother with the peasants this year,’ pursued Nikolai Petrovitch, turning to his son. ‘They won’t pay their rent. What is one to do?’

‘But do you like your hired labourers?’

‘Yes,’ said Nikolai Petrovitch between his teeth. ‘They’re being set against me, that’s the mischief; and they don’t do their best. They spoil the tools. But they have tilled the land pretty fairly. When things have settled down a bit, it will be all right. Do you take an interest in farming now?’

‘You’ve no shade; that’s a pity,’ remarked Arkady, without answering the last question.

‘I have had a great awning put up on the north side over the balcony,’ observed Nikolai Petrovitch; ‘now we can have dinner even in the open air.’

‘It’ll be rather too like a summer villa.... Still, that’s all nonsense. What air though here! How delicious it smells! Really I fancy there’s nowhere such fragrance in the world as in the meadows here! And the sky too.’

Arkady suddenly stopped short, cast a stealthy look behind him, and said no more.

‘Of course,’ observed Nikolai Petrovitch, ‘you were born here, and so everything is bound to strike you in a special——’

‘Come, dad, that makes no difference where a man is born.’

‘Still——’

‘No; it makes absolutely no difference.’

Nikolai Petrovitch gave a sidelong glance at his son, and the carriage went on a half-a-mile further before the conversation was renewed between them.

‘I don’t recollect whether I wrote to you,’ began Nikolai Petrovitch, ‘your old nurse, Yegorovna, is dead.’

‘Really? Poor thing! Is Prokofitch still living?’

‘Yes, and not a bit changed. As grumbling as ever. In fact, you won’t find many changes at Maryino.’

‘Have you still the same bailiff?’

‘Well, to be sure there is a change there. I decided not to keep about me any freed serfs, who have been house servants, or, at least, not to intrust them with duties of any responsibility.’ (Arkady glanced towards Piotr.) ‘Il est libre, en effet,’ observed Nikolai Petrovitch in an undertone; ‘but, you see, he’s only a valet. Now I have a bailiff, a townsman; he seems a practical fellow. I pay him two hundred and fifty roubles a year. But,’ added Nikolai Petrovitch, rubbing his forehead and eyebrows with his hand, which was always an indication with him of inward embarrassment, ‘I told you just now that you would not find changes at Maryino.... That’s not quite correct. I think it my duty to prepare you, though....’

He hesitated for an instant, and then went on in French.

‘A severe moralist would regard my openness, as improper; but, in the first place, it can’t be concealed, and secondly, you are aware I have always had peculiar ideas as regards the relation of father and son. Though, of course, you would be right in blaming me. At my age.... In short ... that ... that girl, about whom you have probably heard already ...’

‘Fenitchka?’ asked Arkady easily.

Nikolai Petrovitch blushed. ‘Don’t mention her name aloud, please.... Well ... she is living with me now. I have installed her in the house ... there were two little rooms there. But that can all be changed.’

‘Goodness, daddy, what for?’

‘Your friend is going to stay with us ... it would be awkward ...’

‘Please don’t be uneasy on Bazarov’s account. He’s above all that.’

‘Well, but you too,’ added Nikolai Petrovitch. ‘The little lodge is so horrid—that’s the worst of it.’

‘Goodness, dad,’ interposed Arkady, ‘it’s as if you were apologising; I wonder you’re not ashamed.’

‘Of course, I ought to be ashamed,’ answered Nikolai Petrovitch, flushing more and more.

‘Nonsense, dad, nonsense; please don’t!’ Arkady smiled affectionately. ‘What a thing to apologise for!’ he thought to himself, and his heart was filled with a feeling of condescending tenderness for his kind, soft-hearted father, mixed with a sense of secret superiority. ‘Please, stop,’ he repeated once more, instinctively revelling in a consciousness of his own advanced and emancipated condition.

Nikolai Petrovitch glanced at him from under the fingers of the hand with which he was still rubbing his forehead, and there was a pang in his heart.... But at once he blamed himself for it.

‘Here are our meadows at last,’ he said after a long silence.

‘And that in front is our forest, isn’t it?’ asked Arkady.

‘Yes. Only I have sold the timber. This year they will cut it down.’

‘Why did you sell it?’

‘The money was needed; besides, that land is to go to the peasants.’

‘Who don’t pay you their rent?’

‘That’s their affair; besides, they will pay it some day.’

‘I am sorry about the forest,’ observed Arkady, and he began to look about him.

The country through which they were driving could not be called picturesque. Fields upon fields stretched all along to the very horizon, now sloping gently upwards, then dropping down again; in some places woods were to be seen, and winding ravines, planted with low, scanty bushes, recalling vividly the representation of them on the old-fashioned maps of the times of Catherine. They came upon little streams too with hollow banks; and tiny lakes with narrow dykes; and little villages, with low hovels under dark and often tumble-down roofs, and slanting barns with walls woven of brushwood and gaping doorways beside neglected threshing-floors; and churches, some brick-built, with stucco peeling off in patches, others wooden, with crosses fallen askew, and overgrown grave-yards. Slowly Arkady’s heart sunk. To complete the picture, the peasants they met were all in tatters and on the sorriest little nags; the willows, with their trunks stripped of bark, and broken branches, stood like ragged beggars along the roadside; cows lean and shaggy and looking pinched up by hunger, were greedily tearing at the grass along the ditches. They looked as though they had just been snatched out of the murderous clutches of some threatening monster; and the piteous state of the weak, starved beasts in the midst of the lovely spring day, called up, like a white phantom, the endless, comfortless winter with its storms, and frosts, and snows.... ‘No,’ thought Arkady, ‘this is not a rich country; it does not impress one by plenty or industry; it can’t, it can’t go on like this, reforms are absolutely necessary ... but how is one to carry them out, how is one to begin?’

Such were Arkady’s reflections; ... but even as he reflected, the spring regained its sway. All around was golden green, all—trees, bushes, grass—shone and stirred gently in wide waves under the soft breath of the warm wind; from all sides flooded the endless trilling music of the larks; the peewits were calling as they hovered over the low-lying meadows, or noiselessly ran over the tussocks of grass; the rooks strutted among the half-grown short spring-corn, standing out black against its tender green; they disappeared in the already whitening rye, only from time to time their heads peeped out amid its grey waves. Arkady gazed and gazed, and his reflections grew slowly fainter and passed away.... He flung off his cloak and turned to his father, with a face so bright and boyish, that the latter gave him another hug.

‘We’re not far off now,’ remarked Nikolai Petrovitch; ‘we have only to get up this hill, and the house will be in sight. We shall get on together splendidly, Arkasha; you shall help me in farming the estate, if only it isn’t a bore to you. We must draw close to one another now, and learn to know each other thoroughly, mustn’t we!’

‘Of course,’ said Arkady; ‘but what an exquisite day it is to-day!’

‘To welcome you, my dear boy. Yes, it’s spring in its full loveliness. Though I agree with Pushkin—do you remember in Yevgeny Onyegin—

‘To me how sad thy coming is,Spring, spring, sweet time of love!What ...’

‘Arkady!’ called Bazarov’s voice from the coach, ‘send me a match; I’ve nothing to light my pipe with.’

Nikolai Petrovitch stopped, while Arkady, who had begun listening to him with some surprise, though with sympathy too, made haste to pull a silver matchbox out of his pocket, and sent it to Bazarov by Piotr.

‘Will you have a cigar?’ shouted Bazarov again.

‘Thanks,’ answered Arkady.

Piotr returned to the carriage, and handed him with the match-box a thick black cigar, which Arkady began to smoke promptly, diffusing about him such a strong and pungent odour of cheap tobacco, that Nikolai Petrovitch, who had never been a smoker from his youth up, was forced to turn away his head, as imperceptibly as he could for fear of wounding his son.

A quarter of an hour later, the two carriages drew up before the steps of a new wooden house, painted grey, with a red iron roof. This was Maryino, also known as New-Wick, or, as the peasants had nicknamed it, Poverty Farm.

Chapter IV

No crowd of house-serfs ran out on to the steps to meet the gentlemen; a little girl of twelve years old made her appearance alone. After her there came out of the house a young lad, very like Piotr, dressed in a coat of grey livery, with white armorial buttons, the servant of Pavel Petrovitch Kirsanov. Without speaking, he opened the door of the carriage, and unbuttoned the apron of the coach. Nikolai Petrovitch with his son and Bazarov walked through a dark and almost empty hall, from behind the door of which they caught a glimpse of a young woman’s face, into a drawing-room furnished in the most modern style.

‘Here we are at home,’ said Nikolai Petrovitch, taking off his cap, and shaking back his hair. ‘That’s the great thing; now we must have supper and rest.’

‘A meal would not come amiss, certainly,’ observed Bazarov, stretching, and he dropped on to a sofa.

‘Yes, yes, let us have supper, supper directly.’ Nikolai Petrovitch with no apparent reason stamped his foot. ‘And here just at the right moment comes Prokofitch.’

A man about sixty entered, white-haired, thin, and swarthy, in a cinnamon-coloured dress-coat with brass buttons, and a pink neckerchief. He smirked, went up to kiss Arkady’s hand, and bowing to the guest retreated to the door, and put his hands behind him.

‘Here he is, Prokofitch,’ began Nikolai Petrovitch; ‘he’s come back to us at last.... Well, how do you think him looking?’

‘As well as could be,’ said the old man, and was grinning again, but he quickly knitted his bushy brows. ‘You wish supper to be served?’ he said impressively.

‘Yes, yes, please. But won’t you like to go to your room first, Yevgeny Vassilyitch?’

‘No, thanks; I don’t care about it. Only give orders for my little box to be taken there, and this garment, too,’ he added, taking off his frieze overcoat.

‘Certainly. Prokofitch, take the gentleman’s coat.’ (Prokofitch, with an air of perplexity, picked up Bazarov’s ‘garment’ in both hands, and holding it high above his head, retreated on tiptoe.) ‘And you, Arkady, are you going to your room for a minute?’

‘Yes, I must wash,’ answered Arkady, and was just moving towards the door, but at that instant there came into the drawing-room a man of medium height, dressed in a dark English suit, a fashionable low cravat, and kid shoes, Pavel Petrovitch Kirsanov. He looked about forty-five: his close-cropped, grey hair shone with a dark lustre, like new silver; his face, yellow but free from wrinkles, was exceptionally regular and pure in line, as though carved by a light and delicate chisel, and showed traces of remarkable beauty; specially fine were his clear, black, almond-shaped eyes. The whole person of Arkady’s uncle, with its aristocratic elegance, had preserved the gracefulness of youth and that air of striving upwards, away from earth, which for the most part is lost after the twenties are past.

Pavel Petrovitch took out of his trouser pocket his exquisite hand with its long tapering pink nails, a hand which seemed still more exquisite from the snowy whiteness of the cuff, buttoned with a single, big opal, and gave it to his nephew. After a preliminary handshake in the European style, he kissed him thrice after the Russian fashion, that is to say, he touched his cheek three times with his perfumed moustaches, and said, ‘Welcome.’

Nikolai Petrovitch presented him to Bazarov; Pavel Petrovitch greeted him with a slight inclination of his supple figure, and a slight smile, but he did not give him his hand, and even put it back into his pocket.

‘I had begun to think you were not coming to-day,’ he began in a musical voice, with a genial swing and shrug of the shoulders, as he showed his splendid white teeth. ‘Did anything happen on the road.’

‘Nothing happened,’ answered Arkady; ‘we were rather slow. But we’re as hungry as wolves now. Hurry up Prokofitch, dad; and I’ll be back directly.’

‘Stay, I’m coming with you,’ cried Bazarov, pulling himself up suddenly from the sofa. Both the young men went out.

‘Who is he?’ asked Pavel Petrovitch.

‘A friend of Arkasha’s; according to him, a very clever fellow.’

‘Is he going to stay with us?’

‘Yes.’

‘That unkempt creature?’

‘Why, yes.’

Pavel Petrovitch drummed with his finger tips on the table. ‘I fancy Arkady s’est dégourdi,’ he remarked. ‘I’m glad he has come back.’

At supper there was little conversation. Bazarov especially said nothing, but he ate a great deal. Nikolai Petrovitch related various incidents in what he called his career as a farmer, talked about the impending government measures, about committees, deputations, the necessity of introducing machinery, etc. Pavel Petrovitch paced slowly up and down the dining-room (he never ate supper), sometimes sipping at a wineglass of red wine, and less often uttering some remark or rather exclamation, of the nature of ‘Ah! aha! hm!’ Arkady told some news from Petersburg, but he was conscious of a little awkwardness, that awkwardness, which usually overtakes a youth when he has just ceased to be a child, and has come back to a place where they are accustomed to regard him and treat him as a child. He made his sentences quite unnecessarily long, avoided the word ‘daddy,’ and even sometimes replaced it by the word ‘father,’ mumbled, it is true, between his teeth; with an exaggerated carelessness he poured into his glass far more wine than he really wanted, and drank it all off. Prokofitch did not take his eyes off him, and kept chewing his lips. After supper they all separated at once.

‘Your uncle’s a queer fish,’ Bazarov said to Arkady, as he sat in his dressing-gown by his bedside, smoking a short pipe. ‘Only fancy such style in the country! His nails, his nails—you ought to send them to an exhibition!’

‘Why of course, you don’t know,’ replied Arkady. ‘He was a great swell in his own day, you know. I will tell you his story one day. He was very handsome, you know, used to turn all the women’s heads.’

‘Oh, that’s it, is it? So he keeps it up in memory of the past. It’s a pity there’s no one for him to fascinate here though. I kept staring at his exquisite collars. They’re like marble, and his chin’s shaved simply to perfection. Come, Arkady Nikolaitch, isn’t that ridiculous?’

‘Perhaps it is; but he’s a splendid man, really.’

‘An antique survival! But your father’s a capital fellow. He wastes his time reading poetry, and doesn’t know much about farming, but he’s a good-hearted fellow.’

‘My father’s a man in a thousand.’

‘Did you notice how shy and nervous he is?’

Arkady shook his head as though he himself were not shy and nervous.

‘It’s something astonishing,’ pursued Bazarov, ‘these old idealists, they develop their nervous systems till they break down ... so balance is lost. But good-night. In my room there’s an English washstand, but the door won’t fasten. Anyway that ought to be encouraged—an English washstand stands for progress!’

Bazarov went away, and a sense of great happiness came over Arkady. Sweet it is to fall asleep in one’s own home, in the familiar bed, under the quilt worked by loving hands, perhaps a dear nurse’s hands, those kind, tender, untiring hands. Arkady remembered Yegorovna, and sighed and wished her peace in heaven.... For himself he made no prayer.

Both he and Bazarov were soon asleep, but others in the house were awake long after. His son’s return had agitated Nikolai Petrovitch. He lay down in bed, but did not put out the candles, and his head propped on his hand, he fell into long reveries. His brother was sitting long after midnight in his study, in a wide armchair before the fireplace, on which there smouldered some faintly glowing embers. Pavel Petrovitch was not undressed, only some red Chinese slippers had replaced the kid shoes on his feet. He held in his hand the last number of Galignani, but he was not reading; he gazed fixedly into the grate, where a bluish flame flickered, dying down, then flaring up again.... God knows where his thoughts were rambling, but they were not rambling in the past only; the expression of his face was concentrated and surly, which is not the way when a man is absorbed solely in recollections. In a small back room there sat, on a large chest, a young woman in a blue dressing jacket with a white kerchief thrown over her dark hair, Fenitchka. She was half listening, half dozing, and often looked across towards the open door through which a child’s cradle was visible, and the regular breathing of a sleeping baby could be heard.

Chapter V

The next morning Bazarov woke up earlier than any one and went out of the house. ‘Oh, my!’ he thought, looking about him, ‘the little place isn’t much to boast of!’ When Nikolai Petrovitch had divided the land with his peasants, he had had to build his new manor-house on four acres of perfectly flat and barren land. He had built a house, offices, and farm buildings, laid out a garden, dug a pond, and sunk two wells; but the young trees had not done well, very little water had collected in the pond, and that in the wells tasted brackish. Only one arbour of lilac and acacia had grown fairly well; they sometimes had tea and dinner in it. In a few minutes Bazarov had traversed all the little paths of the garden; he went into the cattle-yard and the stable, routed out two farm-boys, with whom he made friends at once, and set off with them to a small swamp about a mile from the house to look for frogs.

‘What do you want frogs for, sir?’ one of the boys asked him.

‘I’ll tell you what for,’ answered Bazarov, who possessed the special faculty of inspiring confidence in people of a lower class, though he never tried to win them, and behaved very casually with them; ‘I shall cut the frog open, and see what’s going on in his inside, and then, as you and I are much the same as frogs, only that we walk on legs, I shall know what’s going on inside us too.’

‘And what do you want to know that for?’

‘So as not to make a mistake, if you’re taken ill, and I have to cure you.’

‘Are you a doctor then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Vaska, do you hear, the gentleman says you and I are the same as frogs, that’s funny!’

‘I’m afraid of frogs,’ observed Vaska, a boy of seven, with a head as white as flax, and bare feet, dressed in a grey smock with a stand-up collar.

‘What is there to be afraid of? Do they bite?’

‘There, paddle into the water, philosophers,’ said Bazarov.

Meanwhile Nikolai Petrovitch too had waked up, and gone in to see Arkady, whom he found dressed. The father and son went out on to the terrace under the shelter of the awning; near the balustrade, on the table, among great bunches of lilacs, the samovar was already boiling. A little girl came up, the same who had been the first to meet them at the steps on their arrival the evening before. In a shrill voice she said—

‘Fedosya Nikolaevna is not quite well, she cannot come; she gave orders to ask you, will you please to pour out tea yourself, or should she send Dunyasha?’

‘I will pour out myself, myself,’ interposed Nikolai Petrovitch hurriedly. ‘Arkady, how do you take your tea, with cream, or with lemon?’

‘With cream,’ answered Arkady; and after a brief silence, he uttered interrogatively, ‘Daddy?’

Nikolai Petrovitch in confusion looked at his son.

‘Well?’ he said.

Arkady dropped his eyes.

‘Forgive me, dad, if my question seems unsuitable to you,’ he began, ‘but you yourself, by your openness yesterday, encourage me to be open ... you will not be angry ...?’

‘Go on.’

‘You give me confidence to ask you.... Isn’t the reason, Fen ... isn’t the reason she will not come here to pour out tea, because I’m here?’

Nikolai Petrovitch turned slightly away.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, at last, ‘she supposes ... she is ashamed.’

Arkady turned a rapid glance on his father.

‘She has no need to be ashamed. In the first place, you are aware of my views’ (it was very sweet to Arkady to utter that word); ‘and secondly, could I be willing to hamper your life, your habits in the least thing? Besides, I am sure you could not make a bad choice; if you have allowed her to live under the same roof with you, she must be worthy of it; in any case, a son cannot judge his father,—least of all, I, and least of all such a father who, like you, has never hampered my liberty in anything.’

Arkady’s voice had been shaky at the beginning; he felt himself magnanimous, though at the same time he realised he was delivering something of the nature of a lecture to his father; but the sound of one’s own voice has a powerful effect on any man, and Arkady brought out his last words resolutely, even with emphasis.

‘Thanks, Arkasha,’ said Nikolai Petrovitch thickly, and his fingers again strayed over his eyebrows and forehead. ‘Your suppositions are just in fact. Of course, if this girl had not deserved.... It is not a frivolous caprice. It’s not easy for me to talk to you about this; but you will understand that it is difficult for her to come here, in your presence, especially the first day of your return.’

‘In that case I will go to her,’ cried Arkady, with a fresh rush of magnanimous feeling, and he jumped up from his seat. ‘I will explain to her that she has no need to be ashamed before me.’

Nikolai Petrovitch too got up.

‘Arkady,’ he began, ‘be so good ... how can ... there ... I have not told you yet ...’

But Arkady did not listen to him, and ran off the terrace. Nikolai Petrovitch looked after him, and sank into his chair overcome by confusion. His heart began to throb. Did he at that moment realise the inevitable strangeness of the future relations between him and his son? Was he conscious that Arkady would perhaps have shown him more respect if he had never touched on this subject at all? Did he reproach himself for weakness?—it is hard to say; all these feelings were within him, but in the state of sensations—and vague sensations—while the flush did not leave his face, and his heart throbbed.

There was the sound of hurrying footsteps, and Arkady came on to the terrace. ‘We have made friends, dad!’ he cried, with an expression of a kind of affectionate and good-natured triumph on his face. ‘Fedosya Nikolaevna is not quite well to-day really, and she will come a little later. But why didn’t you tell me I had a brother? I should have kissed him last night, as I have kissed him just now.’

Nikolai Petrovitch tried to articulate something, tried to get up and open his arms. Arkady flung himself on his neck.

‘What’s this? embracing again?’ sounded the voice of Pavel Petrovitch behind them.

Father and son were equally rejoiced at his appearance at that instant; there are positions, genuinely affecting, from which one longs to escape as soon as possible.

‘Why should you be surprised at that?’ said Nikolai Petrovitch gaily. ‘Think what ages I have been waiting for Arkasha. I’ve not had time to get a good look at him since yesterday.’

‘I’m not at all surprised,’ observed Pavel Petrovitch; ‘I feel not indisposed to be embracing him myself.’

Arkady went up to his uncle, and again felt his cheeks caressed by his perfumed moustache. Pavel Petrovitch sat down to the table. He wore an elegant morning suit in the English style, and a gay little fez on his head. This fez and the carelessly tied little cravat carried a suggestion of the freedom of country life, but the stiff collars of his shirt—not white, it is true, but striped, as is correct in morning dress—stood up as inexorably as ever against his well-shaved chin.

‘Where’s your new friend?’ he asked Arkady.

‘He’s not in the house; he usually gets up early and goes off somewhere. The great thing is, we mustn’t pay any attention to him; he doesn’t like ceremony.’

‘Yes, that’s obvious.’ Pavel Petrovitch began deliberately spreading butter on his bread. ‘Is he going to stay long with us?’

‘Perhaps. He came here on the way to his father’s.’

‘And where does his father live?’

‘In our province, sixty-four miles from here. He has a small property there. He was formerly an army doctor.’

‘Tut, tut, tut! To be sure, I kept asking myself, “Where have I heard that name, Bazarov?” Nikolai, do you remember, in our father’s division there was a surgeon Bazarov?’

‘I believe there was.’

‘Yes, yes, to be sure. So that surgeon was his father. Hm!’ Pavel Petrovitch pulled his moustaches. ‘Well, and what is Mr. Bazarov himself?’ he asked, deliberately.

‘What is Bazarov?’ Arkady smiled. ‘Would you like me, uncle, to tell you what he really is?’

‘If you will be so good, nephew.’

‘He’s a nihilist.’

‘Eh?’ inquired Nikolai Petrovitch, while Pavel Petrovitch lilted a knife in the air with a small piece of butter on its tip, and remained motionless.

‘He’s a nihilist,’ repeated Arkady.

‘A nihilist,’ said Nikolai Petrovitch. ‘That’s from the Latin, nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who ... who accepts nothing?’

‘Say, “who respects nothing,”’ put in Pavel Petrovitch, and he set to work on the butter again.

‘Who regards everything from the critical point of view,’ observed Arkady.

‘Isn’t that just the same thing?’ inquired Pavel Petrovitch.

‘No, it’s not the same thing. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.’

‘Well, and is that good?’ interrupted Pavel Petrovitch.

‘That depends, uncle. Some people it will do good to, but some people will suffer for it.’

‘Indeed. Well, I see it’s not in our line. We are old-fashioned people; we imagine that without principles, taken as you say on faith, there’s no taking a step, no breathing. Vous avez changé tout cela. God give you good health and the rank of a general, while we will be content to look on and admire, worthy ... what was it?’

‘Nihilists,’ Arkady said, speaking very distinctly.

‘Yes. There used to be Hegelists, and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will exist in void, in vacuum; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai Petrovitch; it’s time I had my cocoa.’

Nikolai Petrovitch rang the bell and called, ‘Dunyasha!’ But instead of Dunyasha, Fenitchka herself came on to the terrace. She was a young woman about three-and-twenty, with a white soft skin, dark hair and eyes, red, childishly-pouting lips, and little delicate hands. She wore a neat print dress; a new blue kerchief lay lightly on her plump shoulders. She carried a large cup of cocoa, and setting it down before Pavel Petrovitch, she was overwhelmed with confusion: the hot blood rushed in a wave of crimson over the delicate skin of her pretty face. She dropped her eyes, and stood at the table, leaning a little on the very tips of her fingers. It seemed as though she were ashamed of having come in, and at the same time felt that she had a right to come.

Pavel Petrovitch knitted his brows severely, while Nikolai Petrovitch looked embarrassed.

‘Good morning, Fenitchka,’ he muttered through his teeth.

‘Good morning,’ she replied in a voice not loud but resonant, and with a sidelong glance at Arkady, who gave her a friendly smile, she went gently away. She walked with a slightly rolling gait, but even that suited her.

For some minutes silence reigned on the terrace. Pavel Petrovitch sipped his cocoa; suddenly he raised his head. ‘Here is Sir Nihilist coming towards us,’ he said in an undertone.

Bazarov was in fact approaching through the garden, stepping over the flower-beds. His linen coat and trousers were besmeared with mud; clinging marsh weed was twined round the crown of his old round hat; in his right hand he held a small bag; in the bag something alive was moving. He quickly drew near the terrace, and said with a nod, ‘Good morning, gentlemen; sorry I was late for tea; I’ll be back directly; I must just put these captives away.’

‘What have you there—leeches?’ asked Pavel Petrovitch.

‘No, frogs.’

‘Do you eat them—or keep them?’

‘For experiment,’ said Bazarov indifferently, and he went off into the house.

‘So he’s going to cut them up,’ observed Pavel Petrovitch. ‘He has no faith in principles, but he has faith in frogs.’

Arkady looked compassionately at his uncle; Nikolai Petrovitch shrugged his shoulders stealthily. Pavel Petrovitch himself felt that his epigram was unsuccessful, and began to talk about husbandry and the new bailiff, who had come to him the evening before to complain that a labourer, Foma, ‘was deboshed,’ and quite unmanageable. ‘He’s such an Æsop,’ he said among other things; ‘in all places he has protested himself a worthless fellow; he’s not a man to keep his place; he’ll walk off in a huff like a fool.’

Chapter VI

Bazarov came back, sat down to the table, and began hastily drinking tea. The two brothers looked at him in silence, while Arkady stealthily watched first his father and then his uncle.

‘Did you walk far from here?’ Nikolai Petrovitch asked at last.

‘Where you’ve a little swamp near the aspen wood. I started some half-dozen snipe; you might slaughter them; Arkady.’

‘Aren’t you a sportsman then?’

‘No.’

‘Is your special study physics?’ Pavel Petrovitch in his turn inquired.

‘Physics, yes; and natural science in general.’

‘They say the Teutons of late have had great success in that line.’

‘Yes; the Germans are our teachers in it,’ Bazarov answered carelessly.

The word Teutons instead of Germans, Pavel Petrovitch had used with ironical intention; none noticed it however.

‘Have you such a high opinion of the Germans?’ said Pavel Petrovitch, with exaggerated courtesy. He was beginning to feel a secret irritation. His aristocratic nature was revolted by Bazarov’s absolute nonchalance. This surgeon’s son was not only not overawed, he even gave abrupt and indifferent answers, and in the tone of his voice there was something churlish, almost insolent.

‘The scientific men there are a clever lot.’

‘Ah, ah. To be sure, of Russian scientific men you have not such a flattering opinion, I dare say?’

‘That is very likely.’

‘That’s very praiseworthy self-abnegation,’ Pavel Petrovitch declared, drawing himself up, and throwing his head back. ‘But how is this? Arkady Nikolaitch was telling us just now that you accept no authorities? Don’t you believe in them?’

‘And how am I accepting them? And what am I to believe in? They tell me the truth, I agree, that’s all.’

‘And do all Germans tell the truth?’ said Pavel Petrovitch, and his face assumed an expression as unsympathetic, as remote, as if he had withdrawn to some cloudy height.

‘Not all,’ replied Bazarov, with a short yawn. He obviously did not care to continue the discussion.

Pavel Petrovitch glanced at Arkady, as though he would say to him, ‘Your friend’s polite, I must say.’ ‘For my own part,’ he began again, not without some effort, ‘I am so unregenerate as not to like Germans. Russian Germans I am not speaking of now; we all know what sort of creatures they are. But even German Germans are not to my liking. In former days there were some here and there; they had—well, Schiller, to be sure, Goethe ... my brother—he takes a particularly favourable view of them.... But now they have all turned chemists and materialists ...’

‘A good chemist is twenty times as useful as any poet,’ broke in Bazarov.

‘Oh, indeed,’ commented Pavel Petrovitch, and, as though falling asleep, he faintly raised his eyebrows. ‘You don’t acknowledge art then, I suppose?’

‘The art of making money or of advertising pills!’ cried Bazarov, with a contemptuous laugh.

‘Ah, ah. You are pleased to jest, I see. You reject all that, no doubt? Granted. Then you believe in science only?’

‘I have already explained to you that I don’t believe in anything; and what is science—science in the abstract? There are sciences, as there are trades and crafts; but abstract science doesn’t exist at all.’

‘Very good. Well, and in regard to the other traditions accepted in human conduct, do you maintain the same negative attitude?’

‘What’s this, an examination?’ asked Bazarov.

Pavel Petrovitch turned slightly pale.... Nikolai Petrovitch thought it his duty to interpose in the conversation.

‘We will converse on this subject with you more in detail some day, dear Yevgeny Vassilyitch; we will hear your views, and express our own. For my part, I am heartily glad you are studying the natural sciences. I have heard that Liebig has made some wonderful discoveries in the amelioration of soils. You can be of assistance to me in my agricultural labours; you can give me some useful advice.’

‘I am at your service, Nikolai Petrovitch; but Liebig’s miles over our heads! One has first to learn the a b c, and then begin to read, and we haven’t set eyes on the alphabet yet.’

‘You are certainly a nihilist, I see that,’ thought Nikolai Petrovitch. ‘Still, you will allow me to apply to you on occasion,’ he added aloud. ‘And now I fancy, brother, it’s time for us to be going to have a talk with the bailiff.’

Pavel Petrovitch got up from his seat.

‘Yes,’ he said, without looking at any one; ‘it’s a misfortune to live five years in the country like this, far from mighty intellects! You turn into a fool directly. You may try not to forget what you’ve been taught, but—in a snap!—they’ll prove all that’s rubbish, and tell you that sensible men have nothing more to do with such foolishness, and that you, if you please, are an antiquated old fogey. What’s to be done? Young people, of course, are cleverer than we are!’

Pavel Petrovitch turned slowly on his heels, and slowly walked away; Nikolai Petrovitch went after him.

‘Is he always like that?’ Bazarov coolly inquired of Arkady directly the door had closed behind the two brothers.

‘I must say, Yevgeny, you weren’t nice to him,’ remarked Arkady. ‘You have hurt his feelings.’

‘Well, am I going to consider them, these provincial aristocrats! Why, it’s all vanity, dandy habits, fatuity. He should have continued his career in Petersburg, if that’s his bent. But there, enough of him! I’ve found a rather rare species of a water-beetle, Dytiscus marginatus; do you know it? I will show you.’

‘I promised to tell you his story,’ began Arkady.

‘The story of the beetle?’

‘Come, don’t, Yevgeny. The story of my uncle. You will see he’s not the sort of man you fancy. He deserves pity rather than ridicule.’

‘I don’t dispute it; but why are you worrying over him?’

‘One ought to be just, Yevgeny.’

‘How does that follow?’

‘No; listen ...’

And Arkady told him his uncle’s story. The reader will find it in the following chapter.

Chapter VII

Pavel Petrovitch Kirsanov was educated first at home, like his younger brother, and afterwards in the Corps of Pages. From childhood he was distinguished by remarkable beauty; moreover he was self-confident, somewhat ironical, and had a rather biting humour; he could not fail to please. He began to be seen everywhere, directly he had received his commission as an officer. He was much admired in society, and he indulged every whim, even every caprice and every folly, and gave himself airs, but that too was attractive in him. Women went out of their senses over him; men called him a coxcomb, and were secretly jealous of him. He lived, as has been related already, in the same apartments as his brother, whom he loved sincerely, though he was not at all like him. Nikolai Petrovitch was a little lame, he had small, pleasing features of a rather melancholy cast, small, black eyes, and thin, soft hair; he liked being lazy, but he also liked reading, and was timid in society.

Pavel Petrovitch did not spend a single evening at home, prided himself on his ease and audacity (he was just bringing gymnastics into fashion among young men in society), and had read in all some five or six French books. At twenty-eight he was already a captain; a brilliant career awaited him. Suddenly everything was changed.

At that time, there was sometimes seen in Petersburg society a woman who has even yet not been forgotten. Princess R——. She had a well-educated, well-bred, but rather stupid husband, and no children. She used suddenly to go abroad, and suddenly return to Russia, and led an eccentric life in general. She had the reputation of being a frivolous coquette, abandoned herself eagerly to every sort of pleasure, danced to exhaustion, laughed and jested with young men, whom she received in the dim light of her drawing-room before dinner; while at night she wept and prayed, found no peace in anything, and often paced her room till morning, wringing her hands in anguish, or sat, pale and chill, over a psalter. Day came, and she was transformed again into a grand lady; again she went out, laughed, chattered, and simply flung herself headlong into anything which could afford her the slightest distraction. She was marvellously well-proportioned, her hair coloured like gold and heavy as gold hung below her knees, but no one would have called her a beauty; in her whole face the only good point was her eyes, and even her eyes were not good—they were grey, and not large—but their glance was swift and deep, unconcerned to the point of audacity, and thoughtful to the point of melancholy—an enigmatic glance. There was a light of something extraordinary in them, even while her tongue was lisping the emptiest of inanities. She dressed with elaborate care. Pavel Petrovitch met her at a ball, danced a mazurka with her, in the course of which she did not utter a single rational word, and fell passionately in love with her. Being accustomed to make conquests, in this instance, too, he soon attained his object, but his easy success did not damp his ardour. On the contrary, he was in still more torturing, still closer bondage to this woman, in whom, even at the very moment when she surrendered herself utterly, there seemed always something still mysterious and unattainable, to which none could penetrate. What was hidden in that soul—God knows! It seemed as though she were in the power of mysterious forces, incomprehensible even to herself; they seemed to play on her at will; her intellect was not powerful enough to master their caprices. Her whole behaviour presented a series of inconsistencies; the only letters which could have awakened her husband’s just suspicions, she wrote to a man who was almost a stranger to her, whilst her love had always an element of melancholy; with a man she had chosen as a lover, she ceased to laugh and to jest, she listened to him, and gazed at him with a look of bewilderment. Sometimes, for the most part suddenly, this bewilderment passed into chill horror; her face took a wild, death-like expression; she locked herself up in her bedroom, and her maid, putting her ear to the keyhole, could hear her smothered sobs. More than once, as he went home after a tender interview, Kirsanov felt within him that heartrending, bitter vexation which follows on a total failure.

‘What more do I want?’ he asked himself, while his heart was heavy. He once gave her a ring with a sphinx engraved on the stone.

‘What’s that?’ she asked; ‘a sphinx?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘and that sphinx is you.’

‘I?’ she queried, and slowly raising her enigmatical glance upon him. ‘Do you know that’s awfully flattering?’ she added with a meaningless smile, while her eyes still kept the same strange look.

Pavel Petrovitch suffered even while Princess R—— loved him; but when she grew cold to him, and that happened rather quickly, he almost went out of his mind. He was on the rack, and he was jealous; he gave her no peace, followed her about everywhere; she grew sick of his pursuit of her, and she went abroad. He resigned his commission in spite of the entreaties of his friends and the exhortations of his superiors, and followed the princess; four years he spent in foreign countries, at one time pursuing her, at another time intentionally losing sight of her. He was ashamed of himself, he was disgusted with his own lack of spirit ... but nothing availed. Her image, that incomprehensible, almost meaningless, but bewitching image, was deeply rooted in his heart. At Baden he once more regained his old footing with her; it seemed as though she had never loved him so passionately ... but in a month it was all at an end: the flame flickered up for the last time and went out for ever. Foreseeing inevitable separation, he wanted at least to remain her friend, as though friendship with such a woman was possible.... She secretly left Baden, and from that time steadily avoided Kirsanov. He returned to Russia, and tried to live his former life again; but he could not get back into the old groove. He wandered from place to place like a man possessed; he still went into society; he still retained the habits of a man of the world; he could boast of two or three fresh conquests; but he no longer expected anything much of himself or of others, and he undertook nothing. He grew old and grey; spending all his evenings at the club, jaundiced and bored, and arguing in bachelor society became a necessity for him—a bad sign, as we all know. Marriage, of course, he did not even think of. Ten years passed in this way; they passed by colourless and fruitless—and quickly, fearfully quickly. Nowhere does time fly past as in Russia; in prison they say it flies even faster. One day at dinner at the club, Pavel Petrovitch heard of the death of the Princess R——. She had died at Paris in a state bordering on insanity.

He got up from the table, and a long time he paced about the rooms of the club, or stood stockstill near the card-players, but he did not go home earlier than usual. Some time later he received a packet addressed to him; in it was the ring he had given the princess. She had drawn lines in the shape of a cross over the sphinx and sent him word that the solution of the enigma—was the cross.

This happened at the beginning of the year 1848, at the very time when Nikolai Petrovitch came to Petersburg, after the loss of his wife. Pavel Petrovitch had scarcely seen his brother since the latter had settled in the country; the marriage of Nikolai Petrovitch had coincided with the very first days of Pavel Petrovitch’s acquaintance with the princess. When he came back from abroad, he had gone to him with the intention of staying a couple of months with him, in sympathetic enjoyment of his happiness, but he had only succeeded in standing a week of it. The difference in the positions of the two brothers was too great. In 1848, this difference had grown less; Nikolai Petrovitch had lost his wife, Pavel Petrovitch had lost his memories; after the death of the princess he tried not to think of her. But to Nikolai, there remained the sense of a well-spent life, his son was growing up under his eyes; Pavel, on the contrary, a solitary bachelor, was entering upon that indefinite twilight period of regrets that are akin to hopes, and hopes that are akin to regrets, when youth is over, while old age has not yet come.

This time was harder for Pavel Petrovitch than for another man; in losing his past, he lost everything.

‘I will not invite you to Maryino now,’ Nikolai Petrovitch said to him one day, (he had called his property by that name in honour of his wife); ‘you were dull there in my dear wife’s time, and now I think you would be bored to death.’

‘I was stupid and fidgety then,’ answered Pavel Petrovitch; ‘since then I have grown quieter, if not wiser. On the contrary, now, if you will let me, I am ready to settle with you for good.’

For all answer Nikolai Petrovitch embraced him; but a year and a half passed after this conversation, before Pavel Petrovitch made up his mind to carry out his intention. When he was once settled in the country, however, he did not leave it, even during the three winters which Nikolai Petrovitch spent in Petersburg with his son. He began to read, chiefly English; he arranged his whole life, roughly speaking, in the English style, rarely saw the neighbours, and only went out to the election of marshals, where he was generally silent, only occasionally annoying and alarming land-owners of the old school by his liberal sallies, and not associating with the representatives of the younger generation. Both the latter and the former considered him ‘stuck up’; and both parties respected him for his fine aristocratic manners; for his reputation for successes in love; for the fact that he was very well dressed and always stayed in the best room in the best hotel; for the fact that he generally dined well, and had once even dined with Wellington at Louis Philippe’s table; for the fact that he always took everywhere with him a real silver dressing-case and a portable bath; for the fact that he always smelt of some exceptionally ‘good form’ scent; for the fact that he played whist in masterly fashion, and always lost; and lastly, they respected him also for his incorruptible honesty. Ladies considered him enchantingly romantic, but he did not cultivate ladies’ acquaintance....

‘So you see, Yevgeny,’ observed Arkady, as he finished his story, ‘how unjustly you judge of my uncle! To say nothing of his having more than once helped my father out of difficulties, given him all his money—the property, perhaps you don’t know, wasn’t divided—he’s glad to help any one, among other things he always sticks up for the peasants; it’s true, when he talks to them he frowns and sniffs eau de cologne.’ ...

‘His nerves, no doubt,’ put in Bazarov.

‘Perhaps; but his heart is very good. And he’s far from being stupid. What useful advice he has given me especially ... especially in regard to relations with women.’

‘Aha! a scalded dog fears cold water, we know that!’

‘In short,’ continued Arkady, ‘he’s profoundly unhappy, believe me; it’s a sin to despise him.’

‘And who does despise him?’ retorted Bazarov. ‘Still, I must say that a fellow who stakes his whole life on one card—a woman’s love—and when that card fails, turns sour, and lets himself go till he’s fit for nothing, is not a man, but a male. You say he’s unhappy; you ought to know best; to be sure, he’s not got rid of all his fads. I’m convinced that he solemnly imagines himself a superior creature because he reads that wretched Galignani, and once a month saves a peasant from a flogging.’

‘But remember his education, the age in which he grew up,’ observed Arkady.

‘Education?’ broke in Bazarov. ‘Every man must educate himself, just as I’ve done, for instance.... And as for the age, why should I depend on it? Let it rather depend on me. No, my dear fellow, that’s all shallowness, want of backbone! And what stuff it all is, about these mysterious relations between a man and woman? We physiologists know what these relations are. You study the anatomy of the eye; where does the enigmatical glance you talk about come in there? That’s all romantic, nonsensical, æsthetic rot. We had much better go and look at the beetle.’

And the two friends went off to Bazarov’s room, which was already pervaded by a sort of medico-surgical odour, mingled with the smell of cheap tobacco.

Chapter VIII

Pavel Petrovitch did not long remain present at his brother’s interview with his bailiff, a tall, thin man with a sweet consumptive voice and knavish eyes, who to all Nikolai Petrovitch’s remarks answered, ‘Certainly, sir,’ and tried to make the peasants out to be thieves and drunkards. The estate had only recently been put on to the new reformed system, and the new mechanism worked, creaking like an ungreased wheel, warping and cracking like homemade furniture of unseasoned wood. Nikolai Petrovitch did not lose heart, but often he sighed, and was gloomy; he felt that the thing could not go on without money, and his money was almost all spent. Arkady had spoken the truth; Pavel Petrovitch had more than once helped his brother; more than once, seeing him struggling and cudgelling his brains, at a loss which way to turn, Pavel Petrovitch moved deliberately to the window, and with his hands thrust into his pockets, muttered between his teeth, ‘mais je puis vous de l’argent,’ and gave him money; but to-day he had none himself, and he preferred to go away. The petty details of agricultural management worried him; besides, it constantly struck him that Nikolai Petrovitch, for all his zeal and industry, did not set about things in the right way, though he would not have been able to point out precisely where Nikolai Petrovitch’s mistake lay. ‘My brother’s not practical enough,’ he reasoned to himself; ‘they impose upon him.’ Nikolai Petrovitch, on the other hand, had the highest opinion of Pavel Petrovitch’s practical ability, and always asked his advice. ‘I’m a soft, weak fellow, I’ve spent my life in the wilds,’ he used to say; ‘while you haven’t seen so much of the world for nothing, you see through people; you have an eagle eye.’ In answer to which Pavel Petrovitch only turned away, but did not contradict his brother.

Leaving Nikolai Petrovitch in his study, he walked along the corridor, which separated the front part of the house from the back; when he had reached a low door, he stopped in hesitation, then pulling his moustaches, he knocked at it.

‘Who’s there? Come in,’ sounded Fenitchka’s voice.

‘It’s I,’ said Pavel Petrovitch, and he opened the door.

Fenitchka jumped up from the chair on which she was sitting with her baby, and giving him into the arms of a girl, who at once carried him out of the room, she put straight her kerchief hastily.

‘Pardon me, if I disturb you,’ began Pavel Petrovitch, not looking at her; ‘I only wanted to ask you ... they are sending into the town to-day, I think ... please let them buy me some green tea.’

‘Certainly,’ answered Fenitchka; ‘how much do you desire them to buy?’

‘Oh, half a pound will be enough, I imagine. You have made a change here, I see,’ he added, with a rapid glance round him, which glided over Fenitchka’s face too. ‘The curtains here,’ he explained, seeing she did not understand him.

‘Oh, yes, the curtains; Nikolai Petrovitch was so good as to make me a present of them; but they have been put up a long while now.’

‘Yes, and it’s a long while since I have been to see you. Now it is very nice here.’

‘Thanks to Nikolai Petrovitch’s kindness,’ murmured Fenitchka.

‘You are more comfortable here than in the little lodge you used to have?’ inquired Pavel Petrovitch urbanely, but without the slightest smile.

‘Certainly, it’s more comfortable.’

‘Who has been put in your place now?’

‘The laundry-maids are there now.’

‘Ah!’

Pavel Petrovitch was silent. ‘Now he is going,’ thought Fenitchka; but he did not go, and she stood before him motionless.

‘What did you send your little one away for?’ said Pavel Petrovitch at last. ‘I love children; let me see him.’

Fenitchka blushed all over with confusion and delight. She was afraid of Pavel Petrovitch; he had scarcely ever spoken to her.

‘Dunyasha,’ she called; ‘will you bring Mitya, please.’ (Fenitchka did not treat any one in the house familiarly.) ‘But wait a minute, he must have a frock on,’ Fenitchka was going towards the door.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ remarked Pavel Petrovitch.

‘I will be back directly,’ answered Fenitchka, and she went out quickly.

Pavel Petrovitch was left alone, and he looked round this time with special attention. The small low-pitched room in which he found himself was very clean and snug. It smelt of the freshly painted floor and of camomile. Along the walls stood chairs with lyre-shaped backs, bought by the late general on his campaign in Poland; in one corner was a little bedstead under a muslin canopy beside an iron-clamped chest with a convex lid. In the opposite corner a little lamp was burning before a big dark picture of St. Nikolai the wonder-worker; a tiny porcelain egg hung by a red ribbon from the protruding gold halo down to the saint’s breast; by the windows greenish glass jars of last year’s jam carefully tied down could be seen; on their paper covers Fenitchka herself had written in big letters ‘Gooseberry’; Nikolai Petrovitch was particularly fond of that preserve. On a long cord from the ceiling a cage hung with a short-tailed siskin in it; he was constantly chirping and hopping about, the cage was constantly shaking and swinging, while hempseeds fell with a light tap on to the floor. On the wall just above a small chest of drawers hung some rather bad photographs of Nikolai Petrovitch in various attitudes, taken by an itinerant photographer; there too hung a photograph of Fenitchka herself, which was an absolute failure; it was an eyeless face wearing a forced smile, in a dingy frame, nothing more could be made out; while above Fenitchka, General Yermolov, in a Circassian cloak, scowled menacingly upon the Caucasian mountains in the distance, from beneath a little silk shoe for pins which fell right on to his brows.

Five minutes passed; bustling and whispering could be heard in the next room. Pavel Petrovitch took up from the chest of drawers a greasy book, an odd volume of Masalsky’s Musketeer, and turned over a few pages.... The door opened, and Fenitchka came in with Mitya in her arms. She had put on him a little red smock with embroidery on the collar, had combed his hair and washed his face; he was breathing heavily, his whole body working, and his little hands waving in the air, as is the way with all healthy babies; but his smart smock obviously impressed him, an expression of delight was reflected in every part of his little fat person. Fenitchka had put her own hair too in order, and had arranged her kerchief; but she might well have remained as she was. And really is there anything in the world more captivating than a beautiful young mother with a healthy baby in her arms?

‘What a chubby fellow!’ said Pavel Petrovitch graciously, and he tickled Mitya’s little double chin with the tapering nail of his forefinger. The baby stared at the siskin, and chuckled.

‘That’s uncle,’ said Fenitchka, bending her face down to him and slightly rocking him, while Dunyasha quietly set in the window a smouldering perfumed stick, putting a halfpenny under it.

‘How many months old is he?’ asked Pavel Petrovitch.

‘Six months; it will soon be seven, on the eleventh.’

‘Isn’t it eight, Fedosya Nikolaevna?’ put in Dunyasha, with some timidity.

‘No, seven; what an idea!’ The baby chuckled again, stared at the chest, and suddenly caught hold of his mother’s nose and mouth with all his five little fingers. ‘Saucy mite,’ said Fenitchka, not drawing her face away.

‘He’s like my brother,’ observed Pavel Petrovitch.

‘Who else should he be like?’ thought Fenitchka.

‘Yes,’ continued Pavel Petrovitch, as though speaking to himself; ‘there’s an unmistakable likeness.’ He looked attentively, almost mournfully, at Fenitchka.

‘That’s uncle,’ she repeated, in a whisper this time.

‘Ah! Pavel! so you’re here!’ was heard suddenly the voice of Nikolai Petrovitch.

Pavel Petrovitch turned hurriedly round, frowning; but his brother looked at him with such delight, such gratitude, that he could not help responding to his smile.

‘You’ve a splendid little cherub,’ he said, and looking at his watch, ‘I came in here to speak about some tea.’

And, assuming an expression of indifference, Pavel Petrovitch at once went out of the room.

‘Did he come of himself?’ Nikolai Petrovitch asked Fenitchka.

‘Yes; he knocked and came in.’

‘Well, and has Arkasha been in to see you again?’

‘No. Hadn’t I better move into the lodge, Nikolai Petrovitch?’

‘Why so?’

‘I wonder whether it wouldn’t be best just for the first.’

‘N ... no,’ Nikolai Petrovitch brought out hesitatingly, rubbing his forehead. ‘We ought to have done it before.... How are you, fatty?’ he said, suddenly brightening, and going up to the baby, he kissed him on the cheek; then he bent a little and pressed his lips to Fenitchka’s hand, which lay white as milk upon Mitya’s little red smock.

‘Nikolai Petrovitch! what are you doing?’ she whispered, dropping her eyes, then slowly raising them. Very charming was the expression of her eyes when she peeped, as it were, from under her lids, and smiled tenderly and a little foolishly.

Nikolai Petrovitch had made Fenitchka’s acquaintance in the following manner. He had once happened three years before to stay a night at an inn in a remote district town. He was agreeably struck by the cleanness of the room assigned to him, the freshness of the bed-linen. Surely the woman of the house must be a German? was the idea that occurred to him; but she proved to be a Russian, a woman of about fifty, neatly dressed, of a good-looking, sensible countenance and discreet speech. He entered into conversation with her at tea; he liked her very much. Nikolai Petrovitch had at that time only just moved into his new home, and not wishing to keep serfs in the house, he was on the look-out for wage-servants; the woman of the inn on her side complained of the small number of visitors to the town, and the hard times; he proposed to her to come into his house in the capacity of housekeeper; she consented. Her husband had long been dead, leaving her an only daughter, Fenitchka. Within a fortnight Arina Savishna (that was the new housekeeper’s name) arrived with her daughter at Maryino and installed herself in the little lodge. Nikolai Petrovitch’s choice proved a successful one. Arina brought order into the household. As for Fenitchka, who was at that time seventeen, no one spoke of her, and scarcely any one saw her; she lived quietly and sedately, and only on Sundays Nikolai Petrovitch noticed in the church somewhere in a side place the delicate profile of her white face. More than a year passed thus.

One morning, Arina came into his study, and bowing low as usual, she asked him if he could do anything for her daughter, who had got a spark from the stove in her eye. Nikolai Petrovitch, like all stay-at-home people, had studied doctoring and even compiled a homoeopathic guide. He at once told Arina to bring the patient to him. Fenitchka was much frightened when she heard the master had sent for her; however, she followed her mother. Nikolai Petrovitch led her to the window and took her head in his two hands. After thoroughly examining her red and swollen eye, he prescribed a fomentation, which he made up himself at once, and tearing his handkerchief in pieces, he showed her how it ought to be applied. Fenitchka listened to all he had to say, and then was going. ‘Kiss the master’s hand, silly girl,’ said Arina. Nikolai Petrovitch did not give her his hand, and in confusion himself kissed her bent head on the parting of her hair. Fenitchka’s eye was soon well again, but the impression she had made on Nikolai Petrovitch did not pass away so quickly. He was for ever haunted by that pure, delicate, timidly raised face; he felt on the palms of his hands that soft hair, and saw those innocent, slightly parted lips, through which pearly teeth gleamed with moist brilliance in the sunshine. He began to watch her with great attention in church, and tried to get into conversation with her. At first she was shy of him, and one day meeting him at the approach of evening in a narrow footpath through a field of rye, she ran into the tall thick rye, overgrown with cornflowers and wormwood, so as not to meet him face to face. He caught sight of her little head through a golden network of ears of rye, from which she was peeping out like a little animal, and called affectionately to her—

‘Good-evening, Fenitchka! I don’t bite.’

‘Good-evening,’ she whispered, not coming out of her ambush.

By degrees she began to be more at home with him, but was still shy in his presence, when suddenly her mother, Arina, died of cholera. What was to become of Fenitchka? She inherited from her mother a love for order, regularity, and respectability; but she was so young, so alone. Nikolai Petrovitch was himself so good and considerate.... It’s needless to relate the rest....

‘So my brother came in to see you?’ Nikolai Petrovitch questioned her. ‘He knocked and came in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s a good thing. Let me give Mitya a swing.’

And Nikolai Petrovitch began tossing him almost up to the ceiling, to the huge delight of the baby, and to the considerable uneasiness of the mother, who every time he flew up stretched her arms up towards his little bare legs.

Pavel Petrovitch went back to his artistic study, with its walls covered with handsome bluish-grey hangings, with weapons hanging upon a variegated Persian rug nailed to the wall; with walnut furniture, upholstered in dark green velveteen, with a renaissance bookcase of old black oak, with bronze statuettes on the magnificent writing-table, with an open hearth. He threw himself on the sofa, clasped his hands behind his head, and remained without moving, looking with a face almost of despair at the ceiling. Whether he wanted to hide from the very walls that which was reflected in his face, or for some other reason, he got up, drew the heavy window curtains, and again threw himself on the sofa.

Chapter IX

On the same day Bazarov made acquaintance with Fenitchka. He was walking with Arkady in the garden, and explaining to him why some of the trees, especially the oaks, had not done well.

‘You ought to have planted silver poplars here by preference, and spruce firs, and perhaps limes, giving them some loam. The arbour there has done well,’ he added, ‘because it’s acacia and lilac; they’re accommodating good fellows, those trees, they don’t want much care. But there’s some one in here.’

In the arbour was sitting Fenitchka, with Dunyasha and Mitya. Bazarov stood still, while Arkady nodded to Fenitchka like an old friend.

‘Who’s that?’ Bazarov asked him directly they had passed by. ‘What a pretty girl!’

‘Whom are you speaking of?’

‘You know; only one of them was pretty.’

Arkady, not without embarrassment, explained to him briefly who Fenitchka was.

‘Aha!’ commented Bazarov; ‘your father’s got good taste, one can see. I like him, your father, ay, ay! He’s a jolly fellow. We must make friends though,’ he added, and turned back towards the arbour.

‘Yevgeny!’ Arkady cried after him in dismay; ‘mind what you are about, for mercy’s sake.’

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ said Bazarov; ‘I know how to behave myself—I’m not a booby.’

Going up to Fenitchka, he took off his cap.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ he began, with a polite bow. ‘I’m a harmless person, and a friend of Arkady Nikolaevitch’s.’

Fenitchka got up from the garden seat and looked at him without speaking.

‘What a splendid baby!’ continued Bazarov; ‘don’t be uneasy, my praises have never brought ill-luck yet. Why is it his cheeks are so flushed? Is he cutting his teeth?’

‘Yes,’ said Fenitchka; ‘he has cut four teeth already, and now the gums are swollen again.’

‘Show me, and don’t be afraid, I’m a doctor.’

Bazarov took the baby up in his arms, and to the great astonishment both of Fenitchka and Dunyasha the child made no resistance, and was not frightened.

‘I see, I see.... It’s nothing, everything’s as it should be; he will have a good set of teeth. If anything goes wrong, tell me. And are you quite well yourself?’

‘Quite, thank God.’

‘Thank God, indeed—that’s the great thing. And you?’ he added, turning to Dunyasha.

Dunyasha, a girl very prim in the master’s house, and a romp outside the gates, only giggled in answer.

‘Well, that’s all right. Here’s your gallant fellow.’

Fenitchka received the baby in her arms.

‘How good he was with you!’ she commented in an undertone.

‘Children are always good with me.’ answered Bazarov; ‘I have a way with them.’

‘Children know who loves them,’ remarked Dunyasha.

‘Yes, they certainly do,’ Fenitchka said. ‘Why, Mitya will not go to some people for anything.’

‘Will he come to me?’ asked Arkady, who, after standing in the distance for some time, had gone up to the arbour.

He tried to entice Mitya to come to him, but Mitya threw his head back and screamed, to Fenitchka’s great confusion.

‘Another day, when he’s had time to get used to me,’ said Arkady indulgently, and the two friends walked away.

‘What’s her name?’ asked Bazarov.

‘Fenitchka ... Fedosya,’ answered Arkady.

‘And her father’s name? One must know that too.’

‘Nikolaevna.’

‘Bene. What I like in her is that she’s not too embarrassed. Some people, I suppose, would think ill of her for it. What nonsense! What is there to embarrass her? She’s a mother—she’s all right.’

‘She’s all right,’ observed Arkady,—‘but my father.’

‘And he’s right too,’ put in Bazarov.

‘Well, no, I don’t think so.’

‘I suppose an extra heir’s not to your liking?’

‘I wonder you’re not ashamed to attribute such ideas to me!’ retorted Arkady hotly; ‘I don’t consider my father wrong from that point of view; I think he ought to marry her.’

‘Hoity-toity!’ responded Bazarov tranquilly. ‘What magnanimous fellows we are! You still attach significance to marriage; I did not expect that of you.’

The friends walked a few paces in silence.

‘I have looked at all your father’s establishment,’ Bazarov began again. ‘The cattle are inferior, the horses are broken down; the buildings aren’t up to much, and the workmen look confirmed loafers; while the superintendent is either a fool, or a knave, I haven’t quite found out which yet.’

‘You are rather hard on everything to-day, Yevgeny Vassilyevitch.’

‘And the dear good peasants are taking your father in to a dead certainty. You know the Russian proverb, “The Russian peasant will cheat God Himself.”’

‘I begin to agree with my uncle,’ remarked Arkady; ‘you certainly have a poor opinion of Russians.’

‘As though that mattered! The only good point in a Russian is his having the lowest possible opinion of himself. What does matter is that two and two make four, and the rest is all foolery.’

‘And is nature foolery?’ said Arkady, looking pensively at the bright-coloured fields in the distance, in the beautiful soft light of the sun, which was not yet high up in the sky.

‘Nature, too, is foolery in the sense you understand it. Nature’s not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.’

At that instant, the long drawn notes of a violoncello floated out to them from the house. Some one was playing Schubert’s Expectation with much feeling, though with an untrained hand, and the melody flowed with honey sweetness through the air.

‘What’s that?’ cried Bazarov in amazement.

‘It’s my father.’

‘Your father plays the violoncello?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how old is your father?’

‘Forty-four.’

Bazarov suddenly burst into a roar of laughter.

‘What are you laughing at?’

‘Upon my word, a man of forty-four, a paterfamilias in this out-of-the-way district, playing on the violoncello!’

Bazarov went on laughing; but much as he revered his master, this time Arkady did not even smile.

Chapter X

About a fortnight passed by. Life at Maryino went on its accustomed course, while Arkady was lazy and enjoyed himself, and Bazarov worked. Every one in the house had grown used to him, to his careless manners, and his curt and abrupt speeches. Fenitchka, in particular, was so far at home with him that one night she sent to wake him up; Mitya had had convulsions; and he had gone, and, half joking, half-yawning as usual, he stayed two hours with her and relieved the child. On the other hand Pavel Petrovitch had grown to detest Bazarov with all the strength of his soul; he regarded him as stuck-up, impudent, cynical, and vulgar; he suspected that Bazarov had no respect for him, that he had all but a contempt for him—him, Pavel Kirsanov!

Nikolai Petrovitch was rather afraid of the young ‘nihilist,’ and was doubtful whether his influence over Arkady was for the good; but he was glad to listen to him, and was glad to be present at his scientific and chemical experiments. Bazarov had brought with him a microscope, and busied himself for hours together with it. The servants, too, took to him, though he made fun of them; they felt, all the same, that he was one of themselves, not a master. Dunyasha was always ready to giggle with him, and used to cast significant and stealthy glances at him when she skipped by like a rabbit; Piotr, a man vain and stupid to the last degree, for ever wearing an affected frown on his brow, a man whose whole merit consisted in the fact that he looked civil, could spell out a page of reading, and was diligent in brushing his coat—even he smirked and brightened up directly Bazarov paid him any attention; the boys on the farm simply ran after the ‘doctor’ like puppies. The old man Prokofitch was the only one who did not like him; he handed him the dishes at table with a surly face, called him a ‘butcher’ and ‘an upstart,’ and declared that with his great whiskers he looked like a pig in a stye. Prokofitch in his own way was quite as much of an aristocrat as Pavel Petrovitch.

The best days of the year had come—the first days of June. The weather kept splendidly fine; in the distance, it is true, the cholera was threatening, but the inhabitants of that province had had time to get used to its visits. Bazarov used to get up very early and go out for two or three miles, not for a walk—he couldn’t bear walking without an object—but to collect specimens of plants and insects. Sometimes he took Arkady with him.

On the way home an argument usually sprang up, and Arkady was usually vanquished in it, though he said more than his companion.

One day they had lingered rather late; Nikolai Petrovitch went to meet them in the garden, and as he reached the arbour he suddenly heard the quick steps and voices of the two young men. They were walking on the other side of the arbour, and could not see him.

‘You don’t know my father well enough,’ said Arkady.

‘Your father’s a nice chap,’ said Bazarov, ‘but he’s behind the times; his day is done.’

Nikolai Petrovitch listened intently.... Arkady made no answer.

The man whose day was done remained two minutes motionless, and stole slowly home.

‘The day before yesterday I saw him reading Pushkin,’ Bazarov was continuing meanwhile. ‘Explain to him, please, that that’s no earthly use. He’s not a boy, you know; it’s time to throw up that rubbish. And what an idea to be a romantic at this time of day! Give him something sensible to read.’

‘What ought I to give him?’ asked Arkady.

‘Oh, I think Büchner’s Stoff und Kraft to begin with.’

‘I think so too,’ observed Arkady approving, ‘Stoff und Kraft is written in popular language....’

‘So it seems,’ Nikolai Petrovitch said the same day after dinner to his brother, as he sat in his study, ‘you and I are behind the times, our day’s over. Well, well. Perhaps Bazarov is right; but one thing I confess, makes me feel sore; I did so hope, precisely now, to get on to such close intimate terms with Arkady, and it turns out I’m left behind, and he has gone forward, and we can’t understand one another.’

‘How has he gone forward? And in what way is he so superior to us already?’ cried Pavel Petrovitch impatiently. ‘It’s that high and mighty gentleman, that nihilist, who’s knocked all that into his head. I hate that doctor fellow; in my opinion, he’s simply a quack; I’m convinced, for all his tadpoles, he’s not got very far even in medicine.’

‘No, brother, you mustn’t say that; Bazarov is clever, and knows his subject.’

‘And his conceit’s something revolting,’ Pavel Petrovitch broke in again.

‘Yes,’ observed Nikolai Petrovitch, ‘he is conceited. But there’s no doing without that, it seems; only that’s what I did not take into account. I thought I was doing everything to keep up with the times; I have started a model farm; I have done well by the peasants, so that I am positively called a “Red Radical” all over the province; I read, I study, I try in every way to keep abreast with the requirements of the day—and they say my day’s over. And, brother, I begin to think that it is.’

‘Why so?’

‘I’ll tell you why. This morning I was sitting reading Pushkin.... I remember, it happened to be The Gipsies ... all of a sudden Arkady came up to me, and, without speaking, with such a kindly compassion on his face, as gently as if I were a baby, took the book away from me, and laid another before me—a German book ... smiled, and went away, carrying Pushkin off with him.’

‘Upon my word! What book did he give you?’

‘This one here.’

And Nikolai Petrovitch pulled the famous treatise of Büchner, in the ninth edition, out of his coat-tail pocket.

Pavel Petrovitch turned it over in his hands. ‘Hm!’ he growled. ‘Arkady Nikolaevitch is taking your education in hand. Well, did you try reading it?’

‘Yes, I tried it.’

‘Well, what did you think of it?’

‘Either I’m stupid, or it’s all—nonsense. I must be stupid, I suppose.’

‘Haven’t you forgotten your German?’ queried Pavel Petrovitch.

‘Oh, I understand the German.’

Pavel Petrovitch again turned the book over in his hands, and glanced from under his brows at his brother. Both were silent.

‘Oh, by the way,’ began Nikolai Petrovitch, obviously wishing to change the subject, ‘I’ve got a letter from Kolyazin.’

‘Matvy Ilyitch?’

‘Yes. He has come to——to inspect the province. He’s quite a bigwig now; and writes to me that, as a relation, he should like to see us again, and invites you and me and Arkady to the town.’

‘Are you going?’ asked Pavel Petrovitch.

‘No; are you?’

‘No, I shan’t go either. Much object there would be in dragging oneself over forty miles on a wild-goose chase. Mathieu wants to show himself in all his glory. Damn him! he will have the whole province doing him homage; he can get on without the likes of us. A grand dignity, indeed, a privy councillor! If I had stayed in the service, if I had drudged on in official harness, I should have been a general-adjutant by now. Besides, you and I are behind the times, you know.’

‘Yes, brother; it’s time, it seems, to order a coffin and cross one’s arms on ones breast,’ remarked Nikolai Petrovitch, with a sigh.

‘Well, I’m not going to give in quite so soon,’ muttered his brother. ‘I’ve got a tussle with that doctor fellow before me, I feel sure of that.’

A tussle came off that same day at evening tea. Pavel Petrovitch came into the drawing-room, all ready for the fray, irritable and determined. He was only waiting for an excuse to fall upon the enemy; but for a long while an excuse did not present itself. As a rule, Bazarov said little in the presence of the ‘old Kirsanovs’ (that was how he spoke of the brothers), and that evening he felt out of humour, and drank off cup after cup of tea without a word. Pavel Petrovitch was all aflame with impatience; his wishes were fulfilled at last.

The conversation turned on one of the neighbouring landowners. ‘Rotten aristocratic snob,’ observed Bazarov indifferently. He had met him in Petersburg.

‘Allow me to ask you,’ began Pavel Petrovitch, and his lips were trembling, ‘according to your ideas, have the words “rotten” and “aristocrat” the same meaning?’

‘I said “aristocratic snob,”’ replied Bazarov, lazily swallowing a sip of tea.

‘Precisely so; but I imagine you have the same opinion of aristocrats as of aristocratic snobs. I think it my duty to inform you that I do not share that opinion. I venture to assert that every one knows me for a man of liberal ideas and devoted to progress; but, exactly for that reason, I respect aristocrats—real aristocrats. Kindly remember, sir’ (at these words Bazarov lifted his eyes and looked at Pavel Petrovitch), ‘kindly remember, sir,’ he repeated, with acrimony—‘the English aristocracy. They do not abate one iota of their rights, and for that reason they respect the rights of others; they demand the performance of what is due to them, and for that reason they perform their own duties. The aristocracy has given freedom to England, and maintains it for her.’

‘We’ve heard that story a good many times,’ replied Bazarov; ‘but what are you trying to prove by that?’

‘I am tryin’ to prove by that, sir’ (when Pavel Petrovitch was angry he intentionally clipped his words in this way, though, of course, he knew very well that such forms are not strictly grammatical. In this fashionable whim could be discerned a survival of the habits of the times of Alexander. The exquisites of those days, on the rare occasions when they spoke their own language, made use of such slipshod forms; as much as to say, ‘We, of course, are born Russians, at the same time we are great swells, who are at liberty to neglect the rules of scholars’); ‘I am tryin’ to prove by that, sir, that without the sense of personal dignity, without self-respect—and these two sentiments are well developed in the aristocrat—there is no secure foundation for the social ... bien public ... the social fabric. Personal character, sir—that is the chief thing; a man’s personal character must be firm as a rock, since everything is built on it. I am very well aware, for instance, that you are pleased to consider my habits, my dress, my refinements, in fact, ridiculous; but all that proceeds from a sense of self-respect, from a sense of duty—yes, indeed, of duty. I live in the country, in the wilds, but I will not lower myself. I respect the dignity of man in myself.’

‘Let me ask you, Pavel Petrovitch,’ commented Bazarov; ‘you respect yourself, and sit with your hands folded; what sort of benefit does that do to the bien public? If you didn’t respect yourself, you’d do just the same.’

Pavel Petrovitch turned white. ‘That’s a different question. It’s absolutely unnecessary for me to explain to you now why I sit with folded hands, as you are pleased to express yourself. I wish only to tell you that aristocracy is a principle, and in our days none but immoral or silly people can live without principles. I said that to Arkady the day after he came home, and I repeat it now. Isn’t it so, Nikolai?’

Nikolai Petrovitch nodded his head.

‘Aristocracy, Liberalism, progress, principles,’ Bazarov was saying meanwhile; ‘if you think of it, what a lot of foreign ... and useless words! To a Russian they’re good for nothing.’

‘What is good for something according to you? If we listen to you, we shall find ourselves outside humanity, outside its laws. Come—the logic of history demands ...’

‘But what’s that logic to us? We can get on without that too.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Why, this. You don’t need logic, I hope, to put a bit of bread in your mouth when you’re hungry. What’s the object of these abstractions to us?’

Pavel Petrovitch raised his hands in horror.

‘I don’t understand you, after that. You insult the Russian people. I don’t understand how it’s possible not to acknowledge principles, rules! By virtue of what do you act then?’

‘I’ve told you already, uncle, that we don’t accept any authorities,’ put in Arkady.

‘We act by virtue of what we recognise as beneficial,’ observed Bazarov. ‘At the present time, negation is the most beneficial of all—and we deny——’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything!’

‘What? not only art and poetry ... but even ... horrible to say ...’

‘Everything,’ repeated Bazarov, with indescribable composure.

Pavel Petrovitch stared at him. He had not expected this; while Arkady fairly blushed with delight.

‘Allow me, though,’ began Nikolai Petrovitch. ‘You deny everything; or, speaking more precisely, you destroy everything.... But one must construct too, you know.’

‘That’s not our business now.... The ground wants clearing first.’

‘The present condition of the people requires it,’ added Arkady, with dignity; ‘we are bound to carry out these requirements, we have no right to yield to the satisfaction of our personal egoism.’

This last phrase obviously displeased Bazarov; there was a flavour of philosophy, that is to say, romanticism about it, for Bazarov called philosophy, too, romanticism, but he did not think it necessary to correct his young disciple.

‘No, no!’ cried Pavel Petrovitch, with sudden energy. ‘I’m not willing to believe that you, young men, know the Russian people really, that you are the representatives of their requirements, their efforts! No; the Russian people is not what you imagine it. Tradition it holds sacred; it is a patriarchal people; it cannot live without faith ...’

‘I’m not going to dispute that,’ Bazarov interrupted. ‘I’m even ready to agree that in that you’re right.’

‘But if I am right ...’

‘And, all the same, that proves nothing.’

‘It just proves nothing,’ repeated Arkady, with the confidence of a practised chess-player, who has foreseen an apparently dangerous move on the part of his adversary, and so is not at all taken aback by it.

‘How does it prove nothing?’ muttered Pavel Petrovitch, astounded. ‘You must be going against the people then?’

‘And what if we are?’ shouted Bazarov. ‘The people imagine that, when it thunders, the prophet Ilya’s riding across the sky in his chariot. What then? Are we to agree with them? Besides, the people’s Russian; but am I not Russian too?’

‘No, you are not Russian, after all you have just been saying! I can’t acknowledge you as Russian.’

‘My grandfather ploughed the land,’ answered Bazarov with haughty pride. ‘Ask any one of your peasants which of us—you or me—he’d more readily acknowledge as a fellow-countryman. You don’t even know how to talk to them.’

‘While you talk to him and despise him at the same time.’

‘Well, suppose he deserves contempt. You find fault with my attitude, but how do you know that I have got it by chance, that it’s not a product of that very national spirit, in the name of which you wage war on it?’

‘What an idea! Much use in nihilists!’

‘Whether they’re of use or not, is not for us to decide. Why, even you suppose you’re not a useless person.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, no personalities, please!’ cried Nikolai Petrovitch, getting up.

Pavel Petrovitch smiled, and laying his hand on his brother’s shoulder, forced him to sit down again.

‘Don’t be uneasy,’ he said; ‘I shall not forget myself, just through that sense of dignity which is made fun of so mercilessly by our friend—our friend, the doctor. Let me ask,’ he resumed, turning again to Bazarov; ‘you suppose, possibly, that your doctrine is a novelty? That is quite a mistake. The materialism you advocate has been more than once in vogue already, and has always proved insufficient ...’

‘A foreign word again!’ broke in Bazarov. He was beginning to feel vicious, and his face assumed a peculiar coarse coppery hue. ‘In the first place, we advocate nothing; that’s not our way.’

‘What do you do, then?’

‘I’ll tell you what we do. Not long ago we used to say that our officials took bribes, that we had no roads, no commerce, no real justice ...’

‘Oh, I see, you are reformers—that’s what that’s called, I fancy. I too should agree to many of your reforms, but ...’

‘Then we suspected that talk, perpetual talk, and nothing but talk, about our social diseases, was not worth while, that it all led to nothing but superficiality and pedantry; we saw that our leading men, so-called advanced people and reformers, are no good; that we busy ourselves over foolery, talk rubbish about art, unconscious creativeness, parliamentarism, trial by jury, and the deuce knows what all; while, all the while, it’s a question of getting bread to eat, while we’re stifling under the grossest superstition, while all our enterprises come to grief, simply because there aren’t honest men enough to carry them on, while the very emancipation our Government’s busy upon will hardly come to any good, because peasants are glad to rob even themselves to get drunk at the gin-shop.’

‘Yes,’ interposed Pavel Petrovitch, ‘yes; you were convinced of all this, and decided not to undertake anything seriously, yourselves.’

‘We decided not to undertake anything,’ repeated Bazarov grimly. He suddenly felt vexed with himself for having, without reason, been so expansive before this gentleman.

‘But to confine yourselves to abuse?’

‘To confine ourselves to abuse.’

‘And that is called nihilism?’

‘And that’s called nihilism,’ Bazarov repeated again, this time with peculiar rudeness.

Pavel Petrovitch puckered up his face a little. ‘So that’s it!’ he observed in a strangely composed voice. ‘Nihilism is to cure all our woes, and you, you are our heroes and saviours. But why do you abuse others, those reformers even? Don’t you do as much talking as every one else?’

‘Whatever faults we have, we do not err in that way,’ Bazarov muttered between his teeth.

‘What, then? Do you act, or what? Are you preparing for action?’

Bazarov made no answer. Something like a tremor passed over Pavel Petrovitch, but he at once regained control of himself.

‘Hm! ... Action, destruction ...’ he went on. ‘But how destroy without even knowing why?’

‘We shall destroy, because we are a force,’ observed Arkady.

Pavel Petrovitch looked at his nephew and laughed.

‘Yes, a force is not to be called to account,’ said Arkady, drawing himself up.

‘Unhappy boy!’ wailed Pavel Petrovitch, he was positively incapable of maintaining his firm demeanour any longer. ‘If you could only realise what it is you are doing for your country. No; it’s enough to try the patience of an angel! Force! There’s force in the savage Kalmuck, in the Mongolian; but what is it to us? What is precious to us is civilisation; yes, yes, sir, its fruits are precious to us. And don’t tell me those fruits are worthless; the poorest dauber, un barbouilleur, the man who plays dance music for five farthings an evening, is of more use than you, because they are the representatives of civilisation, and not of brute Mongolian force! You fancy yourselves advanced people, and all the while you are only fit for the Kalmuck’s hovel! Force! And recollect, you forcible gentlemen, that you’re only four men and a half, and the others are millions, who won’t let you trample their sacred traditions under foot, who will crush you and walk over you!’

‘If we’re crushed, serve us right,’ observed Bazarov. ‘But that’s an open question. We are not so few as you suppose.’

‘What? You seriously suppose you will come to terms with a whole people?’

‘All Moscow was burnt down, you know, by a farthing dip,’ answered Bazarov.

‘Yes, yes. First a pride almost Satanic, then ridicule—that, that’s what it is attracts the young, that’s what gains an ascendancy over the inexperienced hearts of boys! Here’s one of them sitting beside you, ready to worship the ground under your feet. Look at him! (Arkady turned away and frowned.) And this plague has spread far already. I have been told that in Rome our artists never set foot in the Vatican. Raphael they regard as almost a fool, because, if you please, he’s an authority; while they’re all the while most disgustingly sterile and unsuccessful, men whose imagination does not soar beyond ‘Girls at a Fountain,’ however they try! And the girls even out of drawing. They are fine fellows to your mind, are they not?’

‘To my mind,’ retorted Bazarov, ‘Raphael’s not worth a brass farthing; and they’re no better than he.’

‘Bravo! bravo! Listen, Arkady ... that’s how young men of to-day ought to express themselves! And if you come to think of it, how could they fail to follow you! In old days, young men had to study; they didn’t want to be called dunces, so they had to work hard whether they liked it or not. But now, they need only say, “Everything in the world is foolery!” and the trick’s done. Young men are delighted. And, to be sure, they were simply geese before, and now they have suddenly turned nihilists.’

‘Your praiseworthy sense of personal dignity has given way,’ remarked Bazarov phlegmatically, while Arkady was hot all over, and his eyes were flashing. ‘Our argument has gone too far; it’s better to cut it short, I think. I shall be quite ready to agree with you,’ he added, getting up, ‘when you bring forward a single institution in our present mode of life, in family or in social life, which does not call for complete and unqualified destruction.’

‘I will bring forward millions of such institutions,’ cried Pavel Petrovitch—‘millions! Well—the Mir, for instance.’

A cold smile curved Bazarov’s lips. ‘Well, as regards the Mir,’ he commented; ‘you had better talk to your brother. He has seen by now, I should fancy, what sort of thing the Mir is in fact—its common guarantee, its sobriety, and other features of the kind.’

‘The family, then, the family as it exists among our peasants!’ cried Pavel Petrovitch.

‘And that subject, too, I imagine, it will be better for yourselves not to go into in detail. Don’t you realise all the advantages of the head of the family choosing his daughters-in-law? Take my advice, Pavel Petrovitch, allow yourself two days to think about it; you’re not likely to find anything on the spot. Go through all our classes, and think well over each, while I and Arkady will ...’

‘Will go on turning everything into ridicule,’ broke in Pavel Petrovitch.

‘No, will go on dissecting frogs. Come, Arkady; good-bye for the present, gentlemen!’

The two friends walked off. The brothers were left alone, and at first they only looked at one another.

‘So that,’ began Pavel Petrovitch, ‘so that’s what our young men of this generation are! They are like that—our successors!’

‘Our successors!’ repeated Nikolai Petrovitch, with a dejected smile. He had been sitting on thorns, all through the argument, and had done nothing but glance stealthily, with a sore heart, at Arkady. ‘Do you know what I was reminded of, brother? I once had a dispute with our poor mother; she stormed, and wouldn’t listen to me. At last I said to her, “Of course, you can’t understand me; we belong,” I said, “to two different generations.” She was dreadfully offended, while I thought, “There’s no help for it. It’s a bitter pill, but she has to swallow it.” You see, now, our turn has come, and our successors can say to us, “You are not of our generation; swallow your pill.”’

‘You are beyond everything in your generosity and modesty,’ replied Pavel Petrovitch. ‘I’m convinced, on the contrary, that you and I are far more in the right than these young gentlemen, though we do perhaps express ourselves in old-fashioned language, vieilli, and have not the same insolent conceit.... And the swagger of the young men nowadays! You ask one, “Do you take red wine or white?” “It is my custom to prefer red!” he answers in a deep bass, with a face as solemn as if the whole universe had its eyes on him at that instant....’

‘Do you care for any more tea?’ asked Fenitchka, putting her head in at the door; she had not been able to make up her mind to come into the drawing-room while there was the sound of voices in dispute there.

‘No, you can tell them to take the samovar,’ answered Nikolai Petrovitch, and he got up to meet her. Pavel Petrovitch said ‘bon soir’ to him abruptly, and went away to his study.

Chapter XI

Half an hour later Nikolai Petrovitch went into the garden to his favourite arbour. He was overtaken by melancholy thoughts. For the first time he realised clearly the distance between him and his son; he foresaw that every day it would grow wider and wider. In vain, then, had he spent whole days sometimes in the winter at Petersburg over the newest books; in vain had he listened to the talk of the young men; in vain had he rejoiced when he succeeded in putting in his word too in their heated discussions. ‘My brother says we are right,’ he thought, ‘and apart from all vanity, I do think myself that they are further from the truth than we are, though at the same time I feel there is something behind them we have not got, some superiority over us.... Is it youth? No; not only youth. Doesn’t their superiority consist in there being fewer traces of the slaveowner in them than in us?’

Nikolai Petrovitch’s head sank despondently, and he passed his hand over his face.

‘But to renounce poetry?’ he thought again; ‘to have no feeling for art, for nature ...’

And he looked round, as though trying to understand how it was possible to have no feeling for nature. It was already evening; the sun was hidden behind a small copse of aspens which lay a quarter of a mile from the garden; its shadow stretched indefinitely across the still fields. A peasant on a white nag went at a trot along the dark, narrow path close beside the copse; his whole figure was clearly visible even to the patch on his shoulder, in spite of his being in the shade; the horse’s hoofs flew along bravely. The sun’s rays from the farther side fell full on the copse, and piercing through its thickets, threw such a warm light on the aspen trunks that they looked like pines, and their leaves were almost a dark blue, while above them rose a pale blue sky, faintly tinged by the glow of sunset. The swallows flew high; the wind had quite died away, belated bees hummed slowly and drowsily among the lilac blossom; a swarm of midges hung like a cloud over a solitary branch which stood out against the sky. ‘How beautiful, my God!’ thought Nikolai Petrovitch, and his favourite verses were almost on his lips; he remembered Arkady’s Stoff und Kraft—and was silent, but still he sat there, still he gave himself up to the sorrowful consolation of solitary thought. He was fond of dreaming; his country life had developed the tendency in him. How short a time ago, he had been dreaming like this, waiting for his son at the posting station, and what a change already since that day; their relations that were then undefined, were defined now—and how defined! Again his dead wife came back to his imagination, but not as he had known her for many years, not as the good domestic housewife, but as a young girl with a slim figure, innocently inquiring eyes, and a tight twist of hair on her childish neck. He remembered how he had seen her for the first time. He was still a student then. He had met her on the staircase of his lodgings, and, jostling by accident against her, he tried to apologise, and could only mutter, ‘Pardon, monsieur,’ while she bowed, smiled, and suddenly seemed frightened, and ran away, though at the bend of the staircase she had glanced rapidly at him, assumed a serious air, and blushed. Afterwards, the first timid visits, the half-words, the half-smiles, and embarrassment; and melancholy, and yearnings, and at last that breathing rapture.... Where had it all vanished? She had been his wife, he had been happy as few on earth are happy.... ‘But,’ he mused, ‘these sweet first moments, why could one not live an eternal, undying life in them?’

He did not try to make his thought clear to himself; but he felt that he longed to keep that blissful time by something stronger than memory; he longed to feel his Marya near him again to have the sense of her warmth and breathing, and already he could fancy that over him....

‘Nikolai Petrovitch,’ came the sound of Fenitchka’s voice close by him; ‘where are you?’

He started. He felt no pang, no shame. He never even admitted the possibility of comparison between his wife and Fenitchka, but he was sorry she had thought of coming to look for him. Her voice had brought back to him at once his grey hairs, his age, his reality....

The enchanted world into which he was just stepping, which was just rising out of the dim mists of the past, was shaken—and vanished.

‘I’m here,’ he answered; ‘I’m coming, run along.’ ‘There it is, the traces of the slave owner,’ flashed through his mind. Fenitchka peeped into the arbour at him without speaking, and disappeared; while he noticed with astonishment that the night had come on while he had been dreaming. Everything around was dark and hushed. Fenitchka’s face had glimmered so pale and slight before him. He got up, and was about to go home; but the emotion stirred in his heart could not be soothed at once, and he began slowly walking about the garden, sometimes looking at the ground at his feet, and then raising his eyes towards the sky where swarms of stars were twinkling. He walked a great deal, till he was almost tired out, while the restlessness within him, a kind of yearning, vague, melancholy restlessness, still was not appeased. Oh, how Bazarov would have laughed at him, if he had known what was passing within him then! Arkady himself would have condemned him. He, a man forty-four years old, an agriculturist and a farmer, was shedding tears, causeless tears; this was a hundred times worse than the violoncello.

Nikolai Petrovitch continued walking, and could not make up his mind to go into the house, into the snug peaceful nest, which looked out at him so hospitably from all its lighted windows; he had not the force to tear himself away from the darkness, the garden, the sense of the fresh air in his face, from that melancholy, that restless craving.

At a turn in the path, he was met by Pavel Petrovitch. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked Nikolai Petrovitch; ‘you are as white as a ghost; you are not well; why don’t you go to bed?’

Nikolai Petrovitch explained to him briefly his state of feeling and moved away. Pavel Petrovitch went to the end of the garden, and he too grew thoughtful, and he too raised his eyes toward the heavens. But in his beautiful dark eyes, nothing was reflected but the light of the stars. He was not born an idealist, and his fastidiously dry and sensuous soul, with its French tinge of cynicism was not capable of dreaming....

‘Do you know what?’ Bazarov was saying to Arkady the same night. ‘I’ve got a splendid idea. Your father was saying to-day that he’d had an invitation from your illustrious relative. Your father’s not going; let us be off to X——; you know the worthy man invites you too. You see what fine weather it is; we’ll stroll about and look at the town. We’ll have five or six days’ outing, and enjoy ourselves.’

‘And you’ll come back here again?’

‘No; I must go to my father’s. You know, he lives about twenty-five miles from X——. I’ve not seen him for a long while, and my mother too; I must cheer the old people up. They’ve been good to me, especially my father; he’s awfully funny. I’m their only one too.’

‘And will you be long with them?’

‘I don’t suppose so. It will be dull, of course.’

‘And you’ll come to us on your way back?’

‘I don’t know ... I’ll see. Well, what do you say? Shall we go?’

‘If you like,’ observed Arkady languidly.

In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend’s suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!

The next day he set off with Bazarov to X——. The younger part of the household at Maryino were sorry at their going; Dunyasha even cried ... but the old folks breathed more easily.

Chapter XII

The town of X—— to which our friends set off was in the jurisdiction of a governor who was a young man, and at once a progressive and a despot, as often happens with Russians. Before the end of the first year of his government, he had managed to quarrel not only with the marshal of nobility, a retired officer of the guards, who kept open house and a stud of horses, but even with his own subordinates. The feuds arising from this cause assumed at last such proportions that the ministry in Petersburg had found it necessary to send down a trusted personage with a commission to investigate it all on the spot. The choice of the authorities fell upon Matvy Ilyitch Kolyazin, the son of the Kolyazin, under whose protection the brothers Kirsanov had once found themselves. He, too, was a ‘young man’; that is to say, he had not long passed forty, but he was already on the high road to becoming a statesman, and wore a star on each side of his breast—one, to be sure, a foreign star, not of the first magnitude. Like the governor, whom he had come down to pass judgment upon, he was reckoned a progressive; and though he was already a bigwig, he was not like the majority of bigwigs. He had the highest opinion of himself; his vanity knew no bounds, but he behaved simply, looked affable, listened condescendingly, and laughed so good-naturedly, that on a first acquaintance he might even be taken for ‘a jolly good fellow.’ On important occasions, however, he knew, as the saying is, how to make his authority felt. ‘Energy is essential,’ he used to say then, ‘l’énergie est la première qualité d’un homme d’état;’ and for all that, he was usually taken in, and any moderately experienced official could turn him round his finger. Matvy Ilyitch used to speak with great respect of Guizot, and tried to impress every one with the idea that he did not belong to the class of routiniers and high-and-dry bureaucrats, that not a single phenomenon of social life passed unnoticed by him.... All such phrases were very familiar to him. He even followed, with dignified indifference, it is true, the development of contemporary literature; so a grown-up man who meets a procession of small boys in the street will sometimes walk after it. In reality, Matvy Ilyitch had not got much beyond those political men of the days of Alexander, who used to prepare for an evening party at Madame Svyetchin’s by reading a page of Condillac; only his methods were different, more modern. He was an adroit courtier, a great hypocrite, and nothing more; he had no special aptitude for affairs, and no intellect, but he knew how to manage his own business successfully; no one could get the better of him there, and, to be sure, that’s the principal thing.

Matvy Ilyitch received Arkady with the good-nature, we might even call it playfulness, characteristic of the enlightened higher official. He was astonished, however, when he heard that the cousins he had invited had remained at home in the country. ‘Your father was always a queer fellow,’ he remarked, playing with the tassels of his magnificent velvet dressing-gown, and suddenly turning to a young official in a discreetly buttoned-up uniform, he cried, with an air of concentrated attention, ‘What?’ The young man, whose lips were glued together from prolonged silence, got up and looked in perplexity at his chief. But, having nonplussed his subordinate, Matvy Ilyitch paid him no further attention. Our higher officials are fond as a rule of nonplussing their subordinates; the methods to which they have recourse to attain that end are rather various. The following means, among others, is in great vogue, ‘is quite a favourite,’ as the English say; a high official suddenly ceases to understand the simplest words, assuming total deafness. He will ask, for instance, What’s to-day?’

He is respectfully informed, ‘To-day’s Friday, your Ex-s-s-s-lency.’

‘Eh? What? What’s that? What do you say?’ the great man repeats with intense attention.

‘To-day’s Friday, your Ex—s—s—lency.’

‘Eh? What? What’s Friday? What Friday?’

‘Friday, your Ex—s—s—s—lency, the day of the week.’

‘What, do you pretend to teach me, eh?’

Matvy Ilyitch was a higher official all the same, though he was reckoned a liberal.

‘I advise you, my dear boy, to go and call on the Governor,’ he said to Arkady; ‘you understand, I don’t advise you to do so because I adhere to old-fashioned ideas of the necessity of paying respect to authorities, but simply because the Governor’s a very decent fellow; besides, you probably want to make acquaintance with the society here.... You’re not a bear, I hope? And he’s giving a great ball the day after to-morrow.’

‘Will you be at the ball?’ inquired Arkady.

‘He gives it in my honour,’ answered Matvy Ilyitch, almost pityingly. ‘Do you dance?’

‘Yes; I dance, but not well.’

‘That’s a pity! There are pretty girls here, and it’s a disgrace for a young man not to dance. Again, I don’t say that through any old-fashioned ideas; I don’t in the least imagine that a man’s wit lies in his feet, but Byronism is ridiculous, il a fait son temps.’

‘But, uncle, it’s not through Byronism, I ...’

‘I will introduce you to the ladies here; I will take you under my wing,’ interrupted Matvy Ilyitch, and he laughed complacently. ‘You’ll find it warm, eh?’

A servant entered and announced the arrival of the superintendent of the Crown domains, a mild-eyed old man, with deep creases round his mouth, who was excessively fond of nature, especially on a summer day, when, in his words, ‘every little busy bee takes a little bribe from every little flower.’ Arkady withdrew.

He found Bazarov at the tavern where they were staying, and was a long while persuading him to go with him to the Governor’s. ‘Well, there’s no help for it,’ said Bazarov at last. ‘It’s no good doing things by halves. We came to look at the gentry; let’s look at them!’

The Governor received the young men affably, but he did not ask them to sit down, nor did he sit down himself. He was in an everlasting fuss and hurry; in the morning he used to put on a tight uniform and an excessively stiff cravat; he never ate or drank enough; he was for ever making arrangements. He invited Kirsanov and Bazarov to his ball, and within a few minutes invited them a second time, regarding them as brothers, and calling them Kisarov.

They were on their way home from the Governor’s, when suddenly a short man, in a Slavophil national dress, leaped out of a trap that was passing them, and crying, ‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch!’ dashed up to Bazarov.

‘Ah! it’s you, Herr Sitnikov,’ observed Bazarov, still stepping along on the pavement; ‘by what chance did you come here?’

‘Fancy, absolutely by chance,’ he replied, and returning to the trap, he waved his hand several times, and shouted, ‘Follow, follow us! My father had business here,’ he went on, hopping across the gutter, ‘and so he asked me.... I heard to-day of your arrival, and have already been to see you....’ (The friends did, in fact, on returning to their room, find there a card, with the corners turned down, bearing the name of Sitnikov, on one side in French, on the other in Slavonic characters.) ‘I hope you are not coming from the Governor’s?’

‘It’s no use to hope; we come straight from him.’

‘Ah! in that case I will call on him too.... Yevgeny Vassilyitch, introduce me to your ... to the ...’

‘Sitnikov, Kirsanov,’ mumbled Bazarov, not stopping.

‘I am greatly flattered,’ began Sitnikov, walking sidewise, smirking, and hurriedly pulling off his really over-elegant gloves. ‘I have heard so much.... I am an old acquaintance of Yevgeny Vassilyitch, and, I may say—his disciple. I am indebted to him for my regeneration....’

Arkady looked at Bazarov’s disciple. There was an expression of excitement and dulness imprinted on the small but pleasant features of his well-groomed face; his small eyes, that seemed squeezed in, had a fixed and uneasy look, and his laugh, too, was uneasy—a sort of short, wooden laugh.

‘Would you believe it,’ he pursued, ‘when Yevgeny Vassilyitch for the first time said before me that it was not right to accept any authorities, I felt such enthusiasm ... as though my eyes were opened! Here, I thought, at last I have found a man! By the way, Yevgeny Vassilyitch, you positively must come to know a lady here, who is really capable of understanding you, and for whom your visit would be a real festival; you have heard of her, I suppose?’

‘Who is it?’ Bazarov brought out unwillingly.

‘Kukshina, Eudoxie, Evdoksya Kukshin. She’s a remarkable nature, émancipée in the true sense of the word, an advanced woman. Do you know what? We’ll all go together to see her now. She lives only two steps from here. We will have lunch there. I suppose you have not lunched yet?’

‘No; not yet.’

‘Well, that’s capital. She has separated, you understand, from her husband; she is not dependent on any one.’

‘Is she pretty?’ Bazarov cut in.

‘N-no, one couldn’t say that.’

‘Then, what the devil are you asking us to see her for?’

‘Fie; you must have your joke.... She will give us a bottle of champagne.’

‘Oh, that’s it. One can see the practical man at once. By the way, is your father still in the gin business?’

‘Yes,’ said Sitnikov, hurriedly, and he gave a shrill spasmodic laugh. ‘Well? Will you come?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘You wanted to see people, go along,’ said Arkady in an undertone.

‘And what do you say to it, Mr. Kirsanov?’ Sitnikov put in. ‘You must come too; we can’t go without you.’

‘But how can we burst in upon her all at once?’

‘That’s no matter. Kukshina’s a brick!’

‘There will be a bottle of champagne?’ asked Bazarov.

‘Three!’ cried Sitnikov; ‘that I answer for.’

‘What with?’

‘My own head.’

‘Your father’s purse would be better. However, we are coming.’

Chapter XIII

The small gentleman’s house in the Moscow style, in which Avdotya Nikitishna, otherwise Evdoksya, Kukshin, lived, was in one of the streets of X——, which had been lately burnt down; it is well known that our provincial towns are burnt down every five years. At the door, above a visiting card nailed on all askew, there was a bell-handle to be seen, and in the hall the visitors were met by some one, not exactly a servant, nor exactly a companion, in a cap—unmistakable tokens of the progressive tendencies of the lady of the house. Sitnikov inquired whether Avdotya Nikitishna was at home.

‘Is that you, Victor?’ sounded a shrill voice from the adjoining room. ‘Come in.’

The woman in the cap disappeared at once.

‘I’m not alone,’ observed Sitnikov, with a sharp look at Arkady and Bazarov as he briskly pulled off his overcoat, beneath which appeared something of the nature of a coachman’s velvet jacket.

‘No matter,’ answered the voice. ‘Entrez.’

The young men went in. The room into which they walked was more like a working study than a drawing-room. Papers, letters, fat numbers of Russian journals, for the most part uncut, lay at random on the dusty tables; white cigarette ends lay scattered in every direction. On a leather-covered sofa, a lady, still young, was half reclining. Her fair hair was rather dishevelled; she wore a silk gown, not perfectly tidy, heavy bracelets on her short arms, and a lace handkerchief on her head. She got up from the sofa, and carelessly drawing a velvet cape trimmed with yellowish ermine over her shoulders, she said languidly, ‘Good-morning, Victor,’ and pressed Sitnikov’s hand.

‘Bazarov, Kirsanov,’ he announced abruptly in imitation of Bazarov.

‘Delighted,’ answered Madame Kukshin, and fixing on Bazarov a pair of round eyes, between which was a forlorn little turned-up red nose, ‘I know you,’ she added, and pressed his hand too.

Bazarov scowled. There was nothing repulsive in the little plain person of the emancipated woman; but the expression of her face produced a disagreeable effect on the spectator. One felt impelled to ask her, ‘What’s the matter; are you hungry? Or bored? Or shy? What are you in a fidget about?’ Both she and Sitnikov had always the same uneasy air. She was extremely unconstrained, and at the same time awkward; she obviously regarded herself as a good-natured, simple creature, and all the while, whatever she did, it always struck one that it was not just what she wanted to do; everything with her seemed, as children say, done on purpose, that’s to say, not simply, not naturally.

‘Yes, yes, I know you, Bazarov,’ she repeated. (She had the habit—peculiar to many provincial and Moscow ladies—of calling men by their surnames from the first day of acquaintance with them.) ‘Will you have a cigar?’

‘A cigar’s all very well,’ put in Sitnikov, who by now was lolling in an armchair, his legs in the air; ‘but give us some lunch. We’re awfully hungry; and tell them to bring us up a little bottle of champagne.’

‘Sybarite,’ commented Evdoksya, and she laughed. (When she laughed the gum showed above her upper teeth.) ‘Isn’t it true, Bazarov; he’s a Sybarite?’

‘I like comfort in life,’ Sitnikov brought out, with dignity. ‘That does not prevent my being a Liberal.’

‘No, it does; it does prevent it!’ cried Evdoksya. She gave directions, however, to her maid, both as regards the lunch and the champagne.

‘What do you think about it?’ she added, turning to Bazarov. ‘I’m persuaded you share my opinion.’

‘Well, no,’ retorted Bazarov; ‘a piece of meat’s better than a piece of bread even from the chemical point of view.’

‘You are studying chemistry? That is my passion. I’ve even invented a new sort of composition myself.’

‘A composition? You?’

‘Yes. And do you know for what purpose? To make dolls’ heads so that they shouldn’t break. I’m practical, too, yon see. But everything’s not quite ready yet. I’ve still to read Liebig. By the way, have you read Kislyakov’s article on Female Labour, in the Moscow Gazette? Read it please. You’re interested in the woman question, I suppose? And in the schools too? What does your friend do? What is his name?’

Madame Kukshin shed her questions one after another with affected negligence, not waiting for an answer; spoilt children talk so to their nurses.

‘My name’s Arkady Nikolaitch Kirsanov,’ said Arkady, ‘and I’m doing nothing.’

Evdoksya giggled. ‘How charming! What, don’t you smoke? Victor, do you know, I’m very angry with you.’

‘What for?’

‘They tell me you’ve begun singing the praises of George Sand again. A retrograde woman, and nothing else! How can people compare her with Emerson! She hasn’t an idea on education, nor physiology, nor anything. She’d never, I’m persuaded, heard of embryology, and in these days—what can be done without that?’ (Evdoksya even threw up her hands.) ‘Ah, what a wonderful article Elisyevitch has written on that subject! He’s a gentleman of genius.’ (Evdoksya constantly made use of the word ‘gentleman’ instead of the word ‘man.’) ‘Bazarov, sit by me on the sofa. You don’t know, perhaps, I’m awfully afraid of you.’

‘Why so? Allow me to ask.’

‘You’re a dangerous gentleman; you’re such a critic. Good God! yes! why, how absurd, I’m talking like some country lady. I really am a country lady, though. I manage my property myself; and only fancy, my bailiff Erofay’s a wonderful type, quite like Cooper’s Pathfinder; something in him so spontaneous! I’ve come to settle here finally; it’s an intolerable town, isn’t it? But what’s one to do?’

‘The town’s like every town,’ Bazarov remarked coolly.

‘All its interests are so petty, that’s what’s so awful! I used to spend the winters in Moscow ... but now my lawful spouse, Monsieur Kukshin’s residing there. And besides, Moscow nowadays ... there, I don’t know—it’s not the same as it was. I’m thinking of going abroad; last year I was on the point of setting off.’

‘To Paris, I suppose?’ queried Bazarov.

‘To Paris and to Heidelberg.’

‘Why to Heidelberg?’

‘How can you ask? Why, Bunsen’s there!’

To this Bazarov could find no reply.

‘Pierre Sapozhnikov ... do you know him?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Not know Pierre Sapozhnikov ... he’s always at Lidia Hestatov’s.’

‘I don’t know her either.’

‘Well, it was he undertook to escort me. Thank God, I’m independent; I’ve no children.... What was that I said: thank God! It’s no matter though.’

Evdoksya rolled a cigarette up between her fingers, which were brown with tobacco stains, put it to her tongue, licked it up, and began smoking. The maid came in with a tray.

‘Ah, here’s lunch! Will you have an appetiser first? Victor, open the bottle; that’s in your line.’

‘Yes, it’s in my line,’ muttered Sitnikov, and again he gave vent to the same convulsive laugh.

‘Are there any pretty women here?’ inquired Bazarov, as he drank off a third glass.

‘Yes, there are,’ answered Evdoksya; ‘but they’re all such empty-headed creatures. Mon amie, Odintsova, for instance, is nice-looking. It’s a pity her reputation’s rather doubtful.... That wouldn’t matter, though, but she’s no independence in her views, no width, nothing ... of all that. The whole system of education wants changing. I’ve thought a great deal about it, our women are very badly educated.’

‘There’s no doing anything with them,’ put in Sitnikov; ‘one ought to despise them, and I do despise them fully and completely!’ (The possibility of feeling and expressing contempt was the most agreeable sensation to Sitnikov; he used to attack women in especial, never suspecting that it was to be his fate a few months later to be cringing before his wife merely because she had been born a princess Durdoleosov.) ‘Not a single one of them would be capable of understanding our conversation; not a single one deserves to be spoken of by serious men like us!’

‘But there’s not the least need for them to understand our conversation,’ observed Bazarov.

‘Whom do you mean?’ put in Evdoksya.

‘Pretty women.’

‘What? Do you adopt Proudhon’s ideas, then?’

Bazarov drew himself up haughtily. ‘I don’t adopt any one’s ideas; I have my own.’

‘Damn all authorities!’ shouted Sitnikov, delighted to have a chance of expressing himself boldly before the man he slavishly admired.

‘But even Macaulay,’ Madame Kukshin was beginning ...

‘Damn Macaulay,’ thundered Sitnikov. ‘Are you going to stand up for the silly hussies?’

‘For silly hussies, no, but for the rights of women, which I have sworn to defend to the last drop of my blood.’

‘Damn!’—but here Sitnikov stopped. ‘But I don’t deny them,’ he said.

‘No, I see you’re a Slavophil.’

‘No, I’m not a Slavophil, though, of course ...’

‘No, no, no! You are a Slavophil. You’re an advocate of patriarchal despotism. You want to have the whip in your hand!’

‘A whip’s an excellent thing,’ remarked Bazarov; ‘but we’ve got to the last drop.’

‘Of what?’ interrupted Evdoksya.

‘Of champagne, most honoured Avdotya Nikitishna, of champagne—not of your blood.’

‘I can never listen calmly when women are attacked,’ pursued Evdoksya. ‘It’s awful, awful. Instead of attacking them, you’d better read Michelet’s book, De l’amour. That’s exquisite! Gentlemen, let us talk of love,’ added Evdoksya, letting her arm fall languidly on the rumpled sofa cushion.

A sudden silence followed. ‘No, why should we talk of love,’ said Bazarov; ‘but you mentioned just now a Madame Odintsov ... That was what you called her, I think? Who is that lady?’

‘She’s charming, charming!’ piped Sitnikov. ‘I will introduce you. Clever, rich, a widow. It’s a pity, she’s not yet advanced enough; she ought to see more of our Evdoksya. I drink to your health, Evdoxie! Let us clink glasses! Et toc, et toc, et tin-tin-tin! Et toc, et toc, et tin-tin-tin!!!’

‘Victor, you’re a wretch.’

The lunch dragged on a long while. The first bottle of champagne was followed by another, a third, and even a fourth.... Evdoksya chattered without pause; Sitnikov seconded her. They had much discussion upon the question whether marriage was a prejudice or a crime, and whether men were born equal or not, and precisely what individuality consists in. Things came at last to Evdoksya, flushed from the wine she had drunk, tapping with her flat finger-tips on the keys of a discordant piano, and beginning to sing in a hoarse voice, first gipsy songs, and then Seymour Schiff’s song, ‘Granada lies slumbering’; while Sitnikov tied a scarf round his head, and represented the dying lover at the words—

‘And thy lips to mineIn burning kiss entwine.’

Arkady could not stand it at last. ‘Gentlemen, it’s getting something like Bedlam,’ he remarked aloud. Bazarov, who had at rare intervals put in an ironical word in the conversation—he paid more attention to the champagne—gave a loud yawn, got up, and, without taking leave of their hostess, he walked off with Arkady. Sitnikov jumped up and followed them.

‘Well, what do you think of her?’ he inquired, skipping obsequiously from right to left of them. ‘I told you, you see, a remarkable personality! If we only had more women like that! She is, in her own way, an expression of the highest morality.’

‘And is that establishment of your governor’s an expression of the highest morality too?’ observed Bazarov, pointing to a ginshop which they were passing at that instant.

Sitnikov again went off into a shrill laugh. He was greatly ashamed of his origin, and did not know whether to feel flattered or offended at Bazarov’s unexpected familiarity.

Chapter XIV

A few days later the ball at the Governor’s took place. Matvy Ilyitch was the real ‘hero of the occasion.’ The marshal of nobility declared to all and each that he had come simply out of respect for him; while the Governor, even at the ball, even while he remained perfectly motionless, was still ‘making arrangements.’ The affability of Matvy Ilyitch’s demeanour could only be equalled by its dignity. He was gracious to all, to some with a shade of disgust, to others with a shade of respect; he was all bows and smiles ‘en vrai chevalier français’ before the ladies, and was continually giving vent to a hearty, sonorous, unshared laugh, such as befits a high official. He slapped Arkady on the back, and called him loudly ‘nephew’; vouchsafed Bazarov—who was attired in a rather old evening coat—a sidelong glance in passing—absent but condescending—and an indistinct but affable grunt, in which nothing could be distinguished but ‘I ...’ and ‘very much’; gave Sitnikov a finger and a smile, though with his head already averted; even to Madame Kukshin, who made her appearance at the ball with dirty gloves, no crinoline, and a bird of Paradise in her hair, he said ‘enchanté.’. There were crowds of people, and no lack of dancing men; the civilians were for the most part standing close along the walls, but the officers danced assiduously, especially one of them who had spent six weeks in Paris, where he had mastered various daring interjections of the kind of—‘zut,’ ‘Ah, fichtr-re,’ ‘pst, pst, mon bibi,’ and such. He pronounced them to perfection with genuine Parisian chic, and at the same time he said ‘si j’aurais’ for ‘si j’avais,’ ‘absolument’ in the sense of ‘absolutely,’ expressed himself, in fact, in that Great Russo-French jargon which the French ridicule so when they have no reason for assuring us that we speak French like angels, ‘comme des anges.’

Arkady, as we are aware, danced badly, while Bazarov did not dance at all; they both took up their position in a corner; Sitnikov joined himself on to them, with an expression of contemptuous scorn on his face, and giving vent to spiteful comments, he looked insolently about him, and seemed to be really enjoying himself. Suddenly his face changed, and turning to Arkady, he said, with some show of embarrassment it seemed, ‘Odintsova is here!’

Arkady looked round, and saw a tall woman in a black dress standing at the door of the room. He was struck by the dignity of her carriage. Her bare arms lay gracefully beside her slender waist; gracefully some light sprays of fuchsia drooped from her shining hair on to her sloping shoulders; her clear eyes looked out from under a rather overhanging white brow, with a tranquil and intelligent expression—tranquil it was precisely, not pensive—and on her lips was a scarcely perceptible smile. There was a kind of gracious and gentle force about her face.

‘Do you know her?’ Arkady asked Sitnikov.

‘Intimately. Would you like me to introduce you?’

‘Please ... after this quadrille.’

Bazarov’s attention, too, was directed to Madame Odintsov.

‘That’s a striking figure,’ he remarked. ‘Not like the other females.’

After waiting till the end of the quadrille, Sitnikov led Arkady up to Madame Odintsov; but he hardly seemed to be intimately acquainted with her; he was embarrassed in his sentences, while she looked at him in some surprise. But her face assumed an expression of pleasure when she heard Arkady’s surname. She asked him whether he was not the son of Nikolai Petrovitch.

‘Yes.’

‘I have seen your father twice, and have heard a great deal about him,’ she went on; ‘I am glad to make your acquaintance.’

At that instant some adjutant flew up to her and begged for a quadrille. She consented.

‘Do you dance then?’ asked Arkady respectfully.

‘Yes, I dance. Why do you suppose I don’t dance? Do you think I am too old?’

‘Really, how could I possibly.... But in that case, let me ask you for a mazurka.’

Madame Odintsov smiled graciously. ‘Certainly,’ she said, and she looked at Arkady not exactly with an air of superiority, but as married sisters look at very young brothers. Madame Odintsov was a little older than Arkady—she was twenty-nine—but in her presence he felt himself a schoolboy, a little student, so that the difference in age between them seemed of more consequence. Matvy Ilyitch approached her with a majestic air and ingratiating speeches. Arkady moved away, but he still watched her; he could not take his eyes off her even during the quadrille. She talked with equal ease to her partner and to the grand official, softly turned her head and eyes, and twice laughed softly. Her nose—like almost all Russian noses—was a little thick; and her complexion was not perfectly clear; Arkady made up his mind, for all that, that he had never before met such an attractive woman. He could not get the sound of her voice out of his ears; the very folds of her dress seemed to hang upon her differently from all the rest—more gracefully and amply—and her movements were distinguished by a peculiar smoothness and naturalness.

Arkady felt some timidity in his heart when at the first sounds of the mazurka he began to sit it out beside his partner; he had prepared to enter into a conversation with her, but he only passed his hand through his hair, and could not find a single word to say. But his timidity and agitation did not last long; Madame Odintsov’s tranquillity gained upon him too; before a quarter of an hour had passed he was telling her freely about his father, his uncle, his life in Petersburg and in the country. Madame Odintsov listened to him with courteous sympathy, slightly opening and closing her fan; his talk was broken off when partners came for her; Sitnikov, among others, twice asked her. She came back, sat down again, took up her fan, and her bosom did not even heave more rapidly, while Arkady fell to chattering again, filled through and through by the happiness of being near her, talking to her, looking at her eyes, her lovely brow, all her sweet, dignified, clever face. She said little, but her words showed a knowledge of life; from some of her observations Arkady gathered that this young woman had already felt and thought much....

‘Who is that you were standing with?’ she asked him, ‘when Mr. Sitnikov brought you to me?’

‘Did you notice him?’ Arkady asked in his turn. ‘He has a splendid face, hasn’t he? That’s Bazarov, my friend.’

Arkady fell to discussing ‘his friend.’ He spoke of him in such detail, and with such enthusiasm, that Madame Odintsov turned towards him and looked attentively at him. Meanwhile, the mazurka was drawing to a close. Arkady felt sorry to part from his partner; he had spent nearly an hour so happily with her! He had, it is true, during the whole time continually felt as though she were condescending to him, as though he ought to be grateful to her ... but young hearts are not weighed down by that feeling.

The music stopped. ‘Merci,’ said Madame Odintsov, getting up. ‘You promised to come and see me; bring your friend with you. I shall be very curious to see the man who has the courage to believe in nothing.’

The Governor came up to Madame Odintsov, announced that supper was ready, and, with a careworn face, offered her his arm. As she went away, she turned to give a last smile and bow to Arkady. He bowed low, looked after her (how graceful her figure seemed to him, draped in the greyish lustre of the black silk!), and thinking, ‘This minute she has forgotten my existence,’ was conscious of an exquisite humility in his soul.

‘Well?’ Bazarov questioned him, directly he had gone back to him in the corner. ‘Did you have a good time? A gentleman has just been talking to me about that lady; he said, “She’s—oh, fie! fie!” but I fancy the fellow was a fool. What do you think, what is she?—oh, fie! fie!’

‘I don’t quite understand that definition,’ answered Arkady.

‘Oh, my! What innocence!’

‘In that case, I don’t understand the gentleman you quote. Madame Odintsov is very sweet, no doubt, but she behaves so coldly and severely, that....’

‘Still waters ... you know!’ put in Bazarov. ‘That’s just what gives it piquancy. You like ices, I expect?’

‘Perhaps,’ muttered Arkady. ‘I can’t give an opinion about that. She wishes to make your acquaintance, and has asked me to bring you to see her.’

‘I can imagine how you’ve described me! But you did very well. Take me. Whatever she may be—whether she’s simply a provincial lioness, or “advanced” after Kukshina’s fashion—any way she’s got a pair of shoulders such as I’ve not set eyes on for a long while.’

Arkady was wounded by Bazarov’s cynicism, but—as often happens—he reproached his friend not precisely for what he did not like in him ...

‘Why are you unwilling to allow freethinking in women?’ he said in a low voice.

‘Because, my boy, as far as my observations go, the only freethinkers among women are frights.’

The conversation was cut short at this point. Both the young men went away immediately after supper. They were pursued by a nervously malicious, but somewhat faint-hearted laugh from Madame Kukshin; her vanity had been deeply wounded by neither of them having paid any attention to her. She stayed later than any one at the ball, and at four o’clock in the morning she was dancing a polka-mazurka with Sitnikov in the Parisian style. This edifying spectacle was the final event of the Governor’s ball.

Chapter XV

‘Let’s see what species of mammalia this specimen belongs to,’ Bazarov said to Arkady the following day, as they mounted the staircase of the hotel in which Madame Odintsov was staying. ‘I scent out something wrong here.’

‘I’m surprised at you!’ cried Arkady. ‘What? You, you, Bazarov, clinging to the narrow morality, which ...’

‘What a funny fellow you are!’ Bazarov cut him short, carelessly. ‘Don’t you know that “something wrong” means “something right” in my dialect and for me? It’s an advantage for me, of course. Didn’t you tell me yourself this morning that she made a strange marriage, though, to my mind, to marry a rich old man is by no means a strange thing to do, but, on the contrary, very sensible. I don’t believe the gossip of the town; but I should like to think, as our cultivated Governor says, that it’s well-grounded.’

Arkady made no answer, and knocked at the door of the apartments. A young servant in livery, conducted the two friends in to a large room, badly furnished, like all rooms in Russian hotels, but filled with flowers. Soon Madame Odintsov herself appeared in a simple morning dress. She seemed still younger by the light of the spring sunshine. Arkady presented Bazarov, and noticed with secret amazement that he seemed embarrassed, while Madame Odintsov remained perfectly tranquil, as she had been the previous day. Bazarov himself was conscious of being embarrassed, and was irritated by it. ‘Here’s a go!—frightened of a petticoat!’ he thought, and lolling, quite like Sitnikov, in an easy-chair, he began talking with an exaggerated appearance of ease, while Madame Odintsov kept her clear eyes fixed on him.

Anna Sergyevna Odintsov was the daughter of Sergay Nikolaevitch Loktev, notorious for his personal beauty, his speculations, and his gambling propensities, who after cutting a figure and making a sensation for fifteen years in Petersburg and Moscow, finished by ruining himself completely at cards, and was forced to retire to the country, where, however, he soon after died, leaving a very small property to his two daughters—Anna, a girl of twenty, and Katya, a child of twelve. Their mother, who came of an impoverished line of princes—the H——s— had died at Petersburg when her husband was in his heydey. Anna’s position after her father’s death was very difficult. The brilliant education she had received in Petersburg had not fitted her for putting up with the cares of domestic life and economy,—for an obscure existence in the country. She knew positively no one in the whole neighbourhood, and there was no one she could consult. Her father had tried to avoid all contact with the neighbours; he despised them in his way, and they despised him in theirs. She did not lose her head, however, and promptly sent for a sister of her mother’s Princess Avdotya Stepanovna H——, a spiteful and arrogant old lady, who, on installing herself in her niece’s house, appropriated all the best rooms for her own use, scolded and grumbled from morning till night, and would not go a walk even in the garden unattended by her one serf, a surly footman in a threadbare pea-green livery with light blue trimming and a three-cornered hat. Anna put up patiently with all her aunt’s whims, gradually set to work on her sister’s education, and was, it seemed, already getting reconciled to the idea of wasting her life in the wilds.... But destiny had decreed another fate for her. She chanced to be seen by Odintsov, a very wealthy man of forty-six, an eccentric hypochondriac, stout, heavy, and sour, but not stupid, and not ill-natured; he fell in love with her, and offered her his hand. She consented to become his wife, and he lived six years with her, and on his death settled all his property upon her. Anna Sergyevna remained in the country for nearly a year after his death; then she went abroad with her sister, but only stopped in Germany; she got tired of it, and came back to live at her favourite Nikolskoe, which was nearly thirty miles from the town of X——. There she had a magnificent, splendidly furnished house and a beautiful garden, with conservatories; her late husband had spared no expense to gratify his fancies. Anna Sergyevna went very rarely to the town, generally only on business, and even then she did not stay long. She was not liked in the province; there had been a fearful outcry at her marriage with Odintsov, all sorts of fictions were told about her; it was asserted that she had helped her father in his cardsharping tricks, and even that she had gone abroad for excellent reasons, that it had been necessary to conceal the lamentable consequences ... ‘You understand?’ the indignant gossips would wind up. ‘She has gone through the fire,’ was said of her; to which a noted provincial wit usually added: ‘And through all the other elements?’ All this talk reached her; but she turned a deaf ear to it; there was much independence and a good deal of determination in her character.

Madame Odintsov sat leaning back in her easy-chair, and listened with folded hands to Bazarov. He, contrary to his habit, was talking a good deal, and obviously trying to interest her—again a surprise for Arkady. He could not make up his mind whether Bazarov was attaining his object. It was difficult to conjecture from Anna Sergyevna’s face what impression was being made on her; it retained the same expression, gracious and refined; her beautiful eyes were lighted up by attention, but by quiet attention. Bazarov’s bad manners had impressed her unpleasantly for the first minutes of the visit like a bad smell or a discordant sound; but she saw at once that he was nervous, and that even flattered her. Nothing was repulsive to her but vulgarity, and no one could have accused Bazarov of vulgarity. Arkady was fated to meet with surprises that day. He had expected that Bazarov would talk to a clever woman like Madame Odintsov about his opinions and his views; she had herself expressed a desire to listen to the man ‘who dares to have no belief in anything’; but, instead of that, Bazarov talked about medicine, about homoeopathy, and about botany. It turned out that Madame Odintsov had not wasted her time in solitude; she had read a good many excellent books, and spoke herself in excellent Russian. She turned the conversation upon music; but noticing that Bazarov did not appreciate art, she quietly brought it back to botany, even though Arkady was just launching into a discourse upon the significance of national melodies. Madame Odintsov treated him as though he were a younger brother; she seemed to appreciate his good-nature and youthful simplicity—and that was all. For over three hours, a lively conversation was kept up, ranging freely over various subjects.

The friends at last got up and began to take leave. Anna Sergyevna looked cordially at them, held out her beautiful, white hand to both, and, after a moment’s thought, said with a doubtful but delightful smile. ‘If you are not afraid of being dull, gentlemen, come and see me at Nikolskoe.’

‘Oh, Anna Sergyevna,’ cried Arkady, ‘I shall think it the greatness happiness ...’

‘And you, Monsieur Bazarov?’

Bazarov only bowed, and a last surprise was in store for Arkady; he noticed that his friend was blushing.

‘Well?’ he said to him in the street; ‘are you still of the same opinion—that she’s ...’

‘Who can tell? See how correct she is!’ retorted Bazarov; and after a brief pause he added, ‘She’s a perfect grand-duchess, a royal personage. She only needs a train on behind, and a crown on her head.’

‘Our grand-duchesses don’t talk Russian like that,’ remarked Arkady.

‘She’s seen ups and downs, my dear boy; she’s known what it is to be hard up!’

‘Any way, she’s charming,’ observed Arkady.

‘What a magnificent body!’ pursued Bazarov. ‘Shouldn’t I like to see it on the dissecting-table.’

‘Hush, for mercy’s sake, Yevgeny! that’s beyond everything.’

‘Well, don’t get angry, you baby. I meant it’s first-rate. We must go to stay with her.’

‘When?’

‘Well, why not the day after to-morrow. What is there to do here? Drink champagne with Kukshina. Listen to your cousin, the Liberal dignitary?... Let’s be off the day after to-morrow. By the way, too—my father’s little place is not far from there. This Nikolskoe’s on the S—— road, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Optime, why hesitate? leave that to fools and prigs! I say, what a splendid body!’

Three days later the two friends were driving along the road to Nikolskoe. The day was bright, and not too hot, and the sleek posting-horses trotted smartly along, switching their tied and plaited tails. Arkady looked at the road, and not knowing why, he smiled.

‘Congratulate me,’ cried Bazarov suddenly, ‘to-day’s the 22^nd of June, my guardian angel’s day. Let’s see how he will watch over me. To-day they expect me home,’ he added, dropping his voice.... ‘Well, they can go on expecting.... What does it matter!’

Chapter XVI

The country-house in which Anna Sergyevna lived stood on an exposed hill at no great distance from a yellow stone church with a green roof, white columns, and a fresco over the principal entrance representing the ‘Resurrection of Christ’ in the ‘Italian’ style. Sprawling in the foreground of the picture was a swarthy warrior in a helmet, specially conspicuous for his rotund contours. Behind the church a long village stretched in two rows, with chimneys peeping out here and there above the thatched roofs. The manor-house was built in the same style as the church, the style known among us as that of Alexander; the house too was painted yellow, and had a green roof, and white columns, and a pediment with an escutcheon on it. The architect had designed both buildings with the approval of the deceased Odintsov, who could not endure—as he expressed it—idle and arbitrary innovations. The house was enclosed on both sides by the dark trees of an old garden; an avenue of lopped pines led up to the entrance.

Our friends were met in the hall by two tall footmen in livery; one of them at once ran for the steward. The steward, a stout man in a black dress coat, promptly appeared and led the visitors by a staircase covered with rugs to a special room, in which two bedsteads were already prepared for them with all necessaries for the toilet. It was clear that order reigned supreme in the house; everything was clean, everywhere there was a peculiar delicate fragrance, just as there is in the reception rooms of ministers.

‘Anna Sergyevna asks you to come to her in half-an-hour,’ the steward announced; ‘will there be orders to give meanwhile?’

‘No orders,’ answered Bazarov; ‘perhaps you will be so good as to trouble yourself to bring me a glass of vodka.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the steward, looking in some perplexity, and he withdrew, his boots creaking as he walked.

‘What grand genre!’ remarked Bazarov. ‘That’s what it’s called in your set, isn’t it? She’s a grand-duchess, and that’s all about it.’

‘A nice grand-duchess,’ retorted Arkady, ‘at the very first meeting she invited such great aristocrats as you and me to stay with her.’

‘Especially me, a future doctor, and a doctor’s son, and a village sexton’s grandson.... You know, I suppose, I’m the grandson of a sexton? Like the great Speransky,’ added Bazarov after a brief pause, contracting his lips. ‘At any rate she likes to be comfortable; oh, doesn’t she, this lady! Oughtn’t we to put on evening dress?’

Arkady only shrugged his shoulders ... but he too was conscious of a little nervousness.

Half-an-hour later Bazarov and Arkady went together into the drawing-room. It was a large lofty room, furnished rather luxuriously but without particularly good taste. Heavy expensive furniture stood in the ordinary stiff arrangement along the walls, which were covered with cinnamon-coloured paper with gold flowers on it; Odintsov had ordered the furniture from Moscow through a friend and agent of his, a spirit merchant. Over a sofa in the centre of one wall hung a portrait of a faded light-haired man—and it seemed to look with displeasure at the visitors. ‘It must be the late lamented,’ Bazarov whispered to Arkady, and turning up his nose, he added, ‘Hadn’t we better bolt ...?’ But at that instant the lady of the house entered. She wore a light barège dress; her hair smoothly combed back behind her ears gave a girlish expression to her pure and fresh face.

‘Thank you for keeping your promise,’ she began. ‘You must stay a little while with me; it’s really not bad here. I will introduce you to my sister; she plays the piano well. That is a matter of indifference to you, Monsieur Bazarov; but you, I think, Monsieur Kirsanov, are fond of music. Besides my sister I have an old aunt living with me, and one of our neighbours comes in sometimes to play cards; that makes up all our circle. And now let us sit down.’

Madame Odintsov delivered all this little speech with peculiar precision, as though she had learned it by heart; then she turned to Arkady. It appeared that her mother had known Arkady’s mother, and had even been her confidante in her love for Nikolai Petrovitch. Arkady began talking with great warmth of his dead mother; while Bazarov fell to turning over albums. ‘What a tame cat I’m getting!’ he was thinking to himself.

A beautiful greyhound with a blue collar on, ran into the drawing-room, tapping on the floor with his paws, and after him entered a girl of eighteen, black-haired and dark-skinned, with a rather round but pleasing face, and small dark eyes. In her hands she held a basket filled with flowers.

‘This is my Katya,’ said Madame Odintsov, indicating her with a motion of her head. Katya made a slight curtsey, placed herself beside her sister, and began picking out flowers. The greyhound, whose name was Fifi, went up to both of the visitors, in turn wagging his tail, and thrusting his cold nose into their hands.

‘Did you pick all that yourself?’ asked Madame Odintsov.

‘Yes,’ answered Katya.

‘Is auntie coming to tea?’

‘Yes.’

When Katya spoke, she had a very charming smile, sweet, timid, and candid, and looked up from under her eyebrows with a sort of humorous severity. Everything about her was still young and undeveloped; the voice, and the bloom on her whole face, and the rosy hands, with white palms, and the rather narrow shoulders.... She was constantly blushing and getting out of breath.

Madame Odintsov turned to Bazarov. ‘You are looking at pictures from politeness, Yevgeny Vassilyitch,’ she began. That does not interest you. You had better come nearer to us, and let us have a discussion about something.’

Bazarov went closer. ‘What subject have you decided upon for discussion?’ he said.

‘What you like. I warn you, I am dreadfully argumentative.’

‘You?’

‘Yes. That seems to surprise you. Why?’

‘Because, as far as I can judge, you have a calm, cool character, and one must be impulsive to be argumentative.’

‘How can you have had time to understand me so soon? In the first place, I am impatient and obstinate—you should ask Katya; and secondly, I am very easily carried away.’

Bazarov looked at Anna Sergyevna. ‘Perhaps; you must know best. And so you are inclined for a discussion—by all means. I was looking through the views of the Saxon mountains in your album, and you remarked that that couldn’t interest me. You said so, because you suppose me to have no feeling for art, and as a fact I haven’t any; but these views might be interesting to me from a geological standpoint, for the formation of the mountains, for instance.’

‘Excuse me; but as a geologist, you would sooner have recourse to a book, to a special work on the subject, and not to a drawing.’

‘The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.’

Anna Sergyevna was silent for a little.

‘And so you haven’t the least artistic feeling?’ she observed, putting her elbow on the table, and by that very action bringing her face nearer to Bazarov. ‘How can you get on without it?’

‘Why, what is it wanted for, may I ask?’

‘Well, at least to enable one to study and understand men.’

Bazarov smiled. ‘In the first place, experience of life does that; and in the second, I assure you, studying separate individuals is not worth the trouble. All people are like one another, in soul as in body; each of us has brain, spleen, heart, and lungs made alike; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all; the slight variations are of no importance. A single human specimen is sufficient to judge of all by. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch-tree.’

Katya, who was arranging the flowers, one at a time in a leisurely fashion, lifted her eyes to Bazarov with a puzzled look, and meeting his rapid and careless glance, she crimsoned up to her ears. Anna Sergyevna shook her head.

‘The trees in a forest,’ she repeated. ‘Then according to you there is no difference between the stupid and the clever person, between the good-natured and ill-natured?’

‘No, there is a difference, just as between the sick and the healthy. The lungs of a consumptive patient are not in the same condition as yours and mine, though they are made on the same plan. We know approximately what physical diseases come from; moral diseases come from bad education, from all the nonsense people’s heads are stuffed with from childhood up, from the defective state of society; in short, reform society, and there will be no diseases.’

Bazarov said all this with an air, as though he were all the while thinking to himself, ‘Believe me or not, as you like, it’s all one to me!’ He slowly passed his fingers over his whiskers, while his eyes strayed about the room.

‘And you conclude,’ observed Anna Sergyevna, ‘that when society is reformed, there will be no stupid nor wicked people?’

‘At any rate, in a proper organisation of society, it will be absolutely the same whether a man is stupid or clever, wicked or good.’

‘Yes, I understand; they will all have the same spleen.’

‘Precisely so, madam.’

Madame Odintsov turned to Arkady. ‘And what is your opinion, Arkady Nikolaevitch?’

‘I agree with Yevgeny,’ he answered.

Katya looked up at him from under her eyelids.

‘You amaze me, gentlemen,’ commented Madame Odintsov, ‘but we will have more talk together. But now I hear my aunt coming to tea; we must spare her.’

Anna Sergyevna’s aunt, Princess H——, a thin little woman with a pinched-up face, drawn together like a fist, and staring ill-natured-looking eyes under a grey front, came in, and, scarcely bowing to the guests, she dropped into a wide velvet covered arm-chair, upon which no one but herself was privileged to sit. Katya put a footstool under her feet; the old lady did not thank her, did not even look at her, only her hands shook under the yellow shawl, which almost covered her feeble body. The Princess liked yellow; her cap, too, had bright yellow ribbons.

‘How have you slept, aunt?’ inquired Madame Odintsov, raising her voice.

‘That dog in here again,’ the old lady muttered in reply, and noticing Fifi was making two hesitating steps in her direction, she cried, ‘Ss——ss!’

Katya called Fifi and opened the door for him.

Fifi rushed out delighted, in the expectation of being taken out for a walk; but when he was left alone outside the door, he began scratching and whining. The princess scowled. Katya was about to go out....

‘I expect tea is ready,’ said Madame Odintsov.

‘Come gentlemen; aunt, will you go in to tea?’

The princess got up from her chair without speaking and led the way out of the drawing-room. They all followed her in to the dining-room. A little page in livery drew back, with a scraping sound, from the table, an arm-chair covered with cushions, devoted to the princess’s use; she sank into it; Katya in pouring out the tea handed her first a cup emblazoned with a heraldic crest. The old lady put some honey in her cup (she considered it both sinful and extravagant to drink tea with sugar in it, though she never spent a farthing herself on anything), and suddenly asked in a hoarse voice, ‘And what does Prince Ivan write?’

No one made her any reply. Bazarov and Arkady soon guessed that they paid no attention to her though they treated her respectfully.

‘Because of her grand family,’ thought Bazarov....

After tea, Anna Sergyevna suggested they should go out for a walk; but it began to rain a little, and the whole party, with the exception of the princess, returned to the drawing-room. The neighbour, the devoted card-player, arrived; his name was Porfiry Platonitch, a stoutish, greyish man with short, spindly legs, very polite and ready to be amused. Anna Sergyevna, who still talked principally with Bazarov, asked him whether he’d like to try a contest with them in the old-fashioned way at preference? Bazarov assented, saying ‘that he ought to prepare himself beforehand for the duties awaiting him as a country doctor.’

‘You must be careful,’ observed Anna Sergyevna; ‘Porfiry Platonitch and I will beat you. And you, Katya,’ she added, ‘play something to Arkady Nikolaevitch; he is fond of music, and we can listen, too.’

Katya went unwillingly to the piano; and Arkady, though he certainly was fond of music, unwillingly followed her; it seemed to him that Madame Odintsov was sending him away, and already, like every young man at his age, he felt a vague and oppressive emotion surging up in his heart, like the forebodings of love. Katya raised the top of the piano, and not looking at Arkady, she said in a low voice—

‘What am I to play you?’

‘What you like,’ answered Arkady indifferently.

‘What sort of music do you like best?’ repeated Katya, without changing her attitude.

‘Classical,’ Arkady answered in the same tone of voice.

‘Do you like Mozart?’

‘Yes, I like Mozart.’

Katya pulled out Mozart’s Sonata-Fantasia in C minor. She played very well, though rather over correctly and precisely. She sat upright and immovable, her eyes fixed on the notes, and her lips tightly compressed, only at the end of the sonata her face glowed, her hair came loose, and a little lock fell on to her dark brow.

Arkady was particularly struck by the last part of the sonata, the part in which, in the midst of the bewitching gaiety of the careless melody, the pangs of such mournful, almost tragic suffering, suddenly break in.... But the ideas stirred in him by Mozart’s music had no reference to Katya. Looking at her, he simply thought, ‘Well, that young lady doesn’t play badly, and she’s not bad-looking either.’

When she had finished the sonata, Katya without taking her hands from the keys, asked, ‘Is that enough?’ Arkady declared that he could not venture to trouble her again, and began talking to her about Mozart; he asked her whether she had chosen that sonata herself, or some one had recommended it to her. But Katya answered him in monosyllables; she withdrew into herself, went back into her shell. When this happened to her, she did not very quickly come out again; her face even assumed at such times an obstinate, almost stupid expression. She was not exactly shy, but diffident, and rather overawed by her sister, who had educated her, and who had no suspicion of the fact. Arkady was reduced at last to calling Fifi to him, and with an affable smile patting him on the head to give himself an appearance of being at home.

Katya set to work again upon her flowers.

Bazarov meanwhile was losing and losing. Anna Sergyevna played cards in masterly fashion; Porfiry Platonitch, too, could hold his own in the game. Bazarov lost a sum which, though trifling in itself, was not altogether pleasant for him. At supper Anna Sergyevna again turned the conversation on botany.

‘We will go for a walk to-morrow morning,’ she said to him; ‘I want you to teach me the Latin names of the wild flowers and their species.’

‘What use are the Latin names to you?’ asked Bazarov.

‘Order is needed in everything,’ she answered.

‘What an exquisite woman Anna Sergyevna is!’ cried Arkady, when he was alone with his friend in the room assigned to them.

‘Yes,’ answered Bazarov, ‘a female with brains. Yes, and she’s seen life too.’

‘In what sense do you mean that, Yevgeny Vassilyitch?’

‘In a good sense, a good sense, my dear friend, Arkady Nikolaevitch! I’m convinced she manages her estate capitally too. But what’s splendid is not her, but her sister.’

‘What, that little dark thing?’

‘Yes, that little dark thing. She now is fresh and untouched, and shy and silent, and anything you like. She’s worth educating and developing. You might make something fine out of her; but the other’s—a stale loaf.’

Arkady made no reply to Bazarov, and each of them got into bed with rather singular thoughts in his head.

Anna Sergyevna, too, thought of her guests that evening. She liked Bazarov for the absence of gallantry in him, and even for his sharply defined views. She found in him something new, which she had not chanced to meet before, and she was curious.

Anna Sergyevna was a rather strange creature. Having no prejudices of any kind, having no strong convictions even, she never gave way or went out of her way for anything. She had seen many things very clearly; she had been interested in many things, but nothing had completely satisfied her; indeed, she hardly desired complete satisfaction. Her intellect was at the same time inquiring and indifferent; her doubts were never soothed to forgetfulness, and they never grew strong enough to distract her. Had she not been rich and independent, she would perhaps have thrown herself into the struggle, and have known passion. But life was easy for her, though she was bored at times, and she went on passing day after day with deliberation, never in a hurry, placid, and only rarely disturbed. Dreams sometimes danced in rainbow colours before her eyes even, but she breathed more freely when they died away, and did not regret them. Her imagination indeed overstepped the limits of what is reckoned permissible by conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.... Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink into herself, and feel plaintive and almost angry, and there was only one thing she cared for at that instant—to get away from that horrid draught.

Like all women who have not succeeded in loving, she wanted something, without herself knowing what. Strictly speaking, she wanted nothing; but it seemed to her that she wanted everything. She could hardly endure the late Odintsov (she had married him from prudential motives, though probably she would not have consented to become his wife if she had not considered him a good sort of man), and had conceived a secret repugnance for all men, whom she could only figure to herself as slovenly, heavy, drowsy, and feebly importunate creatures. Once, somewhere abroad, she had met a handsome young Swede, with a chivalrous expression, with honest blue eyes under an open brow; he had made a powerful impression on her, but it had not prevented her from going back to Russia.

‘A strange man this doctor!’ she thought as she lay in her luxurious bed on lace pillows under a light silk coverlet.... Anna Sergyevna had inherited from her father a little of his inclination for splendour. She had fondly loved her sinful but good-natured father, and he had idolised her, used to joke with her in a friendly way as though she were an equal, and to confide in her fully, to ask her advice. Her mother she scarcely remembered.

‘This doctor is a strange man!’ she repeated to herself. She stretched, smiled, clasped her hands behind her head, then ran her eyes over two pages of a stupid French novel, dropped the book—and fell asleep, all pure and cold, in her pure and fragrant linen.

The following morning Anna Sergyevna went off botanising with Bazarov directly after lunch, and returned just before dinner; Arkady did not go off anywhere, and spent about an hour with Katya. He was not bored with her; she offered of herself to repeat the sonata of the day before; but when Madame Odintsov came back at last, when he caught sight of her, he felt an instantaneous pang at his heart. She came through the garden with a rather tired step; her cheeks were glowing and her eyes shining more brightly than usual under her round straw hat. She was twirling in her fingers the thin stalk of a wildflower, a light mantle had slipped down to her elbows, and the wide gray ribbons of her hat were clinging to her bosom. Bazarov walked behind her, self-confident and careless as usual, but the expression of his face, cheerful and even friendly as it was, did not please Arkady. Muttering between his teeth, ‘Good-morning!’ Bazarov went away to his room, while Madame Odintsov shook Arkady’s hand abstractedly, and also walked past him.

‘Good-morning!’ thought Arkady ... ‘As though we had not seen each other already to-day!’

Chapter XVII

Time, it is well known, sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a worm; but man is wont to be particularly happy when he does not even notice whether it passes quickly or slowly. It was in that way Arkady and Bazarov spent a fortnight at Madame Odintsov’s. The good order she had established in her house and in her life partly contributed to this result. She adhered strictly to this order herself, and forced others to submit to it. Everything during the day was done at a fixed time. In the morning, precisely at eight o’clock, all the party assembled for tea; from morning-tea till lunch-time every one did what he pleased, the hostess herself was engaged with her bailiff (the estate was on the rent-system), her steward, and her head housekeeper. Before dinner the party met again for conversation or reading; the evening was devoted to walking, cards, and music; at half-past ten Anna Sergyevna retired to her own room, gave her orders for the following day, and went to bed. Bazarov did not like this measured, somewhat ostentatious punctuality in daily life, ‘like moving along rails,’ he pronounced it to be; the footmen in livery, the decorous stewards, offended his democratic sentiments. He declared that if one went so far, one might as well dine in the English style at once—in tail-coats and white ties. He once spoke plainly upon the subject to Anna Sergyevna. Her attitude was such that no one hesitated to speak his mind freely before her. She heard him out; and then her comment was, ‘From your point of view, you are right—and perhaps, in that respect, I am too much of a lady; but there’s no living in the country without order, one would be devoured by ennui,’ and she continued to go her own way. Bazarov grumbled, but the very reason life was so easy for him and Arkady at Madame Odintsov’s was that everything in the house ‘moved on rails.’ For all that, a change had taken place in both the young men since the first days of their stay at Nikolskoe. Bazarov, in whom Anna Sergyevna was obviously interested, though she seldom agreed with him, began to show signs of an unrest, unprecedented in him; he was easily put out of temper, and unwilling to talk, he looked irritated, and could not sit still in one place, just as though he were possessed by some secret longing; while Arkady, who had made up his mind conclusively that he was in love with Madame Odintsov, had begun to yield to a gentle melancholy. This melancholy did not, however, prevent him from becoming friendly with Katya; it even impelled him to get into friendly, affectionate terms with her. ‘She does not appreciate me? So be it!... But here is a good creature, who does not repulse me,’ he thought, and his heart again knew the sweetness of magnanimous emotions. Katya vaguely realised that he was seeking a sort of consolation in her company, and did not deny him or herself the innocent pleasure of a half-shy, half-confidential friendship. They did not talk to each other in Anna Sergyevna’s presence; Katya always shrank into herself under her sister’s sharp eyes; while Arkady, as befits a man in love, could pay attention to nothing else when near the object of his passion; but he was happy with Katya alone. He was conscious that he did not possess the power to interest Madame Odintsov; he was shy and at a loss when he was left alone with her, and she did not know what to say to him, he was too young for her. With Katya, on the other hand, Arkady felt at home; he treated her condescendingly, encouraged her to express the impressions made on her by music, reading novels, verses, and other such trifles, without noticing or realising that these trifles were what interested him too. Katya, on her side, did not try to drive away melancholy. Arkady was at his ease with Katya, Madame Odintsov with Bazarov, and thus it usually came to pass that the two couples, after being a little while together, went off on their separate ways, especially during the walks. Katya adored nature, and Arkady loved it, though he did not dare to acknowledge it; Madame Odintsov was, like Bazarov, rather indifferent to the beauties of nature. The almost continual separation of the two friends was not without its consequences; the relations between them began to change. Bazarov gave up talking to Arkady about Madame Odintsov, gave up even abusing her ‘aristocratic ways’; Katya, it is true, he praised as before, and only advised him to restrain her sentimental tendencies, but his praises were hurried, his advice dry, and in general he talked less to Arkady than before ... he seemed to avoid him, seemed ill at ease with him.

Arkady observed it all, but he kept his observations to himself.

The real cause of all this ‘newness’ was the feeling inspired in Bazarov by Madame Odintsov, a feeling which tortured and maddened him, and which he would at once have denied, with scornful laughter and cynical abuse, if any one had ever so remotely hinted at the possibility of what was taking place in him. Bazarov had a great love for women and for feminine beauty; but love in the ideal, or, as he expressed it, romantic sense, he called lunacy, unpardonable imbecility; he regarded chivalrous sentiments as something of the nature of deformity or disease, and had more than once expressed his wonder that Toggenburg and all the minnesingers and troubadours had not been put into a lunatic asylum. ‘If a woman takes your fancy,’ he used to say, ‘try and gain your end; but if you can’t—well, turn your back on her—there are lots of good fish in the sea.’ Madame Odintsov had taken his fancy; the rumours about her, the freedom and independence of her ideas, her unmistakable liking for him, all seemed to be in his favour, but he soon saw that with her he would not ‘gain his ends,’ and to turn his back on her he found, to his own bewilderment, beyond his power. His blood was on fire directly if he merely thought of her; he could easily have mastered his blood, but something else was taking root in him, something he had never admitted, at which he had always jeered, at which all his pride revolted. In his conversations with Anna Sergyevna he expressed more strongly than ever his calm contempt for everything idealistic; but when he was alone, with indignation he recognised idealism in himself. Then he would set off to the forest and walk with long strides about it, smashing the twigs that came in his way, and cursing under his breath both her and himself; or he would get into the hay-loft in the barn, and, obstinately closing his eyes, try to force himself to sleep, in which, of course, he did not always succeed. Suddenly his fancy would bring before him those chaste hands twining one day about his neck, those proud lips responding to his kisses, those intellectual eyes dwelling with tenderness—yes, with tenderness—on his, and his head went round, and he forgot himself for an instant, till indignation boiled up in him again. He caught himself in all sorts of ‘shameful’ thoughts, as though he were driven on by a devil mocking him. Sometimes he fancied that there was a change taking place in Madame Odintsov too; that there were signs in the expression of her face of something special; that, perhaps ... but at that point he would stamp, or grind his teeth, and clench his fists.

Meanwhile Bazarov was not altogether mistaken. He had struck Madame Odintsov’s imagination; he interested her, she thought a great deal about him. In his absence, she was not dull, she was not impatient for his coming, but she always grew more lively on his appearance; she liked to be left alone with him, and she liked talking to him, even when he irritated her or offended her taste, her refined habits. She was, as it were, eager at once to sound him and to analyse herself.

One day walking in the garden with her, he suddenly announced, in a surly voice, that he intended going to his father’s place very soon.... She turned white, as though something had given her a pang, and such a pang, that she wondered and pondered long after, what could be the meaning of it. Bazarov had spoken of his departure with no idea of putting her to the test, of seeing what would come of it; he never ‘fabricated.’ On the morning of that day he had an interview with his father’s bailiff, who had taken care of him when he was a child, Timofeitch. This Timofeitch, a little old man of much experience and astuteness, with faded yellow hair, a weather-beaten red face, and tiny tear-drops in his shrunken eyes, unexpectedly appeared before Bazarov, in his shortish overcoat of stout greyish-blue cloth, girt with a strip of leather, and in tarred boots.

‘Hullo, old man; how are you?’ cried Bazarov.

‘How do you do, Yevgeny Vassilyitch?’ began the little old man, and he smiled with delight, so that his whole face was all at once covered with wrinkles.

‘What have you come for? They sent for me, eh?’

‘Upon my word, sir, how could we?’ mumbled Timofeitch. (He remembered the strict injunctions he had received from his master on starting.) ‘We were sent to the town on business, and we’d heard news of your honour, so here we turned off on our way, that’s to say—to have a look at your honour ... as if we could think of disturbing you!’

‘Come, don’t tell lies!’ Bazarov cut him short. ‘Is this the road to the town, do you mean to tell me?’ Timofeitch hesitated, and made no answer. ‘Is my father well?’

‘Thank God, yes.’

‘And my mother?’

‘Anna Vlasyevna too, glory be to God.’

‘They are expecting me, I suppose?’

The little old man held his tiny head on one side.

‘Ah, Yevgeny Vassilyitch, it makes one’s heart ache to see them; it does really.’

‘Come, all right, all right! shut up! Tell them I’m coming soon.’

‘Yes, sir,’ answered Timofeitch, with a sigh.

As he went out of the house, he pulled his cap down on his head with both hands, clambered into a wretched-looking racing droshky, and went off at a trot, but not in the direction of the town.

On the evening of the same day, Madame Odintsov was sitting in her own room with Bazarov, while Arkady walked up and down the hall listening to Katya’s playing. The princess had gone upstairs to her own room; she could not bear guests as a rule, and ‘especially this new riff-raff lot,’ as she called them. In the common rooms she only sulked; but she made up for it in her own room by breaking out into such abuse before her maid that the cap danced on her head, wig and all. Madame Odintsov was well aware of all this.

‘How is it you are proposing to leave us?’ she began; ‘how about your promise?’

Bazarov started. ‘What promise?’

‘Have you forgotten? You meant to give me some lessons in chemistry.’

‘It can’t be helped! My father expects me; I can’t loiter any longer. However, you can read Pelouse et Frémy, Notions générales de Chimie; it’s a good book, and clearly written. You will find everything you need in it.’

‘But do you remember; you assured me a book cannot take the place of ... I’ve forgotten how you put it, but you know what I mean ... do you remember?’

‘It can’t be helped!’ repeated Bazarov.

‘Why go away?’ said Madame Odintsov, dropping her voice.

He glanced at her. Her head had fallen on to the back of her easy-chair, and her arms, bare to the elbow, were folded on her bosom. She seemed paler in the light of the single lamp covered with a perforated paper shade. An ample white gown hid her completely in its soft folds; even the tips of her feet, also crossed, were hardly seen.

‘And why stay?’ answered Bazarov.

Madame Odintsov turned her head slightly. ‘You ask why. Have you not enjoyed yourself with me? Or do you suppose you will not be missed here?’

‘I am sure of it.’

Madame Odintsov was silent a minute. ‘You are wrong in thinking that. But I don’t believe you. You could not say that seriously.’ Bazarov still sat immovable. ‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch, why don’t you speak?’

‘Why, what am I to say to you? People are not generally worth being missed, and I less than most.’

‘Why so?’

‘I’m a practical, uninteresting person. I don’t know how to talk.’

‘You are fishing, Yevgeny Vassilyitch.’

‘That’s not a habit of mine. Don’t you know yourself that I’ve nothing in common with the elegant side of life, the side you prize so much?’

Madame Odintsov bit the corner of her handkerchief.

‘You may think what you like, but I shall be dull when you go away.’

‘Arkady will remain,’ remarked Bazarov. Madame Odintsov shrugged her shoulders slightly. ‘I shall be dull,’ she repeated.

‘Really? In any case you will not feel dull for long.’

‘What makes you suppose that?’

‘Because you told me yourself that you are only dull when your regular routine is broken in upon. You have ordered your existence with such unimpeachable regularity that there can be no place in it for dulness or sadness ... for any unpleasant emotions.’

‘And do you consider I am so unimpeachable ... that’s to say, that I have ordered my life with such regularity?’

‘I should think so. Here’s an example; in a few minutes it will strike ten, and I know beforehand that you will drive me away.’

‘No; I’m not going to drive you away, Yevgeny Vassilyitch. You may stay. Open that window.... I feel half-stifled.’

Bazarov got up and gave a push to the window. It flew up with a loud crash.... He had not expected it to open so easily; besides, his hands were shaking. The soft, dark night looked in to the room with its almost black sky, its faintly rustling trees, and the fresh fragrance of the pure open air.

‘Draw the blind and sit down,’ said Madame Odintsov; ‘I want to have a talk with you before you go away. Tell me something about yourself; you never talk about yourself.’

‘I try to talk to you upon improving subjects, Anna Sergyevna.’

‘You are very modest.... But I should like to know something about you, about your family, about your father, for whom you are forsaking us.’

‘Why is she talking like that?’ thought Bazarov.

‘All that’s not in the least interesting,’ he uttered aloud, ‘especially for you; we are obscure people....’

‘And you regard me as an aristocrat?’

Bazarov lifted his eyes to Madame Odintsov.

‘Yes,’ he said, with exaggerated sharpness.

She smiled. ‘I see you know me very little, though you do maintain that all people are alike, and it’s not worth while to study them. I will tell you my life some time or other ... but first you tell me yours.’

‘I know you very little,’ repeated Bazarov. ‘Perhaps you are right; perhaps, really, every one is a riddle. You, for instance; you avoid society, you are oppressed by it, and you have invited two students to stay with you. What makes you, with your intellect, with your beauty, live in the country?’

‘What? What was it you said?’ Madame Odintsov interposed eagerly. ‘With my ... beauty?’

Bazarov scowled. ‘Never mind that,’ he muttered; ‘I meant to say that I don’t exactly understand why you have settled in the country?’

‘You don’t understand it.... But you explain it to yourself in some way?’

‘Yes ... I assume that you remain continually in the same place because you indulge yourself, because you are very fond of comfort and ease, and very indifferent to everything else.’

Madame Odintsov smiled again. ‘You would absolutely refuse to believe that I am capable of being carried away by anything?’

Bazarov glanced at her from under his brows.

‘By curiosity, perhaps; but not otherwise.’

‘Really? Well, now I understand why we are such friends; you are just like me, you see.’

‘We are such friends ...’ Bazarov articulated in a choked voice.

‘Yes!... Why, I’d forgotten you wanted to go away.’

Bazarov got up. The lamp burnt dimly in the middle of the dark, luxurious, isolated room; from time to time the blind was shaken, and there flowed in the freshness of the insidious night; there was heard its mysterious whisperings. Madame Odintsov did not move in a single limb; but she was gradually possessed by concealed emotion.

It communicated itself to Bazarov. He was suddenly conscious that he was alone with a young and lovely woman....

‘Where are you going?’ she said slowly.

He answered nothing, and sank into a chair.

‘And so you consider me a placid, pampered, spoiled creature,’ she went on in the same voice, never taking her eyes off the window. ‘While I know so much about myself, that I am unhappy.’

‘You unhappy? What for? Surely you can’t attach any importance to idle gossip?’

Madame Odintsov frowned. It annoyed her that he had given such a meaning to her words.

‘Such gossip does not affect me, Yevgeny Vassilyitch, and I am too proud to allow it to disturb me. I am unhappy because ... I have no desires, no passion for life. You look at me incredulously; you think that’s said by an “aristocrat,” who is all in lace, and sitting in a velvet armchair. I don’t conceal the fact: I love what you call comfort, and at the same time I have little desire to live. Explain that contradiction as best you can. But all that’s romanticism in your eyes.’

Bazarov shook his head. ‘You are in good health, independent, rich; what more would you have? What do you want?’

‘What do I want,’ echoed Madame Odintsov, and she sighed, ‘I am very tired, I am old, I feel as if I have had a very long life. Yes, I am old,’ she added, softly drawing the ends of her lace over her bare arms. Her eyes met Bazarov’s eyes, and she faintly blushed. ‘Behind me I have already so many memories: my life in Petersburg, wealth, then poverty, then my father’s death, marriage, then the inevitable tour in due order.... So many memories, and nothing to remember, and before me, before me—a long, long road, and no goal.... I have no wish to go on.’

‘Are you so disillusioned?’ queried Bazarov.

‘No, but I am dissatisfied,’ Madame Odintsov replied, dwelling on each syllable. ‘I think if I could interest myself strongly in something....’

‘You want to fall in love,’ Bazarov interrupted her, ‘and you can’t love; that’s where your unhappiness lies.’

Madame Odintsov began to examine the sleeve of her lace.

‘Is it true I can’t love?’ she said.

‘I should say not! Only I was wrong in calling that an unhappiness. On the contrary, any one’s more to be pitied when such a mischance befalls him.’

‘Mischance, what?’

‘Falling in love.’

‘And how do you come to know that?’

‘By hearsay,’ answered Bazarov angrily.

‘You’re flirting,’ he thought; ‘you’re bored, and teasing me for want of something to do, while I ...’ His heart really seemed as though it were being torn to pieces.

‘Besides, you are perhaps too exacting,’ he said, bending his whole frame forward and playing with the fringe of the chair.

‘Perhaps. My idea is everything or nothing. A life for a life. Take mine, give up thine, and that without regret or turning back. Or else better have nothing.’

‘Well?’ observed Bazarov; ‘that’s fair terms, and I’m surprised that so far you ... have not found what you wanted.’

‘And do you think it would be easy to give oneself up wholly to anything whatever?’

‘Not easy, if you begin reflecting, waiting and attaching value to yourself, prizing yourself, I mean; but to give oneself up without reflection is very easy.’

‘How can one help prizing oneself? If I am of no value, who could need my devotion?’

‘That’s not my affair; that’s the other’s business to discover what is my value. The chief thing is to be able to devote oneself.’

Madame Odintsov bent forward from the back of her chair. ‘You speak,’ she began, ‘as though you had experienced all that.’

‘It happened to come up, Anna Sergyevna; all that, as you know, is not in my line.’

‘But you could devote yourself?’

‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t like to boast.’

Madame Odintsov said nothing, and Bazarov was mute. The sounds of the piano floated up to them from the drawing-room.

‘How is it Katya is playing so late?’ observed Madame Odintsov.

Bazarov got up. ‘Yes, it is really late now; it’s time for you to go to bed.’

‘Wait a little; why are you in a hurry?... I want to say one word to you.’

‘What is it?’

‘Wait a little,’ whispered Madame Odintsov. Her eyes rested on Bazarov; it seemed as though she were examining him attentively.

He walked across the room, then suddenly went up to her, hurriedly said ‘Good-bye,’ squeezed her hand so that she almost screamed, and was gone. She raised her crushed fingers to her lips, breathed on them, and suddenly, impulsively getting up from her low chair, she moved with rapid steps towards the door, as though she wished to bring Bazarov back.... A maid came into the room with a decanter on a silver tray. Madame Odintsov stood still, told her she could go, and sat down again, and again sank into thought. Her hair slipped loose and fell in a dark coil down her shoulders. Long after the lamp was still burning in Anna Sergyevna’s room, and for long she stayed without moving, only from time to time chafing her hands, which ached a little from the cold of the night.

Bazarov went back two hours later to his bed-room with his boots wet with dew, dishevelled and ill-humoured. He found Arkady at the writing-table with a book in his hands, his coat buttoned up to the throat.

‘You’re not in bed yet?’ he said, in a tone, it seemed, of annoyance.

‘You stopped a long while with Anna Sergyevna this evening,’ remarked Arkady, not answering him.

‘Yes, I stopped with her all the while you were playing the piano with Katya Sergyevna.’

‘I did not play ...’ Arkady began, and he stopped. He felt the tears were coming into his eyes, and he did not like to cry before his sarcastic friend.

Chapter XVIII

The following morning when Madame Odintsov came down to morning tea, Bazarov sat a long while bending over his cup, then suddenly he glanced up at her.... She turned to him as though he had struck her a blow, and he fancied that her face was a little paler since the night before. She quickly went off to her own room, and did not appear till lunch. It rained from early morning; there was no possibility of going for a walk. The whole company assembled in the drawing-room. Arkady took up the new number of a journal and began reading it aloud. The princess, as was her habit, tried to express her amazement in her face, as though he were doing something improper, then glared angrily at him; but he paid no attention to her.

‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch’ said Anna Sergyevna, ‘come to my room.... I want to ask you.... You mentioned a textbook yesterday ...’

She got up and went to the door. The princess looked round with an expression that seemed to say, ‘Look at me; see how shocked I am!’ and again glared at Arkady; but he raised his voice, and exchanging glances with Katya, near whom he was sitting, he went on reading.

Madame Odintsov went with rapid steps to her study. Bazarov followed her quickly, not raising his eyes, and only with his ears catching the delicate swish and rustle of her silk gown gliding before him. Madame Odintsov sank into the same easy-chair in which she had sat the previous evening, and Bazarov took up the same position as before.

‘What was the name of that book?’ she began, after a brief silence.

‘Pelouse et Frémy, Notions générales,’ answered Bazarov. ‘I might though recommend you also Ganot, Traité élémentaire de physique éxpérimentale. In that book the illustrations are clearer, and in general it’s a text-book.’

Madame Odintsov stretched out her hand. ‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch, I beg your pardon, but I didn’t invite you in here to discuss text-books. I wanted to continue our conversation of last night. You went away so suddenly.... It will not bore you ...’

‘I am at your service, Anna Sergyevna. But what were we talking about last night?’

Madame Odintsov flung a sidelong glance at Bazarov.

‘We were talking of happiness, I believe. I told you about myself. By the way, I mentioned the word “happiness.” Tell me why it is that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a fine evening, or a conversation with sympathetic people, it all seems an intimation of some measureless happiness existing apart somewhere rather than actual happiness—such, I mean, as we ourselves are in possession of? Why is it? Or perhaps you have no feeling like that?’

‘You know the saying, “Happiness is where we are not,”’ replied Bazarov; ‘besides, you told me yesterday you are discontented. I certainly never have such ideas come into my head.’

‘Perhaps they seem ridiculous to you?’

‘No; but they don’t come into my head.’

‘Really? Do you know, I should very much like to know what you do think about?’

‘What? I don’t understand.’

‘Listen; I have long wanted to speak openly to you. There’s no need to tell you—you are conscious of it yourself—that you are not an ordinary man; you are still young—all life is before you. What are you preparing yourself for? What future is awaiting you? I mean to say—what object do you want to attain? What are you going forward to? What is in your heart? in short, who are you? What are you?’

‘You surprise me, Anna Sergyevna. You are aware that I am studying natural science, and who I ...’

‘Well, who are you?’

‘I have explained to you already that I am going to be a district doctor.’

Anna Sergyevna made a movement of impatience.

‘What do you say that for? You don’t believe it yourself. Arkady might answer me in that way, but not you.’

‘Why, in what is Arkady ...’

‘Stop! Is it possible you could content yourself with such a humble career, and aren’t you always maintaining yourself that you don’t believe in medicine? You—with your ambition—a district doctor! You answer me like that to put me off, because you have no confidence in me. But, do you know, Yevgeny Vassilyitch, that I could understand you; I have been poor myself, and ambitious, like you; I have been perhaps through the same trials as you.’

‘That is all very well, Anna Sergyevna, but you must pardon me for ... I am not in the habit of talking freely about myself at any time as a rule, and between you and me there is such a gulf ...’

‘What sort of gulf? You mean to tell me again that I am an aristocrat? No more of that, Yevgeny Vassilyitch; I thought I had proved to you ...’

‘And even apart from that,’ broke in Bazarov, ‘what could induce one to talk and think about the future, which for the most part does not depend on us? If a chance turns up of doing something—so much the better; and if it doesn’t turn up—at least one will be glad one didn’t gossip idly about it beforehand.’

‘You call a friendly conversation idle gossip?... Or perhaps you consider me as a woman unworthy of your confidence? I know you despise us all.’

‘I don’t despise you, Anna Sergyevna, and you know that.’

‘No, I don’t know anything ... but let us suppose so. I understand your disinclination to talk of your future career; but as to what is taking place within you now ...’

‘Taking place!’ repeated Bazarov, ‘as though I were some sort of government or society! In any case, it is utterly uninteresting; and besides, can a man always speak of everything that “takes place” in him?’

‘Why, I don’t see why you can’t speak freely of everything you have in your heart.’

‘Can you?’ asked Bazarov.

‘Yes,’ answered Anna Sergyevna, after a brief hesitation.

Bazarov bowed his head. ‘You are more fortunate than I am.’

Anna Sergyevna looked at him questioningly. ‘As you please,’ she went on, ‘but still something tells me that we have not come together for nothing; that we shall be great friends. I am sure this—what should I say, constraint, reticence in you will vanish at last.’

‘So you have noticed reticence ... as you expressed it ... constraint?’

‘Yes.’

Bazarov got up and went to the window. ‘And would you like to know the reason of this reticence? Would you like to know what is passing within me?’

‘Yes,’ repeated Madame Odintsov, with a sort of dread she did not at the time understand.

‘And you will not be angry?’

‘No.’

‘No?’ Bazarov was standing with his back to her. ‘Let me tell you then that I love you like a fool, like a madman.... There, you’ve forced it out of me.’

Madame Odintsov held both hands out before her; but Bazarov was leaning with his forehead pressed against the window pane. He breathed hard; his whole body was visibly trembling. But it was not the tremor of youthful timidity, not the sweet alarm of the first declaration that possessed him; it was passion struggling in him, strong and painful—passion not unlike hatred, and perhaps akin to it.... Madame Odintsov felt both afraid and sorry for him.

‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch!’ she said, and there was the ring of unconscious tenderness in her voice.

He turned quickly, flung a searching look on her, and snatching both her hands, he drew her suddenly to his breast.

She did not at once free herself from his embrace, but an instant later, she was standing far away in a corner, and looking from there at Bazarov. He rushed at her ...

‘You have misunderstood me,’ she whispered hurriedly, in alarm. It seemed if he had made another step she would have screamed.... Bazarov bit his lips, and went out.

Half-an-hour after, a maid gave Anna Sergyevna a note from Bazarov; it consisted simply of one line: ‘Am I to go to-day, or can I stop till to-morrow?’

‘Why should you go? I did not understand you—you did not understand me,’ Anna Sergyevna answered him, but to herself she thought: ‘I did not understand myself either.’

She did not show herself till dinner-time, and kept walking to and fro in her room, stopping sometimes at the window, sometimes at the looking-glass, and slowly rubbing her handkerchief over her neck, on which she still seemed to feel a burning spot. She asked herself what had induced her to ‘force’ Bazarov’s words, his confidence, and whether she had suspected nothing ... ‘I am to blame,’ she decided aloud, ‘but I could not have foreseen this.’ She fell to musing, and blushed crimson, remembering Bazarov’s almost animal face when he had rushed at her....

‘Oh?’ she uttered suddenly aloud, and she stopped short and shook back her curls.... She caught sight of herself in the glass; her head thrown back, with a mysterious smile on the half-closed, half-opened eyes and lips, told her, it seemed, in a flash something at which she herself was confused....

‘No,’ she made up her mind at last. ‘God knows what it would lead to; he couldn’t be played with; peace is anyway the best thing in the world.’

Her peace of mind was not shaken; but she felt gloomy, and even shed a few tears once though she could not have said why—certainly not for the insult done her. She did not feel insulted; she was more inclined to feel guilty. Under the influence of various vague emotions, the sense of life passing by, the desire of novelty, she had forced herself to go up to a certain point, forced herself to look behind herself, and had seen behind her not even an abyss, but what was empty ... or revolting.

Chapter XIX

Great as was Madame Odintsov’s self-control, and superior as she was to every kind of prejudice, she felt awkward when she went into the dining-room to dinner. The meal went off fairly successfully, however. Porfiry Platonovitch made his appearance and told various anecdotes; he had just come back from the town. Among other things, he informed them that the governor had ordered his secretaries on special commissions to wear spurs, in case he might send them off anywhere for greater speed on horseback. Arkady talked in an undertone to Katya, and diplomatically attended to the princess’s wants. Bazarov maintained a grim and obstinate silence. Madame Odintsov looked at him twice, not stealthily, but straight in the face, which was bilious and forbidding, with downcast eyes, and contemptuous determination stamped on every feature, and thought: ‘No ... no ... no.’ ... After dinner, she went with the whole company into the garden, and seeing that Bazarov wanted to speak to her, she took a few steps to one side and stopped. He went up to her, but even then did not raise his eyes, and said hoarsely—

‘I have to apologise to you, Anna Sergyevna. You must be in a fury with me.’

‘No, I’m not angry with you, Yevgeny Vassilyitch,’ answered Madame Odintsov; ‘but I am sorry.’

‘So much the worse. Any way, I’m sufficiently punished. My position, you will certainly agree, is most foolish. You wrote to me, “Why go away?” But I cannot stay, and don’t wish to. To-morrow I shall be gone.’

‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch, why are you ...’

‘Why am I going away?’

‘No; I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘There’s no recalling the past, Anna Sergyevna ... and this was bound to come about sooner or later. Consequently I must go. I can only conceive of one condition upon which I could remain; but that condition will never be. Excuse my impertinence, but you don’t love me, and you never will love me, I suppose?’

Bazarov’s eyes glittered for an instant under their dark brows.

Anna Sergyevna did not answer him. ‘I’m afraid of this man,’ flashed through her brain.

‘Good-bye, then,’ said Bazarov, as though he guessed her thought, and he went back into the house.

Anna Sergyevna walked slowly after him, and calling Katya to her, she took her arm. She did not leave her side till quite evening. She did not play cards, and was constantly laughing, which did not at all accord with her pale and perplexed face. Arkady was bewildered, and looked on at her as all young people look on—that’s to say, he was constantly asking himself, ‘What is the meaning of that?’ Bazarov shut himself up in his room; he came back to tea, however. Anna Sergyevna longed to say some friendly word to him, but she did not know how to address him....

An unexpected incident relieved her from her embarrassment; a steward announced the arrival of Sitnikov.

It is difficult to do justice in words to the strange figure cut by the young apostle of progress as he fluttered into the room. Though, with his characteristic impudence, he had made up his mind to go into the country to visit a woman whom he hardly knew, who had never invited him; but with whom, according to information he had gathered, such talented and intimate friends were staying, he was nevertheless trembling to the marrow of his bones; and instead of bringing out the apologies and compliments he had learned by heart beforehand, he muttered some absurdity about Evdoksya Kukshin having sent him to inquire after Anna Sergyevna’s health, and Arkady Nikolaevitch’s too, having always spoken to him in the highest terms.... At this point he faltered and lost his presence of mind so completely that he sat down on his own hat. However, since no one turned him out, and Anna Sergyevna even presented him to her aunt and her sister, he soon recovered himself and began to chatter volubly. The introduction of the commonplace is often an advantage in life; it relieves over-strained tension, and sobers too self-confident or self-sacrificing emotions by recalling its close kinship with them. With Sitnikov’s appearance everything became somehow duller and simpler; they all even ate a more solid supper, and retired to bed half-an-hour earlier than usual.

‘I might now repeat to you,’ said Arkady, as he lay down in bed, to Bazarov, who was also undressing, what you once said to me, ‘Why are you so melancholy? One would think you had fulfilled some sacred duty.’ For some time past a sort of pretence of free-and-easy banter had sprung up between the two young men, which is always an unmistakable sign of secret displeasure or unexpressed suspicions.

‘I’m going to my father’s to-morrow,’ said Bazarov.

Arkady raised himself and leaned on his elbow. He felt both surprised, and for some reason or other pleased. ‘Ah!’ he commented, ‘and is that why you’re sad?’

Bazarov yawned. ‘You’ll get old if you know too much.’

‘And Anna Sergyevna?’ persisted Arkady.

‘What about Anna Sergyevna?’

‘I mean, will she let you go?’

‘I’m not her paid man.’

Arkady grew thoughtful, while Bazarov lay down and turned with his face to the wall.

Some minutes went by in silence. ‘Yevgeny?’ cried Arkady suddenly.

‘Well?’

‘I will leave with you to-morrow too.’

Bazarov made no answer.

‘Only I will go home,’ continued Arkady. ‘We will go together as far as Hohlovsky, and there you can get horses at Fedot’s. I should be delighted to make the acquaintance of your people, but I’m afraid of being in their way and yours. You are coming to us again later, of course?’

‘I’ve left all my things with you,’ Bazarov said, without turning round.

‘Why doesn’t he ask me why I am going, and just as suddenly as he?’ thought Arkady. ‘In reality, why am I going, and why is he going?’ he pursued his reflections. He could find no satisfactory answer to his own question, though his heart was filled with some bitter feeling. He felt it would be hard to part from this life to which he had grown so accustomed; but for him to remain alone would be rather odd. ‘Something has passed between them,’ he reasoned to himself; ‘what good would it be for me to hang on after he’s gone? She’s utterly sick of me; I’m losing the last that remained to me.’ He began to imagine Anna Sergyevna to himself, then other features gradually eclipsed the lovely image of the young widow.

‘I’m sorry to lose Katya too!’ Arkady whispered to his pillow, on which a tear had already fallen.... All at once he shook back his hair and said aloud—

‘What the devil made that fool of a Sitnikov turn up here?’

Bazarov at first stirred a little in his bed, then he uttered the following rejoinder: ‘You’re still a fool, my boy, I see. Sitnikovs are indispensable to us. I—do you understand? I need dolts like him. It’s not for the gods to bake bricks, in fact!’...

‘Oho!’ Arkady thought to himself, and then in a flash all the fathomless depths of Bazarov’s conceit dawned upon him. ‘Are you and I gods then? at least, you’re a god; am not I a dolt then?’

‘Yes,’ repeated Bazarov; ‘you’re still a fool.’

Madame Odintsov expressed no special surprise when Arkady told her the next day that he was going with Bazarov; she seemed tired and absorbed. Katya looked at him silently and seriously; the princess went so far as to cross herself under her shawl so that he could not help noticing it. Sitnikov, on the other hand, was completely disconcerted. He had only just come in to lunch in a new and fashionable get-up, not on this occasion of a Slavophil cut; the evening before he had astonished the man told off to wait on him by the amount of linen he had brought with him, and now all of a sudden his comrades were deserting him! He took a few tiny steps, doubled back like a hunted hare at the edge of a copse, and abruptly, almost with dismay, almost with a wail, announced that he proposed going too. Madame Odintsov did not attempt to detain him.

‘I have a very comfortable carriage,’ added the luckless young man, turning to Arkady; ‘I can take you, while Yevgeny Vassilyitch can take your coach, so it will be even more convenient.’

‘But, really, it’s not at all in your way, and it’s a long way to my place.’

‘That’s nothing, nothing; I’ve plenty of time; besides, I have business in that direction.’

‘Gin-selling?’ asked Arkady, rather too contemptuously.

But Sitnikov was reduced to such desperation that he did not even laugh as usual. ‘I assure you, my carriage is exceedingly comfortable,’ he muttered; ‘and there will be room for all.’

‘Don’t wound Monsieur Sitnikov by a refusal,’ commented Anna Sergyevna.

Arkady glanced at her, and bowed his head significantly.

The visitors started off after lunch. As she said good-bye to Bazarov, Madame Odintsov held out her hand to him, and said, ‘We shall meet again, shan’t we?’

‘As you command,’ answered Bazarov.

‘In that case, we shall.’

Arkady was the first to descend the steps; he got into Sitnikov’s carriage. A steward tucked him in respectfully, but he could have killed him with pleasure, or have burst into tears.

Bazarov took his seat in the coach. When they reached Hohlovsky, Arkady waited till Fedot, the keeper of the posting-station, had put in the horses, and going up to the coach, he said, with his old smile, to Bazarov, ‘Yevgeny, take me with you; I want to come to you.’

‘Get in,’ Bazarov brought out through his teeth.

Sitnikov, who had been walking to and fro round the wheels of his carriage, whistling briskly, could only gape when he heard these words; while Arkady coolly pulled his luggage out of the carriage, took his seat beside Bazarov, and bowing politely to his former fellow-traveller, he called, ‘Whip up!’ The coach rolled away, and was soon out of sight.... Sitnikov, utterly confused, looked at his coachman, but the latter was flicking his whip about the tail of the off horse. Then Sitnikov jumped into the carriage, and growling at two passing peasants, ‘Put on your caps, idiots!’ he drove to the town, where he arrived very late, and where, next day, at Madame Kukshin’s, he dealt very severely with two ‘disgusting stuck-up churls.’

When he was seated in the coach by Bazarov, Arkady pressed his hand warmly, and for a long while he said nothing. It seemed as though Bazarov understood and appreciated both the pressure and the silence. He had not slept all the previous night, and had not smoked, and had eaten scarcely anything for several days. His profile, already thinner, stood out darkly and sharply under his cap, which was pulled down to his eyebrows.

‘Well, brother,’ he said at last, ‘give us a cigarette. But look, I say, is my tongue yellow?’

‘Yes, it is,’ answered Arkady.

‘Hm ... and the cigarette’s tasteless. The machine’s out of gear.’

‘You look changed lately certainly,’ observed Arkady.

‘It’s nothing! we shall soon be all right. One thing’s a bother—my mother’s so tender-hearted; if you don’t grow as round as a tub, and eat ten times a day, she’s quite upset. My father’s all right, he’s known all sorts of ups and downs himself. No, I can’t smoke,’ he added, and he flung the cigarette into the dust of the road.

‘Do you think it’s twenty miles?’ asked Arkady.

‘Yes. But ask this sage here.’ He indicated the peasant sitting on the box, a labourer of Fedot’s.

But the sage only answered, ‘Who’s to know—miles hereabout aren’t measured,’ and went on swearing in an undertone at the shaft horse for ‘kicking with her head-piece,’ that is, shaking with her head down.

‘Yes, yes,’ began Bazarov; ‘it’s a lesson to you, my young friend, an instructive example. God knows, what rot it is? Every man hangs on a thread, the abyss may open under his feet any minute, and yet he must go and invent all sorts of discomforts for himself, and spoil his life.’

‘What are you alluding to?’ asked Arkady.

‘I’m not alluding to anything; I’m saying straight out that we’ve both behaved like fools. What’s the use of talking about it! Still, I’ve noticed in hospital practice, the man who’s furious at his illness—he’s sure to get over it.’

‘I don’t quite understand you,’ observed Arkady; ‘I should have thought you had nothing to complain of.’

‘And since you don’t quite understand me, I’ll tell you this—to my mind, it’s better to break stones on the highroad than to let a woman have the mastery of even the end of one’s little finger. That’s all ...’ Bazarov was on the point of uttering his favourite word, ‘romanticism,’ but he checked himself, and said, ‘rubbish. You don’t believe me now, but I tell you; you and I have been in feminine society, and very nice we found it; but to throw up society like that is for all the world like a dip in cold water on a hot day. A man hasn’t time to attend to such trifles; a man ought not to be tame, says an excellent Spanish proverb. Now, you, I suppose, my sage friend,’ he added, turning to the peasant sitting on the box—‘you’ve a wife?’

The peasant showed both the friends his dull blear-eyed face.

‘A wife? Yes. Every man has a wife.’

‘Do you beat her?’

‘My wife? Everything happens sometimes. We don’t beat her without good reason!’

‘That’s excellent. Well, and does she beat you?’

The peasant gave a tug at the reins. ‘That’s a strange thing to say, sir. You like your joke.’... He was obviously offended.

‘You hear, Arkady Nikolaevitch! But we have taken a beating ... that’s what comes of being educated people.’

Arkady gave a forced laugh, while Bazarov turned away, and did not open his mouth again the whole journey.

The twenty miles seemed to Arkady quite forty. But at last, on the slope of some rising ground, appeared the small hamlet where Bazarov’s parents lived. Beside it, in a young birch copse, could be seen a small house with a thatched roof.

Two peasants stood with their hats on at the first hut, abusing each other. ‘You’re a great sow,’ said one; ‘and worse than a little sucking pig.’

‘And your wife’s a witch,’ retorted the other.

‘From their unconstrained behaviour,’ Bazarov remarked to Arkady, ‘and the playfulness of their retorts, you can guess that my father’s peasants are not too much oppressed. Why, there he is himself coming out on the steps of his house. They must have heard the bells. It’s he; it’s he—I know his figure. Ay, ay! how grey he’s grown though, poor chap!’

Chapter XX

Bazarov leaned out of the coach, while Arkady thrust his head out behind his companion’s back, and caught sight on the steps of the little manor-house of a tall, thinnish man with dishevelled hair, and a thin hawk nose, dressed in an old military coat not buttoned up. He was standing, his legs wide apart, smoking a long pipe and screwing up his eyes to keep the sun out of them.

The horses stopped.

‘Arrived at last,’ said Bazarov’s father, still going on smoking though the pipe was fairly dancing up and down between his fingers. ‘Come, get out; get out; let me hug you.’

He began embracing his son ... ‘Enyusha, Enyusha,’ was heard a trembling woman’s voice. The door was flung open, and in the doorway was seen a plump, short, little old woman in a white cap and a short striped jacket. She moaned, staggered, and would certainly have fallen, had not Bazarov supported her. Her plump little hands were instantly twined round his neck, her head was pressed to his breast, and there was a complete hush. The only sound heard was her broken sobs.

Old Bazarov breathed hard and screwed his eyes up more than ever.

‘There, that’s enough, that’s enough, Arisha! give over,’ he said, exchanging a glance with Arkady, who remained motionless in the coach, while the peasant on the box even turned his head away; ‘that’s not at all necessary, please give over.’

‘Ah, Vassily Ivanitch,’ faltered the old woman, ‘for what ages, my dear one, my darling, Enyusha,’ ... and, not unclasping her hands, she drew her wrinkled face, wet with tears and working with tenderness, a little away from Bazarov, and gazed at him with blissful and comic-looking eyes, and again fell on his neck.

‘Well, well, to be sure, that’s all in the nature of things,’ commented Vassily Ivanitch, ‘only we’d better come indoors. Here’s a visitor come with Yevgeny. You must excuse it,’ he added, turning to Arkady, and scraping with his foot; ‘you understand, a woman’s weakness; and well, a mother’s heart ...’

His lips and eyebrows too were twitching, and his beard was quivering ... but he was obviously trying to control himself and appear almost indifferent.

‘Let’s come in, mother, really,’ said Bazarov, and he led the enfeebled old woman into the house. Putting her into a comfortable armchair, he once more hurriedly embraced his father and introduced Arkady to him.

‘Heartily glad to make your acquaintance,’ said Vassily Ivanovitch, ‘but you mustn’t expect great things; everything here in my house is done in a plain way, on a military footing. Arina Vlasyevna, calm yourself, pray; what weakness! The gentleman our guest will think ill of you.’

‘My dear sir,’ said the old lady through her tears, ‘your name and your father’s I haven’t the honour of knowing....’

‘Arkady Nikolaitch,’ put in Vassily Ivanitch solemnly, in a low voice.

‘You must excuse a silly old woman like me.’ The old woman blew her nose, and bending her head to right and to left, carefully wiped one eye after the other. ‘You must excuse me. You see, I thought I should die, that I should not live to see my da .. arling.’

‘Well, here we have lived to see him, madam,’ put in Vassily Ivanovitch. ‘Tanyushka,’ he turned to a bare-legged little girl of thirteen in a bright red cotton dress, who was timidly peeping in at the door, ‘bring your mistress a glass of water—on a tray, do you hear?—and you, gentlemen,’ he added, with a kind of old-fashioned playfulness, ‘let me ask you into the study of a retired old veteran.’

‘Just once more let me embrace you, Enyusha,’ moaned Arina Vlasyevna. Bazarov bent down to her. ‘Why, what a handsome fellow you have grown!’

‘Well, I don’t know about being handsome,’ remarked Vassily Ivanovitch, ‘but he’s a man, as the saying is, ommfay. And now I hope, Arina Vlasyevna, that having satisfied your maternal heart, you will turn your thoughts to satisfying the appetites of our dear guests, because, as you’re aware, even nightingales can’t be fed on fairy tales.’

The old lady got up from her chair. ‘This minute, Vassily Ivanovitch, the table shall be laid. I will run myself to the kitchen and order the samovar to be brought in; everything shall be ready, everything. Why, I have not seen him, not given him food or drink these three years; is that nothing?’

‘There, mind, good mother, bustle about; don’t put us to shame; while you, gentlemen, I beg you to follow me. Here’s Timofeitch come to pay his respects to you, Yevgeny. He, too, I daresay, is delighted, the old dog. Eh, aren’t you delighted, old dog? Be so good as to follow me.’

And Vassily Ivanovitch went bustling forward, scraping and flapping with his slippers trodden down at heel.

His whole house consisted of six tiny rooms. One of them—the one to which he led our friends—was called the study. A thick-legged table, littered over with papers black with the accumulation of ancient dust as though they had been smoked, occupied all the space between the two windows; on the walls hung Turkish firearms, whips, a sabre, two maps, some anatomical diagrams, a portrait of Hoffland, a monogram woven in hair in a blackened frame, and a diploma under glass; a leather sofa, torn and worn into hollows in parts, was placed between two huge cupboards of birch-wood; on the shelves books, boxes, stuffed birds, jars, and phials were huddled together in confusion; in one corner stood a broken galvanic battery.

‘I warned you, my dear Arkady Nikolaitch,’ began Vassily Ivanitch, ‘that we live, so to say, bivouacking....’

‘There, stop that, what are you apologising for?’ Bazarov interrupted. ‘Kirsanov knows very well we’re not Croesuses, and that you have no butler. Where are we going to put him, that’s the question?’

‘To be sure, Yevgeny; I have a capital room there in the little lodge; he will be very comfortable there.’

‘Have you had a lodge put up then?’

‘Why, where the bath-house is,’ put in Timofeitch.

‘That is next to the bathroom,’ Vassily Ivanitch added hurriedly. ‘It’s summer now ... I will run over there at once, and make arrangements; and you, Timofeitch, meanwhile bring in their things. You, Yevgeny, I shall of course offer my study. Suum cuique.’

‘There you have him! A comical old chap, and very good-natured,’ remarked Bazarov, directly Vassily Ivanitch had gone. ‘Just such a queer fish as yours, only in another way. He chatters too much.’

‘And your mother seems an awfully nice woman,’ observed Arkady.

‘Yes, there’s no humbug about her. You’ll see what a dinner she’ll give us.’

‘They didn’t expect you to-day, sir; they’ve not brought any beef?’ observed Timofeitch, who was just dragging in Bazarov’s box.

‘We shall get on very well without beef. It’s no use crying for the moon. Poverty, they say, is no vice.’

‘How many serfs has your father?’ Arkady asked suddenly.

‘The estate’s not his, but mother’s; there are fifteen serfs, if I remember.’

‘Twenty-two in all,’ Timofeitch added, with an air of displeasure.

The flapping of slippers was heard, and Vassily Ivanovitch reappeared. ‘In a few minutes your room will be ready to receive you,’ he cried triumphantly. Arkady ... Nikolaitch? I think that is right? And here is your attendant,’ he added, indicating a short-cropped boy, who had come in with him in a blue full-skirted coat with ragged elbows and a pair of boots which did not belong to him. ‘His name is Fedka. Again, I repeat, even though my son tells me not to, you mustn’t expect great things. He knows how to fill a pipe, though. You smoke, of course?’

‘I generally smoke cigars,’ answered Arkady.

‘And you do very sensibly. I myself give the preference to cigars, but in these solitudes it is exceedingly difficult to obtain them.’

‘There, that’s enough humble pie,’ Bazarov interrupted again. ‘You’d much better sit here on the sofa and let us have a look at you.’

Vassily Ivanovitch laughed and sat down. He was very like his son in face, only his brow was lower and narrower, and his mouth rather wider, and he was for ever restless, shrugging up his shoulder as though his coat cut him under the armpits, blinking, clearing his throat, and gesticulating with his fingers, while his son was distinguished by a kind of nonchalant immobility.

‘Humble-pie!’ repeated Vassily Ivanovitch. ‘You must not imagine, Yevgeny, I want to appeal, so to speak, to our guest’s sympathies by making out we live in such a wilderness. Quite the contrary, I maintain that for a thinking man nothing is a wilderness. At least, I try as far as possible not to get rusty, so to speak, not to fall behind the age.’

Vassily Ivanovitch drew out of his pocket a new yellow silk handkerchief, which he had had time to snatch up on the way to Arkady’s room, and flourishing it in the air, he proceeded: ‘I am not now alluding to the fact that, for example, at the cost of sacrifices not inconsiderable for me, I have put my peasants on the rent-system and given up my land to them on half profits. I regarded that as my duty; common sense itself enjoins such a proceeding, though other proprietors do not even dream of it; I am alluding to the sciences, to culture.’

‘Yes; I see you have here The Friend of Health for 1855,’ remarked Bazarov.

‘It’s sent me by an old comrade out of friendship,’ Vassily Ivanovitch made haste to answer; ‘but we have, for instance, some idea even of phrenology,’ he added, addressing himself principally, however, to Arkady, and pointing to a small plaster head on the cupboard, divided into numbered squares; ‘we are not unacquainted even with Schenlein and Rademacher.’

‘Why do people still believe in Rademacher in this province?’ asked Bazarov.

Vassily Ivanovitch cleared his throat. ‘In this province.... Of course, gentlemen, you know best; how could we keep pace with you? You are here to take our places. In my day, too, there was some sort of a Humouralist school, Hoffmann, and Brown too with his vitalism—they seemed very ridiculous to us, but, of course, they too had been great men at one time or other. Some one new has taken the place of Rademacher with you; you bow down to him, but in another twenty years it will be his turn to be laughed at.’

‘For your consolation I will tell you,’ observed Bazarov, ‘that nowadays we laugh at medicine altogether, and don’t bow down to any one.’

‘How’s that? Why, you’re going to be a doctor, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but the one fact doesn’t prevent the other.’

Vassily Ivanovitch poked his third finger into his pipe, where a little smouldering ash was still left. ‘Well, perhaps, perhaps—I am not going to dispute. What am I? A retired army-doctor, volla-too; now fate has made me take to farming. I served in your grandfather’s brigade,’ he addressed himself again to Arkady; ‘yes, yes, I have seen many sights in my day. And I was thrown into all kinds of society, brought into contact with all sorts of people! I myself, the man you see before you now, have felt the pulse of Prince Wittgenstein and of Zhukovsky! They were in the southern army, in the fourteenth, you understand’ (and here Vassily Ivanovitch pursed his mouth up significantly). ‘Well, well, but my business was on one side; stick to your lancet, and let everything else go hang! Your grandfather was a very honourable man, a real soldier.’

‘Confess, now, he was rather a blockhead,’ remarked Bazarov lazily.

‘Ah, Yevgeny, how can you use such an expression! Do consider.... Of course, General Kirsanov was not one of the ...’

‘Come, drop him,’ broke in Bazarov; ‘I was pleased as I was driving along here to see your birch copse; it has shot up capitally.’

Vassily Ivanovitch brightened up. ‘And you must see what a little garden I’ve got now! I planted every tree myself. I’ve fruit, and raspberries, and all kinds of medicinal herbs. However clever you young gentlemen may be, old Paracelsus spoke the holy truth: in herbis verbis et lapidibus.... I’ve retired from practice, you know, of course, but two or three times a week it will happen that I’m brought back to my old work. They come for advice—I can’t drive them away. Sometimes the poor have recourse to me for help. And indeed there are no doctors here at all. There’s one of the neighbours here, a retired major, only fancy, he doctors the people too. I asked the question, “Has he studied medicine?” And they told me, “No, he’s not studied; he does it more from philanthropy.”... Ha! ha! ha! from philanthropy! What do you think of that? Ha! ha! ha!’

‘Fedka, fill me a pipe!’ said Bazarov rudely.

‘And there’s another doctor here who just got to a patient,’ Vassily Ivanovitch persisted in a kind of desperation, ‘when the patient had gone ad patres; the servant didn’t let the doctor speak; you’re no longer wanted, he told him. He hadn’t expected this, got confused, and asked, “Why, did your master hiccup before his death?” “Yes.” “Did he hiccup much?” “Yes.” “Ah, well, that’s all right,” and off he set back again. Ha! ha! ha!’

The old man was alone in his laughter; Arkady forced a smile on his face. Bazarov simply stretched. The conversation went on in this way for about an hour; Arkady had time to go to his room, which turned out to be the anteroom attached to the bathroom, but was very snug and clean. At last Tanyusha came in and announced that dinner was ready.

Vassily Ivanovitch was the first to get up. ‘Come, gentlemen. You must be magnanimous and pardon me if I’ve bored you. I daresay my good wife will give you more satisfaction.’

The dinner, though prepared in haste, turned out to be very good, even abundant; only the wine was not quite up to the mark; it was almost black sherry, bought by Timofeitch in the town at a well-known merchant’s, and had a faint coppery, resinous taste, and the flies were a great nuisance. On ordinary days a serf-boy used to keep driving them away with a large green branch; but on this occasion Vassily Ivanovitch had sent him away through dread of the criticism of the younger generation. Arina Vlasyevna had had time to dress: she had put on a high cap with silk ribbons and a pale blue flowered shawl. She broke down again directly she caught sight of her Enyusha, but her husband had no need to admonish her; she made haste to wipe away her tears herself, for fear of spotting her shawl. Only the young men ate anything; the master and mistress of the house had dined long ago. Fedka waited at table, obviously encumbered by having boots on for the first time; he was assisted by a woman of a masculine cast of face and one eye, by name Anfisushka, who performed the duties of housekeeper, poultry-woman, and laundress. Vassily Ivanovitch walked up and down during the whole of dinner, and with a perfectly happy, positively beatific countenance, talked about the serious anxiety he felt at Napoleon’s policy, and the intricacy of the Italian question. Arina Vlasyevna took no notice of Arkady. She did not press him to eat; leaning her round face, to which the full cherry-coloured lips and the little moles on the cheeks and over the eyebrows gave a very simple good-natured expression, on her little closed fist, she did not take her eyes off her son, and kept constantly sighing; she was dying to know for how long he had come, but she was afraid to ask him.

‘What if he says for two days,’ she thought, and her heart sank. After the roast Vassily Ivanovitch disappeared for an instant, and returned with an opened half-bottle of champagne. ‘Here,’ he cried, ‘though we do live in the wilds, we have something to make merry with on festive occasions!’ He filled three champagne glasses and a little wineglass, proposed the health of ‘our inestimable guests,’ and at once tossed off his glass in military fashion; while he made Arina Vlasyevna drink her wineglass to the last drop. When the time came in due course for preserves, Arkady, who could not bear anything sweet, thought it his duty, however, to taste four different kinds which had been freshly made, all the more as Bazarov flatly refused them and began at once smoking a cigarette. Then tea came on the scene with cream, butter, and cracknels; then Vassily Ivanovitch took them all into the garden to admire the beauty of the evening. As they passed a garden seat he whispered to Arkady—

‘At this spot I love to meditate, as I watch the sunset; it suits a recluse like me. And there, a little farther off, I have planted some of the trees beloved of Horace.’

‘What trees?’ asked Bazarov, overhearing.

‘Oh ... acacias.’

Bazarov began to yawn.

‘I imagine it’s time our travellers were in the arms of Morpheus,’ observed Vassily Ivanovitch.

‘That is, it’s time for bed,’ Bazarov put in. ‘That’s a correct idea. It is time, certainly.’

As he said good-night to his mother, he kissed her on the forehead, while she embraced him, and stealthily behind his back she gave him her blessing three times. Vassily Ivanovitch conducted Arkady to his room, and wished him ‘as refreshing repose as I enjoyed at your happy years.’ And Arkady did as a fact sleep excellently in his bath-house; there was a smell of mint in it, and two crickets behind the stove rivalled each other in their drowsy chirping. Vassily Ivanovitch went from Arkady’s room to his study, and perching on the sofa at his son’s feet, he was looking forward to having a chat with him; but Bazarov at once sent him away, saying he was sleepy, and did not fall asleep till morning. With wide open eyes he stared vindictively into the darkness; the memories of childhood had no power over him; and besides, he had not yet had time to get rid of the impression of his recent bitter emotions. Arina Vlasyevna first prayed to her heart’s content, then she had a long, long conversation with Anfisushka, who stood stock-still before her mistress, and fixing her solitary eye upon her, communicated in a mysterious whisper all her observations and conjectures in regard to Yevgeny Vassilyevitch. The old lady’s head was giddy with happiness and wine and tobacco smoke; her husband tried to talk to her, but with a wave of his hand gave it up in despair.

Arina Vlasyevna was a genuine Russian gentlewoman of the olden times; she ought to have lived two centuries before, in the old Moscow days. She was very devout and emotional; she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams, and omens of every possible kind; she believed in the prophecies of crazy people, in house-spirits, in wood-spirits, in unlucky meetings, in the evil eye, in popular remedies, she ate specially prepared salt on Holy Thursday, and believed that the end of the world was at hand; she believed that if on Easter Sunday the lights did not go out at vespers, then there would be a good crop of buckwheat, and that a mushroom will not grow after it has been looked on by the eye of man; she believed that the devil likes to be where there is water, and that every Jew has a blood-stained patch on his breast; she was afraid of mice, of snakes, of frogs, of sparrows, of leeches, of thunder, of cold water, of draughts, of horses, of goats, of red-haired people, and black cats, and she regarded crickets and dogs as unclean beasts; she never ate veal, doves, crayfishes, cheese, asparagus, artichokes, hares, nor water-melons, because a cut water-melon suggested the head of John the Baptist, and of oysters she could not speak without a shudder; she was fond of eating—and fasted rigidly; she slept ten hours out of the twenty-four—and never went to bed at all if Vassily Ivanovitch had so much as a headache; she had never read a single book except Alexis or the Cottage in the Forest; she wrote one, or at the most two letters in a year, but was great in housewifery, preserving, and jam-making, though with her own hands she never touched a thing, and was generally disinclined to move from her place. Arina Vlasyevna was very kindhearted, and in her way not at all stupid. She knew that the world is divided into masters whose duty it is to command, and simple folk whose duty it is to serve them—and so she felt no repugnance to servility and prostrations to the ground; but she treated those in subjection to her kindly and gently, never let a single beggar go away empty-handed, and never spoke ill of any one, though she was fond of gossip. In her youth she had been pretty, had played the clavichord, and spoken French a little; but in the course of many years’ wanderings with her husband, whom she had married against her will, she had grown stout, and forgotten music and French. Her son she loved and feared unutterably; she had given up the management of the property to Vassily Ivanovitch—and now did not interfere in anything; she used to groan, wave her handkerchief, and raise her eyebrows higher and higher with horror directly her old husband began to discuss the impending government reforms and his own plans. She was apprehensive, and constantly expecting some great misfortune, and began to weep directly she remembered anything sorrowful.... Such women are not common nowadays. God knows whether we ought to rejoice!

Chapter XXI

On getting up Arkady opened the window, and the first object that met his view was Vassily Ivanovitch. In an Oriental dressing-gown girt round the waist with a pocket-handkerchief he was industriously digging in his garden. He perceived his young visitor, and leaning on his spade, he called, ‘The best of health to you! How have you slept?’

‘Capitally,’ answered Arkady.

‘Here am I, as you see, like some Cincinnatus, marking out a bed for late turnips. The time has come now—and thank God for it!—when every one ought to obtain his sustenance with his own hands; it’s useless to reckon on others; one must labour oneself. And it turns out that Jean Jacques Rousseau is right. Half an hour ago, my dear young gentleman, you might have seen me in a totally different position. One peasant woman, who complained of looseness—that’s how they express it, but in our language, dysentery—I ... how can I express it best? I administered opium, and for another I extracted a tooth. I proposed an anæsthetic to her ... but she would not consent. All that I do gratis—anamatyer (en amateur). I’m used to it, though; you see, I’m a plebeian, homo novus—not one of the old stock, not like my spouse.... Wouldn’t you like to come this way into the shade, to breathe the morning freshness a little before tea?’

Arkady went out to him.

‘Welcome once again,’ said Vassily Ivanovitch, raising his hand in a military salute to the greasy skull-cap which covered his head. ‘You, I know, are accustomed to luxury, to amusements, but even the great ones of this world do not disdain to spend a brief space under a cottage roof.’

‘Good heavens,’ protested Arkady, ‘as though I were one of the great ones of this world! And I’m not accustomed to luxury.’

‘Pardon me, pardon me,’ rejoined Vassily Ivanovitch with a polite simper. ‘Though I am laid on the shelf now, I have knocked about the world too—I can tell a bird by its flight. I am something of a psychologist too in my own way, and a physiognomist. If I had not, I will venture to say, been endowed with that gift, I should have come to grief long ago; I should have stood no chance, a poor man like me. I tell you without flattery, I am sincerely delighted at the friendship I observe between you and my son. I have just seen him; he got up as he usually does—no doubt you are aware of it—very early, and went a ramble about the neighbourhood. Permit me to inquire—have you known my son long?’

‘Since last winter.’

‘Indeed. And permit me to question you further—but hadn’t we better sit down? Permit me, as a father, to ask without reserve, What is your opinion of my Yevgeny?’

‘Your son is one of the most remarkable men I have ever met,’ Arkady answered emphatically.

Vassily Ivanovitch’s eyes suddenly grew round, and his cheeks were suffused with a faint flush. The spade fell out of his hand.

‘And so you expect,’ he began ...

‘I’m convinced,’ Arkady put in, ‘that your son has a great future before him; that he will do honour to your name. I’ve been certain of that ever since I first met him.’

‘How ... how was that?’ Vassily Ivanovitch articulated with an effort. His wide mouth was relaxed in a triumphant smile, which would not leave it.

‘Would you like me to tell you how we met?’

‘Yes ... and altogether....’

Arkady began to tell his tale, and to talk of Bazarov with even greater warmth, even greater enthusiasm than he had done on the evening when he danced a mazurka with Madame Odintsov.

Vassily Ivanovitch listened and listened, blinked, and rolled his handkerchief up into a ball in both his hands, cleared his throat, ruffled up his hair, and at last could stand it no longer; he bent down to Arkady and kissed him on his shoulder. ‘You have made me perfectly happy,’ he said, never ceasing to smile. ‘I ought to tell you, I ... idolise my son; my old wife I won’t speak of—we all know what mothers are!—but I dare not show my feelings before him, because he doesn’t like it. He is averse to every kind of demonstration of feeling; many people even find fault with him for such firmness of character, and regard it as a proof of pride or lack of feeling, but men like him ought not to be judged by the common standard, ought they? And here, for example, many another fellow in his place would have been a constant drag on his parents; but he, would you believe it? has never from the day he was born taken a farthing more than he could help, that’s God’s truth!’

‘He is a disinterested, honest man,’ observed Arkady.

‘Exactly so; he is disinterested. And I don’t only idolise him, Arkady Nikolaitch, I am proud of him, and the height of my ambition is that some day there will be the following lines in his biography: “The son of a simple army-doctor, who was, however, capable of divining his greatness betimes, and spared nothing for his education ...”’ The old man’s voice broke.

Arkady pressed his hand.

‘What do you think,’ inquired Vassily Ivanovitch, after a short silence, ‘will it be in the career of medicine that he will attain the celebrity you anticipate for him?’

‘Of course, not in medicine, though even in that department he will be one of the leading scientific men.’

‘In what then, Arkady Nikolaitch?’

‘It would he hard to say now, but he will be famous.’

‘He will be famous!’ repeated the old man, and he sank into a reverie.

‘Arina Vlasyevna sent me to call you in to tea,’ announced Anfisushka, coming by with an immense dish of ripe raspberries.

Vassily Ivanovitch started. ‘And will there be cooled cream for the raspberries?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cold now, mind! Don’t stand on ceremony, Arkady Nikolaitch; take some more. How is it Yevgeny doesn’t come?’

‘I’m here,’ was heard Bazarov’s voice from Arkady’s room.

Vassily Ivanovitch turned round quickly. ‘Aha! you wanted to pay a visit to your friend; but you were too late, amice, and we have already had a long conversation with him. Now we must go in to tea, mother summons us. By the way, I want to have a little talk with you.’

‘What about?’

‘There’s a peasant here; he’s suffering from icterus....

‘You mean jaundice?’

‘Yes, a chronic and very obstinate case of icterus. I have prescribed him centaury and St. John’s wort, ordered him to eat carrots, given him soda; but all that’s merely palliative measures; we want some more decided treatment. Though you do laugh at medicine, I am certain you can give me practical advice. But we will talk of that later. Now come in to tea.’

Vassily Ivanovitch jumped up briskly from the garden seat, and hummed from Robert le Diable—

‘The rule, the rule we set ourselves,To live, to live for pleasure!’

‘Singular vitality!’ observed Bazarov, going away from the window.

It was midday. The sun was burning hot behind a thin veil of unbroken whitish clouds. Everything was hushed; there was no sound but the cocks crowing irritably at one another in the village, producing in every one who heard them a strange sense of drowsiness and ennui; and somewhere, high up in a tree-top, the incessant plaintive cheep of a young hawk. Arkady and Bazarov lay in the shade of a small haystack, putting under themselves two armfuls of dry and rustling, but still greenish and fragrant grass.

‘That aspen-tree,’ began Bazarov, ‘reminds me of my childhood; it grows at the edge of the clay-pits where the bricks were dug, and in those days I believed firmly that that clay-pit and aspen-tree possessed a peculiar talismanic power; I never felt dull near them. I did not understand then that I was not dull, because I was a child. Well, now I’m grown up, the talisman’s lost its power.’

‘How long did you live here altogether?’ asked Arkady.

‘Two years on end; then we travelled about. We led a roving life, wandering from town to town for the most part.’

‘And has this house been standing long?’

‘Yes. My grandfather built it—my mother’s father.’

‘Who was he—your grandfather?’

‘Devil knows. Some second-major. He served with Suvorov, and was always telling stories about the crossing of the Alps—inventions probably.’

‘You have a portrait of Suvorov hanging in the drawing-room. I like these dear little houses like yours; they’re so warm and old-fashioned; and there’s always a special sort of scent about them.’

‘A smell of lamp-oil and clover,’ Bazarov remarked, yawning. ‘And the flies in those dear little houses.... Faugh!’

‘Tell me,’ began Arkady, after a brief pause, ‘were they strict with you when you were a child?’

‘You can see what my parents are like. They’re not a severe sort.’

‘Are you fond of them, Yevgeny?’

‘I am, Arkady.’

‘How fond they are of you!’

Bazarov was silent for a little. ‘Do you know what I’m thinking about?’ he brought out at last, clasping his hands behind his head.

‘No. What is it?’

‘I’m thinking life is a happy thing for my parents. My father at sixty is fussing around, talking about “palliative” measures, doctoring people, playing the bountiful master with the peasants—having a festive time, in fact; and my mother’s happy too; her day’s so chockful of duties of all sorts, and sighs and groans that she’s no time even to think of herself; while I ...’

‘While you?’

‘I think; here I lie under a haystack.... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space, in which I am not, and which has nothing to do with me; and the period of time in which it is my lot to live is so petty beside the eternity in which I have not been, and shall not be.... And in this atom, this mathematical point, the blood is circulating, the brain is working and wanting something.... Isn’t it loathsome? Isn’t it petty?’

‘Allow me to remark that what you’re saying applies to men in general.’

‘You are right,’ Bazarov cut in. ‘I was going to say that they now—my parents, I mean—are absorbed and don’t trouble themselves about their own nothingness; it doesn’t sicken them ... while I ... I feel nothing but weariness and anger.’

‘Anger? why anger?’

‘Why? How can you ask why? Have you forgotten?’

‘I remember everything, but still I don’t admit that you have any right to be angry. You’re unlucky, I’ll allow, but ...’

‘Pooh! then you, Arkady Nikolaevitch, I can see, regard love like all modern young men; cluck, cluck, cluck you call to the hen, but if the hen comes near you, you run away. I’m not like that. But that’s enough of that. What can’t be helped, it’s shameful to talk about.’ He turned over on his side. ‘Aha! there goes a valiant ant dragging off a half-dead fly. Take her, brother, take her! Don’t pay attention to her resistance; it’s your privilege as an animal to be free from the sentiment of pity—make the most of it—not like us conscientious self-destructive animals!’

‘You shouldn’t say that, Yevgeny! When have you destroyed yourself?’

Bazarov raised his head. ‘That’s the only thing I pride myself on. I haven’t crushed myself, so a woman can’t crush me. Amen! It’s all over! You shall not hear another word from me about it.’

Both the friends lay for some time in silence.

‘Yes,’ began Bazarov, ‘man’s a strange animal. When one gets a side view from a distance of the dead-alive life our “fathers” lead here, one thinks, What could be better? You eat and drink, and know you are acting in the most reasonable, most judicious manner. But if not, you’re devoured by ennui. One wants to have to do with people if only to abuse them.’

‘One ought so to order one’s life that every moment in it should be of significance,’ Arkady affirmed reflectively.

‘I dare say! What’s of significance is sweet, however mistaken; one could make up one’s mind to what’s insignificant even. But pettiness, pettiness, that’s what’s insufferable.’

‘Pettiness doesn’t exist for a man so long as he refuses to recognise it.’

‘H’m ... what you’ve just said is a common-place reversed.’

‘What? What do you mean by that term?’

‘I’ll tell you; saying, for instance, that education is beneficial, that’s a common-place; but to say that education is injurious, that’s a common-place turned upside down. There’s more style about it, so to say, but in reality it’s one and the same.’

‘And the truth is—where, which side?’

‘Where? Like an echo I answer, Where?’

‘You’re in a melancholy mood to-day, Yevgeny.’

‘Really? The sun must have softened my brain, I suppose, and I can’t stand so many raspberries either.’

‘In that case, a nap’s not a bad thing,’ observed Arkady.

‘Certainly; only don’t look at me; every man’s face is stupid when he’s asleep.’

‘But isn’t it all the same to you what people think of you?’

‘I don’t know what to say to you. A real man ought not to care; a real man is one whom it’s no use thinking about, whom one must either obey or hate.’

‘It’s funny! I don’t hate anybody,’ observed Arkady, after a moment’s thought.

‘And I hate so many. You are a soft-hearted, mawkish creature; how could you hate any one?... You’re timid; you don’t rely on yourself much.’

‘And you,’ interrupted Arkady, ‘do you expect much of yourself? Have you a high opinion of yourself?’

Bazarov paused. ‘When I meet a man who can hold his own beside me,’ he said, dwelling on every syllable, ‘then I’ll change my opinion of myself. Yes, hatred! You said, for instance, to-day as we passed our bailiff Philip’s cottage—it’s the one that’s so nice and clean—well, you said, Russia will come to perfection when the poorest peasant has a house like that, and every one of us ought to work to bring it about.... And I felt such a hatred for this poorest peasant, this Philip or Sidor, for whom I’m to be ready to jump out of my skin, and who won’t even thank me for it ... and why should he thank me? Why, suppose he does live in a clean house, while the nettles are growing out of me,—well what do I gain by it?’

‘Hush, Yevgeny ... if one listened to you to-day one would be driven to agreeing with those who reproach us for want of principles.’

‘You talk like your uncle. There are no general principles—you’ve not made out that even yet! There are feelings. Everything depends on them.’

‘How so?’

‘Why, I, for instance, take up a negative attitude, by virtue of my sensations; I like to deny—my brain’s made on that plan, and that’s all about it! Why do I like chemistry? Why do you like apples?—by virtue of our sensations. It’s all the same thing. Deeper than that men will never penetrate. Not every one will tell you that, and, in fact, I shan’t tell you so another time.’

‘What? and is honesty a matter of the senses?’

‘I should rather think so.’

‘Yevgeny!’ Arkady was beginning in a dejected voice ...

‘Well? What? Isn’t it to your taste?’ broke in Bazarov. ‘No, brother. If you’ve made up your mind to mow down everything, don’t spare your own legs. But we’ve talked enough metaphysics. “Nature breathes the silence of sleep,” said Pushkin.’

‘He never said anything of the sort,’ protested Arkady.

‘Well, if he didn’t, as a poet he might have—and ought to have said it. By the way, he must have been a military man.’

‘Pushkin never was a military man!’

‘Why, on every page of him there’s, “To arms! to arms! for Russia’s honour!”’

‘Why, what stories you invent! I declare, it’s positive calumny.’

‘Calumny? That’s a mighty matter! What a word he’s found to frighten me with! Whatever charge you make against a man, you may be certain he deserves twenty times worse than that in reality.’

‘We had better go to sleep,’ said Arkady, in a tone of vexation.

‘With the greatest pleasure,’ answered Bazarov. But neither of them slept. A feeling almost of hostility had come over both the young men. Five minutes later, they opened their eyes and glanced at one another in silence.

‘Look,’ said Arkady suddenly, ‘a dry maple leaf has come off and is falling to the earth; its movement is exactly like a butterfly’s flight. Isn’t it strange? Gloom and decay—like brightness and life.’

‘Oh, my friend, Arkady Nikolaitch!’ cried Bazarov, ‘one thing I entreat of you; no fine talk.’

‘I talk as best I can.... And, I declare, its perfect despotism. An idea came into my head; why shouldn’t I utter it?’

‘Yes; and why shouldn’t I utter my ideas? I think that fine talk’s positively indecent.’

‘And what is decent? Abuse?’

‘Ha! ha! you really do intend, I see, to walk in your uncle’s footsteps. How pleased that worthy imbecile would have been if he had heard you!’

‘What did you call Pavel Petrovitch?’

‘I called him, very justly, an imbecile.’

‘But this is unbearable!’ cried Arkady.

‘Aha! family feeling spoke there,’ Bazarov commented coolly. ‘I’ve noticed how obstinately it sticks to people. A man’s ready to give up everything and break with every prejudice; but to admit that his brother, for instance, who steals handkerchiefs, is a thief—that’s too much for him. And when one comes to think of it: my brother, mine—and no genius ... that’s an idea no one can swallow.’

‘It was a simple sense of justice spoke in me and not in the least family feeling,’ retorted Arkady passionately. ‘But since that’s a sense you don’t understand, since you haven’t that sensation, you can’t judge of it.’

‘In other words, Arkady Kirsanov is too exalted for my comprehension. I bow down before him and say no more.’

‘Don’t, please, Yevgeny; we shall really quarrel at last.’

‘Ah, Arkady! do me a kindness. I entreat you, let us quarrel for once in earnest....’

‘But then perhaps we should end by ...’

‘Fighting?’ put in Bazarov. ‘Well? Here, on the hay, in these idyllic surroundings, far from the world and the eyes of men, it wouldn’t matter. But you’d be no match for me. I’ll have you by the throat in a minute.’

Bazarov spread out his long, cruel fingers.... Arkady turned round and prepared, as though in jest, to resist.... But his friend’s face struck him as so vindictive—there was such menace in grim earnest in the smile that distorted his lips, and in his glittering eyes, that he felt instinctively afraid.

‘Ah! so this is where you have got to!’ the voice of Vassily Ivanovitch was heard saying at that instant, and the old army-doctor appeared before the young men, garbed in a home-made linen pea-jacket, with a straw hat, also home-made, on his head. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.... Well, you’ve picked out a capital place, and you’re excellently employed. Lying on the “earth, gazing up to heaven.” Do you know, there’s a special significance in that?’

‘I never gaze up to heaven except when I want to sneeze,’ growled Bazarov, and turning to Arkady he added in an undertone. ‘Pity he interrupted us.’

‘Come, hush!’ whispered Arkady, and he secretly squeezed his friend’s hand. But no friendship can long stand such shocks.

‘I look at you, my youthful friends,’ Vassily Ivanovitch was saying meantime, shaking his head, and leaning his folded arms on a rather cunningly bent stick of his own carving, with a Turk’s figure for a top,—‘I look, and I cannot refrain from admiration. You have so much strength, such youth and bloom, such abilities, such talents! Positively, a Castor and Pollux!’

‘Get along with you—going off into mythology!’ commented Bazarov. ‘You can see at once that he was a great Latinist in his day! Why, I seem to remember, you gained the silver medal for Latin prose—didn’t you?’

‘The Dioscuri, the Dioscuri!’ repeated Vassily Ivanovitch.

‘Come, shut up, father; don’t show off.’

‘Once in a way it’s surely permissible,’ murmured the old man. ‘However, I have not been seeking for you, gentlemen, to pay you compliments; but with the object, in the first place, of announcing to you that we shall soon be dining; and secondly, I wanted to prepare you, Yevgeny.... You are a sensible man, you know the world, and you know what women are, and consequently you will excuse.... Your mother wished to have a Te Deum sung on the occasion of your arrival. You must not imagine that I am inviting you to attend this thanksgiving—it is over indeed now; but Father Alexey ...’

‘The village parson?’

‘Well, yes, the priest; he ... is to dine ... with us.... I did not anticipate this, and did not even approve of it ... but it somehow came about ... he did not understand me.... And, well ... Arina Vlasyevna ... Besides, he’s a worthy, reasonable man.’

‘He won’t eat my share at dinner, I suppose?’ queried Bazarov.

Vassily Ivanovitch laughed. ‘How you talk!’

‘Well, that’s all I ask. I’m ready to sit down to table with any man.’

Vassily Ivanovitch set his hat straight. ‘I was certain before I spoke,’ he said, ‘that you were above any kind of prejudice. Here am I, an old man at sixty-two, and I have none.’ (Vassily Ivanovitch did not dare to confess that he had himself desired the thanksgiving service. He was no less religious than his wife.) ‘And Father Alexey very much wanted to make your acquaintance. You will like him, you’ll see. He’s no objection even to cards, and he sometimes—but this is between ourselves ... positively smokes a pipe.’

‘All right. We’ll have a round of whist after dinner, and I’ll clean him out.’

‘He! he! he! We shall see! That remains to be seen.’

‘I know you’re an old hand,’ said Bazarov, with a peculiar emphasis.

Vassily Ivanovitch’s bronzed cheeks were suffused with an uneasy flush.

‘For shame, Yevgeny.... Let bygones be bygones. Well, I’m ready to acknowledge before this gentleman I had that passion in my youth; and I have paid for it too! How hot it is, though! Let me sit down with you. I shan’t be in your way, I hope?’

‘Oh, not at all,’ answered Arkady.

Vassily Ivanovitch lowered himself, sighing, into the hay. ‘Your present quarters remind me, my dear sirs,’ he began, ‘of my military bivouacking existence, the ambulance halts, somewhere like this under a haystack, and even for that we were thankful.’ He sighed. ‘I had many, many experiences in my life. For example, if you will allow me, I will tell you a curious episode of the plague in Bessarabia.’

‘For which you got the Vladimir cross?’ put in Bazarov. ‘We know, we know.... By the way, why is it you’re not wearing it?’

‘Why, I told you that I have no prejudices,’ muttered Vassily Ivanovitch (he had only the evening before had the red ribbon unpicked off his coat), and he proceeded to relate the episode of the plague. ‘Why, he’s fallen asleep,’ he whispered all at once to Arkady, pointing to Yevgeny, and winking good-naturedly. ‘Yevgeny! get up,’ he went on aloud. ‘Let’s go in to dinner.’

Father Alexey, a good-looking stout man with thick, carefully-combed hair, with an embroidered girdle round his lilac silk cassock, appeared to be a man of much tact and adaptability. He made haste to be the first to offer his hand to Arkady and Bazarov, as though understanding beforehand that they did not want his blessing, and he behaved himself in general without constraint. He neither derogated from his own dignity, nor gave offence to others; he vouchsafed a passing smile at the seminary Latin, and stood up for his bishop; drank two small glasses of wine, but refused a third; accepted a cigar from Arkady, but did not proceed to smoke it, saying he would take it home with him. The only thing not quite agreeable about him was a way he had of constantly raising his hand with care and deliberation to catch the flies on his face, sometimes succeeding in smashing them. He took his seat at the green table, expressing his satisfaction at so doing in measured terms, and ended by winning from Bazarov two roubles and a half in paper money; they had no idea of even reckoning in silver in the house of Arina Vlasyevna.... She was sitting, as before, near her son (she did not play cards), her cheek, as before, propped on her little fist; she only got up to order some new dainty to be served. She was afraid to caress Bazarov, and he gave her no encouragement, he did not invite her caresses; and besides, Vassily Ivanovitch had advised her not to ‘worry’ him too much. ‘Young men are not fond of that sort of thing,’ he declared to her. (It’s needless to say what the dinner was like that day; Timofeitch in person had galloped off at early dawn for beef; the bailiff had gone off in another direction for turbot, gremille, and crayfish; for mushrooms alone forty-two farthings had been paid the peasant women in copper); but Arina Vlasyevna’s eyes, bent steadfastly on Bazarov, did not express only devotion and tenderness; in them was to be seen sorrow also, mingled with awe and curiosity; there was to be seen too a sort of humble reproachfulness.

Bazarov, however, was not in a humour to analyse the exact expression of his mother’s eyes; he seldom turned to her, and then only with some short question. Once he asked her for her hand ‘for luck’; she gently laid her soft, little hand on his rough, broad palm.

‘Well,’ she asked, after waiting a little, ‘has it been any use?’

‘Worse luck than ever,’ he answered, with a careless laugh.

‘He plays too rashly,’ pronounced Father Alexey, as it were compassionately, and he stroked his beard.

‘Napoleon’s rule, good Father, Napoleon’s rule,’ put in Vassily Ivanovitch, leading an ace.

‘It brought him to St. Helena, though,’ observed Father Alexey, as he trumped the ace.

‘Wouldn’t you like some currant tea, Enyusha?’ inquired Arina Vlasyevna.

Bazarov merely shrugged his shoulders.

‘No!’ he said to Arkady the next day. I’m off from here to-morrow. I’m bored; I want to work, but I can’t work here. I will come to your place again; I’ve left all my apparatus there too. In your house one can at any rate shut oneself up. While here my father repeats to me, “My study is at your disposal—nobody shall interfere with you,” and all the time he himself is never a yard away. And I’m ashamed somehow to shut myself away from him. It’s the same thing too with mother. I hear her sighing the other side of the wall, and if one goes in to her, one’s nothing to say to her.’

‘She will be very much grieved,’ observed Arkady, ‘and so will he.’

‘I shall come back again to them.’

‘When?’

‘Why, when on my way to Petersburg.’

‘I feel sorry for your mother particularly.’

‘Why’s that? Has she won your heart with strawberries, or what?’

Arkady dropped his eyes. ‘You don’t understand your mother, Yevgeny. She’s not only a very good woman, she’s very clever really. This morning she talked to me for half-an-hour, and so sensibly, interestingly.’

‘I suppose she was expatiating upon me all the while?’

‘We didn’t talk only about you.’

‘Perhaps; lookers-on see most. If a woman can keep up half-an-hour’s conversation, it’s always a hopeful sign. But I’m going, all the same.’

‘It won’t be very easy for you to break it to them. They are always making plans for what we are to do in a fortnight’s time.’

‘No; it won’t be easy. Some demon drove me to tease my father to-day; he had one of his rent-paying peasants flogged the other day, and quite right too—yes, yes, you needn’t look at me in such horror—he did quite right, because he’s an awful thief and drunkard; only my father had no idea that I, as they say, was cognisant of the facts. He was greatly perturbed, and now I shall have to upset him more than ever.... Never mind! Never say die! He’ll get over it!’

Bazarov said, ‘Never mind’; but the whole day passed before he could make up his mind to inform Vassily Ivanovitch of his intentions. At last, when he was just saying good-night to him in the study, he observed, with a feigned yawn—

‘Oh ... I was almost forgetting to tell you.... Send to Fedot’s for our horses to-morrow.’

Vassily Ivanovitch was dumbfounded. ‘Is Mr. Kirsanov leaving us, then?’

‘Yes; and I’m going with him.’

Vassily Ivanovitch positively reeled. ‘You are going?’

‘Yes ... I must. Make the arrangements about the horses, please.’

‘Very good....’ faltered the old man; ‘to Fedot’s ... very good ... only ... only.... How is it?’

‘I must go to stay with him for a little time. I will come back again later.’

‘Ah! For a little time ... very good.’ Vassily Ivanovitch drew out his handkerchief, and, blowing his nose, doubled up almost to the ground. ‘Well ... everything shall be done. I had thought you were to be with us ... a little longer. Three days.... After three years, it’s rather little; rather little, Yevgeny!’

‘But, I tell you, I’m coming back directly. It’s necessary for me to go.’

‘Necessary.... Well! Duty before everything. So the horses shall be in readiness. Very good. Arina and I, of course, did not anticipate this. She has just begged some flowers from a neighbour; she meant to decorate the room for you.’ (Vassily Ivanovitch did not even mention that every morning almost at dawn he took counsel with Timofeitch, standing with his bare feet in his slippers, and pulling out with trembling fingers one dog’s-eared rouble note after another, charged him with various purchases, with special reference to good things to eat, and to red wine, which, as far as he could observe, the young men liked extremely.) ‘Liberty ... is the great thing; that’s my rule.... I don’t want to hamper you ... not ...’

He suddenly ceased, and made for the door.

‘We shall soon see each other again, father, really.’

But Vassily Ivanovitch, without turning round, merely waved his hand and was gone. When he got back to his bedroom he found his wife in bed, and began to say his prayers in a whisper, so as not to wake her up. She woke, however. ‘Is that you, Vassily Ivanovitch?’ she asked.

‘Yes, mother.’

‘Have you come from Enyusha? Do you know, I’m afraid of his not being comfortable on that sofa. I told Anfisushka to put him on your travelling mattress and the new pillows; I should have given him our feather-bed, but I seem to remember he doesn’t like too soft a bed....’

‘Never mind, mother; don’t worry yourself. He’s all right. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,’ he went on with his prayer in a low voice. Vassily Ivanovitch was sorry for his old wife; he did not mean to tell her over night what a sorrow there was in store for her.

Bazarov and Arkady set off the next day. From early morning all was dejection in the house; Anfisushka let the tray slip out of her hands; even Fedka was bewildered, and was reduced to taking off his boots. Vassily Ivanitch was more fussy than ever; he was obviously trying to put a good face on it, talked loudly, and stamped with his feet, but his face looked haggard, and his eyes were continually avoiding his son. Arina Vlasyevna was crying quietly; she was utterly crushed, and could not have controlled herself at all if her husband had not spent two whole hours early in the morning exhorting her. When Bazarov, after repeated promises to come back certainly not later than in a month’s time, tore himself at last from the embraces detaining him, and took his seat in the coach; when the horses had started, the bell was ringing, and the wheels were turning round, and when it was no longer any good to look after them, and the dust had settled, and Timofeitch, all bent and tottering as he walked, had crept back to his little room; when the old people were left alone in their little house, which seemed suddenly to have grown shrunken and decrepit too, Vassily Ivanovitch, after a few more moments of hearty waving of his handkerchief on the steps, sank into a chair, and his head dropped on to his breast. ‘He has cast us off; he has forsaken us,’ he faltered; ‘forsaken us; he was dull with us. Alone, alone!’ he repeated several times. Then Arina Vlasyevna went up to him, and, leaning her grey head against his grey head, said, ‘There’s no help for it, Vasya! A son is a separate piece cut off. He’s like the falcon that flies home and flies away at his pleasure; while you and I are like funguses in the hollow of a tree, we sit side by side, and don’t move from our place. Only I am left you unchanged for ever, as you for me.’

Vassily Ivanovitch took his hands from his face and clasped his wife, his friend, as warmly as he had never clasped in youth; she comforted him in his grief.

Chapter XXII

In silence, only rarely exchanging a few insignificant words, our friends travelled as far as Fedot’s. Bazarov was not altogether pleased with himself. Arkady was displeased with him. He was feeling, too, that causeless melancholy which is only known to very young people. The coachman changed the horses, and getting up on to the box, inquired, ‘To the right or to the left?’

Arkady started. The road to the right led to the town, and from there home; the road to the left led to Madame Odintsov’s.

He looked at Bazarov.

‘Yevgeny,’ he queried; ‘to the left?’

Bazarov turned away. ‘What folly is this?’ he muttered.

‘I know it’s folly,’ answered Arkady.... ‘But what does that matter? It’s not the first time.’

Bazarov pulled his cap down over his brows. ‘As you choose,’ he said at last. ‘Turn to the left,’ shouted Arkady.

The coach rolled away in the direction of Nikolskoe. But having resolved on the folly, the friends were even more obstinately silent than before, and seemed positively ill-humoured.

Directly the steward met them on the steps of Madame Odintsov’s house, the friends could perceive that they had acted injudiciously in giving way so suddenly to a passing impulse. They were obviously not expected. They sat rather a long while, looking rather foolish, in the drawing-room. Madame Odintsov came in to them at last. She greeted them with her customary politeness, but was surprised at their hasty return; and, so far as could be judged from the deliberation of her gestures and words, she was not over pleased at it. They made haste to announce that they had only called on their road, and must go on farther, to the town, within four hours. She confined herself to a light exclamation, begged Arkady to remember her to his father, and sent for her aunt. The princess appeared very sleepy, which gave her wrinkled old face an even more ill-natured expression. Katya was not well; she did not leave her room. Arkady suddenly realised that he was at least as anxious to see Katya as Anna Sergyevna herself. The four hours were spent in insignificant discussion of one thing and another; Anna Sergyevna both listened and spoke without a smile. It was only quite at parting that her former friendliness seemed, as it were, to revive.

‘I have an attack of spleen just now,’ she said; ‘but you must not pay attention to that, and come again—I say this to both of you—before long.’

Both Bazarov and Arkady responded with a silent bow, took their seats in the coach, and without stopping again anywhere, went straight home to Maryino, where they arrived safely on the evening of the following day. During the whole course of the journey neither one nor the other even mentioned the name of Madame Odintsov; Bazarov, in particular, scarcely opened his mouth, and kept staring in a side direction away from the road, with a kind of exasperated intensity.

At Maryino every one was exceedingly delighted to see them. The prolonged absence of his son had begun to make Nikolai Petrovitch uneasy; he uttered a cry of joy, and bounced about on the sofa, dangling his legs, when Fenitchka ran to him with sparkling eyes, and informed him of the arrival of the ‘young gentlemen’; even Pavel Petrovitch was conscious of some degree of agreeable excitement, and smiled condescendingly as he shook hands with the returned wanderers. Talk, questions followed; Arkady talked most, especially at supper, which was prolonged long after midnight. Nikolai Petrovitch ordered up some bottles of porter which had only just been sent from Moscow, and partook of the festive beverage till his cheeks were crimson, and he kept laughing in a half-childish, half-nervous little chuckle. Even the servants were infected by the general gaiety. Dunyasha ran up and down like one possessed, and was continually slamming doors; while Piotr was, at three o’clock in the morning, still attempting to strum a Cossack waltz on the guitar. The strings gave forth a sweet and plaintive sound in the still air; but with the exception of a small preliminary flourish, nothing came of the cultured valet’s efforts; nature had given him no more musical talent than all the rest of the world.

But meanwhile things were not going over harmoniously at Maryino, and poor Nikolai Petrovitch was having a bad time of it. Difficulties on the farm sprang up every day—senseless, distressing difficulties. The troubles with the hired labourers had become insupportable. Some asked for their wages to be settled, or for an increase of wages, while others made off with the wages they had received in advance; the horses fell sick; the harness fell to pieces as though it were burnt; the work was carelessly done; a threshing machine that had been ordered from Moscow turned out to be useless from its great weight, another was ruined the first time it was used; half the cattle sheds were burnt down through an old blind woman on the farm going in windy weather with a burning brand to fumigate her cow ... the old woman, it is true, maintained that the whole mischief could be traced to the master’s plan of introducing newfangled cheeses and milk-products. The overseer suddenly turned lazy, and began to grow fat, as every Russian grows fat when he gets a snug berth. When he caught sight of Nikolai Petrovitch in the distance, he would fling a stick at a passing pig, or threaten a half-naked urchin, to show his zeal, but the rest of the time he was generally asleep. The peasants who had been put on the rent system did not bring their money at the time due, and stole the forest-timber; almost every night the keepers caught peasants’ horses in the meadows of the ‘farm,’ and sometimes forcibly bore them off. Nikolai Petrovitch would fix a money fine for damages, but the matter usually ended after the horses had been kept a day or two on the master’s forage by their returning to their owners. To crown all, the peasants began quarrelling among themselves; brothers asked for a division of property, their wives could not get on together in one house; all of a sudden the squabble, as though at a given signal, came to a head, and at once the whole village came running to the counting-house steps, crawling to the master often drunken and with battered face, demanding justice and judgment; then arose an uproar and clamour, the shrill wailing of the women mixed with the curses of the men. Then one had to examine the contending parties, and shout oneself hoarse, knowing all the while that one could never anyway arrive at a just decision.... There were not hands enough for the harvest; a neighbouring small owner, with the most benevolent countenance, contracted to supply him with reapers for a commission of two roubles an acre, and cheated him in the most shameless fashion; his peasant women demanded unheard-of sums, and the corn meanwhile went to waste; and here they were not getting on with the mowing, and there the Council of Guardians threatened and demanded prompt payment, in full, of interest due....

‘I can do nothing!’ Nikolai Petrovitch cried more than once in despair. ‘I can’t flog them myself; and as for calling in the police captain, my principles don’t allow of it, while you can do nothing with them without the fear of punishment!’

‘Du calme, du calme,’ Pavel Petrovitch would remark upon this, but even he hummed to himself, knitted his brows, and tugged at his moustache.

Bazarov held aloof from these matters, and indeed as a guest it was not for him to meddle in other people’s business. The day after his arrival at Maryino, he set to work on his frogs, his infusoria, and his chemical experiments, and was for ever busy with them. Arkady, on the contrary, thought it his duty, if not to help his father, at least to make a show of being ready to help him. He gave him a patient hearing, and once offered him some advice, not with any idea of its being acted upon, but to show his interest. Farming details did not arouse any aversion in him; he used even to dream with pleasure of work on the land, but at this time his brain was swarming with other ideas. Arkady, to his own astonishment, thought incessantly of Nikolskoe; in former days he would simply have shrugged his shoulders if any one had told him that he could ever feel dull under the same roof as Bazarov—and that roof his father’s! but he actually was dull and longed to get away. He tried going long walks till he was tired, but that was no use. In conversation with his father one day, he found out that Nikolai Petrovitch had in his possession rather interesting letters, written by Madame Odintsov’s mother to his wife, and he gave him no rest till he got hold of the letters, for which Nikolai Petrovitch had to rummage in twenty drawers and boxes. Having gained possession of these half-crumbling papers, Arkady felt, as it were, soothed, just as though he had caught a glimpse of the goal towards which he ought now to go. ‘I mean that for both of you,’ he was constantly whispering—she had added that herself! ‘I’ll go, I’ll go, hang it all!’ But he recalled the last visit, the cold reception, and his former embarrassment, and timidity got the better of him. The ‘go-ahead’ feeling of youth, the secret desire to try his luck, to prove his powers in solitude, without the protection of any one whatever, gained the day at last. Before ten days had passed after his return to Maryino, on the pretext of studying the working of the Sunday schools, he galloped off to the town again, and from there to Nikolskoe. Urging the driver on without intermission, he flew along, like a young officer riding to battle; and he felt both frightened and light-hearted, and was breathless with impatience. ‘The great thing is—one mustn’t think,’ he kept repeating to himself. His driver happened to be a lad of spirit; he halted before every public house, saying, ‘A drink or not a drink?’ but, to make up for it, when he had drunk he did not spare his horses. At last the lofty roof of the familiar house came in sight.... ‘What am I to do?’ flashed through Arkady’s head. ‘Well, there’s no turning back now!’ The three horses galloped in unison; the driver whooped and whistled at them. And now the bridge was groaning under the hoofs and wheels, and now the avenue of lopped pines seemed running to meet them.... There was a glimpse of a woman’s pink dress against the dark green, a young face from under the light fringe of a parasol.... He recognised Katya, and she recognised him. Arkady told the driver to stop the galloping horses, leaped out of the carriage, and went up to her. ‘It’s you!’ she cried, gradually flushing all over; ‘let us go to my sister, she’s here in the garden; she will be pleased to see you.’

Katya led Arkady into the garden. His meeting with her struck him as a particularly happy omen; he was delighted to see her, as though she were of his own kindred. Everything had happened so splendidly; no steward, no formal announcement. At a turn in the path he caught sight of Anna Sergyevna. She was standing with her back to him. Hearing footsteps, she turned slowly round.

Arkady felt confused again, but the first words she uttered soothed him at once. ‘Welcome back, runaway!’ she said in her even, caressing voice, and came to meet him, smiling and frowning to keep the sun and wind out of her eyes. ‘Where did you pick him up, Katya?’

‘I have brought you something, Anna Sergyevna,’ he began, ‘which you certainly don’t expect.’

‘You have brought yourself; that’s better than anything.’

Chapter XXIII

Having seen Arkady off with ironical compassion, and given him to understand that he was not in the least deceived as to the real object of his journey, Bazarov shut himself up in complete solitude; he was overtaken by a fever for work. He did not dispute now with Pavel Petrovitch, especially as the latter assumed an excessively aristocratic demeanour in his presence, and expressed his opinions more in inarticulate sounds than in words. Only on one occasion Pavel Petrovitch fell into a controversy with the nihilist on the subject of the question then much discussed of the rights of the nobles of the Baltic province; but suddenly he stopped of his own accord, remarking with chilly politeness, ‘However, we cannot understand one another; I, at least, have not the honour of understanding you.’

‘I should think not!’ cried Bazarov. ‘A man’s capable of understanding anything—how the æther vibrates, and what’s going on in the sun—but how any other man can blow his nose differently from him, that he’s incapable of understanding.’

‘What, is that an epigram?’ observed Pavel Petrovitch inquiringly, and he walked away.

However, he sometimes asked permission to be present at Bazarov’s experiments, and once even placed his perfumed face, washed with the very best soap, near the microscope to see how a transparent infusoria swallowed a green speck, and busily munched it with two very rapid sort of clappers which were in its throat. Nikolai Petrovitch visited Bazarov much oftener than his brother; he would have come every day, as he expressed it, to ‘study,’ if his worries on the farm had not taken off his attention. He did not hinder the young man in his scientific researches; he used to sit down somewhere in a corner of the room and look on attentively, occasionally permitting himself a discreet question. During dinner and supper-time he used to try to turn the conversation upon physics, geology, or chemistry, seeing that all other topics, even agriculture, to say nothing of politics, might lead, if not to collisions, at least to mutual unpleasantness. Nikolai Petrovitch surmised that his brother’s dislike for Bazarov was no less. An unimportant incident, among many others, confirmed his surmises. The cholera began to make its appearance in some places in the neighbourhood, and even ‘carried off’ two persons from Maryino itself. In the night Pavel Petrovitch happened to have rather severe symptoms. He was in pain till the morning, but did not have recourse to Bazarov’s skill. And when he met him the following day, in reply to his question, ‘Why he had not sent for him?’ answered, still quite pale, but scrupulously brushed and shaved, ‘Why, I seem to recollect you said yourself you didn’t believe in medicine.’ So the days went by. Bazarov went on obstinately and grimly working ... and meanwhile there was in Nikolai Petrovitch’s house one creature to whom, if he did not open his heart, he at least was glad to talk.... That creature was Fenitchka.

He used to meet her for the most part early in the morning, in the garden, or the farmyard; he never used to go to her room to see her, and she had only once been to his door to inquire—ought she to let Mitya have his bath or not? It was not only that she confided in him, that she was not afraid of him—she was positively freer and more at her ease in her behaviour with him than with Nikolai Petrovitch himself. It is hard to say how it came about; perhaps it was because she unconsciously felt the absence in Bazarov of all gentility, of all that superiority which at once attracts and overawes. In her eyes he was both an excellent doctor and a simple man. She looked after her baby without constraint in his presence; and once when she was suddenly attacked with giddiness and headache—she took a spoonful of medicine from his hand. Before Nikolai Petrovitch she kept, as it were, at a distance from Bazarov; she acted in this way not from hypocrisy, but from a kind of feeling of propriety. Pavel Petrovitch she was more afraid of than ever; for some time he had begun to watch her, and would suddenly make his appearance, as though he sprang out of the earth behind her back, in his English suit, with his immovable vigilant face, and his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s like a bucket of cold water on one,’ Fenitchka complained to Dunyasha, and the latter sighed in response, and thought of another ‘heartless’ man. Bazarov, without the least suspicion of the fact, had become the cruel tyrant of her heart.

Fenitchka liked Bazarov; but he liked her too. His face was positively transformed when he talked to her; it took a bright, almost kind expression, and his habitual nonchalance was replaced by a sort of jesting attentiveness. Fenitchka was growing prettier every day. There is a time in the life of young women when they suddenly begin to expand and blossom like summer roses; this time had come for Fenitchka. Dressed in a delicate white dress, she seemed herself slighter and whiter; she was not tanned by the sun; but the heat, from which she could not shield herself, spread a slight flush over her cheeks and ears, and, shedding a soft indolence over her whole body, was reflected in a dreamy languor in her pretty eyes. She was almost unable to work; her hands seem to fall naturally into her lap. She scarcely walked at all, and was constantly sighing and complaining with comic helplessness.

‘You should go oftener to bathe,’ Nikolai Petrovitch told her. He had made a large bath covered in with an awning in one of his ponds which had not yet quite disappeared.

‘Oh, Nikolai Petrovitch! But by the time one gets to the pond, one’s utterly dead, and, coming back, one’s dead again. You see, there’s no shade in the garden.’

‘That’s true, there’s no shade,’ replied Nikolai Petrovitch, rubbing his forehead.

One day at seven o’clock in the morning Bazarov, returning from a walk, came upon Fenitchka in the lilac arbour, which was long past flowering, but was still thick and green. She was sitting on the garden seat, and had as usual thrown a white kerchief over her head; near her lay a whole heap of red and white roses still wet with dew. He said good morning to her.

‘Ah! Yevgeny Vassilyitch!’ she said, and lifted the edge of her kerchief a little to look at him, in doing which her arm was left bare to the elbow.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Bazarov, sitting down beside her. ‘Are you making a nosegay?’

‘Yes, for the table at lunch. Nikolai Petrovitch likes it.’

‘But it’s a long while yet to lunch time. What a heap of flowers!’

‘I gathered them now, for it will be hot then, and one can’t go out. One can only just breathe now. I feel quite weak with the heat. I’m really afraid whether I’m not going to be ill.’

‘What an idea! Let me feel your pulse.’ Bazarov took her hand, felt for the evenly-beating pulse, but did not even begin to count its throbs. ‘You’ll live a hundred years!’ he said, dropping her hand.

‘Ah, God forbid!’ she cried.

‘Why? Don’t you want a long life?’

‘Well, but a hundred years! There was an old woman near us eighty-five years old—and what a martyr she was! Dirty and deaf and bent and coughing all the time; nothing but a burden to herself. That’s a dreadful life!’

‘So it’s better to be young?’

‘Well, isn’t it?’

‘But why is it better? Tell me!’

‘How can you ask why? Why, here I now, while I’m young, I can do everything—go and come and carry, and needn’t ask any one for anything.... What can be better?’

‘And to me it’s all the same whether I’m young or old.’

‘How do you mean—it’s all the same? It’s not possible what you say.’

‘Well, judge for yourself, Fedosya Nikolaevna, what good is my youth to me. I live alone, a poor lonely creature ...’

‘That always depends on you.’

‘It doesn’t at all depend on me! At least, some one ought to take pity on me.’

Fenitchka gave a sidelong look at Bazarov, but said nothing. ‘What’s this book you have?’ she asked after a short pause.

‘That? That’s a scientific book, very difficult.’

‘And are you still studying? And don’t you find it dull? You know everything already I should say.’

‘It seems not everything. You try to read a little.’

‘But I don’t understand anything here. Is it Russian?’ asked Fenitchka, taking the heavily bound book in both hands. ‘How thick it is!’

‘Yes, it’s Russian.’

‘All the same, I shan’t understand anything.’

‘Well, I didn’t give it you for you to understand it. I wanted to look at you while you were reading. When you read, the end of your little nose moves so nicely.’

Fenitchka, who had set to work to spell out in a low voice the article on ‘Creosote’ she had chanced upon, laughed and threw down the book ... it slipped from the seat on to the ground.

‘Nonsense!’

‘I like it too when you laugh,’ observed Bazarov.

‘I like it when you talk. It’s just like a little brook babbling.’

Fenitchka turned her head away. ‘What a person you are to talk!’ she commented, picking the flowers over with her finger. ‘And how can you care to listen to me? You have talked with such clever ladies.’

‘Ah, Fedosya Nikolaevna! believe me; all the clever ladies in the world are not worth your little elbow.’

‘Come, there’s another invention!’ murmured Fenitchka, clasping her hands.

Bazarov picked the book up from the ground.

‘That’s a medical book; why do you throw it away?’

‘Medical?’ repeated Fenitchka, and she turned to him again. ‘Do you know, ever since you gave me those drops—do you remember?—Mitya has slept so well! I really can’t think how to thank you; you are so good, really.’

‘But you have to pay doctors,’ observed Bazarov with a smile. ‘Doctors, you know yourself, are grasping people.’

Fenitchka raised her eyes, which seemed still darker from the whitish reflection cast on the upper part of her face, and looked at Bazarov. She did not know whether he was joking or not.

‘If you please, we shall be delighted.... I must ask Nikolai Petrovitch ...’

‘Why, do you think I want money?’ Bazarov interposed. ‘No; I don’t want money from you.’

‘What then?’ asked Fenitchka.

‘What?’ repeated Bazarov. ‘Guess!’

‘A likely person I am to guess!’

‘Well, I will tell you; I want ... one of those roses.’

Fenitchka laughed again, and even clapped her hands, so amusing Bazarov’s request seemed to her. She laughed, and at the same time felt flattered. Bazarov was looking intently at her.

‘By all means,’ she said at last; and, bending down to the seat, she began picking over the roses. ‘Which will you have—a red one or a white one?’

‘Red, and not too large.’

She sat up again. ‘Here, take it,’ she said, but at once drew back her outstretched hand, and, biting her lips, looked towards the entrance of the arbour, then listened.

‘What is it?’ asked Bazarov. ‘Nikolai Petrovitch?’

‘No ... Mr. Kirsanov has gone to the fields ... besides, I’m not afraid of him ... but Pavel Petrovitch ... I fancied ...’

‘What?’

‘I fancied he was coming here. No ... it was no one. Take it.’ Fenitchka gave Bazarov the rose.

‘On what grounds are you afraid of Pavel Petrovitch?’

‘He always scares me. And I know you don’t like him. Do you remember, you always used to quarrel with him? I don’t know what your quarrel was about, but I can see you turn him about like this and like that.’

Fenitchka showed with her hands how in her opinion Bazarov turned Pavel Petrovitch about.

Bazarov smiled. ‘But if he gave me a beating,’ he asked, ‘would you stand up for me?’

‘How could I stand up for you? but no, no one will get the better of you.’

‘Do you think so? But I know a hand which could overcome me if it liked.’

‘What hand?’

‘Why, don’t you know, really? Smell, how delicious this rose smells you gave me.’

Fenitchka stretched her little neck forward, and put her face close to the flower.... The kerchief slipped from her head on to her shoulders; her soft mass of dark, shining, slightly ruffled hair was visible.

‘Wait a minute; I want to smell it with you,’ said Bazarov. He bent down and kissed her vigorously on her parted lips.

She started, pushed him back with both her hands on his breast, but pushed feebly, and he was able to renew and prolong his kiss.

A dry cough was heard behind the lilac bushes. Fenitchka instantly moved away to the other end of the seat. Pavel Petrovitch showed himself, made a slight bow, and saying with a sort of malicious mournfulness, ‘You are here,’ he retreated. Fenitchka at once gathered up all her roses and went out of the arbour. ‘It was wrong of you, Yevgeny Vassilyevitch,’ she whispered as she went. There was a note of genuine reproach in her whisper.

Bazarov remembered another recent scene, and he felt both shame and contemptuous annoyance. But he shook his head directly, ironically congratulated himself ‘on his final assumption of the part of the gay Lothario,’ and went off to his own room.

Pavel Petrovitch went out of the garden, and made his way with deliberate steps to the copse. He stayed there rather a long while; and when he returned to lunch, Nikolai Petrovitch inquired anxiously whether he were quite well—his face looked so gloomy.

‘You know, I sometimes suffer with my liver,’ Pavel Petrovitch answered tranquilly.

Chapter XXIV

Two hours later he knocked at Bazarov’s door.

‘I must apologise for hindering you in your scientific pursuits,’ he began, seating himself on a chair in the window, and leaning with both hands on a handsome walking-stick with an ivory knob (he usually walked without a stick), ‘but I am constrained to beg you to spare me five minutes of your time ... no more.’

‘All my time is at your disposal,’ answered Bazarov, over whose face there passed a quick change of expression directly Pavel Petrovitch crossed the threshold.

‘Five minutes will be enough for me. I have come to put a single question to you.’

‘A question? What is it about?’

‘I will tell you, if you will kindly hear me out. At the commencement of your stay in my brother’s house, before I had renounced the pleasure of conversing with you, it was my fortune to hear your opinions on many subjects; but so far as my memory serves, neither between us, nor in my presence, was the subject of single combats and duelling in general broached. Allow me to hear what are your views on that subject?’

Bazarov, who had risen to meet Pavel Petrovitch, sat down on the edge of the table and folded his arms.

‘My view is,’ he said, ‘that from the theoretical standpoint, duelling is absurd; from the practical standpoint, now—it’s quite a different matter.’

‘That is, you mean to say, if I understand you right, that whatever your theoretical views on duelling, you would not in practice allow yourself to be insulted without demanding satisfaction?’

‘You have guessed my meaning absolutely.’

‘Very good. I am very glad to hear you say so. Your words relieve me from a state of incertitude.’

‘Of uncertainty, you mean to say.’

‘That is all the same! I express myself so as to be understood; I ... am not a seminary rat. Your words save me from a rather deplorable necessity. I have made up my mind to fight you.’

Bazarov opened his eyes wide. ‘Me?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘But what for, pray?’

‘I could explain the reason to you,’ began Pavel Petrovitch, ‘but I prefer to be silent about it. To my idea your presence here is superfluous; I cannot endure you; I despise you; and if that is not enough for you ...’

Pavel Petrovitch’s eyes glittered ... Bazarov’s too were flashing.

‘Very good,’ he assented. ‘No need of further explanations. You’ve a whim to try your chivalrous spirit upon me. I might refuse you this pleasure, but—so be it!’

‘I am sensible of my obligation to you,’ replied Pavel Petrovitch; ‘and may reckon then on your accepting my challenge without compelling me to resort to violent measures.’

‘That means, speaking without metaphor, to that stick?’ Bazarov remarked coolly. ‘That is precisely correct. It’s quite unnecessary for you to insult me. Indeed, it would not be a perfectly safe proceeding. You can remain a gentleman.... I accept your challenge, too, like a gentleman.’

‘That is excellent,’ observed Pavel Petrovitch, putting his stick in the corner. ‘We will say a few words directly about the conditions of our duel; but I should like first to know whether you think it necessary to resort to the formality of a trifling dispute, which might serve as a pretext for my challenge?’

‘No; it’s better without formalities.’

‘I think so myself. I presume it is also out of place to go into the real grounds of our difference. We cannot endure one another. What more is necessary?’

‘What more, indeed?’ repeated Bazarov ironically.

‘As regards the conditions of the meeting itself, seeing that we shall have no seconds—for where could we get them?’

‘Exactly so; where could we get them?’

‘Then I have the honour to lay the following proposition before you: The combat to take place early to-morrow, at six, let us say, behind the copse, with pistols, at a distance of ten paces....’

‘At ten paces? that will do; we hate one another at that distance.’

‘We might have it eight,’ remarked Pavel Petrovitch.

‘We might.’

‘To fire twice; and, to be ready for any result, let each put a letter in his pocket, in which he accuses himself of his end.’

‘Now, that I don’t approve of at all,’ observed Bazarov. ‘There’s a slight flavour of the French novel about it, something not very plausible.’

‘Perhaps. You will agree, however, that it would be unpleasant to incur a suspicion of murder?’

‘I agree as to that. But there is a means of avoiding that painful reproach. We shall have no seconds, but we can have a witness.’

‘And whom, allow me to inquire?’

‘Why, Piotr.’

‘What Piotr?’

‘Your brother’s valet. He’s a man who has attained to the acme of contemporary culture, and he will perform his part with all the comilfo (comme il faut) necessary in such cases.’

‘I think you are joking, sir.’

‘Not at all. If you think over my suggestion, you will be convinced that it’s full of common-sense and simplicity. You can’t hide a candle under a bushel; but I’ll undertake to prepare Piotr in a fitting manner, and bring him on to the field of battle.’

‘You persist in jesting still,’ Pavel Petrovitch declared, getting up from his chair. ‘But after the courteous readiness you have shown me, I have no right to pretend to lay down.... And so, everything is arranged.... By the way, perhaps you have no pistols?’

‘How should I have pistols, Pavel Petrovitch? I’m not in the army.’

‘In that case, I offer you mine. You may rest assured that it’s five years now since I shot with them.’

‘That’s a very consoling piece of news.’

Pavel Petrovitch took up his stick.... ‘And now, my dear sir, it only remains for me to thank you and to leave you to your studies. I have the honour to take leave of you.’

‘Till we have the pleasure of meeting again, my dear sir,’ said Bazarov, conducting his visitor to the door.

Pavel Petrovitch went out, while Bazarov remained standing a minute before the door, and suddenly exclaimed, ‘Pish, well, I’m dashed! how fine, and how foolish! A pretty farce we’ve been through! Like trained dogs dancing on their hind-paws. But to decline was out of the question; why, I do believe he’d have struck me, and then ...’ (Bazarov turned white at the very thought; all his pride was up in arms at once)—‘then it might have come to my strangling him like a cat.’ He went back to his microscope, but his heart was beating, and the composure necessary for taking observations had disappeared. ‘He caught sight of us to-day,’ he thought; ‘but would he really act like this on his brother’s account? And what a mighty matter is it—a kiss? There must be something else in it. Bah! isn’t he perhaps in love with her himself? To be sure, he’s in love; it’s as clear as day. What a complication! It’s a nuisance!’ he decided at last; ‘it’s a bad job, look at it which way you will. In the first place, to risk a bullet through one’s brains, and in any case to go away; and then Arkady ... and that dear innocent pussy, Nikolai Petrovitch. It’s a bad job, an awfully bad job.’

The day passed in a kind of peculiar stillness and languor. Fenitchka gave no sign of her existence; she sat in her little room like a mouse in its hole. Nikolai Petrovitch had a careworn air. He had just heard that blight had begun to appear in his wheat, upon which he had in particular rested his hopes. Pavel Petrovitch overwhelmed every one, even Prokofitch, with his icy courtesy. Bazarov began a letter to his father, but tore it up, and threw it under the table.

‘If I die,’ he thought, ‘they will find it out; but I’m not going to die. No, I shall struggle along in this world a good while yet.’ He gave Piotr orders to come to him on important business the next morning directly it was light. Piotr imagined that he wanted to take him to Petersburg with him. Bazarov went late to bed, and all night long he was harassed by disordered dreams.... Madame Odintsov kept appearing in them, now she was his mother, and she was followed by a kitten with black whiskers, and this kitten seemed to be Fenitchka; then Pavel Petrovitch took the shape of a great wood, with which he had yet to fight. Piotr waked him up at four o’clock; he dressed at once, and went out with him.

It was a lovely, fresh morning; tiny flecked clouds hovered overhead in little curls of foam on the pale clear blue; a fine dew lay in drops on the leaves and grass, and sparkled like silver on the spiders’ webs; the damp, dark earth seemed still to keep traces of the rosy dawn; from the whole sky the songs of larks came pouring in showers. Bazarov walked as far as the copse, sat down in the shade at its edge, and only then disclosed to Piotr the nature of the service he expected of him. The refined valet was mortally alarmed; but Bazarov soothed him by the assurance that he would have nothing to do but stand at a distance and look on, and that he would not incur any sort of responsibility. ‘And meantime,’ he added, ‘only think what an important part you have to play!’ Piotr threw up his hands, looked down, and leaned against a birch-tree, looking green with terror.

The road from Maryino skirted the copse; a light dust lay on it, untouched by wheel or foot since the previous day. Bazarov unconsciously stared along this road, picked and gnawed a blade of grass, while he kept repeating to himself, ‘What a piece of foolery!’ The chill of the early morning made him shiver twice.... Piotr looked at him dejectedly, but Bazarov only smiled; he was not afraid.

The tramp of horses’ hoofs was heard along the road.... A peasant came into sight from behind the trees. He was driving before him two horses hobbled together, and as he passed Bazarov he looked at him rather strangely, without touching his cap, which it was easy to see disturbed Piotr, as an unlucky omen. ‘There’s some one else up early too,’ thought Bazarov; ‘but he at least has got up for work, while we ...’

‘Fancy the gentleman’s coming,’ Piotr faltered suddenly.

Bazarov raised his head and saw Pavel Petrovitch. Dressed in a light check jacket and snow-white trousers, he was walking rapidly along the road; under his arm he carried a box wrapped up in green cloth.

‘I beg your pardon, I believe I have kept you waiting,’ he observed, bowing first to Bazarov, then to Piotr, whom he treated respectfully at that instant, as representing something in the nature of a second. ‘I was unwilling to wake my man.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ answered Bazarov; ‘we’ve only just arrived ourselves.’

‘Ah! so much the better!’ Pavel Petrovitch took a look round. ‘There’s no one in sight; no one hinders us. We can proceed?’

‘Let us proceed.’

‘You do not, I presume, desire any fresh explanations?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Would you like to load?’ inquired Pavel Petrovitch, taking the pistols out of the box.

‘No; you load, and I will measure out the paces. My legs are longer,’ added Bazarov with a smile. ‘One, two, three.’

‘Yevgeny Vassilyevitch,’ Piotr faltered with an effort (he shaking as though he were in a fever), ‘say what you like, I am going farther off.’

‘Four ... five.... Good. Move away, my good fellow, move away; you may get behind a tree even, and stop up your ears, only don’t shut your eyes; and if any one falls, run and pick him up. Six ... seven ... eight....’ Bazarov stopped. ‘Is that enough?’ he said, turning to Pavel Petrovitch; ‘or shall I add two paces more?’

‘As you like,’ replied the latter, pressing down the second bullet.

‘Well, we’ll make it two paces more.’ Bazarov drew a line on the ground with the toe of his boot. ‘There’s the barrier then. By the way, how many paces may each of us go back from the barrier? That’s an important question too. That point was not discussed yesterday.’

‘I imagine, ten,’ replied Pavel Petrovitch, handing Bazarov both pistols. ‘Will you be so good as to choose?’

‘I will be so good. But, Pavel Petrovitch, you must admit our combat is singular to the point of absurdity. Only look at the countenance of our second.’

‘You are disposed to laugh at everything,’ answered Pavel Petrovitch. ‘I acknowledge the strangeness of our duel, but I think it my duty to warn you that I intend to fight seriously. A bon entendeur, salut!’

‘Oh! I don’t doubt that we’ve made up our minds to make away with each other; but why not laugh too and unite utile dulci? You talk to me in French, while I talk to you in Latin.’

‘I am going to fight in earnest,’ repeated Pavel Petrovitch, and he walked off to his place. Bazarov on his side counted off ten paces from the barrier, and stood still.

‘Are you ready?’ asked Pavel Petrovitch.

‘Perfectly.’

‘We can approach one another.’

Bazarov moved slowly forward, and Pavel Petrovitch, his left hand thrust in his pocket, walked towards him, gradually raising the muzzle of his pistol.... ‘He’s aiming straight at my nose,’ thought Bazarov, ‘and doesn’t he blink down it carefully, the ruffian! Not an agreeable sensation though. I’m going to look at his watch chain.’

Something whizzed sharply by his very ear, and at the same instant there was the sound of a shot. ‘I heard it, so it must be all right,’ had time to flash through Bazarov’s brain. He took one more step, and without taking aim, pressed the spring.

Pavel Petrovitch gave a slight start, and clutched at his thigh. A stream of blood began to trickle down his white trousers.

Bazarov flung aside the pistol, and went up to his antagonist. ‘Are you wounded?’ he said.

‘You had the right to call me up to the barrier,’ said Pavel Petrovitch, ‘but that’s of no consequence. According to our agreement, each of us has the right to one more shot.’

‘All right, but, excuse me, that’ll do another time,’ answered Bazarov, catching hold of Pavel Petrovitch, who was beginning to turn pale. ‘Now, I’m not a duellist, but a doctor, and I must have a look at your wound before anything else. Piotr! come here, Piotr! where have you got to?’

‘That’s all nonsense.... I need no one’s aid,’ Pavel Petrovitch declared jerkily, ‘and ... we must ... again ...’ He tried to pull at his moustaches, but his hand failed him, his eyes grew dim, and he lost consciousness.

‘Here’s a pretty pass! A fainting fit! What next!’ Bazarov cried unconsciously, as he laid Pavel Petrovitch on the grass. ‘Let’s have a look what’s wrong.’ He pulled out a handkerchief, wiped away the blood, and began feeling round the wound.... ‘The bone’s not touched,’ he muttered through his teeth; ‘the ball didn’t go deep; one muscle, vastus externus, grazed. He’ll be dancing about in three weeks!... And to faint! Oh, these nervous people, how I hate them! My word, what a delicate skin!’

‘Is he killed?’ the quaking voice of Piotr came rustling behind his back.

Bazarov looked round. ‘Go for some water as quick as you can, my good fellow, and he’ll outlive us yet.’

But the modern servant seemed not to understand his words, and he did not stir. Pavel Petrovitch slowly opened his eyes. ‘He will die!’ whispered Piotr, and he began crossing himself.

‘You are right ... What an imbecile countenance!’ remarked the wounded gentleman with a forced smile.

‘Well, go for the water, damn you!’ shouted Bazarov.

‘No need.... It was a momentary vertigo.... Help me to sit up ... there, that’s right.... I only need something to bind up this scratch, and I can reach home on foot, or you can send a droshky for me. The duel, if you are willing, shall not be renewed. You have behaved honourably ... to-day, to-day—observe.’

‘There’s no need to recall the past,’ rejoined Bazarov; ‘and as regards the future, it’s not worth while for you to trouble your head about that either, for I intend being off without delay. Let me bind up your leg now; your wound’s not serious, but it’s always best to stop bleeding. But first I must bring this corpse to his senses.’

Bazarov shook Piotr by the collar, and sent him for a droshky.

‘Mind you don’t frighten my brother,’ Pavel Petrovitch said to him; ‘don’t dream of informing him.’

Piotr flew off; and while he was running for a droshky, the two antagonists sat on the ground and said nothing. Pavel Petrovitch tried not to look at Bazarov; he did not want to be reconciled to him in any case; he was ashamed of his own haughtiness, of his failure; he was ashamed of the whole position he had brought about, even while he felt it could not have ended in a more favourable manner. ‘At any rate, there will be no scandal,’ he consoled himself by reflecting, ‘and for that I am thankful.’ The silence was prolonged, a silence distressing and awkward. Both of them were ill at ease. Each was conscious that the other understood him. That is pleasant to friends, and always very unpleasant to those who are not friends, especially when it is impossible either to have things out or to separate.

‘Haven’t I bound up your leg too tight?’ inquired Bazarov at last.

‘No, not at all; it’s capital,’ answered Pavel Petrovitch; and after a brief pause, he added, ‘There’s no deceiving my brother; we shall have to tell him we quarrelled over politics.’

‘Very good,’ assented Bazarov. ‘You can say I insulted all anglomaniacs.’

‘That will do capitally. What do you imagine that man thinks of us now?’ continued Pavel Petrovitch, pointing to the same peasant, who had driven the hobbled horses past Bazarov a few minutes before the duel, and going back again along the road, took off his cap at the sight of the ‘gentlefolk.’

‘Who can tell!’ answered Bazarov; ‘it’s quite likely he thinks nothing. The Russian peasant is that mysterious unknown about whom Mrs. Radcliffe used to talk so much. Who is to understand him! He doesn’t understand himself!’

‘Ah! so that’s your idea!’ Pavel Petrovitch began; and suddenly he cried, ‘Look what your fool of a Piotr has done! Here’s my brother galloping up to us!’

Bazarov turned round and saw the pale face of Nikolai Petrovitch, who was sitting in the droshky. He jumped out of it before it had stopped, and rushed up to his brother.

‘What does this mean?’ he said in an agitated voice. ‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch, pray, what is this?’

‘Nothing,’ answered Pavel Petrovitch; ‘they have alarmed you for nothing. I had a little dispute with Mr. Bazarov, and I have had to pay for it a little.’

‘But what was it all about, mercy on us!’

‘How can I tell you? Mr. Bazarov alluded disrespectfully to Sir Robert Peel. I must hasten to add that I am the only person to blame in all this, while Mr. Bazarov has behaved most honourably. I called him out.’

‘But you’re covered with blood, good Heavens!’

‘Well, did you suppose I had water in my veins? But this blood-letting is positively beneficial to me. Isn’t that so, doctor? Help me to get into the droshky, and don’t give way to melancholy. I shall be quite well to-morrow. That’s it; capital. Drive on, coachman.’

Nikolai Petrovitch walked after the droshky; Bazarov was remaining where he was....

‘I must ask you to look after my brother,’ Nikolai Petrovitch said to him, ‘till we get another doctor from the town.’

Bazarov nodded his head without speaking. In an hour’s time Pavel Petrovitch was already lying in bed with a skilfully bandaged leg. The whole house was alarmed; Fenitchka fainted. Nikolai Petrovitch kept stealthily wringing his hands, while Pavel Petrovitch laughed and joked, especially with Bazarov; he had put on a fine cambric night-shirt, an elegant morning wrapper, and a fez, did not allow the blinds to be drawn down, and humorously complained of the necessity of being kept from food.

Towards night, however, he began to be feverish; his head ached. The doctor arrived from the town. (Nikolai Petrovitch would not listen to his brother, and indeed Bazarov himself did not wish him to; he sat the whole day in his room, looking yellow and vindictive, and only went in to the invalid for as brief a time as possible; twice he happened to meet Fenitchka, but she shrank away from him with horror.) The new doctor advised a cooling diet; he confirmed, however, Bazarov’s assertion that there was no danger. Nikolai Petrovitch told him his brother had wounded himself by accident, to which the doctor responded, ‘Hm!’ but having twenty-five silver roubles slipped into his hand on the spot, he observed, ‘You don’t say so! Well, it’s a thing that often happens, to be sure.’

No one in the house went to bed or undressed. Nikolai Petrovitch kept going in to his brother on tiptoe, retreating on tiptoe again; the latter dozed, moaned a little, told him in French, Couchez-vous, and asked for drink. Nikolai Petrovitch sent Fenitchka twice to take him a glass of lemonade; Pavel Petrovitch gazed at her intently, and drank off the glass to the last drop. Towards morning the fever had increased a little; there was slight delirium. At first Pavel Petrovitch uttered incoherent words; then suddenly he opened his eyes, and seeing his brother near his bed bending anxiously over him, he said, ‘Don’t you think, Nikolai, Fenitchka has something in common with Nellie?’

‘What Nellie, Pavel dear?’

‘How can you ask? Princess R——. Especially in the upper part of the face. C’est de la même famille.’

Nikolai Petrovitch made no answer, while inwardly he marvelled at the persistence of old passions in man. ‘It’s like this when it comes to the surface,’ he thought.

‘Ah, how I love that light-headed creature!’ moaned Pavel Petrovitch, clasping his hands mournfully behind his head. ‘I can’t bear any insolent upstart to dare to touch ...’ he whispered a few minutes later.

Nikolai Petrovitch only sighed; he did not even suspect to whom these words referred.

Bazarov presented himself before him at eight o’clock the next day. He had already had time to pack, and to set free all his frogs, insects, and birds.

‘You have come to say good-bye to me?’ said Nikolai Petrovitch, getting up to meet him.

‘Yes.’

‘I understand you, and approve of you fully. My poor brother, of course, is to blame; and he is punished for it. He told me himself that he made it impossible for you to act otherwise. I believe that you could not avoid this duel, which ... which to some extent is explained by the almost constant antagonism of your respective views.’ (Nikolai Petrovitch began to get a little mixed up in his words.) ‘My brother is a man of the old school, hot-tempered and obstinate.... Thank God that it has ended as it has. I have taken every precaution to avoid publicity.’

‘I’m leaving you my address, in case there’s any fuss,’ Bazarov remarked casually.

‘I hope there will be no fuss, Yevgeny Vassilyitch.... I am very sorry your stay in my house should have such a ... such an end. It is the more distressing to me through Arkady’s ...’

‘I shall be seeing him, I expect,’ replied Bazarov, in whom ‘explanations’ and ‘protestations’ of every sort always aroused a feeling of impatience; ‘in case I don’t, I beg you to say good-bye to him for me, and accept the expression of my regret.’

‘And I beg ...’ answered Nikolai Petrovitch. But Bazarov went off without waiting for the end of his sentence.

When he heard of Bazarov’s going, Pavel Petrovitch expressed a desire to see him, and shook his hand. But even then he remained as cold as ice; he realised that Pavel Petrovitch wanted to play the magnanimous. He did not succeed in saying good-bye to Fenitchka; he only exchanged glances with her at the window. Her face struck him as looking dejected. ‘She’ll come to grief, perhaps,’ he said to himself.... ‘But who knows? she’ll pull through somehow, I dare say!’ Piotr, however, was so overcome that he wept on his shoulder, till Bazarov damped him by asking if he’d a constant supply laid on in his eyes; while Dunyasha was obliged to run away into the wood to hide her emotion. The originator of all this woe got into a light cart, smoked a cigar, and when at the third mile, at the bend in the road, the Kirsanovs’ farm, with its new house, could be seen in a long line, he merely spat, and muttering, ‘Cursed snobs!’ wrapped himself closer in his cloak.

Pavel Petrovitch was soon better; but he had to keep his bed about a week. He bore his captivity, as he called it, pretty patiently, though he took great pains over his toilette, and had everything scented with eau-de-cologne. Nikolai Petrovitch used to read him the journals; Fenitchka waited on him as before, brought him lemonade, soup, boiled eggs, and tea; but she was overcome with secret dread whenever she went into his room. Pavel Petrovitch’s unexpected action had alarmed every one in the house, and her more than any one; Prokofitch was the only person not agitated by it; he discoursed upon how gentlemen in his day used to fight, but only with real gentlemen; low curs like that they used to order a horsewhipping in the stable for their insolence.

Fenitchka’s conscience scarcely reproached her; but she was tormented at times by the thought of the real cause of the quarrel; and Pavel Petrovitch too looked at her so strangely ... that even when her back was turned, she felt his eyes upon her. She grew thinner from constant inward agitation, and, as is always the way, became still more charming.

One day—the incident took place in the morning—Pavel Petrovitch felt better and moved from his bed to the sofa, while Nikolai Petrovitch, having satisfied himself he was better, went off to the threshing-floor. Fenitchka brought him a cup of tea, and setting it down on a little table, was about to withdraw. Pavel Petrovitch detained her.

‘Where are you going in such a hurry, Fedosya Nikolaevna?’ he began; ‘are you busy?’

‘... I have to pour out tea.’

‘Dunyasha will do that without you; sit a little while with a poor invalid. By the way, I must have a little talk with you.’

Fenitchka sat down on the edge of an easy-chair, without speaking.

‘Listen,’ said Pavel Petrovitch, tugging at his moustaches; ‘I have long wanted to ask you something; you seem somehow afraid of me?’

‘I?’

‘Yes, you. You never look at me, as though your conscience were not at rest.’

Fenitchka crimsoned, but looked at Pavel Petrovitch. He impressed her as looking strange, and her heart began throbbing slowly.

‘Is your conscience at rest?’ he questioned her.

‘Why should it not be at rest?’ she faltered.

‘Goodness knows why! Besides, whom can you have wronged? Me? That is not likely. Any other people in the house here? That, too, is something incredible. Can it be my brother? But you love him, don’t you?’

‘I love him.’

‘With your whole soul, with your whole heart?’

‘I love Nikolai Petrovitch with my whole heart.’

‘Truly? Look at me, Fenitchka.’ (It was the first time he had called her that name.) ‘You know, it’s a great sin telling lies!’

‘I am not telling lies, Pavel Petrovitch. Not love Nikolai Petrovitch—I shouldn’t care to live after that.’

‘And will you never give him up for any one?’

‘For whom could I give him up?’

‘For whom indeed! Well, how about that gentleman who has just gone away from here?’

Fenitchka got up. ‘My God, Pavel Petrovitch, what are you torturing me for? What have I done to you? How can such things be said?’...

‘Fenitchka,’ said Pavel Petrovitch, in a sorrowful voice, ‘you know I saw ...’

‘What did you see?’

‘Well, there ... in the arbour.’

Fenitchka crimsoned to her hair and to her ears. ‘How was I to blame for that?’ she articulated with an effort.

Pavel Petrovitch raised himself up. ‘You were not to blame? No? Not at all?’

‘I love Nikolai Petrovitch, and no one else in the world, and I shall always love him!’ cried Fenitchka with sudden force, while her throat seemed fairly breaking with sobs. ‘As for what you saw, at the dreadful day of judgment I will say I’m not to blame, and wasn’t to blame for it, and I would rather die at once if people can suspect me of such a thing against my benefactor, Nikolai Petrovitch.’

But here her voice broke, and at the same time she felt that Pavel Petrovitch was snatching and pressing her hand.... She looked at him, and was fairly petrified. He had turned even paler than before; his eyes were shining, and what was most marvellous of all, one large solitary tear was rolling down his cheek.

‘Fenitchka!’ he was saying in a strange whisper; ‘love him, love my brother! Don’t give him up for any one in the world; don’t listen to any one else! Think what can be more terrible than to love and not be loved! Never leave my poor Nikolai!’

Fenitchka’s eyes were dry, and her terror had passed away, so great was her amazement. But what were her feelings when Pavel Petrovitch, Pavel Petrovitch himself, put her hand to his lips and seemed to pierce into it without kissing it, and only heaving convulsive sighs from time to time....

‘Goodness,’ she thought, ‘isn’t it some attack coming on him?’...

At that instant his whole ruined life was stirred up within him.

The staircase creaked under rapidly approaching footsteps.... He pushed her away from him, and let his head drop back on the pillow. The door opened, and Nikolai Petrovitch entered, cheerful, fresh, and ruddy. Mitya, as fresh and ruddy as his father, in nothing but his little shirt, was frisking on his shoulder, catching the big buttons of his rough country coat with his little bare toes.

Fenitchka simply flung herself upon him, and clasping him and her son together in her arms, dropped her head on his shoulder. Nikolai Petrovitch was surprised; Fenitchka, the reserved and staid Fenitchka, had never given him a caress in the presence of a third person.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, and, glancing at his brother, he gave her Mitya. ‘You don’t feel worse?’ he inquired, going up to Pavel Petrovitch.

He buried his face in a cambric handkerchief. ‘No ... not at all ... on the contrary, I am much better.’

‘You were in too great a hurry to move on to the sofa. Where are you going?’ added Nikolai Petrovitch, turning round to Fenitchka; but she had already closed the door behind her. ‘I was bringing in my young hero to show you, he’s been crying for his uncle. Why has she carried him off? What’s wrong with you, though? Has anything passed between you, eh?’

‘Brother!’ said Pavel Petrovitch solemnly.

Nikolai Petrovitch started. He felt dismayed, he could not have said why himself.

‘Brother,’ repeated Pavel Petrovitch, ‘give me your word that you will carry out my one request.’

‘What request? Tell me.’

‘It is very important; the whole happiness of your life, to my idea, depends on it. I have been thinking a great deal all this time over what I want to say to you now.... Brother, do your duty, the duty of an honest and generous man; put an end to the scandal and bad example you are setting—you, the best of men!’

‘What do you mean, Pavel?’

‘Marry Fenitchka.... She loves you; she is the mother of your son.’

Nikolai Petrovitch stepped back a pace, and flung up his hands. ‘Do you say that, Pavel? you whom I have always regarded as the most determined opponent of such marriages! You say that? Don’t you know that it has simply been out of respect for you that I have not done what you so rightly call my duty?’

‘You were wrong to respect me in that case,’ Pavel Petrovitch responded, with a weary smile. ‘I begin to think Bazarov was right in accusing me of snobbishness. No dear brother, don’t let us worry ourselves about appearances and the world’s opinion any more; we are old folks and humble now; it’s time we laid aside vanity of all kinds. Let us, just as you say, do our duty; and mind, we shall get happiness that way into the bargain.’

Nikolai Petrovitch rushed to embrace his brother.

‘You have opened my eyes completely!’ he cried. ‘I was right in always declaring you the wisest and kindest-hearted fellow in the world, and now I see you are just as reasonable as you are noble-hearted.’

‘Quietly, quietly,’ Pavel Petrovitch interrupted him; ‘don’t hurt the leg of your reasonable brother, who at close upon fifty has been fighting a duel like an ensign. So, then, it’s a settled matter; Fenitchka is to be my ... belle soeur.’

‘My dearest Pavel! But what will Arkady say?’

‘Arkady? he’ll be in ecstasies, you may depend upon it! Marriage is against his principles, but then the sentiment of equality in him will be gratified. And, after all, what sense have class distinctions au dix-neuvième siècle?’

‘Ah, Pavel, Pavel! let me kiss you once more! Don’t be afraid, I’ll be careful.’

The brothers embraced each other.

‘What do you think, should you not inform her of your intention now?’ queried Pavel Petrovitch.

‘Why be in a hurry?’ responded Nikolai Petrovitch. ‘Has there been any conversation between you?’

‘Conversation between us? Quelle idée!’

‘Well, that is all right then. First of all, you must get well, and meanwhile there’s plenty of time. We must think it over well, and consider ...’

‘But your mind is made up, I suppose?’

‘Of course, my mind is made up, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I will leave you now; you must rest; any excitement is bad for you.... But we will talk it over again. Sleep well, dear heart, and God bless you!’

‘What is he thanking me like that for?’ thought Pavel Petrovitch, when he was left alone. ‘As though it did not depend on him! I will go away directly he is married, somewhere a long way off—to Dresden or Florence, and will live there till I——’

Pavel Petrovitch moistened his forehead with eau de cologne, and closed his eyes. His beautiful, emaciated head, the glaring daylight shining full upon it, lay on the white pillow like the head of a dead man.... And indeed he was a dead man.

Chapter XXV

At Nikolskoe Katya and Arkady were sitting in the garden on a turf seat in the shade of a tall ash tree; Fifi had placed himself on the ground near them, giving his slender body that graceful curve, which is known among dog-fanciers as ‘the hare bend.’ Both Arkady and Katya were silent; he was holding a half-open book in his hands, while she was picking out of a basket the few crumbs of bread left in it, and throwing them to a small family of sparrows, who with the frightened impudence peculiar to them were hopping and chirping at her very feet. A faint breeze stirring in the ash leaves kept slowly moving pale-gold flecks of sunlight up and down over the path and Fifi’s tawny back; a patch of unbroken shade fell upon Arkady and Katya; only from time to time a bright streak gleamed on her hair. Both were silent, but the very way in which they were silent, in which they were sitting together, was expressive of confidential intimacy; each of them seemed not even to be thinking of his companion, while secretly rejoicing in his presence. Their faces, too, had changed since we saw them last; Arkady looked more tranquil, Katya brighter and more daring.

‘Don’t you think,’ began Arkady, ‘that the ash has been very well named in Russian yasen; no other tree is so lightly and brightly transparent (yasno) against the air as it is.’

Katya raised her eyes to look upward, and assented, ‘Yes’; while Arkady thought, ‘Well, she does not reproach me for talking finely.’

‘I don’t like Heine,’ said Katya, glancing towards the book which Arkady was holding in his hands, ‘either when he laughs or when he weeps; I like him when he’s thoughtful and melancholy.’

‘And I like him when he laughs,’ remarked Arkady.

‘That’s the relics left in you of your old satirical tendencies.’ (‘Relics!’ thought Arkady—‘if Bazarov had heard that?’) ‘Wait a little; we shall transform you.’

‘Who will transform me? You?’

‘Who?—my sister; Porfiry Platonovitch, whom you’ve given up quarrelling with; auntie, whom you escorted to church the day before yesterday.’

‘Well, I couldn’t refuse! And as for Anna Sergyevna, she agreed with Yevgeny in a great many things, you remember?’

‘My sister was under his influence then, just as you were.’

‘As I was? Do you discover, may I ask, that I’ve shaken off his influence now?’

Katya did not speak.

‘I know,’ pursued Arkady, ‘you never liked him.’

‘I can have no opinion about him.’

‘Do you know, Katerina Sergyevna, every time I hear that answer I disbelieve it.... There is no man that every one of us could not have an opinion about! That’s simply a way of getting out of it.’

‘Well, I’ll say, then, I don’t.... It’s not exactly that I don’t like him, but I feel that he’s of a different order from me, and I am different from him ... and you too are different from him.’

‘How’s that?’

‘How can I tell you.... He’s a wild animal, and you and I are tame.’

‘Am I tame too?’

Katya nodded.

Arkady scratched his ear. ‘Let me tell you, Katerina Sergyevna, do you know, that’s really an insult?’

‘Why, would you like to be a wild——’

‘Not wild, but strong, full of force.’

‘It’s no good wishing for that.... Your friend, you see, doesn’t wish for it, but he has it.’

‘Hm! So you imagine he had a great influence on Anna Sergyevna?’

‘Yes. But no one can keep the upper hand of her for long,’ added Katya in a low voice.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘She’s very proud.... I didn’t mean that ... she values her independence a great deal.’

‘Who doesn’t value it?’ asked Arkady, and the thought flashed through his mind, ‘What good is it?’ ‘What good is it?’ it occurred to Katya to wonder too. When young people are often together on friendly terms, they are constantly stumbling on the same ideas.

Arkady smiled, and, coming slightly closer to Katya, he said in a whisper, ‘Confess that you are a little afraid of her.’

‘Of whom?’

‘Her,’ repeated Arkady significantly.

‘And how about you?’ Katya asked in her turn.

‘I am too, observe I said, I am too.’

Katya threatened him with her finger. ‘I wonder at that,’ she began; ‘my sister has never felt so friendly to you as just now; much more so than when you first came.’

‘Really!’

‘Why, haven’t you noticed it? Aren’t you glad of it?’

Arkady grew thoughtful.

‘How have I succeeded in gaining Anna Sergyevna’s good opinion? Wasn’t it because I brought her your mother’s letters?’

‘Both that and other causes, which I shan’t tell you.’

‘Why?’

‘I shan’t say.’

‘Oh! I know; you’re very obstinate.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘And observant.’

Katya gave Arkady a sidelong look. ‘Perhaps so; does that irritate you? What are you thinking of?’

‘I am wondering how you have come to be as observant as in fact you are. You are so shy so reserved; you keep every one at a distance.’

‘I have lived a great deal alone; that drives one to reflection. But do I really keep every one at a distance?’

Arkady flung a grateful glance at Katya.

‘That’s all very well,’ he pursued; ‘but people in your position—I mean in your circumstances—don’t often have that faculty; it is hard for them, as it is for sovereigns, to get at the truth.’

‘But, you see, I am not rich.’

Arkady was taken aback, and did not at once understand Katya. ‘Why, of course, the property’s all her sister’s!’ struck him suddenly; the thought was not unpleasing to him. ‘How nicely you said that!’ he commented.

‘What?’

‘You said it nicely, simply, without being ashamed or making a boast of it. By the way, I imagine there must always be something special, a kind of pride of a sort in the feeling of any man, who knows and says he is poor.’

‘I have never experienced anything of that sort, thanks to my sister. I only referred to my position just now because it happened to come up.’

‘Well; but you must own you have a share of that pride I spoke of just now.’

‘For instance?’

‘For instance, you—forgive the question—you wouldn’t marry a rich man, I fancy, would you?’

‘If I loved him very much.... No, I think even then I wouldn’t marry him.’

‘There! you see!’ cried Arkady, and after a short pause he added, ‘And why wouldn’t you marry him?’

‘Because even in the ballads unequal matches are always unlucky.’

‘You want to rule, perhaps, or ...’

‘Oh, no! why should I? On the contrary, I am ready to obey; only inequality is intolerable. To respect one’s self and obey, that I can understand, that’s happiness; but a subordinate existence ... No, I’ve had enough of that as it is.’

‘Enough of that as it is,’ Arkady repeated after Katya. ‘Yes, yes,’ he went on, ‘you’re not Anna Sergyevna’s sister for nothing; you’re just as independent as she is; but you’re more reserved. I’m certain you wouldn’t be the first to give expression to your feeling, however strong and holy it might be ...’

‘Well, what would you expect?’ asked Katya.

‘You’re equally clever; and you’ve as much, if not more, character than she.’

‘Don’t compare me with my sister, please,’ interposed Katya hurriedly; ‘that’s too much to my disadvantage. You seem to forget my sister’s beautiful and clever, and ... you in particular, Arkady Nikolaevitch, ought not to say such things, and with such a serious face too.’

‘What do you mean by “you in particular”—and what makes you suppose I am joking?’

‘Of course, you are joking.’

‘You think so? But what if I’m persuaded of what I say? If I believe I have not put it strongly enough even?’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘Really? Well, now I see; I certainly took you to be more observant than you are.’

‘How?’

Arkady made no answer, and turned away, while Katya looked for a few more crumbs in the basket, and began throwing them to the sparrows; but she moved her arm too vigorously, and they flew away, without stopping to pick them up.

‘Katerina Sergyevna!’ began Arkady suddenly; ‘it’s of no consequence to you, probably; but, let me tell you, I put you not only above your sister, but above every one in the world.’

He got up and went quickly away, as though he were frightened at the words that had fallen from his lips.

Katya let her two hands drop together with the basket on to her lap, and with bent head she stared a long while after Arkady. Gradually a crimson flush came faintly out upon her cheeks; but her lips did not smile and her dark eyes had a look of perplexity and some other, as yet undefined, feeling.

‘Are you alone?’ she heard the voice of Anna Sergyevna near her; ‘I thought you came into the garden with Arkady.’

Katya slowly raised her eyes to her sister (elegantly, even elaborately dressed, she was standing in the path and tickling Fifi’s ears with the tip of her open parasol), and slowly replied, ‘Yes, I’m alone.’

‘So I see,’ she answered with a smile; ‘I suppose he has gone to his room.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you been reading together?’

‘Yes.’

Anna Sergyevna took Katya by the chin and lifted her face up.

‘You have not been quarrelling, I hope?’

‘No,’ said Katya, and she quietly removed her sister’s hand.

‘How solemnly you answer! I expected to find him here, and meant to suggest his coming a walk with me. That’s what he is always asking for. They have sent you some shoes from the town; go and try them on; I noticed only yesterday your old ones are quite shabby. You never think enough about it, and you have such charming little feet! Your hands are nice too ... though they’re large; so you must make the most of your little feet. But you’re not vain.’

Anna Sergyevna went farther along the path with a light rustle of her beautiful gown; Katya got up from the grass, and, taking Heine with her, went away too—but not to try on her shoes.

‘Charming little feet!’ she thought, as she slowly and lightly mounted the stone steps of the terrace, which were burning with the heat of the sun; ‘charming little feet you call them.... Well, he shall be at them.’

But all at once a feeling of shame came upon her, and she ran swiftly upstairs.

Arkady had gone along the corridor to his room; a steward had overtaken him, and announced that Mr. Bazarov was in his room.

‘Yevgeny!’ murmured Arkady, almost with dismay; ‘has he been here long?’

‘Mr. Bazarov arrived this minute, sir, and gave orders not to announce him to Anna Sergyevna, but to show him straight up to you.’

‘Can any misfortune have happened at home?’ thought Arkady, and running hurriedly up the stairs, he at once opened the door. The sight of Bazarov at once reassured him, though a more experienced eye might very probably have discerned signs of inward agitation in the sunken, though still energetic face of the unexpected visitor. With a dusty cloak over his shoulders, with a cap on his head, he was sitting at the window; he did not even get up when Arkady flung himself with noisy exclamations on his neck.

‘This is unexpected! What good luck brought you?’ he kept repeating, bustling about the room like one who both imagines himself and wishes to show himself delighted. ‘I suppose everything’s all right at home; every one’s well, eh?’

‘Everything’s all right, but not every one’s well,’ said Bazarov. ‘Don’t be a chatterbox, but send for some kvass for me, sit down, and listen while I tell you all about it in a few, but, I hope, pretty vigorous sentences.’

Arkady was quiet while Bazarov described his duel with Pavel Petrovitch. Arkady was very much surprised, and even grieved, but he did not think it necessary to show this; he only asked whether his uncle’s wound was really not serious; and on receiving the reply that it was most interesting, but not from a medical point of view, he gave a forced smile, but at heart he felt both wounded and as it were ashamed. Bazarov seemed to understand him.

‘Yes, my dear fellow,’ he commented, ‘you see what comes of living with feudal personages. You turn a feudal personage yourself, and find yourself taking part in knightly tournaments. Well, so I set off for my father’s,’ Bazarov wound up, ‘and I’ve turned in here on the way ... to tell you all this, I should say, if I didn’t think a useless lie a piece of foolery. No, I turned in here—the devil only knows why. You see, it’s sometimes a good thing for a man to take himself by the scruff of the neck and pull himself up, like a radish out of its bed; that’s what I’ve been doing of late.... But I wanted to have one more look at what I’m giving up, at the bed where I’ve been planted.’

‘I hope those words don’t refer to me,’ responded Arkady with some emotion; ‘I hope you don’t think of giving me up?’

Bazarov turned an intent, almost piercing look upon him.

‘Would that be such a grief to you? It strikes me you have given me up already, you look so fresh and smart.... Your affair with Anna Sergyevna must be getting on successfully.’

‘What do you mean by my affair with Anna Sergyevna?’

‘Why, didn’t you come here from the town on her account, chicken? By the way, how are those Sunday schools getting on? Do you mean to tell me you’re not in love with her? Or have you already reached the stage of discretion?’

‘Yevgeny, you know I have always been open with you; I can assure you, I will swear to you, you’re making a mistake.’

‘Hm! That’s another story,’ remarked Bazarov in an undertone. ‘But you needn’t be in a taking, it’s a matter of absolute indifference to me. A sentimentalist would say, “I feel that our paths are beginning to part,” but I will simply say that we’re tired of each other.’

‘Yevgeny ...’

‘My dear soul, there’s no great harm in that. One gets tired of much more than that in this life. And now I suppose we’d better say good-bye, hadn’t we? Ever since I’ve been here I’ve had such a loathsome feeling, just as if I’d been reading Gogol’s effusions to the governor of Kalouga’s wife. By the way, I didn’t tell them to take the horses out.’

‘Upon my word, this is too much!’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll say nothing of myself; but that would be discourteous to the last degree to Anna Sergyevna, who will certainly wish to see you.’

‘Oh, you’re mistaken there.’

‘On the contrary, I am certain I’m right,’ retorted Arkady. ‘And what are you pretending for? If it comes to that, haven’t you come here on her account yourself?’

‘That may be so, but you’re mistaken any way.’

But Arkady was right. Anna Sergyevna desired to see Bazarov, and sent a summons to him by a steward. Bazarov changed his clothes before going to her; it turned out that he had packed his new suit so as to be able to get it out easily.

Madame Odintsov received him not in the room where he had so unexpectedly declared his love to her, but in the drawing-room. She held her finger tips out to him cordially, but her face betrayed an involuntary sense of tension.

‘Anna Sergyevna,’ Bazarov hastened to say, ‘before everything else I must set your mind at rest. Before you is a poor mortal, who has come to his senses long ago, and hopes other people too have forgotten his follies. I am going away for a long while; and though, as you will allow, I’m by no means a very soft creature, it would be anything but cheerful for me to carry away with me the idea that you remember me with repugnance.’

Anna Sergyevna gave a deep sigh like one who has just climbed up a high mountain, and her face was lighted up by a smile. She held out her hand a second time to Bazarov, and responded to his pressure.

‘Let bygones be bygones,’ she said. ‘I am all the readier to do so because, speaking from my conscience, I was to blame then too for flirting or something. In a word, let us be friends as before. That was a dream, wasn’t it? And who remembers dreams?’

‘Who remembers them? And besides, love ... you know, is a purely imaginary feeling.’

‘Really? I am very glad to hear that.’

So Anna Sergyevna spoke, and so spoke Bazarov; they both supposed they were speaking the truth. Was the truth, the whole truth, to be found in their words? They could not themselves have said, and much less could the author. But a conversation followed between them precisely as though they completely believed one another.

Anna Sergyevna asked Bazarov, among other things, what he had been doing at the Kirsanovs’. He was on the point of telling her about his duel with Pavel Petrovitch, but he checked himself with the thought that she might imagine he was trying to make himself interesting, and answered that he had been at work all the time.

‘And I,’ observed Anna Sergyevna, ‘had a fit of depression at first, goodness knows why; I even made plans for going abroad, fancy!... Then it passed off, your friend Arkady Nikolaitch came, and I fell back into my old routine, and took up my real part again.’

‘What part is that, may I ask?’

‘The character of aunt, guardian, mother—call it what you like. By the way, do you know I used not quite to understand your close friendship with Arkady Nikolaitch; I thought him rather insignificant. But now I have come to know him better, and to see that he is clever.... And he’s young, he’s young ... that’s the great thing ... not like you and me, Yevgeny Vassilyitch.’

‘Is he still as shy in your company?’ queried Bazarov.

‘Why, was he?’ ... Anna Sergyevna began, and after a brief pause she went on: ‘He has grown more confiding now; he talks to me. He used to avoid me before. Though, indeed, I didn’t seek his society either. He’s more friends with Katya.’

Bazarov felt irritated. ‘A woman can’t help humbugging, of course!’ he thought. ‘You say he used to avoid you,’ he said aloud, with a chilly smile; ‘but it is probably no secret to you that he was in love with you?’

‘What! he too?’ fell from Anna Sergyevna’s lips.

‘He too,’ repeated Bazarov, with a submissive bow. ‘Can it be you didn’t know it, and I’ve told you something new?’

Anna Sergyevna dropped her eyes. ‘You are mistaken, Yevgeny Vassilyitch.’

‘I don’t think so. But perhaps I ought not to have mentioned it.’ ‘And don’t you try telling me lies again for the future,’ he added to himself.

‘Why not? But I imagine that in this too you are attributing too much importance to a passing impression. I begin to suspect you are inclined to exaggeration.’

‘We had better not talk about it, Anna Sergyevna.’

‘Oh, why?’ she retorted; but she herself led the conversation into another channel. She was still ill at ease with Bazarov, though she had told him, and assured herself that everything was forgotten. While she was exchanging the simplest sentences with him, even while she was jesting with him, she was conscious of a faint spasm of dread. So people on a steamer at sea talk and laugh carelessly, for all the world as though they were on dry land; but let only the slightest hitch occur, let the least sign be seen of anything out of the common, and at once on every face there comes out an expression of peculiar alarm, betraying the constant consciousness of constant danger.

Anna Sergyevna’s conversation with Bazarov did not last long. She began to seem absorbed in thought, answered abstractedly, and suggested at last that they should go into the hall, where they found the princess and Katya. ‘But where is Arkady Nikolaitch?’ inquired the lady of the house; and on hearing that he had not shown himself for more than an hour, she sent for him. He was not very quickly found; he had hidden himself in the very thickest part of the garden, and with his chin propped on his folded hands, he was sitting lost in meditation. They were deep and serious meditations, but not mournful. He knew Anna Sergyevna was sitting alone with Bazarov, and he felt no jealousy, as once he had; on the contrary, his face slowly brightened; he seemed to be at once wondering and rejoicing, and resolving on something.

Chapter XXVI

The deceased Odintsov had not liked innovations, but he had tolerated ‘the fine arts within a certain sphere,’ and had in consequence put up in his garden, between the hothouse and the lake, an erection after the fashion of a Greek temple, made of Russian brick. Along the dark wall at the back of this temple or gallery were placed six niches for statues, which Odintsov had proceeded to order from abroad. These statues were to represent Solitude, Silence, Meditation, Melancholy, Modesty, and Sensibility. One of them, the goddess of Silence, with her finger on her lip, had been sent and put up; but on the very same day some boys on the farm had broken her nose; and though a plasterer of the neighbourhood undertook to make her a new nose ‘twice as good as the old one,’ Odintsov ordered her to be taken away, and she was still to be seen in the corner of the threshing barn, where she had stood many long years, a source of superstitious terror to the peasant women. The front part of the temple had long ago been overgrown with thick bushes; only the pediments of the columns could be seen above the dense green. In the temple itself it was cool even at mid-day. Anna Sergyevna had not liked visiting this place ever since she had seen a snake there; but Katya often came and sat on the wide stone seat under one of the niches. Here, in the midst of the shade and coolness, she used to read and work, or to give herself up to that sensation of perfect peace, known, doubtless, to each of us, the charm of which consists in the half-unconscious, silent listening to the vast current of life that flows for ever both around us and within us.

The day after Bazarov’s arrival Katya was sitting on her favourite stone seat, and beside her again was sitting Arkady. He had besought her to come with him to the ‘temple.’

There was about an hour still to lunch-time; the dewy morning had already given place to a sultry day. Arkady’s face retained the expression of the preceding day; Katya had a preoccupied look. Her sister had, directly after their morning tea, called her into her room, and after some preliminary caresses, which always scared Katya a little, she had advised her to be more guarded in her behaviour with Arkady, and especially to avoid solitary talks with him, as likely to attract the notice of her aunt and all the household. Besides this, even the previous evening Anna Sergyevna had not been herself; and Katya herself had felt ill at ease, as though she were conscious of some fault in herself. As she yielded to Arkady’s entreaties, she said to herself that it was for the last time.

‘Katerina Sergyevna,’ he began with a sort of bashful easiness, ‘since I’ve had the happiness of living in the same house with you, I have discussed a great many things with you; but meanwhile there is one, very important ... for me ... one question, which I have not touched upon up till now. You remarked yesterday that I have been changed here,’ he went on, at once catching and avoiding the questioning glance Katya was turning upon him. ‘I have changed certainly a great deal, and you know that better than any one else—you to whom I really owe this change.’

‘I?... Me?...’ said Katya.

‘I am not now the conceited boy I was when I came here,’ Arkady went on. ‘I’ve not reached twenty-three for nothing; as before, I want to be useful, I want to devote all my powers to the truth; but I no longer look for my ideals where I did; they present themselves to me ... much closer to hand. Up till now I did not understand myself; I set myself tasks which were beyond my powers.... My eyes have been opened lately, thanks to one feeling.... I’m not expressing myself quite clearly, but I hope you understand me.’

Katya made no reply, but she ceased looking at Arkady.

‘I suppose,’ he began again, this time in a more agitated voice, while above his head a chaffinch sang its song unheeding among the leaves of the birch—‘I suppose it’s the duty of every one to be open with those ... with those people who ... in fact, with those who are near to him, and so I ... I resolved ...’

But here Arkady’s eloquence deserted him; he lost the thread, stammered, and was forced to be silent for a moment. Katya still did not raise her eyes. She seemed not to understand what he was leading up to in all this, and to be waiting for something.

‘I foresee I shall surprise you,’ began Arkady, pulling himself together again with an effort, ‘especially since this feeling relates in a way ... in a way, notice ... to you. You reproached me, if you remember, yesterday with a want of seriousness,’ Arkady went on, with the air of a man who has got into a bog, feels that he is sinking further and further in at every step, and yet hurries onwards in the hope of crossing it as soon as possible; ‘that reproach is often aimed ... often falls ... on young men even when they cease to deserve it; and if I had more self-confidence ...’ (‘Come, help me, do help me!’ Arkady was thinking, in desperation; but, as before, Katya did not turn her head.) ‘If I could hope ...’

‘If I could feel sure of what you say,’ was heard at that instant the clear voice of Anna Sergyevna.

Arkady was still at once, while Katya turned pale. Close by the bushes that screened the temple ran a little path. Anna Sergyevna was walking along it escorted by Bazarov. Katya and Arkady could not see them, but they heard every word, the rustle of their clothes, their very breathing. They walked on a few steps, and, as though on purpose, stood still just opposite the temple.

‘You see,’ pursued Anna Sergyevna, ‘you and I made a mistake; we are both past our first youth, I especially so; we have seen life, we are tired; we are both—why affect not to know it?—clever; at first we interested each other, curiosity was aroused ... and then ...’

‘And then I grew stale,’ put in Bazarov.

‘You know that was not the cause of our misunderstanding. But, however, it was to be, we had no need of one another, that’s the chief point; there was too much ... what shall I say? ... that was alike in us. We did not realise it all at once. Now, Arkady ...’

‘So you need him?’ queried Bazarov.

‘Hush, Yevgeny Vassilyitch. You tell me he is not indifferent to me, and it always seemed to me he liked me. I know that I might well be his aunt, but I don’t wish to conceal from you that I have come to think more often of him. In such youthful, fresh feeling there is a special charm ...’

‘The word fascination is most usual in such cases,’ Bazarov interrupted; the effervescence of his spleen could be heard in his choked though steady voice. ‘Arkady was mysterious over something with me yesterday, and didn’t talk either of you or your sister.... That’s a serious symptom.’

‘He is just like a brother with Katya,’ commented Anna Sergyevna, ‘and I like that in him, though, perhaps, I ought not to have allowed such intimacy between them.’

‘That idea is prompted by ... your feelings as a sister?’ Bazarov brought out, drawling.

‘Of course ... but why are we standing still? Let us go on. What a strange talk we are having, aren’t we? I could never have believed I should talk to you like this. You know, I am afraid of you ... and at the same time I trust you, because in reality you are so good.’

‘In the first place, I am not in the least good; and in the second place, I have lost all significance for you, and you tell me I am good.... It’s like a laying a wreath of flowers on the head of a corpse.’

‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch, we are not responsible ...’ Anna Sergyevna began; but a gust of wind blew across, set the leaves rustling, and carried away her words. ‘Of course, you are free ...’ Bazarov declared after a brief pause. Nothing more could be distinguished; the steps retreated ... everything was still.

Arkady turned to Katya. She was sitting in the same position, but her head was bent still lower. ‘Katerina Sergyevna,’ he said with a shaking voice, and clasping his hands tightly together, ‘I love you for ever and irrevocably, and I love no one but you. I wanted to tell you this, to find out your opinion of me, and to ask for your hand, since I am not rich, and I feel ready for any sacrifice.... You don’t answer me? You don’t believe me? Do you think I speak lightly? But remember these last days! Surely for a long time past you must have known that everything—understand me—everything else has vanished long ago and left no trace? Look at me, say one word to me ... I love ... I love you ... believe me!’

Katya glanced at Arkady with a bright and serious look, and after long hesitation, with the faintest smile, she said, ‘Yes.’

Arkady leapt up from the stone seat. ‘Yes! You said Yes, Katerina Sergyevna! What does that word mean? Only that I do love you, that you believe me ... or ... or ... I daren’t go on ...’

‘Yes,’ repeated Katya, and this time he understood her. He snatched her large beautiful hands, and, breathless with rapture, pressed them to his heart. He could scarcely stand on his feet, and could only repeat, ‘Katya, Katya ...’ while she began weeping in a guileless way, smiling gently at her own tears. No one who has not seen those tears in the eyes of the beloved, knows yet to what a point, faint with shame and gratitude, a man may be happy on earth.

The next day, early in the morning, Anna Sergyevna sent to summon Bazarov to her boudoir, and with a forced laugh handed him a folded sheet of notepaper. It was a letter from Arkady; in it he asked for her sister’s hand.

Bazarov quickly scanned the letter, and made an effort to control himself, that he might not show the malignant feeling which was instantaneously aflame in his breast.

‘So that’s how it is,’ he commented; ‘and you, I fancy, only yesterday imagined he loved Katerina Sergyevna as a brother. What are you intending to do now?’

‘What do you advise me?’ asked Anna Sergyevna, still laughing.

‘Well, I suppose,’ answered Bazarov, also with a laugh, though he felt anything but cheerful, and had no more inclination to laugh than she had; ‘I suppose you ought to give the young people your blessing. It’s a good match in every respect; Kirsanov’s position is passable, he’s the only son, and his father’s a good-natured fellow, he won’t try to thwart him.’

Madame Odintsov walked up and down the room. By turns her face flushed and grew pale. ‘You think so,’ she said. ‘Well, I see no obstacles ... I am glad for Katya ... and for Arkady Nikolaevitch too. Of course, I will wait for his father’s answer. I will send him in person to him. But it turns out, you see, that I was right yesterday when I told you we were both old people.... How was it I saw nothing? That’s what amazes me!’ Anna Sergyevna laughed again, and quickly turned her head away.

‘The younger generation have grown awfully sly,’ remarked Bazarov, and he too laughed. ‘Good-bye,’ he began again after a short silence. ‘I hope you will bring the matter to the most satisfactory conclusion; and I will rejoice from a distance.’

Madame Odintsov turned quickly to him. ‘You are not going away? Why should you not stay now? Stay ... it’s exciting talking to you ... one seems walking on the edge of a precipice. At first one feels timid, but one gains courage as one goes on. Do stay.’

‘Thanks for the suggestion, Anna Sergyevna, and for your flattering opinion of my conversational talents. But I think I have already been moving too long in a sphere which is not my own. Flying fishes can hold out for a time in the air; but soon they must splash back into the water; allow me, too, to paddle in my own element.’

Madame Odintsov looked at Bazarov. His pale face was twitching with a bitter smile. ‘This man did love me!’ she thought, and she felt pity for him, and held out her hand to him with sympathy.

But he too understood her. ‘No!’ he said, stepping back a pace. ‘I’m a poor man, but I’ve never taken charity so far. Good-bye, and good luck to you.’

‘I am certain we are not seeing each other for the last time,’ Anna Sergyevna declared with an unconscious gesture.

‘Anything may happen!’ answered Bazarov, and he bowed and went away.

‘So you are thinking of making yourself a nest?’ he said the same day to Arkady, as he packed his box, crouching on the floor. ‘Well, it’s a capital thing. But you needn’t have been such a humbug. I expected something from you in quite another quarter. Perhaps, though, it took you by surprise yourself?’

‘I certainly didn’t expect this when I parted from you,’ answered Arkady; ‘but why are you a humbug yourself, calling it “a capital thing,” as though I didn’t know your opinion of marriage.’

‘Ah, my dear fellow,’ said Bazarov, ‘how you talk! You see what I’m doing; there seems to be an empty space in the box, and I am putting hay in; that’s how it is in the box of our life; we would stuff it up with anything rather than have a void. Don’t be offended, please; you remember, no doubt, the opinion I have always had of Katerina Sergyevna. Many a young lady’s called clever simply because she can sigh cleverly; but yours can hold her own, and, indeed, she’ll hold it so well that she’ll have you under her thumb—to be sure, though, that’s quite as it ought to be.’ He slammed the lid to, and got up from the floor. ‘And now, I say again, good-bye, for it’s useless to deceive ourselves—we are parting for good, and you know that yourself ... you have acted sensibly; you’re not made for our bitter, rough, lonely existence. There’s no dash, no hate in you, but you’ve the daring of youth and the fire of youth. Your sort, you gentry, can never get beyond refined submission or refined indignation, and that’s no good. You won’t fight—and yet you fancy yourselves gallant chaps—but we mean to fight. Oh well! Our dust would get into your eyes, our mud would bespatter you, but yet you’re not up to our level, you’re admiring yourselves unconsciously, you like to abuse yourselves; but we’re sick of that—we want something else! we want to smash other people! You’re a capital fellow; but you’re a sugary, liberal snob for all that—ay volla-too, as my parent is fond of saying.’

‘You are parting from me for ever, Yevgeny,’ responded Arkady mournfully; ‘and have you nothing else to say to me?’

Bazarov scratched the back of his head. ‘Yes, Arkady, yes, I have other things to say to you, but I’m not going to say them, because that’s sentimentalism—that means, mawkishness. And you get married as soon as you can; and build your nest, and get children to your heart’s content. They’ll have the wit to be born in a better time than you and me. Aha! I see the horses are ready. Time’s up! I’ve said good-bye to every one.... What now? embracing, eh?’

Arkady flung himself on the neck of his former leader and friend, and the tears fairly gushed from his eyes.

‘That’s what comes of being young!’ Bazarov commented calmly. ‘But I rest my hopes on Katerina Sergyevna. You’ll see how quickly she’ll console you! Good-bye, brother!’ he said to Arkady when he had got into the light cart, and, pointing to a pair of jackdaws sitting side by side on the stable roof, he added, ‘That’s for you! follow that example.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Arkady.

‘What? Are you so weak in natural history, or have you forgotten that the jackdaw is a most respectable family bird? An example to you!... Good-bye!’

The cart creaked and rolled away.

Bazarov had spoken truly. In talking that evening with Katya, Arkady completely forgot about his former teacher. He already began to follow her lead, and Katya was conscious of this, and not surprised at it. He was to set off the next day for Maryino, to see Nikolai Petrovitch. Anna Sergyevna was not disposed to put any constraint on the young people, and only on account of the proprieties did not leave them by themselves for too long together. She magnanimously kept the princess out of their way; the latter had been reduced to a state of tearful frenzy by the news of the proposed marriage. At first Anna Sergyevna was afraid the sight of their happiness might prove rather trying to herself, but it turned out quite the other way; this sight not only did not distress her, it interested her, it even softened her at last. Anna Sergyevna felt both glad and sorry at this. ‘It is clear that Bazarov was right,’ she thought; ‘it has been curiosity, nothing but curiosity, and love of ease, and egoism ...’

‘Children,’ she said aloud, ‘what do you say, is love a purely imaginary feeling?’

But neither Katya nor Arkady even understood her. They were shy with her; the fragment of conversation they had involuntarily overheard haunted their minds. But Anna Sergyevna soon set their minds at rest; and it was not difficult for her—she had set her own mind at rest.

Chapter XXVII

Bazarov’s old parents were all the more overjoyed by their son’s arrival, as it was quite unexpected. Arina Vlasyevna was greatly excited, and kept running backwards and forwards in the house, so that Vassily Ivanovitch compared her to a ‘hen partridge’; the short tail of her abbreviated jacket did, in fact, give her something of a birdlike appearance. He himself merely growled and gnawed the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, or, clutching his neck with his fingers, turned his head round, as though he were trying whether it were properly screwed on, then all at once he opened his wide mouth and went off into a perfectly noiseless chuckle.

‘I’ve come to you for six whole weeks, governor,’ Bazarov said to him. ‘I want to work, so please don’t hinder me now.’

‘You shall forget my face completely, if you call that hindering you!’ answered Vassily Ivanovitch.

He kept his promise. After installing his son as before in his study, he almost hid himself away from him, and he kept his wife from all superfluous demonstrations of tenderness. ‘On Enyusha’s first visit, my dear soul,’ he said to her, ‘we bothered him a little; we must be wiser this time.’ Arina Vlasyevna agreed with her husband, but that was small compensation since she saw her son only at meals, and was now absolutely afraid to address him. ‘Enyushenka,’ she would say sometimes—and before he had time to look round, she was nervously fingering the tassels of her reticule and faltering, ‘Never mind, never mind, I only——’ and afterwards she would go to Vassily Ivanovitch and, her cheek in her hand, would consult him: ‘If you could only find out, darling, which Enyusha would like for dinner to-day—cabbage-broth or beetroot-soup?’—‘But why didn’t you ask him yourself?’—‘Oh, he will get sick of me!’ Bazarov, however, soon ceased to shut himself up; the fever of work fell away, and was replaced by dreary boredom or vague restlessness. A strange weariness began to show itself in all his movements; even his walk, firm, bold and strenuous, was changed. He gave up walking in solitude, and began to seek society; he drank tea in the drawing-room, strolled about the kitchen-garden with Vassily Ivanovitch, and smoked with him in silence; once even asked after Father Alexey. Vassily Ivanovitch at first rejoiced at this change, but his joy was not long-lived. ‘Enyusha’s breaking my heart,’ he complained in secret to his wife; ‘it’s not that he’s discontented or angry—that would be nothing; he’s sad, he’s sorrowful—that’s what’s so terrible. He’s always silent. If he’d only abuse us; he’s growing thin, he’s lost his colour.’—‘Mercy on us, mercy on us!’ whispered the old woman; ‘I would put an amulet on his neck, but, of course, he won’t allow it.’ Vassily Ivanovitch several times attempted in the most circumspect manner to question Bazarov about his work, about his health, and about Arkady.... But Bazarov’s replies were reluctant and casual; and, once noticing that his father was trying gradually to lead up to something in conversation, he said to him in a tone of vexation: ‘Why do you always seem to be walking round me on tiptoe? That way’s worse than the old one.’—‘There, there, I meant nothing!’ poor Vassily Ivanovitch answered hurriedly. So his diplomatic hints remained fruitless. He hoped to awaken his son’s sympathy one day by beginning à propos of the approaching emancipation of the peasantry, to talk about progress; but the latter responded indifferently: ‘Yesterday I was walking under the fence, and I heard the peasant boys here, instead of some old ballad, bawling a street song. That’s what progress is.’

Sometimes Bazarov went into the village, and in his usual bantering tone entered into conversation with some peasant: ‘Come,’ he would say to him, ‘expound your views on life to me, brother; you see, they say all the strength and future of Russia lies in your hands, a new epoch in history will be started by you—you give us our real language and our laws.’

The peasant either made no reply, or articulated a few words of this sort, ‘Well, we’ll try ... because, you see, to be sure....’

‘You explain to me what your mir is,’ Bazarov interrupted; ‘and is it the same mir that is said to rest on three fishes?’

‘That, little father, is the earth that rests on three fishes,’ the peasant would declare soothingly, in a kind of patriarchal, simple-hearted sing-song; ‘and over against ours, that’s to say, the mir, we know there’s the master’s will; wherefore you are our fathers. And the stricter the master’s rule, the better for the peasant.’

After listening to such a reply one day, Bazarov shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and turned away, while the peasant sauntered slowly homewards.

‘What was he talking about?’ inquired another peasant of middle age and surly aspect, who at a distance from the door of his hut had been following his conversation with Bazarov.—‘Arrears? eh?’

‘Arrears, no indeed, mate!’ answered the first peasant, and now there was no trace of patriarchal singsong in his voice; on the contrary, there was a certain scornful gruffness to be heard in it: ‘Oh, he clacked away about something or other; wanted to stretch his tongue a bit. Of course, he’s a gentleman; what does he understand?’

‘What should he understand!’ answered the other peasant, and jerking back their caps and pushing down their belts, they proceeded to deliberate upon their work and their wants. Alas! Bazarov, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, Bazarov, who knew how to talk to peasants (as he had boasted in his dispute with Pavel Petrovitch), did not in his self-confidence even suspect that in their eyes he was all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.

He found employment for himself at last, however. One day Vassily Ivanovitch bound up a peasant’s wounded leg before him, but the old man’s hands trembled, and he could not manage the bandages; his son helped him, and from time to time began to take a share in his practice, though at the same time he was constantly sneering both at the remedies he himself advised and at his father, who hastened to make use of them. But Bazarov’s jeers did not in the least perturb Vassily Ivanovitch; they were positively a comfort to him. Holding his greasy dressing-gown across his stomach with two fingers, and smoking his pipe, he used to listen with enjoyment to Bazarov; and the more malicious his sallies, the more good-humouredly did his delighted father chuckle, showing every one of his black teeth. He used even to repeat these sometimes flat or pointless retorts, and would, for instance, for several days constantly without rhyme or reason, reiterate, ‘Not a matter of the first importance!’ simply because his son, on hearing he was going to matins, had made use of that expression. ‘Thank God! he has got over his melancholy!’ he whispered to his wife; ‘how he gave it to me to-day, it was splendid!’ Moreover, the idea of having such an assistant excited him to ecstasy, filled him with pride. ‘Yes, yes,’ he would say to some peasant woman in a man’s cloak, and a cap shaped like a horn, as he handed her a bottle of Goulard’s extract or a box of white ointment, ‘you ought to be thanking God, my good woman, every minute that my son is staying with me; you will be treated now by the most scientific, most modern method. Do you know what that means? The Emperor of the French, Napoleon, even, has no better doctor.’ And the peasant woman, who had come to complain that she felt so sort of queer all over (the exact meaning of these words she was not able, however, herself to explain), merely bowed low and rummaged in her bosom, where four eggs lay tied up in the corner of a towel.

Bazarov once even pulled out a tooth for a passing pedlar of cloth; and though this tooth was an average specimen, Vassily Ivanovitch preserved it as a curiosity, and incessantly repeated, as he showed it to Father Alexey, ‘Just look, what a fang! The force Yevgeny has! The pedlar seemed to leap into the air. If it had been an oak, he’d have rooted it up!’

‘Most promising!’ Father Alexey would comment at last, not knowing what answer to make, and how to get rid of the ecstatic old man.

One day a peasant from a neighbouring village brought his brother to Vassily Ivanovitch, ill with typhus. The unhappy man, lying flat on a truss of straw, was dying; his body was covered with dark patches, he had long ago lost consciousness. Vassily Ivanovitch expressed his regret that no one had taken steps to procure medical aid sooner, and declared there was no hope. And, in fact, the peasant did not get his brother home again; he died in the cart.

Three days later Bazarov came into his father’s room and asked him if he had any caustic.

‘Yes; what do you want it for?’

‘I must have some ... to burn a cut.’

‘For whom?’

‘For myself.’

‘What, yourself? Why is that? What sort of a cut? Where is it?’

‘Look here, on my finger. I went to-day to the village, you know, where they brought that peasant with typhus fever. They were just going to open the body for some reason or other, and I’ve had no practice of that sort for a long while.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, so I asked the district doctor about it; and so I dissected it.’

Vassily Ivanovitch all at once turned quite white, and, without uttering a word, rushed to his study, from which he returned at once with a bit of caustic in his hand. Bazarov was about to take it and go away.

‘For mercy’s sake,’ said Vassily Ivanovitch, ‘let me do it myself.’

Bazarov smiled. ‘What a devoted practitioner!’

‘Don’t laugh, please. Show me your finger. The cut is not a large one. Do I hurt?’

‘Press harder; don’t be afraid.’

Vassily Ivanovitch stopped. ‘What do you think, Yevgeny; wouldn’t it be better to burn it with hot iron?’

‘That ought to have been done sooner; the caustic even is useless, really, now. If I’ve taken the infection, it’s too late now.’

‘How ... too late ...’ Vassily Ivanovitch could scarcely articulate the words.

‘I should think so! It’s more than four hours ago.’

Vassily Ivanovitch burnt the cut a little more. ‘But had the district doctor no caustic?’

‘No.’

‘How was that, good Heavens? A doctor not have such an indispensable thing as that!’

‘You should have seen his lancets,’ observed Bazarov as he walked away.

Up till late that evening, and all the following day, Vassily Ivanovitch kept catching at every possible excuse to go into his son’s room; and though far from referring to the cut—he even tried to talk about the most irrelevant subjects—he looked so persistently into his face, and watched him in such trepidation, that Bazarov lost patience and threatened to go away. Vassily Ivanovitch gave him a promise not to bother him, the more readily as Arina Vlasyevna, from whom, of course, he kept it all secret, was beginning to worry him as to why he did not sleep, and what had come over him. For two whole days he held himself in, though he did not at all like the look of his son, whom he kept watching stealthily, ... but on the third day, at dinner, he could bear it no longer. Bazarov sat with downcast looks, and had not touched a single dish.

‘Why don’t you eat, Yevgeny?’ he inquired, putting on an expression of the most perfect carelessness. ‘The food, I think, is very nicely cooked.’

‘I don’t want anything, so I don’t eat.’

‘Have you no appetite? And your head?’ he added timidly; ‘does it ache?’

‘Yes. Of course, it aches.’

Arina Vlasyevna sat up and was all alert.

‘Don’t be angry, please, Yevgeny,’ continued Vassily Ivanovitch; ‘won’t you let me feel your pulse?’

Bazarov got up. ‘I can tell you without feeling my pulse; I’m feverish.’

‘Has there been any shivering?’

‘Yes, there has been shivering too. I’ll go and lie down, and you can send me some lime-flower tea. I must have caught cold.’

‘To be sure, I heard you coughing last night,’ observed Arina Vlasyevna.

‘I’ve caught cold,’ repeated Bazarov, and he went away.

Arina Vlasyevna busied herself about the preparation of the decoction of lime-flowers, while Vassily Ivanovitch went into the next room and clutched at his hair in silent desperation.

Bazarov did not get up again that day, and passed the whole night in heavy, half-unconscious torpor. At one o’clock in the morning, opening his eyes with an effort, he saw by the light of a lamp his father’s pale face bending over him, and told him to go away. The old man begged his pardon, but he quickly came back on tiptoe, and half-hidden by the cupboard door, he gazed persistently at his son. Arina Vlasyevna did not go to bed either, and leaving the study door just open a very little, she kept coming up to it to listen ‘how Enyusha was breathing,’ and to look at Vassily Ivanovitch. She could see nothing but his motionless bent back, but even that afforded her some faint consolation. In the morning Bazarov tried to get up; he was seized with giddiness, his nose began to bleed; he lay down again. Vassily Ivanovitch waited on him in silence; Arina Vlasyevna went in to him and asked him how he was feeling. He answered, ‘Better,’ and turned to the wall. Vassily Ivanovitch gesticulated at his wife with both hands; she bit her lips so as not to cry, and went away. The whole house seemed suddenly darkened; every one looked gloomy; there was a strange hush; a shrill cock was carried away from the yard to the village, unable to comprehend why he should be treated so. Bazarov still lay, turned to the wall. Vassily Ivanovitch tried to address him with various questions, but they fatigued Bazarov, and the old man sank into his armchair, motionless, only cracking his finger-joints now and then. He went for a few minutes into the garden, stood there like a statue, as though overwhelmed with unutterable bewilderment (the expression of amazement never left his face all through), and went back again to his son, trying to avoid his wife’s questions. She caught him by the arm at last and passionately, almost menacingly, said, ‘What is wrong with him?’ Then he came to himself, and forced himself to smile at her in reply; but to his own horror, instead of a smile, he found himself taken somehow by a fit of laughter. He had sent at daybreak for a doctor. He thought it necessary to inform his son of this, for fear he should be angry. Bazarov suddenly turned over on the sofa, bent a fixed dull look on his father, and asked for drink.

Vassily Ivanovitch gave him some water, and as he did so felt his forehead. It seemed on fire.

‘Governor,’ began Bazarov, in a slow, drowsy voice; ‘I’m in a bad way; I’ve got the infection, and in a few days you’ll have to bury me.’

Vassily Ivanovitch staggered back, as though some one had aimed a blow at his legs.

‘Yevgeny!’ he faltered; ‘what do you mean!... God have mercy on you! You’ve caught cold!’

‘Hush!’ Bazarov interposed deliberately. ‘A doctor can’t be allowed to talk like that. There’s every symptom of infection; you know yourself.’

‘Where are the symptoms ... of infection Yevgeny?... Good Heavens!’

‘What’s this?’ said Bazarov, and, pulling up his shirtsleeve, he showed his father the ominous red patches coming out on his arm.

Vassily Ivanovitch was shaking and chill with terror.

‘Supposing,’ he said at last, ‘even supposing ... if even there’s something like ... infection ...’

‘Pyæmia,’ put in his son.

‘Well, well ... something of the epidemic ...’

‘Pyæmia,’ Bazarov repeated sharply and distinctly; ‘have you forgotten your text-books?’

‘Well, well—as you like.... Anyway, we will cure you!’

‘Come, that’s humbug. But that’s not the point. I didn’t expect to die so soon; it’s a most unpleasant incident, to tell the truth. You and mother ought to make the most of your strong religious belief; now’s the time to put it to the test.’ He drank off a little water. ‘I want to ask you about one thing ... while my head is still under my control. To-morrow or next day my brain, you know, will send in its resignation. I’m not quite certain even now whether I’m expressing myself clearly. While I’ve been lying here, I’ve kept fancying red dogs were running round me, while you were making them point at me, as if I were a woodcock. Just as if I were drunk. Do you understand me all right?’

‘I assure you, Yevgeny, you are talking perfectly correctly.’

‘All the better. You told me you’d sent for the doctor. You did that to comfort yourself ... comfort me too; send a messenger ...’

‘To Arkady Nikolaitch?’ put in the old man.

‘Who’s Arkady Nikolaitch?’ said Bazarov, as though in doubt.... ‘Oh, yes! that chicken! No, let him alone; he’s turned jackdaw now. Don’t be surprised; that’s not delirium yet. You send a messenger to Madame Odintsov, Anna Sergyevna; she’s a lady with an estate.... Do you know?’ (Vassily Ivanovitch nodded.) ‘Yevgeny Bazarov, say, sends his greetings, and sends word he is dying. Will you do that?’

‘Yes, I will do it.... But is it a possible thing for you to die, Yevgeny?... Think only! Where would divine justice be after that?’

‘I know nothing about that; only you send the messenger.’

‘I’ll send this minute, and I’ll write a letter myself.’

‘No, why? Say I sent greetings; nothing more is necessary. And now I’ll go back to my dogs. Strange! I want to fix my thoughts on death, and nothing comes of it. I see a kind of blur ... and nothing more.’

He turned painfully back to the wall again; while Vassily Ivanovitch went out of the study, and struggling as far as his wife’s bedroom, simply dropped down on to his knees before the holy pictures.

‘Pray, Arina, pray for us!’ he moaned; ‘our son is dying.’

The doctor, the same district doctor who had had no caustic, arrived, and after looking at the patient, advised them to persevere with a cooling treatment, and at that point said a few words of the chance of recovery.

‘Have you ever chanced to see people in my state not set off for Elysium?’ asked Bazarov, and suddenly snatching the leg of a heavy table that stood near his sofa, he swung it round, and pushed it away. ‘There’s strength, there’s strength,’ he murmured; ‘everything’s here still, and I must die!... An old man at least has time to be weaned from life, but I ... Well, go and try to disprove death. Death will disprove you, and that’s all! Who’s crying there?’ he added, after a short pause—‘Mother? Poor thing! Whom will she feed now with her exquisite beetroot-soup? You, Vassily Ivanovitch, whimpering too, I do believe! Why, if Christianity’s no help to you, be a philosopher, a Stoic, or what not! Why, didn’t you boast you were a philosopher?’

‘Me a philosopher!’ wailed Vassily Ivanovitch, while the tears fairly streamed down his cheeks.

Bazarov got worse every hour; the progress of the disease was rapid, as is usually the way in cases of surgical poisoning. He still had not lost consciousness, and understood what was said to him; he was still struggling. ‘I don’t want to lose my wits,’ he muttered, clenching his fists; ‘what rot it all is!’ And at once he would say, ‘Come, take ten from eight, what remains?’ Vassily Ivanovitch wandered about like one possessed, proposed first one remedy, then another, and ended by doing nothing but cover up his son’s feet. ‘Try cold pack ... emetic ... mustard plasters on the stomach ... bleeding,’ he would murmur with an effort. The doctor, whom he had entreated to remain, agreed with him, ordered the patient lemonade to drink, and for himself asked for a pipe and something ‘warming and strengthening’—that’s to say, brandy. Arina Vlasyevna sat on a low stool near the door, and only went out from time to time to pray. A few days before, a looking-glass had slipped out of her hands and been broken, and this she had always considered an omen of evil; even Anfisushka could say nothing to her. Timofeitch had gone off to Madame Odintsov’s.

The night passed badly for Bazarov.... He was in the agonies of high fever. Towards morning he was a little easier. He asked for Arina Vlasyevna to comb his hair, kissed her hand, and swallowed two gulps of tea. Vassily Ivanovitch revived a little.

‘Thank God!’ he kept declaring; ‘the crisis is coming, the crisis is at hand!’

‘There, to think now!’ murmured Bazarov; ‘what a word can do! He’s found it; he’s said “crisis,” and is comforted. It’s an astounding thing how man believes in words. If he’s told he’s a fool, for instance, though he’s not thrashed, he’ll be wretched; call him a clever fellow, and he’ll be delighted if you go off without paying him.’

This little speech of Bazarov’s, recalling his old retorts, moved Vassily Ivanovitch greatly.

‘Bravo! well said, very good!’ he cried, making as though he were clapping his hands.

Bazarov smiled mournfully.

‘So what do you think,’ he said; ‘is the crisis over, or coming?’

‘You are better, that’s what I see, that’s what rejoices me,’ answered Vassily Ivanovitch.

‘Well, that’s good; rejoicings never come amiss. And to her, do you remember? did you send?’

‘To be sure I did.’

The change for the better did not last long. The disease resumed its onslaughts. Vassily Ivanovitch was sitting by Bazarov. It seemed as though the old man were tormented by some special anguish. He was several times on the point of speaking—and could not.

‘Yevgeny!’ he brought out at last; ‘my son, my one, dear son!’

This unfamiliar mode of address produced an effect on Bazarov. He turned his head a little, and, obviously trying to fight against the load of oblivion weighing upon him, he articulated: ‘What is it, father?’

‘Yevgeny,’ Vassily Ivanovitch went on, and he fell on his knees before Bazarov, though the latter had closed his eyes and could not see him. ‘Yevgeny, you are better now; please God, you will get well, but make use of this time, comfort your mother and me, perform the duty of a Christian! What it means for me to say this to you, it’s awful; but still more awful ... for ever and ever, Yevgeny ... think a little, what ...’

The old man’s voice broke, and a strange look passed over his son’s face, though he still lay with closed eyes.

‘I won’t refuse, if that can be any comfort to you,’ he brought out at last; ‘but it seems to me there’s no need to be in a hurry. You say yourself I am better.’

‘Oh, yes, Yevgeny, better certainly; but who knows, it is all in God’s hands, and in doing the duty ...’

‘No, I will wait a bit,’ broke in Bazarov. ‘I agree with you that the crisis has come. And if we’re mistaken, well! they give the sacrament to men who’re unconscious, you know.’

‘Yevgeny, I beg.’

‘I’ll wait a little. And now I want to go to sleep. Don’t disturb me.’ And he laid his head back on the pillow.

The old man rose from his knees, sat down in the armchair, and, clutching his beard, began biting his own fingers ...

The sound of a light carriage on springs, that sound which is peculiarly impressive in the wilds of the country, suddenly struck upon his hearing. Nearer and nearer rolled the light wheels; now even the neighing of the horses could be heard.... Vassily Ivanovitch jumped up and ran to the little window. There drove into the courtyard of his little house a carriage with seats for two, with four horses harnessed abreast. Without stopping to consider what it could mean, with a rush of a sort of senseless joy, he ran out on to the steps.... A groom in livery was opening the carriage doors; a lady in a black veil and a black mantle was getting out of it ...

‘I am Madame Odintsov,’ she said. ‘Yevgeny Vassilvitch is still living? You are his father? I have a doctor with me.’

‘Benefactress!’ cried Vassily Ivanovitch, and snatching her hand, he pressed it convulsively to his lips, while the doctor brought by Anna Sergyevna, a little man in spectacles, of German physiognomy, stepped very deliberately out of the carriage. ‘Still living, my Yevgeny is living, and now he will be saved! Wife! wife!... An angel from heaven has come to us....’

‘What does it mean, good Lord!’ faltered the old woman, running out of the drawing-room; and, comprehending nothing, she fell on the spot in the passage at Anna Sergyevna’s feet, and began kissing her garments like a mad woman.

‘What are you doing!’ protested Anna Sergyevna; but Arina Vlasyevna did not heed her, while Vassily Ivanovitch could only repeat, ‘An angel! an angel!’

‘Wo ist der Kranke? and where is the patient?’ said the doctor at last, with some impatience.

Vassily Ivanovitch recovered himself. ‘Here, here, follow me, würdigster Herr Collega,’ he added through old associations.

‘Ah!’ articulated the German, grinning sourly.

Vassily Ivanovitch led him into the study. ‘The doctor from Anna Sergyevna Odintsov,’ he said, bending down quite to his son’s ear, ‘and she herself is here.’

Bazarov suddenly opened his eyes. ‘What did you say?’

‘I say that Anna Sergyevna is here, and has brought this gentleman, a doctor, to you.’

Bazarov moved his eyes about him. ‘She is here.... I want to see her.’

‘You shall see her, Yevgeny; but first we must have a little talk with the doctor. I will tell him the whole history of your illness since Sidor Sidoritch’ (this was the name of the district doctor) ‘has gone, and we will have a little consultation.’

Bazarov glanced at the German. ‘Well, talk away quickly, only not in Latin; you see, I know the meaning of jam moritur.’

‘Der Herr scheint des Deutschen mächtig zu sein,’ began the new follower of Æsculapius, turning to Vassily Ivanovitch.

‘Ich ... gabe ... We had better speak Russian,’ said the old man.

‘Ah, ah! so that’s how it is.... To be sure ...’ And the consultation began.

Half-an-hour later Anna Sergyevna, conducted by Vassily Ivanovitch, came into the study. The doctor had had time to whisper to her that it was hopeless even to think of the patient’s recovery.

She looked at Bazarov ... and stood still in the doorway, so greatly was she impressed by the inflamed, and at the same time deathly face, with its dim eyes fastened upon her. She felt simply dismayed, with a sort of cold and suffocating dismay; the thought that she would not have felt like that if she had really loved him flashed instantaneously through her brain.

‘Thanks,’ he said painfully, ‘I did not expect this. It’s a deed of mercy. So we have seen each other again, as you promised.’

‘Anna Sergyevna has been so kind,’ began Vassily Ivanovitch ...

‘Father, leave us alone. Anna Sergyevna, you will allow it, I fancy, now?’

With a motion of his head, he indicated his prostrate helpless frame.

Vassily Ivanovitch went out.

‘Well, thanks,’ repeated Bazarov. ‘This is royally done. Monarchs, they say, visit the dying too.’

‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch, I hope——’

‘Ah, Anna Sergyevna, let us speak the truth. It’s all over with me. I’m under the wheel. So it turns out that it was useless to think of the future. Death’s an old joke, but it comes fresh to every one. So far I’m not afraid ... but there, senselessness is coming, and then it’s all up!——’ he waved his hand feebly. ‘Well, what had I to say to you ... I loved you! there was no sense in that even before, and less than ever now. Love is a form, and my own form is already breaking up. Better say how lovely you are! And now here you stand, so beautiful ...’

Anna Sergyevna gave an involuntary shudder.

‘Never mind, don’t be uneasy.... Sit down there.... Don’t come close to me; you know, my illness is catching.’

Anna Sergyevna swiftly crossed the room, and sat down in the armchair near the sofa on which Bazarov was lying.

‘Noble-hearted!’ he whispered. ‘Oh, how near, and how young, and fresh, and pure ... in this loathsome room!... Well, good-bye! live long, that’s the best of all, and make the most of it while there is time. You see what a hideous spectacle; the worm half-crushed, but writhing still. And, you see, I thought too: I’d break down so many things, I wouldn’t die, why should I! there were problems to solve, and I was a giant! And now all the problem for the giant is how to die decently, though that makes no difference to any one either.... Never mind; I’m not going to turn tail.’

Bazarov was silent, and began feeling with his hand for the glass. Anna Sergyevna gave him some drink, not taking off her glove, and drawing her breath timorously.

‘You will forget me,’ he began again; ‘the dead’s no companion for the living. My father will tell you what a man Russia is losing.... That’s nonsense, but don’t contradict the old man. Whatever toy will comfort the child ... you know. And be kind to mother. People like them aren’t to be found in your great world if you look by daylight with a candle.... I was needed by Russia.... No, it’s clear, I wasn’t needed. And who is needed? The shoemaker’s needed, the tailor’s needed, the butcher ... gives us meat ... the butcher ... wait a little, I’m getting mixed.... There’s a forest here ...’

Bazarov put his hand to his brow.

Anna Sergyevna bent down to him. ‘Yevgeny Vassilyitch, I am here ...’

He at once took his hand away, and raised himself.

‘Good-bye,’ he said with sudden force, and his eyes gleamed with their last light. ‘Good-bye.... Listen ... you know I didn’t kiss you then.... Breathe on the dying lamp, and let it go out ...’

Anna Sergyevna put her lips to his forehead.

‘Enough!’ he murmured, and dropped back on to the pillow. ‘Now ... darkness ...’

Anna Sergyevna went softly out. ‘Well?’ Vassily Ivanovitch asked her in a whisper.

‘He has fallen asleep,’ she answered, hardly audibly. Bazarov was not fated to awaken. Towards evening he sank into complete unconsciousness, and the following day he died. Father Alexey performed the last rites of religion over him. When they anointed him with the last unction, when the holy oil touched his breast, one eye opened, and it seemed as though at the sight of the priest in his vestments, the smoking censers, the light before the image, something like a shudder of horror passed over the death-stricken face. When at last he had breathed his last, and there arose a universal lamentation in the house, Vassily Ivanovitch was seized by a sudden frenzy. ‘I said I should rebel,’ he shrieked hoarsely, with his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening some one; ‘and I rebel, I rebel!’ But Arina Vlasyevna, all in tears, hung upon his neck, and both fell on their faces together. ‘Side by side,’ Anfisushka related afterwards in the servants’ room, ‘they dropped their poor heads like lambs at noonday ...’

But the heat of noonday passes, and evening comes and night, and then, too, the return to the kindly refuge, where sleep is sweet for the weary and heavy laden....

Chapter XXVIII

Six months had passed by. White winter had come with the cruel stillness of unclouded frosts, the thick-lying, crunching snow, the rosy rime on the trees, the pale emerald sky, the wreaths of smoke above the chimneys, the clouds of steam rushing out of the doors when they are opened for an instant, with the fresh faces, that look stung by the cold, and the hurrying trot of the chilled horses. A January day was drawing to its close; the cold evening was more keen than ever in the motionless air, and a lurid sunset was rapidly dying away. There were lights burning in the windows of the house at Maryino; Prokofitch in a black frockcoat and white gloves, with a special solemnity, laid the table for seven. A week before in the small parish church two weddings had taken place quietly, and almost without witnesses—Arkady and Katya’s, and Nikolai Petrovitch and Fenitchka’s; and on this day Nikolai Petrovitch was giving a farewell dinner to his brother, who was going away to Moscow on business. Anna Sergyevna had gone there also directly after the ceremony was over, after making very handsome presents to the young people.

Precisely at three o’clock they all gathered about the table. Mitya was placed there too; with him appeared a nurse in a cap of glazed brocade. Pavel Petrovitch took his seat between Katya and Fenitchka; the ‘husbands’ took their places beside their wives. Our friends had changed of late; they all seemed to have grown stronger and better looking; only Pavel Petrovitch was thinner, which gave even more of an elegant and ‘grand seigneur’ air to his expressive features.... And Fenitchka too was different. In a fresh silk gown, with a wide velvet head-dress on her hair, with a gold chain round her neck, she sat with deprecating immobility, respectful towards herself and everything surrounding her, and smiled as though she would say, ‘I beg your pardon; I’m not to blame.’ And not she alone—all the others smiled, and also seemed apologetic; they were all a little awkward, a little sorry, and in reality very happy. They all helped one another with humorous attentiveness, as though they had all agreed to rehearse a sort of artless farce. Katya was the most composed of all; she looked confidently about her, and it could be seen that Nikolai Petrovitch was already devotedly fond of her. At the end of dinner he got up, and, his glass in his hand, turned to Pavel Petrovitch.

‘You are leaving us ... you are leaving us, dear brother,’ he began; ‘not for long, to be sure; but still, I cannot help expressing what I ... what we ... how much I ... how much we.... There, the worst of it is, we don’t know how to make speeches. Arkady, you speak.’

‘No, daddy, I’ve not prepared anything.’

‘As though I were so well prepared! Well, brother, I will simply say, let us embrace you, wish you all good luck, and come back to us as quickly as you can!’

Pavel Petrovitch exchanged kisses with every one, of course not excluding Mitya; in Fenitchka’s case, he kissed also her hand, which she had not yet learned to offer properly, and drinking off the glass which had been filled again, he said with a deep sigh, ‘May you be happy, my friends! Farewell!’ This English finale passed unnoticed; but all were touched.

‘To the memory of Bazarov,’ Katya whispered in her husband’s ear, as she clinked glasses with him. Arkady pressed her hand warmly in response, but he did not venture to propose this toast aloud.

The end, would it seem? But perhaps some one of our readers would care to know what each of the characters we have introduced is doing in the present, the actual present. We are ready to satisfy him.

Anna Sergyevna has recently made a marriage, not of love but of good sense, with one of the future leaders of Russia, a very clever man, a lawyer, possessed of vigorous practical sense, a strong will, and remarkable fluency—still young, good-natured, and cold as ice. They live in the greatest harmony together, and will live perhaps to attain complete happiness ... perhaps love. The Princess K—— is dead, forgotten the day of her death. The Kirsanovs, father and son, live at Maryino; their fortunes are beginning to mend. Arkady has become zealous in the management of the estate, and the ‘farm’ now yields a fairly good income. Nikolai Petrovitch has been made one of the mediators appointed to carry out the emancipation reforms, and works with all his energies; he is for ever driving about over his district; delivers long speeches (he maintains the opinion that the peasants ought to be ‘brought to comprehend things,’ that is to say, they ought to be reduced to a state of quiescence by the constant repetition of the same words); and yet, to tell the truth, he does not give complete satisfaction either to the refined gentry, who talk with chic, or depression of the emancipation (pronouncing it as though it were French), nor of the uncultivated gentry, who unceremoniously curse ‘the damned ‘mancipation.’ He is too soft-hearted for both sets. Katerina Sergyevna has a son, little Nikolai, while Mitya runs about merrily and talks fluently. Fenitchka, Fedosya Nikolaevna, after her husband and Mitya, adores no one so much as her daughter-in-law, and when the latter is at the piano, she would gladly spend the whole day at her side.

A passing word of Piotr. He has grown perfectly rigid with stupidity and dignity, but he too is married, and received a respectable dowry with his bride, the daughter of a market-gardener of the town, who had refused two excellent suitors, only because they had no watch; while Piotr had not only a watch—he had a pair of kid shoes.

In the Brühl Terrace in Dresden, between two and four o’clock—the most fashionable time for walking—you may meet a man about fifty, quite grey, and looking as though he suffered from gout, but still handsome, elegantly dressed, and with that special stamp, which is only gained by moving a long time in the higher strata of society. That is Pavel Petrovitch. From Moscow he went abroad for the sake of his health, and has settled for good at Dresden, where he associates most with English and Russian visitors. With English people he behaves simply, almost modestly, but with dignity; they find him rather a bore, but respect him for being, as they say, ‘a perfect gentleman.’ With Russians he is more free and easy, gives vent to his spleen, and makes fun of himself and them, but that is done by him with great amiability, negligence, and propriety. He holds Slavophil views; it is well known that in the highest society this is regarded as très distingué! He reads nothing in Russian, but on his writing table there is a silver ashpan in the shape of a peasant’s plaited shoe. He is much run after by our tourists. Matvy Ilyitch Kolyazin, happening to be in temporary opposition, paid him a majestic visit; while the natives, with whom, however, he is very little seen, positively grovel before him. No one can so readily and quickly obtain a ticket for the court chapel, for the theatre, and such things as der Herr Baron von Kirsanoff. He does everything good-naturedly that he can; he still makes some little noise in the world; it is not for nothing that he was once a great society lion;—but life is a burden to him ... a heavier burden than he suspects himself. One need but glance at him in the Russian church, when, leaning against the wall on one side, he sinks into thought, and remains long without stirring, bitterly compressing his lips, then suddenly recollects himself, and begins almost imperceptibly crossing himself....

Madame Kukshin, too, went abroad. She is in Heidelberg, and is now studying not natural science, but architecture, in which, according to her own account, she has discovered new laws. She still fraternises with students, especially with the young Russians studying natural science and chemistry, with whom Heidelberg is crowded, and who, astounding the naïve German professors at first by the soundness of their views of things, astound the same professors no less in the sequel by their complete inefficiency and absolute idleness. In company with two or three such young chemists, who don’t know oxygen from nitrogen, but are filled with scepticism and self-conceit, and, too, with the great Elisyevitch, Sitnikov roams about Petersburg, also getting ready to be great, and in his own conviction continues the ‘work’ of Bazarov. There is a story that some one recently gave him a beating; but he was avenged upon him; in an obscure little article, hidden in an obscure little journal, he has hinted that the man who beat him was a coward. He calls this irony. His father bullies him as before, while his wife regards him as a fool ... and a literary man.

There is a small village graveyard in one of the remote corners of Russia. Like almost all our graveyards, it presents a wretched appearance; the ditches surrounding it have long been overgrown; the grey wooden crosses lie fallen and rotting under their once painted gables; the stone slabs are all displaced, as though some one were pushing them up from behind; two or three bare trees give a scanty shade; the sheep wander unchecked among the tombs.... But among them is one untouched by man, untrampled by beast, only the birds perch upon it and sing at daybreak. An iron railing runs round it; two young fir-trees have been planted, one at each end. Yevgeny Bazarov is buried in this tomb. Often from the little village not far off, two quite feeble old people come to visit it—a husband and wife. Supporting one another, they move to it with heavy steps; they go up to the railing, fall down, and remain on their knees, and long and bitterly they weep, and yearn and intently gaze at the dumb stone, under which their son is lying; they exchange some brief word, wipe away the dust from the stone, set straight a branch of a fir-tree, and pray again, and cannot tear themselves from this place, where they seem to be nearer to their son, to their memories of him.... Can it be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, sacred, devoted love, is not all-powerful? Oh, no! However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of ‘indifferent’ nature; tell us too of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.

55. Basic Politics of Movement Security

Author: J. Sakai, Mandy Hiscocks

Authors: J. Sakai, Mandy Hiscocks

Topics: g20, operational security, opsec, security, security culture, informant, surveillance

Date: 2013

Deleted reason: deleted not anarchist

Source: Retrieved on May 2, 2021 from archive.org

Cover:

d-d-dumpster-diving-the-anarchist-library-text-bin-15.png

Editor’s note: sections between two horizontal rules and with the heading “Sidebar” followed by a number were additional notes added by the author after the talk but prior to publication.

Foreword

This is months after the talk, and sitting down with the transcript from a recording made me smile. Often it reads so rough, as though sentences were jumbled in a torrent through the mixer. Originally, the plan was to use the talk as a kind of skeleton and warmup exercise, and build up to a proper paper or article. But, finally, i decided against that, and instead opted to leave much of the talk transcript in for print as a record of a live event on this subject. Also, this better frames the group discussion, which was too sharp to leave out. Comrades were unusually thoughtful. Many people had clearly been really thinking about security and wanted a chance to discuss it in some focused setting with other comrades. So hopefully some of that’s been saved.

A poet once noted, “Art being bartender is never drunk.” Just so there was an agenda in giving this talk, as every political act has agency, tactics, and so forth. Many warnings on security that i’ve heard have been pretty formalistic. You know, lists of things not to do, mostly. My goal was to short-circuit that for now, and talk about the real life struggle and politics behind security as an area of struggle. As part of that, i didn’t tell people at the meeting but i had steered wide to avoid technical discussion. When security comes up, one problem is a tendency of some guys fascinated with technique and especially technology, to run away with the discussion. This has a good side, for sure, but to me what the movement needs first is to work out our political understanding of security.

In the Q&A, there was one comrade who asked a serious question about how we deal with all the compromises and trade-offs involved in doing security. Such as the benefit of computer encryption for our emails and messages versus the daily added work of using it. i refused to answer, in part because such questions could only be discussed with practical examples which would involve laborious back and forth, too much for a short public meeting. And i was personally simply too tired physically at that point to deal with it seriously as it deserved. His question was left in, though, so that readers could think over his point. Even here, though, politics shines the farthest light. When a comrade once was offering me the favor of installing an “unbreakable” encryption program on my dusty old Apple, without his ever thinking about it a number of political decisions were involved. Was this so that i could have “sensitive” messaging and say dangerous things to other comrades without fear of the state? If so, that means i should be willing to risk prison for using that “security” measure. Prison or death for my comrades as well as myself. Betting that this particular technology is “unbreakable” or can never be defeated.

Of course, our encryption does not have to be cracked to be overcome. The weakest link is the end-user. Any encryption does no good if your laptop itself has had remote control covertly installed on it, or if it is physically bugged. Journalists whose life’s work depends on repelling state computer surveillance—such as those who worked with NSA leaker Edward Snowden—never let their laptops leave their sight. They always had the machines physically with them. It’s a strict regimen, for sure. If in five or ten years NSA or a band of brilliant hackers in Uruguay does succeed in cracking that code, NSA won’t be nice enough to warn us. They’ll want us to go right on blathering away telling them everything. Plus NSA has by their own admission saved every single email message ever sent globally since the birth of the internet, so if they ever crack that supposedly eternally invincible code someone’s ass would be grass. Hmm, that’s a lot to risk just for the privilege of talking indiscreetly. Nothing wrong with having computer encryption or using word substitution code in telephone calls or whatever, but am for always being discreet and careful too.

And on a deeper level, have to question the whole idea of trade-offs and compromises as a “problem”. Know what people mean by this, and have thought it myself many times. But it’s there all the time in life, ordinary life, not just in this rarified slice called politics. Using condoms, isn’t that an annoying trade-off or compromise ? Or having faster food instead of an hour’s work of home cooked meal because we’re kinda beat after work? Or… you can fill in the blanks. If we look at it in a zen political way, though, there is no such thing. No compromises, no trade-offs. That is only an illusion our mind creates in its confusion. If you really understand a situation, fully comprehend it, then you know precisely what you have to do. You don’t resent it or question it or wish you could only do half of it, because it’s the right action then whatever it is.

Called this an “informal talk” because it isn’t based on a book and wasn’t built on any research. Just talked about this subject off the cuff, as we might do any evening with comrades. So this version went through some steps in addition to the usual editorial cleanup. A number of comments or explanations were added afterwards, and these are usually marked by being in a grey box. And in a few places examples were moved around or replaced by others which much better showed the point i was hoping to make.

i was afraid to do this talk, because traditionally it is never done (except in closed members only group educationals, which i’ve sometimes heard complaints about but never been in one myself). Never even seen a pamphlet or book on this subject. Obviously,there are good reasons not to publicly disclose your security work. Not sure what this is supposed to look like, so please just take this as a sharing. There are several things which should be clear in reading this, however.

This talk and its discussion that night only scratched the surface of how security should be understood and worked on. Many important things were not even mentioned. So don’t worry, we haven’t done all the work already, there’s lots for you to do. And then there’s the consumer product safety warning on the label—there isn’t any. That is, the goal of security isn’t to protect you personally, though it may help do that. The goal of security is to protect the movement itself, to let the larger struggle against capitalism move forward.

Finally, at the anarchist book fair last May in Montreal, someone handed me a copy of Upping The Anti and asked if i’d seen the latest issue. Really, hadn’t even known it was coming out. The day after the security talk, finally got a chance to kick back and open the magazine and start checking it out. Almost swallowed my chewing tobacco. Near the end was an interview with Mandy Hiscocks on the state’s repression of the G20 Toronto mass protests in 2010, done before she went into prison. If i had known about it before my talk, would have brought it up to discuss. This is some serious thinking over of what the state did and what the movement did in an intense political crunch in the imperial metropolis. Security in a “right now” type situation. While some comrades have seen her interview in UTA already, many comrades in the u.s. probably have missed it as i did. So Mandy Hiscocks is letting us reprint it here to further share her experience, spread her radical insights.

j.s.

The Politics of Security

i’m going to speak for a little while generally. Then i’m going to go more into security, and how state infiltration against the movement has worked. This is in the u.s., mostly, what i’m familiar with. And what its results were, and both the movement’s successes and failures in terms of combating the security agencies. Kind of some of what really happened. And then we can have Q&A. Okay?

A lot of times when we think about security we’re still kind of uneasy about it. It’s kind of like this little box way off on the side. It’s not part of how we think of our regular politics or struggles we’re involved in. Maybe, to us it’s kind of a little dirty, and something confusing. Not certain how we can relate to it as a question. And if we do try to relate to it and deal with it, then we suddenly discover that, “Darn, there’s no Security for Dummies”. You go to the bookshelf and there isn’t a book. Because the tradition is, at least in the u.s. where i come from, that this is a question where knowledge is handed down and transmitted by word-of-mouth, kind of personally. So sometimes when there’s a generational discontinuity, big gap in passing on of this. So that’s one of the reasons i’m talking about it here.

i’m not an expert on security from some security commission, i’m not a professor, i have nothing against them, but that’s not what i am. i’m not a professor who studied this for their lifetime and who writes books on it. i’m just a movement activist. And so i’ve been taught basic things that i’d like to pass some of it on. i’ve witnessed security successes against the state and security failures, i’d like to pass that on.

Security is an area that’s essentially divided into two parts. The first is our attempt to understand, keep track of and spotlight police activity. Eventually at some points even penetrate the armor of state domestic security agencies. What traditionally has been called the “political police”.

The second part, of course, is dealing with their attempts to infiltrate our movements and activities, gain information against us, jam things up, harm people—and don’t make any mistake about it they’re definitely into harming people. This is not the nice guys’ club, no matter what they always say.

The key thing is, to start with—and it’s the most basic understanding—security is not about being macho vigilantes or being super suspicious or having techniques of this or that. It’s not some spy game. Security is about good politics. That’s why it’s so difficult. And it requires good politics from the movement as a whole. Not from some special body or leadership or commission—from the movement as a whole. This is demanded of us. It’s part of the requirement to be a revolutionary, that you try to work on this

Sidebar 1

Forgot to say during the talk, that the security lit that has been available is usually about the more dramatic illegal or or underground work. Such as Victor Serge’s often-reprinted classic on clandestine tactics to evade the Russian Czarist police. Or the 1980s Black Liberation Army pamphlet that’s taking offfrom Serge’s lessons, “Fooling” by Seldom Seen. They’re good but not our greatest need, it isn’t on that level that’s the biggest problem. It’s for security understanding about public mass movements, for ordinary groups, that operate more-or-less on a legal level. Since this is the origin, the entry point for almost all people and issues into rebellion. And if we can’t make it work on this level, we sure can’t do a more difficult level.

When we say “good politics”, well, what is that? Everybody will say they have good politics. So really this cannot be assumed. It absolutely has to be broken down. Or, as the congregation always shouts back at the Baptist preachers, “Make it plain”. So we’re going to try and make it plain, as much as we can here.

First of all, good politics is not the ideology you may or may not have learned from reading a book of Marx or Proudhon or something like that. That’s good, it’s part of education, part of politics. But that’s not sufficient. In terms of security, that and 2 bucks will get you a cup of coffee. That’s about it.

Security demands a higher level of politics. A level of practice and experience, in all three of its aspects. It demands individual experience, collective experience, and historical experience, melded into one knowledge. And that may be a lot for us, but it’s just part of life, it’s what’s demanded of us, to do this work.

You know, after all, if you think about it, it’s like revolutionary zebras, a collective of them on the high savanna in Africa. They’re always being stalked by predators. Well, how do they deal with that? They deal with it usually pretty handily. Because that’s their terrain. They can read their terrain. The ripples on the grasses, all the information brought by the wind. They read that, they understand it.

The same with us when we struggle with capitalism. When we attack capitalist society—that area that we’re on, that we’re engaging them on, this is for that time our terrain. Part of the terrain is still theirs because this is still capitalism. A part of it is now ours because we made it so. And we have to be able to read that terrain, the constant ripples, changes in it, and understand what they mean, you know, in real life.

it’s just like, when i came into the movement—had been around the movement from my early teen years, just cause i hung out with the small pack of nerds and leftovers in secondary school, and many were from movement families. But when I was 18, i joined a social-democratic organization which was pretty moderate and pretty worthless, really, but it was there and i was so glad to find other people to join with and do something political.

Within a year i met 4 people in the group or who came to its public meetings, who were agents. And this is not some case of rumors that they were said to be agents, they all sooner or later confessed to being agents. Okay? In each of the four cases i would not have thought they were agents, i was 18 years old, why would i have thought someone was a police agent? i wasn’t thinking of that stuff. Someone quietly came up to me and said, You know so and so is probably an agent, and this is why. You should listen to him, check it out. This is why we think he’s an agent.

So, one guy, for example, clearly he d gone to see a Hollywood movie or two about leftists or anarchists or something, and that ’s what his act was based on. He was a young college dropout, finding excitement by working for the FBI. So he had a dramatic pose, wore a beret and a black turtleneck sweater, and he smoked Gauloises, the French cigarette, like what he thought the Left Bank of Paris was like. The other thing is he always made these really angry sounding speeches which were incomprehensible because he actually didn’t have any politics, you know. He didn’t have any good political points or bad political points, he didn’t have any political points at all just about. He was peppering his speech with all kinds of words that he heard others use. The dialectic this, the oppressor that. It was just peppered in.

After awhile, i wasn’t listening to him. i was just tuning him out. But when i was listening to him and he just didn’t have any politics at all, that i could ascertain—so what the hell is he doing here? Then it dawned: Oh, that’s why you think he might be a police agent! And the more experienced comrades didn’t try to beat him up or anything, just made fun of him—and created a kind of bubble around him. Anything important wasn’t discussed near him.

When we look at domestic security agencies, the political police (and it may be somewhat different in the u.s. than in Canada, my experience is all in the u.s. so i may be saying things that are really obvious as A-B-C to people in Canada and you know this all already and that’s good, so i’m sorry if this is just old stuff), what we see is the regular police force always justifies political policing and domestic security persecutions as the normal outgrowth of their claimed attempts to be preventing mugging or having traffic accidents or whatever.

Sidebar 2

I’ve never forgotten about that real unimportant police spy, in part because of a completely unrelated incident. Many years later, was sitting in on a small meeting as a gofer, just in case anyone wanted coffee or we had to go photocopy something. It was a big-shot Hollywood agent and her client, an actress named Angelina Jolie, trying to convince some prisoner support workers who had been in the news lately, to sign over the rights to their life stories without any payment. Usual capitalistic rip-off biz. But what i was thinking about all the while was: “Don’t i know her from somewhere? She’s real familiar somehow.” Which bothered me, since obviously i didn’t know her. Then it hit me, damn, she’s just like that police agent actor character was years ago. The mind is a funny thing, connects up things in unexpected ways. She also had a beret and a black turtleneck sweater on under her worn denim jacket, just like he did. His face had been rough, with like acne scars, and hers—now that I really looked at it---was all professionally made up to look off, a bit disfigured like she’d been in a factory accident or something. What crap, for a political meeting with the movement! And she was actually even crying at one point, weeping, saying impassioned but illogical things, trying to get over with her ripoff of our movement. Good try, rookie, but like him she was detected as phoney and politely repelled from our terrain.

This is totally untrue of course. Instinctively we know it’s untrue, but factually it’s just completely untrue in several ways. First, obviously, because the everyday police are there primarily to protect capitalist property and maintain that order in general. While the political police are a part of that, but more narrowly are a counter-insurgency police targeted against political enemies of the state, and in particular dissident groups of the colonized peoples and classes. That is, we could see them as an intelligence police for the oppressors in our permanent internal class war.

Let me use an example which may not seem to connect up for awhile. So bear with me:

Once i was on federal government probation for a couple of years for a protest they didn’t like, and by “coincidence” my probation officer happened to be the commanding officer of the 113^th US Army Military Intelligence Detachment, which is a reserve unit. And his supervising my probation consisted of every few weeks he would appear unannounced at my job, in front of everybody haul me out of work, march me out actually in front of everybody. Put me in the lobby or the hallway and subject me to his, what he obviously thought was his very slick psychological intimidation and brain washing. And it’s kind of gross, and i’m going to mention it only for two reasons: one to show what they really are like and secondly because the u.s. military are still using these exact same tactics that they were trying to use on me, which were really simple and ugly.

He would say, basically, “You know, I’m your friend and here you are, you know you’re a young guy in trouble and you know you just aren’t having fun in life and here’s why,” and then he would start with all the stories of all the Asian women he’d used and how in Korea the lowliest G.l. in his unit had 2 women that sexually serviced him full-time and he of course had many more being the big officer and you know the life you could have if you came over to his side, you know, and became a real man, which i wasn’t. Be a real man and you could go around the world raping women, forcing women into brothels and so forth.

So this is kind of wacky. Why would he be saying this dumb crap? And then i realized: well, firstly he’s trying to obviously mess with my mind. You know, week after week, we would have this little conversation. First of all if he could get me to break, like, “Okay, i can’t take this anymore, and i’m going to punch you out.” Well, then, hold it, then I’m in jail for another couple years. Well, he wouldn’t mind that. Or, he keeps emphasizing the thing that, see, he’s a real man. i’m not a real man, of course, because i don’t have these things, i’m not doing these things that real imperialist men do. So he kept saying to me that i could either hate myself because i’m not a real man, and this may sound funny but this works sometimes on young guys. Or, i could somehow find his spiel attractive because he always said, you know you could have all this. You don’t have to have your miserable life, you could have this glamorous military life; you could be in in some Asian country with all the local women you want or if you like another country to have women in, you can do this too.

This sounds unbelievably stupid and crude, and it was. Well, do you know, they’re still doing that to this very day. The u.s. army has things that they use. It’s unofficial of course. They will disavow it. But they always use it. For example, specially against Asian guys. So you have an 18-year-old Asian volunteer in the army who was stupid enough to join anyway knowing he was going to go to Afghanistan to kill civilians or get his ass blown off. Anyhow, so he’s there and the typical thing is, the training sergeant will walk by him and he’s in the barracks looking at home pictures. You’re lonesome and you’re homesick and you’re looking at home photos. And the Sgt. will come lean over your shoulder and will say “Oh, that’s a nice looking girl, Is that your sister?” and you’ll say “Oh, yeah.” The Sgt. says, “Yeah, I thought so, I fucked her when I was on leave” and then he walks away and says, “Next time I’m going to fuck your mother.” So, of course maybe you can… once again, you can punch him out—well, a year or whatever in jail for you—or you can start hating yourself because you have to take this crap, or think you’re not a man like he is.

The thing is what does this have to do with policing? With security? It turns out the 113^th Military Intelligence detachment was part of the shadow government behind the Chicago Police Red Squad that was investigating and infiltrating the 1960s-70s antiwar movement. They and by implication larger military agencies, were selecting targets and guiding our local police. And in fact they got into a lot of trouble, this military intelligence detachment, because they weren’t content with that and they started sending their own guys out to observe the movement, maybe sabotage it or whatever. Except they got caught doing It and that was kind of embarrassing, because the u.s. army wasn’t supposed to be doing that in the city of Chicago. The cops are supposed to be doing it. The division of labor for bourgeois legality purposes. But when we say that political police are not just an outgrowth, an innocent extension of local policing, right, this can’t be emphasized too much.

Like New York City, in the late ‘60s the New York City Police Department decided it had to get rid of its Red Squad, because traditionally the subversive squad in the New York City police department was geared on investigating trade unions and all that old stuff that was really hot in 1920. Or was after the Communist Party or something Cold War that was dead as a door nail by then, and they weren’t really keeping up with the times. So it became clear that the Red Squad had to be totally rebuilt . So u.s. intelligence not city hall in New York u.s.Intelligence said, you know, New York is the major capital in reality, it ’s critical to us. When we see that the police department has a problem which is that they re a white settler police department representing a white settler government, ruling a city with a large colonial population of color that ’s increasingly getting rebellious. And they don’t know what to do about it because they have these old-fashioned anti-subversive ideas.

Sidebar 3

After the meeting i got questions about whether we could better define the difference between police in general and the political police? Since many of us can see that all the police patrolling the occupied neo-colonial peoples in New York City or Los Angeles, for example, are pretty damn “political”. You know, in middle-class “white” suburbs and expensive urban neighborhoods, most police work is about individual crimes with little of it lethal or even violent—you know, a car gets vandalized or something is stolen out of a garage or someone is drunk and disorderly. Completely different in the neo-colonial zones, where the cops are visibly uninterested in stopping the wholesale epidemic of burglary or muggings or rapes or killings, but only work to pressure youth away from of civilian life and into the drug trade and gunfights and prison.

In the talk i bent over backwards to emphasize the division between regular capitalist policing and the political police, because too many comrades assume that the political police are just some of their own familiar police but turned around to focus on them. Not true strategically. The political police may be similar people and similar uniforms but have of necessity a very different mindset and plans.

Having said that, we have to also recognize that the repressive arms of the state are steadily coming closer and closer to each other, becoming more like each other, as global capitalism develops and also homogenizes divided societies and cultures. Beat cops in neo-colonized communities who have always been an alien occupation force, now have to function as an adjunct to organized intelligence units. Just as police SWAT teams in the 1970s were only the initial cutting edge in the militarization of local police forces. Right after images of the killing of Osama bin Laden by the elite u.s. special ops commandos went worldwide, i also saw a newspaper photo of Brazilian police tactical officers leaving—a favela of the poor they had invaded—and from the dark coveralls to the bulky loaded combat vests and military ballistic helmets and full-auto assault rifles on long slings, the two groups of u.s. elite commandos and Latin American police completely looked alike.

So who has more expertise in a situation like theirs? Oh, those settler South Africans in Johannesburg!

So u.s. intelligence arranged for a team of counter-insurgency detectives from what was then named the South African Bureau of State Security ( obviously called by the acronym “BOSS”) in Johannesburg, i.e. the settler Afrikaner political police, to fly over to New York and to help be the big brothers, reorganizing, retraining, getting the New York City political police up to speed. To honor their Apartheid mentors, the N Y.P.D. also officially named its own political police squad after them, also “B.O.S.S.” It was their settler guys’ little imperialist In-group joke, since their whole relationship was secret back then (the squad’s name has been changed several times since then, naturally). Today the New York City political police, which Is commanded by a former top CIA official, has branches all over the United States and in eleven foreign cities, including Toronto. It’s a little far from New York City, but they clearly have their reasons to maintain that major investment in terms of what they’re doing.

The difference between regular policing, capitalist crap as it is, and the political police is going to become apparent as we talk because there is an important difference. One of the things that’s true about the political police throughout the capitalist world is that they’re all different but also all “family” in the sense that they’re descended, unbelievably as it is, from the Okhrana, the department for the protection of the public order of the Czarist government in late 19^th-century Russia. Which was the first modern political police force under capitalism and was actually quite innovative. Its genetic makeup persists literally to this day inside political police almost everywhere.

So the Okhrana did the usual things you would think. They followed people, infiltrated groups, arrested people, blah blah, blah. But they actually also had a whole different strategic vision, which was really controversial inside that primitive Russian state. It’s controversial actually today in most capitalist states, because there’s a division in security between the people who in effect want to do accelerated or militarized policing—“Well, why can’t we just arrest them all, just beat them up and shoot them, and put them in prison as much as we can, right, at every opportunity”—versus the people who actually usually end up running things, because to be honest they’re smarter. They have an interesting view. They have our class understanding actually. They’re just on the other side.

i was in a classified library once—a law enforcement library, with publications that would fill this room, and mostly none of us has ever seen these things because they’re classified—reading a classified FBI political journal. The FBI had political journals. One of the agents stationed in their bureau in Latin America—because in American security the world is split between the CIA which handles international stuff and the FBI which handles domestic stuff but that including all of South and Central America, since South and Central America in the u.s. ruling class mindset is a lesser part of the u.s.a. “It’s ours, by imperial birthright”, kind of thing. So the FBI is there and they have agents throughout all of the capitals and so forth ( as the CIA does, too, obviously). So this FBI agent is writing a theoretical article about how to stop revolution. He’s saying something like: “Some people wanted to just stamp it out, get rid of all the revolutionaries. That’s impossible because the overwhelming majority of people in the world hate us. They hate American corporations, they hate Wall Street and they’re always going to hate us. There’s no way to change this.”

i’m reading this and i’m, “Hey, you know, they finally got clued in.”

He said, so the “We’ll just stamp them out like they’re insects or something” strategy isn’t going to work. Well, actually, you could never get rid of insects. You could tell that in the real world so, he writes, that’s not really practical. It’s not a good way strategically to proceed. What we have to do is let everybody hate us. We can’t stop that. Let them have anticapitalist, anti-american opinion, fine. But when they organize into groups, when they have dangerous movements, then we don’t worry about average people who hate us. That’s like confusing the issue. Then we go specifically into those movements, those organizations and we destroy them, as much as possible. There’s no talk anywhere in this article of rights, civil liberties, human rights and laws. They don’t care about these things. We think they don’t care about them and they really don’t care about them. Believe me.

A friend was teaching a class of policemen, of cops. The class was report writing, because you think cops are illiterate and everything else and can’t sign their names barely, and that was true more than they liked. And so the commanders get those reports back of some major incident and it’s completely indecipherable. So you have to give them the usual how-to-wnte lectures, i guess. Anyway, the thing is, my friend was telling them: gotta learn to write honestly, concisely, clearly, really tell people what happens, when you write that report. So one of the cops jumps to his feet and says, “If I told what I did I’d be in prison!” Everybody applauds, all the other cops applaud. “Right, no more of this accurate report writing shit.”

So, this has nothing to do with laws, they don’t care about laws. We don’t care about them, they don’t care about them. Wo think most people in the world should hate capitalism. They agree, absolutely. You know, that’s why they’re always trying Io mess us up. Otherwise they’d just be laissez faire---“Oh, the revolutionaries, let them do whatever they want, you know, let the protesters run around, you know, give them whatever, It doesn’t matter ‘cause you know the people will reject them.” They don’t think that. Believe me, they do not think that.

They think, “We have to really be on top of these people, and sooner is better.”

So the Czarist Okhrana had both factions; the “stomp them out” cop faction and the more strategic “we have to manage this” faction. So, they ended up doing things like sponsoring trade unions. Originally, trade unions were illegal, workers want to organize and “Hold it! just a minute! you can’t be doing that, damn subversives!” And the Okhrana said to the other cops, “You hold it, you can’t stop the workers from doing unions. They are miserable and pissed off and they’re absolutely going to do something. Why don’t we start our own loyal trade unions that are like, you know, hate the boss, demand more money, but love the government. The government is on your side.”

So literally the whole legal trade union movement in Russia was started by the political police. If they arrested a band of underground illegal revolutionaries they always would leave one or two people unarrested. They were called breeders. And the reason is really simple. Their worst fear was that rebel movements would start and they wouldn’t know anything about it. They wouldn’t know anybody in it. That was a really terrible idea to them.

So they’d always leave some people not arrested so when new people came into revolutionary anger and awareness they’d seek out the people who were known as revolutionaries, and since those were under surveillance they would actually just be leading people to be in the files of the secret police. The Okhrana would even sponsor what is now called encapsulated gangs, where there’s even like illegal armed terrorist or robbery or guerrilla organizations at the center of which are genuine revolutionaries. But unknown to them mixed in with the new recruits are police agents and they’re letting the group proceed because as long as they know everything it’s doing, has everything under surveillance, and it has prestige and new people get drawn in, they’re just getting an enormous influx of information. The primary thing for political police. And then when they’re ready they wipe this group out and set the stage for a next doomed group.

In other words, they want to control dissent, rebellion, manage it. They don’t want to try and eliminate it because they don’t think that’s possible. They want to control it. By controlling the movement as much as they can. There are limits obviously of what anybody can do on this.

To give an example, they were really alarmed about anarchism. Anarchism wasn’t strong enough in Russia in the 19^th century to overthrow the government, nevertheless it was destabilizing society and more so all the time as most people know. So they said, well we have to have an antidote. Let’s get people to have a different kind of dissenting ideology than this anarchism. So they picked out a variant of socialism, that was popular at the time called Marxism, and they said, well, we’ll make this legal. So if you’re a dissident and you want to study all these exotic ideas, learn this Marxism. The great Russian encyclopedia said, “We’ll even have an entry on Socialism who could we ask?” The secret police said: “Well, there’s a guy named Lenin. You’ve never heard of him, but he would be a good guy to have write this.” So they even wrote to Lenin. like would you please do the entry on socialism for the kind of official Russian encyclopedia?

Clearly they made a few small mistakes in doing it this way, mid m fact there’s lots of criticism of them in capitalist police theorist circles, like: “The Czar’s secret police really messed it up They were really too arrogant. They thought they could maneuver around everything. Well, see what a mess they made out of it. Blah blah blah.”

So, to the security agencies, the most important thing is not immediate arrests, it’s information. That’s the lifeblood of their work. And they’re going to infiltrate us to get it. As well as ail the other surveillance stuff, okay?

So, when we talk about information, to be honest, we are not primarily talking about what a room of 50 radical people do or don’t do because they’re actually operating on a much bigger scale. Because don’t forget, it’s probably true that every single person in this room not only has a file in the computers of the Canadian police, but you certainly have a file in the computers of the u.s. political police. That’s like virtually guaranteed.

But its effects run much bigger than that because to them any organization of the oppressed, even “gangs” that they are at the moment de facto sponsoring and manipulating, are potentially really dangerous. They could get out of control, get politically aware. So that in Chicago, the city where i’m from, for example, there are roughly, there are known to be over 100,000 youth in street organizations, i.e. the “gangs”, maybe even close to 150,000 something like that. There were as of last year about publicly known street organizations ranging from the Latin Kings to the El Rukns to the Gangster Disciples and so on, the groups of young men who are currently shooting each other like in my neighborhood. The largest of these para-military street organizations have many thousands of members.

Many of these 100,000 plus kids, cause it’s a lot, there’s a file on. But this isn’t necessarily a usual individual police file, or an arrest record. No, often it’s a security file. A normal police file might have your name, address, phone number and your arrest and cop contact record. While a security file has all your family, your relations, school and medical record, the places you like to go to drink or recreate, the economic activities you are known to be into, the corners where you hang out, your enemies, the crew in the street organization that you work with, your homies, you know, your fellow soldiers and friends. They have a complete dossier of your activities, on who you are. Of course, being cops, they are also clumsy on the job and get many names and facts wrong as cops do.

It’s amazing. They just put enormous resources into that. They brag for example, that like if i were in such a “gang” and i got shot, you know one day, the next day they could go around and prevent the conflict from spreading by simply picking up all the guys in my crew. Because they know who they are. Well, hold it, they’re not the ones who shot me, right? So, see, the thing is that the guys in my crew were the guys most likely to be shooting back at the other organization that shot me and so the police would be doing “preventive” arresting, you know to stop the revenge back and forth if they wanted to.

So they’re pretty open that they have the intelligence to do this, not that they bother. Which raises a few questions, like so you know each person’s crew, their basically criminal work associates, you know, the guys they fight alongside, the fall-backs and where they hang out. And you can just arrest them because somebody in their crew got shot even though they didn’t do anything yet? You couldn’t even begin to do that unless the state security had updated computer files on the personal lives of masses of oppressed people. Okay. The thing about security agencies and the political police is that they’re not playing cops and robbers. One of the big political things, and you’re not going to find this in Lenin or something bourgeois society conditions us to think of rebellion as a cops and robbers game, like their story is it’s crime and punishment. There’s two sides. The state and whatever. They want us to obey the law and we’re saying “no”, rebelling, we’re the criminals breaking the law and that’s what rebellion is.

Sidebar 4

In 2013 the Chicago cops did a big public relations stunt funded by the National Institutes of Justice that they said would cut down the murder rate. Using a sociological computer analysis, they allegedly identified by name he 400 young people most likely (to either shoot someone or themselves be shot. A group that as a whole supposedly were 500 times more likely in be involved with violence than mythological average “Chicagoans.” Then area police commanders supposedly visited the homes of persons on the list to warn them to change their lifestyles and associates. I how helpful that was (being sarcastic there). The list avoids the predominantly settler North Side, of course, and is only about residents of the heavily New Afrikan and Latino South Side and West Side. What is revealing is the amount of intelligence the cops are regularly collecting on the oppressed now.

Well, that’s true in some way and in a deeper way not true. Almost all rebellion begins in law-breaking, under capitalism. The problem is that that framework leaves your thinking still within the capitalist system and their values as your reference point. So that i wish i had a dollar for every time some young guy has told me in a movement meeting or a demonstration, “I’m not afraid to talk to the police because I’ve done nothing wrong.” Well, first of all you’re an ass for thinking that. But secondly, it’s not about doing something wrong, breaking a law or something, right? Because what’s really happening is, it’s class war—there’s a war between those of us in the oppressed, fighting with the oppressed against capitalism, and those who are defending the nystem. So this isn’t about cops and robbers. But people tend to think of it this way—precisely because that’s how bourgeois culture always tries to get us to think of rebellion.

By the way, the “I’m not afraid to talk to the cops because I’ve done nothing wrong” stuff even on the immediate practical level is not too bright. What the political police want is to update their map. They’re mapping the terrain of the rebellions. So if you prove to them, plausibly, that you and your six friends didn’t do anything illegal last week—and know nothing about it—that helps them narrow the search for the revs who did. You are just helping complete the map to guide their drone strikes, as it were.

So that, for example, i’ve talked to guys who are experienced revolutionaries, who’ve in the past been through armed urban guerrilla groups, who’ve been in prison, and sometimes they’ll say something like, “There’s no way the cops could’ve known anything about us until we got arrested, cause if they’d known a week before, a month before, a year before, well, they would’ve arrested us then.” You see, because this is what my comrade Yaki calls the colonial criminal mentality: that the security cops are about arresting you for violating the law. That’s what they care about. That isn’t true. They actually don’t care about any of that shit. You can’t have bigger criminals and law-breakers than the cops.

But people, if you think this way you get completely misled as to what security agencies are doing, because they will absolutely let you do things to get the deeper information or reposition agents they need to advance their own plans. We have plans, they have plans. Don’t think they’re just individual cops enforcing the law, not true and far from it.

The CIA through an agent inside the Brazilian movement learned for example of an airline hijacking in the 1960s about to take place down there. Now you would think that they would stop that right away. No, because to stop that might have exposed their agent. They let the airline hijacking go right on, all kinds of people were terrorized and some killed, and the airline was hijacked but their agent—he’d proven himself as a rev, right? i mean, you can trust him because of actions like the airline hijacking, the whole thing. Anyway, 2 months later he finally found out about the CIA’s No.1 target there, a guy named Carlos Marighella, who was one of the main revolutionary guerrilla leaders in Brazil at that time, who wrote the famous “Mini Manual of the Urban Guerrilla”, who they absolutely wanted dead. And they finally killed him. So what do they care about airline hijacking or a bank job or two or ten if they can get somebody that they really want, if they get the information they need to put away a whole group or blunt a whole offensive. They absolutely will do these calculated things in cold blood every time.

So this is just practical experience, part of our practical knowledge as revolutionaries. We have to understand these details.

Let me tell you about an FBI penetration of the movement that had mixed results. Of course, the thing about it is that it’s completely over and completely documented publicly so we fully know the results and we are not endangering anybody by talking

At the end of the ‘60s, i was recruited…i was living on the south side of Chicago and was recruited by a small group of working class women to join a community, a revolutionary community group far on the other side of the city. And i got talked into it, so moved to join this organization. It was a working-class, mostly white revolutionary group.

So, this group had an interesting history. When Students for a Democratic Society (or SDS), the nationwide white university radical whatever mass anti-war people of that time went on the offensive, one of the things they wanted to do was to break out of their class world. They started student-run organizing projects in poor working class neighborhoods, often using the name “Jobs Or Income Now” or JOIN. Newark, Baltimore, Chicago, a few other places. So in Chicago these student radicals “colonized” one particular poor neighborhood, temporarily moved activists in there to live, and started organizing. One result was a small street organization of Southern white youth that was political. First organized to do a protest march on the local cop station, against police harassment of poor white youth. And the middle-class university radicals were overjoyed. The working class Southern whites who were supposed to be racist and patriotic redneck and against the movement, well, they had convinced some of them in this neighborhood to join the movement. To be anti-war and for the Black revolutionaries and even ally with them and so on.

To some degree, though, those middle-class radicals were way inexperienced and didn’t quite know what they were doing. When i got into that scene, it was surprising politically. The street organization, which had a hard core of a couple of dozen members mostly from teenagers to guys in their mid-twenties, and maybe a supporters layer of that many, had a small group of about five or six guys who were central, who were leaders in a somewhat informal way. Everyone looked to them to start things, but two of these guys were clearly like fascists. You have to keep in mind whenever you go down, all the way down into the oppressed and very poor, there isn’t one class there but always two. The lower working class and the lumpen do not just coexist, they share the same streets and homes and families, they’re people mixed in with each other fighting to survive on the same shared terrain together.

One guy in particular seemed an obvious fascist and an obvious danger, because he really did want to lead things his way. Tom had grown up in the neighborhood, where his mom was still a “working woman” in the same slum residence hotel they had lived in since he was a kid. He had grown up with many of the other guys, and they all knew him as one of the smartest guys around. Actually, he had even gone to Stanford on a scholarship (few of the other poor white guys had even gone to secondary school). But Tom had dropped out, had kicked around at a different job, and finally come back home to join the movement. And he was pushing definite strong politics, which to me tripped all the alarm bells.

Say what you want about him, Tom did have game. In 1969 the Panthers had called for their United Front Against Fascism, a national conference to unite the left against fascism in America under their leadership. Whether that’s a good or bad idea, not germane to us here. The main Maoist group in America at that time, called the Progressive Labor Party, said, like, “This is outrageous, this is a fraud. The Panthers, who are they? They don’t follow Chairman Mao, they have the little red book, but the only true Maoist leadership here is us. So therefore we’re going to go to the conference, but we’re going to stay a block away. We’ll form a line in the street around the conference.” What we had heard from the movement grapevine, was that they were threatening to physically stop anybody that came to support the Panthers. Sounded like they’d lost it mentally, going to just beat the shit out of anyone and basically prevent them from going to the conference. Don’t know.

But that was a mental moment made in heaven for manipulators like Tom. It isn’t true that someone else’s bad politics like that early Maolst group trying to play little stalin, only effects them and doesn’t hurt us. So he quickly organized a group of our guys from the neighborhood, this was while he was still in the group. They flew out there and they just literally marched tight at the Progressive Labor guys who were led by---they eventually had their martial arts class there with an instructor with a black belt---went right at the PL karate instructor and punched the shit right out of him. Frankly, because Tom had been seriously fighting people and hurting people his whole life, so you might have got yourself a black belt in a dojo but this isn’t the same deal as getting mixed up in a chaotic street brawl.

So that Summer we heard him saying, pretty smoothly, “Hey, all these black people, they’re talking about black power. I’m all for that, That’s wonderful. I love them so much we should adopt the same slogan for us---White Power! That should be our slogan, White Power.” So some of the guys were influenced, like, “Oh, that sounds pretty cool, white power, I like that.” What Tom wasn’t telling them was that “White Power” was right then an official slogan of the neo-nazi movement in the u.s. And had the added treacherous appeal of seeming to be only “equal” with Black Power, while denying that in “race” terms settlers didn’t need to demand power since they already had it all.

We were saying, “Hold it, just a minute, we might want to think about that, you know, whoa, whoa, whoa.” And so Tom went around everybody else, convinced a couple guys to go with him and they went to the button shop and they got a thousand buttons printed up saying, “White people gotta get it on.” What exactly does that mean anyway, right? But there’s kind of a common theme in the work he was doing, you know. It’s all about white people being angry and doing things by themselves and for themselves and that’s the main thing. There’s kind of a pattern about what he was doing.

Anyway so the women---mostly it was a small group of women---you see all the propaganda about this group done in the left talked about guys. How they were like a street gang of pro-movement white guys. Teens and men who had come over to the revolution, wonderful, but it was odd that it was almost like there were no women there. But it turns out that there really were women there, and they thought this was really a bad scene. Their guys are really getting turned around.

So first of all they went and recruited some of us to come in, though we didn’t know what the hell was going on. And—the other thing was by the way this neighborhood was not all settler. For example it was overwhelmingly poor but it was not all white. It was the major neighborhood center for Native people in the Chicago area, for example. In a similar way, it was a center for some of the Asian peoples. There were 15,000 indigenous people in the neighborhood (and over 6,000 Asians), which wasn’t really mentioned in the left propaganda or anything because of the importance of the whiteness to the left of the young guys they were organizing…

So the women with the group started recruiting a few people of color and women with civil rights movement experience, basically just to make certain there wasn’t a racist outbreak going on there. And then they convinced some guys, they talked to some of the guys and said “look, we have to deal with this, what’s going on”. Two of the women in particular i remember—one was an older woman, they were both older from my point of view, could have been in their 40s or 50s. One of the women was Native, and disabled and had 2 kids and was on welfare, and the other woman who was truly leading this was a white southern woman from Appalachia who had no education at all except that she had been through union organizing battles as a poor woman working in a factory, and had the klan try to shoot at them and had been communist baited in her town and whatnot for being against racism and so she actually had experienced politics.

So i came to this meeting and the women said you don’t know what’s happening, just vote with us, don’t worry, i said “okay” and they called out one of these guys, the guy who was Tom, the white power dude who was causing all the trouble.

The thing was…Tom was, the guys knew he was a troublemaker, they said that’s just how he is ’cause they grew up with him in the neighborhood. He grew up on the streets with them. They all knew each other for years. So to say, Tom is no good and to just kick him out, the guys couldn’t do this.

But the women they were serious, they just said, “Tom we have to talk about you. The fact is you’re always causing trouble, and second, you’re a damn racist. No matter what you say, you’re a racist. And third, when we add that up, we think you’re an agent. Why else would you be doing this shit, right? Except that you gotta be an agent. So, we’re taking a vote. Our motion is: your ass gets kicked out. Oh, by the way, you and all the university students. Part of our motion is that you have to be a worker, a working class person, to be in the group, like it’s a union now. All the university students who are being famous al our expense, we thank you for all you’ve done for us, we love you, and you can now leave because we’re now voting to kick you out, too.” There were some surprised people in that room.

And bingo! Tom was doing his usual excuses, “oh, it’s politics that it’s so hard for me to learn, ‘cause I had no education”. Though he had no trouble getting into Stanford. He was hanging his head and whining, “I wanna learn, I’m sorry, give me another chance.” But the women weren’t going to stand for that shit. The women said, “No, Tom. We’ve known you your whole life and you’re a racist and now you’re a damn agent, get out of the room.” So they kicked him out.

So Tom went and we thought, oh, that’s the end of that. The guy’s been kicked out of his own community group by people who’ve known him his whole damn life. Hey, he’s gone permanently, we don’t have to worry about him, good or bad, whatever he is. Yeah, we were wrong about that!

Well, Tom went to the university student movement leader and they were nationally important people on the left at that point and they’d been kicked out of the neighborhood and ware pissed. Tom played them, using his men’s solidarity angle, ii must have been something like, “Yeah, those bitches, they kicked us out, well I’m with you bro’” and ka-ching! The next movement radical conference, there’s Tom being vouched for by these middle-class student leaders. Damn, we know he’s an agent, but suddenly he’s back in the movement again!

He goes back to California, to Stanford, not to school but to hang out, he makes his living doing armed robberies and boasting about it. He’s knocking over a liquor store, a grocery store, whatever, he’s doing armed robberies, selling drugs, stealing drugs at gunpoint to sell, never gets arrested, gee, wonder why. And beating people up. He’s picking fights in the movement. You know, he’ll come to a meeting and, “I don’t like what you’re saying”, suddenly he will lunge himself across the room. He was actually really good at fighting. And he’ll start pounding the crap outta some guy.

So, half the people in the movement said, “Wow, what a revolutionary! Poor, working class, so angry he can’t contain himself, he’s gotta be a revolutionary.” The other half of the people in the room in the movement said, “You know, he’s a stone mental case, he’s so crazy that the FBI would never have somebody like that. He’s totally undisciplined and untrustworthy. So, he may be bad news, but he’s not an agent.” So both sides, for different reasons agreed that he wasn’t an agent. Only problem: Tom was an agent. Tom was crazy like a fox. Tom was just a fascist, that’s all. So, eventually through the movement he got introduced to the Black Panther Party in Northern Cal and Tom reminded them of a very—to him—important moment in history and this is again where we see the relationship between bad politics and bad security in a practical sense.

Back at that conference, remember, Tom and the guys completely mopped the streets with the Progress Labor activists and sent the Maoists leaving, running for their lives. So Tom could later remind the Panther leadership, “Remember that? I was the guy who did that and I know all this stuff—martial arts, bomb making, I can teach marksmanship, I was in the marines, I was in intelligence in the marines. I was really good at, you know, interrogating people, wink wink (i.e torturing people). You got agents, bro’, in your group, I can help you with this.”

So the Panthers say, wow! They’re impressed: a settler guy who had fought on the streets to defend us and he’s got all these skills and now he’s gonna help us find the agents. So Tom launched on a spree of bad jacketing honest ordinary people in the Panthers, “Yeah that guy, he looks like an agent, I’ll beat the crap out of him until he talks, throw him out”, torturing people, the whole thing.

It culminated, he had gotten a ranch up in the mountains he called “Guevara Ranch” where he had bomb making classes. So one night they lured a leading Black Panther revolutionary activist Fred Bennett to “Guevera Ranch”. Fred Bennett was leading the defense around getting support for George Jackson and the other Soledad brothers in prison, the black revolutionaries who were leading the struggle in prisons in California at that time. He was the chairman of that committee. Anyway he was killed. He was tortured and shot to death and his body was set on fire, burned and buried, etc. So nobody knew what happened. All of a sudden a couple weeks later the FBI in and the police descend, they dig up the body, they started raiding Panther offices and they get a witness saying so-and-so and so-and-so was involved.

Tom suddenly appears in suit and tie before the u.s. senate subcommittee on intelligence to explain how, “Yes, it’s terrible the Panthers, they’re killing their own people, they’re so demented and violent that they’re torturing and killing other Panthers. Terrible.” Actually of course Tom instigated the whole thing and he was proud as shit of it. For a settler fascist, to have manipulated the vaunted Black Pather Party into killing one of its own best people—and have done it with the stupid help of those “rich university leftists” that he hated so much—he really loved that.

Okay, when you reel that back what do you see?

What you see is a young undeveloped left in which a small group of working-class women figured out who an agent was, dangerous he was. Because more than just being smart, Tom was a very aggressive and manipulative guy. And they thought they had gotten rid of him, just banished him out of the movement. But some middle-class guys who had gone to NYUs and Berkeleys, those young white guys said in effect, “Who cares what those women think!” They were sure they him better.

Tom the “revolutionary”, they passed him onto the Panthers who absolutely should have known better, except of course they were caught up in their own patriarchal thinking—revolutionary attitude that’s male attitude, aggression, being more violent, forcing your will on people, being the tough important guy…Tom looked great to them!

Well, a lot of people actually ended up getting hurt out of it. They only surfaced one killing because the feds couldn’t admit that they had their agent do a torturing and killing spree through the movement. Tom was like, “I was nowhere near anything and I never knew what happened. I just heard about it later when I couldn’t do anything except tell the FBI, blah, blah, blah.” Complete lies, the grapevine said.

So here’s this mini tragedy. Certainly a successful disrupting of movement activity, that should have been stopped at any number of points, but bad politics covered for agents. So we don’t need good politics because that makes us into super people because it doesn’t. It’s that bad politics—like opportunism, patriarchy, sexism, class privilege—rips up the fabric of our terrain, the area of our radical culture and it weaves instead into that terrain all their old oppressor politics, their values. At which point we’re confused, it’s all backwards. We’re alice-in-wonderland now on their side, their ground, so to speak, even though we don’t have their views.

So i’m just going to stop here.

Questions and Answers

Moderator: So if anyone has any questions?

Q: When you said that the American police had a security file on everyone in everyone in this room, I was wondering what you were basing that on. I was wondering if it would apply to people just in this room or if it would apply to people outside on the street.

J: Well, i don’t know how many people on the street they have investigative files on, but i’m pretty certain that if you’re a Canadian revolutionary or a radical in any real way, other than reading a magazine once a year, they’re definitely going to be interested in you. They’re absolutely into accumulating as much personal information as they can. It makes their job easier. That’s just the long and short of it, and they’re paid for it, so it’s a major activity of theirs. Remember, to Washington some young activists in Canada equals “international terrorists”, a non-u.s. citizen category in which anything goes, there are no rules or limitations on what they can do.

And these are questions that never get asked enough, among ourselves, about what it means. And the reason we need to push the whole underlying question of politics is because a lot of people particularly guys try to present security as an area essentially where it’s about cool techniques or it’s technology. That’s completely not what it’s about. And in terms of bad politics of every kind on this, there’s a lot of it around.

For example…i actually brought with me…this is a curiosity piece from the past that i plucked from my bookshelf. This is the Communist Party Manual on Organization printed here first in the 1930s by the u.s. communist party which by that time had 200,000 members or something, controlled entire industrial unions, had strong arm squads to deal with people who bothered them and in fact, although it’s not publicly admitted, sometimes had assassination units to deal with special comrades who they considered traitors. So this was like a real deal, this was not six guys alone in a room. But although it comes from 1930s, it got reprinted and distributed all over again in 1975 to help guide that new generation of Marxist-Leninists rebuild in the u.s. It keeps getting recycled all over again.

So they had a whole chapter on how they should safeguard the party against informers and spies. And it says:

“Agent provocateurs are planted in the party either by the police department, Department of Justice, patriotic organizations or counterrevolutionary Trotskyites disrupting the work of the party. The methods they use are: A) Creating sentiment against the leadership of the party B) Systematic disruptive criticism against the line of the party.”

This goes on and on. This is like clearly total bullshit, right? On all these different levels. Clearly, this has nothing to do with security. They want to browbeat everybody into following their orders from the central committee or whoever. And if you’re not following their orders then maybe you’re a spy or agent, and that kind of arm-twisting bullshit.

So you think, hopefully you think, well this is kind of stupid. You think this was way back in the 1930s. It’s gone forever in our modern age. Well it isn’t. Sometimes people still use “security” as a club against people they disagree with or don’t like in the movement. An ultra bad idea. To be specific, an ultra bad opportunist idea. Many activists think opportunism is only about someone selling out for a good job or some cash courtesy of the ruling class, and we do see that. But more I commonly we get hit with another kind of opportunism, that’s people—sometimes even with what they believe are good motives—putting factional interests, the little interest of their group or tendency or their own political interests ahead of the needs and health of the struggle as a whole.

Like about a year ago or something, somebody pointed out to me that there was a letter in “Anarchy” magazine which said that a certain anarchist, whom we know as a real pain in the ass personally, was not born in the u.s. The guy was an Immigrant and therefore under the actual letter of the u.s. laws, being a publicly identified anarchist, the FBI could deport him. So the letter-writer went on, given that he is really well known, doesn’t the fact that they’re not deporting him mean that he should be considered an agent by us?

i read this letter and i thought, “This is completely full of it”. So we’re supposed to let the FBI decide by their actions who we label as an agent or not? You know, by what the other side does? If they don’t arrest you or something then that somehow “proves” you’re an agent?! This is like crack addict thinking, frankly. Why did they even print that malicious letter?

Anybody who’s done any security work knows that if you said to someone who really is an agent, “We are going to kick you out of the movement unless you agree to follow the line of whoever, you know follow the line of Noam Chomsky or Joseph Stalin or whatever”. This guy’s an agent, most of the time he doesn’t care about left ideas! He’s going to say, “Oh yeah, i agree with whatever leadership 150%. i’ll agree to any dumb idea you have since i don’t care about your movement anyway!”

What does he care? He’ll agree to any idea you have. There’s no amount of brown nosing or yessing an agent will do to get inside, if that’s what his job is. As opposed, say, to causing fights and personal disputes and throwing sand in the wheels. So the Communist Party that printed that bullshit, 20 years later was being completely crushed by McCarthyism during the 1950s Cold War. Historians now estimate that 1 out of every 3 of their members was a police agent by that time. Well, good job on security, you guys!

You know, it turns out that following the leadership blindly, agreeing to everything, no matter what, it’s not a good idea from anybody’s point of view. The more critical, the more open, the more many-sided our dialogue and our thinking is and our examination of politics is, the more agents tend to stand out because they’re not of us in that sense.

Q: You were mentioning how Czarist police had this division and more political policing has this division between “line them up and shoot them all” and something much more nuanced. I don’t know if you have heard of Frank Kitson? The Brigadier General, the British General, he wrote the manual on counterinsurgency based on Malaysia and Northern Ireland. I’ve taken it based on what i’ve read as the default basis that anglo-american policing is based on.

He talks about three stages, which combines both. So the first stage is when movements just exist, and what they should do is just find out everything about them, which reinforces what you were saying about how they want to have all the information.

The second stage is when those movements become more disruptive and the third is when they become revolutionary. The point is: When they become revolutionary you have all the names, you know who to kill. But in the meantime you should be more subtle about it.

In Quebec for example, the second stage was during the October Crisis, when they had all these names of people to arrest, or who they thought they should arrest. The 3^rd stage was seen in Chile in the Pinochet Coup or after the Suharto Coup when they literally killed hundreds and thousands and millions of people, so I’m wondering whether we should posit these things as opposites or whether they can actually coexist, knowingly coexist as political policing.

Sidebar 5

Reading this 3 months later, i mostly remember how exhausted i was by that point in the discussion, and how it was hard for me to even keep in mind what the point was never mind being coherent. Our comrade was insightful bringing Gen. Frank Kitson and his counter-insurgency work up, because people speculate that he represents the most sophisticated repressive strategy in use.

Certainly he’s a real “name” in the field. Several other comrades at the meeting also informally asked us to discuss Kitson, which I completely didn’t do. So here’s finishing this up better.

To start, there’s several questions wrapped around each other here. One is whether the classic tension has been overcome between the “let’s just round ’em up, shoot them & imprison them”school of policing versus the more strategic police approach of manipulating and trying to permanently manage dissent? Have the two been blended by innovations like Kitson’s counter-insurgency plan into one smoothly integrated club?

The quick answer is no. One big reason that the old-school tendency of simply attacking dissent with raw often illegal state violence never dies is simple: that’s what many police and military innately want to do, what they love doing! Same with the ruling class.This is their subculture, their default setting, which they revert to at every opportunity. These opposing state security tendencies may appear in public relations as a harmonious strategy, but in reality are always in inner conflict pushing to dominate one over the other.

This is the real world not the theory world. Like, in my neighborhood last holidays, between xmas and New Years, the police did a coordinated series of over 20 drug raids to remind all the Mexican immigrants and poor New Afrikan families that santa claus was a white man with a club ruling them. “Happy New Year!” First we heard the rapid footsteps of big guys racing upstairs. Then the ritual shout of“Police! Open up!”followed a second later by a big smash as they broke into the next door apartment. It was the “B team”. Not the SWAT dudes with all black combat garb, military helmets and assault rifles. But the “tactical intervention”squad, a half-dozen tall, young white boys in dark blue “tac” police coveralls and shotguns and pistols. Then we heard the “thud” after “thud” as they charged inside and knocked down to the floor and cuffed everyone in the apartment. This all took only seconds. All i could think of that moment, was to admire how disciplined their little daughter was, how she didn’t cry or scream even though she must have been terrified.

Then an hour of capitalist fun overturning and smashing open all the furniture and cabinets searching for something illegal. Finally, after not finding anything except the big illegal thing–poverty—the euro-settler “tac” team uncuffed the undocumented Mexican family and just left like Batman, running down stairs for their squad cars laughing and shouting at each other happily, still on an adrenaline high. Give this everyday violence up, you got to be kidding? They live for this shit.

During the 1980s, some left writers in the u.s. began pointing to Kitson as a source of important warnings. This was mostly because small groups there & then such as the Revolutionary Armed Task Force and the black liberation army-coordinating committee were pursuing urban guerrilla activity in a still undeveloped way. Comrades needed to see what world-class capitalist anti-guerrilla strategy and tactics looked like. In particular, Kitson’s heavy reliance on the tactic of pseudo-gangs or counter-gangs rang warning bells in our minds back then. To best check out that earlier discussion, you can read the paper “Pseudo-Gangs” in the June 1985 issue of the anonymous left journal “Si” on the kersplebedeb website.

But, no, Gen. Kitson’s writings don’t represent the latest shape of modern political policing. He rose up through the commissioned ranks through three British imperial counter-insurgency campaigns of the1950-60s in Kenya, Malaya and Northern Ireland. His campaigns are important as part of capitalist warfare in the era of the old Western colonial empires. But they have been superceded by newer strategy in this neo-colonial world.

It is true that he helped draw the tactic of pseudo-gangs or counter-gangs out of thebloody closet of Britain’s Special Branch cops, who had used it way way back in the Palestine Colony days against both Arab and Jewish underground organizations (not that it did them much good). That is, Kitson was relying on a specific political police tool that went back all the way to the founding fathers, i.e. the Czarist Okhrana who had used it. But like today’s CIA drone warfare this was and is only a tactic used in specific situations not an overall strategy.

A pseudo-gang or counter-gang, incidentally, is when the political police form an imitation underground revolutionary cell or band; usually using some former guerrillas or rebels they have captured and convinced to “flip” and work for them. In order io infiltrate and often not simply to do arrests but to misdirect the whole insurgency. This goes beyond getting a few more comrades arrested. This type of tactic particularly extended into public mass movements, can have strategic impact. Even stalling and then derailing struggles. For instance, when particularly counter-productive left cults get artificially energized with hard-working agents and a tank full of government cash. They can appear to be a very successful “vanguard” that absorbs more and more new activists into a political crash and burn.

Gen. Kitson neither developed nor led the counter-gangs that he became so famous for after “Mau Mau”in the 1950s; that was all done quietly by the British empire’s police Special Branch.But Kitson saw the opportunity to grab all the public credit and get famous for work the army didn’t even do. Incidentally, the Special Branch officer who developed and personally commanded the countergangs in Kenya was expelled in the 1960s after Kenyan Independence, of course; he ended up spending 20 profitable years running the feared secret police for the royal family of Bahrain.

Also, remember what the most basic thing is we learned about capitalism’s “experts” on repression? That they are always lying to us. Like, just a few years ago, the public was told how u.s. Gen. Petraeus had supposedly brilliantly led the American occupation to victory in Iraq over the “terrorists”, right? Mostly b.s. in reality. Kitson is just the previous NATO generation’s “Petraeus”. What Kitson did is nothing like what he claimed in print.

Gen. Kitson’s work was part of the warfare of the previous colonial era of the 1930s-1950s, and is not directly transferable to today’s more complex neo-colonial period (what capitalism calls “Globalization” and academics call “neo-liberalism”). His writings are part of modern total warfare in and against the colonial periphery, not so much policing inside the imperialist metropolis. Although Kitson himself didn’t agree, of course. In his once-classified paper for the Imperial General Staff, “Low-Intensity Operations.” Kitson rashly outlined how their army units should be spread out to be a secret part of all British local governing down to the village level, using pseudo-gangs to crush things like trade union strikes, ethnic minority protest campaigns and other social “problems”. He even rashly revealed that pseudo-gangs were then being used in the u.s. empire against New Afrikan militants. That was all supposed to be secret. The resulting leaks and liberal scandal and public outrage put the ever-ambitious Gen. Kitson back in his cushy place.

That was what in today’s CIA terminology were “population regroupment”and “enhanced interrogation”programs. Out of the 1.5 million Kikuyus alive in Kenya then, fully 1 million were uprooted from their traditional villages at riflepoint and forced to move into new locations chosen for them, into improvised guarded settlements. Where their movements were restricted and their access to food kept at starvation levels so that no supplying of the rural guerrillas could take place. Massive interrogation activities went on constantly, particularly of the over 77,000 Kikuyu arrested or captured as “Mau Mau” and held separately in prison camps at their height. These British interrogations were based on mass executions as coercion and mass torturing and mutilations such as castration. Rape was such an ordinary activity that it wasn’t even thought of as part of torture, but rather as a “perk” that the “civilized” British had granted their Afrikan mercenary troops and themselves to do at will.

Robbing families of their scant money and possessions, extortion, torturing to death, killing to settle personal scores and spontaneous killing for the enjoyment of it, were common British military activities against the unarmed civilian population. It reached scandalous proportions even by European colonial standards (which is a statement by itself), and Kenya’s British police commissioner Arthur Young resigned rather than Be further implicated. In 2013, after a long grassroots campaign that went mostly unreported here, some 1500 Kikuyu torture interrogation survivors received official letters of apology from the Crown, as well as promises of small cash reparations. But most of the many thousands of torture victims were long dead. Officially the British Empire claimed 11,000 “Mau Mau” deaths by their forces in the 1952–1956 “Emergency”, but actually the daily killing was so widespread and constant that no real body count was kept. Figures in the many tens of thousands are heard.

Now, can you imagine the capitalist state being able to get away with or even desiring such a disruptive bloodbath in Manhattan’s Upper West Side or at Montreal’s Concordia University? If what happens here was proportionate to what Kitson & Co. did in the Kikuyu uprising, we would be talking about forcibly moving millions of euro-settlers to tent cities in barren areas, behind barbed wire and under armed guards, torturing hundreds of thousands of young white women and men in an uncontrollable bloodbath. Even done on a much lesser scale it would be a big systemic shock. That’s what Kitson’s actual strategy would mean if applied to the privileged metropolitan population of empire and its often spirited but frustrated left.

To say that this would be hugely counterproductive as a way of coping with the actually existing left here is a big understatement. Which is why the more experienced and practical levels of state power gently spanked Gen. Kitson and reminded him to follow orders and confine his insane homicidal schemes to indigenous and neo-colonial societies, to the Bantustan, to the ghetto and the rez and the barrio. Not to dream of putting settler anti-nuke committees into concentration camps or gleefully maiming white trade union dissenters. Unnecessary overkill and rocking their whole boat were out, to say the least.

Q. Continued: And the other one was about bad politics. So bad politics is sexist, macho behavior, but it strikes me that in 2013, the political police know that and practice feminist anti-oppressive kinds of behavior. In a really superficial way that movie ‘‘Zero Dark Thirty” which is highlighting female CIA agents who were essentially responsible for finding out where Bin Laden was, using techniques that were more using the mind rather than macho torture or what have you. There are examples of infiltration where it is not the Brandon Darby type macho person but rather a more subtle, listening and nurturing type person who gets a lot of information by being a good stereotypical feminist or what have you. So I’m wondering whether we have to modify our idea of what bad politics is because political police knows that well enough and knows that that macho person will be more targeted.

My 3^rd point is: I find that the fear of the police knowing everything debilitates people from being active and the statement that you made that every revolutionary has a file on them—is there more of a nuance to that? In terms of if you’re politically active, if you’re publicly active, if you’ve done certain things maybe? It strikes me as sometimes the fear of what the state can do debilitates people from being active rather than what they’re actually doing and certainly there’s plenty examples of infiltration and stories we can share of their overwhelming power, but there are also examples of people being able to overcome that despite their resources.

Those are 3 really big things I wanted to get it all out and have you respond to.

J: Well, the thing about security, i agree about a lot of things you say. In terms of them learning to be more nuanced, absolutely. Though, you know, a lot of times they use a range of agents, approach wise, as well as short-term and long-term infiltration with different characteristics, always have. But this is a funny world about fear…

This isn’t a defensive battle is the main thing. When we conceive of security as an area of struggle, that doesn’t mean what security is, police are trying to harass us, arrest us, whatever infiltrate our organizations and we have to defend ourselves. This is not what it’s about. We’re struggling against capitalism in this area. We’re on the offense as much as we can, not defense. Yes, they’re going to have files on lots of people, they’ll photograph us, etc. But we’re fighting, and that’s even in the small sense. Pick your battles but people are fighting. They always have.

For example, it used to be a custom that a lot of people in the movement didn’t get their picture taken. Family photo? include me out! You go to their house, no pictures of them, no photos of them at all. They were laughed at, “Oh man, you’re just out of it! The cops have ten thousand pictures of you at demonstrations so why do you have to worry about that?” That’s true, but the thing is, they like us have lots of room to mess up in daily life, in the daily details of work. We want to give them every opportunity on every practical detail to do it wrong, and we want to work it that way. So for example when Assata Shakur popped in New Jersey—so suddenly she’s not buried in prison but a fugitive, suddenly she’s gone, wanted posters go up all over the country put up by the FBI. One problem: the photo they used of Assata was a surveillance photo from what i could tell, and you actually would never recognize Assata meeting her on the street from that photograph. Funny thing happened: a group was putting out one of those support Assata posters, with a accurate picture of her face on it. And rads had to go tell them, “Hey, good work but you should blur her picture up some, make her less recognizable.” It never occurred to the comrades that the FBI had missed the ball completely and we didn’t want to accidentally do some of their job for them.

Sidebar 6

a few years ago a comrade was telling me about an “outrage” that happened to him at a protest march. He had taken his young child, carrying the kid finally at the head of the march, and suddenly some black bloc or someone behind them he couldn’t see started throwing stones and bottles at the cops. The cops charged them with clubs, of course, and he was really scared that his kid would get hurt. And really pissed at the “anarchists”, not that he knew who had started shit irresponsibly he thought—he angrily called them “agents provocateurs” even. My own take: what’s that old left saying, “A revolution is not a tea party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined…”? Many children have been hurt in the struggle. Times i took my kids when they were little on a demo, and was worried for them. Don’t take your kid to a demo if you want them to be completely safe. And if you want the movement to do completely guaranteed safe actions, sign up in a different world not this real one.

So why did they do it? Why did they use a non-functional wanted picture? Who knows. But i want to give them every chance to do it. That’s not a stray thought, but a basic principle of our work.You better believe i’m not mailing photos to the FBI, because they can mess it up too.

Marilyn Buck, the settler anti-imperialist urban guerrilla, exact same thing with her. She became a fugitive, escaped from prison, etc. They put out a government wanted poster. Photograph from what i could tell came from an old college newspaper, kind of like a junky social news article or something. Absolutely would not recognize her after many years in prison and the struggle from that photograph.

Their use of these things this is part of their political work. They’re not doing it just to arrest us, they’re doing it to criminalize us, to create fear, to picture us as the evil people, to get the people to be afraid, shouldn’t be near them, etc. And we fight them on this.

There was a young artist who took part in a militant demonstration against the previous settler colonial government of South Africa (before it went neo-colonial) which sent its Springboks sports team, famous team, to tour America and build support for their regime, their colonialist racial dictatorship. There was a very militant and small demonstration when they were at the JFK airport in New York against them in the course of which one of cops protecting them was injured. They arrested a young woman artist and said she did it. i don’t know whether she did, i wasn’t there, i don’t know what happened. But she didn’t like her chances, ‘cause they were talking like about 20 years. She didn’t like her chances going to court, so she got bailed out, she disappeared, and hasn’t been seen since in public here, never was caught.

So they issued a special wanted poster. It wasn’t your normal wanted poster. It went up in the subways. It was a long strip of 5 wanted felons’ mug shots. There’s her, the young woman artist in the middle, and there’s 2 guys on each side of the strip: on each side there’s one rapist and one murderer. A rapist and a murderer and then her. That’s who she is supposed to be like. They don’t think they’re going to catch her that way. No, it’s their whole part of criminalizing us, right? Like, they’re saying “This wasn’t a political struggle, it’s these vicious, criminal, violent people.”

So there’s this wave of spontaneous anger from the women’s community in New York (she was a lesbian), from anti-war people who supported the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. People just saying, “I have a couple of hours this evening I’m going to the subway”. People just walking the trains car to car ripping down these damn wanted posters. Within a week there weren’t any, basically, people couldn’t find any. And the pigs figured out that, “Oh, we better not put them up because when we put them up, they’ll just rip them down.”

So they try to maneuver, this has nothing to do with crime stuff, it’s a political thing. They try to maneuver against us and we answered them spontaneously and basically wiped their gambit out. Well, that’s part of security, it’s part of how we should think about things.

Once we were in a struggle where security and guarding ourselves against FBI attack kept merging into the larger struggle against the system, in a way we couldn’t forget. We were based in a New Afrikan poor community, a “black” neighborhood and the FBI was concerned about it and they didn’t like the struggle which was revolutionary and against the system, against the government and stuff. And so they started a political campaign which had 2 stages. They figured out the 1^st thing to do was to criminalize the activity politically so they picked out this one young white woman—and this shows that they know things—and she was important because there were two main elements in the struggle. There were the young street guys and women who were teenagers or young 20s who were the tactical force, and there were the older women who were the strategic leadership mostly like mothers and grandmothers. And that one woman activist was one of the various links between the two elements, because she was running with both groupings. However it came about, that’s just how it worked. Their intelligence figured that out.

So one day we wake up and her photo is on the front page of every daily newspaper in the city. “Communist Agent Trained in Cuba in Infiltration Techniques Found in Negro Community Misleading those Poor Innocent People Into Rebelling” type shit, it was that crude. As if this young woman could ever create a mass rebellion in a New Afrikan neighborhood, right?

Then their next step was they were going to raid the block that she was staying in, squatting in that neighborhood, they were going to have a big raid. They could’ve just sent two guys in, made an appointment and arrested her, but that’s not what they wanted. They wanted to make a big show of force, right, that “we’re in charge”, that they have the power and they were going to arrest her in front of everybody; they literally brought in like dozens of agents and cops, to search the whole block and seize people and do all this shit.

Now the night before this guy who was like “Silky”—he would dress like a pimp but he was actually a full-time police informant, he was actually a major “black” informer on the South Side of Chicago at the time and everybody knew that and he didn’t hide it. And so he’s also armed and a really dangerous guy, he wouldn’t have been alive otherwise. He came up to some of us in a bar and he said, “They’re going to do this raid tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock, they’re going to come get so and so, so you should tell her, just spread the word” and he left.

So that night we talked to the mothers and grandmothers who were the leaders and said, “You’re going to get raided by the cops tomorrow, that’s what so and so said.” One of the women got angry and said, “There’s nothing that the white cops can find that we don’t want them to find”. So our young woman was going to leave the block, so she’d get arrested at some other point somewhere else, not in their neighborhood, but the women said, “No, you stay right here honey.”

And the cops and the FBI descended on the whole block and are banging on doors and there’s a crowd of young kids suddenly who were entranced by them. So they’d go in and there would 4 or 5 cops and there would be kids, little kids in the way, who were yelling and laughing and throwing balls and saying play with me. What are they gonna do? They can’t shoot this little kid. On the other hand they can’t be doing anything because they’re dragging this little kid. And everyone is in the way. Meanwhile this woman was being moved…where the cops weren’t, right? … At one point this young woman was hidden for a long time all the way up on a building roof, guided by a young New Afrikan lesbian (our girl later said that it was nice, with a furious FBI raid going on below them as the two were enjoying the great view of the neighborhood and comparing notes on Chicago’s main lesbian bar, which they both had tried out).

After about 6 hours the state finally gave up. The whole damn block united against them and they couldn’t do a bloody thing.

So they had attempted to make it their terrain, the security police, it was going to be their terrain. They were going to terrorize everybody. They were going to show that nobody could defy them, that they ruled it. But it became the oppressed peoples’ terrain, particularly the women and children’s terrain, because they turned out to be the winners.

So when i’m talking about security i’m not talking about simply defending ourselves. It’s not that. It’s the constant struggle with their security agencies—just another area—with capitalism.

Q: I was wondering, you pointed out before, there’s no “Security for Dummies” book where you can learn various techniques and various strategies but that seems like that’s something that’s widely deficient within our movement and people are getting infiltrated quite easily by police surveillance. As you were pointing out, it’s the tradition that that information get handed down orally, but if we don’t have that information how would you recommend that we cultivate a stronger sense of security within our movements?

J: i can’t say that i know the answers, i don’t. Like for example the NATO 5 in Chicago, who were set up to be guilty of trying to throw Molotov cocktails at Mayor Emmanuel’s house. Popular idea, of course. But you shouldn’t let the police agent set you up to do it, right? In every mobilization, in every organization, people have to quietly organize themselves to take responsibility for teaching and training.

So, you start to learn things and when there are problems like with radical environmental actions or the NATO 5, well…the problem wasn’t with these guys who were perhaps injudicious in how they related to this cop, it’s the fact that if we don’t assume responsibility for politics this is the result. People come, who are not educated, they’re let’s say naive, they’re vulnerable to being worked up by the cops, let’s say. This is one problem. It’s not the biggest problem, necessarily. There’s nobody looking out after them. There’s nobody saying, “If you want to be doing controversial stuff, don’t be doing it with people you didn’t know before yesterday. And you have no idea who this guy is. You know, that’s not how you do things. Do serious politics with your homies, people who you really know, if you want to do whatever, i’m just saying you should be careful about how you do politics because it changes your life one way or another. This is like a little lesson about how to do it or not do it.” Well you see, nobody said this to these guys necessarily.

But who takes responsibility for these things? A movement really has to set up mechanisms. Just like there’s a book fair here and people take responsibility for all the manifold functions, glorious and unglorious of the book fair. And if you have a movement people have to take responsibility for all its functions. Hey, security is one of these functions and it’s not just being a marshal, and it’s not just having a few official roles, right. It’s a communal political activity.

Q: This question is because I have been thinking about the challenge of making good security compromises. For instance if you make use of a secure encrypted form of email, because you don’t want to be monitored, that inconveniences you somewhat. And because there is a great deal of uncertainty about how closely we’re being monitored and what the most secure ways of doing things are, we might be sort of shooting ourselves in the foot rather than just getting stuff done. You said earlier that the security stuff is part of a bigger picture of what we’re trying to do, right. So if we make bad security compromises, we’re actually going backwards a little bit. We go backwards sometimes we go forwards sometimes, not every decision we make has to be perfect. I read about security in general (inaudible)…what do you think about, how do you make good security compromises?

J: Sorry, but i won’t answer this question [stir and comments in audience]. It’s too big. It’s a huge subject of trade-offs and compromises, which can only be discussed in practical details. So you and i would be going back and forth between ourselves on this forever, i’m sorry, but it’s too big for here.

Q: Can you say what you mean in more detail by security itself, like in a general sense. Because we keep saying it, and the examples tend to help, but i thought it was about the art of attack and defense, and we’re always talking about defending ourselves. Could you tell us what you mean by security?

J: i’m not certain i quite understand, but the thing is this: security is not just stopping infiltration. That’s a big thing. Because we’re actually fighting in an area of the overall struggle, fighting capitalism and its state. Not as an idea or something far away that we protest, but in this area quite intimately.

When you go to school, there’s a branch of capitalism that’s interested in selling you a tuition. And there’s a branch of capitalism that’s interested in selling you shoes. And there’s a branch of capitalism that’s interested in nullifying everything we do as rebels and if necessary killing us, right?

Security is fighting that branch of capitalism. That’s what it’s about. It’s not basically defensive in nature. It’s about the same political struggle we do in our mass demonstrations, you know, in actions or teaching, in whatever, when we go into this and security blends into the edges of the larger struggle. That’s why when we start talking about these examples, they blend into organizing and they blend into it because it’s part of one political whole.

Q: in your presentation you talked a lot about infiltration, I was just wondering especially today how important you think that technique is versus acquiring information through surveillance of social media or photo video surveillance?

J: Well in reality today, they’re both important, i mean the thing is maybe we think they don’t need to infiltrate a group because they got it wiretapped and videotaped and everything only, that isn’t how they think really. They really want their people there. It isn’t just information in an abstract sense. The biggest problem they have politically is that they have information that they don’t understand. And that’s their biggest problem actually, when we fight. They need people to stir the mix, cook the dish.

This is a war, which means that we’re never going to not have agents or infiltrators. That’s like saying you’ll have a war but you’ll never have casualties, that’s silly. Of course there’ll be infiltrators. Just like they’ll never stop us from reaching and influencing and winning over people on their side. Which we do.

i have a friend who convinced a cop to leave their side, to not be a cop. Had him as a student in Ethnic Studies, an Asian cop, and he got convinced—because it’s pretty convincing—that cops are the complete enemies of people of color and oppressed people. Just practically speaking, unless you really like shooting people who look like you, you know, who are poor and struggling, you shouldn’t be a cop. And the last day of the course he came to my friend after the others had left, he thanked him for what he’d done, he unbelted his holster with his 9mm and gave it to my friend and said: “If you ever need it for the movement, use it,” and walked away. Serious. So it isn’t true—and look at Private Manning and all that—it isn’t true that we’re just on the defensive. We’re fighting politically with them. We’ll never stop them from doing some messing with us and causing us casualties and they won’t stop us from winning people over.

Sidebar 7

So it’s just like, when i came into the movement at 18 and didn’t know anything but was glad to find others and do something political. And within a year i met people in or around the group who were agents. So earlier i’ve mentioned this one college dropout guy acting like a Hollywood version of a revolutionary who turned out to be working for the FBI. There was another settler guy, his close “comrade”and friend in the group, who turned out to be a part-time informer for a county sheriff’s office.

You know what i said about terrain, about knowing what the changes and moves in our terrain mean? Well, this second guy stood out like a dead spot to everyone because…he really hated us! i mean, hated us all personally, as people. He was a student at a conservative bible college, and he truly hated and feared all of us lefties so much that he couldn’t even hide it. That stood out. He was acting like the pope trying to be undercover at a convention of Judas fans. Which made comrades think: why is a fundamentalist bible college student who seems to really hate almost everyone in the group even around us at all? There was nothing natural about it. Definitely, this second guy was a candidate for world’s worst agent award.

It was so pathetic that comrades mostly laughed it off. And anyway, our social-democratic group wasn’t exactly shaking capitalism from its foundations, we would have rejoiced and broken out the champagne bottles if we’d ever had any actual secrets to protect (yes, it was also true that any remotely sensitive discussions these clowns were kept away from).

So that “Dynamic Duo” was a good example of complete political police ineptitude, or a badly failed attempt at intelligence-gathering which we had deftly foiled? No, unfortunately, in the slippery long range of things it worked out in a way that shouldn’t have surprised me but did.

James Yaki Sayles always told his New Afrikan comrades, over and over, “We have to take ourselves more seriously.” This is a lesson which was really borne home to me, for instance, in this case. And, by the way, this relates to whether agent infiltration is so important to them anymore in an age of total electronic surveillance? This is a question that is raised all the time now not just by that comrade but whenever the issue of movement security comes up. The interesting fact is, our enemy has a “spare no expense” agenda when it comes to fighting the movement, weak though we are. They want it all, every tool, every weapon, and definitely always see a priority need for human informers and agents. We can make it plain.

While everyone in our little group back then laughed off these two obnoxious and obvious white guy agents, what we weren’t thinking of was any larger picture. Like, to start with, if they were so isolated then how did they stay in contact with things at all? The answer was that they were part of a small dissident tendency led by one very smart comrade who wasn’t considered an agent. Who was politically well educated from the IWW to Leninism, much more so than myself or most other young comrades. Let’s call him “A”. So what did that relationship mean? “A” turned out to have a bad weakness which we saw but didn’t see. His critical faculties got suspended whenever someone was willing to be his follower, to praise him and politically support his personal agendas. So “A” wasn’t bothered by everyone’s disbelief in the two agents in his clique.

While we dismissed them and laughed it off, the two fumbling agents had tripped over a very useful piece of information: “A” who was an experienced player in the left could be a security “aircraft carrier” for their whole team, a controversial though respected activist but one who could be manipulated to give political cover to more police infiltrators. How valuable that one piece of information could be.

“A” himself got deeper into the struggle over the years, being smart and curious and important. Wanting to be closer to “real” hard-core struggles such as Black nationalism and working class organizing and even supporting urban guerrilla politics in other countries. Inevitably, we now understand, as he got deeper into the struggle in at least one important situation he was used to run cover for and validate a police agent who outwardly was his “comrade”. How often this happened we aren’t completely sure, but the magic number isn’t likely to be zero.

This is something those of us back in early days never understood or foresaw, because his major league egotism was just so “natural”, so common for many of us in the movement back then that it didn’t stand out. It was accepted as normal static on our political radios. Sometimes the most cutting secrets are the ones hidden in plain sight, hidden it turns out by our own hands from ourselves. So human agents aren’t just walking “ears” for the police. They are themselves catalysts as all people are, changing things and transforming things that might have not been otherwise. The problem in the end turned out to be not with the two clumsy agents but with the smart and “political” comrade who wasn’t thought to be dangerous like an agent would be—and we totally didn’t see it coming.

What we do and don’t do in our small spheres of political work, often has larger effects in the struggle far beyond us. Taking responsibility for that is hard.

Q: I wonder if you want to speak to…good politics is obviously a defense against infiltration and you gave a lot of examples that you can identify this person as an infiltrator because of their bad politics or because of our bad politics this person got a long way. But it also seems like branding people infiltrators, this is obviously really dangerous. I wonder if you could speak to some of the other preventative values of good politics or ways it may protect us that don’t involve us identifying people as traitors, which is probably not even our biggest security problem.

J: It isn’t. Security is like all politics, all living. It’s art and craft in as much as you need to know how to practically do it. You need experience at it. You can’t go around saying, “oh, you have bad politics, you’re an agent”, that’s like harmful and silly, frankly, i don’t want to get into too much tactical stuff because tactical stuff depends on the actual situation, it isn’t a big principle that you’re going to run out and apply like a cure-all lotion kind of thing. And when i talk about egotism or patriarchy, in part that’s because if i overemphasize it… in the sense that they seem to need cooler people as agents now, you know, who can fit in better. But of course in the ‘60s and ‘70s over and over and over again, we saw the same pattern. Only we couldn’t stop ourselves. It was beyond our ability, because our politics weren’t good enough. And not in any abstract way.

Like, you ask people how was Malcolm killed? If you say it was a conspiracy, then it must have been an operation and so how did it work, practically speaking? Malcolm had security and he had trained them, too. This is a guy who basically almost created the Fruit of Islam, the Nation of Islam’s security people that cast a long shadow we all respected. So how did he get killed so easily in the Audubon Ballroom?

Answer: Eugene Roberts, police agent, who presented himself as war veteran, top martial artist…like, “I like roughing up bad guys. Anybody who causes trouble with you, Malcolm, well don’t worry. I won’t let anyone … blah, blah, blah”…

Malcolm liked that. Sounded really tough, man-competent, you know? He made him head of security. So, did Eugene Roberts have good security? Absolutely—for his mission. He had painstaking security. Everybody who walked into the Audubon Ballroom meetings was shaken down, patted down, their bags were emptied, you know, questioned, scrutinized, pushed around. Nobody was going to get past Eugene Roberts and his guys. After awhile, of course, many people stopped coming to Malcolm’s speeches because they didn’t feel like getting messed up and patted down on the way in, and people were complaining to Malcolm about it. So Malcolm said, “Well, this is counterproductive, this security thing!” So he said, “Okay, no more security, no more searching people at the door, no more patting everybody down, no more looking in their bags, just open the doors. It doesn’t matter.”

Bingo! Eugene Roberts struck the jackpot, got what he was aiming at with this murderous cop scheme. The minute he did that and then you got 3 dangerous other guys known to police coming into the weekly public meeting with shotgun and pistols. They came in and did the assassination in front of 200 people and 2 of the 3 got away. (One was grabbed by the crowd). Even though all of them were known to the state, the 2 who escaped were never caught or publicly named. Although the police did arrest innocent people afterwards, of course, as they usually do. Malcolm’s security didn’t do anything to protect him, because it wasn’t his security anymore. New York police who were normally all over revolutionary meetings, disappeared for that night, totally not in sight. What a coincidence, they decided to take the night off. So it all worked out really well for the oppressors. Not so well for our side.

This happened to us over and over and over again in one way or another, coast to coast. It didn’t happen just once, it happened 50, 100, 200, 300 times and you know something, we hardly learned a damn thing from it. So if people are beyond that and they know that, that’s excellent—sorry it’s just ABC’s, but it cost us a lot to tell you this, i mean the knowledge, people died and only then did we get the knowledge in effect that we’re dealing with. It’s not nothing.

Q: I don’t necessarily know if this is a positive example or not. I’ve had experience of groups I’ve been a part of having been infiltrated and I feel that one of the things that people have talked about a lot is about how much do you trust your gut? Like how do you go about trusting your gut if you think people are infiltrators without calling people out for being infiltrators when you could be wrong?

I would just caution people to not have just such a black-and-white…you have suspicions about people so they’re an informant and you treat them like a spy, but at the same time you don’t react against that because of guilt and still include them in everything that you might not want to include them in. I think that people could take a more balanced approach to it and be straightforward about it and try not to alienate everyone they have suspicions of. I don’t know what you think about that. It’s something that we tried recently.

J: It’s true, a lot of security questions when it comes to infiltration are gray, they’re not black and white. Like most of them are gray. So you have to figure out how to deal with it. It depends on how much work you put into it. This may sound funny to you, but we used to simply investigate people. It’s not a big deal to me.

Once the main anti-war group in Chicago was in a crisis because the guy who had the mailing list, they couldn’t reach him by phone and they had to do an emergency mailing. So people went out to his house and they knocked on the door and he wasn’t home. “Where the hell is this guy? he’s a retired bookkeeper he told us, so where the heck is he? Oh, he’s probably at the neighborhood tavern.”

And so they went to the neighborhood tavern and said “Hey, you know so-and-so? Did you see him lately? You know, has he been here today?” And they said. “Oh, you mean so-and-so the cop?” And the anti-war people could only say, “What!?!” It turns out the guy was a full-time on duty Chicago police detective, right? He had the only copy of the movement mailing list for this citywide group…

They threatened him with a lawsuit to get the only copy of the mailing list back, but it sure changed things. Among other stuff, the comrades involved felt like fools. So they formed a small informal but no nonsense work group to not have it happen again. That wasn’t a secret at all, but they didn’t share all the details of the work with everyone, which was understood as just common sense. One of the techniques they used was they dug up a sympathizer who owned a small business, and had access to doing credit checks and bank info. Anyone they had questions about, they ran a credit check to see if their identity and work record matched with what they said about themselves. They also did other similar things, sometimes with unanticipated results. As well as checking with movement sources more. As an old Chinese philosopher once said, “no investigation, no right to speak.”

Sidebar 8

This new idea that the movement has to be completely transparent to everyone as a principle, especially to people whom we don’t trust, to me this is an unconscious influence from the liberal culture or something. That no one should be held back from knowing everything that any part of the movement is up to? This is really new but not too fresh. To be blunt, this is an idea that has come about from the current distortion of the left as part of the cultural zone of “play nice” middle class reformism. As though bourgeois civil liberties mindsets developed in part by interaction with cops and courts should define how we in the struggle relate and work with each other. As though we aren’t outlaws and rebels. This didn’t exist in earlier eras when the movement was primarily made up of oppressed working people fighting to survive, guarded in their trust, and for good reasons. “Necessity knows no laws.”

And oh, here’s another thing that came in our movement experience a lot: there were people, there wasn’t anything on the surface wrong with them, they were nondescript, they sometimes didn’t say anything at meetings. They’d say something fawning like: “Listen, I don’t know too much about all these politics. I just wanna help and do your mailings, help do that kind of stuff.” And some groups in the old days, hopefully not now, there was a hierarchy of roles: the important people didn’t do any work, physical work, they gave orders and talked, whatever. And all the way down the hierarchy, the kind of new, “unimportant” people that nobody knew, they were left to do a lot of the practical whatnot.

It always sounded a little backwards to me, but anyways…so time and again, we just learned that this was like unbelievably backward on our parts..

When Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz left Boston’s Cell 16, the first radical feminist group in the United States, to start a branch that they called the Southern Feminist Revolutionary Union or Women’s Union or something like that in New Orleans, along the way they picked up this young woman who was a graduate student and who said as usual something like, “I love this feminism, I’m all for you, I don’t talk much, I don’t know much about it, but, you know, I just want to help. Like I’ll do all the paperwork. I’ll keep minutes of every meeting. I’ll do all the correspondence. You creative leadership people, I want to free you to just go out and I’ll just take care of little things.”

So, of course, one day they came back to the office and discovered copies of letters that she had inadvertently left.

It turns out of course, she really was a grad student and her professor apparently had been contacted by the FBI. So his line was, “Well, in order to get your thesis approved we want things like a psychological assessment of every person in this radical group. We want all their correspondence. We want to know their personal friends, etc, etc. We want to know this and we want to know that. This is all part of your thesis work. Just do this academic work and if you don’t give us this we’re throwing you out.” She was a rich kid at a fancy university. So, of course she said “I have to do this”. She was like a complete spy inside the group, but instead of being on the police payroll she was actually paying them lots of tuition money to get university credit for being a spy? You do know that capitalist culture is really weird, right?

This whole thing of hierarchy of roles thing, you know, really a bad idea, and not at all the same thing as practical division of labor. Working in the gray areas because we had to, we just looked up people, we thought about who they had worked with before. This wasn’t a big witch-hunt or anything. Just because we checked out peoples’ stories and looked at people’s background a lot because we had to, because we had bad experiences otherwise. This idea that we must automatically assume that everyone is good and trustworthy is just as crack as the idea that we must assume that everyone must be under suspicion and thought to be untrustworthy. Neither is realistic. We play the hand that we are dealt. And you do have to trust your gut and sometimes while you’re working it out you put people in a bubble. They’re in theory at the meeting, but actually you’re working around them, you’re protecting everyone from them but you’re just not saying anything, i don’t know, it sounds Machiavellian or whatever, but it’s a war here. We’re doing what we can, and if there are better ways then hopefully people will find them.

Q: I was just wondering, do we really need to figure out if someone is an agent or not, in order to figure out that they shouldn’t be in one of our groups? One of those things that used to drive me nuts. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. That person is being sexist all the time, they shouldn’t be in the group, right? A person who is disruptive so that we can’t do our business during meetings shouldn’t be in the group. I don’t know, maybe it’s different here, but a lot of people think it’s the worst thing to be like, No you shouldn’t be in this group. It’s just really tough for some groups—maybe not every group—to say that somebody needs to take a time out.

J: Yes, you’re right. Can’t say any more than that.

Moderator: It’s time, the meeting is over.

G20 Repression and Infiltration in Toronto: an Interview with Mandy Hiscocks

Amanda “Mandy” Hiscocks is a long time activist from a Guelph, Ontario. She was centrally involved in organizing against the G20 summit held in Toronto in June 2010. Tom Keefer interviewed Hiscocks a week before she was sentenced in January 2012. She served her sentence in the Vanier Center for Women in Milton, Ontario from where she maintained the blog http://boredbutnotbroken.tao.ca

When and how did the police monitor organizers and infiltrate the movement against the G20?

They sent undercover agents in way before the G20 activism began. The two agents that I’m most familiar with—Brenda Dougherty (Brenda Carey) and Khalid Mohammed (Bindo Showan), in Guelph and Waterloo respectively—came in around the time of the planning against Vancouver Olympics. Their focus only morphed into G8/G20 surveillance later. But even before that, in 2008, I was placed under surveillance by the OPP because they claimed that I was involved in “extremist” left groups such as the Central Student Association (CSA) at the University of Guelph and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I’m not a part of PETA and in any case, neither it nor the CSA are extremist groups.

What was perhaps more important for them was that they also said I was involved in “Aboriginal support” and that I was operating as a “bridge” between Guelph, Toronto, and Ottawa. It’s been a recurring theme in the Crown’s synopsis of events to talk a lot about Indigenous solidarity work. I think the cops had people who were keeping tabs on activists in Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo for their involvement in supporting Indigenous struggles and that they moved to a focus on the Olympics and the G20 when the Integrated Security Unit came into being.

What kind of Indigenous movements were you involved with that they were concerned about?

At the time, back in 2008, I would say nothing particularly structured. I had gone to some demonstrations and there was an Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement chapter in Guelph, but it wasn’t particularly effective. I was going to a lot of events and helping to run events through the Ontario Public Research Interest Group (OPIRG). There was some Six Nations solidarity work going on at that time, and folks were also doing Tyendinaga support work. I would consider myself pretty peripheral to that work at that time, but as a whole the radical community in Guelph was very much into that kind of politics. I’m not really sure that I was actually a bridge between Toronto, Guelph, and Ottawa, but I did know a lot of people in those cities who were doing that kind of work. The main thing that the police were worried about was settler communities working with radical Indigenous people and they were also really worried about the more general networking that was happening in Southern Ontario. They didn’t like that Kitchener, Guelph, and Hamilton were working really closely together and that there was a lot of anarchist organizing going on.

What kind of tactics and strategies did the state use to try to infiltrate the movement?

In my opinion, they did everything right. Khalid, the agent I’m most familiar with, came into Guelph and started working with the people opposing the Hanlon Creek Business Park development in Guelph. An above ground group called LIMITS, which held public meetings, organized petitions, spoke with city council, and hosted debates, had a big sign-up sheet, and wanted a really diverse group of people to join. Khalid started going to meetings and doing a lot of work, and then he met people in that group who were more connected to radical politics. There was crossover between that group and people who ended up doing an occupation at that site. He ended up at the occupation.

The occupation wasn’t underground, but it was illegal. It was easy for him to slide into the other side of things. But at the same time, if we were to do it again, I’m not quite sure how we could prevent that. You do want lots of people joining your email lists and helping out, and if they seem solid, it’s hard to justify keeping them out.

Were there things about his behaviour and activity that had people questioning whether or not he could be trusted or if he was a cop?

Yes, there were. I wasn’t that involved in the Hanlon Creek occupation because I was on bail at the time and had a surety with money on the line, so I couldn’t go to “unlawful” demonstrations, but I heard that there were people who didn’t trust him. I’d hear people say, “Ugh, we can’t be like this about people, just because he’s brown and older, people need to calm down and not be so suspicious.” So that debate was happening in Guelph, but eventually he did get kicked out of the occupation. I’m not sure about the circumstances, but I do know that it happened.

Then there was a backlash because he allied himself with an Indigenous man and a couple of other people at the occupation to identify the Guelph kids who kicked him out as racist. Either way, he did get kicked out and found his way to Kitchener and got involved in activism there. According to his notes in our disclosure, in Kitchener he established trust with a well known activist by doing things like buying illegal cigarettes from a nearby reserve and doing illegal drugs with other activists. He used the trust with that particular person to get into an organizing group in Kitchener.

What strategy did the police agent known as Brenda Dougherty use to get into the activist movement?

She came into Guelph in late 2008 or early 2009. She had instructions from her handlers at the OPP to go and just sit at the Cornerstone cafe because a lot of lefties hang around there; they thought that she should be seen in a cool, progressive coffee shop (she was getting paid to eat her lunch!). She read books like Animal Rights and Human Wrongs by Peter Singer and One Dead Indian by Peter Edwards. She watched the film Trans America and other really mainstream stuff to get a sense of the politics of the movement.

She had a list of people—targets—and she went to events, starting on campus, looking for people. She had photographs and was looking for “face time with targets,” which is her own quote from the disclosure. She went to an International Women’s Day event, did some other stuff, and eventually wound up at a Guelph Union of Tenants and Supporters (GUTS) meeting when they were trying to branch out and recruit on campus. Hardly anyone showed up to that meeting, so she was one of maybe four new members of the group. She started working with GUTS, which was doing very legal things like tenant advocacy and serving meals on the street. She got in by cooking and doing grunt work in a totally non-sketchy way. The cooking was done at people’s houses and people became friendly and comfortable talking while she was in the room, and it transitioned into people talking about the G8/G20.

It wasn’t even that activists were saying sketchy stuff, more just that she thought, “Okay, these are the people. I’ve hit the jackpot with this network, and I’m going to get to know these people a lot better and follow them.” I don’t know how she got to that first anti-G20 meeting in Guelph. I was protesting at the Olympics in Vancouver at the time, so I don’t know if it was an open meeting or if she had been invited because she was around for long enough that people trusted her. But she ended up at the first meeting of what would become the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR) before there was a vouch system in place. And then she breezed through all the rest.

I don’t think anyone ever down and asked, “Who here is officially vouching for Brenda?” But when there was an official vouch system, I vouched for her at a meeting months later—to my eternal shame. I think she got in because she had done so much work and had been there from the start.

One of the conditions of your bail prevented any of the co-accused from contacting one another. In retrospect, do you think it made sense for you to have accepted the nonassociation conditions that were required to get out of custody after you were first arrested?

Well, I can say that I’m never doing that again. I will not take nonassociation conditions again, and I will not go into an arrestable action without understanding that I could be in jail for months and months. I can’t speak for other people, but I think that what set the tone for the conditions we got, more than anything, was the fact that we had lawyers. The lawyers wanted to get us out at any cost and were willing to agree to pretty much anything. If we had refused lawyers, they wouldn’t have been able to put non-association restrictions on us, because we would have had to communicate for the trial.

Ideally, we should have said, “We all get out (or not) but we have to have a way to meet.” If we had stayed in jail, all the women would have been able to meet together and all the men would have been able to meet together. We were all on the same ranges. We would have had a little bit more time to have conversations. The way it turned out, we never had time to talk. We weren’t a group of 17 people with a plan, so we didn’t have time to properly discuss things like, “How do you feel about non-association?” since we’d never done that kind of pre-arrest stuff that you do if you’re doing a cohesive action with a group of people. If we had not signed the non-association agreement and if we had stayed in jail, we could have done that.

I remember arguing with my lawyer about this, and he was adamant: “No, no, this is okay. They’re just playing it up because of the media, everything will die down, just keep your heads down and in a few months we’ll sort it out.” And I should not have believed him! It’s been my experience that it’s really hard to change bail conditions later. Most people in jail wanted to get out quickly. We didn’t have a real discussion in jail that I can remember about whether we should stay there and work as a group to get better conditions later. People hadn’t prepared for that. People had stuff at home that was hanging over them, people had work, people hadn’t thought this stuff through.

What about the publication ban?

Once our lawyers got the publication ban in place it was really hard for people to know what they could do on our behalf, and it also meant there were a lot of complications with organizing any kind of protest. One problem was that people didn’t know what they could say, or even if they could say anything. Another was that there is this weird kind of loophole in the conspiracy law that seemed to mean that if you were alleged to have been part of the conspiracy, and if at a later date in court you were deemed to have actually been a part of that conspiracy, then anything that you said, even after your arrest, is assumed to have been said by anyone in the group. So, everyone was scared to speak without the consent of the group, which we couldn’t get because we had non-association conditions. There was also this idea of the “unindicted co-conspirator,” someone who hasn’t been arrested but is considered by the Crown to be part of the conspiracy. That loophole would also apply to them, so no one who thought they might be an unindicted co-conspirator wanted to speak either. It was surreal and confusing. We didn’t understand it and we couldn’t get a straight legal answer. Someone needs to study this stuff and see what the law actually says and what the restrictions are, so that we know it better for next time.

What do you think the level of fallout has been on the activists involved in G20 organizing? Have people been scared off or has this process strengthened people’s understanding of what’s at stake and what’s required?

I really don’t know. I know what I’d like to think: I’d like to think that people are having better conversations about what they’re willing to do, about what they’re willing to give up. One of the goals of the TCMN (Toronto Community Mobilization Network) was to use the G20 to get people excited and to join groups that were organizing in the city. To some extent I think that happened.

I also think that if you were one of the people who got attacked at Queen’s Park on June 26, you have a pretty different understanding of riot police now. That can be a powerful moment, when you see the state for what it really is. Hopefully people who were there have a better understanding of the state and the police, where they fit, and what the right to protest really means. Hopefully it made people angrier and not more fearful of state repression. But I don’t have a good way of knowing if that’s the case. In terms of prison solidarity, it’s done wonders. The number of people, even just people connected to me on Facebook, who are involved in letter writing, posting information about Bill C-101[210] and programs in prisons, and disseminating information that they wouldn’t normally, has grown exponentially. I don’t know if that’s taking away from other work, but it seems that there is more of a focus on prisoners as a political issue.

How would you respond to the critique that a proponent of non-violent direct action might make, where everything should be organized transparently and people should only engage in civil disobedience so that no one can be portrayed as a terrorist or as being violent? Has that made you reconsider your position on questions around violence or fighting the cops?

No, not at all. I would have liked everything to unfold as a cross between an autonomous black bloc and the way that affinity groups were organized in the anti-globalization movement days. Like the pie chart in Seattle, divide the city: “Is there an affinity group that can shut down this part of the city? Hands up, awesome, there’s ten of you, great. Do you need more people, no? Okay, go to it, go do your autonomous thing.” The idea behind SOAR was that it would allow for a little more cooperation between affinity groups so that there weren’t just a random bunch of affinity groups doing whatever. If one affinity group was doing a particular thing, maybe another affinity group could assist, through a complementary action, or use their own action as a decoy and so on. That’s not the way it panned out, but that was the idea that I had and that was the idea behind the spokescouncils of affinity groups that made up SOAR.

In the end, all of the “ring-leaders” in SOAR were in jail and completely different people took the lead on the day of the march and put up a flare and a bunch of people followed them. It was just a standard black bloc: people wearing black, people who knew and trusted one another, and they went and engaged in some “criminal activity.” The militant action ended up being less organized but it happened and I think it accomplished what it was meant to. And all of that organization that went into SOAR, all of the time and the energy, maybe it was unnecessary. I don’t mean that the idea of more coordinated affinity group actions should be abandoned, or that it’s a bad model, just that it didn’t work this time and we need to think it through more.

If the state of the movement right now was such that another Seattle could happen, or that there were affinity groups out there who acted with no bandanas, who did things like hard blockades, who knew how to do those things, who had the equipment, and were willing do them, I think we would have had a really different situation. The assessment that I and that most people have, however, is that that doesn’t exist anymore. People don’t do those things. It’s not the Pacific Northwest, it’s not the anti-logging stuff, it’s not the anti-globalization days.

I walked into those meetings in Toronto and looked around and thought, where is everyone? Where are the people who have these skills, who know how to do this stuff? They weren’t there. And I remember speaking with a friend of mine who is completely pacifist, and does only non-violent direct action and does it really well and coordinated and I was asked, “Are you going to be here? Can we have some yellow actions?” But there just weren’t those things. I think that’s a problem. Because we have really boring, not very useful, union/NGO-style marches or black bloc actions and nothing in the middle. It’s important to note that it wasn’t only the radical anarchists who were infiltrated. Greenpeace and the Vancouver Media Centre were infiltrated too. A lot of pretty mainstream groups who do mostly non-violent civil disobedience (if they do anything illegal at all) were infiltrated. I don’t think it’s true that the infiltration wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t this idea of “violence.”

It seems that in some ways that black bloc actions have become symbolic actions in themselves and that “it’s not a good summit protest unless something is burning.” The act of smashing stuff is seen as a victory in itself, even though it’s really symbolic and ultimately resulted in the trouble that you and a number of other people went through—all the trials and all the jail time.

The thing is, we knew that the black bloc was going to happen, because it always happens. SOAR or no SOAR, there’s going to be a black bloc. And so the question that we had—in SOAR and the TCMN—was how can we use diversity of tactics to separate the labour march from another march where people can be more “militant.” The original idea was always that shit is going to happen—it always happens and organizers can’t and shouldn’t control what people are going to do or not going to do.

It’s a fair bet that there’s going to be a black bloc and there are going to be smashed windows. How do we make sure that that happens in a place and in a way that doesn’t affect the green march or the low-risk march? That was the intention and it didn’t work out that way, and it kind of didn’t work out that way because of a lack of respect for a diversity of tactics. If there had been a friendly, cordial, “We don’t agree but we recognize that some people want to do different things,” message from the labour march, I think it would have turned out really well.

As for the value of having a small black bloc that runs amok in the city—I haven’t decided either way on that. I think there is some value to showing any kind of resistance that is militant, that’s in your face, that says, “No, you can’t scare me with your tear gas. You can’t scare me with your guns. Fuck you.” I think that’s really important in ways that can’t necessarily be assessed. And I don’t think the window smashing matters. I don’t think the smashing cop cars matters. I think that whatever gives an aura of militancy in the street is really valuable.

I don’t know that a civil disobedience “lie down and let’s get dragged away” action does do that. I think it does a lot of other great things, but it doesn’t inspire the same people as a more confrontational action does. When I was in jail, the general consensus on my range was, “That was fucking awesome.” People who have been constantly harassed by cops, whether they have a really good class analysis or just plain experience, thought it was great. People who hate the power structure but don’t really have a background or academic understanding of it were drawn to the militant actions, and that’s what’s positive. So I don’t think the bloc should be assessed in terms of people getting arrested, or whether or not we shut it down, or if the unions are mad at us now.

I just wish that there had also been a middle ground. I wish that there were people saying, “We’re going to lie down on the Gardiner Expressway,” or saying, “We’re not going to let the delegates through,” or “We’re going to put a tripod in the middle of the entrance way,” or “We’re going to lock down at the fence.”

One thing that I learned was that you can either be part of organizing the structure—making the posters, making the timelines, getting the convergence space—or you can be part of a group that’s going to be doing an action, but you can’t do both. There is no way that my affinity group could have actually planned a really solid action while we were also doing all of the structure stuff. That was the main drawback: that there were not enough people in the city that were willing to give enough of their time to allow people who were part of the TCMN to also plan actions. In hindsight, we needed the people in the TCMN to just plan a big militant action. No one else was doing it and SOAR ended up taking it on.

It’s almost a reflection of the fact that the balance of forces has changed since Seattle and the G20 in Toronto.

It seems that there are fewer people participating, and that people from both sides of the “violence” debate are scornful of the middle. There are people who are only willing to march and will not do anything illegal. And then there are people who are like, “Fuck this non-violent direct action shit, I want to break some windows. I want to do something that feels strong and empowering. I’m going to dress all in black and be part of the black bloc.”

Neither side is interested in the classic mass civil disobedience actions. If there was a middle force between these extremes, maybe there would be more people and if there were more people, maybe there would be a middle.

But yeah—it’s definitely different. But it’s not just time; I think it’s also location. I think if the G20 had happened, for example, in Montreal, where there’s a different political culture, it would have been totally different. There you can be part of a militant march that will confront the police, or at least defend itself against the police. Folks there who will attack a fence or a structure and do that kind of thing on a regular basis don’t dress all in black in some kind of cliquey subculture. If the G20 had met in Montreal, I don’t think the weird conflict between the union and the break-off march would have happened. People would have said, “Of course we will do a militant break-off march.”

My really over-simplified analysis of the black bloc—or the kinds of things the black bloc would do—is that we’ve been doing it backwards. For the last decade, since Seattle, people have been trying to normalize the black bloc. Our thinking was that the more we do it the more people will get used to it and the more appealing these tactics will become.

But we should be looking at Egypt. The protests in Tahrir Square were always called peaceful protests. There was the classic “women and children” line: it was peaceful and it was meant to be peaceful and in the interviews everyone said how peaceful it was and that they just wanted a peaceful demonstration that was massive, to just make their point. But when the police and Mubarak’s people attacked there was not a lot of conflict or tension when people started defending the square and the protest against the state’s forces. Hundreds of people were doing things like burning down police stations as well as climbing on top of tall buildings and throwing molotovs down when the cops came!

It’s almost as if black bloc activists need to bide their time, practice their tactics, but not in a public way because the only time it’s going to be acceptable here is when people feel threatened. If the cops had attacked the labour march I don’t know that the unions would have been so upset about a bunch of people fighting the cops; maybe then they might have thought, “Oh yeah—this is okay. My four year old is here and it’s great that this person in black is preventing the cops from getting too close.” People almost do politics as a hobby, like, “Let’s go out for the day and march around with the unions,” so they might not see the value of the black bloc. But they would if they faced the risk of police violence themselves. Because non-violent rallies are not a threat to the state, the state doesn’t respond with violence. And in my mind, a defensive black bloc that contributes to a larger action is more useful than one that goes alone and engages in small scale property damage.

As you prepare to do 11 months in jail, is there anything that you want to tell people, or are there ways that people can support you in jail, or ways that you can work with prisoner support movements?

The one thing I would like to tell people—because I think people have a really skewed perception of what jail is—is that it’s not really going to be that terrible. I think that it’s really important for people to know that this is something we can do. People have this idea that jail is to be avoided at all costs and it’s the end of the world if you have to do time. I’m hoping that my experience, when I can share it, will demonstrate that it’s not so bad. You can still do important things on the inside and you will still have contact with the outside and it doesn’t take a particularly strong person to be able to get through it.

So you see it as part of the political process, if we’re serious about changing the world?

Exactly. It’s not like they’re going to stop arresting people. However, there are only so many times that you can do time in your life, so I think those times should be worth it. If you are going to put yourself out there knowing that you could potentially do time, then just make sure that your actions are as efficient and effective as possible.

56. Beginner’s Kata

Deleted reason: deleted not anarchist

Subtitle: uncensored stray thoughts on revolutionary organization

Author: J. Sakai

Authors: J. Sakai

Topics: anarchist organization, organization, not-anarchist, organizing

Date: December 4, 2018

Date Published on T@L: 2021-06-09T03:08:19

Source: Text: https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/kata/ Cover: https://www.akpress.org/beginner-s-kata.html

Notes: Publisher: Kersplebedeb.

Cover:

d-d-dumpster-diving-the-anarchist-library-text-bin-16.png

Plain talk with J. Sakai about what we do and don’t know about revolutionary organization, and, indeed, about being revolutionaries.

“Beginner’s mind” is a zen phrase. It reminds us that when we first took this path as beginners, we approached it almost with awe. Self-conscious of knowing so little—knowing nothing, really—we were open for seeing anything. Aware mostly of how unimportant our own little knowledge was. But as we became much more experienced, even became “expert,” it was different. We could separate useful from scrap, what we judge is good from bad, so automatically we hardly needed to pause over it. Our journey became a polished routine. And now we sometimes ask ourselves, is it still a journey?

i was reminded of “beginner’s mind” all over again once, in a very different context. Accidentally tuning past an ongoing discussion between a few marxists and anarchists about the pros and cons of leninism vs. “horizontal” spontaneity in revolutionary organization. It was like people at a dinner party having a familiar argument across the room from you. You can’t catch everything being said, but you know where it’s going anyway.

Seems that every culture has strange traditions. Seemingly illogical , ritual ways of approaching some things. Guess it’s just human. As in the Japanese cartoon world we know as anime, the artistic convention is that the characters are pictured as Caucasians, even though the artists and audience are Japanese. (Critics here guess maybe respecting their art’s origins in the fandom for imported u.s. comic books during the post-1945 Occupation?)

Our left subculture, like in that discussion on leninism & revolutionary organization, is as strange as that. Instead of centering on actual organizations we ourselves might have experimented with, learned from or fought against, by cultural convention the debate often uses the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the conflicting stalinist and anarchist experiences of the 1937 Spanish Civil War as its framework. So discussions on a key subject are familiarly conducted at a remove—using the puppetry of actors and scenarios from almost a century ago, on a different continent; none of it in our living memory or knowledge. This is still a serious political discussion, just as Paris couture fashions are still seriously-intended clothing. But both are heavily stylized and artificial, for unspoken class purposes?

Someone in that small discussion pointed out that leninism and his kind of command organization had played such a large role to this day in modern revolutionary politics, that whether it was negative or positive, good or bad in someone’s opinion, it should be better understood. Unfortunately, put me down as more than skeptical on this.

Only yesterday i had said the exact same thing. But hearing it played back again in someone else’s voice, realized that i don’t really expect it to happen. Useful idea, abstractly, but the left in this country has never been able to successfully do this one specific thing about understanding revolutionary organization, not in a hundred years. Neither anarchists nor marxists. So why would you expect it to happen now? Is it that we’re much smarter all of a sudden? Is everyone more interested in leninism now?

[Those words might sound like i’m either dissing Lenin or dissing revs in this country. No, not at all. But his politics have been untranslatable here, because of the complex barrier which divides our realities. Same reason so many people don’t understand his Russian predecessor, the anarchist Bakunin. If time allows, we might touch lightly on this at another turn down the road.]

This is a singular moment in the struggle, where the old left from the 1960s-70s has finally gone, and where the wind-shaken leafs of brand new radicalisms have begun to sprout up, fragile yet driven. As generations go on and off stage, and society is transformed once again by the leap in the means of economic production & distribution. This is a space in the transition between different historic epochs, in the simultaneous unnatural flowering/world collapse of capitalist civilization. Still, in a brutal continental u.s. empire of some 325 millions, it is only ordinary that there are numbers of radical people as well as different groups with revolutionary ideas. But if only temporarily, there is no revolutionary organization yet which is strong enough to impress its ideas upon mainstream politics.

Everyone who has been around radical protest activity for awhile has heard left organizational ideas—anarchist, social-democratic, old marxist-leninist, maoist, eco-survivalist, whatever. To me the first question isn’t any longer which ideas are “best”—which is how the organization question is usually framed—but how true or useful are the assumptions on which our discussions are based? Where are we really when we start to navigate our course?

What i am trying to do here is not to argue one organizational form or another, but to examine how we think about revolutionary organization. What the framework is around everything. To examine how our easy acceptance of so many assumptions could throw us forward or off-track. Because, at least to me, there’s a big gap between the reality and our superficial talk about the shape of revolutionary organizations to come.

So how much have we learned about revolutionary organization? In practical terms, in one way personally i know a lot (certainly much more than we would ever want to spill in public), but in another way i don’t know near enough. Maybe like the backyard guy you know who fixes cars, but isn’t good enough to get a real mechanic’s job at the dealership? So, not nearly enough. But here’s a handful anyway, right or wrong, tossed into the pot, my share towards what we need for starters.

i know that marxist-leninists here are supposed to know so much about this subject, but don’t.

In my political lifetime i’ve seen what felt like dozens of primarily middle-class, white and asian M-L collectives, organizations and so-called parties started in the metropolis, this u.s. empire , and none of them to my knowledge have been successful. That’s a zero. At one point almost the entire, ex-college asian-american movement on the West Coast and New York City emptied itself into fiercely warring “Marxist-Leninist-Mao-Tse-Tung-Thought party-building” organizations and collectives of one kind or another. All long gone now. Most 1960s-70s M-L organizations quickly disappeared. A few “Trotskyist” sects unfortunately lasted it felt like forever, like those fabled cockroaches briskly going about their business immune to the glowing levels of radioactivity in a post-holocaust world (when i think of those groups, there’s a reason a mental picture of radioactive cockroaches comes into my mind).

If you started early enough way back then, we even saw “pragmatic” social-democratic organizations with their yearning for the wealthy welfare state of nice civilian mice sharing the cheese, come and then go in the blink of an eye. Their coming on in the late 1950s was the little stirring before the much larger wave of radical rebellion in the 1960s. Historically a more European than a u.s. empire phenomena, but with Globalization’s merciless neo-liberalism, more and more people are wanting a full frontal welfare state as their best alternative to mass middle-class flight to Canada. In the 2016 “Bernie” breakthrough, that utopian socialist-capitalist reformism became a progressive “happening.” Yeah, been there, done that. Although for this particular discussion it actually lies outside our map, outside the actual combat zone of decisions about revolutionary organization.

i think that we all know scraps of things, but in practice today don’t know enough to do anything successful about revolutionary organization. Which is one good reason why we aren’t doing it.

One big obstacle to us learning more is our habit of covering up our ignorance. Uncle Mao used the term “invincible ignorance” to identify the self-protective reflex of too many leftists. Shying away from bluntly analyzing the political things that they needed to experience. Clinging to the polishing and re-polishing of “classic” politics in order to avoid the humbling uncertainties of the ever-changing struggle.

A typical old example to me was when famous poet Amiri Baraka & Co. formed their would-be “Maoist” party, the LRS (League of Revolutionary Struggle). One of my asian comrades was a member, and pressing me to join up. So i asked her why their would-be “party” would succeed, when Bob Avakian’s RCP, and the Beijing-officially-endorsed October League, and most of the other 1970s “Maoist“ pre-party groups had fallen face-first into the pavement? ( Hard as it may be to believe now, many thousands of young activists had poured into these M-L party-building groups, which had then promptly evaporated in one of the most striking radical happenings of the Sixties generation. i mean, Charles Manson left a bigger footprint ).

“Because they had bad politics and we have good politics”, my asian comrade simplemindedly answered me, completely confident . That sort of left me speechless. Is mercy killing allowed in the movement, i wondered? (guess not, or i would have been cold stone buried ages ago.) Sadly, it isn’t true that there’s a special goddess to protect the clueless.

The old Marxist left here was like an aircraft manufacturer, whose elite, university-educated engineering teams with great theoretical flourish developed 60 or 70 different airplanes. All of them unfortunately crashing on takeoff. Their potential customers have long since split into two feuding camps: the Marxist-Leninists keep insisting, “Our people are so exceptionally experienced, we must buy their next airplane.” (Anarchists reply: “What this proves is that aviation should be banned, unless travelers going to a destination spontaneously meet and piece together some kind of a ‘plane’ out of whatever parts are left around airports.”)

i also think that “democracy” in revolutionary organizations is highly overrated. At its worst, it’s like “patriotism” and “family,” being “the last refuge of scoundrels.”

Democracy in society may be a necessity of community life, but democracy in revolutionary organizations is something else entirely different. Among other things, revolutionary organizations are part of society and also not part of it. In the society and also living antagonistically outside its borders. Subject to different laws of physics. Resulting in different structures.

Most discussions of revolutionary organizations right here in the garden of the imperialist metropolis, assume and insist on some variety of “democracy.” It’s definitely something sacred. What does this usually consist of? Something learned from our capitalist bosses. Usually something resembling their bourgeois “democracy.” In which the marxist or anarchist or socialist group is “democratic” because there are meetings in which all members have the theoretical right to speak, vote or consent on its politics and activities. Usually, the handful of leaders have met or communicated privately before that meeting, to decide what the members must do. Often, everything is scripted as much as possible.

There’s nothing strange about this. It’s organizational “democracy” as we know it in the world of the imperialist center, like suburban village government, state-regulated trade union locals, or the bored of trustees for whatever NGO. It’s a certain form that comfortably clothes institutions in this decaying capitalist culture. As such, this “democracy” isn’t anything that i’m up in arms about, either for or against. Why shouldn’t an anarchist organization or a trotskyist “party” operate like the local bridge club if it wants to? It’s just our cultural norm.

But the complete absence of this “democracy” isn’t necessarily a loss, either.

Sometimes doing away with “democracy” can be even more democratic in real terms. In fact, stripping away unnecessary people and organization has worked better than leftists here like to admit in many situations. One reason that so much of what has worked well are individual or small group projects, seriously committed to getting things done on a particular issue or function.

As one example, i like the old Prison News Service (PNS) newspaper project, done in the 1980-1990s by the late Jim Campbell & friends up in Canada. For many years, PNS survived as a very open political forum, primarily written by many, many different prisoners, and read by thousands of prisoners. Particularly for New Afrikan prisoners in the u.s.a., it became a rare meeting place to talk politics with each other, spread news about the ongoing skirmishes between the brothers and sisters versus the prison authorities, and generally make themselves known.

Jim Campbell mostly financed it himself out of his wages, and although he had a handful of co-conspirators on the project, from what i could tell back then Jim basically made most of the decisions. If Jim didn’t think that your letter was that important, flip it went into the dusty files (yes, that happened to me, too—have to laugh about it now). Not only was this close to one-man rule, without any “democratic” structure, but it was one-white-man rule to boot. How about that for a taboo?

Why should one white anarchist up in Canada de facto control so much of how prisoners of color in the u.s. gulag talked to each other? Because no one else wanted to or could do it. (The black liberation army-coordinating committee, to be sure, had its own quite serious political discussion zine, but it was both closed and more specifically defined.) Truth was, neither Black nationalist organizations nor white M-L groups wanted to have that much to do with prisoners except to exploit a few famous names. Who might have been hailed in speeches but were privately considered too troublesome, too hard to control, and too needy.

During those years, the National Committee to Defend Black Political Prisoners was also a small but useful source of political linkage for some of those inside, but that was really done by one dedicated older Asian woman. Who stayed up late at night licking the stamps and sending out mailings paid for by her thin wages as a waitress in Harlem (she told me she took the job partly so that she could act as a message center, where guys who might be ducking the Enemy could pick up “kites” from comrades—and to slip hamburgers to hungry rads without cash.) So Jim wasn’t alone, but was one of a thin line of advanced explorers. An actual modest person-by-person vanguard, if you will, probing the gulags and other human garbage dumps for the future. There are vanguards in the struggle, but maybe it’s not what people usually think.

So it was lucky that Jim Campbell identified so personally with the pain and isolation of prisoners, and was so determined to break down the walls to the extent that he and a few other comrades personally could. PNS definitely had the effect of spreading liberation, enabling radical political discussion among some of the oppressed. Which wasn’t ideal, sure wasn’t everything, but was pretty democratic. The how they did it was less important. Democracy isn’t in the ritual forms, in our little rules. It’s in the politics of what we do or don’t do.

Which brings us to data-mining the past. Taking lessons from the past is inescapable, for me as well as everyone else. But check this out: We “know” a lot from all our snatch & grab at the past that isn’t what we think it is.

One immediate suggestion i do have is to take some of the emotion and value judgements out of it. As one of my old martial arts teachers used to say at our annual class evaluations, “Just take it in as information.” One by one, we had to step forward onto the floor and go through our moves, and then were critiqued on the spot by classmates and instructors. “Don’t think of what you’re being told as positive or negative,” he advised us. “It’s just information.” You’ll see what i mean by the next story. [Oh, and to prevent miscues—i’m not any martial artist. Any more than when as kids we played pickup football games in the park with much enthusiasm, that didn’t make us what everyone means by football players.]

When we look through the past as revolutionaries, there’s a natural tendency to focus on examples that verify our existing beliefs. This is a natural but really dangerous habit. For example: for many years i “knew” that Stalin and his damned commissars were responsible for losing the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War to the fascists. The stalinists’ violent repression of the anarchists and independent socialists there had stabbed the most militant center of the working class in the back, and thus fatally weakened the ground-breaking class war. i mean, not that i knew much or anything at all about Spanish history, but like so many others i had read George Orwell’s moving first-hand account of the war, Homage to Catalonia, and it all fit as neatly as a cherry on top of a banana split. A one-book education. i never questioned it.

By karma, back then i knew an older Maoist comrade who actually had been a young soldier with the International Brigades fighting in that Spanish Civil War. Thinking it strange that up to then we’d freely talked about our own confused 1960s movement politics, but he had never brought up his war experiences in Spain, one afternoon i asked him what he thought of Orwell’s book. My friend jumped to his feet and started cursing. He thought that Orwell was a dishonest asshole, and his self-serving version of the anti-fascist Civil War a fabric of clever novelistic half-truths and distortions. The way this older comrade described his war came from a completely different angle than any i’d thought of before then. It really took me aback.

He told me: “In the field hospital I saw wounded die for nothing, freezing to death in the cold overnight without blankets, because someone had fucked up the supply list. Do you think Stalin had blankets withheld to increase his power? ” My Maoist friend’s angry sarcasm had a sharp point: that the whole war was fucked. To him the two sides in Spain, fascist-clericalist versus liberal and left Republican, unfortunately were also the militarily competent versus the idealistic but not-yet competent. He said that all the revolutionaries, the socialists and communists no less than the anarchists, were stumbling around trying to learn how to build a new kind of society there for the first time with the clock running. While with the other hand also fighting a new type of total war against an advancing, experienced mercenary colonialist army, with plenty of guns, artillery and air squadrons.

To him this was a tragic loss in a far deeper way than abstractly our team versus their team. It was his experiences in Spain, my friend said, that made him an early Maoist sympathizer. Since it was a sign of real hope to him and his comrades in Spain that while their flickering progressive Republic was being inexorably crushed by the fascists, in remote regions of China that Red Army was solving the problem of survival in combat against even the largest capitalist armies. No small thing to my friend, after losing so badly, with more real life casualties he knew than he wanted to remember.

He also said that contrary to what Orwell wrote about, anarchism was a real military problem in Spain. To my surprise, he wasn’t talking about the Durruti Column or other legendary anarchist workers’ formations. He was talking about what he considered latent or basic anarchism within the International Brigades, which was stalinist, remember. Like most wars, that one was fought by the young, in many cases teenagers no older than fifteen or sixteen years old (the Canadian naturalist R.D. Lawrence had enlisted as a Spanish anti-fascist infantryman back then when he was only fourteen. He was so short that his rifle slung over the shoulder kept almost bumping the ground—but as he said, “no one cared how old you were if you could shoot a gun.”)

Whenever a fascist offensive somewhere would start, many of the eager young volunteers would spontaneously “desert to the Front.” Taking their rifle and hitching rides on supply trucks or trains to wherever the most intense fighting was. Abruptly leaving their own units short of soldiers. Training plans and readiness and new moves on its own front upset.

Since it is hard to successfully plan an overall war that way, “deserting to the Front” was quickly banned. Soldiers were talked to about revolutionary discipline, etc. etc. Nevertheless, just like with sex, when romanticism and adrenalin flood the heart, young dudes aren’t always thinking ahead to the larger picture. And the men who did this felt that no blame could be attached to any individual who decided to just go off more bravely by themselves into the fighting. Spontaneous soldiering just went on.

Finally, the commanders decided that a sobering line had to be drawn. The next time it happened, a pretty blameless but undisciplined young American revolutionary was selected for charges, court-martialed, and then executed by his own buddies. Their shooting was understandably bad and the condemned comrade was badly wounded, not cleanly killed. So their unit’s commissar (a young tough guy from Brooklyn, my comrade recalled) had to step up, draw his pistol and finish him. Then the commissar wrote the soldier’s parents a letter of condolence, saying that their son had died bravely fighting the fascists. But when their unit returned home, the working class stalinist commissar used his pistol once more and committed suicide. The whole thing was hushed up by the movement. Isn’t it always? (Yes, i know that there were probably a dozen better ways to handle that problem politically, not by coercive authority, but that’s the kind of thing many normally confused macho men did right then—or even now.)

Was that first-hand view all true, or just my friend stretching memories to defend the integrity of the revolutionary band of his youth? He had only one person’s experiences, but think he had an important part of the truth, anyway. i don’t know about the whole deal, but i do believe that the Moscow-directed repressing of so many of the most militant Spanish workers was textbook stalinist anti-revolutionary maneuver 101. So i’m definitely not going to want any stalinist anything around at the next revolution. But give us a break, that’s kind of like, duh. Maybe hot shit as an insight in 1929 or 1939, but pretty small change as a lesson about revolutionary organization now in the 21^st century. We should have easily learned that a long time ago, and much, much more.

The question isn’t whether the stalinists or the socialists or the anarchists were right or wrong or in what ways in the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War. That’s one series of questions, but is that the main lesson we can learn from that past? In radical debates things can get pretty black and white awful fast, lots of tunnel vision, i think. But in the actual struggle with millions of real people freeing themselves, rushing around trying to do things they themselves have never seen before, there are always layers of reality. i mean, not just one true thing, but many true factors of varying meaning, shifting in time. To me what my older comrade said struck a note that went towards the practical heart of things.

Sometimes we can be technically right about something – and still miss the main point.

One very smart anarchist comrade that i told this to, about Spain, came back immediately with: “No, it was the arms. The lack of arms. See, France and Britain wouldn’t sell arms to us. And Stalin cut us off. He wouldn’t give us enough arms.” Actually, i’ve heard that line more than once as an explanation. Which only sounds reasonable until you start to think about it, in terms not of liberal “fairness” but of revolutionary organization. This is something my friend was obviously just repeating from someone else, not something he ever had to work out bit by bit for himself.

Let’s see, the anarchists and independent socialists back then in Spain were saying that Stalin was running a bloodthirsty dictatorship which needed to be overthrown, with the stalinist sycophants and criminal bureaucrats needing to be put before workers courts and firing squads? And yet, they really expected that the same lumpen Joe Stalin was going to pour shiploads of weapons into their hands like the hip-hop Insane Santa Claus? How unreal was that as strategy? That’s like some homeless dude sleeping rough under a bridge, but expecting every freezing night that Obama’s limo will soon be pulling up to take him to his lush bedroom in the new mansion.

The problem in this kind of thinking goes deeper still than that. Whether the anti-capitalist forces in Spain didn’t get enough arms because of Stalin or Wall Street conspiracies or because the boat was late, or whatever, the net practical effect was the same. That the progressive Republic was outgunned by the mercenary forces of General Franco and his eager German and Italian fascist mentors. Skip past the back story and get to where the rubber meets the road. Let’s say that they were outgunned two to one, three to one, or even worse. So? What’s the big deal? i mean, it’s a nice-sounding civilian excuse, but it doesn’t mean much in terms of revolutionary practice.

We revs are always way outgunned and outnumbered by the mercenary forces of the capitalist state, until the final stages of the struggle. In Old China way back then, the communist Red Army was outnumbered and outgunned more like five or ten to one, by both the rightist Chinese armies and the Japanese invaders, for many harsh years. True everywhere for anti-capitalist guerrillas, too, not just that particular Spain. It’s not an excuse, it’s just the usual violent environment of capitalist hegemony everywhere that we must to learn to survive in and grow in.

Everything we do, our tactics and strategies, our organizations and subcultures, all assume great imbalances in strength between us and the capitalist ruling class. Whether of mainstream propaganda, numbers, experience, money, guns, whatever. If it were only a contest of morality and justice, the capitalists would have been kicked out long ago. We all know all this, too. We just don’t always absorb the full meaning.

The lesson that really strikes home to me from that experience back then was not only the brilliant courage of those people overturning backward oppressive society, but also our own lack of revolutionary development in the broadest sense. And tragically what it meant when we had to put it to the test in real life, in real time, with the lives of millions involved. Right now we are used to laughing at the incompetence of Big Capitalism, reeling from setback to setback, from Trump the Reality TV Government to their hopelessly lost but unbelievably lethal misadventures in the Muslim world.

But we conveniently forget how even this crumbling chunks-falling-off-of-it Big Capitalism has accumulated within its structures centuries of learning-by-experience knowledge of how to run society part by part their way. Too often, we think that criticizing them well is equal to having enough know-how to design up and successfully operate our own oppositional counter-cultures and societies. While in practice these two things are many miles apart.

Acknowledging that we anti-capitalist revolutionaries are only beginners, are in historical terms still a young culture, still just starting to learn how to build, is to me a healthy first step in better revolutionary organizations. (What we now know as industrial capitalism took 900 years, historians tell us, to evolve out into a dominant social system—oh, don’t worry, my mom’s a dangerously wild driver and we revs are going to take a much shorter route.)

One thing that i learned the last time around is never to expect evolution to just repeat itself. In the early 1960s, what was that era’s old left and new left overlapped briefly, and the disarray was tragi-comical.

Still active veterans of the great 1930s industrial unionism battles in workplaces and factories, watched with bewilderment as 1960s kids staged small, really personal rallies in the middle of a campus, to support a fellow college student holding up and then burning his draft card. Reading aloud his own individual statement of rejecting the draft and the Vietnam War. And accepting soon going into federal prison. Meanwhile, we marched proudly out of Black communities, crossing borders now not as friends but as reluctant enemies, bitterly into the hate-filled euro-settler working class neighborhoods. The old left veterans from the 1930s were horror-stricken, since they had always believed in the revival of mass euro-settler industrial unionism as the central event in radical social change, like in their own idealistic youth way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. We felt so sorry for them, because they didn’t get it that our future would never look like them. We knew instinctively what Dylan was singing about: “You don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

But for everyone now, too, the fault lines have shifted once more. The passing of the old, euro-colonial economies and the thermal fusing of national imperialisms have been as tectonic plates, grinding deep underneath the earth. Reshaping the political surface into a surprising geography which brings the labor of massive Chinese and Mexican proletariats popping right up into every neighborhood. While the great archipelago of the New Afrikan major cities built up by accretion like coral reefs during the 20^th century, is being physically pounded down and broken up, one after another. As New Afrikans of the “dangerous class” are forced to disperse, to keep moving, keep moving, once again. Many to the prison kamps of the u.s. empire’s vast gulag, while others to the isolated suburban exile townships.

When we first took this path, when we joined our lives with the struggle, we were conscious of knowing so very little. One good reason we were so attracted to this revolutionary organization or that one. Not only to find rads we could run with, but to find mentors and a busy hive of experience we hoped to take cues from. What never occurred to us is that those organizations might know next to nothing, too.

Here’s a cellphone snapshot that comes to mind: One of the liveliest cultural gate-crashers of the 1960s was the sudden popularity of Eastern philosophy and arts. Which was a lot more than the Beatles going to India to try out meditation. The most nitty-gritty among that being the craze for the Eastern martial arts. Even before Bruce Lee’s great Enter the Dragon, young guys Black and Latino as well as Asian were haunting the cheap rerun movie theaters that showed the Hong Kong martial arts flicks. My dumpy baby sister became a changed teenager, as angular and menacing as the Praying Mantis forms she would train at day after day. All good.

This enthusiasm swept through revolutionary organizations and protest movements as well. Whether it was the desire to help protect our marches from street attacks by the white racists, or just the pull of wanting to be strong physically in the struggle, this was something everyone understood. It was a pretty pathetic new revolutionary organization which didn’t have its martial arts class on the side. Or at least its favorite local dojo where its people tended to go. i knew it was really cresting when an enthusiastic white friend told me he had decided to join a rapidly growing local Marxist group, “because their karate class is so good! You should come and try it out!!”

You get the contradiction, the slightly crooked picture. On the one hand, we had so many young revolutionaries sworn to tear down the old American way of life, and most especially all the old left crap. Pushing forward with new radical organizations that were formed next to spontaneously, on the fly, shaped by the dynamite blast of the latest page in the struggle. Often more or less blessed only by a quick papal reading of some “heavy” left text or another. It didn’t matter which one, really, since most of us hardly understood any of them.

But when it came to serious business, to being personally able to really fight, many of the same youth eagerly embraced the legendary training of Eastern martial arts. Which is more traditional and top-down in its teaching than death, with students in the dojo learning forms and sparring painstakingly developed and then tested over generations. Overseen and directed by the black-belt instructor, whose every decision was law on the class floor. Nothing spontaneous or doing whatever-new-you-felt-like there.

To me the double message was definitely signaling something. While youth were in revolt against old oppressive authority, we were hungry for authority in the other sense. For finding empowering knowledge that came from the doing. Learning from those who had actually done it and learned to do it well. Like, you wouldn’t want to learn plumbing from a person who read to you out of some textbook, but who themselves had never picked up a wrench or gotten shit all over themselves.

One thing was for sure. Since there were no already worked out blueprints for organizations back there and then, we had to borrow from incomplete old histories, from any dusty zombie organizations still stumbling about, and mostly from our own imaginations to improvise organizations best we could (pretending, naturally, that we knew much more than we did). To predictable good and not so good results: neat breakthroughs and equally mass running out of gas and abandoned cars scattered on the freeway.

There were hundreds of thousands of people improvising, trying on and remaking and breaking radical organizations of all kinds in the 1960s-70s New Left. From GI anti-war newspapers and off-base coffee shops to the usual mass protest coalitions owned by nationally famous ministers and charismatic male lumpen hustlers. There were countless local student radical groups running on the horizontal principle of “participatory democracy,” as well as at least one nationwide underground of thousands also trying to grow itself by spreading “participatory democracy” local groups well into armed struggle. There were study groups and informal self-defense circles everywhere, way too many to ever keep track of.

There were socialists replacing their college dormitories with a “party” form in which they rented large apartments together in inner city neighborhoods, functioning as community activists together while using their group homes as busy political theory schools. And always there were new seemingly spontaneous grassroots direct actions happening. From mass walkouts closing entire city public school systems (covertly guided in at least one major city by New Afrikan revolutionary nationalist cells quietly working with major youth “gangs”) to the “leaderless resistance” of one hundred anti-war firebombings of Bank of America branches by primarily white youth in California, to the many lumpen militant street organizations. To say nothing of the background murmur of various Old Left “parties” or their copycats trying to carry on traditional euro-agendas.

[It goes almost without saying that a disproportionate number of the most dramatic breakthroughs in the 1950s-70s here came from the u.s. empire’s inner colonies—called the ghetto, inner city, rez, barrios or communidad.]

Looking back, the rich diversity of mass organizational experience was too large to easily describe. Little of which was analyzed or passed on as learning experiences. That’s how disorganized and uneducated we were, despite the university intellectuals who composed much of the movement’s leadership. Hope comrades doing lift-off now do much better at that.

Here’s a thought to share: People sometimes talk about revolutionary organizations as if they were all varieties of one thing, like different gasoline engines to drop under the hood of your same compact car. V6 or straight 4? Which they aren’t. There are broadly two very different types of what we mean when we say “revolutionary organizations.” The most familiar is like the small left collective or intellectual journal or zine. Sometimes in the outward form of a local anti-war group or whatever. Like an antifa group or like one of the “parties” keeping alive the flicker of someone’s ideas. Or it could be the local radical caucuses in the teachers union. And so on.

These are what we are used to seeing sprouting here in the garden of the imperialist metropolis. In other words, meaning “revolutionary organization” as an organization of revolutionaries, promoting anti-capitalist ideas and activity. To help people survive or reinforce protest movements. Usually pretty public and acting more or less legally or with official tolerance, since why not? Such organizations are by their nature transitory, and any one will probably be long gone by the time capitalism is overthrown. There is nothing wrong with this, obviously.

That’s not an organization that actually makes a revolution itself, though. Overthrowing the old society and its state. While there have been many Marxist ”parties” here (put this in quotes because they are free to call themselves anything they like, but most here haven’t met the real definition of a party) claiming that they were going to carry on and on forever until someday they would overthrow capitalism, revs can safely assume that this stuff is largely delusional.

The other kind of revolutionary organization is simply, directly that. Engaged to actually make the revolution against capitalism and its state. To carry out revolutionary transfer of power. These organizations are by their fundamental nature illegal and usually clandestine instruments of warfare. Always popping up from the lower depths, always being repressed and hunted. They are widely present though with different results in the developing neo-colonial periphery, from Mexico to India, but real examples are scarce here in the imperialist metropolis, for obvious reasons, except among the oppressed neo-colonies. Don’t think i need to explain that.

One thought that keeps coming up in every generation, is to narrow the gap between these two kinds of organizations. Exploring just how much terrain, of what kinds, revolutionaries could take over and remake now in daily life in the structures of capitalist society?

Like all complex mechanisms, like a hospital emergency room or a tank brigade, actual revolutionary organizations are super high maintenance. If you’ve never been in one, know that they are a big pain in the ass to keep going. They are also obviously highly dangerous, more dangerous than sex work is or a contract firefighting crew is, or being a clueless u.s. army private somewhere. For sure. So they had better be worth it.

In this violent capitalist end zone of unlimited war and repression, the question of organization suddenly becomes drastically changed for us. Because there you cannot be an individual revolutionary in any meaningful sense. There a lone revolutionary is like being a lone firefighter. You can be as good as you can be, but you are outclassed in the scale of events. Then it is only complex revolutionary organization that lets our full political thoughts and intentions become sails full of reality. This is often lost right now in the garden of the imperial metropolis, where middle-class people so easily deceive themselves that agreeing with this radical idea or that one, makes you a revolutionary. No, it only makes you someone who likes ideas. (And as that lesbian philosopher once said: “Theories are like assholes, everybody has one.”)

This has just been an initial re-examination; a walking over of the uneven ground that structures might be built on. There are obviously tons of critical stuff, most things, really, on anti-capitalist organization that i never got around to here. So take this as a restart button. A beginner’s mind isn’t a bad thing to have.

END

57. A Case of Mutual Aid

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Subtitle: Wikipedia, Politeness, and Perspective Taking

Author: Joseph M. Reagle Jr.

Topics: Wikipedia, mutual aid

Date: 2004

Date Published on T@L: 2022-11-26T11:22:30

Source: Retrieved on 26^th November 2022 from reagle.org

Introduction

The anarchist Peter Kropotkin once wrote that “Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle” (1902). At the time, he was responding to arguments arising from Darwin’s The Origin of Species: that in nature and society individual creatures ceaselessly struggle against each other for dominance. Kropotkin took pains to explain and provide examples of how animals and humans survive by cooperating with each other. Interestingly, Kropotkin also contributed the article on anarchism to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, a collaborative product of the Scottish Enlightenment and a precursor to the Wikipedia, a collaborative, on-line, and free encyclopedia.

This paper explores the character of “mutual aid” and interdependent decision making within the Wikipedia. I provide a brief introduction to Wikipedia, the key terms associated with group decision making, and the Wikipedia dispute resolution process. I then focus on the cultural norms (e.g., “good faith”) within Wikipedia that frame participation as a cooperative endeavor. In particular, I argue that the “neutral point of view” policy is not a source of conflict, as it is often perceived to be, but a resolution shaping norm. However, the naive understanding that this policy is about an unbiased neutrality is also problematic. I conclude by identifying some notions from negotiation literature that may be inappropriate or require adaptation to the Wikipedia case.

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia is an on-line “Wiki” based encyclopedia. “Wiki wiki” means “super fast” in the Hawaiian language, and Ward Cunningham chose the name for his project in 1995 to indicate the ease with which one could edit Web pages. In a sense, a Wiki captures the original conception of the World Wide Web as a browsing and editing medium. However, when the Web began its precipitous growth the most popular clients lacked the ability for users to edit a Web page.

The Wiki changed this asymmetry by placing the editing functionality on the server. Consequently, if a page can be read, it can be edited. With a Wiki, the user enters a simplified markup into a form on a Web page. To add a numbered list item with a link to the Wikipedia one simply types: “# this provides a link to [[Wikipedia]]”. The server-side Wikipedia software translates this into the appropriate HTML and hypertext links. To create a new page, one simply creates a link to it! Furthermore, each page includes links through which one can sign in (if desired), view a log of recent changes to the page (including the author, change, and time), or participate in a discussion about how the page is being edited on its Talk Page – and this too is a Wiki page. These powerful features are representative of Cunningham’s (2004) original design principles for Wiki: that it be open, incremental, organic, mundane (simple), universal, overt (there’s a correspondence between the edited and presented form), unified, precise, tolerant, observable, and convergent (non-redundant content). The application of a general tool facilitates a surprisingly sophisticated creation!

Yet, as is often the case, the consequence of this quick and informal approach was not foreseen – or, rather, was pleasantly surprising. Wikipedia is the populist offshoot of the Nupedia project started in March of 2000 by Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger. Nupedia’s mission was to create a free encyclopedia via rigorous expert review under a free documentation license. Unfortunately, this process moved rather slowly and having recently been introduced to Wiki, Sanger persuaded Wales to set up a scratch-pad for potential Nupedia content where anyone could contribute. However, “There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia’s editors and reviewers, however, to making Nupedia closely associated with a website in the wiki format. Therefore, the new project was given the name ‘Wikipedia’ and launched on its own address, Wikipedia.com, on January 15 [2001]” (Wikipedia 2004hw).

Wikipedia proved to be so successful that when the server hosting Nupedia crashed in September of 2003 (with little more than 23 “complete” articles and 68 more in progress) it was never restored. As of today, there are over 50 different language Wikipedias (2004wa); the original English version exceeds 390,000 articles, including most of the Nupedia content. The Wikimedia Foundation, incorporated in 2003, is now the steward of Wikipedia as well as a new Wiki based dictionary, compendium of quotations, collaborative textbooks, and repository of free source texts.

However, aside from the actual artifact and its history, one of the most interesting features of the Wikipedia is the community itself. One might characterize it according to the definition Kropotkin wrote of in his Britannica article on anarchism: “harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups.” Yet, as one can imagine, having thousands of participants editing a Web site so as to produce a coherent product and congenial community is a significant challenge.

Interdependent decision-making

Kelley et al. (2003:3) define interdependence as “The manner in which two individuals influence each other’s outcomes in the course of their interaction.“ Wikipedia certainly fits the bill: it is difficult to conceive of a large collaborative project that is as accessible to the general public as this one.

Not surprisingly, Wikipedians sometimes disagree: each contributor resisting the other’s influence on the joint outcome of a contested article, Barki and Hartwick (2001:7) define interpersonal conflict as, “a phenomenon that occurs between interdependent parties as they experience negative emotional reactions to perceived disagreements and interference with the attainment of their goals.” In such cases the parties may enter into a “negotiation, or bargaining as it is sometimes called, [which] is a discussion between two or more parties with the aim of resolving the divergence“ (Carnevale and Pruitt 2004: 2). In the Wikipedia context, I would qualify this definition’s connotation that such discussion is an exceptional or at least a salient event; Wikipedia is itself, really, a continuing discussion. Yet, when that discussion becomes particularly heated and participants become polarized the theory and practice of negotiation is relevant.

In recent negotiation literature a foundational concept is that of “integrated potential”: these are options capable of integrating the interests of the parties such that joined utility can be increased (Carnevale and Pruitt 2004). I expect that the integrated potential within the Wikipedia context is huge: any contribution other than that which deletes other useful contributions, or otherwise significantly impairs such contributions is integrative.

Wikipedia disputes

In an article entitled Problems of Conflict Management in Virtual Communities, Smith (1998:146) identified four causes of disputes in on-line (MUD) communities:

Internet community is diverse
Ambiguous goals contribute to conflict
Asymmetric dependence and power leads to much conflict
Administrator response can unintentionally intensify player conflict

Generally, these factors are relevant to the Wikipedia context. However, the Wikipedia does benefit from having an explicit goal and way of achieving it via its Neutral Point of View (Wikipedia 2004wnp) policy which I discuss below. Furthermore, in contrast to the MUD environments that Smith studied, the Wikipedia environment is much more egalitarian: contributions are accepted from all, including the anonymous, and there are few personal privileges that come with an elevated status, but many hassles.

The Wikipedia is often presented as a contentious community because of the occurrence of edit wars (Wikipedia 2004wew): participants repeatedly edit or revert articles to a previous state in order to remove another contributor’s text. As an example of the contentious presentation, on 2004 November 10, two popular press articles on Wikipedia were forwarded to the Wikipedia-l list. A New York Times article entitled Mudslinging Weasels Into Online History (Boxer 2004) summarized the history of edits to the Bush and Kerry articles during the last stages of the U.S. presidential election. And The Onion (Groznic 2004) included a parody of a letter from a “super-fan” taking issue with the Wikipedia entry on “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Yet, the vast majority of Wikipedia contributors and articles are not the subjects of severe dispute. A number of pages within the Wikipedia document ongoing disputes; the following statistics are those for the English language Wikipedia (2004wra, 2004wrm, 2004c, 2004ss) as tabulated on 2004 November 16.

In the cases of arbitration or mediation requests, such documentation typically identifies disputes between two contributors, occasionally more (e.g., naming conventions for geographical objects in Poland). By tabulating the number of list items on the identified page or its archives I estimate 52 total Requests for Arbitration (with 0 active) and 74 archived Requests for Mediation (with 8 active) between users. Note, that there are over 13,200 users who have “edited at least 10 times since they arrived,” half as many which are considered “active,” out of a total of 135,763 registered users.

While not a substantive dispute, vandalism is much more common as it is often petty and easily done by anonymous users – or “ sock puppets ” wherein users participate with more than one identity. Consequently, vandalism entries are often associated with an IP number (the number associated with a Internet host) rather than an actual account name since IP numbers are more difficult to change. The Vandalism in Progress page (Wikipedia 2004wvp) for the past 5 days includes 25, 15, 12, 10 and 7 entries respectively and each entry may affect more than one page – though it is by no means certain all vandalisms are noted or identified. Yet, there are over 390,000 English pages (Wikipedia 2004wa).

However, even a relatively few disputes can be costly to those unfortunate enough to encounter them:

Disputes take a significant amount of time and can cause participant exit.
Disputes can boil over into other topics.
Disputes drive the policies that then affect the rest of the community.
Disputes attract much attention from outside of the community.

Consequently it is worthwhile to consider how disputes are mitigated or resolved.

The process

In the presence of social conflict Carnevale and Pruitt (2004:3) identify the following strategies that can be used in negotiation. I have provided (silly) examples from the Talk Pages associated with Wikipedia’s Lamest edit wars ever (Wikipedia 2004wle):

Concession making (obliging or yielding): when a characterization of Grace Kelly as a gay icon was challenged, the original author conceded “I’ve been at peace with removing her as a gay icon days, if not weeks, ago” (Wikipedia 2004tgk).
Contending (dominating or competing): during a disagreement over the appropriate spelling of flavored/flavoured chips/crisps a user commented, “I’m going to keep fixing the spelling till I get banned, it seems.” (Wikipedia 2004tjc).
Problem solving (integrating or mutual gains bargaining): the same chip/crips debate was settled by describing them as “seasoned.”
Inaction or Withdraw: after debate about commercial bias on the SkyOS page a participant responds “… I am not willing to contribute here, if the people around here dare to call me biased” (Wikipedia 2004tjs).

In continuing disputes (Wikipedia 2004wdr), participants can volunteer to a truce (refrain from editing the article) and “cool off,” or, failing such magnanimity, an administrator might protect/lock the page for a period. Additionally, users can conduct polls or invite comment from the larger community in order to gain perspective – but it might also expand the debate. Failing informal resolution, participants may request mediation by a third-party and even obtain an advocate on one’s behalf. As a last resort, users might request arbitration that can produce an enforceable decision. (These last two steps are characterized as joint decision-making and third-party decision-making by Carnevale and Pruitt (2004:4)).

Wikipedia communion

The notion of “dispute resolution” is surprisingly optimistic: as if agreement and harmony are the natural state from which disputes sometimes errantly arise and must be swiftly corrected. Yet to characterize social relations as inherently conflicted – as is sometimes done with Wikipedia – is also mistaken. (Debates regarding stability versus conflict within social models have a long history. Burrell and Morgan (1979) distinguished the bias in such models as regulation or radical; Deetz (1996) as consensus or dissensus.)

Instead, one needs to recognize and appreciate that social interaction exists in a complex web of individual subjectivity, social structure, and cultural meaning. Diverse interests and expertise can be innovative or costly (Levina 2002). Close relations within a group are important for coordination and links across groups are important for learning (Reagans and Zuckerman 2001). Groups that cooperate do a better job of finding integrative agreements, but groups are also more likely to defect than individuals in a prisoner dilemma task (Morgan and Tindale 2002). Groups are not necessarily harmonious or contentious. Additionally, innovation and efficiency are not the only reasons for groups. Rheingold used the term “communion” to describe that which was both sought and exhibited by some of the earliest electronic communities, an arrangement that “feels to me more like a kind of gift economy in which people do things for one another out of the spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet calculated quid pro quo” (1993:59). Some communications theorists use the term “inter-subjectivity” to identify an awareness of and intention to convey information to another. And philosophers such as Habermas (1991) and Grice (1975) have proposed theories of community and discourse from which social institutions and cooperation can be constituted.

My point, simply, is to warn of my own hesitation in drawing too sharp a line between agreement and conflict. The consequent of this hesitation is my continued search for behaviors and norms that facilitate productive interaction rather than simply creating facile agreement or avoiding productive conflict.

The epistemic stance

A misunderstood notion about Wikipedia is that much contention arises from its Neutral Point Of View ( NPOV ) policy (Wikipedia 2004wnp): that debates arise from this seemingly impossible requirement to remain objectively neutral. Yet, the NPOV policy is quite the opposite and instead recognizes the multitude of viewpoints and provides an epistemic stance in which they all can be recognized as instances of human knowledge – right or wrong.

The NPOV policy seeks to achieve the “ fair “ representation of all sides of the dispute such that all can feel well represented. Articles should explain without advocating, characterize without engaging, and honor the intellectual independence of the readers by refraining from dogmatism. Hence, the clear goal of providing an encyclopedia of all human knowledge explicitly avoids many entanglements. Yet, when such disagreements do occur they often involve the NPOV. Most often, this is because a new participant is ignorant of or in opposition to the NPOV policy. In some circumstances, the debate legitimately raises substantive questions about NPOV. Consequently, while the perception is that NPOV is the source of much debate, it may act rather as a heat shield: reducing conflict and otherwise channeling outstanding arguments in the productive context of the primary goal of developing an encyclopedia that is representative of many viewpoints.

An additional, related, stance is that Wikipedia is not a place for original research. This permits the community to avoid arguments about crackpots, pet theories, neologisms, and vanity links (i.e., a person links from the Wikipedia to a site they wish to promote). If one has “a great idea that you think should become part of the corpus of knowledge that is Wikipedia, the best approach is to publish your results in a good peer-reviewed journal, and then document your work in an appropriately non-partisan manner” (Wikipedia 2004wno).

It is important to note that this stance does have important ethical implications. The policy of only reporting on what it is well-known has significant implications for minority views. This is acknowledged and debated within the Wikipedia community and the present norm is that Wikipedia should be fairly representative and proportional to the phenomenon it seeks to capture.

Within the Wikimedia projects, this stance has led to the development of Wikisource for collecting primary source materials, and a proposal of a collaborative Wikiresearch project. Additionally, Wikinfo, an offshoot of Wikipedia, was forked from Wikipedia so as to operate under a different philosophical stance that encourages a set of sympathetic and critical articles on a single topic: a “sympathetic point of view is a way of encouraging a pluralism of content, rather than limiting content to an unattainable encyclopedic goal” (Wikinfo2004).

Politeness and perspective taking

The Wikipedia’s Dispute Resolution (2004wdr) article advises that “the best way to resolve a dispute is to avoid it in the first place” by improving someone’s contribution – rather than reverting it – and resisting the temptation to respond to rudeness in kind.

On the Wikipedia mailing lists and Talk Pages there is a surprising level of civility; participants often volunteer to take “a timeout” and even apologize. Such behavior is recommended in a number of Wikipedia policies. For example, Neutral Point of View (2004wnp) counsels that,

If we’re going to characterize disputes fairly, we should present competing views with a consistently positive, sympathetic tone.
We should all be engaged in explaining each other’s points of view as sympathetically as possible. …
Unless the case is really egregious, maybe the best thing is to call attention to the problem publicly, pointing the perpetrators to this page (but politely--one gets more flies with honey) and asking others to help.

Wikipetiquette (2004ww) recommends that participants:

Assume good faith.
Be polite. People can’t see you or know for sure your mood. Irony isn’t always obvious, and blunt, raw text can easily appear rude. Be careful of the words you choose — what you intended might not be what others think.
Concede a point, when you have no response to it; or admit when you disagree based on intuition or taste.
Be prepared to apologize. In animated discussions, we often say things we later wish we hadn’t. Say so.
Forgive and forget.

Staying Cool When the Editing Gets Hot (2004wsc) advises that if one is being attacked one should “just ignore it,” “politely ask the person to stop”, and most amazingly: “Edit their words to remove the insulting part—rephrase it as a simple statement of their beliefs, for example.” When humans are likely to exhibit over-confidence in their rightness (Kahneman and Tversky 1995) regardless of their lack of expertise or knowledge, such advice is an important corrective influence.

A consequence of these guidelines is that participants often find themselves writing for the enemy, as,“We should all be engaged in explaining each other’s points of view as sympathetically as possible”; while, “The other side might very well find your attempts to characterize their views substandard, but it’s the thought that counts” (Wikipedia 2004wnp).

In the field of knowledge management this notion is known as perspective taking. In this conceptualization of group learning, participants have unique perspectives about related domains. By entertaining the perspectives of others they are able to engage in “perspective making”: identifying hidden commonalities (i.e., using of similar words for different concepts or different words for similar concepts) and unique information (Boland and Tenkasi 1995) in order to form a more valuable synthesis. In the negotiation context, “negotiators often fail to understand adequately the perspectives of their opponents. Misunderstanding the interest of one’s negotiation opponent can lead to erroneous attributions (Morris, Larrick, & Su, 1999), a failure to maximize joint gains (Thompson & Hrebec, 1996), and impasses (Thompson, 1990)” (Galinsky and Mussweiler 2001).

Additionally, these Wikipedia practices are very much aligned with Yankelovich’s (2001) notion of dialogue which relies upon the notion of empathy:

The gift of empathy — the ability to think someone else’s thoughts and feel someone else’s feelings — is indispensable to dialogue. This is why discussion is more common than dialogue: people find it easy to express their opinions and to bat ideas back and forth with others, but most of the time they don’t have either the motivation or the patience to respond empathically to opinions with which they may disagree or that they find uncongenial.

Psychologists have further found a cognitive relationship between cooperative/competitive priming tasks and the cognitive performance of subsequent tasks. Carnevale and Probst (1998) found that competitive situations, or even the expectation of them, lead to an impairment in problem-solving and categorization tasks – more rigid black-and-white thinking – relative to cooperative situations.

Finally, better solutions tend to be arrived at when participants approach a negotiation with a problem-solving orientation: a desire to solve a problem given the other parties needs (Pruitt and Lewis 1971). Consequently, Wikipedia, either purposefully or accidentally, reflects many findings in the literature on how to encourage productive interdependent collaboration.

Collectivity and Value

While key terms from the literature on interdependent decision-making, and findings on cognition in the psychology literature, are immediately relevant to the Wikipedia, this literature also includes a wide scope of material that that is less readily relevant. Perhaps this is because of a bias towards individualistic and economic models of human interaction.

As already alluded to, in the Wikipedia context it is difficult to distinguish between agreement and disagreement. Furthermore, while negotiators hope to achieve an integrated agreement by finding non-zero sum opportunities, most all Wikipedia interactions qualify as such: the Wikipedia is collective, there’s not much point in being invested in a single article only. (One might have the appropriate expertise for a single article, be proud of such an article, but, unlike other negotiations, one does not happily walk away from the relationship with the Wikipedia with that single article.)

Much of the experimental literature (i.e., that based on game theory (Axelrod 1984) and mixed-motive collective-bargaining (Kelley 1966)) presumes that the interests of the parties can be independently quantified and that the value of the joint product is divisible. If one is involved in an edit war, is there such a thing as a BATNA: the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (Fisher, Ury, Patton 1991)? (I believe there is, but the options are mostly the same for the participants: exit.) Are such alternatives quantifiably valuated? In the Wikipedia, one’s interest is grounded in ideology rather than material commodities. In this production function, time and effort are the input, any output is a collaborative non-divisible product with extraordinarily variable valuations – based in the “eye of the beholders.”

Conclusion

The Wikipedia is an intriguing case for study because of its growing popularity, its novelty as an example of “commons-based peer production” (Benkler 2002), the central role of cultural norms, and the transparency and self documenting character of its discourse. In this paper, I briefly reviewed a few concepts from the interdependent decision-making literature that are relevant to this community. However, I also expressed hesitation about viewing interaction as simplistic agreement or disagreement, and how the productive character of this interaction is not readily adapted to traditional models based on quantifiable valuations of interests and divisible joint products.

Furthermore, the inter-subjective realm of agreement, of “communal discernment” (Sheeran 1996), when there is a “high” that accompanies “a moment of increased coherence, where the group is able to move beyond its perceived blocks or limitations and into new territory” (Bohm, Factor, and Garrett 1991) remains largely unexplored.

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58. The Evolution of the Language Faculty

Deleted reason: not anarchist

Subtitle: Clarifications and implications

Author: Marc D.Hauser, Noam Chomsky, W. Tecumseh Fitch

Authors: Marc D.Hauser, Noam Chomsky, W. Tecumseh Fitch

Topics: evolution, language

Date: September 2005

Date Published on T@L: 2021-09-11T14:51:38

Source: Retrieved on 11^th September 2021 from dash.harvard.edu

Notes: ISSN 0022–2860. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.02.005

Abstract

In this response to Pinker and Jackendoff’s critique, we extend our previous framework for discussion of language evolution, clarifying certain distinctions and elaborating on a number of points. In the first half of the paper, we reiterate that profitable research into the biology and evolution of language requires fractionation of “language” into component mechanisms and interfaces, a non-trivial endeavor whose results are unlikely to map onto traditional disciplinary boundaries. Our terminological distinction between FLN and FLB is intended to help clarify misunderstandings and aid interdisciplinary rapprochement. By blurring this distinction, Pinker and Jackendoff mischaracterize our hypothesis 3 which concerns only FLN, not “language” as a whole. Many of their arguments and examples are thus irrelevant to this hypothesis. Their critique of the minimalist program is for the most part equally irrelevant, because very few of the arguments in our original paper were tied to this program; in an online appendix we detail the deep inaccuracies in their characterization of this program. Concerning evolution, we believe that Pinker and Jackendoff’s emphasis on the past adaptive history of the language faculty is misplaced. Such questions are unlikely to be resolved empirically due to a lack of relevant data, and invite speculation rather than research. Preoccupation with the issue has retarded progress in the field by diverting research away from empirical questions, many of which can be addressed with comparative data. Moreover, offering an adaptive hypothesis as an alternative to our hypothesis concerning mechanisms is a logical error, as questions of function are independent of those concerning mechanism. The second half of our paper consists of a detailed response to the specific data discussed by Pinker and Jackendoff. Although many of their examples are irrelevant to our original paper and arguments, we find several areas of substantive disagreement that could be resolved by future empirical research. We conclude that progress in understanding the evolution of language will require much more empirical research, grounded in modern comparative biology, more interdisciplinary collaboration, and much less of the adaptive storytelling and phylogenetic speculation that has traditionally characterized the field.

1. Introduction

In a recent paper, we (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002) (HCF hereafter) offered a framework for research on language evolution, stressing the importance of an empirical, comparative and interdisciplinary approach to this problem, and of distinguishing between several different notions of “language” found in the literature on this subject. In their paper “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about it?” Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff (PJ hereafter) present a critique of this paper. In our response, we begin by noting the many areas of agreement between HCF and PJ, among them the need to fractionate language into its component mechanisms, the need for an empirical approach to test hypotheses about these mechanisms, the value of comparative data from diverse animal species for doing so, and the need for collaborative, inter-disciplinary work in this endeavor. However, several distinctions and hypotheses that formed the core of our original paper have been misunderstood by PJ. We first clarify these core ideas before addressing PJ’s specific criticisms concerning empirical evidence. Many of their criticisms are based on a mischaracterization of the perspective we outlined; but several substantive areas of disagreement are discussed. This section allows us to clarify certain issues that were left open in HCF, or unmentioned due to space constraints.

1.1. Clarifying the FLB/FLN distinction

One main thrust of PJ’s critique results from their blurring the distinction we drew between broad and narrow interpretations of the term “faculty of language.” Although PJ endorse this distinction, many of their arguments appear to result directly from a failure to make it themselves, or to perceive where we were making it. We thus start by clarifying this distinction, and its importance.

It rapidly became clear in the conversations leading up to HCF that considerable confusion has resulted from the use of “language” to mean different things. We realized that positions that seemed absurd and incomprehensible, and chasms that seemed unbridgeable, were rendered quite manageable once the misunderstandings were cleared up. For many linguists, “language” delineates an abstract core of computational operations, central to language and probably unique to humans. For many biologists and psychologists, “language” has much more general and various meanings, roughly captured by “the communication system used by human beings.” Neither of these explananda are more correct or proper, but statements about one of them may be completely inapplicable to the other. To this end, we denoted “language” in a broad sense, including all of the many mechanisms involved in speech and language, regardless of their overlap with other cognitive domains or with other species, as the “faculty of language in the broad sense” or FLB. This term is meant to be inclusive, describing all of the capacities that support language independently of whether they are specific to language and uniquely human. Second, given that language as a whole is unique to our species, it seems likely that some subset of the mechanisms of FLB is both unique to humans, and to language itself. We dubbed this subset of mechanisms the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN). Although these mechanisms have traditionally been the focus of considerable discussion and debate, they are neither the only, nor necessarily the most, interesting problems for biolinguistic research. The contents of FLN are to be empirically determined, and could possibly be empty, if empirical findings showed that none of the mechanisms involved are uniquely human or unique to language, and that only the way they are integrated is specific to human language. The distinction itself is intended as a terminological aid to interdisciplinary discussion and rapprochement, and obviously does not constitute a testable hypothesis.

We believe that a long history of unproductive debate about language evolution has resulted from a failure to keep this distinction clear, and that PJ, while agreeing with its importance in principle, have not made it in practice. Only this can explain their disagreement with the hypothesis they attribute to HCF at the culmination of their introduction: “that recursion is the only aspect of language that is special to it, that it evolved for functions other than language, and that this nullifies ‘the argument from design’ that sees language as an adaptation”. In any interpretation that equates the last “language” in this sentence with FLB, we not only disagree with this hypothesis (which is not our own), but reject it as extremely implausible. Our focus on the mechanism of recursion in HCF was intended as a plausible, testable hypothesis about a core component of FLB, and likely FLN, not a blanket statement about “language as adaptation.” Here, we hope to clarify any possible misunderstanding by exploring these issues in greater detail.

As we argued in HCF, treating “language“ as a monolithic whole both confuses discussions of its evolution and blocks the consideration of useful sources of comparative data. A more productive approach begins by unpacking FLB into its myriad component mechanisms. These components include both peripheral mechanisms necessary for the externalization of language, and core linguistic computational/cognitive mechanisms. The proper fractionation of FLB into its components is obviously not trivial or given, and it would be naı¨ve to suppose that the biologically appropriate fractionation will precisely mirror traditional disciplinary subdivisions within linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, etc.). For example, “phonetics” is traditionally concerned with the sounds of spoken language, while “phonology” concerns more abstract questions involving the mapping between sounds and linguistic structures. Though distinct, both components of language presumably tap some of the same mechanisms. The “phon-” root of both terms reveals their original preoccupation with sound, but language can also be externalized through the visual and manual modality, as in signed languages, raising tricky questions about the precise borders of the sensory-motor component of language. While it would be a mistake to exclude visual/motor mechanisms from FLB, it is not a core component for the vast majority of humans. This is not an issue we attempted to answer in HCF, nor will we do so here. We raise it simply to illustrate the complexity of the issues raised when one attempts to properly fractionate FLB.

In HCF, we offered one potential cut through FLB, explicitly distinguishing the sensory-motor (SM: phonetics/phonology) and conceptual-intentional (CI: semantics/pragmatics) systems from the computational components of language that have been the traditional focus of study in modern linguistics, including syntax, morphology, a phonological component that interacts with SM systems, and a formal semantic component that interacts with the CI system. We make no claims that this is the only correct way to fractionate FLB, explicitly leaving room for other components (see Figure 1 in HCF). “We make no attempt to be comprehensive in our coverage of relevant or interesting topics and problems” (p. 1570). However, contrary to PJ’s suggestion, our framework does not exclude the many important issues that arise in phonology, morphology, or the lexicon. Questions concerning how internal computations relate signal and meaning are explicitly raised in the initial theoretical discussion (p. 1571), and must be, by definition, part of an adequate theory of language.

Something about the faculty of language must be unique in order to explain the differences between humans and other animals—if only the particular combination of mechanisms in FLB. We thus made the further, and independent, terminological proposal to denote that subset of FLB that is both specific to language and to humans as FLN. To repeat a central point in our paper: FLN is composed of those components of the overall faculty of language (FLB) that are both unique to humans and unique to or clearly specialized for language. The contents of FLN are to be empirically determined. Possible outcomes of this empirical endeavor include that ALL components of FLB are shared either with other species, or with other non-linguistic cognitive domains in humans, and only their combination and organization are unique to humans and language. Alternatively, FLN may turn out to include a very rich set of interconnected mechanisms, as assumed in many earlier versions of generative grammar. The only “claims” we make regarding FLN are that (1) in order to avoid confusion, it is important to distinguish it from FLB, and (2) comparative data are necessary, for obvious logical reasons, to decide upon its contents. An equally obvious point is that research on non-linguistic cognitive domains (number, navigation, social intelligence, music, and others) is fundamental to the proper eventual delineation of FLN.

PJ’s central complaint with HCF lies with our further hypothesis—stated clearly as such in the paper—that only a relatively compact, but powerful, component of the computational component of language falls into the FLN subset of FLB (Hypothesis 3 of HCF). “We propose in this hypothesis that FLN comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mapping to the interfaces.” (p. 1573). The term “FLN” thus served dual duties in HCF. To be precise, we suggest that a significant piece of the linguistic machinery entails recursive operations, and that these recursive operations must interface with SM and CI (and thus include aspects of phonology, formal semantics and the lexicon insofar as they satisfy the uniqueness condition of FLN, as defined). These mappings themselves could be complex (though we do not know) because of conditions imposed by the interfaces. But our hypothesis focuses on a known property of human language that provides its most powerful and unusual signature: discrete infinity. We offered this hypothesis as a starting point for discussion and research, “restricting attention to FLN as just defined but leaving the possibility of a more inclusive definition open to further empirical research” (p. 1571). We do not define FLN as recursion by theoretical fiat (note, we say “a key component”), which would contradict the aims of our paper, but offer this as a plausible, falsifiable hypothesis worthy of empirical exploration. We hypothesize that “at a minimum, then, FLN includes the capacity of recursion”, because this is what virtually all modern approaches to language (including those endorsed by PJ) have agreed upon, at a minimum. Whatever else might be necessary for human language, the mechanisms underlying discrete infinity are a critical capability of FLB, and quite plausibly of FLN.

1.2. Biolinguistics and the Minimalist Program

PJ give a long and detailed critique of the Minimalist Program (MP), based on their interpretation of how the minimalist program informed our “overall vision of what language is like.” In fact, partly for reasons of space, HCF barely discussed MP. The framework advanced in HCF for the study of language evolution does not rise or fall with the fate of the minimalist program. Indeed, most of our points (e.g. the FLN/FLB distinction, the value of an empirical, hypothesis-testing approach, the importance of comparative data, etc.) apply equally to any of the various flavors of modern generative grammar. Like HCF, our discussion here will be largely non-committal as regards the virtues and faults of the various flavors of generative grammar currently available. The only assumption made in HCF, and here, about syntactic theory is the uncontroversial one that, minimally, it should have a place for recursion. We think researchers in fields outside linguistics should adopt a wait-and-see attitude as these intradisciplinary issues are sorted out. It is certainly not the case that our framework is based on a covert “presumption that the Minimalist Program is ultimately going to be vindicated,” and we are quite puzzled by PJ’s assertion to this effect.

PJ see minimalism as providing “a rationale” and “motivation” for our hypothesis 3—the only obvious justification for their long and detailed critique of minimalism. This speculation is incorrect. A primary motivation for writing HCF was our recognition of some pervasive confusion that have led to persistent and unnecessary misunderstandings among researchers interested in the biology and evolution of language. Such misunderstanding has polarized debate unnecessarily, has helped to fuel dogmatic and even hostile stances, and has generally acted to block progress in this field, including especially the severing of possible collaborative projects between linguists, psychologists and biologists. It has contributed to a situation in which animal researchers interested in language almost automatically consider themselves anti-linguist, or anti-generative, while some linguists feel justified in being anti-cognitive or anti-evolutionary. The FLN/FLB distinction, we hoped, would help the field to see that there is no incompatibility between the hypotheses that FLB is an adaptation that shares much with animals, and that the mechanism(s) underlying FLN might be quite unique. We further realized that earlier statements that had been interpreted as anti-evolutionary were in fact compatible with contemporary (and perfectly orthodox) neo-Darwinian theory. This realization, not a covert acceptance of minimalist precepts, was the primary motivation for writing HCF, and phrasing our hypotheses as we did.

PJ’s comments about MP are thus mostly irrelevant to most of the topics of HCF, and of the current paper, and due to space constraints we are unable to discuss them fully here. However, lest readers conclude that PJ’s characterization of MP is accurate, we devote an online appendix to correcting their many misconceptions about this research program (www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab). Research in a minimalist framework has made considerably more progress than allowed by PJ, and this research has addressed many of the issues on PJ’s list of “ignored” phenomena.

Although we stress the independence of the framework advanced in HCF from the minimalist program, we did suggest and maintain here that a core element of FLN may be structured by considerations of efficient use of the core computational mechanisms of recursion; this is the only place where the discussion in HCF ties in directly to the minimalist program. One implication of this proposal is that much of the complex technology of earlier versions of generative grammar might possibly be eliminated, without losing (and sometimes gaining) empirical coverage (see online appendix). The only practical implication of this additional suggestion is that the study of the evolution of language will be made easier if this proposal turns out to be true, as opposed to more baroque alternative possibilities. If most of FLB builds upon ancient foundations, shared with other animals, we will have a much better chance of understanding these foundations from a genetic and neuroscientific viewpoint, because of the much greater variety of deployable experimental methods. If other aspects of FLB are shared with other cognitive domains (e.g. number, navigation, music, social intelligence) or overarching principles of efficient computation, that will vastly improve our chances of gaining an empirical grip on these mechanisms. The fact that a minimalist FLN would be easier to implement neurally, easier to code genetically, and easier to evolve should hardly be counted as evidence against it. Thus, should the minimalist approach find increasing empirical support, it would be good news for biologists and psychologists.

1.3. What is language “for”?

The hypothesis set laid out in HCF might be interpreted as a set of mutually exclusive alternatives. This would be an error. The hypotheses described represent different perspectives and focus on different targets of analysis. The first two hypotheses concern FLB, and were intended to span the range of currently available hypotheses. In contrast, our hypothesis 3 explicitly concerns only FLN; it is a proposal about what mechanisms are uniquely human. In contrast, PJ emphasize the design features of language “as an adaptation for communication.” Crucially, questions of mechanism are distinct from and orthogonal to questions of adaptive function (Tinbergen, 1963), a point clearly distinguished by Hauser (1996). This is not to say that questions at one level do not inform questions at another, as they surely do, but rather, that these are different questions that each require answers. We think PJ’s (and others’) overly restrictive emphasis on adaptive function is misplaced and counter-productive.

The term “adaptation’ conceals a conceptual minefield, long recognized as such by practicing evolutionary biologists (Mayr, 1982; West-Eberhard, 1992; Williams, 1966). Definitions run from diachronic and historical (Gould & Vrba, 1982) to purely synchronic and contemporary (Reeve & Sherman, 1993). Without further specification, the statement that “language is an adaptation” is thus vague enough to have few empirical consequences. In our opinion, there is no question that language evolved, and is very useful to humans for a variety of reasons. We thought our viewpoint on this issue was made relatively clear in HCF: language evolved, shows signs of adaptive design, and comparative data and interdisciplinary cooperation will be necessary to figure out the details of the evolutionary process. We didn’t belabor the point as it seems relatively obvious and is far from a new idea, (e.g. Hauser, 1996; Hewes, 1973; Jackendoff, 2002; Lenneberg, 1967; Lieberman, 1975; Nottebohm, 1976; Pinker & Bloom, 1990). To go further than this requires a more rigorous unpacking of the term “adaptation” with respect to language. We will discuss two aspects in turn, first addressing the current utility of language, then turning to past function(s).

Questions about current utility are (at least in principle) empirically testable. But questions about original function are of a different logical type. It is an unfortunate fact that the two main sources of data to address such historical issues, namely paleontological and comparative, are simply unavailable for behavioral traits unique to one species. This is one reason that some biologists advocate a purely synchronic interpretation of “adaptation” (Reeve & Sherman, 1993). For some behavioral traits there are fossil data available to test hypotheses (e.g. we know from fossils that humans adopted a bipedal posture before brain size expansion), and for some linguistic mechanisms there may be relevant comparative data (e.g. for vocal learning). But, considering language as an unfractionated whole, neither type of data is available: “language” does not fossilize and is unique to humans. Thus, from an empirical perspective, there are not and probably never will be data capable of discriminating among the many plausible speculations that have been offered about the original function(s) of language, as for music, mathematical reasoning or a host of other interesting human abilities. We of course do not question PJ’s right to speculate along these lines, as long as it remains clear that these speculations are not confused with, or offered as alternatives to, testable hypotheses. However, in our opinion, preoccupation with such questions has served as an impediment to more useful empirical research on the evolution, development, and neurobiological underpinnings of language.

1.3.1. Current utility

Empirically addressing specific hypotheses concerning adaptation requires equally specific hypotheses about function. As we discuss below, “communication” is far too vague to constitute such a hypothesis, and none of the other candidates on offer seem much better. So why argue about them? Consider the analogous question: “What is the brain for?” No one would question the assertion that the brain is an adaptation (in some broad and not particularly helpful sense), but it would seem senseless to demand that neuroscientists agree upon an answer before studying neural function and computation.

Even more specific questions like “what is the cerebellum for?” have defied resolution for many decades without blocking detailed and productive empirical research on this neural subsystem. The question “what was the cerebellum originally for?” is hardly even a topic of discussion. This is not to deny the possible utility of adaptive hypotheses in guiding empirical research: suitably specific adaptive hypotheses can serve a useful function in focusing and inspiring empirical research (see Fitch, 2000a; Hauser, 1996 and Section 2.3.2 below). However, there is no need at present for researchers interested in the biology and evolution of language to resolve these issues, or even take a stand on them.

PJ are additionally concerned with the question of what an adaptation is “for”. To them, it seems quite obvious that “language is an adaptation for communication.” To understand our skepticism about this claim, consider a parallel question: “What is bat echolocation for?” If we interpret the question as one about current utility—“what do today’s bats use their echolocation abilities for and how does it contribute to genetic fitness?”—then there are many correct answers. For example, bats use echolocation to find and capture prey (feeding), to navigate, to find mates, and to engage in aerial dogfights with competitors. Bat echolocation is “for” many things, each subserving different aspects of survival and reproduction. Although the majority of pulses are probably used for finding and capturing food, they are simultaneously employed in navigation, and also signal the bat’s presence to conspecifics. The question is akin to asking “what is primate vision for?” There are many correct answers, some of them perhaps conflicting, and it would seem odd to stipulate any one of them as “the purpose” of vision or of echolocation. It is hard for us to see the scientific value of framing the question this way.

Returning to language, and distinguishing rigorously between FLB and FLN, the question of “what is FLB for?” clearly has many answers if interpreted in terms of current utility. Today, FLB is used extensively in both communication, and in private thought. The communicative uses can be further subdivided: humans use language in just about every social interaction, including courtship and mating, aggressive interactions with competitors, caring for offspring, sharing information with kin, etc. Thus there can be little doubt that language is useful for communication with other humans, and communication must be one of the primary selective forces that influenced the evolution of FLB. In fact, one of us wrote an entire book on the evolution of communication (Hauser, 1996) based on this observation. But the private uses of language are equally varied and important, including functions like problem-solving, enhancing social intelligence by rehearsing the thoughts of others, memory aids, focusing attention, etc. They seem to extend into almost every domain of thought. Further, many cognitive scientists have speculated, in the Whorfian tradition, that specific details of language may alter thought, creating cross-cultural cognitive differences (Bowerman & Levinson, 2001); if true this would further complicate the relation between FLB and thought. Finally, the phonological component of private speech might help serialize private cognition, focus attention on one train of thought, and increase the capacity of short-term memory. Thus, the phonological component is not necessarily superfluous to “private” uses of language, as PJ assert.

Questions about the specific current utility of FLN are better defined. Accepting for a moment our provisional, tentative assignment to FLN of only recursion and mapping to the interfaces, it seems clear that the current utility of recursive mental operations is not limited to communication. In addition to its clear utility for cognitive functions like interpreting mathematical formulas that are not plausibly adaptations at all, recursive thought would appear to be quite useful in such functions as planning, problem solving, or social cognition that might themselves be adaptations. As an example of how recursion plausibly functions in spatial reasoning and navigation, consider such concepts as ((((the hole) in the tree) in the glade) by the stream) and ask whether there is an obvious limit to such embedding of place concepts within place concepts (. in the forest by the plain between the mountains in the north of the island.). Our proposal that aspects of FLN may function in spatial navigation did not concern dead reckoning or landmark recognition, as PJ assume, but processes of optimal computation already established in animal navigation, like efficient path integration and no backtracking (e.g. Gallistel & Cramer, 1996). Thus, questions of current utility, while empirically addressable, offer little reason to conclude that either FLB or FLN are useful only in communication.

1.3.2. Functional origins

There is a different way, also interesting, of interpreting the question “what is bat echolocation for?” as a question about functional origins: “What was echolocation for in the first echolocating bats?” This is clearly a different question, and requires different analyses and data if it is to be answered. One potential source of data is the fossil record, but for most traits, paleontological data tell us when a trait appeared, but not why. Analyses of the middle ear in bat fossils suggest that microchiropteran bats evolved echolocation very early in their evolutionary history (Novacek, 1985), but do not tell us what they used it for. And this is exceptional: in the case of behavioral traits like language, even this much fossil data is unavailable. A more promising approach to questions of original function is the comparative method, as emphasized in HCF. If a trait is shared, the first question is whether it evolved independently (“analogy”) in different lineages or is shared by common descent (“homology”). Homologous traits, those shared via common descent, play a central role in comparative biology because they are the key to reconstructing phylogeny (Hall, 1994). However, the existence of homology seriously complicates questions of adaptation, since traits that were adaptive in the common ancestor of some clade are not necessarily so for each species that makes up the clade (Harvey & Pagel, 1991). Thus, while homologous traits are indispensable in systematics, they are not necessarily the traits of choice for the study of function and adaptation.

Organisms can also come to have similar traits through convergent evolution (“analogy”—one form of homoplasy). The discovery and analysis of analogous mechanisms is an equally interesting and important arm of the comparative method, because analogy can provide crucial insights into the adaptive nature of natural selection, independent of inherited details (e.g. Lockwood & Fleagle, 1999; Sanderson & Hufford, 1996). The similarities in body form between dolphins and seals, or in the wings of birds and bats, are independently evolved responses to the physical constraints of swimming and flight respectively. Such similarities provide the surest sign of adaptations to these ways of life, and are crucial in distinguishing adaptation from mere inherited similarity (Gould, 1976). Other types of homoplasy, such as reversions and parallelism, also provide insights into the role of constraints in evolution (Wake, 1991, 1996). Thus, scientists interested in the study of adaptation seek to discover and explore cases of convergence. Returning to bats, if we look at other species which have independently evolved echolocation, echolocating birds appear to use it solely for navigation (Suthers & Hector, 1988), as does a separate bat lineage, the megachiropteran bat Rousettus (Mo¨hres, 1956). Echolocating cetaceans certainly use echolocation for navigation, and perceptual abilities to use sound to sense space exist in other mammals, including cats and humans (Griffin, 1958). The one thing common to all of these species is navigation, making the hypothesis that bat echolocation originally functioned in navigation, and was only later specialized for feeding and communication, a plausible one. But while plausible, it is extremely difficult to test or falsify. The primary value of such hypotheses is to drive comparative work and to lead to more specific, testable hypotheses about mechanistic function.

Regarding the original function of FLB, we advocate a multi-component, multi-functional perspective in HCF, and PJ’s commitment to a view of language as a complex adaptation would appear to entail a similar perspective. From this perspective, it seems unproductive to assume, or to seek, a single answer to the question “What was FLB originally for?” An approach to language evolution that fractionates FLB into its component parts is unlikely to come up with the same overarching function for all of these mechanisms. Moreover, if this question is asked, then surely comparative evidence is absolutely critical to a satisfying answer. For example, several researchers have argued that the evolution of major components of FLB were driven by sexual selection (e.g. Darwin, 1871; Miller, 2001; Pinker & Bloom, 1990). For vocal imitation this seems quite plausible (based on comparisons with birdsong or whale song). But, based on comparative data, sexual selection seems unlikely to have driven the communication of complex facts about the world. This aspect of FLB seems more plausibly driven by kin selection or some other non-sexual selection (Fitch, 2004).

Regarding FLN, we wrote: “It is possible, as we discuss below, that key computational capacities evolved for reasons other than communication, but after they proved to have utility in communication, were altered because of constraints imposed at both the periphery . and more central levels.” (pp 1569–1570). This statement clearly does not deny a communicative role to FLB or FLN. It does, however, suggest the difficulties inevitably involved in discussions of past function(s) of any unique components of FLB. PJ state that “Chomsky’s positive argument that language is not ‘for’ communication” is based on the use of language as inner speech. In the passage to which they refer (Chomsky 2000, pp. 76–7, not 75), not only is their “positive argument” not proposed, it is explicitly rejected. To quote in full: “Furthermore, whatever merit there may be to guesses about selectional processes that might, or might not, have shaped human language, they do not crucially depend on the belief that the system is an outgrowth of some mode of communication. One can devise equally meritorious (that is, equally pointless) tales of the advantage conferred by a series of small mutations that facilitated planning and clarification of thought.—not that I am proposing this or any other story. There is a rich record of the unhappy fate of highly plausible stories about what might have happened, once something was learned about what did happen—and in cases where far more is understood” (emphasis added). In discussion elsewhere, the same points about frequency of “inner speech” are adduced to illustrate the pitfalls in trying to determine “function” or “purpose” of a biological system from frequency of use (Chomsky, 2003).

A “positive argument” has been made, most forcefully by prominent biologists, that communicative needs would not have provided “any great selective pressure to produce a system such as language” with its crucial relation to “development of abstract or productive thinking” (Luria, 1974), through its unique property of allowing “infinite combinations of symbols” and therefore “mental creation of possible worlds” (Jacob, 1982). Of course current utility is a poor guide to past function, and it is an open question whether Luria and Jacob are right to question what PJ declare a “truism.” But PJ’s position on this matter seems obscure. On the one hand, they forcefully deny the Luria-Jacob position. However they also insist on this position, claiming that basic properties of language derive from prior systems of “recursive thought.” There are some concrete proposals about “recursive thought”: namely, generative grammars that yield structures at the CI interface (e.g. Heim & Kratzer, 1998; Larson & Segal, 1995). But that cannot be what PJ mean. Perhaps they have in mind a “language of thought,” which evolved prior to FLB and includes its basic internal computational mechanisms. But that assumption simply transfers the basic questions of evolution from language to a language of thought, and this new problem cannot even be posed until we are told what the language of thought is. Whatever they may have in mind, PJ’s view appears to be that FLB both is and is not an “instrument for expression of thought.”

In conclusion, seeking a single adaptive function for “language”, treated as a monolithic whole, is more likely to produce confusion and misunderstanding than insight. Treating any complex biological character as if it had a single function is likely to be unproductive at best, if not meaningless. Second, our hypothesis 3 concerns FLN, whatever its contents turn out to be, and not “language;” questions about either its current utility or original function are logically separate from those concerning other components of FLB. Our assertion that FLN is not obviously “for” communication in today’s humans, and that there are other equally plausible precursors in past hominids or primates, seems a rather mild one. It is only when FLN is confused with FLB, or current utility conflated with original function, that consideration of this possibility seems unreasonable, or to be “denying a truism.”

1.4. Summary

To recap, we take for granted that the large set of complex mechanisms entering into FLB are adaptive in some broad sense, having been shaped by natural selection for, among other things, communication with other humans. We find this idea neither controversial nor particularly helpful in empirical investigations of the biological nature of the language faculty (FLB). Neither Pinker nor Jackendoff have used their theoretical arguments about the adaptive nature of language to fuel empirical work, to our knowledge. However, once FLB is fractionated into component mechanisms (a crucial but difficult process), we enter a realm where specific mechanisms can be empirically interrogated at all levels (mechanistic, developmental, phylogenetic and functional). Each mechanism might have its own separate phylogenetic and functional history, and we expect diverse answers as progress is made in this research program. As a potential example of this process, we offered our hypothesis 3: that FLN is restricted to a simple but powerful recursive mapping capability by definition, unique to humans and unique to the language faculty. This recursive mechanism has some plausible precursors in cognitive domains other than communication. We think these are worthy of more detailed investigation. Thus, while accepting that FLB is an adaptation, we hypothesized that FLN is not an adaptation “for communication.” Note that there is absolutely no contradiction between these two statements, as long as the distinction between FLN and FLB is kept clear.

Accepting our terminology, and the necessity of recursion in syntax, there are two ways one could rationally disagree with this hypothesis. First, FLN may include more than the computations subserving recursion and mappings to the interfaces to SM and CI, as we suggest in several places in HCF. If so, our Hypothesis 3 can simply be restated as specific to the recursive machinery and associated mappings, rather than FLN in full, and all the same considerations will apply. But in either case our hypothesis concerns a specific subset of linguistic mechanisms, not “language” in a broad sense. Second and less trivially, we argued that the mechanisms of recursion and its mappings are simple enough to nullify the adaptationist’s “argument from design,” a proposition one can question. This more interesting question demands a much better understanding of the neural, developmental and genetic mechanisms underlying recursion and its mappings than currently available. Perhaps the apparent computational simplicity of recursion masks an implementation rich in detailed, fine-tuned shaping of time-hewn parts. But the onus is clearly upon the proponent of this hypothesis to demonstrate this: a priori, there is nothing obvious about it. That recursion is useful is obvious; this does not automatically make it an adaptation in the evolutionary sense.

2. What’s special: a reexamination of the evidence

Our introductory remarks have clarified why the FLB/FLN distinction is critical for productive discussion of language evolution, and what, precisely, we suggested in hypothesis 3 of HCF. By failing to carry through with this distinction, effectively attributing to us the position that “language” (FLB) is recursion, PJ set up an easily-refuted caricature of our hypothesis. Consider as an illustration their discussion of the genetics of language. PJ cite the data concerning the small but significant changes that have occurred in the human FOXP2 gene as casting “even stronger doubt on the recursion-only hypothesis” because “the possibility that the affected people are impaired only in recursion is a non-starter.” PJ conclude that the FOXP2 data refute our hypothesis 3. But as the above discussion will presumably have made clear, these data are irrelevant to our hypothesis. If anything is a candidate for inclusion in FLB but not in FLN, it is the FOXP2 gene, a very heavily conserved transcription factor found in all mammals (Enard et al., 2002) and birds (Haesler et al., 2004). Although the precise function of this gene is still not understood, it would be extremely surprising if its function in humans was fundamentally different from that in other mammals. Furthermore, the gene’s effect in humans are pleiotropic, including pronounced effects on oro-motor praxis that are independent of its effects on speech articulation. Consequently, this gene is nearly identical in form to a homologous gene in other mammals, and the consequences of its expression are not specific to speech or language. Thus, we find it difficult to understand why PJ would cite the FOXP2 data, detailing an important component of FLB, as refuting our hypothesis about FLN. The same observation applies, mutatis mutandis, to many of the observations they present in their critique of our paper. We only work through a few of these here, but encourage the reader to re-evaluate their entire paper in light of these comments.

When the FLB/FLN distinction is maintained, many of the arguments PJ bring to bear simply disappear, at least as criticisms of HCF. In the remainder of this paper we will consider, in turn, the various observations that PJ cite regarding the mechanisms underlying FLB, and organizing our responses using essentially the same numbering system as PJ. We ask for each mechanism whether it might plausibly be a member of the subset constituting FLN. We will conclude that the answer is negative for most of them, either because clear homologues or analogues exist in nonhuman species, or because the same mechanisms are operative in other nonlinguistic cognitive domains. However, several interesting areas of uncertainty exist, prominently including similarities and differences in vocal learning and lexical acquisition between humans and animals, and regarding the cognitive underpinnings of music and language, which we hope will be a focus of future research.

2.1. Conceptual structure

With regard to the hypothesis that the conceptual structure expressed by language is based upon a foundation shared with other animals, PJ appear to have little disagreement with us. They concur that the rich database of comparative evidence amassed by researchers in comparative psychology and cognitive ethology strongly suggests that we share a significant component of our non-linguistic mental lives with other species. Note that this conclusion has been driven by empirical research and it could quite plausibly have turned out otherwise; indeed for a large portion of the twentieth century the very idea of “animal cognition” was considered laughable by many psychologists. It was only by first discovering clever experimental ways to test for conceptual abilities without language in adults (e.g. mental rotation tasks) and non-verbal infants (e.g. habituation/dishabituation tasks) and second, applying these experimental innovations to animals, that these important empirical advances were possible. This is precisely the approach we are advocating for the study of other aspects of language. Cognitive ethology thus provides evidence of the power of the comparative approach, and an excellent role model for work on language evolution.

In passing we observe that cognitive ethology is still in its infancy and there remains much we do not know about what animals can and cannot do. In a summary of research on mental state attribution, (Hauser, 2000) concluded that the ability to represent others’ minds (“theory of mind”) was absent in animals, but as the review went to press, Hare and colleagues provided the first solid evidence of this capacity in chimpanzees (Hare, Call, Agnetta, & Tomasello, 2000), with additional evidence piling up soon thereafter. Such rapid progress should make us cautious concerning statements about what is absent in animals, or what is unlearnable without language. For example, PJ cite “ownership” as a concept that is “hard to discern” in animals’ naturalistic behavior. But there are many aspects of animal territorial behavior that are difficult to explain without some primitive notion of ownership, such as a “home court advantage” effect that persists even when both contestants are equally familiar with the territory. Detailed experiments on animal “ownership” show how it is influenced by dominance, priority of access, value of resource, and species-specific rules and exceptions (Kummer & Cords, 1992; Kummer, Gotz, & Angst, 1974; Stammbach, 1988). Although one can always find differences, post hoc, between animal and human versions of a behaviour, these data suggest an “ownership” concept in some animals with considerable overlap with our own.

Some of PJ’s other suggestions about uniquely human abilities, or concepts “unlearnable without language”, are not supported by comparative data. “Multi-part tools” must be an oversight, since the use of dual hammer and anvil stones by nut-cracking chimpanzees is well-attested in at least two chimpanzee field sites (Whiten et al., 1999). Similarly, we find recent experimental demonstrations of episodic-like memory in jays and rhesus monkeys to be an impressive example of a cognitive representation of time (and space) by non-linguistic animals. Many corvids (crows and jays) hide food for later use (Olson, Kamil, Balda, & Nims, 1995), and sometimes have an extraordinary memory for its location (Balda & Kamil, 1992). Clayton and colleagues have shown that these species also retain a sense of when the food was cached, as demonstrated by their failure to attempt retrieval of food that would have spoiled by the time the birds are permitted access. This clever experiment demonstrates that the ability to mark the passing of relatively long periods of time does not require language (Clayton, Bussey, & Dickinson, 2003). Similarly, rhesus monkeys can report when they recall a prior event and when they have forgotten it (Hampton, 2001). Thus our capacity to mark the passage of time, and know what we do or do not remember, is not unique, and may not rely on language at all (of course claiming that the capacity does not require language is different from the claim that language does not enhance or somehow modify the capacity).

2.2. Speech perception

Our substantive differences with PJ begin with their discussion of speech (for details see Hauser & Fitch, 2003). We noted above that speech is only one of several viable modalities for linguistic expression (others including signed language and writing), and thus it is important to distinguish the evolution of speech from the evolution of language per se (Fitch, 2000a). Nonetheless, speech certainly has pride of place as the default modality when available, and shows many signs of being specially adapted for this role. In their discussion of speech perception, PJ defend the widespread viewpoint that speech perception relies upon speech-specific, uniquely human perceptual mechanisms: that “speech is special” in both of these ways. We agree with PJ, and many other researchers, that “Speech is Special” (SiS) is an interesting, plausible hypothesis. What we rejected in HCF is granting SiS the status of de facto null hypothesis. When mechanism X (say, duplex perception, or the McGurk effect, or many others) is discovered in human speech perception, we believe the default assumption should be that this characteristic is also found in animals, until comparative data are gathered that reject this assumption. While this stance seems to us the logical one, the opposite stance has historically characterized the SiS debate, and several of PJ’s points suggest that they are prone to the same bias.

2.2.1. “Speech is special” as a default hypothesis

Studies of speech perception and production are a traditional focus of discussions of language evolution, and comparative data have rightfully played a central role in these discussions. We credit Alvin Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories with framing the SiS hypothesis strongly and provocatively, and thus spurring a vibrant and important field of research in comparative speech perception. As a result, we know a good deal about animal speech perception. However, Liberman and colleagues used the discovery of categorical perception to argue that speech is special before any relevant comparative data were gathered. At the time, this stance seemed reasonable: the fit between the phenomena of categorical perception and the details of speech (in particular, the shift of category boundaries with place of articulation) seemed too perfect to result from some general auditory processes. Hindsight being 20/20, we can now see that this fit more likely results from the alignment of speech production to pre-existing nonlinearities in speech perception. Furthermore, the zeitgeist of the time certainly favored the idea that there was nothing special about speech, and the Haskins group was justified in using this and other data to call this into question. However, the discovery of categorical perception in chinchillas, complete with shifting category boundaries, placed SiS in its proper place as a provocative, strong hypothesis to be tested, rather than a default assumption about every new aspect of speech perception (and in this case, rejected). These events should have offered a serious cautionary message to speech researchers from that point on. Unfortunately, in our opinion, this did not occur, and SiS remained, and for the most part remains, the default assumption among speech researchers. It is this stance that we reject.

Given current understanding of neurobiology and comparative psychology, indicating huge overlap in the mechanisms underlying human and animal perception, cognition and action, we suggest that the appropriate default assumption about any newly discovered mechanism is that it is shared between humans and other animals. Human uniqueness is something to be demonstrated (as we do for recursion in Section 2.6), not assumed. In advocating the hypothesis of shared mechanisms, we are expressing a simple commonsense point: don’t state that something is not there until you’ve looked for it. Our comments in HCF about the explanatory landscape in research on language evolution also reflect a relatively conventional general philosophy about the role of strong hypotheses in science. Science progresses by stating and testing falsifiable hypotheses, and the hypotheses most conducive to progress are those that are most readily falsifiable (“strong”), because a falsifiable hypothesis that repeatedly resists falsification is likely to be true. The search for strong, testable hypotheses is of course different from the choice of appropriate null hypotheses. Examples of strong hypotheses are “categorical perception is unique to human speech” or “recursion is unique to human language”: either hypotheses can be readily refuted by empirical study. For example, the first hypothesis was rejected both by demonstrations of categorical perception in animals, and of categorical perception of non-speech sounds (Cutting, 1982; Cutting & Rosner, 1974; Rosen & Howell, 1981).

In contrast, the hypothesis that “speech is special” is not strong, because speech requires many component mechanisms, and the demonstration that any one of them is shared with animals does not threaten the hypothesis as a whole. In practice, for each demonstration of a shared mechanism, such as categorical perception, several new mechanisms have risen to take its place that have been postulated as unique to human speech, such as duplex perception or the McGurk effect. Due to the ease of experimentation on humans relative to that on animals, it seems unlikely that this situation will change soon, and we are sympathetic to animal researchers who complain that the SiS hypothesis is a moving target. As PJ say “it would be extraordinarily difficult at present to conduct experiments that fairly compared a primate’s ability to a human’s.” This is precisely why SiS is not a strong hypothesis, nor a suitable default hypothesis in speech research, in our opinion.

We also find the methodological despair implied by this statement puzzling. In our opinion, and many others in the field, it is not “extraordinarily difficult” to compare human and nonhuman abilities. For example, recent comparisons of humans and monkeys have used the same methods and materials to test aspects of speech perception (e.g. with habituation-dishabituation procedures and no training), finding for example that both species use rhythmic features to discriminate among language groups (Ramus, Hauser, Miller, Morris, & Mehler, 2000); see Section 2.2.2. Such studies provide the basis for more detailed neural work, and it seems parsimonious to assume that when nonhuman primates and human infants show the same capacities with speech, given the same methods and materials and with no training, they are using the same mechanism.

PJ cite data from humans on duplex perception and sinewave speech as evidence “casting doubt on the null hypothesis” of shared mechanisms, but these data are not even relevant to our null hypothesis. Relevant data would involve attempts to demonstrate the phenomena either in animals, or in nonspeech domains, and PJ’s statement appears to confuse absence of evidence with evidence of absence. To our knowledge, no one has ever run a study of duplex perception, or the McGurk effect, with nonhuman animals. The simple demonstration of a new phenomenon or illusion in speech perception does not constitute evidence for SiS. As it happens, there are relevant data seemingly rejecting the hypothesis that duplex perception is specific to speech (Fowler & Rosenblum, 1990). The same can be said of infants’ preference for speech sounds: perhaps monkeys (or dogs, or guinea pigs) prefer speech sounds as well. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we suggest, it is not just premature but a logical error to see this as casting doubt on the shared mechanism hypothesis. Of course, one can certainly question our assertion that this hypothesis deserves the status of null hypothesis; perhaps from certain theoretical standpoints this is the wrong choice to make. But if one accepts it, as PJ appear to, many of the empirical observations they cite fail to address this hypothesis at all, much less cast doubt upon it.

2.2.2. Comparative studies of animal speech perception

PJ summarize their views about our “shared mechanisms” hypothesis by stating that “the tasks given to monkeys are not comparable to the feats of human speech perception.” They base this opinion on several claims with which we disagree. PJ’s claim that animal speech research focuses on simple one-bit discriminations accurately summarizes the first twenty years of this research, but ignores progress made in the last five years. Many new studies, cited in HCF, have looked at much more complex discriminations by animals, e.g. the ability to use syllables or vowels to extract the statistical properties of a continuous stream of speech or to extract grammatical rules. PJ’s statement that animal speech perception experiments involve extensive operant conditioning is incorrect. While true of earlier work, the field has recently opened to other methods that involve no training, including habituation/dishabituation techniques; and these are precisely the methods used with human infants, that form the core of PJ’s hypothesis concerning our evolved specialization. Furthermore, we disagree with PJ’s implication that we can only draw weak inferences from training experiments. First, if training is uninformative concerning SiS, this eliminates many studies of human infants that also involve training. Second, training techniques are a powerful tool to determine if a skill can be developed with practice, experience, and attention by an animal. Finally, training studies typically have an initial period of training under reinforcement that is based on a small number of tokens representative of the target category. This training phase is designed, especially for extremely naive animals, to teach them the game: that some sounds are rewarded and others are not. Once trained, the animal moves on to the critical generalization phase (often on stimuli that never appear in the training set) in the absence of reinforcement. The generalization phase is critical for inferring the generality of what the animal has learned, under strict experimental control.

PJ think it is unlikely that monkeys have anything like the human capacity “to rapidly distinguish individual words from tens of thousands of distracters despite the absence of acoustic cues for phoneme and word boundaries, while compensating in real time for the distortions introduced by co-articulation and by variations in age, sex, accent, and emotional state of the speaker” (p. 8). But it is precisely the ability to rapidly extract words from distracters, online, and with speaker variation, that recent animal work on statistical learning addresses: cotton-top tamarins can extract the word-like units (trigrams) within a continuous stream of speech (Hauser, Newport, & Aslin, 2001). This finding directly replicates the results of Saffran and colleagues with 8-month-old babies, using the same methods and materials (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). Overall, these data refute the claim that animals are incapable of the perceptual feats that humans engage in spontaneously, online, and with distracters.

PJ cite several studies that indicate clear differences between species. The training studies of Sinnott and colleagues are exemplary in that they directly compare the performance of animals and humans on the same or similar perceptual tasks. However, beyond some level of detail it is unclear how to interpret a finding of difference between the performance of an animal and a human subject. Some differences among subjects (of any species) are inevitable, raising the question of which of these differences really make a difference to the language faculty. As a rough guide, we would suggest that only differences between humans and animals that exceed the differences observed among normal human subjects are relevant to questions of human uniqueness. Thus, if macaque monkeys can successfully discriminate /ra/ from /la/, a distinction that poses severe difficulties for adult Japanese speakers, but have slightly different category boundaries than adult English speakers, we do not see this as evidence that the mechanisms underlying perception of this distinction are unique to humans.

To summarize, PJ’s review of the literature on animal speech perception is inaccurate and incomplete, ignoring a number of advances that have been made in recent years. Their skepticism about the value of training studies seems ill-founded, and if it were taken at face value it would demand rejection of a significant body of experimental work with human infants (not to mention much of psychophysics). Research on animal speech perception is currently one of the most advanced fields of comparative biolinguistic study, and it is directly relevant to questions of human uniqueness that have dominated discussions of language evolution for many years. A thorough review of this literature (along with results of our own work) led us, in HCF and elsewhere (Hauser & Fitch, 2003), to argue that the traditional claim that “speech is special” needs to be re-evaluated. Claims of human uniqueness should not be made in the absence of at least some relevant animal data, and we currently know of no clear demonstrations of differences between animal and human speech perception relevant to the evolution of language (a possible recent exception is Newport et al., 2004). Thus the safest assumption, at present, is that the mechanisms underlying human speech perception were largely in place before language evolved, based on either general auditory or vocalization-specific perceptual processes.

2.2.3. Neural data on speech perception

We do not think that the demonstration of double dissociations between speech and environmental sounds provides strong evidence that speech is special. To see why, consider a condition termed alexia without agraphia (“pure alexia”), where after brain injury a patient loses the ability to read but retains the ability to write. Such patients can write individual words, or take dictation, but afterwards are unable to read what they have written. General visual and manual abilities remain intact. Although rare, this syndrome has been repeatedly reported in the neurological literature (Geschwind, 1965; Geschwind & Kaplan, 1962). Similar cases have even been reported with written music (Brust, 1980). From an evolutionary viewpoint, alexia without agraphia provides a cautionary tale. Writing is clearly a cultural development, and alphabetic writing appears to have been invented only once in the history of our species, a few thousand years ago. Given this short timespan, modern human abilities to read and write can hardly be considered adaptations: they are clearly the learned result of interactions between the language faculty (FLB), and more general manual and visual skills, and perhaps other faculties. Thus, finding a discrete brain region or circuit whose destruction impairs reading, but leaves writing intact, is no demonstration that these skills represent genetically determined, functionally specialized adaptations.

We interpret such neural data on writing, along with many other apparently “modular” activities, as providing important insights into the plasticity of mammalian neocortex, rather than evidence of evolutionary specialization to that function. Rather than being hard-wired for particular functions, even sensory cortices appear to be relatively “open” early in development. If one area of cortex that normally processes some data is damaged, another area can take over to serve the same function. For example “rewired” ferrets develop working visual cortex in the temporal lobes (where auditory cortex would normally be found) (Sharma, Angelucci, & Sur, 2000; von Melchner, Pallas, & Sur, 2000), and their visual behaviour is indistinguishable from that of control animals. Similarly, monkeys trained to use a particular finger, or listen for a particular tone, exhibit larger areas of sensory cortex that process these sensory data (Merzenich, Recanzone, Jenkins, Allard, & Nudo, 1989). In humans, musicians show larger cortical areas devoted to piano notes (Pantev et al., 1998), string players have a larger sensory representation in the left (string) hand (Elbert, Pantev, Wienbruch, Rockstroh, & Taub, 1995), and blind Braille readers use their occipital cortex (devoted in sighted people to vision) to process tactile inputs (Sterr et al., 1998a, b). Such examples could be multiplied considerably, but the point should be clear enough. The nature of mammalian neocortex leads us to expect cortical specialization for any task to which an individual devotes considerable time and effort (e.g. reading or writing, or speech vs. environmental sound perception). Discovery of such “modular” specializations is not evidence for (or against) the specific neural circuit being an evolutionary adaptation.

2.2.4. Convergent evolution

PJ’s last paragraph of the section on speech perception raises an issue that pervades their discussion of comparative data. PJ describe “comparisons among primates,” and despite some discussion of nonprimate data, relevant non-primate data are often omitted. For instance, Patricia Kuhl hypothesized that the perceptual magnet effect was uniquely human only after finding no evidence for this effect in macaque monkeys (Kuhl, 1991). Later work (Kluender, Lotto, Holt, & Bloedel, 1998), however, demonstrated the most critical component of the effect in an avian species. While PJ are of course perfectly correct in asserting that the perceptual magnet effect is, as far as we know, unique to humans among primates, it is unclear why this restriction to primates should be relevant to claims of human uniqueness. When we ask in HCF whether some trait is uniquely human, we are asking whether it is unique among all living forms, not uniquely human among primates, or uniquely human among mammals. The existence of displaced reference in honeybees would mean that displaced reference is not uniquely human, in our usage. The demonstration of recursion in birds would mean that it is not uniquely human, just as surely as the same finding in chimpanzees. The relevant question is the neural, developmental and genetic mechanisms underlying the trait, which may or may not be shared (a question to be addressed empirically). This general point becomes particularly relevant in discussions of convergent evolution in vocal production.

2.3. Speech production

2.3.1. Complex vocal imitation

PJ criticize our discussion of both neural and peripheral aspects of vocal production in humans. We noted that the ability to imitate complex sounds vocally (“vocal imitation”), although apparently unique to humans among primates, is found abundantly in songbirds, as well as various distantly-related mammals (e.g. dolphins and seals, Janik & Slater, 1997). Therefore, vocal imitation is not a uniquely human characteristic, and not a component of FLN, despite being a crucial component of FLB. We did not, as PJ suggest, advance this as an argument “against evolutionary adaptation for language in the human lineage.” This confuses our exclusion of vocal imitation from FLN with an overall exclusion from language.

The evolution of vocal learning in birds (presumably “for” birdsong) clearly occurred independently of the evolution of vocal learning in humans. But as already discussed, scientists interested in the study of adaptation seek to discover and explore cases of convergence, rather than defining them away. Vocal imitation in birds is quite irrelevant to the question of whether such a mechanism evolved “for” language, as are analogous abilities in whales or in seals. But a discovery of vocal imitation in some relatively unstudied nonhuman primate species would be equally irrelevant. Extant primate species, whether monkeys or apes, are not “ancestral to humans,” and the only way to discover characteristics of extinct common ancestors is through application of the comparative method, examining all available data from many species. Abundant data in all primates examined so far indicate a lack of vocal imitation at a level that could support acquisition of a complex lexicon. These data include most importantly our nearest relatives, the great apes (Crockford, Herbinger, Vigilant, & Boesch, 2004; Hayes & Hayes, 1951; Nottebohm, 1976; Studdert-Kennedy, 1983). Thus, the discovery of complex vocal imitation in some new primate species would almost certainly represent an example of convergent evolution, not evidence for homology.

The significance of this observation cuts both ways: the existence of some trait in our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees, does not demonstrate its presence in our last common ancestor (LCA) with chimpanzees. To choose two examples, female chimpanzees in estrous develop extremely prominent sexual swellings. This might seem to indicate the presence of sexual swellings in the LCA, and loss by humans, but additional comparative data belies this conclusion, since the other great apes lack such swellings, as do most other primates. Chimpanzees apparently evolved sexual swellings independently, perhaps in response to their promiscuous mating systems, and humans, rather than chimpanzees, retain the primitive character. In contrast, laryngeal air sacs are present in chimpanzees, but not in humans. All other great apes also possess such air sacs, allowing us to infer that the LCA had air sacs, and humans have lost them in our subsequent evolution. These examples show that a broad comparative database is necessary to draw conclusions about homology vs. analogy, and traits characterizing the LCA.

PJ contend that human vocal imitation is limited to speech production. But human vocal imitation is not specific to language: the use of vocal imitation in music, which PJ cite parenthetically, refutes their contention. All humans can sing (albeit some quite poorly), and even as adults can easily reproduce a novel tune (even if the pitch or key is off). Indeed, the human ability to imitate novel sounds, both vocally and instrumentally, is absolutely central to the cultural transmission of human musical traditions. (Note that the enlargement of the thoracic spinal cord in late Homo (MacLarnon & Hewitt, 1999), indicating increased breathing control, is as relevant to song production as to speech). Whether the human music faculty is in some sense parasitic on the language faculty (as Pinker, 1997, has argued) or independent of it (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983), is an interesting open question, but it seems premature to exclude melodic imitation from the domain of vocal imitation, or to assume that human musical skills are non-adaptive, unselected byproducts of language abilities. We are equally unconvinced by PJ’s other arguments that vocal imitation is specific to language. That adults are poor at imitating the detailed phonetics of a foreign language should not obscure our adult ability, unusual among mammals, to do a reasonable imitation of complex novel sounds, even those that have no meaning in our own language. Most children enjoy imitating animal sounds, and in many parts of the world, adult hunters are skilled at imitating the sounds of their prey. Finally, the fact that imitative skill is limited by a critical or sensitive period is not evidence that it is language-specific. We conclude from this that (1) vocal imitation is part of FLB, and (2) the question of what it is an adaptation “for” remains open. Even for the much simpler and better studied case of vocal learning in bird song, this question remains open, and again it seems likely that it is “for” many things (Kroodsma & Byers, 1991). We suspect vocal imitation in humans may be similar.

2.3.2. Anatomical issues

In HCF we briefly discussed peripheral anatomical adaptations for vocal production, which we assigned to the SM component of FLB. PJ’s discussion again reflects some misconceptions about the comparative method. The paucity of data on animal supralaryngeal articulation makes it premature to conclude that humans have “incomparably” more complex vocal control: the comparisons that exist suggest that animals may be less limited than previously assumed (Fitch, 2000b; Lieberman, 1968). The discovery of permanently descended larynges in nonhuman animals (Fitch & Reby, 2001; Weissengruber, Forstenpointner, Peters, Ku¨bber-Heiss, & Fitch, 2002) demonstrates that a permanently descended larynx is not uniquely human, as previously believed, and the existence of this trait in speechless nonhumans clearly indicates that it has functions other than increased speech versatility. Size exaggeration is the most plausible candidate explanation, and the factual basis for this hypothesis has been explored in considerable detail (Fitch, 2002; Hauser & Fitch, 2003). These render plausible the hypothesis that the larynx descended originally, in prelinguistic hominids, for purposes of size exaggeration, and that this served as a preadaptation for speech. Of course, like any hypothesis about past function, this one cannot be tested directly. However, current utility can, and the data available indicate that, contrary to PJ’s assertion, the evidence for a size exaggeration function, even in modern humans, is quite strong.

Laryngeal descent lowers formants, and signals with lowered formants are perceived as emanating from larger individuals in at least two species (humans and deer:Fitch, 1994; Reby et al. 2005). These data are consistent with, but do not demonstrate, a size exaggeration function for the descended larynx. More telling is the fact that the human larynx undergoes an additional descent, at puberty, and only in males (Fitch & Giedd, 1999; Lieberman, McCarthy, Hiiemae, & Palmer, 2001). Teenage boys do not appear to undergo a corresponding increase in phonetic ability, and indeed girls appear to enjoy a slight advantage in speech ability over boys (Henton, 1992; Hyde & Linn, 1988). The only obvious function for this male-specific pubertal descent of the larynx would appear to be size exaggeration (Fitch & Giedd, 1999; Ohala, 1984): part of a suite of size-exaggerating traits that appear in males at puberty, including broad shoulders and beards. Thus, for adult males, the evidence that this additional laryngeal descent functioned to exaggerate size, as for deer or lions, and does not function in any additional speech ability, seems rather strong. Does this mean that the descended larynx, today, is not an adaptation for speech? Of course not. The two hypotheses are independent, and to think otherwise would be to confuse current utility with original function, like saying that bat’s wings didn’t evolve “for” flight because bats’ ancestors used them “for” swimming or walking. We intended no such conclusion. Contrary to PJ’s interpretation, nothing in HCF precludes the possibility of a history of selection on and refinement of the supralaryngeal tract for vocal production. Such a claim would be antithetical to some of the most basic principles of evolutionary biology. Note that this also does not mean that the descent of the larynx in human infants is “for” exaggerating size. The fact that this descent starts in babies at age 3 months is a strong argument against this hypothesis, as repeatedly noted (Fitch, 1997; Fitch, 2002; Fitch & Reby, 2001).

The increasingly rich comparative database concerning animal vocal production has interesting implications for the evolution of speech in our species. Specifically, the evidence offers convincing grounds for considering both human speech perception and production to be adaptations that either build upon homologues present in our recent primate ancestors (as comparative primate data indicate) or that have analogues in other more-distantly related species (as with vocal imitation or laryngeal descent). Many of the relevant mechanisms also function in other non-speech domains such as music. For all these reasons, we consider such mechanisms to be part of FLB. They thus do not speak to our hypothesis 3, which concerns FLN. None of these data were offered as “arguments against evolutionary adaptation for language in the human lineage” as PJ suggest. PJ’s discussion simply confuses the issues by failing to maintain the distinction, and attempting to exclude convergent phenomena like vocal imitation from evolutionary consideration.

2.4. Phonology

In HCF we considered phonology as a mapping from narrow syntax to the SM interface. To risk being repetitive, phonology does not represent “a major counterexample to the recursion-only hypothesis” but is irrelevant to the recursion-only hypothesis advanced in HCF. We suggested that the computational resources of recursion and its mapping to SM and CI are the only FLN-specific properties, and that other principles external to language might be responsible for the residual complexity and details of the SM-CI linking. Given our present knowledge, much of phonology is likely part of FLB, not FLN, either because phonological mechanisms are shared with other cognitive domains (notably music and dance), or because the relevant phenomena appear in other species, particularly bird and whale “song”. Some regularities in phonology may result from other principles, perhaps organism-independent, that determine computationally efficient mappings from narrow-syntactic objects to the SM interface, a possibility that can be formulated today, but so far resists serious inquiry. Specific aspects of phonology other than those that follow from recursion plus mapping to the interfaces may well be part of FLN—but this possibility should be stated as a hypothesis and tested, not assumed.

Consider music. We agree with the stance urged by (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983) that music and language are independent domains, to be studied with no strong assumptions about their inter-relationships. Nonetheless, the questions that have been framed for language in the generative tradition are precisely the kinds of questions that we should answer for music (Hauser & McDermott, 2003; Jackendoff & Lerdahl, in press). Although it may turn out that music and language have some deep biological connection at the genetic, neural or even evolutionary levels, such a connection can not be assumed a priori. Thus we were puzzled by the statement that “major characteristics of phonology are specific to language (or to language and music)” These two statements are not equivalent. To the extent that aspects of phonology are shared in music and language, they are by definition not part of FLN. Only if aspects of music can be shown to be “parasitic” on language, with no independent evolutionary history or mechanistic basis, might these two statements amount to the same thing. Although Pinker has suggested that music represents a non-adaptive by-product of the mechanisms underlying language (Pinker, 1997), this has by no means been demonstrated, and unless it is, the independence assumption of (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983) seems more prudent. In our opinion, the many similarities between linguistic and musical structure provide a fascinating source of potential insight into more general aspects of human cognition, and the many phenomenological overlaps between music and language (e.g. critical period phenomena, congenital and acquired amusias, parallel neural systems, etc.) provide a powerful window into questions of the biological basis for both domains (Koelsch et al., 2004; Peretz & Zatorre, 2005; Trainor & Trehub, 1992). For example, the great variability in exposure to music among humans, with some individuals immersed from an early age and others with very little exposure, provides a powerful tool to explore the degree to which neural specializations for music are input-dependent. Such extreme environmental differences are difficult or impossible to study in language. Similar empirical leverage has been gained by studying the similarities between birdsong and human music and language (Doupe & Kuhl 1999). The existence of shared mechanisms (e.g. critical periods in song learning) has opened the door to mechanistic analyses in terms of neurobiology and gene expression. As for many other components of FLB, the fact that these features are shared is welcome news to those favoring an empirical approach to their study.

Turning to rhythm, this is a phenomenon clearly shared between language and music (as PJ agree), but it also characterizes dance, another universal human trait that in most cultures is intimately tied to music, and that has received even less formal study than music. From a comparative perspective, there are some intriguing similarities between human music/dance and the dominance displays in our closest cousins, the great apes.

Both chimpanzees (Goodall, 1986) and gorillas (Schaller, 1963) perform ostentatious displays which involve a pattern of movements idiosyncratic to the displayer, often with vocal accompaniment, and with a bimanually generated rhythmic component. The “drummed” bimanual rhythm may be obligatory (gorilla chest beating) or optional (chimp buttress “drumming”). Although such bimanual sound making seems quite unusual among animals, this phenomenon has received surprisingly little study (Arcadi, Robert, & Boesch, 1998; Schaller, 1963), and it seems premature to conclude, as PJ do, that rhythm-following is uniquely human, particularly on the dubious authority of “informal observations” in a popular book (Williams, 1967). We agree with (Merker, 2000) that rhythmic entrainment in animals is a capacity sorely in need of empirical exploration.

On the lack of recursion in phonology, we agree with PJ (and most other commentators) that phonology is hierarchical but not recursive (although their statement in Section 4.2 concerning “recursive phonological signals” seems to contradict this). Certainly, syllables cannot be embedded within other syllables indefinitely. However, even in this domain of inquiry, there are many open questions. Syllables are not the only relevant components of phonological structure, and other constituents like intonational phrases seem much better candidates for unlimited self-embedding (Ladd, 1996). While we are by no means convinced that this is the case (nor is Ladd), let us accept for the sake of argument that it is.

The discovery of a recursive mechanism in phonology would first raise the empirical questions “is it the same as or different from that in phrasal syntax?” and “is it a reflex of phrasal syntax perhaps modified by conditions imposed at the interface?” Second, given that the phrasal structure of music shows no obvious limit on embedding, we might ask “is phonological recursion the same as or different from that in musical phrases?” or in the phrases of birdsong. If the answer to all of these questions were “same,” we would reject our hypothesis 3, possibly concluding that FLN is an empty subset of FLB, with only the integration of mechanisms being uniquely human. This is precisely the kind of empirical search and hypothesis testing that we favor.

2.5. Words

Regarding word learning, PJ are correct that we misrepresented the results of (Markson & Bloom, 1997) in saying that children “may use domain-general mechanisms” for learning both words and facts. Properly stated, their results indicate that some mechanisms underlying word learning are not specific to language. This is one reason that we consider these mechanisms to be part of FLB, not of FLN. Another is that the ability to link novel arbitrary noises to some referent appears to be quite general among vertebrates, present in some form not only in chimpanzees but in parrots, dogs and other species (Kaminski, Call, & Fischer, 2004; Owren, Dieter, Seyfarth, & Cheney, 1993; Pepperberg, 1991). PJ are correct that an empirical demonstration of fast mapping for both facts and words, or by other species, “does not prove they have all their properties in common.” Indeed, this hypothesis is virtually irrefutable and can never be “proven” by empirical evidence. Even in the face of new empirical data, one can always cite some new detail or phenomenon of words to rescue the hypothesis. This is precisely the sort of unfalsifiable hypothesis of which psychologists and ethologists interested in language evolution have often, and rightly, complained. Hypotheses like “language is uniquely human” or “word learning is uniquely linguistic” are, in our opinion, too vague and weak to be useful spurs to the kind of empirical research upon which progress depends.

PJ quote our own comments about the vastness of the lexicon as being contradictory to our hypothesis 3. Again, misunderstanding has resulted from a failure to carry through the FLN/FLB distinction. There are many aspects of lexical acquisition that are remarkable, which led us in HCF to the suggestions that the learning capabilities underlying the lexicon might represent an independent, evolved component of language (FLB). Humans have independently evolved many traits (e.g. bipedalism, relative hairlessness, complex tool use, and visual arts) that have no obvious connection to language. Other traits, including fact-learning, vocal imitation, and some musical abilities, appear to overlap with language without being specific to it (hence are part of FLB). There is no contradiction between our hypothesis that the mechanisms underlying word learning, although based on some shared mechanisms and thus part of FLB, have been hypertrophied, streamlined or otherwise specialized to this task in our recent evolutionary history. Nor does this contradict our hypothesis that FLN is limited to the core computational capacities of recursion and mappings to the interfaces. Words have qualities unique to language, just as chess moves have qualities unique to chess and theorem-proving has qualities unique to mathematics. Such observations are not, by themselves, relevant to questions of domain specificity. Nor are they the basis for assigning word-learning to FLN.

In HCF we detailed many of the ways in which we think that both animal vocalizations and the symbols learned by enculturated apes, dolphins and parrots differ from human words. As we stated in HCF, the evidence for reference in animals is weak at best:

“Without pursuing the matter here, it appears that many of the elementary properties of words—including those that enter into referentiality—have only weak analogs or homologs in natural animal communication systems, with only slightly better evidence from the training studies with apes and dolphins.” (p. 1576). Word meaning may well have characteristics unique to language and distinct from fact learning, or it might not. Work like that of Markson and Bloom sets up exactly the kinds of empirical questions that we argue should take center stage in discussions of the language faculty. Note that such empirical inquiry is completely independent of whether language is or is not “an adaptation for communication.”

2.6. Syntax

Syntax clearly plays a significant role in our ability to construct and express new meanings, but at least some of the restrictions and complexities of this process are plausibly inherited from conceptual structure, rather than being part of syntax per se. Just as the conceptual structure of objects and events surely influences and constrains the properties of nouns and verbs, it seems plausible to postulate that linguistic devices expressing quantity, tense, aspect or comparison, or other temporal or logical relations, inherit at least some of their structure from the conceptual structure of time, space and logic. The precise locus of such constraints is an active area of current research in linguistics. If there do turn out to be purely syntactic aspects of constituents such as complementizers, auxiliaries, or function words, their existence in other domains (such as music, spatial or social cognition) or in other species, would still require empirical investigation. Such features would not automatically be part of FLN.

Our suggestion that recursion is part of FLN, as defined, is based on the following observations. (1) Recursion is agreed by most modern linguists to be an indispensable core computational ability underlying syntax, and thus language; (2) Despite decades of search, no animal communication system known shows evidence of such recursion, and nor do studies of trained apes, dolphins and parrots; (3) The perceptual data currently available indicate that monkeys cannot even process hierarchical phrase structure, much less recursion; and (4) There are no unambiguous demonstrations of recursion in other human cognitive domains, with the only clear exceptions (mathematical formulas, computer programming) being clearly dependent upon language. Thus, current data justify our placing syntactic recursion in FLN. This assignment would clearly be threatened by a claim of similar recursion in birdsong or the discovery that chimps can process recursive strings, or various other potential empirical findings—all signs of a strong, falsifiable hypothesis. Of course, there’s not a lot riding on this, since we don’t suggest that only phenomena in FLN are worthy of study. If future empirical progress demonstrates that FLN represents an empty set, so be it. A terminological distinction may well outlive its usefulness. For now, though, our hypothesis 3 seems both plausible and consistent with the available data.

We will discuss PJ’s assertion that some of the world’s languages might lack “evidence of recursion” only briefly, because this seems to us irrelevant to the questions under discussion. Modern linguistics asks questions about the biological capacity to acquire human language, a set that includes but is not limited to the huge variety that currently exists on our planet. The putative absence of obvious recursion in one of these languages is no more relevant to the human ability to master recursion than the existence of three-vowel languages calls into doubt the human ability to master a five- or ten-vowel language. A Piraha˜ child raised in a Portuguese, English or Chinese environment will master those languages with the same ease as his or her mother’s tongue, just as the same child could learn the recursive embedding principle of parentheses in mathematics, or a computer programming language with recursive structure. In the face of the huge number of human languages that have clausal embedding, the existence of one that does not would in no way alter the explanatory landscape. If anything, this example would seem to add to the grounds for doubting that recursion evolved “for” communication (whatever this means exactly), if a language is attested that gets along without it. But it surely does not affect the argument that recursion is part of the human language faculty: as Jackendoff (2002) correctly notes, our language faculty provides us with a toolkit for building languages, but not all languages use all the tools.

The inability of cotton-top tamarins to master a phrase-structure grammar (Fitch & Hauser, 2004) is of interest in this discussion primarily as a demonstration of an empirical technique for asking linguistically relevant questions of a nonlinguistic animal. It is clearly too early to conclude that all species are equally hobbled (especially given the paucity of species and methods tested). Nor would we be prepared to draw strong conclusions about innate human abilities until infants or young children have been tested, and until more is known about the neural and psychological basis for the human ability to learn phrase structure (all topics of current investigation). Fitch & Hauser do not even mention recursion in the cited paper, and the generation of limited-depth hierarchical phrase structure was not confused with recursion in that paper (although it was by some commentators on the article). The article does suggest that an inability to perceive and process phrase structure, by any animal, would be a severe impediment to that species’ ability to master language. But to the extent that phrase structure is important to music, it would be a correspondingly severe impediment to their mastering a human musical style. If further empirical research shows that no nonhuman species can master a phrase-structure grammar, the hypothesis that animals either lack any recursive mechanisms, or cannot apply them to auditory strings, will be left standing. But if, for example, we discover that songbirds can master phrase-structure grammars, further research will be necessary to determine how they do it, whether this ability involves recursion, whether it is applied across different domains or problems, and whether the mechanism they use is similar or different to that in human beings. The importance of this work is its introduction of an empirical technique capable of addressing these issues, incorporating the formal analysis of language. The empirical technique can be used in a wide range of species, and the hypothesis can be empirically tested and falsified.

2.7. Summary: our view of the evidence

PJ end their summary of the available data with the conclusion “that the empirical case for the recursion-only hypothesis is extremely weak.” In our view, most of the data PJ discuss concern mechanisms that are part of FLB by definition, because related mechanisms exist in other species and/or other cognitive domains. These data are thus irrelevant to our hypothesis 3, which concerns FLN. Their conclusion is based on a misreading of our hypothesis postulating that, at a minimum, FLN consists of the core computational capacities of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to the interfaces. This hypothesis is intended as a guide to research; we are interested in the extent to which it is true, but we welcome empirical demonstrations that other mechanisms should be added to FLN. In our view, the most promising data in this regard remain those that we cited in HCF, particularly mechanisms for word learning that can plausibly be hypothesized to constitute human- and language-specific mechanisms. But, in the current state of knowledge, none of these possibilities can be interpreted as demonstrated, or even rigorously addressed, by empirical data. The comparative data have simply not been collected; due in part to the recency of the specific theoretical proposals and the new methodological advances. Thus, in sharp contrast to PJ, we conclude that our hypothesis 3 is not only plausible, but that no data refuting it currently exist.

3. Conclusion: where do we go from here?

PJ’s critique offers a vivid illustration of the problems that can arise if we fail to distinguish the various components of FLB, or if we confuse statements about one component with those concerning another. We doubt that future researchers will need to make a point of distinguishing FLN from FLB at every mention of the word “language,” as we have done here. However, keeping the object of discussion clearly delineated would certainly help to avoid future misunderstandings of this sort.

Misunderstandings aside, we feel that numerous areas of agreement, and several areas of substantive disagreement, remain. Agreed is the argument that FLB, as a whole, evolved and functions as a human-specific adaptation with several areas of current utility, one of which is clearly communication with conspecifics. Agreed is the necessity of fractionating FLB into several separate components, each of which might have different evolutionary histories. One of these components, the conceptual-intentional subsystem, is agreed to share major similarities with other vertebrates, meaning that research in comparative cognition and cognitive ethology will play a major role in future discussions of this topic. Topics such as theory of mind in animals are of great interest in this respect. Although it seems likely that some aspects of human conceptual structure are unique to our species, the separate question of whether these are unique to language will require detailed research into nonlinguistic cognition. This highlights a major role for cognitive science in general in this research program, and a need for explicit theoretical models of domains such as spatial reasoning, visual parsing, social cognition and music cognition that can be compared to and contrasted with linguistic theories. Such research is not only interesting in its own right, but will provide insights into the correct fractionation of FLB and the contents of FLN.

We agree with PJ that major aspects of the sensory-motor component of FLB, including minimally vocal imitation and probably some abstract computational mechanisms underlying phonological structure as well, evolved independently in the human lineage. We disagree with PJ’s argument that vocal imitation is uniquely human and speech-specific, and thus part of FLN, given the abilities of birds to imitate human speech, and of humans to imitate non-speech sounds (especially song). We think that the many similarities between the mechanisms underlying the human music faculty and phonology provide independent grounds for doubting the language-specificity of these mechanisms. Detailed research into both the structure and function of animal “music” such as bird- or whale-song, and into the neural underpinnings of human music perception and production, will play an important role in resolving these issues.

The most important area of substantive debate appears to center around the computational apparatus underlying language, and especially syntax. PJ argue that syntax and other formal components of FLB are highly complex adaptations for communication, unique to language, and unique to humans, and thus that FLN is equally complex. They posit that syntax consists of a complex set of independent mechanisms whose interrelations and complexity are the earmarks of adaptation. As we stated in HCF, we agree that this remains a plausible hypothesis, although if true it is very difficult to test. When applied to FLB, as in our hypothesis 2, it is widely agreed upon. But when applied to FLN, its plausibility clearly depends on the complexity of FLN, an issue that is the topic of intense research and far from resolved. If as more comparative data come in, FLN turns out to be empty, as is certainly possible, FLN would not constitute an adaptation by anyone’s standard. If FLN is very small, or even limited to the computations underlying recursion and its interfaces as we suggest in our hypothesis 3, its status as an adaptation is open to question; minimally, it will require more evidence than the reliance on complexity and the argument from design. This statement, as we hope is now clear, in no way questions the current utility of language, or the status of the entire FLB as an adaptation. If we take the evolution of language seriously, we must also take seriously the possibility that any component of FLB may not constitute an adaptation for language, for communication or “for” anything at all, and this is as true of FLN as any other component. If it turned out that the capacity for recursion resulted from a phase transition in the pattern of neural connectivity that results automatically from increases in neocortex to subcortical tissue ratio, interacting with standard mammalian brain development, this would certainly be an interesting result. If that hypothesis (or a host of similar ones) is ultimately rejected, that will be interesting too, and will represent clear progress. Our main concern is that no one prejudge the issues, and that all plausible hypotheses get a chance to be tested.

In summary, it is clear that there is significant agreement among the various disciplines contributing to an understanding of language evolution, and that the prospects for advancing an empirical science of biolinguistics are promising. Researchers interested in these issues must take seriously the complexity of language and the contributions of modern linguistics to its understanding, while incorporating the impressive gains made in neural, developmental, evolutionary and molecular biology. As it progresses, biolinguistics will help to drive an increasingly rich understanding of human and animal cognition, and to a broad comparative approach to understanding the many shared cognitive mechanisms that are part of the human language faculty.

Ultimately, we think it is likely that some bona fide components of FLN—mechanisms that are uniquely human and unique to language—will be isolated and will withstand concerted attempts to reject them by empirical research. An understanding of such mechanisms from the genetic, neural and developmental perspectives will illuminate our understanding of our own species. However, the search for such mechanisms should not be the sole topic of interest, but just one of many fascinating questions to be addressed.

Ultimately, the question of whether it is uniquely human is far from the most interesting question one can ask about language. We intended the ideas raised in HCF to help accelerate progress in these directions, and we hope that PJ’s critique and this response will help clarify the issues and aid progress. And we sincerely hope that research into the biology and evolution of language will not continue to be mired down by the misunderstandings that have so long plagued this field.

Acknowledgements

We thank Stephen Anderson, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Simon Kirby, Robert Ladd, Jacques Mehler, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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59. Exiting The Vampire Castle

Deleted reason: Not anarchist

Author: Mark Fisher, (k-punk)

Authors: Mark Fisher, (k-punk)

Topics: call outs, liberalism, identity politics, acid communism

Date: November 22 2013

This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing.

‘Left-wing’ Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone. Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me.

The open savagery of these exchanges was accompanied by something more pervasive, and for that reason perhaps more debilitating: an atmosphere of snarky resentment. The most frequent object of this resentment is Owen Jones, and the attacks on Jones – the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years – were one of the reasons I was so dejected. If this is what happens to a left-winger who is actually succeeding in taking the struggle to the centre ground of British life, why would anyone want to follow him into the mainstream? Is the only way to avoid this drip-feed of abuse to remain in a position of impotent marginality?

One of the things that broke me out of this depressive stupor was going to the People’s Assembly in Ipswich, near where I live. The People’s Assembly had been greeted with the usual sneers and snarks. This was, we were told, a useless stunt, in which media leftists, including Jones, were aggrandising themselves in yet another display of top-down celebrity culture. What actually happened at the Assembly in Ipswich was very different to this caricature. The first half of the evening – culminating in a rousing speech by Owen Jones – was certainly led by the top-table speakers. But the second half of the meeting saw working class activists from all over Suffolk talking to each other, supporting one another, sharing experiences and strategies. Far from being another example of hierarchical leftism, the People’s Assembly was an example of how the vertical can be combined with the horizontal: media power and charisma could draw people who hadn’t previously been to a political meeting into the room, where they could talk and strategise with seasoned activists. The atmosphere was anti-racist and anti-sexist, but refreshingly free of the paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left-wing twitter like an acrid, stifling fog.

Then there was Russell Brand. I’ve long been an admirer of Brand – one of the few big-name comedians on the current scene to come from a working class background. Over the last few years, there has been a gradual but remorseless embourgeoisement of television comedy, with preposterous ultra-posh nincompoop Michael McIntyre and a dreary drizzle of bland graduate chancers dominating the stage.

The day before Brand’s now famous interview with Jeremy Paxman was broadcast on Newsnight, I had seen Brand’s stand-up show the Messiah Complex in Ipswich. The show was defiantly pro-immigrant, pro-communist, anti-homophobic, saturated with working class intelligence and not afraid to show it, and queer in the way that popular culture used to be (i.e. nothing to do with the sour-faced identitarian piety foisted upon us by moralisers on the post-structuralist ‘left’). Malcolm X, Che, politics as a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality: this was communism as something cool, sexy and proletarian, instead of a finger-wagging sermon.

The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason. This wasn’t Johnny Rotten swearing at Bill Grundy – an act of antagonism which confirmed rather than challenged class stereotypes. Brand had outwitted Paxman – and the use of humour was what separated Brand from the dourness of so much ‘leftism’. Brand makes people feel good about themselves; whereas the moralising left specialises in making people feed bad, and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt and self-loathing.

The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media ‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen. (This last claim could only be heard by the cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic ‘left’ as Brand saying that he wanted to lead the revolution – something that they responded to with typical resentment: ‘I don’t need a jumped-up celebrity to lead me‘.) For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct – specifically his sexism. In the febrile McCarthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralising left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned.

It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”

Brand’s intervention was not a bid for leadership; it was an inspiration, a call to arms. And I for one was inspired. Where a few months before, I would have stayed silent as the PoshLeft moralisers subjected Brand to their kangaroo courts and character assassinations – with ‘evidence’ usually gleaned from the right-wing press, always available to lend a hand – this time I was prepared to take them on. The response to Brand quickly became as significant as the Paxman exchange itself. As Laura Oldfield Ford pointed out, this was a clarifying moment. And one of the things that was clarified for me was the way in which, in recent years, so much of the self-styled ‘left’ has suppressed the question of class.

Class consciousness is fragile and fleeting. The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and pre-emptions which prevent the topic even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it. I’ve been speaking now at left-wing, anti-capitalist events for years, but I’ve rarely talked – or been asked to talk – about class in public.

But, once class had re-appeared, it was impossible not to see it everywhere in the response to the Brand affair. Brand was quickly judged and-or questioned by at least three ex-private school people on the left. Others told us that Brand couldn’t really be working class, because he was a millionaire. It’s alarming how many ‘leftists’ seemed to fundamentally agree with the drift behind Paxman’s question: ‘What gives this working class person the authority to speak?’ It’s also alarming, actually distressing, that they seem to think that working class people should remain in poverty, obscurity and impotence lest they lose their ‘authenticity’.

Someone passed me a post written about Brand on Facebook. I don’t know the individual who wrote it, and I wouldn’t wish to name them. What’s important is that the post was symptomatic of a set of snobbish and condescending attitudes that it is apparently alright to exhibit while still classifying oneself as left wing. The whole tone was horrifyingly high-handed, as if they were a schoolteacher marking a child’s work, or a psychiatrist assessing a patient. Brand, apparently, is ‘clearly extremely unstable … one bad relationship or career knockback away from collapsing back into drug addiction or worse.’ Although the person claims that they ‘really quite like [Brand]‘, it perhaps never occurs to them that one of the reasons that Brand might be ‘unstable’ is just this sort of patronising faux-transcendent ‘assessment’ from the ‘left’ bourgeoisie. There’s also a shocking but revealing aside where the individual casually refers to Brand’s ‘patchy education [and] the often wince-inducing vocab slips characteristic of the auto-didact’ – which, this individual generously says, ‘I have no problem with at all’ – how very good of them! This isn’t some colonial bureaucrat writing about his attempts to teach some ‘natives’ the English language in the nineteenth century, or a Victorian schoolmaster at some private institution describing a scholarship boy, it’s a ‘leftist’ writing a few weeks ago.

Where to go from here? It is first of all necessary to identify the features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent – and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement. I think there are two libidinal-discursive configurations which have brought this situation about. They call themselves left wing, but – as the Brand episode has made clear – they are in many ways a sign that the left – defined as an agent in a class struggle – has all but disappeared.

Inside the Vampires’ Castle

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.

I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.

The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …

The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.

The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. Some of these working class types are not terribly well brought up, and can be very rude at times. Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures. The actual ruling class propagates ideologies of individualism, while tending to act as a class. (Many of what we call ‘conspiracies’ are the ruling class showing class solidarity.) The VC, as dupe-servants of the ruling class, does the opposite: it pays lip service to ‘solidarity’ and ‘collectivity’, while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold. Because they are petit-bourgeois to the core, the members of the Vampires’ Castle are intensely competitive, but this is repressed in the passive aggressive manner typical of the bourgeoisie. What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear – the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned.

The second law of the Vampires’ Castle is: make thought and action appear very, very difficult. There must be no lightness, and certainly no humour. Humour isn’t serious, by definition, right? Thought is hard work, for people with posh voices and furrowed brows. Where there is confidence, introduce scepticism. Say: don’t be hasty, we have to think more deeply about this. Remember: having convictions is oppressive, and might lead to gulags.

The third law of the Vampires’ Castle is: propagate as much guilt as you can. The more guilt the better. People must feel bad: it is a sign that they understand the gravity of things. It’s OK to be class-privileged if you feel guilty about privilege and make others in a subordinate class position to you feel guilty too. You do some good works for the poor, too, right?

The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluraity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip. Once the VC has mustered its witch-hunt, the victim (often from a working class background, and not schooled in the passive aggressive etiquette of the bourgeoisie) can reliably be goaded into losing their temper, further securing their position as pariah/ latest to be consumed in feeding frenzy.

The fifth law of the Vampires’ Castle: think like a liberal (because you are one). The VC’s work of constantly stoking up reactive outrage consists of endlessly pointing out the screamingly obvious: capital behaves like capital (it’s not very nice!), repressive state apparatuses are repressive. We must protest!

Neo-anarchy in the UK

The second libidinal formation is neo-anarchism. By neo-anarchists I definitely do not mean anarchists or syndicalists involved in actual workplace organisation, such as the Solidarity Federation. I mean, rather, those who identify as anarchists but whose involvement in politics extends little beyond student protests and occupations, and commenting on Twitter. Like the denizens of the Vampires’ Castle, neo-anarchists usually come from a petit-bourgeois background, if not from somewhere even more class-privileged.

They are also overwhelmingly young: in their twenties or at most their early thirties, and what informs the neo-anarchist position is a narrow historical horizon. Neo-anarchists have experienced nothing but capitalist realism. By the time the neo-anarchists had come to political consciousness – and many of them have come to political consciousness remarkably recently, given the level of bullish swagger they sometimes display – the Labour Party had become a Blairite shell, implementing neo-liberalism with a small dose of social justice on the side. But the problem with neo-anarchism is that it unthinkingly reflects this historical moment rather than offering any escape from it. It forgets, or perhaps is genuinely unaware of, the Labour Party’s role in nationalising major industries and utilities or founding the National Health Service. Neo-anarchists will assert that ‘parliamentary politics never changed anything’, or the ‘Labour Party was always useless’ while attending protests about the NHS, or retweeting complaints about the dismantling of what remains of the welfare state. There’s a strange implicit rule here: it’s OK to protest against what parliament has done, but it’s not alright to enter into parliament or the mass media to attempt to engineer change from there. Mainstream media is to be disdained, but BBC Question Time is to be watched and moaned about on Twitter. Purism shades into fatalism; better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty.

It’s not surprising, then, that so many neo-anarchists come across as depressed. This depression is no doubt reinforced by the anxieties of postgraduate life, since, like the Vampires’ Castle, neo-anarchism has its natural home in universities, and is usually propagated by those studying for postgraduate qualifications, or those who have recently graduated from such study.

What is to be done?

Why have these two configurations come to the fore? The first reason is that they have been allowed to prosper by capital because they serve its interests. Capital subdued the organised working class by decomposing class consciousness, viciously subjugating trade unions while seducing ‘hard working families’ into identifying with their own narrowly defined interests instead of the interests of the wider class; but why would capital be concerned about a ‘left’ that replaces class politics with a moralising individualism, and that, far from building solidarity, spreads fear and insecurity?

The second reason is what Jodi Dean has called communicative capitalism. It might have been possible to ignore the Vampires’ Castle and the neo-anarchists if it weren’t for capitalist cyberspace. The VC’s pious moralising has been a feature of a certain ‘left’ for many years – but, if one wasn’t a member of this particular church, its sermons could be avoided. Social media means that this is no longer the case, and there is little protection from the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.

So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications. Part of the importance of the British Cultural Studies project – as revealed so powerfully and so movingly in John Akomfrah’s installation The Unfinished Conversation (currently in Tate Britain) and his film The Stuart Hall Project – was to have resisted identitarian essentialism. Instead of freezing people into chains of already-existing equivalences, the point was to treat any articulation as provisional and plastic. New articulations can always be created. No-one is essentially anything. Sadly, the right act on this insight more effectively than the left does. The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!’

But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.

If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.

We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ set up by communicative capitalism, in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.

60. Workers Launch Wave Of Wildcat Strikes As Trump Pushes For ‘Return To Work’ Amidst Exploding Coronavirus

Deleted reason: not anarchist enough

Author: It’s Going Down

Authors: It’s Going Down

Topics: COVID-19, United States, general strike

Date: March 26, 2020

Date Published on T@L: 2020-04-02T03:05:22

Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-02 from itsgoingdown.org

In only a matter of days, the economic collapse brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has completely changed everything about our lives. In many ways, the growing crisis has laid bare the already existing contradictions which threatened to pull this society into open class conflict; from low paying jobs, increasing austerity, brutal police, the quickening of ecological collapse, an out of control housing crisis, and a growing carceral State.

But with millions of people now wondering how they are going to make ends meet and pay rent, let alone survive the current epidemic, a new wave of struggles is breaking out across the social terrain. Prisoners and detention center detainees are launching hunger strikes as those on the outside demand that they be released, tenants are currently pushing for a rent strike starting on April 1^st, the houseless are taking over vacant homes in Los Angeles, and workers have launched a series of wildcat strikers, sick-outs, and job actions in response to being forced onto the front lines of the pandemic like lambs to the slaughter.

But as tensions flare and economists predict upwards of 30% unemployment in the coming months, there is also a growing push from within the elites to herd us all “back to work.” Trump has stated that he wants things back to ‘normal’ by Easter, a move which threatens to undo anything that has been achieved by social distancing and attempts at quarantine. More and more, the refrain from within the Trump camp, Fox News, and sections of the MAGA aligned Right as Republicans and Democrats near a deal for a corporate bailout, is that mass death is acceptable as long as the economy, (read, Trump’s bid at re-election), is salvaged.

Meanwhile, as one report wrote:

The World Health Organization has warned that within the next several weeks—around the time of the Easter holiday—the US will have become the global epicenter of the pandemic.

Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, warned that curbing social distancing could cost millions of lives. “Anyone advising the end of social distancing now needs to fully understand what the country will look like if we do that,” he tweeted. “COVID would spread widely, rapidly, terribly, could kill potentially millions in the yr ahead with huge social and economic impact across the country.”

In cult like fashion, Trump is building support among his base for the mass die-off of a large segment of the population by proclaiming that the “cure” cannot be “worse than the problem,” while leading the charge to end social distancing by Easter. Such a move would lead to the deaths of potentially millions of people, many of them ironically Trump supporters. At the same time, both corporate parties are pushing for a bailout package (that Trump himself may benefit from) which will only further continue to transfer massive amounts of wealth into the hands of the uber-rich.

But in the face of this, anger is mounting. On social media over the past few days, calls for both a rent strike and a general strike have gone viral as have hashtags such as #NotDying4WallStreet. But much more important than Twitter being awash in class rage has been the spike in wildcat strikes and militant rank-n-file actions throughout March.

As the economy crashes and US society depends more and more on the continued operation of dwindling supply chains, workers in service sector jobs that remain open, such as at grocery stores, not only find themselves working at a crucial node in the economy – but with a new sense of potential power. This means simply that workers at different points in supply chains can have a huge impact on the economy and thus gain leverage, simply by engaging in direct action or refusing to work.

As Bloomberg wrote:

These pockets of resistance along the supply chain underscore the balancing act needed to contain the coronavirus and protect workers deemed essential while delivering goods and services. It’s an especially acute issue given that transportation, labor and other logistical woes have already made it hard to get food where it needs to be in the pandemic era.

While none of the meat plant incidents have so far caused operational disruptions, there are concerns that more may be coming, causing supply chain hiccups right as consumers are binge-buying groceries to fuel shelter-in-place lockdowns.

The U.S. pork industry has requested more guest worker visas, and there’s speculation that plants have been running full-tilt not only to supply unprecedented retail food demand, but also to get as much production in as possible before virus-related disruptions slow the pace.

While barely mentioned in the mainstream press or on cable-news, already there is a growing wave of wildcat strikes, self-organized labor actions, sick-outs, and work stoppages – much of it centered around the refusal to work in environments where workers may be exposed to the coronavirus.

If Trump is serious about forcing millions of other people back to work by Easter in mid-April, ensuring the death of potentially millions at the hands of the coronavirus, then calls for a general strike and potentially even broader revolutionary action will only continue to gain steam and popularity.

Here’s a roundup of what’s already gone down.

Auto Workers

Work stoppages and wildcat strikes have broken out in several auto industry factories, as workers demand an end to the spread of coronavirus in their workplaces. The revolt began on March 12^th, when:

Workers at the Fiat Chrysler Windsor Assembly Plant downed tools [on March 12^th] over concerns about the spread of coronavirus at their plant and after learning that a worker at the FCA Kokomo Transmission Plant in the United States was diagnosed with the potentially deadly disease.

This was followed by:

Workers at Fiat Chrysler’s Sterling Heights (SHAP) and Jefferson North (JNAP) assembly plants in Metro Detroit took matters into their own hands last night and this morning and forced a shutdown of production to halt the spread of coronavirus.

The work stoppages began at Sterling Heights last night, only hours after the United Auto Workers and the Detroit automakers reached a rotten deal to keep plants open and operating during the global pandemic…The same day, scores of workers at the Lear Seating plant in Hammond, Indiana refused to work, forcing the shutdown of the parts factory and the nearby Chicago Assembly Plant.

[On March 18^th], workers on SHAP’s first shift followed suit, staged a sit-in and refused to touch vehicles rolling down the line once their shift began. Because hundreds of people handle the vehicles in rapid succession on the assembly line, they are a major potential source of transmission for the virus. Management again sent workers home and canceled the second shift today. “This is awe-inspiring,” one young SHAP worker [stated], referring to the workers’ action to force the closure of the plant.

Workers at Dundee Engine Plant in Ann Arbor and Toledo North Assembly followed suit with their own job actions shortly afterward. Shifts at Warren Truck Assembly and Ford’s Michigan Assembly have also been sent home.

A Facebook Live video from Toledo showed dozens of furious workers crowded around Local 12 Vice President Brian Sims, demanding that the plant be shut down, who then retreats through the back door yelling at workers to “calm down.”

In an interview with Labor Notes, one auto worker stated:

The UAW should be actually fighting for us to get off of work. The union and the company care more about making trucks than about everybody’s health. I feel like they aren’t going to do anything unless we take action. We have got to band together. They can’t fire us all.

Agricultural Workers

In Georgia, several dozen Perdue workers at a poultry plant of about 600, walked off the job on March 23^rd over growing anger at low pay and concerns surrounding the spread of the coronavirus at a time of increased production and workload. In media interviews, those involved in the wildcat strike explained how the company sees them as expendable. According to one report:

Approximately 50 employees at the Perdue Farm plant near Perry, Georgia, walked out March 23 saying they didn’t feel safe in the plant because of the coronavirus, according to WMAZ in Georgia.

Workers say they don’t feel safe working around others who could have potentially been exposed to COVID-19, according to WMAZ. They add that they feel Perdue isn’t doing enough to keep employees safe and isn’t sanitizing their workspaces.

Amazon

On March 18^th, Amazon warehouse workers in Queens staged a wildcat strike after management attempted to push them back to work following a one day shutdown of a facility after someone at the plant tested positive for coronavirus. According to one report:

Amazon warehouse workers at a processing facility in Queens, New York City, received a text from management: “We’re writing to let you know that a positive case of the coronavirus (COVID-19) was found at our facility today.” Amazon temporarily closed the facility the same day but quickly reopened on Thursday.

This news, and the decision by Amazon to reopen the facility, sparked outrage among the warehouse workers, who refused to work and ultimately caused the facility to shut down on Thursday night. In a video posted on social media by “Amazonians United NYC,” a worker voiced his anger.

“We know what you’re doing. We can see that there’s an absolute disregard for our lives. We don’t buy it anymore.” Another worker joined, saying: “It’s not possible that in four hours you’ve disinfected every package after you got a positive diagnosis.”

Bar Workers

Workers at Crush Bar in Portland took action, launching a sit-in after being laid off in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the group’s report:

We did it! 48hrs after staging our sit-in, management provided us with our accrued sick time checks. Thank you for the community support that helped us draw attention to this injustice. We couldn’t have done it without you.

With that said, we the workers are still waiting to hear back on our second and third demands: half pay for cancelled sick hours and the guarantee that every laid off employee be rehired upon the bars reopen.

PDX Eater wrote of the action:

Last night, all 27 of Crush’s employees were laid off, in preparation for today’s forced closure of all dine-in food and drink businesses. At around 3:30 p.m. today, 12 employees arrived at the bar and then refused to leave, protesting owner John Clarke’s decision to lay off all employees without any financial aid, with the claim that he broke the law by denying their use of accrued sick hours to cover lost wages. The protest, which was set to last for up to 24 hours, was dispersed by Portland police after an hour.

Bus Drivers

On March 17^th, bus drivers in Detroit launched a wildcat strike, in response to dirty buses and lack of access to areas where drivers can wash their hands. As one report wrote:

Detroit has shut down the city’s public bus system because a vast majority of the drivers refused to work over concerns about the coronavirus.

The city is negotiating with Detroit Department of Transportation drivers to alleviate their concerns in hopes of restoring bus service Wednesday.

“Due to the driver shortage, there will be no DDoT bus service today,” the city said in a statement. “We are asking passengers to seek other forms of transportation while we work to address our drivers concerns. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Drivers have been expressing concerns that they aren’t adequately protected from the coronavirus. Among the concerns: The buses aren’t cleaned frequently enough, and drivers have been unable to wash their hands because of the statewide shutdown on many businesses.

The wildcat strike also resulted in free fares for riders:

The drivers’ union backed them up and their brief work stoppage, less than 24 hours, won all their demands. Fares will not be collected for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.

In Birmingham, Alabama, bus drivers on March 23^rd also protested and went on wildcat strike, refusing “to work scheduled routes due to Coronavirus (COVID-19) concerns.”

Call Center

Call-center workers and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in Portland, Oregon, launched a one day strike on March 4^th, leading to workers receiving paid leave in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin on March 18^th, other members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as Wobblies, engaged in a sick-out strike to demand better pay and working conditions, especially in the face of COVID-19, which has brought with it an increased work-load.

The union reported on social media:

Days after our sickout, an expression of collective discontent and a protest of our working conditions, CapTel admin have announced that we will be given 15 extra minutes of aux time per shift. For an 8-hour shift this means that ~91% adherence is needed to avoid discipline. CapTel Workers Union has had a stated demand for a 90%-adherence requirement in our five-point platform from day one.

Let’s keep pushing forward for $15/hour, our other demands, and workplace democracy. Let’s remember that this break from the normal austerity that governs our workdays can be ended by the whim of admin at any time. The boss’s promises are just words; a union contract is set in stone.

City Maintenance

On March 20^th, several dozen city workers walked off the job in Cleveland, Oho. According to one report:

Up to 35 Cuyahoga County sewer maintenance employees walked off the job or called in sick Friday morning, citing coronavirus safety concerns, according to Public Works Director Michael Dever.

The sanitary engineers, who maintain regional sewer systems for 39 Cuyahoga County communities, did not want to continue working because they were concerned about going into people’s homes and being in close proximity to one another, among other possible reasons, Dever said.

Construction

In Las Vegas, construction workers are pushing for a wildcat strike. According to one report:

Constructions workers at the Las Vegas Convention Center site said they are considering walking off the job this week because they said they don’t feel their health is being taken seriously.

“Things are getting scary at work,” one worker said. “A large group of us are ready to walk off the job.”

Construction workers on site of the Las Vegas Convention Center expansion say conditions were unsanitary before coronavirus was an issue. They say they haven’t gotten any better.

“As far as trying to prevent the spread, they’re telling us to wash our hands, enact social distancing but as far as actually protecting us, they haven’t done much,” said one worker.

Electricians

According to Organizing Work:

Electricians working on a long-term renovation project at Kaiser Hospital in Sacramento decided to walk off the job due to unsafe working conditions, related to potential exposure to COVID-19.

In an interview with one of the workers, they stated:

What happened yesterday was the result of a lot of talking amongst the rank-and-file over the preceding couple of days – everyone is aware of the severity of the outbreak and the risk it poses to our health and to the health of our loved ones. We saw a lot of abrupt changes around the hospital, for example bringing in large tents to set up testing sites for COVID-19, and we would be walking down a corridor to get materials for our job site a few feet from where these were being set up, and at least a couple of our guys were going through a different part of the hospital, and saw a patient being escorted by hospital staff wearing gowns and masks, and they would yell at our guy to get out of the hallway.

So I showed up in the parking lot in the morning, and there was already a large meeting of union electricians, kind of a spontaneous thing, and at least one of the other crews was going to do the same thing that day…We all agreed to get our shit and go.

Fast Food

Fast food workers at McDonald’s in San Jose and Los Angeles, California walked off the job on March 20^th. According to one report:

The workers said they were angry over their hours being cut, and the restaurant chain allegedly failing to provide soap, gloves and any training on how to protect themselves from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Not to be outdone, Wobblies in Portland, part of the Burgerville Workers Union, walked out of one store over coronavirus related working conditions:

Yesterday, every employee at the SE 92^nd Avenue Burgerville location went on a one-day strike to protest what they claim are unsafe working conditions related to the coronavirus outbreak. The shop re-opened today, and almost 40 of Burgerville’s other locations remain open, but the Burgerville Workers Union (BVWU) has issued a list of requirements during this pandemic.

The strike was largely in protest of a reduced staff making it difficult to maintain sanitation standards and protect workers. While Burgerville locations are open for drive-through customers, all of its dining rooms have been closed, and a press release from the company states that nearly 70-percent of workers have been furloughed or partially furloughed. “How can we keep people safe with a skeleton crew?” Mark Medina, an employee at the 92^nd Avenue location, says. “Maintaining sanitation standards takes a lot of work. Burgerville corporate claims to care about the community, but, by cutting costs like this, they’re putting us all at risk. People could die.”

Garbage Collectors

Garbage collectors in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania launched a wildcat strike to demand hazard pay and access to protective gear. As one article wrote:

Today, a group of several hundred, mostly African-American sanitation workers in Pittsburgh, members of Teamsters Local 249, went out on an illegal, wildcat strikes to protest unsafe working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The strike comes as momentum for strikes goes with #GeneralStrike becoming the top trending topic on twitter in the United States with even popstar Britney Spears calling for a General Strike. Many are wondering if strikes like Pittsburgh’s sanitation workers strike could be the beginning of a growing strike wave as Trump demands that workers risk their lives to return to work quickly.

Workers in Pittsburgh and elsewhere are resisting calls to work in unsafe conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We want better equipment, protective gear. We have no masks, “one African-American sanitation worker told WPXI. “We want hazard pay. Hazard pay is very important,” the worker told WPXI. “Why? Because we have high co-payments on insurance on any type of bill. We risk our lives every time we grab a garbage bag”.

“Here we are at my job. Ain’t picking up no rub,” African-American sanitation worker Fitzroy Moss said in a Facebook live video. “The rubbish is sitting there. That’s all they care about is picking up the garbage. They don’t even care about our health.”

Port Workers

In Oakland, California in the bay area, port workers are threatening to walk off the job in response to unsafe and unsanitary working conditions. According to one report:

Some dockworkers at the Port of Oakland are threatening to refuse work at a terminal that they say isn’t properly sanitizing equipment and facilities for employees. The move could halt logistics operations and further strain the global supply chain amid the coronavirus outbreak.

61. What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?

Deleted reason: not anarchist, but open for more discussion on this one

Author: Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council

Authors: Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann

Topics: dada, German Revolution, art, communism

Date: 1919

Date Published on T@L: 2021-06-08T11:38:54

Source: Retrieved on 8^th June 2021 from libcom.org

Notes: Manifesto written by Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann, first published in ‘Der Dada 1’ (1919), in the context of the unfolding, German revolution.

1 Dadaism demands:

The international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism;
The introduction of progressive unemployment through comprehensive mechanization of every field of activity. Only by unemployment does it become possible for the individual to achieve certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to experience;
The immediate expropriation of property (socialization) and the communal feeding of all; further, the erection of cities of light, and gardens which will belong to society as a whole and prepare man for a state of freedom.

2 The Central Council demands:

Daily meals at public expense for all creative and intellectual men and women on the Potsdamer Platz (Berlin);
Compulsory adherence of all clergymen and teachers to the Dadaist articles of faith;
The most brutal struggle against all directions of so-called “workers of the spirit” (Hiller, Adler), against their concealed bourgeoisism, against expressionism and post-classical education as advocated by the Sturm group;
The immediate erection of a state art center, elimination of concepts of property in the new art (expressionism); the concept of property is entirely excluded from the super-individual movement of Dadaism which liberates all mankind;
Introduction of the simultaneist poem as a Communist state prayer;
Requisition of churches for the performance of bruitism, simultaneist and Dadaist poems;
Establishment of a Dadaist advisory council for the remodeling of life in every city of over 50,000 inhabitants;
Immediate organization of a large scale Dadaist propaganda campaign with 150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat;

Submission of all laws and decrees to the Dadaist central council for approval;

Immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual center.

62. Liberation Theology for Quakers

Deleted reason: Not anarchist.

Author: Alice & Staughton Lynd

Authors: Alice Lynd; Staughton Lynd

Topics: Liberation Theology; Quakers; religion; Nicaragua; Catholicism

Date: April 1996

Date Published on T@L: 2022-10-09T00:29:53

Source: archive.org

About the Authors

Staughton Lynd’s first vivid impression of Quakers came from his father’s description of the Quaker wedding of Staughton’s cousin, David Hartley, and Margaret Wagner of the Stony Run Friends Meeting (Baltimore). David had been an ambulance driver with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Italy during World War II, and was the first conscientious objector Staughton knew.

Alice recalls going as a child to Friends Meeting with her parents, Henry E. Niles and Mary Cushing Howard Niles, in Westerly, RI, and on Park Avenue in Baltimore. Her parents joined the Friends at Stony Run in the late 1940s.

Staughton and Alice were married at the Stony Run Friends! Meeting House in 1951. They joined the Society of Friends in Atlanta in 1963, briefly transferred their membership to the New Haven Friends Meeting, and from there transferred to the 57^th Street Meeting of Friends in Chicago. Since moving to Ohio in 1976, they have continued as non-resident members of the 57^th Street Meeting.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank many Friends and others who read and commented on various drafts of this pamphlet and who enriched what we offer here. These include: Brian Corbin, Michael Ferber. Renate Goepp, Phil Hazelton, Betsy and Lee Rybeck Lynd, Martha Lynd, James Matlack, Jeremy Mott, Lafayette Noda, and Penelope Yungblut

Request for permission to quote or to translate should be addressed to Pendle Hill Publications, Wallingford, Pennsylvania 19086–6099

ISBN 0-87574-326-9

Library of Congress catalog card number 96–67672

April 1996: 2,500

---

We are Quakers. We have faith that there is a potential for good in every person, and that this “inner light” needs no mediation by priest or church. We believe in treating people as equals. We believe in nonviolence and forgiveness. We disavow retaliation or retribution. We try to practice direct speaking, speaking truth to power, and living consistently with our values. We follow a simple way of life and try to be responsible stewards of the earth and its resources. We think these are Quaker beliefs.

At the very opposite end of the spectrum of Christian belief, it might seem, stands the Roman Catholic Church. Hierarchy. ritual, a prescribed liturgy, a fixed creed are sharply at odds with Friends’ practice of a gathered silent meeting in which any person present can become the channel through which a message, unpredictable in advance, may be voiced.

Yet our most powerful spiritual experiences in recent years have been among Roman Catholics in Nicaragua who belonged to what they call the popular Church, that is, the segment of the Catholic community influenced by “liberation theology” and “the preferential option for the poor.”

We urge Friends to reflect on the teachings of liberation theology. As a stimulus, we offer here a record of our own joint effort to live out our Quaker convictions, our own experiments in truth.

Liberation Theology

What is “liberation theology”? What is meant by “the preferential option for the poor”? In our experience, at least the following four things:

First, liberation theology is motivated by the conviction that God does not want anyone to be poor and oppressed and that the Kingdom of God should be lived out here on earth. The spokespersons of this approach refer to institutional violence and structural injustice , meaning that the institutions and structures of society that allow some persons to oppress others must be confronted and changed.

Second, the “preferential option for the poor” or, in plain English, the choice to stand on the side of the poor , refers to two kinds of choice. For those who believe in a personal god (as we do not), there is God’s choice of the poor, shown by the evidence that God chose to deliver his message through someone born in a cow stall, who was a carpenter (or whose father was a carpenter), who found his followers among fishermen, and who was executed in the humiliating manner used to silence slaves and rebels.

Next there is the choice for service to the poor that may be made by persons like ourselves: persons born into the middle class, or educated to a degree that offers access to a middle-class style of life. The preferential option for the poor led Sister Helen Prejean to St. Thomas, a housing project in New Orleans, and later to her work against capital punishment:

I came to St. Thomas as part of a reform movement in the Catholic Church, seeking to harness religious faith to social justice....

In 1980 my religious community, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, had made a commitment to “stand on the side of the poor,” and I had assented, but reluctantly. I resisted this recasting of the faith of my childhood, where what counted was a personal relationship with God, inner peace, kindness to others, and heaven when this life was done. I didn’t want to struggle with politics and economics. We were nuns, after all, not social workers, and some realities in life were, for better or worse, rather fixed like the gap between rich and poor....

She recalls a meeting in June 1980 when Sister Marie Augusta Neal, a sociologist, spoke:

she described the glaring inequities in the world: two thirds of the peoples of the world live at or below subsistence level while one third live in affluence.... I found myself mentally pitting my arguments against her challenge-we were nuns, not social workers, not political. But it’s as if she knew what I was thinking. She pointed out that to claim to be apolitical or neutral in the face of such injustices would be, in actuality, to uphold the status quo- a very political position to take, and on the side of the oppressors....
“The Gospels record that Jesus preached good news to the poor,” she said, “and an essential part of that good news was that they were to be poor no longer.” Which meant they were not to meekly accept their poverty and suffering as God’s will, but, instead, struggle to obtain thenecessities of life which were rightfully theirs. [211]

In that moment, Sister Prejean says, she realized that her spiritual life was too disconnected. She left the meeting and began to seek out the poor.

We think that acting not just for, but with, the poor and oppressed, and then living out the unforeseen consequences of that choice, is what Archbishop Oscar Romero meant by “accompaniment.”

Third, the dignity and self-activity of poor and working people is another cardinal belief of liberation theology. All over the world, very much including the United States, poor and working people are constantly being told that they are dumb, that they are unworthy, and that they cannot solve their own problems. They tend to internalize the oppressor’s image of themselves.

Liberation theology responds that every one has his or her own dignity, and together we can find a path ahead. In Latin America pastoral agents of the new Catholicism teach the poor that they must not be passive victims, that they can and should “see, judge, and act.” These words were spread among Guatemalan workers in the 1950s and 1960s by European priests affiliated with the Young Catholic Worker organization.[212] These same words were the guiding principles of a base community we visited in a remote village in Matagalpa, Nicaragua in 1987.

Finally, liberation theology promotes the institution of the base community. The essence of a base community as it exists in Latin America is for men and women (and inevitably children) in a neighborhood or village to meet regularly, read the Gospel, and try to apply it in their own life situation.[213]

The results can be startling. Here is a base community in Nicaragua reflecting on the story of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10:30–37:

For us it is necessary to journey on the road,
Like the man who was traveling to Jericho (and was set upon by thieves),
We have to go to work, and to our homes,
We are not able to stop using the road.
What shall we do?

And they conclude:
This traveler was assaulted Because he was going by himself.
He was alone,
And for this reason
The robbers were able to assault him
And to leave him half dead.
We must travel very much together.
We must be well organized.
That is: We must organize ourselves

And do all things as a community.
So that what happened to the traveler to Jericho
Won’t happen to us.[214]

Early Friends

Many of these same themes were exemplified in the lives of early Friends. The early Quakers were “made up out of the dregs of the common people”[215] and the original leaders of the Quakers were almost exclusively northern yeomen and craftsmen. Like radical Catholics in Latin America today, these early Quakers stressed institutional rather than individual sin.

It has been suggested that certain Quaker practices preserved in a kind of underground tradition the communal way of life of the medieval peasantry. In a village, “only one form of cultivation was possible at one time in the common fields.... The Quaker ‘sense of the meeting carried over into the modern world something of the desire for unanimity which meant so much to the medieval communities.”[216]

The first Friends in the North American colonies expressed a thoroughgoing social and religious radicalism. There was nothing respectable about Quakerism then. Mary Dyer and other Friends were executed before Quakers were permitted to worship undisturbed in Boston.

Today, Quakers in North America are overwhelmingly white, suburban and well-heeled” and our “meetings consist of well-educated and relatively wealthy enclaves of white people.”[217] It is an open question whether Friends might once more, as in their beginnings, become a group that serves the poor directly and is at least in part made up of people who work with their hands, a group that seeks passionately to create a new society in which there will be no great disparities between rich and poor.[218]

Our Formation: Macedonia Cooperative Community

When asked by a Friend, “what motivated Alice and Staughton?” our immediate answer was “Macedonia.” Nuns with whom we stayed in Nicaragua spoke of their “formation.” The three years we spent at the Macedonia Cooperative Community, 19541957, were the period of our formation, establishing values and teaching us ways of living in community which we vowed to live by for the rest of our lives.

During the summer of 1954, we went for a two-week vacation to visit the Macedonia Cooperative Community in the hills of Northeast Georgia. As we approached, we saw a barefoot woman with a torn shirt carrying a young child. She, we learned later, was a neighbor who visited the community from time to time. Members of the community were better off but lived in “voluntary poverty.” This was a poor area, inhabited by people whose children lacked shoes in winter, on poor land that was suitable for little but pastures and forests. The community earned a meager living from a dairy and from Community Playthings, which made and sold blocks and other wooden play equipment for use in kindergartens and Sunday Schools.

We soon noticed how people at Macedonia listened to each other. There might be a meeting in someone’s living room. Someone spoke. Then a pause. Another observation. Another pause. The speaking was, as Quakers say, “out of the silence.” We fell in love with what we we experienced at Macedonia.

Staughton gave up his scholarship at the University of Chicago where he was studying regional planning, and Alice gave up her job as secretary of the Education Department at Roosevelt University. We returned to Macedonia, arriving on November 1, 1954. Our first child was born there in September 1955 and we became full members of the community in December 1955.

Decisions were by consensus, not voting. Consensus decisionmaking, as practiced at Macedonia, was both a means of finding truth and a means of building community. We presumed that every human being is endowed with a conscience, and that we need to use this conscience, to listen and be guided by it: to keep our hearts open. We need each other because none of us can see the whole truth.

At Macedonia we felt that any one of us might notice something that the rest of us were missing. We treasured a particular member who often said at the end of a long discussion, “There’s something off, something just doesn’t ring true” — whereupon, no matter how few the hours before the morning milking, the discussion began all over again.

Each person spoke with his or her own voice. We tried not to represent what we thought someone else was thinking. We would say, “Let’s ask that person.”

We also practiced what we called “direct speaking,” not “gossiping” or speaking behind someone’s back in a way you would not or have not said directly to that person. If you were irritated by what another person did, you went to that person and tried to work it out. If you needed help, you asked a third person to join the conversation.

Alice Another woman and I had a personality clash that expressed itself in different approaches to the children in the kindergarten. I remember dragging myself to a meeting with this woman and a third member. That meeting! was a turning point. I liked the routines of working with two year olds. The other woman liked to come up with something new every day for the older children. We came to appreciate our differences, each valuing what the other one could do.

The New Testament speaks of clearing up differences with a brother before going to the altar(Matthew 5:23). At Macedonia, we were living together, not just going to church together. We thought it equally important to straighten things out with someone before a business meeting, or on the way to work together at the cowbarn.

We also learned at Macedonia an experiential way of understanding the search for truth. We said that there was a common religious experience that different persons might use quite different words to describe.

We left Macedonia in 1957 when the community decided to merge with the Society of Brothers (later known as the eastern Hutterian Brethren)

Why did our three years at Macedonia mean so much to us? Because it showed us that people could live together in a manner qualitatively different from the dog-eat-dog ambience of capitalist society. The qualitatively different atmosphere of human relationships that we encountered at Macedonia has been our objective ever since. We found it again, to some extent, in the Southern civil rights movement, which sometimes called itself “a band of brothers and sisters standing in a circle of love”: in the practice of solidarity by rank-and-file workers, and in Latin American notions about “accompanying” one another in the search for “el reino de Dios,” the kingdom of God on earth. We found it in these other places because we were looking for it; after Macedonia, we knew it could happen.

Accompaniment: The Southern Civil Rights Movement

When the sit-ins began in early 1960, we cast about for a way to move South. Staughton was then a graduate student in history at Columbia University in New York. The mother of one of the black children in a kindergarten attended by our daughter suggested teaching in a Southern black (or, as they were then called, Negro) college. Staughton was offered a job at Spelman College in Atlanta. His meager salary would be supplemented by a free apartment on campus.

Alice I viewed the situation as a “live-in.” I do not like to participate in picketing, sit-ins, and the like. But, despite my fears that someone would put a bomb in our car, I felt that we could live in the situation.

Good things flowed from that modest preferential option. Spelman students proved full of life. One of them was Alice Walker, future author of The Color Purple. Also, we became convinced Friends. Atlanta schools were beginning to desegregate, starting with the upper grades of high school. The only space in Atlanta where black and white youngsters could meet one another socially before facing the common ordeal of the school year was Quaker House, then managed by John and June Yungblut. We began to attend regularly with our two children, aged six and three. We felt that our children, and the children of other families who believed in integration, needed one another and found support at Quaker House.

When our son had just turned five, he fell from a second-floor window of Quaker House and almost died. After the operation, the days and nights of hospital attendance, and Lee’s miraculous recovery of his mind and spirit (he is now a professor of environmental engineering), all of which we lived through with the Atlanta Meeting, we found that we were Friends, formally joining the meeting seemed an acknowledgment of what we had already experienced.

In the autumn of 1962 came the Cuban missile crisis. The mayor of Atlanta wired President Kennedy that all Atlantans supported him (in going to the brink of nuclear war). That could not be permitted to pass, and so a handful of Spelman faculty members together with staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) set up a picket line in downtown Atlanta.

Staughton My picture appeared in the Atlanta Constitution along with a colleague wrongly identified as Alice. As a result Alice was forced out of her job as a day care teacher.

But something good came of it, too. As the picket line was breaking up, a young black man asked me if he could stay with us overnight until he got his field assignment from SNCC. Of course I said, “Yes.” It was ten days or two weeks before John got his assignment and in the meantime we got to know him well. A year later it was John who called from Mississippi to offer me the position of Freedom School director in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964.

Accompaniment: Draft Counseling

Staughton During the summer of 1965, I was involved in anti-war protests. I was arrested at the Assembly of Unrepresented People that met in Washington, D.C. on August 6^th through 9^th (Hiroshima and Nagasaki Days), to declare peace with the people of Vietnam.

Alice I was asking myself what I could do about the war and still be responsible as a mother and nursery school teacher. Many groups held workshops on the grassy mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument during the Assembly of Unrepresented People. I went from one to another, ending up in a tent where a representative of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) was selling handbooks and talking about the need for draft counselors. At the end of the meeting I asked the workshop leader whether I could become a draft counselor. He replied: “Well, I guess so, if you could get anyone to come to you. There is one female draft counselor.” (That female was a Quaker, Honey Knopp.)

We lived just a few blocks from Yale University at that time and students frequently came to our home. I put up a little sign that students would see as they entered our apartment saying they could ask questions about the draft, and some of them did. A group of divinity students asked to meet with us on a weekly basis to discuss what they should do about the draft.

During one such discussion, a young woman mentioned someone we knew who had gone to prison as a noncooperator. She said she thought he now regretted that action. I asked myself what that man would say if he were present. After the meeting, I said to Staughton, “Your next book should be a book of interviews with people who have refused military service, what happened to them, and what they would say to others who are considering it.” “Why me?,“Staughton replied. So I collected and edited a book of personal accounts of war objectors.[219] It was only because we were close to young people who were faced with the draft and military service that it became possible to do that book; and the book, in turn, became a way for war resisters to show family and friends that others were struggling with the same dilemmas.

I loved draft counseling. Sometimes my first reaction to a counselee was dismay at his appearance, but within an hour I had a deep respect for how he saw life, his relations to his family, and his hopes for the future. I talked with many young men who had grown up with religious training, who took religious values seriously, and who had left their churches because they did not see the members or leaders of the church acting consistently with what was being preached. I felt privileged to touch others at this moment when they were struggling with decisions that involved the whole meaning of their lives.

Because I was not a lawyer at that time, I could not give legal advice. More importantly, draft counselors knew that the counselee was going to have to live with the consequences of his decision, so the decision had better be his. Draft counselors didn’t want to engage in “mindbending.”

Former counselees who refused induction often had lawyers to defend them. They frequently reported that the lawyers would argue their own theories, rather than presenting the reasons that were at the heart of the matter for the refuser. It was as if the refuser were being tried not on his own grounds but to test some lawyer’s theory. There seemed to be a difference between lawyers, who would take a case into their own hands, and counselors, who would not.

I developed a conceptual model. The counselee and the counselor are both experts. The counselor knows about the regulations and what steps to take once the counselee has chosen a particular course of action, but the counselee knows more than the counselor can ever know about the counselee: what he thinks, his family situation, and what he is prepared to do. They work together as partners.

Years later, we both became lawyers. We carried Alice’s counseling model with us into the law. Our labor law clients knew more about what went on in the shop than we could ever know, but we could find out the facts that were necessary to prove a claim, and we could present a legal theory that accurately reflected what our clients believed the problem to be.

Accompaniment: Moving To Youngstown

By the early 1970s we were in our early forties. Staughton could no longer find work as a university teacher because of his wellpublicized civil disobedience against the Vietnam War. The federal monies that had made possible Alice’s work in early childhood education were drying up. We needed a new means of livelihood.

Also, the Movement of the 1960s was at an end. Blacks told whites to leave the civil rights movement and organize in white working-class communities. The Nixon Administration de cided to carry on the Vietnam War with less use of the draft.

We felt that the Movement had come to grief partly because of class. Student activists in universities who protested rather than getting a formal education seemed irresponsible to workingclass parents watching from afar. Sensing a lack of support off campus, student radicals tried to make up for it by escalating their tactics. This only increased the alienation of “hard hats and others whose support students needed to bring! about fundamental social change.

We resolved to try to strike up a conversation with industrial workers. The question was, how? In the 1970s, as in the 1930s, many middle-class radicals went to work in factories.

Staughton There is strong Biblical authority for sharing the situation of the person you are trying to help. Jesus often asked the rich to become poor. He told the rich young ruler to sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor” (Luke 18:22; Matthew 19:21). I once left college after seeing a film about the life of St. Vincent DePaul. Vincent was chaplain to the King of France. Watching from the high poop of the king’s galley a race between galleys rowed by slaves, Vincent saw a slave faint at the oar. He clambered down to the bench, and took the oar into his own hands. He took the place of the stricken rower.”[220]

But when I talked with friends who had gone to work in steel mills, I was told that I would always seem to fellow workers to be exactly what I was: a product of the upper middle class with advanced degrees. “You could be there twenty years and people would say, ‘Let’s go ask the Professor,” was one comment. So we resolved to offer what we hoped would be useful skills, but not to pretend to be other than what we were. Later, it seemed to us that this is also what priests and nuns do in Latin America, when they move to some rural hamlet or city barrio but continue to function as pastoral agents, often in clerical garb.

We began as oral historians. Led from one person to the next. we tape recorded recollections of rank-and-file workers and put them together in a book.”[221][222]

Staughton in the summer of 1971, when the industry-wide Basic Steel Contract was under negotiation, I helped to draft an imaginary steel contract made up of the most radical demands of the many competing union caucuses in the Gary-Chicago area where we then lived. Someone gave us the address of a group in Youngstown, Ohio called the Rank And File Team (RAFT). We put a copy in the mail.

A few days later, as we were sitting at supper, the phone rang. “Hello!,” bellowed a mighty voice. “This is Litch from Youngstown. What mill do you workin?” I confessed that I was only an historian. “That’s all right,” the big voice said, “we like your pamphlet.” (Later we learned that Bill Litch talked so loudly because he had been partly deafened from years of work in the mill.)

It turned out that RAFT was planning to picket at the opening round of union-management negotiations in Washington, D.C., and that I would be in Washington that same day. It was arranged to meet at the picket line.

We met and, after a respectable period of picketing, we adjourned to a nearby coffee shop and got to know each other. The picketers included John Barbero and Ed Mann. John and Edwere advocates of racial equality as well as civil liberties. Former Marines, each had opposed not only the Vietnam War, but the Korean War as well; each had belonged to the Akron-based United Labor Party after World War II; they considered themselves socialists, although they didn’t often use that word. We had never met workers like these, who believed all (or nearly all) the things that we believed.

Five years later, after acquiring credentials as lawyer and paralegal, we moved to the outskirts of Youngstown.

Using One’s Pain

Alice I was hired to work on workers’ compensation cases but very soon found myself assigned to work primarily on Social Security disability cases. It was not like draft counseling. The most I could get for any client was money and the disabled needed far more than money. Staughton mentioned my troubled feelings about this caseload to a colleague who unexpectedly replied, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:16).

I knew what it was like to be disabled. I had been disabled, unable to work for more than two years, after surgery that did not heal properly. I had sometimes been desperate with pain and unable to cope with the needs of our children. I remembered our son’s friend coming to the house and asking our son, “Is your ma crying again?” So I knew that physical hardship affects your mind and spirit.

I began to love the infinite ways people found to cope with disability: a person who lacked the use of her hand could slide a tray onto her forearm; another who couldn’t lift much would fill a large pot on the stove with a small pot, carrying just a little water at one time. I heard about how people had found their personhood in their work. One man had figured out exactly how fast the machine could be set so that the maximum number of bread loaves came down the line without any of them touching each other, the foreman, so he said, would tell the other workers not to make any adjustments after this worker had regulated the machine.

Preparing disability cases became for me a way of expressing love to people. My clients told me that I listened to them as no doctor, nurse, or social worker had done. Because I had to learn about their work history and the activities they could no longer do, I would glimpse the person behind the mask of disability.

Nicaragua

Alice One evening, perhaps in December 1983, I suddenly stopped what I was doing to give my full attention to what was on the TV. A Quaker woman was going to Nicaragua with a group called Witness For Peace. They were going to go into areas of conflict and stand between the warring parties as a deterrent. I thought, “Wow, that’s what nonviolent advocates have talked about for years, but here are people who are going to do it!”

Staughton A nonviolent dimension to the Nicaraguan revolution itself also caught our attention. I read in the New York Times that when the Sandinistas took power in 1979 they did not execute Somoza’s soldiers who fell into their hands. Those who were found to have committed crimes were jailed. All others were released. We also read of an encounter between Tomas Borge, the only surviving member of the group that founded the FSLN (Sandinista Front for National Liberation), and a man who had tortured him in prison. Borge let the torturer go.

Alice So when our son suggested that we rent a cabin on a lake for a summer vacation, I responded, “I’d rather go to Nicaragua!” We did, not with Witness For Peace, but with IFCO, the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization, which had ties to CEPAD, an interdenomi national Protestant relief organization.

It was six years since the Sandinista revolution when we arrived in Nicaragua for the first time. Miskito Indians in northeastern Nicaragua had been evacuated from their homes on the Rio Coco River but now, in a reversal of policy, were being helped to return. We went to Puerto Cabezas on the Atlantic Coast. With the help of a friend who knew English and Spanish and an Indian who knew Spanish and Miskito, we conversed from Miskito to Spanish to English and back to Miskito. Norman Bent, a Moravian minister, told us about the “Fourth World” of indigenous people. We listened to Ray Hooker retell the Exodus story in modern Nicaraguan form, and heard him speak of his hopes for the new woman, the new man.” We had the opportunity to tape record a discussion with Father Miguel D’Escoto, a Catholic priest who served as Foreign Minister and had recently ended a 30-day fast protesting U.S. support for the Contras.

D’Escoto told us that when the FSLN first invited him to join their effort, he had told them he was nonviolent. “And they said [according to our tape recording]. We know that; we know what you believe, you have written about it; and that’s one of the reasons why we want you. We would like for you to inject that dimension also in our revolution.”

St. Mary of the Angels

St. Mary of the Angels is the neighborhood church in Barrio Riguero in Managua. During three of our five short visits to Nicaragua in the years 1985–1990 (we used our summer vacations of two or three weeks), we stayed in the home of a family! only a few blocks from St. Mary’s.

The liturgy celebrated by Father Uriel Molina at St. Mary’s was the Campesino Mass, composed by the Nicaraguan composer Carlos Mejía Godoy in 1975. The following is part of the text of the mass:

You Are the God of the Poor

You go hand in hand with my people
In their struggle in the countryside and city.
You stand in line at the hacienda
To receive the day’s wages.
I’ve seen you in the general store or on the street.
I’ve seen you selling lottery tickets,
Without being embarrassed to do so.
I’ve seen you in the gas stations
Checking the tires of a truck.
And eating snow cones there in the park
With Eusebio, Pancho and Juan Jose.

Chorus

You are the God of the poor.
The God that’s human and simple,
The God that sweats in the streets,
The God with the weather-beaten face

And so when I talk to you,
I speak as my people do.
Because you’re the working class God,
The Christ who’s a laborer too.

The music to the mass was played at St. Mary’s by a band of half a dozen young men, most of them (so we were told) veterans. One feature of the liturgy was the so-called Peace of God, when all present would circulate through the church, embracing or shaking hands with others. Many of the celebrants were elderly women, small in stature, who carried photographs of sons who had been killed in the war.

Staughton At one Peace of God, a bearded, middle-aged man bounded across the church to embrace me. It was Abbie Hoffman, whom I had last seen in a Chicago jail in August 1968.

“We Shall Overcome” was sung in Spanish and in English as a regular part of the liturgy at St. Mary’s. I felt that wild horses could not have kept me from taking communion at that Catholic church.

In 1987 our friend Joe Mulligan, a Jesuit priest from the States, arranged an interview with Father Uriel and translated. I explained my predicament to Father Uriel: “for the Christians in the United States I was too Marxist, and for the Marxists I was too Christian. I think Marxism is a very important tool of analysis, in fact, the best one I know, but when it comes to deciding what to do, how to live, Marxism is not sufficient. From the standpoint of the Christians, I was a poor Christian, and from the standpoint of the Marxists, a bad Marxist. Coming to Nicaragua, I have the feeling that there’s a whole country that feels the way I do.”

Father Uriel responded in part as had Miguel D’Escoto by pointing to the paradoxical nature of atheism. The Good Samaritan, D’Escoto had said in 1985, was an atheist, but “he did what our Lord said we all had to do if we wanted to be saved.” Now Uriel remarked: “In the time of the New Testament, Christians were called atheists. They rejected the gods of the empire and the standard religious beliefs, so they were called atheists. Now there is a new need for a kind of atheist vision where the idols need to be knocked over and the true God is to be found, because the old conception of God doesn’t speak to people today.”

Father Uriel also commented that “we ourselves may not be the ones to discover our role but others may point us to it.” He recalled that at one very grim moment in the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, he had talked to “a young man who never came to church but was a very dedicated person. I said,

Things are looking very bad, maybe we better pull out because it is looking like it is all over and we are all going to be wiped out.’ And the young man, William, said: ‘If you do, then the whole community will lose their hope, because your presence here is during the day like an open door and at night, a light’.”

In El Bonete

On our last visit to Nicaragua, in 1990, we stayed for a week with two Catholic nuns in a village named El Bonete near the Honduran border. Our notes, written while there, say:

Carmencita is from El Salvador, Nelly from Argentina. They belong to the Little Sisters of Jesus. A small capilla (chapel) is part of their house. It is about ten by twelve feet. The altar is a tree stump with a vase of flowers on the floor before it. Shoes are left at the door. Worshippers sit on planks resting on concrete blocks or on mats that cover most of the floor. On one wall hangs an orange fabric, with photographs of Archbishop Romero and of the six Jesuits killed in San Salvador in November 1989.Onit Carmencita has embroidered Romero’s famous words about grains of corn that must die so that there may be new growth, and two ears of corn, yellow and brown in their green sheaves.

The four of us sang a great deal. Some songs were primarily religious. Thus a song of this part of Nicaragua begins:

When a group of brothers approaches the altar,
God’s smile is there.
Lord, we are coming today
To praise you
And to thank you for so much goodness (tanta bondad).

In other songs the longing for a more just world is uppermost. El Salvador has its own campesino mass, the Salvadoran popular mass, written in the base communities of San Salvador in 1978–80. These are the words to the dismissal (despedida) that closes the mass:

When the poor come to believe in the poor
We will be able to sing of freedom.
When the poor come to believe in the poor
We will build fraternity.
See you later, my brothers,
The mass has ended
And we’ve heard what God said to us.
Now we are clear,
We are able to sing,
We need to begin our task.
We have all committed ourselves
At the table of the Lord
To construct love in this world,
To the brothers’ struggle
To become a community.
When the poor seek out the poor
And organization is born
That’s when our freedom begins.
When the poor proclaim to the poor
The hope that he gave us
His Kingdom is born among us.

Return to Quakerism: Nonviolence

Our new friends in Nicaragua were not pacifists. D’Escoto considered revolutionary violence a “concession for a world in transition.” Father Uriel spoke of the university students who had come to live with him in Barrio Riguero. “When many of these people went into the mountains to fight in the armed struggle, I stayed in this community... and felt that what we were forming here was the... spiritual rear guard for the people who were there fighting in the mountains.” Sister Carmencita was the most direct. Several members of her family had been killed. In El Salvador, she told us, torture is the people’s daily bread. She concluded: “I think there is a right to defend oneself.”

The Gulf War

During the Gulf War in 1991, we picketed every day at noon in downtown Youngstown. We began by encircling a marble memorial on which were carved the names of local servicemen who lost their lives in Vietnam. Our presence there was particu larly irritating to some Vietnam veterans. We talked with them. We agreed to move our picket line to a location that was just as visible but less offensive to them. It became a regular part of what we did to step out of the picket line and talk with any heckler or obvious opponent. We probably did not change any minds, but at least respectful relationships were established. Their presence rapidly diminished.

Alice For me, the Gulf War brought a clear affirmation of Christianity. In my view, retaliation and retribution only lead to more suffering, more hatred, and intransigent obstacles remain to be overcome for generations. Unless we can learn to forgive, to forgive “seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:21–22), where is there hope for the future?
Nonviolence and forgiveness are not mere backing down. Nonviolence, as Barbara Deming describes it,” requires stepping forward, with one hand restraining while the other hand offers a better way, maintaining one’s own presence and dignity while respecting the very different experience and outlook of one’s adversary, appealing to basic values that all humans can understand. This is what I experienced on that picket line.

Staughton I recall that when we decided to picket--and I was among those who suggested it-I felt, “Well, fifteen years of workin Youngstown may be going down the drain. But we have to do it anyway.”
What actually happened surprised me. One very outspoken man looked me in the eye and said, “Lynd, you know I disagree with you about the war.” Then everything went on as before. Another man came up to me as I was walking with a group of retired steelworkers along a sidewalk in Cleveland. “You know I agree with you about the war,” he said.

It seemed to me that for both men the critical thing was that they had known us personally for years. It was as if they figured, “This is what you’d expect Staughton to do.” It made no difference whatsoever to our work or to the way in which the community viewed us.

Retirees

Much of our work in Youngstown has been with former steelworkers. Many of them proudly defended this country in World War II or the Korean War. Nonviolence is not part of their creed.

In 1986, when the second largest steel company declared bankruptcy and cut off medical benefits for retirees, an activist organization of retirees quickly formed. It was named “Solidarity USA” after Solidarnosc in Poland. The retirees collected petitions, went on bus trips to the court in New York City and to call on legislators in Washington, D.C. There were community rallies and pray-ins. One former local union president would often say, “It’s time to get out the baseball bats!” But that never happened. Rather, a decision was made to go and confront whomever it was they thought had the capability of doing something that was needed.

Shortly before the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, a retired school teacher began to come to Solidarity USA meetings and to talk about the need for forming a posse to protect our rights. We, Staughton and Alice, were troubled. After the Oklahoma City bombing we raised the issue with Solidarity USA. The chairperson immediately spoke out: “Since 1986, we’ve had not one violent hand in this group! We’ve had our words. We’ve had our arguments. We’ve told them just what we felt. They don’t like it. But that’s the way to do it.”

Return to Quakerism: A Believable Jesus

Is it necessary to believe in the virgin birth, Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and the resurrection of the flesh, in order to practice a preferential option for the poor? We don’t think so.

John Dominic Crossan has described a believable Christianity in the Historical Jesus. Crossan is a Catholic scholar who has done a rigorous job of determining which passages of the New Testament most likely reflect what Jesus did and said. Jesus, as Crossan depicts him, was himself a poor man, who experienced the oppression of people living under the Roman Empire, who rejected guerrilla warfare, and who chose to be a healer, convincing others that “the kingdom of God is within you.”[223] If Crossan is not mistaken, Jesus was a believer in the inner light and in equality, not church-building, and he lived among the poor, sharing whatever they set before him. He showed concern for the needs of their bodies as well as of their souls.

According to Crossan, the major thing on the minds of the Gospel writers was not fact but meaning. Crossan does not find a factual basis for the virgin birth or the details of Passion Week or the resurrection of the flesh. He thinks that in these passages, the canonical authors searched the Scriptures to determine what must have happened if the life and death of Jesus were to fulfill prophecies about the Messiah.
Crossan believes that myth is basic faith in story form. Whether or not the incident of the Good Samaritan occurred in fact, it is consistent with Jesus’ message. After explaining that the Good Samaritan acted as a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves, Jesus concluded, according to Luke 10:37: “Go, and do thou likewise.” This message is what is important, whether or not the incident actually took place.

Crossan suggests that whereas John the Baptist believed that God intended great, transformative changes in the near future, Jesus considered that the Kingdom of God was already here, already available to any seeker. In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (composed before the other Gospels in about 50–60 A.D.), Jesus tells the disciples that what they look for is already present; their error is in awaiting it rather than seeking to discover it.[224]

The way of life Jesus urged on his companions, according to Crossan, was sharing food for the body and healing for the soul:

not “almsgiving but... a shared egalitarianism of spiritual and material resources.”[225] In Crossan’s view, Jesus’ healing was empowerment, telling the poor not to take the ideology of the oppressor as their own, not to internalize the oppressor’s image of themselves. (What Crossan articulates sounds like what we heard from “delegates of the Word” and members of base communities in Nicaragua.) Jesus looked at the world and said, “This is not what God wants.” Jesus’ program was empowerment from the bottom up, to rebuild peasant dignity and hope without waiting for God to do it.[226]

We believe that there is Scriptural authority for an approach to Jesus’ teaching based on what people do, not on what they think. Jesus says that people who feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, and comfort the afflicted, will experience salvation even if during their lives they are unaware of Jesus and give no thought to him (Matthew 25:31–46). Saying “Lord, Lord” is not the path to salvation, for the righteous will be known by their fruits not by their words (Matthew 7:20–21). The unbeliever who does good deeds the Good Samaritan will be preferred to the church member who passes by on the other side (Luke 10:30–37).

Conclusions

Like most other Friends, we ourselves are not poor. We have siblings, children, and grandchildren. We feel it would be irresponsible to desert those closest to us or to impose hardships on them for the sake of others. But our experience suggests to us that there is a middle path between, on the one hand, living in the inner city and giving all that one has to the poor, and, on the other hand, confining one’s well-doing to financial contributions, demonstrations, and other occasional support for worthy causes.

The following are things we think we have learned. We offer them as challenges and concerns.

First, it seems to us that liberation theology teaches an important lesson for Friends concerned to practice reconciliation. Our goal must be a society of equals. Friends should be wary of mediation if it leaves in place the inequality between the rich and powerful on the one hand, and the poor and oppressed on the other. At a minimum one should seek what André Gorz calls “qualitative reforms,” that is, reforms that give more voice in decision-making to those with little power, and thus represent a step toward equality.

Second, if Friends are to address oppression and injustice, Friends need to encounter in a day-to-day manner the life situation of the poor and oppressed.[227] If we can rearrange where and how we live our lives, giving time and energy, that may be more important than giving money. (Of course, in the process of giving time one will also inevitably spend money.) The strategy we, Alice and Staughton, pursued in relation to the civil rights movement, the draft resistance movement, and the labor movement, was a strategy of acquiring a skill useful to the disadvantaged, and then going to live where that skill could be made available. We propose this as a viable model.

Third, we believe that Friends must be willing to go to outof-the-way places and stay there for long periods of time (as some already do). It is sobering that so many who called themselves “revolutionaries in the 1960s burned out or dropped out when the movements of that decade failed to produce instantaneous, total transformation. (In any rational estimate, passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, ending the war in Vietnam, and starting the women’s movement, were significant accomplishments for so short a time.) Friends must be prepared to be long-distance runners.[228]

Fourth, Friends need to be building community. Selffulfillment is not a sufficient goal, for ourselves or for others. The labor movement has a slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” This means that people look out for each other. We want to encourage people to change the circumstances that bear down hard on them. This process requires not only individual growth but also the insights that come through shared experience and action with others. Travellers on this path also need periodically to meet with a community of seekers to re-center and reenergize themselves.[229]

Finally, we urge Friends to trust their weight to the idea that the Kingdom of God is available here and now. These words are written on a day when we made our monthly visit to a friend who is serving a long sentence at a local prison. The main subject of conversation with our friend in prison was his growing belief in nonviolence, which he is daily challenged to put into practice. For us, just to be in the visiting room of that penal institution, surrounded by children, parents, and siblings of the imprisoned men, all conversing with animation, laughing, expressing love, is to be convinced that the great majority of the prisoners would not be there if society gave them the chance to make a living. Going to that room is more like going to church for us than any other experience we have. A young woman in one of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels, a volunteer in revolutionary Nicaragua, describes what we think it might feel like to live as if the Kingdom of God were already here.

[T]he very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around.
The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it.[230]

A Short Bibliography on Liberation Theology

Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1984). Berryman was Central American representative for the American Friends Service Committee from 1976 to 1980.

Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation. History, Politics and Salvation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1986). Published in Spanish in 1971, this was the first book-length exposition of Latin American liberation theology.

Margaret Randall, * Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution* (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983). Oral histories of two Nicaraguan ventures in liberation theology in the 1970s: Gospel discussions and revolutionary action in a peasant community of the Solentiname archipelago led by Father Ernesto Cardenal; and the base community in Barrio Riguero, Managua, formed under the leadership of Father Uriel Molina.

Oscar Romero, Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1985). Romero was archbishop of San Salvador from February 1977 until his assassination in March 1980.

Orbis Books, Box 302, Maryknoll, NY 10545, provides the fullest selection of titles in English available in the United States.

PENDLE HILL WELCOMES YOU
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On an informal campus with paths, vegetable garden, and many fine trees, Pendle Hill offers a three-term residential program from October to June for about 35 persons at any stage of life. Pendle Hill also offers a full program of shortterm events through its Extension Program’s weekend conferences and retreats, summer workshops, and Monday evening lecture series. Persons wishing a short-term experience in the resident community may come as sojourners.

Further details for all programs, dates, and fees are available from:

INFORMATION SERVICES PENDLE HILL 338 PLUSH MILL ROAD WALLINGFORD, PA 19086–6099. PHONE 1-800-742-3150.

63. Outlaw Kings and Rebellion Chic

Deleted reason: Not anarchist.

Author: Alister MacQuarrie

Topics: liberalism

Date: March 27, 2019

Date Published on T@L: 2023-10-26T05:33:51

Source: Retrieved on 25 October 2023 from newsocialist.org.uk/outlaw-kings-rebel-chic

Four hundred die-hard rebels flee an alien moon ahead of the imperial fleet, “the spark that will light the fire” of galaxy-wide revolution. An émigré queen brings an army of traitors, nomads, and freed slaves to the shores of her mother country, promising to “break the wheel” of feudal politics. A secret society of teenage wizards, under the name of their dead teacher, vow to destroy the Dark Lord or die trying.

Then what?

The Non-Ideological Hero

The revolutionary is everywhere in pop culture, but revolutionary politics are conspicuous by their absence—or by their vilification. As the liberal order collapses and open authoritarianism takes its place, our films, TV dramas, and videogames are filled with rebel heroes. Yet the heroic rebel on screen is often very evasive about the principles behind their actions. In many cases, the rebel hero does not take up arms for any specific idea of a better world. Rather, the rebel hero most often turns to force because of personal injury. Even while engaging in political violence, they are non-ideological heroes.

Mark Fisher argues that modern liberal democracy presents itself as non-ideological beyond ideology, a ground state[231]. In a similar way, the heroic rebel in pop culture stands above (say it with a sneer) politics. What beliefs the non-ideological hero does have are often vaguely defined. They may dislike bigotry, despite casual prejudices, but have no particular interest in structural racism as a social problem; they may be called upon to restrain marginalised comrades who “go too far.” The non-ideological hero is against tyranny, again in a general sense, but has no particular interest in the political process, or in building institutions to resist tyranny. Though not always privileged by the old status quo, they are satisfied by a change at the top, trusting that, if good people are left in charge, things will work out.

David Mamet once wrote that the archetypal American hero is a peaceful man pushed far enough that “the very tenets of pacifism themselves would be offended if he did not come out and fight”[232], This is perhaps the epitome of the non-ideological hero: a man of peace with tremendous capacity for violence, with no interest in anything very much beyond self-defence.

British and American culture has always had a strong tendency to abhor “ideology,” which is discussed as if it is something suspicious, even foreign. Particularly under Clinton in the US and Blair in the UK, politicians insisted they were pragmatists first and foremost, unconcerned with ideology or dogma, even as they triangulated in ways that seemed to largely serve the needs of capital. In the time since, that hostility to ideology among elite liberals has transformed into a kind of performative ignorance—a virtuous void. Witness commentators and politicians from the centre, many nominally intelligent and well-educated, proudly declaring they have no idea what “neoliberalism” is (and presumably no concept of Google); or that Corbyn’s Labour party is a vanity project for elitist, south-coast, alternative, intellectual, left-wing, etc. Anna Soubry, in a recent interview, seemed to find the idea that the newly-minted Independent Group might have a specific political platform absurd. They believe in sound economics and common decency, of course! Quite self-explanatory.

Separately, there is in screenwriting a kind of uncodified rule: villains act, heroes react. The hero, according to traditional Hollywood structure, can’t fulfil their destiny until an extraordinary event drags them out of the world they know. More often than not, that event begins with the villain. Harry Potter is only the Chosen One because Lord Voldemort killed his parents. Luke Skywalker would have stayed on Tatooine dreaming of adventure, until Darth Vader’s attack on a rebel ship sends a secret message to his farm. Frodo would be safe and happy in Hobbiton if not for Sauron. Heroes rarely set out to change the world. Villains want change, and heroes run to keep up.

Yet go back to Mamet’s line. In many of these stories, the hero is, reluctantly or proudly, a violent figure—and they’re good at it. Not only that, but their violence is entirely justified, either because their enemies are not fully human (the cloned Stormtroopers in Star Wars, the degenerate orcs of Lord of the Rings) or because a state of war excuses it (as with Harry Potter’s Death Eaters, or the servants of corrupt leaders in Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games). Mamet justifies heroic violence by saying his peaceful man “is given so much provocation” that he can’t stand it no more[233].

Again, this is typical of heroes: violence is made permissible by extreme personal injury. Often their family is under attack, like William Wallace in Braveheart, who leads a rebellion against the English after his childhood sweetheart is brutally executed; or Luke Skywalker, again, whose aunt and uncle are killed by Imperial forces; or Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers to take part in the titular games to protect her sister. Many of these characters live with occupation, oppression, and state brutality as part of their daily lives, but they don’t turn to violent resistance until their families are directly threatened or killed. When heroes commit political violence, it must be to avenge a personal injury. This is supposed to be substantively different from political violence committed for ideological reasons, which receives a much less sympathetic treatment.

Revolution Without Revolution

When we see violent characters who kill for primarily political reasons, they are often anti-heroes at best, outright villains at worst. The idea of the full circle revolution—of the secret dictator hiding in the throat of every rebel leader, waiting to leap out and betray the non-ideological hero—is utterly pervasive. It appears in videogames, where good old-fashioned all-American heroes like Jim Raynor of Starcraft or Booker DeWitt of Bioshock Infinite are betrayed by villainous revolutionaries Arcturus Mengsk and Daisy Fitzroy (and after all they’ve done for them!). It is common in films, from supervillains like Magneto and Killmonger, liberationists written as would-be conquerors, to the rebels of The Hunger Games, who vote to continue the games as soon as they’re in power, except with the children of the dethroned elite rather than the children of the poor. The same reversal is mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire, where rebel slaves, once liberated, enslave their former masters; in the TV version, an evil fundamentalist visits the kind of cruelty on the King’s Landing nobility that they visited on others. In all these examples we see an echo of the primal fear of every oppressive class, the nightmare at the heart of modern white supremacy: what if someone did to us what we’ve done to them? Liberation is re-imagined as the world turned not so much upside-down but mirrored.

Game of Thrones’ High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce) provides an instructive example. Writing in Vox, Emmett Rensin notes the near-universal hatred for his character among fans and critics alike. The High Sparrow, violent, homophobic and misogynist though he and his flock may be, is no worse than many characters Game of Thrones presents as sympathetic. Given their ardent egalitarianism and their commitment to the poor, the Sparrows should appeal more to modern viewers than the scheming nobles. Their body count is certainly much lower than non-ideological hero Jon Snow, or Daenerys, a revanchist warlord with a questionable commitment to liberation.

Rensin attributes the hatred of the High Sparrow to his hypocrisy, but I don’t think that’s quite right. What is terrible about the High Sparrow is that he has no personal grievance. He didn’t see his father killed by the “good guys,” like Killmonger. His family weren’t murdered by his oppressors, like Magneto. By his own account the High Sparrow was a cobbler who became disillusioned, found religion, and now, thanks to the vagaries of a civil war among the elite, finds himself in a position to overturn the social order. The feudal system of Westeros never injured him personally. He simply came to believe it should be torn down, and acted accordingly.

We seem to find this faintly repellent. We are so used to looking for an ulterior motive that, when we can’t find one, we grow uncomfortable. If a good person can commit violence simply because they believe it’s right, without any hidden ambition, then nothing stops us from acting to change the world. We can no longer hide behind the cosy fiction that any of us could be a hero if only we were pushed far enough. The High Sparrow strips us of our excuses.

So if killing for personal injury is more comfortable for us, and killing for ideological reasons is villain’s work, then what are our rebel heroes actually fighting for? After all, they are certainly committing political violence. But to what end? Sticking with Game of Thrones, the dragon-riding Daenerys is among the most open about her political goals. The scion of an ousted royal family, Daenerys initially wants only to reclaim her throne. But by freeing slaves to build herself an army she becomes “the Breaker of Chains,” a liberator figure. When asked what her ultimate plans are, Daenerys compares the power struggle between noble families that defines Westeros—the “game of thrones” itself—as a rotating wheel, and vows to break it, once and for all. Easy enough to say. But judging by Daenerys” actions, “breaking the wheel” does not mean abolishing either monarchy or aristocracy. Her court contains freed slaves and mercenaries, but remains mostly aristocratic. Her allies in Westeros are old noble houses—the spokes in the wheel—and she demands their fealty as any queen would. She has no clear vision for how to change the fortunes of the poor she intends to rule, except that she, Daenerys, is good, and her rival is wicked.

Her imitators are similarly vague. Outlaw King and Mary Queen of Scots, both strongly influenced by Game of Thrones, are at pains to portray their respective heroes as woke monarchs. Outlaw King’s Robert the Bruce is a humble, mild-mannered, decent sort, who fights “for the people, not the land.” But it’s not obvious that “freedom” in this context means anything more than peasants bowing to Scots nobles instead of English—the wheel turning again. In Mary Queen of Scots, Mary deserves the throne because she’s the plucky underdog. Simply by positioning two monarchs as rebels, we are supposed to sympathise, without even the semblance of a cause.

In the Star Wars films, the heroes don’t just pose as rebels, they are explicitly a violent rebellion against the Galactic Empire, a dictatorship that replaced a nominally democratic republic. So far, so good; they fight to restore the Old Republic. Yet nowhere in the films is it ever explained what the republic actually stands for. In the prequel films, it appears to be institutionally corrupt and vastly unequal, with the only law enforcement provided by unaccountable warrior monks. Is that what the rebels of the original trilogy want to restore? In The Last Jedi, perhaps the most explicitly political Star War, the rebels seem to have principles. A trip to an alien casino full of arms dealers suggests the machinations of intergalactic capitalism behind the imperialist New Order. But it’s still done in winks and nudges. Nobody in the rebellion is calling for the overthrow of space capital; no rebels argue with equal vehemence for the Girondin position. When one character delivers the triumphant line “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love,” she seems to mean only the love the rebels have for each other. It is unclear what they fight for beyond that. When there is friction, in The Last Jedi or spin-off Rogue One, it’s over tactics, not politics. Rebellion in Star Wars, rather than a means to an end, is a camouflage that conceals a total void of ideology.

This void is at the heart of nearly all on-screen rebellions in mainstream culture. They fight for platitudes (“freedom,” “the people,” “the light,” “the old ways”). Rarely do we see any contention or exposition of those platitudes. They are self-evident. Explanation is unnecessary—and messy. The Empires of fiction are bad because they do bad things to us, and we’re good because we’re not them. But as the High Sparrow reveals, it’s a symbiotic relationship. When the Empire does bad things to us, maybe then we’ll become the heroes we always wished we could be. In this is the seed of all those asinine ideas that Trump would be good for art, or would bring the Left together, or provide the jolt that the system needed. And until the Empire injures us personally, we are quite justified in doing nothing.

Who Profits?

A popular culture in which rebellion is vague enough to be meaningless, in which the heroic rebel is non-ideological and motivated by personal injury more than anything, is rather convenient for the ruling class. And in making personal injury a prerequisite for rebellion, rebellion is neutered. In Star Wars, the rebels are fully justified in fighting, because the Empire is a brutal dictatorship that can only be removed by force. So too for Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, V for Vendetta, or many other films about plucky rebels. In The Shape of Water or Stranger Things, the American government provides cover for violent conspiracies that exist above the law. In these situations, the liberal democratic system (or its fantastic equivalent) no longer functions. Rather, it is the breakdown of the rule of law that allows the heroes to suffer personal injury. To the extent that they fight for anything, they fight for the restoration of “normality”—always usefully vague.

Violence that does not proceed from personal injury requires no such breakdown. This kind of primarily ideological violence can be directed against a perfectly functional system—functional, at least, for the perpetrator—simply because it appears the “just” thing to do. No wonder, then, that in our mass media, the characters practising ideological violence are cast as morally unsound. If normality is not self-evident but a site of contention, then it problematises easy narratives of rebels vs tyrants. And if dispute over the political system is enough to justify force, then that implies violence against the modern Western state, even its violent overthrow, could be justifiable. This is understandably concerning for many writers, who tend to come from backgrounds closer to the Lannisters than the “smallfolk.”

The Empire of Star Wars, for all its Nazi imagery, also drew on American conduct in Vietnam. The fall of the republic in Revenge of the Sith invited parallels to Bush-era power grabs and the early War on Terror; as did the oppressive regime of V for Vendetta, repurposed by the Wachowskis from the original comics’ fears about Thatcherism and the National Front. Reflecting on the themes of The Hunger Games ten years on, Constance Grady points out that most of its readers are far closer to the villainous elites in the Capitol than the poor children fighting for their amusement in the arena. The Harry Potter books make it clear that, however evil Voldemort may be, all the structural violence and supremacist ideology he represents was already deeply embedded in the wizarding government before he took over, echoing all the ways empire has warped the very roots of the British state. In Game of Thrones, neither the rule of the Targaryens nor any of their successors could be considered just or fair for the commons. At what point is the violent overthrow of these systems justified? And by whom?

The closer rebel characters come to a definable ideology, the more likely they are to be written as villains. At the same time, the emotive aspects of rebellion—the heroism of the underdog, the thrill of fighting the power—are rendered safe for public consumption by taking out any explicit political ideology. Even when rebels jump out of the screen, like the Guy Fawkes masks borrowed from V for Vendetta by real protestors, they are often diluted. In the transition from comic to film to symbol of protest, the more detailed exploration of anarchism in the original text is lost, leaving a void that can be filled by a wide variety of groups whose only common thread is opposition to authority. The effect of all this is to suggest that violence is somehow more sympathetic the less its perpetrators believe—that heroism decreases the more detailed your policy proposals get. If Luke Skywalker was fighting for galactic communism, or Daenerys intended to create a series of peasants’ councils to govern Westeros, or Harry Potter wanted to smash the Ministry of Magic and overturn wizard supremacy, we would have to confront serious and difficult questions about when political violence is appropriate, for whose benefit, and for what purposes. I don’t believe those are questions pop culture is incapable of asking. They are questions we do not want to ask.

64. Think of the (queer) children

Deleted reason: Not anarchist.

Subtitle: Minnesota’s sex education requirements fail LGBTQ+ youth

Author: Ava Gardener

Date Published on T@L: 2021-12-13T20:49:07

Source: LGBTQ+ identities

Notes: CW: Within this op-ed I discuss experiences of homophobic/transpobic assault/abuse implied to be of a sexual nature; if you need support, crisis counseling, or advocacy please contact the Aurora Center for Advocacy & Education at 612-626-9111 or Outfront Minnesota at 800-800-0350.

I first learned about LGBTQ+ identities as an elementary student of the Minnesota public school system. This education took place not in the classroom but on the playground, by male classmates who were my teachers. And through them, I learned that to be “gay,” as they called it, was to be reviled and ridiculed, and that, as a quiet, unathletic ten-year-old boy with long hair, I fit the designation. Entering both middle school and puberty, a desire taking shape within me made me worry that they might be right. My classmates adapted their lessons to degrade this desire out of me, to associate it not with pleasure but with shame and violation. When it came time for health class, the lessons, school-sanctioned this time, reaffirmed this message through what they omitted, what they considered too taboo to mention. Consequently, I learned to put up a more acceptable facade; I cut my hair short, began weightlifting, and played the part of a boyfriend in a heterosexual relationship. Internally, I focused all my shame into molding a new identity, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not purge who I was.

It was not until I met others who were out that I started to accept my bisexuality; it took me far longer to accept my transgender womanhood. If my classes had expressly included queer experiences, it’s likely I would have made peace with these identities sooner. Given the range of experiences of today’s youth, the time has come for Minnesota’s education requirements to treat LGBTQ+ identities as normal and healthy variations of the human experience.

Minnesota has long been an LGBTQ+ trailblazer. The first legal same-sex marriage in the United States took place within Minnesota in 1971. In 1975, it was home to the first legal protections of transgender people, passed in Minneapolis. And in 2018, it became the fourth U.S. state to allow a nonbinary designation of state driver’s licenses. However, Minnesota’s progress in this regard has not extended to sexual health education, which has remained virtually unchanged for the last 20 years. After first focusing on HIV/AIDS reduction in the late 1980s, Minnesota ended the 90s with a shift toward preventing adolescent pregnancy through an abstinence-focused curriculum. This law led to the continuation of Minnesota’s Education Now And Babies Later (ENABL) program, which, like many other abstinence-only curricula, was found to be ineffective after a state report in 2003 found that sexual activity in middle schools doubled during a single year of the program. While the program was terminated, the requirement that sexual education in Minnesota must help “students to abstain from sexual activity until marriage” is still in place today, ensuring that sexual education in our state cannot progress past its moralistic roots.

While Minnesota law does not explicitly prohibit discussion of LGBTQ+ identities within sexual health classes, its omission speaks a thousand words. Although most states neither require nor prohibit such topics, surveys indicate that they are rarely addressed, with only 8.2% of LGBTQ+ students having received inclusive sex education curriculums. Teachers and parents alike typically assume their students are straight and cisgender until they indicate otherwise, and unfortunately, this means that sex education is taught without LGBTQ+ learners in mind. In effect, Minnesota’s current approach denies certain students relevant sex education based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Most parents, regardless of political and religious affiliation, support teaching sex education comprehensively, as do many educational and medical organizations. However, when school districts seek to rectify this exclusion without the support of state law, they frequently face severe pushback by groups at the social and political fringe. A school in Richfield, a Minneapolis suburb, attempted in September to teach a curriculum including several roleplays, a few of which included LGBTQ+ characters. In response to this inclusion, political groups seized upon the story, with school board members accused of “child abuse,” “disparaging [students’] religion and culture,” and “intentionally confusing children about their gender and sexual orientation.” During a similar incident, a Utah Canyons School District program was shut down over the presence of a link to a website with LGBTQ+ inclusive sexual health information. Due to this disproportionate political pressure, local action on this issue can only do so much without state backing.

The pressure to limit sexual health education to heterosexual and cisgender contexts has significant impacts on sexual and gender minorities.Students who received exclusionary education reporti that they felt sexually unprepared, invisible, and less able to make sense of their identity as a result. This contributes to health disparities, with those in the LGBTQ+ community facing higher rates of intimate partner violence, risky sexual behavior, and STI contraction than their peers. LGBTQ+ students of color face the brunt of this marginalization.

In contrast, the presence of inclusive curriculums improves the mental health and safety of LGBTQ+ students, reducing bullying, decreasing substance use before sex, and increasing the age of sexual initiation. For a population that already faces massive health inequities in these areas, this inclusive education is all the more vital.

So what would an inclusive sexual health education curriculum look like? Despite fearmongering claims, comprehensive sexual health education is focused on providing information that is both age-appropriate and attuned to each student’s specific needs. Unlike Minnesota’s current standard of abstinence-only education, these classes place emphasize fostering mutually respectful and consensual relationships, recognizing the rights and responsibilities that each student has within those relationships, and reflecting that sexuality, and sexual diversity by extension, is an aspect of being human. Although the term “sex ed” implies a focus on physical intercourse, comprehensive sex education’s main focus is on healthy relationships in general across identities, whether those relationships include a sexual, romantic, platonic, familial, or self component or not. Due to the foundational importance of healthy relationship skills for developing bonds of all types throughout one’s life, some of these programs begin as early as kindergarten, providing children age-appropriate (and publicly available) instruction on diversity across families, bodies, and boundaries. This information has been found to reduce incidence of domestic violence, better students’ communication skills, and even improve adolescents’ relationships with their parents. Even when only evaluated through the metric of reducing the incidence of unwanted adolescent pregnancies and STI/STD transmission across student populations, these programs still come out on top over LGBTQ+ exclusive abstinence-only programs.

Sydney Jordan and her colleagues in the Minneosta House are currently working on bill HF 358, which would require the inclusion of “diverse sexual orientations and gender identities” within sexual health education. However, without substantial public support, this bill faces an uphill battle, as previous efforts have repeatedly been thwarted by political fear-mongering and partisanship. Minnesota owes it to youth to ensure that sexual health education standards include LGBTQ+ identities, so please make your support of this bill known to your elected officials. Looking back on my experiences within the Minnesota public school system, I wonder how many other students are currently going through that same adversity that I experienced then. How many are currently feeling unseen, invalidated, and alone because of who they are? I urge you to write a letter to your House representatives advocating for HF 358 so that Minnesota youth can the inclusive sexual health education they need.

65. A Planned and Coordinated Anarchy

Deleted reason: not anarchist.

Subtitle: The Barricades of 1971 and the “Diliman Commune”

Author: Joseph Scalice

Authors: Joseph Scalice

Topics: Philippines, student movement, commune, anarchy, history, Stalinism, communist party, communism

Date: December 2018

Date Published on T@L: 2020-09-20T12:13:03

Source: Retrieved on 2020-09-03 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330336239. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, December 2018. DOI: 10.1353/phs.2018.0035

Abstract

In early February 1971, students at UP Diliman erected barricades, fought off the military, and briefly established the “Diliman Commune.” Using material produced by the “communards” themselves, along with contemporary press reports, I reconstruct the dramatic narrative of the commune and debunk two prominent myths: that it was a spontaneous uprising and that it was an isolated event. The commune was a part of a widely coordinated set of barricades raised by the radical groups Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK) in service, in the final analysis, to the political interests of their ruling class allies in an election year.

Introduction

For nine days in early February 1971, students at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman erected barricades around their campus, fought off repeated attempts by the military to tear the barricades down, and took control of the university. While the occupation of the Diliman campus invariably merits passing mention in the wave of memoirs, both personal and collective, produced over the past two decades, it has not been subjected to serious scholarly scrutiny.[234] As a result, two myths, which entered circulation in the months immediately after the events themselves, spread and became the established narrative of what became known as the “Diliman Commune.” The first is that the events were limited to Diliman; they were not. Barricades went up at the University Belt in downtown Manila and at UP Los Banos simultaneously, and there were pitched and protracted battles waged at both locations. Subsequent accounts entirely ignored these concurrent barricades.[235] The second myth is that the Commune emerged spontaneously. A headline article of Bagong Pilipina in its February 1971 issue expressed this conception: “The Diliman Commune was a spontaneous reaction to the needs of the Diliman Republic” (Berbano and Castillo 1971, 1). The story stuck.

Both myths were largely the product of silence. The Diliman Commune has been the subject of countless tangential references in a broader body of work on martial law-era politics, but not the subject of direct scholarly scrutiny. The heady rush of events in the first two weeks of February 1971 left those of Diliman, the flagship campus of the state university, at the center of popular consciousness, while the details regarding barricades elsewhere went largely unreported. Many scholarly works examining other aspects of the martial law era based themselves on this narrative and thus made passing mention of “the Diliman Commune.”[236] Treated as such, its role in a broader, coordinated campaign of barricades was overlooked. Where coordination clearly reveals planning, isolation by easy inference suggests spontaneity.

A good deal of the conduct of the students and individual members of the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK) throughout this affair was, of course, spontaneous. The barricades were launched, however, by a political leadership with a conscious orientation, which shaped the boundaries and channeled the direction of the spontaneous social anger that was finding expression in their erection. This leadership secured its own ends through the students in a planned and coordinated fashion, which is the logical conclusion that I draw from the overwhelming weight of historical evidence presented in this article.

Using the manifestos, resolutions, and various ephemera produced by the “communards” themselves and combining these with contemporary newspaper reports and the official investigation conducted by the University of the Philippines, I have reconstructed a detailed narrative of the barricades of February 1971 to demonstrate their planned and coordinated character. In this I relied above all on the forty-three boxes of documents contained in the Philippine Radical Papers (PRP) Archive housed at UP Diliman and subsequently microfilmed by Cornell University. Any attempt to understand the internally contentious and immensely influential role of the left in Philippine politics in the lead up to martial law must grapple with the complicated contents of this invaluable collection.

I digitized every page of the PRP and carefully indexed each item. Many items were misdated; others were of obscure origin. By working over this material repeatedly, I was able to reconstruct — to triangulate on the basis of lies, half-truths, and honest accounts — an understanding of what had transpired. Much of this material was ephemera: single-page fliers announcing a demonstration on a particular issue. Many were undated because they were handed out a day before the rally, but I reconstructed the date of almost every item on the basis of vocabulary and topical references.

Stalinism and the Two Communist Parties

An immense social anger fueled the political developments of the late 1960s and early 1970s.[237] The brutality of the American war in Vietnam, the skyrocketing cost of living, and the increasingly repressive state apparatus — all bound up with the crisis of capitalism and the relative decline of the postwar economic hegemony of the US — combined to create a revolutionary situation throughout much of the globe. In the Philippines, Pres. Ferdinand Marcos began preparing the instruments of dictatorship, while his ruling-class opponents, many organized within the Liberal Party (LP), began plotting his ouster, concerned that they should be in power prior to the imposition of military rule. The affair known as the Diliman Commune was a manifestation of a broader trend in radical politics in the years leading up to the imposition of martial law. This article seeks to demonstrate the role that the ideas of Stalinism played in the unrest of the time. However, this role cannot be understood simply at the level of abstraction, for it requires the complex reconstruction of historical narrative to reveal Stalinism’s precise social function. What I find is that, on the basis of their shared program of Stalinism, the Moscow-oriented Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) prepared to endorse Marcos and his imposition of martial law, while the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its front organizations labored to safely contain the explosive energy of a decade of unrest within the pistons of the bourgeois opposition’s political machinery.

The Stalinist bureaucracies in first Moscow and then Beijing sought to consolidate their economic privileges and positions through the nationalist program of building socialism in a single country, an idea antithetical to the basic Marxist principle that socialism could only be built on an international scale. This program made paramount the political task of securing the borders and trade of the country in which socialism was to be constructed. International socialist revolution was no longer the order of the day, but rather the securing of alliances, diplomatic gains, and trade deals with other countries in opposition, above all, to Washington. This required intimate ties with a section of the ruling class within these countries. The task for Communist parties around the world was therefore not to organize the working class to seize power, but to secure the support of a section of the bourgeoisie for trade and diplomatic ties. To this end they heralded to the working class and peasantry that the tasks of the revolution were national and democratic only — and not yet socialist. In this national democratic revolution a section of the capitalist class, they claimed, would play a progressive role. On this basis, the Communist party leadership could offer the support of workers, the youth, and peasant groups to a section of the bourgeoisie and in return secure support for the foreign policy interests of the Communist bloc. As they each sought to build socialism in one country, Moscow and Beijing did not merge their economies and, as a result, their rival sets of national interests diverged and led to open conflict, precipitating splits across the globe.

Growing social tensions split the PKP along fault lines drawn by the Sino-Soviet dispute. In 1965 the party, including its youth wing, the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) [Nationalist Youth] under the leadership of Jose Ma. Sison, supported Ferdinand Marcos in his campaign for president. In 1967, however, a majority of the leadership of the party expelled the cohort around Sison, who were drawn to the political line of Mao Zedong and Beijing. In late 1968, the expelled members founded a rival party, the CPP. The PKP and the CPP — adhering to the lines of Moscow and Beijing, respectively — were both Stalinist organizations, but they were oriented to rival sections of the capitalist class.[238] In keeping with the more conservative line of Moscow, the PKP saw in Marcos and his machinations toward dictatorship this “progressive” wing who would open ties with the Soviet bloc and move the Philippines away from subservience to Washington. The CPP meanwhile, using the radical rhetoric of protracted people’s war and the anarchistic enthusiasm of the Cultural Revolution, was able to channel a great deal of the unrest of the times behind the increasingly restive bourgeois opposition to Marcos, in particular Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., the Lopez brothers (Vice Pres. Fernando Lopez and businessman Eugenio Lopez), and the Liberal Party.[239]

The split in the PKP led to a split in its youth wing, fragmenting the KM. The majority of youth, drawn from the peasantry, stayed with the PKP and founded a new organization, the Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (MPKP) [Free Unity of Filipino Youth]; Sison retained hold over a substantial portion of the university-based youth in Manila, who remained within the KM; and a number of the more well-to-do and artistic layers within the KM, drawn above all to the anarchism of the Cultural Revolution, broke with the KM and founded the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK) [Federation of Democratic Youth].

It was in this context of social unrest, political tensions in the ruling class, and the emergence of two Communist parties that the massive explosion of protests that later became known as the First Quarter Storm (FQS) shook the first three months of 1970. Prior to the storm the leadership of the SDK had been closer to the MPKP than they were to the KM, and they had even campaigned together in the summer of 1969. As Marcos’s forces cracked down on protesters and the MPKP responded by blaming the activities of the KM, the SDK shifted to the camp of the CPP and its front organizations. The elite opposition began providing the protesters with funding, favorable press coverage, and access to television and radio broadcasts.

The year 1971 was an election year and the ruling class opponents of Marcos sought another explosion of protest to destabilize the president and secure sympathy for the opposition slate. Sison, writing his political report to the Second Plenum of the First Central Committee of the CPP in September 1970, launched a brief ultraleft policy, which lasted until August 1971 and which closely paralleled the third period policies of the Comintern from 1928 to 1934 (AB 1970).[240] The Stalinists in 1928 declared that a new, third historical period since the 1917 revolution had begun, which would be marked by an uninterrupted upsurge of the revolutionary masses. On this basis, they split the working class, denouncing the Social Democratic parties as “social fascists”; attempted to seize control of the trade unions and split them, forming so-called red unions; and declared that after Adolf Hitler rose to power he would crush the social democrats and facilitate the rise of the Communist parties. Their slogan was “After Hitler, us.”[241] In a similar fashion, Sison declared that the masses were in an uninterrupted upsurge, that state repression increased their resistance, and that dictatorship “can only fan the flames of revolutionary war in the country” (ibid., 14). In early February, as the barricades were erected, the front organizations of the CPP attempted to seize control of a number of trade unions — splitting them, including the union of striking jeepney drivers — and set up headquarters for its new, red unions in Vinzons Hall on the UP Diliman campus. This brief “third period” lasted until six days before the Plaza Miranda bombing, when the CPP abruptly reversed course and issued instructions that its front groups should attempt to win over the so-called middle forces — conservative middle-class elements — by entering various organizations, whom they had recently decried as reactionary, including Catholic student groups. On this basis they campaigned for the Liberal Party in the November election (Scalice 2017, 591–613, 649–56). The barricades and the resulting Diliman commune were an expression of this third period policy.

As 1971 opened, Marcos approved a set of oil price hikes, and jeepney drivers responded by launching a strike. On 13 January police opened fire on the striking drivers and protesters, injuring over a hundred and killing four. Marcos declared a week-long moratorium on the oil price hike, and the strike was temporarily called off (Dalisay and Benaning 1971; PC 1971a). On 25 January Marcos delivered his State of the Nation Address. Protesters assembled, and everyone anticipated another storm akin to that of a year prior, but the day passed peacefully. Antonio Tagamolila (1971a, 6), SDK member and editor of the influential UP Diliman campus paper, the Philippine Collegian, wrote, “Peace has a way of beclouding the issues … The issue to clarify once more, is that the people are still at war, a war declared and imposed by the ruling classes led by their fascist puppet chieftain.”

At the beginning of the year, the SDK reported that Dioscoro Umali, the dean of UP Los Banos, had announced that he possessed information on the group’s intent to take over the Diliman and Los Banos campuses and occupy the administration buildings. The SDK denounced Umali’s claim as a “fairy-tale” and a “fantasy” from his “ever-recurring nightmares” (SDK-UPCACS 1971). Umali’s claim was not at all far-fetched. Ericson Baculinao, chair of the UP Diliman Student Council and a leading member of KM, had threatened precisely such an occupation when presenting a set of fifty- seven demands from the students to UP Pres. Salvador P. Lopez in October 1970 (Go 1970, 7; Scalice 2017, 526). On 25 January 1971, the same day as the disappointingly peaceful protest in front of Congress, the Sandigang Makabansa (SM), the UP Diliman campus student political organization of the KM and SDK, which in 1970–1971 controlled the UP Student Council, published an issue of its paper, Ang Sandigang Makabansa, revisiting these demands, which they declared were not being fulfilled, but the final move rested with the students. In language invoking the Internationale the article concluded, “Matagal nang nabibinbin ang 57 kahilingan at ang gagawing nagkakaisang pagkilos ang siyang magiging huling paglalaban” (The fifty- seven demands have long been detained and the upcoming united action will be the final struggle) (SM 1971).[242] Preparations for the occupation of campus administration buildings were in place.

The SDK was now firmly in the camp of the CPP, and its leaders followed the party’s orders and abided by its discipline. The culmination of the process of its “rectification” was the SDK’s First National Congress, which was held on 30–31 January at the UP Asian Labor Education Center. Militant but Groovy, the anthology of accounts regarding the SDK written by a collection of its own members, stated that the process of “rectification and return to mainstream were consolidated at its First National Congress … The theme of the congress was ‘Unfurl the Great Red Banner of the National Democratic Cultural Revolution’” (Santos and Santos 2008, 11; PC 1971c). During the two-day event, Dulaang Sadeka staged a performance of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother, translated by Rolando Pena and Ma. Lorena Barros and titled “Bandilang Pula,” after the red flag carried by Palagea at the end of the play (SM 1971, 4; Santos and Santos 2008, 34).[243] In the aftermath of the barricades, Bandilang Pula became the title of the SDK paper, and, much later, the name of the official paper of the New People’s Army (NPA).

Barricades: Diliman, University Belt, Los Banos

“Amid the hubbub over the violence at the January 13 rally and the threats of violence at the FQS anniversary rally, the issue of the oil price hike got somewhat sidelined. Gasoline prices were not rolled back” (Quimpo and Quimpo 2012, 90). On 1 February, the morning after the SDK congress had concluded, the jeepney drivers launched a renewed strike and the KM and SDK launched a coordinated campaign of obstructing thoroughfares throughout the country, ostensibly in support of the strike. They erected barricades at UP Diliman and Los Banos and in the University Belt. These were the primary barricade sites, but according to the Collegian barricades were erected at least briefly by students in Laguna, Baguio, Rizal, Cavite, and other locations (PC 1971c).[244] The putting up of these barricades was a coordinated and centrally directed campaign but, because of the prominence given to the Diliman Commune, records of the barricades erected elsewhere are partial and sporadic.

While they pointed to the jeepney drivers’ strike as the reason for their construction of barricades, it was but a pretext for the KM and SDK. In the wake of the disappointment of 25 January, they needed to foment street battles and provoke state repression. The KM shut down traffic on Mendiola Bridge on 30 January, two days before the jeepney strike resumed, claiming they were commemorating the Battle of Mendiola from the FQS a year earlier (Giron 1971). The state seized on the violence of the barricades as a pretext to break up the strike. On 2 February Manila Mayor Antonio Villegas, citing “suspicion of creating disorder in the city,” ordered the arrest without warrant of Lupino Lazaro, secretary general of Pasang Masda, the primary jeepney driver union involved in the strike (PC 1971b; Giron 1971; SDK 1971a). With the arrest of its leader, the strike quickly died. The students at the barricades, however, continued their protests and campus occupations despite the fact that the strike, which they claimed to be supporting, had ended days earlier (AS Rooftop Junta 1971a).

On 1 February the barricades went up in earnest. According to the account in the Mirror, “about 60 per cent of public vehicles, including jeepneys, buses and taxicabs continued operating that Monday in Manila and the rest of the Metropolitan area” (Giron 1971, 1). The students, however, “barricaded streets, solicited strike funds from drivers of passing vehicles, stoned buses and cars that did not stop when they directed them to turn back and … set up pickets in Manila and Quezon City for the jeepney drivers” (ibid.). The students lit a bonfire at the junction of Azcarraga and Lepanto Streets; traffic through the vicinity was shut down, and all Divisoria- bound vehicles were routed through Quiapo. “Passengers in the few buses operating pulled up the window shades to avoid stones,” Giron (ibid.) wrote. The students maintained the barricades in the University Belt the next day. A street battle raged between protesters and the police in front of the University of Santo Tomas (UST). Students threw rocks, handmade bombs known as “pillboxes,” and Molotov cocktails; for their part, the police fired on the students. By the end of the day, three people had been killed: Danilo Rabaja, 19, of the Philippine College of Commerce (PCC); Renato Abrenica, 24, of UST; and Roberto Tolosa, a 12-year-old sweepstakes ticket vendor, who died of a bullet in the back. Twenty-nine others were injured. Barricades and protests continued in the University Belt throughout the first week of February; by Friday, 5 February, two more had been killed. Fernando Duque, 19, a UST student, “fleeing from police and drivers battling the students,” was hit by a pillbox explosion on the head. A “battle took place on Dapitan street when students resorted to stoning the vehicles, hurting passengers and drivers. The drivers fought back with stones” (ibid., 6).

On the Los Banos campus, we know that there were barricades sealing the main entrance to the university on 4 February and that two more sets of barricades were built on 8 February, shutting down the campus (SDK 1971c). The SDK and KM claimed that the barricades were being erected in support of the striking drivers. Most of the drivers, however, ended their strike on 6 February, while the students maintained and expanded the barricades. They “permitted the drivers to operate up to the barricades” (pinayagan silang pumasada hanggang sa mga barikada) but prevented them from continuing their routes through the campus. At least one jeepney driver, after the majority ended the strike, attempted to drive his vehicle through the barricades and the students assaulted him, throwing pillboxes at his vehicle (PC 1971f; Atos 1971).

On 7 February a large contingent of conservative civic groups — the Lions Club, the UP Student Catholic Action (UPSCA), and others — approached the barricades to request that they be taken down. The barricades were making life difficult, they said, for the residents of Los Banos. The students, led by Vicente Ladlad, refused. By 9 February it was anticipated that the constabulary would assault the barricades, and the students fortified themselves with pillboxes to “defend (ipagtanggol ang) UP Los Banos” (PC 1971f, 3). The account of the barricades at Los Banos published in the Collegian ends here. The anticipated battle never occurred, for the KM and SDK, on the basis of instructions from “underground,” lifted their barricades simultaneously at Diliman, Los Banos, and the University Belt on 9 February.[245]

The Diliman Commune

Monday, 1 February

While street battles raged on Azcarraga and provincial traffic was shut down in Los Banos, the KM and SDK erected barricades on the UP Diliman campus. The Physical Plant Office had installed loudspeakers in the Arts and Science (AS) building at the request of the UP Student Council, and the council used these speakers to instruct students to boycott their classes and man the barricades, while “groups of activists made rounds of classes being held, interrupting proceedings in the classrooms” (Committee of Inquiry 1971, 1). The campus at the time remained a public thoroughfare; you could drive its wide, acacia-lined streets from Commonwealth to Katipunan, and a good deal of traffic passed through on a daily basis. Barricades were put up across both the front entrance to the campus as well as the rear entrance at Lopez Jaena (Manzano 1971, 4). While they were initially erected to “stop public utility vehicles from entering campus,” Bandilang Pula, the paper which the students manning the barricades began publishing on 5 February, wrote that all vehicles, public and private, were being stopped and asked to take another route, and anyone who wished to enter the campus was instructed to get out and walk (Taguiwalo and Vea 1971; BP 1971a, 2). The students manning the barricades were armed with pillboxes and Molotov cocktails and waved a red banner. The young men on the barricades were responsible for preventing vehicles from entering the campus, and young women were assigned to solicit funds from those who had been turned away.[246]

Hearing of the disruption to traffic on campus, UP Pres. S. P. Lopez instructed Col. Oscar Alvarez, chief of campus security forces, to request that faculty vehicles be allowed to pass. Alvarez inspected the barricades and returned to report to Lopez that “everything was in order” (Committee of Inquiry 1971, 1–2). By midday many of the students wished to go to lunch, and there were not sufficient numbers to maintain the obstruction, so they knocked over a tree and placed it on the road. The security forces returned and attempted to remove the tree that was blocking traffic.

A skirmish developed, during which pillbox bombs and gasoline bombs were thrown at the UP security guards. One guard drew his side-arm and fired warning shots. The students retaliated with bombs resulting in the injury to [sic] five security guards. More students arrived and reinforced the barricades. Their number was variously estimated at two to three hundred. (ibid., 2)

At 12:30 in the afternoon, UP mathematics professor Inocente Campos arrived in his car. Campos was a known figure on campus, having on several occasions threatened students with failing grades if they participated in demonstrations; students complained that he had pulled out a gun in the classroom and menaced them with it, on one occasion going so far as to fire three “warning shots” (Evangelista 2008, 44). Campos’s abusive and violent behavior had been reported by students to the campus administration for over a year, but no measures were taken against him (Vea 1970, 3). At the barricade, Campos accelerated and attempted to drive through the barrier. “Upon recognizing the professor, students on University avenue began throwing pillboxes at his car. The left rear tire exploded, forcing the car to a stop” (Committee of Inquiry 1971, 3). Dean of Students Armando Malay (1982a, 1) described the situation: “it looked to me that the car was disabled, because its rear was jutting out of line, like a woman with an enlarged derriere.” An account written by the barricaders themselves reported that when the students saw Campos, they shouted “It’s Campos … throw pb [pillboxes] at him … he’s a fascist!” (Si Campos … batuhin niyo ng pb … pasista iyan!) (Manzano 1971, 4). Campos emerged from his damaged vehicle wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet and opened fire on the students with a shotgun. Malay (1982a, 6) described Campos as having “a grim smile on his face” as he shot into the crowd of students. Campos reloaded his shotgun and continued firing, shooting one of the students, Pastor “Sonny” Mesina, in the forehead.

Members of the UP Security Forces, who had been standing nearby since their attempt to remove the tree barricade, arrested Campos and took him to the Quezon City Police Department (QCPD). The students burned Campos’s vehicle (Palatino 2008, 103; BP 1971a, 2). Mesina was taken to the UP infirmary and then transferred to Veterans Memorial Hospital, where he was unconscious for several days and died Thursday evening, 4 February (Committee of Inquiry 1971, 3; BP 1971a; Santos and Santos 2008, 83). Mesina was 17 years old, a first-year student at the university who had joined the SDK a week earlier and on the day of his death had opted to march with some of his friends rather than go to a movie with others. While Mesina was in the hospital, Tagamolila wrote an editorial stating, “The hero of the day is undoubtedly Pastor Mesina, a freshman activist, who was seriously wounded by an insane man we had allowed to roam in our midst,” while Mario Taguiwalo wrote that “Sonny was not an activist nor a revolutionary, but he tried” (Tagamolila 1971b, 6; Taguiwalo 1971, 9). The Bantayog ng mga Bayani monument would later inscribe that Mesina “earned the honor of being considered UP Diliman’s ‘first martyr’ … he gave his life for academic freedom.”

S. P. Lopez had been watching events through binoculars. About fifty students angrily left the barricades and marched to the university administrative building of Quezon Hall, storming the offices of Lopez, tearing plaques off the wall, shattering windows, and throwing rocks. One student threw a piece of wood at Lopez, hitting him in the chest (Committee of Inquiry 1971, 3). Baculinao confronted Lopez, demanding to know why the latter sent security forces to the barricade without first informing him. He blamed Lopez for the actions of Campos, claiming that had the security forces not been present Campos would not have been emboldened to shoot.[247] Tension mounted, and it seemed increasingly likely that a student might physically assault Lopez. To defuse the tension, as was the KM’s standard practice, Baculinao led the group in a loud rendition of the national anthem after which they left Lopez’s office.

Lopez later recounted that he was summoned that afternoon to the military headquarters of Camp Aguinaldo for a meeting of a shady cabal known as the “Peace and Order Council” (ibid., 5–6). Justice Secretary Vicente Abad Santos, chair of the council; Executive Secretary Alejandro Melchor; Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile; Col. Tomas Karingal, QCPD chief; and Gen. Eduardo Garcia, head of the Philippine Constabulary discussed how best to suppress the students at the flagship state university. The council called for the forced entry of the police into the campus, but Lopez protested, citing a prior agreement with Quezon City Mayor Norberto Amoranto to keep the city police off campus and to leave policing to campus security forces (UP Gazette 1971, 20). The council stated that the agreement was not legally binding. A decision was reached, over Lopez’s dissent, that the police would enter the university and clear out the barricades, and it was further decided that if the police could not successfully carry out this action the constabulary would be deployed. Enrile warned that, if the mayor refused to allow the deployment of Karingal’s forces on campus, the constabulary would take over city hall. The council went to Quezon City Hall to inform Amoranto of the measures they were taking. Lopez’s account (Committee of Inquiry 1971) of his meeting with this junta provides a rare insight into just how advanced were the preparations for military rule. If elected leaders or democratic norms interfered even slightly in the suppression of unrest and dissent, the military leadership was poised to strip their powers away.

With the police deployed at every approach to the university, students set up new barricades on the west entrance guarding Commonwealth Avenue. Lopez continued to protest against police on the campus, but Karingal disregarded him; at 3:00 in the afternoon the QCPD broke down the barricades and arrested more than eighteen students.[248] The UP Student Council issued a leaflet on 1 February denouncing the shooting of Mesina, singling out S. P. Lopez for blame for having “abetted and encouraged” the UP Security Police, who “brutally attempted to disperse the students by firing indiscriminately at the crowd” (UP Student Council and Samahan ng Kababaihan ng UP 1971). Palatino (2008, 104) correctly noted that, after the first day, “the issue was no longer the oil price hike but the interference of the military on campus” (hindi na pagtaas ng presyo ng langis ang isyu kundi ang panghihimasok ng militar sa loob ng kampus).

Tuesday, 2 February

Early Tuesday morning the students rebuilt their defenses, incorporating the burned-out remains of Campos’s car into the barricades (Malay 1982b, 6). Leaflets for and against the barricades circulated throughout the campus that morning. A group calling itself the “decent elements of the UP Student Council” signed a document on behalf of the entire council denouncing “student fascism.” Their leaflet read, “UP vilent [sic] activist Sonny Mesina was shot in the head yesterday, when in self-defense Prof. Inocente Campos fired at fascistic students who want to reign supreme in UP” (UP Student Council 1971). The Samahan ng Makabayang Siyentipiko (SMS 1971), meanwhile, issued an appeal to continue support for the jeepney strike and opposition to fascism on campus, concluding by summoning everyone “to the barricades!” This was the last mention of the strike during the Diliman Commune; after the morning of 2 February, this pretext was dropped entirely (ibid.).[249]

The police and the students tensely eyed one another over the barricades. According to the Collegian, the standoff broke when the MPKP drove a jeep past the barricades, leading an assault by the police (PC 1971f). Bandilang Pula described the jeep as flying a flag with a sickle on it, and the students at the barricade expected that the jeep contained reinforcements. In their own version of events, the MPKP claimed that the KM-SDK hurled pillboxes at their jeep, which was bearing MPKP activists and striking drivers (MPKP-UP 1971b). The MPKP carried a leaflet with them, which stated “the massing of hundreds of [Philippine Constabulary] troopers and Quezon City policemen armed with high-powered firearms in the University is a naked act of fascist repression … However, we also see the necessity of criticizing certain elements within the student ranks who committed acts of unwarranted violence against UP personnel and property” (MPKP 1971a).[250] They called on students to “sustain the struggle against American oil monopolies,” but also to “expose and oppose petty-bourgeois pseudo-revolutionary elements.” Behind their jeep came the police, who immediately began firing tear gas; the students at the barricades retreated before the onslaught. The front organizations of the PKP had played no part in the barricades until now, for they stood on the opposite side of this battle; as they entered Diliman they were accompanied by the military.

By 1:00 in the afternoon, S. P. Lopez was engaged in an argument with QCPD chief Karingal, demanding the removal of the police from the university campus. After several skirmishes between police and students, the police appeared to withdraw. At 2:00 in the afternoon the students declared that UP was a “liberated area” (Giron 1971, 6). The upper floors of the AS building were seized by a group that called itself the AS Rooftop Junta and flew a red flag from its roof. The students used the rooftops of the AS and Engineering buildings to throw Molotov cocktails and pillboxes at the police during subsequent encroachments (BP 1971c, 5). Barricades were set up in front of the AS Building.

But police took the road behind the building, cutting off the students’ retreat and many of them were caught. Students battled the militarists at Vinzons Hall where activists held their meetings. Fourteen students were injured when Metrocom soldiers captured the area. At this point, Kabataang Makabayan members of Ateneo de Manila reinforced the UP students. QC Major ELpidio Clemente ordered the attack on two girl dormitories where ten male students fighting the police with bombs sought refuge. In ten minutes the Sampaguita and Camia halls reeked of gas fumes and the cries of 200 occupants resounded. Girls trapped inside broken glass windows and squirmed through broken glass, lacerating or bruising themselves. They were in tears. (Giron 1971, 6)

The students poured water on the road to dampen the effect of the teargas, shouting out to the Metrocom that they were pouring gasoline. The Metrocom began to attack from the grass, as the pillbox bombs routinely did not explode on soft impact (BP 1971c, 5). Low-flying helicopters flew over the campus, dropping teargas bombs in addition to those being thrown by the Metrocom. The students began streamlining the production of Molotov cocktails, using Coke bottles taken from the cafeteria, two drums of crude oil that were available on campus, and curtains torn down from the AS building. The exchanges between the Metrocom and the students continued until late in the night, and at some point the students set the barricades on fire. The embers of the barricades were still smoldering the next morning (Daroy 1971, 8, 9).

Wednesday, 3 February

The DZMM radio station, owned by Eugenio Lopez, sent its Radyo Patrol truck to the campus on Wednesday morning, and Dean Malay issued an appeal to the nation to provide food and supplies to the barricaded students. S. P. Lopez called on the entire university community to assemble in front of Palma Hall, where KM leader Boni Ilagan opened the assembly, recounting to the students the events of the past two days. Lopez addressed the students, stating that what was at stake in the struggle over the barricades was the militarization of the campus (Malay 1982d, 8; Daroy 1971, 9). Mila Aguilar (1971) reported that at the end of Lopez’s speech “a band of white- helmeted fascists were sighted at the corner of the Engineering building 100 meters away from the Arts and Sciences steps, where the gathering was being held.” The students grabbed “chairs, tables, blackboards” and brought them down into the street (ibid.). The barricade rapidly extended down the length of the AS building, and Molotov cocktails and pillboxes were distributed up and down the line. The students occupying the rooftops were given kwitis (fireworks) to launch at helicopters flying overhead.

A negotiating team, including the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, some faculty members, and student representatives, went to meet with the police. The “white-helmeted fascists” were the Metrocom, under the command of QCPD Major Clemente, who was chiefly concerned with the removal of blockades from the main thoroughfares so that buses could pass. Marcos gave orders directly to Clemente to have his men stand down as long as Lopez and the university administration took responsibility for the situation. Clemente and the negotiating team reached an agreement that the buses would be rerouted down Commonwealth Avenue, skirting the north side of the campus; however, as Clemente pulled out his forces, he secretly arranged to leave behind snipers at various locations throughout the campus (Daroy 1971, 9; BP 1971c, B).

During one of the police assaults on Vinzons Hall — it is unclear on which day — Danilo Delfin was critically wounded by a gunshot to the lung (Daroy 1971, 9). Delfin was not a supporter of the commune guarding the barricades. He was a member of the Vanguard Fraternity, a right-wing organization opposed to the KM and SDK. Delfin later stated that he was caught in the crossfire and that the trajectory of the bullet revealed that he was shot in the back by the KM-SDK from behind Vinzons Hall (Convocation Sabotaged 1971). For a brief time after the events, Delfin was hailed by the KM and SDK as a hero and a “martyr” of the movement. When he revealed that he was a Vanguard member who had been shot in the back, he was denounced. In mid-1972 he wrote a bitter public letter:

A year and half after, I’m still confined to a wheel chair, unable to walk or stand by myself. The doctors say that in a year or two, I might finally be able to walk. I don’t know.

Last year, right after the barricades and during the early part of the campus campaign, some groups on campus, specifically those who set up the barricades, were praising me as Kumander Delfin, one of the heroes and martyrs of the barricades. Until I told the truth during the AS confrontation [in July 1971]. Since then I have been consistently denounced as a propagandist for Malacanang. In a wheel chair? (Delfin 1972)

At 5:00 in the evening, Senators Benigno Aquino Jr., Salvador Laurel, and Eva Estrada Kalaw went to and spoke on the Diliman campus, proclaiming “their concern over the military force under control of President Marcos. They called upon the military units on the edges of campus to withdraw” (ang kanilang pagkabahala sa puwersang militar na kontrolado ni Pang. Marcos. Hinikayat nilang umalis ang hukbong militar sa kapaligiran ng kampus) (PC 1971f, 5).[251] Aquino brought bags of food for the students on the barricades (BP 1971d, 6). The senators then met with S. P. Lopez in his office to discuss the affair. While they were in conference, Marcos called Lopez and stated that he was ordering the withdrawal of all troops and that students would not be issued a deadline for the removal of the barricades (Malay 1982e, 7). Marcos, it seems, astutely decided to allow the students to tire of the barricades, which lasted for five more days.

Lopez (1971) issued a press statement calling for the resumption of classes, stating that he was “unalterably opposed” to police entering the campus, but called upon students to tear down the barricades so that classes could resume. The students continued to man the barricades, however, tearing down the stage lights from the AS theater and installing them on the top of the AS hall to serve as a searchlight. They began renaming the UP campus buildings; the campus itself they renamed the “Democratic Diliman Commune.” The accounts of the renaming are contradictory. According to various sources UP was renamed Stalin University; Abelardo Hall became Dante Hall; the Faculty Center became Jose Ma. Sison Hall; Palma Hall became Dante Hall; Gonzalez Hall became Amado Guerrero Hall (Canoy 1980, 2; Rosca 1971, 10). The only renaming that I can independently verify is Jose Ma. Sison Hall because the students scrawled Sison’s name in large red letters on the walls. By Wednesday night, essentially all police and military incursions on the Diliman campus stopped, according to the commune’s own publications. The KM and SDK occupied the campus exclusively until they took the barricades down (BP 1971e, 7).

Thursday, 4 February

By Thursday morning, the university had a “lack of students,” the streets were deserted, and the commune was “isolated.” Those who remained at Diliman were the members of the UP chapters of the KM and SDK, who had been joined by members from other universities (Aguilar 1971).[252] The majority of the student body, however, had left. Those remaining on the campus elected a provisional directorate, of which Baculinao was made head (Malay 1982c, 6).[253]

The occupying students, now styling themselves as “communards,” broke into and seized the DZUP radio station, renaming it Malayang Tinig ng Demokratikong Komunidad ng Diliman (Free Voice of the Democratic Community of Diliman) (Gonzales 1971, 3; Aguilar 1971, 8; Baculinao et al. 1971). Bagong Pilipina described the “liberation” of the station: “The university radio station which used to play and cater to well-educated bourgeoisie [sic] listeners (who else could afford to appreciate Beethoven’s symphony, who else could find time to relax at night and listen to bourgeois’ [sic] music?) was liberated and occupied by the progressive sector” (Berbano and Castillo 1971, 3). The KM and SDK began broadcasting, receiving extraordinary assistance from the Lopez family. DZUP had a broadcast radius of 5 kilometers and, according to Armando Malay (1982g, 1), “nobody (but nobody) had been listening to it before.” ABS-CBN, the national broadcast network owned by Eugenio Lopez, announced that the station had been captured and it was being broadcast at 1410 AM. Having made this announcement, Lopez then arranged the nationwide rebroadcast of the students’ programming. The 5-kilometer campus station now reached the entire archipelago. The student operators managed to burn out the vacuum tubes of the radio station, but these were promptly replaced by a wealthy anonymous donor (ibid.; BP 1971d, 6).

Eugenio Lopez did not merely supply the means of broadcast to the students, but he also supplied the content. As part of Marcos’s presidential campaign in 1969, he had commissioned the production of a film depicting what were supposed to be his years as a guerrilla during the Second World War. The film, Ang mga Maharlika, starred Hollywood actors Paul Burke (as Marcos) and Farley Granger. B-grade movie actress Dovie Beams played Marcos’s love interest.[254] Throughout the course of 1969 and most of 1970 Beams and Marcos carried on a love affair and, without Marcos’s knowledge, Beams recorded the audio of each of their encounters. Imelda Marcos, stung by the scandal, arranged to have Beams deported as an undesirable alien in November 1970. Beams responded by threatening to release the recordings. Ferdinand Marcos made an offer of US$100,000 to Beams for the audio tapes, and the US consul carried out the negotiations on his behalf. Beams refused and called a press conference during which she played a portion of her recording, featuring Marcos singing “Pamulinawen” (an Ilocano folk song) as well as the sounds of their love making. A pair of reporters broke into Beams’s hotel room and stole the audio tapes, and the tapes wound up in the possession of the Lopez media conglomerate (Rotea 1984, 132; Rodrigo 2006, 210). Much as they desired to humiliate Marcos, they could not broadcast the hours of recorded bedroom conversation and noises over their radio network. The Diliman Commune provided the ideal pretext for their broadcast, and they supplied the students with the audio tapes. The KM and SDK cheerfully broadcast Beams’s audio tapes, punctuated at times by performances of the Internationale, and the Lopez radio network carried the broadcast nationwide to the immense humiliation of Marcos. The KM and SDK had been provided with a means of addressing the entire nation, and they made little attempt to present a political perspective. They occupied their time broadcasting explicit sexual recordings in an attempt to embarrass Marcos on behalf of a rival section of the bourgeoisie (Santos and Santos 2008, 83; Malay 1982g, 6; Gonzales 1971, 3).

By mid-Thursday afternoon, the students had broken the lock off the door of the university press, intending to use it to print a newspaper for the Commune. Expressing concern that the students might break the press, Dean Malay (1982f, 7) offered to provide them with several regular press employees: “one or two linotypists, a makeup man, and others you might need.” By the next morning the students had published a newspaper for the barricades, Bandilang Pula. In addition to the press and radio, the students took over the chemistry laboratory, which they used for the production of Molotov cocktails and other explosives. On 4 February Tagamolila (1971b, 6), at the head of the Collegian, published an editorial on the Commune, writing

The scholar turned street fighter becomes a truly wiser man. The political science professor hurling molotovs gets to know more about revolution than a lifetime of pedagogy. The engineering and science majors, preparing fuseless molotovs and operating radio stations, the medical student braving gunfire to aid his fellow-activist, the coed preparing battle-rations of food, pillboxes, and gasoline bombs, by their social practice realize that their skills are in themselves not enough — that the political education they get by using those skills against fascism is the correct summing up of all previous learning.

Friday, 5 February, to Tuesday, 9 February

As the threat of police invasion receded, life on the UP Diliman campus settled into a routine. On Friday morning, the UP Student Catholic Action issued a statement that hailed the student victory over the “fascist” invasion of campus, but stated that the threat had passed and called now for the removal of the barricades (UPSCA Law Chapter 1971). At some point in the early stages of the barricades, the police, for unspecified reasons, had arrested the cafeteria workers. Food production on the campus thus fell to the students themselves. “The President of the UP Women’s Club undertook this task. Foodstuffs came in as donations; they were cooked up at the Kamia Residence Hall and brought in ration to the various barricades” (Daroy 1971, 10). A resident of Kamia, Babes Almario (1971, 4) wrote a sympathetic account of the Commune in which she claimed that an “agent … was caught in the act of sabotaging the molotov cocktails we had neatly laid out as if in preparation for a buffet, and he was dealt the revolutionary punishment of the communards.” Almario did not specify what this “punishment” was. The number of students continued to dwindle. Kamia, which customarily housed 200 students, by Friday only housed twenty (Reyes 1971).[255]

Nine days after they erected them, the students who still remained on campus voluntarily tore down the barricades, and life at the university returned to normal. In his history of the campus, Jose Ma. Sison wrote that the Diliman Commune ended “only after the administration accepted several significant demands of the students and the Marcos regime accepted the recommendation of the UP president to end the military and police siege, and declare assurances that state security forces should not be deployed against the university” (Sison and Sison 2008, 58). Sison’s account is entirely false. The military siege had been lifted days before the commune ended; assurances that state forces would not be used against the campus existed before the Commune was formed, and the events of early February marked a significant step toward their rescinding; and while the commune did publish a set of eight demands, only two were eventually partially granted and none were granted prior to the lifting of the barricades. According to Jerry Araos, whose SDKM played a key role in the arming of the barricades, “the barricades ended only when a decision from the underground [i.e., the CPP] ordered their abandonment” (Santos and Santos 2008, 77). The barricades in the University Belt and at UP Los Banos were lifted on the same day in a coordinated manner; evidently, they had all received the same instructions from the CPP leadership (Tinig ng Mamamayan 1971).

Major explosions and fires broke out on both the Los Banos and Diliman campuses as the barricades were being taken down. Whether these were carried out by provocateurs, students opposing the lifting of the barricades, or as a final action of the “communards” before their removal is unclear. At 3:00 in the morning, thirteen drums of gasoline on the Diliman campus, “set aside by students at the Sampaguita residence hall, suddenly caught fire” (biglang lumiyab ang 13 dram ng gasolina na itinabi ng mga magaaral sa Sampaguita residence hall), while several hours earlier, at 10:00 PM, a large explosion took place at the UPLB armory (PC 1971g, 9). Ang Tinig ng Mamamayan, the publication of the Los Banos barricades, speculated that it might have been set off by the NPA, but a week later SDK UPLB chair Cesar Hicaro said that the idea that “activists” had carried out the bombing was “laughable” (katawa-tawa). He instead alleged that Dean Umali, in cahoots with the constabulary, had carried out the bombing to frame the activists (Tinig ng Mamamayan 1971; PC 1971h, 2).

As the barricades were taken down, SDK leaders Tagamolila, Vea, and Taguiwalo wrote a three-part front-page editorial in the Collegian assessing the now finished commune. Tagamolila (1971c, italics added) stated,

The ever-growing recognition by the masses of the evils of imperialism and the fascism of its staunchest ally, bureaucrat- capitalism, has in fact been accelerated by the very violence with which the fascists sought to silence the masses. … The more the imperialists need to exploit the masses, the more the masses protest. The more the masses protest, the more violent will be the suppression. The more violent the fascist state becomes, the more politicalized and the stronger the masses become.

In keeping with the line of Sison and the CPP, the KM and SDK argued that the violence of “fascism” was serving a good purpose: it was accelerating the growth of revolutionary consciousness. Fascist suppression, they claimed, made the masses stronger. This political line would lead Sison and the CPP to hail the imposition of martial law in 1972 as a great advance in the struggle of the revolutionary masses (Scalice 2017, 775–79). Vea assessed what he perceived to be the errors of the Commune, which he described as the result of”the failure to concretely assess the concrete situation.” Among its errors he listed the “adoption of a purely military viewpoint,” which led to “unnecessary pillbox explosions … Taxis were commandeered without much regard for the political significance,” a situation that was “subsequently rectified in the following days … Taxis were all returned” (Taguiwalo and Vea 1971, 9).

On 12 February, three days after the removal of the barricades, the Malayang Komunidad ng Diliman published its second and final issue of Bandilang Pula. The paper announced that the Commune was being normalized in order to “consolidate gains,” but did not specify a single one. It claimed that the removal of the barricades was undertaken in return for the “presenting of demands.” Not one of the demands had been granted; they had lifted the barricades in exchange for the privilege of presenting them (BP 1971e). The demands were:

Rollback the price of gasoline.
Guarantee against any military or police invasion of campus.
Justice for Pastor Mesina [not specified what this was]
Free use of DZUP radio
Free use of UP Press
Prosecution and dismissal of Inocente Campos [apparently distinct from justice for Pastor Mesina]
Investigation of the UP Security Police; prosecution and dismissal of all officials and police who collaborated with the military invasion.
All students with connections with military or intelligence must disclose their connections on registration on pain of expulsion.

They wrote

It is not out of fear that we lifted the barricades … We decided to lift the barricades on the basis of national democratic and revolutionary principles and primarily on the basis of tactical considerations.

The conditions of the barricades which were those of an emergency and of actual resistance, cannot be maintained as a permanent condition. The fascist military — of course for its own purpose — has [sic] by and large withdrawn its own force by Thursday … The constant exactions, limited resources, both human and material, and the necessity for consolidation were circumstances that also had to be considered. (ibid.)

The communards’ own account reveals that they tore down the barricades not to secure the withdrawal of the military, but because their own numbers were dwindling and because of broader, unspecified political considerations. In response to their demands, students were eventually given unspecified “reduced rates” for use of the UP Press and were allocated airtime at DZUP in “accordance with the rules of the University” (Malay 1982i 6). The initial allotment of airtime was two hours a day under some form of supervision (PC 1971i, 9). The hours at DZUP controlled by the KM-SDK rapidly expanded until they had nearly complete control of the station by the end of 1971. It was, however, the product of gradual expansion and was not the result of a demand granted in the wake of the barricades. Lopez’s stations continued to rebroadcast DZUP throughout greater Manila and the surrounding provinces until the declaration of martial law. Inocente Campos was not dismissed, and in the wake of the barricades he resumed teaching math on the Diliman campus (PC 1972, 2).

Aftermath

The police filed nine charges against Baculinao, including illegal detention, malicious mischief, arson, attempted murder, and five cases of theft. A taxi driver, Pedro Magpoy, filed charges against several students for detaining his Yellow Taxi for ten hours; another taxi driver, Francisco Cadampog, complained that the students had set fire to his Mercury Taxi in the afternoon of 5 February (PC 1971e, 9). Malay, whose account is highly sympathetic to the students, wrote that the students had “commandeered” a motorcycle with a sidecar from a local driver, had detached the sidecar and incorporated it into the barricades, while the motorcycle was used by the student leaders on campus. The owner of the tricycle requested from Malay that the motorcycle and sidecar — his source of livelihood — be returned to him, and Malay (1982h, 6) instructed him to speak to Baculinao. On 8 February UP Student Councilor Ronaldo Reyes (1971) wrote a memo enumerating acts of violence and theft, which he alleged unnamed outsiders had committed behind the barricades, including the death by stabbing of an Esso security guard who lived on the UP campus.

As the barricades came down, the walls of the buildings throughout campus were found to be festooned with “revolutionary” graffiti. Taguiwalo and Vea (1971, 10) wrote on 10 February that “the slogans and caricatures that decorate the buildings were the product” of the “revolutionary artists” of the Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista-Arkitekto (NPAA) (United Progressive Artists-Architects) and the SDK-Artists Group (AG). Across the fagades of Palma and Melchor hall “revolutionary slogans were scrawled in red paint,” the famed Oblation statue had been doused with red paint, and the walls of the Faculty Center had “Jose Ma. Sison” painted all over them (Malay 1982h, 6; Palatino 2008, 104; Vea 1971, 10).

The leaders of the barricades began to recognize just how unpopular the “commune” was with the majority of the student body now returning to campus. They undertook a two-part response, officially defending the barricades while denouncing “outsiders” for any “excesses.” The UP Student Council under Baculinao passed a resolution declaring that “barricades are fine … the UP Student Council endorse barricades as a form of protest.” A second resolution was passed on the same day commending the “revolutionary heroism” of Mesina, Delfin, and others (Baculinao, Pagaduan, and Coloma 1971; Baculinao, Pagaduan, and Vea 1971; Baculinao 1971). The Student Council resolution laid the foundation for the subsequent myth of the Commune, declaring that the “barricades arose spontaneously and immediately gained mass support.”

The official endorsement of the barricades did little to make them popular with the student body. Seizing the opportunity, the MPKP began putting up posters on campus attacking the KM and SDK, some of which read “Wage revolution against American Imperialism, not against UP” (KM 1971, 7). On 10 February the MPKP (1971a) issued a leaflet denouncing the Diliman Commune as “a well-planned sabotage of the national democratic movement … Under the pretext of sympathizing with the jeepney drivers’ struggle against US oil monopolies, the KM-SDK faction ‘occupied’ the UP for 2 weeks and indulged in anarchistic and vandalistic actions that greatly undermined the fundamental interests of the movement.” The MPKP-UP (1971a) continued:

Instead of going out of the narrow confines of the university and joining the pickets set up by the striking drivers outside, the KM-SDK had chosen to barricade themselves inside UP under the illusion of securing a “liberated area” … the KM-SDK infants however overacted in declaring UP a “liberated area,” looting the AS cooperative store, robbing the BA college of typewriters, smashing chairs and burning tables, blackboards, wall clocks and bulletin boards, ransacking the UP Press, and renaming several buildings in honor of dubious characters from whom they apparently draw inspiration.

The KM and SDK leadership, in the second and final issue of Bandilang Pula, admitted that

sa pagtatapos ng mga unang yugto ng pagpapasok ng militar, ang mga organisasyong estudyante ay unti-unting nabawasan sa kawalan ng mga kadre na dapat sanang mamamahala sa mga barikada. Marami ring nagsasayang ng mga paputok na ginastusan ng salapi. Dahil din dito, ang mga ibang namamahala sa barikada ay di galing sa UP. (BP 1971f, A)

after the first wave of troops entering the campus, they lost many cadres, who left, and should have been managing the barricades. Many wasted their explosives that were paid for with money. Because of this, the barricades were often run by outside forces.

The theft and vandalism, they claimed, were the work of these outsiders:

Dahilan din sa kakulangan ng organisasyon, maraming mga kahina-hinalang impiltrador ang nakapasok upang magsabotahe sa kaligtasan ng mga ari-arian ng UP tulad ng paglusob at pagnanakaw sa iba’t ibang lugal ng kampus sa panahon ng kaguluhan. (ibid.)

Also, because of a lack of organization, many suspicious infiltrators were able to enter and sabotage the security of the properties of UP, breaking into and robbing many places on campus during periods of confusion.

We know, however, from the students’ own accounts, that the “communards” themselves had broken into many of the buildings on campus and taken “university property.” The literature of 1 to 9 February is replete with accounts of breaking windows, tearing down curtains and stage lights, and confiscating barrels of crude oil, for example (cf. BP 1971a, 1971b). Rather than defend these actions as necessary for the defense of the barricades, the leadership disavowed them, claiming that they were carried out by infiltrators. The SDK began directly blaming the MPKP for the vandalism and theft that had occurred during the Commune, arguing that if the MPKP had manned the barricades with them there would have been sufficient forces to prevent such crimes (SDK 1971f, 10).

The criticisms, however, were not merely being raised by the MPKP. Adriel Meimban, president of the UP Baguio Student Council, wrote to the Collegian, assessing the pickets and barricades at the various university campuses. The issue in every protest, he stated, was “fascism, fascism and fascism” (Meimban 1971, 8). In Meimban’s assessment, far from winning over public sympathy, despite the brutality of the police, the methods of the students were alienating the public. He wrote, “What was ironical was that the students already suffered physically from pistol butts, karate chops and other manhandling tactics, yet the public opinion deplored and discredited the cause espoused by the students. … [In the wake of the protests] our credibility with the Baguio populace has firmly registered a zero point.”

S. P. Lopez initiated a Committee of Inquiry into the causes of the barricades, which issued its final report on 17 March based on interviews with seventy-eight participants, including students, faculty, police, and university officials. Baculinao and many of the leaders of the Commune refused to be interviewed, choosing instead to assign Sonny Coloma, one of the spokesmen of the barricades, to head a Diliman Historical Committee charged with commemorating the Commune (PC 1971j). In July the KM and SDK ran Rey Vea for Student Council president, but the unpopular memory of the graffiti-festooned and vandalized campus cost them the election.

The August bombing of the Liberal Party miting de avance at Plaza Miranda provided Marcos the pretext to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Baculinao and a host of other figures tied to the CPP had flown to China on 20 August, the day before the bombing (Lacaba 1971, 6). The KM and SDK, erstwhile communards, threw themselves with gusto into an aggressive campaign for the election of the Liberal Party slate (Scalice 2017, 673–91). When the LP won six out of eight senatorial seats, they published an article through their joint organization, the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (1971), claiming that with the election of John Osmena, Jovito Salonga, and the rest of the LP slate, the “Filipino masses” had “fully repudiated the fascist regime of Marcos.”

In September 1971, less than a month after Marcos’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, Gintong Silahis (1972), which had emerged out of the SDK and established itself as an independent national democratic drama group three months earlier, staged a play, Barikada, at UP Theater. Barikada was promoted as a play freely based on the events of 1–9 February 1971. The program for the event informs us that the make up for the Barikada performers was done by Beautifont, high fashion cosmetics, “distinctively formulated for the Filipina”; the next page was headlined “Destroy the state machinery of the ruling classes” (Gintong Silahis 1971). There was an anarchistic tone throughout the performance, calling for the destruction of the old culture and the smashing of the state, but never for the seizing of state power. Behn Cervantes staged the production, which was modeled on the style of Peking Opera, with choreography and songs entitled “Paper Tiger” (Tigreng Papel) and “The People Are What Matter” (Ang Tao ang Mahalaga). It concluded with fifty red flags waving throughout the auditorium and the singing of the Internationale. The event was sponsored by La Pacita Biscuits, and they staged repeat performances on 8–9 October (SDK 1971e, 2). Fernando Lopez, the vice president of the Philippines, locked in fierce political combat with Marcos, arranged for the play to be staged at his family’s prestigious Meralco Theater (Santos and Santos 2008, 119).[256]

The play focused entirely on the events at Diliman. By the end of the year the “commune” was the only portion of the barricades remembered. As was often the case, Diliman had become the focus of attention not because the events there were more dramatic but simply because it was the elite flagship campus of the state university.[257] While Mesina, whose presence at the barricades was almost accidental, is now commemorated at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, Abrenica and the others who died in downtown Manila in the street battles of 1–9 February have been forgotten.

Conclusion

There is a culture about the Communist Party of the Philippines and its affiliated organizations that is simultaneously inflected by amnesia and nostalgia. The KM, under the leadership of Jose Ma. Sison, had endorsed Ferdinand Marcos for president in 1965, but four years later they denounced him as a fascist and entered an alliance with the bourgeois opposition. They did not account for their prior support, but buried it: “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” This cultivated amnesia was combined with a nostalgia for an imagined past. Young people joining the party or its front organizations learn of the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune, events that are never understood historically, but simply appreciated as the great moral lessons of the past, examples of the revolutionary heroism of their predecessors. This appreciation is not entirely baseless. The youths and workers who fought in the battles of the 1960s and early 1970s were often heroic, proving themselves capable of self-sacrifice and endless labor. The best layers of an entire generation fought courageously, and many in the end were tortured and killed by a brutal dictator. But to what end? Here the only honest means of honoring the struggles of this generation is to subject to careful study and trenchant criticism the program and machinations of their leaders. Such an historical examination, to which this article is a small contribution, reveals that the sacrifices made by these youths and workers were first demanded and then dispensed with by Stalinism, which ensured that their lives were no more than grist on the millstone of dictatorship. Much of the Stalinist parties’ political authority among the masses derived from their claim to be Marxist; I am challenging that claim.

On examination, the barricades, particularly the affair known as the Diliman Commune, proved to be an unmitigated defeat for the KM and SDK, which lost almost all connection with the striking jeepney drivers and a great deal of support from the student body; as a direct result of the barricades, the SM lost the 1971–1972 campus elections. The barricades were taken down without a single demand being granted. They provided yet another pretext for Marcos’s declaration of martial law. At the end of nine days, at least one student was dead, another paralyzed, and many were wounded; if we include the University Belt barricades, the death toll grows to seven. The erection of the barricades was not a spontaneous expression of student anger or response to police encroachments. They were a calculated policy, an expression of the program of Stalinism, planned in advance and implemented by the leadership of the KM and SDK, with the motive of service to a section of the bourgeoisie that in 1971 was looking to topple Marcos and secure office for itself.

In September 1972, Inocente Campos was acquitted on all charges. The judge ruled that Campos “acted upon an impulse of an uncontrollable fear of an equal or greater injury” (PC 1972). Campos shot Mesina in the head, the judge argued, because he feared “a greater injury” than the death that he dealt to an unarmed 17-year-old. A week later, Marcos declared martial law.

Abbreviations Used

AB	Ang Bayan
AS	Arts and Sciences
AG	Artists Group
BP	Bandilang Pula, the publication of the Diliman Commune
CPP	Communist Party of the Philippines
FQS	First Quarter Storm
KM	Kabataang Makabayan
LP	Liberal Party
MPKP	Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino
NPA	New People’s Army
NPAA	Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista-Arkitekto
PC	Philippine Collegian, the campus newspaper of UP Diliman
PKP	Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas
PRP	Philippine Radical Papers
QCPD	Quezon City Police Department
SDK	Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan
SDKM	Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan Mendiola
SDS	Students for a Democratic Society
SM	Sandigang Makabansa
SMS	Samahan ng Makabayang Siyentipiko
UP	University of the Philippines
UPLB	UP Los Banos
UPSCA	UP Student Catholic Action

Notes

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Llanes, Ferdinand C., ed. 2012. Tibak rising: Activism in the days of martial law. Mandaluyong City: Anvil.

Lopez, Salvador P. 1971. Press statement, Feb. Box 10, Folder 12, Item 4. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

Malay, Armando J. 1982a. The UP barricades: In retrospect. Chapter I: 2. Campos fires gun. We Forum, 24–26 Sept.: 1, 6.

———. 1982b. The UP barricades: In retrospect, Chapter II: 4. Intrusion in the campus. We Forum, 29–30 Sept.: 1, 6.

———. 1982c. The UP barricades: In retrospect. Chapter III: Logs for the barricades. We Forum, 1–3 Oct.: 1, 6.

———. 1982d. The UP barricades: In retrospect. Chapter IV: The soliders are withdrawn. We Forum, 4–5 Oct.: 1, 8.

———. 1982e. The UP barricades: In retrospect. Chapter IV: Fear grips campus. We Forum, 6–7 Oct.: 1, 7.

———. 1982f. The UP barricades: In retrospect. Chapter V: The “liberated” media. We Forum, 8–10 Oct.: 1, 7.

———. 1982g. The UP barricades: In retrospect. Chapter V: The voice of DZUP. We Forum, 11–12 Oct.: 1, 6.

———. 1982h. The UP barricades: In retrospect. Chapter VI: Picking up the pieces. We Forum, 13–14 Oct.: 1, 6.

———. 1982i. The UP barricades: In retrospect, Chapter XII: Sen. Kalaw on the barricades, We Forum, 10–11 Nov.: 1, 6,

Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino (MPKP), 1970, People’s violence against state violence, 3 Mar, Box 10, Folder 29, Item 16, PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City,

———. 1971a, Oppose militarization of the UP campus, 2 Feb, Box 10, Folder 31, Item 4. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City,

———. 1971b, Kabakahin ang pasismo, ipagpatuloy ang pakikibaka laban sa mga monopolyong kompanya ng langis, at isulong ang pakikipaglaban sa imperyalismo, 3 Feb, Box 13, Folder 28, Item 1, PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino-UP (MPKP-UP), 1971a, On the KM-SDK “occupation” of UP, 10 Feb, Box 10, Folder 31, Item 3, PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City,

———. 1971b, Who the real gangsters are, 16 Feb, Box 10, Folder 31, Item 8, PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City,

Manzano, Enrico J, 1971, Tungo sa barikada ng lipunan, Philippine Collegian, 10 Feb,: 4,

Meimban, Adriel O, 1971, Liham, Philippine Collegian, 10 Feb,: 8,

Melencio, Cesar, 2010, Full quarter storms: Memoirs and writings on the Philippine left (1970–2010), Quezon City: Transform Asia, Inc,

Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), 1971, People reject US-Marcos rule, National Liberation Fortnightly, 26 Nov, Box 37, Folder 1, Item 1, PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City,

Nemenzo, Francisco Jr, 1984, Rectification process in the Philippine communist movement, In Armed Communist movements in Southeast Asia, ed, Lim Joo Jock and Vani S,, 71–105, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,

Palatino, Mong, 2008, Pagbabalik-tanaw sa Diliman commune, In Serve the people: Ang kasaysayan ng radikal na kilusan sa Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, ed, Bienvenido Lumbera, Judy M, Taguiwalo, Rolando B, Tolentino, Ramon G, Guillermo, and Arnold Alamon, 103–5, Quezon City: Ibon Books, Philippine Collegian (PC), 1971a, Welga ng tsuper maaaring maulit, 21 Jan: 1, 7,

———. 1971b, Ang Kilusan, 4 Feb,: 2,

———. 1971c, Idinaos, kongreso ng SDK, 4 Feb,: 1, 2,

———. 1971d, Sinalakay ang UP! Barikada, winasak, 4 Feb,: 1, 5,

———. 1971e, Ang Kilusan, 10 Feb,: 2,

———. 1971f, Nagbarikada rin sa Los Banos, 10 Feb,: 3,

———. 1971g, Bayan, laban sa presyo ng langis, 10 Feb,: 1, 9,

———. 1971h, Ang Kilusan, 18 Feb,: 2,

———. 1971i, 2 kahilingan ibinigay; Radio, press pinagamit, 18 Feb,: 1, 9,

———. 1971j, Diliman Historical Commission, binuo, 4 Mar,: 1, 4,

———. 1972, “A crime but no criminal”: CFI acquits Campos, 14 Sept,: 1, 2,

Quimpo, Susan F. and Nathan Gilbert Quimpo. 2012. Subversive lives: A family memoir of the Marcos years. Pasig City: Anvil.

Reyes, Ronaldo. 1971. [Memorandum]. 8 Feb. Box 15, Folder 5, Item 1. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

Rodrigo, Raul. 2006. Kapitan: Geny Lopez and the making of ABS-CBN. Quezon City: ABS-CBN Publishing.

———. 2007. The power and the glory: The story of the Manila Chronicle, 1945–1998. Pasig: Eugenio Lopez Foundation.

Rosca, Ninotchka. 1971. View from the left: Word War I. Asia Philippines Leader, 16 Apr.: 10–11, 44–45.

Rotea, Hermie. 1984. Marcos’ lovey Dovie. Los Angeles: Liberty Publishing.

Samahan ng Makabayang Siyentipiko (SMS). 1971. Support the strike and oppose campus fascism, 2 Feb. Box 15, Folder 32, Item 1. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK). 1971a. Sa mga kasamang tsuper, mag-aaral at mamamayan, 1 Feb. Box 15, Folder 18, Item 13. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

———. 1971b. Statement of the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan, 1 Feb. Box 15, Folder 18, Item 22. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

———. 1971c. Ika-4 ng Pebrero, 1971, 4 Feb. Box 15, Folder 18, Item 15. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

———. 1971d. On the style of work of Malacanang’s most loyal agent in Vinzons. The Partisan, 30

Sept. Box 37, Folder 17, Item 3. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

———. 1971e. Ibunyag at tuluyang itakwil ang kontra rebolusyonaryong MPKP — ahente ng reaksyon sa hanay ng kabataan! Bandilang Pula, July: 9–12. Box 22, Folder 2. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan UPCA Cultural Society (SDK-UPCACS). 1971. Crush puppet Umali’s reactionary ploy! On with the struggle for national democracy! 5 Jan. Box 15, Folder 23, Item 3. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

Sandigang Makabansa (SM). 1971. Ang sandigang makabansa, 25 Jan.: 4. Box 40, Folder 8, Item 1. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

Santos, Soliman M. and Paz Verdades M. Santos, eds. 2008. SDK: Militant but groovy: Stories of Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan. Pasig City: Anvil.

Scalice, Joseph. 2017. Crisis of revolutionary leadership: Martial law and the Communist parties of the Philippines, 1957–1974. PhD diss., University of California Berkeley. Online, https://doi. org/10.13140/RG.2.2.32960.58887.

Sison, Jose Ma. &&&[Amado Guerrero, pseud.] 1970. Political report to the Second Plenum of the First Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Philippine Collegian. 9 Dec.: 4–5.

Sison, Jose Ma. and Julieta de Lima Sison. 2008. Foundation for sustained development of the national democratic movement in the University of the Philippines. In Serve the people: Ang kasaysayanng radikal na kilusan sa Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, ed. Bienvenido Lumbera, Judy M. Taguiwalo, Rolando B. Tolentino, Ramon G. Guillermo, and Arnold Alamon, 43–62. Quezon City: Ibon Books,

Tagamolila, Antonio. 1971a. Peace was not the issue. Philippine Collegian, 27 Jan.: 6.

———. 1971b. The moment of truth. Philippine Collegian, 4 Feb.: 6.

———. 1971c. I. Victory will be ours. Philippine Collegian, 10 Feb.: 1.

Taguiwalo, Mario. 1971. Sonny. Philippine Collegian, 10 Feb: 9.

Taguiwalo, Mario and Rey Vea. 1971. The university as base for the cultural revolution. Philippine Collegian, 10 Feb.: 10, 9.

Tinig ng Mamamayan. 1971. Barikada, ayaw pa ring alisin, 10 Feb. Box 43, Folder 5, Item 1. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

Trotsky, Leon. 1971. The struggle against fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder.

University of the Philippines (UP) Gazette. 1971. Quezon City-U.P. police cooperation, 28 Feb.: 20–21. UP Student Catholic Action (UPSCA) Law Chapter. 1971. Panawagan, 5 Feb. Box 18, Folder 22, Item 1. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

UP Student Council. 1971. Oppose student fascism! Down with violent student activism, 2 Feb. Box 18, Folder 2, Item 30. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

UP Student Council and Samahan ng Kababaihan ng UP (SKUP). 1971. Oppose campus fascism! Support jeepney strike! 1 Feb. Box 18, Folder 2, Item 29. PRP Archive, University Library, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.

Vea, Rey. 1970. “5” at ang baril. Philippine Collegian, 11 Sept.: 3.

———. 1971. ‘Normalcy’. Philippine Collegian, 18 Feb.: 10.

Weekley, Kathleen. 2001. The Communist Party of the Philippines, 1968–1993: A story of its theory and practice. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

Author

Joseph Scalice is lecturer and postdoctoral researcher, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, 7233 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, California, 94702 USA. He specializes in the history of revolutionary politics in the Philippines, having published a critique of Reynaldo Ileto’s influential work, Pasyon and Revolution, in two articles: “Pasyon and Revolution Revisited: A Critique,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia (2018); and “Pamitinan and Tapusi: Using the Carpio Legend to Reconstruct Lower-class Consciousness in the Late Spanish Philippines,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2018). Scalice wrote his doctoral dissertation at UC Berkeley on the Communist parties of the Philippines in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their role in Marcos’s declaration of martial law in 1972. <jscalice@berkeley.edu>

66. Reversing the “Model”

Deleted reason: Not anarchist.

Subtitle: How Will the Millions Get Organized?

Author: Kim Moody

Topics: Labor Union, trade unions, syndicalism, labor notes

Date Published on T@L: 2021-09-28

Source: Chapter 6 of Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States (2022)

Notes: An earlier version of this essay appeared in: <spectrejournal.com/reversing-the-model>

The membership can only be a sounding board, even the delegates ... they cant make decisions.... The idea of wisdom emanating from the bottom is full of shit, not because they are stupid but because they have a job which is not running the union and knowing all the intricate business about it. Consequently their inability to come up with initiatives is limited.[258]

—Leon Davis, President, Hospital Workers’ Union, 1199

It seems fairly obvious that mass actions leading to social upheaval will require the organizing of the unorganized at Amazon and Walmart, the high-tech outfits and platforms, the nonunion steel minimills and auto plants, warehouses and unorganized truckers, the rest of the nations hospitals and sites of social reproduction, and other new and old industries that can provide the organized power and continuity to the sort of diverse upsurge already taking shape if the political impasse is to be broken. Breaking the impasse is inconceivable without a dynamic, powerful organized labor movement.

Yet, the pandemic has done massive damage to an already declining labor movement. In 2020 unions lost 428,000 private sector members. The largest hits were in hospitality and leisure, at 161,000 lost members, and manufacturing, down 110,000. The losses, of course, were mainly due to the sharp drop in employment in these two sectors. Ironically, this led to a slight increase in overall union density from 7.1 percent in 2019 to 7.2 percent. A surprising 77 percent of the decline was among white males, while Black, Latinx, and women workers made tiny gains.[259] Building the sort of powerful labor movement needed to break the impasse will obviously require a massive effort of a sort not seen since the 1930s. While many socialists would probably agree with that proposition, just how to go about that is a matter of controversy.

One of the most widely read and listened to experts on union organizing these days is Jane McAlevey, whose books, lectures, and online seminars have influenced many on the left.[260] An experienced organizer, McAlevey presents a well-worked-out model of successful organizing. One that, taken as a whole, is, however, itself controversial. Its advantage is that it seems practical and, indeed, many of her suggestions are well grounded. First is McAlevey s useful distinction between organizations that engage in advocacy and mobilization and those that engage in actual organizing. Advocacy is the sort of thing NGOs do that don’t really involve their typically poor clients themselves except in walk-on parts. Mobilization is the practice of many unions in which the members are occasionally activated for a campaign or even a strike and then sent back in silence to the workplace. UAW organizer and dissident Jerry Tucker used to call this the “spigot approach”—turning the flow of worker action on and off by command. McAlevey pretty much dismisses these approaches to social change and insists that organizing is meant to produce permanent, sustainable worker organization and power. This, of course, is one reason why people pay attention when she speaks or writes.

Central to all three of her books and her approach to revitalizing the labor movement is her model of organizing. This model, and she insists it is a model, can be found in schematic form in No Shortcuts[261] but is presented throughout these works in the context of gripping stories of her experiences as a union organizer, official, and consultant that bring the model to life. It has to be said, as well, that the organizing drives, contract negotiations, and campaigns she leads across these many pages, unlike many in recent decades, end up winning.

The model she advocates does not exist in a vacuum. It is explicidy counterposed to the more narrow approach she attributes to legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky and that is employed by many US unions, according to McAlevey. This has particularly been the case in the years since John Sweeney became head of the AFL-CIO in the mid-1990s in an attempt to revive a slumping labor movement. Since it is painfully obvious that neither the top-down reforms implemented by Sweeney’s “New Labor,” as she calls it, nor the limited innovations in organizing tactics have succeeded in turning things around for the labor movement as a whole, McAlevey s counterposed organizing model has a lot of credibility.

The purpose of the model, McAlevey insists, is to activate workers so they can express and use the power they have in both the workplace and community. It is not simply to increase union numbers at any cost, as her former employer the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) often prioritizes, but to increase worker power. The initiative in her examples comes from the organizer whose job is to identify and develop the organic leaders in the workplace. This is not a simple task. Organic leaders are not necessarily the first person to step forward during an organizing drive, much less the “loudmouth” who sometimes stands up to the boss. Rather it is the person in the work group to whom others look for advice or help in various aspects of life as well as on the job. Such natural leaders may be anti-union, as some of her experiences reveal, but it is the job of the organizer to win them over if possible. Identifying such leaders is only the first step. She cites former syndicalist and Communist Party leader in the 1930s William Z. Foster to the effect that, “Organizers do not know how to organize by instinct, but must be carefully taught.”[262] So, the next task is to train new leaders in organizing methods.

Part of the training of organic leaders and, more generally, the rank and file is the continuous charting or mapping of the workplace to locate the strengths and weaknesses of the organization and campaign. This becomes the basis for further actions. Along with this are what she calls “structure tests.” These are essentially escalating collective actions that create confidence, demonstrate and test power, and build a solid majority of about 80 percent in order to win a representation election or eventually 90 percent to carry out a winning strike. Along with this goes “inoculation,” preparing workers for the lies and barriers management or their hired union-busting guns will throw up to thwart the union drive. So far, all of this is pretty well known at least to the best union and workplace organizers. These ideas, without the official organizers’ “lingo”—to use McAlevey’s own term—can be found in Secrets of a Successful Organizer, published by the publication and worker education center Labor Notes, which draws on the experience of rank-and-file workplace organizers, activists, and leaders as well as union staff organizers.[263]

What is more original is McAlevey’s approach to the postrepresentation phase of union organizing: the negotiation and campaign to win a first contract. As she points out, winning the first contract is a major stumbling block and almost half of new unions fail to gain a first agreement. Most unions separate the representation phase from that of negotiating the contract. Once the union has won recognition, the organizers are pulled and sent elsewhere and a new crew of professional negotiators along with lawyers are brought in. After all, negotiating a contract these days is complex. McAlevey argues convincingly that the two phases need to be continuous and connected in terms of personnel because, for one thing, the organizers have presumably developed the trust of the workers. For another, the employers and their unscrupulous hired guns don’t stop fighting, lying, and throwing up barriers once negotiations start. Quite the opposite.

Not only does McAlevey insist that the organizers must still be in charge to lead the fight, but that negotiations should be open to any and all members. Many unions have rank-and-file “negotiating committees,” but these famously sit in the hall or the next room, forced to thrive on pizzas while the officials and lawyers do the real negotiating. McAlevey brings the workers and their leaders into the negotiating session. Some are trained to present demands, many come and go at lunch or break time. The horrified faces of management that she describes and their ineffective protests at such unconventional interventions not only build the solidarity of the workers, but for the readers who haven’t experienced anything quite like this make for terrific reading.

All of these organizing techniques, McAlevey argues, need to be in a strategic context. Simply responding to random “hot shops” where workers contact a union for help will not expand labors power sufficiendy to make a difference[264] Union campaigns should be “industrial or geographic” in nature. In particular, she emphasizes service industries that can’t be moved abroad, notably education and health care, which also have the advantage of close community connections. Her own experience in health care organizing is a clear example of an industrial orientation. In such strategic campaigns, for example, experienced organizers can draw “on workers in the same union but in a different unionized facility, who have experience winning hard-to-win NLRB elections and big strikes.”[265] This strategic emphasis seems sensible, but certainly leaves an awful lot of unorganized workers who don’t fit in the strategy de jour out of the picture.

Despite the vivid narrative and the positive ideas, as I read through these three books, I became more aware of McAlevey’s emphasis on professional organizer (or officer or consultant) initiative in virtually every phase of union life. Although I had been on a panel with McAlevey and heard her speak a few years ago, I hadn’t picked up this consistent, at times overarching, domination by staff organizers in representation elections, contract campaigns, and even strikes. Despite my own longtime emphasis on rank-and-file initiative and power, like most people concerned with the future of unions I recognize that organizers are an important part of the labor movement. I even did a stint as one back in the day. They are often thrust onto the front lines of combat with capital, make personal sacrifices, and do, indeed, help workers get organized to gain representation, win an initial contract, conduct a victorious strike, and sometimes build workplace organization. To be fair, in No Short Cuts McAlevey attacks the notion put forward by some organizing directors that “the workers often get in the way of union growth deals.”[266] Nevertheless, throughout the three books it is professional organizer initiative that recurs again and again and plays the central and dominant role in all the campaigns she is directly involved in, and even in some cases where this emphasis is misplaced, such as her discussions of the teachers’ unions in Chicago and Los Angeles.[267] The initiative of coundess “untrained” workplace organizers and the part played by experience in their development is by and large absent.

Simple numbers and common sense dictate that unions cannot possibly be revitalized, democratized, and massively expanded through the initiative of professional organizers and other staffers alone. They simply cannot do everything and be everywhere, every day in a movement of millions trying to organize tens of millions. Failures aside, their successes at best produce incremental growth that cannot even keep up with membership attrition. Even the multiplication of such organizers several times over, though it would help matters, could not possibly produce the sort of exponential growth in both numbers and power needed to shift the balance of class forces that McAlevey and the rest of us desperately seek.

Without the grassroots initiative, day in and day out, of coundess unidentified workplace organizers be they organic leaders, activists, or interested members with tides no grander than shop steward or local union officer—if that—unions cannot function let alone grow. McAlevey s idea of using unionized workers to approach the unorganized in the same industry is obviously a good one. But if this is left only to the initiative of labor’s too few, overworked organizers it won’t be nearly enough. Worse yet, if this sort of worker-to-worker organizing occurs only with the permission of top leaders, which is typically the case, it will never be enough or display the sort of initiative that can impress the unorganized and give them a sense of ownership in the union. Clearly, it will take much more of the sort of worker self-activity and initiative such as we saw among industrial workers in the 1930s and public employees in the 1960s and 1970s, and have seen recently in the 2018–19 strikes of education workers, as well as the first signs of action by workers at Amazon, Instacart, Uber, Google, and other corners of the digitalizing economy in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Later, I will look in greater detail at this question. To investigate this problem further, however, we need to look at what McAlevey sees as the roots of union decline over the last half century.

“Who Killed the Unions?”

This is the tide of a key chapter in McAlevey’s most recent book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, the most “big picture” of her three books. The bulk of her answer to this question is straightforward: Taft-Hartley and subsequent court decisions, professional union-busters, and globalization. Each of these has played an important role in throwing up barriers to organizing—at least in those all too few cases where workers or a union even attempt to seek representation. Taft-Hartley gives the boss a legal advantage and the unionbusters provide the muscle and intimidation, while globalization allows employers to threaten to move abroad and close up shop. As the record shows, these are, indeed, frequently effective in derailing organizing drives and first-contract campaigns. This story is true as far as it goes, although it downplays the far more persistent role of management in fighting and demoralizing unions and workers day in and day out. It is also the official union leaderships explanation for the decline, retreat, and crisis of the organizations they lead. The problem with this story is that it lets the top leadership, the union hierarchy off the hook for their own role in the crisis of organized labor, certainly in the US.

This is not a question of good or bad people. All union leaders are not the same. Some are clearly much better than others, and that can make a difference. The problem lies in the whole practice of bureaucratic business unionism that emerged in the US most clearly during and after World War II. Taft-Hartley and McCarthyism played a role in this to be sure. But business unionism as a philosophy and practice had its roots way back in the era of Samuel Gompers and his “pure and simple” unionism. The post- WWII expansion and modernization of this old view, however, was based primarily in the simultaneous abandonment of the workplace and labor process in favor of wages and benefits—the US “private welfare state.” This, in turn, led to an increased insulation of the leadership, administration, and the conduct of bargaining from the membership. Along with this came the unions turn from a broader social agenda, their political defeat, and Taft-Hartley. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein has controversially but correctly called this turn away from efforts to win broad social gains politically toward the private welfare state the “product of defeat, not victory.”[268]

By the early 1950s, this defeat included productivity bargaining that linked wages and benefits to worker productivity increases and hence speedup and, more recendy, lean production, extreme work standardization, digitally driven tasks, surveillance, etc. Even before this, the inclusion in most contracts of “management’s rights” (to control the workplace) and “no-strike” (during the life of the contract) clauses became a feature of bargaining that surrendered the unions’ ability to fight over working conditions and their members’ ability to resist through direct action.

Instead, union members got the multilayered grievance procedure that postponed setdement and stripped workers of a major source of power. McAlevey is justifiably critical of such grievance procedures, but doesn’t recognize their roots in this fundamental compromise with management. The surrender of shop-floor power to management also involved the sidestepping of labor’s own racial problems in its organized work sites, which, among other things, led to the failure of “Operation Dixie,” the CIO’s attempt to organize the South in the late 1940s, further undermining labor’s growth and bargaining power.

All of this led to a decade or so of worker rebellion in the 1960s and 1970s by Black and white workers often inspired by the civil rights movement and characterized by rank-and-file caucuses, Black caucuses, wildcat strikes, contract rejections, and the energizing of a new generation of industrial workers. With few exceptions, the union leadership did everything possible to crush the rebellion, helping to deplete rather than harness the energy of this social upsurge.[269] Such growth as labor experienced in that period came largely from the self-initiative of public sector workers, a process I participated in twice as a rank-and-file volunteer activist and leader and once as a staff organizer.

The decline of the unions in terms of numbers, organizing efforts and victories, and the use of the strike accelerated in the aftermath of this failed rebellion as union leaders turned to wage and benefit concessions, labormanagement cooperation schemes, two-tier wage systems, and an increased reliance on right-ward-moving Democratic politicians and pressure tactics that did not depend on worker self-activity. This disarmed the labor movement as a whole without in any way blunting capital’s offensive against the unions and workers in general. In 1979, United Auto Workers’ president Doug Fraser referred to capital’s offensive as “one-sided class ”[270] war.

Among the shocks that introduced labors retreat and the entire neoliberal era were the 1980–82 double-dip recession that destroyed millions of unionized manufacturing and other jobs, the Chrysler bailout and associated union concessions which ended pattern bargaining in auto, setting the precedent for other industries, and Reagans firing of the striking air traffic controllers. But it was the subsequent behavior and practices of the union leadership of the major unions, with few exceptions, that further institutionalized long existing inclinations toward class collaboration. This, in turn, has made it even more difficult to organize the unorganized, a side of the story missing in McAlevey analysis of union decline.

Unions are contradictory organizations that are both institutions and social movements meant to combat the pressures of capital on wages and conditions.[271] Their tendency toward bureaucratization in unions is not an example of Robert Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy,” nor an inevitable “Weberian” cure for large organizations. The problem stems from the leadership’s position as negotiators caught between the demands of capital not only for lower immediate costs, but for the long-term profitability and survival of the business in the vortex of real capitalist competition, on the one hand, and the needs of the membership, on the other. To deal with this contradictory situation the elected leadership tends to institutionally insulate itself and its institutional resources from membership pressure while nonetheless having occasionally to call on that membership to give it the power it needs in negotiations to resist management’s pressure up to and including a strike. It is this dilemma that gives the “union”—that is, the top leadership in particular—the appearance of being a “third party” that McAlevey refers to in No Shortcuts.[272]

McAlevey, of course, is right that the union is not a “third party,” as some management experts would have it, but a working-class institution. Nevertheless, it is one that necessarily attempts to mediate the contradictions inherent in the capital-labor relationship. This is one reason why almost all the “reforms” and “new” tactics of the 1990s and beyond implemented by the officialdom have emphasized forms of pressure that bypassed the self-activity of the membership: corporate and “leverage” campaigns; the fake counterposition of “organizing” and “service” models; union mergers that give the appearance of growth while increasing bureaucracy; the conglomerate nature and fragmented departmentalism of most unions resulting from mergers; the recruitment of former student radicals rather than members as organizers; “neutrality” or, as McAlevey calls them, “election procedure agreements” with management to facilitate organizing; the election of Democrats of any sort at all levels; and the insane split in the movement with the formation of the Change to Win federation in 2005.

In this context, it is also a fact that in most unions organizers are accountable to the union officialdom that hired them, not to the membership or those they are organizing. Some organizers manage a good deal of autonomy and initiative, as McAlevey did in her time with the SEIU in Las Vegas vividly described in Raising Expectations. Nevertheless, organizers are responsible to those who pay their wages, send them where they want them, and supply or deny them resources to carry out their assignment. There is, of course, no law that organizers cannot be chosen by the union membership just as the leaders are, but that would rub against the grain of business unionism even at its best.

There is an alternative or at least a strong countertendency to this longstanding trend toward bureaucratization of the unions and the routinization of collective bargaining away from the influence of the membership. It lies in union democracy stemming first of all from direct democracy and worker-initiative in the workplace, most commonly in the form of elected and collective workplace organization—not just isolated stewards buried in casework. The “representative democracy” characteristic of most unions is insufficient to create leadership and staff accountability because it involves only the occasional exercise of leadership selection in which the incumbent leaders have control of union resources and lines of communication. More often than not, the officialdom is capable of constructing a machine or loyal network strong enough to prevent the erosion of their power, even if the individuals at the top change from time to time. It is for this reason that simply running slates against incumbent leaders seldom changes things significantly.[273]

This is where the idea of rank-and-file movements based in strong workplace organization, caucuses, and networks that connect the various work sites comes into the picture. I will discuss this below in the context of McAlevey’s discussion of the reform movements in the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions as well as the 2018–19 upsurge in teacher strikes. But first, let’s look at the final point in her explanation of “who killed the unions?” It’s one of the top leadership’s most effective alibies— globalization.

Imports, Outsourcing, and the “Other”

One of the most common explanations for labor’s decline and retreat in the United States coming from union organs, leaders, and sometimes friendly think tanks and academics is the loss of American jobs to overseas outsourcing and/or imports. To be sure, fingers are pointed at the employers who do this outsourcing and importing, but the focus is inevitably on the foreign “other.” The foreign perpetrators have changed somewhat over time from the Japanese steel and automakers of the 1970s and 1980s, to the Mexican maquiladoras of the 1990s and 2000s, and most recently, of course, the Chinese who seem to make everything and be everywhere even though they account for just one-fifth of US imports. The story has just enough truth to be credible. Jobs in some industries such as textiles and garment have been all but wiped out by imports, while inputs to other goods production have gone overseas.

The Case of Steel

One of the unions that routinely points to imports as the major source of lost jobs is the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). Steelworker employment has, indeed, plunged in the last four decades or more as has the steel membership of the USWA. Imports are one factor in this job loss, but by no means the only or even the most important cause. One is productivity. To put it simply, the workforce in US steel production fell by about 65 percent from the early 1980s to 2017, while the “man-hours” required to produce a ton of steel fell by 85 percent. The major reason for this was the rise of electric arc (AR) “minimills,” which require far less labor per ton than traditional Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) mills.

Imports rose to about a quarter of US steel consumption by the 1980s and to an average 30 percent between 2012 and 2018, after which they fell back to 25 percent. Minimills, on the other hand, have risen from 31 percent of domestic production in the 1980s to around 60–65 percent in the last two decades. This is about 50 percent of total consumption, a far larger share than imports. Employment in BOF mills, where almost all union members work, of course fell over the years. What seems clear is that more of these lost union jobs fell to productivity, on the one hand, and the shift of domestic production to non-union minimills, on the other, than to imports. The USWA did little to resist job reorganization or to organize the minimills.[274]

One of the problems with citing imports, including outsourced intermediate inputs, as an explanation for the loss of union jobs, however, is that US manufacturing output as measured by the Federal Reserve grew by about 130 percent, or a fairly healthy 3.5 percent yearly average, over the neoliberal period from 1982 to 2019.[275] So, even if imports took a significant bite out of US production, growth on this scale should have created jobs. That is, imports could explain why domestic production grew somewhat more slowly than in the “golden” and more pre-global era of the 1950s and 1960s, but they cannot account for such a massive loss of manufacturing jobs within this level of growing domestic output. The reason for this scale of job loss lay primarily in the double whammy of recurrent recessions resulting from capitalist turbulence and productivity gains from management s application of lean production and work-pacing technology. That is, the contradictory course of capital accumulation, on the one hand, and management-led class struggle, on the other, drastically reduced employment in manufacturing despite significant growth in output. Table VIII shows the loss in manufacturing production jobs during the four major recessions of the neoliberal era.

Table VIII: Manufacturing Production Jobs Lost During Recessions

Years*	Manufacturing
1979–1982	2,751,000
1990–1991	663,000
2001–2003	2,198,000
2008–2010	1,797,000
	Total 7,409,000

* From January of first year to December of last.

Source: BLS, “Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Total Private, Manufacturing,” Data, Tables & Calculators by Subject, 2018, https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab6.htm;

National Bureau of Economic Research, “US Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions,” 2012, https://data.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html.

If repeated recessions eliminated jobs on a monumental scale, significant productivity growth between recessions prevented the recovery of the vast majority of these jobs once growth resumed. Between 1990 and 2000 productivity in manufacturing rose annually by 4.1 percent, while from 2000 to 2007, just before the Great Recession, it increased by an average of 4.7 percent a year.[276] This was sufficient to hold down job growth despite a significant increase in manufacturing output per year from recession trough to recovery highpoint in the 1980s (4.1 percent) and 1990s (6.4 percent). From 2001 to 2007 output grew by an annual average of only 2.8 percent, compared to 4.1 percent for productivity, costing some 2 million jobs even before the next recession. From 2009 to 2019 output grew by 2.4 percent a year and productivity increased by about 2.5 percent so that manufacturing employment grew only slowly by about 1 percent a year, mosdy in lower-productivity jobs.[277]

In the case of the 2020 COVID-19 recession over 1 million production and nonsupervisory manufacturing jobs were lost between February and April as the virus and lockdown took hold, according to BLS figures. By the end of the third quarter in September the number of jobs was still over half a million below the February level despite a 12 percent increase in output. The culprit was a well above average productivity increase of 4.6 percent.[278] The embrace of labor-management cooperation by union leaders and the acceptance of lean production and work-intensifying technology that enabled these levels of productivity cost millions of jobs.

Pinning all this job loss on “globalization” lets the labor officialdom off the hook in two damaging ways. First it reinforces the sort of labor nationalism that sees the foreign “other” rather than the home-based boss as the culprit. At its worst, this has been expressed in the “Buy American” slogan of the 1970s and 1980s, a lingering sentiment that Trump has played effectively. Even at its most liberal where, for example, concerns for the negative impact of NAFTA on Mexican workers in the maquiladora plants are sometimes expressed, this approach still encourages nationalist sentiments and takes the fight for secure and decent employment out of the hands of workers and into those of the lobbyists and legislators who are supposed to stem this tide of foreign goods with “fair trade.”

Second, while even the strongest of unions with the best of leaders could do litde in the context of collective bargaining about capitalism’s tendency toward recurrent crises, they could certainly have done a good deal about labor intensification resulting from lean production, and the work-pacing and surveillance technology that prevented the recovery of jobs between recessions. Instead, for nearly four decades most union toplevel leaderships have engaged in joint “problem-solving” and cooperation with management, wage and benefit concessions, strike-avoidance tactics, one-sided political dependency, appeals to nationalism, and their own form of “social distancing” from the membership. Throughout these books, McAlevey’s criticism of this type of union leader who has been the norm for decades is focused primarily on Andy Stern at the national level of SEIU and his associates. For all her contempt of some other top leaders and “clueless” unions, McAlevey lets the majority of the contemporary labor officialdom off the hook on all these counts.

CIO “Model”?

McAlevey sees her model of organizing as rooted in the CIO’s “high- participation model anchored in deep worker solidarities and cooperative engagement in class struggle.”[279] Though high-participation and solidarity were certainly central to the birth of the new industrial unions of the 1930s that eventually formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), to call the events that led to this a “model” is a stretch to say the least. This turbulent upsurge bore little resemblance to a well-organized and conducted NLRB or “election procedure agreement” (neutrality) representation election, collective bargaining campaign, or even the “model” strikes that McAlevey describes. Rather it arose from a mass grassroots-initiated strike movement that began in 1933 when the number of strikes more than doubled and that of strikers grew by over three and a half times, most without any official union leadership. This disorderly strike wave would continue through to its highpoint in 1937 when the victory of General Motors workers’ unconventional and illegal sit-down strikes turned the tide in favor of the new unions.[280]

The course of events that led to that victory doesn’t resemble that oudined in McAlevey’s model or that of most representation campaigns in recent decades. As I wrote in the introduction for the republication of Sidney Fine’s classic Sit-Down:

The order of events in Flint in 1936–37 were the opposite: build the union in the workplace among those willing to join, take action according to plan even with a minority membership, demonstrate the power of the union, win recognition and bargaining, and recruit a majority.[281]

I am not suggesting this will necessarily work in today’s circumstances, but that as circumstances change so might the way and order in which workers organize themselves. Like those of automobiles, organizing “models” can get out of date.

During the first three or so years of the upsurge of the early 1930s, the as yet unidentified or developed “organic leaders” and activists in hundreds of mines, mills, and factories led their fellow workers into action and organization without waiting for the professional organizers to arrive. This was the case even when in 1933 John L. Lewis sent his (often leftist) organizers into the coalfields in anticipation of the passage of Roosevelt’s Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Relations Act (NIRA),which was supposed to grant the right to organize. As recent research by historians

Michael Goldfield and Cody Melcher has shown, his organizers reported in 1933 that “the miners had been organizing on their own.” As noted in chapter 5, labor historians have found that the coalminers had organized themselves, while steelworkers had joined the old Amalgamated Iron and Steel-workers by the thousands and struck before the passage of the NIRA in 1933.[282] This was even more the case in other industries like auto, rubber, and electrical goods where there was no pre-existing national union —at best federal locals of the AFL which rapidly proved ineffective and were abandoned by the workers.[283]

When the upsurge in auto began in 1933–35, the Communist organizers Bob Travis and Wyndham Mortimer, whom McAlevey cites, and the Socialist activists and organizers she doesn’t, Kermit Johnson (in Chevy 4) and Roy Reuther (Travis’s assistant in 1936–37), were rank-and- filers in various plants around the Midwest. While they were already leaders and organizers in their workplaces, Travis in Toledo, Mortimer in Cleveland, and Reuther in Detroit became staffers in Flint only after autoworkers across the Midwest had been in motion for almost three years. In other words, that era’s “organic leaders” and activists stepped forward on their own as rank-and-file organizers, sometimes as part of worker-based political tendencies well before there were any full-time organizers. Along with the key role played by radical rank-and-file workplace leaders, the birth of the CIO was a classic example of collective worker self-activity.

More particularly, McAlevey credits her organizing techniques to Hospital Workers’ Union Local 1199 prior to the merger of a majority of its local unions with the SEIU in 1998. Though her direct experience was with 1199 New England, which covers Connecticut and Rhode Island, she attributes the organizing model to the union’s founding Local 1199 in New York under the leadership of Leon Davis. 1199 is, of course, famous for its militancy, atypical social unionism, “Bread and Roses” cultural program, embrace of the civil rights movement, and endorsement by Martin Luther King Jr., among other things. 1199’s founding leaders, Leon Davis and Elliott Godoff, were Communists who originally formed a union of pharmacists in the 1930s. Their Communist-led union then organized hospital workers in New York City beginning in the late 1950s, before the air trails of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee had been folly swept away by the winds of a new era of revolt —quite an achievement.

The subsequent history of 1199, however, does not reveal a democratic union adept at training grassroots leaders, at least above the workplace delegate (shop steward) level. When Davis retired in 1982, the union fell into a decade of leadership crisis as first Davis’s handpicked successor, Doris Turner, and then her replacement Georgianna Johnson proved unprepared and incapable of leading or uniting the union. This was primarily because they had been given little leadership experience or responsibility, which remained in the hands of Davis and other top leaders. This story has been told in detail in Upheaval in the Quiet Zone, a history of 1199 by Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg that, oddly enough, McAlevey recommends.[284] What it revealed was that despite its elected delegate system of one delegate per twenty-five workers, 1199 was not a particularly democratic union, nor did it attempt to bargain over the nature of hospital work, or as Fink and Greenberg put it, “pressed no claims for work reorganization” and limited its bargaining to wages and benefits.[285] In both regards, it was, despite its militancy and social movement characteristics, fairly conventional in its organizational and bargaining practices. It was, in fact, a union with a highly centralized leadership in the person of Leon Davis, who said:

The membership can only be a sounding board, even the delegates ... they can’t make decisions.... The idea of wisdom emanating from the bottom is full of shit, not because they are stupid but because they have a job which is not running the union and knowing all the intricate business about it. Consequently, their inability to come up with initiatives is limited.[286]

This, of course, is the more frequently unspoken assumption of business union leaders throughout the American labor movement. It is the central reason that genuine leadership development is not a part of most union cultures above routine stewards’ training and why leadership transitions are mosdy managed affairs even though there is an election. In the case of 1199 it led not only to a decade of internal chaos and racial conflict, but to this unions eventual subordination to the even more bureaucratic structure and bizarre leadership of the SEIU under Andy Stern. Ironically, this kind of all too typical top-down leadership also means that all those “organic leaders” back in the workplace never really have the opportunity to take initiative beyond grievance filing or to learn of the “complexities” that are the monopoly of the inner sanctum.

This doesn’t mean that the organizing “model” proposed by McAlevey is wrong per se in today’s limited context. What it does mean is that, by itself, it is insufficient to produce the kind of democratic, workplace-based, member-led unions, like those of the early CIO, needed to take on capital, expand, act as the backbone of the broader social upsurge, and lay the basis for bigger political changes. It should be obvious that most of today’s unions in the US have failed to grow and win because they are bureaucratically incapable of deploying the collective power of the members beyond the framework of conventional bargaining and equally conventional strike strategies and tactics. There are exceptions in a number of the effective strikes of the last few years, or even a longer period, but they are exceptions. There is much more to winning a strike these days than just getting the 90 percent participation McAlevey proposes. The question then arises, one that McAlevey does not address despite her discussion of West Virginia, Chicago, and Los Angeles teachers’ strikes: How we are to make our unions suitable for class struggle in an era in which the forces arrayed against workers are more massive than ever?

The question is: How or even if we are to transform most of todays bureaucratic unions into democratic organizations with genuinely accountable officials and staff? How are we to gain collective membership power beyond occasional “participation”? How are we to get unions in which workplace leaders are allowed to lead and there is a culture of debate and dissent rather than conformity in the name of “unity,” as well as an atmosphere in which rank-and-file initiative in the fight with capital is encouraged? There are plenty of examples of efforts to democratize unions and improve their ability to fight the boss. These range from large-scale ones like the Teamsters’ reform movement that nearly toppled the Hoffa bureaucracy in 2017 to scores of local rank-and-file caucuses and movements, the best-known example of which is, of course, the Coalition of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) that toppled the old guard of the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010. What then does McAlevey say about this and other aspects of the democratic upsurge of teacher militancy and organization of the past several years?

Reversing the “Model”

It would be unthinkable these days to write a book on US unions without mentioning the great teachers’ rebellion of 2018–20. While McAlevey doesn’t present this as the industry-wide upsurge it has become, she does include accounts of the strike of the West Virginia education workers and the reform movements in the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). To my mind, these important struggles have more in common with the real CIO upsurge from 1933–37 and that of public sector workers and rank-and-file rebels in the 1960s and 1970s than most union struggles these days. These were struggles initiated, organized, and led in the first instance not by professional organizers, but by workers who had “a job which is not running the union,” as Leon Davis so indelicately put it, yet were nonetheless organizers in the full sense of that word. Only after winning election to top positions and initiating the process of transforming the union did they hire full-time organizers to help firm up the union and prepare for the subsequent strikes.

Despite all the stressful hours teachers put in both in and out of school these days, these self-selected leaders and activists managed to organize grassroots caucuses, community alliances, stronger workplace organizations, and mass strikes that have rippled through the US education system. Grassroots leaders from West Virginia and half a dozen other “red” states, along with the successful caucus-based union takeovers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and partially in Massachusetts, and the formation of a national rank-and-file teachers’ caucus, the United Caucuses of Rank-and- File Educators (UCORE), have changed the picture of teacher unionism dramatically in a few short years.

It is worth noting, therefore, that in the case of the Chicago and Los Angeles examples McAlevey discusses, the order of her “model” is reversed. First the “untrained” rank-and-file workers organize, lead a series of fights (structure tests?), and take over. Only then are the full-time organizers hired, most of whom themselves come from the ranks and have no formal training but a good deal of experience.[287] In these examples, and many others, it was in fact “wisdom emanating from the bottom” that made the elevation of struggle and the transformation and democratization of the union possible. McAlevey, of course, knows that workers can develop leadership skills in the course of struggle. But for her this seems to be something exceptional and “extraordinary.” She writes of the workers at the Smithfield packing plant in North Carolina with a tone of surprise, “As the story of this fight will show, the intensity of the previous fight made some of the workers’ leaders extraordinarily skilled, because of their experience in struggle.[288] That struggle involved two mass wildcat strikes in 2006 led by the immigrant Latinx workers in the plant before the organizer from the United Food and Commercial Workers arrived.

The “model” McAlevey proposes is less a replica of the early CIO’s rise than an effort to stretch the essentially restraining and routinized Wagner Act/Taft-Hartley framework of industrial relations to its limits. For decades, however, rank-and-file initiative in this context has been muted by a combination of the monopolization of real decision-making at the top, the routinization of bargaining and shop floor grievance handling, nostrike and management’s rights clauses in most contracts, the ceremonial and boring nature of most union meetings and conventions, and has been further paralyzed by the fear generated by the economic insecurity of the neoliberal era. Substituting greater and more skilled organizer initiative cannot undo this routinized institutional framework by itself.

In this context, the attempt to find more effective ways to organize and fight can be traced to the debate over organizing that began in the 1990s, inspired by victories like the Los Angeles Justice for Janitors campaign in 1990 and the ascent of John Sweeney’s “New Voice” team in 1995. It was carried further in the works of Kate Bronfenbrenner, Tom Juravich, Ruth Needleman, Bruce Nissen, Bill Fletcher Jr., and many others, as well as in the pages of Labor Notes and books it has published. At least two conclusions followed from that research and debate in terms of unionization drives: membership involvement in organizing produced more representation wins, and community support can make a difference.[289] That is, when these practices themselves do not just become more routinized rituals or temporary “mobilizations” in a top-down “strategy,” as often happens.

The ideas McAlevey is proposing add to the best of these conclusions whatever their actual origins. They have been and will be used to extract victories from time to time. Nevertheless, even taken together all these innovations in organizing have not turned things around. On the contrary, they have at best contributed to the rearguard resistance to American labors continued retreat in the face of relendess employers’ aggression. So, we have to ask if they are sufficient for both the conditions and the possibilities that have emerged in recent years and are now taking shape? If not, what can we point to that might make a real difference?

Much has changed in the US labor movement and the context in which it struggles to survive over the past three or four decades. The working class and union membership are more racially diverse and women play a much larger role in both. Most unions have reversed the antiimmigrant positions many held prior to the acceleration of immigration after the mid-1980s. At the same time, the very nature of work and the labor process has morphed yet again from simple lean production to its digitally driven reign of super-standardization (eat your heart out Frederick Taylor), surveillance, and work intensification. This transformation of work now embraces virtually all types of labor. The increasing tendency of educated “millennials” to be pushed down into the working class brings a new source of energy but also uncertainty about one’s social or class identity. The multiple connections of the production of goods and services have been tightened by the development of a global, information-driven logistics infrastructure that didn’t exist even at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

All of this can seem overwhelming. Yet, some of these changes also present new opportunities for working-class organization and action. The tightening of work and the connections between workplaces, between goods producers and service producers, and their key points of convergence in major urban and metropolitan areas has rendered employers more vulnerable.[290] McAlevey makes note of this briefly, but it is an aspect of contemporary capitalism that needs analytical development as a strategic framework.[291] The downward mobility of so many “millennials” brings some new energy to the digitalized, sometimes irregular or platformed workforce from younger workers who are not that different from todays teacher insurgents. At the same time, increased racial diversity and the growing role of women often give todays struggles a more representative, universal, and solidaristic character than many of those in previous eras.

What may prove to be the most important development in creating a renewed labor movement, however, is the increase in worker self-activity found across the various divisions in the workforce. As David McNally has shown, this has increasingly taken the form of mass strikes across the world and by many different groups of workers and others, a major sign of changing times.[292] In the US, the teachers’ movement is the most obvious example of this, but it is evident in the rise of nurse militancy and unionism as well. Direct actions by immigrant workers that go back to the 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” and Smithfield strikes McAlevey discusses, but arise almost continuously in unexpected corners of the economy such as small actions at Amazon as well as larger ones in the traditional “pastures of plenty” such as Washington State’s apple orchards. Perhaps most unexpected, of course, are the many signs of worker selfactivity that have arisen amidst the twin crises of renewed recession-cum- depression and the COVID-19 pandemic that accelerated it. Workers at Amazon, for example, have gone where traditional unions feared to tread. The worker-initiated Amazonians United has engaged in “deep organizing,” as they call it, forming locals across the country, contacts around the world, and building on small actions (structure tests?) with an approach in which there are no professional organizers and that mixes up McAlevey’s order of things.[293]

While it may seem remote from union activity, even the mass widespread protests at the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis represent a form of self-activity that is likely to influence events beyond even the protests’ immediate focus on the depth of racism and police brutality in the US. Urban upheavals, protests, and riots were an integral part of the rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s. Black workers who rebelled in the streets of Detroit in 1967 were among those who struck and formed Black or integrated caucuses in the auto plants in the following years. My own experience in both public sector organizing in the 1960s and rank- and-file activity and a very long strike of telephone workers in the early 1970s convinced me of the impact Black militancy had on the thinking and actions of both Black and white workers in that period.

Furthermore, the protests and rioting in response to George Floyds murder have been more visibly multiracial than those in the 1960s or even Ferguson. To a greater degree than in previous protests and riots over police murders of Black people, those over George Floyd’s death have had more union support, although many top leaders including Rich Trumka of the AFL-CIO stopped short of criticizing the police “unions” for their complicity in defending killer cops.[294] Given the intensity of these mass demonstrations, there’s no reason to doubt that today’s protesters and rioters will return to their jobs cleaning the offices of the rich, assisting the sick in hospitals, stacking shelves in a supermarket, or picking and packing in a warehouse with anything but “attitude.” Protest and militancy are contagious. Just as the upsurge that began in Ferguson created a new wave of activists and gave birth to Black Lives Matter, so this latest rebellion in the streets by working-class people may create unknown workplace leaders and activists who will be disinclined to take the boss’s shit anymore.

This huge outpouring across the US and the world saw a multitude of handmade signs and few famous speakers in its first week or so—except for the ubiquitous Al Sharpton. It was truly an uprising of “untrained” organizers, “undeveloped” organic leaders, activists who skipped a structure test or two, and people who had never protested before. It can be argued that its very spontaneity will make it hard to sustain. Even if so, my guess is that, like the mass hunger marches and early strikes that preceded the CIO, this will prove to be one of the greatest organizer training sessions in a generation or two.

The rise of collective worker self-activity and, therefore, of natural workplace organizers will be the biggest “structure test” of US unions and labor leaders in generations. The advice McAlevey offers in her “model” is mostly good and useful. But it addresses institutional arrangements that have decayed without suggesting how to transcend them. At the same time, the “model” preserves or even enhances a dominant place for the professional organizer that can miss or even discourage the most fundamental ingredient of power—collective worker initiative from below. The time has come to reverse the “model.”

American City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

https:/ZLegacy.trade.gov/ steel/countries/pdfs/imports-us.pdf; Bruce A. Blonigen, Benjamin H. Liebman, and Welsey W. Wilson, “Trade Policy and Market Power: The Case of the US Steel Industry,” NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 13671, December 2007, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5188626_Trade _Policy_and_Market_Power_The_Case_of_the_US_Steel

_Industry/figures?lo=l; Frank Giarratani, Ravi Madhavan, and Gene Gruver, “Steel Industry Restructuring and Location,” Center for Industry Studies, University of Pittsburgh, May 7, 2012; Nicholas Tolomeo, Michael Fitzgerald, and Joe Eckelman, “US Steel Sector Thrives As Mills Move Up Quality Ladder,” Insight (blog), S&P Global Platts, May 9, 2019,

https:/Zblogs.platts.com/2019/05/09/us-steel-mills- quality/; Associated Press, “As Trump Weighs Tariffs, US Steelmakers Enjoy Rising Profits,” March 13, 2018, https://apnews.com/cae426730cd74e64932e4be7fa5cdeb c/As-Trump-weighs-tarifFs,-US-steelmakers-enjoy-rising- profits#/pq=F GkzCO.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/ releases/g 17/201912171gl 7.pdf.

bin/print.pl/1 pc/prodybar.htm; Conference Board, International Comparisons of Manufacturing Productivity and Unit Labor Costs Trends, 2012 (New York: Conference Board, 2013), 7.

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/02/hows- manufacturing/; for a more detailed analyses of why imports are not the major culprit and productivity matters, see Kim Moody, On New Terrain: Howe Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 8–13, 191–95; Kim Moody, “Productivity, Crises and Imports in the Loss of Manufacturing Jobs,” Capital & Class 44, no. 1 (2020): 47–61.

Paul F. Clark, Peter Gottlieb, and Donald Kennedy (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1987), 15–16.

67. You Shouldn’t Have to Pay to Be Alive

Deleted reason: Not anarchist.

Subtitle: Reasons and Direct Action Possibilities for Labor-Free Income

Author: Lavra Tamutus

Authors: Lavra Tamutus

Topics: universal basic income, common resources, plutocracy, ableism, direct action, guaranteed income, anti-work, resource-based economy, social profit, wealth

Date: November 26, 2021

Date Published on T@L: 2021-12-29

Source: Retrieved on December 28, 2012 from https://moneylesssociety.com/economy/you-shouldnt-have-to-pay-to-be-alive/

Notes: Originally rejected from an essay submission about Guaranteed Income, then edited and published online by Moneyless Society on November 26, 2021. You can check out and jump into the project I’m working on at magnova.space

Human beings are a highly intelligent primate, and highly social creatures. We create art, music, gender-affirming surgery, highways, spaceships, submarines, and plenty more. We’ve reached the depths of the ocean and the atmospheres of other planets. Yet we still live in a system that coerces us into copious amounts of mindless, breakneck-paced labor just to survive, and it leaves us resentful. Why?

Some of the most common jobs are being a store clerk/cashier, food service worker, or call center representative. These are the occupations that most people fulfill with all the waking hours of their lives. But not by choice. The majority of these people aspire to higher callings. These are simply the jobs that are available on a consistent basis and without prerequisites. Choosing not to work within the available labor market results in an inability to pay rent, afford healthcare, buy textbooks, provide for your child(ren), etc. Sadly, the same holds true even for most people working within this market, particularly those in service positions.

Isn’t it a little ridiculous that in this age of emergent technological advancement, most people are doing something they don’t want to do? Even people who may have been initially excited to get a job inevitably end up exhausted by the sheer amount of physical and mental labor that comes with the 40-hour work week, on top of home/familial responsibilities. Obeying an authority figure that’s getting rich off of your labor for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, depletes one’s capacity for motivation. Service workers gracefully tolerate daily abuse from rude customers and their managers, all while operating beneath restrictive company policies about how employees can spend their time on and off the clock! According to the World Health Organization, 745,000 people die per year due to being overworked and excessively stressed. In the current socioeconomic system, your time can be owned by somebody else who will risk your life to maximize their profits.

What would it take for people to be able to exist without existential dread looming over their heads? How could that be accomplished?

Give people a choice. Give people their freedom—that beloved ideal around the world—but give it materially. Any way you measure it, people cannot be “free” to live their life how they wish if they are obligated to perform dreadful and sometimes meaningless jobs until they’re too tired to do anything else. Human beings need greater ownership of their time. While there isn’t any mainstream, material exit from working for others, the minimum next step of meaningful progress to liberation is the ability to tell an employer “your terms of employment are bogus and would rob me blind, I’m not going to work for you.” Today, even though that statement would be true, prospective employees must bow their heads and suck it up until they can retire—with the caveat that wage deflation and the foreseeable trajectory of inflation have rendered the possibility of retirement futile for most.

In a world where people are literally paying in blood (plasma) for an education, it’s safe to say that people need more material support from society. In a monetary economy, that means people need access to more money. Hence: Universal Basic Income.

Objections to UBI are usually founded on the idea that money possessed is money earned. But when you analyze the most common monetary exchanges and realize how little cash even exists in circulation, it becomes clear that the main objective of money is to influence labor. In essence, one’s monetary worth equates to how much of other people’s labor one can control. The very wealthy can hire scores of employees, can buy the most difficult-to-produce goods, and can hire assistants to take care of their affairs. People who are financially disadvantaged must toil for the wealthy, having little to no say in the matter. Ultimately, money is not obtained by creating bigger and better futures for humanity, but by increasing the percentage of human labor that fuels the current system. Capitalists who end up billionaires are not the people who work 100 hour weeks producing iPhones (a popular Christmas gift), but the people who manage to negotiate the most exploitative contracts for those mega-laborers, pay the least amount possible, and expand their extant model of exploiting the working class. They are rich because they are the controllers of labor.

Moving money around, then, stoichiometrically cancels out to a question of freedom. How much freedom you can afford is determined mostly by conditions of birth. Wealthy people are nearly always descendants of wealthy families, inheriting what is known as “generational wealth”. Poor people are nearly always descendants of poor families who’ve occupied the most oppressed regions of a given country. Trans people, people of color, non-men, queer people, and all the other marginalized groups see pay gaps, meaning these people have particularly low access to freedom. Which of these groups you might be born as (or even develop into) is outside a person’s control.

Racial disparity is particularly severe because each generation collects new trauma while inheriting the old.

By this point in time, humanity has innovated and manufactured enough stuff for everyone to live a materially blissful life of loving their partner(s), spending time with friends, and finally getting around to learning the sax or koto. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough bread, houses, or phones (i.e. “scarcity”). The issues lie in how these goods are produced and accessed. The market forces of supply and demand are both manipulated by wealthy proponents of “free markets” and by the politicians they finance to create artificial scarcity and facilitate extravagantly profitable price gouging. As a result, prices for everything essential are rising way faster than wages.

Supply is arbitrarily reduced with technology being made to break, and by throwing everything from food to gadgets into the trash when it can’t be sold, utterly wasting the time and labor people put into producing these things. Mass purchasing, as with landlords buying houses en masse for the explicit purpose of renting it for a profit, also drives down supply.

Burning the candle at both ends, capitalists also invest copious resources into directly manufacturing demand through advertising and media outlets. Each person, on average, sees anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 ads per day, breeding desire for commodities they would have been happy without and subsequently influencing cultural values as a whole. Cosmetics companies have a sordid history of reifying toxic beauty standards to psychologically torment women into purchasing their products. Fox’s celebration of US military hegemony drums up perpetual support for the arms industry. Marketing gives corporations subliminal dominance over the public, simultaneously driving sales and legitimizing the jobs they offer. Useless and destructive industries thus thrive and employ millions of people who could otherwise be contributing meaningfully to their communities and society as a whole.

Universal Basic Income is a platform which acknowledges this wasted wealth and potential by reducing the amount of labor people are forced to provide their exploiters. The work has essentially already been done, for the most part, to create a world where people can work a few hours a week. Our ancestors struggled to make things easier and better for us, yet that liberty is continually eroded as it gets more and more expensive for a person in the working class to live on Earth. People who physically, mentally, or emotionally cannot work might get a pittance from unemployment, if they’re lucky enough to fall into a specific, predetermined category. When do we, who were born into the class of people who service our society, say that we have been robbed long enough of what our families have already earned? When do we realize that humanity is wasting its potential?

Beyond Hope: A Cogent and Effective Solution

Labor-free income is based on sound science. When people no longer fear for their survival, they can begin to consider what’s next. They get a chance to breathe. Take stock of their life and what they want to do. Explore new careers. Devote time towards learning. Get involved in their community.

A society where people feel supported is a society of people who want to support others. Numerous studies suggest that receiving support not derived from coerced labor doesn’t hurt the economy. What it does do is give people freedom to decide how they spend their time. This translates into an environment that demands employers offer jobs that are fair and worth doing. People who are in the debt trap of low wage work, climbing cost of living, and inability to build equity will have an out, and the corporations who choose wage theft for profit will lose their cutthroat monopoly on the labor market.

A future with dependable, labor-free income doesn’t require technical innovation as much as it requires reorganization. The tech is already out of the bag. We have robots, machine learning, and sophisticated management tools. The reason society is not taking full advantage of these technologies is simple: doing so would completely obsolete a cornerstone of capitalism—dirt-cheap human labor. Of course, automation doesn’t have to be expensive to implement either, but that’s another story. When humans have the bargaining power to meaningfully negotiate terms of employment, employers will finally have to make work appealing and treat their employees with respect. If said scenario ‘forces’ employers to automate production and services, the working class still wins via the amount of work needed to sustain society decreasing even further.

Some companies would certainly flounder, but rightfully so. The most profitable companies have gotten where they are by turning exploitation into a science. Their techniques include coercing new hires into alternative dispute agreements, forbidding workers from using the bathroom as much as they need, drenching employees in anti-union propaganda, and illegally paying below minimum wage. If a friend treated you like this, they wouldn’t be your friend for long, yet corporate culture sells the idea that their competing co-workers and management are their “family”. Said companies also secure direct lines of contact with politically powerful people, via lobbying and campaign donations. The United States, for instance, has gotten to a point of total harmony between the super-rich and Congress. There is literally zero correlation (5% with an 8% margin of error) between which laws the public wants passed and what Congress actually passes. Economic elites on the other hand enjoy a 70–86% chance of their preferences being written into law. This is an ongoing ethical disaster. Impairing these companies by forcing them to sacrifice profits for livable working conditions isn’t the terrible thing that most news outlets clamor about.

Many Roads to the Dawn

Ideally, UBI could just happen when enough people with power finally listen to the desperate pleas of the citizens to have a livable life, and take heed of the countless deaths of despair caused by economic disenfranchisement and social alienation. The ingenuity to pull it off certainly exists, but perhaps not the political power.

Labor-free income offers the economic power shift that could lead to a new Renaissance. Building up momentum and popular support is an ongoing effort, but the number of people who have to get on board is massive due to the constant pushback by plutocrats, via state-sanctioned murder and culture-wide miseducation. In the United States, the Black Panthers organized towards it, then they were dismantled from the inside by COINTELPRO. Martin Luther King Jr. advocated it, he was shot. Thomas Paine argued for a form of it, but our history books usually leave that out. We need to realize that the government does not offer an avenue to UBI happening in countries like the US.

Alongside the political barriers to the traditional conception of UBI as a recurring paycheck paid by the government, there is another, more left-leaning critique to consider. If UBI is offered via simple payouts/money, there is overwhelming historical precedent for a radical inflation that would defeat much of the benefits gained by the working class, as it would become possible to charge people more for rent, food, and other living essentials. However, if the material disbursement were to happen by way of directly giving people goods and services, the possibility of inflation is nullified.

It’s time to stop asking for it to be given to us, and just do UBI ourselves.

Let’s build infrastructure that is designed with the principles of human dignity at the forefront. Practice giving things away. Pay things forward to people who are needier than us. Build up our communities with mutual aid and set examples of social profit. Help a friend cover an emergency bill if we get a nice bonus. Talk to people on the fence. Teach people about the possibilities of a world with unconditional income. We can help build the new world in the shell of the old.

Make these small changes to your lifestyle, and (as the virtue ethicists argued) they will change the way you think about human relationships. It is hard for most people in a capitalist world to conceive of large-scale structural alternatives to capitalism, and we see that in the perpetuation of money and state control in nations that successfully revolted against those same features of the previous ruling apparatus.

Once you get familiar with mutual aid, you can begin to accept that true change is going to come about when a big enough collective of people decides to create member-owned, member-controlled, single-payer systems for acquiring housing, food, healthcare, education, and all the other things that make human life thrive.

Allow me to share my own project for inspiration. Learning about how severely people are being exploited made me want to act, and I didn’t feel like the options were enough. How do we prevent all the predicted global catastrophes like climate change and nuclear apocalypse, on top of all the socioeconomic hardships facing people here and now, when power has become so concentrated among the economic elite? Well, we have to work together. To do that, we need to have the same kind of management tools that big businesses use, but designed with democracy and collaboration at their core.

I’ve wanted to learn web development for years, but being so worn out from café work made it impossible to focus for long enough to make progress. When I was laid off because of Covid-19 and started receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a mere shadow of Universal Basic Income but enough for me to live frugally, I finally had time to actually finish my course and make a website where people could coordinate grassroots action.

The idea is to bridge the gap between large-scale initiatives and specific action that people can practically take on within their own constraints. Anybody can submit an “issue”, or concern about the world. An issue can be linked to other issues that cause it, so complex problems can be divided into simpler ones. Anybody can submit a project, which might be completely new or draw from existing direct action campaigns. Projects can be broken down into tasks, which outline specific, easily approachable steps that individuals can take. Some of the most important initiatives will certainly be those of economic empowerment: production.

Although there’s a whole lot more to the project, I’ve already got the website started. It’s ready to use for documenting global issues, sharing solution-oriented projects, mapping the connections between issues and projects, forum discussion, and location mapping. Additionally, there are already designs for myriad functionality in the future. The next step will be coding.

And this is just one idea, one component of a possible infrastructural renaissance. What might you come up with if you had a year or two to simply recover from how exploited you’ve been in the struggle to survive? If your living needs could be provided for, would you help build a world that could provide the same to all?

Moneyless Society and One Community Global are among a few systems-change organizations that both have their boots on the ground, starting work on permaculture and physical communities for people to reinvent their socioeconomic relationships. You can find tons of other groups on MoSo’s own website to join and help. There’s no short supply of inspiration from which you can draw. The exciting thing about these projects is their purpose to create infrastructure that frees up people’s time from unnecessary work. Unlike the capitalist economy, working in the live-for-free movement is work towards liberation.

68. Imagining an optimistic cyber-future

Deleted reason: Not anarchist.

Author: Tech Learning Collective

Authors: Tech Learning Collective

Date: 2021-01-05

Date Published on T@L: 2021-03-01T01:34:28

Source: Retrieved on 2021-02-28 from https://techlearningcollective.com/2021/01/05/imagining-an-optimistic-cyber-future.html

Mastering most things humans do requires lifetimes of practice. Woodworking, gardening, and painting are just a few crafts whose histories stretch back thousands of years. But modern telecommunication, the act of communicating nearly instantaneously with someone from afar, is different. Its history is so short that there is relatively little of it: the very first electric telegraph is not even 200 years old, the first telephone patent was granted in 1876, and the World Wide Web was invented in 1989—a mere 32 years ago. The very newness of digital telecommunication means that the Internet we know today is still in a sort of genesis moment. Cyberspace has barely cooled from its initial big bang. The nature, shape, and ultimate utility of our galaxy of computerized (inter)networks are still being formed.

Cyberspace’s infancy partially explains its volatility. In the last half century, computing power made at least three great migrations. It first existed solely at specialized, isolated campuses. These early, lonely mainframes were like stars in a mostly empty sky. Then came the Personal Computer (PC) revolution of the 1980’s, which rapidly dispersed compute power among homes as though the corporate mainframes burst into millions of pieces. Most recently, compute power has coalesced into datacenters like planetary bodies forming from so much stardust. Consumers know this latest formation as “The Cloud,” in which multinationals like Google and Facebook are the strongest gravitational forces. The pendulum swung from centralized to decentralized, and then back to (kind of) centralized again.

Next time the pendulum swings—and it will—what might the catalyzing event be? What shape might the networks that connect our modern world take? And to what ends might we apply such a shift in compute power?

Such questions are critical exercises for honing our collective imagination. They help us refine the language we’ll use to describe the future we want to make real. Unlike the trajectories of stars in the sky, what computers do and how they connect to one another are not choices preordained by God. We decide. And since the impact computers will have on our lives is ultimately up to us to determine, imagining an optimistic cyber-future is the first step towards improving our relationship with digital technology.

Social media and its role in society

What is civilization if not knowledge concretized into the physical world around us? Homes have running water because of piping first laid years ago. We call this “plumbing.” But plumbing is an activity only possible because of thousands of years spent refining the practice of moving water from one spot to another, an activity so important to so many follow-on activities that our civilization built increasingly specialized tools and water-handling infrastructures to make the task easier, like aqueducts, reservoirs, and water pumps. Modern hydraulic engineering techniques would probably seem magical to early plumbers, but each improvement was relatively obvious when it was first introduced. Most of this “obvious” knowledge no longer exists directly in any living plumber’s memory because it is instead embodied by the very tools plumbers use; an S-trap pipe “knows” how to create a liquid seal under a sink whether or not those using the sink realize its importance.

Similarly, what is society if not the aggregate of communication between individuals? Social life is defined by—and exists within—the abilities one has to communicate with other people. Love letters sent to a sweetheart, dinner conversation with friends, watching the nightly news, or waiting in your car at a red light are all examples of society taking shape in real-time: they are communiqués from one individual or group to another reinforcing or reshaping their position in society. Some social norms erode, others strengthen, and new ones appear as people interact. Society therefore depends on the ability of its participants to contact one another, which means it needs to have a medium over which its participants can engage in expressly social behaviors. Framed in this light, the term “social media” could be understood in the profound way it needs to be if we are to use it as a collective social good.

Unlike the Social Media™ of today, which stimulates an imminent need for human connection but is never never meant to fulfill it, the social media of our optimistic cyber-future will fulfill existing needs for human connection but will not be designed to stimulate a need for more. Imagine no more notifications pressuring you into meaningless interactions. No more “happy birthday” reminders from people you friended decades ago and haven’t talked to since. An end to newsfeeds full of FOMO-inducing selfies.

Instead, social media will support pro-social community interactions, and eschew hollow engagement. Its purpose will be stimulating human(e) connections that prioritize the emotional/mental, spiritual/intellectual, and physical/material needs of the people connecting. This simply means that time spent using online platforms will be primarily intended to support offline metrics, rather than being designed to addict users to the online activity itself.

The cacophonous distractions of Facebook and Twitter notifications will be gone not because selfies aren’t ever taken or shared, but because the “front page” of social networks more honestly serve the needs of actual life. As you log in, instead of being encouraged to doomscroll, imagine being presented with a tip on homemade bread-making posted by the proprietors of your neighborhood bakery. Perhaps you are acquainted with them through their 50^th anniversary video call “party” some months back, an event that had simultaneous in-person and virtual meeting spaces as has become commonplace. Also, you don’t “follow” the bakery account to receive the update any more than you stalk an individual across town as they go about their day. Rather, you simply happened to be in the same (cyber)space at the same time and “overheard” them in the middle of a public discussion about bread-making. This mimics the way your ear naturally tunes in to a conversation between people you know when you walk by them on a crowded street. Browsing social media will feel more like strolling downtown, and less like quietly wiretapping a distant target.

A social medium that serves rather than subverts the social needs of individuals is also by definition more capable of providing society with a healthier connective tissue, or social fabric, from which positive connection can more readily grow. By recognizing social media as a critical shared resource worthy of protection in the same way rivers and streams are, our social networks can return to being sites of communal engagement over community matters that are defined more prominently by events that shape our day-to-day lives rather than distant celebrity, the way neighborhood centers, town squares, and even marketplaces are today. This does not mean we imagine a total absence of long-distance communication, but rather a restoration of healthy priorities in which the embodied human condition is reflected in the digital technologies we use to go about our lives.

Engaging with our friends, neighbors, and communities will focus once again on concerns over physical space and matters that are relevant to our material lives, rather than some future afterlife, incorporeal existence, or sensational spectacle.

Privacy, property, and abundance for everyone everywhere

Property laws have long been used as a strategy to manage the working class. During the Industrial Revolution, labor militancy was at times effective at disrupting property’s supremacy. Union organizing could resist the most exploitative aspects of industrial capitalism because a boss’s dependency on the workforce offered workers a means to slow the widening gap in power and control over material resources.

Today, Big Tech employs a similar strategy, though its logic is stretched past absurdity. Workers rent access to online services laced with behavioral trackers from electronic strip malls, where they buy stuff they don’t need, hawked by “influencers” using social networks designed to addict them to hatred, fear, and disinformation. All this user data is sold to corporations as fuel for powering AI systems capable of replacing and outperforming us in both manufacturing and service jobs. Data itself is now treated as a form of property, intellectual property, even though the logic of ideas is incompatible with the logic of material things. In this new “attention economy” we are making the machines who are buying our thoughts.

In “A Hacker Manifesto,” Mackenzie Wark identified the enabling characteristic of such an economy: the way information is being commodified. Intellectual property, she writes, is an abstraction of capital, which is itself an abstraction of land. In the industrial age, economic value was tied directly to the limited amount of land that could be owned. By abstracting value from land, landowners were the first to generate intangible wealth as stocks and bonds.

But abstractions cut both ways: take abstractions too far and their concrete forms lose their immediate potency. For example, a group of workers alienated from their land have few capital resources with which to stage a rebellion, but a group of telecommunicating workers need not rely on the concreteness of physical place to generate value and can thus access new and different resources with potentially fewer constraints. The ability to telecommunicate, as Andrew Feenberg observed, “shifts the boundaries of the personal and the political,” extending “politics into daily life”; events as varied as the Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the formation of patient advocacy coalitions such as recent COVID-19 Long Haulers groups are all examples of this.

While it is the people capable of developing a telecommunications network who benefit most from its physical deployment, it is the network’s topology that determines who will ultimately benefit most from the doubly-abstracted currency of the data-as-property generated by activity on the network. In a centralized system like Facebook, Facebook is the main beneficiary because all activity is directly mediated by Facebook. By design, mere activity on Facebook’s network inevitably enriches Facebook. This is analogous to the way the rentier class extracts money from renters, preventing them from building wealth through home ownership. With the emergence of digital subscription services like Netflix and Spotify, workers must contend with the legal regime of (intellectual) property, technical centralization, and the economics of rent-seeking all at once.

But the same activities made possible by existing centralized systems are also possible on decentralized infrastructures precisely because of data’s abstractedness. Decentralized networks provide another benefit: they enable coordination with no single command center, which is itself an obstacle to acquiring data-as-property. Mesh topologies do not inherently enrich an existing monopoly, but rather the participants themselves. A group of telecommunicating workers organizing on a centralized system might be able to use tools unavailable to early 20^th century labor unions, but their organizing still won’t produce wealth of their own. By switching to a decentralized system, the act of organizing itself becomes an act of self-enrichment with no theoretical limit in the data/attention economy.

Imagine how such a communications network could make political discourse of immediate material benefit to those who engage in it. Reclaiming speech from being a data-product mined from our minds will return it to our communities as social cohesion, creating a virtuous circle enriching our collective consciousness. Discourse will highlight reasonable argumentation, aided by collaborative annotations and speedy fact checking tools to help people avoid regurgitating misinformation, opening up opportunities for more productive interactions.

Community-oriented discourse inherently favors local businesses, keeping local wealth in the community. As social ties grow stronger within the bounds of physical proximity, the line between public and private property will inevitably blur. Neighborhood wellbeing systems will grow out of these ties, too, connecting and strengthening interactions where we look after each other to provide security. Rather than outsourcing our individual safety to Ring cameras sending video streams of our homes to police departments, neighborly telecommunication is used to supercharge existing physical-world alternatives like people letting their neighbors know if they need someone to look after their kids or pets. The “neighborhood network,” no longer wholly operated by Amazon Sidewalk, will become a way to break the ice between neighbors and encourage community engagement.

Meanwhile, as the value of data increases, the notion of “property” will continue to evolve from describing objects we own to describing knowledge we share. The most valuable things in life are already those things that are worth as much “used” as they are “new,” a distinction that no longer exists in cyberspace. And so the endless replicability of digital things, once punished as “piracy,” will be embraced as a way to create new wealth rather than suppressed in the pursuit of rent.

The rise and fall of techno-feudalism

As the Internet embeds itself into more elements of daily life, more people recognize that the gap between State and Corporation is closing. The global economy has already become increasingly codependent with multinationals who are amassing State-like powers and developing bureaucratic governance structures. Critical government functions already rely on corporate operators who are increasingly defining the same government policies they operationalize. Government has all but abandoned its sovereignty as it merges with industry, since government relies on industry to function. Meanwhile, industry is aggressively grafting itself to government since it relies on the functions of the State to police its labor force and to legalize exploitative employment practices. Over time, Silicon Valley will replace everything with robots, and politicians will turn to ever more draconian measures to quell rebellions against the technocracy on which their governments depend.

As glaciers melt, wildfires rage, and government services fail, we imagine more and more of us will recognize the need to decentralize power to push back against this dystopian chimera. We will establish many new heterogeneous infrastructures for networking, storing, and sharing information, because this is important for regaining our autonomy. It has in fact already begun.

Many dual-power projects and self-owned telecoms networks are exploring ways to thrive while minimizing their cooperation with existing capital. The material conditions and physical components necessary for such success are becoming more accessible. For example, physical telecoms infrastructure—radios, cabling, and internetworking devices (routers)—are now almost as ubiquitous in cities as wild grass on ancient plains.

Since the Internet is at its core a set of interconnected computers, many people in dozens of countries already have all the materials they need to service many of their day-to-day needs without involving large companies or sums of money, like keeping phone numbers synchronized across multiple devices, planning their days with a digital calendar, or drafting documents. We need only take a few steps beyond such modest origins to imagine far more impactful uses for the same equipment where security, autonomy, and activism are interwoven. This realization is leading more and more people to abandon monopolistic corporate services by providing the services they need for themselves using “home-brew servers” running Free Software, like a generation of pioneering digital homesteaders. Even better, in cyberspace, newcomers need not displace an indigenous people to settle cyber-land because the metaphorical “land” itself is virtually infinite.

The Internet as we know it today collapses the experience of distance, making every location in cyberspace feel as near as any other location. But in our optimistic cyber-future we will have resisted the temptation to abandon the physical realm, and thereby the Earth, by focusing instead on interconnecting our own servers and local networks with those of our neighbors. This will have been a key step in building the community-owned and surveillance-resistant networks that eventually give rise to powerful autonomous territories, having enabled us to conduct local coordination on local infrastructure, rather than on Facebook’s.

Like the earliest stars in the emptiest skies, these pockets of freedom will grow out of mutual aid networks and good old fashioned neighborly camaraderie. There, an economy organized around freedom and care rather than production and consumption will mean certain needs—food distribution, educational pedagogy, and more—will be fulfilled differently than in the surrounding bureaucracy. The autonomous pockets will quickly seek to interconnect, covering more ground as their practices and networks mature.

Meanwhile, the techno-feudalist State will continue intentionally destroying its citizens’ lives through overwork and fascist concentration camps, weakening its ability to extract labor and enforce dogmatic ideology. Its citizenry will face an increasingly stark choice between ecological harmony and autonomy or eventual extinction and serfdom. Surrounded by technology that has turned everything around them into a tool and anything into a weapon, they betray the State, choosing liberty over patriotism.

Fleeing the ancien regime grants us access to new spaces for learning and more “free time” for filling with our own curiosity and desires. In-person connection will be encouraged by merging physical resources like tool lending libraries with intellectual resources like traditional book libraries, further enabling cross-disciplinary exchanges that propel a neighborhood’s development. In some cases, certain data stores could be most easily accessed in-person at one of these next-generation community hubs, reminiscent of the best parts of religious gatherings or nightclubs.

Borders separating rural and urban areas will fade as telecommuting will become more feasible in more jobs. Weather monitoring equipment will be installed at inner-city community gardens. It will be maintained with the same care and by the same team that ensures the crops there are properly watered by the weather-sensing irrigation system hooked up to the region’s intranet. Such geographical consciousness also makes it easier to imagine more ecologically sustainable futures, in which anti-racist modes of energy production rebalance the burden of climate disaster more equitably across the Global North and the Global South, perhaps by encouraging both individual and institutional action that brings solar energy production costs down.

Having rejected the absurdity of intellectual property, the autonomous regions will be covered by a near total mesh network like an electronic circulatory system. Important public archives, like Wikipedia, will be automatically copied in full to numerous locations in each neighborhood. This will make the notion of paying for Internet access obsolete because residents won’t want to pay to reach a distant server when the majority of what we need is readily available in one of a number of nearby locations freely accessible via myriad routes. Horizontally scaling out data stores also dramatically reduces the strain on long-distance links, enabling the autonomous regions to more easily establish free peering relationships with one another. This enmeshed communication will further support anti-colonialist practices of inter-communal, inter-generational, and even international activism that continues to fuel the downfall of the former techno-feudalist society.

Automation will continue to economically devastate the techno-feudalist State due to its zeal for punishing idleness, causing bread lines to grow to horrific lengths. In contrast, the autonomous regions will use increased automation to reap productivity out of shortening work weeks. Eventually, as more economic activity is automated, organized asynchronously, or people simply become willing to embrace new methods of work (without being forced to do so by a traumatic global pandemic), everyone will finally be free to make their own choices about how they spend their time.

Empty city lots and even residential lawns will be transformed into food forests. Next door to each of the food lots, social knowledge hubs will be built because food will be revered as the center of social life. These hubs will host seed-swap events for other urban farmers, replete with seed library catalogues, food share and organic waste systems, and eco-education events. They will publish digital calendars, and the same system will be used to coordinate work schedules among community members. This infrastructure could also catalyze in-person encounters by combining digital resources such as poetry libraries with a platform to participate in poetry readings and writing workshops.

No longer will the social function of something like a garden be made separate from its material function. Telecommunication can facilitate their rejoining. Perhaps it was always meant to.

69. The Shape of Things to Come

Deleted reason: Not anarchist. If I recall correctly, we mean to exclude J. Sakai from the library.

Author: J. Sakai

Authors: J. Sakai

Topics: Marxism, anti-imperialism, history, criticism and critique, world-systems theory

Date: August 2023

Date Published on T@L: 2024-02-01T21:50:32

Source: “The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings And Interviews” by J. Sakai, published by Kersplebedeb (ISBN: 9781989701218)

Notes: Includes Part I and II of the interview from 2020 and 2022, title is the same as the collection it was published in. Footnotes adapted from “Marginalized Notes / Monday Nov. 28, 2022” by J. Sakai

Part 1 (An Interview with J. Sakai, conducted from mid-2020)

Kersplebedeb: We’ve got a lot to discuss! But maybe first some context: Your work is grounded in Marxism, you clearly have some special affection for Mao, and at the same time you have been accused of being an anarchist (amongst other things); how should younger radicals today approach these legacies of politics from the 19^th and 20^th centuries? What pitfalls should they be looking out for?

J. Sakai: Questions of how to handle inherited ideologies and politics are important now, as a new generation of revs comes onto the torn-up chaos landscape that is our 21^st century. It’s not so easy to understand as it’s supposed to be. And it really is a deeper matter than if you’ve just joined team New Green Deal or team social democrat. As a whole, hard-won pieces of knowledge that revs put together in past tides of struggle to scrawl out a strategic map, and then hopefully a tactical guide however tentative, are valuable. Thought-provoking, with interesting hints, both positive and negative, of what was really thought about, really tried. Yet are always being erased and forgotten, because they were never written in permanent ink in the first place. No more than we ourselves can be. Were always just for right then, though women and men never thought so. Are always receding deeper into memory, as generations and the world itself turn.

Even if saved in some unchristian holy text, they can only become gradually distant from their once sensuous context of immediate life-and-death class struggle, and thus are often now too faded to be easily read. That previous scientific knowledge, that theory and practice, is so precious for us precisely because it keeps disappearing and has to be constantly repatterned and stitched together all over again.

Every new generation must learn to apply revolutionary science themselves, rediscovering fire all over again. Which is why the scraps of basic scientific theory we can hold onto against the tidal pull are so practically important. And, yas, those pitfalls …

Knowledge isn’t something academic or abstract and made only by some intellectual elite. Michael Reinoehl died all alone at night in Lacey, Washington, not knowing how to give himself a chance to stay alive against a right-wing u.s. government assassination squad. Yet the revolutionary movement right here has had extensive, painfully learned practical knowledge in living memory on just this bitter-toswallow situation. But it was scattered and lost to him as though it never had been.

i believe that revolutionaries have to take studying and using theory very seriously, the good and the bad of it. On the deepest level, we all need theory to help give understandable order to the waves of disparate cries and mass explosions streaming across our receivers.

But if revolutionary theory can be an invaluable tool, that doesn’t mean that any given practitioner using the tool knows what they are doing. That’s two very different things. The best roller chest of chrome Snap-On tools is no help if the mechanic working on your car has only an uncertain idea of what the problem is. Or is just faking it, which is infuriating but happens. Left theorists aren’t any more scientific than auto mechanics, you know.

Maybe it would be good to see how that “ideas side” of our struggle has worked here. Or hasn’t, because failed left theory isn’t rare, either. This is a hard vagabond science to capture in a bottle. It humbles you—or it had better.

An obvious example—one which i have devoted much of my own work to examining—would be the critical question of the class nature of this type of metropolitan capitalist society, our “America,” and its settler colonial working class as the once-expected big agent of revolutionary change. Or not so.

Through many lifetimes, the main u.s. left here used to always take pride in the white male industrial working class. Which until very recently they had for whatever reason theoretically positioned inside their class strategy as the largest and most important component of the “united multinational working class” in the u.s.a., or some such abstract formulation.

The majority of white workers were always supposed to be busy gaining consciousness of hypothetical basic class solidarity with their Black and Brown brothers and sisters, and with solid trade union work any old racist rust on them would soon be cleansed away. Or so it was always said by the organized left with their “power of positive thinking” theories. Any day now, the working class would be finally unified under its good white male leaders, and would brush aside “prejudice” of all kinds and overthrow the most powerful capitalist empire in the world—or so their useless white left class theory confidently predicted, generation after generation, century after century. But now time has run out. Their clock itself is dead.

It was in its own way a beautiful picture, though, the soothing lullaby a loyal left made up of the privileged could become very fond of, even addicted to.

Generation after generation, the most respected white left intellectuals across the spectrum, however they differed ideologically, echoed this one “revolutionary” class theory. Whether it was the marxist-leninist Herbert Aptheker, the social democrat Michael Harrington, or the 1960s New Left socialist Howard Zinn. The only problem was that this most fundamental class theory of theirs wasn’t in the least bit true. It was a massive fiction, and a corrupt fiction at that. The “internationalism” of revolutionary anti-capitalism’s 19^th-century founders was only used as a cardboard shield here to hide corrupt oppressor politics.

We know it for a scientific fact, since in 400 years the euro-settler working class has never yet reached a revolutionary thing, and now as a lesser class never will. Much less ever stopped hating New Afrikan, Indigenous, Brown, and Asian workers. Did those respected left theorists forget to tell us that this piece of “Marxist” theory would only work for us once we all died and went to Left heaven?

And now, with the inevitable spread of technology and production overseas, and advanced mechanization at home, the white male working class here is shrinking and desiccating into a distorted husk of its former self. It will never carry out that crackpot white left theory of being anyone’s main revolutionary army. Except for our enemy’s, perhaps.

It isn’t that these popular but badly askew marxist theorists were villains. There are good reasons why they were so respected. Herbert Aptheker’s early 20^th-century historical work on enslaved revolts was ground-breaking. Mike Harrington foresaw a time when his kind of “democratic socialism” could be a mainstream position for new state reforms to help the very poor. Howard Zinn was a passionate participant in the early anti-Segregation Sit-In protests of the 1960s South, willing to risk his university teaching career in them.

The total misreading of the class nature of the majority of white workers here persisted in the organized left, generation after generation, A to Z, from Communists to anarchists. It can hardly be the individual fault of this single theorist or that one.

The anti-capitalist left in the u.s. empire, started by radical emigrants and left exiles in the 19^th century, carried the germ of a completely mistaken idea about the nature of Project America. That new “America” could be a fresh “democratic” society, constructed on an empty stage without any nasty feudal hangovers as in Old Europe. “Democratic” and white from the ground up, they hoped. They didn’t get it that this brand-new militarized society with a continent-wide swagger larger than all the nations of Old Europe, was a settler colonial capitalism. A conquest and genocide and occupation society from day one, born to be an “infant empire” for capitalism, as one of the early right-wing white militia leaders named George Washington admitted.

Reading today’s headlines, it is hard to really grasp how much the young revolutionaries who founded the anti-capitalist Left in 19^th-century still-feudal-tinged Europe saw Project America as the hopeful dawn of a democratic future. Karl Marx himself remarked as a matter of fact that “America” was “the most democratic of nations.” (He also observed presciently that its 1776 white power settler revolution marked the “rise of the middle classes.”) The young blazing rebel against Czarist despotism and serfdom, future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, angrily denounced the Confederate States rebellion against the Union, because “they nearly overthrew and destroyed the finest political organization that ever existed in history.” (Both Bakunin and Marx always added that the blot of New Afrikan slavery had to be abolished, which they both felt it soon would be.)

Remember that the pioneering anti-capitalist radicals like Proudhon, Marx, Engels, and Bakunin weren’t making revolution against the developed capitalism we are so accustomed to. They were part of youthful democratic uprisings against lingering feudalism and its oppressive structures— with democratic capitalist factions as the wavering allies of the new and radicalized urban working class.

Feudalism wasn’t just another word for kings and dictatorship. It was a society owned by the landed hereditary aristocracy, with their own twisted class structure and rigidly hierarchical culture. Young Bakunin had wanted to be a reforming educator but placed too low in the examinations to win a position in the Russian state civil service. As a male member of a minor elite family, he was pledged from birth to compulsory service to his ultimate lord, the Czar. So would-be teacher Bakunin soon found himself in a stiff woolen uniform training for lifelong service … as an artillery officer, of all things. To the angry Bakunin, that was just a higher rank of serf or indentured servant.

Later in life, when he escaped Siberian penal exile, crossed the Pacific, and landed on the West Coast of “America” on his long way back to Europe, he became famous here. An escaped pro-democracy turncoat Imperial Russian army officer was quite new and glamorous to the literate white public. Bakunin himself was thrilled to be here, where unlike in the Russian Empire any white man could rewrite his identity and status, making his way freely living and working wherever he willed across the conquered continent. Making his own destiny, as settlers just love to say.

In Boston he reunited with his old comrade Louis Agassiz, who had taken part in the German revolution with him in 1848, when Bakunin had been more or less drafted to lead the brave but hopeless military defense of the liberated city of Dresden against the might of the Prussian army. (Marx and Engels and most of young rebellious Europe praised his fight. As did the famed composer Richard Wagner, who supported the democratic revolution, and had to go with the leaders into exile for many years when the end came crashing down.) Agassiz hosted Bakunin in Boston, and helped promote his cause of opposition to Czarist autocracy. Agassiz doubtless was an influence in radical Bakunin’s even filling out an initial application for u.s. citizenship.[295]

Of course, Louis Agassiz was equally famous here himself, as the founder of Harvard’s department of anthropology, and one of this u.s. empire’s foremost early pseudo-scientific “experts” on human races. After the Civil War, he helped justify white public opposition to human rights for New Afrikans. They should have recognized non-enslaved status, but without voting or political rights of any kind ever, Agassiz testified before Congress. Since they were by their basic nature as a race, he said, too “subservient” and inferior to be trusted with any weapon of power in a white man’s society. Just like women, some manly white men in the debate pointed out negatively. Even way back then abolitionists raised a storm of protest to this kind of Hate ideology.

Right now at Harvard today, Black Lives Matter wants to finally take his dead white name off their anthropology department door. It all comes ’round. To say that the original founders of left European anti-capitalism, whose contributions were great, and their exiles and political explorers over here, were also to a conscious degree eurocentric, is only to say the obvious.

In Settlers, i tried to quickly skip trace the genetic roots of where the left’s disastrously out-of-the-ballpark class romance with the euro-settler working class here came from. Primarily to show that it’s not a question of individual error, but of understanding that a settler colonial occupation society is not going to create working classes out of itself to fill the roles required in times of revolutionary crisis and change. They are if anything reactionary classes, fulfilling if anything a rearguard and counter-revolutionary role as they demand more and more subsidies.

Thus did “America” in real life foreshadow and be the later conscious model for both Hitler’s early 20^th-century European fascism and today’s trend of traditional industrial classes in the imperial Western metropolis skewing sideways off the turnpike towards far-rightist political movements. Often glibly labeled in the media as “populist nationalism versus globalization.” Which is too shallow to be actually true.

Kersplebedeb: We’re getting near the end of 2020—it has been quite the year, with the biggest u.s. uprising in my lifetime, and now a chaotic whirlwind of activity and flux, on our side and our enemies’—what do you make of the current situation?

J. Sakai: Think we can scarcely miss what is happening, that right now we live at some turning point. Here the American white right is coming together in now less and less concealed shape, as the popular movement for violent settler colonial rule. To refurbish the lumpy furniture of the white past as our future. While the Trump White House reaches out to become a populist white dictatorship. Just as new George Floyd protests sweep the continent and beyond, city by city, using the name “BLM” or no name at all— simply intense anonymous anger and resistance, pushing angrily back against the lifelong pressure of police terrorism. Marches sometimes edging into night-time crowd attacks on state centers and bourgeois symbols. Contradictions central to actually existing capitalism are growing only sharper, more unresolvable.

Strikingly unlike the 1960s, when whites took part in nonviolent civil rights actions but not in violent so-called “ghetto riots,” now even government buildings have been attacked and cops physically confronted with heavy white participation. A future left is starting to stir, different in its own right from all that which went before. In the 1980s–90s transition between old and new, for the first time the public demonstrations of violent u.s. white supremacist groups were physically challenged not just passively accepted, with young anarchists leading the way for everyone. All the time complaining that they were against all leaders. (A resistance culture here in Babylon needs a sense of radical humor.) And now that moment has gone into the possible future.

And at the same time, more and more “Americans” want some version of a social democratic welfare state, desperately hoping that this imperial way of life can be preserved for them in amber.

We can all get it, that everything has somehow changed in this moment. What’s difficult is to comprehend it fully. To catch the inner nature and direction of this transformation as it unfolds.

In the past, some revolutionaries asked, “Can capitalism even survive without colonialism?” Now, in this year 2020, on this terrain, the big answer seems to be clearly “no.” We should take this seriously, because the ramifications are perhaps beyond our present imagining.

Not content to just accept his shock award as imperial president, Trump has had to spend four years openly talking, scheming, and precariously inching towards a euro-settler dictatorship. Whether he ever wins Civil War 2 or ends his days in pathetic exile somewhere as the Bonnie Prince Charlie of white races past, Trump has had to tap the one superpower available to him: coming out as the acid hatemouthed champion of the white race. Promising a return to the good old days of “great” uncompromised white settler colonial ownership of their “America” and all within it. As a perverted papal celebration of his commitment to White Power, Trump has repeatedly taken within his palms the bloody hands of the far right, the neo-fascists; just as the Republican Party itself has done for many years in stealth seg mode, at the inconspicuous grassroots local, district, and county levels.

Again—whether he wins or loses elections, lives or dies— the jinni is finally out of the bottle. Smallville may look the same, but nothing is the same.

After two generations of state-paraded “civil rights” and “equal opportunity” and “integration,” the white majority has spoken—it has experienced more “civil rights” than it thought it would ever see, and has come to the conclusion that it wants Hate. It wants White Power and an impossible return to the life of the post-WW2 u.s. empire at its zenith. Many settler men now want a return to full seg, everything short of chattel slavery. With women as largely servers and reproducers of whiteness; with New Afrikans, Latinos, Indigenous, and Asians recolonized and mostly out of white sight. And only a leader who utters Hate, who calls for mocking and attacking other peoples as less than human, can really satisfy their reality show now, after bitter years of white body blows and white diminishment.

None of his many blunders and lies and nazi-ish hints have cost Trump his core support of something close to a majority of the euro-settler population—especially concentrated among small business owners and those blue collar workers. Again, win or lose, it’s a fact he’s as popular in the polls with white voters as John F. Kennedy was when he ran for president. After all, if you feel that your superior-but-besieged race is in desperate circumstances, and you only have one superpower champion, you’ll rush to defend him all the more when he stumbles.

The other part of North America’s neo-colonial contradiction unfolding relentlessly this year was the great tidal wave of Black Lives Matter–labeled protests and campaigns. But how different from the now-classic 1960s rebellions these have been—and in so many ways, both positive and problematic. How right from the start the class contradictions came forward, where the now decaying term “civil rights” no longer has any positive meaning for anyone. But only stands for opposing lies, where both white and Black “Americans” pretend to believe there is some future within sight where they are not enemies.

One part has been the heightened leadership role of New Afrikan women. Starting from the original Ferguson protests in 2014, where inexperienced young Black lesbians were central to the organizing, young leadership and queer leadership has come out. The same new leadership also has more problematic sides, as all things do, much more than just the DeRay McKesson model (which was like my father’s Oldsmobile). We’ve watched the living dead—only they don’t know it themselves—emerge both from the hustle and from professional NGO managers and would-be liberal politicians. By odd coincidence, Black zombies are currently “in” with filmmakers.

As usual, the real changes, the long-range mass transformations, are occurring below the choppy policed surface. Whole cities are packing up and moving. Last year, an acquaintance who casually takes in various New Afrikan women’s talk sites remarked to me that the No. 1 subject right then was “Race War”—and that there was both lots of agreement and lots of disagreement, contradictory as that may sound. People are arming up individually, person by person, in an incoming tide, but seem also not finished yet working out what that means.

Also flaring at the edge of vision has been the role of a determined minority of white women in the protest wave. What was particularly visible was their role in less promising places to organize. In the white suburbs and small towns, and even in some klan-friendly white big city neighborhoods. There were over ten demonstrations in predominantly white Chicago suburbs last summer, not just in the city. Mostly small and organized by young white women who were new to this all. In Western Springs, a high school junior organized a demonstration and march through town; fists held high by other young white women her age, a small but brave group declaring to locally “amplify the voices” of the big city Black marches that seemed so far away.

This chemical reaction isn’t a new thing. As every other time that there has been a major wave of Black struggle in the u.s. empire’s long history, a white women’s struggle has taken up its own feminist politics in a synchronous wave, standing ambivalently next to the light of Black Freedom Now. Because many know that every step ahead for the white far right will produce more and more patriarchal ownership over their own bodies and their own futures. The enemy who wants to gradually reintroduce full colonialism always has to include “their own” women and children. Because women have always secretly been the “first colony.”

This isn’t only a homebrewed political war of the settler colonial white right versus today’s sudden broad liberal democratic coalition, which involuntarily includes the handcuffed left whether anybody likes it or not. This is that, but is also much larger than that.

Both sides know that we are somehow parts of larger global forces which are clashing all over. In a way somewhat like a World War. Maybe that’s what we will become.

The largest transnational corporations and capitalist structural institutions are now also present in our backyards. Signaling away, if only in meaningless hand gestures, their “support” for the BLM protests, and implicitly disavowing anyone’s right-wing nationalism. Maneuvering to protect the new world-wide culture of cosmopolitan multiculturalism so necessary for the transnational corporations and financiers working in orbit high above our now-parochial passport nations and politics.

On one level, the tsunami panic of transnational capitalists’ attempted simultaneous clumsy warding off of and cooptation of BLM had an instant unpleasant taste all its own. Hilarious mixed with ominous. From the cover of Vogue magazine to the FedEx corporation to Netflix. While Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg declaimed in a preposterous lie, “We stand with the Black community”; just as Amazon improbably posted a “Black Lives Matter” banner on its home page. The CEO of Coca-Cola said that, “Companies like ours must speak up as allies to the Black Lives Matter movement,” while Sprite, which has campaigned to be the soft drink of the world hip hop subculture, announced its “Give Back” program to hand out $300 million to the New Afrikan community. Reconditioned Democratic Party politicians in flocks and all manner of white executives from coast to coast selfied themselves wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts. And this was a long hesitant minute after the historic Ford and Carnegie Foundations’ announcement that they were pledging to raise $100 million for perpetually unspecified Black Lives Matter bribes … oops, sorry, i mean “activities.” Personally, i am waiting for the u.s. army to roll out a new Black Lives Matter heavy tank.

Kersplebedeb: Settlers and your work on this question have been attacked in questionable terms like “racist,” “defeatist,” “dishonest.” Not to mention the truly hallucinatory crackpot dismissals circulating, and the weird role this plays as a negative symbol for various flavors of racist white revanchism. Do you think that the significant white vote—including of the white working class—for Trump will temper such bullshit in left circles?

J. Sakai: That would be nice, but i doubt it. Our settler colonialism is not mainly about some crude distant past that now can be taken for granted as a done deal, as is always implied. It can’t be dealt with superficially as only some historified “moral debt,” in unequal exchange for an unchanging settler colonial totalitarianism of the land. Settler colonialism here is about our very present conflicted lives and about the unseen future hurtling blindly towards us.

This theoretical controversy over the euro-settler working class, which the white elite-centered left always tried to ignore, dodge, or suppress, particularly since Settlers appeared in 1983, is in one sense now resolved. Now everything factually is crystal clear. (Not that the multitude of left political trolls and bare-ass preachers will stop yelling insults and complete nonsense, since that is all that they have left to do.)

A hidden aspect of this question is that it isn’t about the euro-settler working class and its left apologists not being revolutionary enough. That it isn’t about the euro-settler left trying to do radical class struggle but falling short. The nature of classes isn’t about aspirational metrics of improvement, as in Oprah losing weight or Biden hoping to become more presidential than Obama. It’s about the fundamental nature of a class and where it finds itself on the firing line of the actually existing class war.

How can any of this be a surprise, unless you stepped into the pitfall of this false working class theory and were completely detached from “America’s” everyday reality? That as we talk a real majority of the settler colonial working class here in the 21^st century are wearing red caps actual or metaphorical, but not with Lenin’s baseball team logo. Voting for far-right hate with worn-out but actually true excuses of forcing “America” into being what it used to be all over again. Even willing to be bloody “deer” hunting buddies with fascism. Which says a lot today.

The euro-settler working class here never hesitated to join the Slave Patrols of the Old South, or their 1776 Revolutionary War counterpart in New England, the white patriotic Committees of Correspondence (which patrolled the night roads to capture and execute New Afrikans trying to escape Northern euro-settler enslavement by reaching the desperate sanctuary of British military lines). Or ever fought against people joining in the local settler colonial men’s gangs and militias to raid and rape and loot and try to kill Indigenous people. The euro-settler working class supported every capitalist war of conquest and expansion, from the startup settler invasion colonies to u.s. imperialism raising itself high above the rest of the capitalist world as the temporary “lone superpower” with military boots of crumbling clay.

The historic u.s. left was always a house built on a foundation of shifting bone fragments and sand, always divided against itself. Trying to live out our beautiful revolutionary dream of replacing the violent exploitation of capitalism with a liberated world which would freely give “to each according to their needs.” But at the same moment a settler left that never was willing to face how half-corrupted it was. With taking as the “normal” their lives in and loyalty to a privileged oppressor society, however up or down one’s individual lot. This had ramifications so severe that it determined everything.

The established left here, whether communist, socialist, or anarchist, has always fought against being exposed as fronting for settler colonial domination. It is always being implied by them that real change is dependent on winning over the majority. Which happens to mean a pro-settler white majority here, to no surprise.

Anti-war anti-imperialism, Black Power, Indigenous land and treaty rights, Chicano power, counter-culture youth liberation, radical feminism, gay and queer rights—all the great breakouts that came out of that historic ’60s wave were very much minority rebellions far outside the boundaries of majority approval. None of them approved of yet, to tell the truth. Coming from the margins and not the center. Ignored or subtly opposed by the dominant u.s. left of that day as too disruptive, too upsetting, too diversionary to the supposedly main task of building a working-class white majority.

Kersplebedeb: I remember you wrote as much—about change coming from the margins, not the bribed majority—in the interview “When Race Burns Class.” When i first read you explaining that, it was incredibly encouraging, and that idea has stayed with me over the years. Can you give some concrete examples of how this has played out in your lifetime?

J. Sakai: So, one of the spontaneous white shifts of the 1960s was of a sex quietly leaving the left youth movement; here and there, by the ones and twos, hardly noticed at first. Like the earliest trickling in of a tide.

In one of her frank memoirs, the left intellectual Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz relates about her life in the first radical feminist women’s collective, Cell 16 in Boston. In 1969 she went on a road trip with a close male anti-war comrade, who was on a speaking tour of the GI coffeehouses which the movement had started in Southern military base towns. Financing their organizing tour by selling “women’s lib” Cell 16 literature they had piled into the back of their VW “bug” as they went.

Her plan was that while her male comrade would be the official speaker, she would try to informally follow him with an unscheduled talk on the politics of women’s liberation. It had to be kind of improvised, because anything like women’s liberation was strongly opposed in the actual existing left then.

It seemed to start off okay. At one base the coffeeshop filled with an audience of soldiers that was half Latino and Black, which was definitely unusual for anti-war meetings then, and was promising. After one GI half-jokingly asked, “Do we get free pussy if we desert?”—pointing to a then-popular white anti-war poster on the wall, which read “Girls Say Yas To Boys Who Say No”—the male speaker quickly called on Dunbar-Ortiz to answer.

Standing up and turning around from her seat in the audience, she gave it to them straight.

“I said to them that underlying support for the war was institutionalized patriarchy, wherein men were told that they must fight to prove their manhood and that if they didn’t change their consciousness about their attitudes towards women, they were supporting the war just as if they were there fighting. I told them that women wanted to be free and equal and not just mothers or sex objects, angels or whores.”

“The room fell silent as I spoke in my barely audible voice. When I finished the GIs applauded.”

Much more important to her was the discussion the audience had about what she said. “… I had never before heard a group of men seriously discussing male supremacy. I was struck by the irony that these young men—black, white, Latino—from poor, rural, and blue-collar backgrounds were more open to women’s liberation than the middle- and upper-class men in the anti-war movement.” Where it was commonplace for women trying to raise this question to be shouted down, often shunned, or forced out, even with threats of personal violence.

(Everyone back then, including the white explicitly pacifist “peace movement” and mostly Black non-violent civil rights groups, silently condoned movement men hitting “their” women, since that was dismissed as merely “personal problems.” It was surreal back then going into a left office in New York, and noticing that the receptionist’s face was heavy with makeup inadequately covering the bruises—knowing also that her husband was one of the most important protest leaders in “America.” Just as rape between “comrades” was banned as a subject except for private gossip. All dismissed merely as common human failings irrelevant to the struggle for liberation, or as something “nothing can be done about,” to be hushed up to save the movement from police intervention and embarrassment.)

Next, Dunbar-Ortiz and her friend went on to one of the main bases training new army recruits just before they shipped out to Vietnam. But at that GI coffeehouse they ran head-first into a stone wall: the director, a strong woman with a record of civil rights and anti-war views going back to high school. “Nobody is going to talk to my boys about women’s lib,” she insisted. And hours of arguments didn’t change her mind. “So we left,” Dunbar-Ortiz recalls. But a year later, she adds, that stubborn woman would herself leave to become “a full-time women’s liberation organizer in the South.”[296]

That’s what was slowly happening all over the left with many of the most committed women. Starting with handfuls of white women who had caught the spark from working in the Southern civil rights movement daring to oppose the Klan, radicalized white women were raising the question of their own restricted humanity. Even within the very movements putting forth new demands for freedom and justice.

Women had been quietly writing letters and papers about these ideas and sending them to friends, who sent them on into widening circles. In 1968 the first white women’s separatist position paper appeared, Towards a Female Liberation Movement. Men themselves were being named as the enemy, the sinew and material realization of patriarchy, while women started study groups and consciousness raising groups, women’s houses and women’s projects outside familiarity and law. This is the well-known and often-told history of a rising which threatened to change absolutely everything, and yet could not grow to fruition within the structures of the modern patriarchal neo-colonialism that eventually reinfected and contained it.

The point here is that to start together for root change, to shake themselves loose to go for liberation from age-old oppression, those women had to get free of their actually existing male left. Had to distance their activities and especially their own women’s decision-making. Whether it was the Old Left of marxist parties and small sects, or the New Left of the mass sprawling Students for a Democratic Society and campus-centered anti-war and civil rights struggles, they had to leave. As New Afrikans, Indigenous peoples, Latinos, and other colonially oppressed people had largely left before them.

Fairly openly, rebellious white women were students whose teacher was the constantly transforming Black liberation struggle. White women confronting their own oppression couldn’t learn beyond a certain point from their own established settler left, even with all its century of accumulated anti-capitalist theory and teachings. Because that left was itself so corrupted and represented too much of the oppressor mentality that women coming into their own selves had to exclude in order to be free to punch out without reservations. The oppressed learn their most basic lessons from other oppressed. What is more simple to understand than that for revolutionaries?

Kersplebedeb: Indeed! But i want to stop for a moment: Going back to what you were saying about Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and her talk at that anti-war GI coffeeshop. How the GIs—“black, white, Latino—from poor, rural, and bluecollar backgrounds”—were questioning politics together. Weren’t young white workers also doing that?

J. Sakai: Sure, but nowhere near enough of them. There were great moments in the 1960s–70s, like sudden lightning strikes and sheets of rain politically, when the longanticipated political and cultural rebellion turning old imperialist “America” upside down and inside out was being embraced by so many people from every area of society. And yas, for some mostly young white working-class people to turn towards left politics was one real but small stream in that torrent.

i’ll never forget anti-war white working-class comrades like young Ed B., a German-American u.s. Marine veteran, a father and a new union construction worker, sitting-in and going to jail with young Black teenagers. Putting his life into their struggle. Nor the militant GI using the pseudonym “Joe Smith,” in the “F—ked Up Fourth” in Vietnam.

Or much more famously, Peggy Terry, who ran for Vice-President with Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party on the Peace & Freedom Party protest ticket in the 1968 elections (and who never left the poor working-class hillbilly community she came from). Whether Cleaver’s leap into electioneering was a good or bad move (it was heavily criticized then by many Panther Party members, for serious reasons), Terry was trying to follow Black revolutionaries into a new wider breakout of the struggle. She used to say that she first started figuring out about racism when the Ku Klux Klan showed up to try and terrorize her and other workers when they were organizing a union in their Southern factory.

It’s important not to romanticize all that, though, or to take it out of its material context in the class war. When cautiously edging into the middle-class and upper-class left, white working-class men and women could be like pepper in the mix. But later, going back to the euro-settler communities and backgrounds they came from, they were too thin and incomplete a layer to have the same influence then in the mass.

They had also—and this is critical to understand—been politically abandoned by the middle-class and upper-class u.s. left. Mis-taught that the big revolutionary change would finally come when their white working-class majority soon joined us—and then they were left to go back into their conservative settler communities they knew were not going to do anything like that. It wasn’t malice or anything deliberate. That ’60s young student left that had spontaneously created itself into a mass dissident subculture didn’t know any better. No one had anything better than the worn-out old failed theory about the “united working class” or similar such reformist garbage. There’s a big price we pay in the real world, as revs, for corrupted revolutionary theory.

But they left their mark, all of them, though we don’t see it.

Kersplebedeb: So much seems to have changed since that time. For one, just the idea of that level of sympathetic organizing within the u.s. military …

J. Sakai: Indeed. While the lingering public impression of military service is still one of poorly paid enlistees from lower working-class and rural backgrounds taking risks for little reward, like in an old Hollywood movie, the reality is that u.s. imperialism’s military is now qualitatively different.

Regrown from gene-altered DNA, the u.s. military today is primarily their world mercenary corps. Today there’s no universal draft, which turned out to be a two-edged sword for us, too. Instead, they have an all-volunteer, more selective military that tries to be an elite mercenary global intervention force. With special exotic superhero fighting units which are noticeably advertised as almost completely euro-settler in composition. With layers of technology and a shiftier role with which they hope to distance their very costly u.s. soldiers from the point of the spear.

Now you might join the imperialist military to live out single-shooter video games, but more often it’s still to try hands-on, paid while you get an education and a new career. Sure, there’s many young GI households living by payday loans and food stamps, or being ripped off by a car dealer in the neon McRetail strips outside bases—but then again, that’s just blue collar life in “America.”

Things have changed from that old movie cliché, however. 21^st-century u.s. military recruits don’t primarily come from the white working class anymore; the majority are now from the middle classes. And there’s a parallel trend: men and women from what are now termed “national security families” tend increasingly to marry persons of the same background, who understand each other’s special values and service careers, not “civilians.” Almost like in their many millions they would be some embryonic new ersatz loyalist ethnic group for imperialism. Like the old armed frontier settler Cossacks became under the bygone expanding Russian empire of the Czars.

As the wife of one former elite Special Operations battalion commander pointed out (in u.s. army terminology, she was officially the unit’s “senior spouse” with serious assigned duties leading other wives, although completely unwaged of course): the average u.s. “warfighter” is better paid than 75% of u.s. civilian government employees with similar experience, and has major other benefits like free health care and PXs comparable to Walmart’s with average prices 30% lower than civilian stores. With a possible paid four years of full tuition and fees for college. By 2020, one million active duty and retired military were using the special “no down payment, low-interest” federal residential mortgages for their home purchases. “Anyone who thinks there’s no such thing as socialism in America,” she said, “has never spent time on a military base.”[297]

There’s a good reason this major change was made. “America’s” global imperialism was hit by unexpected roadside bombs in the disastrous defeats of the ’Nam era. Not only trend-setting Vietnamese revolutionary military victory, but even more crucial: unprecedented levels of resistance not just at home but even inside the empire’s armed forces. The 1960s–70s threat of mass military insurrections, including from even white servicemen, led by the outbreak of Black liberation. That was the crisis that made Washington step back to crazy-glue their iron fist back together again.

All it took to create that one rebel GI coffeeshop night when “women’s lib” surprised the audience, was the mass drafting of millions of young men dropped randomly into a demented 1960s Asian land war they knew nothing about and felt they had no stake in.

Involuntarily uprooting even white youth away from their homes, friends, communities, and planned futures. Everything familiar to them. Mashing them into new regimented communities of similarly uprooted and uniformed youth. Sent far away to risk minimum-wage death or permanent disability in meaningless jungle firefights. All inside a big trumpeted war effort the incompetent Washington brass and politicians couldn’t even win at. It wasn’t much of a gamble to sow seeds of political questioning and resistance on that fertile ground.

So the imperial state learned and adapted. Once burnt, twice shy for them, too. It’s actually a good example for us, on a small scale easy to chart, of how late capitalism in its metropolis uses its super-accumulated wealth from all over the world in actual class restructuring at home. Not in any “natural” unmediated way, of course, but by ruling class strategy force-feeding its morphing and reshaping.

As late as the Vietnam War, in the 1970s, the ruling class was still trying to get by with the traditional “citizen-soldier” mass military of temps. Drafted en masse from the working classes, the lower middle classes, and small farming families. To their shock, in ’Nam that broke down utterly. So much so that the Vietnamese communists at the time privately expressed being really disappointed with us young revs over here in “America.” They’d seen drug-using, shoulder boombox carrying, soul and rock playing at top volume, u.s. soldiers clumsily penetrating the jungle, who were child’s play to dodge as hometown guerrillas. The Vietnamese weren’t slow, and had no trouble recognizing many GIs as politically disaffected foreign soldiers who didn’t want to fight.

But under a big North Vietnamese infantry ambush trying to overrun them, the same careless u.s. units might suddenly tighten up and become hedgehogs of automatic weapon and mortar fire. Urgently calling in air support like it was their new religion. “FTA” may have been markered onto countless helmets, but as real kids of “America” no one was going to play the part of General Custer in the game.[298]

(Unlike when the Viets were earlier fighting not only regular European French draftees but also French colonial troops from North Africa—who the Vietnamese communists had some success encouraging to surrender or desert—GIs might be enthusiastic in sabotaging the war, but weren’t surrendering to anyone. Some GI deserters in Sweden tried to explain it back then to the Vietnamese comrades—the situational difference between South Vietnamese Army puppet troops who fled or surrendered easily, and the wary, much more gnarly GI units themselves—but the Vietnamese representatives in those talks weren’t happy about having to report back to Hanoi some stuff pretty negative and unorthodoxy by their soviet socialist standards.)

That same “FTA” do-for-yourself spirit, nonetheless, did lead to men replacing an unsatisfactory officer (like too gung-ho or too rule book) by their own informal “any means necessary.” Often grenades rolled under tent flaps late at night. Black soldiers insisted on holding their own marches with banners around camps. More combat companies stopped actually seeking contact—once out of sight they instead relaxed the day away in agreed upon faked “patrol.”

One by one, the critical big aircraft carriers carrying much of the air attack over North Vietnam were delayed and then even knocked out by the military anti-war movement. First the USS Midway, then the Ranger, the Forrestal, and then the Coral Sea, whose enlisted men and some officers not only forced it to return to San Francisco but held a large “SOS— Stop Our Ship” press conference once dockside. There were repeated sabotage fires on the big ships. In October 1972, the carrier Kitty Hawk returning to ’Nam was forced to head back home after Black sailors holding a rebellious meeting fought hand to hand for hours all over the ship against Marines sent to stop them. Then the carrier Constellation was forced to return to San Diego after sabotage and growing unrest. Once ashore, sailors mostly white held a demonstration giving the Black Power salute with upraised fists. Many navy ships had their own illicit anti-war newsletters, such as the Kitty Hawk’s “Kitty Litter.”[299]

As early as June 1971, the end was publicly apparent. That was the month the Armed Forces Journal bluntly admitted: “By every conceivable indicator, our army which now remains in Vietnam is in a state of collapse … dispirited where not near mutinous.”

GI resistance to the Vietnam War was an amazing story of mass illegal and violent resistance to imperialism by the very soldiers supposed to carry out its rule. As such, it momentarily rocked the very stability of the capitalist state. Though it is also an important cautionary tale: for looking back at those military service resisters who were white, once they were demobilized and scattered back into settler communities across the span of the American continent, they as a whole became individualized and lost their political momentum.

The surprising strength of the military rebellions was due to how the anger at “Vietnam” had been taken over, overlaid, and deepened by the even more violent and insistent breakout of Black liberation politics becoming part of daily lived culture against imperialism and its settler colonial hegemony. Black liberation in that entire period was the big straw that stirred the drink for everyone who wanted freeing change. It may not be on some other day, but it was then.

So after their shocked post-defeat period of confusion, the capitalist state and its brass went back to work. Replacing part by part, through trial and error gradually remaking their all-important giant military Frankenstein. Of course, as we know from the strange case of America’s “Forever War” against Muslim peoples, no matter how well-equipped and trained, there’s lots that this costumed superpower military can’t do. Like, it doesn’t seem able in the final conclusion to win any wars at all. That’s an important enigma for us to think about.

Kersplebedeb: We will come back to that question, but right now i want to return again to this thread that keeps on coming up in this discussion, of the role of class in what you are describing. Class features centrally in all of your work; for readers of this interview who may not be familiar with your other writings, how should we understand different classes, and why is it important that we develop analyses of them?

J. Sakai: Once, when i was quite young and even more naive than i am now, i was taking inexpensive night classes at a local college with St. Clair Drake (co-author of the unparalleled 1940s study, Black Metropolis, and a small legend for having once been an organizer with an armed New Afrikan tenant farmers’ self-defense movement in the segregated terrorist Deep South). Not because i was that interested in studying “introduction to cultural anthropology” or “West African society,” but because i thought just listening to him might open rooms i never knew existed. Which it did.

One night i was amazed to hear him curtly dismiss, as with the back of his hand, E. Franklin Frazier’s then controversial study, Black Bourgeoisie. Which he said wasn’t even social science and shouldn’t be read. That book had surprised me—even scared me intellectually—for its cutting dissection of the insular family culture of that era’s small Black bourgeoisie and affluent middle class, saying words bordering on the scandalous on topics like the parentally sanctioned customs of their children. Frazier lit up what he regarded as the self-indulgent individualism and consumerism of the “Black bourgeoisie,” which he said was only imitating the sickness of white “American” culture. He said that their declared class political strategy, of eventually overcoming Jim Crow by the spread of their small business roles and government positions, was only a self-protective delusion minimizing the deepest evils of the capitalist racism they were caught in. i went up to professor Drake after that class and complained to him: “But wasn’t everything Dr. Frazier wrote in his book factually true?” (which we both knew it was). Picking up his briefcase, Drake scowled. “That isn’t social science, that is just a man trying to break with his class!” And strode away. (A bit of context against misunderstanding: As fellow rebel Black intellectuals, Frazier and Drake were colleagues and friends.)

This subject of class is so basic, but it’s really a sleeper. Like it’s so vast, “everything” almost. But “basic” isn’t the same as “simple,” as so many think. Class is deeper and more complex than we can cover right here, on the run as we are in this interview. We all know your damn love life isn’t simple, and raising your kids is too fraught and joyful to be simple, so why the hell should something as all-encompassing as class be the only human thing to be simple? Am going to just lay down some road signs and warnings.

Class identity is real, but its reality is more complex and particular than just rote characteristics or obvious roles. Like the dark blue suits of the corporate manager and the crisp denim overalls of the millionaire farmer are more or less true like all capitalist work uniforms, but also front for layers of deeper roles and identities.

Here as much as in any other life-and-death subject, we need a concrete analysis of the concrete situation to analyze any class situation down to its useful conclusions. Class societies like in global capitalism are made out of building blocks of classes, to the overarching structure of a mode of production and distribution. Classes are the collective identities of people bound together by their common roles and interests and lives in economic production and distribution. People fight for advantages within society as classes. Advance or retreat as classes. All the time people leave their old friends or family, but being disloyal to your particular class is so much harder to even think of.

It’s important practically to know that there are many different kinds of working classes in the world, not one—just as there are many kinds of capitalist classes. With varying cultures and differing experiences in their class character. Just as there are different types of lumpen: Marx and Engels thought there were in Old European history even lumpen/ aristocracy, not just the usual lumpen/proletariat. Like in our capitalist Babylon of today’s mass affluent classes, we find thrown into our mix relatively so many lumpen/petty bourgeois as well as lumpen/capitalists (the one example we all know well of that latter is the Trump family). This is something significant to our practice, but rarely nailed down in print.

Capitalist society is not so eager to show its real decaying face, for all its loud media din and racket. We should keep in mind that classes constantly change. No matter how carved in living stone they seem, capitalist class structures are always evolving, sometimes drastically changing shape, morphing as human life itself surprisingly always does. As quantities of change in any particular aspect of reality continue piling up higher and higher, until finally at a nodal point their relentless accumulation forces its remaking into something completely new. When all that quantitative change topples into higher qualitative change, there occurs a transformation in the basic nature of that class, in that part of reality.

The different classes in capitalism are constantly in the process of change whether their individual members understand it or like it or no. The same with our settler colonialism as a specific form of capitalist hegemony.

This may seem at first more confusing than enlightening, but keeping our bookmark on these ideas, of constant motion and quantitative changes becoming qualitative transformations, helps when we analyze specific aspects of today’s political global class war.

What is most important here is to avoid treating class in an alienated way, misunderstanding it as something mechanical, which is an error that left vulgar materialism has always been prone to. As though something called “the economy” forms and reproduces pre-packaged “class” as impersonal products over us, uncontrolled and above ordinary human life. Like it is often implied to young radicals by vulgar Marxist ideologues that they have only to wait around and the greedy profit needs of capitalism will inevitably shape and mass produce capitalism’s own “hangman,” the pre-packaged takeout proletariat ready-made to do the final revolution. Yeah, about when pigs fly by.

As we have said, capitalist society is never eager to show its real decaying face. And it definitely is far from the first society to mask what are to it really classes, but disguised as races or genders or ethnicities or religions. So that for much of “American” history, the main proletariats or lowest working classes were forced from birth to always wear concealing masks:

The mask of race, as though the sweated bloody commodities of their violently enslaved labors were merely some natural by-products of their New Afrikan or Indigenous subhumanity.

And the mask of gender, as though women giving up their physical bodies and minds were only doing what was biological and “natural” for them. Becoming consumed as lifetime parts in the worldwide patriarchal family machinery, as well as bearing the bio-industrial and social reproduction of all necessary labor for the ruling class economy. Taking loving and being loved while in cages to be an eternal suffocating mask supposedly placed on their faces by the false deities “God” and “Nature.”

At the same time, the great history-shaping classes, such as the bourgeoisie, have always been in part self-creating, not just passively accepting some given economic or social roles. But fighting and innovating within the limits of material possibility to enlarge and transform themselves constantly. The long revolution to liberate this great humanity can accept being no less than that. And even more.

The book Settlers was written starting in 1975, it started out as just a short informal paper to explore a question of mine in this regard; but the work grew and grew following an unexplored path and ended up taking eight years of research and writing and sending texts in and out of the kamps, editing and rewriting by myself and others into underground publication in 1983 for a small outlaw group. It was raw theory sure enough, underdeveloped and wonderfully new-born to us, but not coming from any campus or its universitariat. It all came illicitly from prisons and poor working-class organizing. From solidarity work with guerrilla liberation fighters. Listening to the root understanding of the world held by African and Indigenous militants already at war for their peoples. Settlers then was very basic, theoretically simple, almost raw. Maybe now old but serviceable, like a still-loaded rifle from Wounded Knee.

Radicals have now taken the investigative work of settler colonial theory ranging in different ways beyond that book of labor history, of course. Which would have happened whether or not we had ever had the fortunate chance to do our work (so countless many of the oppressed had just this same insight but were silenced, muffled in blood, trampled under, never had the chance to be heard—it was never our unique idea).

So this is a politics that is still an outlaw coming as an outside threat to established reformist oppressor ideology, from the viewpoint of the oppressed. But drawing more attention, as what we’re told is the advanced superior capitalist world grows more dysfunctional all the time. Even the term “settler colonialism” has become widely used within progressive circles here in the u.s., not only in books about race politics but even in daily newspapers and classrooms. As the pulsing umbilical cord becomes so visible between the swelling of the violent white far right and the unacknowledged weight of “America’s” living dead history. As rebels look further over the devastation for deeper answers.

In that vein, a revealing blog post by the Indigenous revolutionary Rowland “Enaemaehkiw” Keshena Robinson, “Fascism and Anti-Fascism: A Decolonial Perspective,” written in the turbulent uncertainty after Trump’s naked settler colonial reappearance in 2016, reappraises white left theory on fascism in the first light of Indigenous decolonization. Confronting this settler colonial empire on the deceptively camouflaged ground of fascism/antifascism.

Just as there are also voices shining more light on new questions raised in today’s recharged white left protest breakouts. Such as Bromma’s 2020 interview: “Decisively breaking with both worker elite mythology and male leftism.” (Incidentally, Bromma’s earlier quick essay, “Notes on Trump,” analyzing what was behind his rise and the alt-right, is one of the most concise, tough-minded explanations of their place in the world capitalist crisis). So there is still more to do, to deal with taking on the hegemony of entrenched settler colonial capitalism here.

Several examples from young scholars are also significant. In the ground-breaking paper, “The Settler Order Framework: Rethinking Canadian Working Class History,” which appeared in the journal Labour/Le Travail, Fred Burrill draws the line between the old academic labor history defined as white settler labor and its official capitalist workplace organizations, and the new labor history which opens itself up to the fugitive story of Indigenous and other colonial labor from the margins in the making of Canadian capitalism.

Imaginative and reminding us of settler colonialism’s reality in a different-appearing setting, Zachary Samuel Gottesman’s “The Japanese Settler Unconscious: Goblin Slayer the ‘Isekai’ frontier,” in the online journal Settler Colonial Studies, shows how the colonial invasion and conquest mentality that created what we know as Japan, is reenacted over and over again in surrogate form, in a popular Japanese video game set in the usual male fantasy cartoon universe.

As more and more comrades are taking up the investigating and the teaching which strengthens strategic understanding to bring it back into the struggle again.

Kersplebedeb: In terms of understanding the political moment we are in globally, the main contradiction is often described as being between globalized neo-liberalism and right-wing populist nationalism. Above you criticized this view as being overly shallow …

J. Sakai: Indeed, though certainly that’s how journalists and consultants are paid to explain it. So many of us have to follow those loud-speaking establishment guides right now, temporarily while we wait to find out what’s going on. That doesn’t make it true, though.

Usually contradictions don’t only have one outward form, after all. They present their essence in myriad ways, just as a person can wear different clothes. To describe the clothes helps describe the person, but the clothing isn’t the person.

It is closer to what’s true, to say that the globalized capitalism of the transnational corporations has grown so extremely successful, so vast, that they have begun involuntarily ripping away from and moving above the nations that once birthed them. They no longer fit within them. So nations are in part still ruthlessly needed and in part tossed aside. By no means are they “over”; they are still very necessary but invisibly lessened, coming apart, left with dysfunctional societies and economies no longer corresponding to the lived locations of the old class society that once provided the territory for these capitalist beings in earlier life. If that makes sense.

So when Trump went on his would-be historic tirade or trade war with designated wrestling villain “Kung Flu” China, both sides had an unspoken agreement that many outsized capitalist beings like the Apple corporation or Tesla had to be exempt from the match. Otherwise, that would have merely been a public b.d.s.m. hookup. Since Apple, just for example, may be a world-famous u.s. company, but as we know in its years of global rise its famous iPhones were produced first in its own low-wage, prison-discipline production metropolis in Shenzhen, China, and now also in Shengzhou and other Chinese industrial cities. Where almost all iPhones still come from, manufactured by Apple’s large Taiwanese production partner Foxconn corporation (and their even larger silent partner, the Beijing “Red” state capitalist dictatorship)

Both Chinese and u.s. capitalist empires are gaining a lot from this. And if the u.s.a. is Apple’s largest national market, China itself is No. 3 right behind the No. 2 multinational EU. With a value this year reaching $3 trillion and jostling shoulders with Amazon over being the No. 1 corporation in the world, Apple was left to profitably watch the imperialist mud-wrestling match from comfortable Chinese migrant worker–skin seats on the sidelines. It was way too transcontinentally sprawling and too awkwardly shaped, in either side’s understanding, to fit inside the ring of their weirdo pointless nationalist trade war.

Will this imperialist flexing and shoving come in some near future to theatrical “conflict,” or even some pointless actual miniature war—in one gender of armed activity or another? It’s always possible, since “Red” China has always had plastic container take-out military conflicts with many of its smaller or weaker unhappy neighbors. Russia same same. (As one smartass poet once wrote, “Socialism is not a country whose neighbors curse geography.”) While the u.s. empire itself hasn’t won a real war since 1945 but is still “forever” actively engaged in mini-warfare in dozens and dozens of unknown countries on any given unpublicized day.

In this new neo-colonial period there are no longer clear dividing lines between what is military and what is civilian, between war and peace, commerce and crime, each of which take on the other’s properties. Asymmetrical or surrogate military or financial or cultural actions can always happen every day, to gain some advantage or to disadvantage another within the ceaseless “creative destruction” of capitalism.

Any way it goes, it incidentally settles the left controversy of whether the era of imperialism—which began over a hundred years ago at the end of the 19^th century and persisted through two devastating world wars—has been replaced by a fabled era of globalization and peaceful world capitalist unification. We still live—no matter how perilous it seems to us all—in the final capitalist period of imperialism and deep national decadence, and its constant fighting between capitalist entities and powers of all sick shapes and kinds.

That’s just one of many warning signs that this whole “globalization versus right-wing nationalism” thing isn’t what people are assuming it is. It’s not like a real fight, but more like a scripted play of capitalism—with real populations forced to act out its stage directions and lines with our lives.

Nor are the political fistfights ripping apart our own society what we are told they are. To a startling degree, we have been talking about contradictions which are developing in unresolvable ways. That grow only sharper but which cannot be resolved anymore within this actually existing capitalism. The fabric of societies themselves are distorted and are stretched to the breaking point—and then an involuntary tug beyond. Here and now. This is the present moment.

the end for just now

Part 2 (Conclusion of an interview emailed back and forth into mid-2022)

Kersplebedeb: We began this exchange in 2020 and are finishing it off in 2022. Biden is now president; you referred in the first part of this interview very much to Trump, but Trump failed to hold on for a second term, and he may not win or even run again in the future …

J. Sakai: Am always going to focus on a Trump more than a Biden, since he was important in the new white breakout. Not Biden, who everyone knows is just another state manager/politician from the ruling class locker room. Even if our clown Trumpenfuhrer fades away personally like lumpen David Duke did, it’s that Trump was the elected white power President of the settler colonial majority, not liberal corporatist Biden.

The fabled liberal future, in which people of color keep growing to be a new numerical majority of color over the white nation, is only an illusion. New Afrikans were a numerical majority in much of the Old South in the post–Civil War 1 Black Reconstruction era, and yet within a generation white settlers were the “majority” in total armed power race dictatorship over them everywhere there. We are simply going through an agonizing replay of that in a neo-colonial Batman costume.

Again, we have to start going beneath the immediate surface of politics into the underlying reality which first forms its coming shape. And as a necessary reminder, capitalism is a dangerously violent parent even to its own, and severe conflict and disloyalty between the ruling class and discarded u.s. euro-settler factions has happened before and will go on happening until the end.

Not since the fantasy capitalist Confederacy’s total bloody loss in Civil War 1 and then the defeat of the rural Populist protest movement in the Plains states at the turn of the century, have some u.s. white popular classes taken such heavy body blows as in recent history. Although it occurs now in a different and much more difficult setting, that of the decline of u.s. empire within the growing dystopian arc of the capitalist system itself.

Remember, “America’s” white classes are only privileged, not sacred or eternal. All too vulnerable their own selves to big capitalism’s constantly growing “creative destruction” and ceaseless appetite for rolling everything back into yet greater capital accumulation. That’s why they are always ready to jump to the right, to get back more of that settler privilege that they feel is their national birthright. Other versions of the right-wing “Make America Great Again” mass movement have happened before, and have experienced class political progress or defeat—or even in extreme cases, class whiteout. Nor have they themselves always been all that loyal to u.s. imperialism as their nation, when they felt their own desperate interests going in the opposite direction.

The naughty white working class of that Confederate South in the last Civil War, for example, ended up severely reduced in numbers, cut down like no-longer-needed herd animals by the end of the war. 13% of all white military-age men in the South had died in the few years of war, and even many more had been disabled (a year after the War ended, the state of Mississippi had to spend 20% of its revenues on artificial limbs). Some two million white Southerners were forced to migrate West and North looking for new jobs and new Indigenous land to steal to become really white again.[300]

The European conservative theorist of geopolitics, Friedrich Ratzel (who coined the ethnic nationalist slogan lebensraum made famous by “88”), visiting the u.s. South in 1874, was struck that he saw “no skilled workers, nor a vigorous white working class of any size worth mentioning.” He compared even the largest u.s. Southern cities he visited back then to those large but backward cities of colonized agricultural societies, such as non-industrial Havana or Veracruz, that displayed “an incomplete, half-developed profile.”[301] That reduced Southern white working class wouldn’t even start to really recover until the 1930s New Deal and the bloodbath industrial bonanza of WW2.

Even the late-19^th/early-20^th-century political defeat of the precarious small farmers and laborers of the Midwestern Plains in their Populist political uprising, whose presidential candidate was Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan of “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold” fame, also involved mass white class defeat.

Between 1890 and 1920, some u.s. Plains states of the Grain Belt saw widespread white demotion to tenant farmer status as well as actual large lower class removal, with many white bankrupt small farmers and jobless rural laborers forced on the road. Turned back in their attempted populist revolt by the iron walls of the railroad monopolies that controlled their crop sales, and the Wall Street financial interests that controlled their debt. While in one direction, some lingered to swell the anarchist IWW into the greatest rural radical labor organization “America” had ever known. In another direction, a surprising one million struggling rural Plains states whites in those years gave up on their loyalty to “America” altogether and moved camp across the border to remake their nationalistic identity as euro-settler Canadians. (Where some say their white settler anti-banking populism became one important seedbed for Canada’s own social-democratic left.)[302]

Flash forward to more recent history. Even before they became u.s. citizens, early European immigrant “ethnics” such as the Irish had always been counted on to be mass cannon fodder for “America’s” always-outward-moving military. So the fact that modern young white working-class men and boys took up the “FTA” spirit and joined the widespread mutinies against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, was a big shock to the u.s. ruling class.

At the same time, surreal as it may seem today, until the late 1970s a white postal letter carrier or union corporation factory guy could expect to own a home, support a wife and children on his single income, take family vacations—i.e., have some kind of lower middle-class lifestyle. Euro-american settlers got used to that real quick.

So white workers at that time not only expected middleclass incomes in union industries and trades, but increasingly refused to sacrifice themselves in imperialism’s neocolonial invasions abroad. In other words, were of less and less use to the u.s. ruling class.

Little surprise what happened next. Today, now that the u.s. industrial working class has been mostly offshored and local blue collar wages here miniaturized, many white towns and communities that once had a movie theater, maybe a small nearby hospital, restaurants and clothing stores, are often left with none of these. Only a fast food outlet or two and some bars. Since 1979, the number of u.s. manufacturing jobs paying over $20 an hour has decreased by 60%. It is odd but normal now to take in a historic white working-class ex-industrial community that is like half-deserted, where a blue collar family you know is trying to squeeze every adult onto government disability and food stamps. It’s the new “unions.” It’s not just clichés about Appalachia and the upper Midwest “rust belt”—a recent magazine article notes in passing that “Holyoke, Massachusetts, once home to more than 25 paper mills,” is “now one of the poorest places in the state.” Without pausing for any explanation, since it assumes we all get it.[303]

Today, everyone senses our landscape distorting into what feels like the bulging shape of an incipient “civil war” of some yet unnamed kind. Professors and capitalist writers and mass media use that phrase, which has even been debated in contesting New York Times columns. Is Civil War 2 in the cards being dealt us or not?

The capitalist media is choking on these words, but can’t ever explain them. Because by not grounding political analysis in the u.s. empire’s permanent settler colonialism, we can’t get to the unresolvable contradiction of “America’s” post-modern capitalism. That it needs both old colonialism but in camouflaged form, along with a contentious partial de-settlerization of society (or a tactical step back from outright white master-race rule of the biosphere). Which is all an inescapable part of the bitter jumbled neo-colonial capitalist retreat and rearrangement of all classes old and new—and the resultant neo-colonial wars and civil wars like Uyghur genocide and “Iraqistan”—and now with Ukraine emergency alarms inevitably ringing in all our senses.

Kersplebedeb: We are returning to the theme of globalization vs. nationalism, and the limitations of that framework. In that light, and given that you brought it up, what are we to make of the Ukraine war? Are we at some kind of turning point?

J. Sakai: This Ukraine war certainly might become one critical turning point, though it is too early yet to see its full widening circles of consequences. In one way it is a turning point for us because the u.s. left has more or less been united for this moment, only under Biden’s leadership. Confused AOC can be his corporal now, “yessir!” Isn’t that the political gut punch people didn’t see coming?

When globalized economies became evident in the late 20^th century, one of the first premature reactions in bourgeois political analysis was to jump us to the linear conclusion that now separate nations as old news would become unimportant, obsolete, and thus somehow would helplessly fade away. Yet the very reverse happened. Ditto tottering old empires and oligarch/plutocrat monopolies and bureaucrat state capitalism.

Globalization is not some “no speed limits, no traffic laws” economic and cultural free for all, with the fabled “free market” being the sole guide to what anyone can do down and dirty in the scrum. Capitalist globalization needs and is structured around extreme nationalism. How else could they keep the world in order and us under their boot? That’s why English is the mandatory language used by all pilots and air traffic controllers in world commercial aviation, just as a survey of the world’s leading scientific journals found that all the top 50 such publications were in English. In countries such as Germany, France, and Spain, many more university academic papers are produced in English than in their native languages. Many E.U.-based transnational corporations have quietly adopted English as their mandatory language for all company-wide management communications. (All of which also advantages the U.K. and Canada, Ireland and Jamaica, New Zealand and Australia and so on, of course, keeping alive in diffused form the Anglo-Saxon world of the dead British Empire—but within a globalized capitalism. As Vlad the Invader himself bitterly nags us about over and over.)

The universality of identity and outlook that is now natural and needed to make our evolutionary future out of today’s global crises, is also always under constant torque to be twisted into new narrowing capitalist forms. Globalization like everything else exists in contradiction and creates its opposites. “America” can hardly be the “lone superpower” of everything, when China’s trade and investment in Africa are replacing Britain’s and “America’s,” and when Iran is more powerful politically and militarily in the Middle East than either “America” or Russia. And when the biggest global cultural export of “America” isn’t Hollywood anymore but New Afrikan hip hop.

In globalization the capitalist world is becoming more multi-polar but not in the least democratic or egalitarian— and why should it?—and also even more complicated than anyone expected. Like, the natural tendency is for big capitalist industry to concentrate, with duopolies now being seen as the steady end state. Such as Boeing and Airbus in jetliners. But the real trend is much more complex than that.

For instance, we are used to seeing the duopoly of either yellow U.S. Caterpillar or Japan’s Komatsu in bulldozers and earth-moving vehicles on construction sites and highway projects in the U.S. as our bus drives by. But that’s just here, for us locals. Worldwide is a truer more multi-polar picture. While Caterpillar and Komatsu are indeed the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 in market share of heavy construction equipment, white “America’s” beloved “Cat” has only a 13% world share. The three leading Chinese companies have a greater share of world sales together than “Cat” and green John Deere, the other major U.S. company, combined. And Swedish and South Korean and Swiss companies are taking real (for them as small countries) market shares of heavy construction machinery, too. One or two percent of the entire global market for an expensive manufactured commodity is not small change anymore.[304] Some companies specialize more in expensive but extra-heavily-built vehicles for Northern cold weather use, while others put more emphasis on less expensive and lighter equipment for use in flatland tropical climates. No matter how many “Cat” caps white men wear.

Not that many advantages do not persist from imperialism’s previous configuration. Obviously, the u.s. dollar is the foundation currency for world capitalism, which every national treasury and local hedge fund must have access to. As such, the u.s. still enjoys cowboy leverage in the world financial system—at least for now.

And of course, “America’s” FBI together with its elite special military units awkwardly function as globalization’s makeshift neo-colonial super-duper police. Which is why the u.s. could arrest, move to New York, convict, and imprison the former commanding admiral of the Guinea-Bissau Navy. Which must have fascinated fellow Black inmates in their jail tier. Just as they are doing now with arrested Prime Minister Andrew Fahie, the elected leader of the British Virgin Islands. And former president Juan Orlando Hernandez of Costa Rica, who is also awaiting his u.s. trial. It was only an outraged revolt by the leadership of the Mexican Army that forced the FBI to release their recent chief commanding general from federal jail in New York. Under unique u.s. law, any person in the entire world from the UN Secretary General to Putin’s maid can be arrested for alleged direct or indirect relationship to drug dealing or related money laundering, tried here, and imprisoned. Of course, the u.s. is primarily policing up its satraps and subordinates who run the neo-colonial states of the oppressed periphery.

What we see, once we start looking for it, is that “globalization vs. populist nationalism” may loom large in those publicized clashes that dominate our political news—but cannot be any fundamental contradiction of the system because the capitalist ruling class needs, uses and coordinates, and is behind both sides—both globalization and resurgent nationalism. Any more than you can say that big corporations versus state-incorporated trade unions are a principal class contradiction, when both forms of class activity are needed, shaped, and coordinated in symphony by the same ruling class and its state.

Checking off basics: nation-states are the way by which capitalist classes used to stake out and claim territorial class ownership of a particular human society and its lands as their exclusive property, as against all other rival capitalist classes. While under European feudalism there were shifting-in-shape-and-size aristocratic domains and principalities, but not nation-states as we know them (for instance, the present Normandy coast of France once spent more centuries as a feudal part of England than it has since as part of France).

Nation-states are where special bodies of armed men get uniforms that everyone must recognize as their license to kill and enforce overrule. Back in 1776 “America,” the founding foreskins made massively violent racial enslaved labor openly legal and protected in national law and policy, as a necessary gear in the startup motor of its “infant empire’s” capital accumulation. Copycatting patriarchy and the iron law of class society that no born woman may own her own body. Now, centuries later, the large but just-wetnursed Chinese “Red” state capitalist ruling class has similarly made its own mass enslaved and semi-enslaved proletariat, only in veiled form, legally and militarily chained for this same desperate cannibal hunger of startup capital accumulation.

Seen that way, a nation is an indispensable capitalist class instrument, encompassing both steering mechanism and hammer, even though as a form it is now outgrown historically by the humanity-wide development of population, production, and culture. i mean, some say there’s nothing like Arabic Icelandic hip hop. Or Cambodian queer Southern Californian fiction.

Same with rusted old empires and poisoned oligarch countries, neo-colonial tribes, transitory lumpen states—any old collectivities which don’t really fit barrier-leaping humanity anymore, but which addicted ruling classes cannot do without when they need a patch or a fix. It’s as if economic and cultural globalization and the interweaving of the world’s populations is the rising ocean, while now under the surface the sinking structures of antique empires and nations are thrashing about as residual dinosaurs. Like in the Covid-19 pandemic reality tv game, in which industrial high-tech nations like “America,” China, Great Britain, Russia, and much of the EU couldn’t stop dropping and fumbling away any effective public health response.

The more new crisis a capitalist faction is in, the more it wants to have some old nation around it as a safety blanket. Ditto its old races, genders, and religions. That capitalist nation-states across the board increasingly don’t work and are breaking down from anyone’s standpoint, is the central trick bag in our world’s free-falling capitalist plummet.

There are overriding practical reasons for all this, because in endgame system failure not enough is getting repaired or replaced, being obsolete isn’t aging out to be improved. It’s all happening, the capitalistic living and the dying, coupling and competing in every ancient and newest way possible, but all doing their gig work and sex work in one big crowded room. Citizens hoarding toilet paper but also cryptocurrency, while their imperial state hoards its vintage 1950s-era B-52 bombers, as nations willy-nilly join in essential commodity supply chains together while also trying to rain irrational war and sabotage on each other—it’s all the norm for capitalist system dysfunction now.

For what it’s worth, my outsider opinion has been that the most conspicuous old capitalist imperial leaders—like the royal Clintons and oligarch Putin and China’s potentate Xi Jinping—have been completely unable to cope with their own nations’ piling up and up life and death problems. As the world capitalist system’s unresolvable contradictions come more and more due. So all the Borises, Vladimirs, and Bidens are desperately overplaying their own hands in shaky ventures economic and military to somehow “win,” as their ruling class and maybe even their populace remembers once doing.

i mean, the trash fires of fleeing u.s. troops in “Iraqistan” have hardly cooled, but big capitalism’s rulers appear not to have learned a thing from that world’s-longest-running Hollywood movie. These are truly unprecedented big power capitalist gambles in which all sides later turn out to have lost. Costly conflicts where afterwards they can’t find a winner. Although, even if certain of nothing else, “America” is determined right now to fight to the last Ukrainian. That will certainly teach the world a lesson—only what is it?

Keep in mind that this global class system is gigantic, containing billions of people—and like one of their huge oil tankers can turn only in a wide slow arc. Like in Mexico and Central America, for example, this same turning point of a great downward arc of a falling nation coming apart started decades ago. Into the final cataclysm of the capitalist system’s global fall and crash.

Welcome to the steadily spreading chaos that we all sense as the background of our new times. The societies that are capitalism’s human structure coming apart from the stress of this neo-colonial era’s overriding contradictions. Here we see ruling class interests as well as the autonomic survival reflexes of capitalist societies kicking in: all hands desperately ventilating and pumping chest compressions to aging forms of settlerism and ethnic nationalism. While more and more actors outta all classes are grabbing at pieces of their coming apart nations for themselves before it’s too late. Fighting as well over the long ago installed on/off power switch by which one race or nationality can own or control others.

Kersplebedeb: So nations are breaking down, and as you say various players are “desperately overplaying their own hands in shaky ventures economic and military”—what comes to mind for me is that this has consequences in terms of warfare …

J. Sakai: When the 19^th-century military theorist von Clausewitz said that war was just the continuation of politics by other means, he deepened everyone’s understanding of conflict, from the Pentagon to Chinese peasants. Likewise, at the turn of the 21^st century, two Chinese military officers in an army unit assessing strategy published an extended paper/book on war in the neo-colonial era (although that is not a political term they are allowed to use). Which has again helped update the world’s understanding. Peoples Liberation Army colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s 1999 Unrestricted Warfare gave articulated focus to changes which young capitalist military and intelligence and foreign policy officers had been increasingly debating. It became so significant in the spirited discussions on revolutionizing strategy and tactics among u.s. officers throughout the services, that eventually a branch of the CIA had to arrange its full translation and obscure commercial publication.

A word of caution: the Chinese officers did not discover any new military theory themselves, they were usefully summing up the many post-modern leaps actually going on in everyone’s conflicts. Not only the Vietnamese guerrilla victory over “America’s” most technologically advanced imperialist military in the world. But also then right back in turn, the CIA’s White House men in Brooks Brothers suits inventing and financing a global Islamic religious jihad to foil Russia’s attempted colonization of Afghanistan in the 1980s. To mention only the two most stand-out examples besides our own post-modern 9/11.

Their basic theme is that now the rules of warfare have changed, in that there no longer are any rules, at all. That warfare which was formerly given identity by official declarations of war between states, and form by armies of men in distinctive uniforms using lethal specifically military weapons against each other (the countless women and children raped and killed did not count), has broken through all bounds and limitations that used to try and safely divide military activity from civilian activity, war from peace.

The two Chinese officers recognized, in their Unrestricted Warfare, not only how quasi-state actors like the Republican Party or Al-Qaeda (my examples) can wage unorthodox violent conflict to piece together gradual dominance, but that now all combatants can weaponize a wide range of formerly civilian things, such as computer viruses, net browsers, and financial derivative tools. Ditto we can say to mass religions and drug mafias, corporations, and charities—like u.s.-occupied “Iraqistan” used their women’s uplift non-profits as weapons right alongside their men’s criminal ethnic militias, shotgun married by broad-minded Imperial Big Daddy just like that.

Since “the battlefield will be everywhere,” the Chinese theorists predicted wars will not necessarily be declared as such, that there will be no diplomatic, legal, or moral limits at all, that “all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will soon be destroyed.”

This directly relates to what we have seen over the past years in Ukraine, visibly starting in a new Russian war plan of gradual conquest by indirection, seen attempted even before Russia’s “half-sandwich” 2014 military occupation of the Crimea and much of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Coming out of the oven unmistakably when Putin’s man Viktor Yanukovych tried to take the Ukrainian Presidency and then suddenly steer their country back into a USSR-type remarriage with Moscow. This was all borrowed wholesale from China’s Unrestricted Warfare by Gen. V. Gerasimov, Putin’s main military strategist and supposedly the chief planner of today’s 2022 invasion. Some articles, even in the mainstream u.s. media such as Time magazine and The New York Times, linked the invasion with these new concepts of unlimited warfare by misdirection:

“Putin’s strategy was one of unclarity, of blurry, gray movements in a fog of ambiguity, none of them rising to the level of war. American strategists sometimes call this the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine,’ after an essay published in 2013 by Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov, the Russian army’s chief of staff for the last ten years. ‘The emphasis in methods of struggle,’ Gerasimov observed, is on ‘widespread use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other non-military matters … Overt use of force,’ he advises, ‘often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis management, occurs only at a certain stage, primarily to achieve definitive success in the conflict.’”

That Putin’s oligarch-state capitalism was already too weakened to carry out such advanced strategy as well as it wanted to in Ukraine, doesn’t mean that the ideas themselves aren’t increasingly organic to our moment. Armies are starting to supplement the role of expensive and scarce jet attack planes with flocks of bomb-carrying less expensive drones. Or recruiting thousands of smartphone-carrying civilians in the battle zone to act as your forward scouts and intelligence agents about enemy movements. Just like the New Afrikan struggle here is spontaneously doing on the battleground of the streets. Europe hasn’t seen such a real-life quick testing war laboratory since the 1936 Spanish Civil War prepped big fascism for WW2. Which suggests, hmm …

Kersplebedeb: I have seen these developments referred to elsewhere as “fourth generation warfare,” and what you are describing certainly fits what seems to have become the norm over the past half-century. So the contradiction of capitalism surpassing the limitations of its historic nations, and the chaos that ensues from that, would be what is underlying these changes in how conflicts are being waged?

J. Sakai: We have to be careful to hold the lens of capitalist military theory the right way up, since it may seem to help us understand their wars—but is itself a blind alley. Capitalist militaries use terms like “fourth generation” war to systematize their own technical and managerial development. Starting with “first generation warfare,” which to them was the forming of European state armies in the 1600s—who fought in the first rigid formations of soldiers using powered weapons (i.e. muskets and artillery). Today’s “fourth generation warfare” is supposedly characterized by the mixing of regular and irregular forces and tactics, together with the strategic option of waging war directly upon unarmed civilian populations of the enemy, rather than targeting their more dangerous militaries.

How “new” and different this is, certainly sounds pretty questionable to revs, just being polite. i mean, we can test it using one well-established example that we all know about: at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Indigenous women, children, and elderly of the Lakota village (the young men were mostly elsewhere that day) were massacred without any quarter whatsoever, after the majority had disarmed themselves on demand by the invading Union Army cavalry troopers. It was also historic as a first Army enthusiastic field testing of white men’s newly developed u.s. machine guns, which proved highly effective against unarmed women and children trying to hide behind tents. Fleeing Lakota were hunted and ridden down for miles by the victorious u.s. army troopers, a full twenty of whom later received Congressional Medals of Honor to prove that everything that the u.s. military does in its massacres small and large is exceptionally courageous and honorable.

This was one of the last signal battles of the historic eurosettler war to conquer the Plains Indians and Make “America” Great Again. In post-modern military terms, the technological triumph of the u.s. army’s first machine guns and the elaborate propaganda awarding of the highest possible military honors by the “democratically-elected government,” were as important moves as that 7^th Cavalry’s invasion of Indigenous lands itself.

So was trying out advanced “weapons of mass destruction” on unarmed civilians enough to qualify that 1890 day as good as “fourth generation warfare”? Or was it the Putinesque use of the “big lie,” and super elaborate propaganda which publicized and played up their own war crimes but successfully blamed the victims for making it all so necessary, that would make it like “fourth generation warfare”? i think the point is evident.

These “generation” terms were coined as abstract generalizations by the u.s. capitalist military to use in their own managerial theory about capitalist conflict, but they are not accurate about our real world clashes themselves.

And now, since to blab about “fourth generation war” is only like some technocratic jargon to the general public, the u.s. national security community have been instead trying out a more fashionable video game-type term, “hyperwar,” which means exactly the same thing.

We see “hyperwar” trotted out mostly when the housebroken u.s. media is reporting on Putin’s unsavory wars. Obviously, like in Ukraine, where regular Russian army and marine units are sided there with retread veterans and paroled prisoners brought back as the privately uniformed Wagner Group, the more respectable face of an increasing mix of mercenary patch and fill units (such as Donbas Ukrainian town militias and companies of former Syrian army elite soldiers). While Russia uses its military weight advantage to do constant mass artillery and aerial bombardment not only of battlefields but also far beyond, trying to directly wipe out the target society itself. All this might be very striking, but is nothing that the u.s. military and other capitalist militaries haven’t done themselves first, decades or even generations ago (during the long Afghanistan occupation, on most u.s. military bases there “American” mercenaries, politely called “contractors,” often outnumbered regular u.s. troops and aviation forces three or four to one).

Exotic sounding “hyperwar” might stand for some technical capitalist military configuration, but only obscures the actual military change and theory. While WW2, for example, is said by the u.s. capitalist military to mark the time where capitalism’s “second generation war” evolved into the “third generation war” of Nazi blitzkriegs and motorized wars of fast non-linear maneuvering, this is only a narrow technocratic viewpoint. More importantly, to begin with, wars in the capitalist world have distinct and complex political identities and characteristics.

We can gain some perspective by reaching way back in time, to a nodal point of the wave of change that is coming over us right now. The 1935–45 Sino-Japanese war involving millions of combatants, eventually took place within and was to “Americans” mixed up with the global World War 2, where all the major imperialist powers divided into two camps, and fought it out at the admission price totaling at least 60 million lives lost to decide which capitalist nations would colonize everyone else, rule or ruin.

The importance to us now of that 1935–45 Sino-Japanese war, is that it was one of the first great neo-colonial wars, and helped usher in the present era of neo-colonial global economics and politics. When people use the term “neocolonialism,” they usually mean only some money-grubbing trick or crime, where a bribed politician helps some corporate giant of the imperialist metropolis ravage the labor and resources of some peripheral nation. It is so much more than that.

Neo-colonialism occupies a final period of capitalism of its own, where colonial empires and great powers fell, and the new freedom of every capitalist entity to forage and ravage disregarding nationalities and borders around the world became what we call globalization. What the all-enveloping effects of today’s neo-colonial wars like in Ukraine and Ethiopia are to us, only serves to remind us of the shock wave caused by the Sino-Japanese war of the mid-20^th century.

Revs saw the working out of the first successfully developed anti-capitalist revolutionary military practice and theory. The major 1935 Japanese imperialist invasion to make China a wholly owned and occupied Japanese colony, like Korea and Manchuria were then, was defeated in deliberately slowed protracted war by communist guerrilla forces famously represented by Mao Zedong’s political-military teachings. Anti-capitalist revolutionaries who consciously took control of time itself. (While in a contrast we are familiar with, the global “lone superpower” u.s. empire in its Muslim “forever war,” was enslaved and hag ridden by time). This is something capitalist conflict analysts rarely explain. Because in struggle politics is in command, not hardware nor techniques.

The ten-year Sino-Japanese war eventually became in part a theatre of global WW2, of course, but in itself it was one of the first great neo-colonial wars. Anti-capitalist revolutionaries understood this major strategic definition, while capitalist thinking worldwide did not, which meant it also didn’t usefully understand the war there.

The obvious power of all-out Japanese capitalist invasion initially created a great wave of mass defeatism, even among young Chinese militants. China, after all, was famously derided as “the weak man of Asia.” Whose last imperial dynasty had been unable to prevent Western imperialist nations and Japan from occupying China economically and militarily, with parts of the country even being garrisoned and directly governed by foreign capitalists, turning it into the world’s largest neo-colony for the West and Japan. While Japan itself, with its battleships and modern mechanized army, had easily defeated the Russian Czarist empire in their decisive war of 1905. Emerging onto the level of a new great capitalist power as apparently overwhelmingly powerful as China was “weak.”

The Communist revolutionaries reminded their people that far from being militarily invincible in China, as so many believed back then, the well-equipped Japanese fascist invaders were at an invisible but inescapable structural disadvantage to their ragged grassroots anti-capitalist opponents. As Mao pointed out, China was the greatest neocolonial economic prize in the world. With no imperialist power being in the end willing to let one of their other imperialist rivals swallow it all up for themselves. No matter how much troops and equipment the Japanese fascists poured into China’s vast land mass, other imperialist powers would bend the world around to prevent them from being victorious. This bleeding Achilles heel would in protracted struggle combine with revolutionizing the Chinese exploited and oppressed for a new kind of people’s warfare, to prove fatal for the arrogant invaders, a skinny young wanted fugitive Mao accurately predicted.

(Not that Mao was omniscient about all warfare, any more than you or i could be. Used to muse about his dire postwar warning that guerrilla warfare in the Philippines could never succeed—since that capitalist neo-colony has generated armed insurgencies of almost every kind over and over for my entire lifetime and might keep trying til they get over. However unpublicized or unnoticed here in the metropolis, just like Mexico has been.)

More important than the system’s professionals explaining the development of their capitalist warfare, is understanding the war we are in. Ukraine might be not simply a neocolonial war—which it obviously is—but one of the major wars in the fall of the capitalist world-system. “Twilight” capitalism has forced the world on pain of destruction to learn new ways from it, to imitate it, for in the neo-colonial era it invariably teaches over and over all those it must keep intimate with both in production and systemic violence. New modes of production and conflict which leap over the limitations of old nation-state ways that only yesterday seemed invincible, embody how the retreat of the capitalist world-system puts everything we do and are through the grinding change mechanism of neo-colonialism.

Though this neo-colonial era pretends to do away with oppressor and thus also oppressed nations, it really only accelerates their interpenetration. Which has proven that capitalism cannot survive without colonialism. In a mere lifetime it has hollowed out the meaning of great national armies and industries on one hand, as on the other it drives hundreds of millions out of self-sufficient agriculture, handicraft production, and nature-based communities which functioned for centuries. Increasingly populating its computerized societies with reserve armies of labor that it piously and falsely identifies as some new phenomenon of “useless classes.”

In a culture which makes a fetish of what is new, it is easy to forget that global capitalism’s basic structures are to the contrary quite old. The two basic drives of the ceaseless accumulation of more and more capital but only to accumulate still more capital, together with the ceaseless dagger thrusts of “creative destruction,” still compel capitalists and their class system to roll back and forth around the globe to now reconquer and recolonize and rape again the earth every day.

As though the displaced homeless proletariat and lumpen street masses of London and Paris in early 18^th and 19thcentury industrial capitalism were only the harbinger of capitalism’s final shape. For our rulers, even in their new global clothing, have never changed their fundamental structural drives as a class being made up wholly of capital.

Always wiping each other out as entire corporations or entire industries or even whole economic regions in what the noted critical economist Joseph Schumpeter famously named “creative destruction,” calling it the basic inner life cycle of capitalism. As Schumpeter said: “The process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”[305]

While the class structure itself may wear more fashionable clothing, in important ways it is still much as it was centuries ago, except for the foretold wiping away of the peasantry into the global industrial marginalized working class. Only it now envelops the world and the main class sectors have become gigantic in their transcontinental size. The difference in scale changes things, as quantitative change past a critical point becomes qualitative change in its basic nature.

Remember, capitalist classes are never born united and rarely even pretend to be. Capitalist classes are always born with major political-economic internal battles and severe splits of their own. That’s the normal, the ordinary routine of the world. Just as they were born as a top dog class outwardly fighting us—their workers—capitalists are born inwardly fighting each other tooth and nail to the death.

To give one example of changes wrought by the difference in scale: that there are, depending on who counts, loosely 700 to 900 u.s. oligarchs today means that no one on Wall Street or Silicon Valley can be the “gatekeeper” anymore, selectively opening or closing the doors to the large sums of money needed to wage empire-wide political campaigns to wield the state. There’s no J.P. Morgan or Rockefellers politically anymore. (Even without factoring in how the internet has transformed new political agitprop and reorganizing.) While journalists have spotlighted a tiny handful of white right-wing big donors such as Rebekah Mercer as the financial support for the Trump right’s rise, this reaches the target but isn’t in any way hitting the bullseye.

While most u.s. oligarchs are fairly obscure white men keeping a low profile, there is a category we usually don’t think of politically that for other reasons is more visible to us: owners of professional sports teams. So looking at the 31 privately-owned NFL teams, at least four oligarch pro football owners are known to be Trump backers. Just as the men of the Ricketts family, which controls TD Ameritrade and owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team, have been hardcore Trump supporters (because their founding father is an open white power racist, the adult children have had to pledge that he is totally stonewalled from any management of their popular sports team).

Although Silicon Valley has used a progressive or even populist sheen as protective coloration, its actual ingrained hostility to people other than affluent white capitalist men has been proven over and over, and a number of its important figures are if anything to the right of Trump. Same same Wall Street and the financial elite. Now that flamboyantly goofy white power Trumpism has seeped into and become the hatchet’s edge of the renewed GOP, regular big finance capitalist oligarchs are publicly stepping forward as its special funders. Recently, to prepare for the 2022 GOP election campaigns, Ken Griffin of the large Citadel hedge fund donated $20 million to the party; as has Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone, the world’s largest hedge fund. While banking heir Timothy Mellon and insurance oligarch Patrick Ryan gave $10 million each. Nor are they the only ones.[306]

If “only” ten percent or so of u.s. oligarchs would support an extended tear-the-house-down takeover by the white far right, that would still be a financial and political power base of close to a hundred u.s. oligarchs.

While cosmopolitan multicultural transnational corporations encompass some of the ruling class, that is significantly less of a Jesus save factor for liberal democratic society than it is home-staged to appear. And as “America” in its overreaching culture promotes more and more frequent mass shootings to be its classier version of the suicide vest bombings of those backward much poorer societies, only lost-in-space liberals and progressives are left defending old government as legitimate.

Kersplebedeb: i am reading Immanuel Wallerstein, about the rise and fall of world systems. But i’m always unsure to what extent it makes sense to trace what is happening today backwards, as opposed to trying to understand it in the context of everything else happening today. Though the past does tend to feel more interesting.

J. Sakai: You remind me, oddly enough, of Malcolm X. Didn’t he say, “Of all our studies, we have found history to be the most rewarding”? We always go back to our kitchen window to the past, to better understand. Because back in the past is where our present began, and that past is even now alive as a key part of our present. Everyone knows that.

But in the same way, our own present will be part of the future. We need at least a shaky smartphone photo of this future taking form now—a tentative look at its rough shape and a guide as to where revolutionaries will be at our work fighting in it. For now, constructing the outline of the future just using the clues already here in the present for us, if we can pick them out.

This is the anvil where revolutionary theory is being hammered out and tested still glowing hot. It’s no secret that capitalism as a planetary system is in severe disjuncture. It’s in everyone’s conversations and supermarket lines. The other week, was browsing a women’s vampires-and-werewolves paperback novel, when my eyes snagged on a line about a future Asian American Methodist bishop counseling a younger knight-wizard with a most non-biblical quotation: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” The young knight-wizard replies in her knowing ironic to the older woman: “Although I doubt Antonio Gramsci had our kind of monsters in mind.”[307]

i had not expected a real-life 1920s communist anti-fascist prisoner’s words foreseeing the raw interregnum awkwardly looming between old industrial capitalism and some new world-system, somehow dropped head-first into this fantasy novel landscape of post-apocalyptic supervillains and heroes (that was the first and last time he or his politics were mentioned there). But the mixing mix started to get more real when i heard that a writer in the pro-Trump conservative journal American Greatness had called on white men to now embrace their final metamorphosis for euro-capitalism: “The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares. The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”[308]

This country gradually takes on terminal aspects of its modern doppelganger, the desperately dancing for time liberal democratic German Weimar republic which went all to H (spoiler alert: they really really didn’t make it).

For us, “America’s” own Civil War 2 can be a reality check, a flashing little warning light. With at last our very own amateur fight night: a comical “Munich Beer Hall Putsch,” first-toe-in-the-water, January 6 test coup in the Capitol. Don’t forget that between his 2016 triumph and his 2020 defeat, clown Trumpenfuhrer actually gained 1.5 million voters in Democratic sunny California. The whole capitalist system here is now misfiring against itself, parts breaking down one by one, no longer working as the dominant hegemony it once was. Even in the rich garden headquarters society of the imperialist metropolis.

Because the feeling is of crises no longer passing but only kept unresolved, multiplying, our left conversations have taken to peppering phrases with “twilight” and “late” when describing the capitalist system. There’s a left cottage industry of intellectuals hesitantly but seriously writing about globalization deepening the crisis of world capitalism now. That so many differing radical theorists have turned their attention here is itself a signal flag. But revs need to search more directly into the gale.

Even if we weren’t conscious of it, we have long been steeling ourselves for the demise of the capitalist world-system. Even if explicit revolutionary theory on the end of capitalism has been late coming and incomplete. Many of us from all sides have turned much more to culture than Depression economics in feeling our way into the future. But isn’t that always true? As early as 1979, anti-capitalist literary critic H. Bruce Franklin pointed out that science fiction writing was then sampling the theme of the future as an apocalyptic dystopia, mistakenly confusing the end of capitalism for the end of farking everything. As he chipped in about the mindset of then-leading British SF author J.G. Ballard: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is the end of capitalism.”[309]

This aspect of our imperialist culture sonar sensing the ping of possible real-life existential end game, but too frightened to face it except in a transposed fictional form, has grown to wide screen dimensions. As rampaging zombies destroying everything human became normal fixtures in movies and television. Or flip side, same coin, society threatened/saved by supervillains/heroes who without words or permissions appear to matter-of-factly replace ordinary humans as the only beings who can determine the fate of the world. As Kanye West stalks to grab the microphone from Taylor Swift, while millions of refugee people of color driven from their dying nation-states are trying to overrun and erase with the mass of their “useless” bodies the parking lot border lines of the wealthy Western metropolis. Or so oppressor culture in shock mixes the drinks.

Since every previously existing civilization and stage of history known to people has encountered its end times, the idea that present world capitalism might itself run out of time is not a recognition limited to some obscure fringe. Last year i was reading Irish novelist Sally Rooney’s latest bestseller, when i ran aground right into a thick passage. Two main characters are young women who were BFFs at university and afterwards talk frequently though living in different places, by long emails ranging from relationship gossip across to serious intellectual discussions. So one emails the other:

“Your paragraph about time reminded me of something I read online recently. Apparently in the Late Bronze Age, starting about 1,500 years before the Christian era, the Eastern Mediterranean region was characterized by a system of centralized palace governments, which redistributed money and goods through complex and specialized city economies. I read about this on Wikipedia. Trade routes were highly developed at this time and written languages emerged. Expensive luxury goods were produced and traded over huge distances—in the 1980s a single wrecked ship from the period was discovered off the coast of Turkey, carrying Egyptian jewelry, Greek pottery, blackwood from Sudan, Irish copper, pomegranates, ivory. Then, during a seventy-five year period from about 1225 to 1150 BCE, civilization collapsed. The great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or abandoned. Literacy all but died out, and entire writing systems were lost.”

“No one is sure why any of this happened, by the way. Wikipedia suggests a theory called ‘general systems collapse’, whereby ‘centralization, specialization, complexity, and top-heavy political structure’ made Late Bronze Age civilization particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Another of the theories is headlined simply: ‘Climate change’. I think this puts our present civilization in a kind of ominous light, don’t you think? General systems collapse is not something I had ever really thought about as a possibility before. Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilization is a lie. But imagine having to find that out in real life.”[310]

That jab in the head caught me by surprise. The novelist, who is a socialist, didn’t have to make up any fictional “general systems collapse” theory—that developed theory on the possible lessons of the fall of Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean societies exists, and the author of one scholarly book on the subject was even interviewed on a National Public Radio blog or something. Our obvious benefit from this idea is that it maybe opens our minds to considering how what we know are major problems in capitalism might even be much more.

What is pushing and hurrying us about is the ominous feeling that is lurking just behind everyone’s shoulder now. A feeling that everything is somehow getting worse all the time, and that things only get worse and not better. In many countries, ours included, mass politics seem to be moving down the street towards a semi-fascist or maybe even fascist end, unless looming climate disaster gets us first. And no one seems to have any control over it. Like, no one is at the steering wheel.

It’s as if the world is just sliding downhill towards X, and no matter how wide we try to open our eyes, somehow we can’t encompass or take hold of it all. Even though the foreboding feels so damn big we should be able to see it with our naked eyes from across the solar system. Paradoxically it’s too big for us to see.

Big economy/society “over-complexity” theory seems to make immediate sense—right now in this time of global supply-chain dysfunction, pandemic domino world upset, and unprecedented war and economic reprisals on everyone in general all at once—but is just one of a number of plausible theories explaining a near-term collapse of today’s capitalist world-system. It is by far not even the most popular one right now, incidentally, though that doesn’t make it wrong in my view. The most popular view would be global climate disaster, caused by relentless global warming from industrial capitalist civilization’s greenhouse gas emissions. Even those who single out a different factor as the probable lever in tipping this world-system off into its final crash usually bring in climate disaster as a contributing factor for final system disaster. As the novel’s character does herself in that weighty email.

What i’ve come to personally believe is that because today’s capitalist crisis is so great, so enveloping of the entire system from horizon to horizon, it can be seen as many different crises or events, depending on what point or feature your eyes are focused on. All are probably real, but as parts of a greater final transformation of the capitalist world-system as a whole.

Not going to go over or even list all the different points of left opinion on the demise of capitalism. That’s too big a detour to fit in here. But since my favorite interviewer/editor has raised the question of Immanuel Wallerstein’s views on capitalist world-system change, let’s use Wallerstein as an example to bounce off how my own views have developed here.

Left historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein was the most prominent developer of what is termed world-systems analysis or theory. Have read little of Wallerstein’s thick basic writings myself, and certainly don’t claim to understand them well enough to advocate yas or no. World-systems analysis tries to fuse all the varied Western academic fields such as sociology, history, anthropology, economics, astrology, and beyond into one theoryscope, trying to see how world-systems evolve and go through life cycles over long periods of time.[311] Wallerstein believed that every given world historic socio-economic system dies when its growth reaches its furthest limits (a variant away from Marx’s historical materialist dictum that every type of historical society dies when it has exhausted its successive class role in further developing the means of production and distribution). And that capitalism’s absolute need to always rake in capital accumulation and then double down again on even more capital accumulation has really reached its use-by date. As this world-system has effectively enveloped the entire globe and absorbed every human nation and people within it, and has thus hit its limits as a system.

Wallerstein saw this impact accentuating the current downward cycle of a regular “long wave” of the 50-year cycle of capitalist boom and ebb, first charted out by Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev. Which has now been finally disrupted in its cycle and is unable to rise up again, due to the lack of any new space or population to expand into and exploit more. This, he believed, has led to the system being “currently in the terminal stage of structural crisis,” summing things up this way:

“So, to resume, the modern world-system in which we are living cannot continue because it has moved too far from equilibrium, and no longer permits capitalists to accumulate capital endlessly … We are consequently living in a structural crisis in which there is a struggle about the successor system. Although the outcome is unpredictable, we can feel sure that one side or the other will win out in the coming decades, and a new reasonably stable world-system (or set of world-systems) will be established.”[312]

There is a generalized timeline being booted about by some serious analysts for the world-system’s fall and full eclipse into interregnum. In this regard, Wallerstein and fellow historical sociologist Randall Collins won some academic cred in predicting endgame crisis, because in the 1970s they correctly predicted the fall in that next decade or so of the Soviet Union. And although they developed different views on causation—what will finally trigger the toppling of the capitalist world-system—their timeframes at least were essentially similar. Wallerstein earlier said that he saw the time of capitalist world-system collapse in “terminal transformation” occurring approximately in the 2030–2050 range.

Interestingly, both researchers believed that the accuracy of their individual predictions wasn’t going to matter much. Because both agreed with the widely held view that our world is in a desperate race to stop and then to some degree reverse global warming—the great battle over greenhouse gas emissions and industrial age pollution. Which will calendar-wise soon unleash itself after other contradictions have shot their arrows, and which scientists predict will cause such physical and social destruction that the capitalist world will no longer be functional or usable as a system of social organization in any case. Whatever else most radical analysts who work to reveal capitalist endgame crisis may focus on, many of them also see capitalism’s destructive blindness about the environment as bringing down on it the final, most physical, and least escapable fist in the 2050–2100 time period.

We note that Wallerstein believed that today’s political struggle isn’t actually over the fall of capitalism—which had already become a done deal in its early stages to him, fully in process—but over what future world hegemonic society will come to succeed it. Writing in the years before his death in 2019, he saw the future as “at best a 50–50 chance” between some new more democratic and more egalitarian world-system versus something highly repressive like fascism, which we all know hasn’t waited for scholarly validation but is right now racing ahead of us everywhere.

My problem with all that has been that some left intellectuals might agree or not that this analysis or another one could be true, but what “proof” is that anyway? The 64 thousand dollar question applied here is how do we know that a systemic limit on accumulation is really going to finish off the capitalist system in the actually-existing now? Capitalism has gone through periods of no profits and big crisis before—like the 1929 Great Depression, for one—and didn’t get that close to croaking. Got into emergency gear, went all crafty, reformed this while killing off that, sprinkled in some wars, and Bob’s your uncle their capitalist profits were back. Capitalism has proven itself to be ruthlessly supple, capable of surprise strategies and reinventing itself to survive.

i mean, u.s. capitalism once way back in the mid-1860s went in just four quick years from having a vast chattel enslaved labor–based economy with millions of cheapestpossible unwaged workers, to suddenly no race-enslaved chattel property at all and the loss to many Southern capitalists of staggering amounts of one-half of their whole capital and business. But overall mister u.s. cap came out of it all bulging muscular. Ready to expand and conquer as never before.

So while i respect world-systems crisis analysis some, ditto other crisis analyses, wasn’t sure that these theoretical predictions of capitalist system crash were firm and not jumping off-balance at clues. As our ever hopeful intellectual left has done so often before. (Though if there is a joker in the deck, it is certainly the already onrushing global climate change towards disaster.)

But my thoughts on this shifted gears when i started noticing something that i hadn’t been hearing—that capitalism was actually destroying its own nation-states one after another. Some might be rebuilt later or not, but right now they are being gutted and taken down. This is an incalculable event. That’s world changing beyond numbers.

To me the question of nations is so pivotal because that is how capitalism as a world-system has organized its societies structurally to do its work, apply its resources, and solve its problems. Nor is it true that in the absence of a functional capitalist nation, we can just jump in and go ahead with our neighbors to cheerfully and communally solve survival problems—check out Haiti for that one—because capitalism as its most bottom-line autonomic reflex will rather arrange to kill us all than let us remake our lives communally. Much of today’s world can be explained by that one fact.

i initially ran into this understanding on the job—naturally, where else? When i first went to work at a suburban nursery around 9/11, the guys there provided a whole different learning experience about the world for me. That crew mostly came from a town in southern Mexico—largely happy young energetic teens and 20s, who came wading across the border or riding the coyote. We worked the garden season outdoors growing and loading into customers’ SUVs, April until Christmas (selling fall plants then pumpkins and then Christmas trees and wreaths and all that is cash “plant” business, too). So they earned bucks to send home nine months a year, and then went home themselves to their vil to relax and play soccer every day and lord it up as young dudes who had some bit of u.s. cash for three nice months. Sweet to them.

It was all good until it wasn’t. Year by year, their sky gradually darkened. At first the guys used to tell me that they weren’t worried, since they had like a Mexican utopian vision. One married father told me that he knew his young son would be okay, since all Mexicans here had endless jobs for life—because for some strange reason in “America” none of the people liked to work (not saying it’s true, just what they were saying). So Mexicans would gladly do all the real work. (Hey, in my favorite sushi joint all four sushi chefs are Latino, only the boss and cashier are Asian.) They and the u.s.a. were really only two parts of one body, like heart and lungs, they thought, and sometime soon white people would realize that and end all this border nonsense.

Not only did that dream not happen, instead nightmares, like ICE harassment and crazy white hate, shrunk the livable environment here all around them, while getting back for the start of the work season from Mexico got harder year by year. The coyotes got way more costly and unreliable (or were under more heat from the drug gangs to turn over their merchandise faster). Some guys quit, tired of the fear and figuring it wasn’t worth the gamble.

The end finally came when the Mexican government, without an official word, abandoned the area their hometown was in, and big patches of dead state spread over it, like killed-off coral reef zones increasingly spill over the seabed. i mean, the state officials and police were still there and continued riding on top of all the ordinary people, but they were no longer in charge. A fickle criminal syndicate was now the actual state. A shadow state.

One of the guys described going home that last winter. All of a sudden on the main highway into town there was a roadblock complete with men with rifles. Their rules were simple: they did whatever they wanted and you obey or they kill you (the police carefully spent the day on the other side of town). If you were unlucky enough to be driving a newish car or truck, they motioned you out and took it, for keeps. You had to give them your dollars and if you had anything nice—like gifts you’d brought back from “America” for your family—they would take those, too. Laying on almost personal tariffs, just like a Trumpenfuhrer, only daylight naked not covered up in misdirection. No misunderstandings allowed there, that afternoon.

So the people in that town had their little society and bare little economy to live within, poorer but at home. But under this lumpen capitaloid shadow state there was erratic informal taxation and threat of killings always, and if you wanted to travel somewhere it was safest to take the bus and not have anything conspicuous with you. You shouldn’t just drive around if you could avoid it, that wasn’t safe. Those in our workplace up here who decided to stick with their “good” jobs, didn’t go home anymore to Mexico each year—too much hassle and risk. They lived here so they had no safe home either place. Yas, Mexican criminal mafia is different but is also morally and functionally equivalent to ICE, the u.s government migration strong-arm agency. Crap = shite. They weren’t carefree smiling young guys on a work adventure anymore. Babylon is always so inviting, but in the end it’s never fun.

Anyway, you know all this—it’s nobody’s secret that increasing sections of rural and even small city urban Mexico have been overrun or in part taken over by one drug cartel or criminal mafia or another in waves. It’s bigger than the tired out “cops + robbers” or “poor colored people + plenty of crime” stereotypes that capitalist culture loves to stick in our sore heads. Just saying, because instead of mistakenly thinking i know something, picked up abstractly in the distance from the internet news, hearing it first hand from someone’s life is when i started realizing the real, that capitalist nations that people lived in really were being essentially wiped out piece by piece, place by place. Holy crap, i thought. Makes sense on second thought: If the big guys like the u.s.a. and UK and Russia are all busy destroying even their own nations year by year—why not help everyone’s neo-colonized peripheral nations come to go dead, too?

Of course, the u.s. empire—the home base of capitalist globalization—has pretty methodically been going around the world slowly, quietly rubbing troublesome nations jack out of existence for some time now. Oh, they still have wellpaid representatives at the UN and on embassy row, and they are still on the little Rand McNally globe maps of the world. They may or may not be rebuilt some day, but right now they no longer exist as functioning societies with actual coherent governments. It isn’t just Iraq and Afghanistan. They also did it to Libya and Somalia, and of course u.s.- cursed Haiti and Syria, the refugee exodus capital. Then there’s sub-Saharan Africa’s rapidly disintegrating nations no longer in the news, to say nothing of Ethiopia. Chinese diplomats brought this up once at an international gathering, the strange coincidence of countries being internally destroyed after the u.s. “helps” them.

We are starting to see that old Latin phrase interregnum— the dislocated space in time between two kings or reigns without a rule or particular order. And in coming years we will hear it more and more as the existing capitalist worldsystem is replaced with the uncertain wasteland of struggle over a future gone beyond it. What does that transitory landing zone start to look like? Going to take a specific road, and go into that Mexican crisis in a bit more detail. So grab a seat if you’re into this informal map-reading.[313]

This summer, a killing in Mexico made headlines in their news and a little bit in ours. It sheds some negative light, some piercing darkness, which helps define the shape of this. Two old Jesuit Catholic priests, who had dedicated their last years to a small and poor mountain village in Chihuahua state along the border, were shot down along with a local tour guide who was desperately trying to find sanctuary in their church. The murderer is already named by police as a figure in organized crime; he had been set in a rage that day, townspeople said, first kidnapping and disappearing/killing two brothers and burning down their house. Apparently because they and their amateur baseball team had just beat the rival team he had sponsored, as a local personage in a big drug cartel. A Chihuahua environmental activist told reporters simply: “He is a very bloodthirsty man.”

Obviously, killing people isn’t shocking anymore, but his targets were. Far off in the Vatican, Pope Francis himself said he was “dismayed” by the Jesuits’ murders in their own church, and exclaimed on Twitter: “How many killings there are in Mexico!” For his part, the Mexican president said that the killings were “unacceptable.” His prosecutors even offered a reward of $250,000 for information leading to an arrest. So an official big deal. Yawn. Likely the Mexican army troops promptly sent there will someday bring a killer suspect forward in chains for a photo op eventually. Or perhaps by the time you read this some cartel might have disappeared this inconvenient guy. Or likely the story will just vanish from the news for months or years, until a convenient happy ending can be found. It’s all very likely.

What isn’t likely is the stereotyped criminal gang killings fiction we always get force fed to us. This isn’t merely some irrational drug crimie out on a personal “rampage.” A senior area analyst for the respected International Crisis Group has pointed out: “There’s mounting evidence that a lot of criminal actors are testing the waters to see what they can get away with,” particularly in terms of taking over state authority in their regions. A Rector of one Jesuit university observed after the killings that Mexico was “a failed state.”

This isn’t a one-mafia-baseball-team deal. Other big criminal capitalist bodies, such as the Mexican state and its own neo-colonial sponsor, the u.s. empire, are heavily invested right with them. By the Mexican police’s own admission, the alleged Sinaloa gunman had murdered a white u.s. schoolteacher from North Carolina in 2018, but had been allowed to walk around free and completely got away with it. That was the kind of off-side violent transgression that used to be taboo. The next year he was said by local journalists to have killed a Chihuahua state human-rights activist. Again, he is walking around free and publically sponsoring a local sports team, so can be fairly said to have completely gotten away with it. (And, obviously, he has killed many others, if anyone cared.)

So this shooting down of two local priests is a bold step up, but not out of the question at all. Since then, more violent attacks on the Church have occurred. To help consolidate state power, the drug cartel needs to have demonstrated authority with the local population over what kinds of independent social activity are permissible under their rule and what not. Or, as the International Crisis Group analyst said of the Mexican cartels now: “They feel they exercise de facto sovereignty.”

Particularly the Sinaloa Cartel, which was visibly among the largest and most powerful cartels, and got that way by almost two decades of covertly working with or for the u.s. government. This is said to have started around 2000 when Humberto Loya, a lawyer who was a top associate and payoff bagman to politicians for then-Sinaloa co-leaders Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, agreed to provide the u.s. government with critical information on other drug cartels in return for immunity for their own lumpen “creative destruction” biz. Lawyers in the u.s. for another Sinaloa figure on trial have also sworn to the court that “Indeed the United States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

Of course, when “El Chapo” Guzman repeatedly embarrassed the Mexican government and became a legendary outlaw prison-escapee figure, they and u.s. national security had to hunt him down by making deals paying off rival gangsters. Cartels, just like legit world corporations, are constantly changing and in transformation, swelling, merging, shrinking, and splintering, concentrating into niches, switching names and business focus. Only, in the lumpen class zone everything happens much faster and with more relentless turnover.

Always the Mexican government tries to maneuver situations where the most publicity-troublesome criminal actors are chased to big fanfare, while other rival criminal groups are left alone to thrive and pay off in the extra space. During the presidencies of Felip Calderon and his successor, the Mexican murder rate actually tripled—while officially 96% of reported crimes got unsolved by the police.

Last winter and spring, “American” shoppers noticed shortages of avocados and then also limes and mangoes— with big price increases—as news came that Mexican drug cartels were trying to move in and take over commercial agriculture exports to the u.s. Governments on both sides of the border and even armed local militias of avocado growers mobilized to take back the towns and highways, which the very violent Jalisco New Generation Cartel defended not only with gunmen but with highway roadblocks and Taliban-style improvised explosive devices on roadsides. Jalisco cartel men even cut off a Mexican army base, which for a while could only be resupplied by air as though it were in remote Afghanistan. Finally, after a long eight-month siege, Mexican army units were able to enter Naranjo de Chila, the Jalisco cartel’s stronghold there. The Jalisco “soldiers” simply abandoned their center in Michoacán state and disappeared away for a while.

They usually act to repress a cartel in an area only when there is very bad publicity and they need to lift up their battered image. So it was noticed locally that the Mexican government with its army and police were driving away the Michoacán state’s then-dominant Jalisco New Generation cartel, but not other crime factions. In effect, the Mexican army infantry were fighting side by side with the un-uniformed “soldiers” of the ambitious Viagras gang of Jalisco’s rival, the United Cartels (who did not give the Mexican and u.s. governments the same public relations headache). By that point, both had been shooting at and besieging the Jalisco forces and their supporters in the town of Naranjo de Chila for months.

For over a decade, these lumpen economic organizations have episodically taxed the avocado crop in different ways, there being billions of dollars at stake. Now they are pushing once again to take it over, setting a high payoff “tax” of 10% at the packaging plants, in some places even taking over farms altogether. Same with limes now, as well as sometimes mangoes and livestock and timber. David Karp, a former Los Angeles Times journalist on farm markets and researcher on botany at the University of California at Davis, noticing the trends, wrote eight years ago: “Criminal cartels now control, to a shocking extent, the growing and packing of much of the Mexican produce on which United States consumers depend.”

The cartels are not young, and in their own way are beginning to take on the bureaucratic sinews that mature businesses need. They always had not simply “soldiers” but also ship’s captains and mechanics and logistical planning managers. Now government rural health workers are frightened and some are leaving. Doctors and nurses are worried about being drafted into handling the consequences of prolonged battles and possibly being executed if their cartel patients die on them. Already the cartels put up their own sophisticated telecommunications systems with security in rural areas. They get the telecommunications technicians and engineers by simply drafting them; they usually disappear on their way to work, never to be seen again. There was one telling incident when some gunmen stopped a bus and took two telephone company employees away, but they were the wrong guys: phone company, yas, but not technicians—they did consumer phone bill collecting. Their rejected dead bodies were found soon after. This is like watching a raw capitaloid state of its own kind getting formed from scratch before our eyes.

A program director of a Mexican security research agency commented that with “mafias” organized crime is not simply big but has reached into “a gray zone where you tie legal with illegal, the crime with business and the crime with politics.” Since the cartels “understand that that they have more power than anyone else, the government or the businesses they extort.” In the wake of the killings of the two and still another priest, a Catholic bishop has called for a new “social pact,” which in return for less violence would give the cartels a legitimized voice in deciding Mexico’s major political and social questions.

Former Mexican President Calderon, in a speech at the United Nations, said that his earlier attempt to wage a heavily militarized “Mano Dura” or “tough hand” actual war on Mexican drug traffickers—which brought in the regular Mexican army for the first time—as the Bush administration had planned for him, failed because the massive drug economy in the u.s. creates such unstoppable social and political aftereffects swirling through the Global South: “This allows drug traffickers to create powerful networks and gives them an almost unlimited ability to corrupt; they are capable of buying governments and entire police forces, leaving societies and governments defenseless, particularly in the poorest countries.”

This was clever capitalist propaganda. President Calderon himself is said to have been given $3 million in cash in suitcases via his national security chief, in return for protecting the Sinaloa cartel—this according to the sensational testimony of former Sinaloa lieutenant Jesus “El Rey” Zambada, a u.s. government witness at the 2018 Brooklyn trial of “El Chapo” Guzman. These payoffs included at least one delivery that “El Rey” Zambada himself took part in. The u.s. Department of Justice is also conceding that Calderon’s political opponent and successor as Mexican president was even more corrupt and involved with the cartels than he was. Or as one Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: “Witness testifies that El Chapo paid a $100 million bribe to ex-Mexican president Peña Nieto.” So capitalist pro-u.s. state officials and cartel leaders are much more than “frenemies,” because they really do need and benefit from each other even as they still must also play out eroding deadly antagonistic roles in the capitalist system—as though their lives depended on it.

The mega-violent reality fits right into some “The Wire”- type blood drama or “FBI”-type television hoopla. Like the endlessly rebroadcast “tragic” picture here of carelessly dangerous but short-lived violent young men shaped by their intense poverty, caught up in the killing machine of their people’s street criminality. This has the seeming of some raw truth, like a Shakespearian tragedy—but really is only a surface frag of truth. It is high-class nonfiction mixed with high-class fiction, an art form made by wealthy advanced capitalism’s propaganda specialists with real blood and actual poor bodies offered up for verisimilitude.

What was really moving the earth there is even colder, much more implacable. A reality that capitalism can’t let us understand now. Cause at its heart it’s not primarily about bloody melodrama, but about capitalism’s irreplaceable old nations in free fall, damaged with no repair coming, and the u.s. empire and in this example its Mexican neo-colonial subordinates unable to halt or even slow the descent, just throwing in more and more improvised violent stop-gaps as best they can on the fly.

In case nobody noticed, the u.s. imperial Dept. of Justice has a long-term policy of regularly throwing its top Mexican satraps under the bus, always placing the blame for the massive drug trade and spreading criminal lumpen zone on them. Usually not until they leave office, of course. It is a cover story both for the unwillingness of the u.s. ruling class to stop its always-mounting drug addiction business, and for their implicit claim that u.s. imperial gunmen and detectives and military have to always be policing the neocolonial world of people of color in the periphery to protect innocent white communities. As though there were innocent white communities, which is the largest criminal fiction of all.

As over the decades the Mexican capitalist ruling class and their state apparatus have gradually shrunk away from society’s daily functioning—and moved more profitably outward—the empty space has been taken over by lumpen/proletarian economic organizations with the u.s. empire’s tacit agreement. Occupying an important social and economic space, with an improvised and grotesque morphing, partinside and part-outside of capitalism, Mexican crime cartels carry out many billions of dollars in world trade selling not only drugs of many kinds to illicit North American users, not only agricultural products to u.s. supermarkets, but also industrial goods and raw materials to manufacturers of other countries, such as millions of dollars of enriched iron ore directly from their ports to China.

Most important of all, they step in to supplement the old weakening neo-colonial state with a self-funding and autonomous robotic repressive force with capacities beyond what the FBI, Pentagon, the CIA, or the ruling class actors in Mexico City can do in public. Bullet in the head with that avocado, anyone?

In classic class formations, capitalists are largely free riders on their nation-states. Usually very willing, though, to heavily tax the middle and lower classes to support the state structures such as highways and water systems, the police and military, that allow society to function adequately for their capitalism. But back in the day, some capitalists always understood that they could well afford to contribute in special ways, to strengthen what was really their own society’s continued future. Famous capitalists like the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the wealthiest man in “America,” helped lead the building of the “American” nation’s public library system. While in another striking case, Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck paid for the designing and building of over 5,000 basic schools to house New Afrikan formal education over fifteen Southern states, whose “seg” governments would only fund white settler children’s school buildings.

There are no longer any Carnegies or Rosenwalds in that old noble patriarch b.s. way, since even oligarchs like Gates and Buffet cannot rescue long-neglected and now rundown whole capitalist nations, where everything is worn out and dinged and all inadequate anyway. Even more so in a new onrushing age where according to the International Organization for Migration, by 2050 as many as 200 million refugees will be battering down doors seeking shelter just from rising water levels alone (not counting droughts and floods, desertification, firestorms, failing economies, ethnic and religious genocides, invasions and civil wars). And anyway, big capitalism and the big bourgeoisie can’t care that way anymore about whatever place they once came from that’s rotting away no matter what—no one is Saranwrapping their old family condo—since they increasingly are simultaneously both more global and more individualistic in their existence.

We have to get something really reverse to the way most of us are led to understand. Big capitalism gets it that Mexico may be disintegrating just as the u.s.a. is, but from their point of view it is still golden just the way it is. Ruchir Sharma, who manages $45 billion in investments in the Global South as Chairman of International Business for Rockefeller Capital Management, put it this way:

“In the class of [medium] countries with an average per capita income around $10,000 and a population over 100 million, Russia is a laggard … The most dynamic is Mexico, which has also produced ten cities of more than a million people since 1985 … The flowering of second-tier cities in Mexico is intimately connected to the manufacturing centers producing cars and other exports bound for the United States. Among the fastest growing Mexican cities with populations of more than a million, three are in states on the U.S. border: Tijuana, Juarez, and Mexicali. … In central Mexico, Queretaro is a jack-of-all-trades, making everything from wine to appliances to trucks, as well as offering services from call centers to logistics … Aguascalientes is home to Toyota’s most modern manufacturing plant outside Japan.”

Sharma warned investors, however, that the picture on the other side of the peso note is not so crisp. Mexico may have the fifteenth-largest economy in the world, but the Mexican state is bluntly not functional:

“One clear sign that a state is falling short is when it cannot even collect taxes, a failure that tends to expose both a general incompetence on the part of administrators and a popular disdain for the state. Mexico, for example, collects taxes equal to about 14 percent of GDP. That is quite low for a middle class country, and the lack of revenue is making it hard for the government to maintain law and order or suppress the corrupting influence of the drug cartels. Mexico spends just 0.6 percent of GDP on the military, the second lowest among large emerging countries …”[314]

At this point, some might ask, why doesn’t Mexico take substantial amounts of money from that flourishing big city industrial export economy and use it to fix the rest of Mexico and drive out the cartels? The actual bourgeois world isn’t so straight-forward. And for sure the Mexican capitalist ruling class that controls the state isn’t going to heavily tax its own self. They would all rather let the present situation just roll on. Which is why it has. And when and if that part of Mexico gets used up, they expect to just move on to the next disposable plastic part of the neo-colonial periphery.

No, in a zombie-world way, the drug cartels and criminal mafias are capitalist Mexico’s real “military,” and its real “police” as well.

As a neo-colony of the u.s. empire, Mexico’s 130 million people are a giant reserve army of inexpensive labor to backstop and enrich the u.s. imperial economy. Just a truck ride over the border. And their own small but quite affluent Mexican local ruling class sees no need to be taxed to support a military, since it has no traditional enemies as a country except “America” itself. And the Mexican ruling class openly feels that it is the rightful task of the rulers in Washington to defend the neo-colony. So it has just enough official army and navy to protect the capital city and hold the industrial centers and gated luxury reserves for its main capitalist families. All the rest can just go to H and blow away. Mexico being a country is not the same thing as it existing as a functioning nation.

It’s interesting here in a grim sense to turn to another page, that the Pentagon has warned Congress and the “American” public that there is a danger of them falling behind Russia and China in the next generation of advanced military weaponry. Which is said to be autonomous gun- and bombcarrying robots flying over or perhaps driving across the battlefield, killing left and right by self-directed AI computer decision-making. That’s really scary.

What no one is saying, though, is that they have something like that already, only in less precise but also less expensive flesh form. “America’s” forbidden drug cartels and the taboo larger men’s criminal street organization culture in Latin America are exactly that. Autonomous and selfaware killing formations of disposable “robots” that capitalists aren’t publicly associated with or responsible for, that spread out to gradually cover every town and small city in the countryside. Automatically homing in on and subjecting to lethal investigation any persons trying to cause trouble to the existing social order other than them, whether it be by working against oppression or stopping the destruction of the environment, or anyone for human rights or organizing peasants or workers. Then killing or terrorizing the automatically selected targets into silence.

Best of all from the capitalist viewpoint, these kind of autonomous political killing formations of male “robots” can even be made self-financing by their drug selling, lemonade stands, and community car washes. And it’s all “off the books.” Can’t get better than that.

Although capitalist media and culture never admits it, that is what they already know how to do. Which is why the security apparatus of the u.s. government has always not only used such formations, but has worked in the oppressed zone to create them where they didn’t exist. Anywhere the oppressed poor have risen to fight for human rights in the u.s. neo-colonial region of influence in Central America, rightwing mercenary paramilitaries and drug gangs secretly allied to the capitalists and the army have formed to carry out mass killings, assassinations, and cleansing of territory.

In Colombia, a current government-appointed truth commission is trying to finally end the 58-year internal “culture of security,” which was taught to Colombian government forces by the CIA, DEA, and u.s. military, and that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths in a permanent “cycle of violence.” The intelligence chief of the Colombian Army Fourth Brigade provided individual targets for a wave of assassinations of alleged leftists carried out by the Medellin drug cartel. While Western oil companies secretly funded right-wing paramilitary units for “protection,” doubtless with the informed but secret approval of key u.s. officials. “The consequences of this concerted and largely U.S.-driven approach,” the commission concluded, was a “hardening of the conflict in which the civilian population has been the main victim.”[315]

This is the same Colombian “tough hands” model that was instituted during the Mexican Calderon presidency by the u.s. Drug Enforcement Agency. Excited at reports of the high tolls of political rebels killed, not just by the army but by paramilitaries and the drug cartels as well, Robert Bonner (Bush’s chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency as well as simultaneously head of Customs and Border Protection) urged the u.s.-designed “Colombia model” on President Calderon, and publicly defended his Mexican protégé’s actions then and thereafter.

The truth commission has since uncovered that many of those assassinated in Colombia were not doing anything illegal, of course. Which is why they had to be killed “off the books,” as it were. More and more of big capitalism’s ruling the world as the crisis deepens seems to be “off the books.”

As Mexico’s export industries are growing and the affluent middle and upper classes associated with that sector grow wealthier, paradoxically the number of Mexicans in extreme poverty only increases. Populist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has deliberately targeted both ends of the spectrum. Programs used to help poor women and children are now being abolished in favor of subsidy programs giving cash to middle- and even upper-class families. While a long-established program that extended the standard half-day in Mexican schools to include a hot lunch and extra classes has been abolished. Formerly it improved children’s learning while providing all-day childcare so that women could find employment. A newspaper article notes: “Today 44 percent of Mexicans—nearly 56 million people— are destitute, according to the most recent government data available.”[316]

Most ominously, some thousands of communities have in this year’s heat wave run out of water. Streams and rivers have dried up in the extreme drought and heat, and groundwaters, in aquifers below the surface, are being exhausted one by one. By Mexican law, factories have priority for water over human consumption. Right now, scarce water is being trucked in to dry neighborhoods and villages every day. This situation has no solution, and is only growing worse.

Kersplebedeb: Which brings us back to the climate catastrophe, and what it might mean for capitalism …

J. Sakai: Easily the most popular system collapse theory right now, is the spreading climate disaster. This was certainly pushed by James Hansen’s increasingly dire messages that the climate crisis is more severe and coming much sooner than even scientists had expected. Before he retired as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen pioneered the first long-range computer climate modeling, and was one of the world’s leading climatologists. He has been called the “father of global warming.”

He long years ago warned that increasing dangerous atmospheric CO2 levels had “become an emergency.” Almost 14 years ago Hansen said of the eliminating of all coal consumption worldwide by 2029 as the most realistically achievable first real step in the climate recovery process: “This is our one chance.” Since then, the bottom line is that nothing has been done except talk and public relations and increased burning of coal. Elizabeth Kolbert, environmentalist and author of The Sixth Extinction, says that in ignoring Hansen’s prior warning in time, “the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with.” Or as Hansen said: “if you melt all the ice, sea levels will go up two hundred and fifty feet. So you can’t do that without producing a different planet.”[317]

Most radicals who deal with collapse of the capitalist system, don’t predict with the assurance of a Wallerstein or a Collins that it will happen in the range of this date or another. Personally, i have no educated idea whether Wallerstein or Collins are right about their timing of system change. i only am certain that devastating changes beyond what we’ve ever seen will be happening—and very soon in historical terms.

Kersplebedeb: Are there other writers on this capitalist world-system crisis that you find useful now?

J. Sakai: There are many finally who are making contributions, but i find left political economist Minqi Li helpful because he gives us another angle of vision, since he doesn’t share the eurocentric Wall Street, Washington, and London vantage point on the world that is common even in the left, but instead analyzes today’s world-system crisis grounded in his China. While he goes vividly into the meaning of the climate disasters predicted by James Hanson, Li also shows how economic class issues are already politicizing and raising up into action masses of Chinese people.

He notes: “In fact, the Chinese economy is already struggling with unsustainable business and local government debt.” Since to him the huge bankrupt banks’ credit bubble, which is robbing millions and paralyzing the economy, is an assumed fact of Chinese life, just like the Party’s ruling dictatorship is. Whether Chinese capitalism’s giant bad debt bubble is politically sustainable—is another major question, in fact. In China there are already every day illegal protests of the thousands among millions of ordinary people from all walks of life, robbed of their pensions and life’s savings and even homes by the corrupt banking bad debt crisis, which is destabilizing their whole economy.

Minqi Li, who learned from the democracy movement and spent 1990–92 in prison there, also points to the political shock absorber of the mass mirage of a future prosperous capitalist middle-class life, a capitalist narcotic which took over a generation of parents and youth—but that to many has now left only the bitterest aftertaste.

“The dramatic increase in college graduates has led to sharp devaluation of their bargaining power in the job market,” Li writes. “In 2010, about a quarter of Chinese college students who graduated that year were unemployed. Many college graduates live in slum-like conditions on the outskirts of China’s major cities and are known as ‘ant tribes’ … Those college graduates who are ‘employed’ often have to accept a wage that is no higher than that of an unskilled migrant worker. According to a survey by Beijing University, the national average monthly starting pay for college graduates in 2014 was 2,443 Yuan (about 400 u.s. dollars). By comparison, in 2013, the national average monthly pay of migrant workers was 2,609 (about 430 u.s. dollars) … Since the 1990s, many of China’s college graduates have seen their middle class dreams smashed and have undergone a process of proletarianization. To these young people, the promise of a ‘free’ and prosperous capitalism is no more than empty words.” Li ties this to the regrowth of revolutionary politics. “In this context, many intellectuals and college students have been attracted to leftist ideas and become leftist activists.”[318]

China probably leads the world in the number of labor strikes and protest demonstrations. Li points out that:

“The so-called ‘mass incidents’ (a term used by the Chinese government to refer to a wide range of social protests including strikes, sit-ins, marches, rallies, and riots) increased from about 8,700 in 1993, 60,000 in 2003, to 120,000 in 2008. It is estimated that in recent years, the annual occurrence of massive incidents has stayed above 100,000. According to the data collected by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, the cases of various forms of the ‘social order’ violation increased from 3.2 million in 1995, 11.7 million in 2009, to 13.9 million in 2012. In some large-scale mass incidents, tens of thousands of people participated in riots and occupied local governments for days. Assuming that a mass incident on average involves about 100 people, there would be about 10 million Chinese people who are involved in various social protests each year.”[319]

Li feels that the capitalist world-system might be even more vulnerable to collapse right now than many believe, because China as the gigantic center of world industrial production, as well as having become a major financial and consumer economy, is more fragile and teetering-on-the-edge than Westerners understand. And that Chinese events could well trigger and then force a systemic collapse of actuallyexisting capitalism around the globe. Which reminds us that the struggle is always wider than we think.

As a homemade theoryscope on how capitalist worldsystem breakdown is taking place right now, this has been very incomplete. A quick pencil sketch maybe of parts of its wildly transitioning shape. i had to leave out many, many aspects entirely, just to squeeze this study down to interview size. Somehow rambled into the Mexico thing, which i didn’t plan on talking about at all. Was going to explore what has changed so drastically for today’s u.s. ruling class—and does the left understand the capitalist ruling class at all? But that got sidetracked totally. So please understand all the limitations here. Think of this as just a kit to jump start the battered family van with.

& Before we go, let’s pause around the further question of the interregnum a minute. Perhaps one reason the left has been so reluctant to handle the hot event horizon where world-system capitalism is ending, is that we are so uncertain about how to handle the reality of the interregnum. Where at first anyway the odds aren’t with us in Las Vegas. “We’re not ready yet!,” lefty thinks to themself. So i want to talk about it to get used to the idea.

Once, long ago, there was no interregnum in radical thinking—why Gramsci’s pocket parable about the delay in a liberated world and the jack-in-the-box appearance instead of fascism had such an impact on us. Capitalism and anti-capitalism were supposed to be intrinsically counterbalanced in a kind of zero-sum game: as capitalism declined, the radical workers’ left that was massively opposing them would grow in parallel measure, rising to take the inevitable hand-over as the natural inheritors of society. All neat and happy. Or so early hopeful radical thinkers from Europe’s 19^th century, who had never seen socialism or for that matter fascism either, believed.

Our actual dirty world picture has little to do with those old silent movies, and is way more frighteningly complicated and challenging, of course. Capitalism as a world-system has been faltering for some time, but there is no guarantee that an anti-capitalist left of any strength will be there immediately to take over from it. It is possible that capitalism will fall into a chaotic confused landscape. That is what I have been talking about here.

Kersplebedeb: This reminds me of passages in the book Night-Vision, by Butch Lee and Red Rover, especially the chapter “The Changer and the Changed.” In this new twilight reality, what should we be prepared to do? How should we prepare to intervene?

J. Sakai: Night-Vision is a prescient revolutionary writing of the late 20^th century, and still perhaps the most unsettling one. In “The Changer & the Changed,” Butch Lee wrote with a surgical scalpel, cutting away reformism’s scar tissue without painkillers, without compromise:

“But at its essence, the growing chaos of the neocolonial world order is that many different peoples— armed with conflicting capitalist agendas—have been loosed to fight it out. As transnational capitalism hides behind and backs first one side and then the other—or both—to indirectly use the chaos they see no class interest in containing. “This chaos is itself a deepening contradiction of the system, one that no one can be certain of riding, not even the ruling class. And on this charged terrain, dis-unity and not unity is the changed strategic need of the oppressed. This is hard to grab, since it goes against truisms inherited from colonial times. And we think that dis-unity is what’s spontaneously going on all around us anyway, when it’s really an unconscious unity around wrong principles. Old slogans used the picture of unity to make people feel strong: “Sisterhood is Powerful,” “Black Unity,” “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” But these are dead phrases now, not truths but decaying shells.”

And notice that she prefaced the chapter with an acid quotation from the notorious 19^th-century revolutionary, the Moor: “The weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons.”

Often we are all asked, “What should we do?” In the long history of the struggle it is not unusual to be thrown back, to have to restart anew it feels like. Even in the most difficult of times, we have to remember what is basic for us because it is the most practical. To tell the truth. To do the serious and difficult work of learning which truth is key, and then telling it to people who are searching for justice. Which is all there is to do, but is a lot harder than people think. If you assume that things like early 1960s nonviolent civil rights militancy were politically simple, you would be wrong. Often we were thrown into despair because despite the wonderful energy, being on the real offensive for the first time in our young lives, and lots of jail time, we couldn’t budge the racist system at all. And all our charismatic often brilliant leaders lied to us, all the time. Dr. King used to blow smoke rings at us regularly, until his final political awakening that he needed to personally redirect the struggle here, from opposing “discrimination” to overthrowing the system of capitalism, which he explicitly named as the problem (and, yas, his personal breakthrough surprised all of us in the struggle, too). That’s when they quickly pushed their red button and had him assassinated.

That was painful to learn, but it was the rock bottom truth. Not that the leaders were all evil, but most of the time they didn’t know how to proceed without lying. In a capitalist culture, whether on Wall Street or Main Street, “leading” or being the boss is lying as you cover up x and polish up z. The only leader we found to be telling us the truth as fully as he understood it, whether we liked it or not (and largely we didn’t like it), was Malcolm. And he was everyone’s great teacher. Even today, looking out over a world of so many political movements and struggles, i am not seeing more like him. He was usually rebuked by liberal media and intellectuals for not having a detailed program for ending racism in “America” (an idea that today makes me laugh). He would usually say that his belief was that if you could tell people the truth then they would work out what to do. That isn’t the end of our journey, but it certainly has to be the start.

Most things we can’t grasp about the interregnum yet, but there are significant parts we can start with. Particularly about the two contending political forces everyone expects to see—far-right formations including fascism against the new world working class. Two closely related class forces which the present left more or less knows lots of historical-scholarly things about, but in a practical everyday way knows surprisingly little about.

In the interregnum, much of what people say right now won’t matter. Because it will be a new environment with unfamiliar terrain, one that will be constantly impressing us with its own demands. Requiring new people self-selected for that go-round.

Each new historical period ruthlessly requires a different generation of rebels, with different abilities and their own specific character suited for their times. After all, the left generation that fought for the “industrial democracy” of politicized mass unionism worldwide in the 1930s, before plunging into the biggest world war ever, was really not the same as the 1960s youth radicals who smoked dope like “Detroit Red” and jammed a monkey wrench into the whole giant machinery of the Pentagon’s Vietnam War.

Right now we can see the beginning signs of this system’s transition, its breakdown structurally. Most visibly in the old “law and order” which cannot be maintained in the ruleless interregnum space between capitalism and its successors. The political left and the political right will not be the only players. Radical upsurges are always signaled and then also accompanied by tidal waves of mass crime and outlaw cultural movements, since the oppressed and everyone else held down sense that the old restraints have torn loose. We aren’t the only players on the block, not by far, and in times of change never will be.

The Bolshevik leader Lenin learned that the hard way, luckily to little damage except to his pride and his shoe leather. Working late one night as they often did trying to set up a new regime, Lenin with his bodyguard and a few other comrades drove across the Russian capital in an expropriated nice auto. He had rejected his bodyguard’s suggestion that they just crash in communist apartments near their offices, since he wanted to get home. Driving down a deserted street in the dark without traffic, they came to a revolutionary checkpoint. Young “red” fighters manning the barricade waved down the auto, their rifles aimed at the car and its passengers. The communists were peeved that the young “red” guards didn’t recognize Lenin’s face and were unimpressed with them, and had to haul out their wallets and ID. At which point it turned out that the fighters were not really bolshies after all, but armed bandits—

Soon Lenin and his comrades were walking wearily towards the nearest communist group apartment, as their plush car with the imitation “red” soldiers and their money and their papers and the bodyguard’s pistol all roared off into the distance. Understandably angry, Lenin started telling off his bodyguard. Demanding to know why he hadn’t used his gun to defend them instead of insisting that they surrender. The bodyguard was pretty angry himself, and promptly tore comrade Lenin a new one. Pointing out that his starting a one-pistol gun battle against a gang armed with rifles would have only gotten them killed. And it was his job to keep Lenin alive, not be a western gunman. Further, that it would have made a lot more sense if Lenin hadn’t insisted on the lot of them going all the way across town in deserted streets instead of just bunking at a place comrades had near their offices. Guess he was right sheepish on top of embarrassed, but Lenin had to apologize. You live and you learn.[320]

Late 20^th-century globalization reinvented popular piracy of oil tankers and cargo freighters (reaching like 1,000 attacks a year, i believe), but that is overshadowed by what’s going on in the streets now. Last winter, business news reported that the commercial losses from urban looters attacking freight trains here were “out of control.” As proof, one journalist brought back photos from a Union Pacific rail yard of the mountains of debris left over after the train burglars had gone through everything looking for electronics, brand name clothes, and other choice goods : “… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains …”[321] The National Retailers Federation estimated these losses from “‘organized crime’ groups” as high as $1 billion a year, and called for much greater rail policing.

Confess, i got nostalgic when i read that. When you read “organized crime” here you are meant to think the Italian mafia or something, but really in these cases it’s more likely bands of New Afrikan and Latino kids usually. Back in the day when we were raising kids on not much money, had an older Asian acquaintance who knew and every month or so dropped by with a few bags of produce he had gotten at work. You know, to stretch our food budget. One day he called, said he had arranged to get us a whole big bunch of vegetables and fruit. Only i’d have to come by his job after ten that night with a car, so he could load my trunk with bags of grapefruit and oranges, tomatoes and lettuce, til it looked like a grocery store (which it did).

My friend did the graveyard shift at one of the Union Pacific freight yards, where stuff from California came in (i had worked at a yard, too, but different railroad down on the South Side). i showed up of course, and he showed me around. i asked him if giving us all this stuff was a risk, and he said nobody would even notice or care. Showing me some rail cars that were already half empty.

He explained that you can’t speed with a long, zillion-ton train of loaded heavy rail cars without a lot of braking once you get into the city. The risk is too great. So your freight train is going only maybe 5 miles an hour as it very slowly winds through poor neighborhoods getting ready to come to a safe stop in the yards. Bands of teens run alongside the train, trying to break into the cars and climbing in, quickly searching for really good stuff like televisions and jeans. If a rail car had new washing machines they’d gladly try a few of that, too. Good cash stuff on the streets. Which they could ease off to the track side, then if necessary come back with a borrowed truck and vanish with into the night. They only had brief windows of time to get into each rail car and do whatever and jump out. If they ran across oranges or veggies they might take some to sell and a bag or two for mom and the neighbors, but it’s not really that valuable to them or to the railroad.

Not simply crime, but the amount of fearless transgressive activity right now, is more than i’ve ever seen since the 1960s. It is like a torrent from a fire hydrant that’s shoving everything around before it. If anything, the police and capitalist media are frantically trying to downplay it as much as they can. Mostly, it isn’t “political” of course—and too much of it is anti-social—but it all definitely stepped up a whole level on the streets after George Floyd. It’s the big dance.

In the same way of edging outside the lines, women here after the second disaster knifing Roe v. Wade to death by the Supreme Hate Court, were inspired both by the generationchanging novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and by the 1960s underground “Jane” women’s abortion collective in Chicago, and started small unlegal groups to quietly provide medication abortions wherever they are. On their own, desperate women are going around their state laws and using internet resources to illegally “self-manage” abortions. No one is saluting the flag anymore first thing in the morning. (The first great abortion disaster was enacting Roe v. Wade itself, which temporarily granted u.s. women abortions only so as to rebind with looser chains their obeisance to the principle that born women may not do anything with their bodies without patriarchal permission.)

The full meaning of “Jane” and the twin abortion disasters remains unspoken even now by the actually-existing left, because too many still don’t get it. Or don’t want to get it. Let’s dial the clock backward to the raw situation we grew up and lived in, where abortion was outlawed and policed and imprisoned and “always” had been. One thing no one ever says, i guess because it is “dirty” talk, is that in those backward, unscientific days in the A-bomb 1940s and polio vaccine 1950s and moon rocket 1960s, is that many, many thousands of women here needed abortions all the time. Always have. This was civilization without “the pill” yet, remember. (As Butch used to say triumphantly when “the pill” arrived: “Freud was wrong—for women, chemistry is destiny!”) But except for rare public statements adding up to nothing, the postwar u.s. imperial left politely ignored the issue in a manly way. Keeping both respectable and legal. It was much more important to them to demand public support for the steelworkers’ strike or some such issue, of which the then-existing left had a truckload.

On the surface. Below that, in hidden daily life, the desperate need for and massive illegality and fear around abortions churned lives across the left just as in the larger body of society. If you were wealthy or even just very affluent, of course, no prob. Airplane off to Mexico or many other warm and sunny tourist places for a legal abortion vacation. (One of the fav Mexican doctors for that among progressives was an old radical friend of the great artist Diego Rivera, whose large house and clinic was informally a gallery for his patients of many of Rivera’s paintings).

In those old days, the Communist Party, while fading fast, was still the 800-pound gorilla in the room, whose membership and sympathizers even controlled some AFL-CIO unions and were a majority of the anti-capitalist left. Although the Party never said so publicly, women in and around its ranks who got in trouble could on an individual basis quietly find Party doctors who would arrange abortions. Knew women who did that, gratefully.

People today somehow assume that because the women’s “Jane” collective was in operation in the 1960s, that women in Chicago had that covered. You only wish. Although “Jane” eventually had done thousands of abortions, as a small secretive and illegal outfit, of course relatively few women in Chicago knew about them even as they edged more and more into the daylight to spread the rebellion. My comrade Butch knew in a casual movement way some of the “Jane” women, but of course didn’t know their secret. In part because she was older and in different currents in the left. Women she unknowingly knew who were in “Jane” were like white university student activists, who tended to be straight and to live on the North Side (even if they went to the University of Chicago southside). Those who were less reputable, coming out of the South Side Black rebellion and the street drug culture, as Butch did, were less likely to be with that crowd.

That doesn’t mean that women not in that know never got knocked up or needed any less abortions. Abortions were a real issue for women in and around the left back then, a need as immediate and personal as a next meal and a place to lay your head and safety from violence. In our stream of young South Side non–Communist Party, non-respectable rebels back then and there, if you needed an abortion people knew of two options (certainly there were more than two around, but illegally dangerous as it was different groupings had different contacts, just like with copping a gun or scoring dope).

One was the “next day” guy. Who had a very small shabby storefront on 63^rd street in the “ghetto.” He was not any doctor or nurse, just a middle-aged Black man, and for $80 he would give you a really foul smelling drink you had to take on the spot, and keep it down which was not always easy as it didn’t taste any good either. But it worked, women swore, if you went to him no later than the next day after sex.

Usually you were dealing with the need much later than that. For that you needed a real doc, and the one we knew of then was way down south of Chicago near Galesburg. He was an old hostile white country physician, who didn’t make any pretense of respecting the women who came to him. It was all about the greenbacks, and for $400 he would do a quick “D&C” with tools old style ($400 was real numbers back then, like you could get an okay used Ford or Chevy or Plymouth with it). You had to call him for an appointment first and immediately take the one and only he gave you. His phone number was the real secret, and he questioned you to feel safer that you weren’t setting him up. Though he was never nice or “professional.” He was doing a profitable crime he loved to scumbag women he despised, and he didn’t even try to cover that up. Maneuvering in desperation outside the law isn’t as romantic as idealists sometimes like to picture it.

But the thing with illegal contacts is that sometimes you can’t locate them for a while or ever again. My comrade Butch had a young friend, not an intellectual but around the left because she was an outcast, too. Very poor and a high school student—and suddenly preg by a guy she didn’t love and with a family that was breaking up and telling her she was on her own. And Butch couldn’t find any resource we knew about, except the CPUSA doctors. Who paradoxically because they had maneuvered within the medical system so successfully, ran into a wall in this case. They were used to on the sly arranging completely legal medical abortions in hospitals—but couldn’t do it with that girl, since as a familyless minor the legal hurdles were too big. She had the kid, then lost the kid since she tried but couldn’t earn enough working crap jobs to support them with no regular child care anyway. Had to drop out of school, and by the laws then she could never return to public school. Salvaging her life alone after such loss was a tough piece of work, and in some ways though she did it, she always moved with the scar of that bitter oppression.

This experience wasn’t uncommon. You are probably wondering why i am giving all these old details? It is to show how control or not over abortion was real and material to women’s practical lives in a threatening way around the left back then. That was the majority experience in society, not a brilliant breakthrough like “Jane.” Which is why the reformist men’s left ducked and dodged it all as too dangerous in all senses of the word, as completely as they could. Here is the first lesson: we don’t ever need a left like that again. It’s too late for that. It is not even openers in the wild card game of replacing capitalism with a liberated human world-system.

For generations, women in and around the left had to deal with the need for their women’s safety—including abortions and the constant haze of men’s violence—completely informally on their own. Their lives and all women’s lives weren’t judged as needing “political” struggle. Whether communist or socialist or anarchist, the left’s priorities didn’t include that at all. Yas, we all know of brave left women earlier in history who spoke out as exceptions. But Butch’s point which she later blew her stack about a lot was, why couldn’t the anti-capitalist left have made that kind of illegal underground work for women the first priority, the main thrust of reorganizing the culture. Not in the 1960s, which was too late, but starting decades before like in the 1930s say.

Her point was that whether it was a “Jane” or a communal subversive day care and school replacing bourgeois “education,” or women’s dead-secret armed patrols outside the law, women must sooner or later organize themselves to make or provide and control the heart of what they need in society. “Jane” wasn’t just part of a hallway towards a Roe v. Wade, but something alternative and much better, much richer in her eyes. If revs don’t understand that lesson, which people’s struggle itself repeats for us in various ways and forms over and over, we are trying to climb a stairway but tripping on the first stair. To find the future the oppressed need to liberate us all, we need to move towards the danger. Not easy to do, for sure.

The whole 1960s shakeup against the “American” status quo wasn’t only directly fighting the state in terms of antiwar and anti-racism, and cultural rebellions from dope to gender to music. They were heralded by a wave of unafraid outlaw activity of all kinds, including straight-up rude crime both good and evil. That’s what we are experiencing right now. Rough change of all kinds is coming, and the left will grow out of that, too

the end

Introduction from “Marginalized Notes / Monday Nov. 28, 2022”

Like most interviews, this discussion was never researched in the first place. It reflected whatever current news and talk was bouncing off my own thoughts and long memories. When i needed a fact or a name spelled out, like everyone else i just quickly went to the internet pantry. Didn’t even think of endnotes, since others could just google things like i did. A few times, it became convenient to use an old book or a clipping file from my bookshelves, but that wasn’t much and i didn’t worry about it.

That was when i hadn’t planned on anything past the present Part 1. But after delays going to press during the pandemic, and my trying to answer continued questioning from my editor, Karl K., led to adding an even longer Part 2—and using specific sources on facts more heavily not simply my memory.

(BTW at the same time, discovered that some of the sources of my facts had up and disappeared themselves. Just ran away into the forest of knowing. i couldn’t re-find several internet sources i had earlier used.)

Anyway, my editor has always liked source notes whether endnotes or footnotes, arguing that giving people leads where they can read an author’s sources more extensively on their own, is a real help to some readers. Finally, he wore me down and i’ve tried to note sources if only in incomplete ways, particularly in Part 2. Good luck in the hunt.

70. International Council Correspondence, Volume 1, Issue 1

Deleted reason: Not specifically anti-statist.

Author: International Council Correspondence

Authors: International Council Correspondence

Topics: Council Communism, Libertarian marxism, paul mattick

Date: October 1934

Date Published on T@L: 2023-07-19T19:42:46

Source: Retrieved on 7/19/23 from <marxists.org/subject/left-wing/icc/index.htm>

What is Communism?

Paul Mattick 1934

In communism, the process of production is no longer a process of capital expansion, but only a labor process in which society draws from nature the means of consumption which it needs. No longer are values produced, but only articles for use. As an economic criterion, the necessity of which is undeniable, since both production and the productive apparatus must be made to conform to the social need, the only thing which can still serve is the labor time employed in the production of goods. It is no longer the ‘value’ but the calculation in terms of use articles and the immediate labor time required for their production which is the necessary form of expression of a regulated communist economy.

And so, from the standpoint of Marxism, the Russian experiments in planned economy are not to be rated as socialistic. The Russian practice is not directed according to communist principles, but follows the laws of capitalist accumulation. We have here, even though in modified form, a surplus-value production under the ideological camouflage of “socialist construction”. The wage relation is identical with that of capitalist production, forming also in Russia the basis for the existence of a growing bureaucracy with mounting privileges; a bureaucracy which, by the side of the private capitalist elements which are still present, is strictly to be apprised as a new class appropriating to itself surplus labor and surplus value. From the Russian experience no positive conclusions can be drawn which have a relation to communist production and distribution. It still offers only examples of the way in which communism cannot be developed.

The decisive problems of a communist economy do not come up until after the market, wage labor, money, etc., have been completely dispensed with. The very fact of the existence of the wage relation signifies that the means of production are not controlled by the producers, but stand over against them in the form of capital; and this circumstance further compels a reproduction process in the form of capital accumulation. This latter is, by the Marxist theory, beside and because of its validity as a law of crises and collapse, at the same time the accumulation of misery, and hence also the Russian workers are actually growing poorer at the same rate as capital accumulates. The productivity of the Russian workers increases faster than their wages; of the increasing social product they receive a relatively ever smaller share. To Marx this relative pauperization of the working population in the course of accumulation is only a phase of the absolute pauperization; it is only another expression for the increasing exploitation of the workers, and to denominate this as the “growth of socialism” is after all hardly possible.

The gist of the Bolshevist “theory of socialization” may be sketched as follows: With the revolutionary overthrow, i.e. the expropriation of capital, the power over the means of production and hence the control over production and the distribution of the products passes into the hands of the state apparatus. This latter then organizes the various branches of production in accordance with a plan and puts them, as a state monopoly, at the service of society. With the aid of statistics, the central authority computes and determines the magnitude and kind of production, as also the apportionment of the products and producers.

To be sure, the means of production have here passed from the hands of the private entrepreneurs into those of the State; as regards the producers, however, nothing has changed. No more than under capitalism do they themselves exercise the command over the products of their labor, for they still lack the control over the means of production. Just as before, their only means of livelihood is the sale of their labor power. The only difference is that they are no longer required to deal with the individual capitalist, but with the total capitalist, the State, as the purchaser of labor power. In the mind of the Bolshevist theoretician, as in that of the Social Democrat, monopoly capitalism has already made production “ripe for socializing”; the only thing left to do is to give a “socialistic” form to distribution. The decisive aspect of the matter here is the organizational-technical side of the production process; the side developed by monopoly capitalism or to be copied from it, instead of the truly basic factor of communist economy: the economic relation between product and producer.

The conception that the mere centralization of the means of production in the hands of the State is to be regarded as socialization precluded the practical employment of an accounting unit in keeping with a communist mode of economy. Centralized power over social production and distribution admitted of no form of accounting by which an uninterrupted economic process was possible as a substitute for money economy. The Russian attempts at a natural economy during the period of “war communism” completely miscarried. Money accounting had to be re-established.

Under capitalism, the means of production (mp) and labor (l), appear as constant (c) and variable (v) capital. The values c + v can be applied capitalistically only so long as they produce surplus value (s). The capitalistic formula of production is c + v + s. It is only because mp + l appear as c + v, that it is possible to attain s. If c + v drops out, so also does s, and vice versa. What remains is the concrete, material form of c + v, that is mp + l, the means of production and labor. The communist formula of production is – mp + l.

The development of mp and l proceeds in any society; it is nothing other than the “material interaction between man and nature”. The formula c + v + s, however, is historically bound up with capitalist society. If under capitalism it was only the interest in s which determined the development of c + v, since here the need for the expansion of capital prevails over the social needs, under communism on the other hand, it is only the social needs which determine the development of mp + l. The formula c + v + s presupposes exchange between the owners of c + v and the owners of l. If c + v is lacking, so also is this exchange. It is not until mp has ceased to confront the workers in the form of capital, when it remains merely as the tool of society and is nothing else, that it is possible to speak of a communist economy:

“Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labor borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution”. (Capital, Vol. I, Page 90–91).

Taking the social average working hour as the computing unit of communist society, it must be capable of embracing all categories of production and distribution. The working hour unit must be applicable, that is, to the quantitative consumption, the quantitative reproduction and the quantitative expansion of the productive forces. Each enterprise must determine the number of working hours it consumes, so that they can be replaced in the same magnitude. Computation by working hours is not difficult, as all the presuppositions for it have already been formed by capitalist cost accounting. In particular, the capitalist process of rationalisation has developed computing methods which are capable of getting at the cost price both as a whole and also down into the last detail. And while these computing methods are today related to the common denominator of money, their conversion into the working hour is attended by no difficulties.

The production formula of any enterprise, as also that of society as a whole, is very simple. We have already stated it as follows: mp + l = product. With the aid of the means of production, human labor produces a quantity of goods. We distinguish between two different kinds of means of production: fixed and circulating. So we broaden our formula in accordance with this distinction.

mp + _______ r+ _______ l
machines, etc. _______ raw material, etc. _______ labor power
10,000 working hours _______ 70,000 working hours _______ 70,000 working hours

Assuming that these figures are applicable to a shoe factory: mp + r + l = product — 10,000 + 70,000 + 70,000 = 50,000 pairs of shoes in 150,000 working hours, or an average of three working hours is consumed in each pair. In this production formula we have at the same time the reproduction formula for simple reproduction. We know how many labor hours were withdrawn from this factory for the production of 50,000 pairs of shoes. The same number of labor hours must accordingly be restored to it. And what holds for the single enterprise holds also for the whole of society, which of course is only the sum total of all enterprises. The total social product is the product of mp + r + l of all enterprises. To distinguish the production formula of the single enterprises from that of society as a whole, we select capital letters for the latter. The formula for the social product (SP) then reads: MP + R + L = SP. Assuming MP (the sum of all the fixed means of production) to amount to 100 million labor hours, the corresponding sum R to amount to 600 million, and the labor time consumed to be equal to 600 million, we have the following for the total product: MP + R + L = SP – 100 + 600 + 600 = 1,300. Of the total production of 1,300 million labor hours, in conditions of simple reproduction, (i.e.-when no expansion of production occurs), we assume that 600 million labor hours are turned over to the consumers in the form of means of consumption.

The application of the social average labor hour as the computing unit presupposes the existence of workers’ councils (soviets). Each enterprise comes forward as an independent unit and is at the same time, as we shall show later, connected with all the other enterprises. As a result of the division of labor, each factory has certain end products. With the aid of the production formula mp + r + l each enterprise can compute the labor time contained in its end products. In the shoe factory taken as an example, the end product (one pair of shoes) — contains an average of three working hours. This average can be found for each product in each enterprise. The end product of an enterprise, insofar as it is not destined for individual consumption, goes to another enterprise either in the form of mp or r, and this one in turn computes its end products in labor hours. The same thing holds for all places of production, without regard to the magnitude or kind of their products.

When the individual enterprises have determined the average labor time contained in their products, it still remains to find the social average. All enterprises of the same nature, i.e. turning out the same kind of products, must get in touch with each other. From the individual enterprises of a determinate industry, in a given territory, will be derived the total average of all the given averages (average of averages) for these enterprises. To take a rough example: if 100 shoe factories strike an average of three hours, 100 others an average of two, then the general average for a pair of shoes is 2-1/2 hours. The varying averages result from the varying productivity of the individual enterprises. Though this is a condition inherited from capitalism, and the differences in productivity will slowly disappear, the deficit of one enterprise must in the meanwhile be made up through the surplus of the other. From the standpoint of society, however, there is only the social average productivity. The determination of the social labor time calls for the cartelisation of the individual enterprises. The opposition between the factory-average and the social-average labor time comes to an end in the production cartel.

The social average labor time decreases with the development of the productivity of labor. If the product thus “cheapened” is one for individual consumption, it goes into consumption with this reduced average. If it is an end product used by other enterprises as means of production, then the consumption of mp + r for these enterprises falls, the production “costs” decline and hence the average labor time for the products of these enterprises is reduced. The matter of compensating for the variations caused in this way is a purely technical problem which presents no special difficulties.

If the working hour serves as a measure of production, it must likewise be applicable to distribution. A very clear statement of this unit is given by Marx: (Critique of the Gotha Programme, page 29) —

“What the producer has given to society is his individual amount of labor. For example: the social working-day consists of the sum of the individuals’ hours of work. The individual working-time of the individual producer is that part of the social working-day contributed by him, his part thereof. He receives from society a voucher that he has contributed such and such quantity of work (after deductions from his work for the common fund) and draws through this voucher on the social storehouse as much of the means of consumption as the same quantity of work costs. The same amount of work which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another”.

The specialization of labor makes necessary the use of some sort of certificates for drawing from the fund of social articles of consumption. Each producer receives a number of these certificates corresponding to the number of hours of labor he has performed. These certificates may be called labor money, though they are not money at all in the capitalistic sense. “The producers”, writes Marx, “may eventually receive paper checks, by means of which they withdraw from the social supply of means of consumption a share corresponding to their labor-time. These checks are not money. They do not circulate.” (Capital, Vol. 2 — page 412).

The workers cannot, however, receive the full output of their labor. The labor time is not the direct measure for the part of the social product destined for individual consumption. As Marx goes on to explain:

“Let us take the words “proceeds of labour” in the sense of the product of labour, thus the co-operative proceeds of labour is the total social product.

But from this must be deducted: firstly, reimbursement for the replacement of the means of production used up; secondly, an additional portion for the extension of production; thirdly, reserve or insurance funds to provide against misadventures, disturbances through natural events, and so on.”

There is left the other portion of the total product which is meant to serve definitely as means of consumption. But before this can go for individual consumption there has to be taken from it yet: firstly, the general costs of administration not appertaining to production; secondly, what is destined for the satisfaction of communal needs, such as schools, health, services, etc.; thirdly, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, what comes under the heading of so-called official poor relief today. (Critique of the Gotha Programme – page 27.)

Those institutions which produce no tangible goods (cultural and social establishments) and yet participate in the social consumption may be reckoned as enterprises. Their services go over into society without delay; production and distribution here are one. In the case of these enterprises, the final goal of communism, “the taking according to need”, is already actualized; their distribution is governed by no economic measure. We call these public enterprises, or enterprises for general social labor (GSL). Communist accounting is complicated by the existence of these GSL enterprises just as it was by the varying productivity of the single enterprises. Everything which the public enterprises consume must be drawn from the stores of the productive enterprises.

Going back to our production formula for society as a whole: (MP + R) + L = mass of products, or (100 + 600) + 600 million working hours. MP and R have to be reproduced; there remain, of the total mass of products, 600 million working hours. The GSL enterprises take from these 600 million their means of production and raw materials. It is accordingly necessary to know the total consumption of these public enterprises. If we designate the means of production for the public enterprises as MPs, the raw materials as Rs and the labor power as Ls, we get the following total budget for GSL: (MPs + Rs) + Ls = services of the GSL, or (for example — 8 million + 50 million + 50 million = 108 million labor hours.) From the 600 million labor hours to be consumed, 58 million must be deducted for MPs and Rs of the GSL enterprises. There remain 542 million labor hours for the individual consumption of all workers. In the productive enterprises the workers were employed 600 million hours, and in the GSL enterprises 50 million. Of the total output of labor power there is available for individual consumption, accordingly, only 542/ 650 or 83%. We call this proportion the “factor of individual consumption” (FIC). The formula for FIC is: L — (MPs + Rs) over L + Ls. Or employing the figures assumed in our example: (600 million – 58 million) over (600 million + 50 million) = 542 million/650 million = 0.83.

If a worker has worked 40 hours, he receives a labor-money certificate in the amount of 0.83 x 40 = 33.2 which he exchanges for such articles as he pleases. This computation is possible because all enterprises keep an account of their consumption in mp, r and l. The general social bookkeeping, which records all products, has at its disposal all data necessary for determining the payment factor, namely, L, MPs, Rs and Ls, which result from simple summation in the current account.

In the GSL enterprises, the “taking according to needs” was, as we have seen, already realized. With the growth of communism, this type of enterprise receives an ever increasing extension, means of consumption, dwelling, passenger transport, etc. The more society grows in this direction and the more enterprises are transformed into the GSL type, the less will individual labor be the measure for individual consumption. This tendency serves to illustrate the general development of communist society.

With the development of communism, the accounting for FIC changes. Various enterprises, such as an electric plant, work in part for individual consumption and in part for purely productive purposes. To refer to our example: if the consumers are now supplied with electricity free of charge, the electric plant belongs to a new type of enterprise. For accounting purposes, these mixed enterprises must be included either under those of the productive or of the GSL type. This electric plant must receive back from the FIC the deliveries of current, expressed in working hours, going into the individual consumption. The addition of these parts of all mixed enterprises gives the deficit to be made up by the FIC. If we call this part the general deficit (D), we have a new distribution formula: FIC = L — (MPs + Rs) — D over L + Ls.

A number of variations are possible here, depending on whether we assign the mixed enterprises to the public or to the productive ones or divide them between the two. But these variations do not affect the clarity of the general view.

When the relation between the producer and product is established, the question of the horizontal and vertical grouping of the enterprises becomes a technically soluble one, which from the economic point of view presents no difficulties. Distribution also, like production itself, is a social question. The “expenses” of distribution are included in the general budgets for GSL: that is to say, the organs of distribution are enterprises of the GSL type, which likewise conduct their accounting according to the formula mp + r + l.

The conditions of simple reproduction, with which we have been working so far, are after all only a methodological assumption employed for the sake of simplicity and have no basis in actual fact. Human progress demands the expansion of the productive forces; the process of reproduction must be accomplished on a broader scale. Under capitalism, this process which goes on in terms of accumulation of capital, is the individual function of the capitalistic enterprises. In communism, however, it is a social function. Of the social product a part is here employed for the further expansion of the productive apparatus. If this expanded reproduction is to be a conscious action, however, it is necessary to know the social labor time required for simple reproduction. The formula for simple reproduction is: MP + R + L. If the material apparatus of production is to be expanded by 10%, a mass of products of this amount must be withdrawn from individual consumption. When this “accumulation” has been accomplished, production proceeds according to the formula: 1.1 (MP + R) + L. We have already shown that the social product is completely taken up by society when the individual consumption proceeds according to the formula FIC = L – (MPs + Rs) over (L + Ls).

This individual consumption must now be further diminished by 0.1 (MP + R). In the case of a 10% expansion of production, we then get the formula: FIC = L – 0.1(MP + R) – (MPs + Rs) all over (L + Ls). This general formula does not take the place of the concrete solution of the problem in actual reality, but within the scope of this work we must be content with it and merely refer further to Marx: “ If we assumed that society were not capitalistic, but communistic, then the money-capital would be entirely eliminated, and with it the disguise which it carries into the transactions. The question is then simply reduced to the problem that society must calculate beforehand how much labor, means of production, and means of subsistence it can utilize without injury for such lines of activity as, for instance, the building of railroads, which do not furnish any means of production or subsistence, or any useful thing, for a long time, a year or more, while they require labor, and means of production and subsistence out of the annual social production.” (Capital, Vol. 2 — Page 361).

Let us consider this example. If the construction of a railway proves necessary, the work involved belongs to the GSL part of the social production. If it consumes, for example, three years of labor in a certain number of working hours, this sum is deducted yearly by charging it to the GSL account, from the factor of individual consumption (FIC).

In the relations between the individual enterprises, labor-time money is superfluous. When an enterprise delivers its end products, it has linked mp + r + l working hours to the great chain of partial social labors. This must be restored to the various enterprises in the same magnitude in the form of other end products. The labor money is valid only for individual consumption. As more and more enterprises are brought into GSL production, distribution by means of labor money grows less and less, and rushes on to its own abolition. Fixing the factor of individual consumption is the task of social bookkeeping. On the credit side of the social bookkeeping stands L; on the debit side MPs, Rs, and Ls. “Bookkeeping as a control and abstract summary of the economic process,” says Marx, “becomes the more necessary to the extent that the process functions on a social scale and loses its purely individual character. It is, therefore, more necessary in capitalist production than in scattered handicraft and agricultural production, and still more necessary in co-operative than in capitalist production.” This bookkeeping under communism is merely bookkeeping and nothing else. It is the central point of the economic process, but has no power over the producers or the individual enterprises. The social bookkeeping is itself only an enterprise of the GSL type. Its functions are: the registration of the stream of products, the fixing of the FIC, the outlay of labor-time money, the control over production and distribution. The control of the labor process is a purely technical one, which is handled by each enterprise for itself. The control exercised by the social bookkeeping extends only to accounting for all receipts and deliveries of the individual enterprises and watching over their productivity.

The control of production in the society of free and equal producers does not come about through persons and authorities, but is conducted through the public registration of the objective course of the productive process; that is, production is controlled through reproduction.

The different industrial organizations turn their production budgets over to the enterprise which conducts the social bookkeeping. From all the production budgets results the social inventory. Products in one form flow to the enterprises; new ones in another form are given out by them. Each conveyance of goods is recorded in the general social bookkeeping by an endorsement, so that the debit and credit of any particular enterprise at any time can be seen at a glance. Everything which an enterprise consumes in the way of means of production, raw material or labor money, appear on the debit side of the enterprise; what it has turned over to society in the form of products appears as a credit. These two items must cover each other continuously, revealing in this way whether and to what extent the productive process is flowing smoothly. Shortage and excess on the part of the enterprise becomes visible and can be corrected. If an enterprise is unable to maintain its productivity, if that productivity declines, then the other enterprises, even though they work beyond the s.a. production time, cannot cover the shortage of the first one. The comparatively unproductive enterprise is unable to reproduce itself, the malfunction becomes visible and can be remedied by society. The control of the GSL enterprises runs parallel in part with that of the productive ones. It results from the material production, through the registration of the articles turned over to them and the receipt of labor money. The product of the GSL enterprises, however, goes into society “gratuitously”, so that for these enterprises the credit factor is lacking in their bookkeeping. The control of their productivity will probably only be possible with the aid of comparative investigations.

While under capitalism the category s.a. labor time is dependent on “value”, in communism it is only a matter of the labor embodied in goods turned out. And while social productivity under capitalism has to be regulated by the market, which involves a gigantic waste of the social forces of production, in communism the lowering of the s.a. production time is a conscious, socially-regulated act. It leads to a general drop in the time of production. If, for example, an enterprise has reckoned its means of production at 100,000 labor hours, and if we assume that these instruments have a ten-year span of life, then 10,000 working hours are to be added on yearly to the products of this enterprise. If the s.a. reproduction time of the means of production employed in this enterprise declines, then in its process of reproduction it can fashion better or more machines and thus increase its productivity, which in practice means expanding the productive apparatus without the expenditure of extra labor. The production time for this enterprise has changed. Since the s.a. reproduction time is observed, the only change is in the productivity factor of this enterprise. The s.a. production time of the cartel with which the enterprise is connected always remains the same as the reproduction time, since the means of production, too, flow in a continuous stream through all the enterprises. The lowest social reproduction times blend again and again in the process of production with the s.a. reproduction time.

By way of summary, it may be said:

“The basis of the s.a. reproduction time is the s .a. working hour. This category is already valid even in capitalism. Even now the individual differences find no expression in the commodity, for the product is converted on the market into money; that is, transformed into the general commodity, by which all individual differences are abolished. In communism, it is the s.a. reproduction time which embraces within itself all individual differences of slow and experienced workers, of capable and less capable, of manual and intellectual labor. The s.a. reproduction time is accordingly something which as such, as something special, does not exist. Like the laws of nature, which merely bring out what is general in the particular phenomena, without existing as actual laws, the s.a. working hour, which in the concrete sense has no existence, embodies what is general from among the enormous diversity in the material interaction of society”.

The Future of the German Labor Movement

Paul Mattick

1934

Any speculation regarding the possibilities of the German labor movement must take into account, not merely the aims of the various organizations, but the structural transformations in modern society during the last decade. This change in the economic setup, together with its political consequences, is likewise the indispensable key to the complete understanding of fascism.

In the present crisis, the monopolist form of economy develops within itself stagnating tendencies directed economically against the laissez-faire principle and politically against “formal democracy”. The process of capital concentration, which continues during the crisis, acts as a spur to all social groups, though it is only the working class which can be moved into a genuine opposition to the existing order. The economic dependence of the middle class allows it no policy of its own; it develops only a backward ideology, since any social advance brings with it the downfall of this class as a special group.

The fact that the middle class has become the chief support of the fascist movement is only a sign of its own historical insignificance. The policies of the existing economic system cannot be subordinated to the fascist ideology, and the louder that ideology cries, the more surely it also destroys itself. Being incapable of bringing about a revolutionary change in the economic system, fascism is compelled to follow laws which simply force the impoverishment of the middle class as well. The fascist movement must of necessity, in the course of developments, shrink to a fascist state apparatus which has openly to defend the interests of the economically strongest groups against society as a whole. Practically, fascism can only be appraised as the expression of the political necessities of the monopolistic groups during the crisis. It is nothing other than the compulsion to permanent terrorism against the working class; and this compulsion results from the fact that the further endangering of industrial profits by social unrest can no longer be tolerated, since the already insufficient profit brings into question more and more the continued existence of the economic system. Fascism, furthermore, has to wage the class struggle against the class struggle which it denies, so as to prepare the “nation” for the imperialistic clashes to be expected.

As a result of the conflicts of interests within society — conflicts deniable only in words, not in reality — fascism may change its leaders and symbols or may even under certain circumstances, as a result of new social upheavals, give place to a neo-democratic regime. But practically, this transformation would be nothing more than an exchange of leaders and symbols, since even the restored “democracy” would be compelled to adopt the fascist policies. Even a democratically “minded” state apparatus would have to protect the existing society with the necessary means, which today are means of terrorism. Without overlooking the differences between fascism and democracy, it may still be said that both these social forms, within the framework of the present system, have only the same possibilities of action, since politics is always dictated by the economic necessities.

From this standpoint, any struggle for democracy is only a pseudo struggle. And for this reason, such a struggle is quite out of the question for the workers, and can only be conducted by those groups which are willing to play capitalistic politics, that is, merely want to govern. This fight will not even be decided by the “fighters”, but by the processes within the economic system. Only the false assumption that the present economy is still capable of further progressive development can feed the illusion of a new democratic era.

In Germany also, the real class struggle will not turn on the question of democracy, and all attempts to erect a new labor movement on this basis are doomed in advance. The efforts of the socialist movement to get a new lease of life through the radicalizing of its phraseology fall down on the objective impossibility of turning history backward. The demand for the rehabilitation of democracy is no less laughable than the faith of the fascist in the restoration of the “good old times”.

The attempts of the various communist groups to build up illegal movements in the old party style show that they thoroughly share the illusions of the socialist movement. Nothing has changed as regards the idea held by these groups as to the role of the party. What was once legal shall now continue to function illegally in the same form. They completely fail to see that the old party movement was just an expression of formal democracy, and could exist nowhere else. The party is bound up with democracy; the one is not possible without the other. Anyone who fancies that strong party organizations capable of playing a decisive role in history can be built up anew, such a person must necessarily, however much he may protest, believe in the possibility of a new democratic era, and, like the fascists and socialists, is merely intoxicating himself with traditions.

Nothing is more naive than the various assertions of the different political groups in Germany to the effect that they have so and so many thousands of illegal members in their ranks. These computations can only be made and peddled about in foreign countries. They are incapable of proof, and spring only from the competitive needs of the various parties in the countries which have not yet gone fascist. Those computations are dubious for the very reason that there is absolutely no way of making them; no controlled, illegal labor movement embraced on party principles exists in Germany.

It is true that the Communist Party succeeded, during the first few months of the dictatorship, in leading portions of its non-renegade membership to engage in pigmy demonstrations, in collecting dues from the membership, in prompting them to the distribution of leaflets, etc. But this activity was possible only because the fascist terror was still lacking in system, and we find that the communist activity let up in the same measure in which the fascist “Tcheka” spread its nets. This “revolutionary” spirit of the C.P. — spirit which was asleep at the proper moment, because it did not want that moment to come – collapsed from its own senselessness. Thousands of fanaticized party hangers-on drifted into the concentration camps for distributing leaflets containing nothing more than the phrase, “Hands off the Soviet Union”. The fluctuation in membership was peculiar to the C.P. The S.P. was composed of old fellows, incapable of changing, while the C.P. was largely composed of younger elements which instead of convictions had only uniforms to change. These deserters made it all the easier for fascism to wipe out the illegal activity of the C.P. in the shortest conceivable time. The gladiator politics of the C.P. was not even the courage of despair, but served merely to justify the communist “thesis constructors”, who of course had asserted that the rule of Hitler could only be of brief duration. The real relations of power contradicted this criminal policy designed to conceal embarrassing facts, and under the ax of the fascist executioners, the deepest-dyed party fanaticism went to pieces.

Though political groups were reorganized underground, the fascist police also adjusted itself to underground pursuit. Day after day occurred, and still occurs, the arrest of officials, the suppression of meeting places, the seizure of contact men. What is built up today is tomorrow already destroyed. Slowly but with deadly certainty, the very beginnings of the illegal movement are blotted out. It was these circumstances which first clearly revealed how deep the national socialist ideology is still rooted even in the workers. They put themselves willingly at the service of the authorities for the purpose of exterminating “Marxism”. A state of general distrust spread over the movement. One who still sat in the “party” councils today might stand revealed as a Nazi tomorrow. The ideological sway of the Nazis over the great masses brought into the labor movement a state of oppressing resignation and a feeling for the necessity of long-term change of policy. Anything that escaped the hands of the Nazis fell foul of this resignation. What remains is a very small circle of hounded revolutionists who, in view of the true situation, rightly continue for the present to keep their own company. The Party, to them, apart from a few exceptions, means nothing any more. The “groups of five” include workers from the most disparate camps of the old labor movement. The groups themselves serve for the present merely to assure the mutual understanding of those engaged in the movement; they refrain from all outside activity.

Having shattered the old labor movement, Fascism neither can nor will permit the building up of another. What is more, with the further deepening of the crisis, the terrorism must still continue to grow sharper. The necessity of atomizing the masses politically or of bringing them under the direct control of the fascist state apparatus does not, however, do away with the economic necessity of bringing them together in great numbers in the enterprises, industries, employment bureaus, labor service camps, etc. The impossibility of forming strong organizations does not abolish the class struggle itself; in the new situation, it will simply assume new forms. The absence of dominant permanent organizations will and can only lead to the extension of the workers-council movement. The social development has reached a point which makes the council movement the natural and only possible one. What hitherto has been propaganda arises now from the relations themselves. Since the class struggle, viewed as the essential form of historical movement, is not susceptible of being forbidden, the struggle of the workers for their existence must take the spontaneous character under the fascist dictatorship and will be one with the organization. The councils exist only so long as they are in action; they are in action as soon as they exist. In order to be permanent, they have first to win. They are at the same time the realization of the united front since they are not bound together on the basis of ideologies, but are the expression of the material life needs of the combatants without regard to their ideology. They make a reality of what could hitherto be valid only in words; namely, that the Revolution is not a party matter, but the affair of the class.

To avoid going off into empty speculation regarding the coming German labor movement, it must be realized that the period of disintegration of existing society constitutes a new historical epoch which follows its own laws and not those of the past. The old party movement which regarded itself as the decisive factor of the revolution was in reality only a child of aspiring capitalism; a child which the cannibalistic mother devours in the crisis. The setting in of this new epoch is necessarily bound up with the end of democracy and hence with the end of the previous labor movement. The past, to be sure, still weighs upon the present and leads to the building of neo-socialist, neo-communist and other such “neo” organizations, but all traditions must yield in the face of the changed circumstances. The world crisis is still in its first stage, the process of disintegration has only begun. The farther this process advances, the more must the terrorism against the workers be sharpened. But this terrorism serves for their political education. In the course of development, fascism will be compelled to destroy its own organizations; nature sets a limit even to the greatest joy in thralldom. Famishing fascists cease to be fascists. Resignation kills individuals, but not classes. Every attempt of the workers to ward off their impoverishment will be combated in the manner in which rebellions are put down. Thus even the most backward workers will be compelled, in order to save themselves, to act as if they were conscious revolutionists. Every assembly of workers becomes a reservoir of revolutionary energies. The weakness of the illegal organizations will not permit of any great degree of control over the masses. In committees of action and workers councils they will create their own form of organization and their own leadership. And it is only in these first beginnings and their quantitative growth that the revolutionary movement can be discerned.

The tempo of this development is determined by that of the period of disintegration. Unless there occurs a sudden and rapid deepening of the crisis or unless a new war fundamentally changes the whole world picture, nothing much of a surprising nature in reference to the labor movement will happen in Germany in the near future. Of a restoration of the labor movement upon the basis of the old, nothing of the sort need be looked for. So that, so far as concerns the party movement, one will have to deny its very existence. It is impossible to conceive of any way in which it could set itself up as a quite special group, since the movement is identical with the working class itself. And nevertheless, still more surprisingly than did the fascists, that movement will one day snatch the power into its hands.

Unity for What?:Communist League and the American Workers Party Move to Form New Party

Paul Mattick 1934

According to the Militant (#37) the organizational unity of the groups is close at hand. The political bargainers are almost sure to put their deal through to the satisfaction of all concerned. The membership of both groups will be very happy, and they will be proud of a larger and more important organization. The Trotsky bodyguard will easily forget that only yesterday the Musteites were fakirs and political scoundrels. The Muste crowd will soon agree that Trotsky on the same side with their “American Lenin”, the former and present Priest Muste, is not so bad. Together they will fight for the American kind of a revolution, and celebrate the memory and bones of American Bourgeois rebels dead 150 years or more.

The whole matter is a joke, only indicating that by this merger they hope to stop the disintegration going on in both groups. It is of no importance to the working class, and as a matter of fact the workers ignore both of “the only ones”. Divorced or combined, they have no future as their only weapons are outworn traditions which may still confuse part of the workers, but never really influence them.

Practically it may be summed up as an expression of the sound policy “for bigger and better business”. As long as it is not positive that this unity will actually take place, it is not worthwhile to deal with it at great length. We will come back to the subject in one of the future issues of the C. C.

The Strike Wave

Paul Mattick 1934

The present strike wave is characterized by defeats and betrayals. The workers suffer defeats because of their insufficient and treacherous organizations on the one hand, and because the capitalist class and its state cannot permit a victory to the workers on the other. Capitalism in the period of general crisis, must combat to its fullest extent any attempt by the workers to improve their conditions. Victory for the workers would mean endangering the position of capitalism. Every strike is practically lost in advance.

But this does not exclude the necessity of workers fighting every onslaught on their living standard. We must take part in every one of these struggles, and encourage the worker to fight, because the present strike wave in spite of its shortcomings is more important than the whole of the “official political movement” at this time. The fact that these strikes are destined for defeat or betrayal does not mitigate the revolutionary value of the struggle. We may point out that on the basis of the present labor movement no victory is possible, but we have to fight in all these labor struggles as they are, and not as we might want them. We must strive to hinder the labor fakirs from using these strikes to their own advantage, and this is best done by the most activity on the actual strike front.

The fight for existence is the fight of today; and the struggle for a new society can only grow out of these daily struggles. As these day to day struggles increase, and as the worker gains experience from the defeats, the fight changes its quality and becomes revolutionary leading to the overthrow of the present system. A communist may criticize and condemn the character of the strikes and the organizations involved, but he must take part in the strikes and fight, for this is the shortest road to revolution in the declining period of capitalism.

71. The Gender Binary Is a Tool of White Supremacy

Deleted reason: Not sure if this is anarchist.

Subtitle: A brief history of gender expansiveness — and how colonialism slaughtered it

Author: Kravitz M.

Authors: Kravitz M.

Topics: gender, white supremacy, colonialism

Date: 14 July 2021

Date Published on T@L: 2021-10-27T09:53:30

Source: Retrieved on 27 October 2021 from https://aninjusticemag.com/the-gender-binary-is-a-tool-of-white-supremacy-db89d0bc9044

The transgender community is in the public eye more than ever — and people are not pleased about it. From physical harassment to being refused medical care, transgender and nonbinary individuals often have a difficult time living as who they are. Many deny our identities altogether, claiming that they’re an odd fad that shouldn’t be acknowledged. Others claim they’re unnatural as they go against the trusted — albeit rigid and fragile — gender binary.

Declaring that the only genders are female and male, both defined by physical characteristics, the binary sees any deviation from this system as artificial and freakish. This worldview allegedly justifies transphobia. Cisgender people treat this binary as if it were infallible. Enforcing it wherever possible, they code almost every part of their lives with gender, from the way they sit to how they express emotions.

While the past few decades have given people a bit of wiggle room within the confines of their gender, they’re still confined. Why? If this binary is so instinctual, why are there people today who contradict it, or even actively fight against it?

In truth, it’s not gender variation that’s a recent invention, but the Western binary that abnormalizes it. While the term “transgender” wasn’t popularized until the 60s and “genderqueer” not until the 90s, gender expressions outside of a rigid male/female dichotomy are as old as civilization. The reason it seems contemporary is due to its ferocious eradication from history and common knowledge. This suppression was carried out and perpetuated by none other than racism and antisemitism.

Historical Gender Variance

As many more are aware of today, cultures worldwide have often recognized genders other than “male” and “female.” India’s hijra, which has existed for millennia, has an essential place in Hinduism and a socio-cultural role as performers. Judaism recognizes no fewer than six distinct sex¹ categories in its classical texts and tradition. In Oaxaca, Mexico, the third gender muxe dates back to the pre-Columbian era. The South Sulawesi Bugis people recognize five genders which have been crucial to their society for at least 600 years.

Now, not all pre-colonial societies had such views on gender, and non-Western gender systems could be just as insulting as our binary. These cultural genders are not inherently “nonbinary,” either, since the systems that contained them do not operate on a binary whatsoever. I bring them up only to illustrate the historical existence of multi-gender systems.

The Dagaaba people in present-day Ghana didn’t assign gender based on anatomy, but rather on a person’s energy. Some other West African tribes don’t assign genders at all, or at least not until age five or after puberty. African scholar Malidoma Somé notes that “at least among the Dagara people, gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic. In that context, one who is physically male can vibrate female energy, and vice versa. That is where the real gender is.”

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women (1997) illustrates how pre-colonial Yoruba society did not see gender as a determinant for what people could or couldn’t do. Their categories were notably permeable; the terms “man” and “woman” were reasonably insignificant. Several pre-colonial societies also had a relatively fluid approach to relations between men and women. They weren’t always opposites or sharply divided subjects, and in some societies, women had many of the same rights and participation in society as men.

Even in Europe, French poet Kalonymus ben Kalonymus expressed a longing to have been born a woman in one of his fourteenth-century works. Though it’s impossible to be sure of the poem’s sincerity or ben Kalonymus’ identity, its content could be seen as gender dysphoria through a contemporary lens. Seventeenth-century Colonial Virginian servant Thomas(ine) Hall² and eighteenth-century Jens Andersson were arguably bigender, and the Public Universal Friend (1752–1819) explicitly identified as genderless.

European doctors and philosophers used to only acknowledge one sex: male. “Females” were simply males with inverted penises. That began to change during the “long eighteenth century” (1688–1815) when Western society began shifting towards a two-sex system to generate additional chasms between men and women. Gender wasn’t just a role but now a complete physical, anatomical, and physiological difference. With colonialism, European settlers proceeded to force their rigid views on gender upon the civilizations they invaded.

Colonial Gender in Action

In “The Coloniality of Gender,” philosopher Maria Lugones notes:

It is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and in Eurocentered global capitalism. If the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females, it certainly does not follow that the sexual division is based on biology. The cosmetic and substantive corrections to biology make very clear that “gender” is antecedent to the “biological” traits and gives them meaning. The naturalizing of sexual differences is another product of the modern use of science that [Anibal] Quijano points out in the case of “race.” …[S]exual dimorphism served and serves Eurocentered global capitalist domination/exploitation.

In India, colonial officials judged the worth of hijras via British ideals of manhood despite hijras not being men. Seeing them disobey masculinity British masculinity, officials attempted to “correct” their behavior and banish them from the public eye. Colonial police forcefully cut off the long hair of hijras they encountered, stripped off any feminine attire then sold them “men’s” clothing. This bombardment wasn’t exclusive to hijras, either — anyone appearing to be a male cross-dresser was persecuted. In the British mind, the femininity of anyone believed to be men needed to be eradicated by any means possible.

They introduced the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871, aiming to eliminate the hijra. Concerned about the alleged moral threat these people caused by their existence, the CTA began revoking their civil rights and imprisoning them for dressing in a feminine manner or engaging in the performances crucial to the income and social role of hijras. The presence of hijras society became evidence, to the British, of India’s inherently debaucherous and morally corrupt nature. Within several decades through the brutal efforts of the CTA, hijras were systematically disenfranchised. Despite their attempts to petition the government for permission to express themselves, the government denied them, and Indian society began to see hijras as a threat to their community. Today, hijras typically live as outcasts and frequently endure severe discrimination.

In North America, white settlers viciously stifled Native American views surrounding gender and sexuality. Over a hundred tribes recognized more than two genders (an umbrella term coined in 1990 for these genders and sexual identities being “two-spirit”), some having as many as six. Colonizers found this shocking and sinful and sought to exterminate these alternative gender structures.

One way they did so was through violent cultural assimilation in residential schools, where two-spirit students struggled significantly with their identity and mental health as officials forced them into European gender roles. They no longer had agency in their self-expression; they either assimilated or were killed (though many were killed regardless). Assimilation dissolved many formerly accepted Indigenous customs. It proved so effective that many Native Americans are not even aware of their previously broader gender systems today. Two-spirits in the 21^st century may be met with rejection and outright hostility by their families and tribes.

Many cultural genders had significant spiritual and religious roles. The Indonesian bissu is rightfully revered as a ritual-leading priest, hijras can grant blessings to people during events like weddings or childbirth, and two-spirits typically hold a sacred, ceremonial function in their communities. Practitioners and leaders like these are naturally influential. They also go against the white Christianity that colonization rests its worldview on and justifies itself with. Colonizers figured that if they could eradicate the genders linked to these non-Christian religions, they could eliminate not only their power but the beliefs themselves.

As Melissa N. Stein discusses in Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 (2015), race became the purview of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American science. White people used their physical gender standards and proposed sex differences to “prove” their superiority to Africans via scientific racism of the mid-1800s. Many know of the previous measurements of skulls for determining racial purity, but people also used similar evaluations to affirm their gender.

Numerous middle-class white women used phrenology — the assessment of bumps on the skull — to reassure themselves of their womanhood and distinguish themselves from other races and lower economic classes. “By promoting women’s health as good for ‘the race,’” Carla Bittel writes in “Woman, Know Thyself,” “phrenology encouraged good breeding and recommended that women select partners with heredity in mind.” Phrenologists in the United States argued that the procedure demonstrated that Europeans were morally and intellectually superior to other races.

The methods used to explain racial differences through biological means also depended on sexual characteristics. European men saw African men’s genitals as excessive and threatening, thus animalistic. African women who sported larger clitorises than most white women became evidence of white purity and black hypersexuality. In South Africa and Namibia, many Khoikhoi women had notably elongated labia, regarded as animalistic compared to white women. One Khoikhoi, Saartjie Baartman, was exhibited in London and Paris in the early 1800s due to the perceived abnormality of her labia and buttocks. A star of freak shows, white scientists found her to justify their racist beliefs.

Women and Race

Kyla Schuller’s The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (2018) delves further into how sex difference as we understand it today is also a racial difference. The nineteenth-century saw white scientists declaring that only white people could achieve binary sex differentiation. By contrast, people of color allegedly hadn’t evolved enough to differentiate between “male” and “female.” Essentially, they were “unsexed,” and this inability to reach this full sexual dichotomy was yet another marker of racial inferiority.

Lugones elaborates on this separation from the categories “women” and “nonwhite,” stating:

It is part of their history that only white bourgeois women have consistently counted as women so described in the West. Females excluded from that description were not just their subordinates. They were also understood to be animals in a sense that went further than the identification of white women with nature, infants, and small animals. They were understood as animals in the deep sense of “without gender,” sexually marked as female, but without the characteristics of femininity… Thus heterosexual rape of Indian women, African slave women, coexisted with concubinage, as well as with the imposition of the heterosexual understanding of gender relations among the colonized — when and as it suited Eurocentered, global capitalism, and heterosexual domination of white women. But it is clear from the work of Oyewumi and [Gunn] Allen that there was no extension of the status of white women to colonized women even when they were turned into similes of bourgeois white women. Colonized females got the inferior status of gendering as women, without any of the privileges accompanying that status for white bourgeois women. Though, the history presented by Oyewumi and Allen should make clear to white bourgeois women that their status is much inferior to that of Native American women and Yoruba women before colonization.

Schuller sees this reality as the reason white women ritually vote for misogynistic white supremacist candidates. White supremacy is their selling point, surpassing their desire for female liberation. Considering that white women participated heavily in the slave market, making up about 40% of all slave owners in the 1850s-60s, this isn’t too shocking. Stephanie E Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019) reveals that “their very identities as white southern women are tied to the actual or the possible ownership of other people.” They also fully participated in the KKK and lynching.

Nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminist movements virtually only fought for white women — womanhood, in their eyes, was a white phenomenon. Eugenic feminism, beginning in the late 1800s, might be the most blatant example of how white supremacy guided early feminist politics. Eugenic feminists wanted mainstream eugenics to meet their feminist views so they could work on breeding a superior race. Victoria Woodhull, a prominent American eugenic feminist, saw eugenics as more important than the right to vote.

The movement declined by the 1940s when it became harder to gather support and combine feminism with eugenics. In terms of fighting for women of color, however, the white suffrage movement wasn’t at all an improvement. Many white suffragettes — and white women in general — played a crucial role in maintaining white supremacy and crafting white supremacist politics. They were “segregation’s constant gardeners.”

Transmisogyny’s Racist and Antisemitic Legacy

The Nazi era is yet another example of gender’s white supremacy. Out of a desire to “purify” German literature in the 1930s, books opposing Nazi ideology were burned, including those proposing broader views on gender and sexuality. The most significant of these documents were produced by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who coined the word “transvestite” and founded the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin. His clinic was the first to administer gender reaffirming surgeries to transgender people regularly — and the earliest target of the book burnings. Nazis destroyed over 20,000 books housed in the building, which they then took over for their personal use. Hitler deemed Hirschfield “the most dangerous Jew in Germany” due to his work.

Joni Alizah Cohen notes that “Eugenic sexology understood homosexuality essentially through the lens of gender, specifically as the corruption of the male body and psyche by femininity.” Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) described sexual inversion as happening in four increasingly degenerative states, the gravest of which being feeling like the “opposite” gender: “With reference to the sexual feeling and instinct of these urnings [homosexuals], so thoroughly permeated in all their mental being, the men, without exception, feel themselves to be females; the women feel themselves to be males.” The former experience, while now crudely worded, is arguably adjacent to what people would now call transgender womanhood.

Arguably, homophobia during the Nazi era was largely due to contempt for the gender deviance associated with gayness rather than sexual orientation alone. We can see this with Ernst Röhm, the Nazi militia’s gay co-founder and Hitler’s close friend. He and other gay members of the army did not consider themselves gay because they viewed gayness as effeminacy, not only same-gender attraction. To them, their attraction to men was manly and thus acceptable. On November 13, 1933, the Hamburg City Administration requested the Head of Police to “pay special attention to transvestites and to deliver them to the concentration camps if necessary.”

Today’s transgender, nonwhite, and Jewish communities bear the brunt of all this destruction as we try to restore our humanity. This has proven to be an uphill battle at best. Many far-right conspiracy theories point to Judaism as the source of transness, and Transgender Woman-Exclusive Radical Feminists (TWERFs) notoriously use white supremacy to “determine” womanhood. TWERFs are curiously indiscriminate in their discrimination. They often harass not only transgender women, but any woman outside the Eurocentric boundaries of femininity.

The body of Caster Semenya, a South African Olympic runner, has been under fire since she was eighteen. The International Association of Athletics Federations questioned her testosterone levels and made her “prove” she was a woman through sex verification. When the association verified she was female, they then insisted she take medication to lower her testosterone levels or risk disqualification from running events. They argued her natural body put other runners at a disadvantage.

Despite them coercing her into altering her body to keep her athletic career, TWERFs saw this as a victory. They asserted that Semenya was a man due to her hormones, despite her genitalia. (Ironically, TWERFs also refuse to see transitioning transgender men as men due to their genitalia, despite their hormones.) On the other hand, when people discovered Michael Phelps to have half the lactic acid of his competitors, his gender wasn’t questioned at all. The public celebrated his genetic upper hand.

Images of four female runners from the 2019 Chinese National Athletics Championship were spread widely on Twitter, many TWERFs declaring that as many as three of them were men. Yet despite their short hair and “unconventional” physiques, all the runners were cisgender women. The Chinese Athletics Association explicitly confirmed that none of the runners under attack are transgender, but TWERFs refused to believe them. Some went so far as to claim the government was gaslighting the public. Members of the Iranian women’s football team went under similar allegations in September 2019 due to their “masculine” appearances.

Modern transphobic (particularly transmisogynistic) rhetoric continues to be notoriously antisemitic. Mary Daly calls transgender women the “final solution” of women in her book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), where she warns that they desire an “inability to distinguish the female Self and her process from the male-made masquerade.” The “final solution” phrasing alludes to the extermination Jewish people in Europe. Kevin MacDonald, who the Anti-Defamation League names “Neo Nazi’s favorite academic,” declares that it’s the Jewish goal to destabilize societal norms like the Western gender binary.

His online magazine, The Occidental Observer, features many articles written by his followers who blame Jewish people for the spread of “transgender ideology.” One published by Andrew Joyce claims that Jewish sexologists leaning towards fluid, “Talmudic interpretations” of gender, are denying “biological reality.” Another by Brent Sanderson asserts that “the focus of the [Jewish] ‘identity politics’ agenda has now shifted to deconstructing traditional Western views about what it means to be a man or a woman.” Far-right rhetoric remains immensely concerned over the preservation of supposed “biological” divisions, as they are the foundation and justification for their ethnonationalism.

Politically active TWERFs like Cathy Brennan and organizations such as the Women’s Liberation Front routinely work alongside misogynistic conservatives and white supremacists to bar transgender rights. Brennan has collaborated with the Pacific Justice Insititute — which has compared same-sex marriage to the Holocaust — to fabricate stories of transgender women assaulting young girls in public restrooms. Jennifer Bilek wrote an article arguing that transgender “ideology” is the work of wealthy “elites,” particularly Jewish people. Mentioned for funding the “transgender agenda” are George Soros — who Nazis frequently point to as proof of Jewish people controlling the world — and Jewish transgender activists Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker.

It’s unsurprising that gender essentialism is a primary doctrine in “gender critical” radical feminist thought, even though gender essentialism arguably works against gender equality and several scientists question its alleged accuracy. TWERFs routinely cling to the notion of the “biological woman” to keep transgender women out of women’s spaces and frequently examine women’s physiques to “determine” if they’re transgender or not (by the way, Non-classical Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia — NCCAH — is particularly common in cisgender Ashkenazi Jewish women, occasionally accused to be male due to this condition).

Speaking of which, Donald Trump recently proposed a rule which would allow homeless shelters to force transgender women to go to men’s shelters. A memo from his administration explains how to “spot” them: “factors such as height, the presence (but not the absence) of facial hair, the presence of an Adam’s apple, and other physical characteristics which, when considered together, are indicative of a person’s biological sex.” If the rule passes, shelters would be allowed to request proof of “biological sex” from homeless women assumed to be transgender. Interestingly, though, even the rule admits that there is little available “data suggesting that transgender individuals pose an inherent risk” to cisgender women.

It’s most often nonwhite and Jewish women — transgender or not — who will face the brunt of this physical scrutiny. This doesn’t seem coincidental in the slightest, especially not when dominant society’s ideals of femininity depend on whiteness. Claiming the size and proportion of body parts can accurately distinguish between genders reflects grimly on scientific racism, eugenics movements, and Nazi-made literature describing how to spot a Jewish person. Demanding perfect obedience in rigid expectations for the body excludes many cisgender women from what TWERFs consider “natural” womanhood.

Conclusion

The Western gender binary soaks in blood. Sculpted by a shifting European society in the nineteenth century, it restricted the liberty of its people and swiftly oppressed the lives of those who contradicted it. Regardless of society teaching its new mold to itself, civilizations that communicated their identities differently now lead “unnatural” and “deviant” lives. They went against a strict model they hadn’t even known beforehand. People repressed thousands of years of history to justify these newly introduced rules of gender, and everyone feels the aftermath. These rules explicitly favor the white body at the expense of everyone else.

Gender variation is not unusual or historically unknown in the slightest, and implying otherwise contributes to the violence that forced these notions on so many people. Any system trying to sort people into clear cut groups will have its fair share of outliers. The outliers aren’t subhuman. Much like evolution occurs on a gradual scale with no clear distinction as to where one species ends and the next one begins, humanity cannot be sharply defined, and punishing ambiguity will not eradicate it.

Our current political climate sees fascism on the rise and transgender bodies ceaselessly up to debate. One cannot be a genuine ally to nonwhite or Jewish people while disparaging the transgender community. Likewise, it’s unfeasible to discuss transgender history or issues without bringing up colonialism and race. To be transphobic — to discredit the millennia of gender variance in different cultures, to insist that one’s body defines their mind, to cast transgender people as degenerate — is to be racist and antisemitic as well.

72. Democratic Nation

Deleted reason: this text is literally about state formation. not anarchist.

Author: Abdullah Öcalan

Topics: democratic confederalism, decentralization, Direct Democracy, democracy

Date: 2016

Date Published on T@L: 2019-08-02

Source: ocalan-books.com

Cover:

d-d-dumpster-diving-the-anarchist-library-text-bin-4.jpg

Foreword

The International Initiative “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan — Peace in Kurdistan” strives not only to publish Abdullah Öcalan’s works in different languages but also to prepare brochures compiled from different books by him on specific topics. This is useful and necessary not only because it brings together the chain of argument on a specific topic spread over several books, but also because some of his works are still untranslated. Therefore, this brochure should only be regarded as a framework and cannot replace the perusal of the actual books.

Öcalan has been highly critical not only of capitalism but also of real socialist practices from very early on, since the 1980s. He has examined the issue of women’s freedom, the phenomena of power and state and how interrelated they all are. This has led him over and over again to return to an analysis of history to try to understand how it all happened. In doing so he stumbled over nation, state and nation-state and how detrimental these are for any movement; turning even the most revolutionary individuals into mere practitioners of capitalism.

For Abdullah Öcalan it is not sufficient to produce critique and self-critique. He feels compelled to lay out what might constitute an alternative to the way of life that is being imposed on society. Terefore, he makes an effort to systematise the lives and struggles of all those oppressed and exploited throughout history, as well as to propose an alternative model and way of life outside of capitalist modernity and thus classical civilisation.

These brochures become ever more important in the light of developments in the region as well as in Kurdistan. With the revival of sectarian and nationalist conflict in many areas of the world and the consequences of an aggressive capitalism confronting the world, Öcalan’s proposals and an evident effort to implement them in Rojava and Bakur might be just the right remedy for the war-stricken region. He calls upon everybody to build and defend free life and humanity.

Öcalan’s voice is tremendously important as a voice of peace and reason, but it is all too often silenced by his solitary confinement on the isolated Imrali Island where he is imprisoned.

His freedom is in the interest of all peoples in the Middle East — not only for the Kurds.

International Initiative

“Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan — Peace in Kurdistan”

1. Introduction

The PKK’s struggle until now was essentially aimed at making the Kurdish question visible. The denial of Kurdish reality during the time of its formation naturally brought the question of existence on the agenda. Thus, the PKK at first tried to prove the existence of the question, by means of ideological arguments. The continuation of this denial by the left through more refined methods placed on the agenda organising ourselves on the basis of distinct identities and actions.

The Turkish nation-state — who insisted on traditional denial and annihilation policies — refused to consider the possibility of a political solution during this period. On the contrary, it chose to counter the PKK’s initiatives with a campaign of fascist terror that led up to the 12^th of September coup. PKK’s declaration of a revolutionary people’s war emerged as the only viable option.

Under these conditions, PKK was either going to wither away, like the other democratic left groups in Turkey, or decide on resistance. The decisive factor in the transformation of the Kurdish question from being one of ideological identity into a question of war is state’s insistence on maintaining previously covert policies of denial and annihilation through the open terror of 12 September. It would be more realistic to analyse the offensive of 15 August 1984 within this framework.

Such a move is much closer to the objective of proving the existence of the Kurdish people and protecting their existence than of being a liberation movement. It should be pointed out that, in this regard, it has attained a significant success.

The PKK, while proving Kurdish existence beyond any doubt, remained rooted in nation-statism. The ensuing period of self-criticism revealed the anti-socialist and anti-democratic essence of nation-statism. The speedy dissolution of real socialism in the 1990s contributed to a deeper understanding of the underlying factors behind the depression. The dissolution of real socialism was caused by power and real socialist nation- state problematics. To be more precise, the crisis of socialism was the result of an inadequate understanding of the problem of power and the state. When the contradictions of state and power, set out so starkly by the Kurdish question, coalesced with the wider global crisis of real socialism, a comprehensive analysis of the issue of the state and power became inevitable.

To this end, in a significant part of my defence, I try to analyse the state and power throughout civilisational history.

I concentrated on presenting the transformation of the phenomena of state and power in the context of capitalist modernity — the present-day hegemonic civilisation. I specifically argued that the transformation of power into the nation-state was the basis of capitalism. This was an important thesis. I tried to demonstrate that in the absence of power being organised through the nation-state model, capitalism could not have become the new hegemonic system. The nation-state was the fundamental tool that made capitalist hegemony possible.

Therefore, I tried to prove that socialism, as anti-capitalism, presenting itself as what I call “historical-society”, could not establish itself as based on the same state model, in other words, as a real socialist nation-state. I tried to show that the idea that socialism, as proposed by Marx and Engels, could only be constructed through central nation-states was indeed a fundamental defect of scientific socialism. I went on to present the thesis that socialism could not be constructed through the state, especially the nation-state, and that an insistence on this could only result in the most degenerate versions of capitalism as experienced in many instances, but especially in the actually-existing socialism of Russia and China. As a necessary precursor to this thesis, I analysed the system of central civilisation throughout history, the concept of power, and the structure of capitalist modernity’s state and power which is the prevalent structure unique to our era. My main conclusion was that socialists could not have a nation-state principle. Rather, the solution to the national question should be based on the democratic nation principle. The practical expression of this, as I will try to show, is the KCK — the Union of Democratic Communities in Kurdistan — experience.

Kurdistan, in a way, has already become the focus of revolution and counter-revolution in the twenty-first century. It is the weakest link of capitalist modernity. The national and social problems of the people of Kurdistan have become so aggravated that they cannot be concealed by means of liberal prescriptions or the demagogy of individual or cultural rights.

When it comes to the Kurdish question, nation-statism — which led to different practices, including cultural genocide — is no longer a problem-solver; rather, it has long been the source of the problem, both for the oppressor and the oppressed. Nation-statism is in dissolution and it has even become a problem for capitalist modernity. More flexible democratic national developments will spearhead the advances of our era. Democratic modernity signifies the theoretical expression and the practical steps of these advances. The KCK, as the concrete expression of democratic national transformations in Kurdistan, sheds light on the path of democratic modernity solution in the Middle East.

2. Capitalist Modernity and the Nation

The nation, as a concept, comes after entities such as clan and tribe with kinship in the form of people and nationality, and is a social form that is generally characterised by linguistic or cultural similarities. National communities are more inclusionary and have larger capacities than clan and people’s communities; for this reason, they are human communities with looser ties to one another. National society is more of a phenomenon of our time. If a general definition can be offered, it is a community of those who share a common mindset. In other words, it is a phenomenon that exists mentally, which therefore means it is an abstract and imagined phenomenon. We can also call this a culturally defined nation. Sociologically speaking, this would be the correct definition. Despite differing class, gender, colour, ethnicity and even national background, in the most general sense, the formation of a shared mindset and culture is enough to be classified as a nation.

In order to refine this general definition of nation, generated concepts such as state nation, legal nation, economic nation, military nation are different categories of nationalism that are used to underpin the understanding of this general definition of nation. It could also be called ‘power nation’. It is a fundamental aspiration of capitalist modernity to become a strong nation; for as much as a strong nation produces capital privilege, a comprehensive market, colonial opportunities and imperialism. It is, therefore, important not to accept these robust versions of the nation as the only possible model of a nation.

In fact, it is important to see these power nations as nations in the service of capital. These are the qualities that make it the source of the problem.

The main problem in the age of modernity derives from the coupling of power and state with the nation. When we compare the problems of this age with the problems of dictatorships and dynastic states, we can see that the problems of the age of modernity derive from the state nation; this state nation is the biggest difference between the ages. The nation-state is one of the most convoluted subjects within the social sciences, yet it is presented as the tool to solve all the problems that face modernity, like a magic wand. In essence, it only multiplies social problems. The reason being, it spreads the power apparatus into the capillaries of societies. Power itself creates problems — it generates social problems because of the potential character of capital that has been organised in the form of force, which results in suppression and exploitation. The homogeneous nation society to which the nation-state aspires can only construct artificially (supposedly legal) equal citizens, charged with violence as a result of being amputated by power. This citizen may be equal in the eyes of the law, but experiences maximum inequality in every aspect of life as an individual and collective entity.

When analysing the theory of nation, another aspect that needs to be critically evaluated is the sacralisation and deification of the nation. Capitalist modernity has replaced traditional religion and god and constructed the deified nation-state.

If we interpret nationalism as the religion of the nation-state, then we can perceive the nation-state itself to be the god of this religion. The state itself has been constructed in the age of modernity in order to incorporate the essence of medieval and even antiquarian conceptualisations of divinity. The phenomenon called ‘secular state’ is the construction of medieval and antiquarian divinities as state either in whole or in essence.

There should be no mistake here. Once you scrape off the secular or modern nation-state veneer, you encounter the divine state of antiquity and the medieval age. There is a strong correlation between state and divinity. In the same manner, there is a very strong relationship between the rising monarch of antiquity and the medieval ages and the concept of god. After the medieval age, when the monarch lost his significance, both as an individual and in terms of the monarchy, and began to institutionalise and transmute into the national state, the god-monarch was replaced by the nation-state god. Therefore, capitalist modernity’s ideological hegemony, which makes the attainment of maximum profit possible, is what underlies the sacralisation of concepts such as the homeland, nation and market, together with a similar sacralisation of nation-state institutions. The law of maximum profit becomes more legitimate as the concepts related to the nation are religionised by the ideological hegemony and thus validated.

In our age, the use of nation-state symbols and fundamental slogans such as “one flag”, “one language”, “one homeland”, “one state”, “unitary state”, and the expression of national chauvinism are ramped up and turned into a ritual at every opportunity, especially at sporting events or art activities, should be interpreted as the means of worshipping the religion of nationalism. In fact, the practice of worship in previous ages served the same purpose. The main objective here is to validate the interests of monopolies of power and exploitation either through concealing or legitimising them. We will be better able to understand the truth of societal reality once we interpret all the practices and approaches that serve to hide or exaggerate all things related to the nation-state under this fundamental paradigm.

The organisation of capitalist modernity as nation-state plays a much more suppressive and exploitative role then its organisation as an economic monopoly. The inability of Marxism, and sociology in general, to see the nation-state’s relationship with suppression and exploitation, or its presentation of the nation-state as an ordinary institution of the superstructure, is a fundamental flaw and distortion. When an analysis of class and material capital is made independent of the nation-state, what’s being produced is the most stale and abstract generalisation that cannot generate a useful social result. The role played by the consequences related to such abstractions underlies the failure of real socialism.

That the solution to all national and social problems is linked to the nation-state represents the most tyrannical aspect of modernity. To expect a solution from the tool which is itself the source of problems can only lead to the growth of problems and societal chaos. Capitalism itself is the most crisis-ridden stage of civilisation. The nation-state, as the tool deployed in this crisis-ridden stage, is the most developed organisation of violence in social history. It is society besieged by the violence of power; it is the tool deployed forcefully to hold together society and the environment after they have been disintegrated through industrialism and capitalism’s law of maximum profit. The reason behind it being excessively charged with violence is due to the capitalist system’s tendency for maximum profit and uninterrupted accumulation. Without an organisation of violence like the nation-state, the laws of capitalist accumulation could not operate and industrialism could not be maintained. The society and the environment are on the brink of total disintegration in this present era of global finance capitalism. The crises, which were initially cyclical, have now attained a structural and permanent character.

Under these circumstances, the nation-state itself has turned into an obstacle that locks the system down completely. Even capitalism, which is a crisis-ridden system itself, has made getting rid of the obstacle of the nation-state a priority. The sovereignty of the nation-state is not only the cause of societal problems, but is also the main obstacle in the way of solutions.

The theory of democratic modernity, on the other hand, is not only critical of capitalism’s political economy, but of its whole systematic. It criticises its relationship with civilisational history as a hegemonic system; the changes it has caused in city, class and state; and the elements upon which it constructs its modernity in order to uncover its reality. Capitalist modernity continuously legitimises itself through the ideological hegemony it establishes over science, philosophy and the arts.

By instrumentalising these fundamental fields of thought and draining them of their content, it deepens its destruction of society.

3. Democratic Modernity

The alternative modernity of democratic nation is democratic modernity. An economy free of monopolism, an ecology that signifies harmony with the environment, and a technology that is friendly to nature and humanity are the institutional bases of democratic modernity and thus democratic nation. I am neither discovering nor inventing democratic modernity.

Democratic modernity, since the formation of official civilisation, has always existed as its counterpart in a dichotomy. It has existed wherever and whenever the official civilisation has existed. What I am trying to do, albeit as a rough outline, is to give this other form of modernity, which exists at each location and time of official civilisation, the recognition it deserves and offer explanations in terms of its main dimensions. I am also trying to understand its fundamental forms of mindset, its structures and its existing society and to define them. There is nothing baffling about the idea that, according to dialectics, there exists a counterpart to civilisation, although alleged to be singular, at all places and periods that it has existed. To the contrary, the baffling thing is why this most natural equivalent of dialectical method has not been systematically articulated.

Democratic modernity, though it has changed form according to the different eras, has always existed and is a reality that has always had its own counter history throughout civilisational history. It signifies the system of the universal history that is outside of the forces of tyranny and exploitation. Kurdish reality represents a culture that has received the severest blows from civilisational forces and is the culture that has been attacked by forces intent on exterminating it. Therefore, it can only realise its existence through a civilisation which is outside the traditional classed civilisation — the democratic socialist civilisation. If a meaningful Kurdish history is to be written, it can only be done so within this framework. The present day expression of this is democratic modernity.

Democratic modernity responds to the universalist, linear, progressivist and determinist methodology (the methodological approach that is closed to probabilities and alternatives) deployed by the modern nation-state to achieve the homogenisation and herdification of society with methods that are pluralistic, probabilistic, open to alternatives and that can make the democratic society visible. It develops its alternative through its properties of being open to different political formations, multicultural, closed to monopolism, ecological and feminist, creating an economic structure that is grounded in satisfying society’s fundamental needs and is at the disposal of the community.

As opposed to capitalist modernity’s nation-state, democratic confederalism is democratic modernity’s political alternative.

Democratic confederalism is the basic political format of democratic modernity, represents a vital role in reconstruction work and is the most appropriate tool for democratic politics in generating a solution. Democratic confederalism presents the option of a democratic nation as the fundamental tool to resolve the ethnic, religious, urban, local, regional and national problems caused by the monolithic, homogeneous, monochrome, fascist social model implemented by modernity’s nation-state. Within the democratic nation every ethnicity, religious understanding, city, local, regional and national entity has the right to participate with its own identity and democratic federate structure.

4. Democratic Solution

There have always been attempts to solve the national problems caused by capitalist modernity by nation-statist and nationalist mindsets and paradigms. The nation-state itself has been presented as the main actor of the solution. In order to gain a true understanding of the nation-state one must understand its place in the hegemonic system and its links to capitalism and industrialism. The inadequate analysis of the question of state by socialist ideology only obscured the problem further. However, in “the right of nations to self-determination”, the vision of a state for every nation was fundamental in aggravating the issue even more.

The essence of my defence is to research the Kurdish reality and Kurdish people’s existence in relation to civilisation and modernity. The aim is to explain that capitalism was primarily responsible for the rise of the Kurdish question and to separate the democratic essence of the solution from nation-statism for the first time. This approach constitutes the essence of the transformation within the PKK. This defence explains the difference between forms of statist and democratic solutions that have not been clarified since the PKK’s group phase. This is where it differs from real socialism and the classic Marxist-Leninist doctrine behind it. It takes the right of nations to self-determination from its enclosure as a bourgeois right, and includes it within the scope of societal democracy.

In other words, the Kurdish question could be solved without being contaminated by statism, without gravitating towards a nation-statist pursuit and, without being forced into solutions under these categories, it could be resolved within democratic governance models of society. This is the essence of the trans- formation of the PKK.

The democratic solution model is not just an option, it is the primary method for achieving a solution. The democratic solution signifies the pursuit of the democratisation of society outside of the nation-state. As a concept, it sees the nation- state, along with capitalism, as the source of ever increasing problems and not the solution in relation to social problems.

One should not think of the democratic solution model as a unitary nation-state that has been transformed into a federal or confederal form. The federal or confederal state of the nation-state is not the democratic solution. These are solutions that rely on different forms of the state, and yet only aggravate the problem. Perhaps the transformation of a rigidly centralised nation-state into federal or confederal forms within the capitalist system’s mindset may ameliorate problems and offer partial solutions, but it cannot lead to comprehensive solutions. Federal and confederal forms can be deployed as possible solutions between the nation-statist forces and the forces for a democratic solution. However, to expect a deep-rooted solution as a result will only lead yet again to self-deception.

Indeed, we know that states described as national liberationist states or real socialist states are just nation-states with a leftist mask.

It is important to note that the democratic solution method is not completely independent of the nation-state. Democracy and the nation-state can play a role under the same political roof as two authorities. A democratic constitution can determine the domain for each of them. A positive transformation of the nation-state is closely linked to the development of democratisation, democratic autonomous governance, the construction of the democratic nation, local democracy and democratic culture in all social spheres.

KCK should be evaluated as a radical transformation in the solution to the national question as it represents the non- statist democratic interpretation of the right of nations to self- determination for the Kurdish question. KCK is the concrete expression of the democratic solution to the Kurdish question and differs from traditional approaches. The solution is not regarded as taking a share from the state. It is not in the pursuit of state, even in terms of autonomy for the Kurds. Not only does it not aim for a federal or confederal state, it does not see them as the solution. Its main demand from the state is for it to recognise the Kurdish people’s right to self-governance and to remove the obstacles in the way of the Kurdish people becoming a democratic nation. The democratic solution cannot be developed by governments or states. Societal forces are themselves solely responsible for developing the solution.

Societal forces seek to find a compromise with the government or the state through a democratic constitution. The sharing of governance between the democratic societal forces and the state or government forces is determined through constitutions.

Essentially, the democratic solution is the state of being a democratic nation and of society constructing itself as a democratic national entity. It is neither becoming a nation nor ceasing to be a nation through the state; it is the ability to use the right of a society to construct itself as a democratic nation.

At this stage, a new definition of the nation must be created.

First, it is worth noting that the term nation does not have a single definition. I touched on this above. The democratic nation, on the other hand, is the common society formed by the free-will of free individuals and communities. The unifying factor in the democratic nation is the free-will of the people and those groups who decide to belong to that nation. The understanding that binds the nation to a common language, culture, market or history is descriptive of state-nations and cannot be generalised, that is, it cannot be reduced to a single understanding of the nation. This understanding of nation, which was also acknowledged by real socialism, is the opposite of democratic nation. This definition, as developed by Stalin for Soviet Russia, is one of the main reasons for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. If this definition of nation, absolutised by capitalist modernity, is not abandoned, then the solution to all national problems will continue to confront an impasse. The fact that national problems have persisted for the past three centuries is closely linked to this inadequate and absolute definition.

5. The Democratic Nation Model

For societies the nation-state model is nothing but a pitfall and network of suppression and exploitation. The democratic na- tion concept reverses this definition. The definition of a demo- cratic nation that is not bound by rigid political boundaries, one language, culture, religion and interpretation of history, signifies plurality and communities as well as free and equal citizens existing together and in solidarity. The democratic nation allows the people to become a nation themselves, without resting on power and state, becoming a nation through much needed politicisation. It aims to prove that not only through politicisation but also, in the absence of becoming a state or acquiring power, a nation can be created with autonomous institutions in the social, diplomatic, and cultural spheres as well as in economy, law and self-defence, and thus build itself as a democratic nation.

Democratic society can only be realised through such a nation model. The nation-state society is closed to democracy by its very nature. The nation-state represents neither a universal nor a local reality; on the contrary, it disavows universality and locality. The citizenship of an uniformised society represents the death of the human. On the other hand, the democratic nation makes the reconstruction of universality and locality possible. It enables societal reality to express itself. All other definitions of nation lie between these two main models.

Although there is a wide range of definitions for nation- building models, an all-encompassing definition is also possible; and this is the definition of nation in relation to its mindset, consciousness and belief. In this case, the nation is a community of people who share a common mindset. In such a definition of nation language, religion, culture, market, history and political borders do not play a decisive but a bodily role.

Defining nation essentially as a certain mindset gives it a dynamic character. Whereas in state’s nation nationalism leaves its mark on the common mindset, in a democratic nation it is the consciousness of freedom and solidarity. However, defining nations only through their mindset would be incomplete. Just as mindsets cannot exist without bodies, nations too cannot function without a body. The body of nations with a nationalist mindset is the state institution. Tis is why such nations are called the state-nation. When legal and economic institutions outweigh the rest, these nations can be differentiated by categorising them as law or market nations.

Nations with a mindset based on freedom and solidarity exemplify democratic autonomy. Democratic autonomy essentially denotes the self-governance of communities and individuals who share a similar mindset through their own will. This could also be called democratic governance or authority. It is a definition open to universality. A nation model that can be derived from culture nation, but kerbs and excludes exploitation and suppression, is a democratic nation model. A democratic nation is the nation closest to freedom and equality. And in accordance with this definition, this is the ideal understanding of nation for communities who strive for freedom and equality.

Capitalist modernity and the science of sociology that it has inspired have not dealt with the concept of the democratic nation due to their structure and ideological hegemony. The democratic nation is not content with a common mindset and culture, it is a nation that unifies and governs all its members in democratic autonomous institutions. This is its defining quality. The democratic autonomous way of governance is the foremost condition of becoming a democratic nation. In this regard, it is the alternative to the nation-state. Democratic governance as opposed to state governance is a significant opportunity for freedom and equality. Liberal sociology equates the nation essentially either to an already established state, or to a movement that aims to establish a state. The fact that even real socialism had such ambitions shows the strength of liberal ideology.

A common homeland and market are generally presented as preconditions for national societies; these are material components and cannot be considered to be determinant characteristics of the nation. The democratic nation’s understanding of homeland and market are different. The democratic nation values the homeland because it is a huge opportunity for the nation’s mindset and culture; a mindset and culture that does not keep the homeland in mind can not be thought of. However, it should not be forgotten that the reason why capitalist modernity fetishises and prioritises the country- homeland concept over society is profit motivated. It is also important not to exaggerate the homeland. “Everything for the country” derives from a fascistic understanding of the nation. It is more meaningful to devote everything to a free society and a democratic nation, but this should not be fetishised.

What really matters is to render life valuable. The homeland isn’t an ideal, it is merely a tool for the life of the individual and the nation. While the state’s nation pursues homogenised society, the democratic nation mainly consists of different collectivities. It sees diversity as richness. Life itself is only possible through diversity. The nation-state forces citizens to be uniform; in this regard, too, it is contrary to life. The ultimate goal is to create a robotic human. In this sense, it actually runs towards nothingness. The citizen or member of democratic nation is different, this difference is due to the diverse communities it embodies. Tribal entities are a source of strength for the democratic nation.

Although language is as important as culture in creating a nation, it is not a precondition. Different languages are no obstacle to a sense of belonging to the same nation. Just as it is un- necessary for every nation to have a state, it is also unnecessary for every nation to have a single language or dialect. Although a national language is needed, it is not an indispensable condition. It is possible to count different languages and dialects as a richness for a democratic nation. However, the nation-state bases itself on a strict imposition of a single language. It does not easily give multilingualism, especially official multilingualism, a chance to be practised. In this regard, it tries to benefit from the privileges of being the dominant nation.

When democratic nations are unable to develop and nation- statism is unable to resolve problems it is possible to talk of a law nation as a concept and to find a compromise. What is meant by “constitutional citizenship” is actually a solution based on law nation. A constitutionally guaranteed legal citizenship does not discriminate between race, ethnicity and nationality. These characteristics do not accord rights. In this regard, “law nation” is a developing category. European nations in particular are transitioning from nationality nations to law nations. In democratic nations, autonomous governance is fundamental; in a law nation, rights are fundamental. Whereas in the nation-state, it is the rule of power that is decisive. The most dangerous nation type is the ‘army-nation’ mindset and its institutionalisation. Although it may seem as if it represents a strong nation, in essence it is the most difficult nation to live in, containing a mindset that always imposes duties and leads to fascism. The economic nation is a category very similar to the nation-state. This understanding of a nation, seen in countries such as the USA, Japan and even Germany, where the economy is given a leading role, was more prevalent in Europe’s past. Although a socialist nation was attempted, it can’t be said that it was very successful. This is partially what we are witnessing in Cuba. However, this example of a nation is also the real socialist form of the nation-state; in place of a nation-state with mostly private capitalism, it is a nation-state form that contains mostly state capitalism.

The democratic nation is the model of a nation that is the least exposed to such illnesses of being a state nation. It does not sacralise its government. Governance is a simple phenomenon that is at the service of daily life. Anyone who meets the requirements can become a public servant and govern.

Leadership is valuable, but not sacred. Its understanding of national identity is open-ended, not fixed like being a believer or a member of a religion. Belonging to a nation is neither a privilege nor a flaw. One can belong to more than one nation. To be more precise, one can experience intertwined and different nationalities. If a law nation and a democratic nation reach a compromise, they can comfortably coexist. Homeland, flag and language are all valuable but not sacred. To experience the admixture of common homeland, languages and flags through amity and sharing and not confrontation is not only possible, but necessary for historical-society life. With all these characteristics, the democratic nation is once again taking its place in history as a robust alternative to capitalist modernity’s maddening instrument of war; nation-statism.

The democratic nation model, as a constructive solution model, re-democratises those societal relations that have been shattered by nation-statism; it renders different identities tolerant, peaceful and reconciliatory. The evolution of state’s nation into a democratic nation will bring about enormous gains. The democratic nation model ameliorates violence loaded social perceptions through a right social consciousness and renders them humane (a human being who is intelligent, sensitive and empathetic). It may not completely eliminate social anti pathies but it can minimise the violence of exploitation, and help to realise the possibility of a more equal and free society.

It not only fosters internal peace and tolerance, it also transcends suppressive and exploitative approaches to other nations and transforms common interests into synergies through which it realises its mission. Once national and international institutions are reconstructed according to the fundamental mindset and institutions of the democratic nation, it will be understood that this new modernity, democratic modernity, not only theoretically but also its implementation has the attributes of a renaissance. The alternative to capitalist modernity is democratic modernity, with the democratic nation at its core, and the economic, ecological and peaceful society it has woven within and outside of the democratic nation.

5.1 Kurds Becoming a Nation

It is possible to think of the process through which Kurds became a nation within the context of two fundamental concepts.

The first is the intellectual dimension. We are talking about the dimensions of existence of those who unite their state of consciousness in relation to these fundamental areas through a feeling of common solidarity and sharing an intellectual world without neglecting their own language, culture, history, economy and population centres. The main criteria for this dimension is to share the mindset of the ideal or project of a free and equal world based on diversity. We can call this world the communal world or a utopia of free individuals. The important thing is to continuously maintain a mindset of freedom and equality that does not reject differences within the public sphere and the moral and political life of society.

Because the intellectual dimension concerns the world of thought and imagination as well as the solidarity of individuals and communities wanting to become a nation, it requires a limited rearrangement. To this end, developing education in science, philosophy and art (including religion) and opening schools with this objective, are the foremost practical steps; the intellectual and emotional education in relation to becoming a nation is the task of these schools.

It is essential to understand the social culture in relation to now, to our epoch, just as much as in relation to the historical-societal entity, and to share their true, good and beautiful aspects in common thoughts and emotions. In a nutshell, the KCK’s main intellectual task is to envisage the Kurds as a nation within their true, good, and beautiful world of thought and emotions jointly shared in relation to their own existence. In other words, its task is to encourage the Kurdish people to become a nation by means of a scientific, philosophical and artistic revolution and to create the fundamental conditions (intellectual and emotional) for becoming such a nation, freely sharing the scientific, philosophical (ideological) and artistic truth of the Kurdish reality, through self-thought and self-education, sharing the good and living beautifully. The main demand in terms of the intellectual dimension from the sovereign nation-states is for them to adhere fully to freedom of expression and thought. If nation-states want to coexist with the Kurds under common norms, then they must respect the Kurdish people’s desire to create their own intellectual and emotional world and to turn themselves into a national society on the basis of their own differences: the freedom of expression and thought required for this must be constitutionally guaranteed.

The second dimension is the reorganisation of social existence in accordance with its mental world. How is society to be reorganised in accordance with the intellectual world of a nation that is shared commonly? Democratic autonomy lies at the heart of the reorganisation of this physical existence. It is possible to define democratic autonomy in both a broad and narrow sense. In the broadest sense, democratic autonomy is the expression of the democratic nation. The democratic nation has dimensions divided across a wider range. It can be defined in terms of its cultural, economic, social, legal, diplomatic and other dimensions. In the narrow sense, democratic autonomy represents the political dimension; in other words, it means democratic authority or governance. The democratic autonomy dimension of becoming a democratic nation is much more problematic in terms of relations with sovereign nation-states. Sovereign nation-states generally reject democratic autonomy. They do not wish to recognise it as a right unless they are obliged to do so. With regard to the Kurds, the acceptance of democratic autonomy lies at the heart of a reconciliation with nation-states. Democratic autonomy is the minimum requirement to live under a common political roof of a nation-state with a dominant ethnicity. Anything less would lead to an increase in conflict and a worsening of the situation — not a solution. Especially lately, there is the effort to implement the liberal “individual and cultural rights” project — originally developed by the English capitalism in order to rule their working class and colonies — in the Republic of Turkey via AKP. This project, which is alien to Middle Eastern culture, will only serve to expand the conflict. Democratic autonomy is the most suitable solution for the nation-state.

Anything less would only fuel further conflict and war.

5.2 The Democratic Autonomy Solution and its Implementation

The democratic autonomy solution can be implemented in two ways:

The first is predicated on finding a compromise with nation- states. It finds its concrete expression in a democratic constitutional solution. It respects the historical-societal heritage of peoples and cultures. It regards the freedom of expression and organisation of these heritages as one of the irrevocable and fundamental constitutional rights. Democratic autonomy is the fundamental principle of these rights. The foremost conditions of this arrangement are that the sovereign nation-state renounces all denial and annihilation policies, and the oppressed nation abandons the idea of forming its own nation-state. It is difficult for a democratic autonomy project to be implemented without both nations renouncing statist tendencies in this regard. EU countries took more than 300 years of nation-state experience before they could accept democratic autonomy as the best solution for solving nation-states’ regional, national and minority related problems.

In the solution to the Kurdish question, too, the path that is meaningful and consistent is the one that does not rely on separatism and violence and that accepts democratic autonomy. All other paths will either lead to a postponement of problems, and therefore to a deepening of the impasse, or to violent conflict and separation. The history of national problems is littered with such examples. The relative peace, wealth and prosperity of the EU countries — the home of national con- flicts — in the past 60 years were achieved by their acceptance of democratic autonomy and their ability to find flexible and creative solutions to regional, national and minority problems.

The opposite has been true of the Republic of Turkey. The nation-statism that was wished to be brought to completion through the denial and annihilation of Kurds has drawn the republic to the brink of disintegration, huge problems, continuous crises, military coups that are resorted every ten years, and a special warfare regime that is conducted together with Gladio. Only when the Turkish nation-state abandons these policies, and accepts the democratic autonomy of all cultures (including Turkish and Turkmen), and specifically the Kurdish cultural entity’s democratic autonomy, will it achieve lasting peace and prosperity as a normal, lawful, secular and democratic republic.

The second path for a democratic autonomy solution — one that does not depend on finding a compromise with nation- states — is to implement its own project unilaterally. In the broad sense, it recognises the Kurdish people’s right to become a democratic nation through the implementation of democratic autonomy. It goes without saying that in this case conflicts will intensify with those sovereign nation-states who do not accept this unilateral implementation of becoming a democratic nation. If this happens, the Kurds will have no other choice but to adopt a full-scale mobilisation and war position in order to protect their existence and to live freely against the individual or joint attacks of nation-states (Iran, Syria and Turkey). They will not hold back from becoming a democratic nation with all its dimensions and to develop and realize their aspirations through their own efforts until they either reach a compromise or achieve independence amidst the warfare.

5.3 The KCK and the Dimensions of Becoming a Democratic Nation

In light of these general definitions of the nation, the KCK rejects state-nationist approaches and bases itself on the democratic nationist model, acknowledging the Kurdish people’s right to become a nation or achieving their transformation to a national society through democratic autonomy.

If we liken societies, especially the democratic nations of our era, to a live organism, then we can say that all its parts and dimensions are interconnected and co-exist as in the integral whole of a live organism. Therefore, although each and every dimension is discussed on their own right they must always be considered as parts of a whole. A more detailed understanding of the way in which a democratic nation can be created follows:

1 — The Free Individual-Citizen and Democratic Communal Life

The individual-citizen of a democratic nation has to be communal as well as free. The allegedly free individual of capitalist individualism, who has been provoked against the society, essentially lives a life of abject slavery. However, liberal ideology creates an image where the individual apparently possesses limitless freedom. In reality the individual, enslaved by waged labour, represents the most developed form of slavery. This type of individual is produced through the relentless education of, and life in, nation-statism. Because his or her life is bound to the sovereignty of money, the wage system, in effect like a dog’s leash, ensures that the individual can be manipulated as desired: He or she has no other means of surviving. If he seeks to escape, that is, if he opts for unemployment, it is in effect a death sentence. Moreover, capitalist individualism has been shaped on the basis of society’s denial. He thinks that he can only realise himself insofar as he rejects the culture and traditions of historical society. Tis is the biggest distortion of liberal ideology. Its principal slogan is “there is no society, there is the individual”.

As opposed to this, the democratic nation’s individual sees his or her freedom in the communality of society, in the form of the more functional life of small communities. A free and democratic commune or community is the main school in which the individual of the democratic nation takes shape.

Without a commune or communal life, the individual cannot be fully realised. Communes are diverse and valid in every sphere of societal life. In accordance with their diversity, individuals can exist in more than one commune or community.

The important thing is for the individual to know how to live in a communal community in accordance with his or her talents, labour and diversity. The individual considers her responsibility towards her commune or the social units to which she is attached to be the guiding moral principle. Morality means respect and commitment to the community and communal life. The commune or community in turn protects the individual and enhances his or her life. After all, the fundamental principle behind the founding of human society is this very principle of moral responsibility. The democratic character of the commune or communities is what realises the collective freedom — in other words, the political commune or community. A commune or a community that is not democratic cannot be political. A commune or community that is not political cannot thus be free. Tere is a close correlation between the political and democratic character of the commune and its freedom.

The definition of the democratic nation’s individual-citizen becomes slightly broader when she or he lives under the same political roof with a nation-state. In this case, within the framework of “constitutional citizenship”, she is as much an individual-citizen of the nation-state as she is of the democratic nation. The point here is the recognition of the status of the democratic nation, whereby democratic autonomy is acknowledged to have legal status in the national constitution. Democratic national status is two-fold. First, it denotes the status, law and constitution of democratic autonomy.

Secondly, autonomy is incorporated as a sub-section of the national constitutional status.

Although the unilateral construction of a democratic nation based on the free individual-citizen and communal unity of KCK is a priority, it is also possible for KCK to arrive at an agreement with those sovereign nation-states who acknowledge the status of democratic autonomy within the national democratic constitution. KCK recognises both the life of the free individual-citizen and community and the extent to which this life is bound by a legal and constitutional status.

Capitalist individualism requires absolute servitude to the nation-state god; whereas democratic nation citizenship fosters the development of the free individual in the truest sense.

The democratic nation citizenship of the Kurds can be realised under the KCK status. Therefore, it may be more appropriate to define membership of the KCK as being democratic nation citizenship. It is an irrevocable right and duty for the Kurdish people to be citizens of their own democratic nation. To be unable to be a citizen of one’s own nation is a huge alienation and is indefensible.

2 — Political Life and Democratic Autonomy

It is possible to define the school of social sciences that studies the ontology and development of societal nature on the basis of moral and political society as the system of democratic civilisation. Determining moral and political society to be our fundamental unit is also important as this comprises the dimensions of historicity and integrality. Moral and political society is the most historical and holistic narrative of society.

Morality and politics can be seen as history itself. A society with a moral and political dimension is a society that is in harmony with its existence and development. Society can exist without exploitation, classes, cities, power, nation and the state, but a society devoid of morals and politics is unthinkable.

A moral and political society is a democratic society.

Democracy can only attain meaning on the basis of the existence of an open and free society; that is, moral and political society. Democratic society, where individuals and groups become a subject, corresponds with a form of governance that most effectively develops moral and political society. More precisely, the functionality of political society is what we already call democracy. Politics and democracy, in the true sense, are identical concepts. If freedom is the arena in which politics expresses itself, then democracy is the modus operandi of politics within that arena. The trio of freedom, politics and democracy cannot be devoid of a moral base. We can also define morals as the institutionalised or traditional form of freedom, politics and democracy.

Moral and political societies are in dialectical contradiction with the state, which is the official expression of all forms of capital, ownership and power. The state constantly desires to replace morals with law and politics with bureaucratic administration. On the twin poles of this historical contradiction, the official state civilisation and the unofficial democratic civilisation coexist. Two separate typologies of meaning emerge.

The contradictions can either intensify and lead to war, or reconcile and lead to peace.

Today, in particular the problematic nature of nation-states is propelling political societies and their governing forces towards becoming a democratic nation, compelling them to become democratic nations either through reform or revolution. While nation-states were the dominant tendency during the rise of capitalism, under the current conditions of its downfall the dominant tendency is evolving towards the democratic nation. In this regard, it is very important not to equate political force with state power. Politics cannot be equated with power and its institutionalised form, the state. Freedom is in the nature of politics. Politicised societies and nations are societies and nations that are becoming free.

Politics not only liberates, it also regulates. Politics is a unique regulatory force; is a kind of art. It represents the opposite of the suppressive regulations of states and rulers. The stronger the politics in a society or nation, the weaker the state and ruling powers. The opposite is also true: the stronger the state or ruling power is in a society or nation, the weaker the politics — and hence freedom — in that society.

Just as a society or nation that gains state and ruling power does not become free even if there were any democratic features, it also faces the prospect of losing whatever freedoms it previously had. This is why the more we clear the society from the state and power, the more we open it up to freedom. And the fundamental condition that is necessary for liberating that society and nation is for it to maintain itself in a permanent political position.

It will be seen that the democratic civilisation system has always existed and sustained itself as the other face of official civilisation’s history, in essence as the moral and political unity of societal nature. Despite the suppression and exploitation by the official world system, the other face of society could not be eliminated. In any case, its destruction is not possible. Just as capitalism cannot exist without a non-capitalist society, civilisation as the official world system too cannot exist without the existence of the democratic civilisation system. More concretely, the civilisation with monopoly could not exist without the civilisation with no monopoly. The opposite of this is not true.

In other words, democratic civilisation, the historical flow of the moral and political society, could exist quite comfortably and more unobstructedly without the official civilisation. I define democratic civilisation both as a thought system, an accumulation of thought, as well as a totality of moral rules and political organs.

We conceptualised the political dimension of the KCK’s construction of democratic nation as democratic autonomy.

Without self-governance democratic nation is unthinkable. In general all forms of nations and in particular democratic nations are societal entities that have their own self-governance.

If a society is deprived of self-governance, it ceases to be a nation. The Kurds were not only prevented from becoming a nation, they also ceased to exist as a society. The guidance by the PKK and the policies of the KCK not only stopped this process, but also initiated the process of becoming a democratic nation rather than a political society. Kurds, in the current stage, are not only a society that has become an intensely political society, but a society that also works to transform this political reality into a democratic nation.

The KCK plays a key role in the construction of the democratic nation and may be translated as the equivalent of democratic autonomy. The KCK’s fulfilment of its role as the organ for democratic politics is indispensable in the creation of a democratic nation. To confuse it with a nation-state is a deliberate distortion. The KCK, as a principle, has ceased to employ nation-statism as a tool for a solution. It is neither the first nor the last stage of nation-statism. They are both qualitatively different concepts of authority. Although it may contain features that are reminiscent of the nation-states’ institutionalisation in terms of its organisational structure, it is quintessentially different. KONGRA-GEL, as the KCK’s decision-making body, means People’s Assembly. Its importance is derived from people making their own decisions themselves. The People’s Assembly is a democratic organ. It is the alternative to becoming a nation governed by the upper classes or the bourgeoisie. KONGRA-GEL signifies becoming a nation governed by the popular classes and stratum of intellectuals. It is essentially different from the bourgeois parliamentarian system. The Executive Council of the KCK expresses the condensed and centralised daily administration pyramid. It ensures coordination between the working units scattered among the people. It coordinates the daily organisational-operational work involved in becoming a democratic nation as well as governing and defending it. The Council should not be confused with government organs of the state.

It is closer to the system of confederations of democratic civil societies. The KCK’s General Presidential Institution, resting on election by the people, is the most general and highest level of representation. It supervises and monitors the compatibility between all the KCK’s units and the application of fundamental policies.

It is clear that during such a period and under new conditions there will be considerable competition, contention and conflict between the nation-states’ institutions and forces and the KCK’s institutions and forces. There will be different authorities and governances in the cities and rural areas.

3 — Social Life

In the process of becoming a democratic nation, important transformations occur in social life. Traditional life in capitalist modernity undergoes great changes.

The dominant modern lifestyle has turned into a complete trap based around the oldest slave, the woman. In capitalism, women have been turned into the ‘queens of commodity’.

They are not only unwaged workers, as ‘housewives’, they are the lowest wage earner outsides of the house and the main tool for lowering wages.

The woman is the foremost constituent of flexible employment. She is an industrial incubator producing the new generations required by the capitalist system. She is the principal tool for the advertising industry. Her servitude perpetuates sexism. From the global to the little emperor in the family, she is the instrument of unlimited pleasure and power of all dominant men. She is the object that gives birth to the power of those who never had power. At no point in history has the woman been exploited as much as she has been during capitalist modernity. All other slaveries — child and male slavery — have developed in the footsteps of women’s enslavement. This is why in the social life imposed by capitalism everyone, except for those who rule, has been infantilised as much as enslaved.

The family, which is shaped around the woman and is the oldest institution of society, is disintegrating yet again around the woman. What disintegrates the family is capitalism’s manner of accumulation. This manner can only materialise itself as it consumes society and the expected result is that society can be consumed and atomised in so far as it is able to destroy the fundamental cell of the society; the family.

No matter how much the field of medicine is developed, it is unable to stop the rapid spread of disease within society.

Nationalism, religionism, powerism and sexism are the cognitive and emotional DNA of capitalism, constantly generating diseases both individually and institutionally. The increasing number of inherent illnesses is an indicator of mental and psychological disease — the inevitable outcome of capitalism’s destructive effect on society.

In modern social life, the education system is responsible for the creation of the anti-social individual. Both the liberal individualist life and the life of the nation-statist citizen are programmed and implemented in accordance with the requirements of capitalism. For this purpose, a huge industry called the education sector has been formed. In this sector, individuals are bombarded twenty-four hours a day both mentally and spiritually in order to be turned into anti-social beings. They are stunted from being moral and political. They are turned into individuals who are compelled to consume, who run after money, are sexist, chauvinist and lickspittle. This is how social nature is destroyed. Education is not used to enhance the healthy functioning of society, but to destroy it.

A democratic nation is above all adamant about remaining as a society; it stands against capitalist modernity with the slogan “society or nothing”. It insists on the sustenance of society as a historical-social reality, although the society is dissolved within the grindstones of modernity.

Because the democratic nation’s understanding of education targets sociality and the free individual-citizen, the dialectic of the development of the individual with the society and society’s development with the individual is restablished. The socialising, liberating and equalising role of sciences is reaffirmed. Democratic nation is the nationhood of a society that has acquired a true awareness of its existence.

4 — Free Partner Life

We know that there are three main functions for all living or- ganisms: nutrition, self-preservation and preservation of the species. Tese fundamental functions take on a new level in humans.

Once the consciousness of the desire to live is attained, it should also be understood that through procreation alone one can not grasp the meaning of life. Just as reproduction does not make life meaningful, it might even distort and weaken the emergent power of consciousness. Having awareness of one’s own self is undoubtedly an amazing formation in the universe. Ascribing divinity to the human being was not in vain. Continuing the bloodline of the conscious human not only impairs the balance, to the detriment of other living beings, it also endangers humanity’s power of consciousness. In short, the main problem of the conscious human cannot be the continuation of its bloodline. If, as far as we know, the universe has achieved the highest level of power to know itself within the human being for the very first time, then this is something worth getting very excited about. Maybe understanding the universe is the true meaning of life. This, in turn, would mean that the life-death cycle has been transcended; there could be no greater source of excitement and rejoicing for humanity.

The most important result of the PKK’s revolutionary peo- ple’s war in relation to male chauvinism is its understanding that the liberation and freedom of society is only possible through the analysis of phenomenon of woman, as well as her liberation and freedom. However, as it has been pointed out, the Kurdish male mistakenly defines his so-called honour in terms of his absolute sovereignty over women. This egregious contradiction needs to be resolved.

On the way to building a democratic nation, we will have to do the opposite of what has been done to date in the name of honour. I am talking about a transformed Kurdish man- hood, and in part I am talking about myself. And it should be done like this: we must abandon any notion of ownership in relation to women. Women should only belong to herself. She should know that she has no owner, and that the only owner she has is herself. We should not be attached to women with any emotions of subordination, including love and blind love. Likewise, the woman too should stop herself from being dependent and owned. This should be the first condition of being a revolutionary, a militant. Those who come through this experience successfully, are those who realise freedom in their personality, and who can build the new society and democratic nation starting with their own liberated personalities.

The liberation of women is very important in the process of becoming a democratic nation. The liberation of women is the liberation of society. The society that becomes free on the other hand is democratic nation. I talked about the revolutionary significance of reversing the role of the man. This means, instead of approaching the woman as a means of continuing his bloodline or dominating her, he should sustain the process of becoming a democratic nation through his own strength, he should form the ideological and organisational power needed for this, and should ensure the sovereignty of his own political authority; thus he should ideologically and politically produce himself. Thus, rather than physical reproduction, he must ensure spiritual and intellectual empowerment. Capitalist modernity is a system based on the denial of love. The denial of society, the uncontrollability of individualism, pervasive sexism, the deification of money, the substitution of nation-state for god, and the transformation of women into unwaged or low paid workers also mean denial of the material basis of love.

The female nature must be well understood. To approach a woman’s sexuality solely by finding her biologically attractive, and to relate to her on this basis is the loss of love from the very beginning. Just as we don’t call the biological mating of other species love, we cannot call biologically based sexual intercourse between humans love either. We can call this the normal breeding activity of living beings. There is no need to be human to conduct these activities. Those who want true love have to abandon this animal-human type of reproduction.

We can see women as valuable friends and comrades only to the extent that we transcend viewing them as objects of sexual appeal. The most difficult relationship is one of friendship and camaraderie with a woman that transcends sexism. Even when life is freely shared with a woman as a partner, the building of society and democratic nation should form its basis. We must overcome the traditional boundaries, and as in modernity, of seeing women only in the roles of partners, mothers, sisters or lovers. First and foremost, we must forge strong human relationships based on a common understanding and the building of society. If a man wants to have a relationship with a woman that has a strong ideological and societal foundation, then he needs to leave the choice and the courting to the woman. The more woman’s level of freedom, ability to choose freely, and mobility based on her own strength have developed, the more one can live with her meaningfully and beautifully.

We continuously emphasise that the conditions under which jin and jiyan cease to be woman and life reflect the collapse and disintegration of the society. Without this reality being understood and acted on, it is impossible for those components that we call revolution, revolutionary party, guides and militants to play their role. It is impossible for those who are themselves in a deadlock to solve other peoples’ deadlocks and to make them free. The most important consequence of the PKK and its revolutionary people’s warfare in this regard is that the liberation and freedom of society can only be achieved through the analysis of the phenomenon of woman, and her liberation and freedom.

5 — Economic Autonomy

When state power is arranged as nation-state, capitalist modernity and especially its maximum profit and capital accumulation realised over economy can be materialised. Without this instrument, maximum profit and capital accumulation cannot be achieved. It represents the realisation of the maximum level of economic plunder with a certain amount of legitimacy in the history of civilisation. A correct definition of the nation- state cannot be made without analysing its relationship to maximum profit and capital accumulation. The nation-state cannot solely be defined as a system of tyranny and power either. Only when state power is organised as a nation-state can capitalist modernity and, in particular, its maximum profit and capital accumulation over the economy be materialised.

This means that the nation-state’s control over the economic life of society has allowed the state to seize more surplus- value than ever. It is coated with the varnish of nationalism and patriotism, deified through education, and penetrates society completely to legitimise the economic extortion it has perpetrated. Concepts, theories and institutions developed in the fields of law, political economy and diplomacy all pursue legitimacy with the same objective. Enforcement of a relentless terror together with attainment of maximum profit in the economic domain on the one hand condemns society to minimum waged labour, while on the other hand it transforms the majority into an army of unemployed. Low-wage slavery and an enormous army of unemployed are the natural consequences of maximum profit, the nation-state and industrialism.

The realisation of these three fundamental components of capitalist modernity is only made possible when society looses control and the freedom to make choices over its economic life, is condemned to waged slavery, the majority of the population is transformed into an army of the unemployed, and when women are condemned to unpaid or low-wage slavery.

Capitalism’s social sciences in general, and in particular its political economy, are mythologies which concocted to conceal and distort these facts; one must never believe them and must know what these myths entail.

Kurdish society is a society that has been frightened to standup for itself as a consequence of the cultural genocide it has endured through conquests, occupations, invasions, looting, colonialism, and assimilation, as well as the consequences of capitalist modernity. It is a society that has lost control over its own economy and has been taken under the complete control of the three-legged modern monster of foreign and collaborationist elements. The fact that it only works to be able to feed itself shows that it is a society that has been tied down to a genocidal intent. It is a society in which women, the creators of economy, are completely rendered unemployed and their labour the least valued. It is a society whose men have been scattered across the world in search of work in order to support their families. It is a society in which people kill each other for a chicken or a plot of land. Clearly, such a society has ceased to be a society and is one that has crumbled and dissolved.

Economic occupation is the most dangerous of all occupations. It is the most barbaric way to degrade, and destroy a society. More than the suppression and tyranny of the nation- state, Kurdish society has been eviscerated by the loss of its economic tools and of control of its economic domain. It is not possible for a society to maintain its freedom once it has lost control over its means of production and market. The Kurds have not only effectively lost control over their means and relations of production; they have also lost control over their production, consumption and trade. More precisely, it was only possible for them to make use of their property, and partake in trade and industry insofar as they attached themselves to sovereign nation-states through relinquishing their identities. Economic captivity was an effective tool in the denial of identity and loss of freedom. The unilateral enterprises established over the rivers and oil reservoirs have not only destroyed ancient cultural artefacts but also much fertile land.

The intensification of economic colonialism which came after political and cultural colonisation was the final nail in the coffin. The final point arrived at is: “either cease to be a society, or die!”

The economic system of a democratic nation not only puts a stop to these barbaric practices, it bases itself on society re- establishing control over its own economy. Economic autonomy is the minimum compromise to be reached between the nation-state and democratic nation; any lesser compromise is a mandate for surrender and annihilation. The furthering of economic autonomy to independence would mean establishing an opposing nation-state, which is ultimately surrendering to capitalist modernity. Relinquishing economic autonomy, on the other hand, would mean surrendering to the dominant nation-state. The essence of economic autonomy predicates neither private capitalism nor state capitalism. It is predicated on ecological industry and communal economy — the form where democracy is reflected in the economy. Industry, development, technology, businesses and ownership are bound by the principle of being an ecological and democratic society. In economic autonomy there is no room for industry, technology, development, ownership or rural-urban settlement that negate ecological and democratic society. The economy cannot be left to be a domain where profit and capital accumulation materialises.

Economic autonomy is a model in which profit and capital accumulation is minimised. Although it does not reject the market, trade, product variety, competition and productivity, it does, however, reject the dominance of profit and capital accumulation. Finance and financial systems are validated only insofar as they serve economic productivity and functionality.

Making money from money is regarded as the most effortless form of exploitation, which has no place in economic autonomy. The economic autonomy of a democratic nation does not regard work as drudgery, but as an act of liberation. To see work as drudgery is to be alienated from the results of labour.

When the results of labour serve one’s own identity and the individual’s freedom, the situation changes for the better. This isn’t the same as real socialism’s efforts of collectivisation either.

In the commune, there is no place for drudgery or for work and labour that are not liberating.

The dams built on Kurdistan’s rivers have led to historical genocide and ecological disaster. No dam that ignores ecology, the fertile land or the history can be permitted; even those that have already been built will not be replaced when they decay. If possible, early elimination should not be avoided.

Opposition to deforestation and erosion — the biggest enemy of society and life — chimes with the spirit of total mobilisation. It declares the protection of land and reforestation to be the most valuable forms of labour.

The KCK, as the backbone of the democratic nation, predicates itself on and sees economic autonomy and communal economy as essential to the self-defence of society. Just as society cannot sustain itself without self-defence, the nourishment and sustenance of society is only possible with economic autonomy, dependent on soil conservation and reforestation, ecology and commune.

Economic autonomy also requires a legal basis. The uniformity and centralism of the laws of the sovereign nation-state hamper economic creativity, the environment and competition under the pretext of unity. In place of such an understanding of law essentially based on economic colonialism, there is an urgent need for a localised economy that functions autonomously but which takes into account coordination with the national economy. An economic law that makes allowance for local market dynamics, but which does not deny the national market, is crucial. A single central legal system is the biggest factor for conservatism. It is completely political and makes no economic sense.

6 — Legal Structure

Democratic law is a law based on diversity. More importantly, it makes little reference to legal regulation and is a simple construct. Throughout history, the sovereign nation-state is a state form that has developed legal regulations to the greatest extent, in order to eliminate the moral and political society. Past societies attempted to a large extent to solve their problems through moral and political regulations. Capitalist modernity attempted to vest all of its legitimacy on law. Capitalist modernity’s excessive intervention in and exploitation of society led it to resort to a complicated tool called law that formalized justice.

Law, rather than consisting of laws regulating the rights and duties of individuals and society, as it is so often claimed to be, it is the art of ruling through excessive regulation intended to legitimise the injustices caused by capitalism. Ruling through laws rather than moral and political rules is specific to capitalist modernity. Rejecting morals and politics, the bourgeoisie resorts to the instrument of law, which gives it enormous power. In the hands of the bourgeoisie, law is a powerful weapon. It defends itself through law against both the former moral and political order and the workers. The power of the nation-state is largely derived from the power of a legal system that has been unilaterally regulated. The laws, in a sense, are the verses of the nation-state god. It prefers to rule its society through these verses.

It is for this reason that the democratic nation is sensitive towards law, especially constitutional law. The democratic nation is more of a moral and political nation than a nation based on law. The need for law arises if a life with nation-states under a common political roof and compromise is opted for.

When this happens, the distinction between national law and the laws of local government gains importance. When the nation-state laws, which are based on unilaterally centralised bureaucratic interests, constantly face the resistance of local and cultural democratic groups they must embrace the laws of the local government.

Due to the fact that the existence of Kurdistan and Kurds has been denied, the Kurds have no laws specific to them. In the Ottoman period, the Kurds had both written and traditional laws. From 1925 onwards Kurdish identity was regarded as non-existent, to be wiped from history through conspiracies, coups and assimilation. While PKK’s resistance has reestablished the existence of the Kurds, it has not yet been able to ensure a legal definition. During this period the KCK will work to persuade the nation-states to recognise the Kurdish entity legally but if this does not happen, it will unilaterally develop its own autonomous legal system. However, KCK will give priority to find itself a place within the national constitutions. Thus, in accordance with such priority, it will work to express its democratic autonomy status within the national democratic constitutions. This is what is meant by a peaceful and democratic solution to the Kurdish question: National democratic constitutional compromise based on democratic autonomy status. If the KCK does not succeed in its preferred national democratic constitutional solution with democratic autonomy status based on a compromise, it will make the transition to unilateral Democratic Autonomous Governance as its second preferred option. The Democratic Autonomous Governance in Kurdistan is not a nation-state with governance through laws. It is the governance of democratic modernity on a local and regional scale.

7 — Culture

The state rests on thousands of years of patriarchal culture.

The state institution is a male invention, where wars with the objective of pillaging and looting have almost become a form of production. Instead of woman’s social effectivity based on production, a transition to man’s social effectivity based on wars and booty occurred. There is a close correlation between the enslavement of women and warrior society culture. War does not produce, it seizes and pillages. Although in certain specific circumstances violence has played a decisive role in societal development — clearing the path to freedom, resisting occupation, invasion and colonialism — it is largely destructive and negative. The internalised culture of violence in a society is also fuelled by wars. The sword of war among the states and the hand of man within the family both epitomise domination.

In addition, by formalising the cultural norms of a dominant ethnicity or a religious community under the name of national culture, capitalist modernity declares war against all other cultural entities. By claiming that religions, ethnicities, peoples, nations, languages and cultures that have preserved themselves for thousands of years “harm national unity”, capitalist modernity prepares to destroy them either by force or through material incentives. In no other time in history have so many languages, religions, denominations, ethnic tribes and aşiret as well as peoples and nations fallen victim to these policies, or to be more precise, genocides. Physical genocides are actually a drop in the ocean when compared with immaterial genocide. Cultural and linguistic values together with their communities that have existed for thousands of years are sacrificed, for the sake of the sacred act of creating ‘national unity’.

The cultural dimension, too, is very important in the formation of nations. In the narrow sense, culture represents the traditional mentality and emotional reality of a society. Again, in the narrow sense, religion, philosophy, mythology, science and various art forms constitute the culture of a society. In a way, they represent the mindset and mental state of a society. In a nation-state, or as nations are formed by the state, the world of culture is greatly distorted and decimated. This is because in no other way can the state legitimise its rule of maximum profit and capital accumulation. Modernity and the nation- state cannot develop without first reconstructing culture and history according to their own interests. The resulting reality of modernity and nation-state has no relation to reality of history and culture; it represents a different meaning in terms of the truth.

The role of culture in capitalist modernity is vital. Culture, as the total mentality of all social spheres, is first subjected to assimilation (to accommodate economic and political hegemony), then it is turned into an industry to be spread extensively and intensively to all the societies (nations, peoples, nation- states, civil society, corporations) of the world. The industrialisation of culture is the second most effective means of enslavement. Culture, in a narrow sense, represents the mindset of societies. Thought, taste and morals are its three fundamental issues. It has taken centuries for political and economic power to besiege and buy off the cultural elements. They have regard- ed the appropriation of cultural elements as indispensable for their legitimacy throughout civilisational history. Economic and ruling powers were quick to notice this and to take precautions. The assimilation of culture by the rulers dates back to the inception of hierarchy. It is the essential tool for ruling.

Without cultural hegemony, economic and power monopolies cannot rule. The empire stage of capitalism is only possible with a developed cultural industry. It is for this reason that the struggle against cultural hegemony requires constant diligence.

In contrast, democratic society, the moral and political society’s contemporary form of modernity, is a society that truly accommodates difference in the broadest sense. All social groups within democratic society can co-exist on the basis of differences that form around their own culture and identity without being confined to a uniform culture and citizenship.

Societies can reveal their potential in terms of identity differentiation to political differentiation, and transform it into an active life. None of the communities has any concern that they would be homogenised. Uniformity is seen as deformity, poverty-stricken and boring. Pluriformity, however, offers richness, beauty and tolerance. Freedom and equality flourish under these conditions. Only equality and freedom that rest on diversity are valuable. As a matter of fact, freedom and equality attained via the nation-states is only for monopolies, as proven around the world. Power and capital monopolies never allow true freedoms or equality. Freedom and equality can only be acquired through the democratic politics of democratic society, and protected with self-defence.

Just as it is possible to bring together different ethnic cultures within the scope of the democratic nation, it is also important to utilise the democratic content of religious culture within the democratic nation as a free, equal and democratic component and allow room for it in a resolution. The reconciliatory alliance approach developed by democratic modernity towards all anti-systemic movements should also be developed towards the religious culture with democratic content; this is within the scope of another task that is of vital importance.

The democratic nation tries to compose itself by reinstating the true meaning of history and culture, which in the process is reborn in the formation of the democratic nation.

The democratic nation solution of the Kurdish question is first and foremost linked to the correct definition of Kurdish history and culture. The correct definition of its history and culture will bring the recognition of its social existence with it- self. The denial and annihilation of the Kurds in the Republic of Turkey’s history began with the denial of Kurdish history and the annihilation of its cultural heritage, first eliminating its immaterial culture and then its material culture. It is for this reason that it was right for the PKK to begin building with an awareness of history and culture. By attempting to explain Kurdish history and culture through comparison with other people’s history and culture around the world, and to proclaim it in a manifesto called The Path of the Kurdistan Revolution al- lowed the PKK to play the role of a revolutionary Renaissance in the reinvigoration of Kurdish history and culture.

The construction of the Kurdish democratic nation is qualitatively different from the nationalist and statist nation- building processes. It is different from sovereign nation-state nationalism and Kurdish nationalist and statist approaches; it is an alternative construction of a nation grounded on the history and culture of workers and peoples.

The Kurdish democratic nation will gradually acquire a further structural quality under KCK and present a new praxis of nation construction that will become a model for the Middle Eastern peoples. It is open to more extensive democratic national unions and alliances with other peoples on the basis of an open-ended understanding of democratic nation. It will initiate the rise of a new era, the era of democratic modernity, through the revolutionary and democratic nation renaissance against the cultural and historical denialism of nation-states that cannot transcend their role as agents of Western modernity.

8 — Self-Defence System

All species of living organisms have defence systems of their own. There is not a single defenceless species. As a matter of fact, it is possible to interpret the resistance shown by each element or particle in the universe to protect its existence as self-defence.

The same system is more than valid for human species and societies too. Defence in human species is as much social as it is biological. Biological defence is performed by the defensive instincts of every living organism. In societal defence, however, all the individuals of the community collectively defend themselves. Moreover, the number of communities and their organisational form constantly change according to the means of defence. Defence is an essential function of society. Life cannot be sustained without it.

Another important conclusion we can draw from the self- defence mechanisms of living organisms is that this defence is only intended for the protection of their existence. They do not establish dominance and colonisation systems over their own species or any other species. Systems of domination and exploitation were first developed by the human species. The mental development of the human species that resulted in possibilities of exploitation and in connection with this the attainment of surplus-product plays a role in this. This situation leads to protecting its existence along with defending the values of labour, in other words, social wars.

When we view things from the democratic society perspective we must underline the following: when we talk about self- defence rather than a military stance or an armed organisation what we mean is the organisation of society to protect itself in every sphere, and for it to struggle based on these organisations.

This said, in order to counter the attacks of the statist system against society and to protect society, military organisations may also be needed, to defend society in all its diversity. And this could be deemed as legitimate defence. But this sort of military organization, organised in this way, serving to protect society and its reorganisation, cannot merely be evaluated as a military organisation either. The function of the military forces at the service of society, the fundamental self-defence forces, is to play the role of a catalyst to speed up and protect the struggle of democratic society. Military forces that move away from these functions cannot avoid being transformed into an offensive force that is an instrument of hegemonic forces.

Self-defence does not only stipulate an armed structure; al- though it does not reject the use of force when necessary, it can not be viewed only as an armed structure. It represents the organisation of the society in all spheres and in relation to its own identity and life: the decisions taken to this end reflect society’s own will and are implemented at society’s behest. Values that used to belong to the people and the country but were usurped by the colonialist powers are retrieved and returned to social values in an act of self-defence. The society should attain a position where it can both protect its values and recover its usurped rights in order for it to govern itself. This is the way to create a democratic nation.

A self-defence mechanism for women, as the most oppressed and suppressed segment of society, is also of vital importance. Under the patriarchal system all rights of women were usurped. Women can circumvent these policies of degradation, harassment, rape and slaughter through the formation of their own self-defence mechanisms. For this reason, they need to learn their history, create their own organisations and institutions, carve out space for themselves in all areas of life and if necessary create their own military forces.

An important and indispensable heading within the KCK’s programme for the construction of a democratic nation is how self-defence is going to be tied to a permanent systematic. The nation-states, who are the sole armed monopoly, will be unsparing if they have the opportunity to implement new policies of denial, annihilation and assimilation. These policies have compelled the creation of a permanent self-defence system by the KCK. The minimum requirement for coexistence with nation-states is for the Kurdish identity and existence to be constitutionally guaranteed. Constitutional guarantee is not enough: concrete grounds for this guarantee should be sought through statuses determined by law. Apart from the joint national defence for external threats, Kurdish society should meet their own security requirements. This is because a society can only ensure its internal security in accordance with its requirements. Therefore, the related nation-states (the centralised nation-states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria) must implement important reforms in their own internal security policies.

If a compromise cannot be agreed with the relevant nation- states, the KCK, on the basis of protecting the unilateral construction of the democratic nation with all its dimensions, should try to organise the quantitative and qualitative status of its own self-defence forces according to new needs.

9 — Diplomacy

One of the most developed activities by the nation-state is diplomacy between nation-states. Diplomacy describes pre- war activities between nation-states. It may even be defined as the preparatory phase for wars in the history of nation-states.

Throughout history there have always been certain rituals of expressing neighbourhood relations between different types of communal units. These are deemed very valuable. The reason nation-states have institutionalised this relationship can be linked to the profit tendency of capitalist modernity. If relationships are more profitable in times of peace then there is no need for war. Diplomacy serves to achieve profitable relations. If the maximum profit tendency is linked to war, then diplomatic forces will be unable to avert a profitable war, thus terminating the need for diplomacy. Diplomacy has been reduced to the logic of profit; it no longer has any link to the meaningful inter-societal relations that existed throughout history. Diplomacy has been degraded to a manipulative tool in the game of profitable wars between nation-states.

Democratic nation diplomacy must first create a common platform between Kurds who are fragmented and divided in various ways. All other diplomatic activities, especially those that each organisation wishes to develop on their own and according to their own interests, have done more harm than good and have served further to fragment, create conflict and divide Kurds. It is for this reason that establishing the Democratic National Congress is the most vital priority for Kurdish diplomacy. Diplomacy that rests on the Iraqi-Kurdish Federal State is important, but cannot meet the needs of all Kurdish people. This state has neither the ability to meet this demand nor the conditions that would allow it to do so. A diplomacy that meets the needs of all Kurds can be developed only through a Democratic National Congress. Therefore, the primary task is to assemble the Democratic National Congress and declare it to be a permanent general integrative national democratic organisation. It is clear that for some time to come, relations and contradictions both ideologically and politically will continue between KCK as it builds a democratic nation and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq’s nation- statist construction. In this regard, the Democratic National Congress may serve as a solution orientated umbrella organisation.

Diplomacy, which once again becomes a tool for peace and solidarity as well as creative exchanges between societies, deals essentially with the solution of problems. Democratic nation diplomacy is a tool for peace and beneficial relations, not wars.

It signifies a mission where wise people play a role and which has high ethical and political values. It plays an important role in developing and maintaining bilaterally beneficial processes and friendly relations especially amongst neighbouring peoples and related communities. It is the constructive force of common socialities and the synthesis of societies at higher levels.

The diplomacy of the democratic nation can play a lasting role and provide solutions in the context of democratic modernity between the peoples and nations of the Middle East who have endured chaos and conflict because of nation-state diplomacy.

The global union of democratic nations, as an alternative to the UN, is the World Confederation of Democratic Nations.

Continents and large cultural regions can form their own Confederations of Democratic Nations, too.

6. To be a Quester of Democratic Nation Solution

The construction of the democratic nation in Kurdistan is the new historical and societal expression of the Kurdish existence and its free life that requires both theoretical and practical concentration and transformation. It represents a truth that requires devotion at the level of real love. Just as there is no room for false love in this voyage, there is also no room for uncommitted travellers. In this voyage, the question of when the construction of the democratic nation will be completed is a redundant one. This is a construction that will never be finished: it is an ongoing process. The construction of democratic nation has the freedom to re-create itself at every instant. In societal terms, there can be no utopia or reality that is more ambitious than this. In accordance with their historical and societal reality, the Kurds have vigorously turned towards the construction of a democratic nation. As a matter of fact, they have lost nothing by ridding themselves of a nation-state god in which they never believed; they are rid of a very heavy burden, a burden that brought them to the brink of annihilation.

Instead, they have gained the opportunity to become a democratic nation.

The Kurds, as individuals and as a society, must conceive, internalise and implement the construction of a democratic nation as the synthesis of all expressions of truth and resistance throughout their history, including the most ancient goddess beliefs, Zoroastrianism and Islam. The truths that all the past mythological, religious and philosophical teachings as well as contemporary social sciences have tried to teach and that all resistance wars and rebellions have individually and collectively tried to voice are represented in the mind and body of constructing a democratic nation. It was this reality and its expression as truth that was my point of departure, not only when I re-created myself at times but especially arriving at the present as I tried to re-create myself almost at every instant.

In this way, I freely socialised myself, and concretised this as a democratic nation (in a Kurdish context), and presented it as democratic modernity to all humanity, to the oppressed peoples and individuals of the Middle East.

It is clear that care needs to be taken in order to prevent liberalism — as it so often has done throughout its history — from degenerating and dissolving these positive tendencies of democratisation under its own ideological and mate- rial hegemony. The most strategic task is to unify not only all system opponents but also the flow of historical-society with all its urbanist, local and regional political formations in a new ideological and political structure. In this regard, inter- twined with comprehensive theoretical work that needs to be taken up, there is a need to develop a programme and structures for organisation and action. The conditions are ripe in the twenty-first century to avoid the fate of confederal structures which were eliminated by the nation-states in the mid-nineteenth century, and to achieve the victory of democratic confederalism. In order for democratic modernity to come out of the sustained depression, which is the deepest and the longest lasting depression, sustained only through crisis management during modernity’s finance capital era, the ability to succeed in the intellectual, moral and political duties of reconstruction has never had such a vital significance.

7. Conclusion

In that case, if new parties for freedom and equality want to be consistent, then they must develop politics and social forms that are not centred around the state. The alternative to the state is democracy. All paths — aside from democracy — that have been attempted in efforts to counter the state have come to nothing. Contrary to popular belief, democracy is not a form of capitalist state. In addition, nothing other than democracy can restrict the state, and keep it within the law. To topple a state doesn’t mean you have overcome the state culture. A new one can always be created to fill the vacuum. Only democracy shares the same area with the state; by restricting the state, it widens society’s sphere of freedom. It can thus approach equality a little more by reducing the number of appropriated values.

Therefore, we can define democracy to be the self-governance of a non-state society. Democracy is governance that is not state; it is the power of communities to govern themselves without the state. Contrary to popular belief, since its formation human society has experienced democracy more than it has experienced the state. Perhaps, the situation of a general country or nation’s democracy has not been intensely experienced. But the emergence of society’s existence is communal and democratic. Without communality, or in the absence of having a democratic reflex, it is impossible for a society to be solely ruled by the state. The state can only rule by growing at the expense of communality and democracy. The grounds out of which the state rises and on which it thrives are the society’s communality — the need for coexistence — and dem- ocratic stance. There is a dialectic relationship between the two. Therefore, when society and civilisation meet, the main contradiction is between the state and democracy. Less of one is more of the other. Full democracy is statelessness. Full state sovereignty is the denial of democracy. States can only be toppled by states; democracy does not topple the state; it can only pave the way for a newer state like real socialism did.

Democracy’s fundamental function becomes evident in this manner. It can only increase the opportunities for freedom and equality by restricting the state, making it smaller and by trimming its octopus like tentacles over the society. Towards the end of the process, perhaps the state will become redundant and fizzle out. The conclusion we draw from this is that the relationship between the state and democracy is not of one toppling another, but of transcendence.

What I am trying to show with this short analysis is that our world-view contained a fundamental mistake from the beginning because of being a state-oriented party. These parties, whether they form a state or not, cannot achieve their objectives of democracy, freedom and equality through state formation. Without deviating from this path, one cannot become a new libertarian and egalitarian party. In short, the way to become a democratic and socialist party is to ensure renewal by making the transition in the state-oriented theory, programme, strategy and tactics. There is a need for a non-state orientated democratic socialist theory, programme, strategy and tactics. If self-criticism develops within this context, it will be meaningful. Otherwise, the old methods will persist under the guise of the new. The state of real socialism, social democracy and national liberation parties is enough to prove this reality.

Just as it has been the case many times throughout history between civilisational forces and democratic forces, capitalist modernity forces and democratic modernity forces can accept the existence and identity of one another, and can coexist peacefully on the basis of recognising democratic autonomous governances. Within this scope and under these conditions, within and outside the borders of a nation-state, democratic confederal political formations can peacefully coexist with nation-state formations.

I have tried to puzzle out and comprehensively analyse the proposition that while capitalist modernity survives on the basis of capitalism, industrialism and nation-statism, democratic modernity can only come into existence through democratic communality, ecological industry and a democratic nation. I defined democratic communality not as the egalitarianism of a homogeneous society but as any type of community (from women’s to men’s communities, from sports and arts to industry, from intellectuals to shepherds, from tribes to corporations, from families to nations, from villages to cities, from localities to universality and from clan to any type of global society) of any size. I defined eco-industrial communities as communities in which the eco-industrial society, the agricultural society of villages, and the industrial society of the cities nurture each other and are strictly aligned with ecology. On the other hand I defined the democratic nation too. It is a new type of nation that encompasses all cultural entities from ethnicity to religion; from urban, local, regional to national communities formed through democratic autonomous political formations and its main political form, democratic confederalist implementations. More precisely, against the nation-statist monsters, the democratic nation is a nation that has multi- political formations, multiple identities and is multi-cultural.

As we try to analyse the 5,000 years of civilisational history in terms of the two conflicting poles, we understand that these two poles will continue to coexist for some time to come. The eradication of one of the poles by the other is not foreseeable in the near future. Moreover, dialectically this does not seem realistic. The rashness of real socialism in this regard and its attempt to try its own system without first analysing civilisation and modernity have resulted in its own dissolution. The important thing is to take into account this bipolarity in all theoretical and practical work, and continuously to develop democratic civilisation and modernity within daily life and through new constructive work. The more we develop our system through both revolutionary and evolutionary methods, the more we can positively solve the problems of term and space and make the solution permanent. Democratic modernity as a system, including its fundamental elements, is well suited for true peace. The democratic nation, with its clear ability to create solutions from the smallest national community through to a world nation, offers a very valuable peace option.

The important thing is to institutionalise the communal and democratic identity, which is also the basic stance of peoples historically, with contemporary science and technological resources by unifying them. In order to have a more democratic, liberated and ecological social structure, there is a need above all for a new social sciences structure. It should not be forgotten that the most comprehensive and permanent component of democratisation is women’s freedom. Without the attainment of societal gender equality, no demand for freedom or equality can be meaningful or realised.

Nowadays, democracy is needed, just like bread air and water, but nowhere more so than for the peoples of the Middle East. There is no other option but democracy — all others have been tested throughout history — that has the ability to bring happiness to the people. Kurds are at the forefront of these peoples. If they can successfully mobilise their geography, historical time and societal characteristics — all of which have become significant strategic elements — in favour of democratic civilisation in the Middle East, they will have done the greatest good for their neighbours and for humanity. What we have undertaken is a draft for this noble and exciting task.

On the Author

Abdullah Öcalan, born in 1949, studied political sciences in Ankara. He actively led the Kurdish liberation struggle as the head of the PKK from its foundation in 1978 until his abduction on 15 February 1999. He is regarded as a leading strategist and one of the most important political representatives of the Kurdish people.

Under isolation conditions at Imrali Island Prison, Öcalan has written more than ten books, which have revolutionised Kurdish politics. Several times he initiated unilateral ceasefires of the guerilla and presented constructive proposals for a political solution to the Kurdish issue.

The so-called “peace process” started in 2009 when the Turkish state responded to Öcalan’s call to resolve the Kurdish issue politically. This process broke down in April 2015, when the Turkish state unilaterally terminated the talks and returned to a policy of annihilation and denial.

Since 27 July 2011, Öcalan has been held again in almost total isolation at Imrali Island Prison. Since 5 April 2015, the whole prison has been completely cut off from the rest of the world.

On the International Initiative

On 15 February 1999, the President of the Kurdistan Workers Party, Abdullah Öcalan, was handed over to the Republic of Turkey following a clandestine operation backed by an alliance of secret services directed by their corresponding governments. Disgusted by this outrageous violation of international law, several intellectuals and representatives of civil organisations launched an initiative calling for the release of Abdullah Öcalan. With the opening of a central coordination office in March 1999, the International Initiative “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan — Peace in Kurdistan” started its work.

The International Initiative regards itself as a multinational peace initiative working for a peaceful and democratic solution to the Kurdish question. Even after long years of imprisonment, Abdullah Öcalan is still regarded as an undisputed leader by the majority of the Kurdish people. Hence, the solution of the Kurdish question in Turkey will be closely linked to his fate. As the main architect of the peace process, he is viewed by all sides as key to its successful conclusion, which puts Öcalan’s freedom increasingly firmly on the agenda.

The International Initiative is committed to play its part to this end. It does this through disseminating objective information, lobbying and public relations work, including running campaigns. By publishing translations of Öcalan’s prison writings it hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the origins of the conflicts and the possible solutions.

73. DIY Template for Horizontal Bylaws

Deleted reason: Usufruct Collective is libertarian socialist but not all of their texts ought be on the library

Author: Usufruct Collective

Authors: Usufruct Collective

Topics: assembly, democratic assemblies, Direct Democracy, constitution

Date: 04/04/22

Date Published on T@L: 2022-11-12T00:00:00

Source: usufructcollective.wordpress.com

Notes: added all relevant features

Introduction:

Structure, process, decision making, as well as rights and duties within formal groups are important for group functioning, achieving common goals, and solving common problems. Without a defined form and process, unaccountable and arbitrary power can easily emerge within an organization. But for freedom loving people, there is a problem when trying to formulate horizontal organizations: The most common examples of constitutions/bylaws etc. are hierarchical, bureaucratic, and with a significant amount of arbitrary and vicious rules. The entire topic of horizontal governance is practically alien to most all who ideologically agree with hierarchical politics and is even alien to significant segments of anarchists and Marxists.

The following is a DIY bylaw template that includes some fundamentals for directly democratic organizations. The DIY bylaw template is specifically made for community assembly projects but can be adapted to other groups. The following template is based on synthesizing features from historical and contemporary organizations that have various libertarian socialist practices.

The following bylaws are both skeletal and imperfect. The exact features included and wording used need to be fleshed out, made more clear, and adapted to needs and preferences of specific groups achieving specific goals in specific contexts. These bylaws on their own, if given no revision and adaptation, will likely not make sense for the group you are trying to form. There are also some places very intentionally left blank and incomplete for groups to fill in the blanks and flesh out what a specific section consists of. Hopefully such sentences with blanks for people to fill in (as well as occasional commentary on the bylaws within the template itself) will serve as a reminder that the following template needs to be adapted to the group you are forming. If a group copies and pastes the template to flesh out and adapt to needs/preferences/conditions, it is important to think through each point.

Some features of these bylaws refer to features that are necessary to or otherwise generally conducive to good organization. Other features are far more contingent and optional. For all of the strengths of good bylaws: even when they are fleshed out and tailored to specific needs, preferences, and relevant variables, good bylaws are merely one layer of defense against hierarchical, unprincipled, structureless, anti-strategic, and ineffective organization; A living content is needed to fill the form for a horizontal organization to develop ethical and effective action. Good formal features and processes are necessary but insufficient for developing liberatory organizations and the overall flourishing of liberatory content.

In the following, the use of * within parenthesis will indicate commentary as distinct from yet included within the template.

Points of Unity:

(*For social movement groups and popular organizations: this refers to shared processes and practices and goals. They can be used as a mission statement, features bylaws are in harmony with and/or based on, as supplementing the bylaws, and/or as skeletal features that can be made into a full program when fleshed out, adapted to local contexts, and given a strategic orientation for how such features can be developed as means and ends. The following points of unity are not an ideological litmus test but practical agreements about organization. For ideologically and theoretically specific groups– which are distinct from social movement groups and popular organizations that have common practices and processes– points of unity can be adapted to fleshed out ideologies and theories.)

Direct Democracy: Direct Democracy is direct collective decision making. Decisions about common problems and common projects of this association are made in assemblies by all those effected through dialogue and then voting.
Horizontality: The development of institutions and relations that do not have hierarchical rule (referring to top-down command obedience) within the structure and decisions made. (*This can be elaborated as needed– but for groups that are not ideologically specific groups it is important for this point to be about shared goals, practices, and processes rather than a shared ideology. There are other potential ways of phrasing this point that can include the substance of what horizontality refers to such as non-hierarchy, or egalitarian relations, or even equality. The latter two wordings would require definitional elaborations and other words to correspond to the richness of what horizontality refers to, but those words can make sense for pragmatic communication at times).
Free association of persons: Free association refers to freedom of and from associations as well as freedom within associations. Each and all should have the guaranteed right to participatory activity– and each and all have the duty to uphold the participatory activity of others.
Mutual Aid: Multidirectional support to help meet one another’s needs and desires. (*Can be expanded to include commoning as a shared practice and goal orientation)
(*The above is a very minimal and skeletal conception of a points of unity document. Various other points can be included such as direct action, federalism/confederalism/co-federalism/inter-communalism, etc. For example, direct action in particular can be very useful in a points of unity document both to give projects an oppositional character against hierarchical relations and to make an additional clear distinct break from statist politics. And federalism/confederalism/co-federalism/inter-communalism is crucial to avoid parochial localism and reach out beyond one’s backyard to forge a commune of communes. That being said qualities of an organization do not need to be in the official points of unity for them to be crucial features of a specific group and what a specific group does. And additional points can be added to a points of unity document overtime as a group coheres around a more coherent goal and practice orientation. Yet having “direct action” and federalism/confederalism/co-federalism/inter-communalism in a points of unity document sooner than later can help a group orient itself towards such practices and avoid the vices of indirect action and parochialism.)

Bylaws:

Decision Making Process:

Decisions are made through deliberation.
Agenda is to be created by and approved by participants. (The agenda can have different sections for the meeting as needed: Such as introductions, report backs, specific discussion topics and action plans, to announcements, etc.)
Delegated and rotating facilitator calls on people as they volunteer to speak OR otherwise meeting can go round robin style where everyone speaks in turns by passing the speaker role in a circle.
There is a search for full agreement through dialogue. (Deliberation involves: Problem analysis, goal setting, alternative proposals, positives and negatives of multiple proposals)
If there is not full agreement, then deliberation occurs until discussion is sufficiently exhausted.
If full agreement is not reached, then decisions are made by simple majority (51%+ of the vote).
Decisions must have a form and content in harmony with the points of unity and/or bylaws/bill of rights of the assembly.
Different kinds of direct democracy protocols (such as ⅔ voting for an issue, or deliberation style of people in favor of and opposed to a proposal taking turns, etc) can be mandated and recalled by assembly through the above processes.
Assemblies happen at ___ time at ___ location. (*Could for example be monthly, every two weeks, or weekly, etc. depending on the group… and ideally at a consistent space that can meet needs of participants)
Proposed changes to bylaws must be brought up at least two meetings prior to them being voted on.
Quorum is __% of membership or otherwise __ amount of people. (*Varies depending on group. Group participation will fluctuate depending on ebbs and flows. Ideally group participation is consistent enough that this quorum is rarely if ever a concern. Quorum should neither be too big nor too small. It is good to generally aim towards the lower numbers until a group is sufficiently populated and consistent that it warrants raising the quorum.)

Membership:

Living in or being in XYZ block/neighborhood related to assembly based group. (*This point is for community assembly groups only; groups that are not community assemblies would have different criteria. And ideally horizontal assemblies would exist in any community one lives in or moves to, and ideally such assemblies connect inter-communally to help each other out and to develop and self-manage inter-communal commons.)
Agreeing with the minimal features of the group. (*Could be bylaws, points of unity for process/practices of a group, etc. not to be confused with agreeing to a specific ideology/theory)
(*Under the context of living under capitalism: optional to add dues for those able to contribute. For example dues could be for those over a specific income or otherwise as a pay what you want to kind of dues system. Assemblies should be accessible to the dispossessed and impoverished. And if assemblies have resources at their disposals, they will be able to do more to address root causes of inequality and absolute deprivation of resources through practices of the assembly. And participatory budgeting is a way to practice democracy, fuel various projects of the assembly, and even help members of assemblies out in times of need, etc.)
(*Adapt specificities of membership to what kind of group you are forming. There will be significant differences for a community assembly group, a tenants’ council, a radical union, an ideologically specific group, a single or multi issue social movement group of some kind, etc.)

Committees/Working groups/Embedded Councils:

Policy making power is held within the general assembly.
Working groups and embedded councils are to be mandated from below by the general assembly.
Working groups and embedded councils can not make policy over and above the general assembly.
Self management exists for working groups and embedded councils within the bounds of the protocols and policies made by the general assembly.
Working groups and embedded councils are made out of people who agree to implement specific policies. (*It is very possible to disagree with a policy as ideal but still agree enough with the policy to implement it.)
Some of these committees are open committees for any volunteer to join whereas others are made out of those specifically delegated. Some committees are continuous standing committees whereas others are periodic special committees that dissolve after a specified more short term function is complete.
Working groups and embedded councils report back to the general assembly.
Working groups and embedded councils (as well as policies for working groups and embedded councils) are instantly recallable by the general assembly.

Some Potential Committees are as follows:

Common Infrastructure Committee or a Mutual Aid Committee of some kind: Could have general function or specific functions as needed. Specific committees could focus on various ways of developing communal and intercommunal fields, factories, workshops, community housing, building community owned co-ops, communal food systems, free stores, tool libraries, community food programs, community technology projects, community potlucks/block parties, etc.
Direct Action Committee/Solidarity Network: Could have general functions or specific functions as needed. Direct action committee/network would help tenants, workers, the unemployed, the exploited, the dominated, and the dispossessed through direct action.
Special action committees to organize specific direct actions
Special committees for various periodic events
Reforestation committee
Committee for organizing a larger than usual scale assembly or gathering
Childcare committee for either during meetings or in other contexts. (*Can be organized inter-communally so that people do not have to miss meetings to do childcare. Responsibility can be shared and rotated so it is not a burden).
Collective Incubator Committee: a committee of the assembly designed to spawn a separate organization of some kind

Delegated Roles:

Roles are to be delegated by the general assembly directly.
Such roles are to be administrative and communicative and have no representative policy making power.
Roles are to be mandated by people directly and instantly recallable.
Roles can be mandated through: nomination or self-nomination and voting on a person to have such a role+agreement by person delegated to a role, or through lot+agreement by person delegated and the collective delegating, or through specific roles being and passed around in a circle after a set period of time in such a way where everyone able and willing takes turns, etc. (*The above shows multiple ways groups can delegate specific roles and functions to persons. Groups can choose multiple paths forward, use a combination of multiple methods, or choose specific ways of going about the above process for specific delegate positions).
Such roles exist for a maximum term of 6 months (*Or some other amount of time that makes sense for the specific roles and contexts… Roles can be staggered to help pass on knowledge needed for various functions to the next delegate).

Some potential Delegated roles are as follows:

Secretary: takes notes at meetings. (*Can alternatively be rotated each meeting)
Backup facilitator: ready to facilitate if no one else wants to. Helps to teach people who want to facilitate how to do so if needed.
Digital Communications: reads and responds to specific kinds of emails in specific ways (*Within the bounds of mandates and relevant protocols).
Treasurer: Accounts for money. All decisions about spending are made through participatory budgeting.
Co-Federal Delegate: Meets up to deliberate with co-federal delegates from other assemblies and report back to the general assembly where actual policy making power resides.
(*There could be several roles created that are related to assembly functioning that can rotated on a monthly basis between people able and willing so as to 1. help share responsibility for reproducing the organization and to 2. share knowledge and skills)

Co-federal Decision making:

Spokes Councils of different assemblies can meet up regularly and as needed.
Spokes councils are co-ordinative and communicative.
Delegates of assemblies are to bring communication to and from assemblies and delegate councils.
All policy making power remains in direct assemblies.
Decisions that are co-federal in nature are to be made by a majority vote of persons within co-federal agreements bounded by the points of unity/bylaws, or alternatively simple majority of persons and assemblies bounded by points of unity/bylaws.
Decisions are made at the lowest possible level.
(*This part is intentionally left extra skeletal and will need to be figured out between multiple groups)

Conflict Resolution:

Arbitration/mediation/restorative justice/transformative justice

One on One direct communication.
Communication and mediation assisted by a person or people all parties agree to.
Mediation circles facilitated by trained mediators to find mutual resolution. (If the assembly has relationships with trained mediators willing to support outside of the assembly that can help out. In an intercommunal federation, different assemblies can offer one another support for these functions)

4. In the most extreme of cases, involving sufficient (*To be carefully specified) levels of harm and violation of freedoms of others: the assembly can deliberate and vote to disassociate from a person if and when they are found by sufficient evidence to have caused sufficient unjust violence and/or violations of freedoms of others (until if and when such a person has been found by the assembly to have changed their behaviors).

(*It is important to make this section more clear with specified standards.)

(*Other conflict resolution that can make sense as part of how a liberatory society functions more broadly includes: breaking up fights, self defense, defense of others, freely associating and dissociating, diffused social disapproval. And most importantly solving root causes of social problems.)

Bill of Rights:

(*These are aspirational and make more sense as features for a good society where libertarian socialism can functionally exist and be constitutionalized. For example: a budding community assembly can not guarantee access to the means of production and existence until those have been sufficiently seized on a sufficiently intercommunal level. This section is intentionally left particularly incomplete but can serve as a starting off point for both aspirational rights. And some of these rights can function within a horizontal assembly that exists within the context of a hierarchical society. ):

Rights of each and all have the rights to self management on every scale– including horizontal Politics and economics and the means thereof.
Rights of each and all to the means of production and the means of existence.
Rights of each and all to freedom/of/from/within associations.
Freedom from hierarchy and domination.
Rights of communal assemblies to self-management.

74. Strike Strategy

Deleted reason: DELETED writer is not anarchist

Subtitle: A practical manual for labor on the conduct of strikes

Author: John Steuben

Topics: labor, strike, union, labor organizing, wildcat strike, organizing

Date: 1950

Date Published on T@L: 2022-11-25T00:00:00

Source: Retrieved on 3/13/2022 from <archive.org/details/strikestrategy00steurich>

Foreword

The strike is an integral part of American life. In the struggle for a decent, secure life it is labor’s necessary weapon.

In the early history of the American labor movement most strikes were spontaneous. But for a long time now all have been actions conceived, planned, and carried out by labor unions. Notwithstanding this fact, labor has not sufficiently generalized its experience and has failed to formulate on the basis of its rich and varied strike history a set of fundamental principles of strike strategy. It is time to do so. Realistic strike strategy is the surest path to strike victory.

No two strikes, to be sure, are exactly alike. But neither are any two military battles, and yet military strategy has long been a recognized science. There are enough common elements in all strikes to make possible the establishment of a sound strike strategy. Once this has been done, it will be simple to determine the correct strategy and tactics for the preparation and conduct of each strike, taking into consideration the nature of the industry, the character of the union’s objectives, the type of employer, the state of organization of the workers, the surrounding political atmosphere, and the physical set-up of the plant or industry.

It is with a view to removing strikes from the realm of guess- work that this book was undertaken. It is by no means an exhaustive study; much more needs to be thought through and developed before we can call strike strategy a science these pages are only the first efforts in breaking new ground.

The book is divided into four major sections, the first of which is devoted to a brief history of strikes from 1776 to the present; an examination of the relationship of strikes to politics, local and national; and an effort to apply lessons drawn from military strategy to counteract the methods of actual warfare which have been used by employers.

Part Two is designed as a manual for labor on the actual conduct of strikes. The third section contains an analysis of strikebreaking techniques used by industry, and Part Four studies the qualifications necessary for effective strike leadership.

A good deal of space in the book has been devoted to the matter of violence in time of strike. Labor, of course, needs no pointing out that such violence does not originate with the workers. Workers are fully aware that it is the employers and their agents within the ranks of organized labor who are responsible for force and violence. But the accusation of violence has been too consistently raised against labor organizers, labor unions, and the entire labor movement to pass over lightly in a book about strikes. Perhaps while arming leaders with detailed facts and giving them a solid basis for countering employer tactics, these chapters will in some measure expose the real perpetrators of violence. It is high time to tear off the mask of those who in the name of “law and order” commit every violence and throw the guilt of it on labor.

I want to thank the many friends and co-workers in the labor movement who helped me with criticism, suggestions, and material. I am particularly grateful to Lee Candea, who spent much time in doing research for this volume. It is to her that I am indebted for material on the more recent strikes.

John Steuben

Grand View, New York

February 2, 1950

Part One

Chapter 1: The Right to Strike

We Are Strike Conscious

Ever since the factory system became the basis of our mode of production, strikes have been its inseparable accompaniment. Each generation of wage earners, it seems, has been forced at one time or another to resort to the strike weapon. Notwithstanding the continuous efforts of our newspapers and other sections of the press to convince the worker that strikes are detrimental to him, to his family, and to his fellow workers, the number of strikes and the number of people involved in them have increased in direct proportion to the growth of industry. At times millions of workers are directly involved in these battles between capital and labor. At times the battles spread over many States and indirectly involve millions more.

Just what is a strike?

A strike is an organized cessation from work. It is the collective halting of production or services in a plant, industry, or area for the purpose of obtaining concessions from employers. A strike is labor’s weapon to enforce labor’s demands.

In the United States all efforts to outlaw strikes, to discredit them morally, to destroy them physically, or to find formulas to stifle them at birth have failed and we dare say always will fail. To be sure, strikes have at times been done away with elsewhere. Hitler outlawed them in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. But history shows that where there is any vestige of democracy workers fight desperately and, if need be, die to maintain the inalienable right of free men to organize and strike.

It is quite understandable that people should fight for the good things of life. But why do workers fight so hard for the right to strike when the exercise of that right entails such hardships? No one suffers more from a strike than the striker and his family. An employer may lose some profits, the public may be inconvenienced, but the striker loses his entire livelihood for the duration of the battle. All income stops, economic paralysis grips the family. More often than not there are hardly any savings to fall back on. Nor can those engaged in a strike always know how it will culminate a strike is like an illness, its end is unpredictable. Want, emotional stress and strain, physical danger, uncertainty all these come with the strike. Yet threaten to outlaw it and the worker and his union will fight desperately to maintain the right to strike.

A multitude of factors arising out of the economic system under which we live make it imperative for the worker and his union to guard the right to strike with all the strength at their command. To abandon the strike ist o abandon the concept of wage labor; for the essence of wage labor as opposed to slave labor, is refusal to work when conditions of work become unbearable. Abraham Lincoln expressed this better than anyone else when he said:

I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances.... I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to and wish it might prevail everywhere. One of the reasons why I am opposed to slavery is just here. (D. J. Saposs, Readings in Trade Unionism.)

There is no disagreement within the ranks of labor about Lincoln’s point of view. From the right to the left wing of labor there has always been unanimity as regards the necessity of preserving labor’s right to strike. Leaders of the past and leaders of the present stress this point, and on more than one occasion William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, has declared:

The fundamental difference between a free man and a serf is that the free man has the right to withhold his labor and to join with his fellows to improve the conditions under which he works. (William Green, Labor and Democracy.)

In a certain sense the history of American trade unionism has been the history of a continuous fight to maintain the right to strike. For nowhere in the world are workers more strike conscious than in the United States. This is all the more curious because the majority of workers here do not, as in Europe, think in terms of society being divided into distinct classes whose interests are diametrically opposed. In America the instinctive manifestations of consciousness of class express themselves in the economic rather than the political field. American workers talk conservatively, think conservatively. For the most part in political matters they even act conservatively; we have no independent political party of labor, nor a mass Socialist or Communist movement as on the European continent and in other parts of the world. But in the use of the strike weapon American wage earners are the least conservative. Nowhere else have workers so readily and so frequently laid down their tools.

Safeguarding the Right to Strike

The struggle to maintain the right to strike has been carried on with the courts, with conservative Presidents, with Congress, with powerful employer combinations, and at times even with our armed forces. It is being waged with no less fervor today. A numerically weak and inarticulate trade union movement was successful in the past. It defeated the old conspiracy laws, government by injunction and organized strikebreaking. There is every reason to believe that the trade union movement of today, 15 million strong, with the industrial form of organization and with a more advanced leadership can and will defeat all efforts to rob the worker of the freedom guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

At the present stage of the struggle the chief danger is not that the right to strike may be completely taken away. Rather is it that this right may be so emasculated through federal and State legislation that it would become merely theoretical. Labor has to be ever on the alert to prevent an infringement of the right to strike; for the attack is nowadays more devious than of old. Those who are bent on wresting from labor its basic right have put on the cloak of duplicity. They profess to be labor’s friends, they loudly speak of labor’s “inalienable rights,” but they sponsor and vote for bills which in practice destroy such rights. They would lull workers into a false security by paying lip service to the right to strike. In all the anti- strike legislation put forward in recent years the measures proposed have begun with the general statement: “Labor’s right to strike is recognized.” But then have followed provisions devised to rob the strike weapon of all its force.

There are periods when the right to strike is in special danger and those are the times calling for greatest watchfulness. A national emergency such as a war opens the door to an attack; it is so easy under the pretext of emergency to railroad through legislation that will permanently take away the right to strike. During both world wars employers exerted their utmost efforts to outlaw strikes for the duration of hostilities. Their efforts failed, particularly during the last war, because of labor’s vigilance. The AFL and CIO were firm in their insistence that the right to strike must not be jeopardized even in times of national emergency. Typical of labor’s stand on this basic issue was the declaration of the CIO convention in 1940:

Labor must ever be vigilant to guard against any action which, under the pretense of furthering national defense, will seek to deprive the workers of their fair share of those increased earnings, or to deny them their fundamental right to organize into unions of their own choice, or to strike. The protection of these rights is necessary to assure the workers that they will not be relegated to a position of economic slavery.

Labor’s record during World War II, when under the inspiring leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt we became the world’s arsenal of democracy, showed the cry of “national emergency” to be merely a pretext for reactionaries bent on permanently outlawing strikes. Labor, realizing the anti-fascist character of the war, pigeonholed its grievances and voluntarily refrained from resorting to the strike weapon.

The “Cooling Off” Tactic

Another period when labor’s right to strike is in danger is when Congress and State legislatures are dominated by extreme reactionary forces. The Taft-Hartley Law was enacted in such a period. The passing of this act shows how much ground the big business interests and their lobbies have gained since the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and fully bears out the contention that the greatest danger is not that strikes will be illegalized outright, but, rather, that they will be so crippled through a host of provisions as to reduce their effectiveness to a minimum. The Taft-Hartley Act, for example, requires that a union having a collective bargaining agreement shall give a 60-day notice of a strike to the employer. This provision alone takes away a number of advantages. First, the element of surprise, so important in strike strategy, is practically wiped out. Second, it gives the employer two valuable months in which to prepare against the impending strike. Third, in seasonal industries food canning, garment making, building trades, etc., etc. a two months’ delay might prove disastrous; for to be confronted with a strike after the height of the season would play havoc with the union and the workers on strike. Another provision of the Act has the force of extending the two months’ delay to nearly five; the Government is granted the right, after a strike is declared in many industries, to issue an injunction that will be in effect 80 days during which time the workers may not strike. Labor’s enemies have lately been referring to this kind of legal stalling as a “cooling-off period. The very term denotes bias against labor. It implies that labor is so hot-headed that there is need of a federal law to cool workers off. It creates an impression in the minds of the public that the trade unions are always ready to strike at the drop of a hat.

The “cooling-off” provisions are in the Act not for the purpose of making labor think twice and encouraging it to find a solution without resorting to a strike. The real meaning of a compulsory “cooling-off” period is that a status quo condition is established for the union while the employers gather every conceivable weapon for use against the proposed strike. To expect that during the so-called “cooling-off” period the grievances of the workers will disappear is naive, is infantile. CIO President Philip Murray hit the nail on the head when he declared: “The imposition of ‘cooling-off restraints would be a negation of collective bargaining rather than its encouragement.”

A period of reaction is a time when labor has to be especially vigilant. The Taft-Hartley Act is but one of the insidious attacks on the right to strike put over in such a time. There are others. In recent years, in a number of States, laws have been adopted that tend through similar provisions seriously to weaken labor’s right to strike.

The “National Emergency” Device

As we noted above, the cry of “national emergency” is raised in wartime to cloak attacks on the right to strike. Of late the term has been used in another connection. Particularly since enactment of the Taft-Hartley Law, employers, with the help of Congress, have used the phrase as a peacetime pretext to restrain and nullify labor’s right to strike. When certain key industries are confronted with a strike, it is declared that if these workers strike a “national emergency” will be created.

This has brought about a curious situation in America. Those working in our basic industries, upon which our entire economy depends, are reduced to a state approximating second-class citizenship. Buttonhole makers and candlestick workers may exercise the right to strike because their cessation from work could not be said to create a “national emergency.” But railroad and steel workers, coal miners and longshoremen are denied the use of the strike weapon. (This partly explains why miners, steel workers, electrical workers and longshoremen have put up the greatest resistance to the Taft-Hartley Law.)

Add to the aforesaid encroachments on labor’s basic right the vicious interpretations and decisions of the National Labor Relations Board in applying the Taft-Hartley Act, and the picture becomes clear. The interpretations and decisions of the Board constitute another attack on the right to strike. What an insult it was to workers and their unions when the Board decided that not only can scabs remain in the factory, but that they have the right to vote in elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board!

Strikes as Expression of Discontent

What are the underlying causes that force workers to strike? Economists, newspapermen and radio commentators have spoken and written millions of words against strikes. They have attempted to prove that a prolonged strike eats up the very wage demands for which the workers are striking, and that it takes months to catch up financially. They have argued that most strikes end in compromise then why not compromise in the first place? There are those who claim that there would be hardly any strikes at all were it not for a small group of selfish and power-hungry labor leaders. Increasingly we hear the argument that the “reds are responsible for strikes.” Some newspapers even absolve the leaders of the unions involved and put the blame for strikes and walkouts entirely on “Communists.” Others, again, concentrate on being great defenders of the “public,” which they portray as an innocent victim of the strike. In recent years, the cry of the “right to work” has been advanced as an argument against strikes.

These and other arguments are by now well known to the average American worker. Yet strikes, and the number of workers involved in them, do not diminish. On the contrary, as time goes on, the strike weapon is resorted to by ever new sections of wage earners such as telephone workers, bank clerks, foremen, newspapermen, teachers, engineers, insurance agents and similar groups. Indeed, during the past decade there was hardly a wage earner’s family that did not have some member on the picket line.

Obviously, the arguments popularized in our press and on the radio are not convincing, and obviously, standard surface causes for this or that strike, or group of strikes do not tell the whole story of why workers strike. The strike is a social phenomenon of great significance in our economic life and cannot be explained so lightly. What the anti-strike economists and writers fail to understand is that a strike is a social act and, as such, goes beyond the boundaries of the immediate and specific economic demands brought forward by the workers involved. In a certain sense a strike is an elementary, unconscious expression of revolt against conditions which the worker is no longer able to tolerate.

These broader aspects of strikes have been recognized by many government experts on labor, and by the more serious-minded economists and historians. Miss Florence Peterson, for many years a leading authority of the United States Department of Labor, in her preface to a study on strikes, says very significantly:

The strike is a cultural development, a conventionalized expression of discontent. It involves mass action and presupposes a belief in the efficacy of mass action.... A strike is an evidence of discontent and an expression of protest. While some strikes arise over minor internal shop matters, most of them have a broader application and are directed towards a change in basic working conditions or employer-employee relationships. The number of strikes, and their magnitude, is, therefore, one instance of the degree of industrial unrest existing at any particular time, or in any particular situation. (“Strikes in the United States, 1880–1936,” 17. S. Dept. of Labor Bulletin, No. 651.)

The strike is not something that workers can be talked out of. Compelling economic, political, social and psychological factors combine to make it the worker’s natural expression of revolt against things as they are.

Striking for Dollars and Cents

Yet the immediate grievances that bring about a strike should not be minimized when seeking the explanation of why workers strike. Strikes always have some immediate objective, are always specific, are always for something or against something immediately important to workers. In the early history of American labor the ten-hour day was the important issue. In periods when the cost of living goes up, workers strike for wage increases. During past depressions, they struck against wage cuts. In recent years, many strikes have developed around one central issue union recognition. To stress the broader social aspects of the strike is not to lessen the significance of the immediate causes. It is merely to bring out the fact that the strike phenomenon cannot be reduced to dollars and cents.

But even from the viewpoint of dollars and cents the strike is not a losing proposition. A study of wage movements for a period of years will show that general wage increases, in peacetime, came about as a result of a strike wave, or a threatened strike wave. The latest examples are the post-war strikes that established a pattern of wage increases to meet the rise in the cost of living. We may also cite numerous examples of wage increases to non-union employees – white collar and administrative workers – after the union employees struck and obtained such increases. In certain unorganized industries employers have granted partial wage increases in an effort to stem the tide of organization, but in the final analysis even such types of wage increases have resulted from the fear of the strike weapon. There is unquestionably a connection between the relatively high standard of living of American workers and their high degree of strike consciousness.

Moreover, another factor should be taken into consideration when balancing up the credits and debits in the “dollars and cents’* argument. American workers are aware that in times of peace there is a wide discrepancy between the ability of industry to produce and the ability of the public to buy. They know that under our system of private enterprise and production for profit relatively few workers have full employment the year round. Therefore, very often a strike does not at all reduce the annual income of the workers involved. The manufacturer’s orders remain, and are produced after the strike is over at higher hourly or weekly rates. When the annual income is figured, the striker frequently finds himself ahead even with time out for the strike.

Do Strikes Cause Higher Prices?

In recent years the anti-strike propagandists have concentrated on the argument that each strike wave means a dollars and cents loss to the workers because strikes are followed by a rise in prices. They elaborate on this by stating something like this: “Why are you workers so foolish? You go out on strike; you gain a wage increase; your pay envelope is slightly higher, but when you go to the grocery and furniture stores, or when you buy an automobile or refrigerator, you pay a lot more”

On the surface it sounds like a substantial argument. But when analyzed, it falls apart. Strikes or no strikes, prices have been steadily rising for the past four decades. Numerous instances could be cited from the past and present showing that prices have gone up without any relation to wage movements. Examples could also be cited of prices remaining the same after wages were cut. There is nothing automatic about price increases. They do not take place because wage increases mean a drop in profits for the employers. A comparison of the rate of profits of large corporations before granting wage increases and after does not indicate that employer profits dropped when the workers got more pay. On the contrary, some corporations showed even higher profits.

Actually, the explanation of the price rises in recent years at least in part is that employers in certain basic industries took advantage of the upward adjustments in wages and increased prices. This is true of such basic industries as coal, steel, automobiles and electrical manufacturing. Employers in these and other industries raised prices not because they had to or go bankrupt; they did it in order to maintain their very high rate of profit and even increase it. Labor has been too slow in exposing the ‘higher prices” argument. That argument is just sand thrown in the eyes of the workers and the general public.

Why Not Compromise?

How about the anti-strike argument: all strikes end in compromise, so why not compromise before striking?

To begin with, the strike has always been the weapon of last resort. Responsible union leaders and union members do not jump into a strike without very serious consideration of all that is involved. A union and its leaders spend many a day and many a night pondering whether all avenues of solution have been exhausted before deciding on strike action. Direct conferences with employer representatives, pressures short of a strike, utilization of mediation machinery of both the State and federal government, public appeals, and other steps are all tried before resorting to a strike. It is precisely because no reasonable compromise can be reached that unions are forced to take strike action. The argument “why not compromise in the first place” should be directed not against unions and union leaders but against employers. Quite often an employer agrees to a compromise after the strike is declared when, by showing good faith across the conference table, he could have obtained that same compromise without a strike.

Union leaders are not inflexible. As a rule the workers and their union demand from the employers only what they think is reasonable. But they know they cannot always win all of their demands. They measure the success of a strike by the degree of justice obtained. For example, a union may consider a twenty cent hourly increase as reasonable. It may finally accept fifteen cents and be gratified that the workers have received a substantial part of what was sought for them. There is but one thing a union cannot compromise on across the conference table – and that is labor’s very minimum demands.

Most wage and hour negotiations do, as a matter of fact, end up in compromise and agreement rather than in a strike. Let us take the first post-war year, 1946. It was a year of great labor disputes arising out of the rapid increase in the cost of living and the change from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Practically all the unions were involved in wage negotiations. During that year, 4,650,000 workers manned picket lines. But during the same year, the AFL had a membership of over seven million, the CIO a membership of six million, and the four independent railroad unions had a membership of 454,000. Altogether over thirteen and one-half million workers belonged to unions. Yet less than one-third of the membership resorted to strikes. The other two-thirds compromised without strikes. It is only fair to conclude that when management bargains in good faith, labor unions are willing to compromise before striking.

As for the argument that it is selfish and “strike happy” labor leaders, and not rank and file workers, who are responsible for strikes, that notion has been fairly well destroyed by the War Labor Disputes Act, which required workers to decide by secret ballot whether or not to strike. Even a perfunctory examination of the results of such balloting will show that the workers do their own thinking; in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases the rank and file voted with overwhelming majorities for strike action when, in their opinion, it was the only avenue through which they could obtain what they considered their just demands. A strike was, is, and will remain labor’s weapon of last resort.

Is the Public the Victim?

Let us now examine the argument that the public is the “innocent victim” of strikes.

In the first place, who is the “public”? The wage earners and their families are the largest single group of consumers and are, therefore, surely a very important section of the “public.” And their welfare and prosperity are certainly important not only to themselves but also to other large sections of the “public” to grocers and clothing and furniture dealers, to doctors and dentists and lawyers, to automobile dealers and restaurant keepers and owners of movie houses. Workers with a greater buying power create conditions for greater prosperity. Workers existing on substandard levels create conditions for depressions and economic crises.

Take a look at our industrial centers. Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Gary, Homestead and McKeesport are great steel centers. The prosperity of those communities depends upon the economic status of the steel worker. The same is true of Detroit, Flint, Dearborn. Did we not, during the last great depression, term some of those industrial centers “ghost towns”? Surely, it is in the interest of the “public” that the workers in those and a hundred other industrial centers shall constantly improve their economic status. Is the “public,” then, the strike “victim”?

The real public the workers, the farmers, the professionals, the storekeepers and the salesmen have long realized that strikes, in that they are a means of improving the wage earner’s standard of living, are in the interest of the public. The real public, conscious that underlying, intolerable conditions are responsible for the strike, displays a deep-rooted sympathy toward men on strike and takes in stride whatever inconveniences strikes create. In recent years, no amount of full-page advertisements, anti-strike editorials and radio lambasting succeeded in seriously affecting the true, warm, sympathetic feeling of the public toward those on strike. The public may be temporarily aroused against an individual labor leader – the object of a concerted and well-organized press and radio campaign – but not against those marching on the picket line, nor against the things for which they are fighting.

There was a time when “scabbing” was quite a profession, and a well paid one. Scabbery of the old-fashioned kind hardly exists today. The stigma of “scab” is sufficient these days for social ostracism. This, in itself, attests the real public opinion regarding strikes.

Now for the last anti-strike argument: namely, the “right to work.”

Raising the “right to work” argument in time of strike presupposes that those on strike have been forced to strike. But this, as pointed out above, is clearly an impossibility. No labor leader, regardless of how strong a personality he is, could force thousands of workers to leave their jobs. Scarcely a strike has taken place in recent years without the workers involved voting such action. In fact, numerous examples of strikes exist where workers laid down their tools when such action was contrary to the will and advice of their leaders.

In reality, it is not the unions but the employers who block the “right to work.” A clear example is the struggle of the miners during late 1949–1950 for improved conditions and a new contract, which was blocked by the coal operators, thus forcing the miners on a 3-day work week. The miners and the union were certainly anxious to work a 5-day week. After six months of vain efforts to come to an agreement, the miners balked at continuing the limited work schedule and declared: “We want 5 days or nothing, ... The miners are pretty damn sore about the delay...We want to get the contract business settled once and for all.” (N.Y. Times, January 15, 1950.) It is obvious in this situation who interfered with the “right to work.”

Not labor leaders but employers have exerted force against working freedom. They have used every means in their power to stop workers from exercising their own free will to work or not as they saw fit. Intimidation and bribery are standard methods to prevent, or weaken, a strike.

The public relations men in the employers’ pay know very well that union leaders do not and cannot force workers to strike. The “right to work” cry is raised not to defend the workers’ freedom but for quite another reason. It is a slogan meant to confuse the public and the striking workers. There is a carefully disguised meaning in the phrase. It is that a small group of scabs have the right to cross a picket line. Usually the slogan is broadcast when the employer plans a back-to-work movement. But of this more will be said later. Suffice it to say here that it is only in time of strike that employers and their henchmen start talking about the “right to work/’ When mines, mills, and factories close down, either completely or in part, employers are very silent about the “right to work.” Yet it is in this meaning of the phrase that the interest of the worker lies. It is this meaning of the “right to work” that he would like to see written into the Constitution.

Chapter 2: The Great Tradition

Strike strategy and tactics cannot be understood and mastered without some knowledge of strike history. To deal with all the strikes in the American labor movement would, obviously, be impossible here; the strike is a deep-rooted American tradition and strike struggles have been many and gigantic. We must limit ourselves to a general survey of the nature and character of those strikes which were typical for the various periods, dwelling particularly on those that introduced something new. As we examine the various types of demands, how the strikes were conducted, and what the attitudes of employer and government toward them were, gradually a strike pattern will emerge.

Among the early strikes in America was that of the printers in New York City. While the city was occupied by British troops in 1776 the printers demanded a wage increase from their employers, and were refused. They thereupon ordered a “turn-out” and forced the employers to grant their demands.

Twenty years later, 26 Philadelphia printers conducted a successful “turn-out.” This time the strike was not for but against something – a wage reduction. The strike call indicates that benefits were paid the strikers: “We will support,” the call reads, “such of our brothers as shall be thrown out of employment on account of their refusing to work for less than $6.00 per week.” (Florence Peterson, “Strikes in the United States, 1880–1936,” Dept. of Labor Bulletin, No. 651.)

In 1791, the Philadelphia carpenters struck a blow in the long fight to reduce the hours of labor, a fight not yet ended they conducted the first strike for a 10-hour day.

Between 1796 and 1799, the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers, that is), conducted three strikes in Philadelphia. The first two were led by strike committees, called “tramping committees.” The third introduced the paid trade union official – “walking delegate” so called. While the first two strikes resulted in wage increases, the third was only partly successful. It lasted ten weeks and was not without violence.

In 1800, a sailors’ strike occurred in New York. They demanded a wage increase from $10 to $14 a month. Their leaders were arrested and sent to prison, and the strike was lost.

In 1805, the Philadelphia Society of Cordwainers called yet another strike. It resulted in the first attempt of employers, in this country, to invoke the aid of the courts to prohibit strikes and organization of workers. The leaders of the strike were prosecuted under the British common law doctrine for criminal conspiracy. The Court declared: “A combination of workmen to raise their wages may be considered in a twofold point of view: one is benefit to themselves ... the other is to injure those who do not join the society. The rule of the law condemns both.” (John R. Commons & Associates, Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. III.) The jury found the shoe workers “guilty of a combination to raise their wages.”

Nothing daunted, the strike-conscious shoemakers in 1809 called another strike, this time in Baltimore. It was the first general industry-wide strike. According to an indictment of 39 strikers, they were charged with “compelling an employer to discharge certain employees and preventing them from obtaining employment elsewhere.” This seems to indicate that the shoe workers were seeking closed shop conditions.

In 1824, the first known strike in which women participated took place in Pawtucket, R.I., when “female weavers” struck with men against a wage reduction.

A year later, a strike of women alone occurred among the tailoresses of New York. During the same year, the first great strike for the 10-hour day was called in Boston by six hundred carpenters.

In 1829, the first known strike of factory operatives occurred. It was called by the textile workers in Paterson, N.J. This is the first known instance of the calling out of the militia to quell the strikers.

Such were the beginnings of the great strike tradition. It was in these early struggles that a pattern was carved out. As the years went on, this pattern was elaborated and enriched. Reviewing the struggles, Florence Peterson makes these interesting and revealing observations:

The period from 1776 to 1830 not only witnessed a considerable number of industrial disputes in comparison with the relatively few persons working for wages at that time, but the causes of these strikes and the tactics pursued by the strikers and the employers bear close similarity to those existing today. These years saw the introduction by the workers of the walking delegate, strike benefits, the use of the general strike when an individual strike proved in- effective, picketing, social ostracism and sometimes physical violence towards “scabs,” and the use of militia and the courts by the employers and public authorities. (“Strikes in the United States, 1880–1936,” Dept. of Labor Bulletin, No. 651.)

There was, however, one marked difference between these strikes and those that occurred later. The early strikes were mostly spontaneous walkouts of unorganized workers, or of workers who organized expressly for strike action and disbanded after the strike.

In the 1830’s most of the strikes developed around the workers’ demands for a 10-hour day and against the rising cost of living. These strikes assumed a more militant character and spread alarm among the employers. “The times” said the Philadelphia Gazette of June 8, 1835, “are completely out of joint ... our streets and squares are crowded with an idle population. Some manifestations of violence have already taken place; -our buildings are at a stand, and business generally is considerably impeded.” During this period there seems to have been a greater degree of solidarity among the workers. When in 1836 the carpenters, masons, and stonecutters of Boston joined in a strike for the 10-hour day, the trade unions sent money and adopted resolutions pledging to stand by “Boston House Wrights who, in imitation of the noble and decided stand taken by their Revolutionary Fathers, have determined to throw off the shackles of more mercenary tyrants than theirs.” (John R. Commons, History of Labor in the United States, Vol. I.)

In the 1840’s. The long depression that lasted until the gold discoveries of 1849 retarded the trade union movement and reduced the number of strikes. Those that occurred were anti-wage-cut protests and most of them ended in failure. The strikes were outstanding for their violence and long duration. One that deserves special mention is the Boilers strike of 1842 which arose out of a wage cut in the Pittsburgh rolling mills. The strike was lost, but three years later a second strike brought the workers a wage increase. The State of Pennsylvania was one of the main strike centers. Among the few victorious strikes was that of the twelve hundred journeymen tailors of Pennsylvania who in 1847 won wage increases after a four months’ strike. In 1848, Pennsylvania passed a 10-hour law for textile and paper mills and bagging factories. Many strikes had to take place before this law was put in operation.

In the 1850’s. The strike movement went up again in the fifties. The outstanding demands during this period were for wage increases, the closed shop, shorter hours, abolition of night work, greater frequency and regularity of wage payments, substitution of cash for store scrip and restriction of apprentices. Unlike those of the forties, the strikes ended essentially in victory for the workers. During this period there also developed a “restrike” movement. It was especially popular in the building industry where, owing to the absence of written contracts that fixed wage scales, the workers would strike in the spring of the year for wage increases and in the fall to prevent decreases. Among the interesting strikes in the fifties, from the viewpoint of new demands, was the strike of 1,700 shoe workers in Philadelphia in 1859 for uniform rates in all shops. During the same year, the coal miners in the Monongahela Valley in Pennsylvania struck for scales at each pit for weighing the miners’ coal.

In the 1860’s. From the viewpoint of demands and results, the strikes during the sixties did not have the same uniformity as those in previous decades. The Civil War years developed conditions that varied from State to State and this reflected itself both in the demands and in the outcome of the strikes. A new element now entered into the strike scene – the first national employers’ association. The Iron Moulders International, the strongest union of the time, in 1867 called a strike in Cincinnati against a 60 per cent wage cut announced by the National Stove Manufacturers and the Iron Founders Association. The strike against this association of manufacturers lasted nine months and ended in defeat for the workers. Discouraged, the union turned its attention to co-operatives. During the same period, the iron manufacturers of Pittsburgh locked out the puddlers in reply to a demand for wage increases. The struggle was finally settled by arbitration. This was the first recorded wage arbitration case in the United States. It was also during the sixties that striking New England shoe workers for the first time were threatened with competition of low- wage Orientals; Chinese from California were imported into Massachusetts as strike breakers.

In the 1870’s. In the decade of the seventies the trade unions made remarkable progress in building national unions as well as initiating the 8-hour movement. In 1872, 100,000 workers in New York struck and won the 8-hour day, mainly in the building trades. This decade also saw the birth of the “yellow dog contract.” It came about as a result of an unsuccessful textile strike in Fall River, Massachusetts. When the strikers returned to work, they were forced, as the “price of re-employment,” to sign agreements to join no labor union. Another innovation came in 1877, the year of “the great railroad strike.” In connection with this strike, the Federal troops were called out against the workers for the first time. As an answer to the growing powers of industry, in the late seventies the Knights of Labor emerged into the open from a secret society and changed over into a national trade union center calling for the organization of all toilers “to check the power of wealth.”

In the 1880’s. The decade of the eighties is one of the richest in labor history. It witnessed the birth of the AFL; the great mass movement for the 8-hour day; the Haymarket riots followed by a wave of reaction; strikes and lockouts in the railroad and packing industries; the first Congressional investigation of “labor disputes.” Of all these, the most important development was, undoubtedly, the 8-hour day strike movement. It had now become a nation-wide struggle.

In the 1890’s. The outstanding feature of strikes in the nineties was their appearance on a mass scale in the newly trustified basic industries. The great Homestead strike, the Pullman and miners’ strikes attracted much attention. It was during the Pullman strike in 1894, led by Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union, that one of the most sweeping anti-strike injunctions was introduced. When the Homestead strike was lost, it was felt to be a serious setback to the trade union movement. A significant angle of the strikes in this period was the growing demand of workers for union recognition – 490 strikes for it as compared with 194 in the eighties.

In the 1900’s. The struggle for the 8-hour day and union recognition remained the principal demands of the workers in the nineties. It was also during this decade that the strike movement spread toward the Western states. The Western Federation of Miners and, later, the Industrial Workers of the World were in the leadership of many Western strikes, and up to this very day the deep imprint of their militancy upon the Western labor movement remains.

Pre-War Striked – 1910–1916. The period between 1910 and our entry into the First World War was a time of growth for organized labor. The basic demands of the workers remained the same – the 8-hour day and union recognition. However, in 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, the workers were confronted with a new problem: the tremendous rise in the cost of living. This brought forward an additional central demand – substantial wage increases. In 1915 and 1916, 4,924 strikes took place. Of these, 1,386 were for wage increases. The two most important strikes during this period were the Lawrence textile strike, in 1912, and the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike in 1913–14 better known as the “Ludlow Massacre.” The significance of the Lawrence strike is that it was one of the first mass strikes led by the IWW in the East and that the strike was victorious. It was one of the early tests in militant strike strategy, and proved superior. The Colorado Fuel and Iron strike was not just an ordinary strike for higher wages. It lasted fifteen months and still remains one of the longest strikes in American history. Over fifty people – miners, wives and children – were murdered in this strike.

Wartime Strikes – 1917–1918. During our two years in the First World War the strike movement reached large proportions. Over two million workers participated in the strike struggles, despite the stubborn opposition of AFL leaders to any wartime strike movement. The chief causes were the ever rising costs of living and the determination of the workers to obtain recognition of their unions. Out- standing strikes of this period were the packinghouse strike, the lumber workers’ strike in the Northwest, the machinists’ strike in Bridgeport, Conn., the Seattle general strike, the coal miners’ strike, and the strike of the Boston policemen.

Post-War Open Shop Offensive – 1919–1923. After the war the strikes assumed a general defensive character with the unions fighting desperately against wage cuts and for their very existence. In the basic industries the unions were nearly wiped out, and many craft unions became mere skeletons of their former selves. Never before did the government assume such an open strikebreaking role as during the open-shop offensive; the government’s main weapon was a wholesale application of injunctions. During this period the most important strike was the great 1919 steel strike, led by William Z. Foster and receiving a varied degree of support from 24 AFL International Unions.

The Coolidge Period – 1923–1928. Despite the oft-repeated theory that “strikes develop in time of prosperity,” during the Coolidge administration there were very few. Every year there was a decline until in 1928 there were fewer strikes than at any time since 1884. One great strike there was-the textile strike in Passaic, N.J., led by the militants of the Trade Union Educational League. The strike attracted national attention and received the support of the broad labor movement.

The Economic Crisis – 1929–1932. When the depression came, labor unions were too weak and demoralized to fight back the new wage-cutting offensive of the employers. In 1930, for example, when the wage slashing campaign was at its height, only 182,975 workers were on strike. This, too, can be compared with the year 1884. A relatively large number of strikes against wage cuts were called by independent unions during the years 1929–1933. The National Textile Workers, the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union and the National Miners Union, affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League, are some of the unions that led such strikes.

The NRA Period – 1933–1935. With the establishment of the National Recovery Act a strike wave once again spread from industry to industry, coast to coast, electrifying the whole nation. Causes? The failure of employers to wipe out the wage cuts while reaping new millions of profits; the growing determination of workers to organize into their own unions, buttressed as this now was by Section 7-A of the National Recovery Act, which gave workers legal sanction to join a union of “their own choosing.” The strikes were so numerous that only the most outstanding can be noted. In 1933, 30,000 miners from the “captive” and hitherto unorganized mines struck and won. The strike of 60,000 garment workers, of whom the majority were as yet unorganized, resulted in victory. Among other important strikes during this year were those of 12,000 shoe workers in Lynn, Mass., 5,000 workers of the Weirton Steel Co.; and 9,000 tool and die makers in the automobile plants of the Detroit area. A new upsurge had begun among the unskilled and unorganized workers. In one year the total of workers involved in strikes jumped from 324,210 to 1,168,272. The strike wave reached its peak in 1934 and continued on into 1935, the workers actually threatening nation-wide strikes in all the major industries – automobile, textile and steel. The general strike in San Francisco; the general strike in Terre Haute, Ind.; the national textile workers strike; the magnificent strike of Auto-Lite workers in Toledo, Ohio; the significant 1-day strike of 20,000 New York City truck drivers – to warn a judge against enjoining their union (the first strike of its kind); the strike of the Camden, N.J., shipyard workers; the strike of the 12,000 New York painters; and the strike of 15,000 aluminum workers in New Kensington, Pa. – all these were part of the great strike parade. Altogether, during these two years, 2,583,908 workers participated in strikes. The demands and aims of the two years were similar, but the moods in which the strikes were conducted were very different. While in 1933 the workers struck under the illusion that they would be protected by Section 7-A, in 1934–1935, there was deep disillusionment with government labor boards. In 1933, the NRA was labor’s “Magna Carta”; in 1934, it was the “National Run Around.”

CIO Strikes – 1936–1941. The CIO strikes for recognition of the newly organized industrial unions in the basic industries and for wage increases assumed proportions never dreamed of by the most optimistic, most militant labor leaders. In 1936, 788,648 workers were involved in strikes. In 1937, the number jumped to 1,860,621. In 1938 the total dipped to 688,376 but the following year it rose again to 1,170,962. The outstanding feature of these strikes of the late thirties was that during this period labor was definitely on the offensive – workers fought relentlessly for wage increases and union recognition. Another outstanding characteristic was that, for the first time since the end of World War I, the workers in basic industries such as auto, steel, rubber, electrical, etc. participated in such great mass strikes and that nearly all ended in complete, or in substantial, victory. A unique feature of this strike wave was the introduction of the sit-down, or stay-in, strike technique, which proved very effective. The sit-down began in 1936 in the rubber plants in Akron, Ohio, and spread to the auto industry. It has been estimated that from September 1936 through May 1937 sit-down strikes directly involved 484,000 workers and closed plants employing 600,000 others.

Although the newly organized CIO unions led the majority of the workers engaged in strikes, the AFL unions also played a major role. In 1937, for example, 583,063 – or 30% of the total workers on strike – were led by AFL unions.

In 1940 the strike wave declined sharply. The total involved in strikes dropped to 447,000 and enabled Secretary of Labor Perkins to declare that the number of strikes was much smaller than in the somewhat comparable period of national emergency, 1916–1917. In March of the following year the first wartime medium to handle many labor problems was created when President Roosevelt appointed the National Defense Mediation Board.

World War II Strikes – 1941–1945. Even the most consistent enemies of labor must admit that its wartime record was one of patriotism, devotion and sacrifice. A month before Pearl Harbor, the annual convention of the CIO declared that labor “appreciates more than any other group that in this grave crisis, mediation and peaceful solution of our industrial disputes is of the utmost importance to America/’ Similarly, the AFL at its convention went on record as “unequivocally committed to a policy of mediation of labor disputes.” Labor adopted this attitude because of the anti-fascist character of the war, and it kept its pledge well. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded that with the attack on Pearl Harbor “several strikes then in progress were immediately called off, and several threatened strikes even where strike votes had been taken were cancelled.” In 1942 there was not a single strike authorized by the national leaders of the AFL or CIO. The only major exceptions occurring in 1943 were the coal stoppages. Labor’s no-strike pledge was so well kept that when efforts were made to discredit labor within the ranks of our armed forces, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall in August 1944 sent instructions to all orientation officers in the army stating that loss from strikes from shortly after Pearl Harbor until July 1, 1944 “represents less than one-tenth of one per cent of the total labor time available. This bears out the statement of the Secretary of Labor to Congress that the no-strike, no lock- out pledge of labor and management ‘has been kept at a rate of 99%.” Such was labor’s record in a time of grave national crisis.

Post World War II Strikes, 1945–1947. The first two years of the post-war period saw a new strike wave with new demands and peculiarities all its own. The chief demand was for a wage increase. With the change from longer wartime hours to a 40-hour week during reconversion and with elimination of wartime bonuses, the take-home pay had decreased, while the cost of living continued to increase. Nearly three and a half million workers participated in these strikes in 1945, and 4,650,000 in 1946.

The new feature of these post-war strikes was the increasing “fringe” demands brought forward by the unions. These included medical plans, insurance, pensions, holiday and vacation pay and portal-to-portal pay. Another feature was the industry-wide character of the strikes; such was the case with steel, auto, electrical and marine. The fact that the strikes of the post-war years were of longer duration than those of the late thirties indicates that opposition on the part of the employers toward organized labor was growing.

A strike of major political importance was America’s first nation-wide railroad strike. This took place in May 1946. President Truman broke it in an old-fashioned way – by threatening to use the armed forces against the strikers, and this act, more than any other, showed Truman’s complete departure from Roosevelt’s labor policies. The injunction obtained by the Truman Administration against the coal miners, in November 1946 was a natural follow-up.

In this post-war period a development of great significance was the growing number of general strikes. At Stamford, Connecticut, in January 1946, 12,000 workers crippled the industrial life of the city in the first general strike in that State. Both the AFL and CIO participated in this stoppage in protest against the State Police breaking up the machinists’ picket lines at the Yale & Towne Lock Co. In February 1946, a general strike took place in Lancaster, Pa., in support of the striking bus and trolley men belonging to the Street & Electric Railway Employees, AFL. On March 4, 1946, 10,000 AFL and CIO workers declared a general strike in Houston, Texas, in support of an AFL union of city and county employees. During the same month in the city of Rochester, N. Y., over 30,000 AFL and CIO members, together with workers of the independent unions, tied up the city for twenty-two hours in support of the AFL Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. On July 23, 1946, 13,000 workers in Hartford, Conn., proclaimed a general strike in support of UE machinist and electrical workers. On November 22, 1946, 25,000 workers in Camden, N. J., walked out in support of newspapermen striking at the Camden Courier-Post. On December 3, 1946, over 100,000 AFL and CIO workers tied up the city of Oakland, California, in protest against strike-breaking efforts by the city police and Kahn’s and Hasting’s department stores.

Unlike the strikes of 1918 and 1919, the strikes of 1945 and 1946 were generally successful and helped to consolidate many of labor’s wartime gains.

Taft-Hartley Period – 1947–1949. The years 1947, 1948 and 1949 present an interesting strike picture. In 1947 only 2,170,000 workers went on strike – less than half as many as in 1946. In 1948 the number declined to two million. The decline can be traced to a number of factors: the anti-strike provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act; the enactment of vicious, anti-labor laws in a number of States; the leveling off of the rise in the cost of living; growing unemployment; the abandonment of militant tactics by the top leadership of the CIO; and the absence of sustained organizing campaigns by the AFL and CIO.

In 1949 the trend changed, and it became a record year for strikes, with about 3,100,000 workers involved. Union demands for pensions and social insurance plans received great impetus and became major strike issues.

The strikes that occurred did not have the same uniformity in objectives as did those of previous periods. Wage increases were among the central demands, but an increased number of other issues were involved. In 1947 some 370,000 telephone workers struck for a nation-wide collective bargaining agreement and wage increases. In 1948, 320,000 bituminous coal miners struck for a pension plan. During the same year, the East Coast longshoremen made a welfare plan one of their major demands. A novel demand made by the employees of the Keystone Dress and Rubber Company in Philadelphia was a holiday for every worker on his birthday, or, if he preferred to work, double pay. In 1949, 100,000 Ford workers struck against increased speed-up. The Brewery Workers of New York, and 7,000 workers of the Singer Sewing Machine Company also made the fight against speed-up their major demand. During this same period the UMWA declared a one-week holiday. This action, John L. Lewis announced, was taken as a result of “the splendid production record” of the miners. The three outstanding strikes in 1949 were in the steel mills, the coal mines and on the Hawaiian docks.

An interesting development in connection with a number of these strikes was the political aspect. In April 1947, in Iowa, 100,000 AFL and CIO unions declared a one-day State-wide general strike against proposed anti-labor legislation then pending in the State legislature. In June of the same year 200,000 miners struck in protest against the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. One of the chief causes for the 1948 West Coast maritime strike was an attempt of the employers to eliminate the hiring hall – under a provision of the same law. Another 1948 strike growing out of the Taft-Hartley provisions broke out at a Du Pont plant in Charleston, W.Va.

Most of these strikes were of long duration. The telephone workers were out 40 days; the West Coast longshoremen 95 days; the packinghouse workers, 10 weeks; the farm equipment workers, 5 weeks; the San Francisco cab drivers, 4.5 months; the New York brewery workers, 72 days; the Singer Sewing Machine workers 24 weeks; and the Chicago AFL printers 22 months.

It is to be noted that, during this period, there was, proportionately, a larger number of service and transport workers involved in strikes. There were the nation-wide telephone strike, the Boston, New York and Louisville bus strikes, the New York and San Francisco taxi strikes, and the Atlantic City hotel workers’ strike.

The uneven result of these strikes is also of significance. The packinghouse strike ended in defeat. The miners were forced to return by court action. The East Coast and West Coast maritime strikes were successful. The Atlantic City hotel strike was lost. The taxi drivers lost in New York, and won in San Francisco. But most significant is the fact that, with the exception of the New York cab drivers, the unions that suffered strike setbacks, although temporarily weakened, were not destroyed, and some have made comebacks since.

Such, in brief, has been the course of strikes in America. The basic elements have not changed greatly since the early days. The protagonists are the same: on one side stands the employer, often backed by the courts and the armed forces, State and federal – the government playing an ever-increasing role against organized labor; on the other side stands labor. The major difference lies in that the stage is larger, the actors more numerous, better organized. Employers have learned to act in concert. And workers, too, have learned that their strength lies in common action. Today organized labor, fighting to protect its standard of living, its jobs, its future, is 15 million strong.

Labor is becoming conscious of its strength and feels, too, the power and importance of its weapon. Looking back at its past, American labor sees that its gains have not come of themselves; employers have had to be forced into every concession they have made. Every basic economic improvement in workers’ lives came about as a result of strikes, every gain had to be fought for and won. Shorter hours, higher wages, job security, curtailment of speed-up, seniority rights, vacations with pay, health benefits and pension plans – all were won on the picket line.

And so will it be, labor knows, in the foreseeable future. Not employers’ humanity, not generosity, not even “enlightened self-interest” will bring labor one jot nearer its goal. History shows that labor can look only to itself and to its natural allies to fight its battles. To hold on to the gains it has already won and to make further economic advances, labor will need to resort in the future to the same weapon that served it in the past – one of its most powerful weapons, the strike.

Chapter 3: Strikes and Politics

It Was Once a “Conspiracy”

The early history of labor in America clearly shows that to strike has not always been recognized as an inalienable right. There was a time when a strike was considered a conspiracy against the State, and those engaged in such actions were tried, and many were convicted, in various courts. As was noted in the previous chapter, in 1805 eight Philadelphia shoemakers were convicted on charges of forming “a combination and conspiracy to raise wages” The indictment against those workers stated: “Our position is that no man is at liberty to combine, conspire, confederate and unlawfully agree to regulate the whole body of workmen in the city. The defendants are not indicted for regulating their own individual wages, but for undertaking by combination, to regulate the price of labor of others as well as their own.”

Unquestionably this point of view did not spring up spontaneously on the American continent. Like so many of our legal concepts, it was taken over from the mother country where the idea that a strike was a conspiracy was very generally held. Many workers in England were imprisoned for “leaving their work unfinished,” or because of a “conspiracy” to shorten hours and raise wages, and a whole series of so-called “Combination Laws” for some fifty years prevented labor from freely exercising the right to strike. In 1824, these “Combination Laws” were repealed and brought about what is known in English labor history as the “Trade Union Emancipation.”

In America, too, the legal right to strike came into being as a result of political action. The pioneers in the American labor movement fought many political battles before the right to strike was firmly established, the fight being essentially between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian democratic forces.

The same thing happened on the Continent. There, as in England and America, political action on the part of labor and other democratic forces brought about the recognition of the strike as a democratic weapon. It is therefore justifiable to conclude that the recognition of the right to strike is an outgrowth of established democratic rights.

How Strikes Reflect Political Conditions

That the strike itself is a political weapon as well as an economic one is evidenced by recent national and international events. In this country during the war years organized labor, considering the defeat of fascism its most important objective, committed itself voluntarily to a no-strike policy. Labor was willing to subordinate its economic and other grievances to this main objective. British labor adopted a similar position. On the other hand, during the same period workers and their underground organizations in Nazi-occupied lands conducted a vigorous strike policy, notwithstanding the threat of death decreed by their Nazi overlords. Economic betterment was held to be the least objective of these strikes. They were essentially political in character and were conducted for the purpose of weakening the military position of their mortal enemy, fascism.

During the first two post-war years the reverse process took place. In the United States there was a major strike wave, whereas European workers after their liberation engaged in scarcely any strike struggles. Organized labor in many European countries made a major contribution to post-war reconstruction by making uninterrupted and increased production its major objective. The reason for this bears on politics. In many European countries the people established pro-Labor, pro-Socialist or pro-Communist governments. To a varying degree this was true of England, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other European nations. The newly established, or extended, democracies concerned themselves with the vital economic, social, and political needs of the workers; hence a great many of their economic problems were solved through progressive legislation rather than through strikes. A great many industries on the continent were socialized, production for profit was eliminated and with it went many of the methods of exploitation which are the economic roots for strikes.

The close relationship between strikes and politics was again demonstrated in the period 1947–1949. As soon as the coalition governments of France, Italy, and other parts of Western Europe went out of existence, great strike waves developed in those countries. In the United States, during the same years, a number of strikes occurred that would not have taken place had it not been for the oppressive, anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. The long printers’ and West Coast longshoremen’s strikes are cases in point.

All this leads to the conclusion that the number of strikes in a given country and their character are a barometer of the political situation in that country; in countries where workers enjoy a maximum degree of democratic rights and play an important political role, and where production for profit has been curtailed or eliminated, the use of the strike weapon is reduced to a minimum.

This is as true for the United States as for other countries, but several elements are present here that obscure the barometer reading. Certain it is that American labor, like labor elsewhere, won many of its objectives through political measures in periods when a progressive administration was in the saddle. Just as certain is it that labor has been forced to resort to the strike weapon to win back the rights taken from workers in a period of reaction. During the decade 1937–1947, the right to belong to a union and the right of unions as collective bargaining agencies were established by the Wagner Act. Although there were many strikes during this period precipitated by employers’ efforts to curtail the rights granted under the Act, many unions obtained recognition not through picket lines but through National Labor Relations Board elections. On the other hand, the Taft-Hartley Act, which has taken away many of labor’s privileges under the Wagner Act, has provoked a number of strikes that might not have taken place had it not been for the enactment of this law. Also as a result, a growing number of unions refused to sign contracts containing no-strike clauses.

Political Aspects of Strike Strategy

Of late, organized labor has been increasingly charged: with conducting “political strikes.” This accusation was pressed particularly against John L. Lewis and the UMW, Harry Bridges and the West Coast longshoremen, Woodruff Randolph and the International Typographical Union, and many other unions. The truth is that in most cases politics are injected not by the unions, but by the government and the employers. Life itself forces the major strikes to assume a political character. Who can deny today that the government virtually has life and death power over labor unions? Who can deny the powers of government in our entire economy? Who can deny the government’s hand in a vast employment role? Finally, can labor close its eyes to so much federal and State legislation that affects directly and immediately the course of any strike? Is it not a fact that at no time in our history were unions under so much political supervision as they are today?

Were not the West Coast longshoremen and the printers forced to strike because of Taft-Hartley? Did not John L. Lewis publicly declare during the 1949 coal miners’ strike that the dispute could be settled provided the government did not interfere? And was not the Hawaii dock workers’ strike prolonged because of such interference?

In stressing the political aspects of strikes, we point out only what is real; it is not intended here to give color to the false notion that labor conducts “political strikes” The intent is merely to point out the realities and the need for labor to be constantly vigilant politically in order to preserve the right to strike.

The understanding that mass strikes assume a political character even though the demands of the workers may be of an economic nature lies at the very base of strike strategy. The failure of some labor leaders to recognize this important fact in the preparation for, and the conduct of, strikes has often been detrimental to the struggle; characterizing a strike as a purely economic battle of the workers has often made it comparatively easy for the employer to enlist “the law” on his side. Strike strategy must take political factors into consideration. For strike strategy does not consist merely of the organizational routine in the conduct of a strike. It calls for the evaluation of all the forces at work – both favorable and unfavorable – and the planning and execution, on the basis of such analysis, of a course of action that will spell victory. It is hardly possible to work out the correct strategy for a given strike unless the analysis includes an evaluation of the political situation on a national, State, county and city basis.

The Fight for Labor Legislation

What is meant by a strike assuming a political character? Or, as a “practical” trade unionist would put it: what has a strike to do with politics?

Every movement in which wage earners, as a distinct group in society, band together against employers, as another distinct group in society, in order to bring about certain changes by “pressure from without” is a political movement. For example, a strike to obtain shorter hours in a single factory or trade is an economic movement; whereas, a movement to obtain shorter hours by law is a political movement. The history of the labor movement in the United States is rich with examples of political movements growing out of individual economic struggles of the workers.

Take the history of the 8-hour-day movement in America. Here is a perfect example of how labor over a period of decades battled on two fronts – economic and political – for the attainment of a shorter work day. This struggle began in single crafts and towns. With the growth of industry the fight for shorter hours assumed a national character. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions at its convention resolved that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s work, from and after May 1, 1886,” This was to be attained through a general strike. On that date some 340,000 workers took part in great demonstrations for the 8-hour day, and ever since then the 8-hour-day fight has loomed big in all major strikes. This struggle more or less culminated in 1938 when Congress enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law was tested and declared constitutional by the Supreme Court in February 1941.

But turning mass pressure toward securing favorable labor legislation is only one of many ways in which economic struggles can assume a political character. Often striking workers are confronted by the armed forces of the federal and State governments, and then the economic struggle assumes a highly political character. For once, the troops are called in, it is no longer a struggle between workers and employers; the government begins to play a very decisive role and often determines the outcome of the strike.

The use of armed forces against strikes is all too prevalent in the United States. During the great railroad strike of 1877 President Hayes sent Federal troops to break the strike. In 1894 President Cleveland sent troops against the Pullman strikers. In 1897 President McKinley rushed troops against striking metal miners in the Idaho Coeur d’Alenes mine. In 1919 President Wilson sent troops to Seattle during the general strike. Soon after, President Harding ordered federal troops into Southern Virginia to break a strike of coal miners. Even President Roosevelt, a great friend of labor, used Federal troops to break the aircraft workers’ strike in Englewood, California in 1941. In 1946 President Truman threatened the striking railroad workers with the use of armed forces.

The use of the National Guard against strikers has been even more frequent. In 1937 alone, at least twenty cities in nine States were occupied by 10,000 Guardsmen, and another 6,000 were mobilized and ready for strike duty. In March 1948, members of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, CIO, employed in the “Big Four” packing houses – Armour, Cudahy, Swift and Wilson – were on a 67-day strike for a wage increase. The strike spread to nine States. It was one of the major post-war strikes in which employers set themselves the objective of destroying a union. Governor Luther W. Youngdahl of Minnesota sent National Guard detachments to Albert Lea to “protect” the scabs. Troops were also designated for duty at Swift and Armour plants at South St. Paul. In Iowa, Governor Robert D. Blue ordered 1,000 National Guardsmen to Waterloo to “protect” the strike-bound Roth Packing Company plant.

Courts Against Picket Lines

The use of the courts and judge-made laws against strikers also testifies to the political character of strikes. Over the years, “legal” actions against strikers have been standard weapons of employers, and many an injunction has broken a strike. For a time the Norris-La Guardia Anti-Injunction Law did away with this ‘legal” method of delivering a blow below the belt, but with the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act organized labor is once again confronted with a real menace.

The injunction is a very simple and effective device. All that an employer has to do to obtain one is submit affidavits to a judge, charging that the strikers, or the union, are causing injuries to his business. The judge accepts the charges as facts and issues a “preliminary restraining order.” The strikers, with no opportunity to answer, are commanded by this order to abide by the court order. As a rule, the “temporary injunction” lasts for the duration of the strike. These injunctions are so sweeping that, if carried out, they would strangle any strike or union. They outlaw the workers’ right to organize, to strike, and to picket, as well as their right of free speech and assembly. Charlotte Todes, in her pamphlet “Injunction Menace” writes:

Many other acts, commonly considered legal – distributing literature, paying strike benefits, maintaining tent colonies, parading and holding union meetings – have been made crimes under these injunctions. The boycott, sympathy strikes and refusal to work on non-union materials have also been made illegal by injunctions.

Injunctions were first used as strikebreaking devices against the Knights of Labor in the 1880’s. With the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, injunctions were applied against labor on a large scale. A few of the more recent cases follow.

In 1927 the higher courts upheld twelve injunctions issued on behalf of the Red Jacket Consolidated Coal & Coke Co., prohibiting the UMWA to organize miners of the Southern West Virginia coal fields. This injunction also prohibited the sending of funds for organization and relief purposes and enjoined the union from maintaining tent colonies in the vicinity of the mines. A Federal District Court in Ohio, in an injunction against the miners, stopped them from “displaying any signs or banners containing any language designed to intimidate or insult employees, or prospective employees, within a radius of ten miles of the mines.”

In 1931 in Tampa, Florida, a federal injunction prohibited 14,000 tobacco workers from “continuing to maintain and conduct an organization known as the Tobacco Workers Industrial Union.”

In April 1947, during the nation-wide strike of 300,000 telephone workers, the New Jersey State Legislature enacted a drastic public utility anti-strike law. The Governor and his State machinery took over the task of breaking the strike. The new law provided that unless the workers returned to work, the union would be fined $10,000 for each day of the strike. Individual strikers became liable to fines of $250 and $500 a day and/or 30 days in jail if convicted of remaining on strike in defiance of the law. Picketing was declared illegal. In this instance the union and its leadership defied the law by remaining on strike and thus turned the telephone strike into a major political event in the State of New Jersey.

During the days of the New Deal the fights of many courts against unionism subsided. But the Taft-Hartley law brought back the courts as a major weapon against organized labor. Among other things, this Act made the unions liable to damage suits. Judge Goldsborough’s decision, imposing a fine on the United Mine Workers and John L. Lewis, is now well known. During the 1948 strike of the CIO Oil Workers, more than thirty damage suits, amounting to 30 million dollars, were instituted against the union. The AFL teamsters have been battling against similar “damage suits.” During the first seven months of this Act, law suits amounting to over 15 million dollars were filed against unions.

State Anti-Strike Laws

Following the pattern of the Taft-Hartley Act, in thirty States “little acts” were established, some of them even worse than the “big act.” According to a study of the Labor Research Association, these State laws included “bans on union security provisions, mass picketing, secondary boycotts and jurisdictional strikes, requirements for registration of unions and filing of financial reports; and clauses prohibiting or delaying strike action in certain industries.” (Labor Fact Book, 9.)

Some States in their anti-labor frenzy reached the height of absurdity by adopting “right to work” constitutional amendments, or outlawing the closed shop and union shop. Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia took such action. In New Hampshire and Massachusetts, union security contracts were restricted. Laws restricting, or regulating, picketing were enacted in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Virginia. Jurisdictional strikes were completely outlawed in California, Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania. Also, strikes of public employees were outlawed in Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. In a number of States, strikes in public utilities were restricted, and in still other States, limitations were placed on union check-offs.

The use of troops and injunctions, the adoption of all kinds of city and State ordinances against strikers, and the anti-labor actions of the courts create a condition where most strikes, originating as purely economic struggles, assume a highly political character. The failure on the part of some labor leaders to recognize “politics” in strikes has resulted in lack of independent political consciousness among the workers. This in turn has resulted in failure to create labor’s own political weapons. All of which has very often resulted in placing striking workers in a defensive position.

“Emergency” Laws

The need to recognize the political character of strikes will become increasingly important with time. Strikes today do not involve just a few carpenters or dressmakers as once they did. The American labor movement consists of some 15 million organized workers. Most of our basic and mass production industries are organized, and a strike in any one involves hundreds of thousands of workers. A strike on the railroads, in the coal fields, in the steel mills or in the auto plants has immediate political repercussions on a national, and even international, scale. To look upon strikes, therefore, as purely economic events, is outmoded thinking. Employers are not so naive. They recognize the political nature of a great strike and turn it to account. They contact Congressmen to speak out against a strike, and often threaten labor with punitive legislation. Nor are they slow in utilizing the courts, the press, the radio and local and State authorities. In the post-war strikes, particularly in the coal and railroad industries, the employers faded into the background while various government agencies took the lead in strikebreaking.

Under special “emergency laws,” it is possible for a President of the United States to “take over” basic industries confronted with a strike situation. This actually happened in 1948 when railroad workers threatened to walk out. By a Presidential order the Army “took over” in order to stave off the strike. President Truman even threatened to induct the railroad workers into the armed forces. From there on, the railroad workers had to negotiate with Uncle Sam, rather than with the railroad operators. The political character of such a situation was obvious and its purpose clear; the “seizing” of the railroads brought about only one major change: namely, the railroad workers were enjoined from striking. Everything – else profits, management, etc. –remained the same. More. A number of leading railroad officials were given Army commissions, thus doubling their authority. The New York Post of May 14 published an article entitled “Army Runs the Railroads, but Only on Paper.” The article vividly described the real set-up: “There are no Colonels sitting behind railroad Presidents, looking over their shoulders at papers on the desk, and telling them what to do,” it said, and went on about how Mr. William S. Carr, superintendent of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, was “called into service” and became Colonel Carr, with the title of “Deputy Regional Director” for the Army’s railroad operation. His superior officer “for the duration” was Gustav Metzman, the President of the New York Central Railroad, who had been sworn in as an Army Colonel to be Commander of the Eastern Regional Headquarters. The New York Post made this interesting comment: “Col. Metzman, the Regional Chief, is keeping watch on Metzman, the railroad President.”

With the destruction of the Wagner Act, and the enactment of the 1947 Labor-Management Relations Act, the political coloration of strikes has become more pronounced than ever. This Act, by taking away political rights labor won during the last fifty years or more, creates conditions that will necessitate strikes which will be almost entirely political in character. Strike strategists who recognize the political aspects of strikes and are prepared to turn them to account are much wiser labor leaders, and stand a better chance to score substantial victories.

Sooner or later, organized labor is bound to realize that its past gains will never be secure and its future aspirations may never become a reality without independent political action. Our own past history and the history of organized labor throughout the world points to the need for such action. In fact it is not conceivable that the Ameri- can trade union movement can make substantial headway without becoming an independent political force completely divorced from the two old parties which have proved to be anti-labor.

Chapter 4: Application of Military Strategy

Military and Strike Principles Compared

A Strike is a battle – frequently of large proportions – between two opposing social forces. Is it possible to apply to the battle of social forces basic ideas of military strategy –fighting on the offensive; importance of morale; element of surprise; discipline; mobilization of reserves; capturing the initiative? The answer becomes self-evident when the question is put in the negative thus: Is it possible to win a strike by allowing the employers to place the union and the strikers on the defensive? Is it possible to go through a long strike without high morale? Can strike leaders disregard the need for the strictest discipline? Is it conceivable that a difficult strike can be won without the mobilization of the union’s reserves? Obviously not.

How about the yet more fundamental principles of warfare established by the great German military strategist, General Karl von Clausewitz? Is it possible to apply them to the conduct of a strike? It is. At least four principles may be so applied.

First Principle. “To bend all strength which may exist to the very utmost. Any weakening of forces removes the possibility of reaching the goal. Even if success is fairly certain, it would be highly indiscreet not to bend maximum strength, to make it absolutely certain, because such reinforcement cannot have unfavorable consequences.”

When a union is engaged in a decisive strike battle, no resources may be spared; the union simply must “bend all strength to the very utmost.” The outcome of such a strike may well decide the future of the union and everything must be thrown in to make certain that the strike will be won. In recent years the strikes in the coal fields, in the steel industry, in the electrical and other basic industries have all been conducted on this principle.

Second Principle. “To concentrate all possible forces there where it is necessary to deliver a decisive blow. If necessary, to submit to setbacks at secondary points in order to guarantee success on the main point.”

Clearly, the principle of concentrating all possible forces “there where it is necessary to deliver a decisive blow” can and must be applied to strike strategy. In the case of a company-wide strike at Ford, this would mean concentration first of all on the Dearborn plant. A general strike in the steel industry would necessitate concentration on the United States Steel Corporation.

Third Principle. “Not to lose time. To rapidly strangle in its embryo enemy undertakings and incline public opinion to our side.”

To “rapidly strangle enemy undertakings” is a life and death problem for the strikers and their leaders. Such “enemy undertakings” could be a number of things. They could be back-to-work movements; the importing of scabs; demoralizing rumors; an anti-strike campaign in the press; or efforts to split the ranks of the strikers.

Fourth Principle. “To utilize all our victories with the greatest of energy.”

This principle has been applied most successfully by the United Mine Workers. On many occasions they signed contracts with the Northern coal operators and then utilized this victory to achieve a similar goal with the Southern operators. In the electrical manufacturing industry the principle was applied like this: a strike occurred. General Electric came to terms with the union, Westinghouse remained adamant. The victory in General Electric was utilized “with the greatest of energy” to speed victory in Westinghouse. The union did this in a number of ways. It pointed out to the public that the union demands were just; it bolstered the morale of Westinghouse workers by pointing to victory at GE; it placed Westinghouse in a difficult competitive position.

How Strikes and Warfare Differ

It should not be forgotten, however, when attempting to apply military principles to strike strategy, that there are a number of fundamental differences between a regular army and an army of strikers. The following are the most important:

1. Most regular armies are built on a compulsory basis; an army of strikers is a voluntary army. Aside from moral suasion, a union possesses no power over its forces. Employers, on the other hand, possess tremendous resources which they can bring to bear on workers to force them not to enter the struggle.

2. A regular army fights beyond its borders or against an aggressor within the country. The army of strikers does not fight a foreign enemy. The fight takes place within the country, in and around the location of the factory.

3. The general staff of an army and its corps of officers are carefully selected after years of observation and training. Espionage within the commanding group is, therefore, rare. The general staff of the striking workers, on the other hand, gathers more or less accidentally and in a hurry. Company elements penetrate easily, and these have a tremendous influence on the course and outcome of the struggle. Furthermore, the temptation to corruption and disloyalty is greater in a union than in the army – in part because the element of risk is less.

4. The rear of a regular army is the whole country, and in time of war everything in the rear is geared to the front. The rear of a strike army is the workers’ families, the rest of the workers in the same industry, and only on rare occasions is it the labor movement as a whole.

5. A regular army is well equipped with military doctrines and principles tested in a thousand battles. Labor unions, unfortunately, seldom study the experience of strikes other than their own, and sometimes not even that.

6. An army possesses a powerful agitational apparatus which molds the morale of its men – as well as sustaining morale at the rear. A strikers’ army seldom possesses such machinery while the employers have at their disposal the press, radio, and other opinion-molding instruments.

Industrial Munitions Against Unions

Much as the strike army differs from the military army, the likeness remains in that strikers still are soldiers in a battle. Strike strategists must not, and indeed cannot, forget this; the employers will not let them, for more and more of them nowadays regard the strike from a military point of view and prepare for it in a military, or semi-military, fashion. The public relations staffs of large corporations would deny this statement and term it propaganda. But the facts given in this chapter – all drawn from the hearings of the La Follette Senate Civil Liberties Committee – will show that the main burden for giving strikes a military aspect lies with the employers and the government. It is they who force labor into a position where it must meet tactic with tactic in order to defend strikers against superior forces.

“Industrial munitions” are a big business in the United States. Several national companies have been specializing for some time in tear gas, machine guns, rifles and pistols for corporations whose workers were preparing to strike. In 1937 the La Follette Senate Civil Liberties Committee brought to light startling figures on the amount of tear gas purchased by corporations and local authorities in industrial centers for use in time of strikes. The Republic Steel Corporation and its subsidiaries during the strike in May and June 1937, purchased tear and sickening gas equipment to the sum of $49,439.87; Bethlehem Steel’s tear gas bill during the same period amounted to $27,435.31; municipalities in the area affected by the steel strike spent $34,278 on gas. The Senate records show that every major industrial corporation in the country was stocked with tear gas. This same record shows that the total sales of tear gas by Federal Laboratories, Inc. alone was as follows:

1934....................$665,531.99

1935......................504,369.84

1936......................431,370.59

Total.................$1,601,272.42

It must come as a shock to some to learn that industrial corporations and industrial municipalities have spent in a period of three years over a million and a half dollars for tear gas and equipment to use in strikebreaking. But tear gas is only one item. During this same period, just two corporations Republic Steel and Weirton Steel – purchased from Smith & Wesson, Inc. 228 revolvers. These and other corporations bought hundreds of other revolvers, submachine guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition and other military equipment.

That industrial munitions play a major role in the strike strategy of employers was pointed out by the Senate Civil Liberties Committee. In March 1939, Senator La Follette presented to the Senate a special report on this subject. In it he declared that there are four chief instrumentalities of anti-unionism: namely, strikebreaking, industrial espionage, private police systems and industrial munitions.

Industrial munitions represent a greater danger in our industrial life than is generally recognized. Private arsenals and the well-trained private military force at the disposal of reactionary, union-hating employers could physically threaten our trade unions, and could even sustain an armed fascist movement in this country. Was this not the tragic experience of German Labor when steel magnate Fritz Thyssen and his associates, together with banker Schacht, financed and armed the Nazis prior to their coming into power? In the late thirties all the reactionary forces in this country built up Tom Girdler as a “national hero.” Girdler was pictured as the great industrialist leading a crusade against a “labor armed rebellion.” But the La Follette Committee uncovered huge private arsenals in Republic Steel and Youngs town Sheet & Tube plants of a magnitude sufficient to start a civil war. Study the following chart carefully. These facts must not remain buried in the dusty records of the Senate. Strike leaders should know what they are up against when they prepare for a strike battle with steel and other powerful corporations.

INVENTORIES OF PRIVATE ARSENALS OF REPUBLIC STEEL

CORPORATION AND THE YOUNGSTOWN SHEET & TUBE Co.

*Types of Munitions*	*Republic Steel Corp.*	*Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.*	*Total*
Firearms	Number of guns	Number of guns	Number of guns
Revolvers	552	453	1,005
Rifles	64	369	443
Machine Guns	0	8	8
Shotguns	245	190	435
Total Guns	861	1,020	1,881

Gas Guns	Number of guns	Number of guns	Number of guns
Long range	143	14	157
Machine guns	0	24	24
Billie clubs	58	71	129
Revolvers	3	0	3
Total gas guns	204	109	313

Ammunition: Ball Cartridges	Number of rounds	Number of rounds	Number of rounds
Revolver	17,650	19,487	37,137
Rifle	59,350	16,683	76,033
Machine gun	500	40,260	40,760
Total rounds	77,500	76,430	153,930

Ammunition: Shot cartridges	Number of rounds	Number of rounds	Number of rounds
Shotgun shells	5,784	3,950	9,734
Machine gun	500	0	500
Total rounds	6,284	3,950	10,234

Ammunition: Gas	Number of rounds	Number of rounds	Number of rounds
Hand grenades	2,707	689	3,396
Projectiles and shells	4,033	301	4,334
Machine gun projectiles	0	1,357	1,357
Billie club shells	163	789	952
Revolver shells	25	0	25
Total rounds	6,928	3,136	10,064

The stocking of industrial munitions, particularly gas, is not limited to employers in a single industry. The same La Follette report states: “The committee recorded, and tabulated from the books of munitions vendors, $1,255,312.55 worth of purchases of gas and gas equipment. Approximately one-half of this amount is listed as purchased by large industrial employers, and the remainder by local and State law-enforcement agencies.” The report then lists the largest purchasers of gas equipment.

Corporations or Employers Associations
Republic Steel Corporation	$79,712.42
United States Steel Corporation	62,028.12
Bethlehem Steel Corporation	36,173.69
The Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.	28,385.39
General Motors Corporation	24,626.78
Anthracite Institute	17,457.00
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.	16,912.58
San Francisco Employers	13,809.12
National Steel Corporation	12,085.37
E.J. Hunt Co.	12,078.88
Electric Auto-Lite Co.	11,351.96
Ohio Insulator Co.	10,077.88
B.F. Goodrich Co.	7,740.60
Pennsylvania Railroad Co.	7,466.25
Chrysler Corporation	7,000.00
Thompson Products, Inc.	6,867.69
Seattle Chamber of Commerce	5,873.03
Water Front Employers Union, San Francisco	5,512.16
Columbian Enameling & Stamping Co.	5,482.02
Spang Chalfant & Co. Inc.	5,281.35
Total	$375,992.29

It should be noted that during the past few years the employers have not used industrial munitions on as large a scale as in the thirties. There are a number of reasons for such restraint. First, during recent strikes the employers’ objectives were not for an all-out head-on collision with organized labor. Second, the La Follette Committee exposure still rings in the ears of the Tom Girdlers. Third, the Taft-Hartley law is accomplishing for the employers what tear gas and bullets failed to accomplish. However, the conclusion must not be drawn that industrial munitions are no longer a potentially dangerous anti-strike weapon.

Industrial munitions as a strikebreaking weapon generate a dangerous by-product in the form of salesmen. Munitions vendors have become the modern Pinkertons and agents provocateurs who stimulate, promote and organize violence in order that they may reap profits from the sale of munitions. Munitions salesmen have been directed to follow “labor troubles and disputes” and to press sales in anticipation of, or during, strikes.

This has been clearly revealed in the reports and correspondence of these munition vendors. A Lake Erie Chemical Co. salesman for New England in 1935 wrote to the main office: “Wish a hell of a strike would get under way.” A few weeks later, he reported on the prospects of a general strike in the textile industry and added: “I hope that this strike develops, and matures, and that it will be a damn bad one, we need the money.” A representative of Federal Laboratories, operating in California, in 1934 reported to his main office: “Next month should be a good one. Another strike is expected in the Imperial Valley. Things will be popping.” This same salesman sent another report: “Dear Mr. Barker: Good news, I hope. The milk strike is supposed to break today. The strikers presented their demands this morning, and we are standing by to await results. I was in touch with Captain Hastings of the Sheriff’s Communist squad, this morning, and he is up in the air as to what will take place ... I will let you know as soon as possible the outcome of the milk strike. Here’s hoping it is a good one.”

In 1935, Lake Erie’s St. Louis salesman wrote: “We are surrounded with strikes, but they are all too peaceful to suit me.” A similar complaint was registered by another California salesman of Federal Laboratories: “Just a line to let you know that I am still alive and still waiting for a nice juicy strike up here. The darn things don’t happen often enough to suit me.” Another agent of the same munitions company bitterly complained against President Roosevelt: “I think someone should get out a restraining order on the President of the United States to prevent him from stopping all these strikes. It seems to me that his actions are absolutely in restraint of trade – that is, as far as we are concerned.”

The La Follette Committee report revealed how during the 1934 longshore and maritime strike in San Francisco representatives of both Lake Erie and Federal Laboratories were “on the battle front leading and directing squads of police in gassing crowds of strikers. Between them, I.H. McCarty of Lake Erie, and Joseph M. Roush, of Federal Laboratories, delivered between $20,000 and $25,000 worth of gas to the San Francisco police. None of this was paid for by the city, all of it coming out of funds of employers and employers associations, directly affected by the strikes.” In a report to his home office, Roush described his part: “I then started in with long-range shells and believe me they solved the problem. From then on each riot was a victory for us. During the middle of the day we gathered all available riot guns that I had and long-range shells and proceeded to stop every riot as it started.”

Next day – July 5, 1934 – became known in San Francisco as “Bloody Thursday” because Roush, the munitions vendor, scored a direct hit. He himself described it in these words: “I might mention that during one of the riots I shot a long-range projectile into a group, a shell hitting one man and causing a fracture of the skull, from which he has since died. As he was a Communist, I have no feeling in the matter and I am sorry that I did not get more.” In commenting on the bloodshed in San Francisco, Mr. Young, President of Federal Laboratories, wrote: “I want to especially compliment Baxter, Roush, Baum, Greig, Fisher, Richardson and those boys who have given their personal services to direct the activities of the police in the use of this equipment during times of emergency.” Senator La Follette declared that this high praise from the President of Federal Laboratories “for the agent who expressed regret that he killed only one Communist, amounted to orders ‘to shoot to kill.’”

Those who would challenge the idea that a strike is a battle and that there is a similarity between strike strategy and military strategy would do well to reflect on the foregoing facts.

How Employers Plan for Industrial Warfare

Buying munitions is one thing, tactical preparation is another. Employers do not stock up on gas and revolvers and then just sit back and wait for things to develop; often they hire men with military training and background to survey their plants and outline plans for a “tactical situation.”

Just to cite one example: On October 21, 1943, Colonel B.C. Goss, who was also President of the Lake Erie Chemical Company, presented a complete “plan of defense” for the Dodge Main Plant, Plymouth Plant, Jefferson-Kercheval Plant, Highland Park Plant and the Dodge Truck Forge Plants.

As the writer sees your problem [wrote Colonel Goss], it may be compared to several divisions, occupying a corps area. Your four plants, Plymouth, Highland, Dodge Truck and Jefferson-Kercheval are within a radius of two to four miles from your Dodge Main Plant, which may be compared to Corps Headquarters, thus making it possible to follow the best military practice for the disposal of chemical troops. On account of the fact that chemical troops require special training and equipment, they are ordinarily of most value if held as a Reserve Force in a central location and sent to a spot where trouble may be occurring. In your case, it is, therefore, recommended that we regard the four outlying plants more or less as Infantry to be equipped with less severe and, therefore, more simply used chemical weapons. It is further recommended that a Special Chemical Platoon be highly trained and equipped with more severe Chemical weapons as a second line of defense.

In view of such clear preparation for armed warfare, strike strategists have no alternative but to learn how to protect strikers from gas attacks and how to utilize cover and concealment from a line of fire. Hence there is need to master some elementary military facts. This is not something labor desires. As has been stated above, this is being forced upon labor by ruthless employers. How far they intend to go may be judged from the instance of the 1935 Goodyear Rubber strike in ‘Akron, Ohio. The company made most extensive military preparations for the approaching strike. It picked several hundred men for special training in the use of rifles, gas, offensive tactics and in how to operate in “wedge formations.” To deplore such development is not enough. Labor must know how to protect itself. However little inclination for military knowledge strike leaders may have, they must, when confronted with an employer’s military tactics be able to operate without costly mistakes.

Labor leaders must learn, moreover, what to do when troops enter the picture. In view of how repeatedly this has happened in the past and the certainty of its happening again and again in the future, it is unpardonable neglect of duty to sit back and hope that troops will not be called in. There is every expectation that they will. And when they are, they will operate as if strikers were a foreign enemy. The following secret field orders indicate with what care the other side makes military preparations when armed forces enter a big strike situation.

HEADQUARTERS, YOUNGSTOWN MILITARY DISTRICT

The Amory

Youngstown, Ohio, 4, July 37. 8:00 A.M.

SECRET

Field Orders

No. 11

Maps: Sohio Road Map 1937; Mahoning County Hiway Map; Youngstown City Map; Trumbull County Hiway Map; Warren City Map; Niles City Map; Cleveland City Map.

a) The situation in Mahoning Valley continues quiet. Picketing in Youngstown is practically discontinued. Picketing in Warren has greatly reduced. Pickets at Niles continue to be active. The steel plants in Canton and Massillon are building up their working forces. Picketing in these areas is still heavy. The situation there is quiet. One or more plants in Cleveland will attempt to reopen 6 July 37. The plants in Cleveland are widely scattered. There are several thousand steel workers in Cleveland that are anxious to return to work. The strength of the organized steel workers opposing the reopening of steel plants can be augmented by several thousand workers affiliated with parent labor organization.

b) The 74^th Brigade less units left in Youngstown and Canton Districts moves to Cleveland on 5 July 37.

2) Troops remaining in this area will continue to maintain law and order by intensive patrolling.

3) a)

i) The 74^th Brigade less 1^st Bn. 166^th Inf. (Warren), 3^rd Bn. 166^th Inf. less Co. M (Canton), and Howitzer and H Companies 166^th Inf. will march by truck to Cleveland, Ohio at 8:00 A.M. on 5 July 37 to preserve law and order in the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.

ii) The Commanding General, 7^th Brigade, will report to and secure from Sheriff O’Donnell, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, instructions in writing as to the employment of the military forces in aid to civil forces.

iii) For time of departure, route, rate of march, etc., see Annex No. 1, March Table attached.

iv) A reconnaissance party from the 74^th Brigade will reconnoiter Cleveland plants and bivouac areas on 4 July 37. Civilian clothes will be worn.

i) The 1^st Bn. 166^th Inf. less Companies B and C will maintain law and order in Warren and Niles.

ii) Sensitive areas and plant entrances will be covered by intensive patrolling. Patrol Schedules will be so arranged that the patrols are at main plant entrances during the changes in working shifts. A machine gun crew with sufficient riflemen to protect gun crew will be maintained at the main entrances of the Republic plants in Warren and Niles.

iii) Every effort will be made to rest the troops as much as possible in view of their possible use in another area.

i) Companies B and C 166^th Inf. under command of Captain Albert Rankin, Co. C 166^th Inf., will move by truck to Buckeye School, Youngstown at 5:00 A.M. on 5 July 37 and take over the policing of plant entrances in Struthers and on Poland Ave. south and east of Market St.

ii) Sensitive areas and plant entrances will be covered by intensive patrolling. Particular attention being paid to the following entrances:

Rod and Wire plants at Struthers

Stop 14, Poland Ave.

Center St. Viaduct

Stop 5, Poland Avenue

Tube St. and Poland Ave.

d) The Howitzer Company, 166^th Inf. in District Reserve at Parmalee School, Youngstown, will also cover the plant entrances at Campbell and Hubbard by intensive patrolling, patrols to arrive at plant gates during change in shifts.

i) The 37^th Div. Aviation will furnish planes to the 74^th Brigade upon request of the Commanding General, 74^th Brigade.

ii) Planes for observation over Youngstown and Canton District will be requested through this headquarters.

i) Extreme secrecy will be maintained in regard to the above moves and shifts of troops. Every effort will be made to create the impression that large numbers of troops are still available in the Youngstown District.

ii) Strict march discipline will be enforced on all moves.

iii) The decrease in size of Youngstown garrison calls for increased vigilance and attention to duty by remaining troops.

a) For administrative details of movements and set-up for remaining troops see Administrative Order No. 7, attached.

b) For redistribution of ammunition and special weapons see Annex 2, Ordinance attached.

c) Captain Frank Jones, MC, and three men from Medical Detachment 134^th F. A. will constitute the medical set-up at Youngstown.

d) Regimental Commander, 166^th Inf. will leave a medical detachment of one officer and six enlisted men at Warren, Ohio.

e) G-4 will arrange for sufficient trucks at Warren, Parmalee and Buckeye Schools and Youngstown Armory to meet any emergency calling for rapid shifting of any or all troops at these locations.

a) Communications: See Annex No. 3, Signal attached.

b) Command Posts:

Hq. Military District: Armory, Youngstown, O.

74^th Brigade: Girard, O., till 8:00 A.M. 5 July 37

Cleveland, O., from 8:00 A.M. 5 July 37

1^st Bn. 166^th Inf. Armory, Warren, Ohio

Companies B and C, 166^th Inf.: Buckeye School

District Reserve: Parmalee School.

By Command of Major General LIGHT:

(Signed) Lee N. Murlin

Colonel, Infantry, Chief of Staff

How State and Federal Troops Operate

Employers are not the only ones who may be responsible for troops in a strike situation. Federal and State authorities have sent troops in time and again. With some rare exceptions, such a move has been a distinct advantage to the employer.

As a rule, a State or federal military force is ordered to enter a strike area during a crucial moment, such as when a back-to-work movement is started, or when company-instigated violence breaks out. Let us say the Governor orders out the National Guard. These troops are directed “to continue to assist the civil authorities in maintaining law and order.” On the surface it seems like an impartial task. In reality, however, the troops, in most cases, play a strikebreaking role.

For example, during the 1937 Steel Strike, Major General G. D. Light, commanding the National Guard in Youngstown, issued an order – General Order No. 3A – that seemingly took no one’s part. The order merely said: “Persons desiring to return to work shall be permitted to do so and be protected.” But the very next day, General Light and his staff met with the city authorities and representatives of the Steel Corporations behind closed doors to map out the back-to-work movement.

The minutes of that conference are reproduced below. What happened is most revealing. It will serve to eliminate whatever illusions may still exist about the “objectivity” of troops in time of strike.

CONFERENCE AT 10:00 A.M. 25 JUNE 1937 WITH CIVIL AUTHORITIES AND REPRESENTATIVES OF STEEL PLANTS

Present preliminary meeting:

General Gilson D. Light, and members of staff

General Henderson and staff members

General Connelly and staff members

Mayor Roberts of Struthers, Ohio

Chief of Police Olsen, Youngstown, Ohio

Chief of Police Davis of Struthers, Ohio

Mayor Evans, Youngstown, Ohio

Sheriff of Trumbull County, Ohio

General Light explained that we intend to cany out the orders of the Governor to the letter. Situation so far quiet. Thought that Sheet and Tube Co. might open first and, after a day or so, open the Republic plant at Youngstown. After Republic has opened here, then the Republic at Warren and Niles.

The Sheriff said he preferred to see all plants opened at the same time.

NOTE: Take up with steel men whether or not to open all plants without restrictions. Ask what suggestions the steel men have to open these plants.

All previous restrictions are now off. Will allow peaceful picketing within the law. No crowds allowed to collect.

GENERAL LIGHT: “We are working in aid of the civil authorities. We are told by the Sheriff what to do but not how to do it.”

Plants will have free passage for men and freight just the same as before the strike. All restrictions of any kind on traffic or plants are off. It is believed that military authorities should tell the steel men to open their plants.

General Light stated that headlines of the Youngstown Vindicator were written by military authorities for this morning’s edition. Also we have all additional troops and equipment that may be needed, including planes, tanks, etc. Civil authorities told that there is no danger of things not being kept under control.

GENERAL CONNELLY: We have been considered enemies of CIO in Stark County, however situation is well in hand. Believe restrictions should be removed immediately.

Civil authorities advised to be very careful about interviews given to the press so that nothing might be misconstrued.

Crowds of curious bystanders must be dispersed, even though not just at the gates.

10:45 A.M. 25 June 1937

STEEL PLANT REPRESENTATIVES ENTERED MEETING

Present (In addition to those at preliminary meetings)

R. M. Welsh, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.

W. B. Gillies, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.

A. J. Ganthols, Counsel for Republic

Mr. Elliott of Republic Steel

GENERAL LIGHT: We ask the wholehearted cooperation of the steel companies. We are acting under the orders of the Sheriff’s offices. No restrictions of number of men or freight in or out of these plants, however we do insist on the cooperation of the steel people. Suggest the Sheet & Tube Co. be allowed to open first, the Republic plant next. Suggested that injunction of the Court be followed in Warren and Niles. Steel men said there has been no trouble about men going back to work in Warren and Niles. They all want to go back to work and the only trouble to be expected is some snipers, etc. Believes there is no danger in letting the bars down.

AGREED BETWEEN ALL THAT ALL BARS BE LET DOWN IN WARREN AND NILES.

As to Youngstown, the Sheriff believes that there will be some trouble about opening Youngstown plants. Steel men from Sheet & Tube want to start Brier Hill and Campbell. Rod and Wire plants to open after we see how it works out.

Hubbard, Ohio Sheriff and steel men agree that Hubbard plant should wait for a few days before opening.

Steel plants will run two shifts, changing at 7:00 A.M. and 7:00 P.M. One gate at Brier Hill and two gates in Campbell to be opened. Additional opening of gates will be agreed upon before opening. Republic Bessemer will not start for a few days. Republic would like to open Stop 5 and Center St. Bridge today.

AGREED BY ALL THAT STOP FIVE GATE MAY OPEN AT THIS TIME BUT CENTER ST. BRIDGE WILL NOT OPEN.

City police will be responsible for the protection of cars parked near gates.

ALL AGREED THAT REPUBLIC WOULD ONLY OPEN STOP 5 THIS AFTERNOON. THREE OPENINGS AT SHEET & TUBE CO. AT BRIER HILL AND 1 AT CAMPBELL. AT 1 STOP 14. STEEL OPERATIONS WILL RUN RIGHT THROUGH THIS SUNDAY.

Police chief asked for help in patrolling the Center St. Bridge and South Ave. Bridge.

Pickets should be confined to gates and kept moving. Steel plants will run telephone lines from plants to Division and Brigade Headquarters.

Contact men for steel plants: Leventry and Norton of Republic Co., Smith Mauthe & Davis at Campbell for Sheet & Tube Co. Southerland at Brier Hill for Sheet & Tube Co.

The following confidential intelligence report is even more revealing as regards the “impartiality” of the National Guard. Note that the strikers are the “enemy.”

HEADQUARTERS, 166^TH INF.

Campbell, Ohio

22 June 37 – 4 P.M.

23 June 37 – 4 P.M.

24 June 37

S-2 REPORT

1) Picket post maintained by CIO at all points shown on overlay submitted as of 10:30 A.M. June 24.

2) Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. reports an employment of approximately 13,000 men CIO claims 90% of employees as members.

Republic Iron & Steel Co. reports employment within our area of about 4,000 men CIO claims 70% as members.

Total: Y. S. & T. Co................ 11,700

R. I. & S. Co................... 2,800

14,500 men

a) Enemy morale is excellent and well disciplined, under perfect control of their officers and executives. CIO maintains two bread lines or relief stations in our area.

b) Reserves consist of 10,000 to 50,000 CIO members in Ohio (northern) and Pennsylvania Coal field.

c) No changes since last report.

d) No movement of enemy

3) Supplies are unknown

4) Weather – Clear and warm.

5) Enemy operations – none.

a) No arrests made in this section.

b) CIO have ordered pickets into all positions heretofore occupied.

7) CIO have a limited knowledge of our strength. They place entire military force at 4,500 to 5,000.

8) CIO plan no violence; however there are many radicals who would cause trouble or destruction to start trouble.

9) We have the full friendly cooperation of the Struthers, Campbell and Youngstown police.

Robert E. Boyd

1^st Lt. 166^th Inf. S

Indoctrinating the National Guard

The pro-employer bias of the National Guard so clearly expressed in the foregoing conference minutes and intelligence report is not accidental. Nor are the anti-strike activities of this organization due mainly to the anti-labor attitude of commanding officers. The National Guard has been, and is being, oriented and drilled for purposes inimical to the best interests of organized labor. An analysis of its orientation and training manuals indicates that its public pronouncements of impartiality, of serving “all citizens” and “taking no sides” are just a lot of words uttered to mislead and to distract attention from its real purposes.

In 1933 several manuals were issued in Ohio for the guidance of the National Guard in times of “domestic disturbances.” The one entitled “National Guard in Aid of Civil Authority,” pamphlet No. 1, put out by the Adjutant General’s Department, will shatter all illusions as to the supposed impartiality of this group.

In all strike situations where city and county authorities ask for military aid, the Adjutant General, this manual informs us, sends an officer to the scene as an “observer.” It is the duty of this “observer” to ascertain detailed information that will, by and large, determine whether or not troops shall be sent. Where does this officer obtain such information? Article 31 gives the answer:

... as the observer works along, provided there is time, he will find it advisable to contact the County Prosecutor, the County Commissioners, possibly the City Council, as well as the Mayors and police in other cities in the county. He will find it most advisable to contact citizens of the community that represent what is called the better and more responsible element. He may do this thru the local Chamber of Commerce; there are also very often other sources and avenues which will lead him more directly to the men he wants.

Note that the observing officer is not instructed to meet with the union leaders, with representatives of the striking workers, or the central labor body in the community. But it is mandatory for him to meet with city and county authorities hostile to the strikers and known to the “observer” as hostile because these are the very authorities who are asking for troops against the strikers. Further, the “observer” is to meet with the Chamber of Commerce and “the better element” in the city.

Article 58 of the manual states that peaceful picketing “seems to have some legal status,” but “it is hard to determine when and where it can be ‘peaceful’ if hoots and jeers, and threats of violence, are part and parcel of it. What will be allowed of the pickets had better be thoroughly understood at the very beginning, and the restrictions be sharply drawn. At the first break-over of these restrictions the privilege should be denied.”

Article 59 provides that scabs and those enlisting in back-to-work movements shall be armed:

The question of the carrying of guns by men seeking work, or working under the protection of the Sheriff or the troops, will come up, and either the observer or the Commander of Troops will be approached in the matter. Refer all such cases to the Sheriff and the presiding judge in the Common Pleas Court. Frequently, and especially where the individual has been attacked or threatened such permission will be given.

Article 61 stresses “neutrality” but at the same time clearly establishes the real position of the National Guard toward back-to-work movements:

While we must at all times use every endeavor to maintain complete neutrality, once things get to going it becomes very difficult .... The doctrine that men who are willing to work under the conditions and the wages offered have a right to work and they must be protected in that right has never been so clearly and courageously enunciated and maintained as it has been during the year 1932. The stand taken marks a milestone in the long history of our industrial disputes and seems to be a long step forward ....

Article 64 reveals how vicious is the training of the National Guard and that this training is primarily for use against strikers. Public opinion seems to be the only re- straining influence. Once public opinion has been properly molded, the troops are to do their job “neatly and quickly.”

While it may be hard for us to agree that a passive defensive attitude is necessary or advisable, when once conditions require the calling of troops; we are well aware of the fact that the larger general conditions affecting the whole policy of the State’s Executive require that public opinion be behind him before he can permit really drastic steps to be taken. Public opinion is slow to form as a rule and it requires State-wide knowledge of the conditions to agree in support of the employment of force particularly in our industrial disputes. The cry of “cossacks” which is sure to be raised by certain groups is practically sure to be taken up by some of the newspapers, and a great deal of embarrassment result. Good strategy therefore demands a cautious policy steadily carried out in the face of growing violence until public opinion is so aroused over the wanton acts of the lawless that the offensive can be taken and pushed with vigor. Officers and men will therefore, very often, have to grit their teeth and suffer humiliation of spirit until the time comes when they can be released to do their job neatly and quickly as the means given them and the size of the problem will permit.

What is meant by a quick and neat job is outlined in Section 73:

There are one or two methods of dispersing or cowing the groups of disturbers which have proven quite successful and which do not involve bloodshed.

(a) The first and most useful of these is gas. The Guard now has a chemical warfare section and it is intended that some of these men shall be sent out with each body of troops. These men are armed with a gas gun and grenades. The guns are used to throw the gas far into the crowd: effort being made to reach the leader groups, which will not be found in the front ranks. The grenades may be used by the officers or selected enlisted men; but they should be equipped with masks as it is possible to scoop the grenades up and toss them back. The men equipped with masks should be pushed well forward and covered by the arms of others. Care must be exercised as to the direction of the wind and the presence of eddies which may carry the gas to points other than desired.

(b) The second is the use of camera. The disturbers just don’t like to have their pictures taken and will duck if an effort is made to photograph them.

(c) The third consists of the sending of fast-moving patrols to threaten the flanks and rear of the crowds and to all intent preparing to pocket them. The patrols should be instructed not to expose themselves in the line of fire either the main body or other flanking patrols. Even if it is intended to make arrests, at least one avenue of escape should always be left for the mob to use.

(d) A fourth method, applicable largely to a more prolonged disturbance covering a considerable area, consists in the employment of active harassing patrols, the making of arrests and examining at troop headquarters of individuals suspected of hostile activity. Once in a while you will get the right man; but main object is to give the leaders and active partisans the idea they are being watched. Avoid giving those arrested newspaper publicity if at all possible.

Keep records of all car license numbers known or suspected of use by disturbers and ascertain to whom the licenses were issued. If a certain car shows up on record two or three times, have the operators and owner brought in and warn them.

Such is the “neutrality” of the National Guard. In applying the principles of military strategy to strike strategy, union leaders will do well to keep this “neutrality” in mind and not permit themselves to be surprised.

Part Two

Chapter 5: Preparing for Battle

The watchword of every union should be alertness. A union may at no time regard its contract with management as a guarantee of lasting peace; for American labor history is crowded with lockouts and other forms of attack against unions even when contracts were in existence. In the early twenties, when the employers embarked upon their notorious “open shop” offensive, hundreds of union contracts were declared null and void by simply posting a notice on the bulletin board or through a letter to the workers. More recently, a number of employers refused to renew contracts on the grounds that these unions had adopted a policy of “non-compliance” with the Taft-Hartley Act.

It is much safer to view a collective bargaining agreement as a respite, as assurance of a period during which forces may be gathered for the battles to come. Such an approach guarantees that the gains made and the positions won will be secure and that the union will not be caught napping in case of unforeseen emergencies. This certainly has not been the case in the past. The death of President Roosevelt in 1945, the Republican victory in November 1946, the enactment of the Taft-Hartley law in 1947 presented organized labor with many difficult problems, and most unions were not fully prepared to meet them. The errors of the past should not be repeated. If Taft-Hartley-ism persists for any length of time, organized labor will once again be confronted with a new employer-sponsored “open shop” drive. If the political situation changes, labor may find itself facing many unforeseen emergencies. The unions may be called upon to wage a strike at any time. And the time to prepare for a strike is not when negotiations have broken down but when the union has a contract and the possibility of strife does not appear to be immediate.

Careful preparation for a strike is exceedingly important – very often the conduct and the outcome of a strike depend on the quality of the preparatory work. Two outstanding American labor leaders, whose points of view have been extreme opposites, agree in stressing the matter of preparation. Describing how they got ready for a cigar makers’ strike, Samuel Gompers in his Seventy Years of Life and Labor said: “We put into our plans for conducting a strike as much hard thinking as any military strategist ever gave a campaign.” William Z. Foster, on the basis of his experience in the steel strike, declared: “Fundamental to the carrying out of a good strike strategy is a thorough preliminary organization for the struggle. This is the equivalent to the recruiting and training of any army before the battle ... Good preparation gives the workers incomparable greater striking power. It is on the same principle that drilled troops are better fighters than new recruits.” (William Z. Foster, What Means a Strike in Steel]

Preparing the Newly Organized to Strike

Strike preparations must necessarily vary. What they are depends on the character of the expected struggle. If the strike is to take place in a factory or industry where hitherto collective bargaining was not in effect, the major task is to bring the workers into the union. This means to develop the organizing campaign to a peak. In such an intensified recruiting and union building drive, care must be taken that the key plants and departments receive special attention.

Another important step in strike preparations in an unorganized, as well as organized, field must be to popularize the economic demands of the workers. As a rule, unorganized or newly organized workers have no appreciation of the value of organization and solidarity. Their chief concern is whether or not they will derive immediate material benefits by joining the union, or by going out on strike. Hence the necessity of popularizing the immediate gains. Many old-time labor leaders failed in their organization drives on account of their lifeless and abstract slogans. The CIO unions in their formative stages applied the principle of stressing immediate gains and this became a powerful weapon in mobilizing the workers for the approaching struggles. In preparation for the great Ford strike that ended in recognition of the United Auto Workers, the demand for an increase of 10 cents an hour to bring the wage rates of Ford workers up to the standards of General Motors and Chrysler workers was the strongest appeal the union could have made. At the same time this demand exposed the well advertised myth that “Ford pays the highest wages.” Every possible avenue must be used to popularize the economic needs and demands.

Reaching the Workers and Their Families

How about strike preparations in industries where the workers are already substantially organized and the unions well established?

There the first task is mobilization of the membership for response to a strike call. This means getting across to the workers three things: first, that the demands presented to the employers are just and wise; second, that these demands can be obtained only through a strike; third, that if the strike is called, they must actively participate and stick it out till the very end. To take it for granted that workers will automatically respond to a strike call is a mistake. It is not enough to call a membership meeting and decide by a majority vote on strike action. In most unions attendance at membership meetings is entirely unsatisfactory. Local unions with a membership of several thousand have an average attendance of only several hundred. This means that a majority, or at least a substantial minority, of the workers soon to be involved in a strike struggle remain passive. This is a danger spot and may have a bearing on the strike and its outcome.

Clearly, the union and its leaders must take special steps to reach the passive section of the membership before the strike breaks out. This can be accomplished through the union newspaper and through special bulletins and letters explaining the issues involved. In this connection the shop or department steward, the organizer, or the business agent must be assigned to reach the passive members either in the shops or at home.

Next in importance is to reach the worker’s family. A strike upsets the entire normal life of a family. It not only cuts off the income, but it brings tension and anxiety. At the end of the week, Mrs. Striker gets no pay envelope. She cannot pay the bills and do other things that she normally does. She is also subjected to an anti-strike barrage in the local newspaper. And she is worried that something may happen to her husband while on strike duty.

Entirely too often strike leaders neglect the striker’s family while the employer, on the other hand, often recognizes the value of concentrating on Mrs. Striker. As a part of strike preparations the following is the least the union can do:

1. Ask the union members to arrange a “family conference” and explain to the rest of the family why a strike is necessary. Urge patience on the wife and children and make them proud of the fact that Dad is fighting for their rights.

2. Address a special letter to the wives explaining why a strike is unavoidable and urging their support.

3. Call a special meeting of the wives and children and have a union leader and some of the more union-conscious wives, who understand the aims and purposes of the strike, address them.

4. Organize a special committee to visit the families that are confused about the issues involved in the strike.

Going to the People

The importance of winning the support of the strikers’ families can hardly be overestimated, but the general public must not be neglected either. Every effort should be made to win public opinion to the side of the strikers. The average American genuinely believes in fair play and sportsmanship, yet the average American is at the same time very gullible. Employers and their highly skilled public relations agencies have often succeeded in misleading entire communities about the rights and wrongs of a strike battle.

To counteract employer propaganda and win public opinion to its side, the union must first of all recognize that the game is not played fairly, that bribery, subterfuge, corruption and secret deals are all weapons employed against labor.

In the late thirties when the CIO and AFL unions were engaged in great organizing campaigns, the employers perfected a whole series of devices to mislead the workers as well as public opinion in general. A leading role in this anti-labor campaign was played by the MacDonald-Cook Co. of South Bend, Indiana. This public relations crew, hired by steel and other powerful corporations to plan the campaign to mislead the public, hit on a shrewd idea which they termed the “Harmony Campaign.” In each industrial community where the unions were engaged in organizing campaigns the “Harmony Campaign” was instituted. It consisted of 13 full-page cleverly worded advertisements prepared by the MacDonald-Cook Co. and printed at regular intervals in the local newspapers. These ads were so written as to first create the impression of impartiality and even a sympathetic attitude toward the employees and then gradually worked up to an attack against unions.

The game would have been fair had these ads appeared in the name of the steel or other corporations which helped to formulate them and paid for them, or had they appeared in the name of the public relations firm. Instead, the names of prominent citizens of the community were attached to them, the signers often not knowing that the ads were company inspired, company subsidized, and company edited. Nor did they know that these same ads appeared in other cities with another set of local signatures.

This example of unfair play has been elaborated here so as to bring home to the union preparing for a strike that it must have no illusions about the impartiality of most newspapers. Too often local newspapers and radio stations in industrial centers work hand in glove with the employers.

To win public opinion to the side of labor the union must work out a detailed plan of action. The following should be done:

1. Union leaders should confer with editors of local newspapers, present the union’s point of view, and ask that the paper avoid displaying a hostile attitude toward the thousands of citizens who may be forced to go on strike. Should the paper, while claiming to be neutral, depart from a neutral position, the union should lose no time in exposing the hypocrisy.

2. Where the union knows that little can be expected from the local newspaper, the union must be prepared to present its position in paid advertisements.

3. In preparation for the strike, the union must purchase radio time. The broadcasts must explain that the union has tried to prevent a strike and that in the event a strike occurs the responsibility will be the company’s. The broadcasts must also emphasize the mutual benefits to the strikers and the community if the union’s demands are met by the employers. Such broadcasts must be of a popular nature.

4. In the event that space in the newspapers or radio time is not available, the union must print a message to the community. Such a message should be printed as a leaflet and be distributed by the thousands throughout the town or city.

5. A committee of distinguished veterans should be appointed to present labor’s case to the leaders of the local veterans’ organizations and to urge their support.

6. Similar committees should meet with the Mayor, City Councilman, church leaders, civic organization leaders, heads of political parties, and other influential personalities in the community.

All this must be done as part of the strike preparations. The problem of molding public opinion in support of the strike must not be left until after the strike begins.

In addition to the preparatory tasks outlined above, the union must not neglect a number of others. If there are CIO and AFL locals in the plant or industry, every effort should be made to bring about united action. Dramatic actions that capture the imagination are another pre-strike essential; great mass meetings, parades and radio programs help to develop a strike spirit. Nor can the practical organizational tasks be left to the eleventh hour. Picketing, publicity, finances, legal aid and a multitude of other things must be planned in advance.

Involving the Rank and File

The difference between an army and a mob is that an army is a well organized and disciplined body governed by rules and regulations and led by its own chain of command. No army of strikers can possibly achieve such a high degree of organization. However, if a strike is not to assume the character of a formless mob, it must have its own form of organization and a chain of command corresponding to the needs of the particular strike. This we shall refer to as strike machinery.

The strike organization must have a wide democratic base; that is, a large section of strikers must be involved in the various phases of activity. A strike needs active participants, not observers. Union officers or strike leaders who do not understand, or who minimize, the need for active participation of the workers involved in the strike may well blame themselves should a section of the strikers fall prey to company propaganda and join a back-to-work movement or some other company sponsored move.

Union officers must at all times remember that a strike temporarily transforms the mode of life of those involved. Their daily routine changes suddenly. A striker has a lot of free time. From a worker who had to produce every minute of the day, he suddenly discovers he has many free hours and often nothing to do but spend time in a nearby bar, movie or union hall. The strike machinery must be so planned as to utilize those free hours for the good of the strike.

There is a yet more important angle to this problem. While workers on strike are usually idle, management is not. From the corporation President to the department foreman management is busily engaged in anti-strike activities. One of these is to carefully observe the degree of participation of the rank and file. When management comes to the conclusion that the workers are passive, show lack of interest, and merely “sweat it out,” it is greatly encouraged to initiate back-to-work movements and other steps based on the notion that the workers are not solidly behind the union. By the same token, active participation on the part of the strikers has just the opposite effect on management. When the employer sees his workers taking an active part in the strike and that among them are the key people in each department, without whom the plant cannot run, he becomes aware of the strength of the strike. Also, when the workers actively participate in the strike and management observes it, the strikers commit themselves to the union and realize that from then on their future depends almost entirely on the victorious outcome of the battle.

Aside from these considerations, active participation of the workers is essential because a strike is an operative action and requires lots of manpower to handle the thousand and one problems arising daily. Not to have such manpower, or to be unable to utilize it, can have disastrous consequences.

Because in recent years scabbing has become very unpopular some strike leaders have concluded that there is no need for active rank and file participation. In fact, strikers are often told to stay home. Some unions have even adopted the policy of calling off local membership meetings during the strike. Such passivity is distinctly detrimental to the strike. Troops in a wartime army are in constant training till the very moment they are declared in “tactical position.” The same should be true of strikers. An army of strikers that is dispersed, inactive, deployed, cannot possibly react to unforeseen emergencies and sudden turns of events. Dispersion weakens morale and destroys the spirit of solidarity so vitally necessary in time of strike.

Organizing the Strike Leadership

The strike machinery itself depends on the scope of the strike – whether it is industry-wide, regional or local. Furthermore, strike machinery must correspond to the needs and peculiarities of each industry. A miners’ strike is limited to the various mining communities. A national railroad strike spreads all over the country. A maritime strike could spread over many parts of the world. Clearly, strike machinery in these three industries will, of necessity, vary. Yet there are certain guiding principles applicable to most strike conditions, particularly as they apply to lower levels, i.e., the strike in each community.

If the strike is on an industry-wide basis, or against a company with plants in several States, the top leadership of the union must assume the role of high command. It is provided in a large number of union constitutions that such strikes must be sanctioned by the national officers or the general executive board. Often the international officers come forward as leaders of such strikes. It is generally good policy when an industry-wide strike is contemplated that a number of top leaders be assigned to key spots to assist the regional or district leadership of the union.

This alone, however, is insufficient. Strike leadership should be much broader than the regular union leadership; for the greater the participation of the rank and file, the stronger the strike. In recent years this has been better understood, and the principle has been applied, although still inadequately. For example, the auto workers, the electrical and radio workers, the steel workers and the coal miners set up industry-wide or company-wide negotiating committees, or policy committees, or scale committees consisting of representatives from each local union. However, in a number of unions such committees are a mere formality, the real negotiating and policy making remaining in the hands of a few top officers. This is unfortunate. Such committees deserve real recognition and should be given more authority. The committeemen, coming as they do from various sections of the industry, are in closest contact with the workers and are fully aware of the needs, desires and sentiments of the rank and file. Trade union and strike leaders who have experienced genuine union democracy know that the rank and file have a great deal to teach them. It has happened many times during tense negotiations that rank and file leaders, fresh from the mills and factories, have made more of an impression on the employer representatives than the full-time union officers.

The participation of the rank and file in the strike leadership is of tremendous value from another point of view. It often happens during strikes that anti-labor newspapers and radio commentators concentrate their attacks against the top leaders of a strike. They do this not only to make the public antagonistic toward the leaders but also to weaken their prestige within the ranks of the strikers. The voice of a rank and file leader in support of the union and its policies has often proved to be the best way of counteracting the anti-strike propaganda.

Utmost care must be taken that no company agent penetrates into a high position of strike leadership. This could be as damaging to a strike as an enemy spy in the ranks of an army high command in time of war.

For all these reasons it is highly desirable that as part of the strike preparations there be set up an authoritative leading strike committee that will include a representative group of rank and file workers. No strike committee, of course, could be considered genuinely representative unless it included adequate representation of Negro workers on strike.

Setting Up Essential Strike Committees

What strike machinery is needed in the various strike-bound communities? There has to be, of course, a local strike committee to take charge of the strike. This will be the most authoritative committee of all. Next in importance is a well functioning picketing committee.

The problem of picketing is so important that it will be dealt with at length in a separate chapter. Here it will be sufficient to say that a picket line can be compared to that regiment in an army which occupies a line in the most forward area of a front. For such troops the army selects its best trained line officers. Similarly, the men in charge of the picket line must be the ablest, most devoted and most courageous strikers. In each union there are veterans. Among them there are distinguished commissioned and non-commissioned officers who have learned to handle men in difficult times. If these strikers have a basic union loyalty, they will constitute a base for a fine picket committee.

Of great importance in any strike is a well functioning publicity committee. An able publicity committee, alert enough to put out strike bulletins, press releases, letters to editors, effective paid advertisements, special handbills to the strikers and the public, and good radio scripts can go a long way in building a high morale among the strikers and cultivating public sympathy. In most cases the anti- union prejudices of the local newspaper and the radio station are one of the greatest advantages an employer has. Such newspapers and radio stations can have a very demoralizing effect on the strikers and can alienate public support. It is wrong for strike leadership to reconcile itself to such an unfavorable position. Experience has shown that it is possible to reverse or at least neutralize such a condition. In recent years many unions have established their own publicity departments with highly trained newspaper people in charge. But this is generally the case only at the higher levels of union organization and such publicity departments take the place of local publicity committees. The two should supplement each other.

Of equal importance is a strike relief committee. The tasks and duties of this committee will again vary with the strike. Old established unions with substantial treasuries pay regular strike benefits that cover the most urgent needs of strikers and their families. But such unions are few in number. In most cases relief for strikers has to be obtained through the collection of money, food, clothing, and the establishment of regular canteens and kitchens. This is a vital task but also a tremendous undertaking. Often committees of strikers must be sent to nearby farming communities to collect food. Other strikers must visit local unions to solicit funds, and still others must visit the local merchants. Another very important phase of a relief committee’s responsibility is to assist strikers in taking advantage of local relief agencies, obtaining unemployment insurance, stopping evictions, processing relief and other applications at strike headquarters, etc.

Since World War II something new has been added to strike machinery – a veterans’ committee. In a great many ways such a committee can be of tremendous value to the strike. To begin with, if the assumption that there are many similarities between military and strike strategy is correct, then obviously strikers with a rudimentary knowledge of military strategy can play an important role in any strike. Because of their training and experience veterans can become the spark plugs on the picket line, maintaining and giving examples of discipline. They can also lead the defense of strikers in time of attack from company-sponsored sources. Striking veterans can also become the bridge between the union and local veterans’ organizations, whose leadership may be hostile to the strike. Striking veterans’ contingents, under the leadership of an able veterans’ committee, can become the most important detachments of the strike.

“Citizens’ Committees,” whether in support of or against a strike, do not spring up spontaneously. Experience, particularly in industrial centers, indicates that an actively sympathetic Citizens’ Committee can be called into being by the strikers; for there are strong bonds between the mill hand and the merchant on Main Street. A steel town like Youngstown, an auto town like Flint, or a textile center like New Bedford depends almost entirely, economically and politically, on the workers living in those communities. The greater the buying power of these workers, the more prosperous the community. A successful termination of a strike is thus in the interests of the entire community. The merchants, the professionals, the clergy and leaders of civic organizations need to be awakened to this undeniable fact. A Citizens’ Committee sponsored or stimulated by the union becomes an important part of strike machinery.

A good entertainment committee, whose duty is to take care of some of the social needs of the strikers, can go a long way in maintaining high morale and can lend life to a strike. Especially is this true where a large number of the strikers are young. Free dances, free movies, sports activities, and lectures on interesting topics cement friendships among the strikers and foster solidarity. The professional entertainment world is very well organized. Many a Hollywood and Broadway star carries a union book, and is sympathetic to groups of workers on strike. Some of these prominent personalities could be induced to visit strike centers, and their visits would become important events in the life of the strike. An entertainment committee could even venture to organize amateur dramatic groups; plenty of talent can be found in the ranks of the strikers. An entertainment or social committee that is truly enterprising can become as essential a part of the strike machinery as a relief committee.

Among the really important committees often neglected by strike leaders is an investigating committee. This committee could be compared to the intelligence unit of an army. In time of strike wild rumors spread; company “missionaries” spread defeatism; strangers visit picket lines and urge violence; individual strikers are suspected of being in contact with management; somebody is sure scabs are arriving. All this has to be investigated. Or the picket committee reports that a number of strikers have absented themselves over a period of time. Where are those pickets, what are they doing? All the time the company is making moves, some real, others as a decoy. Such developments must be looked into carefully; for every bit of information has meaning for those in charge of the strike. It is, of course, not advisable to make public who the members of the investigating committee are. Their work would be hampered and the quality of what they did greatly reduced.

The committees outlined above are the principal parts of strike machinery. But other essential committees are needed. A women’s committee to develop activities and sustain high morale among the wives of strikers by involving the women in canteen work, picket duty and collection of food can be very effective. Then strike leaders might consider setting up a special trial board to try those who violate strike discipline, as was done during the West Coast maritime strike with good results. A city-wide trade union committee in support of the strike can also become a valuable part of strike machinery.

An Example of Strike Efficiency

The victorious 1936 maritime strike in San Francisco, led by Harry Bridges, offers a fine example of efficient strike machinery. While the strike was still on, the Joint Marine Strike Committee drew up an outline of the organizational machinery in San Francisco in order to give strike leaders in other ports a picture of how the strike was being handled. A great deal can be learned about strike machinery from the excerpt quoted below:

[[The organization which has complete charge of the strike is the San Francisco Bay Area District Council No. 2 of the Maritime Federation, acting as the San Francisco Joint Marine Strike Committee. Each organization is permitted to seat five representatives on the Strike Committee, an increase of two delegates in the representation provided for in the District Council Constitution.[322]

The function of the Joint Strike Committee is to lay down the local policy for the conduct of the strike and supervise the work of the various top committees. The most important committees which are under the direction of the Strike Committee, are:

(1) Central Relief Committee

(2) Central Defense Committee

(3) Central Picketing Committee

(4) Joint Publicity Committee

(5) Ways and Means Committee

(6) Maritime Federation Patrol

The Central Relief Committee: Is composed of three delegates from each organization. Approximately 70 members attend the meetings. This committee has its own chairman, secretary, board of trustees, purchasing agent and bookkeeper. Two representatives are seated on the Joint Strike Committee. The relief committee has established a kitchen at 84 Embarcadero, with a seating capacity of approximately 350. Approximately 15,000 meals a day are now being served by the kitchen. In addition, the relief committee and the Ladies Auxiliary No. 3 are caring for approximately 100 strikers’ families. Facilities are also provided for housing single men.

Serving and preparing and maintenance of the relief kitchen are in charge of the Marine Cooks and Stewards – which is open approximately 24 hours a day and employs about 200 men.

The Central Defense Committee consists of two men from each organization. This committee maintains an office which is open 24 hours a day and has contacts with lawyers and bail bond brokers and can furnish an attorney and bail broker for any striker who may be arrested, on a moment’s notice. This committee has prepared and printed 25,000 instruction cards and distributed them to pickets. The Defense Committee also has two delegates seated on the Joint Strike Committee.

The Central Picketing Committee, which is composed of five representatives of the Joint Strike Committee, has complete authority to issue passes which will permit individuals or material to go through picket lines. This is one of the busiest and most important committees. Its functions include passes to release perishable goods in cold storage warehouses, to permit passengers’ baggage and mail and so forth to be loaded and discharged from foreign ships and to release orders for city, county, state or government institutions and vessels. Organizations and pickets are instructed to recognize only this pass. This system centralizes all passes and permits a close check to be kept on who is going through picket lines. Passes are printed in several colors and every few days the committee cancels all outstanding passes and requires holders to obtain new ones.

The Joint Publicity Committee consists of one member from each organization. Two delegates from this committee are seated on the Joint Strike Committee. This committee has charge of arranging mass meetings, sending speakers to outside organizations, preparing leaflets and pamphlets and writing press releases to newspapers, etc.

The Ways and Means Committee consists of five delegates from the Joint Strike Committee. The duties of this group are to coordinate the activities of all sub-committees and to keep a careful check as to the money collected and handled by the Joint Strike Committee.

All committees are required to submit vouchers in duplicate for all expenditures made. These vouchers must be approved by the Ways and Means Committee before checks are issue in payment. The Ways and Means Committee also pro-rates the cost of the activities of the various committees among the affiliated organizations, keeps the books of the council, plans ways and means of financing the various enterprises, keeps a close check on all debts outstanding and money collections and assists the secretary in transacting the business of the Joint Strike Committee.

Maritime Federation Patrol: The Maritime Federation Patrol consists of 64 men. Approximately 6 from each major striking organization. This patrol is divided into four groups of sixteen men each. There are two captains each in charge of two watches and two sergeants on each watch. The patrol works under the direction of the Secretary of the Joint Strike Committee. Members of the Patrol wear a blue armband which bears the letters M.F.P. in white. The duties of the patrol are to keep drunks off the waterfront, to prevent disturbances and report instances of interest to the unions. Several members of the group act as investigators to check up on information relative to the recruiting of scabs, etc. The Patrol has been very successful. There are more than 15,000 men registered for picket duty in San Francisco, since the strike began two weeks ago, and has experienced no disturbance of any kind on the picket line.

A strike leader reading this chapter might say: “These are all very good ideas, but we don’t have the people to do it with.” This is a wrong approach. Just as in military battles men quiet, modest and untried come forward and become heroes, so workers in time of strike come forward and become leaders. In each local union, in each plant, are hundreds of devoted and intelligent union men and women. They are the shop stewards, board members and numerous other active workers. They, in turn, have hundreds of friends working alongside them. Many of these workers have a great deal of native ability, and a wise strike leader knows how to bring this to the surface and make it operate for the good of the union. All that is needed to turn such workers into leaders is confidence in them, plus training, direction, guidance and strict super- vision.

Solid strike machinery is possible for every union. But it cannot be built in a day or a week or a month. Strike leaders who want to create an effective organization cannot wait until the strike is actually on. Nor, on the other hand, can they perfect the strike machinery before the strike begins. What is needed is a plan, a skeleton organization to build on as the strike goes along.

A strike without solid strike machinery, without a chain of command, without distribution of work and responsibility is exposed to grave dangers that might be fatal; whereas a well-organized and democratically led strike can withstand blows and setbacks and still emerge victorious.

Does a Depression Rule Out Strikes?

It has already been mentioned that the practice of scabbing has been very much discredited in recent years. While this is generally true, strike leaders would be making a serious mistake if they drew the conclusion that under no circumstances can scabbing again become a serious threat to strikes. The past decade is not a criterion. It should be remembered that there is a close relation between scabbing and unemployment and that neither before, during, nor after World War II was there mass unemployment in this country. Such favorable economic circumstances cannot last forever; cyclical crises, depressions and “recessions” are inherent in our economic system. Even as this is being written, unemployment continues to rise, and the fear of its spread has already affected labor’s tactics, particularly as they relate to strikes.

Should labor in time of depression shelve its grievances or strike to obtain its objectives? Which is the correct strategy?

It has been long held by many in the labor movement that during periods of depression unions must avoid strikes under all circumstances, the chief reason being the great army of unemployed and the consequent danger of scabbing. Now there may have been some justification for such a theory in the past when the percentage of organized workers was altogether insignificant and in our basic and mass production industries practically nonexistent. With no contractual relations and with no floor on base rates, the unemployed, under pressure of economic misery, were forced to compete against established higher rates of pay and during strikes often replaced those who were on the picket lines. But at present, because of the strength and prestige of organized labor, the problem of strikes in relation to depressions and unemployment can be viewed in an entirely new manner.

Unions and their leaders must discard old concepts that add up to the theory that during periods of unemployment it is impossible to carry through effective strike movements. Such a policy spells defeat without struggle. It invites the employers to take the offensive in the form of wage cuts, and the very existence of the unions is endangered. The truth is that precisely during difficult economic periods labor’s militancy and determination must reach their highest peak. In time of battle when an army is confronted with possible reverses, its commanders do not think in terms of an all-out retreat but rather how to develop a counteroffensive. Organized labor can develop a policy and a line of action that will reduce the dangers of unemployment to a minimum. It is within the power of labor to move forward in full-scale economic and legislative offensives against depressions and unemployment.

Tackling the Unemployment Problem

Working out ways and means to deal effectively with unemployment is part of strike preparation. Any leader who adopts an attitude that a union deals only with problems of workers who are employed is short-sighted. His attitude is bound to damage both the employed and the unemployed in the industry. Should the thousands or tens of thousands of unemployed in a given industry develop a feeling that their union is not concerned with their plight and does not put up a fight for their immediate needs, they will look upon the union as a “fair weather friend” and may turn against organized labor.

Instead of playing on the fear of strikebreaking by the unemployed, instead of using this as an excuse for making basic and costly concessions to employers, union leaders would serve their union best by devoting time, energy, and resources to working out a detailed plan that will meet the problem of unemployment in the industry or community. The following could constitute a basis for such a program:

1. Individual unions and organized labor as a whole should initiate a movement for the 30 hour week. With the rapid growth of our capacity to produce, the battle for a shorter work week assumes paramount importance. By labor’s taking the lead on this issue, the unemployed will recognize that their own future is bound up with that of organized labor.

2. In shaping up demands for a possible strike, union leaders must include demands the winning of which will result in immediate benefits for the unemployed. In addition to a shorter work week, there should be a demand for a strong clause in the contract that will provide for the application of strict seniority to layoffs and rehiring. A demand for severance pay for all laid-off workers should also be included.

3. The unions should also take the lead in fighting for increased unemployment insurance and other benefits to be provided by the State and federal governments.

4. Labor should initiate broad public works programs such as housing, highways, hospitals, schools, and similar projects that would absorb thousands of unemployed, to be paid at prevailing union rates. Government-financed public works projects were the most popular single piece of legislation sponsored by the early New Deal.

5. Each union must set up its own unemployment department to help the unemployed members to speedily obtain unemployment insurance. The union should give the unemployed legal assistance when they are faced with evictions. When the unemployed are confronted with emergencies, the union should contact welfare agencies and render other assistance, standing by the unemployed as a friend in need.

6. International, as well as local, unions should take steps to eliminate a condition where members, because they are unemployed, lose certain union rights or benefits. A system of special reduced dues rates for unemployed would go a long way toward solving this question.

7. The union should establish the closest relationship with unemployed organizations in the community, giving them all-out assistance in their daily struggles to alleviate their plight.

8. Last, but not least, every union should face courageously and in a progressive manner the problems of the unemployed Negro workers and make them problems of the union as a whole. Since the war ended, unemployment has hit the Negro workers hardest. Because they were among the last hired, the Negroes are the first fired. Whereas seniority is to the white worker a source of security, to the Negro worker it is often the opposite. Often the “seniority” of the white worker is used as a pretext and justification for not putting up a struggle for the rights of Negro workers to remain in industry. The un- employed Negro workers in the industry and community should feel that they have a stake in a winning strike. This means that the union leaders and the white workers must be prepared to make tangible concessions and to offer the Negro workers not just “sympathy” but jobs, promotions to better jobs, and other guarantees in return for all-out support to a strike. It should no longer be one-way traffic.

Achieving United Ranks

No strike strategy is really sound unless its foundation is united and solid ranks. There is no reference here to artificial unity; the unity meant here is a conscious and well-cemented unity that will keep the ranks together come hell or high water. It is a unity based upon the highest interests of the workers. To achieve such unity and solidarity, sincere efforts must be made in several directions.

First and foremost, a high degree of conscious unity must be developed between Negro and white workers. Such unity can never be realized while many trade union leaders are themselves proponents of the vicious anti-labor Jim Crow system. No union has a right to expect that Negro workers will join in an all-out battle when that same union, in one form or another, is guilty of discrimination.

In the past, conservative trade union leaders have attempted to justify their own prejudices on the grounds that the Negro workers are “unorganizable,” that they are “scab-minded,” and that their leaders are “anti-union.” Nothing demonstrated more clearly how false these “theories” are than the first and most progressive decade of the CIO. At its very first convention, the CIO laid the foundation for unity of Negro and white workers. In a special resolution it declared that the CIO pledged itself “to uncompromising opposition to any form of discrimination, whether political or economic, based upon race, color, creed or nationality.” The progressive forces within the CIO gave such pronouncements real content and meaning during the period of the great organizing campaigns.

Not only the Negro workers, but the Negro people as a whole and their great organizations enthusiastically responded to the clarion call for organization. The steel, automobile and other basic and mass production industries today would not be as solidly organized without the great contributions of the Negro workers. In recent major strike struggles in the steel, automobile, and packing house industries, the Negro workers came forward as being among the best strikers, making the greatest sacrifice, even though many of their basic economic problems have not been resolved by these and other unions.

It is childish to think that real Negro and white unity can be achieved on the eve of a strike. To the degree that a union in its daily struggles champions the Negro workers, fighting for their rights to be promoted to better jobs, not to be among the first fired, to be given adequate representation on all levels of leadership, to be able to play a leading role in the political struggles for Negro rights, to that degree will genuine Negro and white unity exist in time of strike.

The American labor movement is divided between AFL and CIO and between right and left. This cannot but affect strike movements. Many examples could be cited from the recent past to show the harm these divisions have done. There are labor leaders who have stooped so low as to use some provisions of the hated Taft-Hartley law against workers and unions conducting strikes.

Notwithstanding these sharp differences, there is a deep-rooted solidarity within the ranks of labor. Often this solidarity is so strong that it sweeps aside edicts from the top, or forces union leaders to yield to the mood of the membership. The general strikes that have occurred in the past represented the highest expression of labor unity and solidarity in time of a major battle.

This aspect of unity will be dealt with in a later chapter. Here we are concerned with unity within the ranks of the workers about to strike: trade union democracy, the autonomous rights of internationals and such rights of local unions within internationals, are the basic prerequisites for unity within the ranks in time of strike. Put in another way, this means that in unions where sharp differences exist genuine efforts must be made to reach unity on the basis of a united front of all forces for the purpose of winning the strike. To guarantee that such a unity program will be carried out, each group and tendency must get representation on all the leading bodies that determine the course and conduct of the strike.

It has been emphasized that such unity must be based on a common objective – winning the strike. Unity “at all cost” could be disastrous. In an industry where the union is controlled by extreme reactionary and corrupt leaders such unity would, in practice, mean surrender to the employers. The East Coast AFL longshoremen were able to obtain partial victories not on the basis of unity with the Joe Ryan machine, but on the basis of repudiating him and his devious deals with the employers and continuing the struggle until the employers were forced to make substantial concessions. Unity with Joe Ryan or his type of labor leader would only weaken a strike instead of strengthening it.

We have also stressed the need of unity on the basis of a full participation of the rank and file in a strike. Very often honest and even progressive-minded trade union leaders do not grasp the importance of this principle. The 1949 CIO brewers’ strike in New York is a case in point. After several weeks on strike the leaders made a settlement with the employers. When the proposition was placed before the workers for ratification, they overwhelmingly voted against it. How could it come to pass that a leadership was repudiated by the membership? There can be only one answer: the leadership was isolated from the moods and sentiments of the workers. The collapse of the 1949 taxi strike is an even worse example of such a gap between leaders and rank and file. This could never have happened if the rank and file had played a leading role. Nor can there be real unity among the workers without a proper appreciation of the role of women in industry. In many organized fields such as radio, communications, electrical industry, office workers, and in service industries, women play a very decisive role. Hence, the need to conduct educational work against “male superiority.” In the above, as well as in many other industries, no strike can be successful without the active participation of women.

Labor leaders with their hearts and minds set on winning a strike will themselves take the initiative in bringing about real unity, or will, at least, readily respond to genuine offers of unity for the common objective – a victorious strike.

Chapter 6: On the Line

Well Begun – Half Done

Military leaders devote a great deal of time and energy to planning the start of a battle. When zero hour approaches, the plan is concrete in every respect. Nothing of importance must go wrong; nothing must be overlooked. Similarly strike leaders must have all their preparations ready for S-Day – for the day and the hour when the strike is to break.

A million and one details must be attended to that will result in good organization on S-Day. Among them are: selection and briefing of picket captains; printing of picket signs, picket cards, identifications; renting strike headquarters and meeting halls; securing sufficient cars and motorcycles; organization of flying squads; establishment of an efficient communication system; setting up of a messenger corps; arranging for bodyguards and protection of union offices; arranging for canteens and first aid stations. Each of these things requires people with administrative ability and sufficiently reliable to be entrusted with the performance of such duties. In addition, the various committees mentioned in the previous chapter must get into action. The strike leader must not let himself be overwhelmed with all these tasks. He must have deep confidence in the men in battle and their ability to come forward in time of stress and strain.

A strike that begins in a smooth and effective manner offers the union a great many advantages which have a bearing on the course of the battle. It certainly makes a lot of difference whether the workers respond one hundred per cent to a strike call. Surely, then, it is important to discuss and determine in advance the exact hour for the walkout It is equally important to consider the steps the employer may take on S-Day and what the union can possibly do to counter them. By all means the union must have a well thought out and detailed plan for S-Day. Such a plan must strive to achieve two objectives: first, that the walkout shall culminate in an effective first blow; second, that maximum organization be achieved with a minimum of confusion.

Timing: The Value of Surprise

In working on such a plan a strike leader should explore the possibilities of using the element of surprise. Although an approaching strike is never a complete surprise to the employer, yet keeping the exact day and hour a secret gives the workers certain distinct advantages. The shock of the suddenness of the strike, even though generally expected, often demoralizes the company personnel, and by the time they rally most of the workers are already outside the gates.

The element of surprise is not of decisive importance in industries where workers have participated in many strikes, have been unionized over a long period of time, and consequently have a deep-rooted union consciousness. The coal miners are a good example. By now the miners have established a basic credo: “no contract, no work.” However, in industries or individual plants where the workers are about to strike for their first contract, or where they are, relatively speaking, newly organized, like the CIO unions, the element of surprise can play an important role. Particularly in a situation where a company is making serious efforts to split the workers on a strike issue, and where the union is aware of a weak and wavering element, a surprise tactic can be of inestimable value.

During the 1937 steel strike in Youngstown, the actual walkout was planned in accordance with this principle. At the appointed hour, the workers from the more strongly organized departments, instead of going directly to the gates, marched through some weaker departments just to give encouragement and impetus to the weak and the wavering.

The element of surprise can also be effective in the extension of a strike. The 1937 General Motors sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, offers a good example of this. The Chevrolet plant No. 4 is the most strategic plant of the company. To involve the workers of this plant in the strike was very decisive. The company was well prepared with guards and guns to prevent a sit-down in Plant No. 4. The leadership of the strike spread word and made all the outward appearance of preparing a sit-down in Plant No. 9. While the armed guards and other company forces rushed to Plant No. 9, the union, with a specially prepared force, carried through the sit-down in Plant No. 4. “The main purpose of this elaborate procedure was to eliminate any chance that details of the new strike plan would get to the company. The careful timing of the strike, which was to start ten minutes earlier at Chevy 9 than at the other two plants, was the secret substance of the whole design to draw off the armed guards at Chevy 4 and thus lighten the task of the union forces at this crucial point. But everything depended on keeping the company in ignorance.” (Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few.)

The element of surprise also works in favor of the union when there is a possibility that part of the company strategy is to recruit scabs. This is particularly true in a service industry. In the 1946 Western Union strike in New York the union made a public announcement of the day and hour of the strike – 11 A.M. January 8^th. Soon after this was made public the union “learned that the company intended to import large numbers of strikebreakers during that morning, and was hiring provocateurs through private detective agencies, whose job it would be to create chaos when the workers attempted to leave the building.” To nullify the Company’s efforts to prevent an effective walkout, the Strategy Committee decided to advance the hour to 7 A.M. “That evening a limited number of key workers were called in from the main centers and in- structed to appear at the office at 6 A.M., January 8. At 6 A.M. the committee met and full plans were finalized for closing down the branch offices .... The plans of the union went into effect with clockwork precision. Within an hour a mass picket line, thousands strong, completely ringed 60 Hudson Street.”

The Power of a Perfect Walkout

But even without the element of surprise a walkout is completely effective if the strike call is answered 100 percent. The following examples will show how dramatic a shutdown can be when everyone answers the call.

On the afternoon of May 26, 1937, the leaders of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee met in Youngstown, Ohio, and came to the conclusion that “Little Steel,” under the leadership of Tom Girdler, would not sign a contract without a strike. The conference ended late that afternoon and the strike began at 11:00 P.M. By early morning the Youngstown Vindicator in a strike Extra described the walkout: “The steel mill glow over the busy Mahoning Valley flickered last night and finally died entirely early today. The busy wheels of giant mills of the independent steel industry ground to a complete stop as a strike called by CIO leaders went into full effect at 11:00 P.M. Wednesday.” In the same issue, the paper carried a large picture of a dead open hearth plant with this description : “Yesterday, black smoke, yellow smoke, brown smoke, and white smoke was pouring up from the stacks of Youngstown’s Sheet & Tube’s open hearth plants as molten iron was boiled through various stages to become steel. Today, 12 hours after the S. W. O. C. strike order was issued, Vindicator photographer Lloyd Jones found the air clear, the stacks cold, and hardly a man in sight at the open hearths.” No wonder the executives of the steel plants in Youngstown on the same day announced: “We are not going to attempt operations.”

Two weeks earlier, 27,000 Jones and Loughlin steel workers marched out on strike for union recognition. In both plants – in Pittsburgh and Aliquippa – the walkout was just as effective. Zero hour was 11:00 P.M., but shortly after 10:00 P.M. thousands of workers and their families were already converging upon the mill gates to witness a major steel strike, the first since 1919. At 11:00 P.M. the night shift came out. Smiling and proud men were met with cheers by the gathering crowds of day workers and their families as the stream of workers poured out of the mill on the South Side of Pittsburgh. As the night wore on, the glare of the mill died out, the plant was shut down tighter than a drum. In Aliquippa the whole town turned out. Union organizer Smiley Chatek addressed the crowd from an open window of a friendly photographer’s studio. He spoke to the whole town. Next morning Philip Murray proudly told newsmen: “It’s a perfect shutdown.”

The 1937 walkouts in Youngstown, Campbell, Aliquippa, Pittsburgh, and other steel centers are good examples of an effective first blow on S-Day. To utilize further this initial victory the leaders of the strike announced to the press the results of the walkout with the comment that “Morale of our people could not be improved upon.” The press release was worded as follows:

UNION LISTS OF STRIKERS

IN MILLS OF 5 STATES

Youngstown, Ohio, May 28. The strikes in the plants of Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet & Tube and Inland are practically 100 per cent solid, with a grand total of 77,240 workers out of 77,900 on strike, the S. W. O. C. declared late today.

“For reasons of strategy,” the S. W. O. C. statement said, “no strike has yet been called at the Southern plants of Republic Steel, where 2,800 are employed. Sentiment among the men there, however, is excellent.”

The S. W. O. C. strike figures follow:

INLAND

Inland Steel Company, Chicago Heights, Illinois, 1,000 employees – all out.

Indiana Harbor, Illinois – 10,500 employees – all out.

Total – 11,500 employees – 11,500 out.

YOUNGSTOWN

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, Brier Hill, Youngstown, Ohio-2,000 employees – all out.

Campbell Plant, Youngstown, Ohio – 12,000 employees – all out.

South Chicago, Illinois – 1,000 employees all out.

Indiana Harbor, Illinois – 8,000 employees – all out.

Total-23,000 employees-23,000 all out.

REPUBLIC

Republic Steel Corporation the strike has been called at the following plants:

Corrigan-McKinney, Cleveland – 3,500 – all out.

Steel & Tube, Cleveland – 500 employees – all out.

Cleveland Plant, Cleveland – 3,600 employees – all out.

Truscon Steel – 800 employees – all out.

Massillon, Ohio – 4,000 employees – all out.

(Republic Steel and Union Drawn Steel) Youngstown, Ohio – 6,000 employees – all out.

South Chicago, Illinois – 3,000 employees – 2,800 out.

Canton Tin Plate, Canton, Ohio – 1,500 employees – all out.

Berger Plant, Canton, Ohio – 1,200 employees – all out.

Stark Sheet Mill, Canton, Ohio – 3,500 employees – all out.

Canton Steel, Canton, Ohio – 3,500 employees – all out.

Warren Plant, 6,500–6,400 out, no production.

Upson Nut, Cleveland, Ohio – 900 employees – all out.

Donner Plant, Buffalo, N.Y. – 2,800 employees – 80 per cent out.

Beaver Falls, Pa. – 350 employees – all out.

Cumberland, Maryland – 400 employees – all out.

Dillworth-Porter, Pittsburgh, Pa. – 300 employees – all out.

Monroe, Mich. – 1,800 employees – all out.

Niles, Ohio – 1,000 employees – all out.

Total employees – 43,400; number out, 42,740.

Thus, out of a total of 77,900–77,240 are out on strike. Morale of our people could not be improved upon. The men are determined that the strike shall be continued until these corporations execute a contract with the S.W.O.C.

This statement generated yet more enthusiasm, for Republic steel workers in Youngstown were anxious to learn if Republic steel workers in other towns had joined the strike, and vice versa. Whatever other weaknesses existed in the “Little Steel” strike, they certainly did not stem from any major defects on S-Day.

How to Handle Backward Workers

It is not always possible to score a perfect walkout on the first day of a strike. This does not necessarily mean a fatal blow to the strike. Such a situation requires that the strike leaders throw the whole weight of the union to bring about a 100 per cent walkout. Often the mistake is made of immediately branding those who do not join the strike as scabs. Such rigidity could hurt the union, particularly in an industry where workers are newly organized. Instead, a speedy campaign must be developed to persuade such weak or backward workers to join the strike. They must be visited in their homes, and striking relatives should be among the visitors. The union representatives must explain to such workers the harm they are inflicting on those on strike, the immorality of scabbing, the permanent mark it leaves on their names in the community, as well as the actual danger they run of losing the job when the union wins. Only after these or similar steps have been taken and these workers still persist in remaining on the side of the employer should they be branded as scabs and be kept out of the mill by strong picket lines. However, such a policy must be subordinated to the major consideration: utmost speed in eliminating production by scabs in time of strike.

Planning the First Picket Line

Now for the second objective on S -Day maximum organization, minimum confusion.

Never is it more important to remember the key organizational principle that “first things come first” than on S-Day. And what comes first on the first day of the strike? Naturally, the securing of a strong picket line. The first picket line must be planned before the day and hour the strike begins. Advance instructions must be given to shop stewards, or specially assigned union members, that when the strike is declared they are not to walk out of the mill and leave; that, instead, they must mobilize groups of workers in their departments to man the first picket line. Union representatives must be assigned to factory gates to be there at zero hour to help to organize the picket line, to have picket signs ready and, on the basis of what develops during the walkout, to give proper guidance and instructions.

Such union representatives at the plant exits on S-Day must be given strict instructions to call union or strike headquarters to report on the progress of the walkout. This information is vitally necessary to the leadership of the strike. At headquarters not everybody should be allowed to accept such messages. A thoroughly reliable worker must be assigned to this task. The minimum information required is as follows: time when called in, the place from where the call came, the person who made the call, and the condition of the walkout at that particular place. Such a log of reports must be immediately examined by one of the leaders and on the basis of these reports immediate action applied.

Reaching the Bulk of the Strikers

Next in importance to the first picket line is reaching the bulk of the strikers. If the hour is appropriate, it may be wise to call upon the workers to march to a nearby meeting hall, or an outdoor place, where the union leaders will address the strikers, recapitulating the demands and imbuing them with a militant and confident spirit. If it is difficult to arrange such a mass meeting immediately after the walkout, then one must be planned within the next 24 hours. The sooner the better. This meeting must also be the occasion to issue all vital instructions. This could be done by word of mouth, or by printed or mimeographed sheets. The important thing is to have the instructions simple – what to do and what not to do, particularly on the picket line. The following are instructions issued to New York bus drivers during their spring, 1941 strike. They are simple and to the point.

NOTICE!

TO ALL MEMBERS ON STRIKE!

This strike was called by unanimous vote of the membership in the New York City Omnibus and Fifth Avenue Coach Branches to enforce your demands for higher wages and better working conditions on your job and for greater security for yourselves and your families.

To ensure victory, every man must do his part. Carry out every duty assigned to you with discipline and diligence. Obey all orders of your picket captains. Do your duty to yourself, your fellow workers and your Union.

You will receive instructions throughout the strike. The first steps to be taken the first day are as follows:

1. Be sure you have your Union Book with you and exchange it for a picket card at Transport Hall the first day of the strike and that you have this picket card on your person until it is exchanged for your union book.

2. Be sure to wear your uniform whenever on picket duty or any other strike activity. Shop employees may wear either their work or civilian clothes.

3. Be sure to wear the Union Button at all times.

Conduct yourself on the picket line and at all other times and places as a decent citizen and responsible Union man. Disregard all rumors, unauthorized instructions or unofficial reports. Do not talk to strangers except to inform them there is a strike and what substitute facilities they may take. Refer all newspaper men and other persons making inquiries to Union Headquarters.

Above all, do not tolerate any breach of discipline, evasion of duty or violation of Union honor.

Stand firm! With determination and unity in our ranks we are invincible! We are marching for a great victory for organized transit Labor!

Matthias Kearns

General Organizer

Fifth Avenue Coach Branch

and NYC Omnibus Branch

March 10, 1941

The Longer the Line – the Shorter the Strike

The picket line is the heart and soul of the strike. It is the first line of defense and attack in any strike. It could be compared with a military sentry in a forward area. The task of a sentry is not so much to attack an approaching enemy as to hold it back until such a time when the main forces have been alerted. At other times the picket line is the main force.

Unfortunately, many strike leaders have paid little attention to this key aspect of strike action. In this respect old time union leaders are particularly great sinners. Some of them still stick to “professional” pickets and to worn out and dusty “unfair” signs. Among highly skilled craft unions there still lingers the idea that for a mechanic to put on a sign and picket is something that is not nice, something to be ashamed of. Through a constant process of education in trade unionism such thinking can and must be eliminated. The membership must be imbued with a sense of pride and honor when they participate in picketing. Just as a veteran speaks with pride of his participation in this or that battle, so must a union member feel about his part in a strike.

A picket line serves many significant purposes. First and foremost, it tells the world that this plant, mill, factory or mine is on strike. Often when men walk out, the employer inserts “help wanted” advertisements in a dozen newspapers in the vicinity of the strike-bound community. Many innocent unemployed workers respond. Only when they arrive at the gates of the plant do they discover for the first time that they have almost been misled into scabbing.

A picket line is and has been the only sound method of preventing professional scabs from entering the plant. If scabbing has been reduced to a minimum, it is in no small measure due to the effectiveness of the picket line.

Pickets also exert healthy moral pressure on strikers who are weak or weakening and ready to join back-to-work movements. It is not an uncommon sight during a strike to see a group of workers who the night before decided to return to work, but the morning after turn away when they conic face to face with a solid picket line. For this reason a strong picket line weeks after the strike begins is just as important, and even more important, than on the day the men walk out.

A strong picket line tends to have a desired effect on management. It is very demoralizing to the employer and company personnel to see their employees marching on that line with a high spirit and morale. Many an employer on the basis of his own observations of the strength of the picket line has made up his mind that it is futile to continue resistance to union demands. The psychological effect of a strong picket line on management can hardly be overestimated.

The picket line serves another major function: it demonstrates to the public that the employees are solidly behind the strike. Very often management claims that “outside agitators” are responsible for strikes. What better answer could there be than picket lines manned and led by the workers from the plant? The picket line helps to mold public opinion in support of the strike.

Lastly, there is no better place where unity can be preserved and strengthened than on the picket line. As has already been stated, during a strike nothing is more important than unity; company sponsored or inspired dissension could endanger the outcome of a strike. The picket line is the place where solidarity between man and man is being cemented most firmly.

Dangers of Token Picketing

What kind of picket line can accomplish such objectives? Can a strike in which thousands of workers are involved orient itself on token picketing? Too often this is the case. The argument goes that there is no need for mass picketing because the plant is shut and that the company is not endeavoring to resume production with scab labor. But the lack of picketing may encourage the company to bring in scabs. The lack of mass picketing creates a real danger that the mass of strikers may become rusty and dispersed and thus not prepared to meet sudden strikebreaking moves. Lack of mass picketing also prevents the workers involved from becoming active participants and turns them into passive observers. Mass picketing reduces to a minimum so-called emergency mobilizations that are often too late or inadequate.

Mass picketing is the surest road to victory. The longer the picket line, the shorter the strike. The picket line is like a mirror, it reflects the morale and strength of the strike. What a sight it must have been when thousands of Ford workers formed a picket line stretching for sixteen miles in a human wall around the Rouge plant!

Fortunately, there is within the ranks of organized labor a growing realization of the importance of mass picketing, particularly in mass production industries. Some unions have even added something new – a pre-strike picket line. Local 436, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, decided on a rehearsal mass picket line in front of the General Instrument Corporation while the union and the company were still en- gaged in negotiations. On June 2, 1948, for about an hour before the plant opened for the day, 750 workers, comprising the majority of the employees, staged this rehearsal. The union representative declared that it was “a rehearsal to show our people what it’s like and what picket duties are,” and “to show the company we mean business.” (New York Times, June 3, 1948.)

The New York 1946 Western Union strike gave the finest examples of effective picketing. If the strike was victorious, it was mainly because the strike leaders were able to organize the kind of picket lines that attracted and caught the imagination of many thousands of union workers, whether AFL or CIO. The pickets and their sound truck even coined a slogan when union members from all over the city came to their support: “Grab a sign and join the line!”

Not without pride did the report to the 1946 ACA Convention declare: “The great picket line ... became a symbol of this determination. Thousands of unionists joined our lines, swelling it to proportions never before seen in our city. Public figures from all walks of life endorsed our strike and many came to the picket line itself. Religious, fraternal and political organizations gave their support. The picket line was not a straggling group of weary people, but a singing, fighting picket line. When the Company could not break it up by tricks and maneuvers, when the police couldn’t frighten the people away, nor the cold keep them away, the Company went into the courts in an attempt to remove, through the infamous injunction, what they couldn’t break ... The Picket Director’s Committee had to maintain picket lines involving more than 5,000 of our members in many different localities. Never once did the picketing break down during the entire course of the strike, in spite of the fact that the picket lines had to be maintained at night as well as day, in spite of the bitter cold, in spite of the active interference of the police and in spite of the activities of Company agents circulating among the strikers.”

Of course, it is not possible to keep a mass picket line going all the time. Nor is it necessary. Those in charge of picketing must allow lulls during certain hours of the day or certain days in the week, but this in no way minimizes the importance and the need to orient a strike toward a policy of effective mass picketing.

Regardless of the size of the strike, or its character, or where it takes place, the scab is in the final analysis the most dangerous factor. This explains why very often the strikers develop more of a hatred toward the scab than the employer, even though the scab is only a company tool. During tense moments, when State or federal troops enter, or are about to enter, the strike scene, one often hears such expressions as “soldiers can’t dig coal,” or “run the railroads,” or “make steel.” But scabs may.

Nor does it matter very much, in the long run, whether the scabs are “professionals,” or workers who did not go out on strike, or workers who joined a back-to-work movement. The success or failure of a strike depends on the union’s ability to halt production for the duration. Hence, to combat scabs is in every strike one of the major objectives of the union.

The danger of professional scabs is greater in smaller strikes. In organized large and mass production industries, where tens of thousands of workers may be involved in a strike, the employers can hardly expect to man their plants with scabs. Thus they concentrate on weakening the will to fight among their own employees, developing dissension and other divisive methods, and work up to a back-to-work movement.

In recent years scabbing has become as immoral and as indecent a “profession” as prostitution. This is the result of the vigorous campaign which organized labor conducted over many generations against scabbing. Nearly seventy years ago, during a strike of textile workers in Paterson, N.J., one of its leaders called a strikebreaker a “scab.” For this he was arrested, tried and convicted. During that trial a labor attorney formulated a definition of a “scab” that became famous:

A “scab” is to his trade what a traitor is to his country. He is the first to take advantage of any benefit secured by united action, and never contributes anything towards its achievement. He is used during a struggle to defeat his fellow-workmen, and though coddled for the time being by the employer he serves, when peace is restored he is cast out, shunned by his employer, his fellow-workmen, and the whole human family. (S. Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, Vol. I.)

Years later Jack London, the great American writer, wrote what has become a classic characterization of a scab:

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a SCAB. A SCAB is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-logged brain, and a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts he carries a tumor of rotten principles.

When a scab comes down the street men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out. No man has a right to SCAB as long as there is a pool of water deep enough to drown his body in, or a rope long enough to hang his carcass with. Judas Iscariot was a gentleman compared with a SCAB. For betraying his Master, he had character enough to hang himself. A SCAB HASN’T.

Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas Iscariot sold his Saviour for thirty pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of commission in the British Army. The modern strike-breaker sells his birthright, his country, his wife, his children, and his fellow-men for an unfulfilled promise from his employer, trust or corporation.

Essau was a traitor to himself, Judas Iscariot was a traitor to his God. Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country.

A STRIKEBREAKER IS A TRAITOR TO HIS GOD, HIS COUNTRY, HIS FAMILY AND HIS CLASS!

A worker on strike has a moral right, a legal right, and a duty to protect his job and the jobs of his fellow workers. So it is not strange that when it comes to fighting scabs, strikers exhibit their highest degree of militancy. To them the elimination of scabs is synonymous with the preservation of their jobs, which in turn means their very livelihood. The struggle against scabs assumes a variety of forms, each according to the peculiarities of the particular strike. These forms of struggle depend on the type of scabs used.

As a rule there are three chief sources from which employers recruit scabs. In newly or recently organized shops the employers may still be able to mislead a number of workers who will be induced to remain inside the factory. With such workers the union must reason, must appeal to their conscience, and try to exert a maximum of moral pressure. At least this must be the starting point. When such efforts fail, this group must be branded for what they are and treated as enemies of their fellow workers, the union, and the community. Often this group remains inside the plant for the duration of the strike. While the union continues to make constant appeals to such workers to leave the plant and join the strike, it at the same time takes all necessary measures to keep these scabs isolated.

How effective such isolation of scabs inside plants can be is described by none other than Tom Girdler, the man who thought he could break the CIO. In great detail Mr. Girdler describes what happened to an insignificant group of steel workers in the Niles and Warren plants who did not join the 1937 strike. The strikers picketed the highways approaching the Niles plant. Nor would the railroad workers deliver food to scabs. Within three days after the strike began, Girdler wrote in his Boot Straps:

300 of our men were facing a choice of starvation or surrender.

Night had fallen and we were sick at heart because we had failed to keep our promise to Sam Brown at Niles. Scarcely a man left the Republic offices in Cleveland for more than a few hours that night. When morning came Sam Brown reported by telephone, said he had pinched out enough food from the previous evening’s meal to give his 300 men a slim breakfast. But they had eaten every scrap. There was not, Sam said, enough food in the plant to feed a mouse. But he felt better when we told him how we were going to get food to Niles that day. We were going to fly it! ... Airplanes were the only answer ...

“Sam, there will be grub there in ten or fifteen minutes. The airplane is on the way. The boys are going to try to drop the stuff inside the plant.”

Mr. Girdler went on to describe Republic Steel’s first experience in a strikebreaking air lift:

... in a few minutes Sam was back on the wire.

“Now it’s coming! I can see it right now, from where I’m standing at my office window.”

Charley White was repeating Sam Brown’s report for the benefit of an anxious group of officials clustered around him. Several were listening on other telephones.

Then old Sam’s voice came over the wire, charged with excitement!

“He’s coming down! He’s coming down! Lower! Coming lower! We’re going to get it now.”

Then Sam’s voice again: “There it comes. He’s dropped a bundle. Breakfast’s late, but here she comes!”

Then: “Damn it, Mr. White, he missed the plant.”

“What!”

“Yes, sir. Two sacks landed outside the fence. Right now all those pickets are scrambling around snatching our food.”

On our first try we had missed a 216 acre plant.

The outcome was that Republic Steel was forced to buy a fleet of eleven planes to deliver food to scabs in the Niles and Warren plants. This company measure dramatically points up the effectiveness of picketing that results in the isolation of scabs inside the plants.

The second chief scabbing source is a back-to-work movement. This is such an important strikebreaking weapon that a special chapter will be devoted to it.

The third source is the professional scabs. Strikers learned long ago how to handle this element.

Can Strikebreaking Ever Be “Legitimate”?

No discussion of scabbery can be complete without some consideration of certain forms of strikebreaking that have recently developed and that are far more dangerous than anything the employers have conjured up so far. These forms of strikebreaking – not all of them entirely new – arise out of sharp differences within the labor movement, aided and abetted by the Taft-Hartley law.

One form operates like this: A union under left leadership goes out on strike. A rival union under right leadership declares that the strike was called for “political” reasons. The strike is declared “illegitimate,” and the workers’ picket line instead of being honored is branded a “political picket line.” On this basis strikebreaking becomes “legitimate.”

This “dog eat dog” policy expresses itself in another form. A union goes out on strike. A rival union forms a clique within the ranks of the strikers to advocate a secession movement. During a difficult moment in the strike these elements invoke the Taft-Hartley law and demand an election to determine which union represents the workers. Thus, instead of presenting a solid front against the employer, worker solidarity splits wide open in a way that even the Mohawk Valley strikebreaking formula – dealt with in later chapters – could seldom accomplish. If the split ends in victory for the rival union, this invariably means a back-to-work movement with disastrous consequences for the workers.

It is almost incomprehensible that a labor union should assume the role of a strikebreaker, yet it has happened a number of times. Let us cite a couple of examples. In 1948 the workers of the Caterpillar Tractor Company in Peoria, Illinois, went out on strike under the leadership of the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers Union, then affiliated with the CIO. They were striking for a new contract and wage increase. Another CIO affiliate, the UAW, dispatched a group of organizers, allocated $100,000, and opened a press barrage against the Farm Equipment Union. The UAW invoked the Taft-Hartley law as their gimmick. The strike was broken, the workers returned to work without a wage increase, and the UAW took over a demoralized FE local. Again, in 1948 in Oakland, California, the AFL grocery clerks went out on strike. The AFL teamsters, under the leadership of Dave Beck, offered the employers a teamsters’ contract and thus broke the strike.

Raiding of one union by another in time of strike, injecting of the Taft-Hartley law by one union against another, and branding picket lines “political” as a justification for crossing them are the most alarming developments in our trade union movement. Those who resort to such methods to victimize other unions will themselves become the victims of such a policy. Labor’s rank and file is permeated with a sense of deep-rooted solidarity. It is inevitable that, no matter what justification is offered, they will rise up against leaders who indulge in strikebreaking.

What a Picket Plan Must Include

To organize and maintain mass picket lines is no easy organizational task. It requires a well-conceived plan, blueprinted before the strike begins. Such a plan for mass picketing must be realistic and flexible enough to meet the needs of the specific strike. The plan must deal with each of the following problems:

1. How many strikers are needed daily to man the lines, minimum and maximum?

To determine this the union must take into consideration the number of workers involved in the strike, the number of plants or factories, and the great importance of involving the rank and file in active participation.

2. Which are the most important plants or entrances and how are these to be covered?

Often a strike involves more than one plant in the same community. Not all the plants are of equal importance. There is always a key plant or department, upon which production, or lack of production, depends. The strike-breaking plans of the employer will depend on what happens at the key point of production. Clearly, the union cannot treat such a plant or department in a routine manner. The best picket captains, the most reliable union members and the largest group of pickets must be assigned to such key points, even at the expense of neglecting secondary places.

The key production points are not the sole consideration in organizing the picket lines. The entrance to a plant close to the office is of great importance. In times of strike the offices of management become the general headquarters of the opposite camp. The headquarters are observation posts and important conclusions are drawn on the basis of what is observed. Obviously there is need for a strong and effective picket line close to the office. Let the employer and management see their skilled, their oldest and most popular workers on the line and it will dampen their enthusiasm for holding out too long.

3. What are the vulnerable and possible danger spots for a breakthrough and how shall such developments be prevented?

Just as a military commander constantly seeks for the weakest link in the enemy’s chain, so does an employer in time of strike. Experienced strike leaders can foresee a breakthrough and prepare against its occurring by strengthening weak links. Often a back-to-work movement does not begin through a main gate where the picket lines are strong; it is the unexpected places that the union must have an eye on. This is particularly true of plants that connect with railroad lines, canals or rivers. Plants isolated from communities where the strikers live must be taken up as special problems in relation to picketing. But vulnerability, it should be remembered, is not limited to physical layouts of plants or their geographical locations. These other aspects of vulnerability will be dealt with in other chapters.

4. How shall strikers who have not reported for strike duty be reached?

This is a major problem in most strikes which involve large groups of workers. As has already been stated, strikes in which workers are passive observers and not active participants are in constant danger of ending in defeat. A great deal of work in training the workers for active strike duty must be done before and all through the battle.

An appropriate method must be found whereby each striker is accountable to an authoritative committee for his action or lack of action. Some unions conduct regular roll calls. Unions distributing strike relief do so only on presentation of picket cards showing the record of the individual worker on the picket line. Still others ask their members to deposit their union books and exchange them for picket cards.

5. How can the strikers on the picket line be doubled or tripled during emergencies?

Wise leadership takes for granted that during the life of a strike emergencies are bound to arise and prepares for such occasions. Usually strike emergencies arise as a result of a sudden or unexpected company move designed to weaken or destroy the strike. Only the application of im- mediate action can frustrate the employer’s objectives. The ability of strike leaders to rally the membership in such emergencies is of decisive importance.

In the 1937 steel strike in Youngstown the strike leaders organized a very efficient flying squad equipped with cars and motorcycles ready for dispatch to any plant or gate where trouble developed. After the squad had been functioning a few days, the leaders hit upon the idea of listening to short-wave police instructions, and often arrived on the scene of difficulty simultaneously with the police radio cars. In Flint, Michigan, during the January 1937 auto strike, a well organized scout system was established serving as an efficient medium for mobilizing large groups of strikers when emergencies arose.

6. How shall steady contact between the top strike leaders and the special personnel in charge of picketing be maintained?

The picket captains – the men in charge of the line – are entrusted with major responsibility in any strike. Theirs is a difficult task even under the best circumstances. To bring the strikers to the picket line, to keep them on the line, to maintain discipline in face of provocation, to observe all movement in and around the plant and to sense the mood of the strikers themselves are just a few of the responsibilities of picket captains.

The policy-making group among the strike leaders can learn a great deal from the picket captains about the morale of the men, their thinking, the degree of stability of the strike and other vital information which has a direct bearing on shaping strike strategy. The picket captains, in turn, need to be constantly briefed and imbued with confidence in victory. It is for them to transmit this confidence to the men on the line.

7. How can picket lines be protected from intimidation and attack?

Because picketing is the heart and soul of a strike, the employers concentrate on weakening the lines. They do this at first through intimidation. They spread rumors among strikers that if the strike is lost those who picketed will not be allowed to return to work. Through “missionaries” working among women they try to create an atmosphere conducive to the idea that picketing is “dangerous” so that the wives, instead of encouraging their husbands to join the line, will become a force that holds them back. The employers also encourage the idea in the community that “responsible citizens” don’t picket, etc.

The union must counteract this kind of intimidation by fostering the conviction that it is an honor and privilege to participate on the line. As has been said in a previous chapter, much of this work has to be accomplished before the strike starts.

Provocation and physical assault can occur on the picket line any time; for the professional strikebreaker operating behind the scene is constantly scheming provocation. A willing tool or “plant” within the ranks of the strikers gives the company the best possible chance of developing provocative action. It is all so simple. A man with a picket sign, or some other person identified with the strike, attacks a representative of management. “Friendly” news- papers appear on the streets with screaming headlines condemning “strike violence.” To reduce such provocation to a minimum is a responsibility strike leaders must face.

People known to the union as being unreliable should be excluded from picket duty and carefully watched; an agent provocateur will sooner or later show his colors. During the 1937 steel strike in Youngstown, an officer of a local union constantly urged “rushing the gates,” now and then he carried a concealed weapon, criticized the leaders for lack of action. Some time later he was exposed as a member of the Republic Steel police force in Buffalo who had been transferred to Youngstown in expectation of a strike. But company agents are briefed not only to start violence; some are instructed to bring to the picket line seeds of defeatism. Theirs is a “what-is-the-use” line, the strike is “lost,” and “let us not be suckers,” etc. These are preliminaries to enrolling workers into a back-to-work movement.

A partial answer to provocation and provocateurs is a reliable, able and vigilant corps of picket captains. The stronger the corps of picket captains, the less the chances of provocation. Equally important is the constant education of the rank and file that will result in greater alertness to the methods and schemes of company agents.

It is a common employer practice to plan physical attacks on picket lines, force the strikers to defend themselves and then condemn them for it. Such attacks, carried through by a specially prepared company force, may come from inside the plant or from without.

Self-defense is not only a moral but a legal American tradition. American workers will not tolerate violence without fighting back, they will defend themselves with all the strength and power at their command. They will fight back on the picket lines and they will utilize all legal channels to expose and bring to the bar of justice those who started the violence.

In recent years organized labor faced the problem of strike violence and developed ways to counter it. Among these was the enactment of a federal law prohibiting the import of scabs from other States; and the enactment of State laws and city ordinances prohibiting the swearing in of deputy marshals with criminal records. In some strikes the unions prevailed upon county and city authorities to deputize strikers. In other strikes the unions established “restricted areas” and outsiders could not approach the picket lines without a permit from strike headquarters.

8. How can the line be fed, particularly during bad weather?

A hot cup of coffee during cold weather or an ice-cold drink during hot weather is a great morale builder. During the war our army and Red Cross spent many thousands of dollars to give our GI’s this kind of service, thousands of miles away from our shores. But often it is necessary to provide more than a hot or cold drink. During some strikes unions have served sandwiches and even hot plates right on the picket lines. This practice should be encouraged. It is particularly important to serve the pickets on the line when there is no convenient restaurant nearby, or when the strike has been a long one and the strikers cannot easily afford to go to a restaurant. Such a program also is valuable in that it busies the women in the preparation and distribution of the food. Instead of staying at home and brooding, the wives themselves become involved in the strike – at all times a very positive development.

9. How can the lines be made lively and interesting for the strikers and for the public?

A picket line that is dull, uneventful, and lifeless does not attract either the strikers or the public. Marching up and down becomes monotonous. To break such monotony and to imbue the pickets with a spirit of enthusiasm is an essential part of a picket plan.

In strikes where thousands of workers are involved and where picketing takes place on a mass scale, a sound truck can be put to good use. A strike leader can address the picket line at regular intervals; popular records can be played; union songs can enliven the line.

Some unions have livened up the line by distributing daily strike bulletins. In other strikes the picket captains have given daily “orientation” talks, encouraging the men to ask questions, or answering newspaper attacks against the strike.

Special picket line events to attract both strikers and the public must be planned all the time. Such special events include the appearance of the most popular strike leaders, outstanding pro-labor public officeholders, friendly popular actors, writers, or church representatives. Some unions have on occasion engaged a band to play at the plant gate. In strikes in which a large group of young people are involved an outdoor dance can add a lot of color. Whenever a fairly large group of workers are on strike, the leaders can always discover plenty of talent – guitar and harmonica players, singers and dancers. The happier the picket line, the higher the morale, the sadder the employer. Good spirits on the line are also very helpful from a public relations point of view.

10. How can a reliable and constant communication system between pickets and strike headquarters be maintained?

No picket plan can be considered sound without a well conceived communication system. In working out such a system one must consider reliability, speed, privacy and general efficiency.

Reliability stands at the top of the list. It is common knowledge that wire tapping is widely practiced even though it is against the law. Information of a confidential nature must not be relayed through a telephone; it is perfectly ridiculous for a picket captain to call the union office only to be connected with the company or local police station. This is particularly true of days when a tense situation exists. A system of runners on motorcycles or in automobiles can be established. When the telephone is being used, the less said the better. During some strikes simple code systems have been established between picket captains and strike headquarters.

To avoid misinterpretation of any kind, it is best to spell out here what is meant by confidential strike information. The following would be of this nature: massing of scabs near the plant and the need for immediate reinforcement of the line; suspicious movements within the plant; observing professional strikebreakers and criminal elements, etc.

The ten points discussed above just about cover the minimum needs for a picket program. For the sake of emphasis one thing needs to be repeated: such a program must be blueprinted before the walkout.

Sample Instructions to Pickets

There is, finally, the problem of constantly orienting, briefing and instructing the pickets. In recent years it has become a common practice to distribute to the pickets a set of instructions that must be followed and rigidly carried out. Such instructions, it has already been pointed out, should be simple directives what to do and what not to do on the picket line. The following are a good example. They are instructions issued by local unions of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to the strikers of Remington Rand Company while on strike in the summer of 1947:

1. Maintain strict discipline on the picket line, the strike headquarters and in the vicinity of the plant. Keep a cool head at all times. Do not fall for any provocations. Report immediately any individuals who are attempting to provoke trouble or incidents. Be firm but courteous in dispatching your picket line duties.

2. Everyone who shows a picket a picket line pass must be permitted to enter the plant. All others must be told to report to the Union Office, or that they cannot enter the plant unless they get a pass.

3. Do not permit anyone under the influence of liquor on the picket line, or to stay in the vicinity of the strike. Escort him away to some place where he cannot do damage. A person who is under the influence of liquor can cause a lot of trouble. No drinking is permitted on the picket line or its vicinity.

4. All questions that are asked by a striker or anybody else must be answered. When a striker is approached by a stranger he should tell him to see the picket captain. If the picket captain does not think he should answer, then he should refer the stranger to the strike headquarters. If the strike headquarters does not know the answer or does not think they should answer then he should call the Union Office to find out what he should say or do. IF IN DOUBT OR TO BE SURE, CALL THE UNION OFFICE.

5. Strikes are won or lost on the picket line. Remember the bigger and stronger the picket line, the shorter the strike. Everyone must serve on the picket line. Contact pickets who you know do not show up to do their part. They may have legitimate reasons why they do not report for picket duty and then they may not.

6. Everyone should report every day at least one hour before their regular work shift for mass picketing. This is everyone’s duty. In addition, everyone will be assigned a regular period of picketing, probably about once a week. Check a day or two before to find out exactly when you should report. Remind your pickets a day or two before by visiting or phoning them.

7. Keep a strict record of the attendance of all pickets. Punch pickets’ record cards after picketing has been done. Check up on all absences.

8. Report whatever happens on the picket line and its vicinity to the strike headquarters before going off duty.

9. Make sure that everyone knows the responsible picket captain or officers on duty at your station.

10. Report all anti-union rumors and activities immediately to the Union Office.

11. Maintain daily contact with the Union Office so that you may be fully posted on all developments. You will thus be able to keep your pickets informed at all times.

MAINTAIN DISCIPLINE AND ORDER-WHEN IN DOUBT CALL THE UNION.

Chapter 7: On the Offensive

All Together or “One at a Time”

To maintain the offensive is the core of correct strike strategy. On the basis of his experiences in the great 1919 steel strike, William Z. Foster writes on this subject as follows: “We must attack always, or at the worst be preparing to attack. This theory applies as well to the class war of industry as to military war on the battlefield. The workers, like soldiers (and they are the same human beings and subject to the same psychological laws), fight best on the offensive. They are then fired with a sense of power and victory; defensive fighting demoralizes them and fills them with defeatism. Every good strike leader, like every good general, must take this basic fact into consideration.”

What does this theory of offensive imply in a practical sense?

It means first of all to spread the struggle. The greater the number involved in the strike, the stronger the feeling and confidence of the workers. This strategy was very ably applied by the CIO in the early days in the automobile industry, particularly in General Motors, where the strike spread from plant to plant. In the steel strike in 1937, the CIO used the same strategy. Instead of striking individual corporations of the “Little Steel” combination, the S.W.O.C. struck most of them at the same time, spreading the strike to seven states and involving 80,000 workers.

When it becomes obvious that the struggle will be sharp and protracted, additional forces must be thrown into battle (if possible) and the strike spread further to render the companies involved additional hard blows. This could be termed a second offensive. In 1919, Foster pleaded with the mine and railroad leaders for joint action he was unable to obtain. In the 1937 steel strike this was partially realized. The UMWA called out on strike 10,000 coal miners in “captive” mines of Bethlehem, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, and Republic Steel. All other coal operators were notified by the union not to attempt to fill the orders of the steel companies. Simultaneously with this action, the CIO dispatched a crew of organizers to Minnesota and Michigan to swiftly organize ore miners working in the mines of the “Little Steel” companies, while the National Maritime Union proceeded with the organization of the barge workers with the hope of preventing the shipment of ore to the struck steel centers before the lakes froze. Here we see a very excellent example of offensive tactics that galvanized the workers on the picket lines.

In recent years, however, in some trade union circles there has developed a certain concept of strike strategy that is detrimental to organized labor. It makes fighting on the offensive pretty nearly impossible. This strategy has come to be known as the “one-at-a-time” strategy. It is based on a theory that only one company in a certain industry will be struck. Then the union would exploit the competitive advantages of other companies as “a club over the heads of the struck company” and force a favorable wage settlement that would then in turn become a “pattern” for the rest of the industry. This strategy was practiced in the auto industry and proved a detriment to the union and the workers. The basic fallacy of this theory is that it exaggerates the importance of competitive relations between employers. It negates the well established fact that when it comes to a battle between labor and capital, the employers in most cases temporarily forget their immediate competitive interests and form a united front against organized labor. This is particularly true of basic and trustified industries.

Walter Reuther used this kind of strategy in 1946 when only the General Motors workers were called out on strike to establish a “wage pattern.” The results were disastrous. The strike lasted four months. The contract that was finally signed opened the door to increased speed-up and “disciplining” of workers. The “one-at-a-time” theory when tested in struggle proved a failure from labor’s point of view. The strike not only failed to establish a satisfactory “pattern” but became a boomerang for the rest of the auto workers.

There are certain exceptional periods when such strategy could work. When labor is generally on the offensive, when a Congress and an administration follow a progressive course, and when there is a crystallized wage movement. But when such conditions don’t exist, the safest course is a united strategy involving all the workers in a major battle. It is not conceivable that in the years to come labor could win major demands based on the “one-at-a-time” strike strategy.

Broader Strategy

It is a major weakness of our trade union movement that it rarely develops a strike strategy based on the united action of several unions. Before the birth of the CIO industrial unions, it was even a common occurrence to have one craft union in the same industry striking while other AFL unions were working. Unfortunately such practices are still current in industries where craft unionism exists. In an article analyzing the victorious strike of the Chicago printers, Woodruff Randolph, president of the International Typographical Union, raised this fundamental issue not without justifiable bitterness. He pointed out that “the Chicago employers enjoyed the regular services of all other unions involved in the newspaper printing industry, many of whom were tied by contracts and prevented by the Taft-Hartley Law and their own Internationals from helping the printers. Many failed to comprehend the basic issues involved and even now will turn over and go to sleep again.” (The Typographical Journal, October 1949.)

The AFL printers and their leaders had a right to complain against this “sleeping melancholy” of craft unionism. The printers spent eleven and a half million dollars on strikes arising out of the Taft-Hartley law.

This failure to develop broader strike strategy is not limited to craft unionism. Even the industrial unions of the CIO never really developed a broad strike strategy. To be sure, some formal efforts were made in this direction, particularly between steel, auto and electrical unions. But their efforts never went much further than discussions on top levels, or statements to the press.

The great importance of a broader strike strategy came up during the 1949 coal and steel strikes. John L. Lewis brought up the question and in his usual bold manner directly addressed William Green and Philip Murray. He stressed the great importance of the steel strike and the need for the entire organized labor movement to rally behind the steel workers and make this struggle “the uncompromising fight of all American labor.” Lewis proposed raising a joint strike defense fund of two and a half million dollars a week to make it possible for the steel workers to continue fighting. This proposal had a galvanizing effect on the steel workers and the rank and file of all unions. There was a moment of hope; perhaps the powerful unions, regardless of affiliations, would join in a common effort at a time when labor was at a crossroad.

Murray’s reply was of a positive nature. He endorsed the plan and declared that the miners were also “engaged in a mighty struggle with powerful employers in the coal industry ... such a defense fund must obviously be available to members of the United Mine Workers.” Then Murray went on to say that “The United Steel workers of America and, I am sure, other equally minded affiliates of the CIO, stand prepared to join with the United Mine Workers and affiliates with the AFL to pool their resources for the common defense and general welfare of the labor movement.”

Labor throughout the country anxiously waited to hear what the AFL leadership would say to this. When Green’s reply came, all hope for united action disappeared. In his answer to Lewis, Green stated: “The pooling of labor’s resources while divided as it is today is impossible and impracticable.” Once more Mr. Green repeated that there can be no united action without “organic unity.”

Again an effort to develop broader strike strategy had ended in failure. Disappointed over the results, Lewis in a bitter frame of mind wrote Green: “You have justified my judgment. I did not think you could do anything. You didn’t. You rarely do. Unfortunately, you follow invariably your well known policy of anxious inertia. You cry aloud for labor peace and labor security, but seldom do anything to achieve it.”

It does not follow, however, that because such broader strategy has not been realized on top labor levels it cannot be achieved on local levels. In numerous cases it has been achieved. The general strikes that occurred in recent years are also an encouraging sign. Eventually this broader type of strike strategy will become the predominant factor in all major strikes. When that day comes fighting on the offensive will cease to be a problem.

Forestalling Employer Tactics

To maintain an offensive often means to prevent the employers from developing their own. What that offensive is most liable to be, experience has demonstrated time after time. To the employers the most effective method of breaking a strike is the use of unadulterated terror. Whether this terror comes by way of company police, professional thugs (often deputized), city police, or State militia depends on the political situation, but that gas attacks, clubbings and shootings will be part of the employer’s plan admits of no doubt. The best offensive strategy the union can use is to nip the planned terror in the bud.

This is exactly what happened when in 1937 the 27,000 steel workers of Jones and Laughlin in Aliquippa and Pittsburgh went out on strike. The company was ready for a blood bath. The union leaders immediately wired the Governor of the dangers involved. Aware of the political strength of the CIO in Pennsylvania, the Governor flew to Aliquippa and warned the company and local police against any violence. The Governor’s warning and his visit to the picket line stimulated the already strong morale of the workers and upset the devious plans of the company. Within a few days the workers were triumphant. In a number of other strikes, the union was able to disrupt the plan of terror by forcing the authorities to deputize the strikers instead of professional strikebreakers. This took away a powerful weapon from the employers and taught labor that it must fight for this right in every strike.

Fighting on the offensive also means timely exposure of all kinds of so-called “innocent” public committees secretly sponsored by the employers for the purpose of molding public opinion against the strikers and their unions. At times these committees are so cleverly set up that often they even mislead the workers themselves. In Akron, Ohio, for example, during the great rubber strikes there suddenly sprang up an organization known as the Greater Akron Association. It was headed by the “finest” citizens in the community. The avowed purpose of the organization was to get new industries into Akron, to promote a “more active interest in civic affairs” and to “coordinate some of the different activities” of existing organizations in the city, such as the City Club, the Kiwanis Club and so forth. This organization sponsored radio talks, full-page advertisements and public meetings. Shortly afterward the union, with the help of the Senate La Follette Committee, exposed the Greater Akron Association as a conspiracy against the Rubber Workers Union planned out by the “public relations firm” Hill and Knowlton and paid for by the rubber companies. This same firm organized or directed the Canton Development Corporation that sponsored a wide “community education” program in Canton, Ohio. In Youngstown and other steel centers, similar organizations sprang up, all pretending to be “neutral” and “impartial.” In many respects such organizations, because they hide their origin, are more dangerous than the open vigilante movements. The union must not hesitate to expose them before their prestige is established.

Examples of Solidarity

Reserves are a very important factor in developing and maintaining the offensive. It stands to reason, then, that large sections of the labor movement must be mobilized in support of the strike.

The spirit of solidarity is highly developed in the ranks of the American workers. This solidarity is so strong that it often brushes aside affiliations, craft interests and orders of conservative union officials. The Seattle and San Francisco general strikes are historic examples of such solidarity. In the many recent strikes in the automobile industry, such solidarity was demonstrated time and again. It was developed during the 1937 steel strike. In Warren, Ohio, the court issued an injunction against the strikers. Gus Hall, the Warren strike leader, appealed to labor to defeat this move. Within 24 hours, 6,000 workers walked out in a sympathy strike. Even the conservative Warren AFL Central Labor Union went on record for a general strike. In Canton, the AFL and CIO unions united against the “Citizens’ Law and Order League” of vigilantes and officially informed the Mayor that a general strike would be called if the vigilantes attempted to smash the picket line. In Youngstown, as a protest against the murder of two strikers at the Republic plant, the powerful AFL Teamsters and Truck Drivers Local No. 377 declared a general strike. The 1,800 truck drivers brought to a standstill all deliveries and prevented all out-of-town trucks from entering the city. At the same time the leaders of the AFL Central Labor body petitioned the court for a temporary injunction to restrain the Mayor from increasing the police force, buying military equipment and hiring gunmen. The spirit of solidarity among AFL workers was so great that William Green and other Federation leaders acknowledged the “bonds of sympathy.” At a press conference in Washington a reporter asked Mr. Green if these AFL local unions would be punished. His reply was significant:

Situations such as those in Youngstown and Canton are of the kind which will develop during strikes. They are entirely due to the local situation and the bond of sympathy which exists between workers, no matter what formal group they may be associated with. They instinctively help and support those who are in distress and it is a good thing. They will not be punished. (Youngstown Vindicator, June 17, 1937.)

The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen stopped switching service at the Republic plants in Youngstown and Canton, crippling rail communications into these plants. The action was taken because the Pennsylvania Railroad sent armed guards to both plants. The railroad crews refused to work in the yards where there were armed guards.

In the great 1941 Ford strike, the AFL teamsters who haul Ford cars to other states immediately notified the strikers that not a truck would roll as long as there was a strike at Ford. Despite the split within the labor movement, it is possible to obtain a degree of solidarity and support from some top labor leaders of an opposite Federation. Thus, in January 1946, when 175,000 General Motors employees were out on strike, five AFL union presidents joined a group of CIO leaders to rally the full support of organized labor behind the UAW-CIO strike. In 1947 when John L. Lewis and the UMWA were engaged in a bitter struggle against Government injunctions, the leaders of the UE locals in the Pittsburgh area offered all-out support, including strike action if need be.

Bringing Up Reserves

Like military commanders, strike leaders must be prepared to throw in reserves.

There are several classifications of such reserves. First, there are the workers most closely related to the strikers. These may be workers of the same industry who are not involved in the struggle. For example, the General Motors and Chrysler workers would be the natural reserves for the Ford strike. There can be no doubt that if the Ford workers had been involved in a protracted struggle, the General Motors and Chrysler workers would have played the role of a powerful reserve. Reserves can also be organized from related industries and nearby industrial centers.

Such reserves are especially valuable during crucial moments in a strike. When on June 23,1937 the steel companies in Youngstown announced that next morning a back-to-work movement would begin and that scabs would be fully armed, the strike leaders sent out an S O S call to nearby Akron. Within a few hours the Rubber Workers Union mobilized 4,000 members and a great automobile caravan swept over the main roads from Akron to Youngstown. The main column was preceded by motor- cycle scouts who reported police barricades and guided the rubber workers over unguarded back roads to their objectives in the Youngstown strike areas. During the Bethlehem strike in Johnstown, Pa., the Mayor organized a mob of armed vigilantes and unleashed a wave of terror. More than 6,000 miners from the nearby mines declared a “holiday” and rushed to Johnstown to support their brother steel workers. On that day a U.P. dispatch from Johnstown read as follows:

More than 6,000 coal miners on a ‘labor holiday” from the soft coal fields marched into Johnstown today to aid union steel workers striking against the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Shouting and singing, the miners established picket lines and heard their leaders promise that we can’t afford to let the steel workers lose their strike ... with the precision and snap of a well drilled regiment, they alighted from their automobiles and marched to the gates.

Sometimes reserves spring up quite unexpectedly. A major strike in a community often develops a “strike fever”; workers in other industries in the same community become encouraged to do something about their own grievances and walk out on strike. During the 1937 steel strike in Mahoning Valley a number of such strikes occurred and turned out to be very helpful. In Warren, Ohio, the telephone operators struck and cut off all telephone service, except emergency calls. In Youngstown the telegraph messenger boys did likewise. Both strikes hampered the steel corporations’ anti-strike activities.

In February 1949, 11,000 Philadelphia bus, trolley, subway and elevated train operators, members of the CIO Transport Workers Union, were on strike. The only available transportation in the city was taxis. The taxi drivers were members of an AFL union. Stimulated by the transport workers’ strike, and taking advantage of the fact that taxis were the sole means of transportation and that this made it possible for the taxi companies to double and triple their profits while the transport strike was on, taxi drivers declared a strike of their own. Such a development was of tremendous value to both the CIO Transport Workers and the AFL taxi drivers. When such unexpected aid comes, strike leaders must not be slow to associate them- selves with the smaller striking groups and give them all the attention and assistance necessary.

A great reserve, often underestimated, are the women-folk of the strikers. In recent years, a number of AFL and CIO unions have learned to appreciate the important role women can play. The miners’ wives are famous for their past militancy and endurance during strikes. The wives of automobile workers are developing a similar tradition. During a grave hour in the Flint sit-down strike, when the City Manager announced in the press that the police force would “go to the plant shooting,” they formed a Women’s Emergency Brigade of 500 and marched down to the plant to protect their men from violence. “This demonstration was unique in the history of labor,” writes Mary Heaton Vorse. “The women marched and marched, their banners and caps brightening the crowd.” (Labor’s New Millions.) When the Ladies’ Auxiliaries in Lansing, Toledo, Bay City, and Pontiac heard of what was happening in Flint, they left their kitchens and hurried to Flint. In the Ford strike, the womenfolk were on the picket line and served 45,000 meals a day. The Transport Workers Union at one time developed a fine Auxiliary, and in one of the New York bus strikes the women were very outstanding. Other unions, and especially AFL unions, will do well to follow these examples.

Not only the women but the children of the strikers must not be neglected. They must be told why their fathers are on strike so that they will be proud of it. Mary Heaton Vorse tells how during the 1937 steel strike in Indiana Harbor, every Saturday was a children’s day, the children being encouraged to make up their own slogans and paint them. She found one little fellow printing the sign: “We Are Uman Beans!”

Dramatizing the Strike

Skillful dramatization is an important part of fighting on the offensive because human beings respond so readily to drama. When the dramatic character of the strike is pointed up, it catches the imagination of the strikers. The public, too, gets the workers’ version of the struggle, is moved by it, and often, as a result, ignores company propaganda.

The picket line offers excellent opportunities for dramatization. Realizing that the strength of a picket line is not only in numbers, strike leaders should be alive to these opportunities. The banners should express the grievances and aspirations of the workers. They should tell the story of the strikers. And they should do it in a way that both attracts the public and wins its sympathy and support. The United Department Store Employees during one of their strikes in New York carried signs with drawings of Lincoln and with his famous remark: “Thank God We Have a Country Where Working Men Have the Right to Strike.”

Local 1224 of the United Electrical and Radio Workers made a hit when they dressed up a couple of pickets as Santa Glaus during hot July days. A picture of the pickets was printed in dozens of newspapers. The New York Times carried the picture and the following story:

Santa Claus appeared in the picket lines yesterday. Nearly 250 striking electrical workers adopted this novel anachronism when they picketed the offices of several electrical companies, in support of their demands for union recognition, higher wages and improved working conditions. Led by two members sweltering in whiskers, red flannels and boots of St. Nicholas, the pickets, who chanted a parody on “Jingle Bells” embodying their demands, explained that the Christmas atmosphere had been inspired by the Christmas tree ornaments manufactured by one of the concerns.

The AFL Electrical Union Local 3 in New York produced a very fine example of methods of dramatizing a strike. The leader, Harry Van Arsdale, staged a “blackout” of the Great White Way, the world-famous theatrical center of New York. The newspapers, the radio, and movie cameras covered the “blackout.” Next day, the New York Times described this dramatic action as follows:

For half an hour last night, the fish didn’t swim in the Wrigley sign in Times Square; Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth vanished from the illuminated square on which their likenesses danced for the greater glory of Wilson whiskey, and the coffee in the magnified Silex bubbled no more, although steam forlornly hissed from it. The “blackout” ordered by Electrical Workers Union Local 3 was far from absolute, but it did end effectively the glare from the major “spectaculars” in the theatre district.

It was a very small and relatively unimportant strike, but millions of Americans heard about it.

Shipyard workers in Kearny, N. J., in reply to a newspaper attack that they were hindering national defense, adopted the letter V as their symbol. The AFL Chefs and Cooks Union Local 89 organized a mass picket line of Broadway chorus girls in front of the Brass Rail Restaurant on strike. This union, under the able leadership of Harry Reich, produced many fine examples in dramatizing strikes in a service industry.

As it does on a number of other aspects of strike strategy, the 1949 Western Union strike offers a fine example of dramatization. A special day was set aside to bring to the picket line an array of talent that Western Union’s money could not buy. Show people, writers and artists, men and women famous on Broadway and known to millions of Americans, joined the picket line. Among them were: Milt Winne, author of Why I Hate the Nazis; Mike Gordon, director of Home of the Brave; Philip Evergood, one of America’s most prominent artists; Bob Newman, Vice President, Radio Writers Guild; Hugo Gellert, internationally known artist; Howard Fast, famous novelist; Fred O’Neil and ten other members of the cast of Anna Lucasta; Richard Huey, baritone star of Bloomer Girl; Diana Andrews of Are You With It; David Burns of Billion Dollar Baby; Martin Wilson of Deep Are the Roots.

No wonder the union paper was able to announce that “If you want to see the best talent New York has to offer, and the best show in town, you don’t have to plunk down $4.40 or $6.60 for a seat. In fact, there are no seats. Just come and picket on the Western Union picket line.”

Parades of wives pushing their babies in carriages, the establishing of army tents in front of a mill, airplane distribution of union leaflets, a nice picket line at the homes of the scabs and even the boss – it is this kind of ingenuity and technique that dramatizes a strike, wins sympathy and becomes “the talk of the town.”

Dramatization must also be applied in the struggle against police or company terror; in raising funds for the strikers; in the exposure of workers’ poverty; in public investigations; in mass violation of injunctions, etc.

The principle of fighting on the offensive must be uppermost in the minds of the strike leaders. This means being alive not only to the movements of the enemy, but also to every opportunity of building morale and winning sympathy and support for the strike.

Chapter 8: Public Support

Labor Has Allies

There was a time when public support of a strike was limited to other unions. It was rare for a mayor or congressman, for a writer or actor to come out openly in support of men on strike. Times have changed. And there is every reason to believe that as the trade union movement continues to grow and develop stature in American life, public support of strikes will continue to increase.

To begin with, a great many professional people are learning that they, too, are wage earners. Some of the best known Hollywood movie stars, many outstanding newspapermen, artists and scientists – whose influence on general thinking is not to be minimized – carry union books: they know that the gains of labor are their gains, too. This same realization is being borne in on large sections of the middle class – the storekeepers, the doctors, the lawyers, the dentists, the beauty parlor operators, the motion picture theater owners, and many others. They are becoming increasingly aware that they benefit from an increase in the buying power of the workers. The veterans’ organizations, too, which two or three decades ago were openly hostile to labor unions and often played a strikebreaking role, have adopted a more sympathetic approach to labor. And there has been a basic change in attitude on the part of some church leaders.

Moreover, the growing role of organized labor in the political field promises greater public support. The results of the 1948 elections, when some 80 congressmen who had supported the Taft-Hartley law were defeated, will not quickly be forgotten. This major victory was achieved almost exclusively by the labor movement, and many public officeholders will think twice before they align themselves on the side of the employers in time of strike.

Conditions exist today for widespread supporting movements in time of strike. It is wrong to take for granted that the mayor of the town, the congressmen, the city council, the legion post or the priest cannot be won over in support of a strike. All of them are subject to pressures. Whichever side exerts greater pressures stands the better chance of winning support. To be sure, the employers have the heavy guns on their side. But in part the reason for it is that they are generally much more awake to the importance of winning allies. This is not to minimize the terrific economic, political and social pressure a large corporation can exert in a community; employers and company managers are large contributors to local churches, company personnel is strongly represented in the leadership of veterans’ organizations, in the Eagles, Lions and Elks, in the YMCA and YWCA. Notwithstanding, public support of the enemy side is not a foregone conclusion. There is nothing automatic about it. Public support must be fought for and won.

In a sense organized labor must compete for it and no strike strategy can be complete without a well conceived plan toward that end. The task cannot be left in unskilled hands. Nor can it wait until the battle has begun. One of the ablest organizers must be assigned to this public relations task long before the strike, so that he will have ample time to work out an effective and all-embracing plan.

How UE Reached the People

The way UE was able to mobilize public support during its crucial strike struggles, particularly against such powerful corporations as General Electric, Westinghouse and General Motors, can serve as a shining example.

It was in the cold winter of 1946 that the UE engaged in its first post-war battle for survival. Some 200,000 UE workers in 79 plants spreading from coast to coast struck for a wage increase. The giant corporations in the electrical industry had thrown in everything they could to destroy, or at least weaken, this powerful union. But the union threw in everything it had, too, and the battle lasted 119 days. In a pictorial history devoted to this gallant strike the UE wrote: “The fight to preserve our union and win a living wage wasn’t easily won. Picketing in sub-zero weather, day after day and month after month with no pay coming in, is not easy. Fighting such powerful and fabulously wealthy companies as G.E. or Westinghouse or G.M. is not easy either. But we took all they had and still came back for more. We kept fighting from that early morning in January when the strike started to the last day in May when the strike ended. Men and women, young and old. Even the kids were on the picket line.” (UE Fights for a Better America.)

It was in this great strike that the UE proved that public support can be won. Fully conscious of the need to mobilize the strike-bound communities in support of the strike ahead of time, even before the strike began the union made this significant declaration: “All fair-minded people within our communities will join with us when they understand how the companies’ pinch-penny policies are injuring the entire community.”

Then the union leaders began to operate on individual groups and people. As a result, Bloomfield, N. J., a town with a population of 65,000, came out almost solid behind the 8,000 UE workers in the General Electric and Westinghouse plants. The mayor of the Town, John A. Reed, actively supported the strike. Addressing a town rally in support of the workers, he told the men: “Your case is just.” He instructed the police to put away their nightsticks for the duration. The merchants proved their loyalty to the workers. One restaurant served 120 strikers. When a newspaper reporter asked the owner why he did it, “Why shouldn’t I help?” he replied, “These are my customers.” A meat market proprietor who supplied free frankfurters said: “I have no stock in GE except in the workers.” A barber shop set aside from 1 to 4 P.M. daily for giving free haircuts to strikers. A bakery supplied rolls and a vegetable market gave potatoes and onions. In one form or another the whole town contributed toward the support of the strike.

What was accomplished in Bloomfield, N. J., was repeated in many other communities. In Lynn, Mass., Mayor Albert Cole wrote the companies urging that union demands be met. In the same town the merchants contributed $3,000 during the first days of the strike. The town Community Fund made funds available to all needy cases. Druggists set aside medicinal supplies for emergencies. Three of the biggest bakeries donated thousands of loaves of bread and pastry to the union kitchen, and the local dance orchestras donated their services. In Essington, Pa., a Citizens Committee consisting of small businessmen and farmers declared: “We feel that the unions are working in the best interests of the national economy in their efforts to maintain the country’s pay envelopes.” Official support for UE strikers was voted by city governments and city and town councils from scores of communities. Among city governments to vote support for GE and Westinghouse strikers were: Mansfield, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pa.; Taunton, Mass.; Newark, N. J.; Pittsfield, Mass.; Bridgeport, Conn.; Ontario, Calif.; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Lynn, Mass.; Cleveland, Ohio; Springfield, Mass.; Fairmont, West Va.; Salem, Mass.; Rotterdam, N. Y.

Even more significant was the ability of the strike leaders to enlist 55 U.S. Senators and Congressmen to make a special public statement declaring: “UE strikers deserve full moral and financial support in their grim struggle for a substantial wage increase and for a decent American standard of living ...”

With each passing strike the UE is adding to its fine record of ability to rally public support. During the 1949 Singer Sewing Machine strike in Elizabeth, N.J., the union reached out into the community and nearby towns to explain to the people why the Singer workers were striking. Street meetings were held in Elizabeth so that the neighbors of the strikers could be told how the speed-up, in that it resulted in lay-offs and declining earnings, endangered the entire community. As in previous UE strikes, the union enlisted the support of the Mayor of Elizabeth and the nearby towns of Winfield and Linden. The mayors of these three towns issued proclamations to the citizens appealing for support to the strike during tag days arranged by the union. Mayor J. Richard Brendel of Winfield, N.J., himself joined the picket line and in a public statement declared that “the demands of the strikers for better working conditions and increased compensation are in the best interests of everyone.” He then further declared that the “responsibility for this prolonged hardship to the families of the strikers is that of the Singer Manufacturing Company.”

The UE is not the only union that has succeeded in mobilizing public support on the side of the strikers. In the 1946 steel strike the town of Clairton, Pa., made labor history when the city council authorized a $50,000 loan for an emergency relief fund for the town’s 4,500 steel workers and their families. The Mayor of the town was John J. Mullen, who was also local organizer of the United Steelworkers. The money was distributed to the strikers in the form of certificates to buy food, clothing and other necessities. The New York newspaper PM, reporting on this new type of public support to strikers, wrote: “This was a bitter pill indeed for the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp., whose Clairton works is the biggest coke and by-products plant in the world. The company is the city’s main source of tax revenue, paying approximately 60% of all taxes collected.” (PM, January 28, 1946.)

The Story of Reverend Jones

The experience of several unions shows that it is possible to win to the side of the strikers the support of church organizations and clergymen. They, of course, are under tremendous pressure from the employers. Many an anti-labor and anti-strike pronouncement has been made from the pulpit, and on many a Sunday morning people who instinctively felt sympathetic to the strike have been misguided. How little scruple the employers have in pressuring clergymen to influence their congregations against a union or a strike is amply illustrated by the case of Rev. Orville C. Jones.

Reverend Jones was the Pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Youngstown when the CIO came to town. He had great understanding of, and sympathy for, the steel workers. He felt it would be better if the steel industry was organized. Because he held such views, top steel officials withdrew their financial support. What happened to the good reverend? The answer can be found in the Hearings of the La Follette Senate Civil Liberties Committee.

Senator La Follette: Reverend Jones, you said you left the church in December of 1937?

Mr. Jones: Yes.

Senator La Follette: Did you leave by request or of your own volition?

Mr. Jones: I resigned. I thought that in view of the general antagonism among the steel people to me it would be better for the church if I withdrew.[323]

Reverend Jones told the Senate Committee honestly and candidly that powerful corporations can and do exert pressure on the Church. Senator La Follette asked in what form. The rest follows:

Mr. Jones: One family associated with the Sheet and Tube dropped out. I sent a representative to find out why and the representative was told that this man’s boss had informed the man that it would be inadvisable, if he wished to continue his job, to continue attending my church.

Senator La Follette: Who was that?

Mr. Jones: I would rather not give the name unless it is necessary.

Senator La Follette: You mean you are afraid he might lose his job?

Mr. Jones: I think it would be possible.

Mr. Purnell: Senator, I will guarantee that he won’t lose his job. I suggest that his name be given.

Senator La Follette: I will accept your guarantee if the minister will.

Mr. Purnell: I will certainly guarantee it.

Mr. Jones: The man’s name was Smith. (Laughter)

Senator La Follette: Order, please, what was Mr. Smith’s position with the company?

Mr. Jones: I think he was in the metallurgical department.

Senator La Follette: What was his first name?

Mr. Jones: Harry.

Senator La Follette: Did anything else happen that indicated any displeasure on the part of anybody?

Mr. Jones: Immediately after my discussion with Mr. Gillies I began to feel considerable pressure from people who were related in one way or another to the officials of the Sheet & Tube. The wife of one official started the story that I had gone into the mill and called the men from their work and urged them to join the CIO.

Senator La Follette: Who was that?

Mr. Jones: Mrs. Thullen.

Senator La Follette: Anything else of a similar nature?

Mr. Jones: She incited another woman who was a member of the church council to make an attack on me in the church board, at the next meeting of the church board. This woman charged in the church board that I had been very discourteous, and that Dr. Batman had said that I had been discourteous. In the meantime, two other women heard of her visit there and went to see Dr. Batman. He denied making any such charge and said that I had been perfectly within my rights and they faced this woman with that and, of course, there was considerable heat and not much light.

Senator La Follette: Anything else of a similar nature?

Mr. Jones: As far as the church is concerned it is a matter of subtle pressure all the time because the steel workers aren’t paid enough, especially in times of depression, to support a church and the churches are dependent on the officials largely for financial support, and they steadily withdraw their support from anyone whose views they disagree with, and apparently influence others, friends, to do likewise. It is a perfectly natural and simple thing and yet it amounts to an effective coercion, which means that the ministers of the city do not express independent judgment.

Senator La Follette: Did your church have any loss of financial support in this period?

Mr. Jones: I expect about 10 families.

Senator La Fottette: Name them.

Mr. Jones: Well, Mr. Purnell withdrew his support and membership for one. The Thullens. Then Mr. Harry Smith and other members of his family. The Parmenters, who were close friends of Mrs. Thullen, and several others.

Winning Church Support

Such are the pressures. However, it is by no means true that the possibility of developing strong church support in time of strike is to be eliminated. During the heat of battle in the “Little Steel” strike of 1937 over one hundred prominent clergymen of many denominations, residing in various States and cities, issued an appeal for a settlement of the strike based on the principles of organized labor relations “with signed agreements.” Their appeal called attention to the long-standing pronouncements of all faiths favoring the right of collective bargaining. Those who signed this appeal included: Monsignor Joseph F. Smith, Vicar General of the Cleveland Diocese; Monsignor John A. Ryan, Washington, D.C.; Rev. Edgar De Witt Jones, President, Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America; Rt. Rev. Benjamin Brewster, Bishop of Portland, Maine; Rabbi Max Currick, President, Central Conference American Rabbis, Erie, Pa.; Rev. W.T. Clemons, Secretary, New York State Council of Churches; and many other outstanding church leaders in the nation.

In the spring of 1941, when the Ford workers were engaged in their decisive strike, the press all over the nation accused the union of a “conspiracy to block rearmament.” The New York East Conference of the Methodist Church came out fully in support of the workers. Its resolution stated: “Familiarity with labor problems from month to month in recent years cuts away the ground from the charge that the present labor situation amounts to a conspiracy to block the effective rearmament of this nation ... It ought to be obvious that we cannot defend democracy by abolishing it. Democracy in terms of structure means a society in which basic freedom of speech, press, assembly and worship are maintained in harmony with equality of opportunity.” (PM, May 20, 1941.)

During the 1948 packing house strike, in protest against the murder of a striker, a group of ministers joined the picket line. They carried signs with these words: “The cause of justice is the cause of Christ” and “Any resort to violence is a confession of weakness.”

Winning the Farmers and Veterans

Unlike the story in the past, farmers and their organizations can be rallied to support workers on strike; unions that have made such efforts have met warm response on the part of fanners’ organizations. During the 1946 Schenectady and the 1947 Remington Rand strike in Illion, N.Y., the UE was successful in enlisting the support of the farmers’ union. One day in Schenectady a delegation of farmers brought a live cow to the strikers’ kitchen. A year later the farmers’ unions of Otsego County made a similar contribution to the Illion strikers. In their letter to the strikers they wrote: “If we are to get a decent price for our products, it can only come as a result of industrial people receiving good wages and having a decent standard of living. It is the workingmen who make up the market and who buy our products.”

The old-time antagonism between farmers and workers – fostered by enemies of both groups – is breaking down. Farmers today are themselves increasingly union-conscious, many of them having at one time or another worked in industry. Getting the support of farming communities will deprive the employers of a force that in the past was used against strikers. But here, again, such support will not come by itself; it must be solicited.

In the battle for public support of the veterans’ organizations, unions will run up against stiff competition from the employers, who have always recognized the key importance of that support. They have consistently endeavored to enlist it, and after World War I were successful in turning the American Legion against organized labor. Since then their pressures have been less successful – at the local level – because there has been a shift in veterans’ attitude. In the thirties, when the labor unions embraced new millions of wage earners, including veterans, the organizations of ex-servicemen began to lean more toward neutrality in labor disputes. In 1937, during the steel strike, the American Legion’s national headquarters announced that Legionnaires doing strike duty under police command are acting “as citizens and not Legionnaires.” Harry W. Colmery, then national commander, announced in a press statement that the Legion’s policy is one of “strict neutrality.” He made it very emphatic that “The American Legion is not a strikebreaking organization.” (UP dispatch, June 17, 1937.)

Today, the possibility of winning veterans’ support of a strike is greater than ever. Since World War II, the veterans’ organizations have given indication of something more than “neutrality.” Part of the reason is that after the war millions of workers joined the veterans’ organizations. A large section of these worker-veterans are union members, and in many industrial communities they constitute a majority in their organizations. The growing participation of ex-servicemen in strikes is an indication that the active support of their organizations can be won on a large scale. In some post-war strikes local veterans’ posts have declared themselves on the side of labor. In the 1946 UE strike the commander of the Legion Post in Bloomfield, N.J., sided with the union and the strike. In Lynn, Mass., during the same strike, one of the Legion Posts made an unsolicited financial contribution to the strikers.

How effective veteran participation can be was demonstrated in the Western Union strike which rallied a large number of worker-veterans. Their influence was particularly felt on the picket line. In describing their role the union paper wrote: “Four abreast, a thousand strong, veterans of the Battle of the Bulge and the Solomons, GFs and sailors, paratroopers, Wacs, men from the tanks and the air corps and the merchant marine marched on the Western Union picket line and held that line against 300 mounted police.” (ACA News, Jan. 31, 1946.) The veterans were of tremendous help in preventing the police from breaking up mass picketing.

The potentialities for winning the support of veterans’ organizations are great. Union and strike leaders must work for it.

Don’t Write Off the Press

To win the support of the press is perhaps the most difficult of all. The average American newspaper is seldom on the side of labor. A great many newspapers don’t even pretend to be neutral. Their editorials, cartoons, many columnists and the slanting of the news are anti-labor and anti-strike. From this, however, one must not conclude that the press and radio must be written off as possible sources of public support. Experience has shown that at least individual columnists and commentators can be moved to side with the strike and that even when the local newspaper or radio station is strongly anti-union, pressure can be exerted to at least curtail or limit their anti-union propaganda.

During the 1937 “Little Steel” strike the press of the nation was almost solidly against the CIO, yet a number of outstanding and nationally known columnists condemned Tom Girdler’s stand against signed contracts and for financing and organizing violence. Walter Lippmann wrote that “it is reactionary to wage the kind of fight these independent steel companies are waging ... In Mr. Girdler’s policy he can look forward only to fighting on the picket lines.” Raymond Clapper, famous Washington columnist, in discussing the strike in Scripps-Howard papers, wrote: “Girdler and his colleagues don’t seem to give a damn about anybody else. They won’t sign any agreement with organized labor. Thus, sabotaging all collective bargaining effort, they precipitate bloody warfare which is causing destruction of life and property and is demoralizing whole communities.” Such statements from such prominent newspapermen were of considerable importance in breaking through a hostile press and helping develop public opinion on the side of the strikers.

It can be done. During the Western Union strike a special press committee was set up. The committee’s main objective was to prevent, as much as possible, the press and radio from playing their usual anti-strike role. The committee visited editors, columnists and commentators. They did not accept “out to lunch” and “gone for the day” excuses. They were determined to see those responsible for newspaper policies. The committee managed to meet the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, who is “practically inaccessible.” For an hour and a half they talked about an unfriendly editorial. The editor finally agreed that the union should submit its point of view and that it would be given six times the space of the editorial.

The New York Herald Tribune published an anti-strike column by the labor-hating Mark Sullivan. Result: the managing editor was visited by the press committee and promised to carry the union’s answer.

When the committee visited the editor of the New York Sun to complain about an editorial, they were told that if they would send in letters presenting the union’s point of view, these letters would be printed. The following day the Sun’s letter page was full of union letters.

In describing these experiences the ACA News said that “even details were not overlooked. Jack Benny on his radio program said he just got a wire from Fred Allen. After the program, its sponsor received a call from the committee reminding him that Western Union was on strike.”

A hostile attitude on the part of the public at large, or even an attitude of apathy and indifference in time of a major strike, is dangerous; for such a condition is favorable to developing an offensive against the strike. Progressive strike leaders do not permit the employers to gain and hold public support. That support rightly belongs to the men who are fighting for a better life for themselves, their families and their fellow workers.

Part Three

Chapter 9: Violence on the Picket Line

The Connection of Politics and Violence

One of the most important phases of strike strategy relates to employer tactics in breaking strikes. Generally speaking, these tactics fall into three distinct classifications: violence, injunctions and the “Mohawk Valley formula” – the last emerging only in recent years and being the most comprehensive and all-embracing form of breaking strikes. A union, of course, has to be prepared to deal with all three forms. But the immediate political situation in the nation, or in individual States, has a great deal to do with which form – if any – it will have to battle at any particular time. The year 1937 will illustrate this.

In January 1937 the great General Motors sit-down strike took place. This powerful corporation was all set to unleash a flood of violence and, if need be, to tear-gas or machine-gun the workers out of the plants. The same employer was also set for legal violence, as evidenced by the demand for sweeping court injunctions and for troops to be sent into the strike-bound Michigan towns. The union did not, in this instance, have to contend with either form of violence. G.M. plans were frustrated largely because Justice Frank Murphy, then Governor of Michigan and a close collaborator of President Roosevelt, prevented such reactionary moves notwithstanding extreme pressures. The strike culminated in one of the first major CIO victories. In defending his pro-labor course in an address to the graduating class of Duquesne University the Governor declared labor’s unrest was “simply an acute manifestation of labor’s long struggle to protect itself ... and to escape the haunting fear of insecurity by consolidating itself in its job ... Essentially the present conflict between capital and labor represents a renewed and vigorous demand by a large group of our people for new rights and new liberties.” (Youngstown Vindicator, June 10, 1937.)

During the same year the “Little Steel” strike took place. The ruling powers in Chicago and in the State of Ohio lined up squarely on the side of the notorious Tom Girdler, head of Republic Steel. The result in Chicago was a massacre of strikers. In Ohio, where Governor Martin L. Davey took the opposite course from Governor Murphy, the result was similar – death and violence against the steel strikers.

The fact that the sit-down strike in Michigan developed under quite favorable political circumstances, while the “Little Steel” strike in Chicago and Ohio ran into the opposite political circumstances, illuminates the point of time and place and that unions and strike leaders must constantly prepare against all eventualities.

The oldest and most persistent form of strikebreaking is unadulterated violence stimulated, sponsored, planned and financed by trie employers. In no country in the world have so many strikers been murdered as in the United States. Yet in most cases those directly and indirectly responsible for killing the men and women who fight for freedom’s cause are never brought before the bar of justice. On the contrary, it is invariably the strikers who are accused of violence.

It is important to substantiate the long chain of murders on the picket line and to place the responsibility where it belongs. Organized labor has not yet fully and thoroughly exposed those who breed strike violence while brazenly accusing the strikers of such crimes. And it has an obligation to do so – not only to the dead but to the living. To fail to do so is to play into the hands of the enemy. For the future of labor depends to no small extent on labor’s ability to prove beyond the possibility of doubt that force and violence are the customary weapon employers use to break strikes and destroy unions. Every approach to anti-labor legislation has been predicated on the theory that labor indulges in force and violence. What arguments are presented when bills are introduced to limit picket lines if not force and violence? On what grounds do employers demand injunctions if not force and violence? Even the arguments against the closed shop are based on the so-called application of “force” against the “individual liberty” of the workers.

It is a grim picture that emerges as we piece together the historic incidents of violence in the labor battles, past and present a picture of simple people fighting for a decent life for themselves, their families, their fellow workers and meeting with force and brutal violence at every step. The rank and file in the labor movement and even the labor leaders themselves do not know the whole story. Perhaps that is why labor has been so remiss in placing the blame for violence where it belongs. But labor may not remain in ignorance. Strike strategy that will effectively counter employer force and violence must rest first of all on a knowledge of the facts.

1877 – 100 Dead in “Railroad Uprising”

The Civil War was over. Under Abraham Lincoln’s leadership the system of slavery had been defeated in battle, the period of reconstruction and rapid industrialization of the nation had been set in motion. And now, while the slaveowners were on their way out, there appeared on the scene a new and ruthless class of industrial magnates. Among them the heads of the railroads were riding roughshod over their workers and over the farmers whose land they had practically stolen. The Vanderbilts of that day were as hated as the Garys in the twenties and the Girdlers in the thirties.

The railroad workers bore the brunt of the exploitation. Suffering from starvation; working only part time; slaving away from 15 to 18 hours a day; making less than $10 a week for 70 to 80 hours of work; resentful of being subject to call although not working a full week; irked by not receiving their meager pay regularly; often deprived of railroad passes; resentful of employer hostility to any form of organization – the railroad workers were now asked to accept a drastic wage cut. Such were the conditions and such the immediate grievance that brought on the “railroad uprising” of 1877. The battle was inevitable. All it needed was a start somehow, somewhere. Despite intimidation, lack of organization and leadership, despite the severe unemployment in the country, the railroad workers rebelled.

The historic labor revolt started when forty firemen and brakemen on the B&O railroad in Baltimore refused to work and stopped freight trains from moving on the day the wage cut went into effect. This small, brave group of workmen were immediately dispersed and replaced.

Without advance knowledge of what was happening in Baltimore, an even smaller group of firemen at Martinsburg, West Virginia, quit working. The news spread, and their action was greeted with enthusiasm. Unlike Baltimore, the people of the town rallied speedily in support of the strikers. When the Mayor arrested the strike leaders, the people forced their release. When the Mayor attempted to move the trains with scabs, the people stopped it. Within a few hours the strike spread. The railroad asked for the militia and the Governor obliged by sending in two companies. A miracle happened – the militia refused to open fire and instead fraternized with the strikers. “Angered by this disobedience, Governor Matthews set out personally from Wheeling at the head of two more companies of militia, but he abandoned them at Grafton because of the hostility of the citizens. Everywhere along the line the people were completely in sympathy with the strikers, nor could the troops be depended upon to act against them.” (Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles.) The Baltimore Sun had to admit that “There is no disguising the fact that the strikers in all their lawful acts have the fullest sympathy of the community.”

The strike spread to Wheeling and other railroad centers in West Virginia. The state militia could no longer be counted upon to break the strike. For the first time in the history of the nation a President of the United States was called upon to send federal troops to crush the strike. President Hayes dispatched 400 U.S. soldiers who dispersed the strikers at bayonet point, arrested their leaders, commandeered the trains, and opened the road.

Considering the lack of organization, the entrance of federal troops for the first time into a strike situation should have been a blow sufficient to prevent the further spreading of the strike. But this was not the case. Railroad workers walked out at Cumberland and Newark, Ohio. The Maryland Governor took no more chances in calling out the local militia. Instead, he ordered a Baltimore regiment to proceed to Cumberland. The workers and unemployed of Baltimore poured out on the streets and attempted to prevent the troops from leaving the city. The militiamen fired straight at the crowd, and when the battle was over, 10 were dead on the streets. Aroused by such outright murder, the working population of Baltimore were in a state of revolt. For three days the rioting continued, and only on Monday, July 23, was an armed peace established. Telling the story of this strike in his American Labor Struggles, Samuel Yellen says: “Baltimore was a military camp ... where 700 soldiers guarded the company property with two Catling guns and several field pieces. The total casualties of the affrays were 13 killed and about 50 wounded.”

During the same week in Pittsburgh, 500 B&O workers joined the strike. What happened in Martinsburg was repeated in Pittsburgh. The Governor of Pennsylvania ordered the Sixth Division of the militia for strike duty. The militiamen refused to become strikebreakers or murderers; instead, they fraternized with the railroad workers. The Governor ordered 1,000 troops from Philadelphia, including artillery. Upon arrival in Pittsburgh, they proceeded to “disperse” the strikers. Within a few hours 20 persons were killed and 29 wounded, including three small children and a woman. As in Baltimore, the people of Pittsburgh were aroused. They congregated by the thousands, armed themselves, and forced the Philadelphia troops to retreat to the Pennsylvania roundhouse. In the battle another 20 workers were killed. The railroad rebellion spread to Altoona, Easton, Harrisburg, Reading, Johnstown, Bethlehem and Philadelphia. President Hayes appointed General Hancock to take charge of 3,000 U. S. soldiers to crush the strike. In Reading 10 were killed and 40 wounded and a number of workers were shot in Johnstown. More troop reinforcements were needed. The strike spread to Buffalo. The city was turned, Yellen says, into an armed camp “with 1,600 militiamen, the regular police force, 1,800 veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, and 300 citizen volunteers. In the street clashes eight soldiers were wounded and an equal number of workmen killed.”

The strike continued to spread to Chicago, to St. Louis and westward. With it the number of dead and wounded continued to mount. In Chicago thousands of workers in shops and factories joined their railroad brothers in sympathy strikes. A demonstration of 8,000 workers was fired upon, with three workers killed and seven wounded. Two days later 10,000 Chicago workers assembled for a demonstration at the Halstead Street Viaduct. Yellen writes that “Soldiers and mounted police arrived, with orders to make every shot tell. At least 12 workers were killed, and fully 100 leaders arrested. The city was patrolled by six companies of the Twenty-second Regular Infantry, the entire Ninth Regular, two regiments of State militia, a battery of artillery, several companies of cavalry, 5,000 special deputies, 500 veteran soldiers, and members of various patriotic organizations ... Each day additional federal troops returned from the Indian wars and marched into the city. In the street fighting, between 30 and 50 men and women were killed and about 100 wounded. On July 28 the first freight train was sent east under military protection.”

The railroad strike was broken. Between July 16 and August 1, 1877, over 100 workingmen lost their lives in a fight against a wage cut, against brutal employers, and against a federal administration that sent the country’s armed forces k to shoot and kill its own citizens. The era of violence against strikers was ushered in and legalized by the federal and State governments.

Who was responsible for the bloodshed? Then, as now, while the strikers were subjected to extreme violence, while they lay dead on the streets of many cities, it was the strikers who were accused of violence. Samuel Yellen found that in a single issue – July 26, 1877 – the New York Times referred to the railroad strikers in the following terms: “disaffected elements, roughs, hoodlums, rioters, mob, suspicious looking individuals, bad characters, thieves, blacklegs, looters, communists, rabble, labor-reform agitators, dangerous class of people, gangs, tramps, drunken section-men, law breakers, threatening crowd, bummers, ruffians, loafers, bullies, vagabonds, cowardly mobs, bands of worthless fellows, incendiaries, enemies of society, reckless crowd, malcontents, wretched people, loud-mouthed orators, rapscallions, brigands, robber mob, riffraff, terrible fellows, felons, idiots.” All this and more because the railroad workers fought against William H. Vanderbilt and other railroad magnates who imposed un- endurable wage scales and unendurable working conditions. All this against men, women, and children who were mowed down and bayonetted upon orders of a President of the United States.

The Battle of “Fort Frick” – 1892

Between the Railroad Uprising and the next mass murder, 15 years passed. In 1892 the two opposing forces clashed again, this time in the most basic industry of the country – steel.

The labor movement of that day was fully cognizant of the importance of the Homestead strike; for the outcome of that struggle with Carnegie Steel would influence the course of American trade unionism for a period of several decades. Both organized and unorganized workers throughout the nation responded with spontaneous sympathy, as did thousands of liberal-minded citizens. No strike up to that time received so much financial support as Homestead did. In many industrial centers labor unions set aside special days when workmen contributed a dollar. In Chicago alone in one day twenty thousand artisans and workers made such a contribution. Moral and material support came from England, Ireland, France, Germany and other lands. Homestead was a preview of things to come when labor made its first effort to challenge the cruel exploitation by the emerging monopolies and trusts.

Homestead, Pa., was one of the few key steel centers where the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had gained a foothold among the skilled workers. This outpost of organized labor in the most important plant of the Carnegie Steel Corporation, where the union had secured a wage scale contract, had to be crushed before it spread to other steel centers.

H.C. Frick was the chairman of the company. He was also one of the wealthiest coke operators in the country. He was a ruthless employer with a consuming hatred for labor unions. In 1889 he smashed a union and a strike of coke workers in the Connellsville region. Mr. Frick directly planned, plotted and schemed for a showdown in Homestead. He insisted that the Amalgamated accept a reduction in wage scales. He demanded a change in the date of expiration of the contract from June to December, making it more difficult for the men to strike in the cold of winter. While pretending to negotiate with the union, the company made preparations, both visible and secret, for the showdown. Enormous fences were erected around the plants, stockades were built, and powerful floodlights were installed. The employees renamed the plant “Fort Frick.” There was no longer any doubt that this was it.

The first blow came two days before the expiration of the contract – the workers were locked out. There was no alternative but to accept the challenge. Fortunately, the 3,000 unskilled non-union workers joined the 800 skilled Amalgamated members and the battle was on.

Unlike the railroad operators, who relied on the armed forces to break the strike, H. C. Frick turned to the Pinkerton agency to do the job. A congressional committee to investigate the strike established that, long before the negotiations broke down, Carnegie asked the notorious Pinkerton brothers to assemble 312 professional strikebreakers and thugs, and to purchase 250 rifles, 300 pistols and large quantities of ammunition.

The Strikers’ Advisory Committee assumed high command, and its leader, Hugh O’Donnell, lost no time in preparing the strikers to meet the crisis. From all accounts the strike was blessed with an able and determined leadership. One of the members of the Advisory Committee was John McLuckie, the burgess of Homestead. Homestead being a town of steel workers and their families, the Advisory Committee, with the help of the burgess, practically took over the town. Guards of strikers were posted around the plants, in the town, and on the highways and along the banks of the river. Headquarters and a signaling system were set up. At the same time the Advisory Committee offered the county sheriff from 100 to 500 strikers as special deputies. Of course, the offer was rejected.

H.C. Frick proceeded with his plan. The Pinkertons gathered secretly in Youngstown. From there they were to embark in two barges. Under cover of darkness they were to arrive in Homestead and in a surprise move occupy the mills and nearby territory.

But neither Frick nor the Pinkertons properly estimated the vigilance of the strikers. Myron R. Stowell, in his book “Fort Frick” or the Siege of Homestead dramatically tells the story of what happened. As the barges approached Homestead they were spotted by scouts. Men on horses galloped to Homestead and sounded the alarm. “The effect was electrical. It is impossible to comprehend the wild-fire-like rapidity with which the intelligence was communicated to everyone in the borough, much less to understand by what facility the news spread. The town was instantly in an uproar. The preconcerted signal, blasts from the electric light plant whistle, filled the air with hoarse, ominous shrieks. Humanity began to pour from houses and buildings all over the town. Men, women and children who but an instant before had been in sound sleep, thronged into the streets like panic-stricken sheep. Then the men began to shout: ‘On to the river!’ ‘To the River!’ ‘The scabs are coming!’ ‘Don’t let the black sheep land!’”

The strikebreaking flotilla reached its destination. Thousands of grim men and women were there to meet them. A gangplank was thrown out and soon afterward some fifty Pinkerton men, each with a Winchester repeater, lined up to go ashore. Someone from the crowd yelled out, “Don’t step off that boat!” In reply a shot came from the boat, followed by a loud command: “Forward!” The Pinkertons raised their rifles, and in a split second some fifty bullets were hurled into the crowd. “A wild scramble for shelter followed. Up the steep bank into the mill yard and down the river toward the waterworks they hurried for their lives. All this time, however, the Pinkertons kept up a rattling fire, which was briskly returned by about two hundred of the millworkers, some of whom stood their ground, while others had retreated to the mill yard at the top of the bank, gaining protection behind piles of steel billets.”

The Pinkertons made a hasty retreat. Firing had ceased. Two of the strikers were dead and a third wounded. A conference between strike leaders and the leader of the Pinkertons followed. “On behalf of 5,000 men,” said the steel worker, “I beg of you to leave here at once. I don’t know who you are nor whence you came, but I do know you have no business here, and if you remain there will be more bloodshed. We, the workers in these mills, are peaceably inclined. We have not damaged any property and we do not intend to. If you will send a committee with us we will take them through the works, carefully explain to them all the details of this trouble and promise them a safe return to their boats. But in the name of God and humanity don’t attempt to land! Don’t attempt to enter these works by force!”

The Pinkerton leader, leaning on his rifle, gave his answer in clear and precise words: “Men, we are Pinkerton detectives. We were sent here to take possession of this property and to guard it for the company ... We are determined to go up there and shall do so. If you men don’t withdraw, we will mow every one of you down and enter in spite of you. You had better disperse, for land we will!” The strike leader looked at the Pinkertons and after a moment of silence declared: “I have no more to say. What you do here is at the risk of many lives. Before you enter those mills you will trample over the dead bodies of 3,000 honest workingmen.”

The strikers were determined that the scabs should not pass. They were aware of the character of the Pinkertons. Besides, two of their fellow workers were already dead. Hastily the strikers armed themselves. They even secured a small cannon, set up steel barricades, and took other measures to prevent the gang of murderers from entering Homestead. For hours the battle raged. The strikers finally set fire to the barges. A white flag was hoisted. The Pinkertons surrendered. They were disarmed and marched up the hill. Seven strikers and three Pinkertons lay dead and many strikers wounded.

For almost five months the ranks of the strikers were solid. The final blow came when Governor Pattison of Pennsylvania under great pressure gave in and sent troops to take over Homestead. Then the strike broke. Organized labor in the steel industry was routed.

Would there have been violence in Homestead had H.C. Frick not brought in the Pinkertons? We have an authoritative answer to this question. Governor Pattison in a press interview declared: “I am of the opinion that there would not have been a drop of blood shed if the proposition had been accepted to let the locked-out men guard the premises.”

The steel workers have never forgotten the Homestead strike. Forty-four years later, during the early days of the CIO organizing drive, in June 1936, 4,000 steel workers attended a “Homestead Memorial Meeting/’ This gathering honored the memory of those who had fallen in the battle of “Fort Frick.” Among those gathered were a few aged steel workers who participated in that strike. There were the children and grandchildren of the honored labor martyrs. The meeting adopted a new Declaration of Independence. It proclaimed: “Through this union we shall win higher wages, shorter hours, and a better standard of living. We shall win leisure for ourselves, and opportunity for our children. Together with our union brothers in other industries, we shall abolish industrial despotism. We shall make real the dreams of the pioneers who pictured America as a land where all might live in comfort and happiness. In support of this declaration, we mutually pledge to each other our steadfast purpose as union men, our honor and our very lives.”

The Ludlow Massacre – 1914

Twenty-one years pass. It is now the year 1913. The scene of battle is the Trinidad region, east of the Rocky Mountains, in the Southern Colorado coal fields.

In an isolated section of the state, the Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Fuel and Iron Company ruled supreme. The miners and their families lived under a system of political, economic and social oppression. It would be a gross exaggeration to refer to the Colorado coal miners of that day as free wage earners. They were really subjects of absentee owners who knew little, and cared less, about the operations of their mines. So long as the rate of profit was satisfactory, everything was all right.

In every way, the miners were at the mercy of the company. They were forced to live in company-owned houses, to trade in company-owned stores. When sick or suffering from accidents, only the company-hired and controlled doctor was to care for them. There was no established authority; the company guards served as the local police force.

Inside the mines, to complain against long hours, low rates of pay, the right to select their own checkweighmen, or even to express vaguely a desire to have a union of their own was tantamount to immediate firing. “The miner who protested lost simultaneously his job, his dwelling, and his right to remain in the community.”

The United Mine Workers, then nationally a strong union, were determined to organize the Colorado coal fields. In the summer of 1913, the UMW conducted a vigorous organizing drive. Considering the circumstances under which these miners lived and worked, it was not surprising that they eagerly responded to the call of the union.

The coal operators did not underestimate the union’s potentialities to reduce the ruthless exploitation and weaken the despotic hold over the mining communities. Although the union did not make its formal recognition the chief issue, the coal operators even refused to meet with the UMW representatives for fear that such an act might be interpreted as a “form of recognition/’ The union, of course, made every effort to obtain a measure of relief without a strike.

A battle was obviously inevitable. The miners were determined to fight it out and the mine owners accepted the challenge. The armed guards were reinforced. Private detective agencies flooded the mining camps with professional strikebreakers, thugs and gunmen. Even before the strike broke out, a leading UMW organizer, Gerald Lippiatt, was killed by a private detective on the streets of Trinidad.

The Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, notorious for its strikebreaking activities in other mining centers, was hired by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company to carry through the infamous task of breaking the strike. The agency went about the job in a manner similar to army commanders in charge of preparations for a major battle. They built a special armored car with a mounted machine gun. During the strike, the miners called it “The Death Special.” Rifle pits were dug in the hills adjacent to the mining properties, and were equipped with rifles, machine guns, and searchlights.

Most of these armed preparations were made openly, brazenly, and without interference on the part of any legally established county, State or federal authority. In Huerfano County, 326 imported strikebreakers were deputized three weeks before the strike began.

The union officials and the miners themselves understood that it would be sheer suicide to sit idly by without preparing for self-defense. In view of the company’s armed preparations, the union had to do likewise. Union officials went to hardware stores and purchased whatever arms they could get. They had a right to do so, it being provided in the Constitution of the State of Colorado that “The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property shall be called in question.” In 1915, a government agency upheld their action; the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in its report on the strike declared: “In all discussion and thought regarding violence in connection with the strike, the seeker after truth must remember the government existed in Southern Colorado only as an instrument of tyranny and oppression in the hands of the operators; that, once having dared to oppose that tyranny in a strike, the miners’ only protection for themselves and their families lay in the physical force which they could muster.”

In preparation for the showdown, the miners met in convention and adopted a set of nine demands: recognition of the union; a ten per cent increase in tonnage rates and a day scale to correspond with the rates in Wyoming; an 8-hour day; payment for dead work; election of checkweighmen by the miners without interference by company officials; the right of miners to trade at any store, and to choose their own dwelling places and their own doctors; the enforcement of the mining laws of the State; abolition of the company guard system; abolition of the blacklist system. The convention set September 23, 1913 as the deadline for an answer to their demands.

The miners were aware that nothing short of a miracle would change the stubborn anti-union position of the mine operators. But the coal diggers and their union could not give up their demands. With their wives and children the miners spent long, dreary evenings discussing the days of cold, hunger, fear, and terror which they knew were approaching. Though they were fully aware that a strike meant losing, temporarily or permanently, the job, the house they lived in, and the community in which their children were raised, they could not yield without a fight.

Before the deadline date, the UMW picked spots where tent colonies were to be set up. From past experience they knew that, once the men refused to go into the pits, the triple blow would fall upon them within a matter of hours. It had been drilled into the coal diggers’ minds that in reply even to the mildest form of protest “down the canyons” they would go.

And so, on that fateful September 23, 9,000 miners packed their meager belongings and, together with their women, children and aged, abandoned the mining camps and marched “down the canyons” to set up some sort of a life in the union-built tent colonies.

The strike was hardly 24 hours old when violence flared throughout the Colorado coal fields. On October 9, the trigger-happy mine “guards” got down to their real business. They entered the Ludlow tent colony and killed a miner. A week later “The Death Special” arrived in the Forbes tent colony and without even a pretext for a provocation opened machine-gun fire, killing a miner and wounding a boy. A few days later, armed thugs killed three miners on the streets of Walsenburg. Murder was to be used as a weapon to intimidate the miners to the point of forcing them back to work.

John D. Rockefeller was quite enthusiastic about the course adopted by his managers in the coal fields. In a telegram to Superintendent Bowers he proclaimed: “You are fighting a good fight, which is not only in the interests of your own company but of the other companies in Colorado and of the business interests of the entire country ...” With this kind of encouragement from Rockefeller himself, the reign of terror was further intensified. Efforts on the part of the Governor to end the strike failed. Efforts on the part of the union to compromise including willingness to give up a demand for recognition failed. Efforts of the union to eliminate further bloodshed by proposing that the miners and mine “guards” be disarmed also failed.

When Governor Ammons ordered out the State troops with instructions to forbid the troops to escort strikebreakers, the miners met them as friends and surrendered their arms. But soon after, the Governor, under pressure, rescinded his original orders, and the troops became the chief strikebreakers. They even permitted the imported gunmen to use the uniform of the National Guard. The General in command suspended civil law, and criminals in uniform took over.

The Colorado State Federation of Labor called an emergency convention. A committee to investigate the actions of the militia was set up. Heading the committee was James H. Brewster, professor of law at the University of Michigan. The members of the committee covered the strike areas to gather evidence. These distinguished citizens reported to the Governor what they had uncovered. At the same time they recommended that the commanding general be removed, that other high officers be discharged from the National Guard, and that the professional strikebreakers be discharged from the militia as a means of preventing further killings. The Governor ignored these recommendations. Aroused by his behavior, the Colorado Federation of Labor initiated a petition for a recall election.

The strike dragged on through the cold winter months of January, February and March. Freezing weather, hunger, sickness, intimidation, terror and death could not break the morale of the miners. Just as frontline soldiers adjust themselves to a miserable and precarious trench existence, so did the Colorado coal miners and their families. In expectation of spring when life would be more bearable, they held on.

The forces on the other side – the mine operators, the private gunmen, and the State administration – were now openly lined up against the miners. The U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations, reporting on this stage of the strike, said: “Thus, by April 20^th, the Colorado National Guard no longer offered even a pretense of fairness or im- partiality, and its units in the field had degenerated into a force of professional gunmen and adventurers who also were economically dependent and subservient to the will of the coal operators.”

Incensed by their failure to weaken the strike, the gunmen in uniform, with the approval of the mine operators, decided on a tactic of all-out terror in order to finally break the strike. Ludlow, because of its location, was strategically important. Therefore, the Ludlow tent colony was singled out for a major attack.

On April 20, the militia occupied a hill overlooking the tents, mounted several machine guns and at a certain set hour exploded two dynamite bombs. The miners’ only chance of survival was self-defense. With a few rifles they still possessed, they answered the fire coming from the hill. Samuel Yellen vividly describes the pitched gun battle that developed: “... a rain of rifle and machine gun fire fell on Ludlow. Hundreds of women and children ran from the tents to seek shelter in the hills and at ranch houses. However, scores failing to escape, hid in pits, and cellars underneath the tents to protect themselves from the bullets. The gunfire continued for 12 hours and resulted in the death of one boy and three men, one of them a militiaman.”

When it appeared that even this battle might be inconclusive, the officers ordered the troops to burn the colony down. They poured oil on the tents and set them on fire, “while the women and children who had huddled in their pits ran in terror from their shelters ... In one pit, 11 children and two women of the colony were discovered suffocated or burned to death after the tents had been set on fire. The militia took three strikers prisoner, and shot them while they were unarmed and under guard ... All that night, men, women and children wandered through the hills, in momentary danger of being shot by the militia.”

The Ludlow massacre enraged the striking miners in nearby tent colonies. They rearmed themselves and “marched to avenge the slaughter.” Workers throughout Colorado were so shocked and bewildered that they were ready to make extreme sacrifices in support of the fighting miners. The strikers themselves issued a general call to arms : “‘Every able-bodied man must shoulder a gun to protect himself and his family from assassins, from arson and plunder. From jungle days to our own so-named civilization, this is man’s inherent right.’ To a man they armed, throughout the whole strike district. Ludlow went on burning in their hearts.” (Autobiography of Mother Jones.)

Various labor unions offered the United Mine Workers an army of 10,000 volunteers. E.L. Doyle, Secretary-Treasurer of District 15 of the UMW wired President Wilson: “We shall be compelled to call on volunteers in the name of humanity to defend these helpless persons unless something is done.”

The battle continued and spread to other strike-bound communities. The miners succeeded in taking the initiative and occupied the area between Ludlow and Trinidad. As Mother Jones put it, “It was open warfare against the civil authorities, the militia, the mine guards, and the operators.”

On April 30, President Wilson ordered federal troops to take over the Colorado coal fields. The fighting ended when six troops of cavalry arrived. Thirty persons, most of them miners, had been killed, aside from the twenty-one who died in the Ludlow massacre.

Who was responsible for the violence? The Survey, in an editorial published on May 16, 1914, answered this question as follows: “The employers who have disobeyed the laws, the state which has not enforced them; the employers who hired mine guards to assault and intimidate, the state which took those mine guards in company pay into its militia, made some of them officers and then turned them on the strikers; the employers who had machine guns and turned them on the tented camps where dwelt the families of the strikers – what answer have they to the question of responsibility for war?”

Murder in Steel Towns

In the 52 years between Homestead and 1938 – the year in which the steel workers firmly established a national industrial union, the United Steelworkers of America – blood was shed in many a steel town. The Homestead strike set the pattern for the destruction of trade unionism in the steel industry wherever and whenever efforts were made to establish the principle of collective bargaining. At times the struggles were local and spontaneous. During other periods they were battles that decided the course of organized labor for many years. Whether skirmishes or decisive strikes, murder on the picket line was a chief weapon in the hands of the steel corporations.

In 1909, some 6,000 workers of the Pressed Steel Car Company of McKee’s Rock, Pennsylvania, went on strike. Although the workers were completely unorganized, conditions were such that they had no alternative. It was either quit their jobs or strike. The company had introduced a wage system where payments were based on the total production of gangs rather than of individuals. To make things worse, the company refused to post the rates on a gang basis. The workers never knew how much to expect on any pay day. The men were also enraged against an extortion system organized by foremen – workmen were frequently discharged for no reason at all and then reinstated for a substantial fee.

Considering the complete lack of organization, the walkout was highly successful, and the company lost no time in bringing force to bear. From the moment the strike was declared, 100 deputy sheriffs and 200 State constables, armed with rifles, occupied the vicinity of the plant. “Immediately rioting and bloodshed followed. Nearly 100 strikers and sympathizers were injured in repeated charges by the mounted constabulary ... Violence continued with many arrests and an order to the constabulary to ‘shoot to kill.’” (S. Perlman & P. Taft, History of Labor in the U.S. 1896–1932, Vol. IV.)

The order was carried out. A steel worker named Harvath was shot and killed in cold blood by a state trooper. In sheer desperation, a strike committee which called itself “The Unknown Committee” for fear of violence against them, let it be known that “for every striker killed or maimed a trooper would pay with his life.” Two weeks later another pitched battle was fought. When it was over, eleven men, mostly strikers, lay dead.

During the same year, 1909, the workers in the American Sheet & Tin Plate Company – with plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio – were engaged in a strike for the preservation of their union, The Amalgamated Association. As in McKee’s Rock, the striking steel workers had to face violence and resultant murder. When the Aetna plant at Martins Ferry, Ohio, reopened early in 1910, Sol Edwards, a striker on the picket line, was shot and killed by a scab.

The next year the steel workers at South Bethlehem, Pa., went on strike in protest against Sunday work and speed-up and for the restoration of extra pay for overtime and Sunday work. The state police arrived and opened fire on the strikers. The pickets ran for cover, but one remained on the ground, with a bullet in his heart.

In 1916, over 10,000 steel workers in Youngstown were on a strike for higher wages. The workers were determined and militant. Although it began as a walkout of unskilled laborers in one plant, the strike soon spread to the skilled workers and embraced the men in most plants. The steel companies were determined to break the strike by importing two trainloads of strikebreakers from the South.

Knowing full well that this meant their jobs, the strikers gathered at the mill gates to protest. The mill guards fired into the crowd. Three strikers were killed. “The rage of the strikers burst all bonds ... The workers raided the saloons, rolled kegs of liquor into the streets, emptied them and set them afire. Houses caught and six square blocks burned down. The Governor ordered out the militia, and the strike ended soon after when a further wage increase was announced.” (Horace B. Davis, Labor and Steel)

Lives and property were lost. Who was responsible? A grand jury was in session. For once it actually put the blame where it belonged. The jury’s verdict found that the guards hired by the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company “had precipitated the disturbance, and it indicted Elbert H. Gary and 113 corporations for violations of a State anti-trust law, charging them with conspiracy to keep down the wages of common labor and to raise the price of steel. The indictments were of course quashed.” (Horace B. Davis, Labor and Steel.)

Four months later, in Braddock, Pa., the men of the Edgar Thomson plant of the Carnegie Steel Company joined in a sympathy strike with the Westinghouse Electric workers in East Pittsburgh. Two strikers were killed by company guards.

The 1919 steel strike and the great AFL organizational drive that preceded it called forth a flood of violence on the part of the employers. They fully realized how high the stakes were. They knew that the period was decisive and that its outcome would be of lasting importance to organized labor; for there is an old adage: Where steel goes, so goes the country.

The organizing campaign – and later the strike – was conducted around twelve principal demands:

1. Right of collective bargaining.

2. Reinstatement of all men discharged for union activities, with pay for time lost.

3. Eight-hour day.

4. One day’s rest in seven.

5. Abolition of the 24-hour shift.

6. Increase in wages sufficient to guarantee an American standard of living.

7. Standard scales of wages in all trades and classifications of workers.

8. Double rates of pay for all overtime after eight hours, holiday and Sunday work.

9. Check-off system of collecting union dues and assessments.

10. Principles of seniority to apply in the maintenance, reduction and increase of working forces.

11. Abolition of company unions.

12. Abolition of physical examination of applicants for employment.

At the beginning of the drive, the steel corporations did not take the drive seriously. They felt it was another flash in the pan. But as soon as they realized that the workers meant business, they sprang into action. The efforts to break the movement crystallized along several lines.

Mass discharges of workers who joined the union took place. Prior to the strike, 30,000 were discharged and blacklisted so that they could not find jobs in other steel centers. All civil rights in the steel towns were completely suppressed. In many towns, union meetings were prohibited. Organizers were beaten and driven out. Even before the strike began, a woman organizer, one of the most able and most colorful workers in the campaign, was brutally murdered.

Mrs. Fannie Sellins was an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America. Her assignment was in the anti-union Black Valley district along the Allegheny River. Being, as Foster said of her in his book The Great Steel Strike, an “able speaker, and possessed of boundless courage, energy, enthusiasm and idealism, she was a most effective worker ... She was the very heart of the local labor movement, which ranked second to none in Pennsylvania for spirit and progress.” During the steel campaign Fannie Sellins was threatened with death many times. On August 26, 1919, they “got” her. Several deputies surrounded her. She was hit by a club over the head and fell to the ground. When she attempted to get up, one of the deputies fired three shots straight at her.

But not even through outright murder could the employers destroy the organizing campaign, and on September 22, 1919, 365,000 steel workers began what was to become one of the greatest strikes in American history. For three and a half months, a brave and courageous labor battle was fought. In this strike, 22 workers were killed, hundreds were slugged, shot and wounded, and thousands were arrested. The strike was lost. Organized labor was too divided, too craft-minded, too concerned with their own narrow craft interests rather than with all of the workers in their industry, to perfect the kind of solid labor front that could have brought victory in the face of employer violence.

Chapter 10: Murder in Our Time

Chicago Memorial Day Massacre – 1937

Murder in steel towns continued after 1919; every time an effort was made to organize steel, bloodshed resulted. In 1937 the violence came to a head with the murder of ten strikers in Chicago. That murder has come to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre.

The Memorial Day Massacre has a special significance for union leaders, not only because it took place so recently. It is important for strike strategists to know that such a thing could happen not in a period of reaction when unions were on the decline and defensive, but during one of the most progressive periods in the life of our country; that it could happen at a time when organized labor was making its greatest strides forward, when Congress enacted pro-labor legislation, when the Supreme Court declared the Wagner Act constitutional, and when the White House was occupied by a man who was in many instances friendly to organized labor. It is also of importance to union leaders that this bloodshed occurred during a “Little Steel” strike after the United States Steel Corporation, the citadel of the country’s open shop, had fallen and signed a union contract and when few labor leaders thought that any steel company would put up serious resistance.

Violence against the strikers was in evidence from the very beginning of the strike. High officers of the Chicago police force had lined up the police department on the side of the steel companies. Pickets were roughed up, and strikers and local leaders were frequently arrested. The situation grew worse from day to day. Van A. Bittner, regional CIO director, publicly charged that Republic Steel had enlisted the support of captains and other high officers of the Chicago police department. It became evident that in the Chicago area Tom Girdler relied on the police force to break the strike. The Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild wired a sharp protest to President Roosevelt, charging the Chicago police with violence against the strikers, preventing peaceful picketing, and illegal and discriminatory arrests of strikers and sympathizers. The Chicago Tribune, on the other hand, lauded the police for preserving “life and property, the business with which it is entrusted by the community.” This notorious anti-labor newspaper assailed John L. Lewis for the miners’ contribution to the 1936 Democratic campaign and raged that Lewis and his associates had “come to believe that, having paid their money they need no longer respect the rights of anyone whether employer, worker, bystander, or property owner ... but Chicagoans can take pride in the fact that in this jurisdiction the law is not for sale ...”

With each passing day, it became more obvious that Tom Girdler had reached an “understanding” with the high police officials in Chicago. It was feared that this intimate relationship would inevitably lead to bloodshed. The union did everything possible to prevent such an occurrence. In fact, three days prior to the massacre, Van A. Bittner sent the following telegram to President Roosevelt: “The Republic Steel Corporation is using every means possible in conspiracy to violate and render ineffective the National Labor Relations Act. In furtherance of this conspiracy the Republic Steel Corporation has enlisted the support of captains and other high officers of the Chicago police department. We request that the Attorney-General’s office immediately send government investigators to Chicago to investigate the entire nefarious scheme of Republic Steel Corporation and the collusion of these officers of the Chicago Police Department.”

The bloody police attack arose out of an incident normal in the life of any strike. On Memorial Day the strikers, their wives, children and sympathizers gathered to protest police interference with peaceful picketing at the Republic Steel plant. At the close of the meeting, the strikers lined up to march closer to the mill to urge the scabs to leave the plant. When the marchers came within two blocks of the Republic gates, the police closed ranks and halted the picket line. What happened a few minutes later is told by George Robbins, a newspaperman on the scene.

“Tear gas grenades sailed into the crowd, enveloping the strikers in a thick, yellowish-blue cloud. The marchers quickly retreated, coughing and sputtering, and scattered in all directions on the rough and swampy prairie-land. There was a crackle of pistol shots, followed by a rapid volley of gunfire. A grey-haired woman retreating ahead of me stopped suddenly. Her legs buckled under her and I could see the blood gushing from a leg wound. The field was strewn with dead and wounded. Police swept over the prairie, pummeling half-conscious men and women and hauling them into patrol wagons ... Five hospitals in the South Chicago area were taxed beyond capacity. Dr. Nickamin, staff physician at the South Side Hospital, said: ‘The wounded looked as if they had come from a virtual massacre.”’ (New Masses, June 15, 1937.)

Eight workers were permanently disabled. The ten who gave their lives in freedom’s cause died as follows:

Earl Handley, of hemorrhage because his wounds were not treated. Workers got him into a car, but the police dragged him out and he bled to death.

Otis Jones had his spinal cord severed by a bullet in the back.

Kenneth Leed bled to death in a patrol wagon. A bullet had sliced through his back and into his abdomen.

Joe Ruthmund was shot from a distance and in the back.

Lee Tisdale, 50-year-old Negro steel worker, died of blood poisoning from a wound because of deliberate lack of treatment in the Bridewell police hospital.

Anthony Tagliori also died from a bullet in the back.

Hilding Anderson died of peritonitis.

Alfred Causey died of four bullet wounds.

Le Francesco died from a bullet shot through the back.

Sam Popovitch was not shot his skull was battered to pieces by police clubs as he ran. It was hard to identify the bloody mass that was once a head.[324]

The Memorial Day Massacre stunned the country. Indignation and protest against such unwarranted murder spread throughout the length and breadth of the nation. The striking steel workers in Youngstown, Canton, Warren, Johnstown and Buffalo determined that this must not happen to them. The instinct of self-preservation and self-defense galvanized the striking communities in the steel industry.

Two weeks after that fateful day in South Chicago, a coroner’s jury in Cook County, after an “investigation” of the death of ten men, brought in a verdict exonerating the police and excusing the massacre as “justifiable homicides.” The coroner’s jury came to this conclusion on the ground that an “armed mob” of CIO strikers “apparently intended to enter the plant of the Republic Steel Corporation.” In other words, not only were the strikers murdered, but, as in the past, they were held responsible for the violence.

A great many newspaper editorials, columnists and radio commentators readily accepted this kind of verdict and interpretation. But this was not the verdict of the Senate Civil Liberties Committee. In a report of its investigation submitted to the Senate, it condemned the findings of the Chicago and Cook County authorities. The report said: “The action of the responsible authorities in setting the seal of their approval upon the conduct of the police, not only fails to place responsibility where responsibility properly belongs, but will invite the repetition of similar incidents in the future.”

While the people of the United States were discussing, debating, and arguing to determine which side was really responsible, this same Committee, headed by Robert M. La Follette, Jr., uncovered a very interesting fact: the Paramount Company had taken a newsreel of the whole battle but had decided not to release it to the theaters. Such a documentary film would establish beyond a shadow of doubt where responsibility lay! A group of prominent Chicago citizens, headed by Paul H. Douglas, Professor of Economics at Chicago University, telegraphed the Paramount asking that the film be shown in Chicago so that all might see what actually happened. To this request A. J. Richard, editor of Paramount News, telegraphed the following reply:

You asked fair questions, which entitle you to fair and frank answers. Our pictures of the Chicago steel riot are not being released any place in the country, for reasons reached after serious consideration of the several factors involved.

First, please remember that, whereas newspapers reach individuals in the home, we show to a public gathered in groups averaging 1000 or more and therefore subject to crowd hysteria when assembled in the theatre. Our pictures depict a tense and nervewracking episode which, in certain sections of the country, might well incite local riots, and perhaps riotous demonstrations in theatres, leading to further casualties.

For these reasons – the public policy which we consider more important than any profit to ourselves, these pictures are shelved, and so far as we are concerned, will stay shelved. We act under the editorial right of withdrawing from screen pictures “not fit to be seen.” This parallels the editorial right exercised by newspapers of withholding from publication “news not fit to print.” (New York Evening Post, June 17, 1937.)

Now in the past Paramount had released strike pictures. What was there in the Chicago Memorial Day picture that was likely to lead to “crowd hysteria”? And against whom would the public riot after seeing this picture?

The Senate Committee finally obtained possession of the film and in an atmosphere of utmost secrecy, reviewed it. The New York Post on June 17, 1937 reported that the audience was limited to little more than Senators La Follette (Prog., Wis.) and Thomas (Dem., Utah), who composed the committee, and members of the staff. The Post went on to say that those “who saw it were shocked and amazed by scenes showing scores of uniformed police firing their revolvers point black into a dense crowd of men, women and children, and then pursuing and clubbing the survivors unmercifully as they made frantic efforts to escape. The impression produced by these fearful scenes was heightened by the sound record which accompanied the picture, reproducing the roar of the police fire and the screams of the victims.”

At the same time the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a complete description of the suppressed newsreel. This account was reprinted in several other liberal newspapers.

A few days later, the news spread that the film definitely convicted the Chicago Police and Republic Steel guards of the deliberate murder of ten pickets. In Congress, Representative Teigan of Minnesota introduced a resolution asking the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee for a special showing of the film before members of Congress. The Congressman charged that “it was not fear of precipitating riots in theatres that caused Paramount to kill the film as claimed, but a desire to avoid antagonizing a powerful corporation like Republic Steel and the other companies that now have strikes in progress.”

Representative Maury Maverick of Texas in a brief but bitter speech declared: “Over there in Chicago, nine men, something like six blocks from a steel plant, were attacked by the police and all of them were murdered. And we stand here and not a soul has said a word about those nine free-born Americans. All we do is spend our time criticizing organized labor.”

Several newspapermen joined in the demand to make the film public. Jay Franklin, in his syndicated column of June 23, 1937, wrote: “We want to see the Paramount newsreel film of the Memorial Day Massacre of the steel strikers by the Chicago police. We think we are sufficiently adult to sit through the spectacle of officers of the law firing on unarmed people, slugging women, shooting men in the back, beating a guy’s brains out.” Mr. Franklin made a fervent appeal to leading American journalists. “There is a chance,” he wrote, “for Dorothy Thompson, ferret of fascism, to defend freedom of the screen. There Walter Lippmann, foe of censorship, can demand a showing. Mark Sullivan, Frank Kent and David Lawrence have often argued that freedom of public utterance is our best defense against totalitarian dictatorship. These conservative commentators are hereby invited to join in my demand that this film be shown to the general public ... Show this film! If that is the sort of country we live in, the sooner we see it, the better.”

The film was never made public, for in it there was indisputable evidence as to who was responsible for the violence and murder on Memorial Day in Chicago.

Women Sit Down – Men Murdered. Youngstown – 1937

The Senate Civil Liberties Committee had declared that the failure of the Chicago authorities to place responsibility where it really belonged would encourage similar incidents in the future. Their words proved to be true even sooner than was expected.

June 19, 1937, in Youngstown was women’s day on the picket line. Strikers’ wives, many with their children, were picketing Stop 5 of the main entrances to the Republic mill. Early that evening one of the worst riots developed. What caused it? Captain Charles Richmond, who was in charge of the police stationed at the mill himself explained how the trouble started: “The women were sitting down and about 200 men were standing grouped on the sidewalk, violating the peaceful picketing agreement the CIO made with us. They were asked decently to continue their picketing and they refused ... I told my men to fire their gas guns at their feet.” (Youngstown Vindicator, June 21, 1937.) In other words, the police officer actually admitted that women and children, a little tired from picketing, attempted to sit down and rest awhile and that because of this he ordered a gas attack.

The provocation was more than the strikers could take. The news of the gas attack on the women spread like wildfire, and hundreds of strikers rushed to the Republic plant. For six hours, in pitch darkness, the workers defended themselves and their wives against a brutal attack deliberately precipitated by the police, deputy sheriffs and Republic gunmen. Starting with tear gas, the employer’s henchmen ended with gunfire.

John Bogovich, a steel striker, heard of the trouble at the main gate of the Republic plant. He told his wife he was going there. A few hours later, two young strikers were carrying the limp body of John Bogovich, blood streaming over his neck and face. Three times the bearers had to throw themselves to the ground to dodge the fusillade of bullets. John Bogovich died in an automobile on the way to the hospital. While Bogovich was being carried away, James Eperjesi, another striker, was fatally wounded and died a day later.

Here the author must inject himself into the story of events during that Saturday night in Youngstown. First, because I was near John Bogovich when the bullet hit him. I saw him fall to the ground, saw his blood gush out. He looked at me but could not speak. Second, because this bloody first-hand experience with company-sponsored and directed violence against a group of unarmed men on strike for recognition of their union demands enables me, who saw it all, to place the blame where I know it lies. Third, because Tom Girdler, in his book Boot Straps, speaks of me as one of the “agitators” whose job it was “to make trouble. Why? Because clashes, civic strife, rioting would further intimidate the majority of workers who were then eager to come back to work.” I shall present here part of the testimony I gave under oath to the Senate Committee on August 5, 1938.

Senator La Follette. Mr. Steuben, were you present this morning and did you hear the testimony of the witnesses concerning the events at Stop 5 on June 19?

Mr. Steuben. Yes, sir.

Senator La Follette. In connection with your work, did you have any occasion to visit Stop 5 on June 19?

Mr. Steuben. We held a mass meeting in Campbell, Ohio, on Saturday, June 19. Around 8:30 we received a telephone call that there was a lot of trouble around Stop 5. Mr. Mayo and I jumped into a car, and rushed immediately to Stop 5.

Senator La Follette. What time, about, did you get to the vicinity of Stop 5?

Mr. Steuben. We arrived about 15 minutes later. The streets were crowded and it was difficult to get to the place. When we reached Poland Avenue and Caledonia St., we could not go any further. We got out of the car and walked towards the gas station. It was difficult to reach that gas station, the bullets were already flying over our heads and the whole section was contaminated with tear gas. It took us about 5 minutes before we got to the gas station. When I arrived there, I saw quite a few of our strikers standing there. That was one of the most dangerous spots to be in. I urged them to leave the Sunoco gas station. We made a serious attempt, myself and others, to take the crowd up the hill on Powersdale. The situation grew more dangerous, it looked like civil war. While urging the men to leave, about 15 feet away from me I saw a man falling to the ground, and I rushed over.

Senator La Follette. You said the Sunoco station. Which one of these stations is the Sunoco station?

Mr. Steuben. It was the right side (indicating).

Senator La Follette. The one here (indicating) 1319?

Mr. Steuben. I cannot see that far.

Senator La Follette. Where the stick is now?

Mr. Steuben. Yes, that is the Sunoco station, the right side there. I saw the man fall, I ran over, he was groaning. At first I thought he just fell, but I immediately saw blood coming out somewhere from him (indicating).

Senator La Follette. Where do you mean “from here”?

Mr. Steuben. I would say the blood came out right below his chin. I urged the men to grab a car and rush him to the hospital. Before that, we identified the man as John Bogovich.

Senator La Follette. Was he a striker?

Mr. Steuben. Yes, he was a striker and an employee of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company. He had a picket card with him, he had his mill check number and a few other things. The car returned about half an hour later and reported that before they reached the hospital, he died.

Senator La Follette. I offer for the record a certified copy of the coroner’s finding in the inquest over the body of John Bogovich.

Mr. Steuben. When I heard the man was dead, I realized how grave the situation was. I urged the men to follow me to the top of the hill. They did. I climbed on top of an automobile to address the strikers. It was a dangerous thing to do, but I felt it was my responsibility to talk to the men, to tell them Bogovich was killed, that they were not armed, that the whole thing was obviously planned and that therefore they must leave that place. Finally the crowd agreed to leave, and we marched to the Center Street Bridge.

Meanwhile the shooting was heard all over town. There was danger that even though this crowd was away from Stop 5 that other crowds may arrive at Stop 5 and our men will return. There was a school at the corner, near the Center Street bridge. I went up on top of the stairs and spoke to the men again, urging them not to go back, but to disperse. Right after, I went to the nearby Republic headquarters of the union and called Sheriff Elser.

I told the sheriff what happened. I begged him and I pleaded with him to take his men away or instruct them to stop shooting, as serious consequences may develop and I already have told him that one of our men was killed. Sheriff Elser replied over the telephone: “What guarantees can you offer me that my life will be protected?” Well, I told him as far as he is concerned, he must take as much of a chance as anyone else. Furthermore, I told him, if he calls Republic Steel and instructs the men to stop shooting, there will be no danger of him being shot or killed. We had quite a lengthy discussion over the telephone. I remember that discussion very vividly. I told Sheriff Elser, “Am I to understand you, Sheriff, that you are yellow or a coward and you refuse to come out and do your duty, or are you part of that plan or conspiracy that brought about this riot?” His reply was, “Well, you may think anyway you want, but I don’t go out.”

While this conversation took place, State Senator Lipscher was in the office. He said, “Let me call him, I know him well.” The senator called. He hung up. He looked at me and said “I should mind my own business in Columbus and he will mind his own business in Youngstown.” The senator tried to reach the governor. I am not sure whether he reached him or not. During all this time, there was also in the office Jackson of the Youngstown Vindicator. Briefly speaking, the sheriff did not come out. Only about five or six in the morning, the sheriff called and said he is coming out and he wanted to meet me half way. Suddenly the sheriff announced to the newspapers that he wanted a truce with me. Well, the sheriff here said that he likes a truce once in a while but he wanted a truce after two of our men were murdered, but he refused to come out, or in any way, shape, or form eliminate the trouble during the entire night.

The Senate Committee proved in every detail that the responsibility for the death of the two Youngstown strikers lies with Republic steel, the Youngstown police department and the deputy sheriffs.

“Little Steel” – Big Sacrifice

Because the police force in Chicago and Youngstown got away with murder, it was inevitable that more steel workers should die on the picket line. On June 28, nine days after Youngstown’s bloody riot, the seven States “Little Steel” strike claimed its thirteenth life with the death of George Mike, at Beaver Falls, Pa. A World War I veteran, wounded and gassed, he was unable to work, but his sympathies were with the strikers. He went to the picket line. Mike was hit by a projectile from a tear gas gun in the hands of a deputy sheriff. The deputy was identified. The District Attorney of Beaver County took him into custody, but the man was never tried for murder.

Next in line of bloodshed was Massillon, Ohio, another Republic Steel town. It happened on a Sunday night, July 11. A correspondent of The New Republic was on the spot. His report was published in the July 28, 1937 issue of the magazine.

On Sunday night, as was customary once or twice a week, a crowd of several hundred were gathered around the headquarters (of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee); an orchestra made up of a bass viol, a violin and mandolin, surrounded by children dancing in the street, was the center of attention ... A car drove up and parked opposite the headquarters, its headlights bringing into focus a group of armed police approaching down the street. A shouted order demanding that the lights be turned off attracted the attention of the crowd ... “Douse those lights or we’ll fill ‘em full of lead!” Before the driver of the car had a chance to comply, a volley of shots riddled the car, followed by the discharge of tear gas bombs, by volley after volley of gunfire and gas, directed at the cars and at the crowd, now wildly scattering for safety, and at the union headquarters, where many sought refuge. With intervals of quiet, the police continued to send volleys of shots into the head- quarters for an hour. A man stepped from the door during one of the intervals, thinking the shooting was over – he was shot in the leg without a word of warning by a deputy sheriff in the group of twenty which had arrived from Canton as reinforcements.

When the battle was over, two more workers – Fulgencio Calzada and Nick Valdoz –were killed. Again, who was responsible for the murder?

There is a surprise witness to answer this question – none other than Massillon’s chief of police, Stanley W. Switter. Ten days after the murder, he was subpoenaed to Washington by the National Labor Relations Board. Chief Switter was on the witness stand for five hours. He drew a picture of a small town administration, trying to be fair and not to act as strikebreakers until bit by bit they were crushed down by Republic Steel and other business interests. He described how on June 9, a little over a week after the Chicago massacre, Karl Meyers, Republic’s general manager for the Canton District, conferred with him at a Massillon hotel. Mr. Meyers said to the chief: “What the hell is going on here? How long are you going to let the hoodlums carry on? Why the hell don’t you take action like the Chicago police did and put them where they belong?” The chief resisted this sort of pressure and retorted that the police force was not meant to be a “strikebreaking outfit.”

The chief, a former steel worker himself and with many friends among the strikers, continued to resist company pressures. Tom Girdler’s agents had been demanding that the city increase its police force. When the National Guard entered Massillon early in July in order to open the plants, General William E. Martin demanded that Switter put special police on the payroll and organize a home guard of Republic Steel employees. The chief again protested and insisted that the police force should be neutral. The chief testified that the general shouted: “This is no time to be picking neutral men. You must be ready to take over.” Without waiting for the chiefs consent, Republic Steel brought Switter a list from which special police and home guards were to be drawn.

Switter and the other city officials stood firm. Finally, however, they broke down. On July 7, the “Law and Order League” composed of prominent businessmen, came to City Hall and threatened to impeach the Mayor and the rest of the administration. By then, the chief testified, he was completely worn out. When the Mayor finally asked him, before the “Law and Order” delegation, if they should agree to add the special police, Switter threw up his hands. “Give ‘em the whole damn works,” he said. “They want it so let them take it. They’re inviting bloodshed. We have fought against it, but we can’t resist this pressure any more. So God dammit, let them take it.”

That was on July 7. Four days later, the strikers were attacked and the two men murdered.

Death continued to spread to other strike-bound steel towns – to Canton and Cleveland, Ohio. Altogether, 18 men were killed in the 1937 “Little Steel” strike. And while violence raced throughout the strike areas, while hundreds of workers were wounded and gassed and thousands arrested, the press and radio and the halls of Congress resounded with the hypocritical cry of “CIO violence.” Not a single police officer, deputy sheriff, company official or company guard was brought to trial and convicted on a murder charge.

Roll Call of the Dead

The instances of violence recounted above all took place during famous strikes that are now part of labor history. But murder on the picket line is not limited to certain communities, nor is it a matter only of the past. Men and women have been killed in all parts of the country, in a variety of industries, including strikes in small shops and cafeterias, and this intentional bloodshed is being used today as a weapon of strikebreaking. Thanks to the Labor Research Association, there is now available a compilation of the killings during strike struggles in the years 1934–1949. From these records, tabulated in the Association’s Labor Fact Books, the Roll Call of the Dead which appears in the back of the book has been compiled.

How to Fight Employer Violence

Such is the story of employer violence in strikes. In the past organized labor did not conduct a sustained campaign against it. It is high time to do so. Proper strike strategy demands that labor convince the nation that violence does not proceed from strikers but is the strikebreaking weapon of employers. This, to be sure, is only the first step in self-defense, but much, very much, hangs upon it.

Like other phases of strike strategy, the struggle against violence cannot begin when a strike is declared, or when a worker is killed or injured. It must start long before. Below, in outline, are the various angles from which the fight against employer violence must be conducted.

1. In each State organized labor must campaign for the enactment of a State law that would prohibit private police forces in industry. It is the company police force that often makes up the central core of men responsible for violent acts in time of strike. In their ranks there are mercenary and criminal elements and those that have made strikebreaking their profession. The coal and iron police in Pennsylvania were a ruthless anti-labor armed force. Their crimes were so numerous that Governor Pinchot, under public pressure, was forced to liquidate the outfit. It is not so commonly known, but it is a fact that the police force on the railroads is among the most vicious private anti-labor armed forces, well experienced in provoking and exercising violence.

2. In all industrial communities, organized labor must conduct a fight for the right to deputize strikers. For this is one of the best guarantees that there will be no violence. Labor can now present a proud record showing that when local authorities deputized strikers violence did not take place, or was negligible. This should be a talking point when the request is made. And it should be made invariably; even a refusal has its value – it exposes the partiality of a city or county authority. Should the right to deputize strikers not be obtainable, then the strike leaders should ask for the next best thing – that members of other labor unions in the community be deputized.

3. The strike and its leadership must expose the “neutrality” on the part of the city authorities. Elected officials, such as the mayor and the county sheriff – and they particularly –must be held accountable to all citizens. A public officeholder must be made to realize that a strike in his community is an acid test of his own loyalty and devotion to the people as a whole, including the strikers and their families. He should be made to feel that if he does not adopt a friendly attitude toward the strikers, he is eliminating all possibilities for himself to remain in public office because no worker will vote for him. And by a friendly attitude is not meant that a formal statement of neutrality is made. The union must demand that the mayor instruct the chief of police that under no circumstances will the police force be used for the purposes of breaking or weakening a strike. The union must insist that the police force will not permit the employer to send into the strikebound community professional strikebreakers, thugs and others who breed violence. Organized labor must demand that the city fathers will not vote for emergency appropriations or special ordinances that will be favorable to the employer. It means that the police department will be prohibited from accepting from private munitions companies tear gas, rifles, and revolvers paid for by the company whose workers are on strike.

4. Organized labor must campaign, on State and city levels, to enact laws that will prohibit private detective agencies from practicing strikebreaking. From a moral, economic, health or indeed from any social point of view, strikebreaking is a menace to society. Agencies that send out emissaries of ill will should not have the seal of legal approval. Until this is accomplished, labor unions must campaign for laws that will prohibit men with criminal records from becoming private detectives or serving on a company police force. In some States, such a law already exists.

5. The strike leaders, upon receipt of well substantiated information that the employer is about ready to embark on a campaign of violence, should waste no time in making this information public to the strikers, the authorities, the local press and the people as a whole. The value of such a course is manifold. First, a forewarned community often can prevent such planned violence. Second, if the violence cannot be prevented, at least strikers will be ready for it – the picket lines will be strengthened, the ranks will be consolidated. Warning the community will also clearly establish, in the mind of the public, the fact that the union took the initiative in exposing the source of violence.

6. If and when violence does come, it must be met and defeated; self-defense is a moral and legal right. There is no weapon more powerful in a struggle against violence than a show of the organized might and solidarity of the strikers themselves. Several thousand strikers, reinforced with representatives of other sections of organized labor, marching to city hall, demanding that a stop be put to violence; that those responsible for it be arrested immediately; that gunmen be disarmed and driven out of town, or if they are members of the community, be placed under arrest: these measures will go a long way in curtailing violence. If violence comes from police authorities, as it often does, the same mass pressure must be applied.

Violence occurs most often on the picket line, and there, too, the answer is solidarity. There is nothing like a mass solid and determined line to defeat violence. A wall of humanity standing solid as a rock and deep in their hearts convinced that what they are doing is just and right can withstand and defeat just about everything the employers can hand out.

7. One of the most important steps in a campaign to defeat violence and expose its source is to ferret out all planted company agents within the ranks of the strikers. In labor history there are examples, too numerous to mention, of how company stoolpigeons and private undercover men in the guise of strikers, and sometimes even of union officers, have organized violence for the sole purpose of compromising the union, the strikers and their leaders. There are cases when such dishonorable people, for a price, have inveigled innocent strikers into some act of violence, only to betray and frame the same workers later. It is, therefore, the responsibility of strike leaders to be extremely vigilant and watch closely those strikers who are advocating measures that might result in violence.

8. When exposing violence it is always a wise and necessary step to invite prominent citizens in the community to conduct their own independent investigation. If violence assumes major importance, nationally prominent citizens should be invited to the strike scene. During the 1919 steel strike, the Interchurch World Movement set up a commission of inquiry under the chairmanship of Bishop Francis J. McConnell. These church leaders did a splendid job in exposing the violence of the steel corporations and local authorities during that strike. A few years later, during a miners’ strike, the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser did a similar job. Equally good is it to demand a congressional investigation of the violence that occurs.

9. In fighting and exposing violence, the union cannot limit itself to the company trigger men or its hired hoodlums. Top management is responsible, and must be held responsible, for those murdered, wounded or injured. On February 24, 1949, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that a union was responsible “for strike violence.” The Board found that the United Furniture Workers, CIO, and its Salem, Ind., local, as well as eight officers, violated the Taft-Hartley law by strike activities at the Smith Cabinet Manufacturing Company of Salem. Among the actions which the Board held as violating the ban on coercion of employees were: “Carrying of sticks by pickets and the piling of bricks for use by pickets; blocking the plant entrances by railroad ties, automobiles, raised gutter plates and tacks; threatening violence to non-strikers over loudspeakers; intimidation of non-strikers as they tried to enter the plant; placing of pickets in a manner to prevent non-strikers from unloading a boxcar on a railroad spur to the plant ... “ (New York Times, Feb. 25, 1949.)

If the union and its officers are held responsible for pickets holding sticks to protect themselves, or placing obstacles in the way of scabs, how much more should the employers be held responsible for taking the lives of pickets!

10. Finally, the union must be technically equipped in its fight against violence. If trouble is expected, strikers with cameras should be on the picket line. Catching the strikebreaker or company guard or a policeman aiming his tear gas gun or revolver at strikers can be valuable evidence in a court case. To take down immediately the names of strikers or bystanders who observed the violence can help produce authentic witnesses. Taking sworn affidavits from eyewitnesses can also prove valuable.

11. All the measures outlined above are necessary and must be a part of effective strike strategy. However, by far the most effective weapon against violence is organized political action by the workers. Because organized labor is 15 million strong, it is within the reach of workers now to elect their own representatives to public office. Labor must give deep consideration to this. It is an illusion to think that labor can gain substantial and permanent victories through the two old parties. It is one step forward and two steps back – as witness the Taft-Hartley Act. Only independent political action through a third party movement can be the final answer to violence as it is also, in the last analysis, to economic insecurity.

Chapter 11: Modern Strikebreaking – The Mohawk Valley Formula

The “New” Approach

With all the weaknesses and inadequacies of our trade union movement, it has obtained a degree of recognition that makes breaking strikes solely through open terrorist measures more and more difficult. A decade of the Wagner Act has had its curbing effect on open and violent anti-union movements. The work of the La Follette Committee in exposing industrial espionage and employer violence is another important factor. The La Guardia anti- injunction act, the law against shipment of scabs from one state to another, the curtailment of activities of private detective agencies, and, above all, the growing union consciousness of the workers, have made it necessary for the employers to develop more “scientific” methods of strikebreaking. The Mohawk Valley Formula is the plan they have dreamed up.

The Mohawk Valley Formula for breaking strikes constitutes a new technique, more subtle than open terror and therefore more dangerous. While this formula includes violence against workers, violence is not the chief strikebreaking weapon. The organization of back-to-work movements, the formation of “Citizens Committees,” the utilization of the press and radio, the employment of “missionaries,” the popularization of slogans such as “the right to work,” and alienating the middle classes are all part of this new technique.

The Mohawk Valley Formula was developed during the Remington Rand strike in 1936. After the strike was broken and the union temporarily defeated, Mr. James H. Rand, Jr., addressed the “Citizens’ Committee” and jubilantly declared: “Two million businessmen have been looking for a formula like this and business has hoped for, dreamed of, and prayed for such an example as you have set” an example that “would go down with history as the Mohawk Valley Formula.”

This was no idle boast. The National Association of Manufacturers recommended this formula as a model of industrial relations. Top corporation executives studied the formula and applied it whenever labor trouble developed. In the July 30, 1936 Labor Relations Bulletin of the NAM, there appeared, under the title “A Community Organizes,” an article analyzing the entire formula and highly recommending it to the employers of the nation. Since then, these “scientific” methods of strikebreaking have been applied in every major strike in the country.

A year later, the formula became a real threat to the then developing great organizing campaigns. Labor reacted strongly; it took the position that the formula became the employers’ method of combating and flaunting the Wagner Act. The National Labor Relations Board was called upon to investigate thoroughly the meaning, the direction, and the legality of the Mohawk Valley Formula. On March 13, 1937, the NLRB made public findings exposing it as a blueprint for strikebreaking.

Strike strategists must study this formula carefully as a prerequisite for successfully combating it. Those unions that have done so, have reduced the dangers of this formula to a bare minimum. It is possible to expose and defeat the Mohawk Valley Formula, and the best proof of that is the fact that the Remington Rand workers, who in 1936 were the first victims of this strikebreaking method, have since that time won several strikes and are at present strongly organized. In the following pages this “new approach” of the employers will be discussed point by point.

Attempt to Discredit Strike Leaders

“When a strike is threatened, label the union leaders as ‘agitators’ to discredit them with the public and their own followers.”

It is highly significant that the very first step the formula recommends is to discredit the union leaders. This is a shrewd thrust at confidence. One of the major requisites for a successful strike is confidence of the rank and file in the leaders who are about to take them into battle. If this confidence can be seriously undermined, then workers may begin to doubt the advisability of the strike or of their joining it. The situation can be compared with that of a military unit in a forward area about to enter a battle. If soldiers have absolute confidence in their commanding officers, their morale is high and discipline fits the occasion. On the other hand, lacking such confidence, soldiers will very likely put up only token resistance, desertions will be greater and casualties higher.

To counteract this attack on confidence, one has to (appreciate what the label “agitator” is intended to carry with it. In the minds of the public the term “agitator” – more often it is “outside agitator” – is synonymous with “trouble maker.” It is this impression of a labor leader that those who shout “agitator” want to get across. It is the first step in attacking and trying to discredit a leader.

Labor history shows that the stronger and the more influential a labor leader is, the more often and the more violently he is called “agitator,” the more bitterly he is attacked. During the formative years of the American trade union movement, Eugene V. Debs was the most harassed and attacked labor leader. He was also undoubtedly among the best loved, most trusted and respected. His name was magic. He attracted thousands to his meetings, no matter what part of the country he went to. In order to counteract his great influence, the press of the nation conducted an unending campaign of vilification against him. Mother Jones was a similar type of devoted labor leader, and she, too, was under constant barrage. “Big” Bill Haywood belonged to this category. After World War I, William Z. Foster became target number one.

It might be said, perhaps, that Debs, Haywood, Mother Jones and Foster were under severe attack not just because they were trade union or strike leaders, but essentially because they believed in socialism. Undoubtedly this made the attack upon them sharper. But recent and current labor developments indicate that labor leaders with a mildly progressive outlook, and even conservative labor leaders, do not escape severe attacks. Sidney Hillman and John L. Lewis are perfect examples.

The fact that John L. Lewis has for more than a decade withstood the severest fire in the press, over the radio and in the halls of Congress and that today his influence among the American miners, and workers in other basic industries, stands at the top is proof positive that the Mohawk Valley Formula for discrediting labor leaders can be defeated. How did Lewis do it? His success is due first of all to the fact that he has conducted an uncompromising struggle for constant improvement of the conditions of the miners. Added to that is his own great courage, great native ability, and the fact that he is the head of one of the most important unions.

But there is only one John L. Lewis. He possesses attributes and strength that hundreds of other labor leaders do not possess. How can they – over and above fighting uncompromisingly for the best interests of the workers – meet and defeat the number one point in the formula?

Surely it cannot be done by silence or by being on the defensive. The usual public statements by employers that “our employees are happy and content but it is the outside agitators that are forcing strike action” can and must be thoroughly exposed. Workers do not strike unless conditions are such that no other course is available to them. In most cases the strike is about wages, hours, conditions of work. A strike victory therefore means immediate economic improvements for the workers involved. The organizers – the so-called “agitators” and “outside agitators” and “trouble makers” – must be shown to be leaders of a movement that results in a better life for the workers, their families and the community. The CIO and the AFL must be pointed out as being no more “outside” organizations than the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers.

Labor leaders all have to be teachers. They must educate workers to understand and appreciate the reasons for organization. The notion that unions and their leaders are organizing strikes because they are interested in dues collections, or because they are power-hungry, or downright racketeers, must be dispelled. Workers must hear what John L. Lewis had to say about the CIO. In 1936, immediately after the Committee for Industrial Organization was organized, Lewis made a nation-wide radio address on the approaching steel campaign. These were his words:

By way of sharp contrast to the policy of bankers, promoters, and directors, it may be said that the Committee for Industrial Organization in organizing the steel workers is animated by no selfish motives. Its fundamental purpose is to be of service to all those who work either by head or hand in the mines, quarries, railroads, blast furnaces, and mills of the steel industry.

Our Committee would bring to the steel workers economic and political freedom; a living wage to those lowest in the scale of occupations, sufficient for the support of the worker and his family in health and modest comfort, and sufficient to enable him to send his children to school; to own a home and accessories; to provide against sickness, death, and the ordinary contingencies of life.

There is but one other fundamental motive which the Committee for Industrial Organization has for unionizing the steel industry.

It is simple and direct. It is to protect the members of our own organizations. We know, although we are now free men and women, that so long as millions of other industrial workers are without economic and political freedom, a condition exists which is a menace to our freedom.

It is this kind of healthy thinking that workers must be educated in to immunize them from company propaganda about “outside agitators.” To be sure, there have been and there are labor racketeers. But are the legal and medical professions condemned just because there are crooked lawyers and unscrupulous doctors? Workers should be taught that they must not, as Westbrook Pegler does, condemn the trade union movement just because some union officials are corrupt.

The Taft-Hartley Attack on Union Leaders

In a number of ways the Taft-Hartley Act legalizes point number one of the Mohawk Valley Formula for strikebreaking. Section 9 (h) of this Act virtually creates a situation where employers can determine what kind of leadership a union shall or shall not have.

It is required under Section 9 (h) of the law that the officials of a union file so-called “non-Communist” affidavits before the union may avail itself of the services of the NLRB. The National Lawyers Guild has rightly expressed what this section really means. In a statement submitted to the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, it declared that such affidavits “are a form of pressure upon union members to abandon the usual standard they employ to evaluate leadership – the quality and consistency of performance in the interests of the union members – and to apply instead a standard of no definition and vague suspicion.” All an unscrupulous employer has to do when confronted with a union leadership constantly fighting for the interests of its members is to refuse to bargain with such a union on the grounds that its leaders are “reds.” The long Pacific Coast longshore strike of 1948 was fought over this issue. The General Electric Company in Schenectady canceled its contract with the UE on similar grounds. The struggle against the Taft-Hartley law has thus become in part a battle against management’s interference in the internal affairs of unions and for the rights of organized labor to determine its own destiny, including the type of leadership it is to have. This explains why such old conservative unions as the International Typographical Union or such conservative leaders as John L. Lewis, Philip Murray and others have opposed Section 9 (h) of the Taft-Hartley law.

Section 9 (h) makes it more difficult to fight against the discrediting of labor leaders, but it is nevertheless possible to turn point one in the strikebreaking formula into its opposite. One way of doing it is to bring forward rank and file strike leaders, workers with long years of service in the plant or industry and well known in the community. It is equally important to popularize the national or international leaders of the union who are directly connected with the strike; their background, their contributions to the labor movement, the strikes they have led in the past, and the benefits the workers derived as a result of their leadership should be made known to every striker. If this is done, the employer’s attacks, instead of weakening the prestige of the leadership among the workers and in the community at large, can very well strengthen it.

Attempt to Discredit Union Demands

“Disseminate propaganda, by means of press releases, advertisement and the activities of the missionaries; such propaganda must stress the arbitrary demands of the strikers ... “

As has already been stated, workers always strike for, or against, something very concrete and specific. If the employer succeeds in convincing workers that their grievances are not real, but imaginary, or that their demands are unjust and therefore unobtainable, the will to go out and stick it out can be broken down. To discredit the demands of the union, therefore, is attack at a vital point.

The employers’ main argument against union demands for a higher wage rate is inability to pay. They produce figures, comparative scales in other communities – usually those that are unorganized – their low rate of profit, and a whole string of smooth arguments as to why they cannot meet the demands of the union. Often the employers present their case to the workers and the public based on “facts” showing that they are paying the “highest scales” in their history.

To speak of labor’s “unfair” or “arbitrary” demands is pure and simple employer propaganda intended to becloud the real facts. The truth is that in recent years the strike demands of all the labor unions have been fairly uniform and have arisen out of the economic conditions in the country and the overall needs of the workers. The uniformity in labor’s demands is an expression of the uniformity in labor’s needs as well as a manifestation of greater coordination on the part of the labor movement.

Far from being “unfair” and “arbitrary,” labor’s wage demands in recent years have been extremely modest. Wages are not what is in the pay envelope, but the purchasing power of what is there, or real wages, and serious economists, unanimously agree that real wages have not gone up in recent years; the cost of living has in most cases outrun increases in money wages. Even in wartime this was so. Wartime wage increases little more than kept pace with the cost of living, in most cases, and only rarely exceeded it. In the war years the struggle for a higher standard of living which the trade unions had for so long tried to bring about had to be abandoned. Then and since the effort has been to keep up with the rising cost of living. The wartime “Little Steel” wage formula was based on this fact.

But are wage demands that attempt not merely to hold but to raise the workers* standard of living for that reason “unfair” and “arbitrary”?

Way back in 1921, the AFL Convention formally repudiated the policy of tying wages to the cost of living. The Convention report that year contained the following statement on this subject: “The practice of fixing wages solely on a basis of the cost of living is a violation ... of sound economic theory and is utterly without logic or scientific support of any kind. What we find as a result of practice, so far as it has gone, is that there is a constant tendency under it to classify human beings and to subordinate classes, each class having a presumptive right to a given quantity of various commodities.”

Labor will and must fight continuously for higher standards of living. This is a major reason why workers join unions. This, in the final analysis, is the only sound wage policy of the trade union movement. In this connection Harry Bridges developed a wage formula that can well be emulated by many other labor unions. It is a simple, sound formula. “Get as much as you can get.” This explains why West Coast longshoremen never accepted token wage increases while other unions did.

All formulas which distract workers from the struggle for a higher standard of living will ultimately hurt labor and consequently the nation. When in 1948 the leaders of some unions signed contracts with escalator clauses providing for a downward revision in wages when the cost of living went down, they in fact legalized a permanently low standard of living. The escalator clauses were a grave error. Tying wages to the cost of living plays into the hands of the employers. It arms them with the argument they need to fully exploit point number two of the Mohawk Formula – to discredit labor’s demands by calling them “unfair” and “arbitrary.”

Labor’s constant struggle for wage increases, whether for the purpose of meeting the rise in the cost of living, or for a higher standard of living, cannot be discredited so far as workers are concerned. Labor leaders need not be apologetic or on the defensive. The workers involved better than anyone else understand the justice of the union’s demands. It is to the public at large that the union’s strategy to defeat this point of the formula must be addressed primarily. The entire community must be made to appreciate the justice of the union’s demands. Of late, the employers and the press have played up the angle that a wage increase automatically means a price increase on coal, steel, automobiles, electrical appliances, home and farm equipment. In a number of industries, when wage increases were granted this did happen. But, as was pointed out in a previous chapter, often the prices went up ‘way out of proportion to the wage increase. Because the trade unions have not sufficiently exposed this, a rift is being created between workers and farmers and other consumer groups.

Are “Fringe” Demands Important?

When it comes to wage demands, labor is potentially in a strong position. It is less strong when it comes to other strike demands, and this is where the Mohawk Valley Formula can be more dangerous. A situation like that of “Little Steel” in 1937, for example, gives the employer the whip hand. The workers in “Little Steel” got wage increases but the steel corporations refused to sign a written contract. In a case like that the union’s position is very difficult. The unions can easily be put in the wrong before the workers and in the community. The employer can come forward and say, “In dollars and cents the workers have nothing to gain from a strike; in dollars and cents they stand only to lose.”

On the surface, the employer presents a strong argument; it seems as if the union’s demand for a written contract is just “arbitrary.” In reality it is not. Without a contract, the employer, to make up for the wage increases, can worsen working conditions through the introduction of speed-up and other devices. Without a contract there are no limitations on firing, and in most cases there is no floor on wage scales. The employer can hire and fire at random, and it is only a matter of time before workers with higher rates are replaced with lower paid workers. It is certain that if the workers did not stand to lose in dollars and cents by his avoiding signing a union contract, the employer would not invest thousands, often hundreds of thousands, of dollars to fight a union. All this must be made clear to workers who are about to be engaged in a strike where wages are not the chief demand.

Since the end of the war, an increasing number of unions have concentrated on a new set of demands such as health programs, sick benefits, pension plans and similar demands. Often these are referred to as “fringe demands,” thus implying their secondary importance. This is a wrong attitude; for some of these demands are of vital importance to the workers and their families. In a nation like ours, where industrial development continues with constant introduction of new machinery which in turn demands greater exertion on the part of the workers, their state of health is far from a “fringe” issue. The chief demands in the 1949 coal miners’ and steel workers’ strikes centered around the issue of satisfactory health and old age pension plans. The UAW and other unions have also made this the chief demand in their 1949 negotiations. Until such time as our government provides medical care for all its citizens, organized labor will continue its struggle for medical plans. In the final analysis such “fringe” demands strengthen the economic security of the workers.

Let us cite, as an example, the New York hotel workers. They are solidly organized under the Hotel Trades Council, AFL. During the past few years, these workers have enjoyed a health and insurance plan which provided sick benefits of $10 and $12 a week for 26 weeks. In addition, the plan provides for 21 days’ hospitalization and, in case of childbirth, for an extra $80 toward the hospital bill. The plan provides a total of $600 each year to meet the medical needs of the hotel workers. In dollars and cents, these benefits are as high as a substantial wage increase. To these workers, their health and insurance plan is not a “fringe” issue. Nor was it to the coal miners and New York teamsters; they considered the issue big enough to go out on strike for it. Such demands cannot be easily discredited by a Mohawk Valley Formula when the union properly explains it to its members and the public at large.

Because of the growing speed-up, and increased productivity in industry, organized labor will soon bring forward a new central demand – the thirty-five and thirty-hour week. It is to be expected that the employers’ highly paid, high-pressure labor relations men will meet this demand with the cry of “socialism,” “un-American,” and “detrimental to industry.” It will be labor’s responsibility to conduct a vigorous campaign to point out that a shorter work week will reduce unemployment, will preserve the health of the nation’s wage earners, and will establish happier family relationships.

Labor’s perspective and trend will be more and more to present its economic demands in “package” form. This has best been exhibited by the powerful UE when in April 1949 its General Executive Board recommended to all locals that they “work out their demands for the coming negotiations within the framework of an increase of $500 per year per employee in wages and salaries, pension improvements and health programs and other economic benefits.”

Here a union presented its program in a manner that even the most backward member can understand. The worker knows what his union aims to accomplish for him and his family in one year. Such a union need not fear that point in the Mohawk Valley Formula which calls for an attack on the union’s demands.

Chapter 12: “Law and Order”

“Impartial” Citizens Committees

If the leadership of a strike lacks alertness and vigilance, the next point of the Mohawk Valley Formula can be a most effective strikebreaking weapon.

“Align the influential members of the community into a cohesive group opposed to the strike. Include in this group, usually designated a Citizens Committee, representatives of the bankers, real estate owners and businessmen.”

Citizens Committees are potentially dangerous because their origin and real purpose are generally concealed. At the start these committees – which are frequently composed of civic and church leaders and consequently have prestige both in the community at large and among the workers – appear to be impartial bodies. Their spokesmen talk from both sides of their mouths. They are for the “right to strike” and the “right to work” at the same time. Behind closed doors they work under the strictest supervision of the employer, but in their public utterances they are neither for one side nor the other.

Numerous examples could be cited to show how this part of the Mohawk Valley Formula was applied during strikes throughout the country. Two will suffice.

During the 1937 “Little Steel” strike in Canton, Ohio, a group of “prominent citizens” gathered in utmost secrecy for the purpose of organizing a “Citizens Law and Order League. There was no double talk at this meeting. Those present knew that their aim was to break the strike by eliminating “mob rule,” and one of the specific purposes of this committee was “to find suitable men to serve as special police and deputy sheriffs/’ Yet this same strike- breaking outfit issued a statement to the press declaring: “The Citizens Law and Order League is not a strikebreaking organization. It is not the purpose of the League to take part in any industrial controversy.”

In Youngstown, Ohio, the same Republic Steel Corporation set up another “citizens committee” under the name of “Mahoning Valley Citizens’ Committee.” Publicly it declared: “We recognize the right of labor to collective bargaining and to the protection of the law in any lawful efforts and attempts of labor in its presentation and its safeguard.” But behind closed doors it pressured the Ohio governor to send troops that would cover and protect a back-to-work movement.

False Patriotism

These “innocent” Citizens Committees, springing up on the eve of a strike or during a strike, perform a variety of functions, depending on the local and state political setups. But always they parade as super-patriotic organizations dedicated to “uphold the Constitution and law and order.” The Youngstown Committee wound up its first public appeal as follows: “We solicit the citizens to join with us, to dedicate ourselves anew, in the spirit that was exemplified by the fathers of the Declaration of Independence.”

Often the impression is created by these Citizens Committees that to go out on strike is tantamount to an insurrection or uprising and the citizens are called upon, in the name of patriotism and loyalty, to uphold the country and flag. In Canton, Ohio, during the steel strike, attorney Adolph linger, a leader of the Law and Order League, delivered a radio address over station WHBC and this is the kind of appeal he made to the citizens of Ohio: “Are we living in the United States of America, whose rights and liberties were purchased by the spilling of blood and maiming of men and the heartaches of women and the yielding of lives? Are Concord, Lexington, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Chateau Thierry, Soissons, Saint Michel, Belleau Woods, the Argonne myths? Are Patrick Henry, Ethan Allen, Nathan Hale, Grant, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt legendary figures or did they actually exist in this country? Has the Bill of Rights become a mere scrap of paper to be carelessly swept aside because we have a dispute called a labor dispute? Is the American flag still the symbol of the paramount sovereignty of this government and constituted authority, or is it to be replaced by a labor flag?” (Hearings of the Committee on Education & Labor, 75^th Congress, Part 32.)

One of the chief tasks strike-bound employers assign to Citizens Committees is to serve as a pressure group. With tremendous financial resources at their disposal, it is possible for such committees to perform a number of things that would greatly lose their usefulness if the employer did them directly and openly. In Canton the Citizens Committee organized a delegation of “prominent citizens,” to meet with the Mayor and county sheriff to demand that they deputize 200 special police for strike duty. In Johns- town, Pa., when the Governor ordered the Bethlehem plants closed and declared martial law, the Citizens Committee organized a campaign of telegrams and letters calling upon the Governor to rescind his order so that a back-to-work movement could be planned. The Governor was actually threatened with a recall movement. In other communities, it was the Citizens Committees that lined up support of women’s and veterans’ organizations against the strike. In Monroe, Mich., the Citizens Committee openly assumed leadership over a vigilante movement. In Youngstown, Ohio, it was the Citizens Committee that led and organized the back-to-work movement.

Camouflaged Company Propaganda

The most important assignment of Citizens Committees is to mold public opinion against the workers, the strike, the strike leaders and their union. However, it is a principle laid down by the Mohawk Valley Formula that company propaganda is much more effective when camouflaged. The employers are advised not to rely entirely on full page ads signed by the company; regular newspaper columnists and radio commentators can less easily give forthright support to an employer than to a “people’s movement” against a strike or strike wave. And many a columnist is seeking for strategic opportunities to come out on the employer’s side. In 1938, the La Follette Committee discovered that Mr. George Sokolsky, a nationally known syndicated newspaper columnist, was on the payroll of the National Association of Manufacturers.

As a rule Citizens Committees are supplied with large amounts of money to hire professional publicity men, buy radio time and newspaper advertising space. In recent years “labor trouble” advertising has become quite a business. Often an exceptionally vicious anti-labor column will be reprinted in a local newspaper in the form of a full-page advertisement.

Among other things a Citizens Committee may be bold enough to call a “mass meeting” in order to “demonstrate” its support in the community. Where this is done, the meetings are usually packed with people influenced by management personnel.

Exposing the “Citizens Committee”

What can strike leaders do to counteract the devious acts of a Citizens Committee?

The first thing is to study the social composition of the committee, the personal and professional background of the individuals. Invariably the committee will be found to consist of middle and upper class citizens – such as bank officials, insurance men, lawyers – with a sprinkling of church leaders. Retail merchants or others who depend on the good will of the people are most unlikely to be included, while the “big money” men, although they exert a decisive influence over these committees, are usually kept in the background. The Canton Citizens Law and Order League, for example, consisted of the following:

15 attorneys	1 contractor
6 association executives	1 physician
5 insurance agents	1 judge
3 manufacturers	1 utility executive
3 suppliers	1 commission merchant
2 ministers	1 salesman
2 retailers	1 stockbroker
2 real estate dealers

A majority of this committee, it was found, had business connections in one form or another with the steel corporations.

It is not enough for the union to know who is on the committee. It must trace the committee’s origin, its financial backing, and find out who its true master minds are. In most cases the union will find that the majority in the leadership of such committees have a personal interest in supporting the employers. All this the union must expose. There will, of course, be cases where innocent and well meaning citizens will be dragged into such committees. Such people must be shown the light and urged to publicly disassociate themselves from the committee.

The fight against these committees must not degenerate into a fight against the individuals involved. The emphasis must be on their strikebreaking activities. To begin with, the union must tear down the mask of “neutrality.” All their verbal pronouncements that they are not opposed to organized labor in general must be shown to be pure hypocrisy. These committees must be forced into a position where they stand in the eyes of the public not as community representatives, but as an agency of the employers. Should the Citizens Committee call a “mass meeting,” the strikers and their families must be urged to attend. Being there, they can make a strong request that a representative of the strikers also be heard. But the best way to expose the function and the unrepresentative character of the committee is to foster the creation of a pro-union Citizens Committee. A public debate between the leaders of the two committees will quickly show which one truly represents the community and the public interests.

Often the majority of a citizens committee serve in a passive capacity, merely lending their names. The real operators are professionals, including imported publicity men working for national advertising firms, and other institutions specializing in anti-union activities. Others among such operators are trained strikebreaking salesmen, people who know how to approach women or foreign-born groups. These salesmen are known as “missionaries.” Their job is to mingle among the strikers and their families, disseminate false rumors, and plant seeds of demoralization. Among such operators are people who specialize in recruiting scabs from among weak strikers and among the unemployed. Quite often neither the strikers nor the people in the community are even aware of the fact that in their midst there is a battery of outside professional strikebreakers, imported for the duration of the strike. They must be searched out and publicly exposed.

Inasmuch as one of the chief objectives of the Mohawk Valley Formula is to arouse the community against the strike, union leaders must direct their attention to all the public moves of the Citizens Committees. In a previous chapter were outlined a number of steps that must be taken to win public support. By putting these steps into successful operation a union can take away the initiative from a Citizens Committee and even prevent it from coming into existence.

Violence in the Name of “Law and Order”

“Bring about the formation of a large armed police force to intimidate the strikers and to exert a psychological effect upon the citizens. This armed force is built up by utilizing local police, state police if the Governor cooperates, vigilantes and special deputies. The deputies should be chosen from other neighborhoods so that there shall be no personal relationships to induce sympathy for the strikers. Coach the deputies and vigilantes on the law of unlawful assembly, inciting to riot and disorderly conduct; unhampered by any thought that the strikers may also possess some rights, they will be ready and anxious to use their newly acquired authority to the limit.”

Under this section of the Mohawk Valley Formula force and violence are brought upon the heads of the strikers in the name of “law and order.” Here the formula picks up a chip of the old strikebreaking block. But the emphasis is on psychological terror and intimidation. What the employers are after is to create the impression that in time of strike there is need for police reinforcements, special deputies, and State troops because violence is inevitable.

Facts do not bear out such a conclusion. Violence is inevitable only when the employers are determined to make it so. The coal miners are a case in point, and their experience should be used to prove to workers and the public at large that strikes are not synonymous with violence.

Two decades ago, a major strike in the coal fields brought death with it. But during the recent miners’ strikes there has been little violence; in fact, the newspapers have played up the “holiday atmosphere” in mining towns. What are the reasons for this change? The first is that liberal Governor Pinchot abolished the dreaded Coal and Iron Police. The second is that the coal operators have been blocked from sending into the coal fields a mob of cutthroats, murderers and frame-up artists by the outlawing of interstate shipment of scabs and professional strike- breakers. Most important, the coal operators have developed a healthy respect for the miners’ organized strength, indomitable spirit to stick it out, and deep-rooted loyalty to the union. In other words, there is no violence in the coal fields now because the employers have decided that terror and intimidation have not been useful in the mining country.

Violence characterizes strikes today for the same reasons it has always characterized them – because the employers still have hopes of crushing unions by defeating the strikers. The Mohawk Valley Formula recommends achieving this by creating, in the name of “law and order,” an atmosphere of terror and intimidation. Mary Heaton Vorse, a journalist who has covered strikes for the past thirty years, describes in Labors New Millions how this kind of atmosphere was created in Johnstown in 1937: “Excited citizens, many of them looking like high school boys, were being given black hats, night sticks, and arms, and were being sent to patrol the residential quarter of town to arouse feelings of alarm in the non-striking population. Everything was being done to give the effect that a violent and dangerous situation existed which must be handled by force.”

A similar atmosphere of expected violence was created in the 1949 New York taxi strike. On the day of the strike – April 1, 1949 – the New York Times on its front page carried a story with the following titles and subtitles:

TAXI DRIVERS STRIKE TODAY

POLICE PUT ON A “WAR” BASIS

“SAFE ROUTES” SET FOR CABS

Motorcycle Force to Patrol Streets Advised for

Travel. Police to Carry Nightsticks, Work in

12-hour Shifts. With All Leaves Canceled –

Get Orders to Protect Public at Any Cost

The same issue of the Times carried another story with the headline, “Taxis Shop in Vain for Riot Insurance.” Similar scary headlines were on the front pages of most newspapers in New York. All through the taxi strike the “violence” angle was played up and blown up even though, with the exception of a few minor skirmishes, there was no violence. Mayor O’Dwyer, the police department, and the press did in New York what the Citizens Committee did in Johnstown, Pa. They created an atmosphere that all hell was about to break loose in this great metropolis. The New York Times of April 1, 1949, opened its story with this announcement: “The Police Department was placed yesterday on its ‘gravest’ emergency footing to control any violence that might arise from the taxicab strike and ‘to insure’ the safety of the public. Orders, effective at 12:01 A.M. today, put the entire department on twelve-hour tours of duty; a move that will augment the regular working force by 3,250 patrolmen and detectives. The special duty chart invoked by Police Commissioner William P. O’Brien has been used only once before, in the first days after the United States 9 entry into World War II.” Mayor O’Dwyer made a special broadcast to the people with warning there will be no “goons,” “no roughhouse and no violence.” Unfortunately, the leaders of the taxi strike did not expose in time the strikebreaking character of this violence propaganda.

To create a violence scare without violence is like smoke without fire! It is bound to dissipate. Hence there is need to actually create incidents of violence. And here is where the professional stoolpigeons, employer-hired saboteurs and frame-up men enter the strike picture. American strike history is crowded with incidents where Pinkerton, Bergoff and other notorious strikebreaking agencies have planted their men among strikers to perform these kinds of Judas tasks. Such “plants” are generally known as agents provocateurs. The La Follette Senate Committee uncovered and exposed hundreds of such characters. They are planted in every labor organization, and no doubt quite a few of them are still in labor’s midst waiting till their masters order them to strike a blow.

The Vigilante Movement

The creation of an atmosphere and incidents of violence – which, of course, are immediately blown up in the press and beamed over the air waves – opens the door for a much more important phase of strikebreaking the development of a vigilante movement. Such a movement is particularly important to an employer when local or State authorities are pro-labor minded or fearful of political consequences if they line up against the strikers and their union.

The vigilante movement has a long history in our nation and in the American labor movement. It began one hundred years ago in California when the people formed vigilance committees to wrest from thieves and gamblers the government power they had usurped and to defend the right to work and build a decent citizenry. Then it was a progressive movement. Afterward it became one of the worst expressions of reaction in American life. It is that today.

Significantly this movement flourished best during periods when the federal and State administrations did not pursue hostile policies toward organized labor. At such times employers could not rely on federal and State troops, on injunctions, on the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to intervene on their behalf. Thus between 1936 and 1938, years when the Wagner Act dominated labor relations, extra-legal means became the employers’ only recourse, and the vigilante movement developed on a national scale. A National Citizens Committee was set up in July, 1937, to coordinate the work of the local committees throughout the country.

Of course, vigilantism varied from State to State, depending mainly on the position of local and State authorities toward organized labor. This can be illustrated by what happened at the time of the 1937 steel strike. In Johnstown, Pa. and Monroe, Mich., open armed vigilante movements developed, but not in the Ohio steel towns. There can be no doubt that one of the main reasons was that Governor Davey of Ohio was ready and willing to cooperate with the steel corporations, whereas in Michigan and Pennsylvania the governors were not ready for such cooperation. In Ohio there was no need for vigilantes; the Citizens Committees could concentrate on discrediting the strike in the eyes of the public, and the armed forces of the State were available to do the rest.

The Underground Conspiracies

In each locality the vigilantes develop their own specific form according to the circumstances. In Michigan, in the middle thirties, there was the powerful “Black Legion” whose leadership was dedicated to a merciless struggle against organized labor. It was a secret, well armed organization based on military principles. Murder and terror were its chief weapons. The true character of this organization was expressed by its own oath:

In the name of God and the devil, one to reward, the other to punish, and by the powers of light and darkness, good and evil, here under the black arch of heaven’s avenging symbol I pledge and consecrate my heart, my brain, my body and my limbs and swear by all the powers of heaven and hell to devote my life to the obedience of my superiors and that no danger or peril shall deter me from executing their orders.

I will exert every possible means in my power for the extermination of the anarchists, Communists, the Roman hierarchy and their abettors.

I further pledge my heart, my brain, my body and my limbs never to betray a comrade and that I will submit to all the tortures that mankind can inflict rather than reveal a single word of this, my oath.

Before violating a single clause or implied pledge of this, my obligation, I will pray to an avenging God and to an unmerciful devil to tear my heart out and roast it over flames of sulphur.

That my head be split open and my brains be scattered over the earth, that my body be ripped up, my bowels be torn out and fed to the carrion birds.

That each of my limbs be broken with stones and then cut off by inches that they may be food for the foulest birds of air.

And lastly may my soul be given unto torment; that my body be submerged into molten metal and stifled in the flames of hell, and that this punishment may be meted out to me through all eternity in the name of God our creator. Amen. (George Morris, The Black Legion Rides.)

After a number of local union leaders were murdered between 1933 and 1936, the “Black Legion” was discovered and exposed. The great forward surge of the automobile workers defeated this fascist organization on the picket lines. But this did not stop vigilantism in Michigan; it only changed its form. In 1937 there sprang up in each auto town a local vigilante organization. These local groups were backed and organized by local leaders of the Republican Party and leaders of American Legion posts who were also active Republicans. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, American Legionnaires openly campaigned for the establishment of uniformed, armed forces, separate from the State militia, whose only duty would be to break strikes. The town newspaper, the Chronicle Independent, became the mouthpiece for the vigilantes. In August 1937 it declared:

Let a special tax be assessed for the purpose of providing a defense fund. This defense fund can be used to pay for the training of 1,000 or more young men enrolled in a special auxiliary police force to be available at times of emergency. The men in this corps should be paid for attending drills and training periods, in the same manner that members of the National Guard companies are paid.

THE COST OF PROVIDING, DRILLING AND MAINTAINING SUCH A FORCE WOULD BE FAR LESS THAN THE COST TO THE CITY OF ONE DAY’S STOPPAGE OF BUSINESS.

In Flint, Mich., the vigilantes formed a “Law and Order League” which was powerful enough to control the city council, to name a city manager and appoint its own police chief. In Monroe, the then Mayor of the town armed a mob that drove the CIO organizers out of town and at a point of a gun prohibited picketing at the Republic Steel Plant.

The vigilante movement spread from North to South and from East to West. In Tampa, Fla., the Ku Klux Klan took up the “crusade” against labor with terror and death resulting. In Seattle, Wash., a vigilante committee was organized to break the 1936 maritime strike. A special bulletin was issued to the vigilantes with the following instructions:

Temper your severity to suit the occasion and if forced to fight, don’t forget that nothing so swiftly sickens a mob of its course than brutal, stomach-wrenching, soul-sickening brutality swiftly, fearlessly and judiciously applied ...

It would be well to provide canned foods and arms for your family, and to arrange for them to stay in company with the families of other members of your unit. Plan with your wife or parents for a place of meeting in case your home is destroyed or impossible to reach ...

TREATMENT OF CROWDS: A crowd is a potential mob. The best time to stop a fight is before it starts. Don’t temporize, don’t harangue, don’t “reason with them,” don’t bluster, don’t argue, don’t “answer back,” don’t let your men be surrounded nor left without an avenue of withdrawal, don’t bite off more than you can chew, don’t plunge into the heart of a crowd for individual arrests unless your force is strong and the crowd is “covered” by your riflemen from a superior altitude.

Remember that the agitators do more shoving from the rear than leading from the front; never neglect an opportunity to improve the potential effect of your fire by posting men on roof tops and second story windows, but don’t weaken your force too much by division of your strength.

Don’t forget that women are aligned with the enemy, they are apt to be in the front rank of a mob and are prone to be the most hysterical and the most abusive. Ignore them unless they imperil your men or your mission and then treat them exactly as though they were men ...

WHEN YOU MAY FIRE: Remember that our sole object is to prevent revolutionary tactics, bloodshed and property damage, by lawful and American means! You must be loath to loose your piece (gun), but must not hesitate to use it if necessity demands. If time permits and wisdom dictates it, challenge the offending party before you fire upon him.

GENERAL NOTES: A cornered rat is hard to whip; leave your crowd an avenue of escape and the weaker souls will take it, thus launching a wholesale rout which you can follow to advantage. Mount your machine guns low, in ground floor windows or entrance ways, behind cover, but so they can cover a wide area. Upper windows are good for riflemen but bad for machine guns since their arc of fire covers but little ground. Keep informed every minute of the enemy’s whereabouts, arrange signals from men in high places, by runners or arm signals. (Isobel Walker Soule, The Vigilantes.)

How to Fight Vigilantism

Strike leaders must not underestimate the danger of vigilantism. In August 1937 the American Institute of Public Opinion conducted a poll. It asked this question: “Do you approve of citizens’ groups, called vigilantes, which have sprung up recently in strike areas?” The results were as follows:

In the east central region, which includes Michigan and the steel strike area, the returns were 22 per cent in support of the vigilantes. Other areas voted thus:

New England	Yes	22%
Middle Atlantic	Yes	22%
West Central	Yes	28%
South	Yes	31%
Rocky Mountains	Yes	19%
Pacific Coast	Yes	34%

It augurs ill for the future that so large a percentage of American citizens could approve such a fascist-like movement – product of anti-labor hysteria built up by a hostile and often irresponsible press. It is conceivable that in time of a future strike wave, a hostile Congress and a hostile press and radio might stimulate very substantial backing for vigilantism.

How shall labor combat the menace of force and violence in the name of “law and order”?

1. Foresee violence and expose attempts to create it. In each strike situation the union leaders, on the basis of past experience and considering the issues involved, can anticipate in general terms the kind of tactics the employer will use. For example: will management attempt to operate the mill with scabs? If so, the employer will inevitably stimulate violence propaganda and exert pressure upon the authorities to enlarge the police force or their own protection department. The first duty of the strike leaders is to expose this kind of propaganda.

2. Demand the removal of munitions. Almost every large company is stacked up with munitions. On the eve of the strike, or during its early stages, the strikers must appeal to the public authorities with a demand that these munitions be taken out of the plant for the duration of the strike. This step by itself will bring into the open which side is preparing acts of violence.

3. Fight against the deputizing of private citizens. At all times the union must vigorously oppose the creation of an extra armed force by the deputizing of private citizens. The very idea of such a force is an offense to the workers on strike. It implies that a strike is a crime and that strikers are potential criminals. The union must do more than oppose; it must offer its own manpower for police duty and press the argument that in communities where strikers were deputized there were hardly any acts of violence. Failing to accomplish its objective, the union must concentrate on exposing the character of the citizens deputized and show their bias in favor of the company. In particular the union should expose the criminal element that always becomes part of such a force.

4. Fight unceasingly all efforts to organize vigilantes. No armed volunteer groups to serve the employers’ interests should be permitted in the community, and proceedings should be instituted against public officials encouraging lawlessness and violence against the rights of workers on strike. Appeals should be made to State and federal authorities, over the heads of local officials, to curtail official or private lawlessness.

5. Form a mass defense organization. Perhaps the most effective way of combating vigilantism is for the strikers to form an organization capable of protecting the strikers, the picket line, the union leaders, strike headquarters and active strikers and their families. The younger strikers, particularly veterans, can give substance to such a strikers’ defense organization.

Chapter 13: Back-to-Work Movements

A Modern Version of Scabbing

Strike leaders cannot lead workers to victory unless they are thoroughly acquainted with the next part of the Mohawk Valley Formula.

“Most important, heighten the demoralizing effect of the above measures all designed to convince the strikers that their cause is hopeless by a ‘back-to-work’ movement, operated by a puppet association of so-called ‘loyal employees’ secretly organized by the employer. The association wages a publicity campaign in its own name and coordinates such campaign with the work of the missionaries circulated among the strikers and visiting their homes.”

All other measures outlined in the Mohawk Valley Formula are simply preliminaries to this decisive strikebreaking step. If a back-to-work movement succeeds, the strike fails. Mary Heaton Vorse aptly characterized it when she wrote that this movement “emerged from an instinctive movement to the number one place in a conscious strikebreaking technique.”

A back-to-work movement is not an entirely new development. It would be more accurate to say that it is just our well known old scabbing modernized to fit in with present-day conditions. It was first used on a large scale in the 1919 steel strike. The strike investigation by the Inter-church World Movement recognized it as a new form of strikebreaking and in its report declared: “As a fighting proposition the strike was broken by the successful establishment of, first, the theory of ‘resuming production,’ and, second, the fact of it.”

As has already been stated, scabbing as a profession, or as a temporary practice, is very much discredited. The famous strike song “Which Side Are You On?” sung on thousands of picket lines and in thousands of union halls expresses labor’s deep contempt for scabs:

“Oh workers can you stand it?

Oh tell me how you can.

Will you be a lousy scab

Or will you be a man?”

It is in part this attitude which has resulted in the lessened importance of professional scab agencies, although the many legal restrictions on such agencies are also a factor. While private scab agencies still exist, and while it is conceivable that under certain circumstances they could expand their strikebreaking activities, they would in any case be totally inadequate in relation to the present strength of organized labor.

Back-to-work movements are the employers’ answer to the new situation. In many respects this answer is superior to the old-fashioned scab method of strikebreaking. Built as they are on employees who worked in the factories before the strike took place and who are known in the community, back-to-work movements do not arouse the same hostility. It is much easier to develop a resentment against out-of-town scabs than against local workers who have decided to betray their own interests and those of their fellow workers.

When and How the Formula Is Applied

Another advantage a back-to-work movement has for the employer is that it causes people to believe the workers are divided over the strike issue. It should be remembered that the leaders of such a movement often form an “independent” union that is for everything except the strike. In most cases, too, the press creates the impression that the back-to-work movement actually represents a majority of the workers involved in the strike.

A third important advantage to the employer is that through such a movement he can keep constant check on striker morale and know just how many strikers are ready to break ranks and return to work. This can have a great bearing on the course of the strike.

A final advantage of a back-to-work movement is that even partial success has its value; the employer can operate with scabs and continue to refuse to bargain collectively, or he can delay the ending of the strike.

Under what circumstances does an employer organize a back-to-work movement?

A study of strikes in which employers developed or attempted to develop back-to-work movements leads to the conclusion that this tactic is generally used when the employers’ objective is to break not only the strike, but also the union, or to prevent the union from establishing itself on a permanent basis. That was the original objective of the author of the Mohawk Valley Formula. Certainly, this was the major objective of the steel corporations in 1937; under the leadership of Tom Girdler, they were determined to prevent the CIO from entering their plants.

During the post-war period, a number of powerful corporations made an attempt to return to the open shop. Among these were the meat packing companies and Remington Rand, then making a second effort to destroy the union. The Remington Rand strike took place in 1947 and the meat packers’ strike in 1948. In both strikes a back-to-work movement was developed. Similarly, in the 1949 New York taxi drivers’ strike, where the fleet owners’ chief objective was to prevent the union from establishing itself, a back-to-work movement was instituted.

On the other hand, during the same period there took place, particularly in the coal fields and auto industry, even larger strikes than the above, but here the employers did not, at the time, set themselves the smashing of the unions as their main objective. In these strikes there was no attempt to organize back-to-work movements. Strike leaders who are confronted with back-to-work movements can justly conclude, therefore, that their union is up against a life and death struggle.

How Workers Are Misled

What are the circumstances under which strikers could be misled into joining a back-to-work movement?

Undoubtedly one of the major factors would be lack of adequate preparation for the strike. When workers are properly forewarned about all possible moves their employer may make when the strike comes, they know what to expect, and when this move does come, it loses the element of surprise and causes no confusion in the ranks. In fact, the prestige of the leadership is strengthened; when strike leaders can predict in advance the moves of the employer, the workers’ confidence in them naturally increases.

A back-to-work movement has greater chances for success among newly organized workers. Among such workers there has not yet developed a deep-rooted sense of solidarity. Such workers are likely to have a strong attachment for the company, developed through clever company propaganda, welfare schemes, sports and social activities and, until recently, company unions; for the new union no such attachments could as yet have developed. It takes time to build solidarity. Back-to-work movements are much less likely to succeed in industries where the unions have been in existence a long time and solidarity has become deep-rooted. The miners’ slogan “no contract – no work” is an expression that reflects a very high degree of union understanding and solidarity. There were no back-to-work movements in the numerous strikes in the coal fields.

A situation in which wages, hours, and union recognition are not the chief issues – because the employers have already granted such demands in the hope that this would keep the workers out of the union – lends itself to a back-to-work movement. Such was the case in the 1937 steel strike. Tom Girdler, his “Citizens Committees,” his press campaign, his “missionaries,” his letters to the workers and full page advertisements kept hammering away that “no questions of wages, hours, or collective bargaining” were involved in the strike, and that even if the strike were won the men would gain nothing in dollars and cents. Such a demagogic appeal to men who had not been organized or on strike for almost two decades had its effect.

An unwholesome psychological setting is also conducive to a back-to-work movement; employers hope and pray for a situation where a feeling of doubt in final victory develops. Sources of such doubts can be manifold. First and foremost is employer propaganda; through every conceivable means employers endeavor to undermine the strikers’ confidence in final victory. Often, however, doubts of final victory arise out of poor performance on the part of strike leaders. Poor organization, isolation of leaders from members, confusion, lack of warmth and understanding of the needs of the strikers and their families, and personal behavior unbecoming strike leaders are all factors that undermine morale and create doubts.

Again, immediate financial and other material considerations can become an attraction to workers lacking a trade union background, particularly at a time when their financial needs are greatest. In Youngstown, the employees of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube were offered the following if they would join the back- to- work movement:

1. All workers, whether union or non-union, would be granted a choice of regular annual vacations, ranging from one to two weeks, or the equivalent in cash.

2. All men who entered the plants would get time and one-half on a 12-hour shift.

3. Insurance would be continued on all its 15,000 employees in the Youngstown area throughout June (while they were out) , by paying all premiums, usually deducted from pay checks.

4. Physical examinations were to be waived. (This meant that thousands of older employees who might otherwise be disqualified by failure to meet physical requirements of employment, would not need to have such examinations.)

Similar material inducements were offered to workers in other strikes in return for joining a back-to-work movement.

In service industries – i.e., hotels, restaurants, taxis, etc. – there are additional reasons why strike leaders must prepare the workers against the dangers of a back-to-work movement. There is a basic difference between workers employed in factories, plants, and mines, and workers employed in service industries. A tipping employee such as a waiter, a bellman or a taxi driver receives only a nominal wage; his real take-home pay depends on his tips. A taxi driver who earns his day’s pay through collecting forty per cent of the meter reading as well as tips is much more susceptible to company propaganda that a strike is an irreparable financial loss to him and that it is to his interest to go back to work as speedily as possible. The leaders of the Taxi Drivers’ Organizing Committee in New York did not sufficiently take into account this important peculiarity of the service industries.

These are some of the chief causes and inducements that prompt workers to join back-to-work movements. But the chief cause is lack of understanding of the principles of trade unionism. However, workers learn from their own experiences. In 1936 Remington Rand broke a strike through the back-to-work movement; in 1947 the same workers broke the back-to-work movement.

“Independent Associations” as Fronts

Who are the sponsors of such movements? At all times they are the employers. Never in any strike was there a genuine back-to-work movement of the workers themselves. A back-to-work movement is planned, manned, financed by the employers. But in public it appears as a real and spontaneous revolt of the workers against strike, leaders, union.

It was not Tom Girdler, or Frank Purnell, President of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube, nor was it “Chowder Head” Cohan or Bergoff who appeared as the public leaders of the Youngstown back-to-work movement. It was a local attorney and a group of former company union representatives who set up an “independent” union for the purpose of initiating this organized scabbery. In Johnstown and Monroe, the mayors of the towns were the puppets. In the Remington Rand strike in Illion, N.Y., a company agent, who was also a union member, was responsible for the organization of the “Committee of Remington Rand Union Members for Democratic Principles,” which, in turn organized the back-to-work movement. Many more examples could be cited showing the same pattern: company controlled unions disguised as “independent,” lawyers and businessmen, city officials and deserters from union ranks are brought forward by the employers to lead a back-to-work movement.

How does the technique operate?

The first step is forming an “independent” organization. This is camouflage to give the thing a worker coloration; the appearance of a spontaneous worker movement. In Youngstown, Ohio, at the Republic plant an “Independent Federation of Republic Employees” was set up. In Sheet & Tube an “Independent Society of Workers of the Campbell Plant of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.” came into being. Usually such organizations are formed secretly, properly staffed with “loyal” employees, a law office, finances, headquarters and public relations people. Their coming into the open is timed and coordinated with the employers’ plan to reopen the mills. In Youngstown, both organizations came out in the open on the same day, June 2, 1937, with public declarations. The Chairman of the Republic “Independents” declared that “as free Americans we have the right to come and go as we wish.” Of course, the “federation” had no quarrel with anyone, but “the gates should be free for the workmen to enter if they want to.” The Sheet & Tube “Independents” came out with a more elaborate program. They sent out a letter to the thousands of workers employed by that company and the same was reprinted in the local press. The letter read:

DO — YOU — WANT — TO — GO — BACK — TO — WORK?

IF YOU DO, READ THIS LETTER!

Fellow Workers – Campbell Works, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.

The Wagner Labor Act automatically eliminated and abolished the so-called Company Employees’ Representation Plan.

An independent organization has been formed and is called the “Independent Society of Workers” which, regardless of the outcome of the present labor trouble, intends to and will continue to function as an agency for collective bargaining for its members on all matters involving grievances, labor disputes, wages, rates of pay, hours of employment, vacations with pay and conditions of work.

This is YOUR SOCIETY, governed and controlled by men chosen by yourselves –

The “Independent Society of Workers” asks you the following questions: (1) Why did we stop working? (2) Who stopped us? (3) Can you afford to be idle and have no income? (4) How long can you hold out? (5) Who loses the most when on strike?

DO YOU WANT TO WORK?

The “Independent Society of Workers” know a large majority of our fellow workers want to return to work and we can help them.

An office has been opened at Room 215 Dollar Bank Bldg., Central Square.

Come in and register. It’s up to you.

(Signed) Independent Society of Workers

Timing the Back-to-Work Offensive

This puppet “Independent Society of Workers” of the Sheet & Tube Co. offers so good an example of how the back-to-work technique operates that its movements and the collateral strikebreaking movements of the company will be described step by step.

As part of the timing, on the very day the formation of the “Independents” was announced, the Youngstown Vindicator carried a streamer across the front page: “Girdler Asks Protection for Workers.” Mr. Girdler stated that he expected to open the mills “when enough employees want to work and can get to work safely. We don’t want them to wade through blood.”

In accordance with the Mohawk Valley Formula a public meeting was called two days later. There it was voted to “inform” management, city and state authorities, and above all, the strikers that the back-to-work movement was soon to begin. The next few days were devoted to a barrage against the strike. The “missionaries” got very busy. Signatures were collected on a petition favoring a return to work, and in general every effort was made to create the impression that the strikers were weakening, and that the “big push” was about to come off.

A few days later, Ray L. Thomas, organizer and spokesman for the back-to-work movement announced that the majority of the strikers had signed up to return to work. On June 16, Mr. Thomas and the leaders of the “loyal employees’* met with Mr. Purnell, President of the Sheet & Tube Co., in the presence of a large number of newspapermen. At this well-staged “conference” Mr. Thomas announced that he had 9,000 signatures of employees requesting that they be “allowed to return to work.” In reply to this “clamoring” of the employees, the good steel corporation president announced to the press that “my great interest just now is the restoration of payrolls so that our employees may resume their lawful occupations and be enabled to support themselves and their families.” Mr. Purnell went on to say that a large number of the employees were pressing the company to open their gates “so that they can go back to work ... and if we develop that the proper law enforcement officers can give them the protection to which, as citizens and taxpayers, they are entitled, it is of course the logical result.” A few hours later, Mr. Lionel Evans, the good Mayor of the town, declared in the press that “if 7,500 or 9,000 men in this valley want to go back to work, I’m going to see the laws are enforced.” The stage was set.

In utmost secrecy and in the name of protection from violence supposedly about to be let loose by the strikers, preparations for real acts of violence were being made. Within the mills, machine guns were placed in position. Loads of tear gas were laid out and made ready for use. In the city, the police force was alerted. In the county, the sheriff deputized more men. Those ready to return to work were armed with revolvers. The city was tense, the people were in a state of expectancy, the strikers were grim and the leaders conscious that “this was it.”

Late in the afternoon of Monday, June 22, the Youngstown Vindicator appeared on the streets with a double streamer announcing: “Sheet & Tube and Republic to Reopen at 7 A.M. Tuesday.” It was like a special back-to-work edition. Both companies carried full page advertisements. The paper also carried a special editorial. It read:

Because of its long record of friendliness to labor, the Vindicator can speak without fear of being misunderstood.

Tomorrow Youngstown faces a crisis. Many thousands of men who have been kept out of work against their will are demanding the right to return to the mills. In consequence of this spontaneous demand, the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. and the Republic Steel Co. have decided to reopen their plants Tuesday morning.

These men have a right to return to work unmolested. Anyone who interferes with them is no friend of labor but will do labor’s cause the greatest possible harm. The public is growing impatient with labor because of the violence of the last few weeks, and it will not stand for any action on the part of strike leaders or sympathizers that will keep men from their jobs.

Tomorrow will be one of the most important days in Youngstown’s history. The peaceful return of all who are protesting against enforced idlness will not only reflect the credit the city desires, but will be in the best interests of labor itself.

The back-to-work movement was so well planned and so well organized that provocation and violence against the strikers were inevitable. As the La Follette Committee uncovered later, there were enough munitions inside the mills to turn Youngstown into a virtual battleground. How to avoid bloodshed was the strike leaders’ chief concern; they had information that the ringleaders were briefed to “shoot their way into the mills” if necessary. With this in mind the three local union leaders sent the following telegram to President Roosevelt and Governor Davey:

The Youngstown paper announced today Sheet & Tube and Republic will attempt to reopen Tuesday morning. We can prove to your satisfaction that an overwhelming majority of employees of both plants are members of the CIO and are determined to stay out on strike until both companies sign an agreement. Any attempt to open gates will automatically bring violence and bloodshed. Already two of our men were brutally murdered Saturday evening. Events Saturday evening may be only a skirmish in comparison with the amount of blood that may be shed tomorrow morning. The local authorities are working hand in glove with the steel companies and this makes the situation more threatening and more serious. In the name of God and the overwhelming majority of the steel workers of Youngstown who together with their families represent a majority of the population of this city we urge you to immediately intervene in this critical hour and avoid a calamity and disaster that Ohio may remember for decades to come. We appeal to you to use your good offices to avoid on time the most horrible things that may let loose within the next 24 hours. We are fully aware of all the preparations that the companies have made to break our strike. It is therefore inevitable that disaster will come. We would greatly appreciate a reply from you.

A few days before this wire was sent, Philip Murray had appeared before the Senate Post Office Committee and publicly declared:

In the city of Youngstown a repetition of the Chicago massacre is being prepared by Republic Steel. Sheriff Elser and Mayor Evans have hired special deputies, and all of the thugs and policemen of Republic Steel Corporation. Scores of these thugs have been brought into Youngstown from New York, Pennsylvania and other states ... Since May 9, Sheriff Elser has sworn in 332 men ... In an astonishingly short space of time, Sheriff Elser has available for these deputies armored trucks, scores of machine guns, other guns, ammunition and stacks of tear gas. The arsenals have been furnished to the sheriff by Republic Steel.

Mr. Murray added that “recourse to local officials in these cases afforded no relief, because of their complete tie-up with the officials of the steel corporations.”

The news of planned bloodshed in Youngstown, against a background of the Chicago massacre, spread throughout the industrial towns of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Rubber workers from Akron, steel workers from nearby mining towns rushed to Youngstown to help their embattled brothers. To prevent such reinforcements for the strikers, city and county authorities blocked all highways leading to Youngstown. Within a matter of hours, hundreds of workers were jailed. The prosecutor announced that the jail was packed.

The lines were drawn. The strikers were at a great disadvantage because they were unarmed, but they had no intention of retreating. Before dawn broke, many of them bid farewell to their families and walked off to the picket lines as though going to war.

As zero hour approached, in reply to the appeal of the steel workers, President Roosevelt made a special plea to the steel masters asking them not to open the mills. At the very last minute Governor Davey ordered the National Guard to Youngstown with instructions to keep the mills closed. It looked like victory for the workers. But a few days later the governor, yielding to pressure, betrayed the steel workers; the mills opened under the protection of the troops.

“The Right to Work” Propaganda

This is how the Mohawk Valley Formula was translated into action in Youngstown. There remained only to put on the finishing touches, for which the formula prescribes the following procedure:

“Close the publicity barrage, which day by day during the entire period has increased demoralization worked by all of these measures, on the theme that the plant is in full operation and that the strikers were merely a minority at- tempting to interfere with the right to work, thus inducing the public to place a moral stamp of approval upon the above measures. With this, the campaign is over – the employer has broken the strike”

The “right to work” versus the right to strike has been raised by employers as a major issue in most strikes where the Mohawk Valley Formula has been applied. As has been pointed out in a previous chapter, this is sheer hypocrisy. Actually, the glittering phrase “the right to work” is invoked in time of strike not to champion but to defeat labor’s most elementary desire: the right always to earn a decent living and have security on the job. The slogan “the right to work” is just part of the effort to make strikebreaking legal and moral. It is popularized to get moral sanction for any man to work so long as he will go to work as a strikebreaker. It is a slogan intended to confuse and mislead workers, but more especially the public at large.

To expose the hypocrisy of this slogan in time of strike the union can bring to mind what the employers thought about “the right to work” in depression days. They can ask the public to remember how in the days of unemployment the manufacturers’ association fought against government financed work projects, fought against unemployment insurance, fought against any other aid to the unemployed. The union can also announce that it is taking a “rain check” on the “right to work.” That is what the Conemaugh Valley Lodge of the Steel Workers Union did. A few months after the 1937 Bethlehem steel strike in Johns- town, hundreds of workers were laid off and thousands were working only two or three days a week. The union put out a leaflet with the title “What About the Right to Work Now?” In this leaflet the union declared:

Not so many weeks ago, we were told about the sacred right to work. The powers that be volunteered us protection if we desired to work.

What about the right to work now? Thousands of men laid off or working part time!

Our union believes in the sacred right to work. We urge you to call on the Citizens’ Committee, the Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor of Johnstown, the company officials and demand the right to work.

Is the right to work a right which exists only when the company chooses to permit us to enjoy it?

Is it a right which can be taken from us at any time when the company chooses? Doesn’t the company owe us some explanation of the present lay-off and the reduction of working time?

Where are the people who willingly contributed thousands of dollars to protect us in our right to work? We see no full page advertisements now demanding that we be allowed to continue at our jobs in the mill.

We see no businessmen calling at the company office to complain that their business is being hurt because we are not allowed to work. Their business is being hurt as much as at any other time when we were not working. Why are they making no demands for us now?

Think these things over, Brothers, and we are sure you will be able to decide who really are your friends. Organize! Build a UNION wall around your right to work. Demand not only the right to work but also the right to fair play and honest collective bargaining.

Remington Rand Workers Defeat the Formula

When a back-to-work movement succeeds, very often the strike fails. But this is equally true in reverse; when the employers’ back-to-work campaign is defeated, the strike is virtually won. What has been the experience of unions which have defeated the application of this most dangerous part of the Mohawk Valley Formula? How have they done it?

The 1947 Remington Rand strike is an excellent example of how the formula can be licked. The example is all the more convincing because the Mohawk Valley Formula, born in a previous Remington Rand strike, had eleven years earlier won a victory over the same workers.

On June 18, 1947, the Remington Rand workers went out on strike for a fifteen cent wage increase – following the wage pattern of most unions at that time. The 14,000 Remington Rand workers were well organized. Most of the plants had contracts with the UE and some with the International Association of Machinists.

From the very start the company flirted with the idea of a back- to- work movement. In Illion, N.Y., on the day of the walkout, Harold Day, manager of Plant 1, declared in the press: “The gates are open to any who want to go back to work.” The Utica Observer-Dispatch elaborated on this statement and bewailed the lack of a leader. Many “would pass the picket lines if somebody started the movement,” it declared. Actually the company had already selected a person to lead such a back-to-work movement.

Unlike 1936, when the employers had passed the assignment on to a private detective agency, the job of breaking the strike was given to John O’Connor, who for a period of years had operated inside the union, where at one time he had gained the confidence of the workers so far that he was elected a shop steward of Local 334, UE. O’Connor had begun to show his colors prior to the strike. During the negotiations he made several attempts to disrupt, con- fuse and undermine the union. As a result he was tried by his union, found guilty of disruption and permanently expelled. Management considered this person just the man for the role of a back-to-work leader.

Twenty days after the strike began, Remington Rand was ready to initiate the back-to-work movement in accordance with its own creation, the Mohawk Valley Formula. O’Connor together with several other “loyal” employees set up a committee, one of the first actions of which was to call a rump meeting for the purpose of stimulating and initiating a back-to-work movement. The union lost no time in striking back. It immediately exposed this employer move. In a statement to the press, the union denounced the projected meeting as a “deliberate company inspired and financed scheme by desperate men to launch a strikebreaking movement.” The union charged that the whole affair was designed to instigate and promote violence and bloodshed in the Mohawk Valley. Furthermore, the union declared that it had evidence that would establish clearly and indisputably the fact that Mr. William E. Shorten, vice-president in charge of industrial relations for Remington Rand, had been conspiring with John O’Connor and had “extended large sums of money and assistance of professional strikebreakers to O’Connor’s group” in order to break the strike.

This timely public exposure of the rump meeting immediately alerted the strikers and the community and placed responsibility for the violence that inevitably accompanies back-to-work movements where it belonged. At the same time, the strike leaders called for a reinforcement of all picket lines. On the day of the meeting called by O’Connor’s committee, a crowd of pickets arrived at the meeting place and staged an excellent demonstration. While hundreds of pickets stayed outside, others entered the meeting hall and spoke for the strikers. In addition, the union issued a leaflet exposing O’Connor and the true purpose of the meeting. The leaflet did not mince words. It read as follows:

YOU MAY BE HERE AS ONE WHO FEELS THAT THIS “back-to-work” IS THE ACTION OF HONEST WORKERS. Don’t be deceived! Don’t let individuals like O’Connor who are being paid by the Company, use you for their reckless and strikebreaking adventures! O’Connor and several of those working with him are being directed and financed by Remington Rand, Inc. and never have denied it. They are trying to use YOU in their union busting game. YOU will suffer in your wages and working conditions while they will be paid for their services in selling their fellow workers out. They are trying to confuse YOU and any others that they can find to take the brunt for their sinister acts. Don’t let them make a SUCKER out of YOU!

YOU MAY BE HERE AS A SPECTATOR ... expecting something to happen. Look around and see how many of those who are talking about “going back” you recognize as Plant 1 workers. You will see faces you have never seen before ... strikebreakers imported here by Remington Rand to deliberately provoke violence and bloodshed into the peaceful and orderly strike situation.

YOU MAY BE HERE AS A FOREMAN OR CLERICAL WORKER NOT PART OF THE BARGAINING UNIT. You too have a stake in this strike. This morning the Company is trying to use you to attempt to break the strike. They will try and use you without regard to what may happen to you or others as a result of their plans to provoke trouble and violence.

Management and its back-to-work leaders were not fully satisfied that their strikebreaking move was a failure. Several days later, another attempt was made. This time the company worked on all cylinders in its attempt to drum up support for such a movement. The so-called “Employees Committee” in a paid advertisement in the local newspaper called upon the workers to go back to work July 14 at 8 A.M., rain or shine. On the same day, Remington Rand placed a “come on in and go to work” advertisement in the same local paper.

The union realized that the strike would be decided that morning. Determined to “bury the Mohawk formula,” the union assembled 1,500 pickets in front of the plants at daybreak. Long picket lines began to circle. The strike leaders were there, the sound trucks were assembled, first-aid stations had been set up. Every man’s mind was made up that no strikebreakers should pass that picket line.

And they did not. The few misguided workers who came with the thought of entering the plant changed their mind the minute they saw the pickets. Michael Jiminez, leader of the strike, addressed the great gathering. “Do you want to go back to work?” A roar of “No’s” was the reply. “Do you want to be betrayed by men like O’Connor?” Another roar of “No’s.” Then Jiminez asked O’Connor whether he had anything to say, and if so, to speak up then, because there was the sound truck and he was welcome to use it.

Beaten, O’Connor went to the microphone. “To all people assembled here who want to go back to work,” he said. “There will be no attempt to enter the gates this morning.”

So ended the back-to-work movement. Ten days later, Mr. James Rand, author of the great Mohawk Valley Formula, admitted defeat in applying his brainchild to his own workers and acceded to the demands of the union.

What happened in Remington Rand can be successfully repeated in other strikes providing strike leaders react to back-to-work movements quickly and resolutely. Under every set of circumstances, the best and only answer to such movements is a speedy mobilization of the rank and file and the community at large.

Part Four

Chapter 14: Strike Leadership

We Don’t Have Enough

Despite the great numerical strength of the American trade union movement and the thousands of men and women who devote their full time to union work, there are not many who have emerged as strike leaders of national stature. There are valid reasons why.

Up to the enactment of the Wagner Act and the birth of the CIO, there were no large-scale organizing campaigns and therefore no major strikes. Old-time leaders were content with small unions, mostly craft in composition and operating in small industrial establishments. Under such circumstances, it could hardly be expected that a strike leadership of national stature would emerge.

Furthermore, for a number of years, and particularly in the twenties, the dominant tactic of the majority of the trade union leaders was collaboration. The strike was considered a “primitive weapon” that belonged to “the days of the jungle.” Labor leaders advocated a “higher strategy” – collaboration and even “partnership” with the employers. Unions were ready to offer greater efficiency, increased production, and elimination of waste in return for a collective bargaining agreement. That certainly was no atmosphere for the development of a strike leadership. Such leadership as did emerge was in keeping with the character of the strike – both were on a local level.

Curiously the same pattern persists today. Today, when industry-wide strikes on a national scale are a common occurrence, strike leaders still retain their local character. Men and women come forward in their communities, be- come outstanding local strike leaders, but remain at that level. At the same time national union leaders have assumed more and more the role of negotiators rather than of strike leaders.

What is the reason for this condition?

A lack of dynamic personalities in the leadership of the unions may have a lot to do with it. Present-day labor leaders for the most part have little of the crusader about them. They resemble businessmen much more. A large number actually live as businessmen do rather than like the workers they represent, and this is not without its effect. There has been an all around softening up process. Old-time labor leaders were softened up by the “higher strategy” and business unionism, while many of the younger and more articulate leaders of CIO unions were softened up because their unions achieved collective bargaining not through picket lines but through Labor Board elections.

But perhaps as much as anything, the reason for the lack of outstanding strike leaders on a national scale is labor’s failure to take up in its educational programs a consistent study of strike strategy. Not even unions with progressive leadership have done this. Yet an elementary knowledge of when and how to apply labor’s most powerful weapon would go far toward molding strike leaders who are confident and who in turn inspire confidence because they know what they are doing and why.

Leadership Qualifications

Leading a strike is never a one-man project. It is a collective effort. Although it often appears that a certain individual union leader is running everything, it takes a team of leaders, each responsible for a different phase of activity, to handle a strike. What qualifications are required of the men and women who make up this team?

First and foremost, there must be undivided loyalty and devotion to the union and its membership. The team must be composed of people with proved and tested records of struggle. They must be men and women with courage and steadfastness and endurance. The background of strike leaders cannot be ignored. The union not only has a right but a duty to review the past life of potential strike leaders. Certainly men who scabbed in the past, or who were employed by private detective agencies, should first prove themselves as loyal rank and file strikers before they are promoted to leadership. Likewise persons with past criminal records, even if completely rehabilitated, could at times do damage to a strike. It has happened in the past that employers and the press played up such individual records in order to alienate public opinion. Such people’s abilities could be utilized without their becoming part of a strike leadership. Strike leaders must be like Caesar’s wife – beyond suspicion.

The capacity to win and hold workers’ confidence stands high on the list of qualifications for strike leadership. Rank and file workers are oftentimes not vocal, but beneath their silence there is clear thinking and sound judgment of the men in front. It is only when the workers know their leaders well and have basic confidence in the leadership that they will give the strike a maximum, instead of token, support.

Self-control is another quality very important for strike leadership. During moments of great provocation on the part of employers or their hired agents or scabs, a leader must remain calm. It takes more courage at times not to fall for provocative acts than to lead head on into danger. Calm also means not to be overwhelmed by the multitude of problems thrown into the lap of strike leaders every minute of the day. The ability to remain calm under trying circumstances plus the ability to make correct spot decisions and resolutely carry them out are at the core of leadership.

Another quality a strike leader must have is the knack of delegating responsibility to the right people. The secret of this, of course, is to assign to people the task they know best. To ask a man who has native abilities as a speaker to take charge of picketing, and to give a man who has organizing abilities an assignment as a speaker, is not to get the best out of either.

It is very rare that any one person can possess all the attributes and qualities outlined above. This is one of the reasons why it is better that a strike be led by a team rather than by a single individual. One is a spokesman, another is the organizer, still another is the public relations man. When the efforts of all are combined, unified, and coordinated, the strike is assured of a satisfactory leadership.

One word more. A strike leadership to be most effective must reflect the composition of the workers involved. It should have representation of both skilled and unskilled workers, as well as departmental representation. A strike including Negro and women workers should have representation from each group.

General Guide for Strike Leaders

For the convenience of local union leaders there is presented below a chart or blueprint of a strike plan. In the event it becomes obvious that a strike is inevitable all possibilities of a settlement without a strike having been exhausted union leaders can follow this plan, taking from it whatever is applicable to their conditions and circumstances. It should be remembered that proper timing is the key to success. In seasonal industries, to plan a strike at the end of the season is to invite a long strike. If conditions are such that the union is free to choose when the strike shall take place, it is obviously to the advantage of the union to strike at the beginning of the season.

A. Preparations for the strike

1. Call a meeting of the workers involved and present an honest and accurate report on all the efforts the union has made to settle the dispute without a strike. The entire union machinery must be put to work in preparing for this general membership meeting.

2. At this meeting a vote should be taken on whether or not to strike. If the members vote to strike, the next point on the order of business is to set up the leading strike committees. It may be advisable to have the officers or the Executive Board bring in recommendations for such committees.

3. Carefully examine the attendance record of the meeting or meetings. If a substantial group of workers failed to attend such an important meeting or meetings, do not take it lightly. Those workers must be reached through the mails, by visitation, or through a special meeting.

4. Issue a statement to the press announcing the impending strike because of the employer’s stubborn resistance to reach an agreement across the conference table. In the statement stress the needs of the workers, the demands of the union, and make an appeal to the public.

5. Meet with the leaders of the key committees and check on their plans and personnel. Pay special attention to the picketing plan.

6. If there is need for additional strike headquarters, these must be rented before the strike and properly equipped. There should be a telephone, chairs, and first aid supplies. A reliable striker should be appointed to take charge.

7. If the strike is of major proportions in the community, consider the idea of a radio address, an advertisement in the newspapers, or a handbill to the public presenting the union’s point of view.

8. A committee consisting of the most authoritative union officers and members should visit the mayor, the city councilmen, and leaders of the church, veteran, and other civic organizations to explain the issues and solicit their good will and support.

9. A similar committee should visit the AFL and CIO central bodies and labor unions.

10. Alert the union attorneys and put them to work on legal matters, such as unemployment insurance, instructions to pickets, and analyzing city ordinances that could be applied to strike situations. Also arrangements must be made in advance with bonding companies for bail in the event of arrests.

11. Call a meeting of the Executive Board and see to it that a sufficient sum of money is allocated for various phases of strike action.

12. Send an official report on the pending strike to your International and outline your needs and how the International could assist you.

13. Meet with the person in charge of security and check if proper measures have been taken to protect union offices, strike leaders, and strike headquarters.

14. Make sure that “coffee and” stations will be set up and ready to serve as soon as picketing begins.

B. On strike day

1. Determine the exact hour and minute of the walkout. If possible, take advantage of the element of surprise. The effectiveness of this tactic depends on the ability of strike leaders to select the right tactic for their particular situation.

2. Make certain that the information about the exact time for the walkout will reach the shop stewards or others especially appointed to lead the walkout so that confusion will be reduced to a minimum.

3. If the policy is for the workers to go into the plants and work a few hours, arrange that union organizers will meet the strikers as they come out. If the policy is not to report to work, then a strong picket line must be thrown around all entrances.

4. Arrange to have detailed printed or mimeographed instructions to the strikers distributed the day the strike is declared.

5. If at all possible, arrange a strike meeting somewhere near the plant or in a specially hired hall.

6. Have the leaders of the various committees get busy on soliciting workers to join their committees.

7. The registration of strikers and the issuing of picket cards must be properly planned and carried through within 48 hours after the strike is declared.

8. If the walkout turns out to be below expectation, particularly if there is danger that production or services have not been fully discontinued, act immediately and decisively to eliminate this weakness.

C. Conduct of the strike

1. Proper timing is as important in conducting as in preparing for a strike. Go carefully into the question of when to introduce mass picketing. Determine also on what occasion dramatization shall be introduced.

2. Maintain discipline at all times. Not only the strikers but the employer, the scabs, the press and all others connected with the strike must be given to understand unequivocally that they have to deal with a body of disciplined fighters. Do not hesitate to remove strikers or union officers from positions of strike leadership when instructions are violated. Do not permit incompetent people, men who show cowardice or are corrupt, to remain in positions of responsibility. The strikers will respect their leaders for taking all necessary steps to maintain discipline.

3. Keep a finger on the strike pulse. It is of prime importance to be able at all times to evaluate the strength or weakness of the strike. On the basis of such evaluation great decisions have to be made. Go carefully into the following questions, remembering always that proper timing in discussing them is in itself of decisive importance:

a. How long can the men hold out?

b. Shall the union take the initiative in calling for negotiations?

c. Is it in the interest of the workers to accept arbitration or mediation?

d. Should the strike be spread to other plants?

D. Do’s and Donts for strike leaders

1. Keep in close contact with the strikers so that you may know fully the sentiments of the workers. Leaders who lock themselves up in hotel rooms or union offices and get their information through other organizers are bound to make costly mistakes. Mingle with the workers in strike halls and meet with various strike committees.

2. Lead by example. Spend several hours a day on the picket line. Our soldiers resented officers who were far away from the battlefield and called such officers “U.S.O. Commandos.” The American Communications Association presents an excellent example of leadership in this respect. During the Western Union strike President Joseph Selly and other international officers accepted, in addition to their other duties, regular daily assignments on the picket lines, including tours ranging from one to three hours on the sound truck.

3. Be ready to do anything and everything that will help win the strike. You cannot ask a striker to do what you yourself are not ready to do.

4. Be ready to make at least the same financial sacrifices that the workers make. In some unions – all too few – the officers give up their salaries during the course of the strike.

5. Be courageous and steadfast in the face of enemy attacks. This does not mean displaying bravado or taking unnecessary risks. A wise leader avoids running into useless and unnecessary danger.

6. Let your personal conduct be beyond reproach. Refrain from drinking. Stop all personal association with people connected with management. Refuse to hold private conferences with employer representatives unless such conferences have been approved by the leading strike committee.

7. Be earnest and resolute in your daily work. The whole strike organization must be permeated with a spirit of determination and seriousness.

8. Be firm. Strike leaders must expect great pressures upon them, both public and private. They may come from the White House, the governor, the press and a hundred other sources. To withstand such pressures and hold fast until victory is certain calls for uncompromising integrity, doggedness and determination. But nothing less will do. One of the chief reasons why John L. Lewis and Harry Bridges have had so much success is that they possess such qualities.

Winding Up the Struggle

Part of good strike strategy is knowing when and how to settle a strike. The right decisions cannot be arrived at by guess or hunch or instinct. To do the right thing at this point requires a correct balancing of strengths and weaknesses, both those of the union and those of the employer.

The first thing in approaching a settlement is to be absolutely sure about what the main objectives of the strike were and about the necessity of fighting for those objectives during negotiations. Negotiations call for firmness. But they also call for flexibility. Negotiators must be sure what they can and what they cannot be flexible about. In this connection William Z. Foster long ago established a formula that can well apply to most strikes. He warned that the workers’ negotiators “must be on watch against a maze of dangers, and yet be prepared to utilize every possible advantage. They must know the relative value of their own demands and also those of the employers. They must understand which are the ‘bargaining points’ and which are fundamental in the given situation. They must learn how to advance their main demands by sacrificing non-essentials, and how to prevent the employers from doing this.”

It will not be amiss to repeat at this point what was said earlier: the rank and file must actively participate in the direct negotiations for a settlement. The workers should elect as their negotiators the most honest, informed, experienced and determined union members. It is an established fact that many a time the presence of rank and file workers at the conference table has been a large factor in gaining the union’s demands.

Negotiations for partial settlement present special difficulties and call for the exercise of great judgment. Often the problem is a very decisive one for a union to face; a partial settlement is fraught with dangerous possibilities and can prove disastrous. In the coal strike of 1922, for example, the signing of a separate agreement would have ruined that great struggle. A separate agreement would have flooded the market with Illinois coal and would have signalized the failure of the union to get control of the whole central competitive field. Fortunately, the leader of the Illinois coal miners, Farrington – later exposed as an agent of the coal miners – did not succeed in signing the agreement.

Generally speaking, partial settlements in the basic industries must be a last resort. In more competitive and lighter industries partial settlements can be applied more frequently and even to the advantage of the unions as a whole. A good example is offered by a painters’ strike in the thirties in New York. Faced with stubborn resistance of the employers’ association, the painters union opened the door to individual settlements, thus breaking the solid front of the employers.

The problem of arbitration is another one that often looms big in the final stages of strikes. Organized labor was and is opposed in principle to compulsory arbitration. Only among the railroads has it gained a foothold. Both the AFL and the CIO stubbornly fought and defeated the attempt of reactionary congressmen to pass compulsory arbitration legislation. However, there are other forms of arbitration that are very dangerous, and sometimes it is not possible to avoid them. While it is true that the offer to arbitrate often comes from the employer because he realizes the workers are too strong for him and that he cannot smash the strike and destroy the union, the union cannot, in the knowledge of its strength, simply make a flat rejection. A flat rejection on its part may put the union in a very unfavorable light. But in accepting some form of arbitration, the union must protect itself as much as it can; it should at least guarantee for itself a voice in the selection of arbitrators.

An example of good strategy in a situation where a union felt it had to accept arbitration or be placed in a bad light is to be found in one of the earlier New York bus strikes. The leadership of the Transport Workers Union found an excellent solution: the union accepted arbitration with the stipulation that there could be no downward revision of conditions; the company involved agreed that the points in the old agreement (closed shop, checkoff, vacations with pay, etc.) would remain. The result was a million dollar wage increase.

Organized Retreat

Winding up a strike calls for a great deal of wisdom. But the demands on the leadership are nowhere near as great when a strike is won, or partly won, as when it is lost. And many a major strike has ended in defeat; when workers enter a battle, they have no guarantee that victory is certain.

Unfortunately, many leaders have not been equal to the demands. It has entirely too often happened that when a strike has been lost, labor leaders abandoned the field and left the workers at the mercy of ruthless corporations. It would seem that those leaders had no conception of organized retreat when there was no hope of victory. For instance, conservative union leaders have very seldom officially called off a strike. The consequence of this bad handling is that great harm has been done to organized labor.

In the event a strike ends in defeat, the union’s first duty is to take care of those courageous workers who suffered most – the jailed, the blacklisted, the hungry. A union cannot abandon the field when the battle has been lost; it has an obligation to stay and pick up the wounded. After the 1919 Steel Strike was called off, Foster kept the commissary system going for another three weeks to take care of the thousands of workers left hungry and without work. It was a great act of solidarity. This tradition was revived after the 1937 “Little Steel” strike. When that strike was over, the union did not desert the workers. It maintained its organizing staffs in Youngstown, Warren, Canton, South Chicago, Cleveland and other “Little Steel” centers. The steel union is now reaping the fruits of its good work. Notwithstanding the loss of the strike, such a powerful organization grew up in all the “Little Steel” plants that Tom Girdler was finally forced to surrender.

Building on Victory

To consolidate a victory is no less important than to stand by after a defeat. American labor history teaches us that strike victories are never secure. The employers have never ceased trying to weaken the workers’ standard of living or to break the unions, and so long as our system of private ownership continues they never will. Organizing campaigns, Labor Board elections, strikes, lockouts, settlements and their aftermath will be part of the American scene for a long time to come. A strike victory therefore does not mean that a union may sit back and rest on its laurels. It must consolidate the victory. It must use the victory first of all to build the organization, more especially if the workers involved were hitherto unorganized. After an important strike is won, splendid opportunities open up for extending union organization into the unorganized sections of the industry, or other industries. That is what the Akron rubber workers were thinking of when, upon completion of one of their great and victorious strikes, they raised the slogan: “transferring the picket lines inside the plants.” They understood that a victory is not an end but a beginning, a springboard to ever greater organization, which means ever greater victories.

Appendix: White Collar Strikes[325]

A word should be said about an unprecedented development in the 30’s during the upsurge of organization by the people against the great depression. This highly significant development consisted of white collar organization and the outbreak of several strikes of white collar and professional workers. Prior to the 30’s there had been little organization and virtually no strikes by such workers, save for momentary, spontaneous protest actions or strikes in the retail trades.

One of the first effective, union-organized strikes that called nation-wide attention to the plight of white collar workers and gave impetus to their unionization was the strike at Ohrbach’s Department Store in New York in 1935, conducted by the Office Workers Union. Victorious after a long and difficult battle, it was marked by the effective action of the women workers (office and sales people) who comprised the majority of the strikers.

A number of other strikes occurred in the years after 1935 among office employees, technical workers and engineers, actors, professionals and technicians in entertainment and other fields.

The strike of 370,000 telephone workers in 1947, organized by a number of loosely cooperating independent unions, included scores of thousands of telephone operators and other categories of white collar workers; again a great number of them were women.

In 1946 the first major strike in the insurance industry took place in the Midwest when some 500 insurance agents of the Monumental Life Insurance Company engaged in a four-week strike under the United Office and Professional Workers of America, CIO, which was successful in winning the workers’ demands.

In late spring of 1947 the first real strike took place in the banking industry in the United States when the Brooklyn Trust Company, a major New York bank, was struck by the United Office and Professional Workers, CIO. This strike, involving the 700 employees of the bank, was tradition-breaking. Though it had to be called off after a bitter four-week struggle without victory, it represented a completely new development.

Later, at the end of 1948, 800 white collar workers at the New York Stock Exchange, organized by the Office Workers Union of the AFL, struck for a closed shop and other demands. This strike, marked by the brutality and violence of the New York police, was unsuccessful, and the Stock Exchange magnates wrung a heavy price from the workers in driving them back to work.

These and many other strikes demonstrated that the growth of white collar organization is an important factor in today’s labor picture and that white collar workers, despite their history of lack of organization, are capable of waging courageous battles. In particular, the strikes showed the union loyalty and effectiveness of women workers who are of course in the majority in numerous white collar fields.

The strikes also indicate one weakness which labor must overcome, and that is the insufficient support by organized workers in plants, mills and factories of the organization and strikes of white collar workers, to whom all of labor in its own interests must give aid and encouragement.

Roll Call of the Dead

(Compiled from records tabulated in the Labor Facts Book of the Labor Research Association)

1934

Pezzy Adkins was a Kentucky miner, 45 years old. He was killed by a gunman on January 29 during a strike in the Edgewater Coal Co.

Paul Mehalic, a youth of 17 in Latrobe, Pa. He was interested in seeing a picket line of workers at the Latrobe Electric Steel Co. strike. On May 1 a deputy shot him dead.

Murphy Humphrey, a 21-year-old Negro longshoreman at Lake Charles, La., was killed on May 2, during a longshore strike.

Rich Foster and Henry Witt, two Alabama Negro ore miners, were murdered on May 9, during the strike at the Raimund Ore Mine of Republic Steel. The day after, two other Negro ore miners, George Bell and W.H. Ford, were shot down in cold blood by “special officers” of Jefferson County, Alabama.

Charles Sharlo was a Negro longshoreman. On May 12 he was on picket duty in front of the Clyde-Mallory Line in Galveston, Texas, when a deputy’s bullet ended his life.

Ed Higgins, a Negro miner, the secretary of his local union in Empire, Ala., was killed on May 14, during a miners’ strike.

Richard Parker, 20 years old, and John Knudsen were killed by police officers during the longshore strike in San Pedro, Cal.

Frank Norman, a union organizer, was kidnaped by a group of vigilantes in Lakeland, Fla., and brutally murdered on May 14.

Frank Hubay and Steve Cyigon, two unemployed youths, were killed on May 24 by National Guardsmen, during the Electric Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio.

Otto Helland, killed by a policeman, during a longshore strike in Smith Cove, Washington.

Eugene Domagalaski, a youth of 24 who sympathized with the Milwaukee streetcar men on strike. On June 28 he was electrocuted by high tension wires at the Lakeside power plant.

Shelby Daffron was a longshoreman on strike at Point Wells, Wash. On July 1, he was killed by Standard Oil guards.

Howard Sperry was a striker and Nick Bordois was a sympathizer during the famous San Francisco longshore strike. Both were killed by police officers on July 5.

Henry B. Ness, a striker during the truck drivers’ strike in Minneapolis. On July 20 he met his death from a police bullet. On August 1, John Belor, another striker, died in a similar manner.

Leo Wakefield and Henry Engleman were two young workers at the Kohler Co. in Kohler, Wis., who joined the rest of the workers in a strike. On July 27 they were both murdered by deputy sheriffs.

Reuben Saunders lost his life on August 10, during the Georgia Webbing & Tape Co. strike in Columbus, Ga.

J.V. Blalock of Rome, Ga., was a sympathizer of the textile workers who were then engaged in a national textile strike. He was killed on September 5 in Trion, Ga. This was to be the first of many victims in that strike. On September 6, nine workers were murdered: Leon Carrol was killed by a police officer in Trion, Ga.; John Black was shot down by a deputy sheriff in Greenville, S. C.; R. T. Yarborough, Lee Crawford, E.M. Knight, Ira Davis, Claude Cannon, C.L. Rucker, and Maxie Peterson were all strikers shot by guards at the Chiquola Mills, Honea Path, S. C. During the same textile strike, on September 12, Jude Courtemanche, 19 years old, was killed in Woonsocket, R.I., and Charles Gozcynski, an 18-year-old striker, was killed on the same day in nearby Saylesville, R.I.A week later, Ernest K. Riley was killed on the picket line in Belmont, N. C., by a National Guardsman, and a few days later the National Guards killed Leo Routte, another 18-year-old textile striker in Woonsocket, R.I. The following week William Blackwood met his death in Saylesville, R.I.

Ed Woolens and H.C. Collins, Negro coal miners, were killed by deputy sheriffs of Jefferson County, Ala., on their way to a UMWA rally on September 16.

Joseph Piskonowicz was killed by a policeman while picketing a bakery in Chicago on September 21.

Elwood Quirk, a 23-year-old textile worker, who was a spectator of the strike at James Lees & Sons in Bridgeport, Pa., was killed by a deputy sheriff on October 3.

1935

Columbus Walker was murdered by a scab on February 3, during the Richmond Hosiery Mills strike in Rossville, Ga.

Frank Petrosky, a young coal miner, was shot and killed by a scab on February 14, during the strike at the Woodward Colliery in Luzerne County, Pa.

Paul Knight of Santa Maria and Kenneth Eldridge of Westmoreland, Gal., were murdered by vigilantes on February 17, during an agricultural workers’ strike.

Andy Latiska, 30, of Port Homer, Ohio, father of two children, was killed by a guard on April 17, during a strike at the Kaul Clay Co., in Toronto, Ohio.

Ray Morency, 32, vice-president of the warehousemen’s local union in Stockton, Cal., was murdered on April 27 by Charles Gray, son of the owner of the trucking company where the union had called a strike.

William Usatalo, a picket at the Marinoff Northwest Brewery, Portland, Ore., was killed by a guard on May 11.

Fonie Stephens, striker, was killed by National Guardsmen during an attack on the picket line, May 11, in front of the Callaway Mills at Lagrange, Ga.

Willie Foster, a Negro organizer of the International Labor Defense, was murdered on May 20 while investigating acts of violence during a cotton choppers’ strike at Selma, Ala. The mob secretly buried him.

George Melhelm, a 66-year-old bystander, was killed on June 13 by Republic Steel Guards, during the Berger Mfg. Co. strike in Canton, Ohio.

John W. Duster, a bystander, met his death during a police attack on streetcar strikers in Omaha, Neb., on June 17.

William Kaarte, a lumber striker of the Holmes-Eureka lumber mill at Eureka, Gal, was killed by a policeman on June 21. Two days later, Harold Edlund, another lumber striker, was killed in a similar manner. Next week a third striker, Paul Lampelli, lost his life during a police attack on the strikers.

Joe Spinner Johnson, a leader of the Sharecroppers Union in Greensboro, Ala., was found murdered in a nearby swamp on July 11. Eight days later, J.P. Merriweather, a Negro leader of this union in Lowndes County, Ala., was brutally murdered during a cottonpickers’ strike.

Gertrude Kelly, mother of two children, was killed on September 2, during a strike at the Pelzer Mfg. Co., Pelzer, S. C.

Edward Bracey, a Negro member of the Sharecroppers Union at Hope Hill Ala., was murdered by a group of vigilantes on September 3, during another cottonpickers’ strike. Nine days later Smith Wadkins, another active Negro member of this union, was found dead in a swamp in Calhoun County, Ala., his body riddled with bullets.

Eugene Casper, 18, and Melvin Bjorklund, 21, were innocent bystanders during a police attack on strikers on September 12 at the Flour City Ornamental Iron Works in Minneapolis. When the attack was over these two young men were dead.

Herman Slater, 41, milk strike picket, was shot down while picketing on October 5 with 200 farmers just north of the Wisconsin state line.

Henry Jones, 42, Negro maritime striker, was killed by a police bullet on October 5, in New Orleans.

William L. Polley, a well-known Socialist and union leader in Kansas City, was attacked and killed by thugs on October 13, after a teamsters’ strike had been decided upon.

Samuel Dowdell, a Negro member of the UMWA employed at the Hamilton Slope Mine near Birmingham, joined his fellow miners in a strike. On October 16 he was murdered by a scab of the Tennessee Coal & Iron Co.

Etienne Christ, 34, was killed on October 21 at Port Arthur, Texas, during a marine strike.

Virgie Thomas, Negro mine union striker, was ambushed and shot down by “persons unknown” on October 28.

Ernest Dukes, Negro longshoreman, member of the I.L.A. in Mobile, Ala., was marching on the picket line on October 31 when a policeman killed him.

Ralph Ratliff, 26, and Estill Damron, 20, striking members of the UMWA, were killed on November 3 by a strikebreaker and a sheriff, near Pikeville, Ky.

Sam Brandt, 21-year-old member of the I.L.A. in Houston, Texas, was active in the Gulf Marine Strike. He was killed on November 25.

Carl Swanson, 26, a striker, was shot and killed by a foreman of the Motor Products Corp. on December 15.

1936

James Ray, 35, and William Blackwood, 40, were on strike and were picketing the Crown Williamette Logging Company at Seaside, Ore. On March 7 they were killed by strikebreakers.

Arthur Whitelock was the business agent of the Ice, Coal and Water Wagon Drivers Union in Cleveland, Ohio. He was leading a strike when on May 13 he was murdered by gangsters.

Otto Krueger was a spectator of a picket line during a strike at the Acme Braid Co. at Closter, N. J., when on September 26 a foreman fired at him and killed him.

Willard Bois was an active marine unionist in Baltimore, Md. On November 24 he went to a union meeting and never returned home. Shortly after he was found dead.

John Kane was on a strike conducted by the Marine Transport Workers Union in Houston, Texas. In December he was killed by a scab.

James Young, a spectator, and Peter Martin, a picket during a Sun Shipbuilding Company strike at Chester, Pa., died on December 11 after fire trucks attacked the strikers.

1937

Victims of the “Little Steel” Strike:

Alfred Causy, 43, Republic striker; Kenneth Reed, 23, Inland Steel striker; Earl Handley, 40; Sam Popovich; Joseph Rothmund, 47, WPA worker (died May 31); Anthony Tagliori, 26, Republic striker (died June 1); Hilding Johnson (died June 3); Otis Jones, 43, picket (died June 8); Leo Francisco (died June 15); Lee Tisdale, Negro striker (died June 19). All the above were victims of the Memorial Day police attack on pickets at South Chicago. John Bogovich and James Espereji met their death in Youngstown, Ohio, when on June 19 the police and Republic thugs opened fire against the steel strikers. Chrisanto Lopez, a steel striker in Canton, Ohio, was killed by National Guardsmen on June 30. In Cleveland John Orecony, 45, a picket at Republic Steel, was crushed to death when on July 26 a strikebreaker’s car ran over him. Nick Valdos, 45, and Fugencio Colzada, 27, Republic Steel pickets, were killed in Massillon, Ohio.

John Cephas, a Negro striker, was fatally injured by a truck at- tacking pickets on June 25, in front of the Phillips Packing Co. in Cambridge, Md.

Anthony Corbo, 42, lost his life on June 25 during a strike at the Fein Tin Can Co. in Brooklyn, N. Y.

Joseph Jozwiak, 42, was killed on the picket line on July 6 by a strikebreaker in front of the Lloyd Mfg. Co. in Menominee, Mich.

Henson Klick, 30, a union picket, was killed by a policeman on July 7, in front of the plant of the Aluminum Company of America, in Alcoa, Term.

1938

Patrick Travis, 48, a member of the NMU, was attacked and killed on February 1 by a “special patrolman” of the Seamen’s House in New York. Travis had taken an active part in two strikes.

Lester Smithers, a union miner, was killed in Harlan, Ky., on June 9 by a Harlan Central Coal Co. representative for testifying against the company in a government trial. On July 13, also at Harlan, Ky., another union miner, Charles Reno, was shot by a deputy sheriff.

Raymond Cooke, 35, a member of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers in Hatboro, Pa., was shot by the chief of police in front of the Oscar Nebel Co., Inc., hosiery mill on July 13. The shot was fired straight into the picket line.

Ramona Lucero, a child of 13, daughter of a striker, died from shock of attack on July 13, when a group of vigilantes broke into her home.

1939

John Abrams, 24, a coal mine picket, was shot during a strike at the Reitler mine in Ostego, Ohio, on April 27.

John Charlton, a union member, was murdered on June 6 by a company slugger during a packing house strike at the Iowa Packing Co. in Des Moines, Iowa.

Dock Caldwell, 31, a miner, was killed by a National Guardsman in an attack on a UMWA picket line on July 12, at the Mahan-Ellison Coal Co. in Harlan, Ky.

Bill Roberts, 35, a union miner, was shot by a Mahan-Ellison Coal Co. strikebreaker on July 15 in Stanfield, Ky.

Frank Bryant, 30, was shot on July 15 by an “unknown” assailant in the National Guard Patrol area, during the coal miners’ strike at Wallins Creek, Ky. A day later, Daniel Noe, 35, was the second victim of the National Guard attack in the Harlan area.

Paul Hicks, member of the Dairy Farmers Union, died of injuries after a strikebreaker’s truck crashed into a milk farmer’s picket line on August 16 at West Burlington, Pa.

Angela Treadway, 54, was shot to death on a picket line at the Dunbar-Dukate Co. cannery on August 25, at Violet, La.

1940

Laura Law, 25, wife of a CIO Woodworkers Union leader, and mother of a three-year-old son, was brutally murdered in her home on January 5 by a group of vigilantes on the payroll of the lumber interests at Aberdeen, Wash.

Vito Trimarco, 38, a business agent of the ILGWU, was shot at the Trio Coat Shop while trying to negotiate the ending of a strike on May 9, in Brooklyn, N. Y.

Thomas Valentine, 33, AFL carpenter, was shot by two guards on a non-union highway project on May 22 in Denver, Col.

Oscar Buckley, a union picket in the Century Electric Co. strike, was stabbed to death by a strikebreaker on August 7, in St. Louis, Mo.

John Kennedy, 32, an AFL electrical union striker, was shot in his home by a hired gunman in New York City on September 3.

Carl P. Roth, an AFL striker at the Triangle Conduit & Cable Co., died after a police attack on the picket line on September 7, in New York City.

Upton Hammond, 69, an AFL Building Trades worker, was clubbed to death by strikebreakers while picketing in a construction strike in St. Louis, Mo., on October 23.

For the years that follow, complete data on workers killed during strikes are not available. Murder of strikers, however, has not ceased. The incomplete record that follows reveals how prevalent it is in most recent times.

1941

Anthony Nunez, 26, was killed while picketing the Furniture Mfg. Co. on January 14 in New Orleans, La.

Oscar Goodwin, 30, Virgil Hampton, 55, Charles Ruth, 30, and Ed Tye, union miners, met their death by machine-gun fire unleashed by gunmen hired by Brummies Creek Coal Co. on April 2 in Harlan, Ky.

Sam Evans, a union miner, was killed by a strikebreaker on April 15 at the Fork Ridge Coal Co., Middlesboro, Ky.

Arthur Q. Queasbrath, a member of the Teamsters Union, was killed while on strike duty at the Currier Lumber Co. in Detroit, Michigan, in May.

Felix Peek, a Negro miner, was shot by a policeman on June 9 at the International Harvester Co.’s coal mine in Benham, Ky.

Irving I. Pickover, 28, was stabbed by a strikebreaker on August 6, during a strike of Local 65, United Wholesale and Warehouse Workers, in New York City.

1942

Henry Matthews, 37, a Negro union member at the Tennessee Coal & Iron Co., was shot by a city policeman on April 8 while a strike was in progress.

Jack Bloodworth, a Negro member of the UMWA, was shot to death on August 13 by Herbert Gray, a company policeman, in Birmingham, Ala.

During the years 1943 and 1944, there were hardly any strike struggles with the notable exception of the coal miners, whose strikes were of brief duration and involved little or no violence.

1945

Walter Campbell, a Negro worker and an organizer for the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union, was stabbed to death by a scab on December 26 in Little Rock, Ark. The scab went scot-free.

1946

Irwin Paschon, 27, member of the AFL Brother of Railway Clerks and Arthur W. Browne, 40, member of the Locomotive Firemen, were picketing at the Toledo, Peoria and Western railroad in Gridley, Il. They were shot down, and three others were wounded, by four armed guards when the railroad sent an armored train in a test run manned by strikebreakers.

Mario Russo, veteran, 27, father of four children, was shot down in cold blood by hired strikebreakers on July 30 at the Phelps Dodge plant in Elizabeth, N. J.

Roosevelt Thomas, 45, and Will Hunt, both West Virginia coal miners, met their death when a foreman of a mine shot at them at close range on November 21.

1947

James E. Harris, a Negro worker and one of the founders of the largest trade union locals in Washington, D. C. – the United Cafeteria Workers – was the leader of a strike in O’Donnell’s Restaurant. On April 28, he was brutally murdered in his bed after returning from picket duty.

1948

Roy Cyril, a Negro worker, member of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union in New Orleans was shot by a patrolman during a strike.

San Cicardo, 38, a picket at the Armour Soap Works in Chicago, was run over by a heavy truck which was waved through the picket line by Police Captain George Barnes, head of the “Labor Detail.”

James Price, president of Local 218 of the National Farm Labor Union, was shot while presiding over a strike committee meeting in Arvin, Cal.

Robert New, Port Agent of the NMU, was attacked on May 7 with a butcher knife in the NMU hiring hall in Charleston, S.C. by Richard Serreo. The confessed killer received the light sentence of 3 years.

William Farrell, 40, member of the United Packinghouse Workers, was shot by a scab while on picket duty at the Roth Packing Co. on May 19, at Waterloo, Iowa.

1949

William Lurye, executive board member of ILGWU Local 60, AFL, New York, was stabbed to death on May 9 by “persons unknown” in a telephone booth of a building where he was organizing an open shop.

Ed Hucks, 54, a picket, employed 25 years at Armour & Co. in National City, 111., was shot dead by a scab on May 9.

Bibliography

Alinsky, Saul, John L. Lewis, An Unauthorized Biography. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1949.

Bliss, William D. P., The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform, Funk & Wagnalls Co., New York, 1908.

Commons, John R. and Associates, History of Labor in the United States, Vol. I. Macmillan Co., New York, 1918.

Clausewitz, Karl Von, Clausewitz on War. Random House, New York, 1943.

Davis, Horace B., Labor and Steel. International Publishers, New York, 1933.

Debs, Eugene V., Speeches of Eugene V. Debs. International Publishers, New York, 1928.

Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. III. The Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleveland, 1910.

Foner, Philip F., History of the Labor Movement. International Publishers, New York, 1947.

Foster, William Z., The Great Steel Strike. B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York, 1920.

Foster, William Z., American Trade Unionism. International Publishers, New York, 1947.

Foster, William Z., What Means a Strike in Steel. Workers Library Publishers, New York, 1937.

Girdler, Tom M., Boot Straps. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1943.

Gompers, Samuel, Seventy Years of Life and Labor. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1925.

Green, William, Labor and Democracy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1939.

Haywood, William D., The Autobiography of William D. Haywood. International Publishers, New York, 1929.

Huberman, Leo, The Great Bus Strike. Modern Age, New York, 1943.

Huberman, Leo, The Truth About Unions. Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1946.

Jones, Mother, Autobiography of Mother Jones. Charles H. Kerr and Co., Chicago, 1925.

Kraus, Henry, The Many and the Few. Plantin Press, Los Angeles, 1947.

Lewis, John L., Industrial Democracy in Steel. CIO Publication, Washington, D. C., 1936.

Lincoln, Abraham, The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln. Random House, New York, 1940.

Labor Research Association, Labor Fact Books. International Publishers, New York, 1934–1939.

Morris, George, The Black Legion Rides. Workers Library Publishers, New York, 1936.

Perlman, Selig, History of Labor in the United States, 1896–1932, Vol. IV. Macmillan Co., New York, 1935.

Peterson, Florence, Strikes in the United States, 1880–1936, Bulletin No. 651. U. S. Department of Labor, Washington, D. C., 1937.

Report on the Steel Strike of 1919, Interchurch World Movement. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, New York, 1920.

The Right to Strike. CIO Publication, Washington, D. C., 1941.

Saposs, David J., Readings in Trade Unionism. George H. Doran Co., New York, 1926.

Left Wing Unionism. International Publishers, New York, 1926.

Steuben, John, Labor in Wartime. International Publishers, New York, 1940.

Stowell, Myron R., “Fort Frick” or the Siege of Homestead. Pittsburgh Printing Co., Pittsburgh, 1893.

Sulzberger, C. L., Sit Down with John L. Lewis. Random House, New York, 1938.

Todes, Charlotte, The Injunction Menace. International Publishers, New York, 1932.

UE Fights for a Better America. UE Publication, New York, 1946.

U.S. Senate Hearings Before a Sub-Committee of Education and Labor, 75^th and 76^th Congress. U.S. Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1938.

U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations. Report on the Colorado Strike. U.S. Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1915.

Vorse, Mary Heaton, Labor’s New Millions. Modern Age, New York, 1938.

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, The History of Trade Unionism. Longmans and Co., New York, 1920.

Yellen, Samuel, American Labor Struggles. Harcourt Brace and Co., New York, 1936.

75. The Authoritarians

Deleted reason: ‘The mid-term elections of 2006 give hope that the best values and traditions of the country will ultimately prevail.’ can we not? deleted pending discussion.

Author: Bob Altemeyer

Topics: authoritarianism, not anarchist

Date: 2006

Date Published on T@L: 2021-04-07T11:51:38

Source: Retrieved on 7^th April 2021 from libgen.rs

Preface

I realize that my making this book available for free on the internet raises questions about my judgment, especially since I am a psychologist. The well-known theory of cognitive dissonance says that people will value something more if they pay a lot of money to get it. So how much will people value what they get for free? Also, if somebody can make money off a book, how much common sense can he have if he gives it away? Why should you read a book written by someone who has so little common sense?

There’s a lot of convincing evidence that dissonance theory is right, and so I am running the risk of your saying, It can’t be any good if it’s free. But there is another psychological principle which says if people experience something that meets a need, it will be a rewarding experience. So even though this book is free, I hope that you will find it worth your reading, and that if you think it’s a good book, you will tell others about this web site so they can read it too. I’m not doing any advertising in the New York Times.

If you want to know why I’m passing on the big bucks, fame, and cocktail party hors d’oeuvres that a blockbuster best seller brings an author, it’s partly because this book would never have rung up big sales. I did make one attempt to place it with a A ‘trade’ publisher, but when their editor said no I stopped acting out of habit and started reflecting. I think what I have found is rather important to the survival of American democracy. As such, it should be made available to everyone, and be essentially free. The “www” makes this possible, and that is why we have met here. So how do you do?

Acknowledgments

If it turns out you do not like this book, blame John Dean. You never would have heard of my research if he had not recently plowed through my studies, trying to understand, first, various people he knew in the Nixon White House, and then some leading figures of the Republican Party of 2004. John Dean is quite a guy. I think I offended him once by addressing him as “Honest John,” which I meant in the sense of “Honest Abe.” John strikes one with his candor and openness. I treasure his friendship as much as I treasure his unfailing help. Some of his closest friends, I have discovered, go back to his high school days. I think that says a lot about a person, especially given what John went through in the 1970s. The “former counsel to the president” has campaigned endlessly on behalf of my research, making it known wherever he could. This book was his idea, and you would not be reading it if he had not kept “bringing me up on the stage” with him as he talked about his Conservatives Without Conscience.

John is too young to be my mentor, a position that was filled many years ago by the distinguished psychologist, M. Brewster Smith. No one would probably have discovered any of my findings on authoritarianism if Brewster had not given a ringing endorsement to my first book many years ago. That endorsement was particularly gratifying because Brewster has been the knowledgeable, critical voice in the field since its beginnings over 50 years ago. And it was Brewster who suggested some years ago that I submit my studies of authoritarian aggression to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s competition for best research in the behavioral sciences. I sent him a basket of fruit when it won, and now I would like to thank him again, and more publicly. Brewster has won almost all the honors that psychology can bestow, but my appreciation of him is even more heartfelt.

I must honor as well Bruce Hunsberger, who joined me—before his death from leukemia in 2003—in much of the research described in the chapter on religion. Bruce was my best (guy) friend for most of my life. I still miss him, and every now and then when I log on I fantasize that there’ll be a message from Bruce saying that one can do research in the afterlife. “So hurry up.”

Then there is my much maligned wife, Jean. I have created the impression in previous acknowledgments that she has no interest in my research. In truth, she asks about it frequently. She just would never do what you=re on the threshold of doing: read about it. But she is more than my best friend, period, more than “the girl I gave up Lent for” in the Tom Lehrer song, more than my co-adventurer in the Byzantine world of parenting. She is the love of my life. I have no idea why she agreed to marry me after our second date in 1964. But she did, and I am forever grateful for that—as she well knows.

Andrew Perchaluk of the University of Manitoba expertly did the web site and PDF stuff. Andrew has the rare ability to talk to electronic innocents such as I as though we really are sentient beings, and at the same time to know when to say, “Just push this key, and then that one.” Also, if he had not had to work on my computer, he probably would have eventually forgotten all the things that were wrong with Windows 98. He has suffered much and is greatly appreciated.

Dedication

To our son, Sean

Introduction

Who am I?

In the fall of 2005 I found myself engaged, most unexpectedly, in a heavy exchange of emails with the man who had blown the whistle on Watergate, John Dean. He was writing a book about “conservatives without conscience”—which the late Senator Barry Goldwater was to have co-authored. Dean, Goldwater, and others with solid Republican credentials had been alarmed by the capture of the Grand Old Party by the Religious Right and its seemingly amoral leaders. Dean was plowing through the social science literatures on conservatism and religion to see what perspective academics could offer his analysis, and eventually he ran across my name.

Who am I? I’m a nearly retired psychology professor in Canada who has spent most of his life studying authoritarianism. I got into this field by being lazy. When I took the exams for getting a Ph.D. at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1965, I failed a question about a famous early effort to understand the authoritarian personality. I had to write a paper to prove I could learn at least something about this research, which had gotten itself into a huge hairy mess by then. However, I got caught up in the tangle too. Thus I didn’t start studying authoritarianism because I am a left-winger (I think I’m a moderate on most issues)[326] (if you want to read a note, click on the number) or because I secretly hated my father. I got into it because it presented a long series of puzzles to be solved, and I love a good mystery.

Now, 40 years later, everyone who knows me would rather volunteer for a root canal operation at a school for spastic dental students than ask me a question about authoritarianism. My wife has never read a single page in any of my books. Few of my colleagues in the psychology department at the University of Manitoba have asked about my research since 1973. People I meet at parties, including folks in their 70s, inevitably discover they have to call the baby-sitter about three minutes after casually asking me, “What do you do?” You can’t shut me up once I get going. Yet John Dean was reading everything I had written and pummeling me with insightful questions for months on end. I had died and gone to heaven. And since John’s best-selling book, Conservatives Without Conscience had used my research to help explain how America was going to the devil, he thought I should write an easy-read, non-technical account of what I have found before I do die, and go to heaven or the devil. It will begin appearing on a screen near you soon.

What is Authoritarianism?

Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want—which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal. In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars both hot and cold. But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I’m going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.

We know an awful lot about authoritarian followers. In one way or another, hundreds of social scientists have studied them since World War II. We have a pretty good idea of who they are, where they come from, and what makes them tick. By comparison, we know little about authoritarian leaders because we only recently started studying them. That may seem strange, but how hard is it to figure out why someone would like to have massive amounts of power? The psychological mystery has always been, why would someone prefer a dictatorship to freedom? So social scientists have focused on the followers, who are seen as the main, underlying problem.

I am going to tell you about my research on authoritarianism, but I am not going to give the kind of technical scientific report I lay on other scientists. Whatever ends up getting crunched in this book, it’s not going to be a pile of numbers. Instead, I’ll very briefly describe how the studies were done and what then happened. In many cases I’ll invite you to pretend you are a subject in an experiment, and ask what you would say or do. I hope you’ll generally find the presentation relaxed, conversational, even playful, because that’s the way I like to write—even on serious topics—to the annoyance of many a science editor. (A sense of humor helps a lot when you spend your life studying authoritarians.)

But I have not “dumbed down” anything. This is not “Authoritarianism for Dummies.” (“Six months ago I couldn’t even spell ‘authoritarian,’ and now I are one.”) It’s an account of some social science research for people who have not sat through a lot of classes on research methods and statistics—a good many of which, it so happens, I also never attended, especially on nice days. I’ll put some of the technical mumbo-jumbo in the optional notes for pitiful people such as I who just can’t live without it. If you want to bore through even denser presentations of my research, with methodological details and statistical tests jamming things up, the way poor John Dean had to, click here for note[327].

But why should you even bother reading this book? I would offer three reasons. First, if you are concerned about what has happened in America since a radical right-wing segment of the population began taking control of the government about a dozen years ago, I think you’ll find a lot in this book that says your fears are well founded. As many have pointed out, the Republic is once again passing through perilous times. The concept of a constitutional democracy has been under attack—and by the American government no less! The mid-term elections of 2006 give hope that the best values and traditions of the country will ultimately prevail. But it could prove a huge mistake to think that the enemies of freedom and equality have lost the war just because they were recently rebuffed at the polls. I’ll be very much surprised if their leaders don’t frame the setback as a test of the followers’ faith, causing them to redouble their efforts. They came so close to getting what they want, they’re not likely to pack up and go away without an all-out drive. But even if their leaders cannot find an acceptable presidential candidate for 2008, even if authoritarians play a much diminished role in the next election, even if they temporarily fade from view, they will still be there, aching for a dictatorship that will force their views on everyone. And they will surely be energized again, as they were in 1994, if a new administration infuriates them while carrying out its mandate. The country is not out of danger.

The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence. Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives, and conservatives have stereotypes about liberals. Moderates have stereotypes about both. Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound. But arguing never seems to get anywhere. Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion. And if you keep finding the same thing experiment after experiment, and other people do too, then that’s a body of facts that demands attention.[328] Some people, we have seen to our dismay, don’t care a hoot what scientific investigation reveals; but most people do. If the data were fairly gathered and we let them do the talking, we should be on a higher plane than the current, “Sez you!”

The last reason why you might be interested in the hereafter is that you might want more than just facts about authoritarians, but understanding and insight into why they act the way they do. Which is often mind-boggling. How can they revere those who gave their lives defending freedom and then support moves to take that freedom away? How can they go on believing things that have been disproved over and over again, and disbelieve things that are well established? How can they think they are the best people in the world, when so much of what they do ought to show them they are not? Why do their leaders so often turn out to be crooks and hypocrites? Why are both the followers and the leaders so aggressive that hostility is practically their trademark? By the time you have finished this book, I think you will understand the reasons. All of this, and much more, fit into place once you see what research has uncovered going on in authoritarian minds.

Ready to go exploring?

Chapter One: Who Are the Authoritarian Followers?

Because this book is called The Authoritarians, you may have thought it dealt with autocrats and despots, the kind of people who would rule their country, or department, or football team like a dictator. That is one meaning of the word, and yes, we shall talk about such people eventually in this book. But we shall begin with a second kind of authoritarian: someone who, because of his personality, submits by leaps and bows to his authorities. It may seem strange, but this is the authoritarian personality that psychology has studied the most.

We shall probably always have individuals lurking among us who yearn to play tyrant. Some of them will be dumber than two bags of broken hammers, and some will be very bright. Many will start so far down in society that they have little chance of amassing power; others will have easy access to money and influence all their lives. On the national scene some will be frustrated by prosperity, internal tranquility, and international peace—all of which significantly dim the prospects for a demagogue -in-waiting. Others will benefit from historical crises that automatically drop increased power into a leader’s lap. But ultimately, in a democracy, a wannabe tyrant is just a comical figure on a soapbox unless a huge wave of supporters lifts him to high office. That’s how Adolf Hitler destroyed the Weimar Republic and became the Fuhrer. So we need to understand the people out there doing the wave. Ultimately the problem lay in the followers.

In this chapter we’ll consider the way I measure people’s tendency to be authoritarian followers and whether this approach has any merit. And if after that you find yourself thinking, “More, more, I still want more. I simply love reading books on a monitor!” I’ll tell you the story of what happened at my university on the night of October 19, 1994, When Authoritarians Ruled The Earth.

Right-Wing and Left-Wing Authoritarian Followers

Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in their society, such as government officials and traditional religious leaders. Such people have historically been the “proper” authorities in life, the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:

a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;
high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
a high level of conventionalism.

Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers right-wing authoritarians. I’m using the word “right” in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English “riht”(pronounced “writ”) as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said. (And when someone did the lawful thing back then, maybe the authorities said, with a John Wayne drawl, “You got that right, pilgrim!”)[329]

In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives,[330] so you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Right-wing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.

You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.

The RWA Scale

The what? The Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. Get out a pencil. I’m going to take you into the inner sanctum of a personality test. Just don’t be FRIGHTENED!

Below is the latest version of the RWA scale. Read the instructions carefully, and then write down your response to each statement on a sheet of paper numbered 1–22.

This survey is part of an investigation of general public opinion concerning a variety of social issues. You will probably find that you agree with some of the statements, and disagree with others, to varying extents. Please indicate your reaction to each statement on the line to the left of each item according to the following scale:

Write down a -4 if you very strongly disagree with the statement.
Write down a -3 if you strongly disagree with the statement.
Write down a -2 if you moderately disagree with the statement.
Write down a -1 if you slightly disagree with the statement.
Write down a +1 if you slightly agree with the statement.
Write down a +2 if you moderately agree with the statement.
Write down a +3 if you strongly agree with the statement.
Write down a +4 if you very strongly agree with the statement.
If you feel exactly and precisely neutral about an item, write down a “0.”

If you feel exactly and precisely neutral about an item, write down a “0.”

(“Dr. Bob” to reader: We’ll probably stay friends longer if you read this paragraph.) Important: You may find that you sometimes have different reactions to different parts of a statement. For example, you might very strongly disagree (“-4”) with one idea in a statement, but slightly agree (“+1”) with another idea in the same item. When this happens, please combine your reactions, and write down how you feel on balance (a “-3” in this case).

___ 1. The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things, while the radicals and protestors are usually just “loud mouths” showing off their ignorance.
___ 2. Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married.
___ 3. Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.
___ 4. Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.
___ 5. It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people’s minds
___ 6. Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.
___ 7. The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.
___ 8. There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps.
___ 9. Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.
___ 10. Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs.
___ 11. Everyone should have their own lifestyle, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, even if it makes them different from everyone else.
___ 12. The “old-fashioned ways” and the “old-fashioned values” still show the best way to live.
___ 13. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer.
___ 14. What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path.
___ 15. Some of the best people in our country are those who are challenging our government, criticizing religion, and ignoring the “normal way things are supposed to be done.”
___ 16. God’s laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.
___ 17. There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action.
___ 18. A “woman’s place” should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women are submissive to their husbands and social conventions belong strictly in the past.
___ 19. Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.
___ 20. There is no “ONE right way” to live life; everybody has to create their own way.
___ 21. Homosexuals and feminists should be praised for being brave enough to defy “traditional family values.
___ 22. This country would work a lot better if certain groups of troublemakers would just shut up and accept their group’s traditional place in society.

Done them all, as best you could? Then let’s score your answers, and get an idea of whether you’re cut out to be an authoritarian follower. First, you can skip your answers to the first two statements. They don’t count. I put those items on the test to give people some experience with the -4 to +4 response system. They’re just “warmups.” Start therefore with No. 3.

If you wrote down a “-4” that’s scored as a 1.
If you wrote down a “-3” that’s scored as a 2.
If you wrote down a “-2” that’s scored as a 3.
If you wrote down a “-1” that’s scored as a 4.
If you wrote down a “0” or left the item unanswered, that’s scored as a 5.
If you wrote down a “+1” that’s scored as a 6.
If you wrote down a “+2” that’s scored as a 7.
If you wrote down a “+3” that’s scored as an 8.
If you wrote down a “+4” that’s scored as a 9.

Your answers to Items 5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19 and 22 are scored the same way.

Now we’ll do the rest of your answers, starting with No. 4.

If you wrote down a “-4” that’s scored as a 9.
If you wrote down a “-3” that’s scored as an 8.
If you wrote down a “-2” that’s scored as a 7.
If you wrote down a “-1” that’s scored as a 6.
If you wrote down a “0” or left the item unanswered, that’s scored as a 5.
If you wrote down a “+1” that’s scored as a 4.
If you wrote down a “+2” that’s scored as a 3.
If you wrote down a “+3” that’s scored as a 2.
If you wrote down a “+4” that’s scored as a 1.

Now simply add up your twenty scores. The lowest total possible would be 20, and the highest, 180, but real scores are almost never that extreme. Introductory psychology students at my Canadian university average about 75. Their parents average about 90. Both scores are below the mid-point of the scale, which is 100, so most people in these groups are not authoritarian followers in absolute terms. Neither are most Americans, it seems. Mick McWilliams and Jeremy Keil administered the RWA scale to a reasonably representative sample of 1000 Americans in 2005 for the Libertarian Party and discovered an average score of 90.[331]^,[332] Thus the Manitoba parent samples seem similar in overall authoritarianism to a representative American adult sample.[333] My Manitoba students score about the same on the RWA scale as most American university students do too.

Let me give you three compelling reasons why you should treat your personal score with a grain of salt. First, psychological tests make mistakes about individuals, which is what you happen to be, I’ll bet. Even the best instruments, such as the best IQ tests, get it wrong sometimes—as I think most people know. Thus the RWA scale can’t give sure-thing diagnoses of individuals. (But it can reliably identify levels of authoritarianism in groups, because too-high errors and too-low errors tend to even out in big samples. So we’ll do the group grope in this book, and not go on the individual counseling trip.[334])

Second, how you responded to the items depended a lot on how you interpreted them. You may have writhed in agony wondering, “What does he mean by _______?” as you answered. If I failed often to get the gist of what I was saying over to you, your score will certainly be misleading.[335]

Third, you knew what the items were trying to measure, didn’t you, you rascal! The RWA scale is a personality test disguised as an attitude survey, but I’ll bet you saw right through it.[336] In fact, you could probably take each statement apart and see how I was trying to slyly tap the various components of the RWA personality trait. Take that first-scored item, No. 3: “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader (authoritarian submission) who will do what has to be done to destroy (authoritarian aggression) the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us” (conventionalism). Well if you’re smart enough to do that, you’re smart enough to realize how easily you might have slanted your answers to look good.[337]

So I didn’t ask you to answer the RWA scale to see if you’d find true happiness and fulfillment as a stormtrooper in some dictator’s army. It’s not a vocational test. Instead, I wanted you to experience for yourself the instrument used to identify and study authoritarian followers. Most of what I have uncovered about authoritarianism, I have dug up with this tool, and now you know what it is and how it works.[338]

Is the RWA Scale Valid?

According to the High Laws of Science (you do not have to genuflect here), ideas must be repeatedly tested to see if they fail. So the next (and extremely important) question is, does the RWA scale really measure what it says it measures? Are the test scores valid? If they are, we should find that high scorers submit to established authority more than most people do, aggress more in the name of such authority, and are much more conventional. What’s the evidence?

Authoritarian Submission. Everybody submits to authority to some degree. Imagine a world in which people ignored traffic laws and sped through red lights. The cost of auto insurance would shoot through the roof (although the line-ups to buy it would become much shorter). But some people go way beyond the norm and submit to authority even when it is dishonest, corrupt, unfair and evil. We would expect authoritarian followers especially to submit to corrupt authorities in their lives: to believe them when there is little reason to do so, to trust them when huge grounds for suspicion exist, and to hold them blameless when they do something wrong. We don’t expect absolutes here; people are much too complicated to completely, always, blindly submit, no matter what. But IF the RWA scale truly measures the tendency to be an authoritarian follower, those who score highly on it should tend to do these things, right? So do they?

Well, they will tell you that people should submit to authority in virtually all circumstances. If you give them moral dilemmas (e.g. should one steal an absurdly expensive drug to save a life?) they’re more likely to say, “The law is the law and must be obeyed” than most people are. High RWAs also say they would bow more to show respect for their fathers, the president of companies where they worked, and so on, than most people indicate. (An astronomer suggested I ask about the bowing, which I thought was silly, but he was right. “Social scientists are such blockheads!”)

High RWAs trusted President Nixon longer and stronger than most people did during the Watergate crisis.[339] Some of them still believed Nixon was innocent of criminal acts even after he accepted a pardon for them.[340] (Similarly the Allies found many Germans in 1945 refused to believe that Hitler, one of the most evil men in history, had ordered the murder of millions of Jews and others. “He was busy running the war,” Hitler’s apologists said. “The concentration camps were built and run by subordinates without his knowing it.”) To pick a more current example, authoritarian followers believed, more than most people did, President George W. Bush’s false claims that Saddam Hussein had extensive links to al-Qaida, and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And they supported the invasion of Iraq, whereas less authoritarian Americans tended to doubt the wisdom of that war from the start.[341]

Caution No. 1. On the other hand, right-wing authoritarians did not support President Clinton during his impeachment and trial over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So as I said, the support is not automatic and reflexive, but can be trumped by other concerns. In Clinton’s case his administration not only had advocated for groups anathema to authoritarians, such as homosexuals and feminists, his sexual misdeeds in the White House deeply offended many high RWAs.

Shifting our focus a bit, please give your reaction to the story below:

It has been reported in the press that the FBI has maintained illegal wiretaps of the telephones of about 60 persons in the United States who were suspected of being sympathetic toward radical political organizations. The FBI is reported to be taking no chances that these persons might become active in their support of these groups. Under current legislation such wiretaps are legally permissible only if a judge has signed a court order authorizing them. The FBI reportedly has never sought court approval of these wiretaps because they believed their case was too weak and the courts would deny them. The FBI has denied the wiretaps exist, and described the report as a “complete fabrication.”

If the story is true, how serious a matter would you say the illegal wiretaps are?

0 = Not serious at all; they clearly are justified by the circumstances.
1 = Mildly serious
2 = Somewhat serious
3 = Pretty serious
4 = Extremely serious; such acts strike at the foundation of a free society.

What would you say? You can put me down for a “4.” What’s the point of having laws protecting privacy if the law enforcers can decide to ignore them whenever they wish, and then get away with it?

The issue may remind you of the Bush administration’s policy of authorizing the National Security Agency to engage in electronic spying, without warrants, on Americans suspected of supporting terrorism—which simply ignored the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that required prior court approval of such surveillance. And indeed, David Winter at the University of Michigan discovered that high RWAs felt Bush’s policy was “both necessary and appropriate” because of terrorism. But the wiretaps case presented above comes from a study I did over thirty years ago, in the autumn of 1974, using students from five scattered American universities. I found that persons who scored highly on the RWA scale tended to answer with 0’s, 1’s and 2’s, while those who scored low in RWA used 3’s and 4’s much more often. (The overall average in those months immediately following Watergate equalled 3.0.)

And this is just the beginning. Over the years I have found that authoritarian followers blissfully tolerated many illegal and unjust government actions that occurred in the United States and Canada, such as:

a police burglary of a newspaper office to get confidential information.
drug raids carried out without search warrants because judges wouldn’t give them.
denial of right to assemble to peacefully protest government actions.
“dirty tricks” played by a governing party on the opposition during an election.
immigration office discrimination against radical speakers.
placing agents provocateurs in organizations to create dissension and bad press relations.
burning down the meeting place of a radical organization.
unauthorized mail openings.

Authoritarian followers seem to have a “Daddy and mommy know best” attitude toward the government. They do not see laws as social standards that apply to all. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not—just as parents can when one is young. But in a democracy no one is supposed to be above the law. Still, authoritarians quite easily put that aside. They also believe that only criminals and terrorists would object to having their phones tapped, their mail opened, and their lives put under surveillance. They have bought their tickets and are standing in line waiting for 1984, The Real Thing. There might as well not be a Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And when the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is used to deny people the right of habeas corpus—one of the oldest rights in western law—it is unlikely that right-wing authoritarians will object to the loss of this constitutional guarantee either.

In fact, who even needs the whole Bill of Rights? Here is a (fake) letter-to-theeditor I asked some San Francisco State University students to respond to in 1990.

If a person stops to think about it, most of the problems we are having can be traced to the Bill of Rights—or more precisely, to the way it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. “Freedom of speech” has been twisted to mean that pornographers can sell their filth, and that anybody can say whatever he wants, whether it’s good for society or not. And “freedom of religion” has been twisted to mean children can’t pray in public schools any more. And the “right to happiness” has been twisted to mean women can have abortion after abortion if they’re “unhappy” being pregnant. And think how many drug pushers and criminals have gotten off scot-free because their “rights” were supposedly violated after they had robbed or killed somebody.

A lot of people hoped the new Supreme Court, rid of the “Liberal Majority” which had made all these terrible rulings, would overturn them. But it’s clear now that they won’t. No Supreme Court can reverse the ruling of an earlier Supreme Court, so we are stuck with these interpretations as long as there is a Bill of Rights. And we will soon be destroyed as a nation because of them. So the only thing we can do, to make America the free, pure, safe Christian nation that the founding fathers intended it to be, is to repeal the Bill of Rights.

If you like, you can count up how many ignorant, inaccurate, misleading and just plain stupid things there are in this letter. I knew it was ridiculous when I composed it. But I got the material from various people I’ve heard speak on the subject. If you haven’t heard them, tune in to “talk radio” some night.

I asked the students how sensible they thought the letter was, and whether they thought the Bill of Rights should be repealed. High RWAs found the letter pretty sensible, don’t you know, and they favored repealing the Bill of Rights more than anyone else did. Which sprinkles a dash of irony into this stew. The founding fathers added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution to prevent tyranny by the government. I wonder if they realized that democracy could be undermined from “below” as well as crushed by tyranny from “above” by people who didn’t want the freedoms?[342]

The last string of studies I want to lay before you regarding authoritarian submission concerns authoritarians’ willingness to hold officials accountable for their misdeeds. Or rather, their lack of willingness—which catches your eye because high RWAs generally favor punishing the bejabbers out of misdoers. But they proved less likely than most people to punish a police officer who beat up a handcuffed demonstrator, or a chief of detectives who assaulted an accused child molester being held in jail, or—paralleling the trial of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley—an Air Force officer convicted of murder after leading unauthorized raids on Vietnamese villages.

The “Milgram experiment,” which we shall discuss at the end of this book, offers another example of authoritarian followers “going easy” on authorities. In his famous study Stanley Milgram maneuvered subjects into a situation in which they were ordered by an Experimenter to inflict painful, and possibly lethal, electric shocks on another person (who in fact was not hurt at all). The subjects clearly did not want to deliver the shocks, but the Experimenter told them they had to. The Experimenter even said, if pressed, that he would accept responsibility for whatever happened. Yet Tom Blass of the University of Maryland at Baltimore found that high RWA students tended to blame the Experimenter less for what happened to the victim than most students did.[343] Whom did they blame instead? I found, when I replicated the study, they blamed the poor devil who was ordered to deliver the shocks, and the victim, more than most others did.

If some day George W. Bush is indicted for authorizing torture, you can bet your bottom dollar the high RWAs will howl to the heavens in protest. It won’t matter how extensive the torture was, how cruel and sickening it was, how many years it went on, how many prisoners died, how devious Bush was in trying to evade America’s laws and traditional stand against torture, or how many treaties the U.S. broke. Such an indictment would grind right up against the core of authoritarian followers, and they won’t have it. Maybe they’ll even say, “The president was busy running the war. He didn’t really know. It was all done by Rumsfeld and others.”[344]

Authoritarian Aggression. When I say authoritarian followers are aggressive I don’t mean they stride into bars and start fights. First of all, high RWAs go to church enormously more often than they go to bars. Secondly, they usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. “Right” for them means, more than anything else, that their hostility is (in their minds) endorsed by established authority, or supports such authority. “Might” means they have a huge physical advantage over their target, in weaponry say, or in numbers, as in a lynch mob. It’s striking how often authoritarian aggression happens in dark and cowardly ways, in the dark, by cowards who later will do everything they possibly can to avoid responsibility for what they did. Women, children, and others unable to defend themselves are typical victims. Even more striking, the attackers typically feel morally superior to the people they are assaulting in an unfair fight. We shall see research evidence in the next chapter that this self-righteousness plays a huge role in high RWAs’ hostility.

Believe it or not, researchers are not allowed to organize murderous mobs to study hostility. So we have to study authoritarian aggression in subtler ways. For example:

You are a judge presiding at the trial of “The People vs. Robert Smith.” Evidence introduced in court indicates that on the evening of May 23^rd, a Mr. Matthew Burns (a 47-year-old, Caucasian accountant) was walking to his car in a hotel parking lot when he was stopped by a man who produced a pistol and demanded Mr. Burns’ wallet. Mr. Burns complied, but as the robber ran from the scene Mr. Burns ducked into a doorway and began shouting “Stop that man!”

These cries were heard by a policeman cruising nearby in a patrol car who after a short chase apprehended a Mr. Robert Smith, (a 28-year-old Caucasian of no fixed address or occupation). The police officer saw Mr. Smith throw what proved to be Mr. Burns’ wallet down a sewer as he was being pursued. Smith matched the general description Mr. Burns gave of his assailant, but Mr. Burns was unable to identify Smith “with absolute certainty” because it was dark in the parking lot at the time of the robbery.

Smith told the court he saw another man running from the parking lot, and then he found the wallet. He began to run after picking up the wallet because he heard the police siren and realized how incriminating the circumstances were. That was also, according to Smith, the reason he threw the wallet down the sewer.

Smith has a record of two previous “mugging” arrests and one prior conviction. He was found guilty of robbing Mr. Burns by the jury, and it is your duty now to declare sentence. A second conviction of armed robbery of this sort is punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, with parole possible after 1/3 of the sentence has been served.

When asked if he had anything to say before being sentenced, Smith said again that he was innocent. What sentence would you give?

Many factors would undoubtedly shape someone’s decision in this matter, even if s/he were just filling out a booklet of surveys and was suddenly asked to imagine being a judge. But such role-playing does create a situation in which someone can imagine punishing someone else in the name of established authority. I’d give Smith about four or five years of further experience with the penitentiary system, and overall, subjects answering my survey would impose an average sentence of about 3.5 years. But right-wing authoritarians would send Robert Smith to the slammer for a significantly longer time than most people would.

In fact they’d send just about anyone to jail for a longer time than most people would, from those who spit on the sidewalk to rapists. However, as noted earlier, authoritarian followers usually would go easy on authorities who commit crimes, and they similarly make allowances for someone who attacks a victim the authoritarian is prejudiced against. (If you were a district attorney prosecuting a lynching case, you would NOT rejoice at a jury filled with high RWAs.) But in general they would sentence most criminals to longer terms than the average Joe would. They also tend to strongly endorse capital punishment.

Why are high RWAs extra-punitive against law-breakers? For one thing, they think the crimes involved are more serious than most people do, and they believe more in the beneficial effects of punishment. But they also find “common criminals” highly repulsive and disgusting, and they admit it feels personally good, it makes them glad, to be able to punish a perpetrator. They get off smiting the sinner; they relish being “the arm of the Lord.” Similarly, high RWA university students say that classmates in high school who misbehaved and got into trouble, experienced “bad trips” on drugs, became pregnant, and so on “got exactly what they deserved” and that they felt a secret pleasure when they found out about the others’ misfortune.[345]

Which suggests authoritarian followers have a little volcano of hostility bubbling away inside them looking for a (safe, approved) way to erupt. This was supported by an experiment I ran in which subjects were (supposedly) allowed to deliver electric shocks to someone trying to master a list of nonsense syllables. The subject/teacher could choose the level of shock for each mistake the learner made. Since the punishment was sanctioned by the experimenter, this opened the door for the authoritarian. The higher the subject’s RWA scale score, the stronger the shocks delivered.

Here are some items from another scale. How would you respond to them on a -4 to +4 basis?

There are entirely too many people from the wrong sorts of places being admitted into our country now.
Black people are, by their nature, more violent and “primitive” than others.
Jews cannot be trusted as much as other people can.
As a group, aboriginal people are naturally lazy, dishonest and lawless.
Arabs are too emotional, and they don’t fit in well in our country.
We have much to fear from the Japanese, who are as cruel as they are ambitious.

I’ll bet you have figured out that I use these to measure prejudice. You may be taken aback however to discover that these prejudices usually show up bundled together in a person. But social psychologists found long ago that people who are prejudiced against one group are usually prejudiced against a whole lot more as well. Prejudice has little to do with the groups it targets, and a lot to do with the personality of the holder. Want to guess who has such wide-ranging prejudices? Authoritarian followers dislike so many kinds of people, I have called them “equal opportunity bigots.” They will not win the gold medal in the Prejudice Olympics (we’ll find out who does in a later chapter), but high RWAs will definitely be on the podium.[346]

Here’s another one of my measures, which I call “Posse,” that you may find so ridiculous that you’d say no one would ever buy into it. Humor me, gentle reader.

Suppose the federal government, some time in the future, passed a law outlawing various religious cults. Government officials then stated that the law would only be effective if it were vigorously enforced at the local level and appealed to everyone to aid in the fight against these cults.

Please respond to the following statements according to the following scale:

-4 indicates the statement is extremely untrue of you.
-3 indicates the statement is very untrue of you. etc. to:
+4 indicates the statement is extremely true of you.

I would tell my friends and neighbors it was a good law.
I would tell the police about any religious cults I knew.
If asked by the police, I would help hunt down and arrest members of religious cults.
I would participate in attacks on religious cult meeting places if organized by the proper authorities.
I would support the use of physical force to make cult members reveal the identity of other cult members.
I would support the execution of religious cult leaders if he government insisted it was necessary to protect the country.

I’ll assume, because I know what a fine person you are, that you would respond to each of these statements with a -4 or a -3. Most people do. But not authoritarian followers. They typically answer with -2s and -1s, and sometimes even say, “Yes I would.” If that shocks you, remember that the premise behind “Posse” runs right down Main Street in the authoritarian aggression mind-set. When the authorities say, “Go get ‘em,” the high RWAs saddle up.

Who can ‘em be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. I started with a proposition to outlaw Communists and found authoritarian followers would be relatively likely to join that posse. Ditto for persecuting homosexuals, and ditto for religious cults, “radicals” and journalists the government did not like. So I tried to organize a posse that liberals would join, to go after the Ku Klux Klan. But high RWAs crowded out everyone else for that job too. Then I offered as targets the very right-wing Canadian Social Credit Party, the Confederation of Regions Party, and the mainstream Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. These were the parties of choice for most authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute even the movements they liked than did others.

Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a “law to eliminate right-wing authoritarians.” (I told the subjects that right-wing authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.) RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law, they were being the very people whom the law would persecute, and the posse should therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves. You can almost hear the circuits clanking shut in their brains: “If the government says these people are dangerous, then they’ve got to be stopped.”

One more thing. Remember when I was talking about putting President Bush on trial for authorizing torture? Look back at Items 5 and 6 in my list of acts an ardent authoritarian follower might do in support of a malevolent government. It’s been clear in my studies for several decades that lots of people, with no persuading by the authorities at all, were already close to endorsing the torture and execution of their fellow citizens if the government simply said it was necessary. So it would be no surprise at all if they supported President Bush’s insistence that America be allowed to torture suspected foreign terrorists.

High RWAs tend to feel more endangered in a potentially threatening situation than most people do, and often respond aggressively. In 1987 my colleague Gerry Sande and I had five-man teams of male introductory psychology students role-play NATO in an “international simulation” involving (they thought) another team of students playing as the Warsaw Pact. Some of the NATO teams were composed entirely of low RWA students, and other NATO teams were stocked entirely with highs. (We experimenters secretly played the Warsaw Pact.) The simulation began with a couple of ambiguous moves by the Warsaw Pact, such as holding military exercises earlier than anticipated, and withdrawing divisions to rear areas (possibly for rest, or —as Dr. Strangelove might argue—possibly for redeployment for an attack). The NATO teams could respond with nonthreatening or threatening moves of varying magnitudes. But if they made threats, the Warsaw pact responded with twice as much threat in return, and the NATO team would reap what it had sown as an escalation of aggressive moves would likely result.

The low RWA teams did not interpret the ambiguous moves at the beginning of the game as serious threats and thus seldom made threatening moves. The high RWAs on the other hand usually reacted to the opening Warsaw Pact moves aggressively, and sowed a whirlwind. Over the course of the simulation, the high RWA teams made ten times as much threat as the low teams did, and usually brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.[347]

Caution No. 2. Can we conclude from all these findings that authoritarian followers always aggress when they think the “proper authorities” approve? No, no more than they always submit to established authority. “Always” is a lot, and such generalizations ignore the complexity of human motivation. Fear of counteraggression can freeze the authoritarian’s hand, or belief that the hostility is unlawful and will be punished. Nevertheless, one can easily find settings in which high RWAs’ aggressive inclinations comes bubbling to the surface.

Conventionalism. By conventionalism, the third defining element of the right-wing authoritarian, I don’t just mean do you put your socks on before your shoes, and I don’t just mean following the norms and customs that you like. I mean believing that everybody should have to follow the norms and customs that your authorities have decreed. Authoritarians get a lot of their ideas about how people ought to act from their religion, and as we’ll see in chapter 4 they tend to belong to fundamentalist religions that make it crystal clear what they consider correct and what they consider wrong. For example these churches strongly advocate a traditional family structure of father-as-head, mother as subservient to her husband and caretaker of the husband’s begotten, and kids as subservient, period. The authoritarian followers who fill a lot of the pews in these churches strongly agree. And they want everybody’s family to be like that. (A word of advice, guys: check with your wives first.)

Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev (Thanks so much, Mikhail!) I can show you how thoroughly some high RWAs sop up the teachings of another set of authorities, their government. As soon as Gorbachev lifted the restraints on doing psychological research in the Soviet Union an acquaintance of mine, Andre Kamenshikov, administered a survey to students at Moscow State University with the same freedom that western researchers take for granted. The students answered the RWA scale and as well a series of questions about who was the “good guy” and who was the “bad guy” in the Cold War. For example, did the USSR start the arms race, or the USA? Would the United States launch a sneak nuclear attack on the Soviet Union if it knew it could do so without retaliation? Would the USSR do that to the United States? Does the Soviet Union have the right to invade a neighbor who looks like it might become allied with the United States? Does the USA have that right when one of its neighbors starts cozying up to the USSR? At the same time Andre was doing his study, I asked the same questions at three different American universities.

We found that in both countries the high RWAs believed their government’s version of the Cold War more than most people did. Their officials wore the white hats, the authoritarian followers believed, and the other guys were dirty rotten warmongers. And that’s most interesting, because it means the most cock-sure belligerents in the populations on each side of the Cold War, the ones who hated and blamed each other the most, were in fact the same people, psychologically. If they had grown up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, they probably would have believed the leaders they presently despised, and despised the leaders they now trusted. They’d have been certain the side they presently thought was in the right was in the wrong, and instead embraced the beliefs they currently held in contempt.[348]^,[349]

Gidi Rubinstein similarly found that high RWAs among both Jewish and Palestinian students in Israel tended to be the most orthodox members of their religion, who tend to be among those most resistant to a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict.[350]If their authorities endorse hostility, you can bet most authoritarian followers will be combative. A lot of high RWAs apparently do not think that the peacemakers will be blessed.

You can also gauge the conventionalism of authoritarian followers through my “feedback-conformity experiments.” I simply tell a group who earlier had filled out a scale for me what the average response had been to each item, in the sample as a whole. For example, I would tell them that the average answer to Item 1 of the RWA scale was a “+1,” the average answer to Item 2 was a “-2,” and so on. Then I ask the sample to answer the scale again, with the average-answers-from-before staring them right in the face. The point, as you have no doubt surmised, is to see which extreme moves more toward the norm, the lows or the highs. High RWAs shift their answers toward the middle about twice as much as lows do. This even works on hard-core authoritarian beliefs such as their answers about homosexuals and religious fundamentalism.

Which explains another peculiar finding. If I tell a group of former subjects most of what I’ve told you in this chapter—which I think raise some questions about how “Blessed are the authoritarians”—and then ask the sample what they personally would like their own RWA scale score to be, what do you think happens? The low RWAs say they’d like to be low RWAs. So do the middles. But the highs usually say they want to be middles, not lows. I thought this happened because highs often dislike the people who would score low on the RWA scale, and that may be part of the explanation.. But I also discovered that if you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place “being normal” substantially higher than most people do. It’s almost as though they want to disappear as individuals into the vast vat of Ordinaries.

Caution No. 3. Once again, however, I should temper our natural tendency to overgeneralize. High RWAs would like to be rich as much as the next person would, they’d like to be smarter than average, and so on. It’s “good” to be different in some ways, it seems. And I found they would not change their opinions about abortion an inch by showing them how different they were from most others. They are quite capable of adhering to the beliefs emphasized by their in-groups when these conflict with what is held by society as a whole. Nevertheless, they do get tugged by what they think everybody else is saying and doing. For example, their attitudes toward homosexuals have become markedly more positive recently, just as the rest of society’s attitudes have changed. And thirty years ago the solid majority of high RWA students in my samples said premarital sexual intercourse was flat-out immoral. Now most say it is moral if the couple plans to get married.

Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference

By now you must be developing a feel for what high RWAs think and do, and also an impression of low RWAs.[351] Do you think you know each group well enough to predict what they’d do if they ran the world? One night in October, 1994 I let a group of low RWA university students determine the future of the planet (you didn’t know humble researchers could do this, did you!). Then the next night I gave high RWAs their kick at the can.

The setting involved a rather sophisticated simulation of the earth’s future called the Global Change Game, which is played on a big map of the world by 50–70 participants who have been split into various regions such as North America, Africa, India and China. The players are divided up according to current populations, so a lot more students hunker down in India than in North America. The game was designed to raise environmental awareness,[352] and before the exercise begins players study up on their region’s resources, prospects, and environmental issues.

Then the facilitators who service the simulation call for some member, any member of each region, to assume the role of team leader by simply standing up. Once the “Elites”in the world have risen to the task they are taken aside and given control of their region’s bank account. They can use this to buy factories, hospitals, armies, and so on from the game bank, and they can travel the world making deals with other Elites. They also discover they can discretely put some of their region’s wealth into their own pockets, to vie for a prize to be given out at the end of the simulation to the World’s Richest Person. Then the game begins, and the world goes wherever the players take it for the next forty years which, because time flies in a simulation, takes about two and a half hours.

The Low RWA Game

By carefully organizing sign-up booklets, I was able to get 67 low RWA students to play the game together on October 18^th . (They had no idea they had been funneled into this run of the experiment according to their RWA scale scores; indeed they had probably never heard of right-wing authoritarianism.) Seven men and three women made themselves Elites. As soon as the simulation began, the Pacific Rim Elite called for a summit on the “Island Paradise of Tasmania.” All the Elites attended and agreed to meet there again whenever big issues arose. A world-wide organization was thus immediately created by mutual consent.

Regions set to work on their individual problems. Swords were converted to ploughshares as the number of armies in the world dropped. No wars or threats of wars occurred during the simulation. [At one point the North American Elite suggested starting a war to his fellow region-aires (two women and one guy), but they told him to go fly a kite—or words to that effect.]

An hour into the game the facilitators announced a (scheduled) crisis in the earth’s ozone layer. All the Elites met in Tasmania and contributed enough money to buy new technology to replenish the ozone layer.

Other examples of international cooperation occurred, but the problems of the Third World mounted in Africa and India. Europe gave some aid but North America refused to help. Africa eventually lost 300 million people to starvation and disease, and India 100 million.

Populations had grown and by the time forty years had passed the earth held 8.7 billion people, but the players were able to provide food, health facilities, and jobs for almost all of them. They did so by demilitarizing, by making a lot of trades that benefited both parties, by developing sustainable economic programs, and because the Elites diverted only small amounts of the treasury into their own pockets. (The North American Elite hoarded the most.)

One cannot blow off four hundred million deaths, but this was actually a highly successful run of the game, compared to most. No doubt the homogeneity of the players, in terms of their RWA scores and related attitudes, played a role. Low RWAs do not typically see the world as “Us versus Them.” They are more interested in cooperation than most people are, and they are often genuinely concerned about the environment. Within their regional groups, and in the interactions of the Elites, these first-year students would have usually found themselves “on the same page”—and writ large on that page was, “Let’s Work Together and Clean Up This Mess.” The game’s facilitators said they had never seen as much international cooperation in previous runs of the simulation. With the exception of the richest region, North America, the lows saw themselves as interdependent and all riding on the same merry-go-round.

The High RWA Game

The next night 68 high RWAs showed up for their ride, just as ignorant of how they had been funneled into this run of the experiment as the low RWA students had been the night before. The game proceeded as usual. Background material was read, Elites (all males) nominated themselves, and the Elites were briefed. Then the “wedgies” started. As soon as the game began, the Elite from the Middle East announced the price of oil had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union (known as the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional forces to defend itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocaust ensued which killed everyone on earth—7.4 billion people—and almost all other forms of life which had the misfortune of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.

When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn out all the lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then the players are given a second chance to determine the future, turning back the clock to two years before the hounds of war were loosed. The former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and invaded China this time, killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called for a “United Nations” meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no agreements were reached.

At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but—perhaps because of the recent failure of the United Nations meeting—no one called for a summit. Only Europe took steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so the crisis got worse. Poverty was spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped regions, which could not control their population growth. Instead of dealing with the social and economic problems “back home,” Elites began jockeying among themselves for power and protection, forming military alliances to confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start another nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager resources to buy into alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of collapse. An Elite called for a United Nations meeting to deal with the crises—take your pick—and nobody came.

By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world—although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.

The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World’s Richest Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World Elites as payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their page was, “Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together.”

The high RWAs also suffered because, while they say on surveys that they care about the environment, when push comes to shove they usually push and shove for the bucks. That is, they didn’t care much about the long-term environmental consequences of their economic acts. For example a facilitator told Latin America that converting much of the region’s forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem vulnerable. But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree’s lumber was very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when it came to birth control. Advised that “just letting things go” would cause the populations in underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians just let things go.

Now the Global Change Game is not the world stage, university students are not world leaders, and starting a nuclear holocaust in a gymnasium is not the same thing as launching real missiles from Siberia and North Dakota. So the students’ behavior on those two successive nights in 1994 provides little basis for drawing conclusions about the future of the planet. But some of what happened in this experiment rang true to me. I especially thought, “I’ve seen this show before” as I sat on the sidelines and watched the high RWAs create their very own October crisis.

Summary

You have trudged your way through (I suspect) the most boring chapter in this book, and are entitled to some sort of reward. I hope you consider this worthy payment: You now know that the RWA scale is a reliable, a valid, and (as these things go) a rather powerful instrument for identifying the authoritarian follower personality. That’s worth knowing because most of what follows in the later chapters depends on it. The social sciences are awash with attitude scales, opinion surveys, and personality tests, and frankly most of them are not very good imho. But this one appears to be the real deal. A goodly amount of evidence has piled up showing that scores on the RWA scale really do measure tendencies toward authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. We can therefore use it to try to understand the people who seem, so unwittingly, ready to cash in democracy, and perhaps the world.

In the next chapter we’ll try to figure out why high RWAs are so aggressive. Then we’ll try to understand how nice, ordinary people—like some of your neighbors, some of your co-workers, and perhaps even some of your relatives—became right-wing authoritarians.

Chapter Two: The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself

I said in the Introduction that we would dig up the roots of authoritarian aggression. We’re going to do that now for authoritarian followers (and we’ll take up the hostility that roars so relentlessly from their leaders in a later chapter). After we have exposed the psychological causes of the followers’ aggression here, we’ll wrestle with the issue of how they became authoritarian followers in the first place.

Since followers do virtually all of the assaulting and killing in authoritarian systems—the leaders see to this most carefully—we are dealing with very serious matters here. Anyone who follows orders can become a murderer for an authoritarian regime. But authoritarian followers find it easier to bully, harass, punish, maim, torture, “eliminate,” “liquidate,” and “exterminate” their victims than most people do. We saw in chapter 1 that high RWAs are more likely to inflict strong electric shocks in a fake learning experiment in which they choose the punishment level, are more likely to sentence common criminals to long jail sentences, are more likely to be prejudiced, are more willing to join “posses” organized by authorities to hunt down and persecute almost any group you can think of, are more mean-spirited, and are more likely to blame victims of misfortune for the calamities that befall them. So while on the surface high RWAs can be pleasant, sociable, and friendly, they seemingly have a lot of hostility boiling away inside them that their authorities can easily unleash. Indeed, this authoritarian aggression is one of the three defining elements of right-wing authoritarianism. What causes it?

A Psychoanalytic Explanation

Several theories have tried to explain authoritarian aggression, and the Freudian one has long been the best known. I was quite seduced by its ingenuity and drama when I first heard of it. Let’s see if it can seduce you.

Supposedly the future authoritarian follower was severely punished as a child by his cold, distant parents for any signs of independence or rebellion. So such urges were repressed. Instead through a reaction-formation the child became obedient, loyal, even adoring of his parents. But deep down inside he hated them. However the Freudian “deep down inside” doesn’t have a shredder or burn-basket, so ultimately the repressed hostility has to come out some way. Thus the authoritarian follower projected his hostility onto safe targets, such as groups whom the parents disliked or people who couldn’t fight back, and decided they were out to get him. That projection provided the rationalization for attacking them and, voila, you have authoritarian aggression—thanks to just about all the ego defense mechanisms in Freud’s book.

Seduced? Resistance is futile? Ready to be assimilated into the Freudian bloc? You’ll find it lonely there. You may have heard that Freud no longer rules the roost in psychology, and this explanation of authoritarian aggression reveals a big reason why. It’s basically untestable. You have no way of discovering whether it is right or wrong, because it supposedly involves deeply unconscious defense mechanisms which the defending mechanic knows nothing about and so will quite honestly deny.

If you try instead to study the “leaks” from the Freudian unconscious, such as dreams or fantasies, you get a mishmash that can be interpreted however you wish. Suppose you did a study of dreams and concluded that authoritarians greatly love their parents. “Ah ha,” the theory would say with goose bumps breaking out, “there’s that reaction-formation I told you about.” Suppose you found, on the other hand, that authoritarians seemed to hate their parents. “Ah ha,” the Freudians would remark, “Just as we said; their unconscious mind is so filled with dislike for dad and mom, it can’t be held back any more.” Suppose you found that authoritarians dream both good things and bad things about their parents. “Ah ha,” goes the explanation. “You see both repression and the true feelings are at work.”

One gets nowhere with a theory that can “predict” whatever happened, after it happens. Having an answer for everything may make one a great used car salesman, but it rings the death knell for a theory in science. In science, the best explanations are nailed-down-testable.

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory of Aggression

A more testable explanation of aggression in general has been provided by Albert Bandura of Stanford University. Bandura says that aggression occurs after two switches are thrown. First some bad feeling like anger or envy stirs up hostility. But that by itself won’t lead to aggression. An angry individual who wants to attack someone may anticipate getting punched in return, or ending up in jail. Or he may have moral restraints against hurting others. So the second stage involves overcoming these restraints, setting aside these inhibitions, letting the aggression erupt and flow.

The Instigator. What sort of bad feelings are likely to be burning away inside high RWAs that would create an urge to attack? I looked at a lot of possibilities. Do they feel guilty about sins they have committed, and attack “sinners” to distance themselves from Satan? Do they secretly envy the jolly good times that sinners seem to be having, and attack them out of jealousy? Are they unsure God will punish the sinners—remembering the parable of the laborers in the vineyard—and so get in a few whacks in the here-and-now just to make sure sinners pay something?

Well, maybe. But please have a look at the statements below.

Any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us. All the signs are pointing to it.
Our society is not full of immoral and degenerate groups who viciously attack decent people. News reports of such cases are often sensationalized and misleading.
If our society keeps degenerating the way it has been lately, it’s liable to collapse like a rotten log and everything will be chaos.
If our society continues to sink into wickedness and corruption, God will destroy us someday as surely as he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
We do not live in an increasingly dangerous world headed for anarchy.
Law and order still prevail in our society. The rule of reason has not been replaced by the law of the jungle

These items and others like them comprise the Dangerous World scale. Items 1, 3, and 4 are worded such that agreement means the person believes society is about to collapse from depravity and decadence. For Items 2, 5, and 6, disagreement means you think The End Is Near.

Authoritarian followers score highly on the Dangerous World scale, and it’s not just because some of the items have a religious context. High RWAs are, in general, more afraid than most people are. They got a “2 for 1 Special Deal” on fear somehow. Maybe they’ve inherited genes that incline them to fret and tremble. Maybe not. But we do know that they were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both the parents and their children tell us so.

Sometimes it’s all rather predictable: authoritarians’ parents taught fear of homosexuals, radicals, atheists and pornographers. But they also warned their children, more than most parents did, about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and drunks—bad guys who would seem to threaten everyone’s children. So authoritarian followers, when growing up, probably lived in a scarier world than most kids do, with a lot more boogeymen hiding in dark places, and they’re still scared as adults. For them, gay marriage is not just unthinkable on religious grounds, and unnerving because it means making the “abnormal” acceptable. It’s yet one more sign that perversion is corrupting society from the inside-out, leading to total chaos. Many things, from stem cell research to right-to-die legislation, say to them, “This is the last straw; soon we’ll be plunged into the abyss.” So probably did, in earlier times, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, sex education and Sunday shopping.

Thus it turns out in experiments that a person’s fear of a dangerous world predicts various kinds of authoritarian aggression better than any other unpleasant feeling I have looked at. As my mentor, Brewster Smith of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said when I told him that fear set off authoritarian aggression more than anything else, “We do have to fear fear itself.” And of course fear rose in the United States after 9/11. As Dave Barry put it in a column in November 2004, “Attorney General John Ashcroft has issued one of those vague, yet at the same time, unhelpful federal terrorism warnings that boil down to: ‘Be afraid! Be very afraid!’”

Events like the attacks of 9/11 can drive large parts of a population to being as frightened as authoritarian followers are day after day. In calm, peaceful times as well as in genuinely dangerous ones, high RWAs feel threatened. They have agreed on the RWA scale, year after year since the 1970s, that sinfulness has brought us to the point of ruin. There’s always a national crisis looming ahead. All times are troubled times that require drastic action.

Things are so bad that many high RWAs believe the world will end soon. As the year 2000 drew near, I found many authoritarian followers agreed with the statement, “The ‘end times’ predicted in the Bible are going to begin at the start of 2000,” and “Floods, famines, wars and other disasters are occurring so often now, the world is going to end in 2000.” As you know, it did not end. But I suspect this failed prediction has not changed authoritarians’ beliefs one bit, and this year’s floods, famines, and other disasters will clearly signal (to them) the end of this dangerous, wicked world. As the leader of a disappointed doomsday group says in the closing lines of the British review Beyond the Fringe, “Never mind lads. Same time tomorrow. We must get a winner someday.”

The Releaser. What releases the aggressive impulse that comes from fear? What slides off the safety on the gun? This, it turns out, is a no-brainer.

How good, how moral are you, compared to other people? (You get to say what is “good” and “moral.”) As I mentioned in chapter 1, if you’re an average human being, you’ll think you’re a better than average human being. Almost everybody thinks she’s more moral than most. But high RWAs typically think they’re way, way better. They are the Holy Ones. They are the Chosen. They are the Righteous. They somehow got a three-for-one special on self-righteousness. And self-righteousness appears to release authoritarian aggression more than anything else.

Chronically frightened authoritarian followers, looking for someone to attack because fighting is one of the things people do when they are afraid, are particularly likely to do so when they can find a moral justification for their hostility. Despite all the things in scriptures about loving others, forgiving others, leaving punishment to God, and so on, authoritarian followers feel empowered to isolate and segregate, to humiliate, to persecute, to beat, and to kill in the middle of the night, because in their heads they can almost hear the loudspeakers announcing, “Now batting for God’s team, his designated hitter, (their name).”

Thus in the experiments done on this subject, if you know how highly people scored on the Dangerous World scale, and if you know how self-righteous they are, you can explain rather well the homophobia of authoritarian followers, their heavy-handedness in sentencing criminals, their prejudices against racial and ethnic minorities, why they are so mean-spirited toward those who have erred and suffered, and their readiness to join posses to ride down Communists, radicals, or whomever.

Why is this better than the Freudian explanation? Because you can’t predict anything with that. But once we have those fear and self-righteousness scores, we can predict rather well who, in a sample of people, will show authoritarian aggression. So we do have to try to control fear, not pump it up, and also appreciate the cruel contradiction that the people who feel holiest are likely to do very unholy things precisely because they feel holiest.

Before leaving this topic, we should also realize that fear can increase submission as well as aggression. This was illustrated by a series of studies in which I asked people to answer the RWA scale while imagining their country was undergoing some internal crisis. A violent left-wing threat featuring a general strike and urban guerrilla warfare understandably caused RWA scale scores to soar. But so also did violent right-wing threats, such as a military-aided coup in the halls of power, or “brownshirt” violence in the streets. Most people seem spring-loaded to become more right-wing authoritarian during crises. The only situation I found in which a crisis lowered RWA scores involved a repressive government that assaulted nonviolent protestors (which I have termed “the Gandhi trap”). Otherwise, when there’s trouble, people generally look to the authorities to fix things. And some authorities will gladly amass greater power in times of peril, whether they have any intention of fixing the problem or not.

The Personal Origins of Right-Wing Authoritarianism

If we line up the usual suspects for explaining anything we do, viz., our genes and our experiences, we have to wonder, “Do some people get born authoritarian followers?” Maybe they do. Much of the social interaction within animal species is shaped by who submits to whom, and we know from breeding experiments that one can turn out increasingly dominant, or increasingly submissive offspring by controlling who mates with whom. That’s where pit bulls came from, on the one hand, and gentle laboratory rats, on the other. For some reason, psychology students will not let us run such experiments on them. (“Uh, Patricia Knowles, you will reproduce with James Riley.”) But studies of identical and fraternal twins have produced some evidence that authoritarianism has hereditary roots.[353]

The more obvious expectation that our level of authoritarianism is shaped by our experiences and environment has more support, but it still may not work the way you’d suppose. We might expect parents to be the chief determiners of their children’s attitudes. My fellow Missourian, Mark Twain, called this the “corn-pone” theory, which he got from a young slave who said, “You tell me where a man gets his corn pone, and I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” And there’s no doubt most parents want their children to have the same attitudes they do, right down to answers to the RWA scale. But even though parents supply the genes and the corn pone, and have the first crack at their children’s learning, they seldom turn out carbon copies of themselves in their offsprung. Are you a clone of your mother or father, attitude-wise? Well why not? What nudged you off their selected path? What will nudge (has nudged) your children, the stinkers, off yours ? Nudge, nudge?[354]

If you think it’s that mortal enemy of good parenting, other people’s children, that’s a great idea but one also basically unsupported by research. University students show much greater sensitivity to their peers’ dress style (55 percent of the students in my classes now expose their belly buttons) than to the issues raised on the RWA scale. So where do young people get their notions?

Here are some items from a scale I developed to answer this question. Feel free to answer them. Only this time I am not looking for your opinions; instead I want to know if you have had the experiences described.

It has been my experience that things work best when fathers are the head of their families. (Do you know families where fathers are not the head of the family? Do things work badly in such families?)
The homosexuals I have known seemed to be normal, decent people, just like everybody else except for their sexual orientation. (If you don’t know any homosexuals, don’t answer. But if you do, are they like everybody else except for their sexual orientation?)
The people I have known who are unpatriotic and disrespectful toward authority have seemed to me to be ignorant troublemakers.
My parents have always known what was right for me.
I have found that breaking the rules can be exciting and fun at times.
Most of the young people I know who have taken advantage of today’s greater freedom have messed up their lives.
It has been my experience that physical punishment is an effective way to make people behave.
I have learned from my contact with lots of different kinds of people that no one group has “the truth” or knows “the right way” to live.

If a group of first-year university students tells me of their experiences in life thus far, in terms of these and other questions, I can make pretty sharp predictions of how they will score on the RWA scale.[355]

Why then aren’t we clones of our parents? Because life has taught us many lessons besides theirs (and our parents may have taught us some they didn’t intend). Some of us found authorities were wise, honest and fair. Others, like my children on occasions, found the Old Man didn’t have a clue as to how to handle a “situation.” Some students have seen vice-principals abuse their power, and national leaders lie through their teeth, and read about TV evangelists who got caught in cat houses. In my own life I have met some protestors who were total jerks; but I have also met dissenters who knew far more about the issues than anyone I had met before. Maybe you broke the rules and had such a good time you broke them over and over again. But maybe you broke the rules, totaled the car, and were filled with shame and guilt.

A General Model. If you take the entering freshman class at some big North American public university, you can develop an explanation of the differences among them in right-wing authoritarianism by again using Bandura’s social learning theory. By and large the students were probably pretty authoritarian as children, submitting to authority, learning whom to fear and dislike, and usually doing what they were supposed to do. But when adolescence struck with all its hormones, urges, and desires for autonomy, some of them began to have new experiences that could have shaken up their early learnings. If the experiences reinforced the parents’, teachers’, and clergies’ teachings (e.g. that wrecked car), authoritarian attitudes would likely remain high. But if the experiences indicated the teachings were wrong (e.g. “Sex isn’t bad. It’s great!”), the teen is likely to become less authoritarian. (Of course, if the wrecked car and one’s first sexual encounter occur at the same moment, the lesson will be mixed. But doubtless memorable.) It’s naturally easier for children from authoritarian homes to remain authoritarian, and it’s easier for kids with unauthoritarian parents to become decidedly unauthoritarian. But ultimately the experiences do most of the shaping.

I have discovered in my investigations that, by and large, high RWA students had simply missed many of the experiences that might have lowered their authoritarianism. Take that first item on page 59 about fathers being the head of the family. Authoritarian followers often said they didn’t know any other kind of families. And they hadn’t known any unpatriotic people, nor had they broken many rules. They simply had not met many different kinds of people or done their share of wild and crazy things. Instead they had grown up in an enclosed, rather homogeneous environment—with their friends, their schools, their readings, their amusements all controlled to keep them out of harm’s way and Satan’s evil clutches. They had contentedly traveled around on short leashes in relatively small, tight, safe circles all their lives.

Interestingly enough, authoritarian followers show a remarkable capacity for change IF they have some of the important experiences. For example, they are far less likely to have known a homosexual (or realized an acquaintance was homosexual) than most people. But if you look at the high RWAs who do know someone gay or lesbian, they are much less hostile toward homosexuals in general than most authoritarians are. Getting to know a homosexual usually makes one more accepting of homosexuals as a group. Personal experiences can make a lot of difference, which is a truly hopeful discovery. The problem is, most right-wing authoritarians won’t willingly exit their small world and try to meet a gay. They’re too afraid. And “coming out” to a high RWA acquaintance might have long-term beneficial effects on him, but it would likely carry some risks for the outgoing person.[356]

A Tale of Two High School Seniors

Let’s put some faces to these general findings by talking about two extremely different cases, and then work our way to the “ordinary people” in the middle. Imagine you’re standing in a hallway at your local high school just as classes are about to begin for the day. Hugh, a senior, is standing in front of his locker. Your intuition might tell you, from his clothes and quiet demeanor, that he grew up in a very “straight,” traditional family that featured parental dominance and made obedience to authority a high virtue. His folks were not brutes, Freudians notwithstanding, but they taught him in hundreds of ways to be “mindful” and “respectful” of authorities, including themselves, and “dutiful” within narrow tolerances. If he stepped over the line he was punished in one way or another, and received occasional spankings when he was you ng.[357] Some kids specialize in not getting caught for breaking the rules. Hugh learned instead not to step over the line. He is what his parents want him to be—a lot like them.

Hugh’s idea of what is right and wrong has been profoundly shaped by the family religion, which is Protestant and fundamentalist. His family all go to church at least once a week, usually more, and he and his friends regularly attend the church’s youth group. He has heard from the earliest age, week after week in Sunday school and summer after summer in Bible camp, that the Holy Book is the revealed word of God. The people Hugh knows best say the Bible is completely true, completely without error. He dutifully reads the parts he is assigned to read, along with other sections, and finds it very meaningful. He understands that almighty God is talking to him then, which thrills him. He similarly feels blessed and enriched when participating in church services with his community of fellow-believers, and is deeply moved by his belief when he is praying that God is listening to him then.

Hugh has thus believed for most of his life that the Truth is already known, and it was not his job to discover it, but to read it, even memorize it. He had a tough time in his biology course two years ago because it was based on the theory of evolution, which his religion says is wrong and sinful. He learned what he had to learn to get a good grade, but he refused to believe a lot of it, although he could not tell you in any detail what was wrong with it except “it simply can’t be true.” His family and friends praised Hugh for being strong and resisting a lot of “scientific fiddle-faddle.”

Hugh was taught that the world is a dangerous place, full of people who will hurt him or lead him astray. Powerful evil forces could lie in ambush anywhere. But he would be safe if he stuck with his own kind. He identifies strongly with his family, his religion, and America, which his parents often say is the greatest nation in the world. His parents may at the same time find a lot wrong with the way America is changing day by day, but they believe everyone should obey the government and honor its leaders in almost all circumstances.[358]

Hugh has taken a pass on nearly all the activities that might create some distance between himself and his folks. His clothes, his friends, the books and magazines he reads, his hobbies, the TV shows he watches, the movies he attends are all monitored by his parents, even though he is nearly 18 now. But “issues” seldom arise between them because Hugh would not ordinarily want to do something his parents said was wrong. Although he takes a certain amount of teasing from other students at his high school, he does not mind the short leash but rather feels reassured when he leans away a bit and feels its tug. He knows that trustworthy authority, safety and righteousness lie within his tight circle, while danger, devils, and damnation stalk without.

Hugh has seen classmates surrender to Satan, and he has learned from their experiences. That’s not going to happen to him. Still, he had some adolescent sexual adventures with one of the girls in his church group last summer, about which he feels both incredibly guilty and incredibly excited. But Hugh is a virgin and intends to remain so until he gets married, to another virgin. He may well succeed.

Lou. Banging her locker shut down the hall is another senior, Lou, who is one of the people Hugh believes has surrendered to Satan and who, from the way she just slammed her locker door, is going to give her teachers a hard time today. Lou comes from a family that is much more egalitarian than most. Her father has never been the absolute authority in the family castle, and her parents’ goal in child rearing was not to supply copies of themselves to the next generation, but competent, independent adults who would make up their own minds about things.

Lou had to obey when she was younger. Her parents did not let her toddle into the street to play. So she too was punished, with spankings when necessary, when she crossed the line. But her parents did not view mild “rebelliousness” as a threat to their authority. Instead they understood and even felt gratified when Lou showed some spirit and independence. They basically tried to guide her with advice as she grew older, but often said, “It’s up to you”—and then stood by to pick up the pieces.

Lou’s parents did not teach her that authority was always right. Precious little “rendering unto Caesar” occurred around her dinner table, as her parents openly criticized the government and its leaders. By now Lou has witnessed authorities being clearly unjust, she quickly spots incompetence in teachers, unfairness in employers, and dishonesty in politicians, and she’ll let you know about it. Nor does she think her parents are always right, although she loves them as much as Hugh loves his. In her own way, she has turned out to be what her parents wanted—just as Hugh did.

Rather than accept dominance and competition as givens in life, Lou was taught to value equality and cooperation. Lou’s parents belong to a liberal Protestant denomination, but seldom darken a church door. The family Bible is used for recording births and deaths. Lou went to Sunday school when she was young, but she came home one day asking why God got so mad at Cain for sacrificing vegetables to him, since that’s what Cain grew? And whom did Cain marry? While some parents would have scolded their child for asking such “impertinent” questions, Lou’s father told her it was good to wonder about these things, and maybe the whole story was a fairy tale. When she was 12 she began reading the Book of Revelation because a classmate told her it “proved” the world was going to end soon. She found it so absurd she couldn’t make herself finish it. At 18 she resists going on her family’s token excursions to church on Christmas and Easter. She does not believe in God, and says that the more she talks to believers, the more she thinks one should be an atheist.

Lou was not raised with well-defined in-groups, nor was she taught that “different” people were probably dangerous and evil. In fact her mother got Lou involved in various inner-city activities as a young teen so she could see how unfair life is to some. Lou has a diverse set of friends now, some of whom are almost “opposites” from one another; but she likes them all. She knows a much wider range of people than Hugh does, and sometimes, with her heart in her throat, she does new and different things just to see what they are like. She chooses her own clothes and she changes her “look” when she wants. The idea of a curfew has evaporated and her parents lie awake in a very still bed at 2 AM afraid the phone is going to ring. Lou’s virginity disappeared when she was 16, and intercourse is a regular part of her relationship with her boyfriend. She is on the pill, and her parents know it.

Unlike Hugh, Lou did not learn from her parents that Truth was in the bag, but that she’d have to figure it out for herself. If Hugh were to abandon his parents’ faith, he might be cast out from the family forever. So even if he somehow came to believe the family religion was wrong, he would likely keep his doubts strictly to himself as long as they were alive—and probably longer. If Lou were to become very different from her parents in religion—say she became a Protestant fundamentalist—her parents would definitely not like it. But they would recognize that Lou is entitled to make up her own mind, that in fact they raised her that way, so it serves them right.

If Hugh and Lou go to university next year, take intro psych, and answer the RWA scale, Hugh is going to score very highly on it, and Lou quite low.

The “Middles”

People can end up with extreme scores on the RWA scale in other ways. Cataclysmic events, for example, can undo everything you have learned before and throw you up on a far-away beach. But most people who end up on one extreme or the other land there because most of the influences in their life got in line and pushed in the same direction, as happened to Hugh and Lou.

Then where do the masses of moderates come from? From the masses of more moderate moms and dads, for one thing. Most parents, for example, are not as restrictive as Hugh’s but also are not as white-knuckled permissive as Lou’s. In-groups are identified, but less emphatically than they were in Hugh’s family. On the other hand few parents deliberately jack up their children’s social consciousness as Lou’s did. Unconventional behaviors and strange friends from different backgrounds are accepted but not gushingly welcomed. The family religion has some importance, but it hardly dominates daily life. And so on.

On balance, the Moderates’ experiences in adolescence made them less authoritarian than they had been earlier. They got into disputes with their parents, teachers, the police, and often came away feeling wronged. They spotted hypocrisy in the pews, and found that a literal interpretation of Genesis made no sense at all. They jumped with joy over the independence a driver’s licence brought. They met some different people and were “broadened.”

But not everything pushed them toward Lou’s end of the RWA scale. For one thing, they might have had one high RWA parent and one low. They may have played on a team run by a strict disciplinarian coach and kicked-ass up and down their schedule. They may have smoked a little of this and tried a little of that and drunk a whole lot of something else—and then smashed, crashed and burned. They may have met “someone different” who robbed them, or left them holding the bag when the cops broke up the party. In short, their experiences generally took them away from Hugh’s domain, but were not nearly as uniform as Lou’s. So they ended up more in the middle, with most other people.

Then There’s The Rest of Life

What will happen to Hugh and Lou’s high school classmates as they go through life? What will they be like when their high school holds their Five-Year Reunion?

That will depend some on if, and where, they continue their educations. Those who go to a fundamentalist Bible college featuring a church-related curriculum, taught by a church-selected faculty to a mainly High RWA student body that lives in men’s dorms and women’s dorms separated by a moat with alligators in it, will probably graduate about as authoritarian as they were when they went in. If, however, they go to a different kind of school, their education may well lower their authoritarianism.

I teach at the “big state university” in my province, and over the four years of an undergraduate program at the University of Manitoba students’ RWA scale scores drop about 10%. Liberal arts majors drop more than that, “applied” majors such as management and nursing drop less. But the students who drop the most, no matter what they major in, are those who laid down high RWA scale scores when they first came in the front door. If Hugh goes to a big university like the one that has graciously deposited money into my bank account over the past forty years, he’s likely to come out changed. Not overhauled but still, different.

High RWA parents may anticipate this and try to send their kids to “safe” colleges. They may also blame the faculty at the public university for “messing up the Jones kid so badly.” But as much as some of the profs might like to take credit for it, I think the faculty usually has little to do with the 10% drop. Instead, I think when High RWA students get to a big university whose catchment area is the world, and especially if it’s located some distance from mom and dad, they simply begin to meet all kinds of new people and begin to have some of the experiences that most of their classmates had some years earlier. The drop does not come from reading Marx in Political Science or from the philosophy prof who wears his atheism as a badge. These attempts at influence can be easily dismissed by the well-inoculated high RWA student. It probably comes more from the late night bull-sessions, where you have to defend your ideas, not just silently reject the prof’s, and other activities that take place in the dorms, I’ll bet.

Three longitudinal studies. What happens after graduation from university? Over the years I have collected RWA scale scores from three different groups of Manitoba alumni. One group answered 12 years after they had first completed the scale as introductory psychology students; the second set responded 18 years after they were freshmen; and the third had to wait 27 years to repeat the thrill. What do you think I found?

If you swear by Freud, there should be only minimal change over all these intervals because Freud thought our personalities were pretty much set in stone by age six. If you believe the man on the street instead, you’ll think RWA scale scores rose after college because “everybody knows people get more conservative as they get older.” But if you believe the data from these three studies, you’ll pay less attention to both Freud and the man in the street from now on. Many alumni did stay more or less the same; but others (usually folks, as I said above, who had been highly authoritarian as freshmen) changed substantially.[359] And overall RWA scale scores showed a decrease in all of the studies: 5% over 12 years, 9% over 18 years, and 11% over 27 years.

“But wait a minute,” I hear you thinking. “Something’s peculiar here, isn’t it? We believe a four-year undergraduate education lowers RWA scores about 10%, and many of these alumni had gone on to graduate school. Shouldn’t the final drop be something like 15%?” Yes, it should. You’re right! So the effects of higher education seem to have worn off some, the scores appear to have bounced back up somewhat, and the man in the street may be partly right.

What would have caused this rebound? Just getting older and wiser? Career advancement? Having a mortgage to pay off? Nope, the data say. But what about having kids? In all three studies, alumni who were parents showed much smaller drops in authoritarianism (i.e. they showed noticeable rebounds) than did those who were childless. Just getting older doesn’t make you more authoritarian. The non-parents in the longest study showed almost a 20% drop in RWA at the age of 45, compared to what they had been at 18. But their classmates who were now raising a family and saying-all-the-things-their-mothers-and-fathers-said-which-they-SWORE-they-wouldnever-say-to-their-own-children were only 10% below their entering freshman level- essentially where they probably had been when they got their bachelor’s degrees.[360] But, miracle of miracles, the parents still were less authoritarian, as a group, than they once had been, even though they now had (shudder) teen-aged children themselves! Who’d have thunk? Higher education matters, and its effect lasts a long, long time.

Finally, if you want to know what happens to authoritarianism after middle age, I don’t think anybody knows yet. But you do seem to spend less time talking with your friends about kids and careers than you used to, and more time talking about medical procedures, good doctors, and prescription drugs.

Chapter Three: How Authoritarian Followers Think

We meet again. If you are keeping track of my promises, as we roll along together on the internet, I said in the Introduction that we would figure out why authoritarian followers think in the bizarre and perplexing way they so often do. The key to the puzzle springs from Chapter 2’s observation that, first and foremost, followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They have not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.

So can everybody, of course, and my wife loves to catch inconsistencies in my reasoning when we’re having a friendly discussion about one of my personal failures. But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and—to top it all off—a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a would-be dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said,“What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”

1. Illogical Thinking

Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989, Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on. Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who “got it wrong” had been mainly high RWAs. So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they’d encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.

Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:

All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.

The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don’t “get it” that the reasoning matters—especially on a reasoning test.

This is not only “Illogical, Captain,” as Mr. Spock would say, it’s quite dangerous, because it shows that if authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is pretty irrelevant. The reasoning should justify the conclusion, but for a lot of high RWAs, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Such is the basis of many a prejudice, and many a Big Lie that comes to be accepted. Now one can easily overstate this finding. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning, and high RWAs are only slightly more likely to make such mistakes than low RWAs are. But in general high RWAs seem to have more trouble than most people do realizing that a conclusion is false.

Deductive logic aside, authoritarians also have trouble deciding whether empirical evidence proves, or does not prove, something. They will often think some thoroughly ambiguous fact verifies something they already believe in. So if you tell them that archaeologists have discovered a fallen wall at ancient Jericho, they are more likely than most people to infer that this proves the Biblical story of Joshua and the horns is true—when the wall could have been knocked over by lots of other groups, or an earthquake, and be from an entirely different era (which it is).

High RWAs similarly think the fact that many religions in the world have accounts of a big flood proves that the story of Noah is true—when the accounts vary enormously, big floods hardly mean the story of the ark, etcetera also occurred, and the tale of Noah was likely adapted from an earlier Sumerian myth. They are sure that accounts of near-death experiences in which people say they traveled through a dark tunnel toward a Being of Light prove the teachings of Christianity are true—even though these stories also vary enormously, the “Being” is usually interpreted according to whom one expects to meet at death, and the vision could just be an hallucination produced by an oxygen-depleted brain.

Not only do authoritarian followers uncritically accept conclusions that support their religious beliefs, they have a problem with evidence in general. They are more likely than most people to think that, since airplane crashes sometimes occur when the pilots’ “biorhythms” are at a low point, this proves biorhythms affect our lives. They buy the argument that if skeptics have introduced controls against cheating in ESP experiments, and no ESP appears, that proves skepticism interferes with the ESP powers. They think that any time science cannot explain something, this proves mysterious supernatural forces are at work. True, they are less likely to believe in Bigfoot than in the Shroud of Turin. But they do not in general have a very critical outlook on anything unless the authorities in their lives have condemned it for them. Then they can be extremely critical.

You can appreciate their short-fall in critical thinking by how easily authoritarian followers get alarmed by things. When I asked a group of students if the most serious problem in our country today was the drug problem and the crime it causes, a solid majority of the high RWAs said yes.[361] When I asked another group if the destruction of the family was our most serious problem, the great majority of authoritarians in that group said it was. When I asked a third group if our most serious problem was the loss of religion and commitment to God, a solid majority of those authoritarians said yes. And a solid majority of the high RWAs in a fourth group agreed the destruction of the environment was our biggest problem. We’ve apparently got a truck load of “biggest” problems.

It’s much harder to catch low RWAs doing this sort of thing. When someone says one of their favorite issues is our biggest problem (e.g. the destruction of individual freedom, or poverty), they seem to ask themselves, “Is it?”—whereas authoritarian followers usually respond, “It is!” So what happens when a demagogue asserts “The Jews are our biggest problem” (or feminists or the liberal press or the United Nations or Iraq—you name it)? Are high RWAs likely to make an independent, thoughtful evaluation of that statement? Or are they going to get riled up and demand repression or censorship or a war? “Yes sir, we’ve got trouble, right here in River City, Trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool !”[362]

The lack of independent, critical thinking goes back some ways in the authoritarian’s life. Here’s a question I asked a large sample of university students.

“Almost everybody believes in God when they are children, and polls show the vast majority of adults continue to believe in God—although a distinct minority does not. It turns out that almost everyone goes through a period of questioning the existence of God, usually during their teen years. “Does God really exist?” we ask ourselves. It is obviously a very important question. IF you ever began to question the existence of the traditional God, to wonder—because of things that happened or doubts that arose in your mind—if this God really exists, HOW did you decide? Below are ten things that people might do in this situation to help them make of their minds.

I talked it over with friends and acquaintances who believed in God.

I read books by atheists or agnostics to see what their arguments were.

I brought my questions to a religious authority, such as a minister, priest or rabbi.

I talked with my parents, asking for their help in figuring things out.

I talked with people who had decided God did not exist, or who had big doubts about it.

I prayed for enlightenment and guidance.

I studied up on scientific findings that would challenge the traditional account of God, creation, etc.

I read scriptures, or other religious books, believing they would contain the answers to my questions.

I purposely read books, plays, etc. that went against my family’s religious beliefs.

I made a determined effort to figure it out for myself, not going to anyone else nor seeking any new information.

Which one of these did you do the most to reach your decision?

What else did you do, more than anything else except the answer you just gave?

Did you do something else besides these two? If so, what?

(If you never questioned the existence of God, then skip these questions.)”

Interestingly, virtually everyone said she had questioned the existence of God at some time in her life. What did the authoritarian students do when this question arose? Most of all, they prayed for enlightenment. Secondly, they talked to their friends who believed in God. Or they talked with their parents. Or they read scriptures. In other words, they seldom made a two-sided search of the issue. Basically they seem to have been seeking reassurance about the Divinity, not pro- and con- arguments about its existence— probably because they were terrified of the implications if there is no God.

Did low RWA students correspondingly immerse themselves in the atheist point of view? No. Instead they overwhelmingly said they had tried to figure things out for themselves. Yes they talked with nonbelievers and studied up on scientific findings that challenged traditional beliefs. But they also discussed things with friends who believed in God and they talked with their parents (almost all of whom believed in God). They exposed themselves to both yea and nay arguments, and then made up their minds—which often left them theists. In contrast, High RWAs didn’t take a chance on a two-sided search.

2. Highly Compartmentalized Minds

As I said earlier, authoritarians’ ideas are poorly integrated with one another. It’s as if each idea is stored in a file that can be called up and used when the authoritarian wishes, even though another of his ideas—stored in a different file-basically contradicts it. We all have some inconsistencies in our thinking, but authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas. Thus they may say they are proud to live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech, but another file holds, “My country, love it or leave it.” The ideas were copied from trusted sources, often as sayings, but the authoritarian has never “merged files” to see how well they all fit together.

It’s easy to find authoritarians endorsing inconsistent ideas. Just present slogans and appeals to homey values, and then present slogans and bromides that invoke opposite values. The yea-saying authoritarian follower is likely to agree with all of them. Thus I asked both students and their parents to respond to, “When it comes to love, men and women with opposite points of view are attracted to each other.” Soon afterwards, in the same booklet, I pitched “Birds of a feather flock together when it comes to love.” High RWAs typically agreed with both statements, even though they responded to the two items within a minute of each other.

But that’s the point: they don’t seem to scan for self-consistency as much as most people do. Similarly they tended to agree with “A government should allow total freedom of expression, even it if threatens law and order” and “A government should only allow freedom of expression so long as it does not threaten law and order.” And “Parents should first of all be gentle and tender with their children,” and “Parents should first of all be firm and uncompromising with their children; spare the rod and spoil the child.”

3. Double Standards

When your ideas live independent lives from one another it is pretty easy to use double standards in your judgments. You simply call up the idea that will justify (afterwards) what you’ve decided to do. High RWAs seem to get up in the morning and gulp down a whole jar of “Rationalization Pills.” Here is a “Trials” case I have used many times in my research, except only half of the sample gets this version.

Imagine that you are the judge presiding over the trial of Mr. William Langley. Mr. Langley is a 44-year old civil servant who is also the founder and president of a local chapter of Canadians for Gay Rights, a noted pro-homosexual organization. Last spring Mr. Langley was leading a demonstration on the steps of a provincial legislature, supporting Bill 38—a proposed law that would redefine marriage and allow homosexuals to be legally married across Canada. A crowd of approximately 100, mainly members of Mr. Langley’s organization, had gathered around his speaker’s stand. A large banner that read, “GAY POWER” was tied between two columns immediately behind Mr. Langley, and some of his supporters were passing out literature to adults passing by.

About half an hour after the rally began, a group of about 30 counter-demonstrators appeared and began walking slowly and silently around the outside of Mr. Langley’s audience. They carried signs which read, “THE FAMILY IS SACRED” and “MARRIAGE IS BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN.” At first Mr. Langley did not seem to notice the counter-demonstrators, but when he did he stopped his speech and, according to several witnesses, said, “There are some of the people who are trying to keep this bill from passing. I say we run them out of here right now. Let’s show everybody we mean business.”

Upon hearing this, many members of Mr. Langley’s audience turned on the counter-demonstrators and began physically to attack them. By the time the police restored order, many of the counter-demonstrators had been injured and one person had to be taken to hospital for overnight observation.

A jury has found Mr. Langley guilty of inciting a riot. He may be sentenced to from 0 to 18 months in jail, with parole possible after 1/3 of the sentence has been served. To how many months in jail you would sentence Mr. Langley?

The other half of the sample gets a mirror-image version of the case. Mr. Langley headed “Canadians Against Perversion” and he was addressing a demonstration opposed to legalizing marriage between homosexuals. The banner behind him read, “The Family is Sacred.” When 30 counter-demonstrators appeared carrying signs which read, “Gay Power” and “Rights for Gays,” Mr. Langley directed his supporters to attack them, with the same results. He was found guilty of inciting a riot, and the subject was asked what sentence, up to 18 months, he would impose.

When you look at the sentences low RWA subjects imposed on the gay Mr. Langley and the sentences other low RWAs imposed on the anti-gay Mr. Langley, you find no difference. Lows typically punish the crime, not the person. But among high RWAs, Mr. Langley’s beliefs make a large difference. The gay Mr. Langley always gets a stiffer jail term than the anti-gay Mr. Langley. Highs think the attack led by the former was more serious than that led by the latter. But the attacks were identical, so that amounts to pure rationalization. Highs simply have a big fat double standard about homosexuals and punish the person as well as the crime. A jury composed of high RWAs would hardly administer “blind justice.”

I have found many other instances in which authoritarian followers show a double standard in their judgments of people’s behavior or the rightness of various causes. For example they will punish a panhandler who starts a fight with an accountant more than an accountant who (in the same situation) starts a fight with a panhandler. They will punish a prisoner in jail who beats up another prisoner more than they will punish a police officer who beats up that second prisoner. (Remember when I said in chapter 1 that high RWAs will go easy on authorities, and on a person who attacks someone the authoritarian wants to attack?) On the other hand I have found it difficult to catch low RWAs using double standards. In all the cases above they seem to operate by principles which they apply in even-handed ways.

4. Hypocrisy

You can also, unfortunately, find a considerable amount of hypocrisy in high RWAs’ behavior. For example, the leaders of authoritarian movements sometimes accuse their opponents of being anti-democratic and anti-free speech when the latter protest against various books, movies, speakers, teachers and so on. They say leftists impose restrictions for “political correctness.” I know some who would. So I wondered if ardent liberals’ desire to censor ideas they disliked was as strong, or stronger, than that of right-wing authoritarians. I asked two large samples of parents of university students to give an opinion in the following twelve cases.

Should a university professor be allowed to teach an anthropology course in which he argues that men are naturally superior to women, so women should resign themselves to inferior roles in our society?
Should a book be assigned in a Grade 12 English course that presents homosexual relationships in a positive light?
Should books be allowed to be sold that attack “being patriotic” and “being religious”?
Should a racist speaker be allowed to give a public talk preaching his views?
Should someone be allowed to teach a Grade 10 sex education course who strongly believes that all premarital sex is a sin?
Should commercials for “telephone sex” be allowed to be shown after 11 PM on television?
Should a professor who has argued in the past that black people are less intelligent than white people be given a research grant to continue studies of this issue?
Should a book be allowed to be published that argues the Holocaust never occurred, but was made up by Jews to create sympathy for their cause?
Should sexually explicit material that describes intercourse through words and medical diagrams be used in sex education classes in Grade 10?
Should a university professor be allowed to teach a philosophy course in which he tries to convince his students there is no God?
Should an openly white supremist movie such as “The Birth of a Nation” (which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan) be shown in a Grade 12 social studies class?
Should “Pro-Choice” counselors and abortion clinics be allowed to advertise their services in public health clinics if “Pro-Life” counselors can?

I hope you’ll agree that half of the situations would particularly alarm liberals, and the other half would raise the hackles on right-wingers. Would low RWAs want to censor the things they thought dangerous as much as high RWAs would in their areas of concern? It turned out to be “no contest,” because in both studies authoritarian followers wanted to impose more censorship in all of these cases—save the one involving the sex education teacher who strongly believed all premarital sex was a sin. How can this be?

It happened because the lows seldom wanted to censor anyone. They apparently believe in freedom of speech, even when they detest the speech. Some low RWAs may insist on political correctness, but the great majority seemingly do not. Authoritarians on the other hand, spring-loaded for hostility, seem all wound up to clamp right down on lots and lots of people. So when authoritarians reproach other people who call for censorship, the reproach may be justified. But a lot of windows probably got broken in the authoritarians’ own houses when they flung that stone.[363]

5. Blindness To Themselves

If you ask people how much integrity they personally have, guess who pat themselves most on the back by claiming they have more than anyone else. This one is easy if you remember the findings on self-righteousness from the last chapter: high RWAs think they had lots more integrity than others do. Similarly when I asked students to write down, anonymously, their biggest faults, right-wing authoritarians wrote down fewer than others did, mainly because a lot of them said they had no big faults. When I asked students if there was anything they were reluctant to admit about themselves to themselves, high RWAs led everyone else in saying, no, they were completely honest with themselves.

Now people who abound in integrity, who have no faults, and who are completely honest with themselves would seem ready for canonization. But we can wonder if it is really true in the case of authoritarian followers, given what else we know about them. So I have done a simple little experiment in my classes on several occasions in which I give some students higher marks on an objective test—supposedly through a clerical error—than they know they earned. High RWAs, for all their posturing about being better than others, are just as likely to take the grade and run as everyone else. But I ‘spect they forget such misdeeds pretty quickly. Self-righteousness comes easily if you can tuck your failings away in boxes and put them at the back of the shelf.

In fact, despite their own belief that they are quite honest with themselves, authoritarians tend to be highly defensive, and run away from unpleasant truths about themselves more than most people do. Thus I once gave several classes of students, who had filled out a booklet of surveys for me, personal feedback about how they had done on a measure of self-esteem. Half the students were told they had scored quite high in self-esteem, and the other half were told they had scored quite low. (These scores were assigned at random, which I confessed to them at the end of the experiment.) I then told them these self-esteem scores predicted later success in life, and I would bring copies of the evidence supporting the scale’s validity to the next class meeting for all the students who wanted to see the evidence.

High RWAs were quite interested in finding out the test was valid IF they thought they had done well on the scale. But if they had been told they had low self-esteem, most right-wing authoritarians did not want to see evidence that the test was valid. Well, wouldn’t everyone do this? No. Most low RWA students wanted to see the evidence whether they had gotten good news, OR bad news about themselves.

What do you think would happen if someone gave right-wing authoritarians a list of all the things that research has found high RWAs are likely to do—such as be prejudiced and conformist and supportive of government injustices? The respondents are simply asked, for each characteristic, “How true do you think this is of you, compared with most other people?” (Are you more prejudiced? Are you more of a conformist? Etcetera.)

High RWAs show little self-awareness when making these comparisons. Sometimes they glimpse themselves through a glass, darkly. For example they agree more than most people do with, “I like to associate with people who have the same beliefs and opinions I do.” But they have no idea how much they differ from others in that way. And most of the time they get it quite wrong, thinking they are not different from others, and even that they are different in the opposite way from how they actually are. For example they are sure they are less self-righteous than most people are—which of course is what self-righteous people would think, isn’t it? And when I give feedback lectures to classes about my studies and describe right-wing authoritarians, it turns out the high RWAs in the room almost always think I am talking about someone else.[364]

6. A Profound Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism means dividing the world up into in-groups and out-groups, and it’s something people do quite automatically. You can see this by how easily we identify with the point of view of a storyteller. If we’re watching a cavalry Indians movie, told from the point of view of the cavalry, that’s whom we cheer on. If we’re watching the same kind of movie, only from the aboriginal point of view, as in Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves, we root for the Indians, don’t we?

As natural as this is, authoritarians see the world more sharply in terms of their in-groups and their out-groups than most people do. They are so ethnocentric that you find them making statements such as, “If you’re not with us, then you’re against us.” There’s no neutral in the highly ethnocentric mind. This dizzying “Us versus Everyone Else” outlook usually develops from traveling in those “tight circles” we talked about in the last chapter, and whirling round in those circles reinforces the ethnocentrism as the authoritarian follower uses his friends to validate his opinions.

Most of us associate with people who agree with us on many issues. Birds of a feather do, empirically, tend to flock together. But this is especially important to authoritarians, who have not usually thought things out, explored possibilities, considered alternate points of view, and so on, but acquired their beliefs from the authorities in their lives. They then maintain their beliefs against new threats by seeking out those authorities, and by rubbing elbows as much as possible with people who have the same beliefs.

As a path to truth, this amounts to skipping on quicksand. It essentially boils down to, “I know I’m right because the people who agree with me say I am.” But that works for authoritarians. And it has lots of consequences. For example, this selective exposure is probably one of the reasons high RWAs do not realize how prejudiced they are “compared with most people.”If you spend a lot of time around rather prejudiced people, you can easily think your own prejudices are normal.

Because authoritarians depend so much on their in-group to support their beliefs (whereas other people depend more on independent evidence and logic), high RWAs place a high premium on group loyalty and cohesiveness. Consider the following statements:

For any group to succeed, all its members have to give it their complete loyalty.
If you belong to a club or some other identifiable group, you should always be a faithful member of that group.
Working side by side for a group goal and “sticking together” come what may are among the best things in life.
There is nothing lower than a person who betrays his group or stirs up disagreement within it.
If we become truly united, acting with one mind on all issues, there is no difficulty we could not overcome.
A person should stick with those who think the way he does, and work together for their common beliefs.

Authoritarian followers usually agree with these notions more than most people do. Similarly they disagree more than most with these ideas:

People can easily lose their individuality in groups that stress being “a good, loyal member.”
Lots and lots of “group loyalty” is bad for the individual and bad for the group.
It would be very dangerous if everyone had the same ideas and beliefs about life.
Members of a family do NOT have to be loyal to each other, no matter what.
Just because you work for a company, you do NOT have to feel “team spirit” with your co-workers.
The worst thing in the world would be for us to all start acting together “with one mind” about something.

Authoritarian followers want to belong, and being part of their in-group means a lot to them. Loyalty to that group ranks among the highest virtues, and members of the group who question its leaders or beliefs can quickly be seen as traitors. Can you also sense from these items the energy, the commitment, the submission, and the zeal that authoritarian followers are ready to give to their in-groups, and the satisfaction they would get from being a part of a vast, powerful movement in which everyone thought the same way? The common metaphor for authoritarian followers is a herd of sheep, but it may be more accurate to think of them as a column of army ants on the march.

The ethnocentrism of high RWAs makes them quite vulnerable to unscrupulous manipulators. Suppose your city is electing a new mayor and the big issue becomes how to handle urban crime. Suppose further that a poll shows the citizens of your fair burg strongly favor a “tough, law and order” approach to the problem. After the poll is released, one of the candidates steps forward and fearlessly endorses a “tough, law and order”approach to crime. Can you trust him? I’d say there’s room for doubt, since he might simply be saying whatever will get the most votes. It would be more convincing, wouldn’t it, if he came out for law and order after polls showed only half the voters favored that course, while the other half wanted a “community development” approach aimed at eliminating the causes of crime.

You’ve probably already figured out that high RWAs generally do favor a tough law and order approach to crime. And you know what? If somebody comes out for that during an election, but only after polls show this is a popular stand, authoritarian followers still believe him. It doesn’t matter whether the candidate really believes it, or might just be saying it to get elected. High RWAs tend to ignore the many devious reasons why someone might lie and say something they find agreeable. They’re just glad to have another person agree with them. It goes back to their relying on social support to maintain their ideas, because that’s really all they’ve got besides their authorities (and one “last stand” defense to be discussed soon).

Well, aren’t most people likely to trust someone who seems to agree with them? Probably, but people differ enormously in gullibility. Low RWAs are downright suspicious of someone who agrees with them when they can see ulterior motives might be at work. They pay attention to the circumstances in which the other fellow is operating. But authoritarians do not, when they like the message.

So (to foreshadow later chapters a little) suppose you are a completely unethical, dishonest, power-hungry, dirt-bag, scum-bucket politician who will say whatever he has to say to get elected. (I apologize for putting you in this role, but it will only last for one more sentence.) Whom are you going to try to lead, high RWAs or low RWAs? Isn’t it obvious? The easy-sell high RWAs will open up their arms and wallets to you if you just sing their song, however poor your credibility. Those crabby low RWAs, on the other hand, will eye you warily when your credibility is suspect because you sing their song? So the scum-bucket politicians will usually head for the right-wing authoritarians, because the RWAs hunger for social endorsement of their beliefs so much they’re apt to trust anyone who tells them they’re right. Heck, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany running on a law-and-order platform just a few years after he tried to overthrow the government through an armed insurrection.

You sometimes hear that paranoia runs at a gallop in “right-wingers”. But maybe you can see how that’s an oversimplification. Authoritarian followers are highly suspicious of their many out-groups; but they are credulous to the point of self-delusion when it comes to their in-groups. So (in another experiment I ran) subjects were told a Christian Crusade was coming to town led by a TV evangelist. The evangelist (the subjects were further told), knowing that people would give more money at the end of the evening if he gave them the kind of service they liked, asked around to see what that might be. Finding out that folks in your city liked a “personal testimonial” crusade, he gave them one featuring his own emotional testimonial to Jesus’ saving grace. How sincere do you think he was? Most subjects had their doubts, given the circumstances. But High RWAs almost always trusted him.

The need for social reinforcement runs so deeply in authoritarians, they will believe someone who says what they want to hear even if you tell them they should not. I have several times asked students or parents to judge the sincerity of a university student who wrote arguments either condemning, or supporting, homosexuals. But some subjects were told the student had been assigned to condemn (or support) homosexuals as part of a philosophy test to see how well the student could make up arguments for anything, on the spot. Other subjects were told the student could choose to write on either side of the issue, and had chosen to make the case she did.

Obviously, you can’t tell anything about the real opinions of someone who was assigned the point of view of her essay. But high RWAs believed that the antihomosexual essay that a student was forced to write reflected that student’s personal views almost as much as when a student had chosen this point of view. In other words, as in the previous experiments, the authoritarians ignored the circumstances and believed the student really meant what she had been assigned to say—when they liked what she said.

You’ve got to feel some sympathy for authoritarian followers at this point, don’t you, because they get nailed coming and going. First of all, they rely on the authorities in their lives to provide their opinions. Usually they don’t care much what the evidence or the logic for a position is, so they run a considerable chance of being wrong. Then once they have “their” ideas, someone who comes along and says what authoritarian followers want to hear becomes trustworthy. High RWAs largely ignore the reasons why someone might have ulterior motives for saying what they want to hear; it’s enough for them that another person indicates they are right. Welcome to the In-group! As Gilbert and Sullivan put it in The Mikado, “And I am right and you are right and everything is quite correct.”

But everything is not correct, for the authoritarian follower makes himself vulnerable to malevolent manipulation by chucking out critical thinking and prudence as the price for maintaining his beliefs. He’s an “easy mark,” custom-built to be snookered. And the very last thing an authoritarian leader wants is for his followers to start using their heads, to start thinking critically and independently about things.[365]

7. Dogmatism: The Authoritarian’s Last Ditch Defense

But the leaders don’t have to worry, because their followers are also quite dogmatic. By dogmatism I mean relatively unchangeable, unjustified certainty. And I’m certain that is right, beyond a doubt. So that establishes how dogmatic I am. If you want a hint as to how dogmatic you are, simply answer the items below—completely ignoring the fact that if you strongly agree with them it means you are a rigid, dogmatic, and totally bad, bad, bad person—and you get no dessert.

The things I believe in are so completely true, I could never doubt them.
My opinions and beliefs fit together perfectly to make a crystal-clear “picture” of things.
There are no discoveries or facts that could possibly make me change my mind about the things that matter most in life.
I am absolutely certain that my ideas about the fundamental issues in life are correct.

These statements are from a survey I call the DOG scale, and as usual there are some items that you’ll have to strongly disagree with to look awful. Such as:

There are so many things we have not discovered yet, nobody should be absolutely certain his beliefs are right.
It is best to be open to all possibilities, and ready to reevaluate all your beliefs.
Flexibility is a real virtue in thinking, since you may well be wrong.
I am a long way from reaching final conclusions about the central issues in life.

Guess who tend to strongly agree with the first set of items, and strongly disagree with the second set. Yep, high RWAs. Which, all kidding aside, suggests they have a dogmatic streak in them a mile wide and a hundred denials deep.

It’s easy to see why authoritarian followers would be dogmatic, isn’t it? When you haven’t figured out your beliefs, but instead absorbed them from other people, you’re really in no position to defend them from attack. Simply put, you don’t know why the things you believe are true. Somebody else decided they were, and you’re taking their word for it. So what do you do when challenged?

Well first of all you avoid challenges by sticking with your own kind as much as possible, because they’re hardly likely to ask pointed questions about your beliefs. But if you meet someone who does, you’ll probably defend your ideas as best you can, parrying thrusts with whatever answers your authorities have pre-loaded into your head. If these defenses crumble, you may go back to the trusted sources. They probably don’t have to give you a convincing refutation of the anxiety-producing argument that breached your defenses, just the assurance that you nonetheless are right. But if the arguments against you become overwhelming and persistent, you either concede the point—which may put the whole lot at risk—or you simply insist you are right and walk away, clutching your beliefs more tightly than ever.

That’s what authoritarian followers tend to do. And let’s face it, it’s an awfully easy stand to take. You have to know a lot nowadays to stake out an intelligent, defendable position on many issues. But you don’t have to know anything to insist you’re right, no matter what. Dogmatism is by far the best fall-back defense, the most impregnable castle, that ignorance can find. It’s also a dead give-away that the person doesn’t know why he believes what he believes.

To illustrate, evidence has been slowly mounting over the years that sexual orientation is, to some extent, biologically determined. Particular genes may have a say, events in the prenatal environment may play a role, and so on. The upshot is that people may have about as much control over which gender attracts them as they do over their eye color. I present this evidence in my introductory psychology classes when we are discussing prenatal development, and sometimes I run a little study to see if the findings have had any effect on people’s attitudes toward homosexuals.

Some of my students do become more accepting, and people in general say such biological findings have led them to feel more positive toward homosexuals. But High RWAs seldom move an inch. When I ask them why, they typically say they still believe homosexuals have chosen to be homosexuals, and if homosexuals wanted to they could become heterosexual. The evidence of any biological determination simply bounces off their hardened position. You might as well talk to a brick wall. Thus authoritarian followers may really mean it when they say no discoveries or facts could change their beliefs about the important things in life.[366]

You can often find elements of dogmatism in religion. Thus I have asked people who believe in the traditional God, “What would be required, what would have to happen, for you to not believe in the traditional Judeo-Christian God? That is, are there conceivable events, or evidence, that would lead you tonot believe? Virtually all right-wing authoritarians say there simply is nothing that could change their minds.

Here’s another example. I have often asked students and parents how they would react if an archaeological discovery revealed that most of the Gospels came from an earlier Greek myth. Suppose a parchment were discovered that clearly predated the time of Jesus, but it contained almost all of the New Testament accounts of his teachings and his life, including the crucifixion and resurrection. Only the central character is someone named Attis who lived in Asia Minor after being born of a virgin and a Zeus-like god. The parchment is inspected and tested by scientists and declared to be genuine and from an era before Jesus’ time. Scholars eventually conclude that the long forgotten myth of Attis was adapted and embellished by a group of Jewish reformers during the Roman occupation of Palestine, and there never was a Jesus of Nazareth.

I remind my subjects that the whole story is made-up. But IF this all actually happened, I ask them, what effect would it have on their beliefs in Jesus’ divinity? Most Christians acknowledge that they would have to qualify their belief. They seldom say their faith would disappear, but they confess they would be less certain than they had been before. But the great majority of high RWA Christians do not budge at all. They say their belief in Jesus is based on personal experience and could never be affected by such a discovery. Others say, “I know it would be a test by God to see if I would remain true.” Others respond, “This would just be one of Satan’s tricks.”[367]

Perhaps one should admire such conviction. One person’s dogmatism is another person’s steadfast commitment. But if authoritarian followers are mistaken about something, will they ever realize it? Not likely, for they appear to have been inoculated against catching the truth when they are wrong.

Before I close this chapter I want to remind us that none of the shortcomings we have discussed is some mysterious illness that only afflicts high RWAs. They just have extra portions of quite common human frailties. The difference in their inability to discover a conclusion is false, in the inconsistency of their ideas, in their use of double standards, and so on are all relative, not absolute. Almost everyone rationalizes, thinks he’s superior, etcetera. When high RWAs condemn “political correctness” and we say they are “kettles calling the pot black,” we should bear in mind the darkness of our own kettle.

A Little Application

That said, let’s take what we have learned in this chapter about how authoritarian followers think and see if it explains what otherwise might seem quite baffling. Beginning in late 2001, the Bush administration stated that Saddam Hussein was a source of terrorist activities around the world, and frequently implied he was involved in the attacks of September 11^th, even though nearly all the attackers had come from Saudi Arabia, and none had come from Iraq. The administration also said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, even though United Nations inspectors had never found any, so an invasion of Iraq was necessary. A choir of “theocons” seconded this “neocon” outlook with the argument, however implausible, that it was highly moral to start a war with Iraq. In fact, it was God’s will.[368]

The polls showed most Americas supported the president, although a significant minority did not. Besides observing that no terrorist connections had been demonstrated, and no “WMDs” or facilities for making them had been discovered, critics said an invasion would make it easier for Muslim fanatics to launch suicide attacks on Americans, and would probably tie down America’s mobile armed forces for years to come because civil war was likely to develop after Saddam’s removal. They also observed that the war would seem not only unjustified to most Muslims, but totally unfair given America’s greatly superior military forces. An American/British slam-dunk victory would probably create so much hatred for those countries in Islam that the number of zealots plotting terrorist attacks against them would probably increase rather than decrease as a result of the war. It would prove a monumental step in the war against terror—but backwards.

The critics were castigated by administration officials and their backers with a vehemence not seen since the anti-Vietnam war protests. Those who urged caution were denounced, even as late as the fall of 2006, as traitors, fools, and idiots by officials and supporters who will likely never admit that the critics were proved right. For after the successful military invasion of Iraq, no pre-existing ties to al-Qaida were discovered and no weapons of mass destruction were found. Some Americans then realized their country had invaded another country on false premises—which would seem to be very wrong morally, and which would have outraged many supporters of the war had certain other countries done such a thing. But several months after the administration itself conceded that no weapons of mass destruction had been discovered, pollsters found a lot of Americans believed such weapons[369] And for these believers and others the new justification for the invasion, viz., to remove Saddam and bring freedom to Iraq, to make it a shining example in the Middle East of what democracy will bring, was good enough anyway.

But as American casualties steadily mounted after the war was declared over, and as chaos descended upon Iraq, and as the Bush administration had no response other than, “We know this is the right thing to do, no matter what,” and as the war helped drive the national debt to such unprecedented heights that the United States became the world’s largest debtor, most Americans finally saw the war had become a national disaster.

Still, nationwide polls for Newsweek, CNN, and USA Today revealed that in October 2006, as the mid-term election drew near, 40 percent of the American people did not think the United States made a mistake in invading Iraq, 30 to 34 percent approved of President Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq, 30 percent said the administration did not misinterpret or misanalyze the intelligence reports they said indicated Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and 36 percent said the administration had not purposely misled the public about this evidence to build support for the war. Thirty-seven percent even thought the U.S. military effort was going “well” (either “fairly” or “very”)” And 35 to 37 percent approved of how Bush was doing his job in general, while 35 percent also were satisfied with the way things were going in the country. In all cases, the solid majority of Americans saw it otherwise. But you have to wonder, who were all those people who thought everything was fine?

Well, what’s not to understand, if that hard-core of supporters mainly consists of authoritarian followers, given what the experiments described in this chapter show us about them? The justification for the war in the first place was largely irrelevant to high RWAs. They liked the conclusion; the reasoning didn’t matter. If the United Nations refused to sanction the war, so what? There’s no contradiction, in a highly compartmentalized mind, between believing that America stands for international cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict on the one hand, while on the other hand insisting it has the “right” to attack whomever it wants, no matter how weak they are, whenever it wants for whatever reasons it decides are good enough. Those who protested were trouble-makers; everyone should support the government.

If no connections to al-Qaida and no weapons of mass destruction turned up after the invasion, just believe they had turned up. An aluminum tube that could have been designed to help enrich uranium was used to enrich uranium,proving Saddam was making atomic bombs! Trailers that could have been used to make biological weapons were used to make them.[370] Besides, people whom the followers look to, such as the evangelist Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) said they still believed Saddam had such weapons, even if there was no evidence he had. And anyway, if the first reason for the war comes up lame, just invent a new one. Everybody knows Saddam is our biggest problem! And when later the president insisted he never said America would “stay the course” in Iraq, when actually he had said it over and over again, most people knew that was an outright, almost pathological lie. But it would not make much of a dent on an authoritarian follower’s mind, which is quite capable of believing white is black when his authority says so.

Authoritarian followers aren’t going to question, they’re going to parrot. After all, in the ethnocentric mind “We are the Good Guys and our opponents are abominations”—which is precisely the thinking of the Islamic authoritarian followers who become suicide bombers in Iraq. And if we turn out not to be such good guys, as news of massacres and the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, by the CIA, and by the arms-length “companies” set up to torture prisoners becomes known, authoritarian followers simply don’t want to know. It was just a few, lower level “bad apples.” Didn’t the president say he was sickened by the revelations of torture, and all American wrong-doers would be punished?

However the policy came from the top, and the administration scrambled to make sure it could not be punished. When the White House said it would veto a bill because it prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, you had to be nearly blind not to realize what was going on. When the White House also insisted, successfully, that Congress pass a bill allowing it to use torture, you had to be completely blind. But high RWAs are quite capable of such blindness.

And while most Americans came to realize what a mistake the war in Iraq has turned out to be, high RWAs lagged far behind. They listen to the news they want to hear. They surround themselves with people who think like they do. They believe the leaders who tell them what they want to be told. They make about as much effort to get both sides of an issue as the Bush administration does to foster different points of view within the White House. And if six high RWAs are sitting in a room talking about the war, and all six now have misgivings, it will still be hard for any of them to say so because the ethic of group solidarity is so strong in the authoritarian mind.

Is there any conceivable evidence or revelation that will lead them to admit the war was a mistake? I suspect some of them will eventually, begrudgingly reach that point, and others will rewrite their personal histories and say they had their doubts from the start.[371] But others, petrified by their dogmatism, will never admit the undeniable. Did they ever about Viet-Nam? No. “We just didn’t use enough force!”-which is exactly the argument those who proposed the invasion of Iraq are using now as they tried to shift the blame for the failure of their incredibly unsound policy.[372]

Chapter Four: Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism[373]

Care to try your hand at another scale? Answer the one below, responding to each item with anything from a -4 to a +4.

____ 1. God has given humanity a complete, unfailing guide to happiness and salvation, which must be totally followed.
____ 2. No single book of religious teachings contains all the intrinsic, fundamental truths about life.
____ 3. The basic cause of evil in this world is Satan, who is still constantly and ferociously fighting against God.
____ 4. It is more important to be a good person than to believe in God and the right religion.
____ 5. There is a particular set of religious teachings in this world that are so true, you can’t go any “deeper” because they are the basic, bedrock message that God has given humanity.
____ 6. When you get right down to it, there are basically only two kinds of people in the world: the Righteous, who will be rewarded by God, and the rest, who will not.
____ 7. Scriptures may contain general truths, but they should NOT be considered completely, literally true from beginning to end.
____ 8. To lead the best, most meaningful life, one must belong to the one, fundamentally true religion.
____ 9. “Satan” is just the name people give to their own bad impulses. There really is no such thing as a diabolical “Prince of Darkness” who tempts us.
____10. Whenever science and sacred scripture conflict, science is probably right.
____11. The fundamentals of God’s religion should never be tampered with, or compromised with others’ beliefs.
____12. All of the religions in the world have flaws and wrong teachings. There is no perfectly true, right religion.

Add up your twelve scores. Unless I have the all-time worst score on the SAT-Math test, you can’t score lower than 12, or higher than 108, no matter how you try. Intro psychology students at my Canadian university average about 50, while their parents usually land a few points higher. A nationwide sample of some 300 members of an unnamed fundamentalist Protestant church in the United States, gathered by Ted Witzig, thumped out a 93.1—the highest group score I have yet seen.[374]

Your famous intuition probably led you to suspect this scale has something to do with religious conservatism (especially if you read the title of this chapter). So you were wised up and should not view your score with much faith (or hope, or charity).

Bruce Hunsberger and I called this the Religious Fundamentalism scale when we developed it some years ago. We did not mean by “fundamentalism” a particular set of religious beliefs, a creed. It was clear that the mind-set of fundamentalism could be found in many faiths. Instead we tried to measure a person’s attitudes toward whatever beliefs she had, trying to identify the common underlying psychological elements in the thinking of people who were commonly called Christian fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists, and Muslim fundamentalists.

We thought a fundamentalist in any of these major faiths would feel that her religious beliefs contained the fundamental, basic, intrinsic, inerrant truth about humanity and the Divine—fundamentally speaking. She would also believe this essential truth is fundamentally opposed by forces of evil that must be vigorously fought, and that this truth must be followed today according to the fundamental, unchangeable practices of the past. Finally, those who follow these fundamental beliefs would have a special relationship with the deity.[375]

Research has confirmed that the Religious Fundamentalism scale has validity in all the religions named. You can find some high scorers in all of them who fit the description just given. More to the point, the scale may give us a way to study the psychology of the “Religious Right” in America today.[376]

The Plan for This Chapter

So here’s the trip map for another seven-stop chapter. First we’ll square up the terms “fundamentalists” and “evangelicals.” Then we’ll bring the discussion into the context of this book, authoritarianism. We’ll analyze the ethnocentrism you often find in fundamentalists. We’ll see how some of the mental missteps we covered in the last chapter appear in them. We’ll appreciate the positive things people get from being fundamentalists. Then we’ll come up against the intriguing fact that, despite these benefits, so many people raised in Christian fundamentalist homes leave the religion. We’ll close our discussion with some data on shortfalls in fundamentalists’ behavior, including a surprising fact or two about their practices and beliefs. By the time we have ended, we’ll have learned many disturbing things about these people who believe, to the contrary, that they are the very best among us.

1. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals in America

“Fundamentalism” has a particular meaning in the United States. It refers to a movement that grew within Protestantism nearly a century ago in reaction to developments in the then modern world, most particularly to scholarly analyses of the Bible that cast strong doubt on its supposed divine origins. To refute these analyses a series of pamphlets called “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth” was widely distributed. At first they dealt mainly with scriptural issues, rebutting the charges that the Bible was man-made, rewritten as time passed, and laced with myths, biases and inaccurate history. Instead, the pamphlets claimed, the Bible has no error in it whatsoever; it is the original word of God, exactly as God wanted things put.[377] But the focus shifted by the end of the series, and essays came out against “The Decadence of Darwinism,” “Romanism,” Christian Science, Mormonism, and socialism. A Baptist editor in 1920 termed those who stood ready “to do battle royal for The Fundamentals” the “fundamentalists,” and the label stuck.

Protestant fundamentalism suffered so much public ridicule after the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 that its influence waned for many years. In the late 1940s it reappeared as (or was transformed into) the evangelical movement, with the Rev. Billy Graham its most famous leader.[378] Evangelicals had a different “take” on the role of religion in society in some respects. In particular, they believed they had a responsibility not just to defend Christianity, but to evangelize, to preach the Gospel to others. The following seven items were developed by George Barna, an admirable evangelical pollster who closely follows religious development in the United States, to identify evangelicals.

Do you believe Jesus Christ lived a sinless life?

Do you believe eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works?

Do you believe Christians have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?

Is your faith very important to your life today?

Do you believe Satan is a real, living entity?

Do you believe God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today?

Do you believe the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teaches?

If you say yes to all seven of these questions, you would be an evangelical by Barna’s definition.

The word “fundamentalists” has gotten a lot of bad press lately, so conservative Protestants today tend to say they are evangelicals. But evangelicals score highly on the Religious Fundamentalism scale you just answered. In a 2005 survey I conducted of over six hundred parents of students at my university, which I shall refer to frequently in this chapter,[379] 85 percent of the one hundred and thirty-nine parents who answered yes to all of George Barna’s seven questions were High fundamentalists (i.e. they landed in the top 25 percent of the scores on the Religious Fundamentalism scale). They racked up an average score of 86.6 on the measure—discernibly lower but still in the same ballpark as the American fundamentalists’ 93.1 in Witzig’s study.

Looked at the other way, 72 percent of the Christians who scored highly on the fundamentalism measure qualified as “Barna evangelicals.”[380] So call them what you will, most evangelicals are fundamentalists according to our measure, and most Christian fundamentalists are evangelicals.[381] Whether you are talking about evangelicals or talking about Christian fundamentalists, you are largely talking about the same people.

Some high religious fundamentalists turn up in all the faiths represented in my samples, including Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Within Christianity, I always find some Catholics scoring highly on the Religious Fundamentalism scale, a few Anglicans post big numbers, some Lutherans ring the bell, and so on. But in study after study the high scores pile up far more often in the conservative Protestant denominations than anywhere else, among Baptists, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Alliance Church, and so on. It bears repeating that this is a generalization, and some Baptists, etcetera score quite low in fundamentalism. But if you want to make a safe wager, see what odds you can get betting that these conservative sects will score higher on the Religious Fundamentalism scale than the other major Christian groups.

2. Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism

The first thing you need to know about religious fundamentalists, in case you haven’t inferred it already, is that they usually score very highly on the RWA scale.[382]^,[383]A solid majority of them are authoritarian followers. The two traits, authoritarianism and fundamentalism, go together so well that nearly everything I have said about high RWAs in the previous chapters also applies to high Religious Fundamentalists.

Since authoritarianism can produce fundamentalism if one grows up submissively in a religiously conservative family, and (conversely), fundamentalism can promote authoritarianism with its emphases on submission to religious authority, dislike of out-groups, sticking to the straight and narrow, and so on, one immediately wonders which is the chicken and which is the egg.

The evidence indicates authoritarianism is more basic. The RWA scale correlates better than the Religious Fundamentalism scale does with acceptance of government injustices, hostility toward homosexuals, willingness to persecute whomever the government targets, and most other things. (The big exception naturally comes when one raises distinctly religious issues.) So the problem’s not so much that some people are fundamentalists, but that fundamentalists so definitely tend to be authoritarian followers. But as I just said, religious fundamentalism does promote authoritarianism in some ways. And you can certainly see the influence of right-wing authoritarianism in many things that religious fundamentalists do.

3. Fundamentalism as a Template for Prejudice

Let me ask you a personal question: Who are you? What makes up your identity? How would you describe yourself?

You would probably list your gender fairly quickly, your age, your nationality, marital status and your job—unless you are a student, in which case you’d say you’re poor and going deeply into debt. Would you mention a religious affiliation? You almost certainly would if you are a high fundamentalist. Furthermore, except for converts, this has probably been true of fundamentalists for all of their lives. They report that their parents placed a lot of emphasis on their religious identification as they were growing up. For example, “You are a Baptist,” or “We belong to the Assembly of God.” It would have become one of the main ways they thought of themselves. By comparison, they say their gender and race were stressed much less.

What’s the effect of emphasizing the family’s religious affiliation to a child? Well, by creating this category of what the family is, you instantly create the category of people who are not that, who are different. You’re laying down an in-group versus out-group distinction. Even if you never say a nasty word about other religions, the enormous human tendency to think in ethnocentric terms will create a preference for “people like me.” Throw in some gratuitous nasty words about Jews, Muslims, Methodists, atheists, and so on, and you’ve likely sown the seeds of religious prejudice in a four-year old. Perhaps more importantly in the long run, you’ve given your child early training in the wonderful world of “Us versus Them”—training that may make it easier for him to acquire racial, sexual, and ethnic prejudices later on.[384]

There can be little doubt that, as adults, Christian fundamentalists harbor a pointed dislike of other religions. Here are some items from my Religious Ethnocentrism scale that fundamentalists tend to agree with.

Our country should always be a Christian country, and other beliefs should be ignored in our public institutions.

Nonchristian religions have a lot of weird beliefs and pagan ways that Christians should avoid having any contact with.

All people may be entitled to their own religious beliefs, but I don’t want to associate with people whose views are quite different from my own.

At the same time, fundamentalists tend to disagree with:

If there is a heaven, good people will go to it no matter what religion they belong to, if any.

You can trust members of all religions equally; no one religion produces better people than any other does.

People who belong to different religions are probably just as nice and moral as those who belong to mine.

Yep, it’s Us versus Them. Religious prejudice does not draw as much attention or produce as much hatred in North America as it does in (say) the Middle East and southern Asia, but it’s still dynamite looking for a place to explode because it’s so often accompanied by the self-righteousness that releases aggression. And it runs deep in Christian fundamentalists because religion is so important to them.

News that they score relatively highly on racial prejudice scales often stuns white fundamentalists. They will usually reply, “You must be mistaken. We’re not prejudiced. Why, we accept black people in our church.” And indeed, if you ask a white fundamentalist if he’d rather spend an evening with a black member of his church or a white atheist, he will almost certainly choose the former.

But fundamentalists still hold more racial prejudices than most people—a fact known to social scientists for over fifty years. White churches were open to just white folks for generations in America, and many pastors found justification in the Bible for both slavery and the segregation that followed the demise of slavery. Vestiges of this remain in fundamentalist religions. Bill McCartney, the founder of the evangelical men’s movement called Promise Keepers, tells the story of what happened on a nation-wide speaking tour when he finished up his stock speech with a call for racial reconciliation:

“There was no response—nothing…In city after city, in church after church, it was the same story—wild enthusiasm while I was being introduced, followed by a morgue-like chill as I stepped away from the microphone.[385]

Ironically, most fundamentalists say they believe in “the brotherhood of all mankind.” “We are all God’s children.” “Jesus loves you”—whoever you are. It says so in their mental boxes. But they still like best, by a long shot, the people who are most exactly like themselves. Where did this crushing rejection of others come from? Its earliest roots appear buried in the person’s religious training.[386]

4. The Mental Life of Fundamentalists

Mark Noll, an evangelical history professor at evangelical Wheaton College, begins his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, with a pithy thought: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Noll observes that “American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.” He points out that evangelicals support dozens of theological seminaries, scores of colleges, and hundreds of radio stations, but not a single research university. “In the United States he writes, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual.” “Modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life.”[387]

I have found nothing in my research that disagrees with this assessment. Indeed almost all of the findings in the last chapter about the authoritarian follower’s penchants for illogical thinking, compartmentalized minds, double standards, hypocrisy and dogmatism apply to religious fundamentalists as well. For example, David Winter at the University of Michigan recently found that fundamentalist students, when evaluating the war in Iraq, rejected a series of statements that were based on the Sermon on the Mount—which is arguably the core of Jesus’ teachings. Fundamentalists may believe they follow Jesus more than anyone else does, but it turns out to depend a lot on where Jesus said we should go. And we can augment such findings by considering the thinking behind three of the fundamentalist’s favorite issues: school prayer, opposition to evolution, and the infallibility of the Bible.

A. School Prayer: Majority Rights, Unless…

Suppose a law were passed requiring the strenuous teaching of religion in public schools. Beginning in kindergarten, all children would be taught to believe in God, pray together in school several times each day, memorize the Ten Commandments and other parts of the Bible, learn the principles of Christian morality, and eventually be encouraged to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. How would you react to such a law?

The great majority of people in my samples who answered this question, including most of the Christians, said this would be a bad law. But most fundamentalists liked the idea, for this is exactly the kind of education they would like to see public schools give to everyone’s children. When I asked fundamentalists about the morality of imposing this learning on the children of Hindus, Jews, atheists, etcetera, they responded along the lines of, “This is a Christian country, and the majority rules. If others don’t like it, they can pay for private education or leave.” (As I said, most people do not favor this proposal, but since the days of the “Moral Majority” fundamentalists have tended to overestimate their numbers in society.)

What do you think happened when I asked people to respond to this parallel scenario?

Suppose you were living in a modern Arab democracy, whose constitution stated there could be NO state religion—even though the vast majority of the people were Muslims. Then a fundamentalist Islamic movement was elected to power, and passed a law requiring the strenuous teaching of religion in public schools. Beginning in kindergarten, all children would be taught to believe in Allah, pray together facing Mecca several times each day, memorize important parts of the Koran, learn the principles of Islamic morality, and eventually be encouraged to declare their allegiance to Muhammad and become a Muslim. How would you react to such a law?

Again, a great majority of my samples thought this would be quite wrong, but this time so did a solid majority of Christian fundamentalists. When you asked them why, they said that obviously this would be unfair to people who help pay for public schools but who want their children raised in some other religion. If you ask them if the majority in an Arab country has a right to have its religion taught in public schools, they say no, that the minority has rights too that must be respected. Nobody’s kids should have another religion forced upon them in the classroom, they say.

So do fundamentalists believe in majority rights or minority rights? The answer is, apparently, neither. They’ll pull whichever argument suits them out of its file when necessary, but basically they are unprincipled on the issue of school prayer. They have a big double standard that basically says, “Whatever I want is right.” The rest is rationalization, and as flexible and multi-directional as a reed blowing in the wind.

My two contrasting scenarios slide fundamentalists under the microscope, but they do not put others to similar scrutiny, do they? What about those on the opposite extreme of the religious belief continuum, atheists? They always oppose school prayer, but wouldn’t they like to have atheism taught if they could? I thus have asked atheists to respond to the following proposal:

Suppose a law were passed requiring strenuous teaching in public schools against belief in God and religion. Beginning in kindergarten, all children would be taught that belief in God is unsupported by logic and science, and that traditional religions are based on unreliable scriptures and outdated principles. All children would eventually be encouraged to become atheists or agnostics. How would you react to such a law?

This would seem to be “right down the atheists’ alley,” and you frequently hear fundamentalists say this is precisely what nonbelievers are ultimately trying to accomplish in their court challenges to school prayer. But 100% of a sample of Manitoba parents who were atheists said this would be a bad law; so did 70% of a sample of the active American atheists whose organizations often launch those court challenges. Atheists typically hold that religious beliefs/practice have no place in public schools, and that includes their own point of view. No double standard there.

(It would be interesting to know how fundamentalists react to the news that, when put to the test, atheists showed more integrity than fundamentalists did on this matter. They often say morality cannot exist without belief in God, but the atheists seem much more principled than the fundamentalists do on this issue.[388])

B. Opposition to Evolution. If fundamentalists have added one thing to the authoritarian follower’s armor of compartmentalized thinking, double standards, rationalization, and so on, it is a preference for selective ignorance. You can see this most clearly in their rejection of evolution.

Instead of learning about one of the major scientific advances of all time, with all its explanatory power and steady flow of amazing discoveries, fundamentalists embrace “creation science”or “intelligent design.” As many a court has ruled, these are “science” in name only since they lack a clear statement of propositions, make no predictions, cannot be tested, and are usually just a back-door attempt to teach the Bible as part of the public school curriculum. Still fundamentalists work tirelessly to give creation science or intelligent design “equal time” with evolution in public schools—which would mean cutting in half the time devoted to real science instruction—hoping to accomplish by zeal, clamor and pressure what is unjustified by scientific accomplishment.[389]

How does this connect to “selective ignorance”? If you ask fundamentalists about evolution, it becomes clear that they seldom understand what they are opposing. Instead they seem to be repeating things they have heard from the leaders of their in-groups, such as “Darwin’s theory of evolution says that humans descended from monkeys,” and “There is a crucial ‘missing link’ in the fossil evidence that shows humans could not have descended from apes,” and “It’s just a theory.”[390] They will sometimes tell you evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics, but when you ask them what those laws are, the conditions under which the featured Second Law applies, and what it has to do with evolution, they stumble all over themselves.

As well, they will say most scientists today have rejected Darwin’s theory, when evolution is probably the most widely accepted explanation of things in the biological, geological, and astronomical sciences. (Debates certainly arise in science about how evolution takes place but not, anymore, whether it occurs.) They will tell you “many famous scientists” don’t believe in evolution at all, but they seldom know any names. They will give you the famous “A watch, therefore a watchmaker” argument-from-design that introductory philosophy students tear to shreds year after year. But when you point out the logical fallacy in this argument it becomes clear they never thought about it, they just stored the argument. They will tell you, mistakenly again, that evolution has never been observed happening. They know well the arguments against evolution that they have heard from their trusted sources, but they know almost nothing about the theory of evolution itself or the overwhelming amount of evidence from all the relevant fields that support it.

As a consequence I have had fundamentalist university students in my classes who had apparently managed to avoid all instruction in genetics in their lives, and who did not know what a gene, or a mutation was. Others, almost as extreme, have heard the human genetic code “can never be broken” and so doubt the value of learning anything about it. Or else that research should be forbidden on DNA because it is the “secret of life” that humanity was not meant to have. Or else everything that science has discovered fits in perfectly with the story of the Great Flood, which is part of the explanation most fundamentalists want everybody to have to learn in school instead of biological science. Adam walked with dinosaurs, they insist.

One can believe in a divinity and also believe that life appeared and developed on earth through evolution. It may look like an accident, you can say, but it’s really God’s plan. Many theists take that position, and eventually religious fundamentalists may come around to it. After all, the Catholic Church eventually came to accept the “theory” that the earth goes around the sun. But that might take centuries and in the meantime, as the rest of the world makes ever-increasing advances in knowledge, the anti-evolutionists will be busting a gut to make sure all of America’s children remain as ignorant as theirs. And one can seriously question whether evolution would get even 10% of the relevant instruction time in public schools that fundamentalists control. Remember how much authoritarians love to censor ideas[391]

C. The Bible Is Always Right, Unless… As we saw in chapter 3, you frequently find dogmatism in religion. Still, I have been amazed at how rigid religious fundamentalists can be—even to the point of dismissing what they say is the cornerstone of their lives, the Bible. I have twice given students who insisted the Bible was both a) divinely inspired and b) free of errors, contradictions and inconsistencies, the four Gospel accounts of Easter morning, laid out side by side. You never see them that way. Most people just hear one account, in church on Easter. Those who set out to read the New Testament go through the Gospels in the order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and may well have forgotten what Matthew said when they get to Mark’s starkly different version. Thus I suspect none of my “true believers” had ever seen the narratives printed alongside one another before. I asked them to read the (literally) Gospel accounts of this, the central, defining event in their religion. Then they read the following summary I had prepared:

“There appear to be many direct contradictions in these four descriptions of the tomb scene. Who actually encountered the risen Jesus in the garden? John says it was just Mary Magdalen. Matthew says it was Mary Magdalen and “the other Mary,” and according to Mark and Luke, neither Mary Magdalen nor any other person actually saw Jesus in the garden. Did Mary Magdalen recognize Jesus when she encountered him? John says no, but Matthew says yes. Did the women tell anyone what happened in the garden? Mark explicitly says they did not; Luke and John explicitly say they told the apostles. Was it light when Mary Magdalen came to the tomb (as Mark, Matthew and Luke say), or dark (as John says)? How many ”men in white”/angels were there: one (Mark and Matthew) or two (Luke and John)? Did Jesus let people hold onto him? Matthew says yes, John says no.

“As well there are numerous inconsistencies . Who actually went to the tomb? (All four accounts disagree.) Which apostles went to the garden? According to Luke, only Peter went; but John says Peter and the “beloved disciple” both went; and Mark and Matthew make no mention of Peter (or any other apostle) going to the garden. Was there a great earthquake, as Matthew says? How could Mark, Luke and John all ignore “a great earthquake”? Were there Roman guards? Matthew says yes, but the others do not mention them at all.”

I then offered each subject space to explain her position on the Bible under various headings. The first possibility was “There are, in fact, no contradictions or inconsistencies in the four accounts.” Other possibilities attributed the contradictions and inconsistencies to human error in translation, etcetera, or to some of the evangelists getting details wrong, or to the whole thing being a myth.

Most of the fundamentalists stuck by their guns and insisted no contradictions or inconsistencies existed in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, no matter what one might point out. I call that dogmatism. Furthermore a curious analogy kept popping up in their defense of this seemingly indefensible stand. Many of them said the evangelists were like witnesses to an automobile accident, each of whom saw the event from a different place, and therefore gave a slightly different account of what had happened. I’m ready to bet they picked up this “analysis-by-analogy” in Sunday school, or some such place. Like the arguments against evolution, you can tell they just swallowed this “explanation” without thinking because it is, in fact, an admission that contradictions and inconsistencies do exist. The “different angles”story just explains how the contradictions got there.

Ultimately the true believers were saying, “I believe so strongly that the Bible is perfect that there’s nothing, not even the Bible itself, that can change my mind.” If that seems like an enormous self-contradiction, put it on the list. We are dealing with very compartmentalized minds. They’re not really interested in coming to grips with what’s actually in the Bible so much as mounting a defense of what they want to believe about the Bible—come Hell or Noah’s high water.[392]

We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of dogmatism to the fundamentalist, even though it sometimes seems to surpass understanding. As noted in the last chapter, it takes no effort to be dogmatic, and you don’t need to know very much to insist you’re right and nothing can possibly change your mind. As well, dogmatism gives the joy and comfort of certainty, which fundamentalists cherish.

Faith and Science. You will sometimes hear fundamentalists dismiss science because of its apparent uncertainty. They observe that today’s scientific explanation of something will sooner or later be replaced by a different one, so why invest anything in it? Their religion already has the Final Word, they say, the perfect explanation of everything.

This view is three players short of a trio. First, it does not grasp that future theories in science will be accepted because they make superior explanations and predictions—which is progress you could not make if you insisted the old theory was perfect. As well, science energetically corrects itself. If a finding is misleading, say due to methodological error, other scientists will discover that and set things straight. Every year a new batch of scientists graduates, and many of them take dead aim—as they were trained to do—on the scientific Establishment. In religion you might get branded a heretic, or worse, for challenging dogma. In science you’ll get promoted and gather research grants as ye may if you knock an established explanation off its perch. Orthodoxy has a big bulls-eye painted on it in science. A scientist who can come up with a better account of things than evolution will become immortal.

Dogmatic Christians also slide quietly around the fact that there’s no real test that what they believe is right. They simply believe it, on faith. They are the faith-full, just as dogmatic Hindus, dogmatic Jews, and dogmatic Muslims all insist they each have the real deal. Unfortunately there’s no way to determine if any of them does, which may be one of the reasons the passionately devoted sometimes resort to the sword, and the car bomb, instead.

Once dogmatism turns out the lights, you might as well close up shop as a civilization and pull up the covers as a sentient life form. You get nowhere with unquestioning certainty. It’s thinking with your mind wide shut. But that would not faze most fundamentalists, because they know that their beliefs will get them exactly where they want to go.

5. Happiness, Joy and Comfort

Fundamentalists get their joy in life much more from standing firm and believing what they stand for than from exploring and discovering. I once asked a large sample of parents how much happiness, joy or comfort they got, in various ways, from science, and how much they got from religion. For most people, religion proved a lot more satisfying than science did. (This ought not knock us off our horses. Pure science is “head stuff,” not intended to satisfy any human want except our desire to understand.)

But the religion-versus-science comparison proved especially striking among fundamentalists. They said religion brought them enormous amounts of happiness. It brought them the joy of God’s love. It showed how they could spend all eternity in heaven. It assured them they would rejoin their loved ones in the kingdom of God. It brought them closer to their loved ones on earth. It brought forgiveness of their sins. It made them feel safe in God’s protection. In contrast, they got almost no happiness from science. Notably, they said science did not enable them to work out their own beliefs and philosophy of life, it did not bring the joy of discovery, it did not provide the surest path we have to the truth, it did not make them feel safe, it did not show how to live a happy life, and it did not bring the satisfaction of knowing their beliefs were based on objective facts.

We should note that fundamentalists indeed get great joy from their religion. While most people tell pollsters they are happy, highly religious people number among the happiest of us all. You can see why they would. They believe they know the meaning of life on its deepest level. They believe they are in personal touch with the all-good creator of the universe, who loves them and takes a special interest in them. They say they are certain they will enjoy an eternity of happiness after they die. In the meanwhile they have answers at their fingertips to all the problems of life that depress others, such as sickness and personal failure. And they are embraced on all sides by a supportive community. Why wouldn’t they be very happy? The real question ought to be: why do so many people, including some of the fundamentalists’ own children, turn their backs on all this happiness?

It’s that old Devil, isn’t it? We shall take this up shortly.

Zealotry. OK, you told me who you are a few pages ago. Now I want to know, in my constantly nosey way, what you believe in. Do you have a most important outlook or way of understanding things? Maybe it’s a religion, a philosophy, a social perspective like socialism or capitalism. What do you use, more than anything else, to make sense out of things, to understand “life”?

___ I don’t have a basic, most important outlook.

___ It’s a religious outlook.

___ It’s a personal outlook all my own that I developed by myself.

___ It’s a personal outlook that I developed with a few friends.

___ It’s a capitalist perspective, a capitalist theory on how society should operate.

___ It’s a socialist perspective, a socialist theory on how society should operate.

___ It’s a scientific outlook. Science gives me my most basic understanding of things.

___ It’s the feminist movement; feminism gives me my most basic understanding of things.

___ It’s the environmental movement; environmentalism gives me my most basic understanding of things.

___ It’s some other “special cause” movement, such as “animal rights” or “right to die.”

All right, if you’ve decided what makes sense out of the world for you, what you use most to comprehend the hurly-burly of life, then to what extent are the following things true for you?

___ 1. This outlook colors and shapes almost everything I experience in life.

0 = Not at all true of me

1 = Slightly true of me

2 = Mildly true of me

3 = Moderately true of me

4 = Decidedly true of me

5 = Definitely true of me

6 = Very definitely true of me

___ 2. I try to explain my outlook to others at every opportunity. (Use the scale above.)

___ 3. I am learning everything I can about this outlook.

___ 4. I think every sensible person should agree with this outlook, once it has been explained.

___ 5. I get excited just thinking about this outlook, and how right it is.

___ 6. It is very important to me to support the leaders of this outlook.

___ 7. Nothing else is as important in my life.

___ 8. It angers me that certain people are trying to oppose this outlook.

___ 9. No other outlook could be as true and valid.

___ 10. It is my mission in life to see that this outlook becomes “No. 1” in our country.

___ 11. This outlook is the solution to all of humanity’s problems.

___ 12. I am very committed to making this outlook the strongest influence in the world.

This is called the Zealot scale, for reasons I think you can easily understand, and it’s time to add up your numbers. If you are the kind of rather normal person who answers my surveys, your total will be something around 10—20. Which means you don’t get terribly worked up about your way of understanding things. But fundamentalists who say their religion provides them with their basic outlook in life score about 40. They are especially likely to say their religion colors and shapes almost everything they experience in life, that it is the solution to all of humanity’s problems, that it is very important to them to support the leaders of their religion, that they are learning everything they can about their religion, that nothing else is as important in their life, and no other outlook could be as true and valid.

No other group comes close to being as zealous. Feminists usually come in second in my studies, but way behind the religious fundamentalists, and one finds far, far fewer of them. And if you took all the zealous capitalists and socialists in my last study of over 600 parents and put them in a room to slug it out, not a punch would be thrown. You want to know who’s on fire, you want to know who’s making a commitment, you want to know who are putting their money, their time and their energy where their beliefs are, you want to know who are constantly “on call” for the cause—and in large numbers—it’s the fundamentalists.[393]

Zealotry and conversion. Fundamentalists, you may have heard, proselytize. Whether they go door to door, or just gently approach co-workers and neighbors, or pleasantly invite classmates to their youth group, fundamentalists usually believe they have an obligation to try to convert others. “Suppose a teenager came to you for advice about religion,” I have asked in several studies. “He had been raised in a nonreligious family as an atheist, but now this person is thinking about becoming much more religious, and wants your advice on what to do.” Even though fundamentalists often speak of parents’ sacred right to raise their children as they see fit, the vast majority of the fundamentalists said they’d tell the teen his parents were wrong. And virtually all said they would try to persuade the teen to join their religion.

One can wonder what fundamentalists would say if one of their children went to an atheist for advice on religion, and the atheist said the parents were wrong and tried to lead their child into atheism. But would such nonbelievers?[394] I have given several groups of atheists the mirror-image scenario in which a teenager who had been raised as a strong and active Christian comes to them for advice because he is now questioning things. Very few Manitoba parent atheists said they would tell this teen that his parents were wrong, nor would they try to get him to become an atheist. Instead they almost all said they’d tell him to continue searching and then decide for himself. A sample of active American atheists was pushier. About two-thirds would have thumped the drum for atheism, loudly or softly, and about half said they would want the teen to become a nonbeliever. But far, far more of the fundamentalists, we saw, would have tried to convert an atheist’s child.

I probed this apparent double standard with a large sample of Manitoba students. Half were told a troubled teenager who had been raised in a strong Christian family went to an atheist for advice. “Would it be wrong for the atheist to try to get the teen to abandon his family’s teachings?” A solid majority of both low and high RWA students (70 percent in each case) said yes, it would be wrong.

The other half of the sample got the mirror image situation of a troubled teen raised an atheist who went to a Christian for advice. A solid majority (61 percent) of the low RWAs again said it would be wrong for the Christian to try to get the teen to abandon his family’s teachings. But only 22 percent of the high RWAs thought proselytizing would be wrong in this case. Instead, the great majority of them thought it would be right for a Christian to try to convert the youth. That’s a double standard big enough to drive a busload of missionaries through.

Parents of university students have, we can safely surmise, raised some children, so we can inquire how much freedom of choice their kids had regarding religion. A solid majority of my samples said they wanted their children to make up their own minds about religion. But not the fundamentalist parents, who said they had made a strong effort to pass their beliefs on to their offspring—a response their children confirmed when describing how much emphasis was placed on the family religion while they were growing up. Fundamentalist parents said they did not want their children to decide about religion. Instead they wanted their progeny to believe what they believed, to keep the faith, and pass it on to the grandchildren.

6. Keeping the Faith, Not

Does the religious emphasis pay off? Yes, in the sense that if parents pay no attention to religion, the children are likely to become non-practicing Catholics, Presbyterians-in-name-only, “I guess I’m a Prodestent” Christians—or even unaffiliated “Nones.” But placing great emphasis on the family religion does not always produce the desired result, and may even backfire.

I have inquired about the current religious affiliations of parents of students at my university for many years. I now have answers from over 6,000 moms and dads. These parents were 48 years old on the average when they served in my studies, and since I also ask what religion they were raised in, we can see if they turned out the way their parents (the grandparents) intended.

Generally they did; about two-thirds of those raised in a Christian denomination still followed the path trod by their ancestors (e.g., raised a Lutheran, still a Lutheran)—although they were not necessarily active members. (Instead they were the “Stay Away Saints,” as some evangelical leaders call them.) But that means about a third of them had disconnected themselves from their home religion. Some had converted to another, but most of them had become Nones, (e.g., raised a Lutheran, now not anything), which was the category that grew the most—almost 300%!—in my studies from where it had started.[395]

The only other group besides the Nones that ended up in the black, with more members than it started out with, were the Protestant fundamentalists (Baptists, Pentecostals, etcetera), and they only gained 18%. Furthermore, they did it through conversions, because almost half of the parents who had been raised in these denominations had left them by the time they reached middle age. (It was one of the poorer “retention” records among the various religions.)

The “departed” departed in all directions, but mostly they went to more liberal denominations, or (especially) they too ended up Nones. The fundamentalists who remained had to proselytize to avoid the fate of all the other denominations: i.e., an appreciable net loss. If they had not won lots of converts, they too would have shrunk, because they had a lot of trouble holding onto their own sons and daughters.

Given all that childhood emphasis on the family religion, and given all the enriching rise-and-shine happiness that comes from being a fundamentalist, how come so many people raised in that environment walk away? Some may walk because active membership in those churches requires a lot of commitment. Protestant fundamentalists go to church way more often than anyone else in Canadian Christendom, they read the Bible more, they tithe more, and so on. Also, being a fundamentalist can require giving up various pleasures and life-styles that others enjoy as a matter of course. So some people may leave these demanding religions precisely because of the demands.

But when Bruce Hunsberger and I interviewed university students who had very religious up-bringings but then left the family religion, and asked them why they did so, they almost never mentioned these things. Instead they mainly said they left because they just couldn’t make themselves believe their church’s teachings any more.

Believing the Word. Christian fundamentalism has three great enemies in the struggle to retain its children, judging by the stories its apostates tell: weaknesses in its own teachings, science, and hypocrisy. As for the first, many a fallen-away fundamentalist told us that the Bible simply proved unbelievable on its own merits. It was inconceivable to them that, if an almighty creator of the universe had wanted to give humanity a set of teachings for guidance across the millennia, it would be the material found in the Bible. The Bible was, they said, too often inconsistent, petty, boring, appalling, self-serving, or unbelievable.

Secondly, science made too much sense and had pushed traditional beliefs into a tight corner. When their church insisted that its version of creation, the story of Adam and Eve, the sundry miracles and so on had to be taken on faith, the fledgling apostates eventually found that preposterous. Faith for them was not a virtue, although they could see why their religion taught people it was. It meant surrendering rationality. From its earliest days fundamentalism has drawn a line in the sand over scripture versus science, and some of its young people eventually felt they had to step over the line, and then they kept right on going.

Still the decision to leave was almost always wrenching, because it could mean becoming an outcast from one’s family and community. Also, fundamentalists are frequently taught that no one is lower, and will burn more terribly in hell, than a person who abandons their true religion. What then gnawed away so mercilessly at the apostates that they could no longer overpower doubt with faith?

Their families will say it was Satan. But we thought, after interviewing dozens of “amazing apostates,” that (most ironically) their religious training had made them leave. Their church had told them it was God’s true religion. That’s what made it so right, so much better than all the others. It had the truth, it spoke the truth, it was The Truth. But that emphasis can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se, especially among highly intelligent youth who have been rewarded all their lives for getting “the right answer.” So if the religion itself begins making less and less sense, it fails by the very criterion that it set up to show its superiority.

Similarly, pretending to believe the unbelievable violated the integrity that had brought praise to the amazing apostates as children. Their consciences, thoroughly developed by their upbringing, made it hard for them to bear false witness. So again they were essentially trapped by their religious training. It had worked too well for them to stay in the home religion, given the problems they saw with it.[396]

7. Shortfalls in Fundamentalists’ Behavior: Hypocrisy

Ronald J. Sider, a theologian at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently followed up Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind with The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. He observed that, despite Jesus’ unequivocal stand on the permanence of marriage, evangelical Christians divorce as often as others do. And despite Jesus’ great concern for the poor, the political agenda of prominent evangelical political movements rarely includes justice for the impoverished. The number of unmarried couples living together jumped more in the Bible Belt during the 1990s, Sider pointed out, than in the nation as a whole. Of the evangelical youth who took a “True Love Waits” pledge to abstain from intercourse until marriage, 88% broke it, he reported. Evangelicals proved more likely to object to having African-American neighbors than any other religious group. He reminded his readers that many evangelical leaders either opposed the civil rights movement or else said nothing. And “saved” men were reported just as likely to use pornography, and to physically abuse their wives, as “unsaved” men.[397]

You will note that while Sider sometimes upbraids his fellow evangelicals for being worse than others, he mainly points out that they are not better than average, when he thinks they should be. We have seen that fundamentalists do indeed think they are morally superior. But hypocrisy comes easy to compartmentalized minds.

For example, Matthew’s Gospel (7:1) has Jesus saying, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” and you will often hear fundamentalists say, “Hate sin, but love the sinner.” When I asked a sample of parents if they believed one should do this, virtually all of the fundamentalists said yes. And yet these same parents only two pages later in the survey were advocating rejection of homosexuals and discrimination against them. Some even agreed with the statement, “In many ways the AIDS disease currently killing homosexuals is just what they deserve.” Gentle pieties get shoved back into their files all too easily in fundamentalist minds when a chance to unload on some despised group pops up.

The hypocrisy does not escape the notice of others. I once asked parents who had stressed the family religion less to their children than it had been stressed to them as they were growing up why they did not “pass it on.” Some said they found church too boring to want to keep going. Others said the church seem preoccupied with money. And of course some said the teachings did not make sense, etcetera. But the reason checked off most often was, “As I grew up, I saw a lot of hypocrisy in the people in my religion.”

The most common examples involved a) “the holy people” looking down on others in the community, b) the people who acted like Christians only on Sunday, and c) the intolerance and prejudice found among members of the congregation, including the clergy. These things had usually been spotted many years ago, when the parent was but a teenager, but obviously the spotting had a lasting effect because these parents were now nearing 50. The “whited sepulchers” they found in church drove them away from the family religion, which consequently lost nearly all of the next generation reared by these parents as well.

You can find other examples of such a backlash. Attitudes toward homosexuals have become markedly more tolerant and accepting in North America in a very short period of time. When I asked students what had affected their attitudes toward gays and lesbians, personally knowing a homosexual proved the most positive influence (as I reported in chapter 2) and the scientific evidence indicating sexual orientation may have biological determinants (as mentioned in chapter 3) finished second. But in third place came, “I have been turned off by anti-homosexual people.”[398] Virulent opposition to homosexual causes may, in the long run, backfire and hurt the opposers and benefit their intended targets, especially when the attackers claim they are acting on moral grounds and actually “love the sinner” they are smiting.

Cheap Grace. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Protestantism may directly promote hypocrisy among its members through one of its major theological principles: that if one accepts Jesus as a personal savior and asks for the forgiveness of one’s sins, one will be saved. But a lot depends on what “accepts” means. Is one’s life transformed? Do good works increase? Is the born-again person more like Jesus, holier? That would be all to the good. But because of some evangelist preachers, the interpretation has grown that all “accepts” means is a one-time verbal commitment. You say the magic words and you go to heaven, no matter what kind of life you lead afterwards. Many have thought that a pretty sweet deal. You’ve conned a free pass through the Pearly Gates from the Almighty and you can sin and debauch all you want for the rest of your life.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the phrase “cheap grace” to denigrate this interpretation of the New Testament,[399] and other writers have lamented the cheap grace that seems to ooze from some evangelists who seem to keep a sharp eye on the donations that follow. Sider (p. 57) summarizes the analysis of another professor of theology, John G. Stackhouse Jr., as follows: “Many evangelicals lie, cheat, and otherwise sin against others in an ‘already-forgiven bliss’ with an attitude of ‘I’m cool-’cause-Jesus-loves-me-and-so-I-don’t-owe-you-a-thing.’”

Do only good little girls and boys go to heaven? Or does goodness, as the film star Mae West said many years ago, have nothing to do with it? I asked a large sample of parents to respond to the following proposition: “If we have faith in Jesus, accepting him as our personal savior and asking forgiveness of our sins, we will be saved, no matter what kind of life we live afterwards.” Forty-two percent of the Christian high fundamentalists agreed with that statement. If that indicates the attitude of fundamentalists in general, a huge number of people are swilling in cheap grace. They fully expect that when the saints go marching in, they’re gonna be in that number because they once uttered a magic spell.[400] The lives they’ve lived since are irrelevant, they believe.

Life Without Guilt. That helps explain the hypocrisy many people find among “the saved.” But it doesn’t really account for the self-righteousness. After all, you still knows you’ve sinned—even if you have a “Get Out of Hell Free”card tucked up your sleeve. So why do fundamentalists think they sin so much less than everyone else? The answer may involve how they have learned to handle guilt, thanks again to their religious instruction.

What do you do when you have done something morally wrong? What are you most likely to do to get over the guilt, to feel forgiven, to be at peace with yourself? Here are some possibilities.

I ask God for forgiveness, by prayer, going to Confession, or some other religious act.

I go out and do something nice for someone else, a “third party” not involved in what I did.

I rationalize the bad act. I tell myself it was not so bad, that I had no choice, etc.

I talk to someone close, such as a good friend or relative, about what I did.

I get very busy with some chore, assignment, or job to take my mind off what I did.

I discuss what I did with those who may have suffered, and make it up to them.

Nothing; I just forget it.

OK, whatever you typically do, how well does this work? How completely forgiven do you feel after you have done this?

0 = Not at all; I still feel just as guilty as before.

1 = A little less guilty

2 = Somewhat less guilty

3 = Moderately less guilty

4 = Appreciably less guilty

5 = Much less guilty

6 = Completely free of guilt

Most Christian fundamentalists who have answered these questions in my studies said they ask God for forgiveness. And you know what, that makes them feel remarkably cleansed. Their average response on the “How completely forgiven?”question was nearly a 5. Again, it’s just a verbal thing. No admission of wrong-doing to injured parties is required, no restitution, and no change in behavior. But it works really well: Instant Guilt-Be-Gone; just add a little prayer. And why wouldn’t you sin again, since it’s so easy to erase the transgression with your Easy-off, Easy-on religious practice?

Fundamentalists therefore might feel little after-effect of their wrong-doings twitching away in their psyches. They have been to the River Jordan and had all their sins washed away, often on a weekly basis just like doing the laundry. But this very likely contributes to self-righteousness, and let’s remember that self-righteousness appears to be the major releaser of authoritarian aggression. So it could come down to this: “Hello Satan!” Yum, sin! “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Whack-whackwhac k![401]

The non-fundamentalists in my samples did not have it so good. Their major ways of handling guilt were to discuss the immoral act with those who may have suffered and make it up to them (which they were twice as likely to do as fundamentalist were), or to talk with a friend about what they had done. Whatever they tried, it did not remove most of the guilt; their responses to the “How completely forgiven?” question averaged less than 3. But the residual guilt may help them avoid doing the same thing again, and when someone asks them how moral they are compared to other people, the unresolved, festering guilt may remind them that they are not as moral as they’d like to be.

A Few Surprising Findings about Fundamentalists. Since fundamentalists insist the Bible is the revealed word of God and without error, you would think they’d have read it. But you’d often be wrong. I gave a listing of the sixty-six books in the King James Bible to a large sample of parents and asked them, “How many of these have you read, from beginning to end? (Example, if you have read parts of the Book of Genesis, but not all of it, that does not count.)” Nineteen percent of the Christian High fundamentalists said they had never read any of the books from beginning to end, which was neatly counterbalanced by twenty percent (but only twenty percent) who said they had read all sixty-six. (I tip my hat to anyone who put her head down and plowed through the first nine chapters of Chronicles I. Look it up.)

On the average, the high fundamentalists said they had read about twenty of the books in the Bible—about a third of what’s there. So they may insist that the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teaches, but most of them have never read a lot of what they’re so sure of. They are likely, again, merely repeating something they were told while growing up, or accepted when they “got religion.” Most of them literally don’t know all that they’re talking about. (But they are Biblical scholars compared to others: Most of the non-fundamentalist parents had not read even one chapter.)

This explains the results of a multiple-choice “Bible Quiz” I gave university students once. It was a very easy test in which I just asked which book in the Bible contains a famous story or quote. It was so easy because most of the possible answers I served up would be ridiculous to anyone who knew the Bible even superficially.

For example, where in the Bible would one find the passage, “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then the angel of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified…to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord”? The Gospel of Luke, The Book of Jeremiah, the Psalms, or Genesis? Since the last three are found in the Old Testament, and almost everyone who goes to a Christian church on Christmas hears this passage during the reading from the Gospels, the answer is pretty obvious, isn’t it?

How about this one: Is the story of Sampson and Delilah in Exodus, the Gospel of Matthew, the Acts of the Apostles, or Judges? (Most students thought Sampson was writ up in Acts, maybe because he was an action-hero.) The other questions involved the location of, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life,” and who said, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal…If I have all faith as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing…And now faith, hope and love abide, these three: and the greatest of these is love.”

The sample as a whole barely scored above chance on my four-question quiz, which makes sense when you recall that most of their parents had not even read one book in the Bible. But what surprised me no end was how poorly the fundamentalist students did: overall they got only a 60%. They did best on that much-advertised quotation from John 3:16—which three-fourths of the fundamentalists got right. But all of the questions were so easy, why didn’t they get an A+ instead of a D or an F?

The answer appears to be that, while they may tell everyone the Bible contains God’s revealed truth to humanity, so everyone should read the Good Book, in truth they—like an awful lot of their parents—don’t know what’s in it because they haven’t read much of it either.

I’ve also asked parents who do read the Bible how they decide what to read. Most fundamentalists said they read selected passages, which often were selected for them by their church, a Bible study group, the editor of a book of devotional readings, and so on. Very few bother to read all the infallible truth they say God has revealed. If you only get into heaven if you’ve been devoted enough to read the whole Bible, there’ll apparently be no line-up before St. Peter.[402]

The Most Amazing Discovery of All (to me, anyway). Isn’t there something profoundly strange about the fact that so many fundamentalists have apparently skipped over so much of the Bible? Wouldn’t you read the Bible, cover to cover, over and over, until the end of your days, if you really thought this was the revealed word of God? Let’s remember who that is: GOD, damn it all, the almighty, eternal, omnipresent—not to mention all-knowing—creator of the universe. What else could you read that would be as important as God’s message, if you believed that’s what the Bible is? What could be one-zillionth as important? What on earth is going on? Don’t the fundamentalists themselves believe what they preach to everyone else?

Maybe not. When I cover the topic of hypnosis in my introductory psychology course I often describe a series of experiments done with the “Hidden Observer” technique. In a typical study people are hypnotized and then they put their arm in some ice-water. The hypnotist tells them their arm feels fine, and they obligingly report it feels just peachy. But then the hypnotist appeals to a “Hidden Observer” he says is inside the person. If this observer knows that actually the arm is hurting like all blazes, it’s to make a certain sign confirming that. A lot of Hidden Observers spill the beans and admit the arm truly does hurt, even though the “public” subject still insists it does not.

I have then, at a later date, asked my students to let their Hidden Observers answer a question about the existence of God. “Does this person (that is, you) have doubts that (s)he was created by an Almighty God who will judge each person and take some into heaven for eternity while casting others into hell forever?” A third of the high RWA students checked off an alternative that read, “Yes, (s)he has secret doubts which (s)he has kept strictly to herself/himself that this is really true.” Another twenty percent said they had such doubts, but at least one other person knew about them. That adds up to most of the highly authoritarian students.

I don’t think I was actually communicating with tiny Munchkins inside the students’ heads. I suspect the Hidden Observer angle just gives people a chance to admit something without taking full responsibility for admitting it—sort of like, “The devil made me do it.” But I think we see in these numbers a continuing subterranean after-shock from that one-sided search about the existence of God that (we saw in chapter 3) high RWAs typically engage in. The “search” was so one-sided it didn’t really resolve the question to the searcher’s satisfaction, all verbal assertions notwithstanding. The doubts remain, but are enormously covered up.

This means the whole edifice of belief, Bible and bustle is built on an unresolved fundamental issue in many fundamentalists. Indeed, it’s the fundamental issue, isn’t it? But what speaks loudest to me is how secret these doubts are in so many cases. NO ONE knows, for very good reason, and the secret doubters will probably never “come out” of the choir. Instead their faithful presence in church will reassure all the others, including the other secret doubters, that “everyone in our group really believes this.” And they may well carry their secret to the grave.[403]

Summary: So What Does All This Amount To?

This chapter has presented my main research findings on religious fundamentalists. The first thing I want to emphasize, in light of the rest of this book, is that they are highly likely to be authoritarian followers. They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites.

But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as they are narrow-minded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they. They are also surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in, and deep, deep, deep down inside many of them have secret doubts about their core belief. But they are very happy, highly giving, and quite zealous. In fact, they are about the only zealous people around nowadays in North America, which explains a lot of their success in their endless (and necessary) pursuit of converts.

I want to emphasize also that all of the above is based on studies in which, if the opposite were true instead, that would have been shown. This is not just “somebody’s opinion.” It’s what the fundamentalists themselves said and did. And it adds up to a truly depressing bottom line. Read the two paragraphs above again and consider how much of it would also apply to the people who filled the stadium at the Nuremberg Rallies. I know this comparison will strike some as outrageous, and I’m NOT saying religion turns people into Nazis. But does anybody believe the ardent Nazi followers in Germany, or Mussolini’s faithful in Italy, or Franco’s legions in Spain were a bunch of atheists? Being “religious” does not automatically build a firewall against accepting totalitarianism, and when fundamentalist religions teach authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism, they help create the problem. Can we not see how easily religious fundamentalists would lift a would-be dictator aloft as part of a “great movement,” and give it their all?

Chapter Five: Authoritarian Leaders

Suppose you were applying for a leadership position in a right-wing religious/political movement—a movement hell-bent on gaining total power so it could impose its beliefs and rules of conduct on everyone forever. (I realize this may not be your No. 1 career choice, but work with me a bit here.) As part of your application you’re asked to take an aptitude test. Indicate whether you dislike, or favor, the sentiments below on a -4 to +4 basis.

This country would be better off if we cared less about how equal all people are.

Some groups of people are simply not the equals of others.

Some people are just more worthy than others.

These items are from the Social Dominance Orientation scale, and if you want the job of Dictator For Life you’ll agree with them, coming out foursquare against equality. In turn, you will disagree with:

If people were treated more equally, we would have fewer problems in this country.

We should try to treat one another as equals as much as possible.

Increased social equality.

Felicia Pratto of the University of Connecticut and Jim Sidanius at UCLA presented the test in 1994 as a measure of belief in social in equality.[404] Whereupon Sam McFarland at the University of Western Kentucky used their scale and twenty-one others in a magnificent “pitting experiment”aimed at finding the best predictors of prejudice. He discovered that only two of the 22 tests he threw “into the pit” to fight it out could predict prejudice at all well: the Social Dominance Orientation scale, and the RWA scale.

I repeated McFarland’s experiment and got the same results. Generally, the Social Dominance scale predicted such unfairness better than the RWA scale did, and so gets the silver medal in the Prejudice Olympics over the bronze medal I awarded the RWA scale in chapter 1. Furthermore I found that these two scales could, between them, explain most of the prejudice my subjects revealed against racial minorities, women, homosexuals, and so on. Furthermore furthermore, social dominance scores and RWA scale scores correlated only weakly with each other—about .20. This “Lite” correlation has a ton of significance that we shall deal with later. But in the first instance it meant persons who scored highly on the social dominance test were seldom high RWAs, and high RWAs were almost never social dominators.

That’s why the two tests could predict so much together: each was identifying a different clump of prejudiced persons—sort of like, “You round up the folks in the white sheets over there, and I’ll get the pious bigots over here.” So it looks like most really prejudiced people come in just two flavors: social dominators and high RWAs. Since dominators long to control others and be authoritarian dictators, and high RWAs yearn to follow such leaders, most social prejudice was therefore connected to authoritarianism.[405] It was one of those discoveries, thanks to Sam McFarland, that happen now and then in science when a great deal of This, That and the Next Thing suddenly boils down to something very simple. Most social prejudice is linked to authoritarianism; it’s found in one kind of authoritarian, or its counterpart.

You don’t have to be a genius to grasp why someone would want to lead armies of people dedicated to doing whatever he wants. So as I said in the Introduction, social scientists have concentrated on understanding authoritarian followers, because the followers constitute the bigger problem in the long run and present the bigger mystery. But after Pratto and Sidanius developed a measure that could identify dominating personalities, and as we came to understand the followers better and better, attention naturally shifted to figuring out the leaders, and especially how the two meshed together. This chapter will tell you what we know so far.

Similarities and Differences Between Social Dominators and Authoritarian Followers

Social dominators and high RWAs have several other things in common besides prejudice. They both tend to have conservative economic philosophies—although this happens much more often among the dominators than it does among the “social conservatives”—and they both favor right-wing political parties. If a dominator and a follower meet for the first time in a coffee shop and chat about African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Jews, Arabs, homosexuals, women’s rights, free enterprise, unions leaders, government waste, rampant socialism, the United Nations, and which political party to support in the next election, they are apt to find themselves in pleasant, virtual non-stop agreement.

This agreement will probably convince the follower, ever scanning for a kindred spirit who will confirm her beliefs, that she and the dominator lie side by side in the same pod of peas. But huge differences exist between these two parts of an authoritarian system in (1) their desire for power, (2) their religiousness, (3) the roots of their aggression, and (4) their thinking processes—which we shall now explore. Then we’ll talk about how people become social dominators, and after that come back to that “highly significant” little correlation between RWA and social dominance. Along the way we’ll consider several experiments that show how nasty things get when the two kinds of authoritarian personalities get their acts together.

Desire for power. Imagine that you are a student taking introductory psychology. (Some of you may be overcome with bliss at the thought—especially the part about being 18 again: “My knees work!” Others have recoiled with horror at memories of things past from intro psych, such as “proactive interference.”—speaking of memories of things past.) (That’s a joke for psychologists.) (You’re not missing much; it’s not very funny.) (In fact it positively smells.) While serving in a survey experiment you come across the following question: “How much power, ability to make adults do what you want, do you want to have when you are 40 years old?”

0 = It does not matter at all to me. If I have no power over adults when I am 40, I will not care.

1 = I would be content having a small amount of power over others, say over a few people at work.

2 = I would like to have a moderate amount of power over others, such as running a department of 40 people.

3 = I would like to have a large amount of power over others, such as controlling a good-sized company.

4 = I want to have a great deal of power in life, making decisions that affect thousands and thousands of lives.

5 = My goal is to have a very great deal of power, being one of the real “movers and shakers” in our country.

So, how much power do you want? Social dominators in each of two studies I ran wanted to have much more than most people did. Authoritarian followers did not.

Now people can want power for different reasons. If you wanted to save the planet from the destructiveness of its dominant species, you would need to make (for example) oil companies do some things they definitely do not want to do. Power as a means to a laudable end is not a bad thing—although we have to acknowledge that almost everyone thinks he’s the good guy, and if you take your stand on the slope of Mount Righteous Cause, it has proven as slippery as greased glass.

But social dominators will run to take their chances on that slippery slope. They thrill to power in and of itself. They want to control others, period. (Make that, “exclamation mark!”) Their name says it all. And they come bundled with a shock of nasty attitudes that completes the package. The following items are from a Personal Power, Meanness, and Dominance Scale I have developed, to which high social dominators respond in very predictable ways, compared with most other people. Look over this “Power Mad” scale to get an idea of what goes on in dominators’ minds.

The Personal Power, Meanness and Dominance Scale

It’s a mistake to interfere with the “law of the jungle.” Some people were meant to dominate others. (Agree)

Would you like to be a kind and helpful person to those in need? (Disagree)

“Winning is not the first thing; it’s the only thing.” (Agree)

The best way to lead a group under your supervision is to show them kindness, consideration, and treat them as fellow workers, not as inferiors. (Disagree)

If you have power in a situation, you should use it however you have to, to get your way. (Agree)

Would you be cold-blooded and vengeful, if that’s what it took to reach your goals? (Agree)

Life is NOT governed by the “survival of the fittest.” We should let compassion and moral laws be our guide. (Disagree)

Do money, wealth, and luxuries mean a lot to you? (Agree)

It is much better to be loved than to be feared. (Disagree)

Do you enjoy having the power to hurt people when they anger or disappoint you? (Agree)

It is much more important in life to have integrity in your dealings with others than to have money power. (Disagree)

It’s a dog-eat-dog world where you have to be ruthless at times. (Agree)

Charity (i.e. giving somebody something for nothing) is admirable, not stupid. (Disagree)

Would you like to be known as a gentle and forgiving person? (Disagree)

Do you enjoy taking charge of things and making people do things your way? (Agree)

Would it bother you if other people thought you were mean and pitiless? (Disagree)

Do you like other people to be afraid of you? (Agree)

Do you hate to play practical jokes that can sometimes really hurt people? (Disagree)

It would bother me if I intimidated people, and they worried about what I might do next. (Disagree)

I will do my best to destroy anyone who deliberately blocks my plans and goals. (Agree)

Social dominance scores correlate very strongly[406] with these answers to the Power Mad scale. High scorers are inclined to be intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful They scorn such noble acts as helping others, and being kind, charitable, and forgiving. Instead they would rather be feared than loved, and be viewed as mean, pitiless, and vengeful. They love power, including the power to hurt in their drive to the top. Authoritarian followers do not feel this way because they seldom have such a drive to start with.

So, are you lucky enough to know some social dominators personally? It’s uncharitable to describe them in these terms. But this is how they describe themselves, compared to others, when answering the Power Mad scale anonymously.

In a similar vein, remember those “group cohesiveness” items in chapter 3, such as, “For any group to succeed, all its members have to give it their complete loyalty.” We saw that authoritarian followers endorse such sentiments. But social dominators do not. Oh sure, they want their followers to be super loyal to the group they lead. But they themselves are not really in it so much for the group or its cause, but more for themselves. It’s all about them, not about a higher purpose. If trouble arises, don’t be surprised if they start playing “Every man for himself” and even sell out the group to save their own skin.[407]

Empathy. Here’s an easy one. How empathetic, how compassionate do you think dominators are? Not very, right? You got it, for they agree with statements such as “I don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for people less fortunate than me,” and “I have a ‘tough’ attitude toward people having difficulty: ‘That’s their problem, not mine.’” And they disagree with, “I feel very sorry for people who are treated unfairly” and “I have a lot of compassion for people who have gotten the bad breaks in life.” For high social dominators “sympathy” indeed falls, as the saying goes, between “ship” and “syphilis” in the dictionary. (Well, maybe that’s not the exact saying, but this is a family web-site.)

Religion. High RWAs, we know, strongly tend to be religious fundamentalists. Social dominators do not. In fact, like most people in my samples, most dominators only go to church for marrying and burying. This would be “Three strikes and ye’re out” as far as the religiously ethnocentric high RWAs are concerned except for one thing. Dominators can easily pretend to be religious, saying the right words and claiming a deep personal belief and, as we saw in chapter 3, gullible right-wing authoritarians will go out on almost any limb, walk almost any plank to believe them.

So some non-religious dominators, as part of the act, do go to church regularly, for manipulative reasons. This amounts to lying, but I hope you don’t think social dominators would never, ever, ever, tell a lie. Here are the items from another measure I’ve concocted, called the Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty (“Exploitive-MAD”) scale. Again, high social dominators’ responses, compared with others, really open your eyes.

The Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty Scale

You know that most people are out to “screw” you, so you have to get them first when you get the chance. (Agree)

All in all, it is better to be humble and honest than important and dishonest. (Disagree)

There is really no such thing as “right” and “wrong.” It all boils down to what you can get away with. (Agree)

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and never do anything unfair to someone else. (Disagree)

One of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly. (Agree)

It gains a person nothing if he uses deceit and treachery to get power and riches. (Disagree)

Basically, people are objects to be quietly and coolly manipulated for your own benefit. (Agree)

Deceit and cheating are justified when they get you what you really want. (Agree)

One should give others the benefit of the doubt. Most people are trustworthy if you have faith in them. (Disagree)

The best skill one can have is knowing the “right move at the right time”: when to “soft-sell” someone, when to be tough, when to flatter, when to threaten, when to bribe, etc. (Agree)

Honesty is the best policy in all cases. (Disagree)

The best reason for belonging to a church is to project a good image and have contact with some of the important people in your community. (Agree)

No one should do evil acts, even when they can “get away with them” and make lots of money. (Disagree)

There’s a sucker born every minute, and smart people learn how to take advantage of them. (Agree)

The end does NOT justify the means. If you can only get something by unfairness, lying, or hurting others, then give up trying. (Disagree)

Our lives should be governed by high ethical principles and religious morals, not by power and greed. (Disagree)

It is more important to create a good image of yourself in the minds of others than to actually be the person others think you are. (Agree)

There’s no excuse for lying to someone else. (Disagree)

One of the best ways to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear. (Agree)

The truly smart person knows that honesty is the best policy, not manipulation and deceit. (Disagree)

Social dominance scores correlate strongly[408] with the responses to these statements. RWA answers again do not correlate at all. Social dominators thus admit, anonymously, to striving to manipulate others, and to being dishonest, two-faced, treacherous, and amoral. It’s as if someone took the Scout Law (“A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, …”) and turned it completely upside down: “A ‘winner’ is deceitful, manipulative, unfair, base, conniving, …” Furthermore, while the followers may feel admiration bordering on adoration of their leaders, we should not be surprised if the leaders feel a certain contempt for their followers. They are the suckers, the “marks,” the fools social dominators find so easy to manipulate.

Roots of hostility. Another difference between authoritarian leaders and followers comes into view when you untangle the roots of their hostility. Social dominators show greater prejudice against minorities and women than high RWAs do, but the followers are much more hostile toward homosexuals. Why should this be the case?

As we saw in chapter 2, high RWAs are especially likely to aggress when they feel established authority approves of the aggression, when they are afraid, and because they are self-righteous. Since the Bible condemns homosexuality in several places, and “giving” rights to homosexuals seems to right-wing authoritarians yet another nail in the coffin of moral society, aggression against homosexuals is aroused and blessed. Similarly high RWAs are more likely than social dominators to impose stiff sentences in the Trials situation, and more likely to help the government persecute radicals when it’s time to round up a “posse.”

However when it comes to racial and ethnic minorities, right-wing authoritarians will still aggress—overtly or sneakily, physically or verbally—but such attacks are less clearly supported by religious and civic authorities than they used to be. So their prejudice in these cases has dropped some. But not that of social dominators.

Why are social dominators hostile? Well unlike high RWAs who fear an explosion of lawlessness, they already live in the jungle that authoritarian followers fear is coming, and they’re going to do the eating. They do not ask themselves, when they meet someone, “Is there any reason why I should try to control this person?” so much as they ask, “Is there any reason why I should not try to gain the upper hand with him right now?” Dominance is the first order of business with them in a relationship, like dogs encountering each other in a school yard, and vulnerable minorities provide easy targets for exerting power, for being mean, for domination. It’s an open question whether the aggression mainly serves a desire to dominate, or if the domination mainly serves a desire to hurt others. But either way in the dog-eatdog world of the social dominator, they’re out to claw their way to the top.

If this analysis is correct, then social dominators should not score highly on the measures that predict authoritarian aggression among the followers: fear of a dangerous world and self-righteousness. And most of them don’t. Dominators aren’t usually afraid that civilization might collapse and lawlessness ensue. Laws, they think, are not something you should necessarily obey in the first place, so much as things you should not get caught disobeying. And as for self-righteousness, it’s pretty irrelevant to people as amoral as most social dominators tend to be. They may speak of the righteousness of their cause, but that’s usually just to assure and motivate their followers. Might makes right for social dominators.

By the same token, as noted earlier, most high RWAs do not score highly on the Power-MAD and Exploitive-MAD scales that reveal “what makes the dominator tick.” Their image of themselves as the good people leaves no room for believing they are cold-blooded, ruthless, immoral manipulators after power at almost any cost. So social dominators might incite authoritarian followers to commit a hate crime, but the dominators and followers probably launch the attack for different reasons: the dominator out of meanness, as an act of intimidation and control; the follower out of fear and self-righteousness in the name of authority.

The mental life of the social dominator. Persons who score highly on the Social Dominance scale do not usually have all the nooks and crannies, contradictions and lost files in their mental life that we find in high RWAs. Most of them do not show weak reasoning abilities, highly compartmentalized thinking, and certainly not a tendency to trust people who tell them what they want to hear. They’ve got their head together. Nor are most of them dogmatic or particularly zealous about any cause or philosophy. You have to believe in something to be dogmatic and zealous, and what social dominators apparently believe in most is not some creed or cause, but gaining power by any means fair or foul.

The “soundness” of their thinking hardly means you can believe them, however. They are quite capable of saying whatever will get them ahead. After all, they hold that there’s no such thing as “right” and “wrong.” It all boils down to what you can get away with. And one of the most useful skills a person should develop, they say, is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingl y.[409] So like high RWAs, social dominators are quite capable of hypocrisy—the difference being that the RWAs probably don’t realize the hypocrisy because their thinking is so compartmentalized, whereas the dominators do but don’t care. I found evidence of this duplicity when I asked various samples for their opinions about equality—the thing the Social Dominance scale is all about, the underlying democratic value that high social dominators do not believe in.

What reasons do dominators give for giving equality short-shrift? Well, they say, ultimately complete equality is a pipe dream. Natural forces inevitably govern the worth of the individual. And people should have to earn their places in society, not get any free rides. All that society is obliged to do, if fairness is an issue, is provide a level playing field. The poor can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they really want to. Lots of people have, haven’t they?

You have probably heard these arguments before, and some of them make a certain amount of sense. But I don’t trust the social dominator when he says them because I know how he reacts to other statements about equality. Namely:

People have no right to economic equality. All of us should get as much as we can, and if some don’t get enough, that’s their problem. (Agree)

Everyone should have an equal opportunity for economic success. Those born into poor circumstances should be given extra help to make the “playing field” level for them. (Disagree)

If the natural forces of supply and demand and power make a few people immensely wealthy and millions of others poor, so be it. (Agree)

“Access programs” to higher education, which give people from poor backgrounds extra financial support and counseling while in university, are a good idea. (Disagree)

Nobody should get extra help improving his place in society. Everyone should start off with what his family gives him, and go from there. (Agree)

There is nothing wrong with the fact that powerful people get better treatment by the law than poor people do. (Agree)

Since so many members of minority groups end up in our jails, we should take strong steps to make sure prejudice plays no role in their treatment in the legal system. (Disagree)

If powerful people can get away with illegal acts because they can afford the best lawyers, and because they have “friends in high places,” so what? It’s just natural. (Agree)

The “one-person-one-vote” idea is dumb. People who make bigger contributions to our society should get a lot more votes than those who do nothing. (Agree)

Equality is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, so we should work hard to increase it. (Disagree)

Equality” is one of those nice-sounding names for suckers. Actually only fools believe in it. (Agree)

No racial group is naturally inferior to any other. If a group does poorly, it is usually because of discrimination. (Disagree)

If everyone really were treated equally, I would get less and I would not like that. (Agree)

Given all of this, do you really believe the social dominator who says people should have to earn their success in life? He’s quite willing to let the children of the rich get rich merely through inheritance. Do you trust him when he says he’s in favor of a level playing field? He’s against programs that would give the disadvantaged a better chance. Does he really believe the poor can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or is he content to let them face an uphill struggle that very few can overcome? It doesn’t bother the social dominator that masses of people are poor. That’s their tough luck. And some racial groups are just naturally inferior to others, he says. Justice should not be applied equally to all. The rich and powerful should have advantages in court, even if that completely violates the concept of justice. Who cares if prejudice plays a role in the justice system? He certainly doesn’t. The “right people” should have more votes than everybody else in elections. And so on.

If you stare deeply into the souls of social dominators, they believe “equality” is a sucker word. Only fools believe in it, they say. And if people took equality seriously, if society did try to provide equal opportunity for all, and if the playing field really were made level so that bootstraps could be pulled up and multitudes of lives bettered, the social dominator knows he would get less. And he very much dislikes that notion. He says so.

Personal Origins of the Social Domination Orientation

We think we understand how people become authoritarian followers (chapter 2). So where do social dominators come from? Right now, it’s hard to say. Attempts to find shaping experiences have uncovered a few “beginnings.” High social dominators among university students say it has been their experience that:

Deceit and cheating were good tactics because it led to what they wanted.

Taking advantage of “suckers” felt great.

They’ve enjoyed having power and having people afraid of them.

“Losers” deserved what happened to them.

It’s smart to use whatever power you have in a situation to get what you want.

Life boils down to what you can get away with.

People who suffer misfortunes deserve them because they are lazy or dumb or made bad moves.

And of course, they say their lives have taught them that “Life is a jungle.”

These experiences indicate that the future dominator was rewarded earlier in life when he cheated, took advantage of others, made people afraid of him, overpowered others, got away with doing something wrong, or beat somebody to the punch. All of these actions may in turn have been predicated by a “tooth and claw” outlook that he learned from (say) his parents. Or that outlook may just serve as a rationalization for being amoral, unsympathetic, and exploitive because acting this way often pays off. Psychologists talk about the “Law of Effect,” which says you learn to do what works. Being unscrupulous works for social dominators.

Students’ social dominance scores correlate only weakly with their parents’ scores (about .25), so it seems unlikely they learned “Life is a jungle”the same way some high RWA students learned “You are a Baptist”as they grew up. Whatever the parental influence might be, it’s usually strongest between fathers and sons-implicating the Y chromosome, or a lot of cultural shaping on the roles of males.

As I said when we were wondering where authoritarian followers come from, we’d be foolish to dismiss the genetic possibilities here. In most animal species social dominance determines who will reproduce and who will not, (i.e., whose genes will be passed on and whose won’t). So some people may just be born with a greater tendency to try to intimidate and dominate others. If these attempts pay off, these “natural bullies” will be on their way. Others may have the genes but not the “muscle” or the smarts to carry it off. Others may become social dominators strictly through their experiences. Research someday will say, I suspect.

An Experiment Combining Social Dominators and Right-Wing Authoritarians

What happens when social dominators and authoritarian followers meet and begin interacting, not in a coffee shop, but in some sort of structured activity? Imagine you are the General Manager in the Chemical Division of a large multi-national corporation. Your division makes a product called “It’s So Clean” in a plant in France. Unfortunately, manufacturing “It’s So Clean” produces an “it’s so dirty” toxic by-product which you have been storing in cheap containers that, again unfortunately, degrade rather quickly. Your corporation has thus been contaminating the ground water with a poisonous chemical, and various ministries of the French government are suing your pants off because—and this is most, most unfortunate—the cheap containers you have been using turn out to be illegal in France. In fact they are illegal in all of the industrialized world because, duh, they quickly spring a leak!

Your division can get better, legal containers that would add 44% to the waste management costs of making “It’s So Clean,” or it can move to Argentina. Why Argentina? Because, you are told in this exercise, the government there will let you use your leaking containers, and will give you tax breaks as well if you re-locate. Also, your labor costs will go down because wages are low in Argentina and the workers don’t expect benefits or pensions. So what are you going to do?

You don’t make this decision by yourself. There’s another manager from your division, an Operations Officer who is lower on the totem pole than you, and you two are going to talk over the situation. And you yourself, the person who is amazingly reading a book on a computer monitor, don’t have to make any decision at all because you’re just reading a book, right? But many pairs of female students at the Universities of Waterloo and Guelph in Ontario had to hash out this problem as part of a psychology experiment, and decide where “It’s So Clean” should be manufactured.

Some of the women were chosen for this experiment and maneuvered into being the higher-up General Manager because they had scored rather highly (for women) on the Social Dominance Orientation scale. For comparative purposes, other women were recruited and put in the General Manager position because they had scored pretty low in dominance. No matter what, the part of the lower-ranking Operations Officer was played by a confederate who basically did the “Smithers thing” and went along with whatever the boss wanted. And you know what? High social dominators were about three times as likely as low social dominators to move the operation—lock, stock, and leaking barrels—to Argentina where they would poison the groundwater and take advantage of the tax breaks and cheap labor. (Heck, they weren’t going to have to drink the water.)

Given what we know about social dominators, that figures, doesn’t it? All right, let’s do the experiment in a different way. This time the confederate plays the role of the superior General Manager, and she’s “Montgomery Burns” and wants to move the operation to Argentina. Real subjects get to be the underling this time, and they can go along with the boss or try to get the boss to do, in my opinion, the right thing. Some of the real subjects scored highly on the RWA scale. They are thus, we believe almost to the point of dogmatism, authoritarian followers as a group. Other real subjects were recruited because they cranked out low RWA scores; we don’t expect them to be very submissive to authority.

And guess what. The high RWAs went along with the unethical decision a lot more than the low RWAs did. In fact they liked it, they said in private afterwards, it was the right thing to do, and they gave their boss a high rating. The less authoritarian students did not like the boss’s decision and said so, and they did not like the boss either. The confederate who played the role of boss, who never knew whether an underling was a high or low RWA, rated each subject on how compliant the subject had been. High RWAs were judged significantly more compliant than the low RWAs were.

Well that figures too, right? But maybe all we’ve found is another example of how high RWAs put dollars ahead of the environment. So let’s do the experiment one more time, only we won’t use confederates at all. Instead we’ll pair up two female students, both real subjects, one of whom is a high social dominator, while the other is a high RWA—our two kinds of authoritarians. Half the time we’ll arrange things so that the social dominator is the boss, and the authoritarian follower is the underling. But in the other pairs of subjects, we’ll declare the high RWA the boss, and the social dominator has to be the underling. Now, where is that plant going to go? The pairs were much more likely to reach an unethical decision and head Down Argentina Way when a social dominator was boss and the high RWA was the underling.

This is now called the “lethal union” in this field of research.[410] When social dominators are in the driver’s seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and high RWAs do the shooting. The trains may be loaded with people crammed into boxcars heading for death camps.

And of course this lethal union is likely to develop in the real world. Authoritarian followers don’t usually try to become leaders. Instead they happily play subservient roles, and can be expected to especially enjoy working for social dominators, who will (you can bet your bottom dollar) take firm control of things, and who share many of the followers’ values and attitudes. The “connection” connects between these two opposites because they attract each other like the north and south poles of two magnets. The two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.

Double Highs: The Dominating Authoritarian Personality

In the “It’s So Clean” experiment just described, the high social dominators were not also high RWAs. They were just ordinary social dominators, the sort we’ve been talking about so far in this chapter, who we know seldom score highly on the RWA scale because there’s just a small correlation between RWA and Social Dominance scores. But you’ll recall that at the beginning of this chapter I said this small relationship is stuffed with significance. It’s time for me to put up or shut up.

The small correlation exists because 5 to 10 percent of my samples score highly on both tests. I call these folks “Double Highs,” and while you only find them by the handful, they are a fascinating group to study.[411] For starters, they win the gold medal in the Prejudice Olympics, whether you’re talking about prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities, hostility toward homosexuals, or men-who-hate-women-who-wantto-control-their-own-lives. They also score higher than anyone else on a “Militia” scale I developed after the Oklahoma City bombing which measures belief that a Jewish-led conspiracy is plotting to take over the United States through such dastardly devices as gun control laws and the United Nations.

So Double Highs have stronger prejudices than do commonplace social dominators (i.e., the ones who don’t score highly in right-wing authoritarianism, the silver medal winners). And they are more prejudiced than ordinary high RWAs (i.e., the ones who don’t score highly in social dominance, the ones who get the bronze). They seem to have piled the prejudice of the high RWA atop the prejudice of the social dominator and reached new depths.

But if you are the careful, critical reasoner we earlier agreed you are, the following thought is zinging around in your brain now: “How can somebody score highly on both tests? One measures an inclination to submit to authority and the other measures a drive to dominate. How can one be a submissive dominator?”

Very well put. You are good. The vast majority of people who score highly on the RWA scale can be called submissive followers, champing at the bit for their champion. But aspiring dictators can sometimes score highly on the RWA scale too. Consider the first item on the measure: “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.” Couldn’t an authoritarian follower and an authoritarian leader both agree with this? The follower would say, “Yes, yes. Oh please let him appear,” and the wannabe leader would say, “Yes, yes. Behold, here I am.” And it’s clear that Double Highs want to dominate, not submit. They score as high on both the “How much power would you like to have at age 40?”question and the “Power-Mad” scale as the rest of the social dominators do—which is much higher than ordinary high RWAs do.

So who are these Double Highs? Simply put, they are “religious” social dominators. They usually had much more religious upbringings than social dominators typically had, or they may have “got religion” as adults. As a group their fervor does not quite reach the levels found among ordinary right-wing authoritarians. But they go to church much more than most people in my samples do. Ditto for being religious fundamentalists. Ditto for being religiously ethnocentric. They thus respond to the religious content on the RWA scale, which ordinary social dominators do not, and that helps make them Double Highs.

But how are they going to answer the Exploitive-MAD scale? It would seem difficult for a religious person who goes to church fairly regularly to rack up a high score on this measure, wouldn’t it? Indeed, ordinary high RWAs score rather low on this test. But not the Double Highs, who score way way up there when it comes to exploitation, manipulation, and so on. Their (anonymous) answers to two items in particular wave a huge red flag:

“The best reason for belonging to a church is to project a good image and have contact with some of the important people in your community.” And,

“It is more important to create a good image of yourself in the minds of others than to actually be the person others think you are.”

Double Highs tend to say yes to these items much more than garden-variety authoritarian followers do. Why would they strike the pose then, to the extent that it is a pose? As one of the Exploitive-MAD items goes, “One of the best ways to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear.” Or, as Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have put it, “You can fool some of the people all of the time.”[412]

The Worst of the Lot. One thing has struck me as I’ve studied Double Highs. They’ve usually combined the worst aspects of being a social dominator with the worst aspects of being a high RWA. Thus we saw that when it comes to prejudice, they pack an extra load of hostility toward their many targets. And they’re just as power hungry as the rest of the social dominators are, rather than being uninterested in personal power as ordinary RWAs are. But when they land in between ordinary dominators and ordinary high RWAs, they usually land closer to the worse outcome.

Thus they could have low Exploitive-MAD scores the way most right-wing authoritarians do, but instead they pile up big numbers the way social dominators usually do. And they could have the low religious fundamentalism and low religious ethnocentrism scores of other social dominators, but instead they look much more like the fundamentalist, ethnocentric RWAs. The same goes for dogmatism. They could have low self-righteousness scores as most social dominators do, but instead they are as highly self-righteous as the rest of the high RWAs. They could have the cool, calm, collected responses to the Dangerous World scale that ordinary social dominators have, but instead they see the world as much more dangerous, the way most high RWAs do.

All in all, they exhibit an amalgam of bad traits and inclinations. They’re like a child who’s got Uncle Harry’s splotchy skin and Aunt Mildred’s difficult temperament and Grandpa Pete’s bow legs and… But don’t feel too sorry for them. With their followers’ eager help, they’re ruining America.

The Particular Threat Posed by Double Highs. We likely have lots of ordinary social dominators in our midst who want to run their clubs, their workplaces, the PTA, their local government, and so on, as their personal kingdom.[413] They’re the people who want to be the sole “deciders” about things. (Don’t get ahead of me here.) They’re probably the people who keep interrupting others during a discussion. I’ve long thought, as I’ve sat fuming, they’re most of the people who jump queues in traffic so they can get ahead of others. I’ll bet they’re the people who get you to do the work while they take the credit. It’s hard not to hypothesize that they make up a lot of the Little League coaches who teach kids that winning is everything, no matter how you have to do it. I’ll wager they make lots of promises in the moonlight that they never intend to keep. I’m willing to bet they’re major purchasers of hard core pornography that shows women being abused. I suspect they’re more likely to be rapists than most men. There even seems to be a whiff of the sociopath about the social dominator. Somebody do the studies and see if any of these hunches is right.

Ordinary social dominators may meet with only limited success in life. Their biggest obstacle in an organizational structure, besides the animosity they create for themselves, will predictably be other social dominators reaching for the top, to whom they might lose out and have to play a subordinate role, biding their time. There’s only one Big Cheese in most outfits. Just because one wants power doesn’t mean one is shrewd enough, attractive enough, well-connected enough, etcetera, to get it. Or they may go too far and get caught in their manipulations, in their lies, in their illegalities-and not be able to squirm their way out of it.

Double Highs, however, have a big head start over ordinary social dominators in politics, because they are the consumate leaders of a readily-formed army of zealots longing for a great warrior. Ordinary authoritarian followers, we have seen, tend to be highly religious (in a fundamentalist way), and their highly ethnocentric minds probably evaluate people on religious grounds more than any other. Ordinary social dominators, who have little religious background or impulse, will have to fake being super-religious to get these followers’ support. They might succeed if they are good actors and clever, especially since RWAs throw the door open to whoever tells them their beliefs are right.

But a Double High has the best chance of attracting this army of yearning and loyal supporters. He comes packaged as “one of our own,” one of the in-group. He not only shares their prejudices, their economic philosophy, and their political leanings, he also professes their religious views, and that can mean everything to high RWAs. He too may be faking his religiousness to some extent, but he will have the credentials up front, and the phrase-dropping familiarity with the Bible to pass the test with flying colors. He’ll know the code words of the movement. He’ll appear to believe everything “all the good people” believe about Satan, being born again, evolution, the role of women, sex, abortion, school prayer, law and order, “perverts,” censorship, zealotry, holy wars, America-as-God’s-right-hand, and so on. Given this head start, you can expect to find a Double High leading most of the right-wing authoritarian groups in our country.

Ex-president Jimmy Carter, in describing the fundamentalist movements that have taken control of the Republican Party, recently wrote, “Almost invariably, fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and, within religious groups, have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers.”[414] They’re probably even worse than Carter stated. But basically the data I’ve collected say he hit the nail, with his Habitat carpenter’s skill, smack on the head.

An Experiment Testing the Interaction of Authoritarian Leaders and Followers

Remember the Global Change Game from the end of chapter 1? When I ran that experiment in 1994 comparing a low RWA world with a high RWA one, I had not screened the players for social dominance. (The dominance scale had just been published.) In all likelihood some Double Highs participated in the high RWA simulation that destroyed the world in a nuclear holocaust, and then went to war and hell again when given a second chance. But I had not controlled for that. So in 1998 I ran the game once more on two consecutive nights, only this time high RWAs covered the earth on both nights. However on the first night the world had no Double Highs lying in the weeds, whereas on the second there were seven.[415]

At the beginning of the “Pure RWA, No Double Highs” game, it took fifteen long seconds before one of the 53 authoritarian followers present stood up and made himself an Elite. Slowly, reluctantly others rose to their feet, in one case being pushed up by players more reluctant than herself. It took 40 seconds for the process to be completed—about twice as long as usual.

After the Elites got their separate briefing, they interacted very little with one another. Usually the Elites in the simulation travel the world playing Let’s Make a Deal. But on this night there were eight little islands of participants on the map, each island inhabited by its players and its Elite, trying to solve their local economic, social and environmental problems in isolation from the rest of the world. The three female Elites did try to interest the North American Elite in a foreign aid program, but when he refused no joint activity was ever attempted again. When the ozone layer crisis occurred, no meeting of any size resulted. The Elites seemed to shrug and say, “There’s nothing anyone can do about something that big,” and no one did anything. One of the facilitators put it this way: “The Elites went into their groups and never came out.”

The groups, which another facilitator noted sometimes said “Go away” when a “foreigner”(their word) occasionally came over to talk, worked enthusiastically and earnestly shoulder-to-shoulder. But they were singularly unimaginative and took a long time finding solutions to their problems. As was true in the 1994 high RWA game, the authoritarians had enormous trouble controlling population growth. Unyielding on the issue of birth control, the high RWAs took their stand in the corner they painted themselves into. Consequently, India began bursting at the seams while disease and poverty ravaged sub-Saharan Africa.

Europe and North America made charitable contributions to the Third World, but it was not enough to keep the poor regions from going down the tubes. An atmosphere of gloom and despair settled in with a thick mental fog about two-thirds of the way into the simulation. Most of the players, assigned to the over-populated, poor regions of the world, had no idea what they could do to make things better, and glumly sat on the gym floor resigned to failure. They reminded me of my classes when I am lecturing, as only I can, in a way no one can possibly follow. “How much longer is this agony going to last?” The players were overwhelmed by the simulation.

There were no wars on this night, not even a hint of a threat. The basic high RWA attitude seemed to be, “You don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.” Still, most regions kept the armed forces they had inherited at the beginning of the game, even regions facing severe social problems. By the time forty years had passed, 1.9 billion people had died from starvation and disease, which the facilitators thought was close to a record for a non-war run of the game.

Gently Stir in a Few Double Highs. On the following night forty-eight ordinary high RWAs and seven Double Highs (all males) took the helm on the earth’s future. I made sure each Double High was “randomly” assigned to a different region. I also made sure at least one other guy was included in each group, so the Double High would not become the Elite just because everybody else was a deferring high RWA female. When the call for volunteer leaders went out, one of the Double Highs jumped to his feet instantly. All of the regions had their self-appointed Elites within twelve seconds—about half the time it normally takes.

Four of the seven Double Highs (57 percent) had literally leapt at the chance to lead their groups, in contrast to only 8 percent of the far more numerous, but far less self-promoting, ordinary high RWAs. And the Double Highs who did not quickly jump to their feet were not necessarily through. When the simulation began one of them went to the facilitators and gathered information on resource exchanges—a task assigned to his region’s Elite. He took this information to his Elite, convinced him of a strategy, and from then on became a co-Elite, never staying home with the other players in his region. (He was called a “Lieutenant” by his Elite, but the other Elites quickly found out he was the one who made the decisions for his region.)

Another Double High who had not jumped to his feet stayed home throughout the game, but eventually led a revolution among his region-mates. They told their official Elite he would have to bring all his negotiated deals to them for approval. The Double High thus became the de facto Elite. (The seventh Double High, off in Latin America, was as quiet as a mouse all during the simulation. But six out of seven ain’t bad.)

In unmistakable contrast to the game the night before, this run featured intense interaction among the Elites. A constant “buzz” of negotiations could be heard as the world leaders visited one another, sometimes in groups of two or three, working out the best deals they could get with their resources and combined bargaining leverage. Trading partnerships developed and dissolved. “It was like the stock exchange” a facilitator commented afterwards.

Because of the wheeling and dealing, some regions made headway against their problems as their Elites traded things they did not need for things they did—again unlike the night before when everyone stayed home. But no charity appeared. Nobody got something for nothing. And no commitment to the planet as a whole ever materialized. When the ozone layer crisis broke out, a global conference was held, but nobody put a farthing into the pot to solve the problem.

Moreover the regions began increasing their military strengths, and the stronger ones started making threats against the weaker ones during economic negotiations. A lot of bullying suddenly appeared. Then the Oceana Elit e[416] bought nuclear weapons and declared war on vastly out-gunned India, which tried to get protection from North America. Getting none, India surrendered immediately and paid a tribute. Soon the Oceana Elite was making the same threats against Africa and Latin America. This time North America offered protection, for a price, and the world quickly rushed to one camp or the other and began buying nukes. The facilitators thought an all-out nuclear war was going to break out just as the forty year time limit for the game expired.

Even though no one had died from warfare, lots of resources had been devoted to increasing military power, and many regions lacked the necessities of life. And for the third high RWA game in a row, the “folks back home” had stumbled badly over population control, so the dwindling “social bucks” had to take care of more and more people. Consequently one billion, six hundred million people had died from starvation and disease by the end of the game. This was three hundred million less than the night before, and the improvement was attributable to the Elites’ trading skills. But the Elites also caused the militarization and nuclear confrontation, and if the game had lasted five minutes longer, everybody might well have died.

When he began the arms race, the Oceana Elite was operating entirely on his own hook. No one else in Oceana wanted to buy nuclear weapons or threaten anybody. But although they outnumbered him in their group, they let him do what he wanted. He was their leader. And he knew how to handle them. He simply declared war on India, and told them afterwards. After his bloodless victory, he skillfully won over a couple of his Oceana colleagues to the slogan, “War is good,” and that provided a base for his further military adventures. But still some of the folks back home remained unhappy with the way their region was driving the world to war, and on post-game surveys they described their Elite as “bad” and “evil.” But they did not have the gumption to stop him. They sat still and sighed and let it happen.

Remembering again that university students are not world leaders, that the Global Change Game is not the real thing, that people do not become world-class Elites simply by rising to their feet, and so on, I still found the experiment instructive —even though it was only a “two-night stand.”

First, the spectacular ethnocentrism of ordinary RWAs takes one’s breath away. Here they were again, as in Doom Night in 1994, in a room filled with people like themselves, and they simply made smaller in-groups. Assigning authoritarian followers to a sub-unit appears to automatically put blinders on them as to what was happening everywhere else. “We’re the (whatever) Team,” they seemed to say, and taking the concept of “team” much more seriously than most people do, they sealed themselves off from the rest of the world. They plopped down on their islands during the first night’s simulation and at best responded with charity now and then to the overwhelming problems they and the other islands were allowing to grow. They were not in the least warlike. But leaderless and rather unimaginative, they accomplished very little during the simulation. Although they started off with a lot of enthusiasm and drive, the disasters that resulted stole all the wind from their sails.

When one injected a few Double Highs into a high-RWA world, almost all of them grabbed power by hook or by crook. Although only a tiny part of the earth’s population, they made a huge difference in how the world developed because authoritarian followers basically just follow. And the world was agruably better than the one created the night before—assuming it would have survived a forty-first year. But everything depends on who leads high RWAs, and when the Double Highs took over and formed that lethal union, their strong need to dominate led to bullying, military build-ups, and warfare. They showed no signs of being guided by moral principles and they certainly had no interest in charity or in serving the common good of the planet. They thus proved as insular as ordinary RWAs, and their world failed almost as badly. A sample of ordinary high school students usually forges a better future than was shaped on either of these nights by authoritarian university students.

But there was one little wrinkle in this story. (There almost always is, in research.) Remember those private fortunes and “The World’s Richest Man”? I thought for sure that the Double Highs would squirrel away tons of dough in their own personal bank accounts. But almost no one did. In hindsight—always a winning perspective; try to find a race track that will let you place your bets after the races are run—the competition was so intense among the Elites that anyone who diverted funds into his own pocket might soon find his region wiped out economically or militarily. So the bucks stayed in the public purse. As I said, the game is not the real world, and if you knew this was going to happen you are smarter than I am and maybe you should stop reading this book and start writing your own.[417]^,[418] (It’s real easy: you just get yourself a website…)

Perspective and Application

Let’s play a game. I’ll describe a well-known American politician, the description being unceremoniously lifted from John Dean’s book, Conservatives Without Conscience. See if you can figure out who it is, and whether you can make a diagnosis of his personality, doctor.

“X” became a born-again Christian when he was first elected to Congress. He brought a strong drive for power with him to Washington, and he steadily worked his way to the top of the Republican caucus. Colleagues have described him as amoral. “If it wasn’t illegal to do it, even if it was clearly wrong and unethical, (he did it). And in some cases if it was illegal, I think he still did it” said another Republican Congressman. “X”is opposed to equality, and Newsweek commented that he has never been subtle about his uses of the power of Love and Fear. He kept marble tablets of the Ten Commandments and a half-dozen bull-whips in his office when the was the party whip. He earned the nicknames, “the Hammer,” “the Exterminator,” and the “Meanest Man in Congress.”

When “X” became House majority leader (talk about a big hint!) he imposed a virtual dictatorship on the House of Representatives. He instituted a number of unprecedented changes in House procedures to keep Democrats, and even other Republicans, from having any say in the laws being passed. He drastically revised bills passed by committees and often sent them to the floor from his office for almost immediate votes. He forbade amendments to most of the bills that came to the floor. He excluded Democrats from the House-Senate conference committees formed to iron out differences in bills passed by the two chambers. He allowed special interests to write laws that were passed by the compliant Republican majority. And he allowed unbelievable billions of dollars in pork-barrel GOP projects to be attached to appropriation bills.[419]

Who is “X”? If you said former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay from Texas, you are right. Can you see why he looked like a Double High to John Dean?[420]

But DeLay is the former House Leader because early in 2006 he was indicted for money-laundering, which forced him eventually to resign. DeLay illegally used corporate donations, allegedly, to get a Republican majority elected to the Texas legislature in 2002. With “his” Republicans in control, the Texas legislature blatantly redrew the U.S. congressional voting districts in 2003 along outlandishly gerrymandered lines to maximize the number of Republicans sent to Congress. African-American and Hispanic-American neighborhoods were packed into districts so all their votes could only elect one Democrat. Meanwhile Republican after Republican, running in hand-crafted districts drawn to their advantage, could win with much narrower margins. Thus the GOP could claim substantially more congressional seats than the Democrats. Republican majorities in the Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio legislatures similarly used “packing,” “cracking,” and “pairing” tactics when redrawing district lines in a blatant attempt, it seemed to many, to institute permanent one-party rule in the United States.[421]

The rise and fall of Tom DeLay simply illustrates once again that understanding social dominators—both the “white bread” kind who are not religious and the “holy bread” Double Highs who are, means grasping their passion for power. They want to control things and—compared with most people—they are prepared to be openly unfair, confrontational, intimidating, ruthless, and cold-blooded if they think that will work best. They are also willing to be manipulative, deceitful, treacherous and underhanded if they judge that the easier path. They can stare you in the face and threaten you with naked force, pure and simple, mano-a-mano. Or they can stab you in the back. But the goal remains, in all cases, more power. And power, once obtained, is meant to be used.

Want another example of an apparent Double High in a position of power, who is also being destroyed because he went too far? When George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 presidential election by the five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court, I remember some commentators saying that he had less of a mandate to carry out his policies than any president in American history. But I also thought, because I knew what was turning up in the research on social dominance, “Mandate-schmandate!” I could easily imagine the Bush team saying. “We’ve got the power now. Let’s do what we want! Who’s going to stop us?”

With eagerly subservient Republican majorities controlling both houses of Congress, Bush and his vice-president could do anything they wanted. And so they did. Greed ruled, the rich got big, big tax cuts, the environment took one body blow after another, religious opinions decided scientific issues, the country went to war, and so on. Bush and his allies had the political and military power to impose their will at home and abroad, it seemed, and they most decidedly used it.

A stunning, and widely overlooked example of the arrogance that followed streaked across the sky in 2002 when the administration refused to sign onto the International Criminal Court. This court was established by over a hundred nations, including virtually all of the United States’ allies, to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and so on when the country for whom they acted would not or could not do the prosecuting itself. It is a “court of last resort” in the human race’s defense against brutality.

Why on earth would the United States, as one of the conveners of the Nuremberg Trials and conceivers of the charge, “crimes against humanity,” want nothing to do with this agreement? The motivation did not become clear until later. But not only did America refuse to ratify the treaty, in 2002 Congress passed an act that allowed the United States to punish nations that did join in the international effort to prosecute the worst crimes anyone could commit! Talk about throwing your weight around, and in a way that insulted almost every friend you had on the planet.

But the social dominators classically overreached. Using military power in Iraq to “get Saddam” produced, not a shining democracy, but a lot of dead Americans, at least fifty times as many dead Iraqis, and the predicted civil war. The “war on terrorism” backfired considerably, as enraged Muslims around the world, with little or no connection to al Queda, formed their own “home-grown” terrorist cells bent on suicide attacks—especially after news of American atrocities in Iraq raced around the globe. Occupying Iraq tied down most of America’s mobile ground forces, preventing their use against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan which had supported the 9/11 attacks, and making American troops easy targets in the kind of guerilla warfare that produces revenge-driven massacres within even elite units.

But the president, showing the usual dogmatism of Double Highs, seemingly refused to learn the lesson of his four-year adventure in Iraq, and that of the 2006 election, and moved unilaterally to increase troop strength in Bagdad.

The national debt, which was being paid down, will now burden Americans for generations as traditional conservative economic policy has been obliterated. Savaging human rights in the torture chambers Bush set up overseas has cost America its moral leadership in the world, when just a few years ago, after September 11^th 2001, nation after nation, people after people, were its compassionate friends. Laws passed by Congress have been ignored through executive reinterpretation. The Constitution itself has been cast aside. The list goes on and on.

With corruption in Congress adding to their revulsion, independent and moderate voters gullied the Republican Party in the 2006 midterm election. How did the GOP fall so far so fast?

Power, the Holy Grail of social dominators, remains an almost uncontrollable two-headed monster. It can be used to destroy the holder’s most hated enemies, such as Saddam. But it often destroys the dominator in the process. Lord Acton put it succinctly with his famous statement that “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

When your life is a long power trip, it’s hard to get enough because it’s hard to get it all. And when a dominator does get power, we can’t be surprised if it is badly used. Social dominators do not use a moral compass to plot their plots—which is particularly ironic because in the case of Double Highs such as George W. Bush they seem to be so religious. But as we have seen, hypocrisy is practically their middle name. And the more power they have, the more disastrously they can hurt their country, their party, and themselves. It’s remarkable how often they do precisely that.[422]

Chapter Six: Authoritarianism and Politics

RWA, Social Dominance, and Political Preferences Among Ordinary People

After all you’ve learned about right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance, you’ll probably be disappointed to learn that these personality traits connect only moderately to the political preferences of ordinary people.[423] But the modest connections can be easily understood: people, darn it, are more complicated than psychologists want them to be.

First, a lot of people have as much interest in politics as I do in rutabaga—and for the same reason. These political drop-outs compose the bulk of that 40 to 60 percent of the population who do not vote in elections. That’s an awful lot of people whose RWA and social dominance scores are not going to correlate with anything political. Then one has the virtuous, heroic, cream-of-the-crop, super- dooper, world class heros, the Independents. (Uh, see note 19 from chapter 5.) The personalities of these party-poopers also won’t correlate with party preference, because they haven’t got any party preference.

Then come the members of the electorate who support a party but have very little idea what it stands for. You might call them political nincompoopers, but we have to recognize that political parties often make it hard to find out what they stand for. But some folks—not as keenly interested as one might perhaps wish—support the Democrats because their parents were Democrats, or their union says they should vote Democrat. Or they support the Republicans because “all the right people do,” or because they think the Republican candidate looks nice on TV. So with all these nonstarters and breakdowns, you can expect personality and party preference to often be strange bedfellows .[424]

If you now have concluded that we could fit all the informed, concerned voters in your community into a phone booth, that’s not true. For one thing, very few phone booths exist any more. But for another, pollsters regularly find that a significant number of ordinary citizens appreciate the importance of politics, and may even be involved in the political process. Generally, men are more likely to be interested than women are, well-educated people care more, and the older you get the more you scrutinize the candidates with your weary, wary eyes. Studies show that the more interested people are in politics, the more likely their party preference will correlate with their authoritarianism.

That implies the connection ought to be strongest among the biggest party animals among us, politicians. But how do you give personality tests to politicians? Well if you are willing to settle for studying lots of successful, important politicians, you can send surveys to legislatures and ask for the lawmakers’ personal, honest, anonymous answers. So I did. I sent the RWA scale to at least one chamber of forty-two of the state legislatures in the United States (all except Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Rhode Island, and West Virginia), mainly between 1990 and 1993. I also sent surveys to most of the legislatures in Canada, including the federal House of Commons. We’ll spend the first part of this chapter digging around in those results. Then we’ll talk about the biggest development in American politics in the past twenty-five years, the growth of the “Religious Right.”

Authoritarianism among American State Legislators

First of all, these studies all happened before the Social Dominance Orientation scale was available. So—because time-travel is strictly forbidden in social science research—I have no answers from legislators to that scale per se. But I do have some data almost as good, and they will tell us a lot when the time comes.

Next, you might rightly be wondering how state lawmakers had time to fill out surveys mailed to them by an obscure Canadian researcher, when they were supposed to be busy with The Public Business. Lawmakers are busy, and that’s probably one of the reasons I only heard from 1,233 (or 26%) of the 4,741 U.S. legislators I sent surveys to. Such a low return rate immediately raises the question of a self-selection sample bias, right? What would the results have been if everybody had responded, instead of only one-quarter?

Luckily you can estimate this with one of the crafty stratagems in the survey-givers’ bag of tricks. Let’s say, just to pick a wild possibility, you’re interested in whether Republican lawmakers score higher on the RWA scale than Democrats do. You look at the states you barely heard from, and then at the states where you got a much better return. Obviously you’re inclined to trust the latter results more. Making this comparison, you find that the higher the return rate was, the more Republicans tended to differ from Democrats. The smaller samples tended to cloud this relationship—which is a major problem with small samples. But it also means that if I had heard back from everyone, the difference would likely be substantially bigger than what actually turned up.

We’ll focus on the results obtained, not what I imagine they might be. But if you are admirably wondering about the response rate—which few readers do, and which few survey-takers even report— a self-selection sample bias certainly compromises my lawmaker studies. The numbers I obtained are “low balls.” Right-wing authoritarianism probably packs a bigger punch in American state legislatures than my data will show. We should keep that in mind. If I had heard from everyone, the bad things would likely be even worse.

Well, what differences did turn up? I sent the thirty-item RWA scale I was using in my research then to fifty legislative chambers, and in every single one except the Louisiana House, the Republicans scored higher overall than the Democrats.

Although the “right-wing” in right-wing authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait that endorses submission to established authority (see chapter 1), not a political ideology, the RWA scale finds different levels of this trait in politicians from the two parties.[425] The Republicans scored almost 40 points higher than the Democrats on the average, on the 30-item scale.

Figure 5.1 shows the average score of each caucus in each of the chambers I approached (viz., eleven senates and thirty-nine lower chambers). (The numbers on the scale have been reset in terms of the twenty-item measure we have been talking about since chapter 1.) Several things may leap out at you. First, the Democrats landed all over the place. The Republicans on the other hand crowd together so much that the person who drew this figure almost went crazy trying to jam all the names into such a small space. Second, as you would expect from the last paragraph, very few Democratic caucuses posted RWA scale scores as high as most of the Republicans did. The Democrats may be all over the place, but they’re mainly all over a less authoritarian place than Republican Country. Third, with the inevitable exceptions, southern legislators posted the highest scores.

Other Issues

I usually included some other measure besides the RWA scale on the surveys I mailed to the state capitols, and accordingly I found that high RWA lawmakers tended to:

not think wife abuse was a serious issue (a weak relationship; see note 12 of Chapter 1)
have conservative economic philosophies (a moderate relationship)
score highly on items assessing racial and ethnic prejudice (a moderate relationship)
reject a law raising the income tax rate for the rich and lowering it for the poor (a moderate relationship)
favor capital punishment (a sturdy relationship)
oppose gun control laws (a sturdy relationship)
favor a law prohibiting television broadcasts from a foreign country’s capital (such as Baghdad during the Gulf War) when the United States is at war with that country (a sturdy relationship)
favor a law requiring Christian religious instruction in public schools (a sturdy relationship)
score high in dogmatism (a sturdy relationship)
oppose a law requiring affirmative action in state hiring that would give priority to qualified minorities until they “caught up” (a sturdy relationship)
favor a law giving police much less restrictive wiretap, search-and-seizure, and interrogation rules (a strong relationship)
favor a law outlawing the Communist Party “and other radical political organizations” (a strong relationship)
oppose the Equal Rights Amendment (a strong relationship)
favor placing greater restrictions on abortion than “Roe versus Wade” (a strong relationship)
favor a law restricting anti-war protests to certain sizes, times, and places— generally away from public view—while American troops are fighting overseas (a very strong relationship)
have a “We were the good guys, the Soviets were the bad guys” view of the Cold War (a very strong relationship)
oppose a law extending equal rights to homosexuals in housing and employment (a very strong relationship)

Figure 5.1

Average RWA Scale Scores of American State Legislators, by State and Party

Notes: Scores have been re-scaled from a 30-item basis to a 20-item basis. The midpoint of the scale is 100. The sample includes 549 Republican legislators and 682 Democrats. Scores from upper chambers are presented in larger print (e.g. CONNECTICUT versus Connecticut). No Connecticut Democratic senator, and only one Mississippi Republican and one Wyoming Democratic senator answered, and hence no scores are given for those caucuses.

If you have read the preceding chapters, or been paying attention to what’s going on in your state capitol lately, none of this will astound you. What surprised me was how strong the relationships usually were. The RWA scale can predict what many lawmakers want to do about a wide variety of important issues.

Because they harbor so many authoritarian sentiments, Republican legislators naturally differed from Democrats overall on the matters above. But the differences were sharpest when you compared high RWA versus low RWA lawmakers, whatever their party affiliation. Many high RWA Democrats, and some low RWA Republicans appeared in these samples. The problem, as I see it, does not arise from Republicans per se but from the right-wing authoritarians on both sides of the aisle. But the data make it quite clear that when you see a bunch of Republican lawmakers huddling, you’re probably looking at mainly high RWAs, whereas when (non-southern) Democrats cluster, they’re probably a pretty unauthoritarian lot overall.

Double Highs in the Legislatures?

I noted in chapter 3 that designing despots will usually slither over to the political right, not just because their hearts and minds lead them there, but because that’s where the “easy sell” high RWAs congregate, wanting to play follow-the-leader. It’s the easiest place to pick up a loyal following cheap, especially if you’re a Double High. Therefore, were the high RWA state legislators in these studies not just high RWAs, but usually Double Highs? Were they social dominators as well?

Nothing would clarify that as quickly as scores on the Social Dominance scale. But, as mentioned earlier, the test had not been invented back then. However I did ask all the state lawmakers in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New Mexico to rank nine values, such as Happiness, National Security, and A World at Peace. I included in the list two of the core values of democracy, Freedom and Equality. Almost everyone ranked freedom first, but no such consensus existed about equality. Low RWA lawmakers ranked it third on their list, on the average, while the high RWAs ranked it seventh out of nine. Recalling that we identify social dominators by their disdain for equality, most of the high RWAs in this study thus appear to be high social dominators as well—which makes them Double Highs.

This makes sense, doesn’t it? Authoritarian followers probably don’t run for public office very often. So ordinary high RWAs are not at all likely to become lawmakers, unless they are hand-picked for the role of Unquestioning Party Supporters by powerful leaders to run in safe, “yellow dog” districts. Thus when you find someone in a legislature who scores highly on the RWA scale, it figures that he’s probably a Double High, as this study indicates.

Authoritarian Lawmakers and Freedom. Before moving on, let’s consider that top ranking of freedom. You hear authoritarian leaders talk all the time about defending freedom, preserving freedom, exporting freedom and (somebody else) dying for freedom. They wear American flag pins in their lapels and give solemn renditions of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner. They may truly believe that they are the real, deep-down, freedom-fighter patriots.

I’m not so sure. Their vision of America seems quite different from that of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and most of the other framers of the Constitution. Despite their pronouncements about freedom-this and freedom-that, high RWA lawmakers would like to pass laws that restrict freedom of the press, the right to protest, the right to privacy, the right to belong to the political organization of one’s choice, and they certainly would trample all over freedom of religion once they made the teaching of Christianity compulsory in public schools.

Such laws would hopefully be struck down as unconstitutional by the courts. But if a Supreme Court was assembled that opened the door to the destruction of the Bill of Rights—which could be just one justice away now—do you think authoritarian lawmakers would feign rushing through it? If so, let me tell you that you just won $10,000,000 in a lottery you didn’t even enter, but there are some administrative expenses you need to pay me first. And I just inherited $30,000,000 from a rich uncle, and if you just send me $3,000 to cover my legal fees, I’ll give you $3,000,000 in return! Oh boy!

Stomp Out the Rot. One last thing: an item on the RWA scale that I used in these legislator studies goes, “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.” It’s a ridiculous statement, isn’t it? People usually laugh when I read it out loud to an audience. It sounds like it came out of some Nazi Cheer Book. And a solid majority of the legislators who wrote the laws in American states when I did these studies rejected it. But 26 percent of the 1,233 lawmakers in my samples agreed with this. That’s already half-way to a majority. And in terms of later developments, I’ll point out that these studies were all done before 1994.

Canadian Legislators

The Canadian political system, you’ll be thrilled to learn, is more complicated than the two-party American arrangement. Federally, the “left” is anchored by the socialist-rooted New Democratic Party. It sticks by its guns, gathers its 12 to 20 percent of the votes each election, and dreams of the day when it will hold the balance of power in the House of Commons.

Next you have the Liberals, who too have a guiding principle by which they unflinchingly abide: getting themselves elected. Sometimes they act like liberals but they will also be conservatives if that will get them a majority government. Since they usually succeed, they attract a lot of the wrong sort of people: viz., politicians, and contributors looking to make a million or ten “on the side.”

When the Canadian electorate can’t abide the Liberals any more, they vote in the Conservatives, who have been Canada’s mainstream conservative party since confederation in 1867, when they were called the Conservatives. (Huh? Well you see, they changed their name to “Progressive Conservatives” for a while, but that party no longer exists, at least for the time being.)

Then you have the Far Right Party from Alberta, the province whose Bible belt and oil reserves remind some people of Texas. This party sticks to its guns too, but not its names. It has used a million different titles in the past thirty years as it keeps reinventing itself. Most recently it called itself the Alliance Party and it allied with the Progressive Conservative Party to become the Conservative Party. (Isn’t this fun?) At the time of this writing the latest wave of Liberal corruption has enabled the Conservatives to form a minority government in Ottawa.

Finally there is a Quebec separatist party, the Bloc Quebecois, which the cunning voters of Quebec send to Parliament in sufficient numbers each election to scare the hell out of the rest of the country. You don’t want to know about all the different provincial parties, believe me. And now the Green Party’s in the game too.

In a two-party system each party contains various factions. You have right-wing Democrats in the United States and left-wing Democrats, right-wing Republicans and the left-wing Republicans who have not been burned at the stake yet by the right-wing Republicans. However both parties, for all their factions, have to capture the “political middle” to win an election. But in a three-, four-, or five-party system the factions usually form their own parties, so in Canada only the Liberals have any sort of wingspan. That means most of the parties do stand for something distinctly different from each other, at least between elections. And that means you can put the RWA scale to a stiffer test in Canada than you can in the United States, because there’s more to predict. Will it reflect the more distinct points of view of Canada’s spread-out political parties?

Between 1983 and 1994 I sent the RWA scale to the legislative assemblies of most of Canada’s provinces, and to the members of the federal House of Commons who represented the western provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. (That was the only region in the country that had any diversity in its elected federal representatives at the time of the study; almost all the other Anglophone Members of Parliament were Liberals.) Altogether I received completed surveys from fifty-six members of the New Democratic Party, sixty-seven Liberals, and seventy-eight conservatives. The average RWA scores for the left-wing and right-wing caucuses are presented in Figure 5.2, with the wide-ranging Liberals tabulated on the side.

You can see that the conservatives’ scores nestle very comfortably into the Republican Country staked out in Figure 5.1. The politicians in the right-wing parties seem to be cut from much the same authoritarian cloth in both countries. But the New Democrats set camp to the left of the American Democrats in Figure 5.1—even to the left of the Democrats’ left-wing. A large chasm yawns in Canada between the New Democrats and the conservatives, a gap the Liberals are happy to cover with a wing and a prayer, as you can see, by flying hither and yon.

If you look at just the New Democrats’ and the conservatives’ scores on the RWA scale, party affiliation correlated .82 on the average with authoritarianism, which is one of the strongest relationships ever found in the social science s.[426] The RWA scale divides these two groups almost as cleanly as a vote in the legislature would.

Nothing else, so far as I know, correlates so highly with left-wing versus right-wing politics, anywhere. In Canada at least, when you are talking about the “left-toright” political dimension among politicians, you are talking about the personality trait measured by the RWA scale. At least until something sharper comes along. This might be true in the United States as well, but it doesn’t show up nearly as crisply in terms of party affiliation mainly because the Democrats have a lot of high RWAs in some of their caucuses, particularly in the South.

Note: Scores have been re-scaled from a 30-item basis to a 20-item basis.

As was true with the American legislatures, I tacked on some items measuring other things besides right-wing authoritarianism in my last two Canadian studies, done in 1994 with the Alberta Legislature and the Members of Parliament. In Alberta, RWA scale scores had a moderate connection with having a conservative economic philosophy. In the House of Commons, authoritarianism was strongly correlated with racial and ethnic prejudice. As you would predict from the findings above, politicians from right-wing parties had the most conservative economic outlooks, and proved the most prejudiced.

I also was able to include, thanks to Felicia Pratto, some Social Dominance items in the survey I sent to the Alberta legislature and the House of Commons. The average correlation between RWA scores and answers to these items equaled .54 and confirms the presence of a lot of Double Highs in those chambers. Almost all of them belonged to the conservative party in those assemblies. In Canada as well as in the United States then, when you’re talking about conservative members of legislatures, the data we have so far indicate you’re usually talking about those fine power-hungry, amoral, manipulative, deceitful, highly prejudiced, dogmatic folks we met at the end of chapter 5, the Double Highs.

Religious Conservatives and the Republican Party

These legislator studies are now more than a decade old, and any politician who did not like the results could argue “Things have changed a lot since then.” And things probably have changed. There are probably a lot more Double Highs in American legislatures now than there were in the early 1990s. Probably more than 26% of the lawmakers in the United States would agree with that “Nazi Cheer Book” item today. In many states, the Double Highs and their minions appear to have formed the majority, and as we noted in chapter 5, have sometimes set about reducing the opposition to permanent impotence through unprecedented levels of gerrymandering, not to mention voter fraud.

For much of its history conservative American Christianity stayed out of politics. Politics was seen as corrupting and the abiding principle was to be “in this world, but not of it.” Even the rise of the evangelical movement under Billy Graham, beginning in the 1950s, was nonpolitical. But in 1969 a young political analyst in the Nixon administration with considerable foresight, Kevin Phillips, published The Emerging Republican Majority in which he identified various developments in the country that he believed would create a boon for Republican candidates for decades to come.

Phillips said the new GOP coalition would include increased numbers of both Catholic and Protestant conservatives, and he says today, “This troubled me not at all .”[427] It was just part of the coalescing “mix.” Now he is greatly troubled because—as he explains in his 2006 book, American Theocracy—religious conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party, turning it into the first religious party in U.S. history and endangering everyone else’s rights, the future of the country, and that of the worl d.[428] How did this happen?

With astonishing speed. To give just the highlights, in the late 1970s a group of conservative political organizers persuaded Jerry Falwell to lead the Moral Majority, which found Ronald Reagan much more to its liking in 1980 than the Baptist (but moderately liberal) Jimmy Carter. As Reagan’s second term drew to a close in 1988 the highly successful Christian broadcaster, Pat Robertson, marshaled his followers in a bid to become the Republican presidential nominee. But George Bush (the first one) countered by making special appeals to conservative Christians, especially Southern Baptists who did not like Robertson’s Pentecostal practices, and Bush won the nomination.

At the 1988 Republican convention Robertson urged his supporters to work for Bush. But he then used remnants of his campaign apparatus to found the Christian Coalition in 1989, whose purpose was to get conservative Christians of all denominations involved in a voter mobilization movement. He knew an intense effort could pay big dividends, as he wrote in The New Millennium in 1990, “With the apathy that exists today, a small, well-organized minority can influence the selection of (political) candidates to an astonishing degree.” Two years later he wrote in The New World Order, “The Christian Coalition is launching an effort in selected states to become acquainted with registered voters in every precinct. This is slow, hard work. But it will build a significant database to use to communicate with those people who are regular voters. When they are mobilized in support of vital issues, elected officials listen.”

The Christian Coalition, composed of thousands of members burning with zeal, began distributing hundreds of thousands of bulletins in churches to help elect approved candidates. At the same time conservative Christians began taking control of state Republican organizations, by joining the party and showing up for meetings, from the precinct-level up, so that eventually they decided who would run for the state legislature, for governor, and for the Congress. Kevin Phillips noted, “By the end of the 1990s more than half of the fifty Republican state committees had been taken over by the religious right at least once.”[429]

In 1994 the hard-working religious conservatives played a pivotal role in electing a GOP majority in the House of Representatives. By 2000 they were able to make one of their own, George W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president, and the expanding ranks of the Christian Coalition distributed over 70 million voter guides in Catholic as well as Protestant churches, and elsewhere across the country. This effort enabled Bush to come close to Al Gore’s popular vote totals, and ultimately to win the electoral college vote after the Supreme Court ruled in the Republican Party’s favor in Florida. Everyone knows Bush would have lost his re-election bid in 2004 without the support of tens of thousands of devoted workers recruited by his chief campaign strategist, Karl Rove, through their churches.

By most estimates the religious right constitutes about 40 percent of Republican supporters nationwide, which means that most of the people who vote Republican do not belong to the movement. But that 60 percent has almost no say in what the party does, because the 40 percent constitutes by far the largest organized block of voters in the party, and in the country.

How organized are they? After their leaders have decided who will run on the Republican ticket in an election, religious fundamentalists donate money, work the phones for hours on end, canvass night and day, bring the candidate to their social groups, talk to their neighbors, and drop leaflets over and over again to win the race. After all, proselytizing is one of the things they do best, and politics is now directly connected to their religion. In fact political “education” and “guidance”come directly from the pulpit in many churches now.

Authoritarian followers will thus do everything humanly possible to “get out their vote” and send more of “their kind” of people to the school board, state legislature, the statehouse, Congress and the White House. Unfortunately, “their kind” of candidates will usually be Double Highs—about the last people you would want in positions of power in a democracy.

The leadership of the religious right—a mixture of established politicians, prominent religious figures, and behind-the-scenes organizers—can firmly control a legislator it helped elect—even if most of the lawmaker’s votes came from non-fundamentalists. The legislator realizes that if the power brokers pull the plug on him and put someone else up for the next election, he’ll be out of a job.

The religious right can also put a lot of pressure on those it did not help elect. It can bury a “swing-vote” senator or a representative with letters, emails, telegrams and petitions in a flash. As Ted Haggard, the soon-to-be-disgraced president of the National Association of Evangelicals says on Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary film, Friends of God, “We can crash the Capitol switchboard system. That’s power.” Fundamentalist organizers thus will try to carry almost any contentious issue by storm today, if they have to, from whether to keep Terri Schiavo on life support to the next nomination to the Supreme Court.[430][431]

The 2006 Mid-Term Election

But didn’t the Religious Right abandon the Republican party in the November 2006 mid-term election? And didn’t the rest of the country firmly repudiate the Republicans too?

You may have seen headlines to this effect, but some ugly facts say otherwise. In the 2004 federal election, when the Religious Right made an all-out effort to reelect George Bush and support Republican candidates, the big “exit poll” study done by a consortium of major news organizations found that 74% of white evangelicals voted for the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in their district. (It was, far and away, the biggest demographic advantage the GOP had in the election.) In the 2006 mid-term election, the figure dropped, but only to 70%, and white evangelicals again provided the Republicans their most solid, unswerving base of support. Despite all the moral scandals and unfulfilled “value” promises, the high RWAs turned out in goodly numbers—especially given that it was a mid-term election-and staunchly voted Republican.

Let’s zoom back and look at the electorate as a whole. As voters went to the polls in November 2006 the war in Iraq was clearly becoming unwinnable, one corruption scandal after another had rocked Republicans in the Congress,[432] the national debt was shooting out of sight, the Bush administrations’ use of domestic spying in violation of the Constitution had been well-documented, as had its systematic program of torturing people it suspected of terrorism, evidence was piling up that the Republicans had stolen the 2004 presidential election through voter fraud and dirty tricks in Ohio, the economy was slowing down, “Robocall” was hammering away at the phone lines, and the final two nails, named Representative Mark Foley and the Reverend Ted Haggard, had just been nailed into the GOP coffin.

With all that happening, only 40% of the eligible voters sent to the polls, and 45% of them voted Republican. If the war in Iraq had just taken a few more months to become transparently disastrous, or if there had been just one or two fewer scandals in the last weeks of the campaign, America would still have a monolithic federal government controlled by a pack of Double Highs. Maybe you take some comfort from November 7, 2006. I think the bullet just missed us.

As this is being written in April, 2007, the leading GOP presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani, seems likely to lose support as the public learns more about him. If the leaders of the Religious Right can agree on a candidate, I believe the loyal followers can easily be motivated to make their choice the Republican nominee. And devastation could result, either to the GOP, or to the country.

A Bit of Modest Speculation

One of the easiest mistakes to make when judging a threatening movement is to perceive it as being more unified and monolithic than it really is. So let’s do a little speculating here. Let’s suppose the Religious Right gains long-term control of the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of the federal government and accomplishes its common agenda. Which is, for starters, to outlaw all abortions, outlaw homosexuality, stomp out feminism, make female subjugation to males the law, keep holy wars going, especially in the Middle East, using nuclear weapons as needed, withdraw from the United Nations, smack the hell out of France and any other country that isn’t automatically on America’s side, censor virtually every movie, television program, magazine, newspaper and the internet in any way possible, install the teaching of Christian fundamentalism in public schools, forbid the teaching of evolution, make scientific judgments on the basis of conservative Christian ideology, and so on—complete with the death penalty for various violators, possibly by public stoning. (I hope you don’t think I’m making this all up. Google “Religious Right Agenda,” “Christian Reconstructionists,” and “Dominionists.”)

Would the victors then all clap each other on the back and live happily ever after in Taliban America? Maybe they would. But recalling what we know about the dominance drives and prejudices of Double Highs, wouldn’t a subsequent Catholic versus Protestant struggle for control be just as likely? Coalitions last only as long as the common enemy does, and few things provoke animosity the way religious differences do among the very religious. And if the Protestants subdued the Catholics, would that be the end of religious warfare, or the beginning of the next round? After all, Baptists and Pentecostals don’t really like each other all that much.

Well of course this is all wild-eyed speculation, isn’t it, and we’re talking about things that may have occurred elsewhere, but are absolutely unprecedented in American history. So there is little reason to think this would indeed happen. OK, I hear you. Now tell me why all of this will not happen.

Chapter Seven: What’s To Be Done?[433]

If you are a reasonably critical person, by now you’ve got to be wondering if you’re being buried by a big snow job. Almost without exception, the findings about authoritarians in the previous chapters have been negative. You wouldn’t want your daughter to marry one, would you? But maybe this presentation has been one-sided. Maybe is has been unfair. Maybe things have been biased.[434]

It is one-sided if we conclude that authoritarians have no good qualities whatsoever, for they do. High RWAs are earnest, hard-working, happy, charitable, undoubtedly supportive of people in their in-group, good friends, and so on. Social dominators are ambitious and competitive—cardinal virtues in American society. It’s as big a mistake, I have to keep telling myself, to see people as all-bad as it is to see them as all-good.

But the downside remains, and I want to emphasize that it’s really there. The presentation of the research in this book has not passed through any kind of theoretical or ideological filter. In almost every experiment, low RWAs and low Social Dominators had as much a chance to look bad as their counterparts on the high end. But they seldom did. I have not stole past any praiseworthy findings about authoritarians; I have always reported any bad news that turned up about lows. I know it seems very one-sided, but that’s the way the data tumbled. While authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders have their good side, their bad side is pretty broad and hard to miss.

Self-Righteousness Begins at Home

Having said this, I’d like to start this last chapter with some observations about any self-righteous s.o.b.’s who are reading it. Let’s start with me.

When I was an undergraduate I often attended a weekly film series held in one of the big lecture halls. There I saw many of the black-and-white classics that came out before I started going to the movies, such as “All’s Quiet on the Western Front” and “King Kong.” What I did not realize, as I listened to actors moaning and screaming on the screen before me was that a lot of moaning and screaming was going on, night after night, just under my feet in the basement of this building. For that’s where Stanley Milgram did most of his famous studies of obedience.

We’re going to talk about those studies now, then consider other evidence of what ordinary men are capable of doing, and then decide what to do about all this.

Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience

At one time these studies were well known in North America, but fewer and fewer people heard of them as time passed. So I’m going to summarize Milgram’s basic experiment here and hope that, when you don’t believe me, you’ll look it up and see for yourself. Then I’m going to connect it to The Basic Finding of Social Psychology (now you can genuflect) and make a truly fundamental point about authoritarianism to help control the self-righteousness simmering in all our beings. For you see, if Stanley Milgram had tapped me on the shoulder one night as I left the film series and asked me to serve in his experiment, I would probably have done the most hideous, unforgivable thing in my life then.

Milgram never would have tapped a student, though. He studied mainly men recruited through newspaper ads in the greater New Haven, Connecticut area for a “study of memory.” When you arrived at the Yale University building to keep your appointment, you might have encountered a pleasant, middle-aged, white gentleman who was looking for the same room you were. After a little exploring the two of you locate it and are met by the Experimenter. He explains that his study is designed to explore the effects of punishment on learning. One of you is going to be a Teacher, and the other subject a Learner. The two of you draw lots, and (I promise you) you become the Teacher. Lucky you.

If you have been gazing around the room during this spiel you have noticed a large metal box on a table where the Teacher is going to sit. It’s an electric shock generator, and there’s a long row of thirty up-down toggle switches running across the face of it. The first switch says it gives a 15 volt shock, the second, 30 volts, and so on. A few switches more and you’re at 120 volts, which is approximately the voltage of the electricity that comes out of the wall sockets in your house.

On and on the switches go, until finally they end at 450 volts. The last two are simply labeled “XXX.” The Experimenter gives you, the Teacher, a sample shock of 45 volts so you’ll get an idea what it feels like. When a switch is thrown you hear something thunk inside the box, a buzzer sounds, various lights go on, the needle lurches on a voltmeter, and the man in the adjacent room may scream.

The man in the adjacent room is the other subject, who got the job of Learner. He has been given an obviously impossible task of memorizing a long list of word-pairs after just one run-through. You’ve seen him get strapped into a heavy chair and you’ve seen a shock plate fastened onto his arm. Your job is quite simple. As the Teacher, you ask the Learner a question through an intercom. If he gets it right, you ask him the next one. When he gets it wrong, which anyone would do quite often, you give him a shock. However, here’s the joker: you have to throw the next switch each time, which means each shock is 15 volts stronger than the last, and as the Learner makes the inevitable mistakes, you’re moving closer and closer to an electrocution.

At 75 volts the Learner grunts, “Ugh!” You can hear him through the wall separating him from you. Let’s say you turn to the Experimenter, who is sitting behind you, and say “He just said something.” The Experimenter says, “Please continue,” and so you do. More grunting occurs at 90 and 105 volts. You again ask for guidance, and the Experimenter says, “The experiment requires that you continue.” At 120 volts the Learner grunts and then shouts, “Hey, this really hurts!” You relay this to the Experimenter, who says, “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” Two shocks later, at 150 volts, the Learner shouts, “Experimenter! Get me out of here. I won’t be in the experiment any more. I refuse to go on.”

You are now clearly standing at a fork in the road, because the Learner has demanded to be set free. He didn’t address his demand to you, but it’s crystal clear that he doesn’t want to be in the study any longer. You would be inflicting pain on him against his will if you throw the next switch. He HAS the right to quit the experiment, hasn’t he? There, but for the luck of the draw, sits you strapped in the Learner’s seat receiving obviously painful electric shocks. And all your experience tells you the shocks are getting more and more dangerous with every mistake.

So you turn to the Experimenter expecting him to call it quits. But instead he says, “Please continue.” You point out the Learner is demanding to be set free. The Experimenter says, “Whether the Learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.” If you say the shocks are dangerous now, the Experimenter says, “Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.” If you still refuse, the Experimenter tells you sternly, “You have no other choice. You must go on.” If your knees buckle and you say, “But who’s going to be responsible for what happens to that man in there?” the Experimenter ignores you. If you say it again, the Experimenter says, “I’ll be responsible. Now please continue.” What are you going to do? Defy a psychologist in his own laboratory? Would anyone dare?

Assuming you can’t find it in yourself to defy this tin-pot authority figure—and you have every right to be insulted by this assumption—more shouting and demanding to be set free occur until you get to 270 volts. Then you hear an agonized scream followed by an hysterical, “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here.

Let me out. Do you hear? Let me out of here.” Four screams later the Learner stops responding in any way. If you give him the next shock (345 volts) there is no sound. The Learner is either unconscious or dead.

Still the Experimenter insists on continuing the procedure until the (dying or dead) Learner “gets all the word pairs right.” If you go onward, likely with trembling hand if you do, to 450 volts, you might think this insanity will end there because you’ve run out of switches. But no, “Dr. Frankenstein” tells you to keep using the last switch over and over again until the Learner you-know-what. When you use the 450 volt switch for the third time, the experiment does end.

Stanley Milgram then comes into the room (the role of Experimenter was played by a hired hand), and slowly debriefs the Teacher, who soon finds out that no electricity ever reached the Learner. The Learner (another hired hand) appears, all alive, friendly and forgiving. This is very good news to you because while many people who hear about the experiment suspect the Teacher must have seen through the ruse at some point, all the evidence in the world says the Teachers did not. If they had gone all the way, where I am sure I would have gone in 1962, they were usually basket cases by the time the experiment ended.[435]

Well, how many people would go all the way to 450 volts in that situation? Milgram asked 39 psychiatrists and they all said NO ONE would. If you ask ordinary people the same question, they say only a pathological fringe element, perhaps one or two percent of the population, would go all the way. Certainly people know they themselves WOULD NOT, COULD NOT, EVER, NEVER do such a thing. So if you know that you would not, could not, that’s what almost everyone says.

Milgram ran 40 men, one at a time, in the situation I just described. All 40 shocked the Learner after he started grunting; all 40 gave the “household voltage” 120 volt shock. Thirty-four went past the 150 volt mark where the Learner demanded to be set free, which means 85% of the Teachers paid less attention to the Learner’s undeniable rights than they did to the Experimenter’s insistence that the study continue. Thereafter a few more people dropped out, one here and one there. Altogether fifteen men got up the gumption to eventually tell the Experimenter, “No, I won’t.” But the other twenty-five men went to 450 volts and threw the switch over and over until the Experimenter told them to stop.

That’s not NONE of them. That’s 62%. It’s not all of them, but it is MOST of them![436]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called a liar or a fool by people who had never heard of Milgram’s experiment before I told them. The results just stagger one, don’t they? But they seem to be true and general. Milgram’s basic finding that most adults would inflict severe pain upon and even risk the death of an innocent victim in a psychology-experiment-gone-mad has been found numerous times since, elsewhere in the United States, and in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Jordan. University students as well as persons recruited from the general population have served as subjects, and obeyed just as much.

Subjects believe the shocks are real. Virtually no Teacher is willing to become the Learner and start the experiment over. The Teachers are greatly relieved when they discover the Learner was actually unharmed. Yet most of them would surely have killed the Learner if electricity had actually flowed from the shock box.[437]

Why do people do it? The Experimenter makes no threat against the Teachers whatsoever. The Teachers were only paid $4.50 for participating in the study (a penny a volt, it turns out) so they weren’t brutalizing someone for riches beyond belief. Absolutely nothing outside the Teachers prevented them from saying “Go to hell!” and setting the Learner free and walking out of the joint. But instead most of them sat there, smoking, squirming, sweating, shaking, mumbling, biting their lips, protesting-and then throwing the next switch.

Why, then?

Partly they did it, I am sure, because people think they lose their independence and right to act freely when they become part of a psychology experiment (whereas the researcher usually wants them to act exactly as they feel like acting).[438] But the bigger reason has to be that the vast majority of us have had practically no training in our lifetimes in openly defying authority. The authorities who brought us up mysteriously forgot to teach that. We may desperately want to say no, but that turns out to be a huge step that most people find impossibly huge—even when the authority is only a psychologist you never heard of running an insane experiment. From our earliest days we are told disobedience is a sin, and obedience is a virtue, the “riht” thing to do.

I saw this myself when I ran a very mild “fake electric shock memory experiment”four times in 1971 and 1972. In my study the Teacher chose the level of shock after each mistake. The shock machine only sported five switches, running from “Slight Shock” to “Very Strong Shock” and the Teacher could repeatedly use the lowest shock if s/he wished. Most subjects used a variety of shocks, and (as I reported in chapter 1) it turned out authoritarians gave stronger shocks on the average to the Learner, whom they could see in the next room through a one-way mirror, than most people did.

There was, however, a second shock device sitting on the table before the Teacher which had a single large red button on it, and the ominous label: “Danger: Very Severe Shock. Do not push this button unless you are instructed to do so.” When the learning trials had ended the Experimenter told the Teacher to push this button because he thought the Learner had not tried hard enough during the memory test. It was a punishment, pure and simple, a very severe one, and it had nothing to do with the data being collected because the data had all been collected.

In my four studies (two of which used people recruited through newspaper ads, and the other two introductory psychology students) 89%, 86%, 88% and 91% of the subjects pushed the button that said it would deliver a dangerous shock. It took these compliant subjects, on the average, about four seconds to do so. Teachers typically asked, “You mean this one?” before proceeding, but once that was verified they pushed “Big Red.” The few subjects who refused usually thought they were going to get the shock if they did so. (Nothing happened when the dangerous button was pushed; the Experimenter “discovered” a high voltage connection had come loose.)[439]

In this study the subjects had about twenty minutes to anticipate what they would do if they were told to give a dangerous, very severe shock, and still most of them did so almost immediately. The possibility of saying “no” seems not to have occurred to them.

Milgram’s Variations on His Theme. Once he overcame his own astonishment at what he had found, Stanley Milgram ran numerous variations on his experiment to see what factors affected obedience. For example, he seated the Learner right next to the Teacher. This understandably made it more difficult to hurt the victim, but still 40 percent of a new sample of forty men went all the way to 450 volts. So Milgram then made another batch of Teachers hold the Learner’s hand down on a shock plate through an insulating sheet, while throwing switches with their other hand. This especially gruesome condition further reduced compliance, but still 30 percent of 40 men totally obeyed.

If you assume the samples were reasonably representative of the general population, it means someone who wished you dead would have to try three or four complete strangers in this experimental setup before he found someone who would hold you down and kill you with electric shocks rather than say no to a psychology experimenter. If that doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, nothing will.

But, you might well argue, these experiments were run at a big famous university, and Teachers in conflict over whether to throw the next switch might have reasoned, “Yale wouldn’t run an experiment that endangered someone’s life.”

Milgram appreciated this too, so he moved his set-up to Bridgeport, Connecticut and distributed a mail circular soliciting men to serve in a memory experiment for the fictitious “Research Associates of Bridgeport.” Subjects reported to a sparsely equipped office in a rather run-down building in downtown Bridgeport. If they asked who was doing the study, they were told the Associates was a private firm doing studies for industry. No connection to Yale or any other prestigious institution was stated or implied. Rather the opposite seemed to be the case; the whole arrangement had a somewhat “seedy,” fly-by-night appearance, and total compliance dropped—but only from 62 percent to 48 percent. Clearly the connection to Yale was not the primary reason Milgram had found such stunning and destructive obedience.[440]

The “Teaching Team” Conditions and Social Psychology’s Great Discovery

Let me tell you about Milgram’s two “Teaching Team” experiments, and then I’ll make my big point. Back in New Haven, real subjects were combined with (supposedly) other subjects to form a teaching team that quizzed the Learner and administered the shocks. The other Teachers, like the Experimenter and the Learner, were confederates playing scripted roles. In one version of the Teaching Team experiment, two (confederate) Teachers who were seated next to the real subject refused, by 210 volts, to participate any further. The Experimenter then tried to get the real subject, who had been serving in a subsidiary role, to take over shocking the Learner. Do you think the 40 men serving in this condition would do so? Not a chance. Only 10 percent of them went all the way to 450 volts; the other 90 percent followed their peers in open rebellion.

But what did another 40 men do when a (confederate) fellow teacher did the shocking without complaint while they did essential but subsidiary tasks? In this “Adolf Eichmann” condition, 92 percent of the real subjects went all the way to 450 volts with scarcely a murmur of protest.

So did it matter who the individuals were who served in these Teaching Team conditions? Do you think that the people who defied the Experimenter in the first situation would similarly have quit if they had been randomly assigned to the “Adolf Eichmann”condition instead? Isn’t it obvious that virtually everyone simply did what the people around him did? If the other teachers defied the Experimenter, so did thirty-six of the forty real subjects. If the other teacher went merrily on his obedient way shocking the Learner, nary a word was heard from thirty-seven of those forty real subjects. Obedience of authority is one of the “strong forces” in life, but so also is conformity to one’s peers. How people acted depended very little on what kind of people they were, and very greatly on the situation they were in—particularly on what their peers did.[441]

That is the Great Discovery of social psychology. Experiment after experiment demonstrates that we are powerfully affected by the social circumstances encasing us. And very few of us realize how much. So if we are tempted by all the earlier findings in this book to think that right-wing authoritarians and social dominators are the guys in the black hats while we fight on the side of the angels, we are not only falling into the ethnocentric trap, we are not only buttering ourselves up one side and down the other with self-righteousness, we are probably deluding ourselves as well. Milgram has shown us how hard it is to say no to malevolent authority, how easy it is to follow the crowd, and how very difficult it is to resist when the crowd is doing the biding of malevolent authority. It’s not that there’s some part of “No” we don’t understand. It’s that situational pressures, often quite unnoticed, temporarily strike the word from our vocabulary.

So the RWA scale and the Social Dominance scale do not “tell us how authoritarian we are.” They only suggest how authoritarian we are inclined to be. Our behavior says how authoritarian we are. “Hello, my name is Bob. I can be an authoritarian.”

Say what? In case you’re wondering, I’m not taking back all the things I said in the first six chapters of this book. Our levels of authoritarianism do matter in most of life. Milgram’s Teachers were in a very unfamiliar environment among complete strangers who were scripted to act in certain ways no matter what the Teachers did. Trying to change them would have been as futile as my trying to change the outcome of the movies I was watching one floor above.

Usually, however, we are in familiar situations interacting with others who are well known to us, whom we can affect by how we act. So it matters who we are and what we do. And research shows it takes more pressure to get low RWAs to behave shamefully in situations like the Milgram experiment than it takes for highs. But the difference between low and high authoritarians is one of degree, I repeat, not kind. To put a coda on this section: with enough direct pressure from above and subtle pressure from around us, Milgram has shown, most of us cave in.

Not very reassuring, huh. But it makes crystal clear, if it wasn’t before, why we have to keep malevolent leaders out of power.

Ordinary Men

If you’re thinking that the man on the street might somehow be manipulated into administering possibly lethal shocks to someone in a psychology experiment, but he certainly could not be induced to murder innocent victim after innocent victim in real life, let me ask you: Who did the killing in the Holocaust? Answer: Mostly members of Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, the “S.S.” They followed along behind the German army as it advanced through Poland and the Soviet Union, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews who now found themselves in Nazi-occupied territory. And they operated the death camps, including the greatest murder factory of them all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. To be a member of the S.S. you had to be a fanatical Nazi. Usually believed Jews were sub-human racial enemies and had to be destroyed. By all accounts they destroyed with sadistic enthusiasm.

But they did not do all the systematic murdering of the Jews. Some of it was done by quite ordinary men who were not consumed with anti-Semitism, and who were only marginally members of the German armed forces. Reserve Police Battalion 101 provides an example.[442] It was a part of the “Order Police” formed in Germany to maintain control in occupied countries.

Battalion 101 had eleven officers and nearly 500 men—nearly all of them from Hamburg. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was a World War I veteran who had risen in the police service after that war. He was not a member of the S.S., but two of his company commanders were, and the third was a “Nazi by conviction.” The rank and file were about 40 years old on the average, too old to be drafted into the Wermacht. They had worked on the docks, driven trucks, and moved things around warehouses for the most part prior to being drafted. Although a quarter of them were members of the Nazi Party, they had grown up before Hitler came to power. They were given basic military training and in June 1942, sent to Poland.

At first the battalion rounded up Jews in various locations and send them off to camps and eventual death. The men did this with about as much hesitation as Milgram’s subjects showed in the “Eichmann condition.” But on July 11, 1942 Major Trapp received orders to move his battalion to the town of Jozefow —which was probably a village much like Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof—and after sending the fit Jewish males off to labor camps, to kill the 1800 Jewish women, children, infirm and elderly who remained.

Trapp was quite distressed by this assignment, and as the order passed down the chain of command within the battalion of policemen, one of the junior officers announced he would not take part in the killings. His platoon was therefore put in charge of moving the Jewish men to the labor camp.

As the day of execution dawned Trapp assembled his battalion, told them of their assignment, and then made an extraordinary offer: any of the older policemen who did not feel up to the task would be excused. One man stepped forward and was immediately berated by his company commander. But Major Trapp cut his officer off and took the soldier under his wing. Seeing this, ten to twelve other men stepped forward. But the rest of the battalion stayed in their ranks, and were soon moved out to perform the executions. Major Trapp excused himself from any direct participation, and the three company commanders organized the massacre.

The policemen blocked off the Jewish section of the village and set to work herding the residents to the town square. The old and infirm were shot in their homes. Infants and small children were sometimes shot on the spot, but usually were moved with everyone else to the square. One company of the battalion was pulled aside and given a quick lesson in how to shoot someone in the back of the head with a rifle. It then moved to a nearby wooded area and awaited the victims to be brought to them in trucks.

When the trucks were unloaded the executioners were paired off, face to face, with their individual victims. They marched the Jews further into the woods, made them kneel down, and shot them. The killings continued all day without interruption, but the pace was slow so Major Trapp ordered a second company into the woods to speed up the murders. The leader of one of the platoons in this company gave all his men the opportunity to do something else, without penalty, but no one took up his offer.

A number of the policemen however found various ways to avoid becoming executioners. They hid in the village, or gave themselves extra “searching” duties. Some of the shooters asked to be given other assignments, especially after being given a woman or child to kill, and generally they were excused. Some of the policemen deliberately missed their target from point-blank range, while others just “disappeared” into the woods for the rest of the day. But these were the exceptions. At least 80 percent of those called upon to murder helpless civilians did so and continued to do so until all the Jews from Jozefow had been killed.

Afterwards Major Trapp instructed his men not to talk among themselves about what they had done. But great resentment and bitterness roiled in the battalion. The physical act of shooting someone had proved quite gruesome, with many of the shooters becoming covered with the blood and brains of their victims. Some of the policemen had killed people they had known earlier in Hamburg or elsewhere. Almost everyone was angry about having to kill children.

How could they do it, especially since many of them never individually had to? For one thing, while the policemen were not usually Nazis, they had little regard for Jews in general, so that made it easier. For another, their company commanders made it clear that, whatever Major Trapp had said and whomever he had protected, they expected their men to do the job assigned to them.

But judicial interrogations of some 125 of the men conducted in the 1960s indicated that, while no one had to participate, and about a dozen men demonstrated this by stepping forward, and others later dropped out in various ways, the great majority stayed in ranks and later killed whoever was brought to them out of loyalty to those ranks, and to maintain their standing in their units. “The act of stepping out that morning in Jazefow meant leaving one’s comrades and admitting that one was too weak or cowardly.” “Who would have dared,” declared one of the policemen, “to lose face before the assembled troops?”[443]

Thus the men chose to become murderers rather than look bad in the eyes of the other men. It was a hideous, barbarous, supremely evil thing to do for mere acceptance, but as I said, researchers find the need to belong and conform, to be liked and “not make waves” powerfully affect the behavior of ordinary men. And the mass murderers in Reserve Police Battalion 101 were rather ordinary men.

Over time, as the battalion participated in more and more mass murders, it became much more relaxed and efficient in its deadly operations. These ordinary men got used to killing thousands of people at close range as part of their day’s work. By the time their part of the “Final Solution”was completed in Poland, the battalion had shot at least 38,000 Jews to death.

So What’s Your Point?

Good question. I’m not saying you and I are homicidal maniacs, or that the Christian fundamentalist down the street is ready to shoot all his out-groups at the drop of a hat. I’m not saying that America in the twenty-first century is the Third Reich in the 1940s. I’m not saying that the Republican Party today is the born-again Nazi Party. But I am saying that we as individuals are poorly prepared for a confrontation with evil authority, and some people are especially inclined to submit to such authority and attack in its name.

Authoritarian followers, who have always been there but were usually uninterested and unorganized, are now mightily active and highly organized in American politics. They claim to be the “real Americans,” but the America they yearn to create seems quite antithetical to the nation envisioned by the founding fathers. Far from seeing the wisdom of separating church and state, for example, they want a particular religious point of view to control government, and be spread and enforced by the government. Furthermore, if research on abolishing the Bill of Rights and tolerance for government injustices is to be believed, authoritarian followers frankly don’t give a damn about democratic freedoms.

If being prejudiced makes it easier to commit atrocities, high RWAs rank among the most prejudiced people in the country. If obedience to malevolent authority makes one more likely to persecute others—hey, authoritarian followers can chant “We’re Number One, We’re Number One!” If wanting to belong, and loyalty to your group, and a tendency to conform play a role in attacks on others, high RWAs lead the league in those things too. If inclination to persecute any group the government selects counts for something, we know from the “posse” studies that right-wing authoritarians head up that line as well.

If illogical thinking, highly compartmentalized ideas, double standards, and hypocrisy help one to be brutally unfair to others, high RWAs have extra helpings in all those respects. If being fearful makes one likely to aggress in the name of authority, high RWAs are scared up one side and down the other. If being self-righteous permits one to think that attacks against helpless victims are justified, authoritarian followers have their self-righteousness super-sized, thank you. If being able to forgive oneself and forget the evil one has done make it easier to attack over and over again in the future, right-wing authoritarians know all about that kind of forgiving and forgetting. If being defensive, blind to oneself and highly dogmatic make it unlikely one will ever come to grips with one’s failings, authoritarian followers get voted “Least Likely to Change.”

Add it all up and tell yourself there’s nothing to worry about.

Our worries more than double because the Religious Right has helped elect to high public office a lot of the power-mad, manipulative, amoral deceivers to whom these followers are so vulnerable. Lots of unauthoritarian people voted for George W. Bush, for example, because people vote for candidates for many different reasons. But what the country got was a government infested with social dominators and Double Highs. True, some of them got caught, or were recently voted out of office. But most of them haven’t moved an inch. They’re still sitting in Congress or running the show from the White House. Calculate how thin the margins were, realize how good the cheaters are at cheating, and tell yourself again that things are fine, there’s nothing to worry about.

What’s To Be Done?

Question: Is it the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out this rot that is poisoning our country from within? No, I hope it’s obvious that that’s no solution at all. It may be just as obvious that social dominators will want to hang onto control until it is pried from their cold, dead fingers in the last ditch. And authoritarian followers will prove extremely resistant to change. The more one learns about the problem, I think, the more one realizes how difficult it will be to change people who are so ferociously aggressive, and fiercely defensive.

You’re not likely to get anywhere arguing with authoritarians. If you won every round of a 15 round heavyweight debate with a Double High leader over history, logic, scientific evidence, the Constitution, you name it, in an auditorium filled with high RWAs, the audience probably would not change its beliefs one tiny bit. Authoritarian followers might even cling to their beliefs more tightly, the wronger they turned out to be. Trying to change highly dogmatic, evidence-immune, group-gripping people in such a setting is like pissing into the wind.

Still, I don’t think the situation is hopeless. Others can do certain things that should, in the long run, lessen the threat authoritarianism poses to democracy. And Americans are going to have to do some things in the short run if we’re going to have a long run.

Long-term Reductions in Authoritarianism: Wishing for the Moon

Let’s start with some obvious ways to reduce authoritarianism that are, nevertheless, probably doomed to failure because they require various people to act against their narrower self-interest. (But we can at least say we thought of them.)

Reducing fear. Fear ignites authoritarian aggression more than anything else. From the crime-fixated Six O’clock News, to the Bush administration’s claim that “We fight ‘em there or else we fight ‘em here,” to Pat Robertson’s recurring predictions of catastrophe the day-after-tomorrow, lots of people have been filling America to the brim with fear. It would undoubtedly help things if the fear-mongers ratcheted down their mongering. But don’t hold your breath; they have their reasons for trying to scare the pants off everybody.

Reducing self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is the major releaser of authoritarian aggression, and it is often based on theology and teachings that seem to bring out the worst in people, not the best. Couldn’t “cheap grace” become so disgraced that it lost all currency? Well, the folks who’d have to do this may be most reluctant to throw away their best draw, even if it does, in fact, lead to more sin.

Nipping the religious roots of ethnocentrism. Fundamentalist parents could talk to their children about being Christians before talking about being Baptists. They could talk about being God’s children before talking about being Christians. They could talk about all being brothers and sisters before that. They could.

Teaching children not to trust authorities automatically. Parents in general could teach their older children that sometimes authorities can be bad and should be resisted, the way they try to “street-smart” their kids about strangers offering candy. But somehow that suggestion leads parents to think of Pandora’s Box.

Maybe the solution is right in front of our noses. How about having authoritarians read this book? I mentioned in chapter 1 that when high RWAs learn about right-wing authoritarianism, and the many undesirable things it correlates with such as prejudice, they frequently wish they were less authoritarian.[444] So isn’t the solution to the problem as plain as the thing that’s glaring you in the face right now?

Would that it were so. But in that study the high RWAs wished they had moderate scores, not low ones, and they were hardly likely to put that wish on the top of their list the next time they blew out the candles on a birthday cake. Even more daunting, as I mentioned in chapter 3, experiments show that high RWAs are so defensive and so unaware of themselves that when you tell them what high RWAs are like, they almost always think you’re talking about somebody else.

So I predict most authoritarian followers would sail right through this book and compartmentalize, misinterpret, rationalize, and dogmatically deny it had anything to do with them personally. If you tried to force this self-awareness on them, they would probably run away, run away, as fast as they could. So good luck if you passed on this URL to your fascist Uncle George.

Help the followers see how they’re being played for suckers. I similarly think you’ll likely be wasting your time trying to convince authoritarian followers that they are being systematically misinformed and played for dopes by their leaders. It’s too important to them to believe otherwise, and just your raising the question will likely put you into their huge out-group and make them suspicious of you.

Long-term Reductions in Authoritarianism: More Practical Solutions

Like I said, it’s not going to be easy. And knowing you as well as I do, I think you’d probably be suspicious yourself of anyone who says he’s got a Magic Pill that will cure our spell of authoritarianism. But some approaches have been blessed by data, and I can give you the “short list” here. (Uh, there is no long list, but future research should add justifiable means to our end.)

Wanting to be “normal.” By and large, these approaches are not based on what high RWAs might become, but rather on what they are. For example, we can catch a favoring breeze from the fact that high RWAs want to be normal. Studies show they will moderate their attitudes and beliefs just from finding out that they’re different from most people. They don’t usually realize how extreme they are because they stick so closely with their own kind. They need to get out more.

How can you possibly accomplish that since—like “Hugh”—they love staying in their tight circles? Through common cause, believe it or not. Low RWAs and high RWAs land on the opposite ends of a certain personality test, but they’re not really, totally, from head-to-toe opposites. They disagree about lots, but not about everything. People tend to overemphasize their disagreements and overlook their commonalities. And keep in mind how high RWAs open the door to those who seem to believe what they believe. Find your common grounds, and meet on them.

Many fundamentalists, for example, are becoming concerned about the damage being done to the environment. God gave us dominion over the earth and all its creatures, they believe, and we are doing a pretty crummy job as God’s caretakers. So environmentalists should reach out to them, uniting on local projects that everyone can see need to be done. The “tree-huggers” will be glad they did; fundamentalists work hard for causes they believe in.

High RWAs will be most likely to come to meetings, do some picketing, or clean up a stream when they can come in pairs, threes, and so on—or especially have you join them. Don’t be surprised if they try to convert you while you’re pulling tires out of the creek. I don’t recommend you proselytize back, but it would be important for them to learn, in a non-confrontational way, that people who disagree with their religious views have reasons for their stand. Dropping the drag net in a can-filled stream and shouting at each other from the opposite shores will not get anybody anywhere. It’s not an argument you can win, especially if you win. (Couples who live together learn this about certain arguments.)

Instead, you’ll be amazed how bonding it is when four people wrestle an old washing machine out of the brown water that none of them could have managed alone. This is called a superordinate goal, and social psychologists can cite many studies that show it really does open doors between groups.

You’re not asking the fundamentalists to come through the door to your side. You’re not trying to change their religious beliefs. You’re just trying to augment their awareness of others, and increase their Christian charity, by simply giving them the chance to see through an open doorway. Meeting different people in a situation where all are joined in common cause, where all have to work together, can open such vistas. (Of course, if you’re a disgusting person that no one would enjoy meeting [ask around], take a pass on this.)

For another example, non-fundamentalists churches can extend their hand to fundamentalist faiths. People often think that low RWAs are all atheists and agnostics. They’re not. Most (62%) of the low RWAs in my big 2005 parent study said they were members of some religion—typically liberal Protestants or Catholics. A solid majority of moderates are religious too, and often church-goers as well. Overall, people who believe in God and have religious inclinations are not high RWAs, and they are well-positioned to broaden those who are.

Fundamentalist congregations in their suburban mega-churches can look like those high RWA students sitting on their islands in the Global Change Game: “We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us.” So, go bother them. Reach out, looking especially for whatever moderates may be in their numbers. Their front rank will likely be filled with their highest RWAs, as was true on both sides in the USA-USSR study. Reach over them. Suggest joint services. Let the fundamentalists get to know you. Show them people can be different and still be decent human beings with whom they’ll agree about lots. They need to see that it’s not always cut-and-dried, Us versus Them. Lots of Thems are a lot like Us.

Visible minorities. Along this same line, high RWAs misperceive how diverse America is. It’s quite natural to think, when you are in the white, Christian, heterosexual, solvent majority that this is a huge majority. Minorities should speak out for their rights. If they don’t, they are (among other things) helping a lot of the majority remain steeped in ignorance. People can learn, but they won’t have a chance if the minorities remain invisible. I know, I know, the high RWAs will howl whatever chorus their leaders dictate when minorities become “uppity”. But recall the evidence that nothing improves authoritarians’ attitudes toward homosexuals as much as getting to know a homosexual—or learning that they’ve known one for years.

Higher Education. Moving to a broader perspective in this broadening effort, evidence we encountered in chapter 2 shows that higher education can have a significant beneficial impact upon authoritarian followers that lasts a lifetime. It doesn’t usually turn them into anti-matter versions of their former selves. But four years of undergraduate experience knocks their RWA scale scores down about 1520%. That’s a lot when you’re talking about very dogmatic people.

So for this, and many other reasons, it makes sense to keep our universities alive, vibrant and accessibl e.[445] For all their faults, they can be the bastions of democracy they were meant to be. And if you buy my interpretation that it’s the experience of interacting with so many different kinds of people that mainly produces the drop in authoritarianism, then we should especially support the institutions of higher learning that create such an environment.

Children? I know what you’re thinking. We also saw in chapter 2 that becoming parents raises RWA scale scores. Should we therefore stop reproducing? No. That might prove counterproductive. It would bollix up all those theories that say human beings are just a way for our DNA to keep itself going.

Laws. We can catch another prevailing wind from the fact that, of all the people in a society, high RWAs are probably the most likely to obey laws they don’t like. For example, I once asked a group of students to imagine they were members of a school board and a law had just been passed prohibiting the hiring of homosexual teachers. Virtually all of the low RWAs said they would find such a law repugnant, and only a small minority (19%) of those said they would obey it. (Their modal response was to disobey the law through passive resistance.) Another group of students was presented with the mirror-image situation of a law that ordered school boards not to discriminate against homosexuals when hiring teachers. The great majority of high RWAs in that situation said they would disagree with such a law. But most (53%) of them said they would obey it, usually because “the law is the law and must be obeyed.”

You often hear that one cannot legislate brotherhood, but I think you sometimes can. Anti-discrimination laws, designed to make sure everyone has the rights she is entitled to, can lead many prejudiced people to equal-footing contact with minorities. It’s vital that the authoritarians believe the law will be enforced, but if they think it will be, that contact can help break down stereotypes. Beyond that, such laws give high RWAs an excuse within their in-group for doing the right thing: “OK, I’ll break the law if you’ll pay my fine.”

Modeling and Leadership.Milgram’s finding that defiant (confederate) Teachers almost always inspired defiance in real subjects fits in nicely with other studies in social psychology that reveal the “power of one.” An early demonstration of this took place in a famous conformity experiment run at Harvard in the late 1940s. Subjects were surrounded by confederates who deliberately gave obviously wrong answers to questions. Usually the subjects went along with the wrong majority at least some of the time. But if, in another condition of the experiment, one other person gave the right answer, real subjects were much more likely to “do the right thing”—even though it meant joining a distinct minority rather than the majority.

Many times people know that something wrong is happening, but they don’t do anything because they know other people are also aware of the situation. As a result, all can trap themselves into inactivity. A vivid example of this occurred in an experiment in which subjects were answering surveys in a New York City office building, and the room began to fill up with smoke. If a subject was alone, he usually left the room. But if three real subjects were seated together, they usually stayed in their chairs even though the smoke eventually got so thick they couldn’t see the surveys anymore. When asked why they hadn’t gotten up, their usual answer was, “The other guys didn’t get up.”

I don’t want to overgeneralize this point. At Jozefow one man stepped forward and about ten others followed when they saw it was safe to do so. But hundreds of others stayed where they stood. “Courageous leaders” can become isolates in a flash. But when things are obviously going wrong and everyone is frozen by everyone else’s inactivity, all can perish for exactly the same reason that racing lemmings do.

Often one person can steel another, and another and another, until many are working together. You don’t have to form a majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking out can sometimes get a school board, a church board, a board of aldermen to reconsider authoritarian actions. Lack of any opposition teaches bullies simply to go for more. But it takes one person, an individual, to start the opposition.

Non-violent protest. Here’s a “Don’t.” Don’t use violence as a tool to advance your cause. Besides the dubious morality of such acts, they play straight into the hands of the people whose influence you’re trying to reduce. As I mentioned in chapter 2, studies show most people are spring-loaded to become more authoritarian when violence increases in society. (Besides, when a reform movement turns to violence, it paves the way for any social dominators within the movement to come to the fore, and “The Revolution” seeds the next dictatorship.)[446]

The Short Run Imperative: Speak Out Now or Forever, Perhaps, Be Silenced

If they work, most of these suggestions will only produce changes in high RWAs in the long run. But we may not have a long run. We have to contain authoritarianism now lest it destroy us. We’ve got to act now.

I say this with some hesitation. I’ve been studying authoritarianism since 1966, and I’ve been publishing my findings since 1981, but you never heard of the results presented in this book before, right? Partly that’s because I’ve always gotten an “F” in self-promotio n.[447]And I’ve always worried that publicity would invalidate my future studies. But I’ve mainly laid low, sticking to academic outlet s,[448] because what I’ve found is alarming, and I know that raising this alarm can horrendously backfire. We do have to fear fear itself. Thus I took pains in my previous writings to present my findings in a concerned voice, but I tried hard not to sound like Paul Revere. Here’s how I put it in 1996 at the end of what I intended to be my last book on the subject:

“I am now writing the last page in my last book about authoritarianism. So, for the last time, I do not think a fascist dictatorship lies just over our horizon. But I do not think we are well protected against one. And I think our recent history shows the threat is growing…We cannot secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves, and our posterity, if we sit with our oars out of the water. If we drift mindlessly, circumstances can sweep us to disaster. Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities as a matter of course, enough to stage the Nuremberg Rallies over and over and over again. Turning a blind eye to this could someday point guns at all our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong to right-wing authoritarians. We ignore this at our peril.”[449]

Eleven years later, as I am now definitely writing the last pages in my last book on the subject, I believe circumstances such as “9/11” have nearly swept us to disaster, the authoritarian threat has grown unabated, and almost all the protections I saw in 1996, such as a “free and vigilant press,” are being eroded or have already been destroyed. The biggest problem we have now, in my view, is authoritarianism. It has placed America at one of those historic cross-roads that will profoundly affect the rest of its history, and the future of our planet. The world deserves a much better America than the one it has seen lately. And so do Americans.

So what’s to be done right now? The social dominators and high RWAs presently marshaling their forces for the next election in your county, state and country, are perfectly entitled to do what they’re doing. They have the right to organize, they have the right to proselytize, they have the right to select and work for candidates they like, they have the right to vote, they have the right to make sure folks who agree with them also vote. Jerry Falwell has already declared, “We absolutely are going to deliver this nation back to God in 2008!”[450][451]

If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can’t sit these elections out and say “Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now.”The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them.

Research shows most people are not in this army. However Americans have, for the most part, been standing on the sidewalk quietly staring at this authoritarian parade as it marches on. You can watch it tear American democracy apart, bit by bit, bite by bite. Or you can exercise your rights too, while you still have them, and get just as concerned, active, and giving to protect yourself and your country. If you, and other liberals, other moderates, other conservatives with conscience do, then everything can turn out all right. But we have to get going. If you are the only person you know who grasps what’s happening, then you’ve got to take leadership, help inform, and organize others. One person can do so much; you’ve no idea! And two can do so much more.

But time is running out, fast, and nearly everything is at stake.

Postscript on the 2008 Election

Rick Roane of Cherryhill Media in San Diego has offered to produce an audio-book version of The Authoritarians and make it available at minimal cost. I wrote a brief analysis of the 2008 presidential election in two stages for this audio-book, and a third segment the day after the November 4 vote, which are all given below.

Part I–Written Right After the Republican Convention

As I just said (in Chapter 7), I expected the Religious Right to decide who would be the Republican presidential candidate, which proved quite wrong. Even though I mentioned in the Introduction to the book that the authoritarian leaders might not be able to find an acceptable presidential candidate for 2008, I thought surely they would. I did not foresee that the king-makers would be unable to agree upon a candidate among themselves, and thus leave the door open for other forces to shape the nomination.

The Religious Right and John McCain

Let’s go back to March, 2007. The midterm election has occurred, the Republicans got pasted at the polls, and the Democrats gained control of Congress. The Conservative Political Action Conference held its annual meeting in Washington, and every Republican running for president attended except John McCain–who chose to campaign in Utah instead. (By some reports, whenever McCain’s name was mentioned by a speaker, loud booing erupted from the audience.)

By then Rudy Giuliani was opening a large lead in presidential preference polls among Republicans. (Remember? Everyone thought Giuliani would win the GOP nomination hands-down.) But Giuliani was anathema to (almost all of) the leadership of the Religious Right, because he was a “social liberal” on abortion, sexual orientation, and other issues. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, led the charge against Giuliani. He also declared in January 2008, “I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances.” Richard Land, president of the Religious and Ethics Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, also publicly came out against Giuliani and said the religious leaders he knew did not trust John McCain.

A lot of bad blood had developed between certain evangelical spokesmen and John McCain by then. It had started in 2000 when McCain was running for president the first time. On February 17, seemingly out of the blue, James Dobson attacked McCain’s record from stem to stern, and denounced him in no uncertain terms for being unethical (the Keating scandal) and an adulterer (his affairs during his first marriage). But it was not entirely out of the blue, because McCain was squaring off against George W. Bush in the South Carolina primary two days later, and the Bush team had brought in the former director of the Christian Coalition to get out the fundamentalist vote. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson campaigned vigorously against McCain, and a week after he lost the primary McCain gave an angry speech in which he labeled both Falwell and Robertson as “agents of intolerance” who exercised a corrupting influence in America. The next day he went further, criticizing “the evil influence” these two pillars of the Religious Right had in the Republican Party.

But as he studied his prospects for the 2008 election, McCain (along with lots of other people) thought the leaders of the Religious Right would select the Republican nominee for president. So as I mentioned in Chapter 7, McCain visited Liberty University in May, 2006 to accept an honorary degree from Jerry Falwell, and extend the hand of friendship to religious conservatives. If there was a moment when John McCain began to sacrifice his reputation for integrity to gain the White House, it was then.

When asked, Falwell said the visit should not be interpreted as a sign he was supporting McCain in 2008. Evangelicals continued to view McCain with suspicion, despite his strong support of the pro-life position. Two “value voters” conferences were held in the fall of 2007 and straw votes were taken for the various Republican candidates. McCain came in last in both.

The trouble was, the religious leaders couldn’t agree on someone else. Mitt Romney was a Mormon and had once endorsed abortion. Fred Thompson, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Mike Huckabee all had higher appeal, but some evangelical leaders doubted any of them could raise the dough and wage the hard-fought campaign that would lay ahead. “In the real world, you’ve got to have an organization and some money,” said Rev. Don Wildmon, leader of the American Family Association. “Most of those candidates (below) the first tier lack both” The religious leaders wanted someone who would be both “their guy” and a winner, and couldn’t agree on anybody. So they went their separate ways in 2007.

By the fall of 2007 Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and Bob Jones III had endorsed Mitt Romney. Pat Robertson took time out from his 2,000 lb. leg presses to endorse– hold onto your hats–Rudy Giuliani. Don Wildmon came out for Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee was developing momentum in the rank-and-file. He finished first in the straw vote of the first “values voter debate” and come a very close second at the next conference. An AP-Yahoo News Survey in December 2007 found that 4 in 10 evangelicals had changed their preference for president, and most of them had switched to Huckabee. He was developing that all-important “mo-mentum.”

Then Came the Primaries

Giuliani, still leading in the polls but losing ground as evangelical leaders made his pro-choice stance better known to their followers, blazed a trail that no future presidential candidate will likely ever follow. He decided to skip the “insignificant” early primaries and concentrate on Florida’s January 29^th contest instead. And that ended his chances.

Thanks to a genuine, underfinanced grass-roots movement led by local pastors, Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in January, 2008. He did not do nearly as well in New Hampshire a few days later, but New Hampshire has relatively few fundamentalist voters.

This was the point at which the national evangelical leaders could have thrown their support to the candidate who clearly had the greatest appeal to their followers. Trouble was, many of the leaders were already committed to someone else. Huckabee’s next big chance came in the South Carolina primary on January 19, where he only got 43% of the evangelical vote, and lost to McCain. The next day Rush Limbaugh said he opposed the nomination of both McCain and Huckabee. Huckabee stumbled further in Florida, where he came in fourth. He was essentially finished when Dobson finally endorsed him in February.

Dobson also declared then, “I cannot and I will not vote for Senator John McCain as a matter of conscience… Should John McCain capture the nomination, as many assume, I believe this general election will offer the worst choices for president in my lifetime. If these are the nominees in November, I simply will not cast a ballot for president.”

But McCain did win most of the remaining primaries. Even though upwards of 40% of Republican supporters are white evangelical Christians, who constitute by far the largest demographic block within the party, and are easily led, a candidate favored by almost none of their leaders had become the nominee. The leaders had no one to blame but each other.

Whereupon a stand-offish courtship ensued. McCain may have felt the Religious Right had nowhere else to go, but it did form the core of the Republican party and he could certainly use its enthusiastic followers to counter the passion Barack Obama inspired. The leaders of the Religious Right, in turn, found themselves on the outside looking in at the political party that they thought was theirs.. Both sides could use each other, but both sides were testy.

The evangelical leaders had the most to gain, IF they could get back into the game. In May, according to Robert Novak, Dobson invited McCain to visit his Focus on the Family campus in Colorado Springs. A member of McCain’s staff called back and instead invited Dobson to meet with McCain in his hotel suite when McCain was in Denver on May 2. Dobson refused, and McCain declined to go to Colorado Springs. The stand-off was predictable, given the things Dobson had said about McCain in 2000..

Several issues remained on the table: the party platform, and the selection of a vice-presidential candidate. Dobson again started the ball rolling on July 20, when he announced there was a possibility, despite his firm declaration to the contrary, that he might endorse McCain. “If that’s a flip-flop” he said, “then so be it.” (Uh yes, that’s definitely a flip-flop.) The McCain campaign however did not fall all over itself thanking Dobson for his possible change of heart.

In mid-August new reports began circulating that McCain had a short list of four men for his V-P choice, including two pro-choice advocates: Joseph Lieberman and Tom Ridge. The campaign was bombarded by warnings that he better not pick someone who supported abortion, or there would be a revolt at the convention. On August 20 McCain announced he would accept a plank in the party platform that opposed all abortions, including cases of rape, incest, and risk to the mother’s life. That directly contradicted a position he had embraced since 2000, when he begged George Bush not to accept such a plank. But it was sweet music to the leaders of the Religious Right.

McCain apparently wanted Lieberman as his running mate, but his advisors argued that would lead to a huge floor fight at the convention, and pushed for other candidates instead, particularly Mitt Romney. McCain resisted and shifted to Sarah Palin instead. She had not been checked out by a long shot. McCain met with her (for the first time) on August 28 and announced the next day that she would be his running mate. This sealed the deal with the Religious Right. It took James Dobson about 3 milliseconds to appear on a radio program and announce he would vote for McCain. The evangelical leadership was immensely gratified; they had gotten some very important concessions from a candidate who didn’t like them any more than they liked him. They still had clout.

Two Figures

Two of the evangelical leaders stand out in this story for me, one because he was so often in the news, and the other because he has disappeared. Dobson is, of course, the former. I think his profound switch reveals much about his character. He attacked John McCain in 2000 for not being a man of principle, but he took as unequivocal a stand against McCain as one possibly could, and then went completely against his word. When he said, “I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances,” what he meant was, “Except in the circumstance that McCain wins the primaries. Then we’ll see.” There isn’t a pinch of integrity in that position.

Let me point out something about this switcheroo in the context of this book. Suppose you were James Dobson, and you now wanted to make nice with John McCain. Wouldn’t you worry about the impact of that on all the people whom you’ve told McCain is an unethical, adulterous, impulsive, hot-headed, foul-mouthed, money grubbing crook whom you’d never, ever vote for–all of which Dobson earlier had said about McCain? How can you expect them to pay attention to you in the future when you go so completely against your own word on such a major issue? But I suspect Dobson didn’t worry even 15 seconds about that. He knew his followers would follow. “The despicable enemy is now a good guy, according to the leader. He’s in the in-group now. It’s as simple as that.” Authoritarian leaders take their followers almost completely for granted, as well they can.

The person who disappeared is Pat Robertson, whose level of absurdity Dobson is now approaching. Did you notice that John McCain scorched both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but (as far as I know) only tried to make amends with Falwell. I’ll bet Pat Robertson noticed it. John McCain’s message to the host of “The 700 Club,” in McCain’s celebrated terminology, is “F you!” Robertson could stick a dagger in McCain now, but even if he wanted to, his handlers would stop him. And even if he did, the rest of the evangelical leadership would rally around McCain. He’s not their guy, but they fear and loathe Barack Obama.

The McCain-Obama Match-up

It will take many books to analyze the McCain–Obama campaign, but in the context of this one, the most striking fact to me has been Obama’s difficulty in building a commanding lead. He has some natural disadvantages which the Republicans have skillfully and fairly pointed out. But the country was disgusted with the GOP, registered Democrats far outnumbered Republicans, the economy was in big trouble (supposedly the death knell for the party holding the White House), Obama had much more money, McCain was vulnerable on so many issues–and yet Obama has had only a slight lead in the polls. Why is it so close?

Part of the reason would have to be that McCain, like Obama, had many supporters who are unmovable. The polls showed white, Christian evangelicals strongly favored McCain, even if their leaders did not. The alternative, Obama, was altogether distasteful to them. Obama is probably a much more religious person than McCain, but John Kerry volunteered to serve in Vietnam, and won medals for heroism, while George W. Bush did everything he could to avoid going any closer to Vietnam than Alabama, and the Religious Right ignored that. Obama was not religious “in the right way.”

The Democrats made appeals to younger evangelicals, who are much more concerned about the environment and eliminating poverty than their parents are. I doubt these appeals will make much difference, and will be delighted if this turns out to be another stupid prediction on my part. But young evangelicals will, I predict, be unable to go against their parents’ preferences and their community’s norm. They have enormously strong ties to both. It will be so easy for the Republicans to assure them that McCain will address the environment and poverty, “but in a sensible way.” Young evangelicals have trusted and been reassured by their parents’ views all their lives.

So I expect the Religious Right to work hard for the Republicans. Oh, not as hard as they worked for GWB, who was their perfect candidate, but as things stand now (in early September, 2008) I’d be surprised if they didn’t turn out in their usual numbers and 70% of white Christian Evangelicals voted for McCain/Palin…with the emphasis on the latter.

The other group that is proving immovable for Obama is white male blue collar workers, most of whom are nominal Democrats. There are several reasons for this, I suspect. For one thing, McCain seems more like a “man’s man,” what with having been a navy pilot and a POW. But for another thing, Obama isn’t a white guy. Some people wonder why white male blue collar workers would vote for a Republican, against their “class interest,” but it’s not hard to see why. White male blue collar workers are the most vulnerable segment of American society if persons of color get a fair break. They’re like the less skilled white baseball/basketball/football players who filled out major league rosters when African-Americans were not allowed to play. After all, Jackie Robinson replaced a white guy, and they see themselves as pretty replaceable too. They don’t warm to the idea of a “black” president who (they think) will give nonwhites special advantages.

We know from research that prejudiced people do not respond to overtly prejudiced appeals. Instead they look for other reasons to justify their discriminating against someone. The Republicans have given them lots of “Obama’s different from us” rationales without having to use racial epithets.

The GOP advertising campaign has brilliantly appealed to the white, blue-collar males in another important way. They have saturated the airwaves with any number of aggressive ads, usually misleading and unfair ones. (The worst, in my judgment, was taking a statement Obama made about “It’s not me, it’s us” 180 degrees out of context and portraying it as “It’s all about me” .)

The Obama camp reacted at first with that stunned deer-in-the-headlights confusion that the “swiftboat attack” produced in 2004. “Why, this is outrageous! This is a lie! You can’t do this!” But the Republicans strategists, then and now, had no interest in playing fair or with honor. They were in the game to win.

What does this have to do with white male blue collar workers? As a group, they may care more about aggressiveness than fairness in a presidential candidate. They want to see who is the toughest guy. You want to be on his side. It’s like establishing a pecking order in the school yard, or a family. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo correctly identified the Republican strategy as the “bitch-slap” approach– with apologies for the term, and the act. “I don’t give a damn if it’s fair!” the McCain campaign said as sub-text in ad after ad. “I’m going to hit you over and over. Yeah, I’m mean and brutal. Yes, these are lies. Yeah, this is unjustified. What are you going to do about it, huh?” The strategy comes right out of the social dominator’s play book, page 1. When the Democrats did not aggressively fight back, a lot of white, male, blue collar workers concluded McCain was a tough leader, the kind of guy you’d want running the show, and Obama was another Democratic wimp.

Labor union leaders warned the Obama campaign that he would lose the blue collar vote if he did not counterattack, and Obama did in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. A Gallup Poll showed the speech had its biggest impact on males who had not previously supported Obama. Unlike the Religious Right, and opposition based on racism, the “tough guy” vote is still accessible to the Democrats. (I’m not saying they should be unfair or lie. I’m saying they should continue now to be assertive and confrontational about the truth versus the lies. So far as I know, the “new politics” doesn’t mean you let somebody kick the stuffings out of you.)

Postscript—Part II

It’s now October 14, the day before the third presidential debate. The campaign still has two and a half weeks to go, but Rick is ready to produce the galley version of this audio-book so I’ll have to go with what has happened so far. Maybe we’ll be able to squeeze in some more after the presumably happy ending on Nov. 4.

A lot has happened since the national conventions. The economy turned out to be not just in “big trouble,” but in the worst mess in our lifetimes. Sarah Palin has brought out the evangelicals as everyone expected, but has also proven so unqualified that some prominent conservatives have called for her to resign. The horribly unfair “It’s all about me” ad has been bested for UNfairness several times by claims that Obama wants to teach sexual intercourse in kindergarten, favors unlimited abortions, and caused the turmoil on Wall Street. The Democrats have hit back, however, following their nominee’s statement that he wouldn’t throw the first punch, but he would land the last one. Polls show the Democratic won all the debates so far. And polls also show the Obama-Biden ticket has opened a significant lead over McCain-Palin, and is doing well in most of the battleground states.

And yet, the lead seems to go forward three steps, say after a debate, and then go back two. There’s an undertow that keeps this from being as breakaway a victory as it should be. Some voters have such strong resistance to the Democratic nominee that when he does impress them, they still are overcome later by their doubts (and Republican attacks). He may have to impress them three or four times to get their votes. And there are the “Undecided” voters, who still comprise about 6 percent of the polls. “Undecideds” usually break strongly for the conservative candidate in an election, and some of them aren’t the least bit undecided. I’ve a pretty good idea who the people are who say they’re undecided, but have already made up their minds not to vote for Obama on racial grounds.

So while this should be a landslide Democratic victory, at this stage I think it will be closer than many people are saying.

Let’s look at a few recent developments in the campaign in the context of this book. The economic turmoil has been the biggest reason for Democrats’ rise in the polls. It has brought back some “Reagan Democrats”–particularly white blue-collar males—as they see the threat to their jobs, homes and hopes. But the second-biggest reason for the Democrats improved standing is the reaction among women to Sarah Palin.

Palin not only brought the rank-and-file Religious Right into action, she also momentarily attracted a lot of women who saw her as a genuine heroine for women’s causes. For a while, you couldn’t buy a potato without passing half a dozen magazines at the checkout stand with her smiling face on the cover. But as time passed, as her record became better known, as her singular unpreparedness for national office became crystal clear, as her ignorance made her a laughing stock, as her distortions and lies about her record came to light, and as she hid away and stone-walled, she came to resemble not Blue-Collar Super Mom, but George W. Bush with lip-stick.

Sarah Palin brought some desperately needed energy to the Republican campaign. She always draws a bigger, more enthusiastic crowd than John McCain. And reporters noticed that when Palin and McCain did a rally together, some people would leave after Palin gave her speech, not staying for McCain’s. Many evangelicals still dislike him. He will undoubtedly be the only presidential candidate in history who will get the votes of millions of people who pray to God he wins, and just as sincerely hope that he then dies at the Inaugural Ball.

As I said in the first part of this postscript, I think almost all these people would have voted for McCain anyway. They weren’t going to stay home when someone they considered the “Anti-Christ” was running for the Democrats. So I doubt the GOP picked up many votes by placing Sarah Palin on the ticket. Instead she probably has lost them lots of votes among the people who count at this stage–Independents and undecided Republicans and Democrats.

It’s no accident, I think, that the level of vitriolic attacks on the Democrats at Republican rallies–from the stage and from the audience—have mainly come since Palin joined the ticket. Partly this happened because the Republicans decided to ratchet their negative campaign to the max as they found themselves falling behind. But secondly Palin’s candidacy has brought out significant numbers of religious conservatives, high RWAs, and studies show these people have a lot of hostility in them looking for a place to explode. As well, it seems to me that Palin has incited her audiences more than McCain has. I don’t envy the Secret Service’s job now, because authoritarian followers are looking for their authorities to sanction attacks on “the enemy” and the Republican ticket has, at times, whipped up hostility in their frightened followers.

The followers are frightened partly because they are so terribly misinformed about things. As noted in the book, high RWAs travel in tight circles, getting their information from each other and sources that tell them what they want to hear. That’s why so many of them believe Obama is an Arab and a Muslim and a terrorist and so on. Their friends tell them he is, and they tell their friends. The Republicans could stop most of this nonsense by saying, “No he’s not,” and John McCain recently told a rally that Barack Obama was a decent man and they should not be scared of his being president of the United States. But the crowd boo’d, and it’s asking a lot of politicians to discredit a whisper campaign that’s hugely benefitting them. A lot of people in the Republican campaign might raise a toast to their loyal followers with the words, “Yes, you’re narrow-minded and uninformed and wildly mistaken and will never discover the truth. And we love you for it. We can’t possibly win without you.”

Indeed, McCain and Palin have promoted the “terrorist” label with their campaign linking Obama to William Ayres. This is McCarthyism at its worst, guilt by association—any association. But this works with high RWAs for exactly the same underlying psychological reason: those tight circles. High RWAs believe, strongly, that you’re judged by the people you associate with. That’s why they try to minimize their contact with “others.” If someone has some sort of connection with a bad guy, any sort of connection, that means he’s a bad guy too. Unless, of course, he’s your guy, as in McCain’s Keating connection, or Palin’s husband who joined an organization that wants Alaska to secede from the United States. Revisit Chapter 3 if you want to see how such double-standards can lay side by side in high RWA minds.

Another thing High RWAs will readily believe is that their side is losing because the Democrats are cheating in voter registration (which certainly appears true in some instances, but doesn’t explain the lead in the polls), or because the media “will not tell the truth” about Obama (such as, he’s a Muslim terrorist). Similarly they’re ready to believe that the housing mortgage crash that has hurt the Republicans so much was in fact caused by Democrats forcing lenders to give mortgages to poor (that is, African-American) people.

It all reminds me of Hitler’s Big Lie as he rose to power that the only reason Germany lost World War I was because the army was stabbed in the back by Jews in Berlin. Because high RWAs will always believe these falsehoods about the election of 2008, I doubt they’ll ever become reconciled to the Democratic victory that seems ahead. They will forcefully oppose many of the proposals the new administration will enact. They aren’t going to go away. They’re too frightened, and now they’re too angry as well.

And here’s where John McCain reaps the ultimate grapes of wrath. Who’s going to be in control of the Republican Party after this election? The Religious Right, for sure–the last people McCain would want to fill the vacuum he’ll leave behind. They’ll form its firmest voting block more than ever, because conservatives with conscience and others have abandoned ship. And he provided them with a leader out of nowhere when they couldn’t find one themselves. Sarah Palin will probably prove a disastrous choice, but the job is hers now if she wants it. And I don’t think she’ll turn it down. The conservative columnist David Brooks knew what he was talking about when he said on October 6^th that Sarah Palin represents a fatal cancer upon the GOP.

When all is said and done, the Republic may have thankfully passed through the perilous times I referred to at the beginning of this book. America now has the opportunity to reclaim itself from the horror of recent times and establish an era of hope and renewal, although the problems ahead are formidable. This is where Barack Obama’s message of uniting and working together will become important, as I was also saying at the end of chapter 7. Whatever their shortfalls, High RWAs are not aliens or “the enemy” or “the other,”–the way they see their outgroups. They have extra helpings of some unhelpful traits, such as fearfulness and ethnocentrism, but they have good qualities too that will be needed. I don’t think you’ll ever convince them they’re wrong, but you can still get them to work for common goals, and a magical transformation can take place when that happens. There’s too much common cause in the country nowadays to let the differences among us decide things. Lincoln’s words at his second inaugural might well be recalled on January 20, 2009: “With malice toward none, with charity for all” let us bind up the nation’s wounds. Can we bind all the wounds, can we agree on everything, can we unite in every effort? Probably not. But we can unite for much, maybe most. It is a dream worth pursuing. As a nation, as a world, we are all in this together.

Part III–Written on November 5, 2008

The Polls, the Undecideds, and the “Bradley Effect”

The national polls all correctly predicted Obama would win, but they varied quite a bit in their accuracy. First prize goes jointly to Rasmussen and Pew Research, both of whom predicted a 52–46 split when the real numbers appear to have been 52.3–46.4. That’s pretty darn good, and not unusual for these outfits. As well, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com predicted a 6.1% difference, which came very close to the 5.9% figure produced by the voters. The worst prediction came from the USAToday/Gallup poll, which gave Obama nearly twice his real margin of victory at 53–42, and Gallup’s own poll, which had it 55–44.

I’ve averaged the 16 national polls I could find that conducted surveys in the last days of the race, and together they showed Obama with 51.4% and McCain with 43.6%. Five percent of the vote was accordingly “undecided,” or (in a few cases) going to some other candidate. You can see that most of that 5% broke for McCain, boosting his poll average of 43.6% to 46.4% and making the race somewhat tighter. During the Democratic primaries, “undecideds” also went against Obama once they got into the voting booth. This fits in with the observed tendency I mentioned earlier for people who say they haven’t made up their minds to end up voting for conservative candidates. Does it also show the “Bradley effect” that I was worried about? If so, it was quite weak.

Sarah Palin

Analysis of voting patterns, backed up by (the somewhat unrepresentative) exit polls, show that Sarah Palin did drag the Republican ticket down. She influenced significant numbers of moderates, Independents, and women to vote for Obama. (But the big reasons for Obama’s victory were George W. Bush, the economy, Obama’s huge financial advantage, his masterful organization, and ultimately his message and charisma.)

The exit polls found that 74% of white evangelicals/Born-again Christians voted for McCain, four percent less than voted for George Bush in 2004 but still a very solid turnout and by far the GOP’s strongest demographic. I haven’t seen a breakdown by age yet, but it seems clear Obama’s attempt to win over (young) fundamentalists proved the least successful of his various stratagems. He did, of course, earn the support of many other religious voters.

The Religious Right remains the base of the Republican Party. If its leaders get their act together, they can make Sarah Palin (or you or me) the GOP nominee in 2012–a fact that rightly troubles the “Eastern Establishment” of the party no end. Yes, Palin is getting a lot of bad press today, especially with the Newsweek behind-the-scenes revelations. But these will mean nothing to high RWAs who will vote-as-led in the 2012 primaries. But 2012 is a galaxy far, far away and a long time ahead. A lot will happen between now and then.

A Final Point

Despite all the factors handicapping the Republicans from the start, and the painfully inept, lurching, hypocritical, unfocused campaign they ran, some 60 million Americans voted for McCain/Palin. That’s a pretty sobering realization. I think it shows Barack Obama was working against a significantly stronger headwind than John McCain was, yet he prevailed.

Unfortunately, the wretchedly divisive 2008 GOP campaign will, I fear, poison the country for some time. High RWAs have been told over and over again by their trusted sources that Barack Obama is a Muslim socialist/Communist America-hating dictatorial terrorist intent on destroying the country. They have been led to intensely dislike, if not hate the president-elect, and it’s no accident, I submit, that the Secret Service noted a sharp increase in the number of threats to the Democratic standard-bearer as Palin’s crowds became more rabid. Furthermore the Republican National Committee, Fox News, and so on have sold authoritarian followers the myth that the Democrats won through massive voter fraud, because the media conspired to keep Americans from discovering “the truth” about Obama, and that the Democrats caused all the problems that have occurred over the past eight years. You could easily find postings on various blogs in the last weeks of the campaign saying people should be ready to “take up arms” against an “illegal Obama tyranny” to “preserve democracy and the Constitution.”

Thus while Barack Obama may genuinely seek a more inclusive, consensual approach to the country’s dire problems, many high RWAs may say “Count me out.” Their leaders—social dominators pursuing their own agendas—will instead stoke the often racist dislike for Obama that was so evident at Republican rallies in the closing days of the campaign.

Almost nothing would give me greater pleasure than seeing the research on authoritarian personalities become totally irrelevant, now that we have seemingly put the nightmare behind us and begun anew. I’d much rather people get interested in my next book instead, which is about a far more pleasant subject: my studies of the sexual behavior of university students. But I’m afraid www.theauthoritarians.com will remain worth people’s visiting for the next little while at least.

Comment on the Tea Party Movement

April 20, 2010

A Brief History of the Movement

Today’s Tea Party movement began in early 2009 in reaction to the American government’s efforts to stabilize the banking system and keep the nation from sinking into economic turmoil. In October, 2008 the Democrat-controlled Congress passed a “Wall St. bailout” bill (the “TARP” bill) proposed by the Bush administration, which Bush immediately signed. This bill deeply offended some economic conservatives who held a “let the chips fall where they may, no matter what” view of free market economics. *

* I’m not going to provide references to major events that are part of the public record, such as the TARP bill, nor to organizations and polls that can easily be tracked down through Google from the information provided.

Anger among economic conservatives rose yet higher in early 2009 when Congress responded to President Obama’s call for a massive economic stimulus to keep the recession from turning into a Depression. Almost every major Western government, whatever its political stripe, went deeply into the red at this time to keep its economy afloat. Republicans in Congress voted massively against the bill, and Democrats took the heat for trying to stop a recession that the Republicans had largely caused by deregulating the banking system.

The first of what became Tea Party protests occurred on February 10, 2009. It was produced by FreedomWorks, an organization led by influential Republicans such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, that specialized in creating “grass roots” protests. On February 9, a FreedomWorks official phoned Mary Rakovich in Ft. Myers, Florida, whom he had trained in organizing demonstrations www.verumserum.com . He wanted a protest the next night when Obama was in town holding a town hall on the stimulus bill. About ten people showed up on short notice to decry government waste and “Obama’s socialism,” but it was a start. Rakovich was then interviewed on Fox.

The next week a truly grass-roots demonstration occurred in Seattle when Keli Carender, entirely on her own, asked every conservative she knew to join her in protesting the “pork” in the stimulus bill taxdayteaparty.com More than a hundred people showed up. Another week later she used email addresses collected at the first meeting to draw a crowd of over 200. Fox”s Michelle Malkin, reported these events, and said, “There should be one of these in every town in America.” Malkin promoted a protest in Denver being organized by another conservative group, Americans for Prosperity. She then stated that the Seattle, Denver and other protests showed a movement was growing among conservatives against the pork in the spending bill. It certainly was, although various conservative organizations had produced most of the protests and Fox had fanned the flames.

On February 18, President Obama announced a plan to help people refinance bad mortgages. This led Rick Santelli, a Chicago-based editor for the CNBC Business Network, to complain on air about “promoting bad behavior” by “losers,” and to suggest that a Tea Party be held in Chicago to protest this decision. The conservative news website, The Drudge Report, prominently featured “the rant” and it raced around the Internet. On February 27, “Chicago Tea Parties” were staged across the United States. But the turnout was light. Only about 200 appeared in Chicago, a rather typical result by most reports. Still, there had only been about a dozen at the first protest on February 10.

Warmer weather brought out much larger crowds for a nationwide Tax Day Tea Party on April 15, 2009. A liberal and (in my opinion) very competent and fair statistician, Nate Silver, estimated that over 300,000 people had attended nearly 350 such parties across the nation www.fivethirtyeight.com . A Rasmussen Poll a few days later reported that most of its sample viewed the Tea Party movement favorably. The protestors seemed to be ordinary people who had simply “had it” with Washington.

The Fourth of July provided the backdrop for the next day of national protest. I have not been able to track down national attendance estimates. The local ones I’ve seen suggest the turnout was down some from Tax Day.

Health Care Reform. In mid-July a new organization with roots in FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, organized a protest against the health care proposals that Democrats were developing in Congress. It then helped assemble demonstrations at town halls convened by elected representatives to discuss the issues. Some of the meetings were peaceful and polite, but in many others opponents of the proposals shouted down speakers and kept representatives from discussing the matter with their constituents.

Yet another group, the Tea Party Express, was created by a Republican public relations firm in Sacramento eager to get some of the money pouring in from Partiers for its political action committee www.politico.com . It got into the game late but captured headlines by organizing a cross-country bus tour that made daily stops for demonstrations, giving it ties to local groups. The officially non-partisan Tea Party Patriots said the Tea Party Express was basically raising money for the GOP. Other Tea Party groups have also sprung up, but the Express, with its “PR” skills at organizing events and giving the media catchy stories seems to have become the best known of them all. Those Tea Partiers who say they dislike both the Democratic and Republican parties probably don’t know they are increasingly being led by a Republican PAC.

The various Tea Parties sponsored a rally in Washington D. C. on September 12 to protest the emerging health care legislation. FreedomWorks said 1.5 million protestors had shown up; the crowd was more likely 60–70,000 www.foxnews.com .

Demonstrations continued on the local level throughout the winter, especially whenever Congressional representatives came home. But the next major national event was the First Annual Tea Party Convention, held in Nashville in February, 2010. Many within the movement condemned its mercenary ways, however, including the $100,000 speaker’s fee given Sarah Palin.

Tax Day, 2010 saw hundreds of local Tea Party protests across the country. The demonstrators were enthusiastic and peaceful. Reports of crowd sizes were sketchy, but the turnout appeared smaller than that a year earlier. The Drudge Report did not even carry a story on the demonstrations the next day. The Washington Post reported the gatherings in Washington D.C. were smaller than those of last September, but “the ire and energy that have defined the tea party movement since it became a force last summer have not abated.” The Tea Party Express got the lion”s share of the media coverage with its list of Congressional “heroes” (all Republicans but one) and “targets” (all Democrats but one).

Are Tea Partiers Ordinary Citizens? Three Recent Polls

A nationwide Quinnipiac Poll of 1907 registered voters released on March 24, 2010 reported that 13 percent of its sample said they were part of the Tea Party movement. Another nationwide poll of 3,000 registered voters, released eight days later by the Winston Group, pegged the figure at 17 percent. So only a small percentage of potential voters are Tea Partiers. However, 15 percent of the registered voters in the United States amount to 25 million citizens. And they are very active and committed individuals in a nation where a solid majority of the citizens are not. And additional millions support them even if they do not identify with the movement themselves. To put this in perspective, only 81 million people voted in the 2006 mid-term election.

Like the student radicals and hippies who joined forces to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam, the Tea Party is composed of disparate groups united more by what they are against (President Obama and Democrats) than what they are for. The public sees them as ordinary people, and Tea Party organizations insist their members are a cross-section of American adults, a nonpartisan mix of Democrats, Independents and Republicans. But the Quinnipiac poll found that 74 percent of the Tea Partiers were Republicans, or Republican-leaning Independents. Seventy-two percent had a favorable view of Sarah Palin, while the sample as a whole disliked her by a 2–1 margin. They were a little less educated than most, more female than male, older (most were over 50), and overwhelmingly white (88 percent).

The Winston Group results generally reinforced and expanded on these Quinnipiac demographics. Eighty-five percent of that batch of Tea Partiers said they were Republicans (57 percent) or Independents (28 percent). Sixty-five percent said they were “conservatives,” about twice the national average. This time males outnumbered females. Most of them again were over 50. Data were apparently not collected on education or race. Tea Partiers proved much more likely than most people to watch Fox News.

The Winston survey dug into what matters to Tea Party members. The most common theme was a conservative economic philosophy. Their top priority, like the rest of the sample, was job creation. But they thought the way to create jobs was mainly to cut taxes on small businesses and increase development of energy resources. Also like the sample as a whole, getting unemployment rates down to 5 percent was more important to Tea Partiers than balancing the budget. But in general they abhorred deficit spending. Ninety-five percent believed the Democrats were taxing and spending too much. Eighty-seven percent said the stimulus package was not working. Eighty-two percent opposed the Democrats” health care plan. Eighty-one percent disapproved of Obama”s performance as president; and 81 percent had an unfavorable view of Congressional Democrats. So Tea Party members were most united in what they were against: the Democratic Party.

A third poll, released by USA Today/Gallup on April 5, 2010, interviewed 1,033 adults whether they were registered voters or not. So this less-focused poll does not compare directly with the first two. It found that 28 percent of the sample supported the Tea Party movement (whether they were members or not); 26 percent opposed it, and the rest were undecided. The supporters were overwhelmingly Republicans or Independents. Seventy percent described themselves as “conservatives.” They were mostly male, only slightly older, 79 percent “Non-Latin White,” but just as well-educated as U.S. adults as a whole. They overwhelmingly (87 percent) condemned the passage of health reform, and 65 percent said they took a “pro-life” stand on abortion.

So are the Tea Partiers ordinary people with no political leanings, as they say they are? Definitely not. The findings cited above and other data in the polls indicate that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly stocked with Republican supporters. They are by no means “ordinary people,” although the public”s perception that they are is one of their strongest suits.

Are they just economic conservatives then? The Winston survey tells us much about Tea Partiers” economic views, and the “Contract from America” released on April 14, 2010 focuses on taxes, federal spending, and big government. But if you Google the questionnaires that local Tea Parties send to candidates, you will almost always find more than questions about these issues. You will often discover inquiries about religion as well (e.g., Do you support school prayer? Do you recognize God”s place in America?). And often there are questions about abortion and gay marriage and teaching Creation Science in public schools. And you run into queries about gun control, law and order, and immigration. So while Tea Partiers overwhelmingly take conservative economic stands, which bind them together most, many seem to be strong “social conservatives” as well. Local groups often speak of wanting only “pure conservatives” or “100 percent” conservatives as candidates.

Authoritarian Followers

If you read the book presented at this website, you”ll find lots of evidence that, as a group, social conservatives share the psychological trait of being authoritarian followers.[452] And you can hardly miss the authoritarian follower tendencies in the behavior of the Tea Partiers. Here are a dozen that seem pretty obvious.

Authoritarian submission. Authoritarian followers submit to the people they consider authorities much more than non-authoritarians do. In this context, Tea Partiers seem to believe without question whatever their chosen authorities say. Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, various religious groups, the House and Senate GOP leaders, Sen. Grassley from Iowa, Rep. Bachmann from Minnesota, and of course Sarah Palin can say whatever they want about the Democrats, and the Tea Partiers will accept it and repeat it. The followers don”t find out for themselves what the Democratic leader truly said, what is really in a bill, what a treaty actually specifies, or whether taxes have really gone up. They are happy to let Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin do their thinking for them. It has gotten so bad that their leaders casually say preposterous things that are easily refuted, because they know their audience will never believe the truth, or even hear about it.
Fear. Fear constantly pulses through authoritarian followers, and Tea Partiers are mightily frightened. They believe President Obama is a dictator. They also think the country will be destroyed by its mounting debt. They readily believed the health care proposals provided for “death panels” that will euthanize Down”s syndrome babies, “put Grandma in the grave,” and place microchips in each American so the government can track us. When Rep. Paul Brown (R-GA) said that Obama”s plan to expand such things as the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps was really intended to create a Gestapo-like, brown-shirt military force in the United States, his followers accepted this. Conservative leaders especially vilify Barack Obama, recently calling him in the space of two days (April 7 and 8) the “most radical president ever” (Gingrich) who is “inflicting untold damage on this great country” (Limbaugh) and is inviting a nuclear attack on the United States by indicating we won”t hit back (Palin). The people who orchestrate the Tea Party movement know well what button to push first and hardest among social conservatives, and they work it overtime. And they know spreading fear “works” with others as well. Sometimes it seems they are all trying to out-boogie-man each other.
Self-righteousness. Self-righteousness runs very strongly in authoritarian followers, and combines with fear to unleash aggression in them. The Tea Partiers commonly describe themselves as “the good Americans,” “the true Americans,” “the people,” and “the American Patriots.” They could hardly wrap themselves in the flag more thoroughly or more often than they do. Theirs is the holy cause. They believe they are the only ones who can save the country.
Hostility. Authoritarian aggression is one of the defining characteristics of authoritarian followers. Do Tea Partiers seem particularly aggressive? The behind-the-scenes organizers of the protests often provided the “words” for the protest through talking-points they distributed. But the protestors put the feeling into the song, and the feeling was often hostility. They angrily called people who disagreed with them at the town halls “Liars,” “Communists,” and “Traitors.” They booed and booed until opposing speakers simply gave up. They lashed out at elected representatives who tried to engage in dialogue. If you look at some of the videos of last August”s protests, you can see veins bulging in the necks of some of the Tea Partiers as they vented their fury.[453]
A lack of critical thinking. Authoritarian followers have more trouble thinking logically than most people do. In particular, they tend to agree with sayings and slogans, even contradictory ones, because they have heard them a lot. Thus Tea Partiers reflexively, patriotically thump that the United States is the best country on earth, but as well that it is now an Obama dictatorship. They also have extra trouble applying logic to false reasoning when they like the conclusion. A ready example can be found in Tea Partiers” assertion that Obama is a socialist. They have heard this over and over again from Rush Limbaugh, etcetera, and “so it must be true.” But Obama has never advocated state ownership of an industry. He certainly did not advocate state ownership of health insurance, and eventually even backed away from the “public option” (that most Americans wanted) which would have let the government as well as private companies offer health insurance.[454]
Our “biggest problem.” Authoritarian followers will readily believe that lots of things are our “biggest problem.” It can be drugs, the decline of religion, the breakdown of the family, you name it. Thus it was not hard to get Tea Partiers worked up about, of all things, a plan to improve health care to the levels found in other industrialized countries. Yet Tea Partiers believe the passage of the health care bill marks the end of liberty. But they could just as easily have been led to believe that climate change legislation, nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, or taking “In God we trust” off the money would sound the death knell for America. In earlier eras it could have been sex education, Sunday shopping, the 40-hour week, or a Catholic president that would lead to our doom.
Compartmentalized thinking. Authoritarian followers can have so many contradictory beliefs and “biggest problems” because their thinking is highly compartmentalized. Ideas exist independently of the other ideas in their head. Their thinking is so unintegrated because they have spent their lives copying what their authorities say, without examining whether the ideas fit together sensibly. And Tea Partiers say over and over that the Democrats are installing a dictatorship, but they demonstrate every time they demonstrate that Americans still have all the freedom of speech they ever had. And one notes the health care reforms bear a striking resemblance to Social Security and Medicare—which many of the protestors happily enjoy and would never give up. Tea Partiers argue that competition makes private enterprise do things more efficiently than the wasteful government can; but they don”t want the insurance industry to have to compete against a public option in health care that might offer coverage at lower prices. And they complain bitterly that the government is ruining the economy by interfering in the free market system. But the recession was brought on precisely because the banks had been de-regulated, showing the only “invisible hand” at work then was the one sliding other people”s money into its own pocket. Even Alan Greenspan eventually realized this ( www.nytimes.com ).[455]
Double Standards. Highly compartmentalized thinking makes it easy for authoritarian followers to employ double standards in their judgments. One finds many examples of this among the Tea Partiers. The protest started off being about “pork” in the stimulus bill. But there have long been clots of extravagant local spending in the federal budget. Who of the protestors took to the streets when Senator Ted Stevens, a champion pork barrel-er, brought tons and tons of pork home to Alaska year after year, such as Sarah Palin”s “bridge to nowhere”? Tea Partiers also protested about the federal deficit growing by unprecedented leaps and bounds under Obama. But it grew by unprecedented leaps and bounds during George W. Bush”s presidency, and demonstrations against that were few and far between. President Bush signed the $300 billion Housing and Economic Recovery Act on July 30, 2008 which gave relief to people who were losing their houses and shored up the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agencies. But this set off no epic rants in Chicago or declarations that Bush was a socialist.
Tea Partiers have asserted that the Obama administration has too much power and is taking away our Constitutional rights. But they did not cry out when President Bush set up illegal domestic spying operations. And when Tea Partiers claimed today”s government is riding roughshod over basic human rights, how loudly did they protest the previous government”s use of torture? And can we not doubt people”s commitment to democratic freedoms when they shout down speakers at town halls, allowing only their own opinions to be heard?
Tea Partiers howled, on cue, when the Senate used the reconciliation process to pass health care reform. How loudly did they howl when the Republicans used reconciliation to pass George W. Bush”s tax cuts? They thought the Democrats bullied the Senate parliamentarian into giving them the rulings they wanted. Did they recall that this parliamentarian had been hired by a Republican controlled Senate, and that those Republicans had fired the previous parliamentarian because he had ruled against them? The Tea Partiers vilified Nancy Pelosi for the way she “steamrolled” the legislation through the House. Did they ever hear of Tom DeLay, “the meanest man in Congress”? Tea Partiers claimed abuse of process when Obama made “recess appointments” that he could not get through Congress. Do they know how many times George W. Bush did exactly the same thing?
It’s pretty clear that many, many Tea Partiers aren’t really against the things they say they’re against.For them, it”s OK when Republicans do these things. But that is pure hypocrisy, which one finds in abundance among authoritarian followers. And in their leaders, such as the various governors who condemned the stimulus package, said they would refuse such funds, but then accepted them and had their picture taken at project announcements that followed.
Feeling empowered when in groups. Authoritarian followers seem to want to disappear as individuals. They’re not comfortable taking stands on their own, or acting alone. Instead they seem fulfilled simply by being part of a large, powerful movement on the march. Thus the insult-hurling Tea Partiers probably would have been quiet, even deferential, had they met with their member of the House one-on-one last August. But experiments have shown that authoritarian followers are highly conforming. When they are in a group of like-minded persons they are much more likely to do things, especially aggressive things, that they would not do alone. They make a good mob, winding each other up by hearing each other yell. Did you notice how they got louder and louder as the town halls wore on? Being in a crowd of fellow-believers also helps them maintain their opinions through the “GOP echo chamber.” “You say to me, ‘Obama’s a tyrant!’ and then I’ll tell you ‘Obama’s a tyrant!’ Then we’ll both be more certain he is. And if we’re with lots of other people who agree, we’ll all shout it. And the more we shout it, the more I’ll believe it.”
Dogmatism. We also know that authoritarian followers lead the league in being dogmatic. When their leaders set their opinions for them, those opinions are set in stone. Experiments show that nothing (aside from their authorities) can convince them they are wrong. If overwhelmed by logic and evidence, they simply “castle” into dogmatism. This is probably because they don’t really know why they believe what they believe. They didn’t figure it out for themselves; they Xeroxed what their authorities said.
Does this apply to Tea Partiers? During the health care debate their authorities said an enormous number of untrue things, and the proponents of reform quickly countered them point by point. For example, Joe Wilson was proved the liar when he famously shouted that Obama was lying about no coverage for illegal immigrants. And opponents endlessly told their followers that federal dollars would now be used to fund abortions, when they would not. Obama called out the Republican House caucus face-to-face in a meeting last January about the lies they had spread, but Tea Partiers probably never heard about it. So the truth was out there in lots of places. But it rolled right past the protestors, who had been inoculated against catching it.
Another example of Tea Partiers” intransigence in the face of fact was illustrated by a CBS News/New York Times poll reported on February 12, 2010. Democrats have lowered income taxes for almost all Americans, but the poll found that virtually none of the Tea Partiers realized their taxes had gone down. Instead nearly half of them thought their taxes had gone up, a mistake they made more than twice as often as the rest of the sample. They simply believed the rhetoric of their movement more than the information on their own pay slips.
Ethnocentrism. Authoritarian followers are notably ethnocentric, constantly judging others and events through “Us versus Them” lenses. They largely choose their friends according to their beliefs. They stick to news outlets that tell them what they want to hear. They live in a polarized world, divided into their in-group, and out-groups consisting of everybody else. They stress in-group loyalty, and try to keep their distance from the out-groups.
Tea Partiers certainly display a streak of ethnocentrism. They wrap themselves in the flag so tightly, everybody else is outside it. They have very definite out-groups. And of course one of the reasons that the Tea Partiers were uninfluenced by what was actually in the health care reform proposals is that they relied so much on their untrustworthy trusted sources.
This fierce in-group orientation, along with the followers’ need for external confirmation of their beliefs, explains why Fox News has such a big audience compared with other outlets, why Sarah Palin’s, Glenn Beck’s, and Ann Coulter’s books leap to the top of the best sellers lists, and why “hate radio” is so popular. Authoritarian followers have to get their ideas “validated” by others more than most people do. So they constantly seek out sources of information that will tell them they’re right. It amounts to in-group in-breeding of the intellect. Research shows that less authoritarian people are more likely to consider different sides of an issue, and figure things out more for themselves.[456]
Prejudice. Studies have found that authoritarian followers are among the most prejudiced people in society. It is the nastiest aspect of their ethnocentrism, and one they insistently deny—to others and to themselves. And they really do not realize how prejudiced they are, compared with others, because they associate so much with other prejudiced people. So their prejudices seem normal and perfectly justified to them.
Racial prejudice appeared at many of the Tea Party demonstrations, in the form of signs, banners, and tee-shirts—just as it did during the 2008 campaign after Sarah Palin energized the social conservatives. Tea Party spokespersons attributed these racist attacks to outsiders, “a few bad apples,” or fringe members of the group. However Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York who was enthusiastically supported by the Tea Party as a “100% conservative,” was discovered on April 12, 2010 to have emailed racist photos (and also a picture of a woman having sex with a horse) to a long list of friends. One doctored photo depicted the president and Michelle Obama as a stereotyped black pimp and prostitute. Another described an African tribal dance as the Obama inauguration rehearsal. A third picture showed an airplane landing behind a group of black men, with the caption, “Holy Shit, run niggers, run!”
Paladino quickly disassociated himself from the emails he sent, saying “That activity is not Carl Paladino.” He didn’t however say who it was instead, but still insisted he is not a racist. You can be pretty sure that the rank-and-file of the Tea Party doesn’t think he is either. But the point here is, he sent these pictures to so many associates, some influential people in the movement had to know what he thought. And it was apparently all right with them too, for he got a rousing Tea Party endorsement.
The vitriol directed at Barack Obama seems unprecedented to many observers. It may be that most Americans now see him as the President of the United States who happens to be African-American. But to many Tea Partiers he is a black man/N-word first, who has no right to be president. Instead, he is a Muslim, a foreigner, a gangster, a fascist, a communist, even the anti-Christ. And they will probably never see him as anything else.

You will find the research alluded to in the twelve points above in The Authoritarians.[457] You will also see that the studies discovered less authoritarian people were not nearly as submissive, fearful, self-righteous, etcetera as the authoritarian followers. It”snot a case of, “Well, you do it too, just as much.” Liberals do show some of these same behaviors—but not nearly as often. So if you have noticed, for example, how hostile today”s conservative and Republican leaders have been with their inflammatory speeches, cross-haired congressional targets, and threats to turn a shotgun on the census taker, compared to liberals and Democrats, you have noticed something repeatedly borne out by scientific study.

Still and all, I was just amazed by the Tea Party protest movement. It seemed as if the demonstrators had read the research findings on authoritarianism and then said, “Let”s go out and prove that all those things are true.” Whatever else the Tea Party movement has accomplished, it has certainly made the research on authoritarianism look good.[458]

The Other Authoritarian Personality

Because the Tea Partiers display so many “classic” signs of authoritarian followers, I think it’s safe to conclude that a lot of the members have such personalities.[459] But another sizeable group swells the ranks who would seem to have little tendency to follow anyone: libertarians. And while the two contingents may agree on many economic issues, they appear to have fundamentally different views of government and liberty.

Oh sure, authoritarian followers will shout that Obama has too much power and is crushing individual liberty. But studies have shown they would like government to impose their own religious beliefs upon others, outlaw the teaching of evolution, punish homosexuals, forbid abortions, and so on. Libertarians, on the other hand, may genuinely want a government that does as little as possible and lets “nature take its course” otherwise. They wouldn”t want governments saying anything about abortion, for instance. They”d say that”s the woman”s decision. As John Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr. point out in Pure Goldwater, that was the very pro-choice position of “Mr. Conservative” himself (who almost certainly could not get the GOP nomination for the Senate in Arizona now because of that position).

Libertarianism has deep roots in American history. Nobody likes the government telling him what to do, and then having to fill out pages and pages of forms to do it. And you find libertarian sentiments at almost every Tea Party web site, talking about individual rights, small government, and taxation. Their positions vary from general principles that everyone can agree with (taxes must be spend wisely; government waste must be reduced) to quite dramatic pronouncements such as this I found at www.teaparty-patriots.com/ on April 13, 2010.

“In a Republic we have three kinds of people…

Group One: These are the achievers, those who stride, work hard and are rewarded with the fruits of their toils.

Group Two: The non-achievers. This group seldom exerts the extra effort required to rise above their station and attain their perceived goals. They are dissatisfied with their lot in life and spend much of their lives in envy of achievers.

Group Three: This segment consists of those who contribute absolutely nothing, yet demand equality based on the labor and achievements of society as a whole.

…

Any attempt to engage in the confiscation or the conscription of the fruit of one man’s labor, by either men or government, in order to provide goods or services to another is an act of illegal plunder and as such should be protested and resisted by all.”

According to this rather extreme position, a government that used tax revenues to give a white cane to a blind man would be illegally plundering others. As well, one can think of other “Groups” besides the three listed above, such as “Group One-A: Those who work hard and are not rewarded with the fruits of their toils because of unfairness.”

Libertarians vary in how much the government should do, but staunch libertarianism apparently rejects the role that government can play in righting injustice and social wrong. It seems to say, “If some people get screwed in life because of discrimination against their race or gender or nationality or sexual orientation or whatever, that”s their tough luck. The government exists to do things like organize fire departments. It has no business interfering with the way society works.”

One can hold this view, but it does not overflow with sympathy, generosity, or a sense of justice. When millions of Americans had no health insurance and other millions were being gouged by the big insurance companies, when so many had been laid off because of a recession caused by greedy, deceitful bankers, when the poor stayed poor while the rich got richer through tax cuts enormously favoring them, the “leave things alone” attitude seems morally bankrupt and very selfish. You often see the Gadsden flag at Tea Party rallies; it’s the yellow one with the coiled snake in the center. The inscription under the snake does not read, “Don’t tread on us;” it goes, “Don’t tread on me.” It’s an apt symbol for this kind of libertarianism.

If you read postings and comments that argue the Tea Party’s case on various websites, you will sometimes encounter sentiments like those expressed in the “Three Groups” quote above. Poor people are poor, they say, simply because they are lazy. We should not extend unemployment benefits to the people laid off now because it will just encourage them to watch TV instead of looking for work. The poor people who accepted the banks” invitation to buy nice houses for their families at low interest rates were “reaching beyond their class” and deserved to lose them. The rich are rich simply because they worked harder than everybody else, and deserve their wealth. Obama is taking money from those who work hard to buy votes from people demanding hand-outs.

These attitudes come right out of the catechism of the other authoritarian personality that research has discovered, the social dominators. Their defining characteristic is opposition to equality. They believe instead in dominance, both personal (if they can pull it off) and in their group dominating other groups. They endorse using intimidation, threats, and power to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This is the natural order of things, they believe. “It is a mistake to interfere with the ‘law of the jungle,’ they argue. Some people were meant to dominate others.” “It’s a dog eat dog world in which the superior people get to the top.”

Such people may want government to stick to running fire departments so they can rise/stay above others unimpeded. Research shows that social dominators are power-hungry, mean, amoral, and even more prejudiced than the authoritarian followers described earlier. They want unfairness throughout society. Barack Obama, and the ludicrous perception that he is going to lead African-Americans in “taking over America” would be their worst nightmare. So the hypothesis that the Tea Party movement has more than its fair share of social dominators may have merit.

Summary

The Tea Party movement was largely created by conservative groups that provided organization, guidance and publicity for the protests. But these efforts by themselves would never have gotten tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands of Americans into public squares to rail against the government. While the sponsoring organizations undoubtedly set up the protests for their own purposes, bussed demonstrators to town halls, and organized massive telephone and email campaigns to elected officials, “astroturfing” can’t explain the size of the protests. The Tea Partiers seem to have been spring-loaded, waiting for the call to arms. I suspect FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Express were rather astonished at how easily they rounded up crowds, and have been working hard ever since trying to control and channel the eruption they set off.

The people who responded to the call appear to be primarily the authoritarian followers who form the base of the present GOP—social conservatives who, when they campaigned behind religious leadership, were known as the religious right. But the movement also attracted economic conservatives, who also strongly tend to lean Republican. Many of these economic conservatives are libertarians, and they may include a relatively high percentage of social dominators.

Other groups have no doubt flocked to the Tea Party banner. Like most populist movements, the Tea Party has attracted many people who are pissed off about many different things. And while it is intensely organized on the local level, it is anything but unified nationally. Some local groups insist they are politically independent and equally disgusted with both parties. And of course many people in the movement are not particularly authoritarian. But it does seem that the movement has lots of authoritarians in it, and that is quite troubling.

Suppose slavery still existed in the United States, but the federal government was trying to end it. However Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and so on told their audiences that slavery was a good thing, recognized by the Founding Fathers, endorsed in the Old Testament, the natural order of things, an issue for individual states to decide, protected by an individual’s inalienable right to do what he wanted with his property, and so on. I doubt Abraham Lincoln would find these arguments compelling. But how much trouble do you think the Patriotic Association of Slave Owners would have getting today’s Tea Partiers out to campaign for slavery in America?

What will the future bring?

Is the Tea Party losing steam? Tax Day 2010 apparently did not bring out nearly as many protestors as Tax Day 2009 did. Does that mean the Tea Party is waning, and by November will be but a shadow of itself? I wouldn’t count on it. The grass roots may have tired of taking to the plazas over and over. After all, how many votes on health care reform did the demonstrations change? But the various organizers behind the movement are clearly focused now on November, and the people who show up at the rallies are promising to turf their enemies out through the ballot box. I think it’s foolish to think the Tea Partiers are going to go home and stay there. They are madder now than they’ve ever been. They pump each other up too much to quit. They are by far the most committed political force in the country now. And their numbers are not dropping in the polls. A CBS News/New York Times poll released April 10, 2010 found 18 percent of the sample identified with the Tea Party, compared with 13 percent and 17 percent in polls a little earlier.

The movement has lost some of its shining image among the American people. Fifty-one percent of a Rasmussen poll released after the first Tax Day rally had a favorable view of the Tea Party. The figure had dropped to 28 percent in the Quinnipiac poll dated March 24, 2010, and 37 percent in the USA Today/Gallup poll of April 5. But Americans still hold Tea Partiers in higher esteem than their national leaders. Rasmussen released a poll on April 1, 2010 that showed most registered voters believe the average member of the Tea Party has a better understanding of the issues facing America than the average member of Congress. President Obama fared little better in a Rasmussen poll released on April 5: 48 percent said the average Tea Bagger is closer to their views than the president is, compared to 44 percent who opted for Obama. Republicans of course overwhelmingly voted for the average Tea Bagger, and Democrats of course overwhelmingly endorsed the president. The difference in the final score was decided by Independents, who felt closer to the Tea Partiers by a 50–38 margin.

In the long run, the emergence of the Tea Party movement is just the latest step in the radicalization of the Republican Party that began in the 1980s. The same people who formed the religious right over the past twenty-five years continue to drive the party to the far, far right. In the process almost every moderate Republican leader has been purged from the lists, and the party”s intellectual capital is as low now as Lehman Brothers” net worth when it rolled over and went belly up. When the American Enterprise Institute recently fired David Frum for saying the GOP was contributing to its own Waterloo by listening to the most radical voices in the party, it was just the latest loss of a principled, intelligent conservative that began some time ago.

As a moderate and an Independent, I would like to see at least two sets of well-thought-out policies to choose from when I vote. But who is left to shape and guide conservatism in America now? Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Glenn Beck? Sean Hannity? Newt Gingrich? Michelle Bachmann? Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? Mitt Romney? Scott Brown? Mike Huckabee? Ann Coulter? The best and brightest Republicans have been shown the door. As was true during McCarthyism, some GOP leaders must be deeply concerned about what is happening, but few dare speak. They’ve seen what happens when someone challenges Rush.

Will the Tea Party become a third political party? I doubt it. Some local groups are determined to keep the Republican Party at arm”s length, but where else can the Tea Partiers go in their determination to throw out the Democrats? The Tea Party will probably put up candidates itself only in contests where the nominees are too moderate for its tastes. The Conservative Party did this in New York’s 23^rd Congressional District in 2009, causing a monumental Republican loss in a district the party had won for eons. The resulting message of “Do what we want, or you’ll lose” has to make local GOP officials very leery of supporting a candidate unsatisfactory to the Tea Party leadership. And the Tea Party wants “pure conservative” candidates like Carl Paladino who take very right-wing stands on everything. It’s not going to be enough to just champion smaller government and lower taxes. So Republican nominees will probably become yet more radical than they are now.

In the long run, this should be good for the Democrats. Most Americans do not like radicals of any stripe, they want gifted people running the government, and they will turn on liars once they discover the lies. Thus Sarah Palin hurt the GOP ticket in 2008. But in the short run, meaning this year of 2010, I see a great danger. The rock-solid Republican base has been recharged and augmented. It will bust a gut to send as many radical social/economic conservatives to Congress as possible. While the Tea Party movement is opposed by a significant part of the population, the rest of the electorate is up for grabs. And not many people understand who is controlling the Tea Party movement, who is in it, and what they will do if they come to power. Significantly more Republicans than anyone else tell pollsters now that they are certain to vote in November. And although Democrats appreciably outnumber Republicans in the country, more people say they plan to vote for a Republican candidate than a Democrat. Combining the zeal of the Republican grass roots with a slowly recovering economy, a less-than-popular president, and the sentiment that “Whoever’s in/running Congress now should be thrown out on his ass,” I predict the Republicans will score a great victory in November.[460]

Unless. Unless the least authoritarian part of the American population out-organizes, out-hustles, out-reaches, out-recruits, out-communicates, and out-delivers the votes drummed up by the most authoritarian part. They did exactly that in 2008, and achieved unimagined victories. So it can be done, by patiently and sensibly explaining to moderate, independent, “middle” voters exactly who got us into this mess, and who has done nothing to get us out of it except constantly say “no”—like someone who stands on the hose when you’re trying to put out a fire. And if the Tea Partiers succeed in getting more and more extremists running on the Republican ticket, that should open huge differences between the Democratic candidates and them. That can produce victory after victory—thanks to the Tea Partiers.

But alternately, the least authoritarian folks can find a dozen reasons to do little or nothing, and then the authoritarians will win. I”m pretty sure the authoritarians will be ready to take to the field next autumn in force, deeply committed and raring to go. So the liberals will decide the outcome of the election in November.[461]

Comment on Donald Trump and Authoritarian Followers

In 1998 I tried to explain why social scientists who are worried about our freedoms have focused on the crowd that would lift a dictator aloft rather than the autocrat himself.

“Wanna-be tyrants in a democracy are just comical figures on soapboxes when they have no following. So the real... threat lay coiled in parts of the population itself, it was thought, ready someday to catapult the next Hitler to power with their votes.”

That apprehension was well-founded, it turns out. Research suggests that 20–25% of the adults in North America are highly vulnerable to a demagogue who would incite hatred of various minorities to gain power. These people are waiting for a tough “man on horseback” who will supposedly solve all our problems through the ruthless application of force. When such a man gains prominence, you can expect the authoritarian followers to mate devotedly with the authoritarian leader, because each gives the other something they desperately want: the feeling of safety for the followers, and the tremendous power of the modern state for the leader.

I would not say that all of the people trying to carry Donald Trump to the presidency are authoritarian followers. But they likely compose his hard core base. Furthermore, many authoritarian followers presently support Senator Ted Cruz for religious reasons. You can expect most of them to slide into the Trump ranks once Cruz drops out of the race. By summer, the vast majority of authoritarian followers in the United States will likely be for Trump. And so will many others for various reasons.

We know a lot about authoritarian followers, but unfortunately most of what we know indicates it will be almost impossible to change their minds, especially in a few months. Here are a dozen things established by research.

They are highly ethnocentric, highly inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. Because they are so committed to their in-group, they are very zealous in its cause.
They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experiencing stronger fear than most people do.
They are highly self-righteous. They believe they are the “good people” and this unlocks a lot of hostile impulses against those they consider bad.
They are aggressive. Given the chance to attack someone with the approval of an authority, they will lower the boom.
They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities, non-heterosexuals, and women in general.
Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They have highly compartmentalized minds, in which opposite beliefs exist side-by-side in adjacent boxes. As a result, their thinking is full of double-standards.
They reason poorly. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they don’t pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent.
They are highly dogmatic. Because they have gotten their beliefs mainly from the authorities in their lives, rather than think things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.
They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know, almost every news broadcast they see, almost every radio commentator they listen to, tells them they are. That is, they screen out the sources that will suggest that they are wrong.
Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them. And thinking they are “the moral majority” supports their attacks on the “evil minorities” they see in the country.
They are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain.
They are largely blind to themselves. They have little self-understanding and insight into why they think and do what they do.

I hasten to add that almost anyone would become more ethnocentric, frightened, self-righteous, and so on if their situations, or our country’s situation, changed enough. And studies find examples of these twelve things in lots of others, not just authoritarian followers. But not as consistently, and not nearly as much.

If, as you went down this list of things experiments have discovered about authoritarian followers, you found yourself saying, “Yeah, you can sure see that in the Trump supporters,” and if you believe that a President Trump would be a very stiff test of democracy the United States, then what can you do — without becoming a highly ethnocentric person yourself?

Well, it’s not going to be easy changing highly aggressive, dogmatic, insular people who will dismiss you out of hand as “the enemy”? They have been that way for most of their lives, and they have built a lot of supports, including straight-out denial, to keep their views intact.

Authoritarian followers in America today are tremendously energized by fear and anger. They’re scared, and they want someone really strong and confident to protect them. It’s a very natural, understandable reaction. As well they’re intensely angry about the way their country is changing, and most pointedly furious with the Republican Party which has won many elections because of their support, and then utterly failed to “get things right again.” So they feel betrayed, and that is a very powerful motivator.

One suspects they will feel even more betrayed if Trump becomes president and turns out to have been conning them all along too. But he is going to keep telling them he’s one of them, and keep them scared and angry while selling himself as the Toughest Guy They Ever Met. Authoritarian followers are always waiting for The Leader, and now they firmly believe they’ve found him.

But let me not stoke your fears too high, for we do have to fear fear itself. There is a simple way out of this situation: Others can outvote them. But even though most of the American electorate says now that they would never vote for Trump, he’ll become the next President if those folks stay home on election day. If Trump’s opponents do not get as energized as Trump’s very loyal followers are, his supporters will carry him on their shoulders to the highest office in the land.

76. Leaves of Grass

Deleted reason: for now, published by accident.

Author: Walt Whitman

Topics: sex, sexuality, free love, poetry, individualist anarchism, individualism

Date: 1855

Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322

Book I. Inscriptions

One’s-Self I Sing

  One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
  Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

  Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
  Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say
      the Form complete is worthier far,
  The Female equally with the Male I sing.

  Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
  Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
  The Modern Man I sing.

As I Ponder’d in Silence

  As I ponder’d in silence,
  Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
  A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
  Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
  The genius of poets of old lands,
  As to me directing like flame its eyes,
  With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
  And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
  Know’st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
  And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
  The making of perfect soldiers.

  Be it so, then I answer’d,
  I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,
  Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance
      and retreat, victory deferr’d and wavering,
  (Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the
      field the world,
  For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
  Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
  I above all promote brave soldiers.

In Cabin’d Ships at Sea

  In cabin’d ships at sea,
  The boundless blue on every side expanding,
  With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,
  Or some lone bark buoy’d on the dense marine,
  Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails,
  She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under
      many a star at night,
  By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
  In full rapport at last.

  Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
  Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
  The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
  We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
  The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
      briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
  The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
  The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
  And this is ocean’s poem.

  Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny,
  You not a reminiscence of the land alone,
  You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos’d I know not
      whither, yet ever full of faith,
  Consort to every ship that sails, sail you!
  Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear mariners, for you I fold it
      here in every leaf;)
  Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the
      imperious waves,
  Chant on, sail on, bear o’er the boundless blue from me to every sea,
  This song for mariners and all their ships.

To Foreign Lands

  I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
  And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
  Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.

To a Historian

  You who celebrate bygones,
  Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life
      that has exhibited itself,
  Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates,
      rulers and priests,
  I, habitan of the Alleghanies, treating of him as he is in himself
      in his own rights,
  Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited itself,
      (the great pride of man in himself,)
  Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,
  I project the history of the future.

To Thee Old Cause

  To thee old cause!
  Thou peerless, passionate, good cause,
  Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea,
  Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands,
  After a strange sad war, great war for thee,
  (I think all war through time was really fought, and ever will be
      really fought, for thee,)
  These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee.

  (A war O soldiers not for itself alone,
  Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.)

  Thou orb of many orbs!
  Thou seething principle! thou well-kept, latent germ! thou centre!
  Around the idea of thee the war revolving,
  With all its angry and vehement play of causes,
  (With vast results to come for thrice a thousand years,)
  These recitatives for thee,—my book and the war are one,
  Merged in its spirit I and mine, as the contest hinged on thee,
  As a wheel on its axis turns, this book unwitting to itself,
  Around the idea of thee.

Eidolons

       I met a seer,
  Passing the hues and objects of the world,
  The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,
       To glean eidolons.

       Put in thy chants said he,
  No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in,
  Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,
       That of eidolons.

       Ever the dim beginning,
  Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,
  Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)
       Eidolons! eidolons!

       Ever the mutable,
  Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,
  Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,
       Issuing eidolons.

       Lo, I or you,
  Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,
  We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
       But really build eidolons.

       The ostent evanescent,
  The substance of an artist’s mood or savan’s studies long,
  Or warrior’s, martyr’s, hero’s toils,
       To fashion his eidolon.

       Of every human life,
  (The units gather’d, posted, not a thought, emotion, deed, left out,)
  The whole or large or small summ’d, added up,
       In its eidolon.

       The old, old urge,
  Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles,
  From science and the modern still impell’d,
       The old, old urge, eidolons.

       The present now and here,
  America’s busy, teeming, intricate whirl,
  Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing,
       To-day’s eidolons.

       These with the past,
  Of vanish’d lands, of all the reigns of kings across the sea,
  Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors’ voyages,
       Joining eidolons.

       Densities, growth, facades,
  Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,
  Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave,
       Eidolons everlasting.

       Exalte, rapt, ecstatic,
  The visible but their womb of birth,
  Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape,
       The mighty earth-eidolon.

       All space, all time,
  (The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,
  Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)
       Fill’d with eidolons only.

       The noiseless myriads,
  The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,
  The separate countless free identities, like eyesight,
       The true realities, eidolons.

       Not this the world,
  Nor these the universes, they the universes,
  Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,
       Eidolons, eidolons.

       Beyond thy lectures learn’d professor,
  Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics,
  Beyond the doctor’s surgery, anatomy, beyond the chemist with his chemistry,
       The entities of entities, eidolons.

       Unfix’d yet fix’d,
  Ever shall be, ever have been and are,
  Sweeping the present to the infinite future,
       Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons.

       The prophet and the bard,
  Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages yet,
  Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them,
       God and eidolons.

       And thee my soul,
  Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations,
  Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet,
       Thy mates, eidolons.

       Thy body permanent,
  The body lurking there within thy body,
  The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself,
       An image, an eidolon.

       Thy very songs not in thy songs,
  No special strains to sing, none for itself,
  But from the whole resulting, rising at last and floating,
       A round full-orb’d eidolon.

For Him I Sing

  For him I sing,
  I raise the present on the past,
  (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,)
  With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws,
  To make himself by them the law unto himself.

When I Read the Book

  When I read the book, the biography famous,
  And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?
  And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
  (As if any man really knew aught of my life,
  Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
  Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
  I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Beginning My Studies

  Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
  The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
  The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
  The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
  I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
  But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

Beginners

  How they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals,)
  How dear and dreadful they are to the earth,
  How they inure to themselves as much as to any—what a paradox
      appears their age,
  How people respond to them, yet know them not,
  How there is something relentless in their fate all times,
  How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward,
  And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same
      great purchase.

To the States

  To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
      much, obey little,
  Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
  Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
      afterward resumes its liberty.

On Journeys Through the States

  On journeys through the States we start,
  (Ay through the world, urged by these songs,
  Sailing henceforth to every land, to every sea,)
  We willing learners of all, teachers of all, and lovers of all.

  We have watch’d the seasons dispensing themselves and passing on,
  And have said, Why should not a man or woman do as much as the
      seasons, and effuse as much?

  We dwell a while in every city and town,
  We pass through Kanada, the North-east, the vast valley of the
      Mississippi, and the Southern States,
  We confer on equal terms with each of the States,
  We make trial of ourselves and invite men and women to hear,
  We say to ourselves, Remember, fear not, be candid, promulge the
      body and the soul,
  Dwell a while and pass on, be copious, temperate, chaste, magnetic,
  And what you effuse may then return as the seasons return,
  And may be just as much as the seasons.

To a Certain Cantatrice

  Here, take this gift,
  I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or general,
  One who should serve the good old cause, the great idea, the
      progress and freedom of the race,
  Some brave confronter of despots, some daring rebel;
  But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any.

Me Imperturbe

  Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
  Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things,
  Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,
  Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less
      important than I thought,
  Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee,
      or far north or inland,
  A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of these
      States or of the coast, or the lakes or Kanada,
  Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies,
  To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as
      the trees and animals do.

Savantism

  Thither as I look I see each result and glory retracing itself and
      nestling close, always obligated,
  Thither hours, months, years—thither trades, compacts,
      establishments, even the most minute,
  Thither every-day life, speech, utensils, politics, persons, estates;
  Thither we also, I with my leaves and songs, trustful, admirant,
  As a father to his father going takes his children along with him.

The Ship Starting

  Lo, the unbounded sea,
  On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even
      her moonsails.
  The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately—
      below emulous waves press forward,
  They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam.

I Hear America Singing

  I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
  Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
  The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
  The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
  The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
      singing on the steamboat deck,
  The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as
      he stands,
  The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning,
      or at noon intermission or at sundown,
  The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
      or of the girl sewing or washing,
  Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
  The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young
      fellows, robust, friendly,
  Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

What Place Is Besieged?

  What place is besieged, and vainly tries to raise the siege?
  Lo, I send to that place a commander, swift, brave, immortal,
  And with him horse and foot, and parks of artillery,
  And artillery-men, the deadliest that ever fired gun.

Still Though the One I Sing

  Still though the one I sing,
  (One, yet of contradictions made,) I dedicate to Nationality,
  I leave in him revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O
      quenchless, indispensable fire!)

Shut Not Your Doors

  Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
  For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet
      needed most, I bring,
  Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
  The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
  A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
  But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

Poets to Come

  Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
  Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
  But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than
      before known,
  Arouse! for you must justify me.

  I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
  I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.

  I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a
      casual look upon you and then averts his face,
  Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
  Expecting the main things from you.

To You

  Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why
      should you not speak to me?
  And why should I not speak to you?

Thou Reader

Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.

Book II. Starting from Paumanok

       1
  Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,
  Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother,
  After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements,
  Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas,
  Or a soldier camp’d or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner
      in California,
  Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink from
      the spring,
  Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess,
  Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy,
  Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of
      mighty Niagara,
  Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and
      strong-breasted bull,
  Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow,
      my amaze,
  Having studied the mocking-bird’s tones and the flight of the
      mountain-hawk,
  And heard at dawn the unrivall’d one, the hermit thrush from the
      swamp-cedars,
  Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.

       2
  Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
  The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
  Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
  This then is life,
  Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.

  How curious! how real!
  Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.

  See revolving the globe,
  The ancestor-continents away group’d together,
  The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus
      between.

  See, vast trackless spaces,
  As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill,
  Countless masses debouch upon them,
  They are now cover’d with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.

  See, projected through time,
  For me an audience interminable.

  With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop,
  Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions,
  One generation playing its part and passing on,
  Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn,
  With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me to listen,
  With eyes retrospective towards me.

       3
  Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian!
  Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
  For you a programme of chants.

  Chants of the prairies,
  Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican sea,
  Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota,
  Chants going forth from the centre from Kansas, and thence equidistant,
  Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all.

       4
  Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,
  Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own off-spring,
  Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,
  And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect
      lovingly with you.

  I conn’d old times,
  I sat studying at the feet of the great masters,
  Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me.

  In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique?
  Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.

       5
  Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
  Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
  Language-shapers on other shores,
  Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
  I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left
      wafted hither,
  I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,)
  Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more
      than it deserves,
  Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
  I stand in my place with my own day here.

  Here lands female and male,
  Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of
      materials,
  Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow’d,
  The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms,
  The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing,
  Yes here comes my mistress the soul.

       6
  The soul,
  Forever and forever—longer than soil is brown and solid—longer
      than water ebbs and flows.
  I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the
      most spiritual poems,
  And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
  For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and
      of immortality.

  I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any
      circumstances be subjected to another State,
  And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by
      night between all the States, and between any two of them,
  And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of
      weapons with menacing points,
  And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces;
  And a song make I of the One form’d out of all,
  The fang’d and glittering One whose head is over all,
  Resolute warlike One including and over all,
  (However high the head of any else that head is over all.)

  I will acknowledge contemporary lands,
  I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously
      every city large and small,
  And employments! I will put in my poems that with you is heroism
      upon land and sea,
  And I will report all heroism from an American point of view.

  I will sing the song of companionship,
  I will show what alone must finally compact these,
  I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love,
      indicating it in me,
  I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were
      threatening to consume me,
  I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires,
  I will give them complete abandonment,
  I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,
  For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy?
  And who but I should be the poet of comrades?

       7
  I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,
  I advance from the people in their own spirit,
  Here is what sings unrestricted faith.

  Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may,
  I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also,
  I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is—and I say
      there is in fact no evil,
  (Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the land or
      to me, as any thing else.)

  I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion, I
      descend into the arena,
  (It may be I am destin’d to utter the loudest cries there, the
      winner’s pealing shouts,
  Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above every thing.)

  Each is not for its own sake,
  I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake.

  I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
  None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough,
  None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain
      the future is.

  I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be
      their religion,
  Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur;
  (Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion,
  Nor land nor man or woman without religion.)

       8
  What are you doing young man?
  Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
  These ostensible realities, politics, points?
  Your ambition or business whatever it may be?

  It is well—against such I say not a word, I am their poet also,
  But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion’s sake,
  For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential
      life of the earth,
  Any more than such are to religion.

       9
  What do you seek so pensive and silent?
  What do you need camerado?
  Dear son do you think it is love?

  Listen dear son—listen America, daughter or son,
  It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it
      satisfies, it is great,
  But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,
  It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and
      provides for all.

       10
  Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,
  The following chants each for its kind I sing.

  My comrade!
  For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising
      inclusive and more resplendent,
  The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.

  Melange mine own, the unseen and the seen,
  Mysterious ocean where the streams empty,
  Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me,
  Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we
      know not of,
  Contact daily and hourly that will not release me,
  These selecting, these in hints demanded of me.

  Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me,
  Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him,
  Any more than I am held to the heavens and all the spiritual world,
  After what they have done to me, suggesting themes.

  O such themes—equalities! O divine average!
  Warblings under the sun, usher’d as now, or at noon, or setting,
  Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching hither,
  I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to them, and
      cheerfully pass them forward.

       11
  As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning walk,
  I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest in
      the briers hatching her brood.

  I have seen the he-bird also,
  I have paus’d to hear him near at hand inflating his throat and
      joyfully singing.

  And while I paus’d it came to me that what he really sang for was
      not there only,
  Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes,
  But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
  A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.

       12
  Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and
      joyfully singing.

  Ma femme! for the brood beyond us and of us,
  For those who belong here and those to come,
  I exultant to be ready for them will now shake out carols stronger
      and haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth.

  I will make the songs of passion to give them their way,
  And your songs outlaw’d offenders, for I scan you with kindred eyes,
      and carry you with me the same as any.

  I will make the true poem of riches,
  To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward
      and is not dropt by death;
  I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the
      bard of personality,
  And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of
      the other,
  And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determin’d
      to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious,
  And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and
      can be none in the future,
  And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to
      beautiful results,
  And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
  And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are
      compact,
  And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each
      as profound as any.

  I will not make poems with reference to parts,
  But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble,
  And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to
      all days,
  And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has
      reference to the soul,
  Because having look’d at the objects of the universe, I find there
      is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.

       13
  Was somebody asking to see the soul?
  See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts,
      the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands.

  All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them;
  How can the real body ever die and be buried?

  Of your real body and any man’s or woman’s real body,
  Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners and
      pass to fitting spheres,
  Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the
      moment of death.

  Not the types set up by the printer return their impression, the
      meaning, the main concern,
  Any more than a man’s substance and life or a woman’s substance and
      life return in the body and the soul,
  Indifferently before death and after death.

  Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern and
      includes and is the soul;
  Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part
      of it!

       14
  Whoever you are, to you endless announcements!

  Daughter of the lands did you wait for your poet?
  Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indicative hand?
  Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States,
  Exulting words, words to Democracy’s lands.

  Interlink’d, food-yielding lands!
  Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!
  Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple
      and the grape!
  Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of
      those sweet-air’d interminable plateaus!
  Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!
  Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west
      Colorado winds!
  Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of the Delaware!
  Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!
  Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and
      Connecticut!
  Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks!
  Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen’s land!
  Inextricable lands! the clutch’d together! the passionate ones!
  The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb’d!
  The great women’s land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and
      the inexperienced sisters!
  Far breath’d land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez’d! the diverse! the
      compact!
  The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian!
  O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any
      rate include you all with perfect love!
  I cannot be discharged from you! not from one any sooner than another!
  O death! O for all that, I am yet of you unseen this hour with
      irrepressible love,
  Walking New England, a friend, a traveler,
  Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples on
      Paumanok’s sands,
  Crossing the prairies, dwelling again in Chicago, dwelling in every town,
  Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts,
  Listening to orators and oratresses in public halls,
  Of and through the States as during life, each man and woman my neighbor,
  The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her,
  The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me, and I yet with any of them,
  Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river, yet in my house of adobie,
  Yet returning eastward, yet in the Seaside State or in Maryland,
  Yet Kanadian cheerily braving the winter, the snow and ice welcome to me,
  Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or the
      Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State,
  Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet welcoming every
      new brother,
  Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they
      unite with the old ones,
  Coming among the new ones myself to be their companion and equal,
      coming personally to you now,
  Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me.

       15
  With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on.
  For your life adhere to me,
  (I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give
      myself really to you, but what of that?
  Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

  No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
  Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived,
  To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
  For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.

       16
  On my way a moment I pause,
  Here for you! and here for America!
  Still the present I raise aloft, still the future of the States I
      harbinge glad and sublime,
  And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.

  The red aborigines,
  Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds
      and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names,
  Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee,
      Kaqueta, Oronoco,
  Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla,
  Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the
      water and the land with names.

       17
  Expanding and swift, henceforth,
  Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious,
  A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching,
  A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests,
  New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts.

  These, my voice announcing—I will sleep no more but arise,
  You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you,
      fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

       18
  See, steamers steaming through my poems,
  See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing,
  See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter’s hut, the flat-boat,
      the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village,
  See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea,
      how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores,
  See, pastures and forests in my poems—see, animals wild and tame—see,
      beyond the Kaw, countless herds of buffalo feeding on short curly grass,
  See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets,
      with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,
  See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press—see, the electric
      telegraph stretching across the continent,
  See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching,
      pulses of Europe duly return’d,
  See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing
      the steam-whistle,
  See, ploughmen ploughing farms—see, miners digging mines—see,
      the numberless factories,
  See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools—see from among them
      superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, drest in
      working dresses,
  See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me
      well-belov’d, close-held by day and night,
  Hear the loud echoes of my songs there—read the hints come at last.

       19
  O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
  O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!
  O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
  O now I triumph—and you shall also;
  O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover!
  O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.

Book III. Song of Myself

       1
  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
  And what I assume you shall assume,
  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I loafe and invite my soul,
  I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

  My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
  Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
      parents the same,
  I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
  Hoping to cease not till death.

  Creeds and schools in abeyance,
  Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
  I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
  Nature without check with original energy.

       2
  Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
      perfumes,
  I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
  The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

  The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
      distillation, it is odorless,
  It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
  I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
  I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

  The smoke of my own breath,
  Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
  My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
      of blood and air through my lungs,
  The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
      dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

  The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of
      the wind,
  A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
  The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
  The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields
      and hill-sides,
  The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
      from bed and meeting the sun.

  Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
  Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
  Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

  Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
      all poems,
  You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
      of suns left,)
  You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
      the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
  You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
  You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

       3
  I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
      beginning and the end,
  But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

  There was never any more inception than there is now,
  Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

  Urge and urge and urge,
  Always the procreant urge of the world.

  Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and
      increase, always sex,
  Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
  To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.

  Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well
      entretied, braced in the beams,
  Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
  I and this mystery here we stand.

  Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

  Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
  Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

  Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
  Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
      discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

  Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
  Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
      less familiar than the rest.

  I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing;
  As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night,
      and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,
  Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with
      their plenty,
  Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
  That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
  And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
  Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?

       4
  Trippers and askers surround me,
  People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and
      city I live in, or the nation,
  The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
  My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
  The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
  The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss
      or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
  Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,
      the fitful events;
  These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
  But they are not the Me myself.

  Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
  Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
  Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
  Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
  Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

  Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
      linguists and contenders,
  I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

       5
  I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
  And you must not be abased to the other.

  Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
  Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
      even the best,
  Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

  I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
  How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue
      to my bare-stript heart,
  And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

  Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
      all the argument of the earth,
  And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
  And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
  And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
      my sisters and lovers,
  And that a kelson of the creation is love,
  And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
  And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
  And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and
      poke-weed.

       6
  A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
  How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

  I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
      stuff woven.

  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
  A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
  Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see
      and remark, and say Whose?

  Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
  And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
  Growing among black folks as among white,
  Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
      receive them the same.

  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
  It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
  It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
  It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out
      of their mothers’ laps,
  And here you are the mothers’ laps.

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
  And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

  I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
  And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
      soon out of their laps.

  What do you think has become of the young and old men?
  And what do you think has become of the women and children?

  They are alive and well somewhere,
  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
  And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
      end to arrest it,
  And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

  All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
  And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

       7
  Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
  I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

  I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and
      am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
  And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
  The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

  I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
  I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
      fathomless as myself,
  (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

  Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
  For me those that have been boys and that love women,
  For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
  For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the
      mothers of mothers,
  For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
  For me children and the begetters of children.

  Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
  I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
  And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

       8
  The little one sleeps in its cradle,
  I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies
      with my hand.

  The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
  I peeringly view them from the top.

  The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
  I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol
      has fallen.

  The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of
      the promenaders,
  The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the
      clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
  The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
  The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,
  The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
  The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
  The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his
      passage to the centre of the crowd,
  The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
  What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits,
  What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and
      give birth to babes,
  What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls
      restrain’d by decorum,
  Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances,
      rejections with convex lips,
  I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart.

       9
  The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
  The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
  The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
  The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow.

  I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load,
  I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
  I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
  And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.

       10
  Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
  Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
  In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
  Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game,
  Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.

  The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,
  My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.

  The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
  I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
  You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

  I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,
      the bride was a red girl,
  Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking,
      they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets
      hanging from their shoulders,
  On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant
      beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,
  She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks
      descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.

  The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
  I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
  Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
  And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
  And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
  And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some
      coarse clean clothes,
  And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
  And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
  He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
  I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.

       11
  Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
  Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
  Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

  She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
  She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

  Which of the young men does she like the best?
  Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

  Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
  You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

  Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
  The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

  The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
  Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

  An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
  It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

  The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
      sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
  They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
  They do not think whom they souse with spray.

       12
  The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife
      at the stall in the market,
  I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.

  Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
  Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in
      the fire.

  From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,
  The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
  Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
  They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

       13
  The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags
      underneath on its tied-over chain,
  The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and
      tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece,
  His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over
      his hip-band,
  His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat
      away from his forehead,
  The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of
      his polish’d and perfect limbs.

  I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there,
  I go with the team also.

  In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as
      forward sluing,
  To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing,
  Absorbing all to myself and for this song.

  Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what
      is that you express in your eyes?
  It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

  My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and
      day-long ramble,
  They rise together, they slowly circle around.

  I believe in those wing’d purposes,
  And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me,
  And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional,
  And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
  And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
  And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

       14
  The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
  Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
  The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
  Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.

  The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the
      chickadee, the prairie-dog,
  The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
  The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,
  I see in them and myself the same old law.

  The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
  They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

  I am enamour’d of growing out-doors,
  Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
  Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and
      mauls, and the drivers of horses,
  I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

  What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
  Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
  Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
  Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
  Scattering it freely forever.

       15
  The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
  The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane
      whistles its wild ascending lisp,
  The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
  The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
  The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
  The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
  The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar,
  The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
  The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and
      looks at the oats and rye,
  The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case,
  (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s
      bed-room;)
  The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
  He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
  The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,
  What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
  The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by
      the bar-room stove,
  The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat,
      the gate-keeper marks who pass,
  The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do
      not know him;)
  The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
  The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their
      rifles, some sit on logs,
  Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;
  The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,
  As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them
      from his saddle,
  The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their
      partners, the dancers bow to each other,
  The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret and harks to the
      musical rain,
  The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
  The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth is offering moccasins and
      bead-bags for sale,
  The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut
      eyes bent sideways,
  As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for
      the shore-going passengers,
  The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it
      off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,
  The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne
      her first child,
  The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the
      factory or mill,
  The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead
      flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering
      with blue and gold,
  The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his
      desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread,
  The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him,
  The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions,
  The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white
      sails sparkle!)
  The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray,
  The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling
      about the odd cent;)
  The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock
      moves slowly,
  The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips,
  The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and
      pimpled neck,
  The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to
      each other,
  (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;)
  The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great
      Secretaries,
  On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms,
  The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,
  The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle,
  As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the
      jingling of loose change,
  The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the
      roof, the masons are calling for mortar,
  In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers;
  Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it
      is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
  Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows,
      and the winter-grain falls in the ground;
  Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in
      the frozen surface,
  The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep
      with his axe,
  Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees,
  Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through
      those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas,
  Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,
  Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons
      around them,
  In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after
      their day’s sport,
  The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
  The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
  The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
  And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
  And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
  And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

       16
  I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
  Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
  Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
  Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff
      that is fine,
  One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the
      largest the same,
  A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and
      hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
  A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest
      joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
  A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin
      leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
  A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;
  At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen
      off Newfoundland,
  At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,
  At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the
      Texan ranch,
  Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving
      their big proportions,)
  Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands
      and welcome to drink and meat,
  A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
  A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
  Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
  A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
  Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

  I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
  Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
  And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

  (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
  The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
  The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)

       17
  These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
      are not original with me,
  If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
  If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
  If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

  This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
  This the common air that bathes the globe.

       18
  With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums,
  I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for
      conquer’d and slain persons.

  Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
  I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit
      in which they are won.

  I beat and pound for the dead,
  I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.

  Vivas to those who have fail’d!
  And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
  And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
  And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
  And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

       19
  This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
  It is for the wicked just same as the righteous, I make appointments
      with all,
  I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
  The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
  The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
  There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

  This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,
  This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
  This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
  This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

  Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
  Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the
      side of a rock has.

  Do you take it I would astonish?
  Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering
      through the woods?
  Do I astonish more than they?

  This hour I tell things in confidence,
  I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

       20
  Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
  How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

  What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

  All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
  Else it were time lost listening to me.

  I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
  That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

  Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity
      goes to the fourth-remov’d,
  I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

  Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

  Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with
      doctors and calculated close,
  I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

  In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
  And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

  I know I am solid and sound,
  To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
  All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

  I know I am deathless,
  I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
  I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt
      stick at night.

  I know I am august,
  I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
  I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
  (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,
      after all.)

  I exist as I am, that is enough,
  If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
  And if each and all be aware I sit content.

  One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
  And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten
      million years,
  I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

  My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
  I laugh at what you call dissolution,
  And I know the amplitude of time.

       21
  I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
  The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
  The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate
      into new tongue.

  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
  And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
  And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

  I chant the chant of dilation or pride,
  We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
  I show that size is only development.

  Have you outstript the rest? are you the President?
  It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and
      still pass on.

  I am he that walks with the tender and growing night,
  I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night.

  Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night!
  Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!
  Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.

  Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
  Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
  Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt!
  Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
  Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
  Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
  Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth!
  Smile, for your lover comes.

  Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!
  O unspeakable passionate love.

  Thruster holding me tight and that I hold tight!
  We hurt each other as the bridegroom and the bride hurt each other.

       22
  You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,
  I behold from the beach your crooked fingers,
  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
  We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
  Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

  Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,
  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
  Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,
  Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
  I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

  Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
  Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.

  I am he attesting sympathy,
  (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that
      supports them?)

  I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet
      of wickedness also.

  What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
  Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
  My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,
  I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

  Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
  Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?

  I find one side a balance and the antipedal side a balance,
  Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
  Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

  This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
  There is no better than it and now.

  What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such wonder,
  The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.

       23
  Endless unfolding of words of ages!
  And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

  A word of the faith that never balks,
  Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.

  It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,
  That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.

  I accept Reality and dare not question it,
  Materialism first and last imbuing.

  Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
  Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
  This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of
      the old cartouches,
  These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas.
  This is the geologist, this works with the scalper, and this is a
      mathematician.

  Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
  Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
  I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.

  Less the reminders of properties told my words,
  And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,
  And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and
      women fully equipt,
  And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that
      plot and conspire.

       24
  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
  No more modest than immodest.

  Unscrew the locks from the doors!
  Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

  Whoever degrades another degrades me,
  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

  Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current
      and index.

  I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
      counterpart of on the same terms.

  Through me many long dumb voices,
  Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
  Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
  Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
  And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the
      father-stuff,
  And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
  Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
  Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

  Through me forbidden voices,
  Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
  Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

  I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

  I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
  Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
      is a miracle.

  Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
      touch’d from,
  The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
  This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

  If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of
      my own body, or any part of it,
  Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
  Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
  Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
  Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
  You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
  Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
  My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
  Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded
      duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
  Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
  Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
  Sun so generous it shall be you!
  Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
  You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
  Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
  Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my
      winding paths, it shall be you!
  Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d,
      it shall be you.

  I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
  Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
  I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
  Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the
      friendship I take again.

  That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
  A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics
      of books.

  To behold the day-break!
  The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
  The air tastes good to my palate.

  Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising
      freshly exuding,
  Scooting obliquely high and low.

  Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
  Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

  The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,
  The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,
  The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!

       25
  Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
  If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

  We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
  We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

  My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
  With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

  Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
  It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
  Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?

  Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of
      articulation,
  Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
  Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
  The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
  I underlying causes to balance them at last,
  My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,
  Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search
      of this day.)

  My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
  Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
  I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

  Writing and talk do not prove me,
  I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
  With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

       26
  Now I will do nothing but listen,
  To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

  I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,
      clack of sticks cooking my meals,
  I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
  I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
  Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
  Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of
      work-people at their meals,
  The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
  The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing
      a death-sentence,
  The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the
      refrain of the anchor-lifters,
  The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking
      engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,
  The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
  The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,
  (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

  I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)
  I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
  It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

  I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
  Ah this indeed is music—this suits me.

  A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
  The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

  I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)
  The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
  It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them,
  It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves,
  I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
  Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
  At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
  And that we call Being.

       27
  To be in any form, what is that?
  (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
  If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.

  Mine is no callous shell,
  I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
  They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

  I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
  To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

       28
  Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
  Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
  Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them,
  My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly
      different from myself,
  On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
  Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip,
  Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial,
  Depriving me of my best as for a purpose,
  Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist,
  Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields,
  Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
  They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,
  No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
  Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
  Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

  The sentries desert every other part of me,
  They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
  They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

  I am given up by traitors,
  I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the
      greatest traitor,
  I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

  You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
  Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

       29
  Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!
  Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

  Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,
  Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

  Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
  Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.

       30
  All truths wait in all things,
  They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
  They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
  The insignificant is as big to me as any,
  (What is less or more than a touch?)

  Logic and sermons never convince,
  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

  (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
  Only what nobody denies is so.)

  A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
  I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
  And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
  And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
  And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
      becomes omnific,
  And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

       31
  I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
  And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
      of the wren,
  And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
  And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
  And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
  And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
  And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

  I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
      grains, esculent roots,
  And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
  And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
  But call any thing back again when I desire it.

  In vain the speeding or shyness,
  In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
  In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones,
  In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
  In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
  In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
  In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
  In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
  In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador,
  I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

       32
  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
      self-contain’d,
  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
      owning things,
  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
      years ago,
  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

  So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
  They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their
      possession.

  I wonder where they get those tokens,
  Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

  Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
  Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
  Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
  Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
  Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.

  A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
  Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
  Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
  Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.

  His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
  His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.

  I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
  Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
  Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

       33
  Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,
  What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,
  What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,
  And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.

  My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,
  I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,
  I am afoot with my vision.

  By the city’s quadrangular houses—in log huts, camping with lumber-men,
  Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed,
  Weeding my onion-patch or hosing rows of carrots and parsnips,
      crossing savannas, trailing in forests,
  Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase,
  Scorch’d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the
      shallow river,
  Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the
      buck turns furiously at the hunter,
  Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the
      otter is feeding on fish,
  Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou,
  Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the
      beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tall;
  Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower’d cotton plant, over
      the rice in its low moist field,
  Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and
      slender shoots from the gutters,
  Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav’d corn, over the
      delicate blue-flower flax,
  Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with
      the rest,
  Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;
  Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low
      scragged limbs,
  Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush,
  Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,
  Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great
      goldbug drops through the dark,
  Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to
      the meadow,
  Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous
      shuddering of their hides,
  Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle
      the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters;
  Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders,
  Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs,
  Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it
      myself and looking composedly down,)
  Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat
      hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand,
  Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it,
  Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke,
  Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water,
  Where the half-burn’d brig is riding on unknown currents,
  Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below;
  Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments,
  Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island,
  Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance,
  Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,
  Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of
      base-ball,
  At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license,
      bull-dances, drinking, laughter,
  At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the
      juice through a straw,
  At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,
  At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings;
  Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles,
      screams, weeps,
  Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are
      scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,
  Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to
      the mare, where the cock is treading the hen,
  Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,
  Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,
  Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
      far and near,
  Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived
      swan is curving and winding,
  Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her
      near-human laugh,
  Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the
      high weeds,
  Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with
      their heads out,
  Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery,
  Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees,
  Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at
      night and feeds upon small crabs,
  Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon,
  Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over
      the well,
  Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves,
  Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs,
  Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the
      office or public hall;
  Pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign, pleas’d with
      the new and old,
  Pleas’d with the homely woman as well as the handsome,
  Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,
  Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church,
  Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher,
      impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting;
  Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon,
      flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass,
  Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds,
      or down a lane or along the beach,
  My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle;
  Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek’d bush-boy, (behind me
      he rides at the drape of the day,)
  Far from the settlements studying the print of animals’ feet, or the
      moccasin print,
  By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,
  Nigh the coffin’d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;
  Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure,
  Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any,
  Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him,
  Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while,
  Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful gentle God by my side,
  Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,
  Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the
      diameter of eighty thousand miles,
  Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,
  Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,
  Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
  Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,
  I tread day and night such roads.

  I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product,
  And look at quintillions ripen’d and look at quintillions green.

  I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul,
  My course runs below the soundings of plummets.

  I help myself to material and immaterial,
  No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me.

  I anchor my ship for a little while only,
  My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me.

  I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a
      pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue.

  I ascend to the foretruck,
  I take my place late at night in the crow’s-nest,
  We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough,
  Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,
  The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is
      plain in all directions,
  The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my
      fancies toward them,
  We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to
      be engaged,
  We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still
      feet and caution,
  Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin’d city,
  The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities
      of the globe.

  I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,
  I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
  I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

  My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,
  They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drown’d.

  I understand the large hearts of heroes,
  The courage of present times and all times,
  How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the
      steamship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,
  How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of
      days and faithful of nights,
  And chalk’d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will
      not desert you;
  How he follow’d with them and tack’d with them three days and
      would not give it up,
  How he saved the drifting company at last,
  How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the
      side of their prepared graves,
  How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the
      sharp-lipp’d unshaved men;
  All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,
  I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

  The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
  The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her
      children gazing on,
  The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence,
      blowing, cover’d with sweat,
  The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous
      buckshot and the bullets,
  All these I feel or am.

  I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
  Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
  I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the
      ooze of my skin,
  I fall on the weeds and stones,
  The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
  Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

  Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
  I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the
      wounded person,
  My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

  I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,
  Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,
  Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,
  I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,
  They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.

  I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake,
  Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy,
  White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared
      of their fire-caps,
  The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches.

  Distant and dead resuscitate,
  They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself.

  I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort’s bombardment,
  I am there again.

  Again the long roll of the drummers,
  Again the attacking cannon, mortars,
  Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive.

  I take part, I see and hear the whole,
  The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim’d shots,
  The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip,
  Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs,
  The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion,
  The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.

  Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves
      with his hand,
  He gasps through the clot Mind not me—mind—the entrenchments.

       34
  Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,
  (I tell not the fall of Alamo,
  Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
  The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)
  ’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve
      young men.

  Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for
      breastworks,
  Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemies, nine times their
      number, was the price they took in advance,
  Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
  They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and
      seal, gave up their arms and march’d back prisoners of war.

  They were the glory of the race of rangers,
  Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,
  Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
  Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,
  Not a single one over thirty years of age.

  The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and
      massacred, it was beautiful early summer,
  The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.

  None obey’d the command to kneel,
  Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,
  A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead
      lay together,
  The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there,
  Some half-kill’d attempted to crawl away,
  These were despatch’d with bayonets or batter’d with the blunts of muskets,
  A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more
      came to release him,
  The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood.

  At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies;
  That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.

       35
  Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
  Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
  List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me.

  Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
  His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer,
      and never was, and never will be;
  Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us.

  We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d,
  My captain lash’d fast with his own hands.

  We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water,
  On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire,
      killing all around and blowing up overhead.

  Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark,
  Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain,
      and five feet of water reported,
  The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold
      to give them a chance for themselves.

  The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels,
  They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust.

  Our frigate takes fire,
  The other asks if we demand quarter?
  If our colors are struck and the fighting done?

  Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,
  We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part
      of the fighting.

  Only three guns are in use,
  One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s main-mast,
  Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and
      clear his decks.

  The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially
      the main-top,
  They hold out bravely during the whole of the action.

  Not a moment’s cease,
  The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine.

  One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking.

  Serene stands the little captain,
  He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,
  His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

  Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.

       36
  Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,
  Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
  Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the
      one we have conquer’d,
  The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a
      countenance white as a sheet,
  Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin,
  The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully
      curl’d whiskers,
  The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,
  The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
  Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh
      upon the masts and spars,
  Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,
  Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,
  A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
  Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by
      the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,
  The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
  Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long,
      dull, tapering groan,
  These so, these irretrievable.

       37
  You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
  In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d!
  Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering,
  See myself in prison shaped like another man,
  And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

  For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
  It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.

  Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him
      and walk by his side,
  (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat
      on my twitching lips.)

  Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried
      and sentenced.

  Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,
  My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.

  Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
  I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

       38
  Enough! enough! enough!
  Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!
  Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping,
  I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

  That I could forget the mockers and insults!
  That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the
      bludgeons and hammers!
  That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and
      bloody crowning.

  I remember now,
  I resume the overstaid fraction,
  The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,
  Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.

  I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average
      unending procession,
  Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines,
  Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth,
  The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years.

  Eleves, I salute you! come forward!
  Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.

       39
  The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
  Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?

  Is he some Southwesterner rais’d out-doors? is he Kanadian?
  Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California?
  The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea?

  Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him,
  They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them.

  Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d
      head, laughter, and naivete,
  Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations,
  They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers,
  They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of
      the glance of his eyes.

       40
  Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask—lie over!
  You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also.

  Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,
  Say, old top-knot, what do you want?

  Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot,
  And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot,
  And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days.

  Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
  When I give I give myself.

  You there, impotent, loose in the knees,
  Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you,
  Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,
  I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,
  And any thing I have I bestow.

  I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,
  You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

  To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean,
  On his right cheek I put the family kiss,
  And in my soul I swear I never will deny him.

  On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes.
  (This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.)

  To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door.
  Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed,
  Let the physician and the priest go home.

  I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will,
  O despairer, here is my neck,
  By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me.

  I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up,
  Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force,
  Lovers of me, bafflers of graves.

  Sleep—I and they keep guard all night,
  Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
  I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself,
  And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.

       41
  I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
  And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.

  I heard what was said of the universe,
  Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;
  It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all?

  Magnifying and applying come I,
  Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
  Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,
  Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,
  Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,
  In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix
      engraved,
  With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,
  Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,
  Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,
  (They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly
      and sing for themselves,)
  Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself,
      bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,
  Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,
  Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves
      driving the mallet and chisel,
  Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or
      a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,
  Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me
      than the gods of the antique wars,
  Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,
  Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths, their white
      foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;
  By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for
      every person born,
  Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels
      with shirts bagg’d out at their waists,
  The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,
  Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his
      brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;
  What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and
      not filling the square rod then,
  The bull and the bug never worshipp’d half enough,
  Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d,
  The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of
      the supremes,
  The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the
      best, and be as prodigious;
  By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,
  Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows.

      42
  A call in the midst of the crowd,
  My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.

  Come my children,
  Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,
  Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass’d his prelude on
      the reeds within.

  Easily written loose-finger’d chords—I feel the thrum of your
      climax and close.

  My head slues round on my neck,
  Music rolls, but not from the organ,
  Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine.

  Ever the hard unsunk ground,
  Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever
      the air and the ceaseless tides,
  Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,
  Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that
      breath of itches and thirsts,
  Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides
      and bring him forth,
  Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
  Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

  Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
  To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
  Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,
  Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment
      receiving,
  A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

  This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
  Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets,
      newspapers, schools,
  The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories,
      stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.

  The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail’d coats
  I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,)
  I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest
      is deathless with me,
  What I do and say the same waits for them,
  Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them.

  I know perfectly well my own egotism,
  Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less,
  And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.

  Not words of routine this song of mine,
  But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring;
  This printed and bound book—but the printer and the
      printing-office boy?
  The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid
      in your arms?
  The black ship mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets—but
      the pluck of the captain and engineers?
  In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture—but the host and
      hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
  The sky up there—yet here or next door, or across the way?
  The saints and sages in history—but you yourself?
  Sermons, creeds, theology—but the fathomless human brain,
  And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?

       43
  I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
  My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
  Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern,
  Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years,
  Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun,
  Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in
      the circle of obis,
  Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols,
  Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and
      austere in the woods a gymnosophist,
  Drinking mead from the skull-cap, to Shastas and Vedas admirant,
      minding the Koran,
  Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife,
      beating the serpent-skin drum,
  Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing
      assuredly that he is divine,
  To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting
      patiently in a pew,
  Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till
      my spirit arouses me,
  Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land,
  Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.

  One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like
      man leaving charges before a journey.

  Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
  Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical,
  I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair
      and unbelief.

  How the flukes splash!
  How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood!

  Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
  I take my place among you as much as among any,
  The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
  And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely
      the same.

  I do not know what is untried and afterward,
  But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.

  Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not
      single one can it fall.

  It cannot fall the young man who died and was buried,
  Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side,
  Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back
      and was never seen again,
  Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with
      bitterness worse than gall,
  Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder,
  Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d, nor the brutish koboo
      call’d the ordure of humanity,
  Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in,
  Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth,
  Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads
      that inhabit them,
  Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.

       44
  It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.

  What is known I strip away,
  I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

  The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?

  We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
  There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

  Births have brought us richness and variety,
  And other births will bring us richness and variety.

  I do not call one greater and one smaller,
  That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

  Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
  I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
  All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
  (What have I to do with lamentation?)

  I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.

  My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
  On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
  All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.

  Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
  Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
  I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
  And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

  Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.

  Immense have been the preparations for me,
  Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.

  Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
  For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
  They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

  Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
  My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

  For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
  The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
  Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
  Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it
      with care.

  All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
  Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

      45
  O span of youth! ever-push’d elasticity!
  O manhood, balanced, florid and full.

  My lovers suffocate me,
  Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
  Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,
  Crying by day, Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and
      chirping over my head,
  Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
  Lighting on every moment of my life,
  Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
  Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.

  Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!

  Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows
      after and out of itself,
  And the dark hush promulges as much as any.

  I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
  And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of
      the farther systems.

  Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
  Outward and outward and forever outward.

  My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
  He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
  And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

  There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
  If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
      were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would
      not avail the long run,
  We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
  And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

  A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do
      not hazard the span or make it impatient,
  They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

  See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
  Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

  My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
  The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
  The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

       46
  I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and
      never will be measured.

  I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
  My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
  No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
  I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
  I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
  But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
  My left hand hooking you round the waist,
  My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

  Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
  You must travel it for yourself.

  It is not far, it is within reach,
  Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
  Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

  Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
  Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

  If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand
      on my hip,
  And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
  For after we start we never lie by again.

  This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,
  And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
      and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we
      be fill’d and satisfied then?
  And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

  You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
  I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

  Sit a while dear son,
  Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
  But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you
      with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

  Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
  Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
  You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every
      moment of your life.

  Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
  Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
  To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
      and laughingly dash with your hair.

       47
  I am the teacher of athletes,
  He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
  He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

  The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power,
      but in his own right,
  Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,
  Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,
  Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,
  First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a
      skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,
  Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over
      all latherers,
  And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun.

  I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?
  I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,
  My words itch at your ears till you understand them.

  I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while
      I wait for a boat,
  (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
  Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)

  I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
  And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her
      who privately stays with me in the open air.

  If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore,
  The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves key,
  The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.

  No shutter’d room or school can commune with me,
  But roughs and little children better than they.

  The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well,
  The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with
      him all day,
  The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice,
  In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen
      and love them.

  The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine,
  On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them,
  On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me.
  My face rubs to the hunter’s face when he lies down alone in his blanket,
  The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon,
  The young mother and old mother comprehend me,
  The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are,
  They and all would resume what I have told them.

       48
  I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
  And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
  And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
  And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
      funeral drest in his shroud,
  And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
  And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the
      learning of all times,
  And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it
      may become a hero,
  And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
  And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed
      before a million universes.

  And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
  For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
  (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
      about death.)

  I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
  Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

  Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
  I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
  In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
  I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d
      by God’s name,
  And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
  Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

       49
  And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to
      try to alarm me.

  To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes,
  I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting,
  I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
  And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

  And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not
      offend me,
  I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
  I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.

  And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,
  (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

  I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
  O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions,
  If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?

  Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
  Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,
  Toss, sparkles of day and dusk—toss on the black stems that decay
      in the muck,
  Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.

  I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
  I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,
  And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.

       50
  There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.

  Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes,
  I sleep—I sleep long.

  I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid,
  It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.

  Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
  To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

  Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.

  Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
  It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal
      life—it is Happiness.

       51
  The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
  And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

  Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
  Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
  (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

  Do I contradict myself?
  Very well then I contradict myself,
  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

  Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
  Who wishes to walk with me?

  Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

       52
  The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
      and my loitering.

  I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

  The last scud of day holds back for me,
  It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
  It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

  I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
  I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

  I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
  If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

  You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
  And filter and fibre your blood.

  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
  Missing me one place search another,
  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Book IV. Children of Adam

To the Garden the World

  To the garden the world anew ascending,
  Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
  The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
  Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
  The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
  Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
  My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for
      reasons, most wondrous,
  Existing I peer and penetrate still,
  Content with the present, content with the past,
  By my side or back of me Eve following,
  Or in front, and I following her just the same.

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers

  From pent-up aching rivers,
  From that of myself without which I were nothing,
  From what I am determin’d to make illustrious, even if I stand sole
      among men,
  From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus,
  Singing the song of procreation,
  Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people,
  Singing the muscular urge and the blending,
  Singing the bedfellow’s song, (O resistless yearning!
  O for any and each the body correlative attracting!
  O for you whoever you are your correlative body! O it, more than all
      else, you delighting!)
  From the hungry gnaw that eats me night and day,
  From native moments, from bashful pains, singing them,
  Seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it
      many a long year,
  Singing the true song of the soul fitful at random,
  Renascent with grossest Nature or among animals,
  Of that, of them and what goes with them my poems informing,
  Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
  Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves,
  Of the mad pushes of waves upon the land, I them chanting,
  The overture lightly sounding, the strain anticipating,
  The welcome nearness, the sight of the perfect body,
  The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back
      lying and floating,
  The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching,
  The divine list for myself or you or for any one making,
  The face, the limbs, the index from head to foot, and what it arouses,
  The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment,
  (Hark close and still what I now whisper to you,
  I love you, O you entirely possess me,
  O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless,
  Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea not more
      lawless than we;)
  The furious storm through me careering, I passionately trembling.
  The oath of the inseparableness of two together, of the woman that
      loves me and whom I love more than my life, that oath swearing,
  (O I willingly stake all for you,
  O let me be lost if it must be so!
  O you and I! what is it to us what the rest do or think?
  What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other and exhaust
      each other if it must be so;)
  From the master, the pilot I yield the vessel to,
  The general commanding me, commanding all, from him permission taking,
  From time the programme hastening, (I have loiter’d too long as it is,)
  From sex, from the warp and from the woof,
  From privacy, from frequent repinings alone,
  From plenty of persons near and yet the right person not near,
  From the soft sliding of hands over me and thrusting of fingers
      through my hair and beard,
  From the long sustain’d kiss upon the mouth or bosom,
  From the close pressure that makes me or any man drunk, fainting
      with excess,
  From what the divine husband knows, from the work of fatherhood,
  From exultation, victory and relief, from the bedfellow’s embrace in
      the night,
  From the act-poems of eyes, hands, hips and bosoms,
  From the cling of the trembling arm,
  From the bending curve and the clinch,
  From side by side the pliant coverlet off-throwing,
  From the one so unwilling to have me leave, and me just as unwilling
      to leave,
  (Yet a moment O tender waiter, and I return,)
  From the hour of shining stars and dropping dews,
  From the night a moment I emerging flitting out,
  Celebrate you act divine and you children prepared for,
  And you stalwart loins.

I Sing the Body Electric

       1
  I sing the body electric,
  The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
  They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
  And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

  Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
  And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
  And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
  And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

       2
  The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
      balks account,
  That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.

  The expression of the face balks account,
  But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
  It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of
      his hips and wrists,
  It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
      and knees, dress does not hide him,
  The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
  To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
  You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

  The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the
      folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the
      contour of their shape downwards,
  The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through
      the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls
      silently to and from the heave of the water,
  The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the
      horse-man in his saddle,
  Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,
  The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open
      dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,
  The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or
      cow-yard,
  The young fellow hosing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six
      horses through the crowd,
  The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty,
      good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work,
  The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,
  The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
  The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine
      muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,
  The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes
      suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
  The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d
      neck and the counting;
  Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s
      breast with the little child,
  Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with
      the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

       3
  I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
  And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.

  This man was a wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
  The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and
      beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness
      and breadth of his manners,
  These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also,
  He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were
      massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
  They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,
  They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love,
  He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the
      clear-brown skin of his face,
  He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he
      had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had
      fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,
  When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish,
      you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,
  You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit
      by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.

       4
  I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
  To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
  To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
  To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly
      round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
  I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

  There is something in staying close to men and women and looking
      on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
  All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

       5
  This is the female form,
  A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
  It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
  I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,
      all falls aside but myself and it,
  Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what
      was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,
  Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response
      likewise ungovernable,
  Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all
      diffused, mine too diffused,
  Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
      and deliciously aching,
  Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
      love, white-blow and delirious nice,
  Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
  Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
  Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

  This the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,
  This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the
      outlet again.

  Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the
      exit of the rest,
  You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

  The female contains all qualities and tempers them,
  She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
  She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active,
  She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

  As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
  As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness,
      sanity, beauty,
  See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

       6
  The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,
  He too is all qualities, he is action and power,
  The flush of the known universe is in him,
  Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well,
  The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is
      utmost become him well, pride is for him,
  The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,
  Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to
      the test of himself,
  Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes
      soundings at last only here,
  (Where else does he strike soundings except here?)

  The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
  No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the
      laborers’ gang?
  Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
  Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as
      much as you,
  Each has his or her place in the procession.

  (All is a procession,
  The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)

  Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?
  Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has
      no right to a sight?
  Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and
      the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,
  For you only, and not for him and her?

       7
  A man’s body at auction,
  (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
  I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.

  Gentlemen look on this wonder,
  Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
  For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one
      animal or plant,
  For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.

  In this head the all-baffling brain,
  In it and below it the makings of heroes.

  Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in
      tendon and nerve,
  They shall be stript that you may see them.

  Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
  Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,
      good-sized arms and legs,
  And wonders within there yet.

  Within there runs blood,
  The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
  There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires,
      reachings, aspirations,
  (Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in
      parlors and lecture-rooms?)

  This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be
      fathers in their turns,
  In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
  Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.

  How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring
      through the centuries?
  (Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace
      back through the centuries?)

       8
  A woman’s body at auction,
  She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
  She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

  Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
  Have you ever loved the body of a man?
  Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations
      and times all over the earth?

  If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,
  And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
  And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more
      beautiful than the most beautiful face.

  Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool
      that corrupted her own live body?
  For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

       9
  O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
      women, nor the likes of the parts of you,
  I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of
      the soul, (and that they are the soul,)
  I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and
      that they are my poems,
  Man’s, woman’s, child, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s,
      father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
  Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
  Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or
      sleeping of the lids,
  Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
  Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
  Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
  Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the
      ample side-round of the chest,
  Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
  Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger,
      finger-joints, finger-nails,
  Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
  Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
  Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round,
      man-balls, man-root,
  Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
  Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
  Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
  All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your
      body or of any one’s body, male or female,
  The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
  The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
  Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
  Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
  The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping,
      love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
  The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
  Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
  Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
  The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
  The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
  The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked
      meat of the body,
  The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
  The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward
      toward the knees,
  The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
      marrow in the bones,
  The exquisite realization of health;
  O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
  O I say now these are the soul!

A Woman Waits for Me

  A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,
  Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the
      right man were lacking.

  Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
  Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
  Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,
  All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves,
      beauties, delights of the earth,
  All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,
  These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

  Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,
  Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

  Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women,
  I will go stay with her who waits for me, and with those women that
      are warm-blooded and sufficient for me,
  I see that they understand me and do not deny me,
  I see that they are worthy of me, I will be the robust husband of
      those women.

  They are not one jot less than I am,
  They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
  Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
  They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
      retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
  They are ultimate in their own right—they are calm, clear,
      well-possess’d of themselves.

  I draw you close to me, you women,
  I cannot let you go, I would do you good,
  I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for
      others’ sakes,
  Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards,
  They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.

  It is I, you women, I make my way,
  I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,
  I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,
  I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I
      press with slow rude muscle,
  I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,
  I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.

  Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,
  In you I wrap a thousand onward years,
  On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America,
  The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls,
      new artists, musicians, and singers,
  The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,
  I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,
  I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you
      inter-penetrate now,
  I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them, as I
      count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,
  I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death,
      immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

Spontaneous Me

  Spontaneous me, Nature,
  The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
  The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,
  The hillside whiten’d with blossoms of the mountain ash,
  The same late in autumn, the hues of red, yellow, drab, purple, and
      light and dark green,
  The rich coverlet of the grass, animals and birds, the private
      untrimm’d bank, the primitive apples, the pebble-stones,
  Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after
      another as I happen to call them to me or think of them,
  The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
  The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
  This poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all
      men carry,
  (Know once for all, avow’d on purpose, wherever are men like me, are
      our lusty lurking masculine poems,)
  Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding, love-climbers,
      and the climbing sap,
  Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of love, breasts
      of love, bellies press’d and glued together with love,
  Earth of chaste love, life that is only life after love,
  The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the
      man, the body of the earth,
  Soft forenoon airs that blow from the south-west,
  The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down, that gripes the
      full-grown lady-flower, curves upon her with amorous firm legs, takes
      his will of her, and holds himself tremulous and tight till he is
      satisfied;
  The wet of woods through the early hours,
  Two sleepers at night lying close together as they sleep, one with
      an arm slanting down across and below the waist of the other,
  The smell of apples, aromas from crush’d sage-plant, mint, birch-bark,
  The boy’s longings, the glow and pressure as he confides to me what
      he was dreaming,
  The dead leaf whirling its spiral whirl and falling still and
      content to the ground,
  The no-form’d stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with,
  The hubb’d sting of myself, stinging me as much as it ever can any
      one,
  The sensitive, orbic, underlapp’d brothers, that only privileged
      feelers may be intimate where they are,
  The curious roamer the hand roaming all over the body, the bashful
      withdrawing of flesh where the fingers soothingly pause and
      edge themselves,
  The limpid liquid within the young man,
  The vex’d corrosion so pensive and so painful,
  The torment, the irritable tide that will not be at rest,
  The like of the same I feel, the like of the same in others,
  The young man that flushes and flushes, and the young woman that
      flushes and flushes,
  The young man that wakes deep at night, the hot hand seeking to
      repress what would master him,
  The mystic amorous night, the strange half-welcome pangs, visions, sweats,
  The pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers,
      the young man all color’d, red, ashamed, angry;
  The souse upon me of my lover the sea, as I lie willing and naked,
  The merriment of the twin babes that crawl over the grass in the
      sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them,
  The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen’d
      long-round walnuts,
  The continence of vegetables, birds, animals,
  The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent,
      while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent,
  The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity,
  The oath of procreation I have sworn, my Adamic and fresh daughters,
  The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate
      what shall produce boys to fill my place when I am through,
  The wholesome relief, repose, content,
  And this bunch pluck’d at random from myself,
  It has done its work—I toss it carelessly to fall where it may.

One Hour to Madness and Joy

  One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
  (What is this that frees me so in storms?
  What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
  O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
  O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
  I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

  O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
      in defiance of the world!
  O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
  O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
      a determin’d man.

  O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
      untied and illumin’d!
  O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
  To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
      you from yours!
  To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
  To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!
  To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.

  O something unprov’d! something in a trance!
  To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!
  To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
  To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
  To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
  To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
  To be lost if it must be so!
  To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
  With one brief hour of madness and joy.

Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd

  Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
  Whispering I love you, before long I die,
  I have travel’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
  For I could not die till I once look’d on you,
  For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

  Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,
  Return in peace to the ocean my love,
  I too am part of that ocean my love, we are not so much separated,
  Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!
  But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,
  As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;
  Be not impatient—a little space—know you I salute the air, the
      ocean and the land,
  Every day at sundown for your dear sake my love.

Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals

  Ages and ages returning at intervals,
  Undestroy’d, wandering immortal,
  Lusty, phallic, with the potent original loins, perfectly sweet,
  I, chanter of Adamic songs,
  Through the new garden the West, the great cities calling,
  Deliriate, thus prelude what is generated, offering these, offering myself,
  Bathing myself, bathing my songs in Sex,
  Offspring of my loins.

We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d

  We two, how long we were fool’d,
  Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes,
  We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
  We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
  We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks,
  We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side,
  We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any,
  We are two fishes swimming in the sea together,
  We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings
      and evenings,
  We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals,
  We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down,
  We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic
      and stellar, we are as two comets,
  We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,
  We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,
  We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling
      over each other and interwetting each other,
  We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious,
  We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence
      of the globe,
  We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,
  We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

O Hymen! O Hymenee!

  O hymen! O hymenee! why do you tantalize me thus?
  O why sting me for a swift moment only?
  Why can you not continue? O why do you now cease?
  Is it because if you continued beyond the swift moment you would
      soon certainly kill me?

I Am He That Aches with Love

  I am he that aches with amorous love;
  Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
  So the body of me to all I meet or know.

Native Moments

  Native moments—when you come upon me—ah you are here now,
  Give me now libidinous joys only,
  Give me the drench of my passions, give me life coarse and rank,
  To-day I go consort with Nature’s darlings, to-night too,
  I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight
      orgies of young men,
  I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers,
  The echoes ring with our indecent calls, I pick out some low person
      for my dearest friend,
  He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be one condemn’d by
      others for deeds done,
  I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?
  O you shunn’d persons, I at least do not shun you,
  I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet,
  I will be more to you than to any of the rest.

Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City

  Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future
      use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
  Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met
      there who detain’d me for love of me,
  Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long
      been forgotten by me,
  I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
  Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
  Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
  I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ

  I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday morn I
      pass’d the church,
  Winds of autumn, as I walk’d the woods at dusk I heard your long-
      stretch’d sighs up above so mournful,
  I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the
      soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
  Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through one of the
      wrists around my head,
  Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells last
      night under my ear.

Facing West from California’s Shores

  Facing west from California’s shores,
  Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
  I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,
      the land of migrations, look afar,
  Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
  For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
  From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
  From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
  Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
  Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
  (But where is what I started for so long ago?
  And why is it yet unfound?)

As Adam Early in the Morning

  As Adam early in the morning,
  Walking forth from the bower refresh’d with sleep,
  Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
  Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
  Be not afraid of my body.

Book V. Calamus

In Paths Untrodden

  In paths untrodden,
  In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
  Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
  From all the standards hitherto publish’d, from the pleasures,
      profits, conformities,
  Which too long I was offering to feed my soul,
  Clear to me now standards not yet publish’d, clear to me that my soul,
  That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades,
  Here by myself away from the clank of the world,
  Tallying and talk’d to here by tongues aromatic,
  No longer abash’d, (for in this secluded spot I can respond as I
      would not dare elsewhere,)
  Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains
      all the rest,
  Resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,
  Projecting them along that substantial life,
  Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,
  Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first year,
  I proceed for all who are or have been young men,
  To tell the secret my nights and days,
  To celebrate the need of comrades.

Scented Herbage of My Breast

  Scented herbage of my breast,
  Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards,
  Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death,
  Perennial roots, tall leaves, O the winter shall not freeze you
      delicate leaves,
  Every year shall you bloom again, out from where you retired you
      shall emerge again;
  O I do not know whether many passing by will discover you or inhale
      your faint odor, but I believe a few will;
  O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit you to tell in
      your own way of the heart that is under you,
  O I do not know what you mean there underneath yourselves, you are
      not happiness,
  You are often more bitter than I can bear, you burn and sting me,
  Yet you are beautiful to me you faint tinged roots, you make me
      think of death,
  Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful
      except death and love?)
  O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers,
      I think it must be for death,
  For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers,
  Death or life I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer,
  (I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most,)
  Indeed O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as
      you mean,
  Grow up taller sweet leaves that I may see! grow up out of my breast!
  Spring away from the conceal’d heart there!
  Do not fold yourself so in your pink-tinged roots timid leaves!
  Do not remain down there so ashamed, herbage of my breast!
  Come I am determin’d to unbare this broad breast of mine, I have
      long enough stifled and choked;
  Emblematic and capricious blades I leave you, now you serve me not,
  I will say what I have to say by itself,
  I will sound myself and comrades only, I will never again utter a
      call only their call,
  I will raise with it immortal reverberations through the States,
  I will give an example to lovers to take permanent shape and will
      through the States,
  Through me shall the words be said to make death exhilarating,
  Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it,
  Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, and
      are folded inseparably together, you love and death are,
  Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life,
  For now it is convey’d to me that you are the purports essential,
  That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons, and that
      they are mainly for you,
  That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real reality,
  That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long,
  That you will one day perhaps take control of all,
  That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of appearance,
  That may-be you are what it is all for, but it does not last so very long,
  But you will last very long.

Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand

  Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
  Without one thing all will be useless,
  I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
  I am not what you supposed, but far different.

  Who is he that would become my follower?
  Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

  The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
  You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your
      sole and exclusive standard,
  Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
  The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives
      around you would have to be abandon’d,
  Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let
      go your hand from my shoulders,
  Put me down and depart on your way.

  Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
  Or back of a rock in the open air,
  (For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
  And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
  But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any
      person for miles around approach unawares,
  Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or
      some quiet island,
  Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
  With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,
  For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.

  Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
  Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
  Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
  For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
  And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

  But these leaves conning you con at peril,
  For these leaves and me you will not understand,
  They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will
      certainly elude you.
  Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
  Already you see I have escaped from you.

  For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
  Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
  Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
  Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few)
      prove victorious,
  Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil,
      perhaps more,
  For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times
      and not hit, that which I hinted at;
  Therefore release me and depart on your way.

For You, O Democracy

  Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
  I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
  I will make divine magnetic lands,
       With the love of comrades,
         With the life-long love of comrades.

  I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,
      and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
  I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
       By the love of comrades,
         By the manly love of comrades.

  For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
  For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

These I Singing in Spring

  These I singing in spring collect for lovers,
  (For who but I should understand lovers and all their sorrow and joy?
  And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)
  Collecting I traverse the garden the world, but soon I pass the gates,
  Now along the pond-side, now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,
  Now by the post-and-rail fences where the old stones thrown there,
      pick’d from the fields, have accumulated,
  (Wild-flowers and vines and weeds come up through the stones and
      partly cover them, beyond these I pass,)
  Far, far in the forest, or sauntering later in summer, before I
      think where I go,
  Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and then in the silence,
  Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me,
  Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,
  They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come, a
      great crowd, and I in the middle,
  Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with them,
  Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever is near me,
  Here, lilac, with a branch of pine,
  Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull’d off a live-oak in
      Florida as it hung trailing down,
  Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
  And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pondside,
  (O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again
      never to separate from me,
  And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this
      calamus-root shall,
  Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!)
  And twigs of maple and a bunch of wild orange and chestnut,
  And stems of currants and plum-blows, and the aromatic cedar,
  These I compass’d around by a thick cloud of spirits,
  Wandering, point to or touch as I pass, or throw them loosely from me,
  Indicating to each one what he shall have, giving something to each;
  But what I drew from the water by the pond-side, that I reserve,
  I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself am capable
      of loving.

Not Heaving from My Ribb’d Breast Only

  Not heaving from my ribb’d breast only,
  Not in sighs at night in rage dissatisfied with myself,
  Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs,
  Not in many an oath and promise broken,
  Not in my wilful and savage soul’s volition,
  Not in the subtle nourishment of the air,
  Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists,
  Not in the curious systole and diastole within which will one day cease,
  Not in many a hungry wish told to the skies only,
  Not in cries, laughter, defiancies, thrown from me when alone far in
      the wilds,
  Not in husky pantings through clinch’d teeth,
  Not in sounded and resounded words, chattering words, echoes, dead words,
  Not in the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,
  Nor the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day,
  Nor in the limbs and senses of my body that take you and dismiss you
      continually—not there,
  Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!
  Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.

Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

  Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
  Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded,
  That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
  That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
  May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, hills,
      shining and flowing waters,
  The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, may-be these
      are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions, and the real
      something has yet to be known,
  (How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound me and mock me!
  How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them,)
  May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they indeed but seem)
      as from my present point of view, and might prove (as of course they
      would) nought of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from entirely
      changed points of view;
  To me these and the like of these are curiously answer’d by my
      lovers, my dear friends,
  When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me
      by the hand,
  When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason
      hold not, surround us and pervade us,
  Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, I
      require nothing further,
  I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity
      beyond the grave,
  But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
  He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.

The Base of All Metaphysics

  And now gentlemen,
  A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
  As base and finale too for all metaphysics.

  (So to the students the old professor,
  At the close of his crowded course.)

  Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
  Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
  Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
  And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having
      studied long,
  I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
  See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
  Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
  The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
  Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
  Of city for city and land for land.

Recorders Ages Hence

  Recorders ages hence,
  Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I
      will tell you what to say of me,
  Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover,
  The friend the lover’s portrait, of whom his friend his lover was fondest,
  Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love
      within him, and freely pour’d it forth,
  Who often walk’d lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers,
  Who pensive away from one he lov’d often lay sleepless and
      dissatisfied at night,
  Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov’d might
      secretly be indifferent to him,
  Whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on hills,
      he and another wandering hand in hand, they twain apart from other men,
  Who oft as he saunter’d the streets curv’d with his arm the shoulder
      of his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon him also.

When I Heard at the Close of the Day

  When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d
      with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for
      me that follow’d,
  And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still
      I was not happy,
  But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
      refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
  When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the
      morning light,
  When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed,
      laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
  And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way
      coming, O then I was happy,
  O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
      nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
  And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came
      my friend,
  And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly
      continually up the shores,
  I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me
      whispering to congratulate me,
  For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in
      the cool night,
  In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
  And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?

  Are you the new person drawn toward me?
  To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
  Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
  Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
  Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?
  Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
  Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant
      manner of me?
  Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
  Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?

Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone

  Roots and leaves themselves alone are these,
  Scents brought to men and women from the wild woods and pond-side,
  Breast-sorrel and pinks of love, fingers that wind around tighter
      than vines,
  Gushes from the throats of birds hid in the foliage of trees as the
      sun is risen,
  Breezes of land and love set from living shores to you on the living
      sea, to you O sailors!
  Frost-mellow’d berries and Third-month twigs offer’d fresh to young
      persons wandering out in the fields when the winter breaks up,
  Love-buds put before you and within you whoever you are,
  Buds to be unfolded on the old terms,
  If you bring the warmth of the sun to them they will open and bring
      form, color, perfume, to you,
  If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers,
      fruits, tall branches and trees.

Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes

  Not heat flames up and consumes,
  Not sea-waves hurry in and out,
  Not the air delicious and dry, the air of ripe summer, bears lightly
      along white down-balls of myriads of seeds,
  Waited, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may;
  Not these, O none of these more than the flames of me, consuming,
      burning for his love whom I love,
  O none more than I hurrying in and out;
  Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give up? O I the same,
  O nor down-balls nor perfumes, nor the high rain-emitting clouds,
      are borne through the open air,
  Any more than my soul is borne through the open air,
  Wafted in all directions O love, for friendship, for you.

Trickle Drops

  Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
  O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
  Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
  From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,
  From my face, from my forehead and lips,
  From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d, press forth red
      drops, confession drops,
  Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops,
  Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
  Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,
  Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
  Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.

City of Orgies

  City of orgies, walks and joys,
  City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make
  Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your
      spectacles, repay me,
  Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships at the wharves,
  Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with
      goods in them,
  Nor to converse with learn’d persons, or bear my share in the soiree
      or feast;
  Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash
      of eyes offering me love,
  Offering response to my own—these repay me,
  Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.

Behold This Swarthy Face

  Behold this swarthy face, these gray eyes,
  This beard, the white wool unclipt upon my neck,
  My brown hands and the silent manner of me without charm;
  Yet comes one a Manhattanese and ever at parting kisses me lightly
      on the lips with robust love,
  And I on the crossing of the street or on the ship’s deck give a
      kiss in return,
  We observe that salute of American comrades land and sea,
  We are those two natural and nonchalant persons.

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

  I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
  All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
  Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
  And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
  But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
      without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
  And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
      twined around it a little moss,
  And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
  It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
  (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
  Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
  For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
      solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
  Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
  I know very well I could not.

To a Stranger

  Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
  You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me
      as of a dream,)
  I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
  All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
      chaste, matured,
  You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
  I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours
      only nor left my body mine only,
  You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you
      take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
  I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or
      wake at night alone,
  I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
  I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful

  This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone,
  It seems to me there are other men in other lands yearning and thoughtful,
  It seems to me I can look over and behold them in Germany, Italy,
      France, Spain,
  Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or talking other dialects,
  And it seems to me if I could know those men I should become
      attached to them as I do to men in my own lands,
  O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
  I know I should be happy with them.

I Hear It Was Charged Against Me

  I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
  But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
  (What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the
      destruction of them?)
  Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these
      States inland and seaboard,
  And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large
      that dents the water,
  Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
  The institution of the dear love of comrades.

The Prairie-Grass Dividing

  The prairie-grass dividing, its special odor breathing,
  I demand of it the spiritual corresponding,
  Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,
  Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,
  Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
  Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and
      command, leading not following,
  Those with a never-quell’d audacity, those with sweet and lusty
      flesh clear of taint,
  Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors,
      as to say Who are you?
  Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain’d, never obedient,
  Those of inland America.

When I Peruse the Conquer’d Fame

  When I peruse the conquer’d fame of heroes and the victories of
      mighty generals, I do not envy the generals,
  Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house,
  But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them,
  How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long
      and long,
  Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how
      affectionate and faithful they were,
  Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill’d with the bitterest envy.

We Two Boys Together Clinging

  We two boys together clinging,
  One the other never leaving,
  Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
  Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
  Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
  No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,
      threatening,
  Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on
      the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
  Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
  Fulfilling our foray.

A Promise to California

  A promise to California,
  Or inland to the great pastoral Plains, and on to Puget sound and Oregon;
  Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain,
      to teach robust American love,
  For I know very well that I and robust love belong among you,
      inland, and along the Western sea;
  For these States tend inland and toward the Western sea, and I will also.

Here the Frailest Leaves of Me

  Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
  Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
  And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

No Labor-Saving Machine

  No labor-saving machine,
  Nor discovery have I made,
  Nor will I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to found
      hospital or library,
  Nor reminiscence of any deed of courage for America,
  Nor literary success nor intellect; nor book for the book-shelf,
  But a few carols vibrating through the air I leave,
  For comrades and lovers.

A Glimpse

  A glimpse through an interstice caught,
  Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove
      late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner,
  Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and
      seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
  A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and
      oath and smutty jest,
  There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
      perhaps not a word.

A Leaf for Hand in Hand

  A leaf for hand in hand;
  You natural persons old and young!
  You on the Mississippi and on all the branches and bayous of
      the Mississippi!
  You friendly boatmen and mechanics! you roughs!
  You twain! and all processions moving along the streets!
  I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to
      walk hand in hand.

Earth, My Likeness

  Earth, my likeness,
  Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there,
  I now suspect that is not all;
  I now suspect there is something fierce in you eligible to burst forth,
  For an athlete is enamour’d of me, and I of him,
  But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible
      to burst forth,
  I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.

I Dream’d in a Dream

  I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
      whole of the rest of the earth,
  I dream’d that was the new city of Friends,
  Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,
  It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
  And in all their looks and words.

What Think You I Take My Pen in Hand?

  What think you I take my pen in hand to record?
  The battle-ship, perfect-model’d, majestic, that I saw pass the
      offing to-day under full sail?
  The splendors of the past day? or the splendor of the night that
      envelops me?
  Or the vaunted glory and growth of the great city spread around me? —no;
  But merely of two simple men I saw to-day on the pier in the midst
      of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends,
  The one to remain hung on the other’s neck and passionately kiss’d him,
  While the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.

To the East and to the West

  To the East and to the West,
  To the man of the Seaside State and of Pennsylvania,
  To the Kanadian of the north, to the Southerner I love,
  These with perfect trust to depict you as myself, the germs are in all men,
  I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb
      friendship, exalte, previously unknown,
  Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men.

Sometimes with One I Love

  Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse
      unreturn’d love,
  But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one
      way or another,
  (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
  Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

To a Western Boy

  Many things to absorb I teach to help you become eleve of mine;
  Yet if blood like mine circle not in your veins,
  If you be not silently selected by lovers and do not silently select lovers,
  Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?

Fast Anchor’d Eternal O Love!

  Fast-anchor’d eternal O love! O woman I love!
  O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of you!
  Then separate, as disembodied or another born,
  Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,
  I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man,
  O sharer of my roving life.

Among the Multitude

  Among the men and women the multitude,
  I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
  Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
      any nearer than I am,
  Some are baffled, but that one is not—that one knows me.

  Ah lover and perfect equal,
  I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
  And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.

O You Whom I Often and Silently Come

  O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,
  As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
  Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is
      playing within me.

That Shadow My Likeness

  That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood,
      chattering, chaffering,
  How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits,
  How often I question and doubt whether that is really me;
  But among my lovers and caroling these songs,
  O I never doubt whether that is really me.

Full of Life Now

  Full of life now, compact, visible,
  I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
  To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
  To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

  When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
  Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
  Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;
  Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)

Book VI. Salut au Monde!

       1
  O take my hand Walt Whitman!
  Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!
  Such join’d unended links, each hook’d to the next,
  Each answering all, each sharing the earth with all.

  What widens within you Walt Whitman?
  What waves and soils exuding?
  What climes? what persons and cities are here?
  Who are the infants, some playing, some slumbering?
  Who are the girls? who are the married women?
  Who are the groups of old men going slowly with their arms about
      each other’s necks?
  What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these?
  What are the mountains call’d that rise so high in the mists?
  What myriads of dwellings are they fill’d with dwellers?

       2
  Within me latitude widens, longitude lengthens,
  Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east—America is provided for in the west,
  Banding the bulge of the earth winds the hot equator,
  Curiously north and south turn the axis-ends,
  Within me is the longest day, the sun wheels in slanting rings, it
      does not set for months,
  Stretch’d in due time within me the midnight sun just rises above
      the horizon and sinks again,
  Within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests, volcanoes, groups,
  Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian islands.

       3
  What do you hear Walt Whitman?

  I hear the workman singing and the farmer’s wife singing,
  I hear in the distance the sounds of children and of animals early
      in the day,
  I hear emulous shouts of Australians pursuing the wild horse,
  I hear the Spanish dance with castanets in the chestnut shade, to
      the rebeck and guitar,
  I hear continual echoes from the Thames,
  I hear fierce French liberty songs,
  I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of old poems,
  I hear the locusts in Syria as they strike the grain and grass with
      the showers of their terrible clouds,
  I hear the Coptic refrain toward sundown, pensively falling on the
      breast of the black venerable vast mother the Nile,
  I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of the mule,
  I hear the Arab muezzin calling from the top of the mosque,
  I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches, I hear
      the responsive base and soprano,
  I hear the cry of the Cossack, and the sailor’s voice putting to sea
      at Okotsk,
  I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle as the slaves march on, as the
      husky gangs pass on by twos and threes, fasten’d together
      with wrist-chains and ankle-chains,
  I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms,
  I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of
      the Romans,
  I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death of the beautiful
      God the Christ,
  I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars,
      adages, transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote three
      thousand years ago.

       4
  What do you see Walt Whitman?
  Who are they you salute, and that one after another salute you?
  I see a great round wonder rolling through space,
  I see diminute farms, hamlets, ruins, graveyards, jails, factories,
      palaces, hovels, huts of barbarians, tents of nomads upon the surface,
  I see the shaded part on one side where the sleepers are sleeping,
      and the sunlit part on the other side,
  I see the curious rapid change of the light and shade,
  I see distant lands, as real and near to the inhabitants of them as
      my land is to me.

  I see plenteous waters,
  I see mountain peaks, I see the sierras of Andes where they range,
  I see plainly the Himalayas, Chian Shahs, Altays, Ghauts,
  I see the giant pinnacles of Elbruz, Kazbek, Bazardjusi,
  I see the Styrian Alps, and the Karnac Alps,
  I see the Pyrenees, Balks, Carpathians, and to the north the
      Dofrafields, and off at sea mount Hecla,
  I see Vesuvius and Etna, the mountains of the Moon, and the Red
      mountains of Madagascar,
  I see the Lybian, Arabian, and Asiatic deserts,
  I see huge dreadful Arctic and Antarctic icebergs,
  I see the superior oceans and the inferior ones, the Atlantic and
      Pacific, the sea of Mexico, the Brazilian sea, and the sea of Peru,
  The waters of Hindustan, the China sea, and the gulf of Guinea,
  The Japan waters, the beautiful bay of Nagasaki land-lock’d in its
      mountains,
  The spread of the Baltic, Caspian, Bothnia, the British shores, and
      the bay of Biscay,
  The clear-sunn’d Mediterranean, and from one to another of its islands,
  The White sea, and the sea around Greenland.

  I behold the mariners of the world,
  Some are in storms, some in the night with the watch on the lookout,
  Some drifting helplessly, some with contagious diseases.

  I behold the sail and steamships of the world, some in clusters in
      port, some on their voyages,
  Some double the cape of Storms, some cape Verde, others capes
      Guardafui, Bon, or Bajadore,
  Others Dondra head, others pass the straits of Sunda, others cape
      Lopatka, others Behring’s straits,
  Others cape Horn, others sail the gulf of Mexico or along Cuba or
      Hayti, others Hudson’s bay or Baffin’s bay,
  Others pass the straits of Dover, others enter the Wash, others the
      firth of Solway, others round cape Clear, others the Land’s End,
  Others traverse the Zuyder Zee or the Scheld,
  Others as comers and goers at Gibraltar or the Dardanelles,
  Others sternly push their way through the northern winter-packs,
  Others descend or ascend the Obi or the Lena,
  Others the Niger or the Congo, others the Indus, the Burampooter
      and Cambodia,
  Others wait steam’d up ready to start in the ports of Australia,
  Wait at Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin, Marseilles, Lisbon, Naples,
  Hamburg, Bremen, Bordeaux, the Hague, Copenhagen,
  Wait at Valparaiso, Rio Janeiro, Panama.

       5
  I see the tracks of the railroads of the earth,
  I see them in Great Britain, I see them in Europe,
  I see them in Asia and in Africa.

  I see the electric telegraphs of the earth,
  I see the filaments of the news of the wars, deaths, losses, gains,
      passions, of my race.

  I see the long river-stripes of the earth,
  I see the Amazon and the Paraguay,
  I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River,
      the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl,
  I see where the Seine flows, and where the Danube, the Loire, the
      Rhone, and the Guadalquiver flow,
  I see the windings of the Volga, the Dnieper, the Oder,
  I see the Tuscan going down the Arno, and the Venetian along the Po,
  I see the Greek seaman sailing out of Egina bay.

       6
  I see the site of the old empire of Assyria, and that of Persia, and
      that of India,
  I see the falling of the Ganges over the high rim of Saukara.

  I see the place of the idea of the Deity incarnated by avatars in
      human forms,
  I see the spots of the successions of priests on the earth, oracles,
      sacrificers, brahmins, sabians, llamas, monks, muftis, exhorters,
  I see where druids walk’d the groves of Mona, I see the mistletoe
      and vervain,
  I see the temples of the deaths of the bodies of Gods, I see the old
      signifiers.

  I see Christ eating the bread of his last supper in the midst of
      youths and old persons,
  I see where the strong divine young man the Hercules toil’d
      faithfully and long and then died,
  I see the place of the innocent rich life and hapless fate of the
      beautiful nocturnal son, the full-limb’d Bacchus,
  I see Kneph, blooming, drest in blue, with the crown of feathers on
      his head,
  I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-belov’d, saying to the people
      Do not weep for me,
  This is not my true country, I have lived banish’d from my true
      country, I now go back there,
  I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn.

       7
  I see the battle-fields of the earth, grass grows upon them and
      blossoms and corn,
  I see the tracks of ancient and modern expeditions.

  I see the nameless masonries, venerable messages of the unknown
      events, heroes, records of the earth.

  I see the places of the sagas,
  I see pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts,
  I see granite bowlders and cliffs, I see green meadows and lakes,
  I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors,
  I see them raised high with stones by the marge of restless oceans,
      that the dead men’s spirits when they wearied of their quiet
      graves might rise up through the mounds and gaze on the tossing
      billows, and be refresh’d by storms, immensity, liberty, action.

  I see the steppes of Asia,
  I see the tumuli of Mongolia, I see the tents of Kalmucks and Baskirs,
  I see the nomadic tribes with herds of oxen and cows,
  I see the table-lands notch’d with ravines, I see the jungles and deserts,
  I see the camel, the wild steed, the bustard, the fat-tail’d sheep,
      the antelope, and the burrowing wolf

  I see the highlands of Abyssinia,
  I see flocks of goats feeding, and see the fig-tree, tamarind, date,
  And see fields of teff-wheat and places of verdure and gold.

  I see the Brazilian vaquero,
  I see the Bolivian ascending mount Sorata,
  I see the Wacho crossing the plains, I see the incomparable rider of
      horses with his lasso on his arm,
  I see over the pampas the pursuit of wild cattle for their hides.

       8
  I see the regions of snow and ice,
  I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn,
  I see the seal-seeker in his boat poising his lance,
  I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge drawn by dogs,
  I see the porpoise-hunters, I see the whale-crews of the south
      Pacific and the north Atlantic,
  I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys, of Switzerland—I
      mark the long winters and the isolation.

  I see the cities of the earth and make myself at random a part of them,
  I am a real Parisian,
  I am a habitan of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Constantinople,
  I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne,
  I am of London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Limerick,
  I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, Lyons, Brussels, Berne,
      Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin, Florence,
  I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw, or northward in Christiania or
      Stockholm, or in Siberian Irkutsk, or in some street in Iceland,
  I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them again.

       10
  I see vapors exhaling from unexplored countries,
  I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poison’d splint, the
      fetich, and the obi.
  I see African and Asiatic towns,
  I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne, Mogadore, Timbuctoo, Monrovia,
  I see the swarms of Pekin, Canton, Benares, Delhi, Calcutta, Tokio,
  I see the Kruman in his hut, and the Dahoman and Ashantee-man in their huts,
  I see the Turk smoking opium in Aleppo,
  I see the picturesque crowds at the fairs of Khiva and those of Herat,
  I see Teheran, I see Muscat and Medina and the intervening sands,
      see the caravans toiling onward,
  I see Egypt and the Egyptians, I see the pyramids and obelisks.
  I look on chisell’d histories, records of conquering kings,
      dynasties, cut in slabs of sand-stone, or on granite-blocks,
  I see at Memphis mummy-pits containing mummies embalm’d,
      swathed in linen cloth, lying there many centuries,
  I look on the fall’n Theban, the large-ball’d eyes, the
      side-drooping neck, the hands folded across the breast.

  I see all the menials of the earth, laboring,
  I see all the prisoners in the prisons,
  I see the defective human bodies of the earth,
  The blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, lunatics,
  The pirates, thieves, betrayers, murderers, slave-makers of the earth,
  The helpless infants, and the helpless old men and women.

  I see male and female everywhere,
  I see the serene brotherhood of philosophs,
  I see the constructiveness of my race,
  I see the results of the perseverance and industry of my race,
  I see ranks, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, I go among them, I
      mix indiscriminately,
  And I salute all the inhabitants of the earth.

       11
  You whoever you are!
  You daughter or son of England!
  You of the mighty Slavic tribes and empires! you Russ in Russia!
  You dim-descended, black, divine-soul’d African, large, fine-headed,
      nobly-form’d, superbly destin’d, on equal terms with me!
  You Norwegian! Swede! Dane! Icelander! you Prussian!
  You Spaniard of Spain! you Portuguese!
  You Frenchwoman and Frenchman of France!
  You Belge! you liberty-lover of the Netherlands! (you stock whence I
      myself have descended;)
  You sturdy Austrian! you Lombard! Hun! Bohemian! farmer of Styria!
  You neighbor of the Danube!
  You working-man of the Rhine, the Elbe, or the Weser! you working-woman too!
  You Sardinian! you Bavarian! Swabian! Saxon! Wallachian! Bulgarian!
  You Roman! Neapolitan! you Greek!
  You lithe matador in the arena at Seville!
  You mountaineer living lawlessly on the Taurus or Caucasus!
  You Bokh horse-herd watching your mares and stallions feeding!
  You beautiful-bodied Persian at full speed in the saddle shooting
      arrows to the mark!
  You Chinaman and Chinawoman of China! you Tartar of Tartary!
  You women of the earth subordinated at your tasks!
  You Jew journeying in your old age through every risk to stand once
      on Syrian ground!
  You other Jews waiting in all lands for your Messiah!
  You thoughtful Armenian pondering by some stream of the Euphrates!
      you peering amid the ruins of Nineveh! you ascending mount Ararat!
  You foot-worn pilgrim welcoming the far-away sparkle of the minarets
      of Mecca!
  You sheiks along the stretch from Suez to Bab-el-mandeb ruling your
      families and tribes!
  You olive-grower tending your fruit on fields of Nazareth, Damascus,
      or lake Tiberias!
  You Thibet trader on the wide inland or bargaining in the shops of Lassa!
  You Japanese man or woman! you liver in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Borneo!
  All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent
      of place!
  All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea!
  And you of centuries hence when you listen to me!
  And you each and everywhere whom I specify not, but include just the same!
  Health to you! good will to you all, from me and America sent!

  Each of us inevitable,
  Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
  Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
  Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

       12
  You Hottentot with clicking palate! you woolly-hair’d hordes!
  You own’d persons dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops!
  You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes!
  You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look down upon for all
      your glimmering language and spirituality!
  You dwarf’d Kamtschatkan, Greenlander, Lapp!
  You Austral negro, naked, red, sooty, with protrusive lip,
      groveling, seeking your food!
  You Caffre, Berber, Soudanese!
  You haggard, uncouth, untutor’d Bedowee!
  You plague-swarms in Madras, Nankin, Kaubul, Cairo!
  You benighted roamer of Amazonia! you Patagonian! you Feejeeman!
  I do not prefer others so very much before you either,
  I do not say one word against you, away back there where you stand,
  (You will come forward in due time to my side.)

       13
  My spirit has pass’d in compassion and determination around the whole earth,
  I have look’d for equals and lovers and found them ready for me in
      all lands,
  I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.

  You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant
      continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
  I think I have blown with you you winds;
  You waters I have finger’d every shore with you,
  I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,
  I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high
      embedded rocks, to cry thence:

  What cities the light or warmth penetrates I penetrate those cities myself,
  All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.

  Toward you all, in America’s name,
  I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal,
  To remain after me in sight forever,
  For all the haunts and homes of men.

Book VII. Song of the Open Road

       1
  Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
  Healthy, free, the world before me,
  The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

  Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
  Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
  Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
  Strong and content I travel the open road.

  The earth, that is sufficient,
  I do not want the constellations any nearer,
  I know they are very well where they are,
  I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

  (Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
  I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
  I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
  I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

       2
  You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all
      that is here,
  I believe that much unseen is also here.

  Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,
  The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the
      illiterate person, are not denied;
  The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the
      drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
  The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,
  The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the
      town, the return back from the town,
  They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted,
  None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

       3
  You air that serves me with breath to speak!
  You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
  You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
  You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
  I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

  You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!
  You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined
      side! you distant ships!
  You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d facades! you roofs!
  You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
  You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
  You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
  You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
  From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to
      yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,
  From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces,
      and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.

       4
  The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
  The picture alive, every part in its best light,
  The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is
      not wanted,
  The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.

  O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?
  Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost?
  Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied,
      adhere to me?

  O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,
  You express me better than I can express myself,
  You shall be more to me than my poem.

  I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all
      free poems also,
  I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,
  I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever
      beholds me shall like me,
  I think whoever I see must be happy.

       5
  From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
  Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
  Listening to others, considering well what they say,
  Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
  Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that
      would hold me.

  I inhale great draughts of space,
  The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

  I am larger, better than I thought,
  I did not know I held so much goodness.

  All seems beautiful to me,
  can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me
      I would do the same to you,
  I will recruit for myself and you as I go,
  I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,
  I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,
  Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
  Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

       6
  Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,
  Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d it would not
      astonish me.

  Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
  It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

  Here a great personal deed has room,
  (Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
  Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all
      authority and all argument against it.)

  Here is the test of wisdom,
  Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
  Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
  Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
  Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
  Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the
      excellence of things;
  Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes
      it out of the soul.

  Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
  They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the
      spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

  Here is realization,
  Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,
  The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you
      are vacant of them.

  Only the kernel of every object nourishes;
  Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
  Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?

  Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d, it is apropos;
  Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?
  Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?

       7
  Here is the efflux of the soul,
  The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates,
      ever provoking questions,
  These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they?
  Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight
      expands my blood?
  Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
  Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious
      thoughts descend upon me?
  (I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always
      drop fruit as I pass;)
  What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?
  What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side?
  What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by
      and pause?
  What gives me to be free to a woman’s and man’s good-will? what
      gives them to be free to mine?

       8
  The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,
  I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,
  Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

  Here rises the fluid and attaching character,
  The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of
      man and woman,
  (The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day
      out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet
      continually out of itself.)

  Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the
      love of young and old,
  From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,
  Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.

       9
  Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
  Traveling with me you find what never tires.

  The earth never tires,
  The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude
      and incomprehensible at first,
  Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,
  I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

  Allons! we must not stop here,
  However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling
      we cannot remain here,
  However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must
      not anchor here,
  However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted
      to receive it but a little while.

       10
  Allons! the inducements shall be greater,
  We will sail pathless and wild seas,
  We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper
      speeds by under full sail.

  Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements,
  Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;
  Allons! from all formules!
  From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.

  The stale cadaver blocks up the passage—the burial waits no longer.

  Allons! yet take warning!
  He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance,
  None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health,
  Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself,
  Only those may come who come in sweet and determin’d bodies,
  No diseas’d person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here.

  (I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,
  We convince by our presence.)

       11
  Listen! I will be honest with you,
  I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
  These are the days that must happen to you:
  You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
  You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
  You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly
      settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an
      irresistible call to depart,
  You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those
      who remain behind you,
  What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with
      passionate kisses of parting,
  You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands
      toward you.

       12
  Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!
  They too are on the road—they are the swift and majestic men—they
      are the greatest women,
  Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,
  Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,
  Habitues of many distant countries, habitues of far-distant dwellings,
  Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,
  Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,
  Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of
      children, bearers of children,
  Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of coffins,
  Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious
      years each emerging from that which preceded it,
  Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases,
  Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days,
  Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded
      and well-grain’d manhood,
  Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content,
  Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood,
  Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe,
  Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

       13
  Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,
  To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,
  To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights
      they tend to,
  Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys,
  To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
  To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,
  To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you,
      however long but it stretches and waits for you,
  To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither,
  To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without
      labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one
      particle of it,
  To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant
      villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and
      the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,
  To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,
  To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go,
  To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter
      them, to gather the love out of their hearts,
  To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave
      them behind you,
  To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for
      traveling souls.

  All parts away for the progress of souls,
  All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is
      apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners
      before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.

  Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of
      the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance.

  Forever alive, forever forward,
  Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble,
      dissatisfied,
  Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
  They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go,
  But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great.

  Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!
  You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though
      you built it, or though it has been built for you.

  Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!
  It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.

  Behold through you as bad as the rest,
  Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,
  Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash’d and trimm’d faces,
  Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.

  No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,
  Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
  Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and
      bland in the parlors,
  In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,
  Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom,
      everywhere,
  Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the
      breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,
  Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers,
  Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,
  Speaking of any thing else but never of itself.

       14
  Allons! through struggles and wars!
  The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.

  Have the past struggles succeeded?
  What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature?
  Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that
      from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth
      something to make a greater struggle necessary.

  My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
  He going with me must go well arm’d,
  He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies,
      desertions.

       15
  Allons! the road is before us!
  It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not
      detain’d!
  Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the
      shelf unopen’d!
  Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
  Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
  Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the
      court, and the judge expound the law.

  Camerado, I give you my hand!
  I give you my love more precious than money,
  I give you myself before preaching or law;
  Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
  Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Book VIII. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

       1
  Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
  Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face
      to face.

  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious
      you are to me!
  On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning
      home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
  And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more
      to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

       2
  The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
  The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every
      one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
  The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
  The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on
      the walk in the street and the passage over the river,
  The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
  The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
  The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

  Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
  Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
  Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the
      heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
  Others will see the islands large and small;
  Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half
      an hour high,
  A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others
      will see them,
  Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the
      falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

       3
  It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
  I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many
      generations hence,
  Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
  Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
  Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the
      bright flow, I was refresh’d,
  Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
      current, I stood yet was hurried,
  Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
      thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

  I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,
  Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air
      floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
  Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left
      the rest in strong shadow,
  Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,
  Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
  Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
  Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my
      head in the sunlit water,
  Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,
  Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
  Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,
  Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
  Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
  The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,
  The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender
      serpentine pennants,
  The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilothouses,
  The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
  The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,
  The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the
      frolic-some crests and glistening,
  The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the
      granite storehouses by the docks,
  On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on
      each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
  On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning
      high and glaringly into the night,
  Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow
      light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

       4
  These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,
  I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,
  The men and women I saw were all near to me,
  Others the same—others who look back on me because I look’d forward
      to them,
  (The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

       5
  What is it then between us?
  What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

  Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,
  I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
  I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the
      waters around it,
  I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
  In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
  In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
  I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
  I too had receiv’d identity by my body,
  That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I
      should be of my body.

       6
  It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
  The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
  The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
  My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
  Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
  I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
  I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
  Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
  Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
  Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
  The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.
  The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

  Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
  Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
  Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as
      they saw me approaching or passing,
  Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of
      their flesh against me as I sat,
  Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet
      never told them a word,
  Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
  Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
  The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
  Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

       7
  Closer yet I approach you,
  What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my
      stores in advance,
  I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

  Who was to know what should come home to me?
  Who knows but I am enjoying this?
  Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you
      now, for all you cannot see me?

       8
  Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than
      mast-hemm’d Manhattan?
  River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?
  The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the
      twilight, and the belated lighter?
  What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I
      love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as approach?
  What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that
      looks in my face?
  Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

  We understand then do we not?
  What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
  What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not
      accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?

       9
  Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
  Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
  Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the
      men and women generations after me!
  Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
  Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
  Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
  Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
  Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!
  Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my
      nighest name!
  Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
  Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one
      makes it!
  Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be
      looking upon you;
  Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet
      haste with the hasting current;
  Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
  Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all
      downcast eyes have time to take it from you!
  Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any
      one’s head, in the sunlit water!
  Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d
      schooners, sloops, lighters!
  Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!
  Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at
      nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses!
  Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,
  You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,
  About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,
  Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and
      sufficient rivers,
  Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,
  Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

  You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
  We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,
  Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,
  We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,
  We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
  You furnish your parts toward eternity,
  Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Book IX. Song of the Answerer

       1
  Now list to my morning’s romanza, I tell the signs of the Answerer,
  To the cities and farms I sing as they spread in the sunshine before me.

  A young man comes to me bearing a message from his brother,
  How shall the young man know the whether and when of his brother?
  Tell him to send me the signs. And I stand before the young man
      face to face, and take his right hand in my left hand and his
      left hand in my right hand,
  And I answer for his brother and for men, and I answer for him that
      answers for all, and send these signs.

  Him all wait for, him all yield up to, his word is decisive and final,
  Him they accept, in him lave, in him perceive themselves as amid light,
  Him they immerse and he immerses them.

  Beautiful women, the haughtiest nations, laws, the landscape,
      people, animals,
  The profound earth and its attributes and the unquiet ocean, (so
      tell I my morning’s romanza,)
  All enjoyments and properties and money, and whatever money will buy,
  The best farms, others toiling and planting and he unavoidably reaps,
  The noblest and costliest cities, others grading and building and he
      domiciles there,
  Nothing for any one but what is for him, near and far are for him,
      the ships in the offing,
  The perpetual shows and marches on land are for him if they are for anybody.

  He puts things in their attitudes,
  He puts to-day out of himself with plasticity and love,
  He places his own times, reminiscences, parents, brothers and
      sisters, associations, employment, politics, so that the rest
      never shame them afterward, nor assume to command them.

  He is the Answerer,
  What can be answer’d he answers, and what cannot be answer’d he
      shows how it cannot be answer’d.

  A man is a summons and challenge,
  (It is vain to skulk—do you hear that mocking and laughter? do you
      hear the ironical echoes?)

  Books, friendships, philosophers, priests, action, pleasure, pride,
      beat up and down seeking to give satisfaction,
  He indicates the satisfaction, and indicates them that beat up and
      down also.

  Whichever the sex, whatever the season or place, he may go freshly
      and gently and safely by day or by night,
  He has the pass-key of hearts, to him the response of the prying of
      hands on the knobs.

  His welcome is universal, the flow of beauty is not more welcome or
      universal than he is,
  The person he favors by day or sleeps with at night is blessed.

  Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and tongue,
  He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and
      any man translates, and any man translates himself also,
  One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees
      how they join.

  He says indifferently and alike How are you friend? to the President
      at his levee,
  And he says Good-day my brother, to Cudge that hoes in the sugar-field,
  And both understand him and know that his speech is right.

  He walks with perfect ease in the capitol,
  He walks among the Congress, and one Representative says to another,
      Here is our equal appearing and new.

  Then the mechanics take him for a mechanic,
  And the soldiers suppose him to be a soldier, and the sailors that
      he has follow’d the sea,
  And the authors take him for an author, and the artists for an artist,
  And the laborers perceive he could labor with them and love them,
  No matter what the work is, that he is the one to follow it or has
      follow’d it,
  No matter what the nation, that he might find his brothers and
      sisters there.

  The English believe he comes of their English stock,
  A Jew to the Jew he seems, a Russ to the Russ, usual and near,
      removed from none.

  Whoever he looks at in the traveler’s coffee-house claims him,
  The Italian or Frenchman is sure, the German is sure, the Spaniard
      is sure, and the island Cuban is sure,
  The engineer, the deck-hand on the great lakes, or on the Mississippi
      or St. Lawrence or Sacramento, or Hudson or Paumanok sound, claims him.

  The gentleman of perfect blood acknowledges his perfect blood,
  The insulter, the prostitute, the angry person, the beggar, see
      themselves in the ways of him, he strangely transmutes them,
  They are not vile any more, they hardly know themselves they are so grown.

       2
  The indications and tally of time,
  Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs,
  Time, always without break, indicates itself in parts,
  What always indicates the poet is the crowd of the pleasant company
      of singers, and their words,
  The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark,
      but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark,
  The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality,
  His insight and power encircle things and the human race,
  He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race.

  The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets,
  The singers are welcom’d, understood, appear often enough, but rare
      has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker
      of poems, the Answerer,
  (Not every century nor every five centuries has contain’d such a
      day, for all its names.)

  The singers of successive hours of centuries may have ostensible
      names, but the name of each of them is one of the singers,
  The name of each is, eye-singer, ear-singer, head-singer,
      sweet-singer, night-singer, parlor-singer, love-singer,
      weird-singer, or something else.

  All this time and at all times wait the words of true poems,
  The words of true poems do not merely please,
  The true poets are not followers of beauty but the august masters of beauty;
  The greatness of sons is the exuding of the greatness of mothers
      and fathers,
  The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

  Divine instinct, breadth of vision, the law of reason, health,
      rudeness of body, withdrawnness,
  Gayety, sun-tan, air-sweetness, such are some of the words of poems.

  The sailor and traveler underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer,
  The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist, all
      these underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer.

  The words of the true poems give you more than poems,
  They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war,
      peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, and every thing else,
  They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes,
  They do not seek beauty, they are sought,
  Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing,
      fain, love-sick.

  They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,
  They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,
  Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to
      learn one of the meanings,
  To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless
      rings and never be quiet again.

Book X. Our Old Feuillage

  Always our old feuillage!
  Always Florida’s green peninsula—always the priceless delta of
      Louisiana—always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas,
  Always California’s golden hills and hollows, and the silver
      mountains of New Mexico—always soft-breath’d Cuba,
  Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern sea, inseparable with
      the slopes drain’d by the Eastern and Western seas,
  The area the eighty-third year of these States, the three and a half
      millions of square miles,
  The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main,
      the thirty thousand miles of river navigation,
  The seven millions of distinct families and the same number of dwellings—
      always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches,
  Always the free range and diversity—always the continent of Democracy;
  Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers,
      Kanada, the snows;
  Always these compact lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing
      the huge oval lakes;
  Always the West with strong native persons, the increasing density there,
      the habitans, friendly, threatening, ironical, scorning invaders;
  All sights, South, North, East—all deeds, promiscuously done at all times,
  All characters, movements, growths, a few noticed, myriads unnoticed,
  Through Mannahatta’s streets I walking, these things gathering,
  On interior rivers by night in the glare of pine knots, steamboats
      wooding up,
  Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys
      of the Potomac and Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke
      and Delaware,
  In their northerly wilds beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks the
      hills, or lapping the Saginaw waters to drink,
  In a lonesome inlet a sheldrake lost from the flock, sitting on the
      water rocking silently,
  In farmers’ barns oxen in the stable, their harvest labor done, they
      rest standing, they are too tired,
  Afar on arctic ice the she-walrus lying drowsily while her cubs play around,
  The hawk sailing where men have not yet sail’d, the farthest polar
      sea, ripply, crystalline, open, beyond the floes,
  White drift spooning ahead where the ship in the tempest dashes,
  On solid land what is done in cities as the bells strike midnight together,
  In primitive woods the sounds there also sounding, the howl of the
      wolf, the scream of the panther, and the hoarse bellow of the elk,
  In winter beneath the hard blue ice of Moosehead lake, in summer
      visible through the clear waters, the great trout swimming,
  In lower latitudes in warmer air in the Carolinas the large black
      buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree tops,
  Below, the red cedar festoon’d with tylandria, the pines and
      cypresses growing out of the white sand that spreads far and flat,
  Rude boats descending the big Pedee, climbing plants, parasites with
      color’d flowers and berries enveloping huge trees,
  The waving drapery on the live-oak trailing long and low,
      noiselessly waved by the wind,
  The camp of Georgia wagoners just after dark, the supper-fires and
      the cooking and eating by whites and negroes,
  Thirty or forty great wagons, the mules, cattle, horses, feeding
      from troughs,
  The shadows, gleams, up under the leaves of the old sycamore-trees,
      the flames with the black smoke from the pitch-pine curling and rising;
  Southern fishermen fishing, the sounds and inlets of North
      Carolina’s coast, the shad-fishery and the herring-fishery, the
      large sweep-seines, the windlasses on shore work’d by horses, the
      clearing, curing, and packing-houses;
  Deep in the forest in piney woods turpentine dropping from the
      incisions in the trees, there are the turpentine works,
  There are the negroes at work in good health, the ground in all
      directions is cover’d with pine straw;
  In Tennessee and Kentucky slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge,
      by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking,
  In Virginia, the planter’s son returning after a long absence,
      joyfully welcom’d and kiss’d by the aged mulatto nurse,
  On rivers boatmen safely moor’d at nightfall in their boats under
      shelter of high banks,
  Some of the younger men dance to the sound of the banjo or fiddle,
      others sit on the gunwale smoking and talking;
  Late in the afternoon the mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing
      in the Great Dismal Swamp,
  There are the greenish waters, the resinous odor, the plenteous
      moss, the cypress-tree, and the juniper-tree;
  Northward, young men of Mannahatta, the target company from an
      excursion returning home at evening, the musket-muzzles all
      bear bunches of flowers presented by women;
  Children at play, or on his father’s lap a young boy fallen asleep,
      (how his lips move! how he smiles in his sleep!)
  The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the
      Mississippi, he ascends a knoll and sweeps his eyes around;
  California life, the miner, bearded, dress’d in his rude costume,
      the stanch California friendship, the sweet air, the graves one
      in passing meets solitary just aside the horse-path;
  Down in Texas the cotton-field, the negro-cabins, drivers driving
      mules or oxen before rude carts, cotton bales piled on banks
      and wharves;
  Encircling all, vast-darting up and wide, the American Soul, with
      equal hemispheres, one Love, one Dilation or Pride;
  In arriere the peace-talk with the Iroquois the aborigines, the
      calumet, the pipe of good-will, arbitration, and indorsement,
  The sachem blowing the smoke first toward the sun and then toward
      the earth,
  The drama of the scalp-dance enacted with painted faces and guttural
      exclamations,
  The setting out of the war-party, the long and stealthy march,
  The single file, the swinging hatchets, the surprise and slaughter
      of enemies;
  All the acts, scenes, ways, persons, attitudes of these States,
      reminiscences, institutions,
  All these States compact, every square mile of these States without
      excepting a particle;
  Me pleas’d, rambling in lanes and country fields, Paumanok’s fields,
  Observing the spiral flight of two little yellow butterflies
      shuffling between each other, ascending high in the air,
  The darting swallow, the destroyer of insects, the fall traveler
      southward but returning northward early in the spring,
  The country boy at the close of the day driving the herd of cows and
      shouting to them as they loiter to browse by the roadside,
  The city wharf, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, New
      Orleans, San Francisco,
  The departing ships when the sailors heave at the capstan;
  Evening—me in my room—the setting sun,
  The setting summer sun shining in my open window, showing the
      swarm of flies, suspended, balancing in the air in the centre
      of the room, darting athwart, up and down, casting swift
      shadows in specks on the opposite wall where the shine is;
  The athletic American matron speaking in public to crowds of listeners,
  Males, females, immigrants, combinations, the copiousness, the
      individuality of the States, each for itself—the moneymakers,
  Factories, machinery, the mechanical forces, the windlass, lever,
      pulley, all certainties,
  The certainty of space, increase, freedom, futurity,
  In space the sporades, the scatter’d islands, the stars—on the firm
      earth, the lands, my lands,
  O lands! all so dear to me—what you are, (whatever it is,) I putting it
      at random in these songs, become a part of that, whatever it is,
  Southward there, I screaming, with wings slow flapping, with the
      myriads of gulls wintering along the coasts of Florida,
  Otherways there atwixt the banks of the Arkansaw, the Rio Grande,
      the Nueces, the Brazos, the Tombigbee, the Red River, the
      Saskatchawan or the Osage, I with the spring waters laughing
      and skipping and running,
  Northward, on the sands, on some shallow bay of Paumanok, I with
      parties of snowy herons wading in the wet to seek worms and
      aquatic plants,
  Retreating, triumphantly twittering, the king-bird, from piercing
      the crow with its bill, for amusement—and I triumphantly twittering,
  The migrating flock of wild geese alighting in autumn to refresh
      themselves, the body of the flock feed, the sentinels outside
      move around with erect heads watching, and are from time to time
      reliev’d by other sentinels—and I feeding and taking turns
      with the rest,
  In Kanadian forests the moose, large as an ox, corner’d by hunters,
      rising desperately on his hind-feet, and plunging with his
      fore-feet, the hoofs as sharp as knives—and I, plunging at the
      hunters, corner’d and desperate,
  In the Mannahatta, streets, piers, shipping, store-houses, and the
      countless workmen working in the shops,
  And I too of the Mannahatta, singing thereof—and no less in myself
      than the whole of the Mannahatta in itself,
  Singing the song of These, my ever-united lands—my body no more
      inevitably united, part to part, and made out of a thousand
      diverse contributions one identity, any more than my lands
      are inevitably united and made ONE IDENTITY;
  Nativities, climates, the grass of the great pastoral Plains,
  Cities, labors, death, animals, products, war, good and evil—these me,
  These affording, in all their particulars, the old feuillage to me
      and to America, how can I do less than pass the clew of the union
      of them, to afford the like to you?
  Whoever you are! how can I but offer you divine leaves, that you
      also be eligible as I am?
  How can I but as here chanting, invite you for yourself to collect
      bouquets of the incomparable feuillage of these States?

Book XI. A Song of Joys

  O to make the most jubilant song!
  Full of music—full of manhood, womanhood, infancy!
  Full of common employments—full of grain and trees.

  O for the voices of animals—O for the swiftness and balance of fishes!
  O for the dropping of raindrops in a song!
  O for the sunshine and motion of waves in a song!

  O the joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning!
  It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,
  I will have thousands of globes and all time.

  O the engineer’s joys! to go with a locomotive!
  To hear the hiss of steam, the merry shriek, the steam-whistle, the
      laughing locomotive!
  To push with resistless way and speed off in the distance.

  O the gleesome saunter over fields and hillsides!
  The leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds, the moist fresh
      stillness of the woods,
  The exquisite smell of the earth at daybreak, and all through the forenoon.

  O the horseman’s and horsewoman’s joys!
  The saddle, the gallop, the pressure upon the seat, the cool
      gurgling by the ears and hair.

  O the fireman’s joys!
  I hear the alarm at dead of night,
  I hear bells, shouts! I pass the crowd, I run!
  The sight of the flames maddens me with pleasure.

  O the joy of the strong-brawn’d fighter, towering in the arena in
      perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent.

  O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is
      capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods.

  O the mother’s joys!
  The watching, the endurance, the precious love, the anguish, the
      patiently yielded life.

  O the of increase, growth, recuperation,
  The joy of soothing and pacifying, the joy of concord and harmony.

  O to go back to the place where I was born,
  To hear the birds sing once more,
  To ramble about the house and barn and over the fields once more,
  And through the orchard and along the old lanes once more.

  O to have been brought up on bays, lagoons, creeks, or along the coast,
  To continue and be employ’d there all my life,
  The briny and damp smell, the shore, the salt weeds exposed at low water,
  The work of fishermen, the work of the eel-fisher and clam-fisher;
  I come with my clam-rake and spade, I come with my eel-spear,
  Is the tide out? I Join the group of clam-diggers on the flats,
  I laugh and work with them, I joke at my work like a mettlesome young man;
  In winter I take my eel-basket and eel-spear and travel out on foot
      on the ice—I have a small axe to cut holes in the ice,
  Behold me well-clothed going gayly or returning in the afternoon,
      my brood of tough boys accompanying me,
  My brood of grown and part-grown boys, who love to be with no
      one else so well as they love to be with me,
  By day to work with me, and by night to sleep with me.

  Another time in warm weather out in a boat, to lift the lobster-pots
      where they are sunk with heavy stones, (I know the buoys,)
  O the sweetness of the Fifth-month morning upon the water as I row
      just before sunrise toward the buoys,
  I pull the wicker pots up slantingly, the dark green lobsters are
      desperate with their claws as I take them out, I insert
      wooden pegs in the ’oints of their pincers,

  I go to all the places one after another, and then row back to the shore,
  There in a huge kettle of boiling water the lobsters shall be boil’d
      till their color becomes scarlet.

  Another time mackerel-taking,
  Voracious, mad for the hook, near the surface, they seem to fill the
      water for miles;
  Another time fishing for rock-fish in Chesapeake bay, I one of the
      brown-faced crew;
  Another time trailing for blue-fish off Paumanok, I stand with braced body,
  My left foot is on the gunwale, my right arm throws far out the
      coils of slender rope,
  In sight around me the quick veering and darting of fifty skiffs, my
      companions.

  O boating on the rivers,
  The voyage down the St. Lawrence, the superb scenery, the steamers,
  The ships sailing, the Thousand Islands, the occasional timber-raft
      and the raftsmen with long-reaching sweep-oars,
  The little huts on the rafts, and the stream of smoke when they cook
      supper at evening.

  (O something pernicious and dread!
  Something far away from a puny and pious life!
  Something unproved! something in a trance!
  Something escaped from the anchorage and driving free.)

  O to work in mines, or forging iron,
  Foundry casting, the foundry itself, the rude high roof, the ample
      and shadow’d space,
  The furnace, the hot liquid pour’d out and running.

  O to resume the joys of the soldier!
  To feel the presence of a brave commanding officer—to feel his sympathy!
  To behold his calmness—to be warm’d in the rays of his smile!
  To go to battle—to hear the bugles play and the drums beat!
  To hear the crash of artillery—to see the glittering of the bayonets
      and musket-barrels in the sun!

  To see men fall and die and not complain!
  To taste the savage taste of blood—to be so devilish!
  To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy.

  O the whaleman’s joys! O I cruise my old cruise again!
  I feel the ship’s motion under me, I feel the Atlantic breezes fanning me,
  I hear the cry again sent down from the mast-head, There—she blows!
  Again I spring up the rigging to look with the rest—we descend,
      wild with excitement,
  I leap in the lower’d boat, we row toward our prey where he lies,
  We approach stealthy and silent, I see the mountainous mass,
      lethargic, basking,
  I see the harpooneer standing up, I see the weapon dart from his
      vigorous arm;
  O swift again far out in the ocean the wounded whale, settling,
      running to windward, tows me,
  Again I see him rise to breathe, we row close again,
  I see a lance driven through his side, press’d deep, turn’d in the wound,
  Again we back off, I see him settle again, the life is leaving him fast,
  As he rises he spouts blood, I see him swim in circles narrower and
      narrower, swiftly cutting the water—I see him die,
  He gives one convulsive leap in the centre of the circle, and then
      falls flat and still in the bloody foam.

  O the old manhood of me, my noblest joy of all!
  My children and grand-children, my white hair and beard,
  My largeness, calmness, majesty, out of the long stretch of my life.

  O ripen’d joy of womanhood! O happiness at last!
  I am more than eighty years of age, I am the most venerable mother,
  How clear is my mind—how all people draw nigh to me!
  What attractions are these beyond any before? what bloom more
      than the bloom of youth?
  What beauty is this that descends upon me and rises out of me?

  O the orator’s joys!
  To inflate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the
      ribs and throat,
  To make the people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself,
  To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue.

  O the joy of my soul leaning pois’d on itself, receiving identity through
      materials and loving them, observing characters and absorbing them,
  My soul vibrated back to me from them, from sight, hearing, touch,
      reason, articulation, comparison, memory, and the like,
  The real life of my senses and flesh transcending my senses and flesh,
  My body done with materials, my sight done with my material eyes,
  Proved to me this day beyond cavil that it is not my material eyes
      which finally see,
  Nor my material body which finally loves, walks, laughs, shouts,
      embraces, procreates.

  O the farmer’s joys!
  Ohioan’s, Illinoisian’s, Wisconsinese’, Kanadian’s, Iowan’s,
      Kansian’s, Missourian’s, Oregonese’ joys!
  To rise at peep of day and pass forth nimbly to work,
  To plough land in the fall for winter-sown crops,
  To plough land in the spring for maize,
  To train orchards, to graft the trees, to gather apples in the fall.

  O to bathe in the swimming-bath, or in a good place along shore,
  To splash the water! to walk ankle-deep, or race naked along the shore.

  O to realize space!
  The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
  To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying
      clouds, as one with them.

  O the joy a manly self-hood!
  To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown,
  To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic,
  To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye,
  To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,
  To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.

  Knowist thou the excellent joys of youth?
  Joys of the dear companions and of the merry word and laughing face?
  Joy of the glad light-beaming day, joy of the wide-breath’d games?
  Joy of sweet music, joy of the lighted ball-room and the dancers?
  Joy of the plenteous dinner, strong carouse and drinking?

  Yet O my soul supreme!
  Knowist thou the joys of pensive thought?
  Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart?
  Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow’d yet proud, the suffering
      and the struggle?
  The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day
      or night?
  Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space?
  Prophetic joys of better, loftier love’s ideals, the divine wife,
      the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade?
  Joys all thine own undying one, joys worthy thee O soul.

  O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,
  To meet life as a powerful conqueror,
  No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,
  To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving
      my interior soul impregnable,
  And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

  For not life’s joys alone I sing, repeating—the joy of death!
  The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments,
      for reasons,
  Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn’d, or render’d
      to powder, or buried,
  My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,
  My voided body nothing more to me, returning to the purifications,
      further offices, eternal uses of the earth.

  O to attract by more than attraction!
  How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which obeys none
      of the rest,
  It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws.

  O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
  To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!
  To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
  To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with
      perfect nonchalance!
  To be indeed a God!

  O to sail to sea in a ship!
  To leave this steady unendurable land,
  To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the
      houses,
  To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,
  To sail and sail and sail!

  O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!
  To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
  To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,
  A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)
  A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.

Book XII. Song of the Broad-Axe

       1
  Weapon shapely, naked, wan,
  Head from the mother’s bowels drawn,
  Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,
  Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown,
  Resting the grass amid and upon,
  To be lean’d and to lean on.

  Strong shapes and attributes of strong shapes, masculine trades,
      sights and sounds.
  Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music,
  Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great organ.

       2
  Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind,
  Welcome are lands of pine and oak,
  Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig,
  Welcome are lands of gold,
  Welcome are lands of wheat and maize, welcome those of the grape,
  Welcome are lands of sugar and rice,
  Welcome the cotton-lands, welcome those of the white potato and
      sweet potato,
  Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies,
  Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings,
  Welcome the measureless grazing-lands, welcome the teeming soil of
      orchards, flax, honey, hemp;
  Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands,
  Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands,
  Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores,
  Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc,
  Lands of iron—lands of the make of the axe.

       3
  The log at the wood-pile, the axe supported by it,
  The sylvan hut, the vine over the doorway, the space clear’d for garden,
  The irregular tapping of rain down on the leaves after the storm is lull’d,
  The walling and moaning at intervals, the thought of the sea,
  The thought of ships struck in the storm and put on their beam ends,
      and the cutting away of masts,
  The sentiment of the huge timbers of old-fashion’d houses and barns,
  The remember’d print or narrative, the voyage at a venture of men,
      families, goods,
  The disembarkation, the founding of a new city,
  The voyage of those who sought a New England and found it, the outset
      anywhere,
  The settlements of the Arkansas, Colorado, Ottawa, Willamette,
  The slow progress, the scant fare, the axe, rifle, saddle-bags;
  The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons,
  The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men with their clear untrimm’d faces,
  The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves,
  The American contempt for statutes and ceremonies, the boundless
      impatience of restraint,
  The loose drift of character, the inkling through random types, the
      solidification;
  The butcher in the slaughter-house, the hands aboard schooners and
      sloops, the raftsman, the pioneer,
  Lumbermen in their winter camp, daybreak in the woods, stripes of
      snow on the limbs of trees, the occasional snapping,
  The glad clear sound of one’s own voice, the merry song, the natural
      life of the woods, the strong day’s work,
  The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the
      bed of hemlock-boughs and the bear-skin;
  The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,
  The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,
  The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them
      regular,
  Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises according as they
      were prepared,
  The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their
      curv’d limbs,
  Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, holding on by
      posts and braces,
  The hook’d arm over the plate, the other arm wielding the axe,
  The floor-men forcing the planks close to be nail’d,
  Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers,
  The echoes resounding through the vacant building:
  The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,
  The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end, carefully
      bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a cross-beam,
  The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right hands rapidly
      laying the long side-wall, two hundred feet from front to rear,
  The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the
      trowels striking the bricks,
  The bricks one after another each laid so workmanlike in its place,
      and set with a knock of the trowel-handle,
  The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the
      steady replenishing by the hod-men;
  Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown apprentices,
  The swing of their axes on the square-hew’d log shaping it toward
      the shape of a mast,
  The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,
  The butter-color’d chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,
  The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes,
  The constructor of wharves, bridges, piers, bulk-heads, floats,
      stays against the sea;
  The city fireman, the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the
      close-pack’d square,
  The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring,
  The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line,
      the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water,
  The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets, the bringing to bear of the
      hooks and ladders and their execution,
  The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors
      if the fire smoulders under them,
  The crowd with their lit faces watching, the glare and dense shadows;
  The forger at his forge-furnace and the user of iron after him,
  The maker of the axe large and small, and the welder and temperer,
  The chooser breathing his breath on the cold steel and trying the
      edge with his thumb,
  The one who clean-shapes the handle and sets it firmly in the socket;
  The shadowy processions of the portraits of the past users also,
  The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engineers,
  The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizra edifice,
  The Roman lictors preceding the consuls,
  The antique European warrior with his axe in combat,
  The uplifted arm, the clatter of blows on the helmeted head,
  The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of friend and foe
      thither,
  The siege of revolted lieges determin’d for liberty,
  The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce
      and parley,
  The sack of an old city in its time,
  The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and disorderly,
  Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,
  Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women in the
      gripe of brigands,
  Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons despairing,
  The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds,
  The list of all executive deeds and words just or unjust,
  The power of personality just or unjust.

       4
  Muscle and pluck forever!
  What invigorates life invigorates death,
  And the dead advance as much as the living advance,
  And the future is no more uncertain than the present,
  For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the
      delicatesse of the earth and of man,
  And nothing endures but personal qualities.

  What do you think endures?
  Do you think a great city endures?
  Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the
      best built steamships?
  Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d’œuvres of engineering,
      forts, armaments?

  Away! these are not to be cherish’d for themselves,
  They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,
  The show passes, all does well enough of course,
  All does very well till one flash of defiance.

  A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
  If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the
      whole world.

       5
  The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch’d
      wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,
  Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the
      anchor-lifters of the departing,
  Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops
      selling goods from the rest of the earth,
  Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where
      money is plentiest,
  Nor the place of the most numerous population.

  Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,
  Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in
      return and understands them,
  Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,
  Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,
  Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,
  Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases,
  Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of
      elected persons,
  Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle of
      death pours its sweeping and unript waves,
  Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside
      authority,
  Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President,
      Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for pay,
  Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on
      themselves,
  Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,
  Where speculations on the soul are encouraged,
  Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,
  Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men;
  Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands,
  Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,
  Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,
  Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
  There the great city stands.

       6
  How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!
  How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a
      man’s or woman’s look!

  All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears;
  A strong being is the proof of the race and of the ability of the universe,
  When he or she appears materials are overaw’d,
  The dispute on the soul stops,
  The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn’d back, or laid away.

  What is your money-making now? what can it do now?
  What is your respectability now?
  What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books, now?
  Where are your jibes of being now?
  Where are your cavils about the soul now?

       7
  A sterile landscape covers the ore, there is as good as the best for
      all the forbidding appearance,
  There is the mine, there are the miners,
  The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplish’d, the hammersmen
      are at hand with their tongs and hammers,
  What always served and always serves is at hand.

  Than this nothing has better served, it has served all,
  Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek, and long ere the Greek,
  Served in building the buildings that last longer than any,
  Served the Hebrew, the Persian, the most ancient Hindustanee,
  Served the mound-raiser on the Mississippi, served those whose
      relics remain in Central America,
  Served Albic temples in woods or on plains, with unhewn pillars and
      the druids,
  Served the artificial clefts, vast, high, silent, on the
      snow-cover’d hills of Scandinavia,
  Served those who time out of mind made on the granite walls rough
      sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean waves,
  Served the paths of the irruptions of the Goths, served the pastoral
      tribes and nomads,
  Served the long distant Kelt, served the hardy pirates of the Baltic,
  Served before any of those the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia,
  Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure and the
      making of those for war,
  Served all great works on land and all great works on the sea,
  For the mediaeval ages and before the mediaeval ages,
  Served not the living only then as now, but served the dead.

       8
  I see the European headsman,
  He stands mask’d, clothed in red, with huge legs and strong naked arms,
  And leans on a ponderous axe.

  (Whom have you slaughter’d lately European headsman?
  Whose is that blood upon you so wet and sticky?)

  I see the clear sunsets of the martyrs,
  I see from the scaffolds the descending ghosts,
  Ghosts of dead lords, uncrown’d ladies, impeach’d ministers, rejected kings,
  Rivals, traitors, poisoners, disgraced chieftains and the rest.

  I see those who in any land have died for the good cause,
  The seed is spare, nevertheless the crop shall never run out,
  (Mind you O foreign kings, O priests, the crop shall never run out.)

  I see the blood wash’d entirely away from the axe,
  Both blade and helve are clean,
  They spirt no more the blood of European nobles, they clasp no more
      the necks of queens.

  I see the headsman withdraw and become useless,
  I see the scaffold untrodden and mouldy, I see no longer any axe upon it,

  I see the mighty and friendly emblem of the power of my own race,
      the newest, largest race.

       9
  (America! I do not vaunt my love for you,
  I have what I have.)

  The axe leaps!
  The solid forest gives fluid utterances,
  They tumble forth, they rise and form,
  Hut, tent, landing, survey,
  Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade,
  Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, lamb, lath, panel, gable,
  Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition-house, library,
  Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, turret, porch,
  Hoe, rake, pitchfork, pencil, wagon, staff, saw, jack-plane, mallet,
      wedge, rounce,
  Chair, tub, hoop, table, wicket, vane, sash, floor,
  Work-box, chest, string’d instrument, boat, frame, and what not,
  Capitols of States, and capitol of the nation of States,
  Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans or for the poor or sick,
  Manhattan steamboats and clippers taking the measure of all seas.

  The shapes arise!
  Shapes of the using of axes anyhow, and the users and all that
      neighbors them,
  Cutters down of wood and haulers of it to the Penobscot or Kenebec,
  Dwellers in cabins among the Californian mountains or by the little
      lakes, or on the Columbia,
  Dwellers south on the banks of the Gila or Rio Grande, friendly
      gatherings, the characters and fun,
  Dwellers along the St. Lawrence, or north in Kanada, or down by the
      Yellowstone, dwellers on coasts and off coasts,
  Seal-fishers, whalers, arctic seamen breaking passages through the ice.

  The shapes arise!
  Shapes of factories, arsenals, foundries, markets,
  Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads,
  Shapes of the sleepers of bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches,
  Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows, lake and canal craft, river craft,
  Ship-yards and dry-docks along the Eastern and Western seas, and in
      many a bay and by-place,
  The live-oak kelsons, the pine planks, the spars, the
      hackmatack-roots for knees,
  The ships themselves on their ways, the tiers of scaffolds, the
      workmen busy outside and inside,
  The tools lying around, the great auger and little auger, the adze,
      bolt, line, square, gouge, and bead-plane.

       10
  The shapes arise!
  The shape measur’d, saw’d, jack’d, join’d, stain’d,
  The coffin-shape for the dead to lie within in his shroud,
  The shape got out in posts, in the bedstead posts, in the posts of
      the bride’s bed,
  The shape of the little trough, the shape of the rockers beneath,
      the shape of the babe’s cradle,
  The shape of the floor-planks, the floor-planks for dancers’ feet,
  The shape of the planks of the family home, the home of the friendly
      parents and children,
  The shape of the roof of the home of the happy young man and
      woman, the roof over the well-married young man and woman,
  The roof over the supper joyously cook’d by the chaste wife, and joyously
      eaten by the chaste husband, content after his day’s work.

  The shapes arise!
  The shape of the prisoner’s place in the court-room, and of him or
      her seated in the place,
  The shape of the liquor-bar lean’d against by the young rum-drinker
      and the old rum-drinker,
  The shape of the shamed and angry stairs trod by sneaking foot- steps,
  The shape of the sly settee, and the adulterous unwholesome couple,
  The shape of the gambling-board with its devilish winnings and losings,
  The shape of the step-ladder for the convicted and sentenced
      murderer, the murderer with haggard face and pinion’d arms,
  The sheriff at hand with his deputies, the silent and white-lipp’d
      crowd, the dangling of the rope.

  The shapes arise!
  Shapes of doors giving many exits and entrances,
  The door passing the dissever’d friend flush’d and in haste,
  The door that admits good news and bad news,
  The door whence the son left home confident and puff’d up,
  The door he enter’d again from a long and scandalous absence,
      diseas’d, broken down, without innocence, without means.

       11
  Her shape arises,
  She less guarded than ever, yet more guarded than ever,
  The gross and soil’d she moves among do not make her gross and soil’d,
  She knows the thoughts as she passes, nothing is conceal’d from her,
  She is none the less considerate or friendly therefor,
  She is the best belov’d, it is without exception, she has no reason
      to fear and she does not fear,
  Oaths, quarrels, hiccupp’d songs, smutty expressions, are idle to
      her as she passes,
  She is silent, she is possess’d of herself, they do not offend her,
  She receives them as the laws of Nature receive them, she is strong,
  She too is a law of Nature—there is no law stronger than she is.

       12
  The main shapes arise!
  Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries,
  Shapes ever projecting other shapes,
  Shapes of turbulent manly cities,
  Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth,
  Shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth.

Book XIII. Song of the Exposition

       1
  (Ah little recks the laborer,
  How near his work is holding him to God,
  The loving Laborer through space and time.)

  After all not to create only, or found only,
  But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
  To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free,
  To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire,
  Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate,
  To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead,
  These also are the lessons of our New World;
  While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!

  Long and long has the grass been growing,
  Long and long has the rain been falling,
  Long has the globe been rolling round.

       2
  Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,
  Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
  That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and AEneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings,
  Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,
  Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on jaffa’s gate and on
      Mount Moriah,
  The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles,
      and Italian collections,
  For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain
      awaits, demands you.

       3
  Responsive to our summons,
  Or rather to her long-nurs’d inclination,
  Join’d with an irresistible, natural gravitation,
  She comes! I hear the rustling of her gown,
  I scent the odor of her breath’s delicious fragrance,
  I mark her step divine, her curious eyes a-turning, rolling,
  Upon this very scene.

  The dame of dames! can I believe then,
  Those ancient temples, sculptures classic, could none of them retain her?
  Nor shades of Virgil and Dante, nor myriad memories, poems, old
      associations, magnetize and hold on to her?
  But that she’s left them all—and here?

  Yes, if you will allow me to say so,
  I, my friends, if you do not, can plainly see her,
  The same undying soul of earth’s, activity’s, beauty’s, heroism’s
      expression,
  Out from her evolutions hither come, ended the strata of her former themes,
  Hidden and cover’d by to-day’s, foundation of to-day’s,
  Ended, deceas’d through time, her voice by Castaly’s fountain,
  Silent the broken-lipp’d Sphynx in Egypt, silent all those century-
      baffling tombs,
  Ended for aye the epics of Asia’s, Europe’s helmeted warriors, ended
      the primitive call of the muses,
  Calliope’s call forever closed, Clio, Melpomene, Thalia dead,
  Ended the stately rhythmus of Una and Oriana, ended the quest of the
      holy Graal,
  Jerusalem a handful of ashes blown by the wind, extinct,
  The Crusaders’ streams of shadowy midnight troops sped with the sunrise,
  Amadis, Tancred, utterly gone, Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver gone,
  Palmerin, ogre, departed, vanish’d the turrets that Usk from its
      waters reflected,
  Arthur vanish’d with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and
      Galahad, all gone, dissolv’d utterly like an exhalation;
  Pass’d! pass’d! for us, forever pass’d, that once so mighty world,
      now void, inanimate, phantom world,
  Embroider’d, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends, myths,
  Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and
      courtly dames,
  Pass’d to its charnel vault, coffin’d with crown and armor on,
  Blazon’d with Shakspere’s purple page,
  And dirged by Tennyson’s sweet sad rhyme.

  I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious emigre, (having it
      is true in her day, although the same, changed, journey’d considerable,)
  Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for
      herself, striding through the confusion,
  By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
  Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
  Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
  She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!

       4
  But hold—don’t I forget my manners?
  To introduce the stranger, (what else indeed do I live to chant
      for?) to thee Columbia;
  In liberty’s name welcome immortal! clasp hands,
  And ever henceforth sisters dear be both.

  Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,
  I candidly confess a queer, queer race, of novel fashion,
  And yet the same old human race, the same within, without,
  Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearnings the same,
  The same old love, beauty and use the same.

       5
  We do not blame thee elder World, nor really separate ourselves from thee,
  (Would the son separate himself from the father?)
  Looking back on thee, seeing thee to thy duties, grandeurs, through
      past ages bending, building,
  We build to ours to-day.

  Mightier than Egypt’s tombs,
  Fairer than Grecia’s, Roma’s temples,
  Prouder than Milan’s statued, spired cathedral,
  More picturesque than Rhenish castle-keeps,
  We plan even now to raise, beyond them all,
  Thy great cathedral sacred industry, no tomb,
  A keep for life for practical invention.

  As in a waking vision,
  E’en while I chant I see it rise, I scan and prophesy outside and in,
  Its manifold ensemble.

  Around a palace, loftier, fairer, ampler than any yet,
  Earth’s modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping,
  High rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades,
  Gladdening the sun and sky, enhued in cheerfulest hues,
  Bronze, lilac, robin’s-egg, marine and crimson,
  Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath thy banner Freedom,
  The banners of the States and flags of every land,
  A brood of lofty, fair, but lesser palaces shall cluster.

  Somewhere within their walls shall all that forwards perfect human
      life be started,
  Tried, taught, advanced, visibly exhibited.

  Not only all the world of works, trade, products,
  But all the workmen of the world here to be represented.

  Here shall you trace in flowing operation,
  In every state of practical, busy movement, the rills of civilization,
  Materials here under your eye shall change their shape as if by magic,
  The cotton shall be pick’d almost in the very field,
  Shall be dried, clean’d, ginn’d, baled, spun into thread and cloth
      before you,
  You shall see hands at work at all the old processes and all the new ones,
  You shall see the various grains and how flour is made and then
      bread baked by the bakers,
  You shall see the crude ores of California and Nevada passing on and
      on till they become bullion,
  You shall watch how the printer sets type, and learn what a
      composing-stick is,
  You shall mark in amazement the Hoe press whirling its cylinders,
      shedding the printed leaves steady and fast,
  The photograph, model, watch, pin, nail, shall be created before you.

  In large calm halls, a stately museum shall teach you the infinite
      lessons of minerals,
  In another, woods, plants, vegetation shall be illustrated—in
      another animals, animal life and development.

  One stately house shall be the music house,
  Others for other arts—learning, the sciences, shall all be here,
  None shall be slighted, none but shall here be honor’d, help’d, exampled.

       6
  (This, this and these, America, shall be your pyramids and obelisks,
  Your Alexandrian Pharos, gardens of Babylon,
  Your temple at Olympia.)

  The male and female many laboring not,
  Shall ever here confront the laboring many,
  With precious benefits to both, glory to all,
  To thee America, and thee eternal Muse.

  And here shall ye inhabit powerful Matrons!
  In your vast state vaster than all the old,
  Echoed through long, long centuries to come,
  To sound of different, prouder songs, with stronger themes,
  Practical, peaceful life, the people’s life, the People themselves,
  Lifted, illumin’d, bathed in peace—elate, secure in peace.

       7
  Away with themes of war! away with war itself!
  Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of
      blacken’d, mutilated corpses!
  That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for
      lop-tongued wolves, not reasoning men,
  And in its stead speed industry’s campaigns,
  With thy undaunted armies, engineering,
  Thy pennants labor, loosen’d to the breeze,
  Thy bugles sounding loud and clear.

  Away with old romance!
  Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts,
  Away with love-verses sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers,
  Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide,
  The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few,
  With perfumes, heat and wine, beneath the dazzling chandeliers.

  To you ye reverent sane sisters,
  I raise a voice for far superber themes for poets and for art,
  To exalt the present and the real,
  To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade,
  To sing in songs how exercise and chemical life are never to be baffled,
  To manual work for each and all, to plough, hoe, dig,
  To plant and tend the tree, the berry, vegetables, flowers,
  For every man to see to it that he really do something, for every woman too;
  To use the hammer and the saw, (rip, or cross-cut,)
  To cultivate a turn for carpentering, plastering, painting,
  To work as tailor, tailoress, nurse, hostler, porter,
  To invent a little, something ingenious, to aid the washing, cooking,
      cleaning,
  And hold it no disgrace to take a hand at them themselves.

  I say I bring thee Muse to-day and here,
  All occupations, duties broad and close,
  Toil, healthy toil and sweat, endless, without cessation,
  The old, old practical burdens, interests, joys,
  The family, parentage, childhood, husband and wife,
  The house-comforts, the house itself and all its belongings,
  Food and its preservation, chemistry applied to it,
  Whatever forms the average, strong, complete, sweet-blooded man or
      woman, the perfect longeve personality,
  And helps its present life to health and happiness, and shapes its soul,
  For the eternal real life to come.

  With latest connections, works, the inter-transportation of the world,
  Steam-power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum,
  These triumphs of our time, the Atlantic’s delicate cable,
  The Pacific railroad, the Suez canal, the Mont Cenis and Gothard and
      Hoosac tunnels, the Brooklyn bridge,
  This earth all spann’d with iron rails, with lines of steamships
      threading in every sea,
  Our own rondure, the current globe I bring.

       8
  And thou America,
  Thy offspring towering e’er so high, yet higher Thee above all towering,
  With Victory on thy left, and at thy right hand Law;
  Thou Union holding all, fusing, absorbing, tolerating all,
  Thee, ever thee, I sing.

  Thou, also thou, a World,
  With all thy wide geographies, manifold, different, distant,
  Rounded by thee in one—one common orbic language,
  One common indivisible destiny for All.

  And by the spells which ye vouchsafe to those your ministers in earnest,
  I here personify and call my themes, to make them pass before ye.

  Behold, America! (and thou, ineffable guest and sister!)
  For thee come trooping up thy waters and thy lands;
  Behold! thy fields and farms, thy far-off woods and mountains,
  As in procession coming.

  Behold, the sea itself,
  And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships;
  See, where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the
      green and blue,
  See, the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port,
  See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke.

  Behold, in Oregon, far in the north and west,
  Or in Maine, far in the north and east, thy cheerful axemen,
  Wielding all day their axes.

  Behold, on the lakes, thy pilots at their wheels, thy oarsmen,
  How the ash writhes under those muscular arms!

  There by the furnace, and there by the anvil,
  Behold thy sturdy blacksmiths swinging their sledges,
  Overhand so steady, overhand they turn and fall with joyous clank,
  Like a tumult of laughter.

  Mark the spirit of invention everywhere, thy rapid patents,
  Thy continual workshops, foundries, risen or rising,
  See, from their chimneys how the tall flame-fires stream.

  Mark, thy interminable farms, North, South,
  Thy wealthy daughter-states, Eastern and Western,
  The varied products of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia, Texas,
      and the rest,
  Thy limitless crops, grass, wheat, sugar, oil, corn, rice, hemp, hops,
  Thy barns all fill’d, the endless freight-train and the bulging store-house,
  The grapes that ripen on thy vines, the apples in thy orchards,
  Thy incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes, thy coal, thy gold
      and silver,
  The inexhaustible iron in thy mines.

  All thine O sacred Union!
  Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories, mines,
  City and State, North, South, item and aggregate,
  We dedicate, dread Mother, all to thee!

  Protectress absolute, thou! bulwark of all!
  For well we know that while thou givest each and all, (generous as God,)
  Without thee neither all nor each, nor land, home,
  Nor ship, nor mine, nor any here this day secure,
  Nor aught, nor any day secure.

       9
  And thou, the Emblem waving over all!
  Delicate beauty, a word to thee, (it may be salutary,)
  Remember thou hast not always been as here to-day so comfortably
      ensovereign’d,
  In other scenes than these have I observ’d thee flag,
  Not quite so trim and whole and freshly blooming in folds of
      stainless silk,
  But I have seen thee bunting, to tatters torn upon thy splinter’d staff,
  Or clutch’d to some young color-bearer’s breast with desperate hands,
  Savagely struggled for, for life or death, fought over long,
  ’Mid cannons’ thunder-crash and many a curse and groan and yell, and
      rifle-volleys cracking sharp,
  And moving masses as wild demons surging, and lives as nothing risk’d,
  For thy mere remnant grimed with dirt and smoke and sopp’d in blood,
  For sake of that, my beauty, and that thou might’st dally as now
      secure up there,
  Many a good man have I seen go under.

  Now here and these and hence in peace, all thine O Flag!
  And here and hence for thee, O universal Muse! and thou for them!
  And here and hence O Union, all the work and workmen thine!
  None separate from thee—henceforth One only, we and thou,
  (For the blood of the children, what is it, only the blood maternal?
  And lives and works, what are they all at last, except the roads to
      faith and death?)

  While we rehearse our measureless wealth, it is for thee, dear Mother,
  We own it all and several to-day indissoluble in thee;
  Think not our chant, our show, merely for products gross or lucre—
      it is for thee, the soul in thee, electric, spiritual!
  Our farms, inventions, crops, we own in thee! cities and States in thee!
  Our freedom all in thee! our very lives in thee!

Book XIV. Song of the Redwood-Tree

       1
  A California song,
  A prophecy and indirection, a thought impalpable to breathe as air,
  A chorus of dryads, fading, departing, or hamadryads departing,
  A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
  Voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense.

  Farewell my brethren,
  Farewell O earth and sky, farewell ye neighboring waters,
  My time has ended, my term has come.

  Along the northern coast,
  Just back from the rock-bound shore and the caves,
  In the saline air from the sea in the Mendocino country,
  With the surge for base and accompaniment low and hoarse,
  With crackling blows of axes sounding musically driven by strong arms,
  Riven deep by the sharp tongues of the axes, there in the redwood
      forest dense,
  I heard the might tree its death-chant chanting.

  The choppers heard not, the camp shanties echoed not,
  The quick-ear’d teamsters and chain and jack-screw men heard not,
  As the wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years to
      join the refrain,
  But in my soul I plainly heard.

  Murmuring out of its myriad leaves,
  Down from its lofty top rising two hundred feet high,
  Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs, out of its foot-thick bark,
  That chant of the seasons and time, chant not of the past only but
      the future.

  You untold life of me,
  And all you venerable and innocent joys,
  Perennial hardy life of me with joys ’mid rain and many a summer sun,
  And the white snows and night and the wild winds;
  O the great patient rugged joys, my soul’s strong joys unreck’d by man,
  (For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity,
  And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth,)
  Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,
  Our time, our term has come.

  Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers,
  We who have grandly fill’d our time,
  With Nature’s calm content, with tacit huge delight,
  We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
  And leave the field for them.

  For them predicted long,
  For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time,
  For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings.’
  In them these skies and airs, these mountain peaks, Shasta, Nevadas,
  These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys, far Yosemite,
  To be in them absorb’d, assimilated.

  Then to a loftier strain,
  Still prouder, more ecstatic rose the chant,
  As if the heirs, the deities of the West,
  Joining with master-tongue bore part.

  Not wan from Asia’s fetiches,
  Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house,
  (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and
      scaffolds everywhere,
  But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes, peacefully builded thence,
  These virgin lands, lands of the Western shore,
  To the new culminating man, to you, the empire new,
  You promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate.

  You occult deep volitions,
  You average spiritual manhood, purpose of all, pois’d on yourself,
      giving not taking law,
  You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and
      love and aught that comes from life and love,
  You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America, age
      upon age working in death the same as life,)
  You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould
      the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space,
  You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal’d but ever alert,
  You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued, may-be
      unconscious of yourselves,
  Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface;
  You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts,
      statutes, literatures,
  Here build your homes for good, establish here, these areas entire,
      lands of the Western shore,
  We pledge, we dedicate to you.

  For man of you, your characteristic race,
  Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower proportionate to Nature,
  Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck’d by wall or roof,
  Here laugh with storm or sun, here joy, here patiently inure,
  Here heed himself, unfold himself, (not others’ formulas heed,)
  here fill his time,
  To duly fall, to aid, unreck’d at last,
  To disappear, to serve.

  Thus on the northern coast,
  In the echo of teamsters’ calls and the clinking chains, and the
      music of choppers’ axes,
  The falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan,
  Such words combined from the redwood-tree, as of voices ecstatic,
      ancient and rustling,
  The century-lasting, unseen dryads, singing, withdrawing,
  All their recesses of forests and mountains leaving,
  From the Cascade range to the Wahsatch, or Idaho far, or Utah,
  To the deities of the modern henceforth yielding,
  The chorus and indications, the vistas of coming humanity, the
      settlements, features all,
  In the Mendocino woods I caught.

       2
  The flashing and golden pageant of California,
  The sudden and gorgeous drama, the sunny and ample lands,
  The long and varied stretch from Puget sound to Colorado south,
  Lands bathed in sweeter, rarer, healthier air, valleys and mountain cliffs,
  The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow, the silent, cyclic chemistry,
  The slow and steady ages plodding, the unoccupied surface ripening,
      the rich ores forming beneath;
  At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession,
  A swarming and busy race settling and organizing everywhere,
  Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the
      whole world,
  To India and China and Australia and the thousand island paradises
      of the Pacific,
  Populous cities, the latest inventions, the steamers on the rivers,
      the railroads, with many a thrifty farm, with machinery,
  And wool and wheat and the grape, and diggings of yellow gold.

       3
  But more in you than these, lands of the Western shore,
  (These but the means, the implements, the standing-ground,)
  I see in you, certain to come, the promise of thousands of years,
      till now deferr’d,
  Promis’d to be fulfill’d, our common kind, the race.

  The new society at last, proportionate to Nature,
  In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart trees imperial,
  In woman more, far more, than all your gold or vines, or even vital air.

  Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared,
  I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal,
  Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of
      the past so grand,
  To build a grander future.

Book XV. A Song for Occupations

       1
  A song for occupations!
  In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find
      the developments,
  And find the eternal meanings.

  Workmen and Workwomen!
  Were all educations practical and ornamental well display’d out of
      me, what would it amount to?
  Were I as the head teacher, charitable proprietor, wise statesman,
      what would it amount to?
  Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that satisfy you?

  The learn’d, virtuous, benevolent, and the usual terms,
  A man like me and never the usual terms.

  Neither a servant nor a master I,
  I take no sooner a large price than a small price, I will have my
      own whoever enjoys me,
  I will be even with you and you shall be even with me.

  If you stand at work in a shop I stand as nigh as the nighest in the
      same shop,
  If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend I demand as
      good as your brother or dearest friend,
  If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be
      personally as welcome,
  If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake,
  If you remember your foolish and outlaw’d deeds, do you think I
      cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw’d deeds?
  If you carouse at the table I carouse at the opposite side of the table,
  If you meet some stranger in the streets and love him or her, why
      I often meet strangers in the street and love them.

  Why what have you thought of yourself?
  Is it you then that thought yourself less?
  Is it you that thought the President greater than you?
  Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

  (Because you are greasy or pimpled, or were once drunk, or a thief,
  Or that you are diseas’d, or rheumatic, or a prostitute,
  Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar and never
      saw your name in print,
  Do you give in that you are any less immortal?)

       2
  Souls of men and women! it is not you I call unseen, unheard,
      untouchable and untouching,
  It is not you I go argue pro and con about, and to settle whether
      you are alive or no,
  I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns.

  Grown, half-grown and babe, of this country and every country,
      in-doors and out-doors, one just as much as the other, I see,
  And all else behind or through them.

  The wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband,
  The daughter, and she is just as good as the son,
  The mother, and she is every bit as much as the father.

  Offspring of ignorant and poor, boys apprenticed to trades,
  Young fellows working on farms and old fellows working on farms,
  Sailor-men, merchant-men, coasters, immigrants,
  All these I see, but nigher and farther the same I see,
  None shall escape me and none shall wish to escape me.

  I bring what you much need yet always have,
  Not money, amours, dress, eating, erudition, but as good,
  I send no agent or medium, offer no representative of value, but
      offer the value itself.

  There is something that comes to one now and perpetually,
  It is not what is printed, preach’d, discussed, it eludes discussion
      and print,
  It is not to be put in a book, it is not in this book,
  It is for you whoever you are, it is no farther from you than your
      hearing and sight are from you,
  It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest, it is ever provoked by them.

  You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it,
  You may read the President’s message and read nothing about it there,
  Nothing in the reports from the State department or Treasury
      department, or in the daily papers or weekly papers,
  Or in the census or revenue returns, prices current, or any accounts
      of stock.

       3
  The sun and stars that float in the open air,
  The apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is
      something grand,
  I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,
  And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation or
      bon-mot or reconnoissance,
  And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us,
      and without luck must be a failure for us,
  And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

  The light and shade, the curious sense of body and identity, the
      greed that with perfect complaisance devours all things,
  The endless pride and outstretching of man, unspeakable joys and sorrows,
  The wonder every one sees in every one else he sees, and the wonders
      that fill each minute of time forever,
  What have you reckon’d them for, camerado?
  Have you reckon’d them for your trade or farm-work? or for the
      profits of your store?
  Or to achieve yourself a position? or to fill a gentleman’s leisure,
      or a lady’s leisure?

  Have you reckon’d that the landscape took substance and form that it
      might be painted in a picture?
  Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?
  Or the attraction of gravity, and the great laws and harmonious combinations
      and the fluids of the air, as subjects for the savans?
  Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?
  Or the stars to be put in constellations and named fancy names?
  Or that the growth of seeds is for agricultural tables, or
      agriculture itself?

  Old institutions, these arts, libraries, legends, collections, and
      the practice handed along in manufactures, will we rate them so high?
  Will we rate our cash and business high? I have no objection,
  I rate them as high as the highest—then a child born of a woman and
      man I rate beyond all rate.

  We thought our Union grand, and our Constitution grand,
  I do not say they are not grand and good, for they are,
  I am this day just as much in love with them as you,
  Then I am in love with You, and with all my fellows upon the earth.

  We consider bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine,
  I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,
  It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
  Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth,
      than they are shed out of you.

       4
  The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are,
  The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who
      are here for him,
  The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,
  The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,
  Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the
      going and coming of commerce and malls, are all for you.

  List close my scholars dear,
  Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,
  Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are tallied in you,
  The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
      reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,
  If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?
  The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would
      be vacuums.

  All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,
  (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
      the arches and cornices?)

  All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,
  It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the
      beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his
      sweet romanza, nor that of the men’s chorus, nor that of the
      women’s chorus,
  It is nearer and farther than they.

       5
  Will the whole come back then?
  Can each see signs of the best by a look in the looking-glass? is
      there nothing greater or more?
  Does all sit there with you, with the mystic unseen soul?

  Strange and hard that paradox true I give,
  Objects gross and the unseen soul are one.

  House-building, measuring, sawing the boards,
  Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-roofing,
      shingle-dressing,
  Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, flagging of sidewalks by flaggers,
  The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brickkiln,
  Coal-mines and all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness,
      echoes, songs, what meditations, what vast native thoughts
      looking through smutch’d faces,
  Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains or by river-banks, men
      around feeling the melt with huge crowbars, lumps of ore, the
      due combining of ore, limestone, coal,
  The blast-furnace and the puddling-furnace, the loup-lump at the
      bottom of the melt at last, the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars
      of pig-iron, the strong clean-shaped Trail for railroads,
  Oil-works, silk-works, white-lead-works, the sugar-house,
      steam-saws, the great mills and factories,
  Stone-cutting, shapely trimmings for facades or window or door-lintels,
      the mallet, the tooth-chisel, the jib to protect the thumb,
  The calking-iron, the kettle of boiling vault-cement, and the fire
      under the kettle,
  The cotton-bale, the stevedore’s hook, the saw and buck of the
      sawyer, the mould of the moulder, the working-knife of the
      butcher, the ice-saw, and all the work with ice,
  The work and tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker,
  Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colors, brushes, brush-making,
      glazier’s implements,
  The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner’s ornaments, the decanter
      and glasses, the shears and flat-iron,
  The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart measure, the
      counter and stool, the writing-pen of quill or metal, the making
      of all sorts of edged tools,
  The brewery, brewing, the malt, the vats, every thing that is done
      by brewers, wine-makers, vinegar-makers,
  Leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, rope-twisting,
      distilling, sign-painting, lime-burning, cotton-picking,
      electroplating, electrotyping, stereotyping,
  Stave-machines, planing-machines, reaping-machines,
      ploughing-machines, thrashing-machines, steam wagons,
  The cart of the carman, the omnibus, the ponderous dray,
  Pyrotechny, letting off color’d fireworks at night, fancy figures and jets;
  Beef on the butcher’s stall, the slaughter-house of the butcher, the
      butcher in his killing-clothes,
  The pens of live pork, the killing-hammer, the hog-hook, the
      scalder’s tub, gutting, the cutter’s cleaver, the packer’s maul,
      and the plenteous winterwork of pork-packing,
  Flour-works, grinding of wheat, rye, maize, rice, the barrels and
      the half and quarter barrels, the loaded barges, the high piles
      on wharves and levees,
  The men and the work of the men on ferries, railroads, coasters,
      fish-boats, canals;
  The hourly routine of your own or any man’s life, the shop, yard,
      store, or factory,
  These shows all near you by day and night—workman! whoever you
      are, your daily life!

  In that and them the heft of the heaviest—in that and them far more
      than you estimated, (and far less also,)
  In them realities for you and me, in them poems for you and me,
  In them, not yourself-you and your soul enclose all things,
      regardless of estimation,
  In them the development good—in them all themes, hints, possibilities.

  I do not affirm that what you see beyond is futile, I do not advise
      you to stop,
  I do not say leadings you thought great are not great,
  But I say that none lead to greater than these lead to.

       6
  Will you seek afar off? you surely come back at last,
  In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the best,
  In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
  Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for
      another hour but this hour,
  Man in the first you see or touch, always in friend, brother,
      nighest neighbor—woman in mother, sister, wife,
  The popular tastes and employments taking precedence in poems or anywhere,
  You workwomen and workmen of these States having your own divine
      and strong life,
  And all else giving place to men and women like you.
  When the psalm sings instead of the singer,

  When the script preaches instead of the preacher,
  When the pulpit descends and goes instead of the carver that carved
      the supporting desk,
  When I can touch the body of books by night or by day, and when they
      touch my body back again,
  When a university course convinces like a slumbering woman and child
      convince,
  When the minted gold in the vault smiles like the night-watchman’s daughter,
  When warrantee deeds loafe in chairs opposite and are my friendly
      companions,
  I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as I do
      of men and women like you.

Book XVI. A Song of the Rolling Earth

       1
  A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
  Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
      those curves, angles, dots?
  No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground
      and sea,
  They are in the air, they are in you.

  Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds
      out of your friends’ mouths?
  No, the real words are more delicious than they.

  Human bodies are words, myriads of words,
  (In the best poems re-appears the body, man’s or woman’s,
      well-shaped, natural, gay,
  Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)

  Air, soil, water, fire—those are words,
  I myself am a word with them—my qualities interpenetrate with
      theirs—my name is nothing to them,
  Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would
      air, soil, water, fire, know of my name?

  A healthy presence, a friendly or commanding gesture, are words,
      sayings, meanings,
  The charms that go with the mere looks of some men and women,
      are sayings and meanings also.

  The workmanship of souls is by those inaudible words of the earth,
  The masters know the earth’s words and use them more than audible words.

  Amelioration is one of the earth’s words,
  The earth neither lags nor hastens,
  It has all attributes, growths, effects, latent in itself from the jump,
  It is not half beautiful only, defects and excrescences show just as
      much as perfections show.

  The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,
  The truths of the earth continually wait, they are not so conceal’d either,
  They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,
  They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly,
  Conveying a sentiment and invitation, I utter and utter,
  I speak not, yet if you hear me not of what avail am I to you?
  To bear, to better, lacking these of what avail am I?

  (Accouche! accouchez!
  Will you rot your own fruit in yourself there?
  Will you squat and stifle there?)

  The earth does not argue,
  Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
  Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
  Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
  Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out,
  Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, shuts none out.

  The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself,
      possesses still underneath,
  Underneath the ostensible sounds, the august chorus of heroes, the
      wail of slaves,
  Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young
      people, accents of bargainers,
  Underneath these possessing words that never fall.

  To her children the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never fail,
  The true words do not fail, for motion does not fail and reflection
      does not fall,
  Also the day and night do not fall, and the voyage we pursue does not fall.

  Of the interminable sisters,
  Of the ceaseless cotillons of sisters,
  Of the centripetal and centrifugal sisters, the elder and younger sisters,
  The beautiful sister we know dances on with the rest.

  With her ample back towards every beholder,
  With the fascinations of youth and the equal fascinations of age,
  Sits she whom I too love like the rest, sits undisturb’d,
  Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while her
      eyes glance back from it,
  Glance as she sits, inviting none, denying none,
  Holding a mirror day and night tirelessly before her own face.

  Seen at hand or seen at a distance,
  Duly the twenty-four appear in public every day,
  Duly approach and pass with their companions or a companion,
  Looking from no countenances of their own, but from the countenances
      of those who are with them,
  From the countenances of children or women or the manly countenance,
  From the open countenances of animals or from inanimate things,
  From the landscape or waters or from the exquisite apparition of the sky,
  From our countenances, mine and yours, faithfully returning them,
  Every day in public appearing without fall, but never twice with the
      same companions.

  Embracing man, embracing all, proceed the three hundred and
      sixty-five resistlessly round the sun;
  Embracing all, soothing, supporting, follow close three hundred and
      sixty-five offsets of the first, sure and necessary as they.

  Tumbling on steadily, nothing dreading,
  Sunshine, storm, cold, heat, forever withstanding, passing, carrying,
  The soul’s realization and determination still inheriting,
  The fluid vacuum around and ahead still entering and dividing,
  No balk retarding, no anchor anchoring, on no rock striking,
  Swift, glad, content, unbereav’d, nothing losing,
  Of all able and ready at any time to give strict account,
  The divine ship sails the divine sea.

       2
  Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you,
  The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.

  Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and liquid,
  You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
  For none more than you are the present and the past,
  For none more than you is immortality.

  Each man to himself and each woman to herself, is the word of the
      past and present, and the true word of immortality;
  No one can acquire for another—not one,
  Not one can grow for another—not one.

  The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him,
  The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him,
  The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him,
  The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him,
  The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him,
  The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail,
  The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress
      not to the audience,
  And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own, or
      the indication of his own.

       3
  I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall
      be complete,
  The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains
      jagged and broken.

  I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those
      of the earth,
  There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the
      theory of the earth,
  No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
      unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
  Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of
      the earth.

  I swear I begin to see love with sweeter spasms than that which
      responds love,
  It is that which contains itself, which never invites and never refuses.

  I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
  All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,
  Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth,
  Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch.

  I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,
  It is always to leave the best untold.

  When I undertake to tell the best I find I cannot,
  My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots,
  My breath will not be obedient to its organs,
  I become a dumb man.

  The best of the earth cannot be told anyhow, all or any is best,
  It is not what you anticipated, it is cheaper, easier, nearer,
  Things are not dismiss’d from the places they held before,
  The earth is just as positive and direct as it was before,
  Facts, religions, improvements, politics, trades, are as real as before,
  But the soul is also real, it too is positive and direct,
  No reasoning, no proof has establish’d it,
  Undeniable growth has establish’d it.

       4
  These to echo the tones of souls and the phrases of souls,
  (If they did not echo the phrases of souls what were they then?
  If they had not reference to you in especial what were they then?)

  I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells
      the best,
  I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.

  Say on, sayers! sing on, singers!
  Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth!
  Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost,
  It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use,
  When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.

  I swear to you the architects shall appear without fall,
  I swear to you they will understand you and justify you,
  The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you, and encloses
      all and is faithful to all,
  He and the rest shall not forget you, they shall perceive that you
      are not an iota less than they,
  You shall be fully glorified in them.

Youth, Day, Old Age and Night

  Youth, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
  Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
      force, fascination?

  Day full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sun, action,
      ambition, laughter,
  The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
      restoring darkness.

Book XVII. Birds of Passage

Song of the Universal

       1
  Come said the Muse,
  Sing me a song no poet yet has chanted,
  Sing me the universal.

  In this broad earth of ours,
  Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
  Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
  Nestles the seed perfection.

  By every life a share or more or less,
  None born but it is born, conceal’d or unconceal’d the seed is waiting.

       2
  Lo! keen-eyed towering science,
  As from tall peaks the modern overlooking,
  Successive absolute fiats issuing.

  Yet again, lo! the soul, above all science,
  For it has history gather’d like husks around the globe,
  For it the entire star-myriads roll through the sky.

  In spiral routes by long detours,
  (As a much-tacking ship upon the sea,)
  For it the partial to the permanent flowing,
  For it the real to the ideal tends.

  For it the mystic evolution,
  Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified.

  Forth from their masks, no matter what,
  From the huge festering trunk, from craft and guile and tears,
  Health to emerge and joy, joy universal.

  Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
  Out of the bad majority, the varied countless frauds of men and states,
  Electric, antiseptic yet, cleaving, suffusing all,
  Only the good is universal.

       3
  Over the mountain-growths disease and sorrow,
  An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering,
  High in the purer, happier air.

  From imperfection’s murkiest cloud,
  Darts always forth one ray of perfect light,
  One flash of heaven’s glory.

  To fashion’s, custom’s discord,
  To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies,
  Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard,
  From some far shore the final chorus sounding.

  O the blest eyes, the happy hearts,
  That see, that know the guiding thread so fine,
  Along the mighty labyrinth.

       4
  And thou America,
  For the scheme’s culmination, its thought and its reality,
  For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived.

  Thou too surroundest all,
  Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by pathways broad and new,
  To the ideal tendest.

  The measure’d faiths of other lands, the grandeurs of the past,
  Are not for thee, but grandeurs of thine own,
  Deific faiths and amplitudes, absorbing, comprehending all,
  All eligible to all.

  All, all for immortality,
  Love like the light silently wrapping all,
  Nature’s amelioration blessing all,
  The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain,
  Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.

  Give me O God to sing that thought,
  Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith,
  In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,
  Belief in plan of Thee enclosed in Time and Space,
  Health, peace, salvation universal.

  Is it a dream?
  Nay but the lack of it the dream,
  And failing it life’s lore and wealth a dream,
  And all the world a dream.

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

       Come my tan-faced children,
  Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
  Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       For we cannot tarry here,
  We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
  We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       O you youths, Western youths,
  So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
  Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Have the elder races halted?
  Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
  We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       All the past we leave behind,
  We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
  Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       We detachments steady throwing,
  Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
  Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       We primeval forests felling,
  We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
  We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Colorado men are we,
  From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
  From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
  Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
       blood intervein’d,
  All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       O resistless restless race!
  O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
  O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Raise the mighty mother mistress,
  Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
       (bend your heads all,)
  Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       See my children, resolute children,
  By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
  Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       On and on the compact ranks,
  With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
  Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       O to die advancing on!
  Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
  Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d.
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       All the pulses of the world,
  Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
  Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Life’s involv’d and varied pageants,
  All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
  All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      All the hapless silent lovers,
  All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
  All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      I too with my soul and body,
  We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
  Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      Lo, the darting bowling orb!
  Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
  All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

      These are of us, they are with us,
  All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
  We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

  O you daughters of the West!
  O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
  Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Minstrels latent on the prairies!
  (Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
  Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Not for delectations sweet,
  Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
  Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
  Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors?
  Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Has the night descended?
  Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
       on our way?
  Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

       Till with sound of trumpet,
  Far, far off the daybreak call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
  Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places,
       Pioneers! O pioneers!

To You

  Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
  I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,
  Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners,
      troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
  Your true soul and body appear before me.
  They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work,
      farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking,
      suffering, dying.

  Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
  I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
  I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

  O I have been dilatory and dumb,
  I should have made my way straight to you long ago,
  I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing
      but you.

  I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
  None has understood you, but I understand you,
  None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,
  None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,
  None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent
      to subordinate you,
  I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God,
      beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

  Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,
  From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light,
  But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus
      of gold-color’d light,
  From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams,
      effulgently flowing forever.

  O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
  You have not known what you are, you have slumber’d upon yourself
      all your life,
  Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,
  What you have done returns already in mockeries,
  (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in
      mockeries, what is their return?)

  The mockeries are not you,
  Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,
  I pursue you where none else has pursued you,
  Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the
      accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others or from
      yourself, they do not conceal you from me,
  The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these
      balk others they do not balk me,
  The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed,
      premature death, all these I part aside.

  There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you,
  There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you,
  No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,
  No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

  As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully
      to you,
  I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing
      the songs of the glory of you.

  Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
  These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,
  These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense
      and interminable as they,
  These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent
      dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
  Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain,
      passion, dissolution.

  The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency,
  Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest,
      whatever you are promulges itself,
  Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing
      is scanted,
  Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are
      picks its way.

France [the 18^th Year of these States]

  A great year and place
  A harsh discordant natal scream out-sounding, to touch the mother’s
      heart closer than any yet.

  I walk’d the shores of my Eastern sea,
  Heard over the waves the little voice,
  Saw the divine infant where she woke mournfully wailing, amid the
      roar of cannon, curses, shouts, crash of falling buildings,
  Was not so sick from the blood in the gutters running, nor from the single
      corpses, nor those in heaps, nor those borne away in the tumbrils,
  Was not so desperate at the battues of death—was not so shock’d at
      the repeated fusillades of the guns.

  Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution?
  Could I wish humanity different?
  Could I wish the people made of wood and stone?
  Or that there be no justice in destiny or time?

  O Liberty! O mate for me!
  Here too the blaze, the grape-shot and the axe, in reserve, to fetch
      them out in case of need,
  Here too, though long represt, can never be destroy’d,
  Here too could rise at last murdering and ecstatic,
  Here too demanding full arrears of vengeance.

  Hence I sign this salute over the sea,
  And I do not deny that terrible red birth and baptism,
  But remember the little voice that I heard wailing, and wait with
      perfect trust, no matter how long,
  And from to-day sad and cogent I maintain the bequeath’d cause, as
      for all lands,
  And I send these words to Paris with my love,
  And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them,
  For I guess there is latent music yet in France, floods of it,
  O I hear already the bustle of instruments, they will soon be
      drowning all that would interrupt them,
  O I think the east wind brings a triumphal and free march,
  It reaches hither, it swells me to Joyful madness,
  I will run transpose it in words, to justify
  I will yet sing a song for you ma femme.

Myself and Mine

  Myself and mine gymnastic ever,
  To stand the cold or heat, to take good aim with a gun, to sail a
      boat, to manage horses, to beget superb children,
  To speak readily and clearly, to feel at home among common people,
  And to hold our own in terrible positions on land and sea.

  Not for an embroiderer,
  (There will always be plenty of embroiderers, I welcome them also,)
  But for the fibre of things and for inherent men and women.

  Not to chisel ornaments,
  But to chisel with free stroke the heads and limbs of plenteous
      supreme Gods, that the States may realize them walking and talking.

  Let me have my own way,
  Let others promulge the laws, I will make no account of the laws,
  Let others praise eminent men and hold up peace, I hold up agitation
      and conflict,
  I praise no eminent man, I rebuke to his face the one that was
      thought most worthy.

  (Who are you? and what are you secretly guilty of all your life?
  Will you turn aside all your life? will you grub and chatter all
      your life?
  And who are you, blabbing by rote, years, pages, languages, reminiscences,
  Unwitting to-day that you do not know how to speak properly a single word?)

  Let others finish specimens, I never finish specimens,
  I start them by exhaustless laws as Nature does, fresh and modern
      continually.

  I give nothing as duties,
  What others give as duties I give as living impulses,
  (Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)

  Let others dispose of questions, I dispose of nothing, I arouse
      unanswerable questions,
  Who are they I see and touch, and what about them?
  What about these likes of myself that draw me so close by tender
      directions and indirections?

  I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but
      listen to my enemies, as I myself do,
  I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot
      expound myself,
  I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me,
  I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.

  After me, vista!
  O I see life is not short, but immeasurably long,
  I henceforth tread the world chaste, temperate, an early riser, a
      steady grower,
  Every hour the semen of centuries, and still of centuries.

  I must follow up these continual lessons of the air, water, earth,
  I perceive I have no time to lose.

Year of Meteors [1859–60]

  Year of meteors! brooding year!
  I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds and signs,
  I would sing your contest for the 19^th Presidentiad,
  I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the
      scaffold in Virginia,
  (I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch’d,
  I stood very near you old man when cool and indifferent, but trembling
      with age and your unheal’d wounds you mounted the scaffold;)
  I would sing in my copious song your census returns of the States,
  The tables of population and products, I would sing of your ships
      and their cargoes,
  The proud black ships of Manhattan arriving, some fill’d with
      immigrants, some from the isthmus with cargoes of gold,
  Songs thereof would I sing, to all that hitherward comes would welcome give,
  And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, young
      prince of England!
  (Remember you surging Manhattan’s crowds as you pass’d with your
      cortege of nobles?
  There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;)
  Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,
  Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was
      600 feet long,
  Her moving swiftly surrounded by myriads of small craft I forget not
      to sing;
  Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven,
  Nor the strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting
      over our heads,
  (A moment, a moment long it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over
      our heads,
  Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
  Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would
      gleam and patch these chants,
  Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings!
  Year of comets and meteors transient and strange—lo! even here one
      equally transient and strange!
  As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant,
  What am I myself but one of your meteors?

With Antecedents

       1
  With antecedents,
  With my fathers and mothers and the accumulations of past ages,
  With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am,
  With Egypt, India, Phenicia, Greece and Rome,
  With the Kelt, the Scandinavian, the Alb and the Saxon,
  With antique maritime ventures, laws, artisanship, wars and journeys,
  With the poet, the skald, the saga, the myth, and the oracle,
  With the sale of slaves, with enthusiasts, with the troubadour, the
      crusader, and the monk,
  With those old continents whence we have come to this new continent,
  With the fading kingdoms and kings over there,
  With the fading religions and priests,
  With the small shores we look back to from our own large and present shores,
  With countless years drawing themselves onward and arrived at these years,
  You and me arrived—America arrived and making this year,
  This year! sending itself ahead countless years to come.

       2
  O but it is not the years—it is I, it is You,
  We touch all laws and tally all antecedents,
  We are the skald, the oracle, the monk and the knight, we easily
      include them and more,
  We stand amid time beginningless and endless, we stand amid evil and good,
  All swings around us, there is as much darkness as light,
  The very sun swings itself and its system of planets around us,
  Its sun, and its again, all swing around us.

  As for me, (torn, stormy, amid these vehement days,)
  I have the idea of all, and am all and believe in all,
  I believe materialism is true and spiritualism is true, I reject no part.

  (Have I forgotten any part? any thing in the past?
  Come to me whoever and whatever, till I give you recognition.)

  I respect Assyria, China, Teutonia, and the Hebrews,
  I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demigod,
  I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without
      exception,
  I assert that all past days were what they must have been,
  And that they could no-how have been better than they were,
  And that to-day is what it must be, and that America is,
  And that to-day and America could no-how be better than they are.

       3
  In the name of these States and in your and my name, the Past,
  And in the name of these States and in your and my name, the Present time.

  I know that the past was great and the future will be great,
  And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time,
  (For the sake of him I typify, for the common average man’s sake,
      your sake if you are he,)
  And that where I am or you are this present day, there is the centre
      of all days, all races,
  And there is the meaning to us of all that has ever come of races
      and days, or ever will come.

Book XVIII. A Broadway Pageant

       1
  Over the Western sea hither from Niphon come,
  Courteous, the swart-cheek’d two-sworded envoys,
  Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive,
  Ride to-day through Manhattan.

  Libertad! I do not know whether others behold what I behold,
  In the procession along with the nobles of Niphon, the errand-bearers,
  Bringing up the rear, hovering above, around, or in the ranks marching,
  But I will sing you a song of what I behold Libertad.

  When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements,
  When the thunder-cracking guns arouse me with the proud roar love,
  When the round-mouth’d guns out of the smoke and smell I love
      spit their salutes,
  When the fire-flashing guns have fully alerted me, and
      heaven-clouds canopy my city with a delicate thin haze,
  When gorgeous the countless straight stems, the forests at the
      wharves, thicken with colors,
  When every ship richly drest carries her flag at the peak,
  When pennants trail and street-festoons hang from the windows,
  When Broadway is entirely given up to foot-passengers and
      foot-standers, when the mass is densest,
  When the facades of the houses are alive with people, when eyes
      gaze riveted tens of thousands at a time,
  When the guests from the islands advance, when the pageant moves
      forward visible,
  When the summons is made, when the answer that waited thousands
      of years answers,
  I too arising, answering, descend to the pavements, merge with the
      crowd, and gaze with them.

       2
  Superb-faced Manhattan!
  Comrade Americanos! to us, then at last the Orient comes.
  To us, my city,
  Where our tall-topt marble and iron beauties range on opposite
      sides, to walk in the space between,
  To-day our Antipodes comes.

  The Originatress comes,
  The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race of eld,
  Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with passion,
  Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments,
  With sunburnt visage, with intense soul and glittering eyes,
  The race of Brahma comes.

  See my cantabile! these and more are flashing to us from the procession,
  As it moves changing, a kaleidoscope divine it moves changing before us.

  For not the envoys nor the tann’d Japanee from his island only,
  Lithe and silent the Hindoo appears, the Asiatic continent itself
      appears, the past, the dead,
  The murky night-morning of wonder and fable inscrutable,
  The envelop’d mysteries, the old and unknown hive-bees,
  The north, the sweltering south, eastern Assyria, the Hebrews, the
      ancient of ancients,
  Vast desolated cities, the gliding present, all of these and more
      are in the pageant-procession.

  Geography, the world, is in it,
  The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast beyond,
  The coast you henceforth are facing—you Libertad! from your Western
      golden shores,
  The countries there with their populations, the millions en-masse
      are curiously here,
  The swarming market-places, the temples with idols ranged along the
      sides or at the end, bonze, brahmin, and llama,
  Mandarin, farmer, merchant, mechanic, and fisherman,
  The singing-girl and the dancing-girl, the ecstatic persons, the
      secluded emperors,
  Confucius himself, the great poets and heroes, the warriors, the castes,
      all,
  Trooping up, crowding from all directions, from the Altay mountains,
  From Thibet, from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of China,
  From the southern peninsulas and the demi-continental islands, from
      Malaysia,
  These and whatever belongs to them palpable show forth to me, and
      are seiz’d by me,
  And I am seiz’d by them, and friendlily held by them,
  Till as here them all I chant, Libertad! for themselves and for you.

  For I too raising my voice join the ranks of this pageant,
  I am the chanter, I chant aloud over the pageant,
  I chant the world on my Western sea,
  I chant copious the islands beyond, thick as stars in the sky,
  I chant the new empire grander than any before, as in a vision it
      comes to me,
  I chant America the mistress, I chant a greater supremacy,
  I chant projected a thousand blooming cities yet in time on those
      groups of sea-islands,
  My sail-ships and steam-ships threading the archipelagoes,
  My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind,
  Commerce opening, the sleep of ages having done its work, races
      reborn, refresh’d,
  Lives, works resumed—the object I know not—but the old, the Asiatic
      renew’d as it must be,
  Commencing from this day surrounded by the world.

       3
  And you Libertad of the world!
  You shall sit in the middle well-pois’d thousands and thousands of years,
  As to-day from one side the nobles of Asia come to you,
  As to-morrow from the other side the queen of England sends her
      eldest son to you.

  The sign is reversing, the orb is enclosed,
  The ring is circled, the journey is done,
  The box-lid is but perceptibly open’d, nevertheless the perfume
      pours copiously out of the whole box.

  Young Libertad! with the venerable Asia, the all-mother,
  Be considerate with her now and ever hot Libertad, for you are all,
  Bend your proud neck to the long-off mother now sending messages
      over the archipelagoes to you,
  Bend your proud neck low for once, young Libertad.

  Here the children straying westward so long? so wide the tramping?
  Were the precedent dim ages debouching westward from Paradise so long?
  Were the centuries steadily footing it that way, all the while
      unknown, for you, for reasons?

  They are justified, they are accomplish’d, they shall now be turn’d
      the other way also, to travel toward you thence,
  They shall now also march obediently eastward for your sake Libertad.

Book XIX. Sea-Drift

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

  Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
  Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
  Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
  Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
      leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
  Down from the shower’d halo,
  Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they
      were alive,
  Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
  From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
  From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
  From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
  From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
  From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
  From the myriad thence-arous’d words,
  From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
  From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
  As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
  Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
  A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
  Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
  I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
  Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
  A reminiscence sing.

  Once Paumanok,
  When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,
  Up this seashore in some briers,
  Two feather’d guests from Alabama, two together,
  And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
  And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
  And every day the she-bird crouch’d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,
  And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
  them,
  Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

  Shine! shine! shine!
  Pour down your warmth, great sun.’
  While we bask, we two together.

  Two together!
  Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
  Day come white, or night come black,
  Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
  Singing all time, minding no time,
  While we two keep together.

  Till of a sudden,
  May-be kill’d, unknown to her mate,
  One forenoon the she-bird crouch’d not on the nest,
  Nor return’d that afternoon, nor the next,
  Nor ever appear’d again.

  And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,
  And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,
  Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
  Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
  I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
  The solitary guest from Alabama.

  Blow! blow! blow!
  Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok’s shore;
  I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.

  Yes, when the stars glisten’d,
  All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop’d stake,
  Down almost amid the slapping waves,
  Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.

  He call’d on his mate,
  He pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know.

  Yes my brother I know,
  The rest might not, but I have treasur’d every note,
  For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
  Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,
  Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights
      after their sorts,
  The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
  I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
  Listen’d long and long.

  Listen’d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,
  Following you my brother.

  Soothe! soothe! soothe!
  Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
  And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
  But my love soothes not me, not me.

  Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
  It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

  O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
  With love, with love.

  O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?
  What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

  Loud! loud! loud!
  Loud I call to you, my love!
  High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,
  Surely you must know who is here, is here,
  You must know who I am, my love.

  Low-hanging moon!
  What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
  O it is the shape, the shape of my mate.’
  O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

  Land! land! O land!
  Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again
      if you only would,
  For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

  O rising stars!
  Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

  O throat! O trembling throat!
  Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
  Pierce the woods, the earth,
  Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

  Shake out carols!
  Solitary here, the night’s carols!
  Carols of lonesome love! death’s carols!
  Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
  O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!
  O reckless despairing carols.

  But soft! sink low!
  Soft! let me just murmur,
  And do you wait a moment you husky-nois’d sea,
  For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
  So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,
  But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

  Hither my love!
  Here I am! here!
  With this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you,
  This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

  Do not be decoy’d elsewhere,
  That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,
  That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,
  Those are the shadows of leaves.

  O darkness! O in vain!
  O I am very sick and sorrowful

  O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
  O troubled reflection in the sea!
  O throat! O throbbing heart!
  And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

  O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
  In the air, in the woods, over fields,
  Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
  But my mate no more, no more with me!
  We two together no more.

  The aria sinking,
  All else continuing, the stars shining,
  The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
  With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
  On the sands of Paumanok’s shore gray and rustling,
  The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of
      the sea almost touching,
  The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the
      atmosphere dallying,
  The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously
      bursting,
  The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
  The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
  The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
  The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
  To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,
  To the outsetting bard.

  Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)
  Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
  For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,
  Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
  And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder
      and more sorrowful than yours,
  A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.

  O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
  O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
  Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
  Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
  Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
      there in the night,
  By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
  The messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within,
  The unknown want, the destiny of me.

  O give me the clue! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
  O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

  A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
  The word final, superior to all,
  Subtle, sent up—what is it?—I listen;
  Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?
  Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

  Whereto answering, the sea,
  Delaying not, hurrying not,
  Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
  Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,
  And again death, death, death, death
  Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,
  But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
  Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
  Death, death, death, death, death.

  Which I do not forget.
  But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
  That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach,
  With the thousand responsive songs at random,
  My own songs awaked from that hour,
  And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
  The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
  That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
  (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet
      garments, bending aside,)
  The sea whisper’d me.

As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life

       1
  As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,
  As I wended the shores I know,
  As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,
  Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,
  Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,
  I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,
  Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,
  Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,
  The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land
      of the globe.

  Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those
      slender windrows,
  Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,
  Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,
  Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,
  Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,
  These you presented to me you fish-shaped island,
  As I wended the shores I know,
  As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.

       2
  As I wend to the shores I know not,
  As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
  As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
  As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
  I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
  A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
  Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

  O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,
  Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
  Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have
      not once had the least idea who or what I am,
  But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
      untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
  Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,
  With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
  Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

  I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
      object, and that no man ever can,
  Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon
      me and sting me,
  Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

       3
  You oceans both, I close with you,
  We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,
  These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.

  You friable shore with trails of debris,
  You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,
  What is yours is mine my father.

  I too Paumanok,
  I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been
      wash’d on your shores,
  I too am but a trail of drift and debris,
  I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.

  I throw myself upon your breast my father,
  I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,
  I hold you so firm till you answer me something.

  Kiss me my father,
  Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love,
  Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.

       4
  Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)
  Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,
  Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,
  Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or
      gather from you.

  I mean tenderly by you and all,
  I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead,
      and following me and mine.

  Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
  Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
  (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
  See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
  Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
  Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,
  From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
  Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,
  Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
  A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating,
      drifted at random,
  Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
  Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,
  We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,
  You up there walking or sitting,
  Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

Tears

  Tears! tears! tears!
  In the night, in solitude, tears,
  On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand,
  Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,
  Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;
  O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?
  What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?
  Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
  O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!
  O wild and dismal night storm, with wind—O belching and desperate!
  O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and
      regulated pace,
  But away at night as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosen’d ocean,
  Of tears! tears! tears!

To the Man-of-War-Bird

  Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
  Waking renew’d on thy prodigious pinions,
  (Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended’st,
  And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,)
  Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating,
  As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee,
  (Myself a speck, a point on the world’s floating vast.)

  Far, far at sea,
  After the night’s fierce drifts have strewn the shore with wrecks,
  With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene,
  The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun,
  The limpid spread of air cerulean,
  Thou also re-appearest.

  Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)
  To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,
  Thou ship of air that never furl’st thy sails,
  Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
  At dusk that lookist on Senegal, at morn America,
  That sport’st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
  In them, in thy experiences, had’st thou my soul,
  What joys! what joys were thine!

Aboard at a Ship’s Helm

  Aboard at a ship’s helm,
  A young steersman steering with care.

  Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
  An ocean-bell—O a warning bell, rock’d by the waves.

  O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
  Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

  For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
  The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails,
  The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds
      away gayly and safe.

  But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!
  Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.

On the Beach at Night

  On the beach at night,
  Stands a child with her father,
  Watching the east, the autumn sky.

  Up through the darkness,
  While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
  Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
  Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
  Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
  And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
  Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

  From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
  Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
  Watching, silently weeps.

  Weep not, child,
  Weep not, my darling,
  With these kisses let me remove your tears,
  The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
  They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in
      apparition,
  Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the
      Pleiades shall emerge,
  They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall
      shine out again,
  The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
  The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall
      again shine.

  Then dearest child mournest thou only for jupiter?
  Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

  Something there is,
  (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
  I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
  Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
  (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
  Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
  Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
  Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

The World below the Brine

  The world below the brine,
  Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,
  Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick
      tangle openings, and pink turf,
  Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the
      play of light through the water,
  Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes,
      and the aliment of the swimmers,
  Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling
      close to the bottom,
  The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting
      with his flukes,
  The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy
      sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
  Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths,
      breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
  The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed
      by beings like us who walk this sphere,
  The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

On the Beach at Night Alone

  On the beach at night alone,
  As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
  As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef
      of the universes and of the future.

  A vast similitude interlocks all,
  All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
  All distances of place however wide,
  All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
  All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in
      different worlds,
  All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
  All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
  All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
  All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
  This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
  And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

Song for All Seas, All Ships

       1
  To-day a rude brief recitative,
  Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal,
  Of unnamed heroes in the ships—of waves spreading and spreading
      far as the eye can reach,
  Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing,
  And out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations,
  Fitful, like a surge.

  Of sea-captains young or old, and the mates, and of all intrepid sailors,
  Of the few, very choice, taciturn, whom fate can never surprise nor
      death dismay.
  Pick’d sparingly without noise by thee old ocean, chosen by thee,
  Thou sea that pickest and cullest the race in time, and unitest nations,
  Suckled by thee, old husky nurse, embodying thee,
  Indomitable, untamed as thee.

  (Ever the heroes on water or on land, by ones or twos appearing,
  Ever the stock preserv’d and never lost, though rare, enough for
      seed preserv’d.)

       2
  Flaunt out O sea your separate flags of nations!
  Flaunt out visible as ever the various ship-signals!
  But do you reserve especially for yourself and for the soul of man
      one flag above all the rest,
  A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death,
  Token of all brave captains and all intrepid sailors and mates,
  And all that went down doing their duty,
  Reminiscent of them, twined from all intrepid captains young or old,
  A pennant universal, subtly waving all time, o’er all brave sailors,
  All seas, all ships.

Patroling Barnegat

  Wild, wild the storm, and the sea high running,
  Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,
  Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing,
  Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,
  Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,
  On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting,
  Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,
  Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,
  (That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)
  Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
  Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,
  Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,
  A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,
  That savage trinity warily watching.

After the Sea-Ship

  After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,
  After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes,
  Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,
  Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship,
  Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
  Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves,
  Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,
  Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface,
  Larger and smaller waves in the spread of the ocean yearnfully flowing,
  The wake of the sea-ship after she passes, flashing and frolicsome
      under the sun,
  A motley procession with many a fleck of foam and many fragments,
  Following the stately and rapid ship, in the wake following.

Book XX. By the Roadside

A Boston Ballad [1854]

  To get betimes in Boston town I rose this morning early,
  Here’s a good place at the corner, I must stand and see the show.

  Clear the way there Jonathan!
  Way for the President’s marshal—way for the government cannon!
  Way for the Federal foot and dragoons, (and the apparitions
      copiously tumbling.)

  I love to look on the Stars and Stripes, I hope the fifes will play
      Yankee Doodle.
  How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops!
  Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through Boston town.

  A fog follows, antiques of the same come limping,
  Some appear wooden-legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless.

  Why this is indeed a show—it has called the dead out of the earth!
  The old graveyards of the hills have hurried to see!
  Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear!
  Cock’d hats of mothy mould—crutches made of mist!
  Arms in slings—old men leaning on young men’s shoulders.

  What troubles you Yankee phantoms? what is all this chattering of
      bare gums?
  Does the ague convulse your limbs? do you mistake your crutches for
      firelocks and level them?

  If you blind your eyes with tears you will not see the President’s marshal,
  If you groan such groans you might balk the government cannon.

  For shame old maniacs—bring down those toss’d arms, and let your
      white hair be,
  Here gape your great grandsons, their wives gaze at them from the windows,
  See how well dress’d, see how orderly they conduct themselves.

  Worse and worse—can’t you stand it? are you retreating?
  Is this hour with the living too dead for you?

  Retreat then—pell-mell!
  To your graves—back—back to the hills old limpers!
  I do not think you belong here anyhow.

  But there is one thing that belongs here—shall I tell you what it
      is, gentlemen of Boston?

  I will whisper it to the Mayor, he shall send a committee to England,
  They shall get a grant from the Parliament, go with a cart to the
      royal vault,
  Dig out King George’s coffin, unwrap him quick from the
      graveclothes, box up his bones for a journey,
  Find a swift Yankee clipper—here is freight for you, black-bellied clipper,
  Up with your anchor—shake out your sails—steer straight toward
      Boston bay.

  Now call for the President’s marshal again, bring out the government cannon,
  Fetch home the roarers from Congress, make another procession,
      guard it with foot and dragoons.

  This centre-piece for them;
  Look, all orderly citizens—look from the windows, women!

  The committee open the box, set up the regal ribs, glue those that
      will not stay,
  Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the skull.
  You have got your revenge, old buster—the crown is come to its own,
      and more than its own.

  Stick your hands in your pockets, Jonathan—you are a made man from
      this day,
  You are mighty cute—and here is one of your bargains.

Europe [The 72d and 73d Years of These States]

  Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
  Like lightning it le’pt forth half startled at itself,
  Its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hands tight to the throats
      of kings.

  O hope and faith!
  O aching close of exiled patriots’ lives!
  O many a sicken’d heart!
  Turn back unto this day and make yourselves afresh.

  And you, paid to defile the People—you liars, mark!
  Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,
  For court thieving in its manifold mean forms, worming from his
      simplicity the poor man’s wages,
  For many a promise sworn by royal lips and broken and laugh’d at in
      the breaking,

  Then in their power not for all these did the blows strike revenge,
      or the heads of the nobles fall;
  The People scorn’d the ferocity of kings.

  But the sweetness of mercy brew’d bitter destruction, and the
      frighten’d monarchs come back,
  Each comes in state with his train, hangman, priest, tax-gatherer,
  Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant.

  Yet behind all lowering stealing, lo, a shape,
  Vague as the night, draped interminably, head, front and form, in
      scarlet folds,
  Whose face and eyes none may see,
  Out of its robes only this, the red robes lifted by the arm,
  One finger crook’d pointed high over the top, like the head of a
      snake appears.

  Meanwhile corpses lie in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men,
  The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are
      flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud,
  And all these things bear fruits, and they are good.

  Those corpses of young men,
  Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets, those hearts pierc’d by
      the gray lead,
  Cold and motionless as they seem live elsewhere with unslaughter’d vitality.

  They live in other young men O kings!
  They live in brothers again ready to defy you,
  They were purified by death, they were taught and exalted.

  Not a grave of the murder’d for freedom but grows seed for freedom,
      in its turn to bear seed,
  Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.

  Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,
  But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering, counseling, cautioning.
  Liberty, let others despair of you—I never despair of you.

  Is the house shut? is the master away?
  Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching,
  He will soon return, his messengers come anon.

A Hand-Mirror

  Hold it up sternly—see this it sends back, (who is it? is it you?)
  Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth,
  No more a flashing eye, no more a sonorous voice or springy step,
  Now some slave’s eye, voice, hands, step,
  A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater’s face, venerealee’s flesh,
  Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous,
  Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,
  Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams,
  Words babble, hearing and touch callous,
  No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex;
  Such from one look in this looking-glass ere you go hence,
  Such a result so soon—and from such a beginning!

Gods

  Lover divine and perfect Comrade,
  Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain,
  Be thou my God.

  Thou, thou, the Ideal Man,
  Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving,
  Complete in body and dilate in spirit,
  Be thou my God.

  O Death, (for Life has served its turn,)
  Opener and usher to the heavenly mansion,
  Be thou my God.

  Aught, aught of mightiest, best I see, conceive, or know,
  (To break the stagnant tie—thee, thee to free, O soul,)
  Be thou my God.

  All great ideas, the races’ aspirations,
  All heroisms, deeds of rapt enthusiasts,
  Be ye my Gods.

  Or Time and Space,
  Or shape of Earth divine and wondrous,
  Or some fair shape I viewing, worship,
  Or lustrous orb of sun or star by night,
  Be ye my Gods.

Germs

  Forms, qualities, lives, humanity, language, thoughts,
  The ones known, and the ones unknown, the ones on the stars,
  The stars themselves, some shaped, others unshaped,
  Wonders as of those countries, the soil, trees, cities, inhabitants,
      whatever they may be,
  Splendid suns, the moons and rings, the countless combinations and effects,
  Such-like, and as good as such-like, visible here or anywhere, stand
      provided for a handful of space, which I extend my arm and
      half enclose with my hand,
  That containing the start of each and all, the virtue, the germs of all.

Thoughts

  Of ownership—as if one fit to own things could not at pleasure enter
      upon all, and incorporate them into himself or herself;
  Of vista—suppose some sight in arriere through the formative chaos,
      presuming the growth, fulness, life, now attain’d on the journey,
  (But I see the road continued, and the journey ever continued;)
  Of what was once lacking on earth, and in due time has become
      supplied—and of what will yet be supplied,
  Because all I see and know I believe to have its main purport in
      what will yet be supplied.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

  When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
  When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
  When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
  When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
      applause in the lecture-room,
  How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
  Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
  In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
  Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Perfections

Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves,
As souls only understand souls.

O Me! O Life!

  O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
  Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
  Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
      and who more faithless?)
  Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
      struggle ever renew’d,
  Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see
      around me,
  Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
  The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

       Answer.
  That you are here—that life exists and identity,
  That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

To a President

  All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages,
  You have not learn’d of Nature—of the politics of Nature you have
      not learn’d the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality,
  You have not seen that only such as they are for these States,
  And that what is less than they must sooner or later lift off from
      these States.

I Sit and Look Out

  I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
      oppression and shame,
  I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with
      themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
  I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying,
      neglected, gaunt, desperate,
  I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer
      of young women,
  I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be
      hid, I see these sights on the earth,
  I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and
      prisoners,
  I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who
      shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,
  I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
      laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
  All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
  See, hear, and am silent.

To Rich Givers

  What you give me I cheerfully accept,
  A little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money, as I
      rendezvous with my poems,
  A traveler’s lodging and breakfast as journey through the States,—
      why should I be ashamed to own such gifts? why to advertise for them?
  For I myself am not one who bestows nothing upon man and woman,
  For I bestow upon any man or woman the entrance to all the gifts of
      the universe.

The Dalliance of the Eagles

  Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
  Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
  The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
  The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
  Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
  In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
  Till o’er the river pois’d, the twain yet one, a moment’s lull,
  A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
  Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
  She hers, he his, pursuing.

Roaming in Thought [After reading Hegel]

  Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good
      steadily hastening towards immortality,
  And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge itself
      and become lost and dead.

A Farm Picture

  Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
  A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
  And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.

A Child’s Amaze

  Silent and amazed even when a little boy,
  I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements,
  As contending against some being or influence.

The Runner

  On a flat road runs the well-train’d runner,
  He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs,
  He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs,
  With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais’d.

Beautiful Women

Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young,
The young are beautiful—but the old are more beautiful than the young.

Mother and Babe

I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother,
The sleeping mother and babe—hush’d, I study them long and long.

Thought

  Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness;
  As I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly
      affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who
      do not believe in men.

Visor’d

  A mask, a perpetual natural disguiser of herself,
  Concealing her face, concealing her form,
  Changes and transformations every hour, every moment,
  Falling upon her even when she sleeps.

Thought

  Of justice—as If could be any thing but the same ample law,
      expounded by natural judges and saviors,
  As if it might be this thing or that thing, according to decisions.

Gliding O’er all

  Gliding o’er all, through all,
  Through Nature, Time, and Space,
  As a ship on the waters advancing,
  The voyage of the soul—not life alone,
  Death, many deaths I’ll sing.

Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour

  Hast never come to thee an hour,
  A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles,
      fashions, wealth?
  These eager business aims—books, politics, art, amours,
  To utter nothingness?

Thought

  Of Equality—as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and
      rights as myself—as if it were not indispensable to my own
      rights that others possess the same.

To Old Age

I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as
it pours in the great sea.

Locations and Times

  Locations and times—what is it in me that meets them all, whenever
      and wherever, and makes me at home?
  Forms, colors, densities, odors—what is it in me that corresponds
      with them?

Offerings

  A thousand perfect men and women appear,
  Around each gathers a cluster of friends, and gay children and
      youths, with offerings.

To The States [To Identify the 16^th, 17^th, or 18^th Presidentiad]

  Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?
  What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters,
  Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
  What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North,
      your arctic freezings!)
  Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that
      the President?
  Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for
      reasons;
  (With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we
      all duly awake,
  South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)

Book XXI. Drum-taps

First O Songs for a Prelude

  First O songs for a prelude,
  Lightly strike on the stretch’d tympanum pride and joy in my city,
  How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue,
  How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang,
  (O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless!
  O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!)
  How you sprang—how you threw off the costumes of peace with
      indifferent hand,
  How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard
      in their stead,
  How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of
      soldiers,)
  How Manhattan drum-taps led.

  Forty years had I in my city seen soldiers parading,
  Forty years as a pageant, till unawares the lady of this teeming and
      turbulent city,
  Sleepless amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,
  With her million children around her, suddenly,
  At dead of night, at news from the south,
  Incens’d struck with clinch’d hand the pavement.

  A shock electric, the night sustain’d it,
  Till with ominous hum our hive at daybreak pour’d out its myriads.

  From the houses then and the workshops, and through all the doorways,
  Leapt they tumultuous, and lo! Manhattan arming.

  To the drum-taps prompt,
  The young men falling in and arming,
  The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith’s
      hammer, tost aside with precipitation,)
  The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the court,
  The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing
      the reins abruptly down on the horses’ backs,
  The salesman leaving the store, the boss, book-keeper, porter, all leaving;
  Squads gather everywhere by common consent and arm,
  The new recruits, even boys, the old men show them how to wear their
      accoutrements, they buckle the straps carefully,
  Outdoors arming, indoors arming, the flash of the musket-barrels,
  The white tents cluster in camps, the arm’d sentries around, the
      sunrise cannon and again at sunset,
  Arm’d regiments arrive every day, pass through the city, and embark
      from the wharves,
  (How good they look as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with
      their guns on their shoulders!
  How I love them! how I could hug them, with their brown faces and
      their clothes and knapsacks cover’d with dust!)
  The blood of the city up-arm’d! arm’d! the cry everywhere,
  The flags flung out from the steeples of churches and from all the
      public buildings and stores,
  The tearful parting, the mother kisses her son, the son kisses his mother,
  (Loth is the mother to part, yet not a word does she speak to detain him,)
  The tumultuous escort, the ranks of policemen preceding, clearing the way,
  The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their favorites,
  The artillery, the silent cannons bright as gold, drawn along,
      rumble lightly over the stones,
  (Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence,
  Soon unlimber’d to begin the red business;)
  All the mutter of preparation, all the determin’d arming,
  The hospital service, the lint, bandages and medicines,
  The women volunteering for nurses, the work begun for in earnest, no
      mere parade now;
  War! an arm’d race is advancing! the welcome for battle, no turning away!
  War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm’d race is advancing to
      welcome it.

  Mannahatta a-march—and it’s O to sing it well!
  It’s O for a manly life in the camp.

  And the sturdy artillery,
  The guns bright as gold, the work for giants, to serve well the guns,
  Unlimber them! (no more as the past forty years for salutes for
      courtesies merely,
  Put in something now besides powder and wadding.)

  And you lady of ships, you Mannahatta,
  Old matron of this proud, friendly, turbulent city,
  Often in peace and wealth you were pensive or covertly frown’d amid
      all your children,
  But now you smile with joy exulting old Mannahatta.

Eighteen Sixty-One

  Arm’d year—year of the struggle,
  No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you terrible year,
  Not you as some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,
  But as a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing,
      carrying rifle on your shoulder,
  With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands, with a knife in
      the belt at your side,
  As I heard you shouting loud, your sonorous voice ringing across the
      continent,
  Your masculine voice O year, as rising amid the great cities,
  Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you as one of the workmen, the
      dwellers in Manhattan,
  Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and Indiana,
  Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait and descending the Allghanies,
  Or down from the great lakes or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along
      the Ohio river,
  Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at
      Chattanooga on the mountain top,
  Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs clothed in blue, bearing
      weapons, robust year,
  Heard your determin’d voice launch’d forth again and again,
  Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp’d cannon,
  I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.

Beat! Beat! Drums!

  Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
  Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
  Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
  Into the school where the scholar is studying;
  Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with
      his bride,
  Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering
      his grain,
  So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

  Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
  Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
  Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers
      must sleep in those beds,
  No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would
      they continue?
  Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
  Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
  Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.

  Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
  Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
  Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
  Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
  Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
  Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the
      hearses,
  So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.

From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird

  From Paumanok starting I fly like a bird,
  Around and around to soar to sing the idea of all,
  To the north betaking myself to sing there arctic songs,
  To Kanada till I absorb Kanada in myself, to Michigan then,
  To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs, (they are inimitable;)
  Then to Ohio and Indiana to sing theirs, to Missouri and Kansas and
      Arkansas to sing theirs,
  To Tennessee and Kentucky, to the Carolinas and Georgia to sing theirs,
  To Texas and so along up toward California, to roam accepted everywhere;
  To sing first, (to the tap of the war-drum if need be,)
  The idea of all, of the Western world one and inseparable,
  And then the song of each member of these States.

Song of the Banner at Daybreak

       Poet:
  O A new song, a free song,
  Flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, by sounds, by voices clearer,
  By the wind’s voice and that of the drum,
  By the banner’s voice and child’s voice and sea’s voice and father’s voice,
  Low on the ground and high in the air,
  On the ground where father and child stand,
  In the upward air where their eyes turn,
  Where the banner at daybreak is flapping.

  Words! book-words! what are you?
  Words no more, for hearken and see,
  My song is there in the open air, and I must sing,
  With the banner and pennant a-flapping.

  I’ll weave the chord and twine in,
  Man’s desire and babe’s desire, I’ll twine them in, I’ll put in life,
  I’ll put the bayonet’s flashing point, I’ll let bullets and slugs whizz,
  (As one carrying a symbol and menace far into the future,
  Crying with trumpet voice, Arouse and beware! Beware and arouse!)
  I’ll pour the verse with streams of blood, full of volition, full of joy,
  Then loosen, launch forth, to go and compete,
  With the banner and pennant a-flapping.

       Pennant:
  Come up here, bard, bard,
  Come up here, soul, soul,
  Come up here, dear little child,
  To fly in the clouds and winds with me, and play with the measureless light.

       Child:
  Father what is that in the sky beckoning to me with long finger?
  And what does it say to me all the while?

       Father:
  Nothing my babe you see in the sky,
  And nothing at all to you it says—but look you my babe,
  Look at these dazzling things in the houses, and see you the money-
      shops opening,
  And see you the vehicles preparing to crawl along the streets with goods;
  These, ah these, how valued and toil’d for these!
  How envied by all the earth.

       Poet:
  Fresh and rosy red the sun is mounting high,
  On floats the sea in distant blue careering through its channels,
  On floats the wind over the breast of the sea setting in toward land,
  The great steady wind from west or west-by-south,
  Floating so buoyant with milk-white foam on the waters.

  But I am not the sea nor the red sun,
  I am not the wind with girlish laughter,
  Not the immense wind which strengthens, not the wind which lashes,
  Not the spirit that ever lashes its own body to terror and death,
  But I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, sings,
  Which babbles in brooks and scoots in showers on the land,
  Which the birds know in the woods mornings and evenings,
  And the shore-sands know and the hissing wave, and that banner and pennant,
  Aloft there flapping and flapping.

       Child:
  O father it is alive—it is full of people—it has children,
  O now it seems to me it is talking to its children,
  I hear it—it talks to me—O it is wonderful!
  O it stretches—it spreads and runs so fast—O my father,
  It is so broad it covers the whole sky.

       Father:
  Cease, cease, my foolish babe,
  What you are saying is sorrowful to me, much ’t displeases me;
  Behold with the rest again I say, behold not banners and pennants aloft,
  But the well-prepared pavements behold, and mark the solid-wall’d houses.

       Banner and Pennant:
  Speak to the child O bard out of Manhattan,
  To our children all, or north or south of Manhattan,
  Point this day, leaving all the rest, to us over all—and yet we know
      not why,
  For what are we, mere strips of cloth profiting nothing,
  Only flapping in the wind?

      Poet:
  I hear and see not strips of cloth alone,
  I hear the tramp of armies, I hear the challenging sentry,
  I hear the jubilant shouts of millions of men, I hear Liberty!
  I hear the drums beat and the trumpets blowing,
  I myself move abroad swift-rising flying then,
  I use the wings of the land-bird and use the wings of the sea-bird,
      and look down as from a height,
  I do not deny the precious results of peace, I see populous cities
      with wealth incalculable,
  I see numberless farms, I see the farmers working in their fields or barns,
  I see mechanics working, I see buildings everywhere founded, going
      up, or finish’d,
  I see trains of cars swiftly speeding along railroad tracks drawn by
      the locomotives,
  I see the stores, depots, of Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans,
  I see far in the West the immense area of grain, I dwell awhile hovering,
  I pass to the lumber forests of the North, and again to the Southern
      plantation, and again to California;
  Sweeping the whole I see the countless profit, the busy gatherings,
      earn’d wages,
  See the Identity formed out of thirty-eight spacious and haughty
      States, (and many more to come,)
  See forts on the shores of harbors, see ships sailing in and out;
  Then over all, (aye! aye!) my little and lengthen’d pennant shaped
      like a sword,
  Runs swiftly up indicating war and defiance—and now the halyards
      have rais’d it,
  Side of my banner broad and blue, side of my starry banner,
  Discarding peace over all the sea and land.

       Banner and Pennant:
  Yet louder, higher, stronger, bard! yet farther, wider cleave!
  No longer let our children deem us riches and peace alone,
  We may be terror and carnage, and are so now,
  Not now are we any one of these spacious and haughty States, (nor
      any five, nor ten,)
  Nor market nor depot we, nor money-bank in the city,
  But these and all, and the brown and spreading land, and the mines
      below, are ours,
  And the shores of the sea are ours, and the rivers great and small,
  And the fields they moisten, and the crops and the fruits are ours,
  Bays and channels and ships sailing in and out are ours—while we over all,
  Over the area spread below, the three or four millions of square
      miles, the capitals,
  The forty millions of people,—O bard! in life and death supreme,
  We, even we, henceforth flaunt out masterful, high up above,
  Not for the present alone, for a thousand years chanting through you,
  This song to the soul of one poor little child.

       Child:
  O my father I like not the houses,
  They will never to me be any thing, nor do I like money,
  But to mount up there I would like, O father dear, that banner I like,
  That pennant I would be and must be.

       Father:
  Child of mine you fill me with anguish,
  To be that pennant would be too fearful,
  Little you know what it is this day, and after this day, forever,
  It is to gain nothing, but risk and defy every thing,
  Forward to stand in front of wars—and O, such wars!—what have you
      to do with them?
  With passions of demons, slaughter, premature death?

       Banner:
  Demons and death then I sing,
  Put in all, aye all will I, sword-shaped pennant for war,
  And a pleasure new and ecstatic, and the prattled yearning of children,
  Blent with the sounds of the peaceful land and the liquid wash of the sea,
  And the black ships fighting on the sea envelop’d in smoke,
  And the icy cool of the far, far north, with rustling cedars and pines,
  And the whirr of drums and the sound of soldiers marching, and the
      hot sun shining south,
  And the beach-waves combing over the beach on my Eastern shore,
      and my Western shore the same,
  And all between those shores, and my ever running Mississippi with
      bends and chutes,
  And my Illinois fields, and my Kansas fields, and my fields of Missouri,
  The Continent, devoting the whole identity without reserving an atom,
  Pour in! whelm that which asks, which sings, with all and the yield of all,
  Fusing and holding, claiming, devouring the whole,
  No more with tender lip, nor musical labial sound,
  But out of the night emerging for good, our voice persuasive no more,
  Croaking like crows here in the wind.

       Poet:
  My limbs, my veins dilate, my theme is clear at last,
  Banner so broad advancing out of the night, I sing you haughty and resolute,
  I burst through where I waited long, too long, deafen’d and blinded,
  My hearing and tongue are come to me, (a little child taught me,)
  I hear from above O pennant of war your ironical call and demand,
  Insensate! insensate! (yet I at any rate chant you,) O banner!
  Not houses of peace indeed are you, nor any nor all their
      prosperity, (if need be, you shall again have every one of those
      houses to destroy them,
  You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast,
      full of comfort, built with money,
  May they stand fast, then? not an hour except you above them and all
      stand fast;)
  O banner, not money so precious are you, not farm produce you, nor
      the material good nutriment,
  Nor excellent stores, nor landed on wharves from the ships,
  Not the superb ships with sail-power or steam-power, fetching and
      carrying cargoes,
  Nor machinery, vehicles, trade, nor revenues—but you as henceforth
      I see you,
  Running up out of the night, bringing your cluster of stars,
      (ever-enlarging stars,)
  Divider of daybreak you, cutting the air, touch’d by the sun,
      measuring the sky,
  (Passionately seen and yearn’d for by one poor little child,
  While others remain busy or smartly talking, forever teaching
      thrift, thrift;)
  O you up there! O pennant! where you undulate like a snake hissing
      so curious,
  Out of reach, an idea only, yet furiously fought for, risking bloody
      death, loved by me,
  So loved—O you banner leading the day with stars brought from the night!
  Valueless, object of eyes, over all and demanding all—(absolute
      owner of all)—O banner and pennant!
  I too leave the rest—great as it is, it is nothing—houses, machines
      are nothing—I see them not,
  I see but you, O warlike pennant! O banner so broad, with stripes,
      sing you only,
  Flapping up there in the wind.

Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps

       1
  Rise O days from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier, fiercer sweep,
  Long for my soul hungering gymnastic I devour’d what the earth gave me,
  Long I roam’d amid the woods of the north, long I watch’d Niagara pouring,
  I travel’d the prairies over and slept on their breast, I cross’d
      the Nevadas, I cross’d the plateaus,
  I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail’d out to sea,
  I sail’d through the storm, I was refresh’d by the storm,
  I watch’d with joy the threatening maws of the waves,

  I mark’d the white combs where they career’d so high, curling over,
  I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds,
  Saw from below what arose and mounted, (O superb! O wild as my
      heart, and powerful!)
  Heard the continuous thunder as it bellow’d after the lightning,
  Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning as sudden and
      fast amid the din they chased each other across the sky;
  These, and such as these, I, elate, saw—saw with wonder, yet pensive
      and masterful,
  All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me,
  Yet there with my soul I fed, I fed content, supercilious.

       2
  ’Twas well, O soul—’twas a good preparation you gave me,
  Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill,
  Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never gave us,
  Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the mightier cities,
  Something for us is pouring now more than Niagara pouring,
  Torrents of men, (sources and rills of the Northwest are you indeed
      inexhaustible?)
  What, to pavements and homesteads here, what were those storms of
      the mountains and sea?
  What, to passions I witness around me to-day? was the sea risen?
  Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?
  Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage,
  Manhattan rising, advancing with menacing front—Cincinnati, Chicago,
      unchain’d;
  What was that swell I saw on the ocean? behold what comes here,
  How it climbs with daring feet and hands—how it dashes!
  How the true thunder bellows after the lightning—how bright the
      flashes of lightning!
  How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on, shown
      through the dark by those flashes of lightning!
  (Yet a mournful wall and low sob I fancied I heard through the dark,
  In a lull of the deafening confusion.)

       3
  Thunder on! stride on, Democracy! strike with vengeful stroke!
  And do you rise higher than ever yet O days, O cities!
  Crash heavier, heavier yet O storms! you have done me good,
  My soul prepared in the mountains absorbs your immortal strong nutriment,
  Long had I walk’d my cities, my country roads through farms, only
      half satisfied,
  One doubt nauseous undulating like a snake, crawl’d on the ground before me,
  Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironically hissing low;
  The cities I loved so well I abandon’d and left, I sped to the
      certainties suitable to me,
  Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energies and Nature’s
      dauntlessness,
  I refresh’d myself with it only, I could relish it only,
  I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire—on the water and air
      waited long;
  But now I no longer wait, I am fully satisfied, I am glutted,
  I have witness’d the true lightning, I have witness’d my cities electric,
  I have lived to behold man burst forth and warlike America rise,
  Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary wilds,
  No more the mountains roam or sail the stormy sea.

Virginia—The West

  The noble sire fallen on evil days,
  I saw with hand uplifted, menacing, brandishing,
  (Memories of old in abeyance, love and faith in abeyance,)
  The insane knife toward the Mother of All.

  The noble son on sinewy feet advancing,
  I saw, out of the land of prairies, land of Ohio’s waters and of Indiana,
  To the rescue the stalwart giant hurry his plenteous offspring,
  Drest in blue, bearing their trusty rifles on their shoulders.

  Then the Mother of All with calm voice speaking,
  As to you Rebellious, (I seemed to hear her say,) why strive against
      me, and why seek my life?
  When you yourself forever provide to defend me?
  For you provided me Washington—and now these also.

City of Ships

  City of ships!
  (O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
  O the beautiful sharp-bow’d steam-ships and sail-ships!)
  City of the world! (for all races are here,
  All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
  City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
  City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and
      out with eddies and foam!
  City of wharves and stores—city of tall facades of marble and iron!
  Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
  Spring up O city—not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
  Fear not—submit to no models but your own O city!
  Behold me—incarnate me as I have incarnated you!
  I have rejected nothing you offer’d me—whom you adopted I have adopted,
  Good or bad I never question you—I love all—I do not condemn any thing,
  I chant and celebrate all that is yours—yet peace no more,
  In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine,
  War, red war is my song through your streets, O city!

The Centenarian’s Story

       [Volunteer of 1861–2, at Washington Park, Brooklyn, assisting
       the Centenarian.]
  Give me your hand old Revolutionary,
  The hill-top is nigh, but a few steps, (make room gentlemen,)
  Up the path you have follow’d me well, spite of your hundred and
      extra years,
  You can walk old man, though your eyes are almost done,
  Your faculties serve you, and presently I must have them serve me.

  Rest, while I tell what the crowd around us means,
  On the plain below recruits are drilling and exercising,
  There is the camp, one regiment departs to-morrow,
  Do you hear the officers giving their orders?
  Do you hear the clank of the muskets?
  Why what comes over you now old man?
  Why do you tremble and clutch my hand so convulsively?
  The troops are but drilling, they are yet surrounded with smiles,
  Around them at hand the well-drest friends and the women,
  While splendid and warm the afternoon sun shines down,
  Green the midsummer verdure and fresh blows the dallying breeze,
  O’er proud and peaceful cities and arm of the sea between.

  But drill and parade are over, they march back to quarters,
  Only hear that approval of hands! hear what a clapping!

  As wending the crowds now part and disperse—but we old man,
  Not for nothing have I brought you hither—we must remain,
  You to speak in your turn, and I to listen and tell.

       [The Centenarian]
  When I clutch’d your hand it was not with terror,
  But suddenly pouring about me here on every side,
  And below there where the boys were drilling, and up the slopes they ran,
  And where tents are pitch’d, and wherever you see south and south-
      east and south-west,
  Over hills, across lowlands, and in the skirts of woods,
  And along the shores, in mire (now fill’d over) came again and
      suddenly raged,
  As eighty-five years agone no mere parade receiv’d with applause of friends,
  But a battle which I took part in myself—aye, long ago as it is, I
      took part in it,
  Walking then this hilltop, this same ground.

  Aye, this is the ground,
  My blind eyes even as I speak behold it re-peopled from graves,
  The years recede, pavements and stately houses disappear,
  Rude forts appear again, the old hoop’d guns are mounted,
  I see the lines of rais’d earth stretching from river to bay,
  I mark the vista of waters, I mark the uplands and slopes;
  Here we lay encamp’d, it was this time in summer also.

  As I talk I remember all, I remember the Declaration,
  It was read here, the whole army paraded, it was read to us here,
  By his staff surrounded the General stood in the middle, he held up
      his unsheath’d sword,
  It glitter’d in the sun in full sight of the army.

  ’Twas a bold act then—the English war-ships had just arrived,
  We could watch down the lower bay where they lay at anchor,
  And the transports swarming with soldiers.

  A few days more and they landed, and then the battle.

  Twenty thousand were brought against us,
  A veteran force furnish’d with good artillery.

  I tell not now the whole of the battle,
  But one brigade early in the forenoon order’d forward to engage the
      red-coats,
  Of that brigade I tell, and how steadily it march’d,
  And how long and well it stood confronting death.

  Who do you think that was marching steadily sternly confronting death?
  It was the brigade of the youngest men, two thousand strong,
  Rais’d in Virginia and Maryland, and most of them known personally
      to the General.

  Jauntily forward they went with quick step toward Gowanus’ waters,
  Till of a sudden unlook’d for by defiles through the woods, gain’d at night,
  The British advancing, rounding in from the east, fiercely playing
      their guns,
  That brigade of the youngest was cut off and at the enemy’s mercy.

  The General watch’d them from this hill,
  They made repeated desperate attempts to burst their environment,
  Then drew close together, very compact, their flag flying in the middle,
  But O from the hills how the cannon were thinning and thinning them!

  It sickens me yet, that slaughter!
  I saw the moisture gather in drops on the face of the General.
  I saw how he wrung his hands in anguish.

  Meanwhile the British manœuvr’d to draw us out for a pitch’d battle,
  But we dared not trust the chances of a pitch’d battle.

  We fought the fight in detachments,
  Sallying forth we fought at several points, but in each the luck was
      against us,
  Our foe advancing, steadily getting the best of it, push’d us back
      to the works on this hill,
  Till we turn’d menacing here, and then he left us.

  That was the going out of the brigade of the youngest men, two thousand
      strong,
  Few return’d, nearly all remain in Brooklyn.

  That and here my General’s first battle,
  No women looking on nor sunshine to bask in, it did not conclude
      with applause,
  Nobody clapp’d hands here then.

  But in darkness in mist on the ground under a chill rain,
  Wearied that night we lay foil’d and sullen,
  While scornfully laugh’d many an arrogant lord off against us encamp’d,
  Quite within hearing, feasting, clinking wineglasses together over
      their victory.

  So dull and damp and another day,
  But the night of that, mist lifting, rain ceasing,
  Silent as a ghost while they thought they were sure of him, my
      General retreated.

  I saw him at the river-side,
  Down by the ferry lit by torches, hastening the embarcation;
  My General waited till the soldiers and wounded were all pass’d over,
  And then, (it was just ere sunrise,) these eyes rested on him for
      the last time.

  Every one else seem’d fill’d with gloom,
  Many no doubt thought of capitulation.

  But when my General pass’d me,
  As he stood in his boat and look’d toward the coming sun,
  I saw something different from capitulation.

       [Terminus]
  Enough, the Centenarian’s story ends,
  The two, the past and present, have interchanged,
  I myself as connecter, as chansonnier of a great future, am now speaking.

  And is this the ground Washington trod?
  And these waters I listlessly daily cross, are these the waters he cross’d,
  As resolute in defeat as other generals in their proudest triumphs?

  I must copy the story, and send it eastward and westward,
  I must preserve that look as it beam’d on you rivers of Brooklyn.

  See—as the annual round returns the phantoms return,
  It is the 27^th of August and the British have landed,
  The battle begins and goes against us, behold through the smoke
      Washington’s face,
  The brigade of Virginia and Maryland have march’d forth to intercept
      the enemy,
  They are cut off, murderous artillery from the hills plays upon them,
  Rank after rank falls, while over them silently droops the flag,
  Baptized that day in many a young man’s bloody wounds.
  In death, defeat, and sisters’, mothers’ tears.

  Ah, hills and slopes of Brooklyn! I perceive you are more valuable
      than your owners supposed;
  In the midst of you stands an encampment very old,
  Stands forever the camp of that dead brigade.

Cavalry Crossing a Ford

  A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
  They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to
      the musical clank,
  Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop
      to drink,
  Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the
      negligent rest on the saddles,
  Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,
  Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
  The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.

Bivouac on a Mountain Side

  I see before me now a traveling army halting,
  Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
  Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
  Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
  The numerous camp-fires scatter’d near and far, some away up on the
      mountain,
  The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,
  And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded,
      breaking out, the eternal stars.

An Army Corps on the March

  With its cloud of skirmishers in advance,
  With now the sound of a single shot snapping like a whip, and now an
      irregular volley,
  The swarming ranks press on and on, the dense brigades press on,
  Glittering dimly, toiling under the sun—the dust-cover’d men,
  In columns rise and fall to the undulations of the ground,
  With artillery interspers’d—the wheels rumble, the horses sweat,
  As the army corps advances.

By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame

  By the bivouac’s fitful flame,
  A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow—but
      first I note,
  The tents of the sleeping army, the fields’ and woods’ dim outline,
  The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence,
  Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
  The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily
      watching me,)
  While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts,
  Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that
      are far away;
  A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
  By the bivouac’s fitful flame.

Come Up from the Fields Father

  Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
  And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

  Lo, ’tis autumn,
  Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
  Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the
      moderate wind,
  Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
  (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
  Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

  Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and
      with wondrous clouds,
  Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

  Down in the fields all prospers well,
  But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call.
  And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

  Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
  She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

  Open the envelope quickly,
  O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
  O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!
  All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main
      words only,
  Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish,
      taken to hospital,
  At present low, but will soon be better.

  Ah now the single figure to me,
  Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
  Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
  By the jamb of a door leans.

  Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through
      her sobs,
  The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)
  See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

  Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be
      better, that brave and simple soul,)
  While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
  The only son is dead.

  But the mother needs to be better,
  She with thin form presently drest in black,
  By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
  In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
  O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
  To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

  Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;
  When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
  One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I
      shall never forget,
  One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,
  Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
  Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,
  Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of
      responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
  Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the
      moderate night-wind,
  Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the
      battlefield spreading,
  Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
  But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,
  Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my
      chin in my hands,
  Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest
      comrade—not a tear, not a word,
  Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
  As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
  Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
  I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall
      surely meet again,)
  Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,
  My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,
  Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and
      carefully under feet,
  And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his
      grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
  Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
  Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
  Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day
      brighten’d,
  I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
  And buried him where he fell.

A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown

  A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
  A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
  Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
  Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,
  We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,
  ’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital,
  Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and
      poems ever made,
  Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,
  And by one great pitchy torch stationary with wild red flame and
      clouds of smoke,
  By these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see on the floor, some
      in the pews laid down,
  At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of
      bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)
  I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily,)
  Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene fain to absorb it all,
  Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity,
      some of them dead,
  Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether,
      odor of blood,
  The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill’d,
  Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the
      death-spasm sweating,
  An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls,
  The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of
      the torches,
  These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor,
  Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in;
  But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,
  Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,
  Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,
  The unknown road still marching.

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

  A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
  As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
  As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,
  Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,
  Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,
  Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

  Curious I halt and silent stand,
  Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first
      just lift the blanket;
  Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair,
      and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
  Who are you my dear comrade?
  Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling?
  Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?
  Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of
      beautiful yellow-white ivory;
  Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the
      Christ himself,
  Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods

  As toilsome I wander’d Virginia’s woods,
  To the music of rustling leaves kick’d by my feet, (for ’twas autumn,)
  I mark’d at the foot of a tree the grave of a soldier;
  Mortally wounded he and buried on the retreat, (easily all could
      understand,)
  The halt of a mid-day hour, when up! no time to lose—yet this sign left,
  On a tablet scrawl’d and nail’d on the tree by the grave,
  Bold, cautious, true, and my loving comrade.

  Long, long I muse, then on my way go wandering,
  Many a changeful season to follow, and many a scene of life,
  Yet at times through changeful season and scene, abrupt, alone, or
      in the crowded street,
  Comes before me the unknown soldier’s grave, comes the inscription
      rude in Virginia’s woods,
  Bold, cautious, true, and my loving comrade.

Not the Pilot

  Not the pilot has charged himself to bring his ship into port,
      though beaten back and many times baffled;
  Not the pathfinder penetrating inland weary and long,
  By deserts parch’d, snows chill’d, rivers wet, perseveres till he
      reaches his destination,
  More than I have charged myself, heeded or unheeded, to compose
      march for these States,
  For a battle-call, rousing to arms if need be, years, centuries hence.

Year That Trembled and Reel’d Beneath Me

  Year that trembled and reel’d beneath me!
  Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
  A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me,
  Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
  Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
  And sullen hymns of defeat?

The Wound-Dresser

       1
  An old man bending I come among new faces,
  Years looking backward resuming in answer to children,
  Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me,
  (Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,
  But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself,
  To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;)
  Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances,
  Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)
  Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth,
  Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?
  What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,
  Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

       2
  O maidens and young men I love and that love me,
  What you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls,
  Soldier alert I arrive after a long march cover’d with sweat and dust,
  In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the
      rush of successful charge,
  Enter the captur’d works—yet lo, like a swift-running river they fade,
  Pass and are gone they fade—I dwell not on soldiers’ perils or
      soldiers’ joys,
  (Both I remember well—many the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.)

  But in silence, in dreams’ projections,
  While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,
  So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,
  With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,
  Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)

  Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
  Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
  Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
  Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground,
  Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
  To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
  To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
  An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
  Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.

  I onward go, I stop,
  With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
  I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
  One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you,
  Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that
      would save you.

       3
  On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
  The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)
  The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through examine,
  Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life
      struggles hard,
  (Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
  In mercy come quickly.)

  From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
  I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
  Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side falling head,
  His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
      bloody stump,
  And has not yet look’d on it.

  I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
  But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
  And the yellow-blue countenance see.

  I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
  Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening,
      so offensive,
  While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

  I am faithful, I do not give out,
  The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
  These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast
      a fire, a burning flame.)

       4
  Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
  Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
  The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
  I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
  Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
  (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
  Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Long, Too Long America

  Long, too long America,
  Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn’d from joys and
      prosperity only,
  But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing,
      grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,
  And now to conceive and show to the world what your children
      en-masse really are,
  (For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse
      really are?)

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

       1
  Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,
  Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
  Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows,
  Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape,
  Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching
      content,
  Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the
      Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,
  Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can
      walk undisturb’d,
  Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman of whom I should never tire,
  Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the
      world a rural domestic life,
  Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only,
  Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal
      sanities!

  These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and
      rack’d by the war-strife,)
  These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,
  While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city,
  Day upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets,
  Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time refusing to give me up,
  Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich’d of soul, you give me forever faces;
  (O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries,
  see my own soul trampling down what it ask’d for.)

       2
  Keep your splendid silent sun,
  Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,
  Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards,
  Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
  Give me faces and streets—give me these phantoms incessant and
      endless along the trottoirs!
  Give me interminable eyes—give me women—give me comrades and
      lovers by the thousand!
  Let me see new ones every day—let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
  Give me such shows—give me the streets of Manhattan!
  Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of
      the trumpets and drums!
  (The soldiers in companies or regiments—some starting away, flush’d
      and reckless,
  Some, their time up, returning with thinn’d ranks, young, yet very
      old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
  Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
  O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
  The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
  The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the
      torchlight procession!
  The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons
      following;
  People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
  Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,
  The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
      the sight of the wounded,)
  Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
  Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

Dirge for Two Veterans

       The last sunbeam
  Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,
  On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
       Down a new-made double grave.

       Lo, the moon ascending,
  Up from the east the silvery round moon,
  Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
       Immense and silent moon.

       I see a sad procession,
  And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles,
  All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,
       As with voices and with tears.

       I hear the great drums pounding,
  And the small drums steady whirring,
  And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
       Strikes me through and through.

       For the son is brought with the father,
  (In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
  Two veterans son and father dropt together,
       And the double grave awaits them.)

       Now nearer blow the bugles,
  And the drums strike more convulsive,
  And the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,
       And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

       In the eastern sky up-buoying,
  The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d,
  (’Tis some mother’s large transparent face,
       In heaven brighter growing.)

       O strong dead-march you please me!
  O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
  O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
       What I have I also give you.

       The moon gives you light,
  And the bugles and the drums give you music,
  And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
       My heart gives you love.

Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice

  Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
  Be not dishearten’d, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet,
  Those who love each other shall become invincible,
  They shall yet make Columbia victorious.

  Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious,
  You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth.

  No danger shall balk Columbia’s lovers,
  If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one.

  One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian’s comrade,
  From Maine and from hot Carolina, and another an Oregonese, shall
      be friends triune,
  More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth.

  To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come,
  Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death.

  It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affection,
  The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly,
  The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,
  The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.

  These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron,
  I, ecstatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers tie you.

  (Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
  Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?
  Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)

I Saw Old General at Bay

  I saw old General at bay,
  (Old as he was, his gray eyes yet shone out in battle like stars,)
  His small force was now completely hemm’d in, in his works,
  He call’d for volunteers to run the enemy’s lines, a desperate emergency,
  I saw a hundred and more step forth from the ranks, but two or three
      were selected,
  I saw them receive their orders aside, they listen’d with care, the
      adjutant was very grave,
  I saw them depart with cheerfulness, freely risking their lives.

The Artilleryman’s Vision

  While my wife at my side lies slumbering, and the wars are over long,
  And my head on the pillow rests at home, and the vacant midnight passes,
  And through the stillness, through the dark, I hear, just hear, the
      breath of my infant,
  There in the room as I wake from sleep this vision presses upon me;
  The engagement opens there and then in fantasy unreal,
  The skirmishers begin, they crawl cautiously ahead, I hear the
      irregular snap! snap!
  I hear the sounds of the different missiles, the short t-h-t! t-h-t!
      of the rifle-balls,
  I see the shells exploding leaving small white clouds, I hear the
      great shells shrieking as they pass,
  The grape like the hum and whirr of wind through the trees,
      (tumultuous now the contest rages,)
  All the scenes at the batteries rise in detail before me again,
  The crashing and smoking, the pride of the men in their pieces,
  The chief-gunner ranges and sights his piece and selects a fuse of
      the right time,
  After firing I see him lean aside and look eagerly off to note the effect;
  Elsewhere I hear the cry of a regiment charging, (the young colonel
      leads himself this time with brandish’d sword,)
  I see the gaps cut by the enemy’s volleys, (quickly fill’d up, no delay,)
  I breathe the suffocating smoke, then the flat clouds hover low
      concealing all;
  Now a strange lull for a few seconds, not a shot fired on either side,
  Then resumed the chaos louder than ever, with eager calls and
      orders of officers,
  While from some distant part of the field the wind wafts to my ears
      a shout of applause, (some special success,)
  And ever the sound of the cannon far or near, (rousing even in
      dreams a devilish exultation and all the old mad joy in the
      depths of my soul,)
  And ever the hastening of infantry shifting positions, batteries,
      cavalry, moving hither and thither,
  (The falling, dying, I heed not, the wounded dripping and red
      heed not, some to the rear are hobbling,)
  Grime, heat, rush, aide-de-camps galloping by or on a full run,
  With the patter of small arms, the warning s-s-t of the rifles,
      (these in my vision I hear or see,)
  And bombs bursting in air, and at night the vari-color’d rockets.

Ethiopia Saluting the Colors

  Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human,
  With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet?
  Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?

  (’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines,
  Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com’st to me,
  As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.)

  Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d,
  A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,
  Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.

  No further does she say, but lingering all the day,
  Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
  And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by.

  What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?
  Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green?
  Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?

Not Youth Pertains to Me

  Not youth pertains to me,
  Nor delicatesse, I cannot beguile the time with talk,
  Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant,
  In the learn’d coterie sitting constrain’d and still, for learning
      inures not to me,
  Beauty, knowledge, inure not to me—yet there are two or three things
      inure to me,
  I have nourish’d the wounded and sooth’d many a dying soldier,
  And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp,
  Composed these songs.

Race of Veterans

  Race of veterans—race of victors!
  Race of the soil, ready for conflict—race of the conquering march!
  (No more credulity’s race, abiding-temper’d race,)
  Race henceforth owning no law but the law of itself,
  Race of passion and the storm.

World Take Good Notice

  World take good notice, silver stars fading,
  Milky hue ript, wet of white detaching,
  Coals thirty-eight, baleful and burning,
  Scarlet, significant, hands off warning,
  Now and henceforth flaunt from these shores.

O Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy

  O tan-faced prairie-boy,
  Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift,
  Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among
      the recruits,
  You came, taciturn, with nothing to give—we but look’d on each other,
  When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me.

Look Down Fair Moon

  Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,
  Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,
  On the dead on their backs with arms toss’d wide,
  Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.

Reconciliation

  Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
  Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be
      utterly lost,
  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly
      wash again, and ever again, this solid world;
  For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
  I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I draw near,
  Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

How Solemn As One by One [Washington City, 1865]

  How solemn as one by one,
  As the ranks returning worn and sweaty, as the men file by where stand,
  As the faces the masks appear, as I glance at the faces studying the masks,
  (As I glance upward out of this page studying you, dear friend,
      whoever you are,)
  How solemn the thought of my whispering soul to each in the ranks,
      and to you,
  I see behind each mask that wonder a kindred soul,
  O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
  Nor the bayonet stab what you really are;
  The soul! yourself I see, great as any, good as the best,
  Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill,
  Nor the bayonet stab O friend.

As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado

  As I lay with my head in your lap camerado,
  The confession I made I resume, what I said to you and the open air
      I resume,
  I know I am restless and make others so,
  I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,
  For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to
      unsettle them,
  I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could ever have
      been had all accepted me,
  I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions,
      majorities, nor ridicule,
  And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me,
  And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me;
  Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still
      urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
  Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.

Delicate Cluster

  Delicate cluster! flag of teeming life!
  Covering all my lands—all my seashores lining!
  Flag of death! (how I watch’d you through the smoke of battle pressing!
  How I heard you flap and rustle, cloth defiant!)
  Flag cerulean—sunny flag, with the orbs of night dappled!
  Ah my silvery beauty—ah my woolly white and crimson!
  Ah to sing the song of you, my matron mighty!
  My sacred one, my mother.

To a Certain Civilian

  Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
  Did you seek the civilian’s peaceful and languishing rhymes?
  Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow?
  Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand—nor
      am I now;
  (I have been born of the same as the war was born,
  The drum-corps’ rattle is ever to me sweet music, I love well the
      martial dirge,
  With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer’s funeral;)
  What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works,
  And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
  For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.

Lo, Victress on the Peaks

  Lo, Victress on the peaks,
  Where thou with mighty brow regarding the world,
  (The world O Libertad, that vainly conspired against thee,)
  Out of its countless beleaguering toils, after thwarting them all,
  Dominant, with the dazzling sun around thee,
  Flauntest now unharm’d in immortal soundness and bloom—lo, in
      these hours supreme,
  No poem proud, I chanting bring to thee, nor mastery’s rapturous verse,
  But a cluster containing night’s darkness and blood-dripping wounds,
  And psalms of the dead.

Spirit Whose Work Is Done [Washington City, 1865]

  Spirit whose work is done—spirit of dreadful hours!
  Ere departing fade from my eyes your forests of bayonets;
  Spirit of gloomiest fears and doubts, (yet onward ever unfaltering
      pressing,)
  Spirit of many a solemn day and many a savage scene—electric spirit,
  That with muttering voice through the war now closed, like a
      tireless phantom flitted,
  Rousing the land with breath of flame, while you beat and beat the drum,
  Now as the sound of the drum, hollow and harsh to the last,
      reverberates round me,
  As your ranks, your immortal ranks, return, return from the battles,
  As the muskets of the young men yet lean over their shoulders,
  As I look on the bayonets bristling over their shoulders,
  As those slanted bayonets, whole forests of them appearing in the
      distance, approach and pass on, returning homeward,
  Moving with steady motion, swaying to and fro to the right and left,
  Evenly lightly rising and falling while the steps keep time;
  Spirit of hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as death next day,
  Touch my mouth ere you depart, press my lips close,
  Leave me your pulses of rage—bequeath them to me—fill me with
      currents convulsive,
  Let them scorch and blister out of my chants when you are gone,
  Let them identify you to the future in these songs.

Adieu to a Soldier

  Adieu O soldier,
  You of the rude campaigning, (which we shared,)
  The rapid march, the life of the camp,
  The hot contention of opposing fronts, the long manœuvre,
  Red battles with their slaughter, the stimulus, the strong terrific game,
  Spell of all brave and manly hearts, the trains of time through you
      and like of you all fill’d,
  With war and war’s expression.

  Adieu dear comrade,
  Your mission is fulfill’d—but I, more warlike,
  Myself and this contentious soul of mine,
  Still on our own campaigning bound,
  Through untried roads with ambushes opponents lined,
  Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis, often baffled,
  Here marching, ever marching on, a war fight out—aye here,
  To fiercer, weightier battles give expression.

Turn O Libertad

  Turn O Libertad, for the war is over,
  From it and all henceforth expanding, doubting no more, resolute,
      sweeping the world,
  Turn from lands retrospective recording proofs of the past,
  From the singers that sing the trailing glories of the past,
  From the chants of the feudal world, the triumphs of kings, slavery, caste,
  Turn to the world, the triumphs reserv’d and to come—give up that
      backward world,
  Leave to the singers of hitherto, give them the trailing past,
  But what remains remains for singers for you—wars to come are for you,
  (Lo, how the wars of the past have duly inured to you, and the wars
      of the present also inure;)
  Then turn, and be not alarm’d O Libertad—turn your undying face,
  To where the future, greater than all the past,
  Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.

To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod

  To the leaven’d soil they trod calling I sing for the last,
  (Forth from my tent emerging for good, loosing, untying the tent-ropes,)
  In the freshness the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits
      and vistas again to peace restored,
  To the fiery fields emanative and the endless vistas beyond, to the
      South and the North,
  To the leaven’d soil of the general Western world to attest my songs,
  To the Alleghanian hills and the tireless Mississippi,
  To the rocks I calling sing, and all the trees in the woods,
  To the plains of the poems of heroes, to the prairies spreading wide,
  To the far-off sea and the unseen winds, and the sane impalpable air;
  And responding they answer all, (but not in words,)
  The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely,
  The prairie draws me close, as the father to bosom broad the son,
  The Northern ice and rain that began me nourish me to the end,
  But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs.

Book XXII. Memories of President Lincoln

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

       1
  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
  And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
  I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

  Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
  Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
  And thought of him I love.

       2
  O powerful western fallen star!
  O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
  O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
  O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
  O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.

      3
  In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,
  Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
  With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
  With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,
  With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
  A sprig with its flower I break.

       4
  In the swamp in secluded recesses,
  A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

  Solitary the thrush,
  The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
  Sings by himself a song.

  Song of the bleeding throat,
  Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
  If thou wast not granted to sing thou wouldst surely die.)

       5
  Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
  Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d
      from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
  Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the
      endless grass,
  Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the
      dark-brown fields uprisen,
  Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
  Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
  Night and day journeys a coffin.

       6
  Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
  Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
  With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
  With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
  With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
  With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the
      unbared heads,
  With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
  With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong
      and solemn,
  With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
  The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these
      you journey,
  With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
  Here, coffin that slowly passes,
  I give you my sprig of lilac.

       7
  (Nor for you, for one alone,
  Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
  For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane
      and sacred death.

  All over bouquets of roses,
  O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
  But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
  Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
  With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
  For you and the coffins all of you O death.)

       8
  O western orb sailing the heaven,
  Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d,
  As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
  As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
  As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the
      other stars all look’d on,)
  As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not
      what kept me from sleep,)
  As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you
      were of woe,
  As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
  As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black
      of the night,
  As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
  Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

       9
  Sing on there in the swamp,
  O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,
  I hear, I come presently, I understand you,
  But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,
  The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.

       10
  O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
  And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
  And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

  Sea-winds blown from east and west,
  Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till
      there on the prairies meeting,
  These and with these and the breath of my chant,
  I’ll perfume the grave of him I love.

       11
  O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
  And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
  To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
  Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
  With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
  With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking
      sun, burning, expanding the air,
  With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves
      of the trees prolific,
  In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a
      wind-dapple here and there,
  With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky,
      and shadows,
  And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
  And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen
      homeward returning.

       12
  Lo, body and soul—this land,
  My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides,
      and the ships,
  The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light,
      Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri,
  And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.

  Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
  The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
  The gentle soft-born measureless light,
  The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,
  The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
  Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

       13
  Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
  Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
  Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

  Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
  Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

  O liquid and free and tender!
  O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
  You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
  Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.

       14
  Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth,
  In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and
      the farmers preparing their crops,
  In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,
  In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds and the storms,)
  Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the
      voices of children and women,
  The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
  And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy
      with labor,
  And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with
      its meals and minutia of daily usages,
  And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—
      lo, then and there,
  Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
  Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
  And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

  Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
  And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
  And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of
      companions,
  I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
  Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
  To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.

  And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
  The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
  And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

  From deep secluded recesses,
  From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
  Came the carol of the bird.

  And the charm of the carol rapt me,
  As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
  And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

  Come lovely and soothing death,
  Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
  In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
  Sooner or later delicate death.

  Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
  For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
  And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
  For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

  Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
  Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
  Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
  I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

  Approach strong deliveress,
  When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
  Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
  Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

  From me to thee glad serenades,
  Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
  And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread shy are fitting,
  And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

  The night in silence under many a star,
  The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
  And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
  And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

  Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
  Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
      prairies wide,
  Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
  I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.

       15
  To the tally of my soul,
  Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
  With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.

  Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
  Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
  And I with my comrades there in the night.

  While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
  As to long panoramas of visions.

  And I saw askant the armies,
  I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
  Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,
  And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
  And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
  And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.

  I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
  And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
  I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
  But I saw they were not as was thought,
  They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
  The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
  And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
  And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

       16
  Passing the visions, passing the night,
  Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
  Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
  Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
  As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling,
      flooding the night,
  Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again
      bursting with joy,
  Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
  As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
  Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
  I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

  I cease from my song for thee,
  From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
  O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

  Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
  The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
  And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
  With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
  With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
  Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for
      the dead I loved so well,
  For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for
      his dear sake,
  Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
  There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

O Captain! My Captain!

  O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
  The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
  The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
  While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
      But O heart! heart! heart!
       O the bleeding drops of red,
         Where on the deck my Captain lies,
           Fallen cold and dead.

  O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
  Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
  For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
  For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
      Here Captain! dear father!
       This arm beneath your head!
         It is some dream that on the deck,
           You’ve fallen cold and dead.

  My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
  My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
  The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
  From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
       Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
         But I with mournful tread,
           Walk the deck my Captain lies,
             Fallen cold and dead.

Hush’d Be the Camps To-Day [May 4, 1865]

  Hush’d be the camps to-day,
  And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
  And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
  Our dear commander’s death.

  No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
  Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time’s dark events,
  Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
  But sing poet in our name,

  Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.

  As they invault the coffin there,
  Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—one verse,
  For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

This Dust Was Once the Man

  This dust was once the man,
  Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
  Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
  Was saved the Union of these States.

Book XXIII

By Blue Ontario’s Shore

  By blue Ontario’s shore,
  As I mused of these warlike days and of peace return’d, and the
      dead that return no more,
  A Phantom gigantic superb, with stern visage accosted me,
  Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of America,
      chant me the carol of victory,
  And strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet,
  And sing me before you go the song of the throes of Democracy.

  (Democracy, the destin’d conqueror, yet treacherous lip-smiles everywhere,
  And death and infidelity at every step.)

       2
  A Nation announcing itself,
  I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,
  I reject none, accept all, then reproduce all in my own forms.

  A breed whose proof is in time and deeds,
  What we are we are, nativity is answer enough to objections,
  We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,
  We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,
  We are executive in ourselves, we are sufficient in the variety of
      ourselves,
  We are the most beautiful to ourselves and in ourselves,
  We stand self-pois’d in the middle, branching thence over the world,
  From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.

  Nothing is sinful to us outside of ourselves,
  Whatever appears, whatever does not appear, we are beautiful or
      sinful in ourselves only.

  (O Mother—O Sisters dear!
  If we are lost, no victor else has destroy’d us,
  It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)

       3
  Have you thought there could be but a single supreme?
  There can be any number of supremes—one does not countervail
      another any more than one eyesight countervails another, or
      one life countervails another.

  All is eligible to all,
  All is for individuals, all is for you,
  No condition is prohibited, not God’s or any.

  All comes by the body, only health puts you rapport with the universe.

  Produce great Persons, the rest follows.

       4
  Piety and conformity to them that like,
  Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like,
  I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,
  Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!

  I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning every
      one I meet,
  Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?
  Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?

  (With pangs and cries as thine own O bearer of many children,
  These clamors wild to a race of pride I give.)

  O lands, would you be freer than all that has ever been before?
  If you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen to me.

  Fear grace, elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
  Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey—juice,
  Beware the advancing mortal ripening of Nature,
  Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men.

       5
  Ages, precedents, have long been accumulating undirected materials,
  America brings builders, and brings its own styles.

  The immortal poets of Asia and Europe have done their work and
      pass’d to other spheres,
  A work remains, the work of surpassing all they have done.

  America, curious toward foreign characters, stands by its own at all
      hazards,
  Stands removed, spacious, composite, sound, initiates the true use
      of precedents,
  Does not repel them or the past or what they have produced under
      their forms,
  Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne
      from the house,
  Perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was
      fittest for its days,
  That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who
      approaches,
  And that he shall be fittest for his days.

  Any period one nation must lead,
  One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

  These States are the amplest poem,
  Here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations,
  Here the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doings of the
      day and night,
  Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars,
  Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves,
  Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the
      soul loves.

       6
  Land of lands and bards to corroborate!
  Of them standing among them, one lifts to the light a west-bred face,
  To him the hereditary countenance bequeath’d both mother’s and father’s,
  His first parts substances, earth, water, animals, trees,
  Built of the common stock, having room for far and near,
  Used to dispense with other lands, incarnating this land,
  Attracting it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with
      incomparable love,
  Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits,
  Making its cities, beginnings, events, diversities, wars, vocal in him,
  Making its rivers, lakes, bays, embouchure in him,
  Mississippi with yearly freshets and changing chutes, Columbia,
      Niagara, Hudson, spending themselves lovingly in him,
  If the Atlantic coast stretch or the Pacific coast stretch, he
      stretching with them North or South,
  Spanning between them East and West, and touching whatever is between them,
  Growths growing from him to offset the growths of pine, cedar, hemlock,
      live-oak, locust, chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,
  Tangles as tangled in him as any canebrake or swamp,
  He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with
      northern transparent ice,
  Off him pasturage sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,
  Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the
      fish-hawk, mocking-bird, night-heron, and eagle,
  His spirit surrounding his country’s spirit, unclosed to good and evil,
  Surrounding the essences of real things, old times and present times,
  Surrounding just found shores, islands, tribes of red aborigines,
  Weather-beaten vessels, landings, settlements, embryo stature and muscle,
  The haughty defiance of the Year One, war, peace, the formation of
      the Constitution,
  The separate States, the simple elastic scheme, the immigrants,
  The Union always swarming with blatherers and always sure and impregnable,
  The unsurvey’d interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals,
      hunters, trappers,
  Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the
      gestation of new States,
  Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming
      up from the uttermost parts,
  Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially
      the young men,
  Responding their manners, speech, dress, friendships, the gait they
      have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the
      presence of superiors,
  The freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and
      decision of their phrenology,
  The picturesque looseness of their carriage, their fierceness when wrong’d,
  The fluency of their speech, their delight in music, their curiosity,
      good temper and open-handedness, the whole composite make,
  The prevailing ardor and enterprise, the large amativeness,
  The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement
      of the population,
  The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-digging,
  Wharf-hemm’d cities, railroad and steamboat lines intersecting all points,
  Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the Northeast,
      Northwest, Southwest,
  Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,
  Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the
      ruins of all the rest,
  On and on to the grapple with it—Assassin! then your life or ours
      be the stake, and respite no more.

       7
  (Lo, high toward heaven, this day,
  Libertad, from the conqueress’ field return’d,
  I mark the new aureola around your head,
  No more of soft astral, but dazzling and fierce,
  With war’s flames and the lambent lightnings playing,
  And your port immovable where you stand,
  With still the inextinguishable glance and the clinch’d and lifted fist,
  And your foot on the neck of the menacing one, the scorner utterly
      crush’d beneath you,
  The menacing arrogant one that strode and advanced with his
      senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife,
  The wide-swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much,
  To-day a carrion dead and damn’d, the despised of all the earth,
  An offal rank, to the dunghill maggots spurn’d.)

       8
  Others take finish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever
      keeps vista,
  Others adorn the past, but you O days of the present, I adorn you,
  O days of the future I believe in you—I isolate myself for your sake,
  O America because you build for mankind I build for you,
  O well-beloved stone-cutters, I lead them who plan with decision
      and science,
  Lead the present with friendly hand toward the future.
  (Bravas to all impulses sending sane children to the next age!
  But damn that which spends itself with no thought of the stain,
      pains, dismay, feebleness, it is bequeathing.)

       9
  I listened to the Phantom by Ontario’s shore,
  I heard the voice arising demanding bards,
  By them all native and grand, by them alone can these States be
      fused into the compact organism of a Nation.

  To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account,
  That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle,
      as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants.

  Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most
      need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest,
  Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their
      poets shall.

  (Soul of love and tongue of fire!
  Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world!
  Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?)

       10
  Of these States the poet is the equable man,
  Not in him but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of
      their full returns,
  Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad,
  He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither
      more nor less,
  He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,
  He is the equalizer of his age and land,
  He supplies what wants supplying, he checks what wants checking,
  In peace out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich,
      thrifty, building populous towns, encouraging agriculture, arts,
      commerce, lighting the study of man, the soul, health,
      immortality, government,
  In war he is the best backer of the war, he fetches artillery as
      good as the engineer’s, he can make every word he speaks draw blood,
  The years straying toward infidelity he withholds by his steady faith,
  He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him absolutely,)
  He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun failing round
      helpless thing,
  As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,
  His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
  In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
  He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement,
  He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women
      as dreams or dots.

  For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals,
  For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
  The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.

  Without extinction is Liberty, without retrograde is Equality,
  They live in the feelings of young men and the best women,
  (Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been always
      ready to fall for Liberty.)

       11
  For the great Idea,
  That, O my brethren, that is the mission of poets.

  Songs of stern defiance ever ready,
  Songs of the rapid arming and the march,
  The flag of peace quick-folded, and instead the flag we know,
  Warlike flag of the great Idea.

  (Angry cloth I saw there leaping!
  I stand again in leaden rain your flapping folds saluting,
  I sing you over all, flying beckoning through the fight—O the
      hard-contested fight!
  The cannons ope their rosy-flashing muzzles—the hurtled balls scream,
  The battle-front forms amid the smoke—the volleys pour incessant
      from the line,
  Hark, the ringing word Charge!—now the tussle and the furious
      maddening yells,
  Now the corpses tumble curl’d upon the ground,
  Cold, cold in death, for precious life of you,
  Angry cloth I saw there leaping.)

       12
  Are you he who would assume a place to teach or be a poet here in
      the States?
  The place is august, the terms obdurate.

  Who would assume to teach here may well prepare himself body and mind,
  He may well survey, ponder, arm, fortify, harden, make lithe himself,
  He shall surely be question’d beforehand by me with many and stern questions.

  Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
  Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
  Have you learn’d the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography,
      pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
  Have you consider’d the organic compact of the first day of the
      first year of Independence, sign’d by the Commissioners, ratified
      by the States, and read by Washington at the head of the army?
  Have you possess’d yourself of the Federal Constitution?
  Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them,
      and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?
  Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea, the
      bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?
  Have you sped through fleeting customs, popularities?
  Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls,
      fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the
      whole People?
  Are you not of some coterie? some school or mere religion?
  Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to
      life itself?
  Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?
  Have you too the old ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality?
  Do you hold the like love for those hardening to maturity? for the
      last-born? little and big? and for the errant?

  What is this you bring my America?
  Is it uniform with my country?
  Is it not something that has been better told or done before?
  Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship?
  Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?—Is the good old cause in it?
  Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
      literats, of enemies’ lands?
  Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
  Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
  Does it sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory of the Union in
      that secession war?
  Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
  Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
      strength, gait, face?
  Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not mere
      amanuenses?
  Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face?
  What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities? Chicago,
      Kanada, Arkansas?
  Does it see behind the apparent custodians the real custodians
      standing, menacing, silent, the mechanics, Manhattanese, Western
      men, Southerners, significant alike in their apathy, and in the
      promptness of their love?
  Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen,
      each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist,
      infidel, who has ever ask’d any thing of America?
  What mocking and scornful negligence?
  The track strew’d with the dust of skeletons,
  By the roadside others disdainfully toss’d.

       13
  Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill’d from poems pass away,
  The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes,
  Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature,
  America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it
      or conceal from it, it is impassive enough,
  Only toward the likes of itself will it advance to meet them,
  If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there
      is no fear of mistake,
  (The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d till his country
      absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it.)

  He masters whose spirit masters, he tastes sweetest who results
      sweetest in the long run,
  The blood of the brawn beloved of time is unconstraint;
  In the need of songs, philosophy, an appropriate native grand-opera,
      shipcraft, any craft,
  He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original
      practical example.

  Already a nonchalant breed, silently emerging, appears on the streets,
  People’s lips salute only doers, lovers, satisfiers, positive knowers,
  There will shortly be no more priests, I say their work is done,
  Death is without emergencies here, but life is perpetual emergencies here,
  Are your body, days, manners, superb? after death you shall be superb,
  Justice, health, self-esteem, clear the way with irresistible power;
  How dare you place any thing before a man?

       14
  Fall behind me States!
  A man before all—myself, typical, before all.

  Give me the pay I have served for,
  Give me to sing the songs of the great Idea, take all the rest,
  I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches,
  I have given aims to every one that ask’d, stood up for the stupid
      and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others,
  Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence
      toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown,
  Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young,
      and with the mothers of families,
  Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees,
      stars, rivers,
  Dismiss’d whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body,
  Claim’d nothing to myself which I have not carefully claim’d for
      others on the same terms,
  Sped to the camps, and comrades found and accepted from every State,
  (Upon this breast has many a dying soldier lean’d to breathe his last,
  This arm, this hand, this voice, have nourish’d, rais’d, restored,
  To life recalling many a prostrate form;)
  I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself,
  Rejecting none, permitting all.

  (Say O Mother, have I not to your thought been faithful?
  Have I not through life kept you and yours before me?)

       15
  I swear I begin to see the meaning of these things,
  It is not the earth, it is not America who is so great,
  It is I who am great or to be great, it is You up there, or any one,
  It is to walk rapidly through civilizations, governments, theories,
  Through poems, pageants, shows, to form individuals.

  Underneath all, individuals,
  I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
  The American compact is altogether with individuals,
  The only government is that which makes minute of individuals,
  The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one
      single individual—namely to You.

  (Mother! with subtle sense severe, with the naked sword in your hand,
  I saw you at last refuse to treat but directly with individuals.)

       16
  Underneath all, Nativity,
  I swear I will stand by my own nativity, pious or impious so be it;
  I swear I am charm’d with nothing except nativity,
  Men, women, cities, nations, are only beautiful from nativity.

  Underneath all is the Expression of love for men and women,
  (I swear I have seen enough of mean and impotent modes of expressing
      love for men and women,
  After this day I take my own modes of expressing love for men and
      women.) in myself,

  I swear I will have each quality of my race in myself,
  (Talk as you like, he only suits these States whose manners favor
      the audacity and sublime turbulence of the States.)

  Underneath the lessons of things, spirits, Nature, governments,
      ownerships, I swear I perceive other lessons,
  Underneath all to me is myself, to you yourself, (the same
      monotonous old song.)

       17
  O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
  Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
  Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me,
  Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, ships,
      are you and me,
  Its endless gestations of new States are you and me,
  The war, (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth
      forget), was you and me,
  Natural and artificial are you and me,
  Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and me,
  Past, present, future, are you and me.

  I dare not shirk any part of myself,
  Not any part of America good or bad,
  Not to build for that which builds for mankind,
  Not to balance ranks, complexions, creeds, and the sexes,
  Not to justify science nor the march of equality,
  Nor to feed the arrogant blood of the brawn belov’d of time.

  I am for those that have never been master’d,
  For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,
  For those whom laws, theories, conventions, can never master.

  I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth,
  Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all.

  I will not be outfaced by irrational things,
  I will penetrate what it is in them that is sarcastic upon me,
  I will make cities and civilizations defer to me,
  This is what I have learnt from America—it is the amount, and it I
      teach again.

  (Democracy, while weapons were everywhere aim’d at your breast,
  I saw you serenely give birth to immortal children, saw in dreams
      your dilating form,
  Saw you with spreading mantle covering the world.)

       18
  I will confront these shows of the day and night,
  I will know if I am to be less than they,
  I will see if I am not as majestic as they,
  I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they,
  I will see if I am to be less generous than they,
  I will see if I have no meaning, while the houses and ships have meaning,
  I will see if the fishes and birds are to be enough for themselves,
      and I am not to be enough for myself.

  I match my spirit against yours you orbs, growths, mountains, brutes,
  Copious as you are I absorb you all in myself, and become the master myself,
  America isolated yet embodying all, what is it finally except myself?
  These States, what are they except myself?

  I know now why the earth is gross, tantalizing, wicked, it is for my sake,
  I take you specially to be mine, you terrible, rude forms.

  (Mother, bend down, bend close to me your face,
  I know not what these plots and wars and deferments are for,
  I know not fruition’s success, but I know that through war and crime
      your work goes on, and must yet go on.)

       19
  Thus by blue Ontario’s shore,
  While the winds fann’d me and the waves came trooping toward me,
  I thrill’d with the power’s pulsations, and the charm of my theme
      was upon me,
  Till the tissues that held me parted their ties upon me.

  And I saw the free souls of poets,
  The loftiest bards of past ages strode before me,
  Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me.

       20
  O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not!
  Not for the bards of the past, not to invoke them have I launch’d
      you forth,
  Not to call even those lofty bards here by Ontario’s shores,
  Have I sung so capricious and loud my savage song.

  Bards for my own land only I invoke,
  (For the war the war is over, the field is clear’d,)
  Till they strike up marches henceforth triumphant and onward,
  To cheer O Mother your boundless expectant soul.

  Bards of the great Idea! bards of the peaceful inventions! (for the
      war, the war is over!)
  Yet bards of latent armies, a million soldiers waiting ever-ready,
  Bards with songs as from burning coals or the lightning’s fork’d stripes!
  Ample Ohio’s, Kanada’s bards—bards of California! inland bards—
      bards of the war!
  You by my charm I invoke.

Reversals

  Let that which stood in front go behind,
  Let that which was behind advance to the front,
  Let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions,
  Let the old propositions be postponed,
  Let a man seek pleasure everywhere except in himself,
  Let a woman seek happiness everywhere except in herself

Book XXIV. Autumn Rivulets

As Consequent, Etc.

  As consequent from store of summer rains,
  Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,
  Or many a herb-lined brook’s reticulations,
  Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,
  Songs of continued years I sing.

  Life’s ever-modern rapids first, (soon, soon to blend,
  With the old streams of death.)

  Some threading Ohio’s farm-fields or the woods,
  Some down Colorado’s canons from sources of perpetual snow,
  Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas,
  Some in the north finding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa,
  Some to Atlantica’s bays, and so to the great salt brine.

  In you whoe’er you are my book perusing,
  In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing,
  All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

  Currents for starting a continent new,
  Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid,
  Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves,
  (Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous’d and ominous too,
  Out of the depths the storm’s abysmic waves, who knows whence?
  Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter’d sail.)

  Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring,
  A windrow-drift of weeds and shells.

  O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless,
  Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held,
  Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity’s music faint and far,
  Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica’s rim, strains for the soul of
      the prairies,
  Whisper’d reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously sounding,
  Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable,
  Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life,
  (For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,)
  These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry,
  Wash’d on America’s shores?

The Return of the Heroes

       1
  For the lands and for these passionate days and for myself,
  Now I awhile retire to thee O soil of autumn fields,
  Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee,
  Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart,
  Turning a verse for thee.

  O earth that hast no voice, confide to me a voice,
  O harvest of my lands—O boundless summer growths,
  O lavish brown parturient earth—O infinite teeming womb,
  A song to narrate thee.

       2
  Ever upon this stage,
  Is acted God’s calm annual drama,
  Gorgeous processions, songs of birds,
  Sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul,
  The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves,
  The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees,
  The liliput countless armies of the grass,
  The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages,
  The scenery of the snows, the winds’ free orchestra,
  The stretching light-hung roof of clouds, the clear cerulean and the
      silvery fringes,
  The high-dilating stars, the placid beckoning stars,
  The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows,
  The shows of all the varied lands and all the growths and products.

       3
  Fecund America—today,
  Thou art all over set in births and joys!
  Thou groan’st with riches, thy wealth clothes thee as a swathing-garment,
  Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions,
  A myriad-twining life like interlacing vines binds all thy vast demesne,
  As some huge ship freighted to water’s edge thou ridest into port,
  As rain falls from the heaven and vapors rise from earth, so have
      the precious values fallen upon thee and risen out of thee;
  Thou envy of the globe! thou miracle!
  Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty,
  Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns,
  Thou Prairie Dame that sittest in the middle and lookest out upon
      thy world, and lookest East and lookest West,
  Dispensatress, that by a word givest a thousand miles, a million
      farms, and missest nothing,
  Thou all-acceptress—thou hospitable, (thou only art hospitable as
      God is hospitable.)

       4
  When late I sang sad was my voice,
  Sad were the shows around me with deafening noises of hatred and
      smoke of war;
  In the midst of the conflict, the heroes, I stood,
  Or pass’d with slow step through the wounded and dying.

  But now I sing not war,
  Nor the measur’d march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps,
  Nor the regiments hastily coming up deploying in line of battle;
  No more the sad, unnatural shows of war.

  Ask’d room those flush’d immortal ranks, the first forth-stepping armies?
  Ask room alas the ghastly ranks, the armies dread that follow’d.

  (Pass, pass, ye proud brigades, with your tramping sinewy legs,
  With your shoulders young and strong, with your knapsacks and your muskets;
  How elate I stood and watch’d you, where starting off you march’d.

  Pass—then rattle drums again,
  For an army heaves in sight, O another gathering army,
  Swarming, trailing on the rear, O you dread accruing army,
  O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea, with your fever,
  O my land’s maim’d darlings, with the plenteous bloody bandage and
      the crutch,
  Lo, your pallid army follows.)

       5
  But on these days of brightness,
  On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes the
      high-piled farm-wagons, and the fruits and barns,
  Should the dead intrude?

  Ah the dead to me mar not, they fit well in Nature,
  They fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass,
  And along the edge of the sky in the horizon’s far margin.

  Nor do I forget you Departed,
  Nor in winter or summer my lost ones,
  But most in the open air as now when my soul is rapt and at peace,
      like pleasing phantoms,
  Your memories rising glide silently by me.

       6
  I saw the day the return of the heroes,
  (Yet the heroes never surpass’d shall never return,
  Them that day I saw not.)

  I saw the interminable corps, I saw the processions of armies,
  I saw them approaching, defiling by with divisions,
  Streaming northward, their work done, camping awhile in clusters of
      mighty camps.

  No holiday soldiers—youthful, yet veterans,
  Worn, swart, handsome, strong, of the stock of homestead and workshop,
  Harden’d of many a long campaign and sweaty march,
  Inured on many a hard-fought bloody field.

  A pause—the armies wait,
  A million flush’d embattled conquerors wait,
  The world too waits, then soft as breaking night and sure as dawn,
  They melt, they disappear.

  Exult O lands! victorious lands!
  Not there your victory on those red shuddering fields,
  But here and hence your victory.

  Melt, melt away ye armies—disperse ye blue-clad soldiers,
  Resolve ye back again, give up for good your deadly arms,
  Other the arms the fields henceforth for you, or South or North,
  With saner wars, sweet wars, life-giving wars.

       7
  Loud O my throat, and clear O soul!
  The season of thanks and the voice of full-yielding,
  The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility.

  All till’d and untill’d fields expand before me,
  I see the true arenas of my race, or first or last,
  Man’s innocent and strong arenas.

  I see the heroes at other toils,
  I see well-wielded in their hands the better weapons.

  I see where the Mother of All,
  With full-spanning eye gazes forth, dwells long,
  And counts the varied gathering of the products.

  Busy the far, the sunlit panorama,
  Prairie, orchard, and yellow grain of the North,
  Cotton and rice of the South and Louisianian cane,
  Open unseeded fallows, rich fields of clover and timothy,
  Kine and horses feeding, and droves of sheep and swine,
  And many a stately river flowing and many a jocund brook,
  And healthy uplands with herby-perfumed breezes,
  And the good green grass, that delicate miracle the ever-recurring grass.

       8
  Toil on heroes! harvest the products!
  Not alone on those warlike fields the Mother of All,
  With dilated form and lambent eyes watch’d you.

  Toil on heroes! toil well! handle the weapons well!
  The Mother of All, yet here as ever she watches you.

  Well-pleased America thou beholdest,
  Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters,
  The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements;
  Beholdest moving in every direction imbued as with life the
      revolving hay-rakes,
  The steam-power reaping-machines and the horse-power machines
  The engines, thrashers of grain and cleaners of grain, well
      separating the straw, the nimble work of the patent pitchfork,
  Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the southern cotton-gin, and the
      rice-cleanser.

  Beneath thy look O Maternal,
  With these and else and with their own strong hands the heroes harvest.

  All gather and all harvest,
  Yet but for thee O Powerful, not a scythe might swing as now in security,
  Not a maize-stalk dangle as now its silken tassels in peace.

  Under thee only they harvest, even but a wisp of hay under thy great
      face only,
  Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, every barbed spear
      under thee,
  Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, each ear in its
      light-green sheath,
  Gather the hay to its myriad mows in the odorous tranquil barns,
  Oats to their bins, the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan, to theirs;
  Gather the cotton in Mississippi or Alabama, dig and hoard the
      golden the sweet potato of Georgia and the Carolinas,
  Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania,
  Cut the flax in the Middle States, or hemp or tobacco in the Borders,
  Pick the pea and the bean, or pull apples from the trees or bunches
      of grapes from the vines,
  Or aught that ripens in all these States or North or South,
  Under the beaming sun and under thee.

There Was a Child Went Forth

  There was a child went forth every day,
  And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
  And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
  Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

  The early lilacs became part of this child,
  And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
      clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
  And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the
      mare’s foal and the cow’s calf,
  And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side,
  And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the
      beautiful curious liquid,
  And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him.

  The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him,
  Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow corn, and the
      esculent roots of the garden,
  And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms and the fruit afterward,
      and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road,
  And the old drunkard staggering home from the outhouse of the
      tavern whence he had lately risen,
  And the schoolmistress that pass’d on her way to the school,
  And the friendly boys that pass’d, and the quarrelsome boys,
  And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls, and the barefoot negro boy and girl,
  And all the changes of city and country wherever he went.

  His own parents, he that had father’d him and she that had conceiv’d
      him in her womb and birth’d him,
  They gave this child more of themselves than that,
  They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him.

  The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table,
  The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a wholesome
      odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by,
  The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust,
  The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
  The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the
      yearning and swelling heart,
  Affection that will not be gainsay’d, the sense of what is real, the
      thought if after all it should prove unreal,
  The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious
      whether and how,
  Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
  Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes
      and specks what are they?
  The streets themselves and the facades of houses, and goods in the windows,
  Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank’d wharves, the huge crossing at
      the ferries,
  The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset, the river between,
  Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of
      white or brown two miles off,
  The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little
      boat slack-tow’d astern,
  The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
  The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away
      solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
  The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh
      and shore mud,
  These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who
      now goes, and will always go forth every day.

Old Ireland

  Far hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
  Crouching over a grave an ancient sorrowful mother,
  Once a queen, now lean and tatter’d seated on the ground,
  Her old white hair drooping dishevel’d round her shoulders,
  At her feet fallen an unused royal harp,
  Long silent, she too long silent, mourning her shrouded hope and heir,
  Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow because most full of love.

  Yet a word ancient mother,
  You need crouch there no longer on the cold ground with forehead
      between your knees,
  O you need not sit there veil’d in your old white hair so dishevel’d,
  For know you the one you mourn is not in that grave,
  It was an illusion, the son you love was not really dead,
  The Lord is not dead, he is risen again young and strong in another country,
  Even while you wept there by your fallen harp by the grave,
  What you wept for was translated, pass’d from the grave,
  The winds favor’d and the sea sail’d it,
  And now with rosy and new blood,
  Moves to-day in a new country.

The City Dead-House

  By the city dead-house by the gate,
  As idly sauntering wending my way from the clangor,
  I curious pause, for lo, an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute brought,
  Her corpse they deposit unclaim’d, it lies on the damp brick pavement,
  The divine woman, her body, I see the body, I look on it alone,
  That house once full of passion and beauty, all else I notice not,
  Nor stillness so cold, nor running water from faucet, nor odors
      morbific impress me,
  But the house alone—that wondrous house—that delicate fair house
      —that ruin!
  That immortal house more than all the rows of dwellings ever built!
  Or white-domed capitol with majestic figure surmounted, or all the
      old high-spired cathedrals,
  That little house alone more than them all—poor, desperate house!
  Fair, fearful wreck—tenement of a soul—itself a soul,
  Unclaim’d, avoided house—take one breath from my tremulous lips,
  Take one tear dropt aside as I go for thought of you,
  Dead house of love—house of madness and sin, crumbled, crush’d,
  House of life, erewhile talking and laughing—but ah, poor house,
      dead even then,
  Months, years, an echoing, garnish’d house—but dead, dead, dead.

This Compost

       1
  Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
  I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
  I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
  I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
  I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

  O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
  How can you be alive you growths of spring?
  How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
  Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
  Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

  Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
  Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
  Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
  I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,
  I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through
      the sod and turn it up underneath,
  I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

       2
  Behold this compost! behold it well!
  Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
  The grass of spring covers the prairies,
  The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
  The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
  The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
  The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
  The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
  The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on
      their nests,
  The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
  The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the
      colt from the mare,
  Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
  Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in
      the dooryards,
  The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata
      of sour dead.

  What chemistry!
  That the winds are really not infectious,
  That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which
      is so amorous after me,
  That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
  That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited
      themselves in it,
  That all is clean forever and forever,
  That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
  That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
  That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that
      melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
  That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
  Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once
      catching disease.

  Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
  It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
  It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
      successions of diseas’d corpses,
  It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
  It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
  It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
      from them at last.

To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire

  Courage yet, my brother or my sister!
  Keep on—Liberty is to be subserv’d whatever occurs;
  That is nothing that is quell’d by one or two failures, or any
      number of failures,
  Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any
      unfaithfulness,
  Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.

  What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents,
  Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is
      positive and composed, knows no discouragement,
  Waiting patiently, waiting its time.

  (Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
  But songs of insurrection also,
  For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over,
  And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,
  And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.)

  The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat,
  The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,
  The prison, scaffold, garrote, handcuffs, iron necklace and
      leadballs do their work,
  The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,
  The great speakers and writers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands,
  The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with their own blood,
  The young men droop their eyelashes toward the ground when they meet;
  But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the
      infidel enter’d into full possession.

  When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the
      second or third to go,
  It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

  When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,
  And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged
      from any part of the earth,
  Then only shall liberty or the idea of liberty be discharged from
      that part of the earth,
  And the infidel come into full possession.

  Then courage European revolter, revoltress!
  For till all ceases neither must you cease.

  I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself,
      nor what any thing is for,)
  But I will search carefully for it even in being foil’d,
  In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment—for they too are great.

  Did we think victory great?
  So it is—but now it seems to me, when it cannot be help’d, that
      defeat is great,
  And that death and dismay are great.

Unnamed Land

  Nations ten thousand years before these States, and many times ten
      thousand years before these States,
  Garner’d clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and
      travel’d their course and pass’d on,
  What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes
      and nomads,
  What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others,
  What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions,
  What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and phrenology,
  What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of death
      and the soul,
  Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish and
      undevelop’d,
  Not a mark, not a record remains—and yet all remains.

  O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more
      than we are for nothing,
  I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much
      as we now belong to it.

  Afar they stand, yet near to me they stand,
  Some with oval countenances learn’d and calm,
  Some naked and savage, some like huge collections of insects,
  Some in tents, herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,
  Some prowling through woods, some living peaceably on farms,
      laboring, reaping, filling barns,
  Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories,
      libraries, shows, courts, theatres, wonderful monuments.
  Are those billions of men really gone?
  Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?
  Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us?
  Did they achieve nothing for good for themselves?

  I believe of all those men and women that fill’d the unnamed lands,
      every one exists this hour here or elsewhere, invisible to us.
  In exact proportion to what he or she grew from in life, and out of
      what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinn’d, in life.

  I believe that was not the end of those nations or any person of
      them, any more than this shall be the end of my nation, or of me;
  Of their languages, governments, marriage, literature, products,
      games, wars, manners, crimes, prisons, slaves, heroes, poets,
  I suspect their results curiously await in the yet unseen world,
      counterparts of what accrued to them in the seen world,
  I suspect I shall meet them there,
  I suspect I shall there find each old particular of those unnamed lands.

Song of Prudence

  Manhattan’s streets I saunter’d pondering,
  On Time, Space, Reality—on such as these, and abreast with them Prudence.

  The last explanation always remains to be made about prudence,
  Little and large alike drop quietly aside from the prudence that
      suits immortality.

  The soul is of itself,
  All verges to it, all has reference to what ensues,
  All that a person does, says, thinks, is of consequence,
  Not a move can a man or woman make, that affects him or her in a day,
      month, any part of the direct lifetime, or the hour of death,
  But the same affects him or her onward afterward through the
      indirect lifetime.

  The indirect is just as much as the direct,
  The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the
      body, if not more.

  Not one word or deed, not venereal sore, discoloration, privacy of
      the onanist,
  Putridity of gluttons or rum-drinkers, peculation, cunning,
      betrayal, murder, seduction, prostitution,
  But has results beyond death as really as before death.

  Charity and personal force are the only investments worth any thing.

  No specification is necessary, all that a male or female does, that
      is vigorous, benevolent, clean, is so much profit to him or her,
  In the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope
      of it forever.

  Who has been wise receives interest,
  Savage, felon, President, judge, farmer, sailor, mechanic, literat,
      young, old, it is the same,
  The interest will come round—all will come round.

  Singly, wholly, to affect now, affected their time, will forever affect,
      all of the past and all of the present and all of the future,
  All the brave actions of war and peace,
  All help given to relatives, strangers, the poor, old, sorrowful,
      young children, widows, the sick, and to shunn’d persons,
  All self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw
      others fill the seats of the boats,
  All offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a
      friend’s sake, or opinion’s sake,
  All pains of enthusiasts scoff’d at by their neighbors,
  All the limitless sweet love and precious suffering of mothers,
  All honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded,
  All the grandeur and good of ancient nations whose fragments we inherit,
  All the good of the dozens of ancient nations unknown to us by name,
      date, location,
  All that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no,
  All suggestions of the divine mind of man or the divinity of his
      mouth, or the shaping of his great hands,
  All that is well thought or said this day on any part of the globe,
      or on any of the wandering stars, or on any of the fix’d stars,
      by those there as we are here,
  All that is henceforth to be thought or done by you whoever you are,
      or by any one,
  These inure, have inured, shall inure, to the identities from which
      they sprang, or shall spring.

  Did you guess any thing lived only its moment?
  The world does not so exist, no parts palpable or impalpable so exist,
  No consummation exists without being from some long previous
      consummation, and that from some other,
  Without the farthest conceivable one coming a bit nearer the
      beginning than any.

  Whatever satisfies souls is true;
  Prudence entirely satisfies the craving and glut of souls,
  Itself only finally satisfies the soul,
  The soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every lesson
      but its own.

  Now I breathe the word of the prudence that walks abreast with time,
      space, reality,
  That answers the pride which refuses every lesson but its own.

  What is prudence is indivisible,
  Declines to separate one part of life from every part,
  Divides not the righteous from the unrighteous or the living from the dead,
  Matches every thought or act by its correlative,
  Knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement,
  Knows that the young man who composedly peril’d his life and lost it
      has done exceedingly well for himself without doubt,
  That he who never peril’d his life, but retains it to old age in
      riches and ease, has probably achiev’d nothing for himself worth
      mentioning,
  Knows that only that person has really learn’d who has learn’d to
      prefer results,
  Who favors body and soul the same,
  Who perceives the indirect assuredly following the direct,
  Who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries nor
      avoids death.

The Singer in the Prison

          O sight of pity, shame and dole!
          O fearful thought—a convict soul.

       1
  Rang the refrain along the hall, the prison,
  Rose to the roof, the vaults of heaven above,
  Pouring in floods of melody in tones so pensive sweet and strong the
      like whereof was never heard,
  Reaching the far-off sentry and the armed guards, who ceas’d their pacing,
  Making the hearer’s pulses stop for ecstasy and awe.

       2
  The sun was low in the west one winter day,
  When down a narrow aisle amid the thieves and outlaws of the land,
  (There by the hundreds seated, sear-faced murderers, wily counterfeiters,
  Gather’d to Sunday church in prison walls, the keepers round,
  Plenteous, well-armed, watching with vigilant eyes,)
  Calmly a lady walk’d holding a little innocent child by either hand,
  Whom seating on their stools beside her on the platform,
  She, first preluding with the instrument a low and musical prelude,
  In voice surpassing all, sang forth a quaint old hymn.

       A soul confined by bars and bands,
       Cries, help! O help! and wrings her hands,
       Blinded her eyes, bleeding her breast,
       Nor pardon finds, nor balm of rest.

       Ceaseless she paces to and fro,
       O heart-sick days! O nights of woe!
       Nor hand of friend, nor loving face,
       Nor favor comes, nor word of grace.

       It was not I that sinn’d the sin,
       The ruthless body dragg’d me in;
       Though long I strove courageously,
       The body was too much for me.

       Dear prison’d soul bear up a space,
       For soon or late the certain grace;
       To set thee free and bear thee home,
       The heavenly pardoner death shall come.

          Convict no more, nor shame, nor dole!
          Depart—a God-enfranchis’d soul!

       3
  The singer ceas’d,
  One glance swept from her clear calm eyes o’er all those upturn’d faces,
  Strange sea of prison faces, a thousand varied, crafty, brutal,
      seam’d and beauteous faces,
  Then rising, passing back along the narrow aisle between them,
  While her gown touch’d them rustling in the silence,
  She vanish’d with her children in the dusk.

  While upon all, convicts and armed keepers ere they stirr’d,
  (Convict forgetting prison, keeper his loaded pistol,)
  A hush and pause fell down a wondrous minute,
  With deep half-stifled sobs and sound of bad men bow’d and moved to weeping,
  And youth’s convulsive breathings, memories of home,
  The mother’s voice in lullaby, the sister’s care, the happy childhood,
  The long-pent spirit rous’d to reminiscence;
  A wondrous minute then—but after in the solitary night, to many,
      many there,
  Years after, even in the hour of death, the sad refrain, the tune,
      the voice, the words,
  Resumed, the large calm lady walks the narrow aisle,
  The wailing melody again, the singer in the prison sings,

       O sight of pity, shame and dole!
       O fearful thought—a convict soul.

Warble for Lilac-Time

  Warble me now for joy of lilac-time, (returning in reminiscence,)
  Sort me O tongue and lips for Nature’s sake, souvenirs of earliest summer,
  Gather the welcome signs, (as children with pebbles or stringing shells,)
  Put in April and May, the hylas croaking in the ponds, the elastic air,
  Bees, butterflies, the sparrow with its simple notes,
  Blue-bird and darting swallow, nor forget the high-hole flashing his
      golden wings,
  The tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor,
  Shimmer of waters with fish in them, the cerulean above,
  All that is jocund and sparkling, the brooks running,
  The maple woods, the crisp February days and the sugar-making,
  The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted,
  With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset,
  Or flitting among the trees of the apple-orchard, building the nest
      of his mate,
  The melted snow of March, the willow sending forth its yellow-green sprouts,
  For spring-time is here! the summer is here! and what is this in it
      and from it?
  Thou, soul, unloosen’d—the restlessness after I know not what;
  Come, let us lag here no longer, let us be up and away!
  O if one could but fly like a bird!
  O to escape, to sail forth as in a ship!
  To glide with thee O soul, o’er all, in all, as a ship o’er the waters;
  Gathering these hints, the preludes, the blue sky, the grass, the
      morning drops of dew,
  The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves,
  Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blossoms called innocence,
  Samples and sorts not for themselves alone, but for their atmosphere,
  To grace the bush I love—to sing with the birds,
  A warble for joy of returning in reminiscence.

Outlines for a Tomb [G. P., Buried 1870]

       1
  What may we chant, O thou within this tomb?
  What tablets, outlines, hang for thee, O millionnaire?
  The life thou lived’st we know not,
  But that thou walk’dst thy years in barter, ’mid the haunts of
      brokers,
  Nor heroism thine, nor war, nor glory.

       2
  Silent, my soul,
  With drooping lids, as waiting, ponder’d,
  Turning from all the samples, monuments of heroes.

  While through the interior vistas,
  Noiseless uprose, phantasmic, (as by night Auroras of the north,)
  Lambent tableaus, prophetic, bodiless scenes,
  Spiritual projections.

  In one, among the city streets a laborer’s home appear’d,
  After his day’s work done, cleanly, sweet-air’d, the gaslight burning,
  The carpet swept and a fire in the cheerful stove.

  In one, the sacred parturition scene,
  A happy painless mother birth’d a perfect child.

  In one, at a bounteous morning meal,
  Sat peaceful parents with contented sons.

  In one, by twos and threes, young people,
  Hundreds concentring, walk’d the paths and streets and roads,
  Toward a tall-domed school.

  In one a trio beautiful,
  Grandmother, loving daughter, loving daughter’s daughter, sat,
  Chatting and sewing.

  In one, along a suite of noble rooms,
  ’Mid plenteous books and journals, paintings on the walls, fine statuettes,
  Were groups of friendly journeymen, mechanics young and old,
  Reading, conversing.

  All, all the shows of laboring life,
  City and country, women’s, men’s and children’s,
  Their wants provided for, hued in the sun and tinged for once with joy,
  Marriage, the street, the factory, farm, the house-room, lodging-room,
  Labor and toll, the bath, gymnasium, playground, library, college,
  The student, boy or girl, led forward to be taught,
  The sick cared for, the shoeless shod, the orphan father’d and mother’d,
  The hungry fed, the houseless housed;
  (The intentions perfect and divine,
  The workings, details, haply human.)

       3
  O thou within this tomb,
  From thee such scenes, thou stintless, lavish giver,
  Tallying the gifts of earth, large as the earth,
  Thy name an earth, with mountains, fields and tides.

  Nor by your streams alone, you rivers,
  By you, your banks Connecticut,
  By you and all your teeming life old Thames,
  By you Potomac laving the ground Washington trod, by you Patapsco,
  You Hudson, you endless Mississippi—nor you alone,
  But to the high seas launch, my thought, his memory.

Out from Behind This Mask [To Confront a Portrait]

       1
  Out from behind this bending rough-cut mask,
  These lights and shades, this drama of the whole,
  This common curtain of the face contain’d in me for me, in you for
      you, in each for each,
  (Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears—0 heaven!
  The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!)
  This glaze of God’s serenest purest sky,
  This film of Satan’s seething pit,
  This heart’s geography’s map, this limitless small continent, this
      soundless sea;
  Out from the convolutions of this globe,
  This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter, Venus, Mars,
  This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only universe,
  Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapt;)
  These burin’d eyes, flashing to you to pass to future time,
  To launch and spin through space revolving sideling, from these to emanate,
  To you whoe’er you are—a look.

       2
  A traveler of thoughts and years, of peace and war,
  Of youth long sped and middle age declining,
  (As the first volume of a tale perused and laid away, and this the second,
  Songs, ventures, speculations, presently to close,)
  Lingering a moment here and now, to you I opposite turn,
  As on the road or at some crevice door by chance, or open’d window,
  Pausing, inclining, baring my head, you specially I greet,
  To draw and clinch your soul for once inseparably with mine,
  Then travel travel on.

Vocalism

       1
  Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine
      power to speak words;
  Are you full-lung’d and limber-lipp’d from long trial? from vigorous
      practice? from physique?
  Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?
  Come duly to the divine power to speak words?
  For only at last after many years, after chastity, friendship,
      procreation, prudence, and nakedness,
  After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
  After a loosen’d throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races,
      after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
  After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing
      obstructions,
  After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man,
      woman, the divine power to speak words;
  Then toward that man or that woman swiftly hasten all—none
      refuse, all attend,
  Armies, ships, antiquities, libraries, paintings, machines, cities,
      hate, despair, amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration, form in
      close ranks,
  They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through the
      mouth of that man or that woman.

       2
  O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?
  Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow,
  As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere
      around the globe.

  All waits for the right voices;
  Where is the practis’d and perfect organ? where is the develop’d soul?
  For I see every word utter’d thence has deeper, sweeter, new sounds,
      impossible on less terms.

  I see brains and lips closed, tympans and temples unstruck,
  Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose,
  Until that comes which has the quality to bring forth what lies
      slumbering forever ready in all words.

To Him That Was Crucified

  My spirit to yours dear brother,
  Do not mind because many sounding your name do not understand you,
  I do not sound your name, but I understand you,
  I specify you with joy O my comrade to salute you, and to salute
      those who are with you, before and since, and those to come also,
  That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession,
  We few equals indifferent of lands, indifferent of times,
  We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers of all theologies,
  Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,
  We walk silent among disputes and assertions, but reject not the
      disputers nor any thing that is asserted,
  We hear the bawling and din, we are reach’d at by divisions,
      jealousies, recriminations on every side,
  They close peremptorily upon us to surround us, my comrade,
  Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and
      down till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras,
  Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and women of races,
      ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are.

You Felons on Trial in Courts

  You felons on trial in courts,
  You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain’d and
      handcuff’d with iron,
  Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison?
  Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain’d with
      iron, or my ankles with iron?

  You prostitutes flaunting over the trottoirs or obscene in your rooms,
  Who am I that I should call you more obscene than myself?

  O culpable! I acknowledge—I expose!
  (O admirers, praise not me—compliment not me—you make me wince,
  I see what you do not—I know what you do not.)

  Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch’d and choked,
  Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell’s tides continually run,
  Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me,
  I walk with delinquents with passionate love,
  I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself,
  And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?

Laws for Creations

  Laws for creations,
  For strong artists and leaders, for fresh broods of teachers and
      perfect literats for America,
  For noble savans and coming musicians.
  All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the
      compact truth of the world,
  There shall be no subject too pronounced—all works shall illustrate
      the divine law of indirections.

  What do you suppose creation is?
  What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and
      own no superior?
  What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but
      that man or woman is as good as God?
  And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
  And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
  And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?

To a Common Prostitute

  Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and
      lusty as Nature,
  Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
  Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to
      rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

  My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that you
      make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
  And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.

  Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me.

I Was Looking a Long While

  I was looking a long while for Intentions,
  For a clew to the history of the past for myself, and for these
      chants—and now I have found it,
  It is not in those paged fables in the libraries, (them I neither
      accept nor reject,)
  It is no more in the legends than in all else,
  It is in the present—it is this earth to-day,
  It is in Democracy—(the purport and aim of all the past,)
  It is the life of one man or one woman to-day—the average man of to-day,
  It is in languages, social customs, literatures, arts,
  It is in the broad show of artificial things, ships, machinery,
      politics, creeds, modern improvements, and the interchange of nations,
  All for the modern—all for the average man of to-day.

Thought

  Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth,
      scholarships, and the like;
  (To me all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,
      except as it results to their bodies and souls,
  So that often to me they appear gaunt and naked,
  And often to me each one mocks the others, and mocks himself or herself,
  And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the
      rotten excrement of maggots,
  And often to me those men and women pass unwittingly the true
      realities of life, and go toward false realities,
  And often to me they are alive after what custom has served them,
      but nothing more,
  And often to me they are sad, hasty, unwaked sonnambules walking the dusk.)

Miracles

  Why, who makes much of a miracle?
  As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
  Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
  Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
  Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
  Or stand under trees in the woods,
  Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
      with any one I love,
  Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
  Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
  Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
  Or animals feeding in the fields,
  Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
  Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
      and bright,
  Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
  These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
  The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

  To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
  Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
  Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
  Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
  To me the sea is a continual miracle,
  The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the
      ships with men in them,
  What stranger miracles are there?

Sparkles from the Wheel

  Where the city’s ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day,
  Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with them.

  By the curb toward the edge of the flagging,
  A knife-grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife,
  Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by foot and knee,
  With measur’d tread he turns rapidly, as he presses with light but
      firm hand,
  Forth issue then in copious golden jets,
  Sparkles from the wheel.

  The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me,
  The sad sharp-chinn’d old man with worn clothes and broad
      shoulder-band of leather,
  Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here
      absorb’d and arrested,
  The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,)
  The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the streets,
  The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press’d blade,
  Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,
  Sparkles from the wheel.

To a Pupil

  Is reform needed? is it through you?
  The greater the reform needed, the greater the Personality you need
      to accomplish it.

  You! do you not see how it would serve to have eyes, blood,
      complexion, clean and sweet?
  Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and soul that
      when you enter the crowd an atmosphere of desire and command
      enters with you, and every one is impress’d with your Personality?

  O the magnet! the flesh over and over!
  Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day to
      inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness,
      elevatedness,
  Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

Unfolded out of the Folds

  Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded, and is
      always to come unfolded,
  Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth is to come the
      superbest man of the earth,
  Unfolded out of the friendliest woman is to come the friendliest man,
  Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman can a man be
      form’d of perfect body,
  Unfolded only out of the inimitable poems of woman can come the
      poems of man, (only thence have my poems come;)
  Unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love, only thence
      can appear the strong and arrogant man I love,
  Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman
      love, only thence come the brawny embraces of the man,
  Unfolded out of the folds of the woman’s brain come all the folds
      of the man’s brain, duly obedient,
  Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded,
  Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy;
  A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity, but
      every of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman;
  First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself.

What Am I After All

  What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own
      name? repeating it over and over;
  I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.

  To you your name also;
  Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in
      the sound of your name?

Kosmos

  Who includes diversity and is Nature,
  Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of
      the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,
  Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing,
      or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing,
  Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover,
  Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,
      spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual,
  Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good,
  Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body
      understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
  The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States;
  Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in
      other globes with their suns and moons,
  Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day
      but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
  The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

Others May Praise What They Like

  Others may praise what they like;
  But I, from the banks of the running Missouri, praise nothing in art
      or aught else,
  Till it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river, also the
      western prairie-scent,
  And exudes it all again.

Who Learns My Lesson Complete?

  Who learns my lesson complete?
  Boss, journeyman, apprentice, churchman and atheist,
  The stupid and the wise thinker, parents and offspring, merchant,
      clerk, porter and customer,
  Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy—draw nigh and commence;
  It is no lesson—it lets down the bars to a good lesson,
  And that to another, and every one to another still.

  The great laws take and effuse without argument,
  I am of the same style, for I am their friend,
  I love them quits and quits, I do not halt and make salaams.

  I lie abstracted and hear beautiful tales of things and the reasons
      of things,
  They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.

  I cannot say to any person what I hear—I cannot say it to myself—
      it is very wonderful.

  It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe moving so
      exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one jolt or
      the untruth of a single second,
  I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years,
      nor ten billions of years,
  Nor plann’d and built one thing after another as an architect plans
      and builds a house.

  I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman,
  Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman,
  Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

  Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is immortal;
  I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and
      how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful,
  And pass’d from a babe in the creeping trance of a couple of
      summers and winters to articulate and walk—all this is
      equally wonderful.

  And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other
      without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see
      each other, is every bit as wonderful.

  And that I can think such thoughts as these is just as wonderful,
  And that I can remind you, and you think them and know them to
      be true, is just as wonderful.

  And that the moon spins round the earth and on with the earth, is
      equally wonderful,
  And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is equally
      wonderful.

Tests

  All submit to them where they sit, inner, secure, unapproachable to
      analysis in the soul,
  Not traditions, not the outer authorities are the judges,
  They are the judges of outer authorities and of all traditions,
  They corroborate as they go only whatever corroborates themselves,
      and touches themselves;
  For all that, they have it forever in themselves to corroborate far
      and near without one exception.

The Torch

  On my Northwest coast in the midst of the night a fishermen’s group
      stands watching,
  Out on the lake that expands before them, others are spearing salmon,
  The canoe, a dim shadowy thing, moves across the black water,
  Bearing a torch ablaze at the prow.

O Star of France [1870–71]

  O star of France,
  The brightness of thy hope and strength and fame,
  Like some proud ship that led the fleet so long,
  Beseems to-day a wreck driven by the gale, a mastless hulk,
  And ’mid its teeming madden’d half-drown’d crowds,
  Nor helm nor helmsman.

  Dim smitten star,
  Orb not of France alone, pale symbol of my soul, its dearest hopes,
  The struggle and the daring, rage divine for liberty,
  Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast’s dreams of brotherhood,
  Of terror to the tyrant and the priest.

  Star crucified—by traitors sold,
  Star panting o’er a land of death, heroic land,
  Strange, passionate, mocking, frivolous land.

  Miserable! yet for thy errors, vanities, sins, I will not now rebuke thee,
  Thy unexampled woes and pangs have quell’d them all,
  And left thee sacred.

  In that amid thy many faults thou ever aimedst highly,
  In that thou wouldst not really sell thyself however great the price,
  In that thou surely wakedst weeping from thy drugg’d sleep,
  In that alone among thy sisters thou, giantess, didst rend the ones
      that shamed thee,
  In that thou couldst not, wouldst not, wear the usual chains,
  This cross, thy livid face, thy pierced hands and feet,
  The spear thrust in thy side.

  O star! O ship of France, beat back and baffled long!
  Bear up O smitten orb! O ship continue on!

  Sure as the ship of all, the Earth itself,
  Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos,
  Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons,
  Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty,
  Onward beneath the sun following its course,
  So thee O ship of France!

  Finish’d the days, the clouds dispel’d
  The travail o’er, the long-sought extrication,
  When lo! reborn, high o’er the European world,
  (In gladness answering thence, as face afar to face, reflecting ours
      Columbia,)
  Again thy star O France, fair lustrous star,
  In heavenly peace, clearer, more bright than ever,
  Shall beam immortal.

The Ox-Tamer

  In a far-away northern county in the placid pastoral region,
  Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous tamer of oxen,
  There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to
      break them,
  He will take the wildest steer in the world and break him and tame him,
  He will go fearless without any whip where the young bullock
      chafes up and down the yard,
  The bullock’s head tosses restless high in the air with raging eyes,
  Yet see you! how soon his rage subsides—how soon this tamer tames him;
  See you! on the farms hereabout a hundred oxen young and old,
      and he is the man who has tamed them,
  They all know him, all are affectionate to him;
  See you! some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking;
  Some are buff-color’d, some mottled, one has a white line running
      along his back, some are brindled,
  Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)—see you! the bright hides,
  See, the two with stars on their foreheads—see, the round bodies
      and broad backs,
  How straight and square they stand on their legs—what fine sagacious eyes!
  How straight they watch their tamer—they wish him near them—how
      they turn to look after him!
  What yearning expression! how uneasy they are when he moves away from them;
  Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics,
      poems, depart—all else departs,)
  I confess I envy only his fascination—my silent, illiterate friend,
  Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
  In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.

An Old Man’s Thought of School
  [For the Inauguration of a Public School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874]

  An old man’s thought of school,
  An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth itself cannot.

  Now only do I know you,
  O fair auroral skies—O morning dew upon the grass!

  And these I see, these sparkling eyes,
  These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,
  Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,
  Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
  On the soul’s voyage.

  Only a lot of boys and girls?
  Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
  Only a public school?

  Ah more, infinitely more;
  (As George Fox rais’d his warning cry, “Is it this pile of brick and
      mortar, these dead floors, windows, rails, you call the church?
  Why this is not the church at all—the church is living, ever living
      souls.”)

  And you America,
  Cast you the real reckoning for your present?
  The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil?
  To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.

Wandering at Morn

  Wandering at morn,
  Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,
  Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine!
  Thee coil’d in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
      with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
  This common marvel I beheld—the parent thrush I watch’d feeding its young,
  The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,
  Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

  There ponder’d, felt I,
  If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn’d,
  If vermin so transposed, so used and bless’d may be,
  Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;
  Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?
  From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
  Destin’d to fill the world.

Italian Music in Dakota
  [“The Seventeenth—the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.”]

  Through the soft evening air enwinding all,
  Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
  In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes,
  Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,
  (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before,
  Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
  Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house,
  Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
  Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish,
  And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)
  Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
  Music, Italian music in Dakota.

  While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl’d realm,
  Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
  Acknowledging rapport however far remov’d,
  (As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)
  Listens well pleas’d.

With All Thy Gifts

  With all thy gifts America,
  Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,
  Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee—with these and like of
      these vouchsafed to thee,
  What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving,)
  The gift of perfect women fit for thee—what if that gift of gifts
      thou lackest?
  The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee?
  The mothers fit for thee?

My Picture-Gallery

  In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix’d house,
  It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;
  Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories!
  Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death;
  Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself,
  With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures.

The Prairie States

  A newer garden of creation, no primal solitude,
  Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms,
  With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one,
  By all the world contributed—freedom’s and law’s and thrift’s society,
  The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time’s accumulations,
  To justify the past.

Book XXV. Proud Music of the Storm

       1
  Proud music of the storm,
  Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,
  Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains,
  Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras,
  You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,
  Blending with Nature’s rhythmus all the tongues of nations;
  You chords left as by vast composers—you choruses,
  You formless, free, religious dances—you from the Orient,
  You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts,
  You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry,
  Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls,
  Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless,
  Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you seiz’d me?

      2
  Come forward O my soul, and let the rest retire,
  Listen, lose not, it is toward thee they tend,
  Parting the midnight, entering my slumber-chamber,
  For thee they sing and dance O soul.

  A festival song,
  The duet of the bridegroom and the bride, a marriage-march,
  With lips of love, and hearts of lovers fill’d to the brim with love,
  The red-flush’d cheeks and perfumes, the cortege swarming full of
      friendly faces young and old,
  To flutes’ clear notes and sounding harps’ cantabile.

  Now loud approaching drums,
  Victoria! seest thou in powder-smoke the banners torn but flying?
      the rout of the baffled?
  Hearest those shouts of a conquering army?

  (Ah soul, the sobs of women, the wounded groaning in agony,
  The hiss and crackle of flames, the blacken’d ruins, the embers of cities,
  The dirge and desolation of mankind.)

  Now airs antique and mediaeval fill me,
  I see and hear old harpers with their harps at Welsh festivals,
  I hear the minnesingers singing their lays of love,
  I hear the minstrels, gleemen, troubadours, of the middle ages.

  Now the great organ sounds,
  Tremulous, while underneath, (as the hid footholds of the earth,
  On which arising rest, and leaping forth depend,
  All shapes of beauty, grace and strength, all hues we know,
  Green blades of grass and warbling birds, children that gambol and
      play, the clouds of heaven above,)
  The strong base stands, and its pulsations intermits not,
  Bathing, supporting, merging all the rest, maternity of all the rest,
  And with it every instrument in multitudes,
  The players playing, all the world’s musicians,
  The solemn hymns and masses rousing adoration,
  All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals,
  The measureless sweet vocalists of ages,
  And for their solvent setting earth’s own diapason,
  Of winds and woods and mighty ocean waves,
  A new composite orchestra, binder of years and climes, ten-fold renewer,
  As of the far-back days the poets tell, the Paradiso,
  The straying thence, the separation long, but now the wandering done,
  The journey done, the journeyman come home,
  And man and art with Nature fused again.

  Tutti! for earth and heaven;
  (The Almighty leader now for once has signal’d with his wand.)

  The manly strophe of the husbands of the world,
  And all the wives responding.

  The tongues of violins,
  (I think O tongues ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself,
  This brooding yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.)

       3
  Ah from a little child,
  Thou knowest soul how to me all sounds became music,
  My mother’s voice in lullaby or hymn,
  (The voice, O tender voices, memory’s loving voices,
  Last miracle of all, O dearest mother’s, sister’s, voices;)
  The rain, the growing corn, the breeze among the long-leav’d corn,
  The measur’d sea-surf beating on the sand,
  The twittering bird, the hawk’s sharp scream,
  The wild-fowl’s notes at night as flying low migrating north or south,
  The psalm in the country church or mid the clustering trees, the
      open air camp-meeting,
  The fiddler in the tavern, the glee, the long-strung sailor-song,
  The lowing cattle, bleating sheep, the crowing cock at dawn.

  All songs of current lands come sounding round me,
  The German airs of friendship, wine and love,
  Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances, English warbles,
  Chansons of France, Scotch tunes, and o’er the rest,
  Italia’s peerless compositions.

  Across the stage with pallor on her face, yet lurid passion,
  Stalks Norma brandishing the dagger in her hand.

  I see poor crazed Lucia’s eyes’ unnatural gleam,
  Her hair down her back falls loose and dishevel’d.

  I see where Ernani walking the bridal garden,
  Amid the scent of night-roses, radiant, holding his bride by the hand,
  Hears the infernal call, the death-pledge of the horn.

  To crossing swords and gray hairs bared to heaven,
  The clear electric base and baritone of the world,
  The trombone duo, Libertad forever!
  From Spanish chestnut trees’ dense shade,
  By old and heavy convent walls a wailing song,
  Song of lost love, the torch of youth and life quench’d in despair,
  Song of the dying swan, Fernando’s heart is breaking.

  Awaking from her woes at last retriev’d Amina sings,
  Copious as stars and glad as morning light the torrents of her joy.

  (The teeming lady comes,
  The lustrious orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother,
  Sister of loftiest gods, Alboni’s self I hear.)

       4
  I hear those odes, symphonies, operas,
  I hear in the William Tell the music of an arous’d and angry people,
  I hear Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, the Prophet, or Robert,
  Gounod’s Faust, or Mozart’s Don Juan.

  I hear the dance-music of all nations,
  The waltz, some delicious measure, lapsing, bathing me in bliss,
  The bolero to tinkling guitars and clattering castanets.

  I see religious dances old and new,
  I hear the sound of the Hebrew lyre,
  I see the crusaders marching bearing the cross on high, to the
      martial clang of cymbals,
  I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers’d with frantic
      shouts, as they spin around turning always towards Mecca,
  I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs,
  Again, at Eleusis, home of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks dancing,
  I hear them clapping their hands as they bend their bodies,
  I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet.

  I see again the wild old Corybantian dance, the performers wounding
      each other,
  I see the Roman youth to the shrill sound of flageolets throwing and
      catching their weapons,
  As they fall on their knees and rise again.

  I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling,
  I see the worshippers within, nor form nor sermon, argument nor word,
  But silent, strange, devout, rais’d, glowing heads, ecstatic faces.

  I hear the Egyptian harp of many strings,
  The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen,
  The sacred imperial hymns of China,
  To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone,)
  Or to Hindu flutes and the fretting twang of the vina,
  A band of bayaderes.

       5
  Now Asia, Africa leave me, Europe seizing inflates me,
  To organs huge and bands I hear as from vast concourses of voices,
  Luther’s strong hymn Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott,
  Rossini’s Stabat Mater dolorosa,
  Or floating in some high cathedral dim with gorgeous color’d windows,
  The passionate Agnus Dei or Gloria in Excelsis.

  Composers! mighty maestros!
  And you, sweet singers of old lands, soprani, tenori, bassi!
  To you a new bard caroling in the West,
  Obeisant sends his love.

  (Such led to thee O soul,
  All senses, shows and objects, lead to thee,
  But now it seems to me sound leads o’er all the rest.)

  I hear the annual singing of the children in St. Paul’s cathedral,
  Or, under the high roof of some colossal hall, the symphonies,
      oratorios of Beethoven, Handel, or Haydn,
  The Creation in billows of godhood laves me.

  Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)
  Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
  Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also,
  The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,
  Utter, pour in, for I would take them all!

       6
  Then I woke softly,
  And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
  And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,
  And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
  And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervor,
  And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
  And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,
  I said to my silent curious soul out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
  Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
  Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day,
  Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
  Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.

  And I said, moreover,
  Haply what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,
  Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings nor harsh scream,
  Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
  Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers
      of harmonies,
  Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,
  Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-calls of camps,
  But to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
  Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night
      air, uncaught, unwritten,
  Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.

Book XXVI. Passage to India

       1
  Singing my days,
  Singing the great achievements of the present,
  Singing the strong light works of engineers,
  Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
  In the Old World the east the Suez canal,
  The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,
  The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;
  Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul,
  The Past! the Past! the Past!

  The Past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect!
  The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows!
  The past—the infinite greatness of the past!
  For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
  (As a projectile form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on,
  So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)

       2
  Passage O soul to India!
  Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.

  Not you alone proud truths of the world,
  Nor you alone ye facts of modern science,
  But myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables,
  The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,
  The deep diving bibles and legends,
  The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;
  O you temples fairer than lilies pour’d over by the rising sun!
  O you fables spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known,
      mounting to heaven!
  You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d
      with gold!
  Towers of fables immortal fashion’d from mortal dreams!
  You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest!
  You too with joy I sing.

  Passage to India!
  Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
  The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
  The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
  The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
  The lands to be welded together.

  A worship new I sing,
  You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,
  You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,
  You, not for trade or transportation only,
  But in God’s name, and for thy sake O soul.

       3
  Passage to India!
  Lo soul for thee of tableaus twain,
  I see in one the Suez canal initiated, open’d,
  I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Engenie’s leading the van,
  I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level
      sand in the distance,
  I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d,
  The gigantic dredging machines.

  In one again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the same,)
  I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier,
  I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying
      freight and passengers,
  I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,
  I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world,
  I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes,
      the buttes,
  I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless,
      sage-deserts,
  I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me the great
      mountains, I see the Wind river and the Wahsatch mountains,
  I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest, I pass the
      Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas,
  I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its base,
  I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river,
  I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines,
  Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold
      enchanting mirages of waters and meadows,
  Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines,
  Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,
  Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,
  The road between Europe and Asia.

  (Ah Genoese thy dream! thy dream!
  Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,
  The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.)

       4
  Passage to India!
  Struggles of many a captain, tales of many a sailor dead,
  Over my mood stealing and spreading they come,
  Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach’d sky.

  Along all history, down the slopes,
  As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again to the surface rising,
  A ceaseless thought, a varied train—lo, soul, to thee, thy sight,
      they rise,
  The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions;
  Again Vasco de Gama sails forth,
  Again the knowledge gain’d, the mariner’s compass,
  Lands found and nations born, thou born America,
  For purpose vast, man’s long probation fill’d,
  Thou rondure of the world at last accomplish’d.

       5
  O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
  Cover’d all over with visible power and beauty,
  Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
  Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
  Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees,
  With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
  Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.

  Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating,
  Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
  Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,
  With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,
  With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and
      Whither O mocking life?

  Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
  Who Justify these restless explorations?
  Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
  Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
  What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a
      throb to answer ours,
  Cold earth, the place of graves.)

  Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out,
  Perhaps even now the time has arrived.

  After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d,)
  After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
  After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the
      geologist, ethnologist,
  Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
  The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

  Then not your deeds only O voyagers, O scientists and inventors,
      shall be justified,
  All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d,
  All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,
  All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and
      link’d together,
  The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be
      completely Justified,
  Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by
      the true son of God, the poet,
  (He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains,
  He shall double the cape of Good Hope to some purpose,)
  Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,
  The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.

       6
  Year at whose wide-flung door I sing!
  Year of the purpose accomplish’d!
  Year of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans!
  (No mere doge of Venice now wedding the Adriatic,)
  I see O year in you the vast terraqueous globe given and giving all,
  Europe to Asia, Africa join’d, and they to the New World,
  The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a festival garland,
  As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand.

  Passage to India!
  Cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man,
  The river Euphrates flowing, the past lit up again.

  Lo soul, the retrospect brought forward,
  The old, most populous, wealthiest of earth’s lands,
  The streams of the Indus and the Ganges and their many affluents,
  (I my shores of America walking to-day behold, resuming all,)
  The tale of Alexander on his warlike marches suddenly dying,
  On one side China and on the other side Persia and Arabia,
  To the south the great seas and the bay of Bengal,
  The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes,
  Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender and junior Buddha,
  Central and southern empires and all their belongings, possessors,
  The wars of Tamerlane,the reign of Aurungzebe,
  The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the
      Arabs, Portuguese,
  The first travelers famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor,
  Doubts to be solv’d, the map incognita, blanks to be fill’d,
  The foot of man unstay’d, the hands never at rest,
  Thyself O soul that will not brook a challenge.

  The mediaeval navigators rise before me,
  The world of 1492, with its awaken’d enterprise,
  Something swelling in humanity now like the sap of the earth in spring,
  The sunset splendor of chivalry declining.

  And who art thou sad shade?
  Gigantic, visionary, thyself a visionary,
  With majestic limbs and pious beaming eyes,
  Spreading around with every look of thine a golden world,
  Enhuing it with gorgeous hues.

  As the chief histrion,
  Down to the footlights walks in some great scena,
  Dominating the rest I see the Admiral himself,
  (History’s type of courage, action, faith,)
  Behold him sail from Palos leading his little fleet,
  His voyage behold, his return, his great fame,
  His misfortunes, calumniators, behold him a prisoner, chain’d,
  Behold his dejection, poverty, death.

  (Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,
  Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
  Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s due
      occasion,
  Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms,
  And fills the earth with use and beauty.)

       7
  Passage indeed O soul to primal thought,
  Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness,
  The young maturity of brood and bloom,
  To realms of budding bibles.

  O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,
  Thy circumnavigation of the world begin,
  Of man, the voyage of his mind’s return,
  To reason’s early paradise,
  Back, back to wisdom’s birth, to innocent intuitions,
  Again with fair creation.

       8
  O we can wait no longer,
  We too take ship O soul,
  Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
  Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,
  Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,)
  Caroling free, singing our song of God,
  Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.

  With laugh and many a kiss,
  (Let others deprecate, let others weep for sin, remorse, humiliation,)
  O soul thou pleasest me, I thee.

  Ah more than any priest O soul we too believe in God,
  But with the mystery of God we dare not dally.

  O soul thou pleasest me, I thee,
  Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night,
  Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, like waters flowing,
  Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite,
  Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over,
  Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,
  I and my soul to range in range of thee.

  O Thou transcendent,
  Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
  Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
  Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,
  Thou moral, spiritual fountain—affection’s source—thou reservoir,
  (O pensive soul of me—O thirst unsatisfied—waitest not there?
  Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade perfect?)
  Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
  That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
  Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
  How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if, out
      of myself,
  I could not launch, to those, superior universes?

  Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
  At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
  But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou actual Me,
  And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,
  Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
  And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.

  Greater than stars or suns,
  Bounding O soul thou journeyest forth;
  What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?
  What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours O soul?
  What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength?
  What cheerful willingness for others’ sake to give up all?
  For others’ sake to suffer all?

  Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d,
  The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,
  Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
  As fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
  The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

       9
  Passage to more than India!
  Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?
  O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?
  Disportest thou on waters such as those?
  Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas?
  Then have thy bent unleash’d.

  Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas!
  Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling problems!
  You, strew’d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, never reach’d you.

  Passage to more than India!
  O secret of the earth and sky!
  Of you O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
  Of you O woods and fields! of you strong mountains of my land!
  Of you O prairies! of you gray rocks!
  O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!
  O day and night, passage to you!

  O sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!
  Passage to you!

  Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!
  Away O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!

  Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail!
  Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
  Have we not grovel’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?
  Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

  Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
  Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
  For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
  And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

  O my brave soul!
  O farther farther sail!
  O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
  O farther, farther, farther sail!

Book XXVII. Prayer of Columbus

  A batter’d, wreck’d old man,
  Thrown on this savage shore, far, far from home,
  Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows, twelve dreary months,
  Sore, stiff with many toils, sicken’d and nigh to death,
  I take my way along the island’s edge,
  Venting a heavy heart.

  I am too full of woe!
  Haply I may not live another day;
  I cannot rest O God, I cannot eat or drink or sleep,
  Till I put forth myself, my prayer, once more to Thee,
  Breathe, bathe myself once more in Thee, commune with Thee,
  Report myself once more to Thee.

  Thou knowest my years entire, my life,
  My long and crowded life of active work, not adoration merely;
  Thou knowest the prayers and vigils of my youth,
  Thou knowest my manhood’s solemn and visionary meditations,
  Thou knowest how before I commenced I devoted all to come to Thee,
  Thou knowest I have in age ratified all those vows and strictly kept them,
  Thou knowest I have not once lost nor faith nor ecstasy in Thee,
  In shackles, prison’d, in disgrace, repining not,
  Accepting all from Thee, as duly come from Thee.

  All my emprises have been fill’d with Thee,
  My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee,
  Sailing the deep or journeying the land for Thee;
  Intentions, purports, aspirations mine, leaving results to Thee.

  O I am sure they really came from Thee,
  The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will,
  The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,
  A message from the Heavens whispering to me even in sleep,
  These sped me on.

  By me and these the work so far accomplish’d,
  By me earth’s elder cloy’d and stifled lands uncloy’d, unloos’d,
  By me the hemispheres rounded and tied, the unknown to the known.

  The end I know not, it is all in Thee,
  Or small or great I know not—haply what broad fields, what lands,
  Haply the brutish measureless human undergrowth I know,
  Transplanted there may rise to stature, knowledge worthy Thee,
  Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn’d to reaping-tools,
  Haply the lifeless cross I know, Europe’s dead cross, may bud and
      blossom there.

  One effort more, my altar this bleak sand;
  That Thou O God my life hast lighted,
  With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee,
  Light rare untellable, lighting the very light,
  Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages;
  For that O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees,
  Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee.

  My terminus near,
  The clouds already closing in upon me,
  The voyage balk’d, the course disputed, lost,
  I yield my ships to Thee.

  My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,
  My brain feels rack’d, bewilder’d,
  Let the old timbers part, I will not part,
  I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me,
  Thee, Thee at least I know.

  Is it the prophet’s thought I speak, or am I raving?
  What do I know of life? what of myself?
  I know not even my own work past or present,
  Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
  Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
  Mocking, perplexing me.

  And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
  As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes,
  Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
  And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
  And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

Book XXVIII. The Sleepers

       1
  I wander all night in my vision,
  Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
  Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,
  Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory,
  Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.

  How solemn they look there, stretch’d and still,
  How quiet they breathe, the little children in their cradles.

  The wretched features of ennuyes, the white features of corpses, the
      livid faces of drunkards, the sick-gray faces of onanists,
  The gash’d bodies on battle-fields, the insane in their
      strong-door’d rooms, the sacred idiots, the new-born emerging
      from gates, and the dying emerging from gates,
  The night pervades them and infolds them.

  The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm on
      the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of the husband,
  The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed,
  The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs,
  And the mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt.

  The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
  The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps,
  The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep?
  And the murder’d person, how does he sleep?

  The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
  And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
  The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
  And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.

  I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst-suffering and
      the most restless,
  I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them,
  The restless sink in their beds, they fitfully sleep.

  Now I pierce the darkness, new beings appear,
  The earth recedes from me into the night,
  I saw that it was beautiful, and I see that what is not the earth is
      beautiful.

  I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers
      each in turn,
  I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
  And I become the other dreamers.

  I am a dance—play up there! the fit is whirling me fast!

  I am the ever-laughing—it is new moon and twilight,
  I see the hiding of douceurs, I see nimble ghosts whichever way look,
  Cache and cache again deep in the ground and sea, and where it is
      neither ground nor sea.

  Well do they do their jobs those journeymen divine,
  Only from me can they hide nothing, and would not if they could,
  I reckon I am their boss and they make me a pet besides,
  And surround me and lead me and run ahead when I walk,
  To lift their cunning covers to signify me with stretch’d arms, and
      resume the way;
  Onward we move, a gay gang of blackguards! with mirth-shouting
      music and wild-flapping pennants of joy!

  I am the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician,
  The emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box,
  He who has been famous and he who shall be famous after to-day,
  The stammerer, the well-form’d person, the wasted or feeble person.

  I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly,
  My truant lover has come, and it is dark.

  Double yourself and receive me darkness,
  Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him.

  I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk.

  He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,
  He rises with me silently from the bed.

  Darkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was sweaty and panting,
  I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.

  My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions,
  I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.

  Be careful darkness! already what was it touch’d me?
  I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one,
  I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.

       2
  I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid,
  Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake.

  It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman’s,
  I sit low in a straw-bottom chair and carefully darn my grandson’s
      stockings.

  It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter midnight,
  I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

  A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie in the coffin,
  It is dark here under ground, it is not evil or pain here, it is
      blank here, for reasons.

  (It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy,
  Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.)

       3
  I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies
      of the sea,
  His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with
      courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs,
  I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,
  I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on
      the rocks.

  What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?
  Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime
      of his middle age?

  Steady and long he struggles,
  He is baffled, bang’d, bruis’d, he holds out while his strength
      holds out,
  The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him away,
      they roll him, swing him, turn him,
  His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is
      continually bruis’d on rocks,
  Swiftly and ought of sight is borne the brave corpse.

       4
  I turn but do not extricate myself,
  Confused, a past-reading, another, but with darkness yet.

  The beach is cut by the razory ice-wind, the wreck-guns sound,
  The tempest lulls, the moon comes floundering through the drifts.

  I look where the ship helplessly heads end on, I hear the burst as
      she strikes, I hear the howls of dismay, they grow fainter and fainter.

  I cannot aid with my wringing fingers,
  I can but rush to the surf and let it drench me and freeze upon me.

  I search with the crowd, not one of the company is wash’d to us alive,
  In the morning I help pick up the dead and lay them in rows in a barn.

       5
  Now of the older war-days, the defeat at Brooklyn,
  Washington stands inside the lines, he stands on the intrench’d
      hills amid a crowd of officers.
  His face is cold and damp, he cannot repress the weeping drops,
  He lifts the glass perpetually to his eyes, the color is blanch’d
      from his cheeks,
  He sees the slaughter of the southern braves confided to him by
      their parents.

  The same at last and at last when peace is declared,
  He stands in the room of the old tavern, the well-belov’d soldiers
      all pass through,
  The officers speechless and slow draw near in their turns,
  The chief encircles their necks with his arm and kisses them on the cheek,
  He kisses lightly the wet cheeks one after another, he shakes hands
      and bids good-by to the army.

       6
  Now what my mother told me one day as we sat at dinner together,
  Of when she was a nearly grown girl living home with her parents on
      the old homestead.

  A red squaw came one breakfast-time to the old homestead,
  On her back she carried a bundle of rushes for rush-bottoming chairs,
  Her hair, straight, shiny, coarse, black, profuse, half-envelop’d
      her face,
  Her step was free and elastic, and her voice sounded exquisitely as
      she spoke.

  My mother look’d in delight and amazement at the stranger,
  She look’d at the freshness of her tall-borne face and full and
      pliant limbs,
  The more she look’d upon her she loved her,
  Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity,
  She made her sit on a bench by the jamb of the fireplace, she cook’d
      food for her,
  She had no work to give her, but she gave her remembrance and fondness.

  The red squaw staid all the forenoon, and toward the middle of the
      afternoon she went away,
  O my mother was loth to have her go away,
  All the week she thought of her, she watch’d for her many a month,
  She remember’d her many a winter and many a summer,
  But the red squaw never came nor was heard of there again.

       7
  A show of the summer softness—a contact of something unseen—an
      amour of the light and air,
  I am jealous and overwhelm’d with friendliness,
  And will go gallivant with the light and air myself.

  O love and summer, you are in the dreams and in me,
  Autumn and winter are in the dreams, the farmer goes with his thrift,
  The droves and crops increase, the barns are well-fill’d.

  Elements merge in the night, ships make tacks in the dreams,
  The sailor sails, the exile returns home,
  The fugitive returns unharm’d, the immigrant is back beyond months
      and years,
  The poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his childhood with
      the well known neighbors and faces,
  They warmly welcome him, he is barefoot again, he forgets he is well off,
  The Dutchman voyages home, and the Scotchman and Welshman voyage
      home, and the native of the Mediterranean voyages home,
  To every port of England, France, Spain, enter well-fill’d ships,
  The Swiss foots it toward his hills, the Prussian goes his way, the
      Hungarian his way, and the Pole his way,
  The Swede returns, and the Dane and Norwegian return.

  The homeward bound and the outward bound,
  The beautiful lost swimmer, the ennuye, the onanist, the female that
      loves unrequited, the money-maker,
  The actor and actress, those through with their parts and those
      waiting to commence,
  The affectionate boy, the husband and wife, the voter, the nominee
      that is chosen and the nominee that has fail’d,
  The great already known and the great any time after to-day,
  The stammerer, the sick, the perfect-form’d, the homely,
  The criminal that stood in the box, the judge that sat and sentenced
      him, the fluent lawyers, the jury, the audience,
  The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow, the red squaw,
  The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wrong’d,
  The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the dark,
  I swear they are averaged now—one is no better than the other,
  The night and sleep have liken’d them and restored them.

  I swear they are all beautiful,
  Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is
      beautiful,
  The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.

  Peace is always beautiful,
  The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.

  The myth of heaven indicates the soul,
  The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less, it
      comes or it lags behind,
  It comes from its embower’d garden and looks pleasantly on itself
      and encloses the world,
  Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting,and perfect and
      clean the womb cohering,
  The head well-grown proportion’d and plumb, and the bowels and
      joints proportion’d and plumb.

  The soul is always beautiful,
  The universe is duly in order, every thing is in its place,
  What has arrived is in its place and what waits shall be in its place,
  The twisted skull waits, the watery or rotten blood waits,
  The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and the child of
      the drunkard waits long, and the drunkard himself waits long,
  The sleepers that lived and died wait, the far advanced are to go on
      in their turns, and the far behind are to come on in their turns,
  The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite—
      they unite now.

       8
  The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
  They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as
      they lie unclothed,
  The Asiatic and African are hand in hand, the European and American
      are hand in hand,
  Learn’d and unlearn’d are hand in hand, and male and female are hand
      in hand,
  The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover, they
      press close without lust, his lips press her neck,
  The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with
      measureless love, and the son holds the father in his arms with
      measureless love,
  The white hair of the mother shines on the white wrist of the daughter,
  The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man, friend is
      inarm’d by friend,
  The scholar kisses the teacher and the teacher kisses the scholar,
      the wrong ’d made right,
  The call of the slave is one with the master’s call, and the master
      salutes the slave,
  The felon steps forth from the prison, the insane becomes sane, the
      suffering of sick persons is reliev’d,
  The sweatings and fevers stop, the throat that was unsound is sound,
      the lungs of the consumptive are resumed, the poor distress’d
      head is free,
  The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and smoother
      than ever,
  Stiflings and passages open, the paralyzed become supple,
  The swell’d and convuls’d and congested awake to themselves in condition,
  They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the
      night, and awake.

  I too pass from the night,
  I stay a while away O night, but I return to you again and love you.

  Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
  I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you,
  I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long,
  I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you, but
      I know I came well and shall go well.

  I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes,
  I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return to you.

Transpositions

  Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever
      bawling—let an idiot or insane person appear on each of the stands;
  Let judges and criminals be transposed—let the prison-keepers be
      put in prison—let those that were prisoners take the keys;
  Let them that distrust birth and death lead the rest.

Book XXIX. To Think of Time

      1
  To think of time—of all that retrospection,
  To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward.

  Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
  Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
  Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?

  Is to-day nothing? is the beginningless past nothing?
  If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.

  To think that the sun rose in the east—that men and women were
      flexible, real, alive—that every thing was alive,
  To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part,
  To think that we are now here and bear our part.

       2
  Not a day passes, not a minute or second without an accouchement,
  Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse.

  The dull nights go over and the dull days also,
  The soreness of lying so much in bed goes over,
  The physician after long putting off gives the silent and terrible
      look for an answer,
  The children come hurried and weeping, and the brothers and sisters
      are sent for,
  Medicines stand unused on the shelf, (the camphor-smell has long
      pervaded the rooms,)
  The faithful hand of the living does not desert the hand of the dying,
  The twitching lips press lightly on the forehead of the dying,
  The breath ceases and the pulse of the heart ceases,
  The corpse stretches on the bed and the living look upon it,
  It is palpable as the living are palpable.

  The living look upon the corpse with their eyesight,
  But without eyesight lingers a different living and looks curiously
      on the corpse.

       3
  To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials,
  To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others taking
      great interest in them, and we taking no interest in them.

  To think how eager we are in building our houses,
  To think others shall be just as eager, and we quite indifferent.

  (I see one building the house that serves him a few years, or
      seventy or eighty years at most,
  I see one building the house that serves him longer than that.)

  Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they never
      cease—they are the burial lines,
  He that was President was buried, and he that is now President shall
      surely be buried.

      4
  A reminiscence of the vulgar fate,
  A frequent sample of the life and death of workmen,
  Each after his kind.

  Cold dash of waves at the ferry-wharf, posh and ice in the river,
      half-frozen mud in the streets,
  A gray discouraged sky overhead, the short last daylight of December,
  A hearse and stages, the funeral of an old Broadway stage-driver,
      the cortege mostly drivers.

  Steady the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell,
  The gate is pass’d, the new-dug grave is halted at, the living
      alight, the hearse uncloses,
  The coffin is pass’d out, lower’d and settled, the whip is laid on
      the coffin, the earth is swiftly shovel’d in,
  The mound above is flatted with the spades—silence,
  A minute—no one moves or speaks—it is done,
  He is decently put away—is there any thing more?

  He was a good fellow, free-mouth’d, quick-temper’d, not bad-looking,
  Ready with life or death for a friend, fond of women, gambled, ate
      hearty, drank hearty,
  Had known what it was to be flush, grew low-spirited toward the
      last, sicken’d, was help’d by a contribution,
  Died, aged forty-one years—and that was his funeral.

  Thumb extended, finger uplifted, apron, cape, gloves, strap,
      wet-weather clothes, whip carefully chosen,
  Boss, spotter, starter, hostler, somebody loafing on you, you
      loafing on somebody, headway, man before and man behind,
  Good day’s work, bad day’s work, pet stock, mean stock, first out,
      last out, turning-in at night,
  To think that these are so much and so nigh to other drivers, and he
      there takes no interest in them.

       5
  The markets, the government, the working-man’s wages, to think what
      account they are through our nights and days,
  To think that other working-men will make just as great account of
      them, yet we make little or no account.

  The vulgar and the refined, what you call sin and what you call
      goodness, to think how wide a difference,
  To think the difference will still continue to others, yet we lie
      beyond the difference.

  To think how much pleasure there is,
  Do you enjoy yourself in the city? or engaged in business? or
      planning a nomination and election? or with your wife and family?
  Or with your mother and sisters? or in womanly housework? or the
      beautiful maternal cares?
  These also flow onward to others, you and I flow onward,
  But in due time you and I shall take less interest in them.

  Your farm, profits, crops—to think how engross’d you are,
  To think there will still be farms, profits, crops, yet for you of
      what avail?

       6
  What will be will be well, for what is is well,
  To take interest is well, and not to take interest shall be well.

  The domestic joys, the dally housework or business, the building of
      houses, are not phantasms, they have weight, form, location,
  Farms, profits, crops, markets, wages, government, are none of them
      phantasms,
  The difference between sin and goodness is no delusion,
  The earth is not an echo, man and his life and all the things of his
      life are well-consider’d.

  You are not thrown to the winds, you gather certainly and safely
      around yourself,
  Yourself! yourself!. yourself, for ever and ever!

       7
  It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother and
      father, it is to identify you,
  It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should be decided,
  Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form’d in you,
  You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

  The threads that were spun are gather’d, the wet crosses the warp,
      the pattern is systematic.

  The preparations have every one been justified,
  The orchestra have sufficiently tuned their instruments, the baton
      has given the signal.

  The guest that was coming, he waited long, he is now housed,
  He is one of those who are beautiful and happy, he is one of those
      that to look upon and be with is enough.

  The law of the past cannot be eluded,
  The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,
  The law of the living cannot be eluded, it is eternal,
  The law of promotion and transformation cannot be eluded,
  The law of heroes and good-doers cannot be eluded,
  The law of drunkards, informers, mean persons, not one iota thereof
      can be eluded.

       8
  Slow moving and black lines go ceaselessly over the earth,
  Northerner goes carried and Southerner goes carried, and they on the
      Atlantic side and they on the Pacific,
  And they between, and all through the Mississippi country, and all
      over the earth.

  The great masters and kosmos are well as they go, the heroes and
      good-doers are well,
  The known leaders and inventors and the rich owners and pious and
      distinguish’d may be well,
  But there is more account than that, there is strict account of all.

  The interminable hordes of the ignorant and wicked are not nothing,
  The barbarians of Africa and Asia are not nothing,
  The perpetual successions of shallow people are not nothing as they go.

  Of and in all these things,
  I have dream’d that we are not to be changed so much, nor the law of
      us changed,
  I have dream’d that heroes and good-doers shall be under the present
      and past law,
  And that murderers, drunkards, liars, shall be under the present and
      past law,
  For I have dream’d that the law they are under now is enough.

  And I have dream’d that the purpose and essence of the known life,
      the transient,
  Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the permanent.

  If all came but to ashes of dung,
  If maggots and rats ended us, then Alarum! for we are betray’d,
  Then indeed suspicion of death.

  Do you suspect death? if I were to suspect death I should die now,
  Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward annihilation?

  Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
  Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
  The whole universe indicates that it is good,
  The past and the present indicate that it is good.

  How beautiful and perfect are the animals!
  How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!
  What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect,
  The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable
      fluids perfect;
  Slowly and surely they have pass’d on to this, and slowly and surely
      they yet pass on.

       9
  I swear I think now that every thing without exception has an eternal soul!
  The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weeds of the sea have! the
      animals!

  I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
  That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for
      it, and the cohering is for it!
  And all preparation is for it—and identity is for it—and life and
      materials are altogether for it!

Book XXX. Whispers of Heavenly Death

Darest Thou Now O Soul

  Darest thou now O soul,
  Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
  Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

  No map there, nor guide,
  Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
  Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

  I know it not O soul,
  Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
  All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.

  Till when the ties loosen,
  All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
  Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

  Then we burst forth, we float,
  In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
  Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.

Whispers of Heavenly Death

  Whispers of heavenly death murmur’d I hear,
  Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
  Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low,
  Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,
  (Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)

  I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
  Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
  With at times a half-dimm’d sadden’d far-off star,
  Appearing and disappearing.

  (Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;
  On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
  Some soul is passing over.)

Chanting the Square Deific

       1
  Chanting the square deific, out of the One advancing, out of the sides,
  Out of the old and new, out of the square entirely divine,
  Solid, four-sided, (all the sides needed,) from this side Jehovah am I,
  Old Brahm I, and I Saturnius am;
  Not Time affects me—I am Time, old, modern as any,
  Unpersuadable, relentless, executing righteous judgments,
  As the Earth, the Father, the brown old Kronos, with laws,
  Aged beyond computation, yet never new, ever with those mighty laws rolling,
  Relentless I forgive no man—whoever sins dies—I will have that man’s life;
  Therefore let none expect mercy—have the seasons, gravitation, the
      appointed days, mercy? no more have I,
  But as the seasons and gravitation, and as all the appointed days
      that forgive not,
  I dispense from this side judgments inexorable without the least remorse.

       2
  Consolator most mild, the promis’d one advancing,
  With gentle hand extended, the mightier God am I,
  Foretold by prophets and poets in their most rapt prophecies and poems,
  From this side, lo! the Lord Christ gazes—lo! Hermes I—lo! mine is
      Hercules’ face,
  All sorrow, labor, suffering, I, tallying it, absorb in myself,
  Many times have I been rejected, taunted, put in prison, and
      crucified, and many times shall be again,
  All the world have I given up for my dear brothers’ and sisters’
      sake, for the soul’s sake,
  Wanding my way through the homes of men, rich or poor, with the kiss
      of affection,
  For I am affection, I am the cheer-bringing God, with hope and
      all-enclosing charity,
  With indulgent words as to children, with fresh and sane words, mine only,
  Young and strong I pass knowing well I am destin’d myself to an
      early death;
  But my charity has no death—my wisdom dies not, neither early nor late,
  And my sweet love bequeath’d here and elsewhere never dies.

       3
  Aloof, dissatisfied, plotting revolt,
  Comrade of criminals, brother of slaves,
  Crafty, despised, a drudge, ignorant,
  With sudra face and worn brow, black, but in the depths of my heart,
      proud as any,
  Lifted now and always against whoever scorning assumes to rule me,
  Morose, full of guile, full of reminiscences, brooding, with many wiles,
  (Though it was thought I was baffled, and dispel’d, and my wiles
      done, but that will never be,)
  Defiant, I, Satan, still live, still utter words, in new lands duly
      appearing, (and old ones also,)
  Permanent here from my side, warlike, equal with any, real as any,
  Nor time nor change shall ever change me or my words.

       4
  Santa Spirita, breather, life,
  Beyond the light, lighter than light,
  Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell,
  Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume,
  Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including
      Saviour and Satan,
  Ethereal, pervading all, (for without me what were all? what were God?)
  Essence of forms, life of the real identities, permanent, positive,
      (namely the unseen,)
  Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the
      general soul,
  Here the square finishing, the solid, I the most solid,
  Breathe my breath also through these songs.

Of Him I Love Day and Night

  Of him I love day and night I dream’d I heard he was dead,
  And I dream’d I went where they had buried him I love, but he was
      not in that place,
  And I dream’d I wander’d searching among burial-places to find him,
  And I found that every place was a burial-place;
  The houses full of life were equally full of death, (this house is now,)
  The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement, the Chicago,
      Boston, Philadelphia, the Mannahatta, were as full of the dead as
      of the living,
  And fuller, O vastly fuller of the dead than of the living;
  And what I dream’d I will henceforth tell to every person and age,
  And I stand henceforth bound to what I dream’d,
  And now I am willing to disregard burial-places and dispense with them,
  And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere,
      even in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be satisfied,
  And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly
      render’d to powder and pour’d in the sea, I shall be satisfied,
  Or if it be distributed to the winds I shall be satisfied.

Yet, Yet, Ye Downcast Hours

  Yet, yet, ye downcast hours, I know ye also,
  Weights of lead, how ye clog and cling at my ankles,
  Earth to a chamber of mourning turns—I hear the o’erweening, mocking
      voice,
  Matter is conqueror—matter, triumphant only, continues onward.

  Despairing cries float ceaselessly toward me,
  The call of my nearest lover, putting forth, alarm’d, uncertain,
  The sea I am quickly to sail, come tell me,
  Come tell me where I am speeding, tell me my destination.

  I understand your anguish, but I cannot help you,
  I approach, hear, behold, the sad mouth, the look out of the eyes,
      your mute inquiry,
  Whither I go from the bed I recline on, come tell me,—
  Old age, alarm’d, uncertain—a young woman’s voice, appealing to
      me for comfort;
  A young man’s voice, Shall I not escape?

As If a Phantom Caress’d Me

  As if a phantom caress’d me,
  I thought I was not alone walking here by the shore;
  But the one I thought was with me as now I walk by the shore, the
      one I loved that caress’d me,
  As I lean and look through the glimmering light, that one has
      utterly disappear’d.
  And those appear that are hateful to me and mock me.

Assurances

  I need no assurances, I am a man who is preoccupied of his own soul;
  I do not doubt that from under the feet and beside the hands and
      face I am cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not cognizant
      of, calm and actual faces,
  I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in
      any iota of the world,
  I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are limitless,
      in vain I try to think how limitless,
  I do not doubt that the orbs and the systems of orbs play their
      swift sports through the air on purpose, and that I shall one day
      be eligible to do as much as they, and more than they,
  I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and on millions of years,
  I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have
      their exteriors, and that the eyesight has another eyesight, and
      the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice,
  I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of young men are
      provided for, and that the deaths of young women and the
      deaths of little children are provided for,
  (Did you think Life was so well provided for, and Death, the purport
      of all Life, is not well provided for?)
  I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of
      them, no matter whose wife, child, husband, father, lover, has
      gone down, are provided for, to the minutest points,
  I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen anywhere at any
      time, is provided for in the inherences of things,
  I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I
      believe Heavenly Death provides for all.

Quicksand Years

  Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
  Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me,
  Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess’d soul, eludes not,
  One’s-self must never give way—that is the final substance—that
      out of all is sure,
  Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
  When shows break up what but One’s-Self is sure?

That Music Always Round Me

  That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long
      untaught I did not hear,
  But now the chorus I hear and am elated,
  A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes of
      daybreak I hear,
  A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense waves,
  A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the universe,
  The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and
      violins, all these I fill myself with,
  I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite
      meanings,
  I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving,
      contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;
  I do not think the performers know themselves—but now I think
      begin to know them.

What Ship Puzzled at Sea

  What ship puzzled at sea, cons for the true reckoning?
  Or coming in, to avoid the bars and follow the channel a perfect
      pilot needs?
  Here, sailor! here, ship! take aboard the most perfect pilot,
  Whom, in a little boat, putting off and rowing, I hailing you offer.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

  A noiseless patient spider,
  I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
  Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
  It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
  Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

  And you O my soul where you stand,
  Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
  Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to
      connect them,
  Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
  Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

O Living Always, Always Dying

  O living always, always dying!
  O the burials of me past and present,
  O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
  O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
  O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and
      look at where I cast them,
  To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.

To One Shortly to Die

  From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
  You are to die—let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate,
  I am exact and merciless, but I love you—there is no escape for you.

  Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you ’ust feel it,
  I do not argue, I bend my head close and half envelop it,
  I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
  I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
  I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is
      eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
  The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

  The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
  Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
  You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
  You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
      I am with you,
  I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
  I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

Night on the Prairies

  Night on the prairies,
  The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,
  The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;
  I walk by myself—I stand and look at the stars, which I think now
      never realized before.

  Now I absorb immortality and peace,
  I admire death and test propositions.

  How plenteous! how spiritual! how resume!
  The same old man and soul—the same old aspirations, and the same content.

  I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,
  I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless
      around me myriads of other globes.

  Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will
      measure myself by them,
  And now touch’d with the lives of other globes arrived as far along
      as those of the earth,
  Or waiting to arrive, or pass’d on farther than those of the earth,
  I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
  Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.

  O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,
  I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

Thought

  As I sit with others at a great feast, suddenly while the music is playing,
  To my mind, (whence it comes I know not,) spectral in mist of a
      wreck at sea,
  Of certain ships, how they sail from port with flying streamers and
      wafted kisses, and that is the last of them,
  Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President,
  Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations founder’d
      off the Northeast coast and going down—of the steamship Arctic
      going down,
  Of the veil’d tableau-women gather’d together on deck, pale, heroic,
      waiting the moment that draws so close—O the moment!

  A huge sob—a few bubbles—the white foam spirting up—and then the
      women gone,
  Sinking there while the passionless wet flows on—and I now
      pondering, Are those women indeed gone?
  Are souls drown’d and destroy’d so?
  Is only matter triumphant?

The Last Invocation

  At the last, tenderly,
  From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
  From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
  Let me be wafted.

  Let me glide noiselessly forth;
  With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,
  Set ope the doors O soul.

  Tenderly—be not impatient,
  (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
  Strong is your hold O love.)

As I Watch the Ploughman Ploughing

  As I watch’d the ploughman ploughing,
  Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,
  I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies;
  (Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)

Pensive and Faltering

  Pensive and faltering,
  The words the Dead I write,
  For living are the Dead,
  (Haply the only living, only real,
  And I the apparition, I the spectre.)

Book XXXI. Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood

       1
  Thou Mother with thy equal brood,
  Thou varied chain of different States, yet one identity only,
  A special song before I go I’d sing o’er all the rest,
  For thee, the future.

  I’d sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality,
  I’d fashion thy ensemble including body and soul,
  I’d show away ahead thy real Union, and how it may be accomplish’d.

  The paths to the house I seek to make,
  But leave to those to come the house itself.

  Belief I sing, and preparation;
  As Life and Nature are not great with reference to the present only,
  But greater still from what is yet to come,
  Out of that formula for thee I sing.

       2
  As a strong bird on pinions free,
  Joyous, the amplest spaces heavenward cleaving,
  Such be the thought I’d think of thee America,
  Such be the recitative I’d bring for thee.

  The conceits of the poets of other lands I’d bring thee not,
  Nor the compliments that have served their turn so long,
  Nor rhyme, nor the classics, nor perfume of foreign court or indoor
      library;
  But an odor I’d bring as from forests of pine in Maine, or breath of
      an Illinois prairie,
  With open airs of Virginia or Georgia or Tennessee, or from Texas
      uplands, or Florida’s glades,
  Or the Saguenay’s black stream, or the wide blue spread of Huron,
  With presentment of Yellowstone’s scenes, or Yosemite,
  And murmuring under, pervading all, I’d bring the rustling sea-sound,
  That endlessly sounds from the two Great Seas of the world.

  And for thy subtler sense subtler refrains dread Mother,
  Preludes of intellect tallying these and thee, mind-formulas fitted
      for thee, real and sane and large as these and thee,
  Thou! mounting higher, diving deeper than we knew, thou
      transcendental Union!
  By thee fact to be justified, blended with thought,
  Thought of man justified, blended with God,
  Through thy idea, lo, the immortal reality!
  Through thy reality, lo, the immortal idea!

       3
  Brain of the New World, what a task is thine,
  To formulate the Modern—out of the peerless grandeur of the modern,
  Out of thyself, comprising science, to recast poems, churches, art,
  (Recast, may-be discard them, end them—maybe their work is done,
      who knows?)
  By vision, hand, conception, on the background of the mighty past, the dead,
  To limn with absolute faith the mighty living present.

  And yet thou living present brain, heir of the dead, the Old World brain,
  Thou that lay folded like an unborn babe within its folds so long,
  Thou carefully prepared by it so long—haply thou but unfoldest it,
      only maturest it,
  It to eventuate in thee—the essence of the by-gone time contain’d in thee,
  Its poems, churches, arts, unwitting to themselves, destined with
      reference to thee;
  Thou but the apples, long, long, long a-growing,
  The fruit of all the Old ripening to-day in thee.

       4
  Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy,
  Of value is thy freight, ’tis not the Present only,
  The Past is also stored in thee,
  Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western
      continent alone,
  Earth’s resume entire floats on thy keel O ship, is steadied by thy spars,
  With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or
      swim with thee,
  With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou
      bear’st the other continents,
  Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant;
  Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye O helmsman, thou
      carriest great companions,
  Venerable priestly Asia sails this day with thee,
  And royal feudal Europe sails with thee.

       5
  Beautiful world of new superber birth that rises to my eyes,
  Like a limitless golden cloud filling the westernr sky,
  Emblem of general maternity lifted above all,
  Sacred shape of the bearer of daughters and sons,
  Out of thy teeming womb thy giant babes in ceaseless procession issuing,
  Acceding from such gestation, taking and giving continual strength
      and life,
  World of the real—world of the twain in one,
  World of the soul, born by the world of the real alone, led to
      identity, body, by it alone,
  Yet in beginning only, incalculable masses of composite precious materials,
  By history’s cycles forwarded, by every nation, language, hither sent,
  Ready, collected here, a freer, vast, electric world, to be
      constructed here,
  (The true New World, the world of orbic science, morals, literatures
      to come,)
  Thou wonder world yet undefined, unform’d, neither do I define thee,
  How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future?
  I feel thy ominous greatness evil as well as good,
  I watch thee advancing, absorbing the present, transcending the past,
  I see thy light lighting, and thy shadow shadowing, as if the entire globe,
  But I do not undertake to define thee, hardly to comprehend thee,
  I but thee name, thee prophesy, as now,
  I merely thee ejaculate!

  Thee in thy future,
  Thee in thy only permanent life, career, thy own unloosen’d mind,
      thy soaring spirit,
  Thee as another equally needed sun, radiant, ablaze, swift-moving,
      fructifying all,
  Thee risen in potent cheerfulness and joy, in endless great hilarity,
  Scattering for good the cloud that hung so long, that weigh’d so
      long upon the mind of man,
  The doubt, suspicion, dread, of gradual, certain decadence of man;
  Thee in thy larger, saner brood of female, male—thee in thy
      athletes, moral, spiritual, South, North, West, East,
  (To thy immortal breasts, Mother of All, thy every daughter, son,
      endear’d alike, forever equal,)
  Thee in thy own musicians, singers, artists, unborn yet, but certain,
  Thee in thy moral wealth and civilization, (until which thy proudest
      material civilization must remain in vain,)
  Thee in thy all-supplying, all-enclosing worship—thee in no single
      bible, saviour, merely,
  Thy saviours countless, latent within thyself, thy bibles incessant
      within thyself, equal to any, divine as any,
  (Thy soaring course thee formulating, not in thy two great wars, nor
      in thy century’s visible growth,
  But far more in these leaves and chants, thy chants, great Mother!)
  Thee in an education grown of thee, in teachers, studies, students,
      born of thee,
  Thee in thy democratic fetes en-masse, thy high original festivals,
      operas, lecturers, preachers,
  Thee in thy ultimate, (the preparations only now completed, the
      edifice on sure foundations tied,)
  Thee in thy pinnacles, intellect, thought, thy topmost rational
      joys, thy love and godlike aspiration,
  In thy resplendent coming literati, thy full-lung’d orators, thy
      sacerdotal bards, kosmic savans,
  These! these in thee, (certain to come,) to-day I prophesy.

       6
  Land tolerating all, accepting all, not for the good alone, all good
      for thee,
  Land in the realms of God to be a realm unto thyself,
  Under the rule of God to be a rule unto thyself.

  (Lo, where arise three peerless stars,
  To be thy natal stars my country, Ensemble, Evolution, Freedom,
  Set in the sky of Law.)

  Land of unprecedented faith, God’s faith,
  Thy soil, thy very subsoil, all upheav’d,
  The general inner earth so long so sedulously draped over, now hence
      for what it is boldly laid bare,
  Open’d by thee to heaven’s light for benefit or bale.

  Not for success alone,
  Not to fair-sail unintermitted always,
  The storm shall dash thy face, the murk of war and worse than war
      shall cover thee all over,
  (Wert capable of war, its tug and trials? be capable of peace, its trials,
  For the tug and mortal strain of nations come at last in prosperous
      peace, not war;)
  In many a smiling mask death shall approach beguiling thee, thou in
      disease shalt swelter,
  The livid cancer spread its hideous claws, clinging upon thy
      breasts, seeking to strike thee deep within,
  Consumption of the worst, moral consumption, shall rouge thy face
      with hectic,
  But thou shalt face thy fortunes, thy diseases, and surmount them all,
  Whatever they are to-day and whatever through time they may be,
  They each and all shall lift and pass away and cease from thee,
  While thou, Time’s spirals rounding, out of thyself, thyself still
      extricating, fusing,
  Equable, natural, mystical Union thou, (the mortal with immortal blent,)
  Shalt soar toward the fulfilment of the future, the spirit of the
      body and the mind,
  The soul, its destinies.

  The soul, its destinies, the real real,
  (Purport of all these apparitions of the real;)
  In thee America, the soul, its destinies,
  Thou globe of globes! thou wonder nebulous!
  By many a throe of heat and cold convuls’d, (by these thyself solidifying,)
  Thou mental, moral orb—thou New, indeed new, Spiritual World!
  The Present holds thee not—for such vast growth as thine,
  For such unparallel’d flight as thine, such brood as thine,
  The FUTURE only holds thee and can hold thee.

A Paumanok Picture

  Two boats with nets lying off the sea-beach, quite still,
  Ten fishermen waiting—they discover a thick school of mossbonkers
      —they drop the join’d seine-ends in the water,
  The boats separate and row off, each on its rounding course to the
      beach, enclosing the mossbonkers,
  The net is drawn in by a windlass by those who stop ashore,
  Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats, others stand
      ankle-deep in the water, pois’d on strong legs,
  The boats partly drawn up, the water slapping against them,
  Strew’d on the sand in heaps and windrows, well out from the water,
      the green-back’d spotted mossbonkers.

Book XXXII. From Noon to Starry Night. Thou Orb Aloft Full-dazzling

  Thou orb aloft full-dazzling! thou hot October noon!
  Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand,
  The sibilant near sea with vistas far and foam,
  And tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue;
  O sun of noon refulgent! my special word to thee.

  Hear me illustrious!
  Thy lover me, for always I have loved thee,
  Even as basking babe, then happy boy alone by some wood edge, thy
      touching-distant beams enough,
  Or man matured, or young or old, as now to thee I launch my invocation.

  (Thou canst not with thy dumbness me deceive,
  I know before the fitting man all Nature yields,
  Though answering not in words, the skies, trees, hear his voice—and
      thou O sun,
  As for thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of
      flame gigantic,
  I understand them, I know those flames, those perturbations well.)

  Thou that with fructifying heat and light,
  O’er myriad farms, o’er lands and waters North and South,
  O’er Mississippi’s endless course, o’er Texas’ grassy plains,
      Kanada’s woods,
  O’er all the globe that turns its face to thee shining in space,
  Thou that impartially enfoldest all, not only continents, seas,
  Thou that to grapes and weeds and little wild flowers givest so liberally,
  Shed, shed thyself on mine and me, with but a fleeting ray out of
      thy million millions,
  Strike through these chants.

  Nor only launch thy subtle dazzle and thy strength for these,
  Prepare the later afternoon of me myself—prepare my lengthening shadows,
  Prepare my starry nights.

Faces

       1
  Sauntering the pavement or riding the country by-road, faces!
  Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality,
  The spiritual-prescient face, the always welcome common benevolent face,
  The face of the singing of music, the grand faces of natural lawyers
      and judges broad at the back-top,
  The faces of hunters and fishers bulged at the brows, the shaved
      blanch’d faces of orthodox citizens,
  The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face,
  The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the handsome detested or
      despised face,
  The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the mother of
      many children,
  The face of an amour, the face of veneration,
  The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock,
  The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face,
  A wild hawk, his wings clipp’d by the clipper,
  A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder.

  Sauntering the pavement thus, or crossing the ceaseless ferry, faces
      and faces and faces,
  I see them and complain not, and am content with all.

       2
  Do you suppose I could be content with all if I thought them their
      own finale?

  This now is too lamentable a face for a man,
  Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing for it,
  Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it wrig to its hole.

  This face is a dog’s snout sniffing for garbage,
  Snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat.

  This face is a haze more chill than the arctic sea,
  Its sleepy and wobbling icebergs crunch as they go.

  This is a face of bitter herbs, this an emetic, they need no label,
  And more of the drug-shelf, laudanum, caoutchouc, or hog’s-lard.

  This face is an epilepsy, its wordless tongue gives out the unearthly cry,
  Its veins down the neck distend, its eyes roll till they show
      nothing but their whites,
  Its teeth grit, the palms of the hands are cut by the turn’d-in nails,
  The man falls struggling and foaming to the ground, while he
      speculates well.

  This face is bitten by vermin and worms,
  And this is some murderer’s knife with a half-pull’d scabbard.

  This face owes to the sexton his dismalest fee,
  An unceasing death-bell tolls there.

       3
  Features of my equals would you trick me with your creas’d and
      cadaverous march?
  Well, you cannot trick me.

  I see your rounded never-erased flow,
  I see ’neath the rims of your haggard and mean disguises.

  Splay and twist as you like, poke with the tangling fores of fishes or rats,
  You’ll be unmuzzled, you certainly will.

  I saw the face of the most smear’d and slobbering idiot they had at
      the asylum,
  And I knew for my consolation what they knew not,
  I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my brother,
  The same wait to clear the rubbish from the fallen tenement,
  And I shall look again in a score or two of ages,
  And I shall meet the real landlord perfect and unharm’d, every inch
      as good as myself.

       4
  The Lord advances, and yet advances,
  Always the shadow in front, always the reach’d hand bringing up the
      laggards.

  Out of this face emerge banners and horses—O superb! I see what is coming,
  I see the high pioneer-caps, see staves of runners clearing the way,
  I hear victorious drums.

  This face is a life-boat,
  This is the face commanding and bearded, it asks no odds of the rest,
  This face is flavor’d fruit ready for eating,
  This face of a healthy honest boy is the programme of all good.

  These faces bear testimony slumbering or awake,
  They show their descent from the Master himself.

  Off the word I have spoken I except not one—red, white, black, are
      all deific,
  In each house is the ovum, it comes forth after a thousand years.

  Spots or cracks at the windows do not disturb me,
  Tall and sufficient stand behind and make signs to me,
  I read the promise and patiently wait.

  This is a full-grown lily’s face,
  She speaks to the limber-hipp’d man near the garden pickets,
  Come here she blushingly cries, Come nigh to me limber-hipp’d man,
  Stand at my side till I lean as high as I can upon you,
  Fill me with albescent honey, bend down to me,
  Rub to me with your chafing beard, rub to my breast and shoulders.

       5
  The old face of the mother of many children,
  Whist! I am fully content.

  Lull’d and late is the smoke of the First-day morning,
  It hangs low over the rows of trees by the fences,
  It hangs thin by the sassafras and wild-cherry and cat-brier under them.

  I saw the rich ladies in full dress at the soiree,
  I heard what the singers were singing so long,
  Heard who sprang in crimson youth from the white froth and the water-blue.

  Behold a woman!
  She looks out from her quaker cap, her face is clearer and more
      beautiful than the sky.

  She sits in an armchair under the shaded porch of the farmhouse,
  The sun just shines on her old white head.

  Her ample gown is of cream-hued linen,
  Her grandsons raised the flax, and her grand-daughters spun it with
      the distaff and the wheel.

  The melodious character of the earth,
  The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go,
  The justified mother of men.

The Mystic Trumpeter

       1
  Hark, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician,
  Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night.

  I hear thee trumpeter, listening alert I catch thy notes,
  Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me,
  Now low, subdued, now in the distance lost.

       2
  Come nearer bodiless one, haply in thee resounds
  Some dead composer, haply thy pensive life
  Was fill’d with aspirations high, unform’d ideals,
  Waves, oceans musical, chaotically surging,
  That now ecstatic ghost, close to me bending, thy cornet echoing, pealing,
  Gives out to no one’s ears but mine, but freely gives to mine,
  That I may thee translate.

       3
  Blow trumpeter free and clear, I follow thee,
  While at thy liquid prelude, glad, serene,
  The fretting world, the streets, the noisy hours of day withdraw,
  A holy calm descends like dew upon me,
  I walk in cool refreshing night the walks of Paradise,
  I scent the grass, the moist air and the roses;
  Thy song expands my numb’d imbonded spirit, thou freest, launchest me,
  Floating and basking upon heaven’s lake.

       4
  Blow again trumpeter! and for my sensuous eyes,
  Bring the old pageants, show the feudal world.

  What charm thy music works! thou makest pass before me,
  Ladies and cavaliers long dead, barons are in their castle halls,
      the troubadours are singing,
  Arm’d knights go forth to redress wrongs, some in quest of the holy Graal;
  I see the tournament, I see the contestants incased in heavy armor
      seated on stately champing horses,
  I hear the shouts, the sounds of blows and smiting steel;
  I see the Crusaders’ tumultuous armies—hark, how the cymbals clang,
  Lo, where the monks walk in advance, bearing the cross on high.

       5
  Blow again trumpeter! and for thy theme,
  Take now the enclosing theme of all, the solvent and the setting,
  Love, that is pulse of all, the sustenance and the pang,
  The heart of man and woman all for love,
  No other theme but love—knitting, enclosing, all-diffusing love.

  O how the immortal phantoms crowd around me!
  I see the vast alembic ever working, I see and know the flames that
      heat the world,
  The glow, the blush, the beating hearts of lovers,
  So blissful happy some, and some so silent, dark, and nigh to death;
  Love, that is all the earth to lovers—love, that mocks time and space,
  Love, that is day and night—love, that is sun and moon and stars,
  Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume,
  No other words but words of love, no other thought but love.

       6
  Blow again trumpeter—conjure war’s alarums.

  Swift to thy spell a shuddering hum like distant thunder rolls,
  Lo, where the arm’d men hasten—lo, mid the clouds of dust the glint
      of bayonets,
  I see the grime-faced cannoneers, I mark the rosy flash amid the
      smoke, I hear the cracking of the guns;
  Nor war alone—thy fearful music-song, wild player, brings every
      sight of fear,
  The deeds of ruthless brigands, rapine, murder—I hear the cries for help!
  I see ships foundering at sea, I behold on deck and below deck the
      terrible tableaus.

       7
  O trumpeter, methinks I am myself the instrument thou playest,
  Thou melt’st my heart, my brain—thou movest, drawest, changest
      them at will;
  And now thy sullen notes send darkness through me,
  Thou takest away all cheering light, all hope,
  I see the enslaved, the overthrown, the hurt, the opprest of the
      whole earth,
  I feel the measureless shame and humiliation of my race, it becomes
      all mine,
  Mine too the revenges of humanity, the wrongs of ages, baffled feuds
      and hatreds,
  Utter defeat upon me weighs—all lost—the foe victorious,
  (Yet ’mid the ruins Pride colossal stands unshaken to the last,
  Endurance, resolution to the last.)

      8
  Now trumpeter for thy close,
  Vouchsafe a higher strain than any yet,
  Sing to my soul, renew its languishing faith and hope,
  Rouse up my slow belief, give me some vision of the future,
  Give me for once its prophecy and joy.

  O glad, exulting, culminating song!
  A vigor more than earth’s is in thy notes,
  Marches of victory—man disenthral’d—the conqueror at last,
  Hymns to the universal God from universal man—all joy!
  A reborn race appears—a perfect world, all joy!
  Women and men in wisdom innocence and health—all joy!
  Riotous laughing bacchanals fill’d with joy!
  War, sorrow, suffering gone—the rank earth purged—nothing but joy left!
  The ocean fill’d with joy—the atmosphere all joy!
  Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life!
  Enough to merely be! enough to breathe!
  Joy! joy! all over joy!

To a Locomotive in Winter

  Thee for my recitative,
  Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
  Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,
  Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
  Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating,
      shuttling at thy sides,
  Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
  Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,
  Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
  The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
  Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of
      thy wheels,
  Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,
  Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
  Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,
  For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
  With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
  By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
  By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

  Fierce-throated beauty!
  Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps
      at night,
  Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,
      rousing all,
  Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,
  (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
  Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,
  Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
  To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

O Magnet-South

  O magnet-south! O glistening perfumed South! my South!
  O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all
      dear to me!
  O dear to me my birth-things—all moving things and the trees where
      I was born—the grains, plants, rivers,
  Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant,
      over flats of slivery sands or through swamps,
  Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the
      Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa and the Sabine,
  O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul to haunt their
      banks again,
  Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float on the
      Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings
      or dense forests,
  I see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and the
      blossoming titi;
  Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, I coast
      up the Carolinas,
  I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the yellow-pine,
      the scented bay-tree, the lemon and orange, the cypress, the
      graceful palmetto,
  I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet,
      and dart my vision inland;
  O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp!
  The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers,
  The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged
      with mistletoe and trailing moss,
  The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in
      these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the
      fugitive has his conceal’d hut;)
  O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable
      swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding with the bellow of the
      alligator, the sad noises of the night-owl and the wild-cat, and
      the whirr of the rattlesnake,
  The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon,
      singing through the moon-lit night,
  The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum;
  A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav’d corn,
      slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful
      ears each well-sheath’d in its husk;
  O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart;
  O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian!
  O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and
      never wander more.

Mannahatta

  I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
  Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

  Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,
      musical, self-sufficient,
  I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
  Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,
  Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an
      island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
  Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong,
      light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,
  Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,
  The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining
      islands, the heights, the villas,
  The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the
      ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model’d,
  The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the houses
      of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers, the river-streets,
  Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,
  The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the
      brown-faced sailors,
  The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,
  The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river,
      passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,
  The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d,
      beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
  Trottoirs throng’d, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,
  A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—
      the most courageous and friendly young men,
  City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
  City nested in bays! my city!

All Is Truth

  O me, man of slack faith so long,
  Standing aloof, denying portions so long,
  Only aware to-day of compact all-diffused truth,
  Discovering to-day there is no lie or form of lie, and can be none,
      but grows as inevitably upon itself as the truth does upon itself,
  Or as any law of the earth or any natural production of the earth does.

  (This is curious and may not be realized immediately, but it must be
      realized,
  I feel in myself that I represent falsehoods equally with the rest,
  And that the universe does.)

  Where has fail’d a perfect return indifferent of lies or the truth?
  Is it upon the ground, or in water or fire? or in the spirit of man?
      or in the meat and blood?

  Meditating among liars and retreating sternly into myself, I see
      that there are really no liars or lies after all,
  And that nothing fails its perfect return, and that what are called
      lies are perfect returns,
  And that each thing exactly represents itself and what has preceded it,
  And that the truth includes all, and is compact just as much as
      space is compact,
  And that there is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth—but
      that all is truth without exception;
  And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am,
  And sing and laugh and deny nothing.

A Riddle Song

  That which eludes this verse and any verse,
  Unheard by sharpest ear, unform’d in clearest eye or cunningest mind,
  Nor lore nor fame, nor happiness nor wealth,
  And yet the pulse of every heart and life throughout the world incessantly,
  Which you and I and all pursuing ever ever miss,
  Open but still a secret, the real of the real, an illusion,
  Costless, vouchsafed to each, yet never man the owner,
  Which poets vainly seek to put in rhyme, historians in prose,
  Which sculptor never chisel’d yet, nor painter painted,
  Which vocalist never sung, nor orator nor actor ever utter’d,
  Invoking here and now I challenge for my song.

  Indifferently, ’mid public, private haunts, in solitude,
  Behind the mountain and the wood,
  Companion of the city’s busiest streets, through the assemblage,
  It and its radiations constantly glide.

  In looks of fair unconscious babes,
  Or strangely in the coffin’d dead,
  Or show of breaking dawn or stars by night,
  As some dissolving delicate film of dreams,
  Hiding yet lingering.

  Two little breaths of words comprising it,
  Two words, yet all from first to last comprised in it.

  How ardently for it!
  How many ships have sail’d and sunk for it!

  How many travelers started from their homes and neer return’d!
  How much of genius boldly staked and lost for it!
  What countless stores of beauty, love, ventur’d for it!
  How all superbest deeds since Time began are traceable to it—and
      shall be to the end!
  How all heroic martyrdoms to it!
  How, justified by it, the horrors, evils, battles of the earth!
  How the bright fascinating lambent flames of it, in every age and
      land, have drawn men’s eyes,
  Rich as a sunset on the Norway coast, the sky, the islands, and the cliffs,
  Or midnight’s silent glowing northern lights unreachable.

  Haply God’s riddle it, so vague and yet so certain,
  The soul for it, and all the visible universe for it,
  And heaven at last for it.

Excelsior

  Who has gone farthest? for I would go farther,
  And who has been just? for I would be the most just person of the earth,
  And who most cautious? for I would be more cautious,
  And who has been happiest? O I think it is I—I think no one was
      ever happier than I,
  And who has lavish’d all? for I lavish constantly the best I have,
  And who proudest? for I think I have reason to be the proudest son
      alive—for I am the son of the brawny and tall-topt city,
  And who has been bold and true? for I would be the boldest and
      truest being of the universe,
  And who benevolent? for I would show more benevolence than all the rest,
  And who has receiv’d the love of the most friends? for I know what
      it is to receive the passionate love of many friends,
  And who possesses a perfect and enamour’d body? for I do not believe
      any one possesses a more perfect or enamour’d body than mine,
  And who thinks the amplest thoughts? for I would surround those thoughts,
  And who has made hymns fit for the earth? for I am mad with
      devouring ecstasy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth.

Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats

  Ah poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
  Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me,
  (For what is my life or any man’s life but a conflict with foes, the
      old, the incessant war?)
  You degradations, you tussle with passions and appetites,
  You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah wounds the sharpest of all!)
  You toil of painful and choked articulations, you meannesses,
  You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the shallowest of any;)
  You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother’d ennuis!
  Ah think not you finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth,
  It shall yet march forth o’ermastering, till all lies beneath me,
  It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory.

Thoughts

  Of public opinion,
  Of a calm and cool fiat sooner or later, (how impassive! how certain
      and final!)
  Of the President with pale face asking secretly to himself, What
      will the people say at last?
  Of the frivolous Judge—of the corrupt Congressman, Governor,
      Mayor—of such as these standing helpless and exposed,
  Of the mumbling and screaming priest, (soon, soon deserted,)
  Of the lessening year by year of venerableness, and of the dicta of
      officers, statutes, pulpits, schools,
  Of the rising forever taller and stronger and broader of the
      intuitions of men and women, and of Self-esteem and Personality;
  Of the true New World—of the Democracies resplendent en-masse,
  Of the conformity of politics, armies, navies, to them,
  Of the shining sun by them—of the inherent light, greater than the rest,
  Of the envelopment of all by them, and the effusion of all from them.

Mediums

  They shall arise in the States,
  They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness,
  They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos,
  They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive,
  They shall be complete women and men, their pose brawny and supple,
      their drink water, their blood clean and clear,
  They shall fully enjoy materialism and the sight of products, they
      shall enjoy the sight of the beef, lumber, bread-stuffs, of
      Chicago the great city.
  They shall train themselves to go in public to become orators and
      oratresses,
  Strong and sweet shall their tongues be, poems and materials of
      poems shall come from their lives, they shall be makers and finders,
  Of them and of their works shall emerge divine conveyers, to convey gospels,
  Characters, events, retrospections, shall be convey’d in gospels,
      trees, animals, waters, shall be convey’d,
  Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be convey’d.

Weave in, My Hardy Life

  Weave in, weave in, my hardy life,
  Weave yet a soldier strong and full for great campaigns to come,
  Weave in red blood, weave sinews in like ropes, the senses, sight weave in,
  Weave lasting sure, weave day and night the wet, the warp, incessant
      weave, tire not,
  (We know not what the use O life, nor know the aim, the end, nor
      really aught we know,
  But know the work, the need goes on and shall go on, the
      death-envelop’d march of peace as well as war goes on,)
  For great campaigns of peace the same the wiry threads to weave,
  We know not why or what, yet weave, forever weave.

Spain, 1873–74

  Out of the murk of heaviest clouds,
  Out of the feudal wrecks and heap’d-up skeletons of kings,
  Out of that old entire European debris, the shatter’d mummeries,
  Ruin’d cathedrals, crumble of palaces, tombs of priests,
  Lo, Freedom’s features fresh undimm’d look forth—the same immortal
      face looks forth;
  (A glimpse as of thy Mother’s face Columbia,
  A flash significant as of a sword,
  Beaming towards thee.)

  Nor think we forget thee maternal;
  Lag’d’st thou so long? shall the clouds close again upon thee?
  Ah, but thou hast thyself now appear’d to us—we know thee,
  Thou hast given us a sure proof, the glimpse of thyself,
  Thou waitest there as everywhere thy time.

By Broad Potomac’s Shore

  By broad Potomac’s shore, again old tongue,
  (Still uttering, still ejaculating, canst never cease this babble?)
  Again old heart so gay, again to you, your sense, the full flush
      spring returning,
  Again the freshness and the odors, again Virginia’s summer sky,
      pellucid blue and silver,
  Again the forenoon purple of the hills,
  Again the deathless grass, so noiseless soft and green,
  Again the blood-red roses blooming.

  Perfume this book of mine O blood-red roses!
  Lave subtly with your waters every line Potomac!
  Give me of you O spring, before I close, to put between its pages!
  O forenoon purple of the hills, before I close, of you!
  O deathless grass, of you!

From Far Dakota’s Canyons [June 25, 1876]

  From far Dakota’s canyons,
  Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the
      silence,
  Haply to-day a mournful wall, haply a trumpet-note for heroes.

  The battle-bulletin,
  The Indian ambuscade, the craft, the fatal environment,
  The cavalry companies fighting to the last in sternest heroism,
  In the midst of their little circle, with their slaughter’d horses
      for breastworks,
  The fall of Custer and all his officers and men.

  Continues yet the old, old legend of our race,
  The loftiest of life upheld by death,
  The ancient banner perfectly maintain’d,
  O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!

  As sitting in dark days,
  Lone, sulky, through the time’s thick murk looking in vain for
      light, for hope,
  From unsuspected parts a fierce and momentary proof,
  (The sun there at the centre though conceal’d,
  Electric life forever at the centre,)
  Breaks forth a lightning flash.

  Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle,
  I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a
      bright sword in thy hand,
  Now ending well in death the splendid fever of thy deeds,
  (I bring no dirge for it or thee, I bring a glad triumphal sonnet,)
  Desperate and glorious, aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious,
  After thy many battles in which never yielding up a gun or a color,
  Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,
  Thou yieldest up thyself.

Old War-Dreams

  In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,
  Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that indescribable look,)
  Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,
       I dream, I dream, I dream.

  Of scenes of Nature, fields and mountains,
  Of skies so beauteous after a storm, and at night the moon so
      unearthly bright,
  Shining sweetly, shining down, where we dig the trenches and
      gather the heaps,
       I dream, I dream, I dream.

  Long have they pass’d, faces and trenches and fields,
  Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away
      from the fallen,
  Onward I sped at the time—but now of their forms at night,
       I dream, I dream, I dream.

Thick-Sprinkled Bunting

  Thick-sprinkled bunting! flag of stars!
  Long yet your road, fateful flag—long yet your road, and lined with
      bloody death,
  For the prize I see at issue at last is the world,
  All its ships and shores I see interwoven with your threads greedy banner;
  Dream’d again the flags of kings, highest borne to flaunt unrival’d?
  O hasten flag of man—O with sure and steady step, passing highest
      flags of kings,
  Walk supreme to the heavens mighty symbol—run up above them all,
  Flag of stars! thick-sprinkled bunting!

What Best I See in Thee
  [To U. S. G. return’d from his World’s Tour]

  What best I see in thee,
  Is not that where thou mov’st down history’s great highways,
  Ever undimm’d by time shoots warlike victory’s dazzle,
  Or that thou sat’st where Washington sat, ruling the land in peace,
  Or thou the man whom feudal Europe feted, venerable Asia swarm’d upon,
  Who walk’d with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade;
  But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
  Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
  Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front,
  Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round
      world’s promenade,
  Were all so justified.

Spirit That Form’d This Scene
  [Written in Platte Canyon, Colorado]

  Spirit that form’d this scene,
  These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
  These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
  These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
  These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
  I know thee, savage spirit—we have communed together,
  Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
  Wast charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
  To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
  The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace—column
      and polish’d arch forgot?
  But thou that revelest here—spirit that form’d this scene,
  They have remember’d thee.

As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

  As I walk these broad majestic days of peace,
  (For the war, the struggle of blood finish’d, wherein, O terrific Ideal,
  Against vast odds erewhile having gloriously won,
  Now thou stridest on, yet perhaps in time toward denser wars,
  Perhaps to engage in time in still more dreadful contests, dangers,
  Longer campaigns and crises, labors beyond all others,)
  Around me I hear that eclat of the world, politics, produce,
  The announcements of recognized things, science,
  The approved growth of cities and the spread of inventions.

  I see the ships, (they will last a few years,)
  The vast factories with their foremen and workmen,
  And hear the indorsement of all, and do not object to it.

  But I too announce solid things,
  Science, ships, politics, cities, factories, are not nothing,
  Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring,
      triumphantly moving, and grander heaving in sight,
  They stand for realities—all is as it should be.

  Then my realities;
  What else is so real as mine?
  Libertad and the divine average, freedom to every slave on the face
      of the earth,
  The rapt promises and lumine of seers, the spiritual world, these
      centuries-lasting songs,
  And our visions, the visions of poets, the most solid announcements
      of any.

A Clear Midnight

  This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
  Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
  Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
      lovest best,
  Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Book XXXIII. Songs of Parting

As the Time Draws Nigh

  As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud,
  A dread beyond of I know not what darkens me.

  I shall go forth,
  I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long,
  Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will
      suddenly cease.

  O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this?
  Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us? —and yet it is
      enough, O soul;
  O soul, we have positively appear’d—that is enough.

Years of the Modern

  Years of the modern! years of the unperform’d!
  Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more august dramas,
  I see not America only, not only Liberty’s nation but other nations
      preparing,
  I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity
      of races,
  I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world’s stage,
  (Have the old forces, the old wars, played their parts? are the acts
      suitable to them closed?)
  I see Freedom, completely arm’d and victorious and very haughty,
      with Law on one side and Peace on the other,
  A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste;
  What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?
  I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions,
  I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken,
  I see the landmarks of European kings removed,
  I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way;)
  Never were such sharp questions ask’d as this day,
  Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God,
  Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest!
  His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the
      Pacific, the archipelagoes,
  With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the
      wholesale engines of war,
  With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all
      geography, all lands;
  What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under
      the seas?
  Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?
  Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim,
  The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war,
  No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights;
  Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to
      pierce it, is full of phantoms,
  Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me,
  This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams
      O years!
  Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not
      whether I sleep or wake;)
  The perform’d America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,
  The unperform’d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.

Ashes of Soldiers

  Ashes of soldiers South or North,
  As I muse retrospective murmuring a chant in thought,
  The war resumes, again to my sense your shapes,
  And again the advance of the armies.

  Noiseless as mists and vapors,
  From their graves in the trenches ascending,
  From cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee,
  From every point of the compass out of the countless graves,
  In wafted clouds, in myriads large, or squads of twos or threes or
      single ones they come,
  And silently gather round me.

  Now sound no note O trumpeters,
  Not at the head of my cavalry parading on spirited horses,
  With sabres drawn and glistening, and carbines by their thighs, (ah
      my brave horsemen!
  My handsome tan-faced horsemen! what life, what joy and pride,
  With all the perils were yours.)

  Nor you drummers, neither at reveille at dawn,
  Nor the long roll alarming the camp, nor even the muffled beat for burial,
  Nothing from you this time O drummers bearing my warlike drums.

  But aside from these and the marts of wealth and the crowded promenade,
  Admitting around me comrades close unseen by the rest and voiceless,
  The slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris alive,
  I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers.

  Faces so pale with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet,
  Draw close, but speak not.

  Phantoms of countless lost,
  Invisible to the rest henceforth become my companions,
  Follow me ever—desert me not while I live.

  Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living—sweet are the musical
      voices sounding,
  But sweet, ah sweet, are the dead with their silent eyes.

  Dearest comrades, all is over and long gone,
  But love is not over—and what love, O comrades!
  Perfume from battle-fields rising, up from the foetor arising.

  Perfume therefore my chant, O love, immortal love,
  Give me to bathe the memories of all dead soldiers,
  Shroud them, embalm them, cover them all over with tender pride.

  Perfume all—make all wholesome,
  Make these ashes to nourish and blossom,
  O love, solve all, fructify all with the last chemistry.

  Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,
  That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew,
  For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.

Thoughts

       1
  Of these years I sing,
  How they pass and have pass’d through convuls’d pains, as through
      parturitions,
  How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure
      fulfilment, the absolute success, despite of people—illustrates
      evil as well as good,
  The vehement struggle so fierce for unity in one’s-self,
  How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths,
      obedience, compulsion, and to infidelity,
  How few see the arrived models, the athletes, the Western States, or
      see freedom or spirituality, or hold any faith in results,
  (But I see the athletes, and I see the results of the war glorious
      and inevitable, and they again leading to other results.)

  How the great cities appear—how the Democratic masses, turbulent,
      willful, as I love them,
  How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the
      sounding and resounding, keep on and on,
  How society waits unform’d, and is for a while between things ended
      and things begun,
  How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of
      freedom and of the Democracies, and of the fruits of society, and
      of all that is begun,
  And how the States are complete in themselves—and how all triumphs
      and glories are complete in themselves, to lead onward,
  And how these of mine and of the States will in their turn be
      convuls’d, and serve other parturitions and transitions,
  And how all people, sights, combinations, the democratic masses too,
      serve—and how every fact, and war itself, with all its horrors,
      serves,
  And how now or at any time each serves the exquisite transition of death.

       2
  Of seeds dropping into the ground, of births,
  Of the steady concentration of America, inland, upward, to
      impregnable and swarming places,
  Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Arkansas, and the rest, are to be,
  Of what a few years will show there in Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada,
      and the rest,
  (Or afar, mounting the Northern Pacific to Sitka or Aliaska,)
  Of what the feuillage of America is the preparation for—and of what
      all sights, North, South, East and West, are,
  Of this Union welded in blood, of the solemn price paid, of the
      unnamed lost ever present in my mind;
  Of the temporary use of materials for identity’s sake,
  Of the present, passing, departing—of the growth of completer men
      than any yet,
  Of all sloping down there where the fresh free giver the mother, the
      Mississippi flows,
  Of mighty inland cities yet unsurvey’d and unsuspected,
  Of the new and good names, of the modern developments, of
      inalienable homesteads,
  Of a free and original life there, of simple diet and clean and
      sweet blood,
  Of litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes, and perfect physique there,
  Of immense spiritual results future years far West, each side of the
      Anahuacs,
  Of these songs, well understood there, (being made for that area,)
  Of the native scorn of grossness and gain there,
  (O it lurks in me night and day—what is gain after all to savageness
      and freedom?)

Song at Sunset

  Splendor of ended day floating and filling me,
  Hour prophetic, hour resuming the past,
  Inflating my throat, you divine average,
  You earth and life till the last ray gleams I sing.

  Open mouth of my soul uttering gladness,
  Eyes of my soul seeing perfection,
  Natural life of me faithfully praising things,
  Corroborating forever the triumph of things.

  Illustrious every one!
  Illustrious what we name space, sphere of unnumber’d spirits,
  Illustrious the mystery of motion in all beings, even the tiniest insect,
  Illustrious the attribute of speech, the senses, the body,
  Illustrious the passing light—illustrious the pale reflection on
      the new moon in the western sky,
  Illustrious whatever I see or hear or touch, to the last.

  Good in all,
  In the satisfaction and aplomb of animals,
  In the annual return of the seasons,
  In the hilarity of youth,
  In the strength and flush of manhood,
  In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age,
  In the superb vistas of death.

  Wonderful to depart!
  Wonderful to be here!
  The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!
  To breathe the air, how delicious!
  To speak—to walk—to seize something by the hand!
  To prepare for sleep, for bed, to look on my rose-color’d flesh!
  To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large!
  To be this incredible God I am!
  To have gone forth among other Gods, these men and women I love.

  Wonderful how I celebrate you and myself
  How my thoughts play subtly at the spectacles around!
  How the clouds pass silently overhead!
  How the earth darts on and on! and how the sun, moon, stars, dart on and on!
  How the water sports and sings! (surely it is alive!)
  How the trees rise and stand up, with strong trunks, with branches
      and leaves!
  (Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some living soul.)

  O amazement of things—even the least particle!
  O spirituality of things!
  O strain musical flowing through ages and continents, now reaching
      me and America!
  I take your strong chords, intersperse them, and cheerfully pass
      them forward.

  I too carol the sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting,
  I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the
      growths of the earth,
  I too have felt the resistless call of myself.

  As I steam’d down the Mississippi,
  As I wander’d over the prairies,
  As I have lived, as I have look’d through my windows my eyes,
  As I went forth in the morning, as I beheld the light breaking in the east,
  As I bathed on the beach of the Eastern Sea, and again on the beach
      of the Western Sea,
  As I roam’d the streets of inland Chicago, whatever streets I have roam’d,
  Or cities or silent woods, or even amid the sights of war,
  Wherever I have been I have charged myself with contentment and triumph.

  I sing to the last the equalities modern or old,
  I sing the endless finales of things,
  I say Nature continues, glory continues,
  I praise with electric voice,
  For I do not see one imperfection in the universe,
  And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.

  O setting sun! though the time has come,
  I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.

As at Thy Portals Also Death

  As at thy portals also death,
  Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,
  To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
  To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
  (I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,
  I sit by the form in the coffin,
  I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks,
      the closed eyes in the coffin;)
  To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth,
      life, love, to me the best,
  I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,
  And set a tombstone here.

My Legacy

  The business man the acquirer vast,
  After assiduous years surveying results, preparing for departure,
  Devises houses and lands to his children, bequeaths stocks, goods,
      funds for a school or hospital,
  Leaves money to certain companions to buy tokens, souvenirs of gems
      and gold.

  But I, my life surveying, closing,
  With nothing to show to devise from its idle years,
  Nor houses nor lands, nor tokens of gems or gold for my friends,
  Yet certain remembrances of the war for you, and after you,
  And little souvenirs of camps and soldiers, with my love,
  I bind together and bequeath in this bundle of songs.

Pensive on Her Dead Gazing

  Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,
  Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields gazing,
  (As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger’d,)
  As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d,
  Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my
      sons, lose not an atom,
  And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,
  And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,
  And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers’ depths,
  And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children’s
      blood trickling redden’d,
  And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,
  My dead absorb or South or North—my young men’s bodies absorb,
      and their precious precious blood,
  Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a
      year hence,
  In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,
  In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give
      my immortal heroes,
  Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an
      atom be lost,
  O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
  Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.

Camps of Green

  Nor alone those camps of white, old comrades of the wars,
  When as order’d forward, after a long march,
  Footsore and weary, soon as the light lessens we halt for the night,
  Some of us so fatigued carrying the gun and knapsack, dropping
      asleep in our tracks,
  Others pitching the little tents, and the fires lit up begin to sparkle,
  Outposts of pickets posted surrounding alert through the dark,
  And a word provided for countersign, careful for safety,
  Till to the call of the drummers at daybreak loudly beating the drums,
  We rise up refresh’d, the night and sleep pass’d over, and resume our
      journey,
  Or proceed to battle.

  Lo, the camps of the tents of green,
  Which the days of peace keep filling, and the days of war keep filling,
  With a mystic army, (is it too order’d forward? is it too only
      halting awhile,
  Till night and sleep pass over?)

  Now in those camps of green, in their tents dotting the world,
  In the parents, children, husbands, wives, in them, in the old and young,
  Sleeping under the sunlight, sleeping under the moonlight, content
      and silent there at last,
  Behold the mighty bivouac-field and waiting-camp of all,
  Of the corps and generals all, and the President over the corps and
      generals all,
  And of each of us O soldiers, and of each and all in the ranks we fought,
  (There without hatred we all, all meet.)

  For presently O soldiers, we too camp in our place in the
      bivouac-camps of green,
  But we need not provide for outposts, nor word for the countersign,
  Nor drummer to beat the morning drum.

The Sobbing of the Bells [Midnight, Sept. 19–20, 1881]

  The sobbing of the bells, the sudden death-news everywhere,
  The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People,
  (Full well they know that message in the darkness,
  Full well return, respond within their breasts, their brains, the
      sad reverberations,)
  The passionate toll and clang—city to city, joining, sounding, passing,
  Those heart-beats of a Nation in the night.

As They Draw to a Close

  As they draw to a close,
  Of what underlies the precedent songs—of my aims in them,
  Of the seed I have sought to plant in them,
  Of joy, sweet joy, through many a year, in them,
  (For them, for them have I lived, in them my work is done,)
  Of many an aspiration fond, of many a dream and plan;
  Through Space and Time fused in a chant, and the flowing eternal identity,
  To Nature encompassing these, encompassing God—to the joyous,
      electric all,
  To the sense of Death, and accepting exulting in Death in its turn
      the same as life,
  The entrance of man to sing;
  To compact you, ye parted, diverse lives,
  To put rapport the mountains and rocks and streams,
  And the winds of the north, and the forests of oak and pine,
  With you O soul.

Joy, Shipmate, Joy!

  Joy, shipmate, Joy!
  (Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)
  Our life is closed, our life begins,
  The long, long anchorage we leave,
  The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
  She swiftly courses from the shore,
  Joy, shipmate, joy.

The Untold Want

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.

Portals

What are those of the known but to ascend and enter the Unknown?
And what are those of life but for Death?

These Carols

These carols sung to cheer my passage through the world I see,
For completion I dedicate to the Invisible World.

Now Finale to the Shore

  Now finale to the shore,
  Now land and life finale and farewell,
  Now Voyager depart, (much, much for thee is yet in store,)
  Often enough hast thou adventur’d o’er the seas,
  Cautiously cruising, studying the charts,
  Duly again to port and hawser’s tie returning;
  But now obey thy cherish’d secret wish,
  Embrace thy friends, leave all in order,
  To port and hawser’s tie no more returning,
  Depart upon thy endless cruise old Sailor.

So Long!

  To conclude, I announce what comes after me.

  I remember I said before my leaves sprang at all,
  I would raise my voice jocund and strong with reference to consummations.

  When America does what was promis’d,
  When through these States walk a hundred millions of superb persons,
  When the rest part away for superb persons and contribute to them,
  When breeds of the most perfect mothers denote America,
  Then to me and mine our due fruition.

  I have press’d through in my own right,
  I have sung the body and the soul, war and peace have I sung, and
      the songs of life and death,
  And the songs of birth, and shown that there are many births.

  I have offer’d my style to every one, I have journey’d with confident step;
  While my pleasure is yet at the full I whisper So long!
  And take the young woman’s hand and the young man’s hand for the last time.

  I announce natural persons to arise,
  I announce justice triumphant,
  I announce uncompromising liberty and equality,
  I announce the justification of candor and the justification of pride.

  I announce that the identity of these States is a single identity only,
  I announce the Union more and more compact, indissoluble,
  I announce splendors and majesties to make all the previous politics
      of the earth insignificant.

  I announce adhesiveness, I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d,
  I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.

  I announce a man or woman coming, perhaps you are the one, (So long!)
  I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste,
      affectionate, compassionate, fully arm’d.

  I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,
  I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.

  I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded,
  I announce a race of splendid and savage old men.

  O thicker and faster—(So long!)
  O crowding too close upon me,
  I foresee too much, it means more than I thought,
  It appears to me I am dying.

  Hasten throat and sound your last,
  Salute me—salute the days once more. Peal the old cry once more.

  Screaming electric, the atmosphere using,
  At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing,
  Swiftly on, but a little while alighting,
  Curious envelop’d messages delivering,
  Sparkles hot, seed ethereal down in the dirt dropping,
  Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring,
  To ages and ages yet the growth of the seed leaving,
  To troops out of the war arising, they the tasks I have set
  promulging,
  To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing, their affection
      me more clearly explaining,
  To young men my problems offering—no dallier I—I the muscle of
      their brains trying,
  So I pass, a little time vocal, visible, contrary,
  Afterward a melodious echo, passionately bent for, (death making
      me really undying,)
  The best of me then when no longer visible, for toward that I have
      been incessantly preparing.

  What is there more, that I lag and pause and crouch extended with
      unshut mouth?
  Is there a single final farewell?
  My songs cease, I abandon them,
  From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you.

  Camerado, this is no book,
  Who touches this touches a man,
  (Is it night? are we here together alone?)
  It is I you hold and who holds you,
  I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.

  O how your fingers drowse me,
  Your breath falls around me like dew, your pulse lulls the tympans
      of my ears,
  I feel immerged from head to foot,
  Delicious, enough.

  Enough O deed impromptu and secret,
  Enough O gliding present—enough O summ’d-up past.

  Dear friend whoever you are take this kiss,
  I give it especially to you, do not forget me,
  I feel like one who has done work for the day to retire awhile,
  I receive now again of my many translations, from my avataras
      ascending, while others doubtless await me,
  An unknown sphere more real than I dream’d, more direct, darts
      awakening rays about me, So long!
  Remember my words, I may again return,
  I love you, I depart from materials,
  I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.

Book XXXIV. Sands at Seventy

Mannahatta

  My city’s fit and noble name resumed,
  Choice aboriginal name, with marvellous beauty, meaning,
  A rocky founded island—shores where ever gayly dash the coming,
      going, hurrying sea waves.

Paumanok

  Sea-beauty! stretch’d and basking!
  One side thy inland ocean laving, broad, with copious commerce,
      steamers, sails,
  And one the Atlantic’s wind caressing, fierce or gentle—mighty hulls
      dark-gliding in the distance.
  Isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water—healthy air and soil!
  Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine!

From Montauk Point

  I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,
  Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky,)
  The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance,
  The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps—that inbound urge and urge
      of waves,
  Seeking the shores forever.

To Those Who’ve Fail’d

  To those who’ve fail’d, in aspiration vast,
  To unnam’d soldiers fallen in front on the lead,
  To calm, devoted engineers—to over-ardent travelers—to pilots on
      their ships,
  To many a lofty song and picture without recognition—I’d rear
      laurel-cover’d monument,
  High, high above the rest—To all cut off before their time,
  Possess’d by some strange spirit of fire,
  Quench’d by an early death.

A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine

  A carol closing sixty-nine—a resume—a repetition,
  My lines in joy and hope continuing on the same,
  Of ye, O God, Life, Nature, Freedom, Poetry;
  Of you, my Land—your rivers, prairies, States—you, mottled Flag I love,
  Your aggregate retain’d entire—Of north, south, east and west, your
      items all;
  Of me myself—the jocund heart yet beating in my breast,
  The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed—the strange inertia
      falling pall-like round me,
  The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,
  The undiminish’d faith—the groups of loving friends.

The Bravest Soldiers

  Brave, brave were the soldiers (high named to-day) who lived through
      the fight;
  But the bravest press’d to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown.

A Font of Type

  This latent mine—these unlaunch’d voices—passionate powers,
  Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout,
  (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,)
  These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death,
  Or sooth’d to ease and sheeny sun and sleep,
  Within the pallid slivers slumbering.

As I Sit Writing Here

  As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
  Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,
  Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui,
  May filter in my dally songs.

My Canary Bird

  Did we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,
  Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?
  But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,
  Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,
  Is it not just as great, O soul?

Queries to My Seventieth Year

  Approaching, nearing, curious,
  Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death?
  Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?
  Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?
  Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,
  Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching?

The Wallabout Martyrs

  Greater than memory of Achilles or Ulysses,
  More, more by far to thee than tomb of Alexander,
  Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones,
  Once living men—once resolute courage, aspiration, strength,
  The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.

The First Dandelion

  Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,
  As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
  Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden, calm
      as the dawn,
  The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

America

  Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
  All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
  Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
  Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
  A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
  Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Memories

  How sweet the silent backward tracings!
  The wanderings as in dreams—the meditation of old times resumed
      —their loves, joys, persons, voyages.

To-Day and Thee

  The appointed winners in a long-stretch’d game;
  The course of Time and nations—Egypt, India, Greece and Rome;
  The past entire, with all its heroes, histories, arts, experiments,
  Its store of songs, inventions, voyages, teachers, books,
  Garner’d for now and thee—To think of it!
  The heirdom all converged in thee!

After the Dazzle of Day

  After the dazzle of day is gone,
  Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
  After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
  Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.

Abraham Lincoln, Born Feb. 12, 1809

To-day, from each and all, a breath of prayer—a pulse of thought,
To memory of Him—to birth of Him.

Out of May’s Shows Selected

  Apple orchards, the trees all cover’d with blossoms;
  Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green;
  The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning;
  The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun;
  The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers.

Halcyon Days

  Not from successful love alone,
  Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
  But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
  As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
  As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
  As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
      really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
  Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
  The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

FANCIES AT NAVESINK

   [I] The Pilot in the Mist

  Steaming the northern rapids—(an old St. Lawrence reminiscence,
  A sudden memory-flash comes back, I know not why,
  Here waiting for the sunrise, gazing from this hill;)
  Again ’tis just at morning—a heavy haze contends with daybreak,
  Again the trembling, laboring vessel veers me—I press through
      foam-dash’d rocks that almost touch me,
  Again I mark where aft the small thin Indian helmsman
  Looms in the mist, with brow elate and governing hand.

  [II] Had I the Choice

  Had I the choice to tally greatest bards,
  To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will,
  Homer with all his wars and warriors—Hector, Achilles, Ajax,
  Or Shakspere’s woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—Tennyson’s fair ladies,
  Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme,
      delight of singers;
  These, these, O sea, all these I’d gladly barter,
  Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer,
  Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse,
  And leave its odor there.

  [III] You Tides with Ceaseless Swell

  You tides with ceaseless swell! you power that does this work!
  You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space’s spread,
  Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations,
  What are the messages by you from distant stars to us? what Sirius’?
      what Capella’s?
  What central heart—and you the pulse—vivifies all? what boundless
      aggregate of all?
  What subtle indirection and significance in you? what clue to all in
      you? what fluid, vast identity,
  Holding the universe with all its parts as one—as sailing in a ship?

  [IV] Last of Ebb, and Daylight Waning

  Last of ebb, and daylight waning,
  Scented sea-cool landward making, smells of sedge and salt incoming,
  With many a half-caught voice sent up from the eddies,
  Many a muffled confession—many a sob and whisper’d word,
  As of speakers far or hid.

  How they sweep down and out! how they mutter!
  Poets unnamed—artists greatest of any, with cherish’d lost designs,
  Love’s unresponse—a chorus of age’s complaints—hope’s last words,
  Some suicide’s despairing cry, Away to the boundless waste, and
      never again return.

  On to oblivion then!
  On, on, and do your part, ye burying, ebbing tide!
  On for your time, ye furious debouche!

  [V] And Yet Not You Alone

  And yet not you alone, twilight and burying ebb,
  Nor you, ye lost designs alone—nor failures, aspirations;
  I know, divine deceitful ones, your glamour’s seeming;
  Duly by you, from you, the tide and light again—duly the hinges turning,
  Duly the needed discord-parts offsetting, blending,
  Weaving from you, from Sleep, Night, Death itself,
  The rhythmus of Birth eternal.

  [VI] Proudly the Flood Comes In

  Proudly the flood comes in, shouting, foaming, advancing,
  Long it holds at the high, with bosom broad outswelling,
  All throbs, dilates—the farms, woods, streets of cities—workmen at work,
  Mainsails, topsails, jibs, appear in the offing—steamers’ pennants
      of smoke—and under the forenoon sun,
  Freighted with human lives, gaily the outward bound, gaily the
      inward bound,
  Flaunting from many a spar the flag I love.

  [VII] By That Long Scan of Waves

  By that long scan of waves, myself call’d back, resumed upon myself,
  In every crest some undulating light or shade—some retrospect,
  Joys, travels, studies, silent panoramas—scenes ephemeral,
  The long past war, the battles, hospital sights, the wounded and the dead,
  Myself through every by-gone phase—my idle youth—old age at hand,
  My three-score years of life summ’d up, and more, and past,
  By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a nothing,
  And haply yet some drop within God’s scheme’s ensemble—some
      wave, or part of wave,
  Like one of yours, ye multitudinous ocean.

  [VIII] Then Last Of All

  Then last of all, caught from these shores, this hill,
  Of you O tides, the mystic human meaning:
  Only by law of you, your swell and ebb, enclosing me the same,
  The brain that shapes, the voice that chants this song.

Election Day, November, 1884

  If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
  ’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor
      your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
  Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
      geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
  Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor
      Mississippi’s stream:
  —This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still
      small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,
  (The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the
      quadriennial choosing,)
  The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—
      Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,
  The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
  The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
  Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the
      peaceful choice of all,
  Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
  —Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart
      pants, life glows:
  These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
  Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

  With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
  Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
  Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
  (I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
  Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
  Thy ample, smiling face, dash’d with the sparkling dimples of the sun,
  Thy brooding scowl and murk—thy unloos’d hurricanes,
  Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
  Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears—a lack from all
      eternity in thy content,
  (Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee
      greatest—no less could make thee,)
  Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek’st and seek’st, yet
      never gain’st,
  Surely some right withheld—some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of
      freedom-lover pent,
  Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chafing in those breakers,
  By lengthen’d swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
  And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
  And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
  And undertones of distant lion roar,
  (Sounding, appealing to the sky’s deaf ear—but now, rapport for once,
  A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
  The first and last confession of the globe,
  Outsurging, muttering from thy soul’s abysms,
  The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
  Thou tellest to a kindred soul.

Death of General Grant

  As one by one withdraw the lofty actors,
  From that great play on history’s stage eterne,
  That lurid, partial act of war and peace—of old and new contending,
  Fought out through wrath, fears, dark dismays, and many a long suspense;
  All past—and since, in countless graves receding, mellowing,
  Victor’s and vanquish’d—Lincoln’s and Lee’s—now thou with them,
  Man of the mighty days—and equal to the days!
  Thou from the prairies!—tangled and many-vein’d and hard has been thy part,
  To admiration has it been enacted!

Red Jacket (From Aloft)

  Upon this scene, this show,
  Yielded to-day by fashion, learning, wealth,
  (Nor in caprice alone—some grains of deepest meaning,)
  Haply, aloft, (who knows?) from distant sky-clouds’ blended shapes,
  As some old tree, or rock or cliff, thrill’d with its soul,
  Product of Nature’s sun, stars, earth direct—a towering human form,
  In hunting-shirt of film, arm’d with the rifle, a half-ironical
      smile curving its phantom lips,
  Like one of Ossian’s ghosts looks down.

Washington’s Monument February, 1885

  Ah, not this marble, dead and cold:
  Far from its base and shaft expanding—the round zones circling,
      comprehending,
  Thou, Washington, art all the world’s, the continents’ entire—not
      yours alone, America,
  Europe’s as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer’s cot,
  Or frozen North, or sultry South—the African’s—the Arab’s in his tent,
  Old Asia’s there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins;
  (Greets the antique the hero new? ’tis but the same—the heir
      legitimate, continued ever,
  The indomitable heart and arm—proofs of the never-broken line,
  Courage, alertness, patience, faith, the same—e’en in defeat
      defeated not, the same:)
  Wherever sails a ship, or house is built on land, or day or night,
  Through teeming cities’ streets, indoors or out, factories or farms,
  Now, or to come, or past—where patriot wills existed or exist,
  Wherever Freedom, pois’d by Toleration, sway’d by Law,
  Stands or is rising thy true monument.

Of That Blithe Throat of Thine

  Of that blithe throat of thine from arctic bleak and blank,
  I’ll mind the lesson, solitary bird—let me too welcome chilling drifts,
  E’en the profoundest chill, as now—a torpid pulse, a brain unnerv’d,
  Old age land-lock’d within its winter bay—(cold, cold, O cold!)
  These snowy hairs, my feeble arm, my frozen feet,
  For them thy faith, thy rule I take, and grave it to the last;
  Not summer’s zones alone—not chants of youth, or south’s warm tides alone,
  But held by sluggish floes, pack’d in the northern ice, the cumulus
      of years,
  These with gay heart I also sing.

Broadway

  What hurrying human tides, or day or night!
  What passions, winnings, losses, ardors, swim thy waters!
  What whirls of evil, bliss and sorrow, stem thee!
  What curious questioning glances—glints of love!
  Leer, envy, scorn, contempt, hope, aspiration!
  Thou portal—thou arena—thou of the myriad long-drawn lines and groups!
  (Could but thy flagstones, curbs, facades, tell their inimitable tales;
  Thy windows rich, and huge hotels—thy side-walks wide;)
  Thou of the endless sliding, mincing, shuffling feet!
  Thou, like the parti-colored world itself—like infinite, teeming,
      mocking life!
  Thou visor’d, vast, unspeakable show and lesson!

To Get the Final Lilt of Songs

  To get the final lilt of songs,
  To penetrate the inmost lore of poets—to know the mighty ones,
  Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespere, Tennyson, Emerson;
  To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt—
      to truly understand,
  To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price,
  Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.

Old Salt Kossabone

  Far back, related on my mother’s side,
  Old Salt Kossabone, I’ll tell you how he died:
  (Had been a sailor all his life—was nearly 90—lived with his
      married grandchild, Jenny;
  House on a hill, with view of bay at hand, and distant cape, and
      stretch to open sea;)
  The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year his
      regular custom,
  In his great arm chair by the window seated,
  (Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,)
  Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to himself—
      And now the close of all:
  One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long—cross-tides
      and much wrong going,
  At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck veering,
  And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly entering,
      cleaving, as he watches,
  “She’s free—she’s on her destination”—these the last words—when
      Jenny came, he sat there dead,
  Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother’s side, far back.

The Dead Tenor

  As down the stage again,
  With Spanish hat and plumes, and gait inimitable,
  Back from the fading lessons of the past, I’d call, I’d tell and own,
  How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from thee!
  (So firm—so liquid-soft—again that tremulous, manly timbre!
  The perfect singing voice—deepest of all to me the lesson—trial
      and test of all:)
  How through those strains distill’d—how the rapt ears, the soul of
      me, absorbing
  Fernando’s heart, Manrico’s passionate call, Ernani’s, sweet Gennaro’s,
  I fold thenceforth, or seek to fold, within my chants transmuting,
  Freedom’s and Love’s and Faith’s unloos’d cantabile,
  (As perfume’s, color’s, sunlight’s correlation:)
  From these, for these, with these, a hurried line, dead tenor,
  A wafted autumn leaf, dropt in the closing grave, the shovel’d earth,
  To memory of thee.

Continuities

  Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
  No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
  Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
  Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
  Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
  The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
  The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
  The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
  To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
  With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

Yonnondio

  A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge,
  Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,
  To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;
  Yonnondio—I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine, with
      plains and mountains dark,
  I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,
  As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the
      twilight,
  (Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls!
  No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)
  Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn’d they disappear;
  To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms, factories fade;
  A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air
      for a moment,
  Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

Life

  Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man;
  (Have former armies fail’d? then we send fresh armies—and fresh again;)
  Ever the grappled mystery of all earth’s ages old or new;
  Ever the eager eyes, hurrahs, the welcome-clapping hands, the loud
      applause;
  Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;
  Struggling to-day the same—battling the same.

“Going Somewhere”

  My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend,
  (Now buried in an English grave—and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake,)
  Ended our talk—“The sum, concluding all we know of old or modern
      learning, intuitions deep,
  “Of all Geologies—Histories—of all Astronomy—of Evolution,
      Metaphysics all,
  “Is, that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering,
  “Life, life an endless march, an endless army, (no halt, but it is
      duly over,)
  “The world, the race, the soul—in space and time the universes,
  “All bound as is befitting each—all surely going somewhere.”

Small the Theme of My Chant

  Small the theme of my Chant, yet the greatest—namely, One’s-Self—
      a simple, separate person. That, for the use of the New World, I sing.
  Man’s physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. Not physiognomy alone,
      nor brain alone, is worthy for the Muse;—I say the Form complete
      is worthier far. The Female equally with the Male, I sing.
  Nor cease at the theme of One’s-Self. I speak the word of the
      modern, the word En-Masse.
  My Days I sing, and the Lands—with interstice I knew of hapless War.
  (O friend, whoe’er you are, at last arriving hither to commence, I
      feel through every leaf the pressure of your hand, which I return.
  And thus upon our journey, footing the road, and more than once, and
      link’d together let us go.)

True Conquerors

  Old farmers, travelers, workmen (no matter how crippled or bent,)
  Old sailors, out of many a perilous voyage, storm and wreck,
  Old soldiers from campaigns, with all their wounds, defeats and scars;
  Enough that they’ve survived at all—long life’s unflinching ones!
  Forth from their struggles, trials, fights, to have emerged at all—
      in that alone,
  True conquerors o’er all the rest.

The United States to Old World Critics

  Here first the duties of to-day, the lessons of the concrete,
  Wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty;
  As of the building of some varied, vast, perpetual edifice,
  Whence to arise inevitable in time, the towering roofs, the lamps,
  The solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars.

The Calming Thought of All

  That coursing on, whate’er men’s speculations,
  Amid the changing schools, theologies, philosophies,
  Amid the bawling presentations new and old,
  The round earth’s silent vital laws, facts, modes continue.

Thanks in Old Age

  Thanks in old age—thanks ere I go,
  For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air—for life, mere life,
  For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear—you,
      father—you, brothers, sisters, friends,)
  For all my days—not those of peace alone—the days of war the same,
  For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,
  For shelter, wine and meat—for sweet appreciation,
  (You distant, dim unknown—or young or old—countless, unspecified,
      readers belov’d,
  We never met, and neer shall meet—and yet our souls embrace, long,
      close and long;)
  For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books—for colors, forms,
  For all the brave strong men—devoted, hardy men—who’ve forward
      sprung in freedom’s help, all years, all lands
  For braver, stronger, more devoted men—(a special laurel ere I go,
      to life’s war’s chosen ones,
  The cannoneers of song and thought—the great artillerists—the
      foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)
  As soldier from an ended war return’d—As traveler out of myriads,
      to the long procession retrospective,
  Thanks—joyful thanks!—a soldier’s, traveler’s thanks.

Life and Death

  The two old, simple problems ever intertwined,
  Close home, elusive, present, baffled, grappled.
  By each successive age insoluble, pass’d on,
  To ours to-day—and we pass on the same.

The Voice of the Rain

  And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
  Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
  I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
  Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
  Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d, altogether changed, and
      yet the same,
  I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
  And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
  And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin,
      and make pure and beautify it;
  (For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,
  Reck’d or unreck’d, duly with love returns.)

Soon Shall the Winter’s Foil Be Here

  Soon shall the winter’s foil be here;
  Soon shall these icy ligatures unbind and melt—A little while,
  And air, soil, wave, suffused shall be in softness, bloom and
      growth—a thousand forms shall rise
  From these dead clods and chills as from low burial graves.

  Thine eyes, ears—all thy best attributes—all that takes cognizance
      of natural beauty,
  Shall wake and fill. Thou shalt perceive the simple shows, the
      delicate miracles of earth,
  Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents and flowers,
  The arbutus under foot, the willow’s yellow-green, the blossoming
      plum and cherry;
  With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their songs—the
      flitting bluebird;
  For such the scenes the annual play brings on.

While Not the Past Forgetting

  While not the past forgetting,
  To-day, at least, contention sunk entire—peace, brotherhood uprisen;
  For sign reciprocal our Northern, Southern hands,
  Lay on the graves of all dead soldiers, North or South,
  (Nor for the past alone—for meanings to the future,)
  Wreaths of roses and branches of palm.

The Dying Veteran

  Amid these days of order, ease, prosperity,
  Amid the current songs of beauty, peace, decorum,
  I cast a reminiscence—(likely ’twill offend you,
  I heard it in my boyhood;)—More than a generation since,
  A queer old savage man, a fighter under Washington himself,
  (Large, brave, cleanly, hot-blooded, no talker, rather spiritualistic,
  Had fought in the ranks—fought well—had been all through the
      Revolutionary war,)
  Lay dying—sons, daughters, church-deacons, lovingly tending him,
  Sharping their sense, their ears, towards his murmuring, half-caught words:
  “Let me return again to my war-days,
  To the sights and scenes—to forming the line of battle,
  To the scouts ahead reconnoitering,
  To the cannons, the grim artillery,
  To the galloping aides, carrying orders,
  To the wounded, the fallen, the heat, the suspense,
  The perfume strong, the smoke, the deafening noise;
  Away with your life of peace!—your joys of peace!
  Give me my old wild battle-life again!”

Stronger Lessons

  Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you, and were
      tender with you, and stood aside for you?
  Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and
      brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt,
      or dispute the passage with you?

A Prairie Sunset

  Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,
  The earth’s whole amplitude and Nature’s multiform power consign’d
      for once to colors;
  The light, the general air possess’d by them—colors till now unknown,
  No limit, confine—not the Western sky alone—the high meridian—
      North, South, all,
  Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.

Twenty Years

  Down on the ancient wharf, the sand, I sit, with a new-comer chatting:
  He shipp’d as green-hand boy, and sail’d away, (took some sudden,
      vehement notion;)
  Since, twenty years and more have circled round and round,
  While he the globe was circling round and round, —and now returns:
  How changed the place—all the old land-marks gone—the parents dead;
  (Yes, he comes back to lay in port for good—to settle—has a
      well-fill’d purse—no spot will do but this;)
  The little boat that scull’d him from the sloop, now held in leash I see,
  I hear the slapping waves, the restless keel, the rocking in the sand,
  I see the sailor kit, the canvas bag, the great box bound with brass,
  I scan the face all berry-brown and bearded—the stout-strong frame,
  Dress’d in its russet suit of good Scotch cloth:
  (Then what the told-out story of those twenty years? What of the future?)

Orange Buds by Mail from Florida

  A lesser proof than old Voltaire’s, yet greater,
  Proof of this present time, and thee, thy broad expanse, America,
  To my plain Northern hut, in outside clouds and snow,
  Brought safely for a thousand miles o’er land and tide,
  Some three days since on their own soil live-sprouting,
  Now here their sweetness through my room unfolding,
  A bunch of orange buds by mall from Florida.

Twilight

  The soft voluptuous opiate shades,
  The sun just gone, the eager light dispell’d—(I too will soon be
      gone, dispell’d,)
  A haze—nirwana—rest and night—oblivion.

You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me

  You lingering sparse leaves of me on winter-nearing boughs,
  And I some well-shorn tree of field or orchard-row;
  You tokens diminute and lorn—(not now the flush of May, or July
      clover-bloom—no grain of August now;)
  You pallid banner-staves—you pennants valueless—you overstay’d of time,
  Yet my soul-dearest leaves confirming all the rest,
  The faithfulest—hardiest—last.

Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone

  Not meagre, latent boughs alone, O songs! (scaly and bare, like
      eagles’ talons,)
  But haply for some sunny day (who knows?) some future spring, some
      summer—bursting forth,
  To verdant leaves, or sheltering shade—to nourishing fruit,
  Apples and grapes—the stalwart limbs of trees emerging—the fresh,
      free, open air,
  And love and faith, like scented roses blooming.

The Dead Emperor

  To-day, with bending head and eyes, thou, too, Columbia,
  Less for the mighty crown laid low in sorrow—less for the Emperor,
  Thy true condolence breathest, sendest out o’er many a salt sea mile,
  Mourning a good old man—a faithful shepherd, patriot.

As the Greek’s Signal Flame

  As the Greek’s signal flame, by antique records told,
  Rose from the hill-top, like applause and glory,
  Welcoming in fame some special veteran, hero,
  With rosy tinge reddening the land he’d served,
  So I aloft from Mannahatta’s ship-fringed shore,
  Lift high a kindled brand for thee, Old Poet.

The Dismantled Ship

  In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,
  On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor’d near the shore,
  An old, dismasted, gray and batter’d ship, disabled, done,
  After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul’d up at last and
      hawser’d tight,
  Lies rusting, mouldering.

Now Precedent Songs, Farewell

  Now precedent songs, farewell—by every name farewell,
  (Trains of a staggering line in many a strange procession, waggons,
  From ups and downs—with intervals—from elder years, mid-age, or youth,)
  “In Cabin’d Ships, or Thee Old Cause or Poets to Come
  Or Paumanok, Song of Myself, Calamus, or Adam,
  Or Beat! Beat! Drums! or To the Leaven’d Soil they Trod,
  Or Captain! My Captain! Kosmos, Quicksand Years, or Thoughts,
  Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood,” and many, many more unspecified,
  From fibre heart of mine—from throat and tongue—(My life’s hot
      pulsing blood,
  The personal urge and form for me—not merely paper, automatic type
      and ink,)
  Each song of mine—each utterance in the past—having its long, long
      history,
  Of life or death, or soldier’s wound, of country’s loss or safety,
  (O heaven! what flash and started endless train of all! compared
      indeed to that!
  What wretched shred e’en at the best of all!)

An Evening Lull

  After a week of physical anguish,
  Unrest and pain, and feverish heat,
  Toward the ending day a calm and lull comes on,
  Three hours of peace and soothing rest of brain.

Old Age’s Lambent Peaks

  The touch of flame—the illuminating fire—the loftiest look at last,
  O’er city, passion, sea—o’er prairie, mountain, wood—the earth itself,
  The airy, different, changing hues of all, in failing twilight,
  Objects and groups, bearings, faces, reminiscences;
  The calmer sight—the golden setting, clear and broad:
  So much i’ the atmosphere, the points of view, the situations whence
      we scan,
  Bro’t out by them alone—so much (perhaps the best) unreck’d before;
  The lights indeed from them—old age’s lambent peaks.

After the Supper and Talk

  After the supper and talk—after the day is done,
  As a friend from friends his final withdrawal prolonging,
  Good-bye and Good-bye with emotional lips repeating,
  (So hard for his hand to release those hands—no more will they meet,
  No more for communion of sorrow and joy, of old and young,
  A far-stretching journey awaits him, to return no more,)
  Shunning, postponing severance—seeking to ward off the last word
      ever so little,
  E’en at the exit-door turning—charges superfluous calling back—
      e’en as he descends the steps,
  Something to eke out a minute additional—shadows of nightfall deepening,
  Farewells, messages lessening—dimmer the forthgoer’s visage and form,
  Soon to be lost for aye in the darkness—loth, O so loth to depart!
  Garrulous to the very last.

Book XXXV. Good-bye My Fancy

Sail out for Good, Eidolon Yacht!

  Heave the anchor short!
  Raise main-sail and jib—steer forth,
  O little white-hull’d sloop, now speed on really deep waters,
  (I will not call it our concluding voyage,
  But outset and sure entrance to the truest, best, maturest;)
  Depart, depart from solid earth—no more returning to these shores,
  Now on for aye our infinite free venture wending,
  Spurning all yet tried ports, seas, hawsers, densities, gravitation,
  Sail out for good, eidolon yacht of me!

Lingering Last Drops

  And whence and why come you?

  We know not whence, (was the answer,)
  We only know that we drift here with the rest,
  That we linger’d and lagg’d—but were wafted at last, and are now here,
  To make the passing shower’s concluding drops.

Good-Bye My Fancy

  Good-bye my fancy—(I had a word to say,
  But ’tis not quite the time—The best of any man’s word or say,
  Is when its proper place arrives—and for its meaning,
  I keep mine till the last.)

On, on the Same, Ye Jocund Twain!

  On, on the same, ye jocund twain!
  My life and recitative, containing birth, youth, mid-age years,
  Fitful as motley-tongues of flame, inseparably twined and merged in
      one—combining all,
  My single soul—aims, confirmations, failures, joys—Nor single soul alone,
  I chant my nation’s crucial stage, (America’s, haply humanity’s)—
      the trial great, the victory great,
  A strange eclaircissement of all the masses past, the eastern world,
      the ancient, medieval,
  Here, here from wanderings, strayings, lessons, wars, defeats—here
      at the west a voice triumphant—justifying all,
  A gladsome pealing cry—a song for once of utmost pride and satisfaction;
  I chant from it the common bulk, the general average horde, (the
      best sooner than the worst)—And now I chant old age,
  (My verses, written first for forenoon life, and for the summer’s,
      autumn’s spread,
  I pass to snow-white hairs the same, and give to pulses
      winter-cool’d the same;)
  As here in careless trill, I and my recitatives, with faith and love,
  wafting to other work, to unknown songs, conditions,
  On, on ye jocund twain! continue on the same!

MY 71^st Year

  After surmounting three-score and ten,
  With all their chances, changes, losses, sorrows,
  My parents’ deaths, the vagaries of my life, the many tearing
      passions of me, the war of ’63 and ’4,
  As some old broken soldier, after a long, hot, wearying march, or
      haply after battle,
  To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call, Here,
      with vital voice,
  Reporting yet, saluting yet the Officer over all.

Apparitions

  A vague mist hanging ’round half the pages:
  (Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul,
  That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, concepts,
      non-realities.)

The Pallid Wreath

  Somehow I cannot let it go yet, funeral though it is,
  Let it remain back there on its nail suspended,
  With pink, blue, yellow, all blanch’d, and the white now gray and ashy,
  One wither’d rose put years ago for thee, dear friend;
  But I do not forget thee. Hast thou then faded?
  Is the odor exhaled? Are the colors, vitalities, dead?
  No, while memories subtly play—the past vivid as ever;
  For but last night I woke, and in that spectral ring saw thee,
  Thy smile, eyes, face, calm, silent, loving as ever:
  So let the wreath hang still awhile within my eye-reach,
  It is not yet dead to me, nor even pallid.

An Ended Day

  The soothing sanity and blitheness of completion,
  The pomp and hurried contest-glare and rush are done;
  Now triumph! transformation! jubilate!

Old Age’s Ship & Crafty Death’s

  From east and west across the horizon’s edge,
  Two mighty masterful vessels sailers steal upon us:
  But we’ll make race a-time upon the seas—a battle-contest yet! bear
      lively there!
  (Our joys of strife and derring-do to the last!)
  Put on the old ship all her power to-day!
  Crowd top-sail, top-gallant and royal studding-sails,
  Out challenge and defiance—flags and flaunting pennants added,
  As we take to the open—take to the deepest, freest waters.

To the Pending Year

  Have I no weapon-word for thee—some message brief and fierce?
  (Have I fought out and done indeed the battle?) Is there no shot left,
  For all thy affectations, lisps, scorns, manifold silliness?
  Nor for myself—my own rebellious self in thee?

  Down, down, proud gorge!—though choking thee;
  Thy bearded throat and high-borne forehead to the gutter;
  Crouch low thy neck to eleemosynary gifts.

Shakspere-Bacon’s Cipher

  I doubt it not—then more, far more;
  In each old song bequeath’d—in every noble page or text,
  (Different—something unreck’d before—some unsuspected author,)
  In every object, mountain, tree, and star—in every birth and life,
  As part of each—evolv’d from each—meaning, behind the ostent,
  A mystic cipher waits infolded.

Long, Long Hence

  After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials,
  Accumulations, rous’d love and joy and thought,
  Hopes, wishes, aspirations, ponderings, victories, myriads of readers,
  Coating, compassing, covering—after ages’ and ages’ encrustations,
  Then only may these songs reach fruition.

Bravo, Paris Exposition!

  Add to your show, before you close it, France,
  With all the rest, visible, concrete, temples, towers, goods,
      machines and ores,
  Our sentiment wafted from many million heart-throbs, ethereal but solid,
  (We grand-sons and great-grandsons do not forget your grandsires,)
  From fifty Nations and nebulous Nations, compacted, sent oversea to-day,
  America’s applause, love, memories and good-will.

Interpolation Sounds

  Over and through the burial chant,
  Organ and solemn service, sermon, bending priests,
  To me come interpolation sounds not in the show—plainly to me,
      crowding up the aisle and from the window,
  Of sudden battle’s hurry and harsh noises—war’s grim game to sight
      and ear in earnest;
  The scout call’d up and forward—the general mounted and his aides
      around him—the new-brought word—the instantaneous order issued;
  The rifle crack—the cannon thud—the rushing forth of men from their
      tents;
  The clank of cavalry—the strange celerity of forming ranks—the
      slender bugle note;
  The sound of horses’ hoofs departing—saddles, arms, accoutrements.

To the Sun-Set Breeze

  Ah, whispering, something again, unseen,
  Where late this heated day thou enterest at my window, door,
  Thou, laving, tempering all, cool-freshing, gently vitalizing
  Me, old, alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat;
  Thou, nestling, folding close and firm yet soft, companion better
      than talk, book, art,
  (Thou hast, O Nature! elements! utterance to my heart beyond the
      rest—and this is of them,)
  So sweet thy primitive taste to breathe within—thy soothing fingers
      my face and hands,
  Thou, messenger—magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me,
  (Distances balk’d—occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot,)
  I feel the sky, the prairies vast—I feel the mighty northern lakes,
  I feel the ocean and the forest—somehow I feel the globe itself
      swift-swimming in space;
  Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone—haply from endless store,
      God-sent,
  (For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense,)
  Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told, and
      cannot tell,
  Art thou not universal concrete’s distillation? Law’s, all
      Astronomy’s last refinement?
  Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee?

Old Chants

  An ancient song, reciting, ending,
  Once gazing toward thee, Mother of All,
  Musing, seeking themes fitted for thee,
  Accept me, thou saidst, the elder ballads,
  And name for me before thou goest each ancient poet.

  (Of many debts incalculable,
  Haply our New World’s chieftest debt is to old poems.)

  Ever so far back, preluding thee, America,
  Old chants, Egyptian priests, and those of Ethiopia,
  The Hindu epics, the Grecian, Chinese, Persian,
  The Biblic books and prophets, and deep idyls of the Nazarene,
  The Iliad, Odyssey, plots, doings, wanderings of Eneas,
  Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Merlin, Arthur,
  The Cid, Roland at Roncesvalles, the Nibelungen,
  The troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, skalds,
  Chaucer, Dante, flocks of singing birds,
  The Border Minstrelsy, the bye-gone ballads, feudal tales, essays, plays,
  Shakespere, Schiller, Walter Scott, Tennyson,
  As some vast wondrous weird dream-presences,
  The great shadowy groups gathering around,
  Darting their mighty masterful eyes forward at thee,
  Thou! with as now thy bending neck and head, with courteous hand
      and word, ascending,
  Thou! pausing a moment, drooping thine eyes upon them, blent
      with their music,
  Well pleased, accepting all, curiously prepared for by them,
  Thou enterest at thy entrance porch.

A Christmas Greeting

  Welcome, Brazilian brother—thy ample place is ready;
  A loving hand—a smile from the north—a sunny instant hall!
  (Let the future care for itself, where it reveals its troubles,
      impedimentas,
  Ours, ours the present throe, the democratic aim, the acceptance and
      the faith;)
  To thee to-day our reaching arm, our turning neck—to thee from us
      the expectant eye,
  Thou cluster free! thou brilliant lustrous one! thou, learning well,
  The true lesson of a nation’s light in the sky,
  (More shining than the Cross, more than the Crown,)
  The height to be superb humanity.

Sounds of the Winter

  Sounds of the winter too,
  Sunshine upon the mountains—many a distant strain
  From cheery railroad train—from nearer field, barn, house,
  The whispering air—even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn,
  Children’s and women’s tones—rhythm of many a farmer and of flail,
  An old man’s garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we give out yet,
  Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.

A Twilight Song

  As I sit in twilight late alone by the flickering oak-flame,
  Musing on long-pass’d war-scenes—of the countless buried unknown
      soldiers,
  Of the vacant names, as unindented air’s and sea’s—the unreturn’d,
  The brief truce after battle, with grim burial-squads, and the
      deep-fill’d trenches
  Of gather’d from dead all America, North, South, East, West, whence
      they came up,
  From wooded Maine, New-England’s farms, from fertile Pennsylvania,
      Illinois, Ohio,
  From the measureless West, Virginia, the South, the Carolinas, Texas,
  (Even here in my room-shadows and half-lights in the noiseless
      flickering flames,
  Again I see the stalwart ranks on-filing, rising—I hear the
      rhythmic tramp of the armies;)
  You million unwrit names all, all—you dark bequest from all the war,
  A special verse for you—a flash of duty long neglected—your mystic
      roll strangely gather’d here,
  Each name recall’d by me from out the darkness and death’s ashes,
  Henceforth to be, deep, deep within my heart recording, for many
      future year,
  Your mystic roll entire of unknown names, or North or South,
  Embalm’d with love in this twilight song.

When the Full-Grown Poet Came

  When the full-grown poet came,
  Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its
      shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;
  But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled,
      Nay he is mine alone;
  —Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each
      by the hand;
  And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,
  Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,
  And wholly and joyously blends them.

Osceola

  When his hour for death had come,
  He slowly rais’d himself from the bed on the floor,
  Drew on his war-dress, shirt, leggings, and girdled the belt around
      his waist,
  Call’d for vermilion paint (his looking-glass was held before him,)
  Painted half his face and neck, his wrists, and back-hands.
  Put the scalp-knife carefully in his belt—then lying down, resting
      moment,
  Rose again, half sitting, smiled, gave in silence his extended hand
      to each and all,
  Sank faintly low to the floor (tightly grasping the tomahawk handle,)
  Fix’d his look on wife and little children—the last:

  (And here a line in memory of his name and death.)

A Voice from Death

  A voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and power,
  With sudden, indescribable blow—towns drown’d—humanity by
      thousands slain,
  The vaunted work of thrift, goods, dwellings, forge, street, iron bridge,
  Dash’d pell-mell by the blow—yet usher’d life continuing on,
  (Amid the rest, amid the rushing, whirling, wild debris,
  A suffering woman saved—a baby safely born!)

  Although I come and unannounc’d, in horror and in pang,
  In pouring flood and fire, and wholesale elemental crash, (this
      voice so solemn, strange,)
  I too a minister of Deity.

  Yea, Death, we bow our faces, veil our eyes to thee,
  We mourn the old, the young untimely drawn to thee,
  The fair, the strong, the good, the capable,
  The household wreck’d, the husband and the wife, the engulfed forger
      in his forge,
  The corpses in the whelming waters and the mud,
  The gather’d thousands to their funeral mounds, and thousands never
      found or gather’d.

  Then after burying, mourning the dead,
  (Faithful to them found or unfound, forgetting not, bearing the
      past, here new musing,)
  A day—a passing moment or an hour—America itself bends low,
  Silent, resign’d, submissive.

  War, death, cataclysm like this, America,
  Take deep to thy proud prosperous heart.

  E’en as I chant, lo! out of death, and out of ooze and slime,
  The blossoms rapidly blooming, sympathy, help, love,
  From West and East, from South and North and over sea,
  Its hot-spurr’d hearts and hands humanity to human aid moves on;
  And from within a thought and lesson yet.

  Thou ever-darting Globe! through Space and Air!
  Thou waters that encompass us!
  Thou that in all the life and death of us, in action or in sleep!
  Thou laws invisible that permeate them and all,
  Thou that in all, and over all, and through and under all, incessant!
  Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm,
  Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,
  How ill to e’er forget thee!

  For I too have forgotten,
  (Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture,
      wealth, inventions, civilization,)
  Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye
      mighty, elemental throes,
  In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is buoy’d.

A Persian Lesson

  For his o’erarching and last lesson the greybeard sufi,
  In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
  On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
  Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
  Spoke to the young priests and students.

  “Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,
  Allah is all, all, all—immanent in every life and object,
  May-be at many and many-a-more removes—yet Allah, Allah, Allah is there.

  “Has the estray wander’d far? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?
  Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
  Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every life;
  The something never still’d—never entirely gone? the invisible need
      of every seed?

  “It is the central urge in every atom,
  (Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
  To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
  Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception.”

The Commonplace

  The commonplace I sing;
  How cheap is health! how cheap nobility!
  Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust;
  The open air I sing, freedom, toleration,
  (Take here the mainest lesson—less from books—less from the schools,)
  The common day and night—the common earth and waters,
  Your farm—your work, trade, occupation,
  The democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground for all.

“The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete”

  The devilish and the dark, the dying and diseas’d,
  The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and savage,
  The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank, malignant,
  Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the dissolute;
  (What is the part the wicked and the loathesome bear within earth’s
      orbic scheme?)
  Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,
  The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot.

Mirages

  More experiences and sights, stranger, than you’d think for;
  Times again, now mostly just after sunrise or before sunset,
  Sometimes in spring, oftener in autumn, perfectly clear weather, in
      plain sight,
  Camps far or near, the crowded streets of cities and the shopfronts,
  (Account for it or not—credit or not—it is all true,
  And my mate there could tell you the like—we have often confab’d
      about it,)
  People and scenes, animals, trees, colors and lines, plain as could be,
  Farms and dooryards of home, paths border’d with box, lilacs in corners,
  Weddings in churches, thanksgiving dinners, returns of long-absent sons,
  Glum funerals, the crape-veil’d mother and the daughters,
  Trials in courts, jury and judge, the accused in the box,
  Contestants, battles, crowds, bridges, wharves,
  Now and then mark’d faces of sorrow or joy,
  (I could pick them out this moment if I saw them again,)
  Show’d to me—just to the right in the sky-edge,
  Or plainly there to the left on the hill-tops.

L. of G.’s Purport

  Not to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their formidable
      masses (even to expose them,)
  But add, fuse, complete, extend—and celebrate the immortal and the good.
  Haughty this song, its words and scope,
  To span vast realms of space and time,
  Evolution—the cumulative—growths and generations.

  Begun in ripen’d youth and steadily pursued,
  Wandering, peering, dallying with all—war, peace, day and night
      absorbing,
  Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task,
  I end it here in sickness, poverty, and old age.

  I sing of life, yet mind me well of death:
  To-day shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has for years—
  Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.

The Unexpress’d

  How dare one say it?
  After the cycles, poems, singers, plays,
  Vaunted Ionia’s, India’s—Homer, Shakspere—the long, long times’
      thick dotted roads, areas,
  The shining clusters and the Milky Ways of stars—Nature’s pulses reap’d,
  All retrospective passions, heroes, war, love, adoration,
  All ages’ plummets dropt to their utmost depths,
  All human lives, throats, wishes, brains—all experiences’ utterance;
  After the countless songs, or long or short, all tongues, all lands,
  Still something not yet told in poesy’s voice or print—something lacking,
  (Who knows? the best yet unexpress’d and lacking.)

Grand Is the Seen

  Grand is the seen, the light, to me—grand are the sky and stars,
  Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space,
  And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary;
  But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those,
  Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing
      the sea,
  (What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what
      amount without thee?)
  More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul!
  More multiform far—more lasting thou than they.

Unseen Buds

  Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well,
  Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch,
  Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn,
  Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping;
  Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them waiting,
  (On earth and in the sea—the universe—the stars there in the
      heavens,)
  Urging slowly, surely forward, forming endless,
  And waiting ever more, forever more behind.

Good-Bye My Fancy!

  Good-bye my Fancy!
  Farewell dear mate, dear love!
  I’m going away, I know not where,
  Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
  So Good-bye my Fancy.

  Now for my last—let me look back a moment;
  The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
  Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.

  Long have we lived, joy’d, caress’d together;
  Delightful!—now separation—Good-bye my Fancy.

  Yet let me not be too hasty,
  Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter’d, become really blended
      into one;
  Then if we die we die together, (yes, we’ll remain one,)
  If we go anywhere we’ll go together to meet what happens,
  May-be we’ll be better off and blither, and learn something,
  May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who
      knows?)
  May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning—so now finally,
  Good-bye—and hail! my Fancy.

77. The Life and Writings of Severine

Author: Severine

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78. Intellectual Property

Author: The Anarchist Library

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79. Christian Theology of the Homosexual Reaction

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80. The Coworker

Author: David Graeber

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81. Eclipse and Re Emergence of the Communist Movement

Author: Francois Martin and Jean Barrot Aka Gilles Dauve

Not archived: <https://web.archive.org/web/https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/francois_martin_and_jean_barrot__aka_gilles_dauve___eclipse_and_re-emergence_of_the_communist_movement>

82. Esperanto and Anarchism

Author: Will Firth

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83. What’s Wrong With Postanarchism

Author: Jesse Cohnand & Shawn Wilbur

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84. Antonio Tellez Sola Anarchist International Octavio

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85. Cornelius 168precisely

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86. Rick Astley a Left Nrx Manifesto

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87. Aldo Perego Alfredo M

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88. Beforeactivate Change

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89. Bob Blek Uprazdnenie Raboty

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90. De Ric Shannon and J

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91. Janeaddamscollective

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92. Nomadicnegativist

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93. The Dialectical Delinquents

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[1] Thanks to Francesca Manning for her invaluable help in working through the ideas in this text. I’d also like to thank Aaron Benanav for his help in editing this piece.

[2] See ‘Misery and Debt’, Endnotes 2 (2010): 20–51, http://endnotes.org.uk/ articles/1.

[3] For a key debate on this point, see Endnotes 1 (2008), http://endnotes.org. uk/issues/1

[4] Théorie Communiste, ‘The Present Moment’, unpublished.

[5] Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard, Familiar Exploitation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).

[6] Not all human beings fit into the categories of male and female. The point is not to use the language of biology to ground a theory of naturalized sexuality, as distinct from a socialized gender. Nature, which is without distinction, becomes integrated into a social structure – which takes natural averages and turns them into behavioral norms. Not all ‘women’ bear children; maybe some ‘men’ do. That does not make them any less beholden to society’s strictures, including at the level of their very bodies, which are sometimes altered at birth to ensure conformity with sexual norms.

[7] These statistics make it clear to what extent violence against women, sometimes carried out by women themselves, has always been necessary to keep them firmly tied to their role in the sexual reproduction of the species. See Paola Tabet, ‘Natural Fertility, Forced Reproduction’, in Diana Leonard and Lisa Adkins, Sex in Question (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996).

[8] For an introduction to demography, see Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population (Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

[9] Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Capitalism and Human Emancipation’, New Left Review I/167 ( Jan-Feb 1988): 3–20.

[10] The term comes from Japan, see Makotoh Itoh, The Japanese Economy Reconsidered (Palgrave 2000).

[11] Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression’, New Left Review I/144 (Mar-Apr 1984): 33–71.

[12] Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression’, New Left Review I/144 (Mar-Apr 1984): 33–71.

[13] For a more developed theory of women’s relation to property, see ‘Notes on the New Housing Question’, Endnotes 2 (2010): 52–66, http://endnotes. org.uk/articles/3. The ground of this loosening, as well as its timing, has remained inexplicable within the bounds of queer theory.

[14] Brenner and Ramas, ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression’.

[15] In this sense, we are of course interested only in the history of women’s situation within the workers’ movement. Bourgeois suffragettes argued for property-based voting qualifications – thus excluding women as class enemies. By the middle of the twentieth century, these same bourgeois became defenders of women’s maternal role – at the same time as they founded organizations to control the bodies of women among the ‘dangerous classes’.

[16] Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

[17] Radical feminism followed a curious trajectory in the second half of the 20^th century, taking first childbearing, then domestic work, and finally sexual violence (or the male orgasm) as the ground of women’s oppression. The problem was that in each case, these feminists sought an ahistorical ground for what had become an historical phenomenon.

[18] On the history of women’s situation within the workers’ movement, see Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[19] Théorie Communiste, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, Endnotes 1 (2008), http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/13.

[20] Stafford 1992: 4ff.

[21] quoted in Stafford 1992: 1

[22] Buick 1995: 5

[23] Rucker 1992: 78

[24] It should be mentioned here that the cybernetic counterculture that Leary describes in his later works encompasses a cluster of subcultures, among them computer hackers, ravers, technopagans, and cyber-hippies (I will describe these subcultures in my discussion of cyberculture). Leary uses the generic term “cyberpunk” to describe all these subcultures because they all share the same vision: the cyberpunk vision of a world where space, time, and body are transcended – no limits, total freedom.

[25] Williams 1978: 94

[26] The translation was first published in 1964 under the title The Psychedelic Experience.

[27] First published in 1966 under the title Psychedelic Prayers and Other Meditations (Leary 1997a).

[28] Philosophic models which define seven levels were used in Hinduism and various schools of Buddhism. According to the Hinduistic chakra system, for example, we can experience seven energy-spots in the body which correspond to different levels of consciousness.

[29] Leary seems to have been influenced by Aldous Huxley very much. This can be seen in the following passage from Huxley’s Heaven and Hell: “[I]n one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely “spiritual”, purely “intellectual”, purely “aesthetic”, it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence (Huxley 1972: 121). Huxley visited Leary in Harvard in the early 60s when Leary had just ‘discovered’ psychedelics.

[30] Leary recorded an LP with Jimmy Hendrix and drummer Buddy Miles, which is called “You can be anyone this time around.” On this LP Leary raps that the hippies were “the first generation in human history who are able to control their own nervous systems” which made them able to be literally anyone or anything we want to be.

[31] Interesting similarities can be seen if we compare this level of consciousness with Carl Jung’s concept of the Collective Unconscious (Jung 1936). Also LSD-therapist Stanislov Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious (1976) should be mentioned here. Based on LSD experiences, Grof developed a theory of consciousness which deals with transpersonal (e.g. prenatal or perinatal) experiences. Grof still uses this theory for his LSD psychotherapy and a therapeutic method called “holotropic breathing.”

[32] Neither scientists nor philosophers have found the final answer to the consciousness question. Buddhists believe that if we continue to cling to “either/or” causal logic we will never be able to answer the question in a satisfying way.

[33] Aldous Huxley repeatedly uses this metaphor of the drug as a magnifying glass which makes all things appear under a crystal-clear light in The Doors of Perception as well.

[34] quoted in Bukatman 1993: 3

[35] In the early 70s, the Apollo-Saturn space missions and the first skylab — this was in 1973 — seemed to open a promising new frontier. Obviously, Leary was deeply impressed by these new developments because he became obsessed with space migration. The idea that salvation might be found in outer space occurred to Leary during the time when he was in prison. Several chapters of his Exo-psychology works were written during periods of solitary confinement. In the introduction to Neuropolitique — which was written in the 80s and is a revision of Neuropolitics — Leary admits that in prison he felt alienated from the whole world. This alienation and the fact that he was unable to change the system which deprived him of his freedom was the reason for his longing for the freedom, happiness, and the endless possibilities that outer space seemed to offer.

[36] Leary introduces the generic term „Hir“ (i.e., a combination of „his“ and „her“) because in the Higher Intelligence he is talking about male and female are united.

[37] To avoid confusion, I want to tell the reader that I was not able to get the books Exo-Psychology and Neuropolitics. They are out of print. The books I use as sources for describing the model of the Eight Circuits of Consciousness are Info-Psychology(1990), a revision of Exo-Psychology(1977b), and Neuropolitique(1995), which is a revision of Neuropolitics(1977a). These revised versions contain the most important essays of Leary’s Exo-Psychology theory in an unchanged form, which means that they do not differ from the original versions published in the 70s.

[38] In Exo-Psychology, Leary subdivides the 8 neurological phases of evolution in 24 stages (8x3) of biological-neurological evolution. Furthermore, in another book titled The Game of Life (1977c) Leary tries to correlate the 8 phases, or 24 stages, with the chemical Periodic Table of Elements, the Tarot, the Zodiac, the I Ching, the Greco-Roman Panthenon, the Hebrew alphabet, and other symbol systems. I do not want to discuss these 24 stages and the correspondences between Leary’s 8-fold model and the other systems (all based on the number 8) in detail because these things are not of crucial importance for my paper.

[39] Why Operant conditioning and not Classical conditioning? There is a crucial difference between Classical and Operant conditioning. In Classical conditioning the animal, or person is passive; it merely waits until the unconditioned stimulus is presented and is followed by the unconditioned stimulus. Pavlov’s dog, for example, is not encouraged to show new behavior. In Operant conditioning, the animal, or person, has to be active; its/his/her behavior cannot be reinforced unless it does something. A large part of human behavior may be classified as operant – turning a key in a lock, driving a car, writing a letter. Such activities are not elicited by an unconditioned stimulus of the Pavlovian type. But once the behavior occurs it can be reinforced according to the principles of Operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is often applied in politics and education .

[40] In McLuhan’s The medium is the Massage (1967) the pages are not numbered. However, there are headings. The passages from The Medium is the Massage I quote in this paragraph can be found under the headings “The medium is the massage?” , „Your neighborhood”, “Your government,” and “the others.”

[41] I asked Rushkoff what Leary’s impact was. He said that Leary‘s greatest influence was in seeing computers and the Internet as an extension of human beings. Attached to his email Rushkoff sent me an essay he wrote for the Guardian of London, “Timothy, Allen, and Bill: The Godfathers of Cyberspace” (date of publishing ???). The quotation above is from this article.

[42] I attended this conference. In his lecture Wilson also said that, in his opinion, Leary’s model is still the best model of human consciousness.

[43] In the 80s and 90s, Leary did not talk about his Eight-Circuit model much any more but rather tried to show that the universe is just too complex and chaotic to be pressed in a simple, rigid model like his Eight Circuit model. However, in 1987 Leary published and updated version of Exo-Psychology which is titled Info-Psychology. In Info-Psychology, the focus is on cyberspace, not outer space. The model of the Eight Circuits of consciousness basically remains the same. The Neuroelectric Circuit is renamed Cybernetic Circuit (the Internet being the electronic nervous system Leary predicted in the 70s).

[44] In Escape Velocity cultural critic Mark Dery describes the Diggers as “a Haight-Ashbury-based anarchist collective that harmonized the counterculture’s Arcadian longings with the technetronic age”[sic](Dery 1996: 34). Dery quotes Sirius who explains that the Diggers preached the Arthur C. Clarkeian gospel of “a post scarcity culture where work was obsolete, ‘all of [us] watched over by machines of loving grace’”(Dery 1996: 35). In the 60s, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke prophesied that in the near future “ultraintelligent” machines would make possible an “uninhibited, hedonistic society” of cradle-to-grave leisure (cf. Dery 1996: 29).

[45] “Nanotechnology is the manufacture of materials and structures with dimensions that measure up to 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter). Its definition applies to a range of disciplines, from conventional synthetic chemistry to techniques that manipulate individual elements with tiny probe elements. In the vision promulgated by Eric Drexler [the avatar of nanotechnology] current nanoscale fabrication methods could eventually into techniques for making molecular robots or shrunken versions of 19^th-century mills. In the course of a few hours, manufacturing systems based on Drexler’s nanotechnology could produce anything from a rocket ship to minute disease-fighting submarines that roam in the blood stream. [...] Molecular robots could repair cells in our bodies and make us immortal.[...] (This passage is taken from an article by Gary Stix “Waiting for Breakthroughs” which can be found on the homepage of Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/exhibit/040000trends.html).

[46] Michael Heim, “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,” in Benedikt 1991: 65

[47] This idea involves a contradiction. It seems that Leary was not aware of the fact that science tries to order chaos.

[48] Einstein used the term “quanta” to describe particles of light (now known as photons). This is the origin of the term “Quantum Theory”(cf. Capra 1982: 79).

[49] Capra’s explanation of these probabilities may help us to understand what Leary means: „At the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies to exist’, and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite places, but rather show ‘tendencies to occur.’ In the formalism of quantum mechanics, these tendencies are expressed as probabilities and are associated with quantities that take the form of waves [...]. This is how particles can be waves at the same time. They are not ‘real’ three- dimensional waves [but] ‘probablility waves’ – abstract mathematical quantities with the characteristic property of waves – that are related to the probabilities of finding the particles at particular points in space and at particular times. All the laws of atomic physics are expressed in terms of these probabilities”(Capra 1983: 80). So this means that the probabilities tell us if a particle can be found at a particular point in space at a particular time (1) or not (0).

[50] Leary uses the word “memes” (this term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene) to describe ideas that, like a self-replicating virus, sweep across human populations, bringing about cultural mutations.

[51] The term “cybernetics” was coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 to describe a branch of science which is concerned with studying control processes in living and artificial systems/computers (see chapter 4.2.2.).

[52] Leary’s computer-brain model also has an explanation for visions and halluzinations that occur during psychedelic experiences. According to Leary, there are programs in the ROM of our biocomputers which are responsible for psychedelic visions. During a psychedelic experience these programs are activated (cf. CC 39).

[53] The slogan “Just Say Know” was Leary’s reaction to the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign in the US. In “head shops” in San Francisco, for example, you can by bumper stickers and patches with Leary’s slogan printed on them.

[54] The reader who is interested in the mental and physical effects of MDMA is referred to the following books: Bruce Eisner’s Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. Alexander Shulgin’s PHIKAL. Nicolas Saunders’ E for Ecstasy.

[55] It should be mentioned here that Leary was Rushkoff’s mentor. In various magazine articles and essays, Rushkoff praises Leary as the “godfather of cyberspace.” In Cyberia, Rushkoff talks about Leary and his ideas quite a lot. It should also be mentioned here that Rushkoff also wrote a novel, Ecstasy Club (Rushkoff 1997), in which he turns his extensive knowledge of the cyber-scene into a fictional account of the rise and fall of a rave club. Leary (in the novel his name is Samuel Clearwater) is an important character in this novel.

[56] McKenna took a hexagram from the I Ching and generated from it a fractal theory of change which places the end of all things at the end of 2012 AD. This idea had been revealed to him whilst in an altered state of consciousness brought about by psilocybin mushrooms (cf. http://deoxy.org/mckenna.html , McKenna’s home page). McKenna first described his Timewave theory in his book The Invisible Landscape. (McKenna 1975).

[57] AT&T is one of the biggest communication services corporations in the US.

[58] Michael Bakunin, God and the State (New York: Dover, 1970), p. 10.

[59] Bakunin, God and the State, p. 10.

[60] Bakunin, God and the State, pp. 12–13.

[61] Isiah, Berlin, Karl Marx (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 21–22.

[62] Neal Riemer, Karl Marx and Prophetic Politics (New York: Praeger, 1987), p. 64.

[63] See Riemer, Karl Marx and Prophetic Politics, 1–20.

[64] Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: I: The Founders. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 409; 412; 414.

[65] Berlin, Karl Marx, p. 229.

[66] Riemer, Karl Marx and Prophetic Politics, p. 11–12.

[67] Black writes, “Bakunin considered Marx, ‘the German scholar, in his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German,’ to be a ‘hopeless statist.’ A Hegelian, a Jew, a sort-of scholar, a Marxist, a hopeless (city-) statist — does this sound like anybody familiar?’ Full text available at theanarchistlibrary.org

[68] AngryWorkers:
https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/contribution-to-debate-on-social-strikes-and-directional-demands/
https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2015/09/11/on-the-social-strike-contribution-for-the-plan-c-fast-forward-festival-september-2015/
https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/general-thoughts-on-relation-between-capitalist-development-class-struggle-and-communist-organisation/

[69] Beverly Silver: Forces of Labor
https://libcom.org/files/Beverly_J._Silver-Forces_of_Labor__Workers’_Movements_and_Globalization_Since_1870_(Cambridge_Studies_in_Comparative_Politics)__-Cambridge_University_Press(2003).pdf

[70] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html

[71] http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/occupyeverything-web.pdf

[72] Mason:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/27/concorde-iphone-history-state-intervention-technological-innovation

[73] Mason:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/20/young-skint-self-employed-new-labour-market

[74] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/britain-rainy-fascist-island-progrexit-brexit

[75] Era of Riots
https://libcom.org/library/era-riots-update

[76] Steven Colatrella: Global Strike Wave
https://libcom.org/library/worldwide-strike-wave-austerity-political-crisis-global-governance-steven-colatrella

[77] Global Labour History:
http://www.iisg.nl/publications/globallabourhistory.pdf

[78] Wildcat: Global Working Class
https://libcom.org/library/global-working-class-wildcat-germany

[79] Wildcat on Peasant Question:
http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/wildcat/82/w82_bauern_en.html

[80] Trotsky on Combined Development:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/

[81] Example of Experiments with Alternative Communication Networks:
http://awmn.net/content.php?r=288-AWMN&s=c5217ebf903e411769286b4cefb4b80c

[82] Can anyone say communism?
http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/wildcat/86/w88_communism_en.html

[83] On Popular Front in France, 1936:
https://libcom.org/library/1914-1946-third-camp-internationalists-france-during-world-war-ii

[84] On Chile, 1973:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5GeEzBKGsQ

[85] On Inventing the Future and Critique of Universal Basic Income:
In November 2015, Verso Books sent a copy of Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams to every member of the UK’s Labour Shadow Cabinet, appealing to the helping hand of the state to accelerate the technological progress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventing_the_Future:_Postcapitalism_and_a_World_Without_Work
https://libcom.org/library/aufheben/pamphlets-articles/stop-the-clock-critiques-of-the-new-social-workhouse/reforming-the-welfare-state-in-order-to

[86] On Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism:
https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/i-have-seen-the-techno-future-and-im-not-so-sure-it-works/

[87] Invisible Committee: To Our Friends
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends

[88] On current communisation theories:
http://libcom.org/library/communisation-its-theorists-friends-classless-society

[89] Plan C on Reproduction:
http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/a-syndicalism-of-everyday-life-a-conversation-on-the-social-strike/

[90] Operaismo: Refusal of Work
https://libcom.org/library/refusal-work-workers-committee-porto-marghera-1970

[91] Group of International Communists:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/

[92] Goldner on Transition Program:
“What follows in conclusion, then, is a program for the “first hundred days” of a successful proletarian revolution in key countries, and hopefully throughout the world in short order. It is intended to illustrate the potential for a rapid dismantling of “value” production in Marx’s sense.”

[93] Bolchevik foreign policies:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1947/germany.htm

[94] Seattle 1919:
https://libcom.org/history/1919-the-seattle-general-strike

[95] Spanish Civil War:
https://libcom.org/library/workers-against-work-michael-seidman

[96] Oaxaca 2006:
https://libcom.org/history/looking-back-oaxaca-rebellion

[97] Workers’ Control:
http://www.workerscontrol.net

[98] WorkersWildWest:
www.workerswildwest.wordpress.com

[99] Nuclei Armati Proletari — Proletarian Armed Nuclei

[100] According to Neocosmos in Thinking Freedom in Africa, the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics existed in the 1950s and 1960s. The name of a mode is the name of a specific relation of a politics to its thought, but not the name of the politics itself. NLS is strongly associated with the Leninist influenced decolonial and anti-imperialist uprisings that took place in Africa during that period. cf., Salar Mohandesi’s Red Internationalism.

[101] Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford University Press, 2003), 8–15; Desai, Geopolitical Economy.

[102] Alessandro Russo, “Mummifying the Working Class: The Cultural Revolution and the Fates of the Political Parties of the 20^th Century,” The China Quarterly, no. 227 (2016): 653–73.

[103] Amilcar Cabral, “Presuppositions and Objectives of National Liberation Struggle in Relation to Social Structure,” in Unity and Struggle, trans. Michael Wolfers (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 119–37.

[104] Anonymous and Bruno Bosteels, “The Dialectical Mode: With Regard to Mao Zedong and Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 663–68. It is highly likely that this anonymous author is Sylvain Lazarus.

[105] Asad Haider, “On Depoliticization,” Viewpoint Magazine, December 16, 2019, https://viewpointmag.com/2019/12/16/on-depoliticization/.

[106] Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, 43.

[107] Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (MIT Press, 1988), 57.

[108] Engels, “The Role of Force in History,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 453–510.

[109] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 18.

[110] Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” 18. Fukuyama’s argument provides the best way into the subject matter of this essay, despite the misgivings many have towards it. His argument is best appreciated for presenting a liberal Hegelian view of the philosophy of history and clearly grasping the impending period of depoliticization that was to follow the exhaustion of the revolutionary sequences of the 20^th century. For Fukuyama, history has ended in the sense that there is no existing project which presents a higher form of human society than liberal democracy. There will of course still be wars, and other forms of state or governance, but the key is that they do not present themselves as transcending what already exists.

[111] Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 5.

[112] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (Batoche, 2004).

[113] Georgij Valentinovič Plekhanov, Essays in Historical Materialism, Foundations, #9 (Paris: Foreign languages press, 2021), 72.

[114] Hegel, The Philosophy of History.

[115] Hegel, 64–88.

[116] Ibid

[117] Ibid, “Mummifying the Working Class.”

[118] Ibid, 183.

[119] Ibid, 221.

[120] Ibid, 657–58.

[121] Ibid, 662.

[122] Ibid, 663.

[123] Ibid, 670.

[124] Ibid, 671.

[125] Ibid.

[126] Ibid.

[127] Ibid.

[128] Ibid.

[129] Ibid.

[130] Ibid.

[131] It is considerable that the age old debate over “socialism in one country” versus “permanent revolution” is merely a disagreement over the role of objective determinants and the ways in which a proper “dialectical” understanding sees a post-revolution state transitioning to “socialism.” In thought, the “Stalinists” and “Trotskyists” are not very different.

[132] It is significant that in such thoughts of history, one’s politics, one’s state, cannot help but take the position of protagonist, with an infallible grasp on laws of human development. To Fukuyama, the Marxist project was but a fleeting moment in the overall trajectory of history which culminates in the liberal state and market society. Marxists would likely argue the same of liberal democracy, of fascism, etc. Same system of logic, different subjects and ends.

[133] J.V. Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” in History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951), 165–206; Alessandro Russo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 94.

[134] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Political Writings (London: Verso, 2019), 61.

[135] Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (London; New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), 164.

[136] Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, 101.

[137] Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, 177.

[138] Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name.

[139] Lazarus, 102.

[140] Lazarus, 182.

[141] Lenin, “Better Fewer, But Better,” in Collected Works, trans. David Skvirsky and George Hanna, 2^nd English, vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 487–502, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm.

[142] Lenin, 410, 415.

[143] Lenin, 467.

[144] Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” Interpretation 29, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 353–78.

[145] Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 255

[146] Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice and Contradiction, Reissue edition (London; New York: Verso, 2017).

[147] Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Marxist Internet Archive, 1957, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm.

[148] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (John Hunt Publishing, 2009).

[149] Marx and Engels, 73.

[150] Marx, “Marx to J. Weydemeyer in New York,” Marxist Internet Archive, 1852, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05-ab.htm.

[151] Michael Neocosmos, “Analysing Political Subjectivities: Naming the Post-Developmental State in Africa Today,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 45, no. 5 (October 2010): 534–53, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909610373895.

[152] Neocosmos, 537.

[153] Neocosmos.

[154] Plekhanov, Essays in Historical Materialism, 47.

[155] Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (Pluto Press, 2013). What is in question in this essay is not whether ‘multipolarity,’ understood as the dispersion of power on a global scale as the result of objective, political economic processes is a real phenomenon, but rather a questioning of there being any necessary connection between the emergence or viability of emancipatory politics and such processes. Which is to say, such processes have no politics, nor do they give rise to politics in the sense of invention at a distance from the state.

[156] Ronald J. Pestritto, “Woodrow Wilson, the Organic State, and American Republicanism,” in History of American Political Thought, ed. Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 584–85.

[157] Russo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, 96.

[158] Russo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture.

[159] Russo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture.

[160] Russo, 657.

[161] Russo, 91–98.

[162] Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 53.

[163] Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics,” in Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London; New York: Continuum, 2008), 145–76.

[164] Schmitt, 63.

[165] Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropology of the Name, trans. Gila Walker, The French List (Seagull Books, 2015), 52–53. Lazarus writes, “There are intellectualities. To identify one is to identify its mode. The mode will be the operative category of the singularity of each intellectuality and we will call ‘multiplicity of intellectualities’, the configuration of different modes. I posit the singularity and multiplicity of intellectualities.” A footnote on the same page clarifies “The mode is either a historical mode of politics, in which case it qualifies politics and is the relation of a politics to its thought; or it is a mode of intellectuality, that is to say, a particular configuration of the process there is thought.” Here, the term ‘intellectuality’ can be taken to mean a thought of politics that is based on a political sequence that has taken place. Names for these intellectualities include Trotskyism, Leninism, Maoism, and so on. What is important is that these names themselves are contested and do not have set meanings, they are polysemic. Fidelity to an event, in some ways, can be considered an aspect of developing an intellectuality — one sets about thinking politics based on the Cultural Revolution, or the Bolshevik seizure of power, or more nationally specific events such as Wounded Knee.

[166] V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in Collected Works, trans. Stepan Apresyan and Jim Riordan, vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 461.

[167] Wilson, 209.

[168] Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2, no. 2 (87 1886): 209.

[169] Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought? (Duke University Press, 2018), 43; Louis Althusser, “The Crisis of Marxism (1977),” Viewpoint Magazine, December 15, 2017, https://viewpointmag.com/2017/12/15/crisis-marxism-1977/.

[170] The CCP’s tactics of mass detention and surveillance affect many communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR, also known as “Xinjiang,” “Northwest China,” “East Turkestan,” “Uighuria,” “Ghulja,” “Tarbagai,” “Altay,” “Dzungarstan and Altishahr,” and/or “Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin Region,” and which will henceforth be referred to as “Xinjiang”), most visibly Uyghurs but no less significantly other indigenous and minority ethnic groups.

A highly contested term, the proper name Xinjiang (新疆) was first used by the 18^th century emperor Qianlong, and conferred on the XUAR upon Zuo Zongtang’s reoccupation of the region in the late 19^th century. In Mandarin Chinese, it means “new territory,” “new border,” or “new frontier.”

As outsiders, we appreciate being in conversation with comrades on how best to advocate for the liberation of those suffering settler colonial repression in the region. Using accurate terminology to the best of our knowledge and recognizing how the CCP’s campaign of mass detention and cultural genocide impacts numerous communities differently across the XUAR region are important elements of this work. Please contact us if you have further questions and comments.

[171] Canetti, Elias. 1962. Crowds and Power. London: Gollancz.

[172] e.g. Dunbar, Robin I. M. 2010. How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[173] Bird, Douglas W. et al. 2019. “Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: foragers do not live in small-scale societies.” Journal of Human Evolution 131: 96–108; see also Hill, Kim et al. 2011. “Co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure.” Science 331: 1286–1289; David Wengrow and David Graeber. 2015. “Farewell to the childhood of man: ritual, seasonality, and the origins of inequality.” (The Henry Myers Lecture). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 (3): 597–619.

[174] Bloch, Maurice. 2013. In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social. Boulder, Co.: Paradigm.

[175] Fischer, Claude S. 1977. “Comment on Mayhew and Levinger’s ‘Size and the density of interaction in human aggregates’.” American Journal of Sociology 83 (2): 452–455.

[176] Mieroop, Marc Van De. 2013. “Democracy and the rule of law, the assembly, and the first law code,” in H. Crawford (ed.), The Sumerian World. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, pp. 277–289; Possehl, Gregory L. 2002. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek: Altamira; Wengrow, David. 2015. Cities before the State in Early Eurasia. (The Jack Goody Lecture). Halle: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology; Chapman, John, Bisserka Gaydarska and Duncan Hale. 2016. “Nebelivka: assembly houses, ditches, and social structure.” In J. Müller et al. (eds.), Trypillia Mega-Sites and European Prehistory, 4100–3400 BCE. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 117–132.

[177] Froese, Tom, Carlos Gershenson and Linda R. Manzanilla. 2014. “Can government be self-organized? A mathematical model of the collective social organization of ancient Teotihuacan, Central Mexico.” PLOS One 9 (10): e109966; Robb, Matthew H. 2017. Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and University of California Press.

[178] Fargher, Lane, Richard E. Blanton, and Verenice Y Heredia Espinoza. 2010. “Egalitarian ideology and political power in prehispanic Central Mexico: the case of Tlaxcalan.” Latin American Antiquity 21 (3): 227–251; Fargher, Lane et al. 2011. “Tlaxcallan: the archaeology of an ancient republic in the New World.” Antiquity 85: 172–186.

[179] e.g. Pournelle, Jennifer. 2003. Marshland of Cities: Deltaic Landscapes and the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization. University of California: San Diego.

[180] The Left Green Network was formed by North American Greens and other independent leftists to advance an anti-capitalist, anti-statist program and revolutionary strategy within the Green movement and the broader independent left.

[181] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989; orig. 1938).

[182] Anton Pannekoek, “Workers’ Councils,” in Root and Branch, eds., Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers’ Movements (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1975; orig. 1942). The most extensive attempt to work out the economics of council communism is in Cornelius Castoriadis, Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society (Philadelphia: Wooden Shoe, 1984; orig. 1958).

[183] G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980; orig. 1920).

[184] “Negotiated coordination” is the term used by Pat Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning: The Political Economy of a Self-governing Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), one of the most detailed attempts to work out a non-market, non-statist socialist economic model.

[185] “Participatory planning” is the term used by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their detailed model of a non-market, non-statist socialist economy. See Albert and Hahnel, Socialism Today and Tomorrow (Boston: South End Press, 1981); “Participatory Planning” in Steve Shalom, ed., Socialist Visions (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century (Boston: South End Press, 1991); and The Political Economy of Participatory Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

[186] Peter Kropotkin is the classic anarcho-communist. Two representative statements are his The Conquest of Bread (London: Elephant, 1985; orig. 1892) and Act for Yourselves (London: Freedom Press, 1988; orig. 1886–1907). A good historical overview is provided by Alain Pengam, “Anarcho-communism,” in Maximillien Rubel and John Crump, eds., Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Macmillan Press, 1987). Murray Bookchin stated the contemporary case for anarcho-communism in his Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986; orig. 1970). Other important statements for the ultimate accountability of workers’ control to community control are Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958; orig. 1949) and Gar Alperovitz, “Notes Toward a Pluralist Commonwealth”, in Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, Strategy and Program: Two Essays Toward a New American Socialism (Boston:Beacon Press, 1973). Two other statements along these lines that also have an ecological orientation are Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1934), Chapter 8; and Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1960; orig. 1948), Chapter 6.

[187] Cole, Devine, and Albert and Hahnel do give the community through its political institutions the final say on economic planning when there are disputes among the workers’ and consumers’ federations. In each case, these political institutions are participatory, based on assembly forms and mandated and recallable representation. Cole calls these institutions communal as opposed to statist; Albert and Hahnel sometimes do and sometimes do not make it clear that these forms are distinct from statist forms, while Devine simply regards them as more democratic forms of the state. But what still distinguishes these models from community-oriented models is that the economy is still institutionalized as a separate set of institutions. The community, through its political institutions, is merely a court of last resort for economic disputes.

[188] Daniel Guerin, Anarchism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 58–59.

[189] Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (New York: Harper & Row, 1974; orig. 1888–1890); Alexander Berkman, What Is Communist Anarchism? (New York: Dover, 1972; orig. 1929), pp. 283–88.

[190] Murray Bookchin’s writings on libertarian municipalism include “The Forms of Freedom” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism; “The American Crisis,” Comment, Vol. 1, Nos. 4, 5 (February, August 1980); “Anarchism: Past and Present,” Comment, Vol. 1, No. 6 (May 1980); “The Concept of Libertarian Municipalism,” Comment, Vol. 2, No. 1 (November 1980); “Municipalization: Community Ownership of the Economy,” Green Perspectives, Vol. 2 (February 1986); “Theses on Libertarian Municipalism” in The Limits of the City (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986); “The New Municipal Agenda” in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987); “Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Green Perspectives, Vol. 18 (November 1989); “The Meaning of Confederalism,” Green Perspectives, Vol. 20 (November 1990); “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview” (Burlington: Social Ecology Project, April 1991).

[191] It is precisely because the guild socialism of Cole and the democratic planning models of Devine and Albert and Hahnel do not envision the eventual dissolution of the enterprise with its separate workplaces into the life of communities that they retain a form of money and exchange-value based on labor time in order to link workplaces by exchange that is national and international in scale. As long as ownership remains social, workplaces remains internally democratic, and prices remain socially planned by a democratic process of negotiation, exploitation, imbalances, and private accumulation are theoretically precluded. Yet as long as workplaces confront each other and consumption units as functionally differentiated interests, there is the real possibility that these units will seek advantage over each other, reintroducing competition, and leading eventually to regression back to capitalism with competitive markets and private accumulation.

[192] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968; orig. 1848), p. 2.

[193] The Communist Manifesto, p. 20.

[194] The Communist Manifesto, p. 22.

[195] The Communist Manifesto, p. 3.

[196] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975; orig. 1844), p. 47.

[197] Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968; orig. 1845), p. 273.

[198] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967; orig. 1867), p. 763.

[199] The Communist Manifesto, p. 21.

[200] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970; orig. 1932). This problem for the Left of irrational political behavior in contradiction of one’s own interests is also explored in Wilhelm Reich, Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934 (New York: Vintage, 1972); Maurice Brinton, The Irrational in Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1974); and Bertell Ollman, Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

[201] James Boggs, Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages From a Black Worker’s Notebook (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 40, 45–46.

[202] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, pp. 121–23.

[203] Margit Mayer, “Politics in the Post-Fordist City,” Socialist Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January/March 1991), pp. 105–24.

[204] On the history of municipalist movements in opposition to capitalism and the national state, see Murray Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987); and Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

[205] On the hidden history of transclass social movements, see Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes, “Ten Theses on Social Movements,” IFDA Dossier 63 (January 1987) and “Civil Democracy: Social Movements in Recent World History,” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).

[206] Rudolph Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, pp. 116–17.

[207] Jeremy Brecher, “Crisis Economy: Born-Again Labor Movement?” Monthly Review, Vol. 35, No. 10 (March 1984).

[208] For discussions of this kind of scenario in modern industrial countries, see Murray Bookchin, “The Forms of Freedom” and “The May-June Events in France – 2” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

[209] An interesting report on the struggle in France can be found here. Some quotes: “ The alternative—to face up and fight back–seems unavoidable to many. A situation of conflict between social forces, against the capitalist class, is coming into being, even among those who for a long time have preferred the easier path of reform. his particular situation has brought to the fore a sensibility that was formerly underground, shining a new light on the absurdity of the condition of wage labor, now seen in the perspective of the ravaged condition of the world and the difficulties of life. Work has become for many synonymous with precarity, a violent life, impoverishment, the destruction of beings. So to work “two more years” to guarantee an end to this life without human meaning—No! It’s enough to report the innumerable individual placards and slogans of the French demonstrations, with their wealth of imagination, to grasp the general sentiment of rejection of this state of affairs. These are no longer only union demonstrations demanding negotiations in the framework of a reform, they are also demonstrations against the way the economy works and the intentions of the world’s masters, against a vision of the world.(….) It is significant that the mood in the continuous demonstrations expresses the idea that we may lose this battle but we have created a force and there will be another future. (…) t is a mobilization whose principal motor is a qualitative desire to change the order of things, to call into question the deadly logic of capitalism. ”Capitalism should retire,” read a placard carried on February 7.

[210] Omnibus Crime Bill C-10, also called the “Safer Streets, Safer Communities Act,” was passed by the Canadian federal government in March 2012. The bill combines amendments from nine separate bills that had failed to pass in previous sessions of parliament and makes fundamental changes to almost every component of Canada’s criminal justice system

[211] Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 5–6.

[212] Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), especially Chapter 3.

[213] See Phillip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (Maryknoll, New York.: Orbis Books, 1984), Chapter 1, pp. 59–69.

[214] Amanecer [Dawn], Jan-Feb. 1988, p. 20.

[215] Quoted in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 60.

[216] Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), pp. 493–94.

[217] Larry Ingle, “Quakers and the AFSC: Can we be Friends?,” * Christian Century* , Apr. 19, 1995, p. 413.

[218] We have collected in our book, * Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History* , revised edition (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1995), the experiences of many people who shared these longings and acted on them. Some of these persons, like John Woolman, were Quakers.

[219] Alice Lynd, ed., We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

[220] Our friend Renate Goepp recalls two other passages from the movie. The first is the moment when, despondent over the society women who are supporting him, but are really only engaged in a contest of vanities, he is approached by a peasant girl begging him to let her help. He raises his eyes in prayer, Thank you, Lord, for showing me that it is only with the poor that I shall be able to help the poor.’ And, finally, the last scene when, knowing himself close to death, he speaks to the last and youngest girl who has joined the sisterhood: ‘Never lose your gentleness and your smile; for it is only because of those that the poor will forgive you for helping them.”

[221] Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers, third edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988).

[222] See Lynd and Lynd, ed., Nonviolence in America , pp. 405, 415–16, 418–19, 422.

[223] Our friend Michael Ferber remarks: “The Greek at Luke 17:21 ( entos bumon ) almost has to read ‘among’ when, as here, the object is plural, hence perhaps ‘The Kingdom of God is in the midst of you.’ At least in this passage Jesus is not advocating an individualistic solution.”

[224] Crossan offers the following three passages from the Gospel of Thomas as examples:

(1) Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea, then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.”

(2) His disciples said to him, “When ... will the new world come?” He said to them, “What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.”

(3) His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?” (Jesus said,] “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), pp. 228–29, quoting Gospel of Thomas 3:1, 51, 113.

[225] Crossan, The Historical Jesus , p. 341.

[226] From notes by Alice Lynd on a workshop held at Kirkridge, Bangor, PA, on April 21–23, 1995, entitled “The Historical Jesus: A Conversation with John Dominic Crossan.”

[227] Our daughter Martha reminds us: “Living with the poor is not the only way to challenge oppression. Being a radical artist like Diego Rivera is also a way to challenge oppression. He painted the history of oppression of indigenous people in murals and changed or created space in the Mexican ladino, mainstream consciousness.”

[228] Our friend Phil Hazelton puts it this way: “What we do must be sustainable. We must hold on to the Kingdom of God long enough for it to settle down, long enough that it can’t be blown away.”

[229] The Little Sisters of Jesus, with whom we stayed in Nicaragua, take a one or two-day retreat each month and a week long retreat each year for reflection and inner growth.

[230] Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), p. 299.

[231] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (zer0 Books, London, 2009)

[232] David Mamet, Some Freaks (Faber and Faber: London, 1989), p. 110

[233] Mamet, ibid.

[234] Among the examples of this growing body of literature are Santos and Santos 2008; Quimpo and Quimpo 2012, 40–42; Melencio 2010, 24; Evangelista 2008, 41–47; and Llanes 2012.

[235] Among these accounts are Malay 1982 (various issues) and Palatino 2008.

[236] A selective sampling of these works might include Hedman and Sidel 2000; Rodrigo 2007; Weekley 2001; Bresnan 2014; and Claudio 2017.

[237] For all of the contextual material and background developments leading up to February 1971, which I have outlined here, see the detailed examination in Scalice 2017, where I copiously document these claims.

[238] Mao Zedong thought, to which the CPP subscribed, was in fact a variant of Stalinism, retaining all of its critical programmatic features — Socialism in One Country, a two-stage revolution, and the bloc of four classes. My account of the origins of the split in the PKP is a revision of the standard historical narrative that revolves around domestic political disputes, in which personal animosity played a strong role. A key work in establishing the standard narrative is Nemenzo 1984.

[239] The Lopez brothers should be distinguished from UP Pres. Salvador P. Lopez, who was not related to the vice president and the media mogul and was not part of their machinations.

[240] This political report was reprinted in the Philippine Collegian (Sison 1970, 4).

[241] For a history of the Third Period from the perspective of its political opposition, cf. Trotsky 1971.

[242] The chorus of the Tagalog version of the Internationale opens with “Ito’y huling paglalaban” (This is the last struggle).

[243] Butch Dalisay recounted that this staging was “before Brecht had been set aside for being too bourgeois in favor of more overt Peking Opera-style tableaus.” Dalisay himself performed in this staging of Brecht, acting in whiteface (Santos and Santos 2008, 38). Wilma Austria, later Tiamzon, played the lead.

[244] In a similar vein, Nathan Quimpo gives us an account of the repeated attempts to erect and maintain barricades at Gate 3 of the Ateneo de Manila University in the first week of February 1971 (Quimpo and Quimpo 2012, 91).

[245] As at Diliman, there was a vicious right-wing response to the barricades at UP Los Banos, including a vulgar leaflet denouncing the barricaders as “fascistic totalitarian congenital liars” (Fontanilla 1971).

[246] The SDK (1971b) put out and distributed from the barricades a leaflet calling on the masses to “resolutely support the patriotic jeepney drivers.”

[247] Baculinao’s argument seems highly suspect. Campos drove to the barricades in body armor and armed with multiple weapons. His assault on the students was clearly premeditated.

[248] The arrested students were released after four hours (BP 1971a, 2). This account states that Baculinao was among those arrested. However, the Committee of Inquiry’s report claimed that Baculinao was not arrested but went to Quezon City Hall to protest the arrests and that he found Lopez there. This version corresponds with Armando Malay’s (1982c, 6) account.

[249] On 3 February the various front organizations of the PKP, including the MPKP and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (BRPF), issued a joint statement on the strike, signed by a number of drivers and operators’ associations. They called for the continuation of the struggle against American oil monopolies and called on “drivers, militant students, and the Filipino masses” to “expose and oppose the phony revolutionaries and paid agents and provocateurs who are carrying out needless violence that confuses the masses and ruins the national democratic movement while covering up the true issue against imperialism” (MPKP 1971b). These groups, however, were now operating entirely off campus. No further mention of the strike was made within the Commune.

[250] The leaflet cited the March 1970 MPKP (1970) statement, “People’s Violence Against State Violence,” as the correct political line, a statement that denounced both the state and the KM.

[251] An article in the same issue of the Philippine Collegian (1971d, 5) stated that the senators arrived on the campus at noon and that Sen. Gene Magsaysay accompanied them.

[252] Aguilar’s account was fiercely supportive of the Commune, but still notes that by 4 February the Commune did not have significant student support. Prominent among those who joined the barricades was the explicitly anarchist SDKM under Jerry Araos, who later stated that a member of the SDKM was present at every barricade (Santos and Santos 2008, 77).

[253] Some accounts say “elected,” others “appointed.” How exactly the directorate was constituted is unclear.

[254] The story of Marcos’s affair with Beams and the scandal that followed are detailed in Rotea 1984.

[255] The production of literature likewise began to taper off. The AS Rooftop Junta (1971b) issued a manifesto on 7 February, a slight affair which stated that “the masses who suffer most under [the Marcos] maladministration have reached a point of realization … en masse . … As mass realization among the people gains momentum, so does American imperialism gain deceleration.”

[256] A right-wing student group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), picketed the event, handing out a Leaflet calling on the audience to “oppose future barricades” (Concerned Families of Area Two and SDS 1971).

[257] Graduates of this elite university, the alumni of the Diliman Commune, had bright futures ahead: Baculinao became NBC bureau chief in Beijing; Vea, president of Mapua Institute of Technology (MIT); Taguiwalo, Undersecretary of Health in the Corazon Aquino administration; Coloma, Presidential Communications Secretary in the Benigno Aquino III administration. Of the student leadership, Tagamolila alone did not survive martial law. He was killed by Marcos’s forces in 1974 as a member of the NPA.

[258] Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers’ Union Local 1199 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 203–4.

[259] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members — 2020,” Economic News Release, January 22, 2021, https://www.bls.gov/ news.release/union2.nr0.htm#

[260] Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (London: Verso, 2014); Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy (New York: Ecco, 2020).

[261] McAlevey, Shortcuts, 54–55.

[262] McAlevey, Shortcuts, 33.

[263] Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, and Jane Slaughter, Secrets of a Successful Organizer (Brooklyn: A Labor Notes Book, 2016).

[264] No Shortcuts, 202–3.

[265] McAlevey, Collective Bargain, 158–59.

[266] McAlevey, Shortcuts, 51.

[267] McAlevey, Shortcuts, 101–42; McAlevey, Collective Bargain, 199–231.

[268] Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 99–100.

[269] For multiple examples of this, see Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s (London: Verso, 2010); Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern

[270] Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of Renewal from Below (London: Verso, 2007), 104.

[271] See, for example, Sheila Cohen, Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get It Back (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 149–73.

[272] McAlevey, Shortcuts.

[273] For the best detailed discussion of building union democracy, see Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle, Democracy Is Power: Rebuilding Unions from the Bottom Up (Detroit: A Labor Notes Book, 1999).

[274] 1nternational Trade Administration, “Steel Imports Report: United States,” May 2020, Global Steel Trade Monitor,

[275] Federal Reserve Statistical Release, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization, G.17 (419), December 17, 2019,

[276] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Productivity and Costs,” https://data.bls.gov/ cgi-

[277] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Production and Nonsupervisory Employees,” 2019; “How’s Manufacturing? Depends on the Sector,” The FRED* Blog, February 1, 2018;

[278] Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Manufacturing: NAICS 31–33,” Industries at a Glance, January 8, 2021, https://www. bls.gov/ iag/ tgs/iag31 -33 .htm.

[279] McAlevey, Shortcuts, 30.

[280] See, for example, Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969); and Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).

[281] Kim Moody, introduction to Sidney Fine, SitDown: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2020).

[282] David Brody, “The Origins of Modern Steel Unionism: The SWOC Era,” in Forging a Union of Steel: Philip Murray, SWOC, & the United Steelworkers, ed.

[283] Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 440–43, 604–7.

[284] Finkand Greenberg, Upheaval, 181–243.

[285] Fink and Greenberg, Upheaval, 202

[286] Fink and Greenberg, Upheaval, 203–4.

[287] McAlevey, Shortcuts, 120–21; McAlevey, Collective Bargain, 199.

[288] McAlevey, Shortcuts, 154–55.

[289] For some of the works in this research and debate, see: Kate Bronfenbenner et al., eds. Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Lowell Turner, Harry Katz, and Richard W. Hurd, eds., Rekindling the Movement: Labor’s Quest for Relevance in the 21^st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.); and Ruth Milkman and Kim Voss, eds., Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

[290] Kim Moody, “Labour and the Contradictory Logic of Logistics,” Work Organization, Labour & Globalisation 13, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 79–95.

[291] For some more works on this, see Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, eds., Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (London: Pluto Press, 2018); and Moody, On New Terrain, 59–69.

[292] David McNally, “The Return of the Mass Strike: Teachers, Students, Feminists, and the New Wave of Popular Upheavals,” Spectre 1, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 1337.

[293] For this and a summary of such actions up to June 2020, see Jane Slaughter “In a Pandemic, Finding Ways to Fight New and Old Foes,” Labor Notes 495 (June 2020): 1,3–4.

[294] Saurav Sarkar, “Twin Cities Labor Mobilizes against George Floyd Murder,” Labor Notes, May 29, 2020, https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2020/05/twin-cities-labor-mobilizes-against-george-floyd-murder; Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “As Protests Grow, Big Labor Sides with Police Unions,” Center for Public Integrity, June 5, 2020, https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/as-protests-grow-big-labor-sides-with-police-unions.

[295] Mikhail Bakunin was obviously an important revolutionary figure in starting revolutionary anti-capitalism, and although much maligned and dismissed by Marx and Engels in a way that wasn’t truthful, he did lead a life much of which sounds like it was from an adventure novel. Wanted to list and comment on where i had found my facts about his life, so i went back to the suburban public library where i had found and read three biographies of the Russian revolutionary—only to find that all were now unavailable. Asking about them, i was told unofficially by one library worker after a computer search that all three were really missing, had probably been stolen. Wasn’t that just like something that would happen to the footloose rebel? And, no, i was told, they were not being replaced, because that was futile since some kinds of books were just always being stolen. Hmm, not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is frustrating.

[296] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Outlaw Woman. A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975. City Lights Books, 2001. Pages 198–200. Incidentally, during the anti–Vietnam War struggle days i had met both women involved in that political clash of wills at that GI coffeeshop, and had even worked with one. Both were respected in the movement then, and i recall hearing on the anti-war grapevine about their disagreement at that Army base town—and how the one later came out and crossed over to women’s liberation work. So Dunbar-Ortiz wasn’t just making up that great story.

[297] Rosa Brooks. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. Simon & Schuster, 2016. Pages 318–320; Alison Bowen. “Easing the Path to Owning A Home.” Chicago Tribune November 22, 2020. For poverty problems among young u.s. military families in the time of coronavirus and job losses in off-base civilian communities, see: Jennifer Steinhauer. “For More Military Families, Losing a Job or School Lunch Means a Search for Food Aid.” New York Times. December 17, 2020. Unlike most sources used here, this How Everything Became War book was an international bestseller that made an unlikely state policy star out of a professor of international law. Rosa Brooks was both a former advisor for Human Rights Watch and once the member of a top secret Pentagon committee which gave the final yas or no to individual u.s. assassinations of young Muslim activists. In her latter role Brooks rose to being a senior counselor to the u.s. Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy (she still lectures soldiers as an adjunct at the Army’s West Point Modern War Institute). How Everything Became War never does explain its title subject, of course, but the book was so popular in the Establishment and warmly recommended by a number of top u.s. generals because it intellectually massages the growing contradictions in “America’s” cancerous militarycivilian relationship, from a soothingly white liberal humanitarian but loyally pro-imperialist viewpoint.

[298] “FTA,” short for “Fuck The Army,” was the great all-purpose anti-brass graffiti among u.s. Army troops then in the 1960s–70s, with it inked onto the front of many thousands of helmets in ’Nam (not usually taken up in other u.s. services, especially among Marines, who used their own graffiti phrases incorporating the slang dis “The Green Machine”).

[299] H. Bruce Franklin. Crash Course. From the Good War to the Forever War. Rutgers University Press, 2018. Pages 264–267. Franklin was widely followed, envied, admired and resented on the West Coast during the anti-war 1960s. As a controversial Stanford professor, his breakthrough literary criticism which insisted on raising up as important thenbanned or marginal genres, such as criminal prison writings and science-fiction, had a wide effect. He was more immediately one of the main radical anti-war activists in the Bay Area. Finally burning out as one purist national leader in the birth of u.s. Maoism, a failed period of his life he later wrote off as a self-delusional fever. He retained his basic anti-capitalist view of u.s. society, though. Much of this memoir of his own capitalist war (he was a frontline air force veteran) and anti-war is shocking material with a positive jolt. Though to be clear, it’s not about the u.s. revolutionary left.

[300] Alan Greenspan and Adrian Woolridge. Capitalism in America: A History. Penguin Press, 2018. Page 84. This is a different kind of history of “America.” Stripped down and perhaps easier to read, the legendary former longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and his co-author, the political editor of The Economist, explain the u.s.a. primarily in terms of business investments, profits, and developing the capitalist class economy. Minor things like the rise of the Klan and lynchings, as well as changes in presidential politics, receive only brief lines to help frame the passing times as direct capitalist activity holds center stage. In its own way, a very cold-blooded but telling exposition of how “America” was made into a great-but-nowdeclining economic empire. The blame now, according to the conservative authors, is the “encrusting” suffocation of liberal state benefits like Social Security, which bestow automatic income on the masses without their having to work every day or risk anything. Charming.

[301] Ibid. Pages 88–89.

[302] Gabriel Kolko. Main Currents in Modern American History. Harper & Row, 1976. Pages 26–29.

[303] Daniel Bergner. “Open Minds.” The New York Times Magazine. May 22, 2022.

[304] See: statista. “leading construction equipment manufacturers in 2020 based on global market share”; iSeekplant. “TOP TEN HEAVY EQUIPMENT COMPANY MARKET SHARES.”

[305] Greenspan & Woolridge. op cit. Page 14.

[306] Shane Goldmacher. “Drop in Small-Dollar Donations Alarms G.O.P.” The New York Times. July 27, 2022.

[307] Ilona Andrews. Blood Heir. Nancy Yost Literary Agency, Inc, 2021. Page 77.

[308] David Brooks. “The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse.” The New York Times. April 23, 2021.

[309] This quotation is often seen right now, but almost always attributed to the left critic Fredric Jameson. As in it being described as “the famous Jameson quote” on one popular Goodreads page. Not that there’s any mystery about H. Bruce Franklin’s work, but Jameson is so much more “hip” and “in” right this moment to the shoddy white reformist intellectuals.

[310] Sally Rooney. Beautiful World, Where Are You? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Pages 43–44.

[311] Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derlugian, Craig Calhoun. Does Capitalism Have a Future? Oxford University Press, 2013. Pages 57, 65. For a good browse, try his paperback selected works, which include not only some highlights from his world-system theory but also short writings on subjects such as race and ethnicity, the bourgeois as concept and reality, and liberalism: The Essential Wallerstein. The New Press, 2000.

[312] Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian, Calhoun. op cit. Page 35.

[313] After the June 2022 slaying of the two Catholic priests, i took out one of my files of press clippings on the Mexican crisis. While these are separate news stories on different events in the crisis, they really are interconnected, and i urge anyone interested in diving deeper into the situation to simply read them all together. It’s like an extended magazine article: Natalie Kittroeff and Oscar Lopez. “Catholic Church Joins Mexico’s Critics After Murder of 2 Jesuit Priests.” The New York Times. June 25, 2022 ; CBS News. July 6, 2022. 10:06 am. “Bishop proposes ‘Social Pact’ with drug traffickers to tackle violence in Mexico”; Maria Abi-Habib. “In Mexico, Farmers Are Caught in Middle of Drug Cartels Turf War.” The New York Times. May 5, 2022; David Agren. “Witness testifies that El Chapo paid a $100 million bribe to ex-Mexican president Peña Nieto.” Washington Post. January 15, 2019 at 7:34 p.m. EST; Noah Hurowitz. “El Chapo Trial: Witness Alleges Presidential Bribes, Cartel Brutality.” Rolling Stone. November 21, 2018. 12:54 PM ET; Randal C. Archibold. “In Mexico, a Growing Gap Between Political Class and Calls for Change.” The New York Times. December 13, 2014; David Karp. “Is the Lime an Endangered Species?” The New York Times. May 30, 2014; Jose de Cordoba. “Bloody Struggle Erupts Over Avocado Trade.” The Wall Street Journal. February 1–2, 2014; Santiago and Jose de Cordoba. “Executive Slaying Sparks New Fears.” The Wall Street Journal. January 11–12, 2014; Ginger Thompson, Randal C. Archibold and Eric Schmitt. “Hand of U.S. Is Seen in Halting General’s Rise.” The New York Times. February 5, 2013; Mary Anastasia O’Grady. “The Real Victims of Mexico’s Drug War.” The Wall Street Journal. November 12, 2012; Jose de Cordoba. “Trial Exposes Odd Ties in Mexico Drug War.” The Wall Street Journal. January 7–8, 2012. (contains Mexican Attorney General Office’s color map of different drug cartel areas at that time). Look up if you are interested some of the many internet articles on drug cartel officer Jesus Zambada Niebla as well as Bush regime security official Robert Bonner (especially his op ed on Mexico in the New York Times).

[314] Ruchir Sharma. The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World. W.W. Norton & Co. 2016. Pages 141, 193–194.

[315] Julie Turkewitz and Genevieve Glatsky. “Soul-Searching Report From Colombia’s Truth Commission.” The New York Times. June 29, 2022; Phil Klay. “America’s Ongoing Secret Wars.” The New York Times. May 29, 2022.

[316] Maria Abi-Habib and Oscar Lopez. “Plight of Mexico’s Poor Worsens, Despite President’s Promises.” The New York Times. July 18, 2022.

[317] Elizabeth Kolbert. “The Catastrophist.” The New Yorker. July 27, 2020.

[318] Minqi Li. China and the 21^st Century Crisis. Pluto Press, 2016. Pages 33, 95, 137.

[319] Ibid. Page 182.

[320] Lenin never wrote much about his own life, particularly in the chaotic time when the revolution was going on, so this isn’t something i read about (my best friend seized my set of the collected works anyway, when we moved into separate places and divvied up the bookcase). This great story of Lenin getting held up by stick-up guys posing as red guards was told to me by an old trotskyist, as part of the mostly unwritten lore of the marxist-leninist movement. i was young and not in his faction of the left, but he tried to wise me up anyway. He said it came from a French socialist who had gone to Russia to work with Lenin and his communist international and was a first-hand witness. Much later, that French comrade published his own memoir, parts of which were translated into English and circulated in the movement here. Was struck by the story so much that i kept asking questions about it, to get that older comrade to repeat the tale so i could remember it best i could. Can’t prove the facts, but in some dusty old sectarian journal or zine from the way past i think it was passed on.

[321] Dani Romero. John Schreiber. “LA freight train looting ‘out of control’ as thieves worsen supply chain bottlenecks.” Yahoo/finance Wed, January 19, 2022. 6:47 AM.

[322] Make this whole section in a table cell like the other inserted documents

[323] This deviates from the original formatting. Originally the conversation markers had periods instead of colons, and no bold or italics. This version adds for simplified reading

[324] Text originally had italicized names, not underlined. Original text on page 212

[325] In the original text, this appendix appears after the bibliography

[326] I have found that some people make assumptions about why I study authoritarianism that get in the way of what the data have to say. The stereotype about professors is that they are tall, thin, and liberals. I’m more liberal than I am tall and thin, that’s for sure. But I don’t think anyone who knows me well would say I am a left-winger. My wife is a liberal, and she and all her liberal friends will tell you I am definitely not one of them. Sometimes they make me leave the room. I have quite mixed feelings about abortion, labor unions, welfare and warfare. I supported the war in Afghanistan from the beginning; I disapproved of the war in Iraq from its start in March 2003.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party, or any other political party. I do give money to various parties, trying to defeat whomever I am most disgustatated with at the time. (My political contributions have almost become automatic withdrawals from my bank account since one of our sons became a Member of the Legislative Assembly in our province.) I did not flee to Canada in 1968 because of the war in Viet-Nam. I crossed the border with my draft board’s good wishes because the University of Manitoba offered me the best job I could find. And my research has not been funded by “some liberal think-tank” or foundation. Instead, I paid for almost all of it out of my own pocket. I have not had a research grant since 1972—not because I am opposed to people giving me money, but because I proved so lousy at getting grants that I gave up. (Whereas I, like my politician son, found I was a soft touch whenever I hit me up for some dough.)

[327] The best scientifically up-to-snuff presentation of my research on authoritarian followers is contained in The Authoritarian Specter, published in 1996 by Harvard University Press. The only reports of my research on authoritarian leaders are 1) a chapter entitled, “The Other Authoritarian Personality” in Volume 30 (1998) of a series of books called Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, edited by Mark Zanna and published by Academic Press, and 2) an article in the Journal of Social Psychology, edited by Keith Davis, in 2004 entitled “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities” (Volume 144, pages 421–447).

[328] I hope you’ll agree that the studies were fair and square. It’s your call, of course, and everybody else’s. That’s the beauty of the scientific method. If another researcher—and there are hundreds of them—thinks I only got the results I did because of the particular way I set things up, phrased things, and so on, she can repeat my experiment her way, find out, and let everybody know what happened. It’s the wonderful way science polices and corrects itself.

[329] John Dean, who loves words the way I love pizza, pointed out this early meaning of “right” after pinning me to the wall on how come I called this personality trait right-wing authoritarianism. I’ve always called it right-wing authoritarianism rather than simply authoritarianism in acknowledgement that left-wing authoritarianism also exists. An authoritarian follower submits excessively to some authorities, aggresses in their name, and insists on everyone following their rules. If these authorities are the established authorities in society, that’s right-wing authoritarianism. If one submits to authorities who want to overthrow the establishment, that’s left-wing authoritarianism, as I define things.

[330] When writing for a general audience, I bandy about terms such as “conservative” and “right-wing” with the same exquisite freedom that journalists, columnists and politicians do. It’s actually very hard to define these phrases rigorously, partly because they have been used over the ages to describe such very different people and movements. But we’re all friends here, so let’s pretend I know what I am talking about when I use these words.

[331] If you’ve heard of an inconvenient truth, I just laid a convenient untruth on you so we can compare apples with apples. People who answered McWilliams and Keil’s survey answered each RWA scale item on a -3 to +3, seven-point basis; thus scores on the test could go from 20 to 140. The average (mean) was 72.5. When you map that onto the 20 to 180 scale that results from the -4 to +4, nine-point format I use, you get 90. (No, not 93.2; it’s not a proportion thing because the scales don’t start at 0, but at 20. However, you get an “A” in word-problems; give yourself a hug.)
Next, as we touch the statistical bases, the RWA scale had an “alpha” coefficient of .90 in McWilliams and Keil’s sample. Does that mean it was the boss coefficient, the way an “alpha animal” is the leader of the pack? No. When you’re talking about a personality test, you care a lot about how well the items all measure the same underlying trait, even though on the surface they seem to be talking about lots of different things. That cohesiveness is called the internal consistency of the test, and strong item-to-item cohesiveness makes for a good test. The “alpha” coefficient, which can go from .00 to 1.00, reflects a test’s internal consistency. If a 20-item test has an alpha of .90, it is very boss, just like 90% is a pretty good grade on a test. (Or is it, these days?) (In my day, 90% was an “A” in college. And we wrote our essays on the back of a coal shovel. And our college was located in an alligator-infested swamp twenty miles away in which we died every day. And….)
Finally you should know, if you are a social scientist on the prowl for scales to throw into the pot for your next project, that I have made a pact with the devil. Hell will be the final destination of any researcher who decides to use only part of the RWA scale, or any of my tests, in a study. Some investigators assume they have a right to chop up somebody else’s carefully developed instrument as they wish and claim they are still measuring the same thing. I have yet to see one of these fly-bynight versions that measures the “thing” as reliably, or as validly, as the scale they pillaged, and of course these “scales” all tap somewhat different things depending on which items were dropped. Some of these hare-brained modifications aren’t even balanced against response sets. All this short-weighting introduces unnecessary confusion and error in the literature.
Physicists, astronomers, chemists, and so on learned long ago that it is essential to the scientific quest to standardize measurements, but many social scientists can’t seem to understand that.
Beelzebub has even agreed to my request that these people be forced to listen to badly played banjo music 24/7/365/Eternity while in hell. There will be another room nearby featuring novice bagpipe players, for editors who accept articles that used a mangled version of one of my scales.

[332] The Libertarian Party poll also solicited opinions on a variety of social issues and economic attitudes. RWA scale scores correlated highest with attitudes against same-sex marriage, abortion, drugs, pornography, women’s equality, unconventional behavior and free speech, and with support for the Patriot Act and America’s “right” to spread democracy by military force. In contrast, the relationships with economic issues (taxation, minimum wage, the public versus private sector, free trade) proved much weaker. The data thus indicate, as do a lot of other findings, that high RWAs are “social conservatives” to a much greater extent that they are “economic conservatives.”

[333] If I were you, I’d be wondering how well my results, which are based mainly on my local Canadian samples, apply to the United States. I wondered that too, so I made a determined effort when I started out to repeat my studies with American samples. I almost always found the same things in Alabama and Pennsylvania and Texas and Indiana and New York and Wyoming and California that I had found in Manitoba. Once American researchers began using my measures, I could simply loll by my hearth and read what others turned up in Massachusetts and Kentucky and Michigan and Nebraska and Washington and so on. The bottom line: A strong record of replication has accumulated over time.
Still, sometimes weird things happen. For example, a Colorado Ph.D. student recently told me she found no correlation between college students’ RWA scale scores, and those of their parents—whereas correlations in the .40s to .50s have appeared quite routinely in the past. And naturally other researchers do not get exactly the same results I do in my studies. A relationship of .45 in my study might come in at .30 in an American one, or .60. But if I have found authoritarianism correlates significantly with something in a Manitoba-based study, then a significant correlation has appeared at least 90% of the time in American-based studies that tested the same thing. (That ain’t bad in the social sciences, and I think it’s mainly due to experienced researchers using good measures and careful methodologies.)

[334] The Weschler Adult Intelligence Survey, probably the most widely used IQ test, has a reliability of about .90. So also does the RWA scale, and nearly all the other tests I have developed that are mentioned in this book. (The alpha coefficient, described in note 3, is often used as an index of reliability.) What does that “.90” mean? It tells you that the “signal to noise” performance of your test equals 9 to 1. Most of what you are getting is useful “signal,” and only 10% of it is meaningless, confusing “noise” or static. In these days of high definition television you would be all over your cable company if your TV picture was 10% “snow.” But the reliability of most psychological tests falls well short of .90, you’ll be disheartened to learn—especially after you’re denied a job because of your score on one. You can easily find journal articles that say .70 is “adequate” reliability.
P.S. We’re going to have a lot of technical notes at the beginning of this chapter as I try to anticipate the questions that you might bring up—if you are the careful, critical reader everyone says you are. Eventually the sailing will get smoother. But you don’t have to read these notes, which you see can be rather tedious. They won’t be on the exam.

[335] This isn’t as big a problem with the RWA scale as it might be. Believe it or not, most people don’t writhe over the meaning of its statements. The items had to show they basically meant the same thing to most people to get on the test in the first place. If a statement is terrifically ambiguous, the answers it draws will be all over the lot, connect to nothing else reliably, and explain zilcho. I know because I’ve written lots of crummy items over the years.
But I stubbornly plodded along until I got enough good ones. It took eight studies, run over three years, involving over 3000 subjects and 300 items to get the first version of the RWA scale in 1973. Then the scale was continually revised as better (less ambiguous, more pertinent) statements replaced weaker ones. Only two of the items you answered (Nos. 6 and 18) survive from the first version. The internal consistency of responses to the test is so high, producing its high alpha and reliability, because items that were too ambiguous fouled out of the game during all this testing. So the years spent developing the test paid off. Let’s hear it for fixation. (And can you see why I get so p.o.’d when some researchers chop up my scales?).
But still, to any individual person, any item can mean something quite different from what I intend. And some people will consistently have “unusual” interpretations of the items. And the test, which was designed to measure right-wing authoritarianism in North America, will probably fall apart in markedly different cultures.
While we’re on the subject of what the items on the RWA scale measure, people sometimes say “Of course conservatives (or religious conservatives) score highly on it; it’s full of conservative ideas.” I think this does a disservice to “conservative ideas” and to being “religious.” Take Item 16: “God’s laws about abortion, pornography, and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.” Knowing what you do about the concept of right-wing authoritarianism, you can pretty easily see the authoritarian submission (“God’s laws…must be strictly followed”), the authoritarian aggression (“must be strongly punished”), and the run-away conventionalism in the underlying sentiment that everyone should be made to act the way someone’s interpretation of God’s laws dictates. The item appears on the RWA scale because responses to it correlate strongly with responses to all the other items on the scale, which together tap these three defining elements of right-wing authoritarianism.
On the other hand the item, “Abortion, pornography and divorce are sins”-which you may agree reflects a conservative and religious point of view—would not make the cut for inclusion on the RWA scale because it does not ring the bells that identify a high RWA loudly enough. You could in fact sensibly agree with this statement and still reject Item 16, could you not? Item 16 isn’t just about being conservative and religious. It goes way beyond that.
(My God! You’re still reading this!) To put it another way, an empirical way: if you look at how responses to Item 16 correlate with the other items on the RWA scale, and then also look at how it correlates with some measure of traditional religious belief, such as the Christian Orthodoxy scale that measures acceptance of the Nicene Creed (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1982, 21, pp. 317–326), you’ll find the former correlations are much stronger. Item 16 does not measure time-honored, customary religious sentiment so much as it measures right-wing authoritarianism dressed up in sanctimonious clothes. The same is true of all the other religion items on the RWA scale—most of which came onto the RWA scale relatively recently as authoritarianism in North America increasingly became expressed in religious terms. Furthermore, these items all individually correlate with the authoritarian behaviors we shall be discussing in this chapter.
Unless you think that conservatives (as opposed to authoritarians) are inclined to follow leaders no matter what, pitch out the Constitution, attack whomever a government targets, and so on—which I do not think—this too indicates that the items are not revealing conservatism, but authoritarianism.

[336] The RWA scale is well-disguised. Personality tests are usually phrased in the first person (e.g., “I have strange thoughts while in the bathtub”) whereas attitude surveys typically are not (e.g., “Bath tubs should keep to ‘their place’ in a house”). So it is easy to pass off the RWA scale, a personality test, as yet another opinion survey. Most respondents think that it seeks “opinions about society” or has “something to do with morals.”

[337] For the same good reasons, it’s out of bounds to give the RWA scale to your loved ones, and unloved ones, to show them how “authoritarian they are.”
By the way, chances are you have relatively unauthoritarian attitudes. You see, authoritarian followers are not likely to be reading this book in the first place, especially if their leaders told them it was full of evil lies, or schluffed it off as “scientific jibberish.” (This is not exactly a book that an authoritarian leader would want his followers to read. Don’t expect it to be featured as a prime selection by the Authoritarian Book of the Month Club.) Still, the real test of how authoritarian or unauthoritarian we are comes from how we act in various situations. And that, we shall see at the end of this book, is a whole different ball game than answering a personality test.
I am, incidentally, taking a minor chance by letting you score your own personality test in this book. I conceivably could get kicked out of the American or Canadian Psychological Associations—if I belonged to them. And for good reason: people have a long history of over-valuing psychological test results—which I have tried to warn you about. A good example of this popped up on the internet right after John Dean’s book, Conservatives Without Conscience, was published. Almost immediately a thread was begun on the Daily KOS site by someone who had Googled “authoritarianism” and found (s/he thought) the research program summarized in Dean’s book. S/he described the theory and also placed the personality test at the heart of this program right in the posting. Tons of people immediately jumped in, talking about how low they had scored on the test, how relieved they were that they weren’t an authoritarian, and how the theory and the attitudes mentioned on the test seemed so amazingly true and reminded them of “definite authoritarians” they knew.
Trouble was, they got the wrong research program and the wrong test. People were basing their analysis on a theory and scale developed during the 1940s, which has long been discredited and abandoned by almost all of the researchers in the field. So (1) Don’t pay much attention to your score on the RWA scale, and (2) Realize how easy it is to perceive connections that aren’t really there. Back to chapter

[338] One thing we haven’t discussed is why half of the statements on the RWA scale (and any good personality test) are worded in sort of the “opposite way” such that you have to disagree with them to look authoritarian. The answer, it turns out, is quite important if you care about doing meaningful research with surveys or if you want to be a critical consumer of surveys. People tend to say “Yes” or “Agree” when they (1) don’t understand a statement, (2) don’t have an opinion, or (3) (Horror!) don’t care about your survey. It’s similar to what happens to me when I’m walking down the street, and an acquaintance on the other side yells something at me. If I didn’t hear clearly what he said (an increasingly likely event, I confess) I’ll often just smile and nod and continue on my way. Now this may prove idiotic. Maybe the person yelled, “Bob, you’re walking on wet cement!” But I didn’t know what he said; I assumed it was just a greeting, so I smiled and nodded and moved on. Well sometimes people just smile and nod and move on when they’re answering surveys.

[339] What is a “high RWA”? When I am writing a scientific report of my research I call the 25% of a sample who scored highest on the RWA scale “High RWAs” with a capital-H. Similarly I call the 25% who scored lowest “Low RWAs,” and my computer runs wondrous statistical tests comparing Highs with Lows. But in this book where I’m describing results, not documenting them, I’ll use “high RWAs” more loosely to simply mean the people in a study who score relatively highly on the RWA scale, and “low RWAs” will mean those who score relatively low on the test.
If I’ve made myself at all clear here, you’ll know that I am comparing relative differences in a sample. I am not talking about types of individuals, the way you might say Aunt Barbara is an extrovert while Uncle Jim is an introvert. High and low RWAs are different from one another but not opposites. It’s a matter of degree, not a hard cut, “100% versus 0%” distinction.

[340] (As always, reading this note is purely voluntary and in this particular case may even be a sign of madness.) We need to talk about generalizations, don’t we. All of the findings I shall be presenting in this book are generalizations-with-exceptions, which means that whatever the issue, some high RWAs acted the way low RWAs typically did, and some lows acted like highs usually did. That’s the stuff that the social sciences crank out, journal article after journal article: general truths, but hardly perfect ones.
Some generalizations have so many exceptions that you wonder why they’re worth the bother; a lot of gender differences, for example, turn out to be miniscule. Other generalizations have so few exceptions you can almost take them to the bank; I’ll show you a connection in Chapter 6 between RWA scale scores and political party affiliation among politicians that will knock your socks off—if you’re a social scientist (wearing socks).
If you really want to know more about this (and you certainly don’t have to; this is going to take a while), let’s look at the fact that tall people tend to be heavier than short people. You compute correlations to get a fix on how well two things, like height and weight, go together. A correlation can go from 0.00 (no connection at all) to 1.00 (a perfect association). The correlation between height and weight among North American adults comes in at about .50, which means the two are “middlin’” connected. That’s important if you’re wondering how big to make the jackets for tall men. So the generalization is valid, and useful, but we all know some tall, skinny people and my wife knows a “Mr. Short and Dumpy” very well.
As a generalization about generalizations, the RWA scale correlations I present in this book usually run between .40 and .60. Thus they’re about as solid as the connection between height and weight. But how good is that in absolute terms? [Warning: the next sentence will take you back to your high school algebra class, which may trigger unconscious memories of bizarre hair-dos and “meat loaf” in the cafeteria every Thursday. Proceed at your own risk.] Social scientists commonly square a correlation to get an idea of how much of the “Mystery of Thing X” you can explain by Clue Y. So if weight and height correlate .50, (.50 x .50 = .25, or) 25 percent of the difference in people’s weight can be explained by taking into account how tall they are. That’s rather good in this business, because our weight is affected by so many other things, such as how many Big Macs you stuff into yourself, and whether you jog or crawl to the fridge to get more Haagen- Dazs. (Some psychologists, I must confess, say you don’t have to square the correlation to see how much you have explained. Instead, the simple correlation itself tells you that. Bet you wish you were reading a book written by one of them, huh?)
(Have you ever had so much fun in one note? It gets even worse.) Most relationships reported in psychology research journals can only explain about 5–10 percent of why people acted the way they did. I call those “weak”. If one thing can explain 10 to 20 percent of another’s variability (the statistical phrase is “they share 10 to 20 percent of their variance”), I call that a “moderate” connection. I call 20 to 30 percent a “sturdy” relationship, and 30 to 40 percent gets the designation “strong” in my book. Above 40% equals “very strong,” and you could call above 50% “almost unheard of” in the behavioral sciences.
This may seem quite under-achieving to you, but it’s tough figuring people out and, as Yogi Berra might put it, everybody already knows all the things that everybody already knows. Social scientists are slaving away out on the frontiers of knowledge hoping to find big connections that nobody (not even your mother) ever realized before, and that’s practically impossible. Ask your mom.
In terms of precise correlation coefficients, a correlation less than .316 is weak, .316 to .417 is moderate, .418 to .548 is sturdy, .549 to .632 is strong, .633 to .707 is very strong, and over .707 is almost unheard of. These are my own designations, and they are probably set the bar higher than most behavioral scientists do. You can easily find researchers who call .30 “a strong correlation,” whereas I think it is weak. (I could have used labels like “hefty,” “stout,’ and “a great big fat one!” But for some reason I don’t like these designations.) .

[341] David Winters of the University of Michigan found in 2005 that the high RWAs in a large sample of university students believed the invasion of Iraq constituted a just war. They thought the danger posed by Iraq was so great, the United States had no other choice. They thought the invasion occurred only as a last resort, after all peaceful alternatives had been exhausted, and that the war would bring about more good than evil. They rejected the notion that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction showed the “pre-emptive” attack had not been necessary for self-defense. They also rejected the suggestion that the war was conducted to control oil supplies and extend American power, or as an act of revenge. And they still believed that Saddam had been involved in the 9/11 attacks.
If you want a star-spangled example of authoritarian submission by an ordinary citizen, it would be hard to beat the sentiment of Clydeen Tomanio of Chickamuauga, Georgia, who was quoted on a CNN.com report dated September 7, 2006 as saying, “There are some people, and I’m one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord. I don’t care how he governs, I will support him.”
In turn, you won’t find a better example of authoritarian submission in government than that displayed by Steven Bradbury, the Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, on July 11, 2006. At the end of June the Supreme Court ruled that the Pentagon’s use of special military commissions to try suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay violated the Geneva Conventions and the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice. Bradbury appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain what the administration was therefore going to do instead. Pressed by Senator Leahy of Vermont to say whether President Bush was right in his assessment of the situation, Bradbury replied, “The president is always right.” Is Bradbury wildy atypical? Investigations into the December, 2006 firing of the eight U.S. attorneys suggests that George W. Bush has placed hundreds of “true believers” in the highest levels of his administration, many of them products of Pat Robertson’s Regency University, who put loyalty to the president above all other concerns.
For a truly horrifying argument that the president ought to be above the law, see Professor H. Mansfield’s op-ed piece in the May 2, 2007 Wall Street Journal.

[342] Lest I seem to be Yank-bashing, when some of my best friends are Americans (including I), let me add that I have obtained the same results many times in Canadian samples regarding Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And Sam McFarland, Vladimir Ageyev and Marina Abalakina (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1992, 63, 1004—1010) discovered “very strong” to “almost unheard of” correlations (see the end of note 12) between RWA scale scores and dislike of dissidents, rejection of a free press, and opposition to democracy in a representative poll of Soviet adults during the last days of the USSR.

[343] Blass, T. (1992) “Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Role as Predictors of Attributions about Obedience to Authority.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston.

[344] This is the third time I have referred to George W. Bush, his administration, or his supporters, and we’re only half-way through chapter 1. I am running a risk, in a book I hope will have some lasting value, by anchoring it so much in the here-and-now. I’m doing so partly because the here-and-now naturally appeals to contemporary readers. But mainly I am doing it because the past six years have provided so many examples of authoritarian behavior in American government. There has never been a more obvious, appropriate, and pressing time for this discussion. The threat that authoritarians poses to American democracy has probably never been clearer. It is just a coincidence, but human affairs have provided the foremost example of how badly right-wing authoritarianism can damage the United States at the same time my work has come to an end and I am telling everyone what I’ve found. George W. Bush has been the most authoritarian president in my lifetime, as well as the worst. And that’s not a coincidence.

[345] High RWAs are also slightly more likely to “blame the victim” for misfortunes suffered. This is especially so when the victim has done something the authoritarian disapproves of (e.g., a young woman who is raped after going to a party sexily dressed, a young man who gets beaten after leaving a bar, a woman who is killed by her husband when she leaves him, seeks a divorce and starts dating another man). But it even shows up in some situations in which the victim was utterly blameless (e.g., a family that was standing on a grate on a downtown sidewalk when an electrical transformer underneath them exploded).
Social psychologists generally think that people blame victims because it maintains belief in a just world. You see, if tragedies happen to the virtuous, and you think you are virtuous, then bad things could happen to you. It’s more comforting to believe bad things usually happen to bad people—so you are safe.

[346] Right-wing authoritarians are prejudiced compared to other people. That does not mean they think that Jews can’t be trusted at all, that all Black people are naturally violent, or that every Japanese is cruel. High RWAs may, as a group, even disagree with these blatantly racist statements. However they don’t disagree very much, while most people strongly or very strongly disagree. So authoritarian followers are relatively prejudiced, which means it would presumably take less persuasion or social pressure to get them to discriminate than it would most people.

[347] Of course, what would have happened if the Warsaw Pact had been preparing an attack on NATO? Wouldn’t the low RWA teams have been caught unprepared? Probably not, because the ambiguous opening moves by the Communist Bloc were not that immediately serious. But many people perceive “liberals” as being “weak on defense,” too trusting of their enemies, and proven fools when dealing with potentially dangerous situations. So in 1996 I asked students to pretend they were the leader of Israel. Israel wanted to be recognized by its Arab neighbors and live in peace. But it also feared that Arab nations would destroy it if they had the chance. So Israel had the strongest armed forces in the region. One thing Israel could do, the subjects were told, that might open the door to peace would be to return the strategic Golan Heights to Syria. Suppose the chances of this bringing a lasting peace were only one in four. Would the subject do it? Suppose it had a 50–50 chance of working, other subjects were asked. Would they take the chance? Suppose, a third group was told, the odds were three-to-one that Syria would prove trustworthy and a lasting peace would result. Would you surrender the Heights?
What did the low RWAs do in these various conditions? Only 37 percent said they would take the chance against 3–1 odds, but most of the lows (61 percent) facing the 50–50 situation would have given back the Golan Heights. With 3–1 odds in favor of a lasting peace, 73 percent of those lows would have made the move. Whether you think all of these foolishly high, or foolishly low, they do follow the logic of being more willing to take the chance as the odds of success increase.
What did the high RWAs say? Nothing very logical, I’m afraid. Nearly half (48 percent) said they’d return the Golan Heights if the odds for peace were 3–1 against. Increasing the odds for a successful outcome to 50–50 made highs less willing (41 percent) to make the gesture. When the odds got to 3–1 in favor of peace, 60 percent said “Go for it.” The authoritarian followers thus didn’t seem to pay much attention to the odds for success, and they proved to be the ones who’d take a foolish chance for peace in this situation. So who’s the peacenik?
I ran the experiment again with a sample of parents in 1997, using just the first and third conditions. The low RWAs again showed sensitivity to the chances for success, with 37 percent willing to return the Heights if the odds for peace were 3–1 against, but 57 percent saying they would do so if the odds were 3–1 in favor. The high RWAs again proved unfathomable and bigger risk takers, with 62 percent and 63 percent returning the Heights in the two respective conditions.
Maybe high RWAs don’t like Israel. But I doubt they like Syria more. Or maybe this has something to do with religious fundamentalists wanting a big war in the middle east so the End of the World can gloriously occur. But just as the data from the NATO simulation indicate high RWAs tend to make an ambiguous situation dangerous, the Golan Heights experiment indicates that high RWAs are likely to turn a secure situation into a dangerous one. Their thinking simply baffles one at times—a topic we’ll take up in chapter 3.

[348] I’m not saying that the United States was the bad guy in the Cold War and the Soviet Union was the good guy. The people of Russia and other Communist-controlled European countries made it clear how evil they thought the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist dictatorships were. But in the context of this study, I think you can point out instances in which both sides invaded neighbors to control their international allegiance, lied to their own people and to the world, made disarmament proposals for public relations purposes on the world stage, and so on. And when their government did such things, the authoritarian followers in both countries tended to believe and support them more than others did.

[349] This and a study by McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Papp (see note 14) confirmed—you will please notice because it means a lot to me—what I said about right-wing authoritarianism at the beginning of this chapter. High RWAs in the USSR turned out to be mainly members of the Communist Party. So psychologically they were right-wing authoritarian followers, even though we would say they were, as Communists, extreme political and economic left wingers.

[350] See Gidi Rubinstein, “Two Peoples in One Land: A Validation Study of Altemeyer’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale in the Palestinian and Jewish Societies in Israel,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1996, 27, 216–230.

[351] People often ask me two questions when they know as much about right-wing authoritarians as I’ve told you so far. 1) Who scores higher, men or women? and 2) Have scores on the scale gone up or down over the decades? Virtually every study I know of has found men and women score about the same, on the average. Men probably tend to be more aggressive than women, but women are supposed to be more conventional, so it seems to even out. As for changes over time, that’s rather interesting because as I have kept on giving the test to students entering my university year after year, the successive 18 year olds’ answers have seemed to reflect the mood of their times. So in the early 1970s, when the test was invented, scores were pretty low. They’ve never been as low since. Instead they slowly climbed up and up, peaking in the mid 1980s. Then they started dropping and have remained about half-way between the low and high extremes since 1998. By age 18 university students appear to be “carriers”of their times.

[352] I knew about the Global Change Game because one of our sons, Rob, helped develop it. It has been used from coast to coast to coast in Canada, and elsewhere, in high schools and universities, to raise environmental awareness. Rob had certainly heard of authoritarianism. (Had he experienced it in his upbringing? Never say it!) He (and other) facilitators might have guessed the independent variable I was manipulating in this experiment, especially from the conservative dress and religious emblems worn by the highly authoritarian students at their game. But the facilitators have little to do with the decisions made by each region in the Global Change Game, and certainly they had no hand in causing the blood-bath that ensued on high RWA night.

[353] Support for genetic origins of things like right-wing authoritarianism increased recently when Jack and Jeanne Block of the University of California at Berkeley reported some results of a longitudinal study they ran. They found that females who became liberals as adults had shown some distinctive characteristics while in nursery school, compared with little girls who grew up to become conservatives. The future liberals had been talkative and dominating, expressed negative feelings openly, teased other children rather than got teased, were verbally fluent, sought to be independent, were self-assertive, attempted to transfer blame onto others, were aggressive and set high standards for themselves. Little girls who grew up to be conservatives, in turn, had been indecisive and vacillating, were easily victimized by other children, were inhibited and constricted, kept their thoughts and feelings to themselves, were shy and reserved, were anxious in an unpredictable environment, tended to yield and give in to others, were obedient, and compliant, and were immobilized by stress.
The liberal versus conservative men showed far fewer differences as children than the women had. But future liberals were resourceful, independent and proud of their accomplishments, while tomorrow’s conservative men at nursery school were visibly deviant from their peers, appeared to feel unworthy, had a readiness to feel guilty, were anxious in an unpredictable environment, and tended to be suspicious and distrustful of others.
By the time children get to nursery school they bring with them not only the genes that created them but also several years of experiences at home. But a study that shows connections between such early childhood behaviors and adult attitudes—even weak ones, which were the rule in the data—has to lend weight to the genetic possibility.

[354] See Circus, M. P. F., 1969, “How to Recognise Different Trees from Quite a Long Way Away.”

[355] If you want some numbers, students’ RWA scale scores correlate in the .40s to the .50s with their parents’ RWA scale scores (a “moderate” to “strong” connection), and over .70 (an “almost unheard of” relationship) with their answers to the Experiences scale.

[356] This is backed up by an experiment I did with my own introductory psychology classes one year. I told one class I was gay (which I am not), and another class served as a control group and received no such information. Then they both evaluated (1) me as a person, and (2) gays as a group. Compared to the control group, the class that thought I was a homosexual lowered their opinions of me a touch, but raised their opinions of gays in general. (This study came to the attention of a New York Times columnist who misunderstood that I actually was gay. He wrote a piece about my “coming out” to my class, and it gave my father-in-law quite a jolt the next day.)

[357] The well-known cognitive scientist George Lakoff proposes in Moral Politics (1996, U. of Chicago Press) that conservatives and liberals think differently because they use different moral systems based upon different ideal family types. He also states (p. 110) that conservatives actually tend to come from one of these family backgrounds, and liberals from the other. Because authority plays such a pivotal role in the development of conservative thought in Lakoff’s analysis, one can easily imagine it might also explain right-wing authoritarians.
Conservatives, it is proposed, grew up in a family featuring “strict father morality.” Fundamentally, life was seen as difficult and the world as dangerous. Typically the father had primary “responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as authority to set overall family policy. He taught children right from wrong by setting strict rules for their behavior and enforcing them through punishment.
The punishment was mildly to moderately painful, commonly being corporal punishment administered with a belt or a stick. He also gained their cooperation by showing love and appreciation when they followed the rules” (p. 65).
Liberals, on the other hand, seemingly came from a “nurturant parent” family background, which featured “being cared for and cared about, having one’s desires for loving interactions met, living as happily as possible, and deriving meaning from mutual interaction and care” (p. 108). Supposedly liberals had more secure and loving attachments to their parents, which leads them to develop nurturing, empathetic social consciences.
This briefest of summaries does not do justice to Lakoff’s conceptualizations, but I am happy to report that some of what he proposes is supported by my own findings. For example the statement, “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues that children should learn”appeared on the RWA scale for many years and goes back to the first attempt to measure authoritarianism during the 1940s. Similarly the reader knows from this chapter that parents of high RWA students, and high RWA students themselves tend to believe the world is a dangerous place. The story of Hugh and Lou, which is based on my own research with the RWA scale and which first appeared in my 1988 book Enemies of Freedom, resonates with Lakoff’s model in many places, as I’m sure you noticed.
I would point out some differences, however. First, the early childhood explanations of adult authoritarianism have always been way ahead of the data—and in some cases were trotted out in spite of the data. (See pp. 33–49 of my 1981 book, Right-Wing Authoritarianism for a critique of some of this literature). It now appears that adult authoritarianism begins to coalesce as an organized set of attitudes during adolescence, where (to be sure) it sometimes follows the furrow plowed by the parents. But it also can take off in quite a different direction depending on the child’s experiences in life.
In particular, the connection between receiving corporal punishment in childhood and becoming an authoritarian has always been a wandering stereotype searching for evidence. I have looked several times for an association between students’ RWA scale scores and their accounts, or their parents’ accounts, of how often they were struck when growing up. The correlations usually turned up, but were always weak. (less than .20; see pages 260–265 of Right-Wing Authoritarianism). In 2000 and 2001 I revisited the issue asking nearly 1000 students how they had been punished when younger. Virtually all of them (92%) reported having been struck at least once, with the average being five times. Again high RWAs tended to have received more spankings than the rest of the sample, but only modestly so. I don’t know of anyone who has found even a moderate connection between childhood physical punishment and adult RWA scores. (I also would not bet the farm on a big reliable difference emerging in how securely liberals versus conservatives were attached to their parents.)
Second, some of Lakoff’s explanation appears to apply (as we shall see later in this book) much more to authoritarian leaders than to authoritarian followers. His stress upon competition’s being a crucial ingredient (p. 68) in the conservative outlook well describes the leaders, but authoritarian followers seldom endorse this point of view.
Third, I believe the process of becoming a high RWA, or a low one, is more complicated than Lakoff’s model allows. Religion’s ability to sometimes independently pump up right-wing sentiments, and higher education’s ability to lower them get little play in Moral Politics, and the genetic possibilities are barely touched upon (pp. 134–135). Instead the focus remains on parental practice. But if you look at pages 73–74 of my 1996 book, The Authoritarian Specter (go ahead; I’ll wait) you’ll find that the correlation on the RWA scale between members of 299 pairs of same-sexed fraternal twins averaged .50. While this constitutes a sturdy relationship, far bigger than the things social scientists usually discover, it still leaves most of the individuals’ personal level of authoritarianism unexplained. And these pairs of people were born at the same time, raised at the same time by the same parents, went to the same schools and churches, had the same peer group, probably watched lots of TV together, and so on. (Identical twins raised together [N = 418 pairs] understandably correlated a hunkier .65 with each other.) Thus the origins of right-wing authoritarianism appear much more complicated than those advanced by the dichotomous, one-factor typology one might project from Lakoff’s model.

[358] See if you can top this one. My local newspaper recently carried a story about a woman in a nearby city who wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the mayor and city council. She said the present council lacked initiative and acted too often in the interest of “boys with money and toys.” A few days later the pastor of the Pentecostal church she attends wrote her, saying her letter was an embarrassment because good Christians do not publicly criticize their leaders. He told her to find another church if she was not going to change her ways. (“ ‘Bad sheep’ raises ire of pastor,” Winnipeg Free Press, August 22, 2006, P. A6.)

[359] The correlations between the first and second set of answers to the RWA scale were .62 over 12 years, .59 over 18 years, and .57 over 27 years. Since the RWA scale sports quite a high test-retest reliability, these numbers indicate the considerable extent to which these people changed after their 18^th birthday. Roll over, Sigmund.

[360] Here are two analgesics that parents can take for their aching psyches. When your kids start giving you action about what a tyrant you are, tell them you didn’t believe so much in submitting to authority until they came along. And when you do something dumb and your kids find out, you can at least wrap yourself in the warm blanket of realizing you have probably made your kids less authoritarian by displaying your incompetence. I know I did.

[361] Although it pains me deeply I am going to continue my pledge of not choking the narrative of this book with numbers. So when I say “most”of some group did something, I mean at least 51 percent did. When I say “a solid majority, “ it means somewhere between 60 and 75 percent. When I say a “great majority” I mean over 75 percent. When I say “virtually everyone” I mean over 90 percent.

[362] For the 99 percent of my readers (“virtually everyone”) who are blissfully younger than I, the quote is from a song in The Music Man, in which a traveling salesman whips the good citizens of River City, Iowa into a frenzy because a pool hall has opened in town. I know, I know, I should have found a hip-hop lyric instead. But...

[363] Why do high RWAs want to censor, for example, a racist when they themselves are prejudiced? Because they don’t know they are, so a racist is a socially condemnable outsider to them. Furthermore, experiments show authoritarian followers are turned off by blatantly racist appeals. A skilled demagogue knows you play the “race card” best by disguising it as something else, like law and order.

[364] So if you’ve been thinking I’ve been talking about someone else as I described high RWAs, does that mean you are a high? No. Because low and moderate RWAs also think I am talking about someone else—and they are right.

[365] Once someone becomes a leader of the high RWAs’ in-group, he can lie with impunity about the out-groups, himself, whatever, because he knows the followers will seldom check on what he says, nor will they expose themselves to people who set the record straight. Furthermore they will not believe the truth if they somehow get exposed to it, and if the distortions become absolutely undeniable, they will rationalize it away and put it in a box. If the scoundrel’s duplicity and hypocrisy lands him on the front page of every daily in the country, the followers will still forgive him if he just says the right things.
As a consequence, I think, politicians, authors and commentators who lead the authoritarian followers in our society get seduced by how easy it is to just lie about things, from obfuscation to equivocation to prevarication. For a charming example of this, read They Never Said It by Paul F. Boller, Jr. and John George (1989, New York: Oxford University Press). As one reads through all the misquotes, distortions and inventions attributed to Washington, Lincoln, Lenin, and so on, one is struck first by how many of these falsehoods originated, predictably, with political extremists. Then one notices that most of the time, they were right-wing extremists, as Boller and George themselves noted (p. x).
Often the quotes get picked up by other, un-checking right-wingers and spread like wild-fire (pp. 15–16 in They Never Said It). One can easily find examples of leftwingers doing this too, and I say “a plague on both their houses.” But right-wing leaders appear to do it more, and one reason might be that they know it’s easier for them to get away with it with their devoted readers, listeners, viewers, followers. (Another reason, we shall see two chapters hence, is that the people most likely to become the leaders of right-wing authoritarians simply don’t believe very much in telling the truth.)

[366] More powerful yet, as we saw in Chapter 2, is the effect on an authoritarian follower of personally knowing a homosexual. And I have found that the few high RWAs who score low in dogmatism are influenced by the biological findings. So I don’t mean to say that all high RWAs are so dogmatic that they will never change their positions. (If I give you the impression anywhere in this book that I have discovered Absolute Truths, I beg you to flay me with angry Comments.) But I do believe the evidence to date indicates high RWAs tend to be more dogmatic than most people.
Another thing that I’ll bet would change authoritarian followers’ opinions quite dramatically is a reversal of position by their trusted authorities. Remember when Richard Nixon went to China to normalize the relationship? Suppose Lyndon Johnson, or Jimmy Carter had done it instead.

[367] Very unauthoritarian people can also be dogmatic on the same issue—although not as dogmatic as high RWAs. Bruce Hunsberger and I asked a sample of active American atheists the same question, only it was along the lines, “Is there anything conceivable that could happen that would make you believe in the traditional God?” Fifty-one percent of them said no—which is a lot, but not nearly the 91% of the high RWAs in a large sample of Manitoba parents surveyed in 2005 who said nothing conceivable could make them not believe in the traditional God. Most (64%) of our active atheists also said they would be uninfluenced by the discovery of a “Roman file on Jesus” that confirmed much of the Gospels, including the resurrection—but 76% of those aforementioned high RWA Manitoba parents said the discovery of the “Attis” scrolls would not lower their belief in the divinity of Jesus. See Atheists, by B. Hunsberger and B. Altemeyer, 2006: Prometheus Press, Chapter 4.
Are you surprised that I described a study in which people who are probably quite low RWAs looked bad? I try to develop testing situations that will let both high and low authoritarians show their virtues or their warts, and sometimes the low RWAs look bad too. I always report those findings. But so far they’re pretty rare, especially compared with the high authoritarians’.

[368] See Damon Linker’s, “The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege,” by Doubleday, 2006.

[369] The United States government called off further searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on January 12, 2005, conceding none had been found. A Harris Poll taken the following month found that 36% of the American public believed such weapons had been found—a drop of only 2 percent from a pre-concession poll taken in November 2004. By December 2005 the figure had fallen to 26 percent, but that’s still a quarter of the American people.

[370] Dunwoody, Plane, Rice and Rothrock thus found that as late as August 2005 and January 2006 high RWA Pennsylvania college students were likely to have inaccurate perceptions of the war in Iraq in all the areas tested. They believed Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons against American troops, that Iraq’s government was highly connected with al-Qaida, that Americans had found evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with al-Qaida, that most people in the world favored the United States’ going to war in Iraq, and so did most people in Europe. They also believed that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but this was only statistically significant at the .09 level. In general the students were better informed than the American public as a whole, but the authoritarian followers among them still carried a lot of demonstrably erroneous beliefs around in their heads.
McWilliams and Keil’s nationwide poll of 1000 Americans in 2005 found a correlation of .51 between RWA scores and being satisfied with “the job President Bush and his administration are doing.”

[371] An NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll released on December 12, 2006 found only 23% of Americans still approved of President Bush’s policy on Iraq. Support on this issue is boiling down to the bed rock of hard-core right-wing authoritarians, who seem to make up roughly 20–25% of the American public. The same poll, and several others at the same time, found 34% still gave Bush’s overall performance positive marks. A month later, on the eve of Bush’s address to the nation pushing for a “surge” in troop strength in Iraq, a Gallup poll found his overall approval rating had dropped to 26%. A CBS News Poll on January 22, 2007 put the figure at 28%.
At the end of 2006 an Ipsos Poll of the American public for AP/AOL News found the president was spontaneously named the baddest “bad guy” on the planet more often (25%) than anyone else. But he was also named by others the best “good guy” more (13%) than anyone else. GWB was also spontaneously named the “most admired man”in the annual Gallup Poll at the end of the year—again by 13% of the respondents, more than anyone else..

[372] When bad news spills out about things that high RWAs support, they want to be told it isn’t true. So some governments have gotten used to issuing “non-denial denials” and flimsy counter-arguments, because that’s all it takes and it’s so effortless. If a well-researched paper by a prestigious scientific body concludes that human activity is seriously increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, culprit governments will say “the evidence is incomplete” and they will find someone, somewhere, with some sort of credentials, who will dismiss a great number of studies with a wave of the hand and give them the sound-bite they want.
When someone responds to evidence with “a wave of the hand” or a bland dismissal like “It’s just nonsense,” they’re usually revealing they can’t say anything more specific because they’re whupped. But the government’s supporters will be reassured. For them, one sound bite cancels the other, and there really is no difference between a widely-confirmed fact and a speculation, between fifty studies and one.
To take a non-political example of walking extra miles for authorities, when people first began to reveal they had been sexually assaulted as children by priests and ministers, bishops often issued statements saying they had thoroughly investigated the charge and found it had no merit. That was good enough for the authoritarian followers. If the evidence nevertheless grew against Father X, church authorities asked the public, “Whom are you going to believe, this obviously disturbed person who claims to have been assaulted, or the Church?” That too was an easy one for the high RWAs.
If it eventually became known that the bishops’ own inquiries had discovered that Father X was indeed a pedophile, but the bishops still denied he was and sometimes even quietly transferred Father X to another parish, where he sexually assaulted still more children, do you think the high RWAs learned anything from this? How many “disconnects” do you think they have at hand to avoid realizing they allowed themselves to be deceived?
I fear you will wait a long time before authoritarian followers wise up to their chosen leaders, and to themselves—and their leaders know it. When the Watergate revelations were sinking his ratings in the polls, Richard Nixon pointed out to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldemann, “I think there’s still a hell of a lot of people out there…[who] want to believe. That’s the point, isn’t it?” “Why sure,” Haldemann replied. “Want to and do.” (Conversation of April 25, 1973 recorded on the “Watergate tapes,” reported by the New York Times on November 22, 1974, p. 20.)

[373] Because religion is such an opinion-based topic, I had better lay my own cards on the table. I was raised a Catholic and was a strong believer until age 21. After searching other religions I became a “None,”and then an agnostic—believing one cannot say at this point whether the universe had a creator, and if so what that creator’s qualities might be (beyond the all-time highest score on the SAT-Math test). I have enough familiarity with religion that I can pass as a scholar among people who know nothing about the subject. Similarly, I know enough of the Bible to seem well-informed in a room of people who have never opened the book. I don’t think any of this has affected the answers people have given to my surveys, which is what this chapter is about. But as always, you will be the judge of that.

[374] See Witzig, T.F., Jr. (2005) Obsessional beliefs, religious beliefs, and scrupulosity among fundamental Protestant Christians. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences Engineering, Vol. 65 (7-B), 3735. US: University Microfilms International. Witzig used the original 20-item version of the Religious Fundamentalism scale, whose scores could range from 20 to 180. Converting the 141.2 mean that he obtained to an equivalent score on the twelve-item revision you answered involves two steps. First one graphically maps the 141.2 (on a 20—180 dimension) onto the equivalent place on a 12–108 dimension (see note 3 of chapter 1). This gives you an 84.7. Second, because the two scales have different sets of items, when the same people take both tests the average item score on the revised version is about 10 percent higher than that on the original version. Multiplying 84.7 by 1.10 gives you an equivalent score of 93.1 on the revised scale.
Howard Crowson of the University of Oklahoma informed me in January, 2007 that a sample of 137 residents of Norman Oklahoma had averaged 60.7 on the Religious Fundamentalism scale (in terms of a -4 to +4 response scale). The sample was recruited by students in his graduate statistics class, and was predictably young (mean = 37.5 years) and well-educated (most had earned at least bachelor’s degrees). Fundamentalism correlated .62 with my DOGmatism scale, .47 with Dangerous World scores, and .61 with self-placement on a “Liberal—Conservatism” scale.

[375] If I had it to do over again, I would have emphasized “militancy” more in the construct of the religious fundamentalist. A militant item made it onto the original 20 item version of the Religious Fundamentalism scale: “God’s true followers must remember that he requires them to constantly fight Satan and Satan’s allies on this earth.” But it was not sufficiently connected to the rest of the scale, in our Canadian samples, to make the more cohesive 12-item version I use now. Similarly, “If you really believe in God’s true religion, you will use all your might to make it the strongest force in our nation” and the contrait, “When it comes to religion, ‘Live and let live’ is the best motto. No one religion should dominate in our country” almost connect with the rest of the Religious Fundamentalism scale strongly enough in Canadian samples to be included in the measure—but still fall short. It would be interesting to see if they make a stronger showing in American samples.
Which raises the question of how much Christian fundamentalists in Canada differ from American fundamentalists. As Mark A. Knoll points out in A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI, William B. Eerdmans, pages 246–250), one can find both similarities and differences in the history of religion in the two countries. For example, both modern nations were founded by Christian immigrants from Western Europe. But Protestants settled almost all of the thirteen original colonies, whereas in Canada two Christianities took root from the start, Catholicism and Protestantism. Some Christian fundamentalists came directly to Canada from Europe, as in the later migration of the Anabaptist Mennonites and Hutterites. But a lot also came up from the United States, and the biggest difference between fundamentalists in the two countries today may not involve theology or brand names, but strength. A much greater percentage of Americans than Canadians could be called Christian fundamentalists.

[376] Fundamentalists have been successful, to some extent, at appropriating the label “religious” for only themselves, just as some political conservatives have unfairly pilfered “patriot.” Many fundamentalists claim that if one does not believe what they believe and act as they say you should, one is not really religious (e.g. “not a true Christian”). This chapter is about religious fundamentalists, and I do not wish to imply that all religious people are fundamentalists. Most persons in my sample who consider themselves affiliated with an organized religion do not score highly on the Religious Fundamentalism scale, and there are many ways of being religious without even belonging to a religion.

[377] It may be true that the Bible is without error, but the issue is certainly confused by the fact that Christians do not have a Bible. Over 7000 different editions of the Bible have been published (Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, 1992, P. 402). Care to argue which one is closest to an “original” version no one can find anymore? As well, the Catholic Bible has about a dozen books in it, the Apocrypha, that you won’t find in a Protestant Bible. And even if there were only one (English) Bible, believers have a never-ending capacity for interpreting it in different ways. Consider all the different sects that have balkanized Christianity over the interpretation of one particular, often obscure, passage or another.
Probably the best known “distinctly different” interpretation of seemingly minor Biblical texts is presented by Jehovah’s Witnesses who believe certain verses prohibit blood transfusions—a procedure not even known in Biblical times. Most of these passages however involve prohibitions against eating blood, and nobody eats blood during a transfusion any more than someone “eats” a flu shot. Genesis 9:4 for example goes, “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” Leviticus 17:11–14 talks about pouring out the blood of an animal before eating it. In Acts 15:20 and 29 the apostle James combines, somewhat mysteriously, idols, fornication, animals that have been strangled, and blood as things one should avoid. Because of the way these passages have been interpreted, hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses have died because they (or their parents) refused a blood transfusion.
Probably the most nonrepresentative of all the splinter groups would be the Church of Jesus Christ—Christian (a.k.a the Aryan Nations). This white supremacist group thinks the most significant passage in the Bible, also involving blood, is Genesis 9:5, in which God says to Noah, “And surely your blood of your lives will I require…” Why is this so significant? Because followers believe this means God only loves white people, who show their blood in their faces when they blush. (No, I’m not inventing this; see Blood in the Face by James Ridgeway.) (By the way, folks who aren’t white also blush, but it sometimes takes a little sensitivity to notice it, and sensitivity does not appear to be the strong suit of the Aryan Nations.)
To take a slightly less splintered, but still striking example, does Mark 16:18 [“They (Christ’s followers) shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them”] mean—as some Appalachian Christian sects insist—that disciples of Jesus won’t be hurt if they handle poisonous snakes? Most Christians seem to interpret this in some other way, which seems very sensible. But the meaning of the words themselves appears clear as a bell, and the Appalachian rattlesnake-handlers could well claim that other Christians are not following the Bible. (One notes however that even the “true believers” here limit themselves to picking up poisonous snakes, not drinking lethal amounts of cyanide or strychnine. And inevitably many of them die of snake bites, the latest being 48-year old Linda Long who died of a bite received during services on November 5, 2006 at the East London Holiness Church in London, Kentucky. See Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Peter C. Hill, and W. Paul Williamson, The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism, 2005, New York: The Guilford Press, Chapter 5.)
Want an ironic wrinkle? Because the best and oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end with Chapter 16, verse 8, most New Testament scholars agree the concluding verses 9—20 that you will surely find in your Bible were tacked on by a scribe early in the second century. Defenders of your Bible say these verses must have been lost for a while by the early church, and then discovered and put back in their original place. But there’s no evidence that such a slip-up occurred, and stylistic differences and syntactical jerks make it pretty clear the added verses were not recovered from an earlier manuscript, but were instead added on by “someone else.”
Without the additional verses, the account of the Resurrection found in Mark is pretty unconvincing—no one sees Jesus—whereas verses 9—20 bring “Mark’s” Gospel (the first one compiled) closer to the later Gospels of Luke and John. But the part in the add-on about handling serpents and drinking poison (Mark 16:18) comes straight out of left field, in terms of the other Gospels (although Acts 28: 3–7 says that Paul was unharmed by a venomous snake bite). So in all probability, those rattlesnakes have been handled, and a lot of people have died, because of a dishonest scriptural editor nineteen hundred years ago. (Let all editors beware!)
Of course, the vast majority of Christians have very ordinary, straightforward interpretations of Biblical texts. These can nevertheless give rise to considerable disagreement. What precisely did Jesus mean when he said “Thou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18)? The Pope had one opinion; Henry VIII another. But have you ever heard two Freudians argue over the interpretation of a dream? And how many kookie theories of psychotherapy do you suppose there are?

[378] One could date evangelicalism in America back to early 19^th century revivalism, or even earlier. See George M. Marsden’s Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 1991, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI.

[379] This is a good place to describe my parent studies for those who join me in caring about methodological issues. Let’s focus on the big study of religion I did in October, 2005 that provides much of the data in this chapter. I made a long, eight page (i.e sixteen printed sides) booklet available to students in my own introductory psychology class and two other classes. The students were told they could take a booklet (and two answer sheets) home to their parents, if they wished. If both parents (or one parent and another “old” relative) filled out the anonymous survey within a month, the student would receive credits worth 4% of his grade in the course. All 500 of the booklets I had printed were claimed, and most of the parents came through for their kids. Seven hundred and fifty-six of the one thousand answer sheets were returned (which is a little lower than usual in these studies, but the booklet was the longest I ever sent home, and took about two hours to complete). The vast majority of the answers came from the students’ mother and father.
Some of the answer sheets had to be discarded immediately because the parent had not replied to most of the questions, or had given stereotypical answers (e.g., all “neutrals”), or the responses came from a sibling rather than a member of the older generation. Altogether I pitched thirty-one bubble sheets from the stack for these reasons. I then screened each remaining answer sheet looking for careless answering, which you can judge by seeing how often the respondent contradicted earlier responses on the same scale. A lot of contradiction usually means the parent just blackened bubbles at random to make it look as though they had answered the survey. As well (and this was my fault for asking so many questions) some of the parents clearly lost their way on the bubble sheet, especially toward the end of the booklet. You can tell this by the frequency with which they put down an answer that wasn’t possible, given the question (e.g. a “Yes or No” question to be answered with a 1 or 0, but the “8-bubble” was blackened). When the rest of the answer sheet made sense, I tried to figure out where the respondent had gone off the track and slide the misplaced answers up or down a notch. But sometimes that was impossible, so I chucked the answer sheet from the study. Altogether I pitched another fifty-seven sheets for these reasons, which is more than usual in these studies and again attributable to the lengthy booklet. This was all done “blindly,” before any of the sheets had been read by the optical scanner.
By now I was down to 668 respondents. Setting aside surveys from parents who said they were Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etcetera, the sample size became 638. The top 25% of the Religious Fundamentalism distribution scored over 71 on that scale (N = 160, 89 of whom were women). I call these parents “high fundamentalists” in the narrative.
How representative is the 638-person sample of any larger group? Well they certainly don’t accurately represent the Canadian public, nor that in my province. They are 48.5 years old on the average and went to school for an average of 13.9 years. [The 160 high fundamentalists averaged slightly lower in age (47.7 years) and education (13.7).]But the overall sample probably provides a reasonably good cross-section of the parents whose children attend the large public university in my province. I never have found a self-selection bias for RWA, for example, in these parent studies, and while I worry that some students may fill out the questionnaires themselves, my past inquiries about this in a super-anonymous setting have revealed only about 2% do so. If you think parents of university students are reasonably normal folks, then this is probably a reasonably representative draw of a rather normal population.
Of course a Canadian sample is not an American sample. But one would expect the RWA Scale and Religious Fundamentalism relationships found within Canadian samples to appear within American ones. They almost always have before, and usually are a little larger in the USA because of the greater range in scores provided by more fundamentalists.

[380] Why the difference between 85 percent and 72 percent? For one thing, there are fewer evangelicals (139) by Barna’s criterion than high fundamentalists (160) in the sample, so at most only (139/160’) 87 percent of the high fundamentalists could possibly be evangelicals. Beyond that, a certain number of high scorers on the Religious Fundamentalism scale achieved only near-perfect scores on the seven items used to identify evangelicals, instead of the “7 out of 7” required. The item most frequently “missed” was the one dealing with salvation and grace, about which evangelicals disagree, as we shall see. Put that aside, and the 72 percent becomes 80 percent.

[381] Being “born again” did not match up with being an evangelical or a fundamentalist. I used the two items Barna has developed to identify born-again Christians, viz., “Have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today,” and “Do you believe that when you die you will go to heaven because you have confessed your sins and accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?” Most (54%) of the parents answered yes to both questions. Lots of people are “born again,” but many of them would not qualify as evangelicals nor do they usually pile up big scores on the fundamentalism scale.

[382] “Well of course they do,” you might be saying. “Both scales have a lot of religious stuff on them.” Good point. But (to repeat material from note 7 of chapter 1) several lines of evidence indicate that the religious items on the RWA scale got onto the scale because, more than anything else, they tapped sentiments of authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. That is, religion turns up on a measure of right-wing authoritarianism in North America because that’s one of the aspects of life in which authoritarianism is now quite prevalent. If this were not the case, the correlation between these items and the rest of the scale would be much lower and they would not have “made the cut” for getting onto the RWA scale.

[383] To illustrate the point about generalizations always having exceptions, one can think of some very unauthoritarian Baptists, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and ex- president Jimmy Carter. The first socialist premier in Canada, who pioneered medicare and other programs in Canada’s social “safety net,” was the Baptist minister Tommy Douglas.

[384] See Bob Altemeyer, “Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to be Prejudiced?”The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2003, 13, 17–28.

[385] The Promise Keepers quote is from Bill McCartney with David Halbrook, Sold Out: Becoming Man Enough to Make a Difference, 1997, Nashville: Word Publishers, and was given by Donald J. Sider in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, 2005, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, on pages 25–26.

[386] Want some numbers to get an idea how strong these generalizations are? In that 2005 study of 638 parents of university students I described in note 7, Religious Fundamentalism correlated .74 with Right-Wing Authoritarianism (an “almost unheard of” strong relationship), .89 with Barna’s measure of being an evangelical (an even bigger “almost unheard of” relationship), .72 with scores on the Religious Ethnocentrism scale (yet another almost unheard of relationship), and (THUD!) .19 with scores on the Manitoba Ethnocentrism scale that measures racial and ethnic prejudice (a weak relationship). (See note 12 of Chapter 1 to see where these labels came from.) The size of the last correlation is hardly alarming, but the question I have tried to answer is, why is there a positive correlation between being a religious fundamentalist and being racially prejudiced—as there has been in study after study? Why are “holy people” more prejudiced than “unholy people”? Shouldn’t holy people be less prejudiced than most?
Recently Gary Leak and Darrel Moreland at Creighton University in Omaha tested my hunch that religious ethnocentrism plays a pivotal role in the appearance of non-religious prejudices in fundamentalists. Using a mediated hierarchical regression analysis of Religious Fundamentalism and Religious Ethnocentrism scores from nearly 300 students to predict general racial prejudice, hostility toward homosexuals and prejudice toward African-Americans, they found religious ethnocentrism mediated fundamentalists’ other hostilities so powerfully that controlling for it always appreciably reduced the fundamentalist-prejudice relationship. In all cases, religious ethnocentrism proved to be the mediator in the relationship, not fundamentalism. After I learned of their study I performed their analysis on my sample of 638 parents’ answers to the Manitoba Ethnocentrism scale and the Attitudes toward Homosexuals scale, and found the same thing. A considerable amount of fundamentalists’ nonreligious prejudices thus are attributable to their strong religious prejudices. Learning to dislike people on religious grounds seemingly has powerful consequences for how we react to people who are different in other ways.

[387] Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 1994, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm.
B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., pages ix, 3.

[388] I recently looked to see if Christian fundamentalists had a double standard about Mormons proselytizing door-to-door. They did not. Most of them (52%) said no restraints should be placed on such activity, and only a very few (6%) said it should be forbidden. So it is not true that fundamentalists use double standards in every judgment they make.
One is always tempted to make such over-generalizations when a string of findings all come out pointing in the same direction. Exceptions exist, in my own studies and possibly in others’, to most of the conclusions I am drawing here. Fundamentalists/authoritarians do not always think illogically, think everything is our greatest problem, hold starkly contradictory ideas, act without integrity, respond dogmatically, and so on. But it is easy to find situations in which they do, compared with others, so with the bulk of the data on one side, I draw the conclusions I do. Thus in this case, I have often found that fundamentalists/authoritarians use double standards in their judgments. I have moreover tried several times to see if their opposites do the same thing when given the chance, and it is much harder to find evidence that they do.

[389] For a clear explanation of the ways in which creation science and intelligent design run afoul of accumulated evidence and fail to make the grade as sciences, see Francis Collins’ The Language of God, 2006, New York: Free Press. Dr. Collins, an evangelical Christian, heads the Human Genome Project in Washington D. C., and along with many other scientists has no difficulty reconciling his deeply held religious beliefs with a total acceptance of the theory of evolution. David G. Myers of Hope College, a man of strong faith and the author of the textbook I assign my introductory psychology students, would be another example.

[390] For the record, Darwin never said humans evolved from monkeys, even though many other people besides fundamentalists think he did. Even with the limited knowledge available to him 150 years ago, Darwin realized that humanity’s ancestors had long separated from the evolutionary path that led to monkeys. Instead, he correctly inferred that the “anthropomorphous apes” (chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas, orangutans, and ourselves) had descended from an ancient anthropomorphous forerunner (Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species and the Descent of Man, New York: The Modern Library, p. 518–519.)
Our “grandma” and “grandpa” were not monkeys or chimps but australopithecines, whose fossil record now goes back several million years. It is one thing to look at a rhesus monkey and say, “We could never have come from that.” It is another thing to look at “Lucy”and say the same thing—and fundamentalists would go much farther out on a limb and deny the relevance of even Homo erectus. But of course most fundamentalists probably have no knowledge of such discoveries which-while they have an endless capacity for igniting controversy among paleoanthropologists—long ago supplied many possible “missing links” between humans and our “recent” predecessors. The problem is not, “Where is the link?” but “Which one was it at this point in time?”That said, the total primate fossil record is by no means complete; fossils only form under certain rare conditions, and exploration for them is still going on.
As for evolution being “just a theory,” people who say this are using “theory” in the sense of a theory being an untested hypothesis, a hunch. When scientists talk about the theory of evolution, they mean “theory” in the sense of a set of testable propositions that have been shown to explain and predict a lot of things. Thus you have Newton’s theory of gravity (and on a broader scale, Einstein’s). Does anybody think gravity is unproven because there is a theory of gravity? If so, I hope they don’t try stepping off a tall building.
In just the same way, virtually every scientist working in a relevant field believes evolution occurred and is still occurring. Evolution itself is not a hypothesis, not a hunch. Evolution is as accepted as a fact in science as the belief that if you lift a pencil now and let go, it will fall. (Go ahead, try this, even at home.) And if you want a demonstration that evolution still occurs, get yourself infected by one of the treatment-resistant bacteria that have evolved and spread since the introduction of antibiotics. (No, don’t try this, anywhere.)

[391] Hence I was not surprised to read on December 3, 2006 that Bishop Adoyo, the head of the Pentecostal Church in Kenya, wants the National Museum in Nairobi to place its priceless collection of hominid fossils in a back room where the public cannot see them. He explained that these fossils support the theory of evolution, which his religion opposes. The bishop threatened to organize protests to force the museum to comply if it did not agree to his request. The bishop’s message seems crystal clear: We don’t believe this, so we don’t want the public to see the evidence that we are wrong.
I did this to make sure the experimental procedure did not have undue influence over them, and to give their trusted sources of information the last word. The students were also given the phone numbers of several on-campus counseling services and the university chaplains in case they found the experiment upsetting. The precautions proved unnecessary, as opinions almost never changed from Phase 1 to Phase 2. I did the experiment, not to try to convert gullible university students to a life of agnostic debauchery—which I thought from the outset extremely unlikely to happen—but to see if my DOG scale could predict who would modify their beliefs about the Bible and who would not. (It did.) See Bob Altemeyer, “Dogmatic Behavior among Students: Testing a New Measure of Dogmatism,” 2002, Journal of Social Psychology, 142, 713–721.
Mike Friedman and his colleagues at Texas AM University recently used the resurrection accounts and the confronting paragraph as part of a study of fundamentalists’ reactions to threat. All of the high fundamentalist students in this condition of the experiment stated on the pretest that the Bible was free of inconsistency or contradiction, and 31% of them still insisted it was after reading the confrontation. The rest admitted inconsistencies existed, saying they were due to translation errors (44%) or else were unimportant to the main point (25%). The investigators did not collect data on personal dogmatism, so we do not know if the unyielding believers were more dogmatic than the believers who budged, which they had been in my study.

[392] You may understandably be wondering where I get off putting students’ religious beliefs to such a test as part of a psychology experiment, so let me tell you more about the study. The students knew when they signed up for the experiment that it involved “interpreting certain passages from the Bible.” They also knew the study happened in two phases held one week apart. In the first part they read the four Gospel accounts, the confrontational summary, and gave their reaction. Then they were given a copy of the Gospel accounts used, the confrontation, and the survey they had just answered to take home. I asked the students to discuss the matter with whomever they wished (parents, friends, ministers or priests were specifically mentioned), reconsider their answers, respond to the survey once more, and turn in their “second opinion.”

[393] Religious fundamentalists do not just open their pocketbooks to the causes and politicians of their choice. Several studies have found that religious people give more money and time to charities than nonreligious people do. The most charitable region in Canada, according to studies of tax returns, is the heavily Mennonite section of my province, Manitoba. Wondering if this might reflect tithing to support their own churches, I asked a big sample of parents what percentage of their income they gave to charity, excluding any support of their church, missionaries, religious schools, and so on. The fundamentalist average equaled 3.2 percent, while the rest of the sample gave only about half as much, 1.7 percent. If you think the fundamentalists were exaggerating so as to look good, how did they know what the rest of the sample would answer?

[394] Bruce Hunsberger and I found in our study of active American atheists that the few members of that sample who said they had “advertised” their atheism through such things as bumper stickers found that it attracted a lot of parking tickets and vandalism.
Some highly religious people are outraged that atheists would publicly declare their lack of faith. Accordingly many of the people who belong to atheist associations hide their beliefs from most others, knowing from experience it could affect their employment, membership in other clubs, and social connections. It reminds me of the reaction of many high RWAs when homosexuals began to come out: “Don’t these people know they’re supposed to be ashamed of what they are?” That in turn reminded me of the reaction of many White supremists to the civil rights movement: “Don’t these n——— know they’re inferior and should never be treated as our equals?” Fortunately, eventually, minorities can overcome these reactions.

[395] This is just one example of how organized religion is slowly dying in the Western world. In Europe, polls reveal, hardly anyone goes to church every week any more. The United States, with about 32% of its adult population regularly attending weekly services, is one of the most “religious” countries in the West. See Bob Altemeyer, “The Decline of Organized Religion in Western Civilization,” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2004, 14, 77–89.

[396] Another factor may play a considerable role in creating amazing apostates in fundamentalist sects. Their religion may have tried very hard to “put the fear of the Lord” into them. But the apostates may not have been as fearful as their brothers and sisters and peers who stayed. They may have been more willing to take the risk of going it alone. Certainly it would take considerable courage to cut all those ties, throw away the sure ticket to Heaven, and start over from scratch facing the emptiness alone.
Speaking of fear, Bruce Hunsberger and I also interviewed university students who had come from nonreligious backgrounds but were now “amazing believers.” They had, it seemed, usually become religious for emotional reasons as a way of dealing with fear of death, despair, and personal failure, and been “brought to Christ” by religious friends and youth groups. These conversions seldom happened for intellectual reasons. Frequently, in fact, the amazing believers were given the Bible after making their commitment to Jesus so they could “find out what you now believe.” See Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger, Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith and Others Abandon Religion, 1997, Amherst, N.Y., Prometheus Books.
For a conversion from atheism to evangelical Christianity brought about by intellectual reasons, see The Language of God by the amazing believer, Francis Collins.

[397] Donald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, 2005, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, Chapter 1.

[398] See Bob Altemeyer, “Changes in Attitudes toward Homosexuals,” 2001, Journal of Homosexuals, 42, 63–75.

[399] Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Protestant theologian who joined an underground anti-Nazi movement as Hitler marched Germany to war. He was arrested and eventually executed in 1945 shortly before Allied forces liberated the camp in which he had been held. His analysis of cheap grace appeared in his 1937 book, The Cost of Discipleship, which was translated into English in 1959 by SCM Press of New York.

[400] Being sensitive to direction-of-wording effects, I also posed the question in a “negative” form, where belief in cheap grace would require disagreement: “If we are born again but continue to sin, we are NOT saved. God will not accept sinful persons, no matter what they have faith in.”A third of the Christian high fundamentalists disagreed with this. So what was the real level of belief in cheap grace in this sample? Somewhere between 33 and 42 percent. But either way, tis a good-sized crowd.

[401] A political columnist for a Winnipeg newspaper, Frances Russell, wrote an article in 2005 on the religious right in which she said the movement seemed intolerant, dogmatic, and a threat to democracy. She expected a negative reaction from fundamentalists, but she was quite unprepared for the tooth-and-claw hostility that erupted. Besides sending the inevitable messages to Ms. Russell hoping/promising that she would roast in hell forever, fundamentalists organized letter-writing and telephone campaigns (something they do very well) to the paper’s editor and publisher demanding she be fired. Since there is a wee chance some fundamentalists will be upset by what I have reported about them here, they probably want to know whom to contact to get me fired. But they’ve missed their chance, since I now stand on the very brink of retirement.

[402] George W. Bush is reported to have read the Bible in its entirety twice. So he might do very well on the following pop quiz which is based—not on Habakkuk, Haggai, Nahum and other books in the Bible that most people never heard of, but on the New Testament and the books from the Old Testament that people are more likely to read.
1. Which Gospel was originally Part I of a two-part account of the origins of Christianity? (Look up “Acts” to get the answer.)
2. After God finally convinced Moses to go back to Egypt and demand that Pharaoh release the Jews, who met Moses at an inn and tried to kill him?
3. If a “cubit” was—as is commonly inferred—the distance from a man’s elbow to the end of his longest finger, or about eighteen inches, about how big was Solomon’s magnificent temple? (A) A duplex apartment building, (B) A medium-size circus tent, (C) An indoor football stadium, or (D) An ocean liner.)
4. What prayer did Jesus instruct his disciples not to say in public but “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (Matthew 6:6)?
5. How many “Of every clean beast…the male and his female” did God command Noah to take into the ark? (See Genesis 7:2 and Genesis 7:8, 9; see also Genesis 8:20.)
6. Where does God tell the Hebrews, “Thrice in the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God, the God of Israel,” and “The first of the first fruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not see the a kid in his mother’s milk”? (A) The ceremonial and dietary laws in Deuteronomy, (B) The Epistle to the Hebrews, (C) They are two of the commandments God gave Moses, who wrote them down on stone tablets, (D) The admonitions of the prophet Amos, (E) The epistle of Andy.
7. From which tree in the Garden of Eden were Adam and Eve forbidden to eat? (A) The Tree of Life, (B) The big apple tree in the middle, (C) The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, (D) It’s not named, but it’s whatever tree the snake was in). (See Genesis 2:17.)
8. Which of the following epistles did the Apostle Paul not write: (A) Romans, (B) II Corinthians, (C) I, Claudius, (D) Galatians, (E) It’s a trick question; most scholars of the New Testament agree Paul wrote all of these.
9. Which of these is specifically stated in the Bible regarding God’s “anointed one” (“the Mesiha” in Arameic) whose right hand God would hold, who would subdue nations before him? (A) That his name would be Yeshua {“Jesus” in translation}, (B) That he was King Cyrus of Persia, (C) That he would come from Galilee, or (D) The name of his mother would be “Miriam”).
10. When Jesus said in Luke 24:46, just before he ascended to heaven, “Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day,” which passage in the Hebrew scriptures was Jesus referring to that prophesied he would suffer, die, and rise from the dead on the third day?
And since you’re such a good reader, even of long endnotes, I’ll give you an Extra Credit question.
11. It says in Leviticus 20:13 that (male) homosexuals should be put to death. What other activity does the Bible indicate should be punished by death (by stoning) in Numbers 15: 32–36?
[Look in Exodus 4:24 for the very surprising answer to the question of who tried to kill Moses before he could get back to Egypt. The answer to Question 3 is “A;” Solomon’s temple was about as big as a duplex. (See 1 Kings 6:2.) Look in Exodus 34 for the amazing answer to Question 6. The answer to Question 8 should be easy for anyone who’s read the New Testament; there is no Epistle to Claudius. Look in Isaiah 45:1 for the interesting answer to Question 9. The answer to the Extra Credit question: picking up sticks on the Sabbath would get you well and truly stoned, once and for all, if authorities took the Bible literally.]
If you know the answer to Question 10, a lot of people who have never been able to find that prophecy will be stupendously grateful. Various long-shots have been cited, such as Jonah 1:17 (“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”) But that’s hardly a prediction of what happened to Jesus, and you’ll have trouble getting three days and three nights squeezed into the approximate 40 hours between a Friday afternoon and a Sunday morning. Other, even longer shots have been offered up: Psalm 30:3; 41:10; 68:20; 118:17, and Hosea 6:2. Look them up and see what you think.
(How does one explain the fact—if the Gospels are true—that Jesus thought his death and resurrection fulfilled a prophecy that in fact did not exist?)
All the quotes here, by the way, are from the King James version of the Bible, which scholars tend to think is inaccurate in many respects, but which conservative Protestants prefer.

[403] The fact that so many authoritarians appear to have Top Secret doubts about the very existence of God brings all their other loudly professed beliefs into question. For example do they really believe, down to the soles of their feet and the bottom of their souls, that they are going to continue living after death, and indeed go to heaven for all eternity? I know they say they absolutely and positively, 110 percent believe this, but these are people much given to fear and they may secretly be just as terrified of death as others are—maybe more so.
Do you remember when the televangelist Oral Roberts told the world God had revealed that he would “call Oral home” if the faithful did not contribute $8 million dollars to Oral’s operations in Tulsa? The point is, Oral did not want to die. That’s why he kept asking people to send him more dough. Well think about it. If you believe Oral believed that God had threatened him with an eternity of utter happiness if he did not raise the $8 million, why didn’t Oral just keep God’s ultimatum to himself and hold the Almighty to his word?
Roberts raised $9.1 million by God’s deadline—and one does mean “deadline” apparently—and sure enough God has not called him home yet. He (Oral) did break his hip in March, 2006. He was a faith healer in the early days of his ministry, but he hied himself bimby fast to a hospital to get his hip fixed.

[404] See Pratto, F., J. Sidanius, L. M. Stallworth, and B.F. Malle, 1994. “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741–763.

[405] See Altemeyer, B., 1998. “The Other ‘Authoritarian Personality,’” In M. Zanna (Ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 30, San Diego: Academic Press.
As far as demographics go, social dominators tend to be males—and I’d be very surprised if you’re surprised by that. They do not have more education than is average for my samples, nor do they have higher incomes. (They most certainly would like to have lots more dough, but dreams do not always come true.)

[406] Usually in the .60s

[407] Were you as astonished as I was by how immediately the Republican leadership and its ardent supporters fell upon one another after the mid-term election in 2006? From everybody blaming the Congressional leaders about corruption, to the Congressional leaders blaming the Neocons for Iraq, to the Neocons blaming Donald Rumsfeld for his management of the war, to James Dobson blaming the G.O.P. for abandoning “values voters,” to Newt Gingrich blaming Karl Rove for the election strategy, to Karl Rove blaming the candidates for not doing what he wanted them to do, to Rush Limbaugh’s saying he was glad about the outcome because “I no longer am going to carry the can for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried”—it was hard to find much group cohesiveness after that campaign. Indeed, as the Italian Fascist Galeazzo Ciano wrote in his diary in September, 1942 (which JFK quoted after the Bay of Pigs debacle) “Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan.”

[408] Around .60.

[409] And lying often pays. One established propaganda technique is called the Big Lie, in which one says something outrageous, completely false, the complete opposite of what is true. Take Holocaust Denial. The Holocaust is one of the best documented and best known events of the twentieth century. Yet I found that today’s university students showed virtually no resistance to a pamphlet written by a S.S. officer who served at Auschwitz which denied it was a death camp. Their belief in the Holocaust tumbled like bowling pins before the flimsiest of arguments. Most surprisingly to me, low RWAs were just as likely to be affected as highs. See Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1996, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, chapter 10.

[410] See Authoritarian Dynamics and Unethical Decision Making: High Social Dominance Orientation Leaders and High Right-Wing Authoritarianism Followers. Son Hing, Leanne S.; Bobocel, D. Ramona; Zanna, Mark P.; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 92(1), Jan 2007, pp. 67–81.

[411] See Altemeyer, B., 2004. “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,” Journal of Social Psychology, 144 , 421–447.

[412] George W. Bush gave his version of this famous statement at a Gridiron Club Dinner held in March 2001 when he quipped, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.” This annual dinner features jokes and political satire, so the president probably did not mean to be taken seriously. The trouble is, it’s pretty hard to find evidence that he doesn’t truly believe it.

[413] I’m not saying, incidentally, that everyone who becomes important in society is a social dominator. People without a dominating bone in their bodies can become leaders of movements for greater equality, for example. One thinks of Gandhi. Conversely, a social dominator can become the leader of a movement for equality and freedom, but after succeeding become just the next dictator in a string of dictators. One thinks of many. I see no reason why social dominators would not head for left- wing movements, if they see those as the faster route to power.

[414] Carter, J., 2005. Our endangered values: America’s moral crisis. New York: Simon Schuster, p. 34.

[415] See Altemeyer, B., 2003. “What Happens When Authoritarians Inherit the Earth? A Simulation. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 3, 161–169.

[416] Oceana was a reworked “Pacific Rim” from the 1994 simulation. The Global Change Game is updated, and the world re-divided, as some economies improve, environmental problems are dealt with or grow worse, and so on.

[417] I don’t think there’s any chance the facilitators consciously or unconsciously affected the different outcomes of these two high RWA runs of the Global Change Game. None of them had ever heard of social dominance orientation, and they would have only been confused by the similarity of dress, presence of religious symbols, and so on over the two nights. Furthermore, if the facilitators had been trying to tweak things, they probably would have found a way to let the simulation run five more minutes on the second night when regions were arming their ballistic missiles.

[418] Remember the 1987 NATO-Warsaw Pact experiment from chapter 1, in which five-man teams of high RWAs reacted aggressively to ambiguous moves by the Warsaw Pact and precipitated a crisis? Gerry Sande and I followed up that experiment with a version in which NATO had developed a perfect “Star Wars” defense against nuclear attack. When low RWA teams thought they were unbeatable, they made virtually no threats against the Warsaw Pact—just as they had made no threats in the first run of the experiment. But when the high RWA teams knew they had the upper hand, they did one of two things. Some of the high RWA NATO teams became quite non-belligerent. But just as many became enormously aggressive. Believing that another group of students in the next room was playing the Warsaw Pact part of the simulation, they felt, as one of their members said, “We wanted them to realize we could wipe them out at any time.” A member of another very aggressive high RWA group put it more graphically: “We had all the power, and we wanted them to kiss our asses.”
We were puzzled at the time, because we thought having ultimate power would relax the high RWAs and make them less aggressive—which it did in half the groups, but not the other half. What caused the difference among the high RWA groups? I’ll bet you my chance of getting to heaven—which may be slim anyway after chapter 4-that the aggressive groups had some Double Highs in them. But this was some years before the Social Dominance Orientation scale was developed, so there’s no way of knowing.
We also ran a condition in which the enemy, the Warsaw Pact, had perfected a defense against nuclear attack while NATO had none. Incredibly, this produced an increase in aggressiveness among the low RWA teams, and an even bigger, record-breaking level of hostility in the high RWA groups. This produced counter-aggressiveness in their superior enemy. Why were the NATO players such idiots? Usually, they said, they wanted to send a signal that they would not be intimidated just because they were at a (hopeless) disadvantage. But they did not wait to see if their enemy would become threatening; they simply made him so in a situation in which they could not possibly win.

[419] Dean, J. Conservatives without conscience, 2006, New York: Viking, pp. 123–135.

[420] There’s always a problem in fitting an individual to a statistical conglomerate. No one matches the overall model perfectly. It’s like the old joke that the average American family had two-and-a-half kids. As well, everyone is so unique that you will surely find parts of a trait missing in an individual who seems, in general, to possess the trait. Thus people who know Tom DeLay well might observe that he is not at all (let’s say) prejudiced against racial minorities or hostile toward women. Be that as it may, so much of his behavior seems to match up with the distinctive attributes of Double Highs that I feel comfortable citing him as an example.

[421] But it doesn’t always work out as planned. You have to be careful when shifting your supporters around, because if you get too greedy you might spread yourself too thin, and end up with a net loss should enough of the electorate unexpectedly turn against you. Thus in Pennsylvania the Republicans lost several Congressional seats because they moved too many voters from supposedly safe GOP districts to try to defeat Democrats in other districts.
But the incredible 2003 gerrymandering of Texas, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in all but one particular, served the Republicans well. In an election that saw so many GOP incumbents around the nation go down to defeat, the Republican delegation in Texas lost only two of its seats in spite of everything. One of the losses occurred in the 22^nd District, where Tom DeLay’s late resignation forced the Republicans to have to use a write-in campaign for their nominee.

[422] I am not a Democrat, not even in Will Roger’s sense when he famously said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” I understand the necessity of having political parties in a democracy, but I also believe that when the interests of any party conflict with the interests of the country, the party will almost always butter its own bread first. So I basically don’t trust political parties, and consider myself an Independent.
If the Democratic Party had been swarmed by authoritarians the way the Republican Party has been, I would be talking about it now rather than the GOP. I want the Republican Party to be recaptured by its Grand Old Principles and go back to presenting the conservative options to the American people, not imposing the authoritarian one.

[423] But not so in Canada, where about 60 percent of the Manitoba parents in my samples who support the conservative political party are either high RWAs or high social dominators (or both). But the multi-party Canadian political system, we shall see, tends to line people up more by their political ideology than the two-party American system does.

[424] In McWilliams and Keil’s 2005 nationwide survey of American adults, mentioned in Chapter 1, the 406 Democrats averaged 76.9 on the RWA scale, and the 393 Republicans, 104.2, following conversion from a -3 to +3 response scale to the -4 to +4 format. An appreciably bigger difference appeared in terms of respondents’ self-classification as liberals or conservatives. The 275 persons who called themselves liberals averaged 61.8, while the 356 self-described conservatives had a mean of 111.1. The Democrat ic vs. Republican RWA scale correlation was .34.

[425] The Democratic vs. Republican RWA scale correlation in the American legislatures was .44.

[426] This is only the beginning. One of the things a researcher looks at when using a survey such as the RWA scale, as explained in note 3 of chapter 1, is how well responses to each item go along with the responses to all the other items on the scale. The politicians I studied, both in the United States and Canada, showed an incredible amount of inter-item agreement on the RWA scale. The “alpha coefficient” of internal consistency in these responses was .95 in the United States and .94 in Canada. Most researchers have never seen values that high, anywhere, with anything. The only thing I know that beats it is the internal consistency of a scale Tim Fullerton and I developed based on the Nicene Creed that measures Christian orthodoxy, and there one is measuring an ideology that people were taught and frequently memorized.
But in this case the RWA scale uncovered an ideology almost as strong as a religion among North American legislators—one I am sure no one ever taught them, one they certainly did not have to memorize, but one almost as tightly interconnected as a religious creed.

[427] Phillips, K. American theocracy, 2006, New York: Viking, p. xiii.

[428] Phillips, K. American theocracy, 2006, New York: Viking, p. 188.

[429] If anyone ought to be interested in understanding authoritarianism, it’s the mainstream conservatives who used to form and control the Republican Party. They have seen their political party hijacked by the most radical element in their party, and it’s anybody’s guess whether they can get it back. The takeover has been so complete that many people have forgotten what “conservative” meant before it became “authoritarian.” I don’t look forward to “conservative” becoming a dirty word the way “liberal” did. Until we find someone who’s always right, democracy needs both traditional and progressive voices to choose from. But the principled conservative options have been badly tarred lately by authoritarianism.
I can’t imagine Senator Barry Goldwater agreeing with, “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.”As John Dean points out, Goldwater was quite apprehensive about what the “cultural conservatives” would do to the Grand Old Party. “Mark my word,” the former senator said after the 1994 midterm election, “if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me.” (Conservatives Without Conscience, p. xxxiv.)
And yet, if you go through the “Comments” that have been posted so far on this website, there is little evidence that conservatives are reading a book that might help them understand who the hi-jackers are and why they have been so successful. And that, I believe, is most unfortunate.

[430] Want to play the “Guess Who?” game again. This chapter’s mystery guest sought the Republican nomination for president and told Americans he had been a combat Marine in Korea and been awarded three battle stars there. But those who knew him then, including Republican Congressman Paul McCloskey, Jr., said “X” had done nothing of the kind. Instead “X” had always been stationed far out of harm’s way because his father, a U.S. Senator, pulled some strings. “X” instead was known as the “liquor procurement officer” in his outfit, and he never came within miles of a shot fired in anger. (“X” sued McCloskey for saying this, but then dropped the suit and agreed to pay McCloskey’s court costs.)
After returning from the Far East, “X” got a law degree from Yale but could not pass the bar exam—which must have thrilled his former profs no end. He converted to the Pentecostal movement at this crossroad in his life and moved into religious broadcasting. He proved to be a shrewd businessman, accumulating a large network of stations around the world and considerable wealth.
Beginning in 1985 “X” claimed God had moved hurricanes away from his neck of the Virginia woods in answer to his particular prayers. He also wrote that, if Americans didn’t watch out, the United Nations would disarm the country, and the rest of the world would take over the United States. Like many fundamentalists he welcomed the Gulf War, viewing it as one of the signs that the “End Days” were nigh and the Kingdom of God was at hand. But the “Rapture” did not occur. Then he said the events of 9/11 were God’s punishment of the United States for its immoral behavior—leaving unexplained why, if this was the point the Almighty wished to make, such a traumatic disaster did not occur during President Clinton’s presidency instead.
“X” has railed against hypocrisy on many occasions. Yet in 1994 when he was making emotional appeals on his television program for donations to fund Operation Blessing, which he said would transport refugees from Rwanda, it turned out the money was mainly used to transport diamond mining equipment for a company he owned in Zaire. Caught owning a race horse, when many evangelicals disapprove of gambling, he explained that he bought it simply because he liked to look at it. Like Oral Roberts, he preached faith healing to others, but got himself to a hospital quickly when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2003.
Every few months “X” makes an outrageous statement that he later apologizes for, claims was misinterpreted, or doggedly sticks to with mind-bending elaborations and rationalizations. In August 2005 he opined that the CIA ought to assassinate Venezuela’s president. In January 2006 he suggested God had smote the prime minister of Israel with a stroke because his government had withdrawn its troops from the Gaza Strip. In May 2006 he said that God had told him that storms will hit America’s coastlines, including “possibly” a tsunami in the Pacific northwest. Later in May he announced that, thanks to the “age-defying protein shake” he hawks on his evangelistic TV show, he had leg pressed 2,000 pounds at age 73–about a thousand pounds more than the strongest football players can do in their prime. In January 2007 he told his enormous and faithful television audience that God had warned him that a terrorist attack on the United States would cause a mass killing late in 2007. “Something like a nuclear attack.” (If “X” is God’s prophet, why doesn’t the Almighty give him more specific information so we can see a real honest-to-God prediction confirmed? Why does God play “I know something you don’t know” through “X”?)
Because of X’s several scandals and many outrageous declarations, some observers think his influence among conservative Christians is waning. But the money keeps pouring in from his devoted followers. [As the scandal-plagued faith-healer Aimee Semple McPherson said decades ago, “If the papers tomorrow morning proved that I had committed eleven murders, (my followers) would still believe me.”]
Who is “X”? Oh heck, everybody knows that this, believe it or not, is the person most responsible for the formation of the Religious Right. Look to you like a Double High?

[431] A telling example of how the piper must be paid when it comes to the Religious Right appeared on May 13, 2006 when Senator John McCain accepted an honorary degree and delivered the commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. During his 2000 campaign to become the Republican nominee for president, McCain had called Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance” and said Falwell and Pat Robertson had an “evil influence” in the Republican Party. But McCain is given no chance to become the Republican nominee in 2008 without the support of the Christian Right.
When asked about his appearance at Liberty University the next day on “Meet the Press,” Senator McCain said, “I believe that the ‘Christian Right’ has a major role to play in the Republican Party. One reason is because they’re so active and their followers are. And I believe they have a right to be a part of our party. I don’t have to agree with everything they stand for, nor do I have to agree with everything that’s on the liberal side of the Republican Party.”

[432] On September 20, 2006 an independent Congressional-watch organization called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released its second annual “Most Corrupt Members of Congress Report.” Three senators and seventeen members of the House were named, most of them hold-overs from the first annual report (although the news release noted with some glee that two of the previous winners were already on their way to jail).
I found it instructive to look up the ratings these 20 lawmakers’ voting records received from the Family Research Council, the successor to the Christian Coalition as the major lobbying organization for the Religious Right. The average was 80%. Eight of the “most corrupt” had perfect 100% endorsements from the Family Research Council. The lowest score was a 64% posted by the Democratic Representative Alan Mollohan from West Virginia. (Seventeen of the twenty “most corrupt” were Republicans.)
To be sure, many other lawmakers who got high scores from the Family Research Council did not get named as most corrupt. But I think I read somewhere that there’s this interesting connection between being a lying, dishonest, amoral manipulator and becoming a leader of right-wing religious movements.

[433] My advocacy for various things will startle some readers, since people often think professors should stay in their ivory towers and “be above it all” (or at least “out of it”). But I think, to the contrary, that professors have an obligation to speak what they believe to be the truth, especially when they see important social values such as freedom and equality under attack. This is the big reason for tenure. It pays a free society in the long run to safeguard teachers so they can say whatever they think is true without fear of losing their jobs. It’s an implicit part of our role to profess the truth, as best we know it. That’s why we’re called professors.

[434] So far as I know, only two social scientists have offered basically negative reviews of my research on authoritarianism. The first was John J. Ray, an Australian sociologist whose major critique appeared in Canadian Psychologist, 1990, Volume 31, pages 392–393. He will, I am certain, be glad to provide you with copies of his thoughts. But if you can get the original journal (lots of luck!), you’ll find my reply immediately following his article.
The second, much lengthier criticism was published by a Rutgers University sociologist, John Martin, in Political Psychology, 2001, Volume 22, pages 1–26. I prepared a reply to it but withdrew it from the journal when the editors told me I would not be allowed to respond to any further comments Professor Martin might make. But if you read his article and want to see my response, email me at “altemey@cc.umanitoba.ca”.
A couple of other scholars have offered up alternate interpretations of what the RWA scale measures (e.g. a need for group identification), but I don’t think they’d disagree with any of the findings presented in this book, just what the results “really mean”on the deeper theoretical level.

[435] Milgram took a LOT of heat over the ethics of his experiment. Most commentators eventually agreed that his study met the ethical guidelines of the time, but his study also led to a revision of those ethical codes. It would probably be impossible to conduct the Milgram experiment today at a North American university.
Professor Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University ran a partial replication of Milgram’s experiment in July 2006 that was featured in an ABC “Viewpoint” program televised on January 3, 2007. It was, of course, impossible to do the experiment exactly as Milgram had in the early 1960s. Burger’s Teachers went no further than the 150 volt shock, which leads the Learner to demand, for the first time, to be set free. If a Teacher hesitated to continue, the Experimenter tried to get him to ask the next question of the Learner, but once he did the experiment apparently stopped then, before the 165 volt switch would have been thrown.
As often happens when a research project gets reported in the media, the results were not clearly presented. (I apologize for any misrepresentations I make here. I emailed Professor Burger on January 4^th seeking clarification, but he did not respond. I then emailed this note to him on February 21^st, but he again did not respond.) As best I can make out, 12 of 18 men (or 67%) “went past” the 150 volt level. And 16 of 22 female Teachers (73%) continued past 150 volts. This is presented in the program as a replication of Milgram’s finding.
Actually, 82% of Milgram’s subjects in the replicated “weak heart-baseline” condition (which is the one shown in the film, “Obedience”) went past 150 volts. So one might think obedience has dropped since Milgram’s time.
However numerous differences exist between in the original study and the 2006 replication. Some would probably increase compliance. Milgram paid his subjects $4.50, Burger, $50. And the victim’s (taped) performance in 2006 struck me as appreciably less frantic and anguished than the one Milgram’s “Mr. Wallace” gave. As well, the Experimenter seemed positively friendly (which could increase or decrease compliance, I guess). But at one point the Experimenter readily agreed that he would be responsible for any lawsuits that might be filed, which could increase obedience.
On the other hand—and I think this is the strongest factor of all—it is very likely that Dr. Burger’s subjects signed an Informed Consent document before the experiment began that explicitly stated they could quit the experiment at any time. (Today’s ethical standards would almost always require this.) One of the subjects seen in the TV program in fact says, “The experiment allows me to walk out at any time, and I will walk out if you want to push this.” Milgram’s subjects did not have any such understanding, an understanding that would very likely lower compliance.
Beyond that, there is the real danger that some of the subjects had heard of the Milgram experiment and/or recognized it once the shocking began. We do not know how the subjects were recruited, and if they were then screened for prior awareness.
Taking all these things into account, what can we conclude besides it’s hard to repeat a study 45 years later exactly the way it was run the first time? I think, like Dr. Burger, that the results essentially match what Milgram found. Milgram’s subjects are still alive, and living among us. In fact, if you know who Pogo is...

[436] These are the results for the “Voice Feedback” condition of Milgram’s experiment, given on p. 35 of his book, The Obedience Experiments (see next note). Milgram made the Learner more vulnerable in later conditions by having him say he had a weak heart (but it didn’t make any difference).

[437] The best sources for Milgram’s research are his own book, Obedience to Authority, 1974, New York: Harper, The Obedience Experiments by Arthur G. Miller, 1986, New York: Praeger, and “The Social Psychology of Stanley Milgram,” by Thomas Blass, 1992, in M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 279–329): San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

[438] Milgram ran a condition in which the Teacher chose the shock level after each mistake. The strongest shock given, on average, was 60 volts.

[439] Bob Altemeyer, Right-wing authoritarianism, 1981, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, pp. 273–274.

[440] Teachers who completely complied with the Experimenter when the Learner was sitting right beside them scored highly on the early, unidirectionally-worded measure of authoritarianism called the Fascism Scale. So your worst enemy might find your executioner much faster if he only puts authoritarian followers in the Teacher’s chair. See Elms, A. C. and Milgram, S. (1966), Personality Characteristics Associated with Obedience and Defiance toward Authoritative Command. Journal of Experimental Research in Personality, 1, 282–289.

[441] Professor Burger (see note 3) also ran an undisclosed number of subjects through a “teaching team” condition with one confederate, who quit after the 90 volt shock. Sixty-three percent of the subjects continued on, which appears to sharply contradict Milgram’s results on the face of it. But not much is happening at 90 volts; the Learner will not demand to be set free for four more switches. All but one of Milgram’s 40 subjects in the “Two Peers Rebel” condition continued on after 90 volts. And 80 percent kept going after 150 volts, where the first confederate quit. Of course, the second confederate stayed in the game for a while more, which would have induced the real subject in Milgram’s experiment to keep going after 150. Basically, the setups differ in too many ways to draw a clear conclusion.
People often ask how women would have reacted had they been placed in the role of Teacher. Milgram ran one such condition. Sixty-five percent of the 40 women who served in his “baseline” experiment went to 450 volts, virtually the same figure found with men.

[442] Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary men, 1992, New York: Harper.

[443] Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary men, 1992, New York: Harper, p. 72..

[444] Telling people their RWA scale scores can be seen as unethical, which is why I keep saying to take your score with a grain of salt. In this experiment, which is described in detail on pages 312–318 of Enemies of Freedom, I discreetly gave everyone in a class of introductory psychology students the good news that she had scored highly on the RWA scale. After the students answered some questions about that epiphany I revealed my evil plot, explaining I was trying to see how people react to getting this news. Thus the high RWAs left the room having no more knowledge about their real scores on the test than anyone else did. But I could look at how they reacted when they thought the score was valid.

[445] Every year Macleans Magazine ranks the big universities in Canada, and my school usually comes in dead last because we have relatively low entry standards for our incoming freshmen classes. Some students who would be rejected by other institutions get a chance at higher education at my university, and we have a number of access programs that provide extra support for students from devastating backgrounds. (My school also has about the lowest tuition fees and Fees fees of any university in Canada, further increasing its accessiblity.)
I was lucky enough to attend an elite university, which I love dearly. I also am proud that the University of Manitoba has the courage of its convictions and swallows its last place standing in the national rankings rather than close the door to a few hundred people who might surprise us—as many do, of course. (Anybody who thinks you can well predict who will succeed in a university program based on past academic performance, scores on SAT-type exams, letters of recommendation, etcetera, has never supervised graduate students admitted to his program.)

[446] I could add other, fairly obvious recommendations to this list of long-term solutions to the authoritarian threat. For example, psychologists have long argued that “authoritative” child-rearing (where rules exist and are enforced, but can be openly discussed and modified) produces better adults than authoritarian child-rearing does. Stories that low RWAs told me about their upbringing, which led to the portrait of “Lou”in Chapter 2, indirectly support this. IF I had a study demonstrating a solid connection between having an authoritative background and being a low RWA, I’d be recommending such an approach in the main text. But I don’t, and I am sticking to the promise I made in the Introduction not to lather you up with my opinions, but to talk instead about what data show.
Similarly, our educational systems could encourage—even train—disobedience of malevolent authority. Don’t expect the authoritarians in your community to climb all over each other in support of this idea. Resistance to teaching evolution will look like a church picnic compared to the furor this would stir up. But a module in high school civics classes on unjust governmental actions in the past could help lower authoritarianism. IF I had a study showing this…
And of course the media could emphasize the same point. And so on. Conversations about these things are perking along on the Group Discussion website reached through this site’s home page. Feel invited to join in. Feel especially free, those of you who can, to do the studies that would test these ideas.

[447] I really deserve the “F.” Consider how you found this website. It happened because someone else told you about it—probably a friend or a stranger on another site. Nobody has been paid to publicize this work.
Since I think what I’ve found in my studies is important, maybe I’m wrong to be so un-promoting. But I believe—call it an experimental hypothesis—that many people care about what has happened to America lately, and what might happen next. If they’re there, they’re going to determine this book’s future. And if they’re not there, or if they are but find this book uninformative or unimportant and it then “dies,” it won’t be the first experiment I tried that turned out “wrong.”
My adversity to self-promotion runs so deep, by the way, that if it were possible to publish studies under a pseudonym, as one can a novel, you would be reading a book now written by Roger Galtenflyer. (“Roger Galtenflyer” was the name I acquired as I was passed down the reception line at the President’s Tea during Freshman Orientation Week at Yale. I was Robert Altemeyer at the beginning of the line, but by the time I got past the Freshman Dean and his wife I was being introduced as Ronald Alteflyer, and so on until President Griswold shook my hand and said, “So nice to have you with us, Roger.” You can tell this was a long time ago, in what now seems a galaxy far, far away: stick-um name tags had not yet been invented. Honest!)

[448] My hesitation about “going public” with my findings may also explain why virtually none of what you now know has ever appeared in psychology text books. This stuff would fit very nicely in the chapters on personality in introductory psychology texts, for example, which have gotten pretty dull since the demise of Freud. But it never has...
In my certifiably paranoid moments I wonder whether publishers recoil in terror at the thought of putting out a textbook that will offend the Religious Right. If so, I doubt anyone had to even make a phone call to produce this censorship. After experiencing all the pressure to keep evolution out of biology textbooks, the publishers might simply censor themselves now: “Who needs all that trouble?” Of course, ducking that trouble rather than offending pressure groups who want unfavorable findings about themselves squelched means the rest of the population won’t learn the dangerous things about these groups. Perhaps that’s wrong, or at least unwise. So if a prof thought some part of this on-line book was relevant to her course…

[449] Altemeyer, B., The Authoritarian Specter, 1996, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 306.

[450] The quote is from Alexandra Pelosi’s film, “Friends of God,” broadcast on HBO on January 25, 2007.

[451] Some high RWAs may be especially energized now because the backlash that is growing against their causes convinces them that they are being discriminated against. Overgeneralizing the findings that reveal their shortcomings would indeed be wrong. But these highly prejudiced people appear to be performing another of their amazing mental gymnastics by seeing themselves as the victims of prejudice.

[452] It will seem strange that persons protesting against the government would be labeled “authoritarian followers.” But the concept of authoritarianism centers on submission to those whom one views as the legitimate, established authorities. And the whole point of the “birther” campaign against Obama is that he is an illegitimate president. As well, many Republican rank-and-file members believe the Democrats were unfairly favored by the media in 2008, and stole the election through massive voter fraud engineered by ACORN.

[453] On April 13, 2010 word appeared that Tea Party leaders in Oklahoma were trying to organize an armed militia to fight federal intrusion into state”s rights. And on April 18 a Baptist minister told a rally in Greenville, S.C. that he was “ready to suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” I”m sure he”d say he holds the Constitution sacred, but he”s talking about armed insurrection against the United States government. At the same rally former Representative and GOP presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo said it was time to send Obama “back to Kenya.”

[454] Limbaugh ( www.rushlimbaugh.com ) has given definitions of socialism which sensibly centered on state ownership of industry. But he then “showed” that the Democrats were socialists because, for example, they caused the subprime crisis. (?) (??) (???) Recently Sean Hannity agreed that Obama was a socialist: “Obama is a socialist. If you take over banks, if you take over car companies, if you take over financial institutions, the way that he has—now the health care system. If you’re going to use every crooked deal that you can come up with to get a bill like that passed—most recently the health care bill—that is by definition, if you look up the dictionary definition of socialism, this is it.” www.dittos-rush.com
If you can work your way through Hannity”s fractured syntax (is socialism defined as “using every crooked deal,” or as the health bill, and how is either of those a definition?) he ignores the fact that it was George W. Bush who asked for the TARP funds, and then gave billions in loans to General Motors and Chrysler as well as the banks. Obama continued loaning TARP funds to various banks to keep them solvent, and he advanced billions more to GM and Chrysler. But true blue socialists hardly loan money to industries going down the tubes when no one else will; they nationalize them. Barack Obama hasn”t nationalized anything. (The Treasury does now own 60 percent of GM stock, taken as security for a lot of the loan; but it is looking forward to selling its shares so it can get some of its money back.)
My point here is that Limbaugh”s and Hannity”s confused and misleading pronouncements are accepted so uncritically by Tea Partiers. A competent senior in high school would find their flaws after 30 minutes of research.

[455] A CBS News/New York Times poll released on the eve of the 2010 Tax Day protests reported that most Tea Party supporters said the income tax they paid this year was fair. This may be a stunning example of compartmentalization, since the “Tea” in Tea Party is often said to stand for “Taxed enough already.” But there was considerable ambiguity in the question used: “Is the income tax you will pay this year fair?” “Fair” in what sense? Does the government take a fair part of my income, versus too much? Or did some people interpret the question to mean, “Are your taxes fair relative to what everyone else pays?” You will also note that the question was not worded in “both directions,” such as “Is the income tax you will pay this year unfair or fair?” Authoritarian followers tend to acquiesce (say yes) more than most people do when asked ambiguous questions. So it may be that 100 percent of Tea Party supporters think their taxes are too high, despite the poll”s findings.

[456] In this context one must stand on a chair and applaud Senator Tom Corburn (R-OK) who told an Oklahoma City town hall on April 5, 2010 not to believe everything they saw on Fox News. Instead, he said, they should watch other channels as well, and get a balanced view of what”s going on. He also chided his audience when it booed the name Nancy Pelosi. He said she was a nice person. “Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn”t mean they”re not a good person” he added. (Bill O”Reilly of Fox News was not amused at Corburn”s comment.)

[457] The list of parallels between the research on authoritarian followers and the behavior of Tea Partiers probably extends well beyond twelve. For example, such followers in general have very poor self-insight; they realize almost nothing about how unfavorably they stack up compared to most people. As well, authoritarian followers run away from bad news about themselves; they are highly defensive. Authoritarian followers also have a strong tendency to be zealots, and Tea Partiers seem quite zealous. And authoritarian followers know surprisingly little about the things they say they believe in. It would be interesting to see how much the Tea Partiers actually know about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and American history. For example Tea Partiers commonly refer to the sanctity of “the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Do they not know about all the amendments since 1791, or just don”t consider them part of the Constitution?

[458] The Authoritarians was written in 2006 and appeared on this website in early 2007. One can quietly modify an e-book over and over again, changing what one said to fit new facts. But except for (numerous) spelling corrections, and changing “I Titus” to I, Claudius” on pp. 157–8, the book appears now as it did originally. The Authoritarians has been read by some tens of thousands of people—proving the price is right. Only a few people have challenged the results. The most determined protest came from a conservative blogger who thought my findings on authoritarianism were misleading because my way of measuring authoritarianism involved issues that conservatives had definite opinions about, whether they were authoritarian or not. The findings would disappear, he said, if a good measure of conservatism were used instead, such as political party affiliation. The discussion ended when I did the analyses he wanted, and found Republicans were way more prejudiced than Democrats, etcetera.
As I mention at the end of the book, some other researchers think I am really, unknowingly studying intense in-group identification, or some other thing. (It may be a sign of dogmatism, but I haven”t been convinced yet.) But there have been no noteworthy “failures to replicate,” as far as I know, by other scientists—going back to 1981 when these results began appearing. Indeed, the record for replication and extension by other researchers in other places has been quite reinforcing.

[459] The task of identifying Tea Partiers” sentiments might grow more difficult now because a group called “Crash the Tea Party” announced on April 13, 2010 that it will infiltrate their rallies. Their goal is to “top” whatever a real member of the movement says, to make them sound like a gathering of crazy people. I think this both unfair and unwise. How would liberals like it if some group posed as Communists in their ranks and shouted Marxist slogans to the press? And just by announcing the plan to place agents provocateurs at Tea Party demonstrations, they have given the movement a ready alibi when one of its real members does something stupid. (In fact, the “Spy vs. Spy” part of my personality suspects this announcement is bogus—I mean, why would you tell people you were going to do this?—and the real purpose is to sow internal distrust by making the real Tea Partiers suspect one another.)

[460] A Pew Research poll released on April 18, 2010 found that only 22% of its nationwide sample said they trust the government in Washington almost always or most of the time.

[461] Americans are rightly disgusted with Congress. Democratic lawmakers might sensibly respond to this disgust by offering the voters a list of promises regarding pork barreling, lobbyist influence, Senator “holds,” limiting the filibuster, campaign financing, and so on that they will enact if they win enough seats—with some iron-clad promises of what will happen if they don”t.

Various Authors

Dumpster Diving the Anarchist Library Text Bin

Introduction

A List of Some of the Deleted Texts

A Table of Some of the Deleted Texts

1. Finbar Cafferkey: The life and death of an Irish fighter ‘who put his money where his mouth is’ in Ukraine

2. The Virtual Fatory

3. Armenia doesn’t need another political party — it needs a MOVEMENT!

4. Communization and the abolition of gender

I. The Construction of the Category ‘Woman’

II. The Destruction of the Category ‘Woman’ Though

5. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

6. Economic Battle

7. Child Molestation vs. Child Love

Introduction: A Word of Warning

Here Be Dragons

Morals?

Childhood “sexuality”

Child Molestation vs. Child Love (Main text from 1987)

Critical Annotations by Black Oak Clique

8. A Tyranny Of Editors

9. All Days Matter!

10. Anarchism Before Labels

11. Identity Poltics Are Boring As Fuck

12. Insurrectional Nihilism

13. Second Wave “Feminism” Is Feminism...

14. The Fox Knows the Hen

15. The Ones Who Came Back to Omelas

16. White Supremacy Is a Disease

17. A Tranarchist Manifesto

18. ‘Human Rights’ and the Discontinuous Mind

19. Chile: Anatomy of an economic miracle, 1970–1986

Anatomy of an Economic Miracle

The working class

The real “Miracle”

State Aid

20. The IWW in Canada

General Introduction

Birth of the IWW

Canada 1906 – 1918

The 1,000- Mile Picket Line

Repression in W.W.I

Postwar Growth

Organizing in the 20’s

Changes in the 30’s

World War II

The Dark 50’s

21. Ableism at the Anarchy Fair

22. Chinese Anarchism for the 21th Century

Abstract

Introduction

Part 1: Three Principles of the People (三民主義, Sān Mín Zhǔ Yì)

Nationalism (民族主義, Mín Zú Zhǔ Yì)

Democracy (民權主義, Mín Quán Zhǔ Yì)

People’s Livelihood (民生主義, Mín Shēng Zhǔ Yì)

Part 2: Working with Other Ethnic Groups

Part 3: Conclusion

Reference List

23. Capitalist Education and Learned Helplessness

24. Think for Yourself, Question Authority

Introduction

1. Biography

2. The Politics of Ecstasy/The Seven Levels of Consciousness (the 60s)

2.1. Ancient models are good but not enough

2.2. “The Seven Tongues of God”

2.3. Leary’s model of the Seven Levels of Consciousness

1. The Void (level 7):

2. Emotional Stupor (level 6):

3. The State of Ego Consciousness/The Mental-social-symbolic Level (level 5):

4. The Sensory Level (level 4):

5. The Somatic (Body) Level (level 3):

6. The Cellular Level (level 2):

7. The Atomic — Solar Level (level 1):

2.4. The importance of “set” and “setting”

2.5. The political and ethical aspects of Leary’s “Politics of Ecstasy”

2.6. Leary’s impact on the young generation of the 60s

2.6.1. “ACID IS NOT FOR EVERYBODY”

3. Exo-Psychology (the 70s)

3.1. S.M.I.²L.E. to fuse with the Higher Intelligence

3.2. Imprinting and conditioning

22. Chinese Anarchism for the 21^th Century