[This is an edited transcript of a conversation in the Seattle home of Abe Osheroff, June 17-18, 2005.]
Authenticity in life and politics
Robert Jensen: I want to start with a term that is often used without much thought about what it might really mean -- authenticity. What does that word mean to you?
Abe Osheroff: Authenticity is incredibly important. To me, authenticity comes when your thoughts, your words, and your deeds have some relation to each other. It comes when there’s a real organic relationship between the way you think, the way you talk, and the way you act. You have to fight for authenticity all the time in this world, and if you don’t fight for it you will get derailed. But when you have it, when you feel that surge of recognition -- that I’m saying exactly what I’m thinking, and I’m ready to do something about it -- well, that’s an intellectual and emotional orgasm that makes sex look like nothing.
I talk about it that way to audiences, especially to kids, because it draws them in. They giggle because I mentioned sex. But they think about it. Some of those kids in that audience know what I’m trying to tell them. They’re smart, and they come up afterwards and ask me about it. They ask me, “How do I follow that path?” And they realize that if they follow that path they will have to make choices. So they ask me, “What do I do when I come to a crossroads in life and I have to make a choice that means sacrifice and pain?”
I tell them that, first, it’s good that they are thinking about these things. Some people are afraid to think, because thinking can present problems. When you have thoughts, you have to decide what to do with them. We can save them and take them to a therapist, or we can go to a bar and drink them away, or we can talk about them. But immediately we have to deal with self-censorship. Talking honestly can have consequences. Take an easy example. If you’re involved in a relationship and there’s something bothering you about the relationship, and you tell the other person your thoughts, that may be the end of the relationship. You’re in a funny bind because if you talk about it you may risk the relationship, but if you don’t talk about it you know that down the road the same problem will be there. What do you do? Authenticity is about making that decision.
Then once you’ve said something, the question is, “What are you going to do about it?” A lot of people don’t do anything. Trying to be authentic is another way of saying you are struggling to let out the best part of who you are, the part that will act and take risks. We all have a choice: We can choose to be made by history, or we can choose to participate in making history.
RJ: Do you remember the first time you felt that authenticity as a young person?
AO: No, I didn’t realize what this meant until my later years. As a kid I don’t even remember understanding that kind of concept. And when I was in the Communist Party, I was too absolutely devoted to the party to be really authentic.
RJ: When you talk about yourself and the party, it sounds like there was always a struggle inside you, between your rebellious nature and your loyalty to the party. I wonder if you were always a communist with the soul of an anarchist. You were in this rigid institutional structure, but a rebel at heart.
AO: I suppose I am more of an anarchist than a communist, and always have been. You’re right -- as young man I was rebellious. I hated authority and didn’t like to be told what to do by my mother, my teachers, or anybody else. And, living in a poor part of New York, immigrant community, I also had a built-in social conscience. We saw people suffering every day. My family was relatively well off, compared to others in the neighborhood, and we ate fairly regularly. My father was a very skilled worker. But a lot of people around us were not living very well. I remember once when I saw a man eating out of a garbage can, when I was 13 or so. I ran upstairs and said to my parents, “Mama, papa, there’s a man eating out of a garbage can.” My mother disappeared into the kitchen and started filling a paper bag with food. My father sat down and said, “Well, what can I tell you, son. When you get a little older, you’ll understand. It’s too much for a young boy.” And I said, “No, I want to know now.” I wanted an honest answer.
RJ: When did feel like you started to find an answer?
AO: A year or two later I learned why people were eating out of garbage cans, why people were being put out on the street with their furniture when the Depression hit. I got an education quickly. Part of it came through my first activism. In 1930 I had organized a club, the Brownsville Athletic and Cultural Club, which had two activities: We pumped iron and we listened to classical music, kind of a weird combination. One day a member of the Young Communist League came to me and said, “I have a way you guys can help the community. When people are evicted and put onto the street, you get your guys and take the furniture right back in.” So we did that. It was a great form of activism, a way to help people immediately. The landlords would eventually give in. But of course sooner or later, we were bound to get busted. I was young and tempestuous, and me and two other guys beat the shit out of a cop who tried to stop us. That was serious business, and the cops weren’t happy.
RJ: You got arrested? Beaten up?
AO: Not beaten, really more tortured by the cops, for about 72 hours. That’s one kind of lesson in this world, about power. But the important thing I want to get to is that I was sort of preconditioned for becoming a communist because -- whatever everyone thinks about the communists, and looking back I can be pretty critical -- the one thing they did was furnish a reasonable explanation for why that man was eating out of the garbage can, and why the landlords were putting people in the street, and they’re the only ones who did it. The Democrats didn’t do it. The Republicans didn’t do it. The Communist Party appealed to anyone who was a thinking or relatively sensitive young man. So I got involved in the Young Communist League, and that led to me to going to Spain and fighting fascism there. It was all part of the same thing.
But before I ever knew what to label myself, I was already a radical humanist, and the communists were the closest thing to that. That was also the reason I left the party in 1956. You could no longer believe the party was radical or humanist. The Soviet Union, which had really been like a shining beacon to me until then, became really an evil society in many, many ways. So, for a lot of us, it was like the CP left us, not us leaving the party.
RJ: What was it like, making that break with the Communist Party?
AO: That was a tough period after leaving. I felt hopeless, didn’t know which way to turn. For two years, I agonized. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t just leave the party, I had to break with some of my closest, dearest colleagues and friends, some of whom even denounced me. That was devastating. People with whom I’d shared all kinds of experiences -- the brigades in Spain, jail, all kinds of shit -- now pointed a finger and said, “You’ve become an enemy of the working class.” But eventually I came out of that, and I became aware of the beginnings of the civil-rights movement, which appealed to me a great deal, and I began to raise money for them. But just raising money didn’t feel right, it wasn’t enough. So I looked around to find a way to do more.
RJ: Before we talk about your time in Mississippi, I want to ask you more about this notion of authenticity and empathy, their role in politics.
AO: You can’t keep yourself walled off from the pain of the world and expect to be a whole person, let alone a useful person politically. If you look out the window and see a hungry, emaciated child and do not feel -- not just pain, but a desire to do something to make the world a little better -- then you’re not a complete human being, in my book anyway. There’s something missing in you that makes a person complete -- empathy, compassion, the ability to feel the pain of another, whatever you want to call it. That’s the starting point. From there you have to do something about what you feel. And there’s a difference between real activism that flows from that, and all kinds of pseudo-activism.
RJ: What is pseudo-activism?
AO: Pseudo-activism is for people who occasionally do something useful only because it makes them feel good, but it has to be public so that others know they are good people. True activism involves public or private activity and expression under any and all conditions, including when you won’t get recognition. You’re driven to do it because you have no choice; you have to do it because there’s something in you that needs nourishing.
RJ: Is the professor you mentioned a pseudo-activist?
AO: You can take this as a criticism, an indictment, of your profession, but most academics aren’t worth shit as activists. You’re overpaid, and you still all complain about the workload. I was lucky. I got out of the academic game early. What saved my ass was becoming a carpenter. Not only that, but I was a top-notch carpenter. I could work anywhere and make good money. I didn’t have to worry about the boss not liking my politics, because most of them cared about your work, not your politics.
The fact is that I have contempt for most of academia. Not just criticism, but contempt for it as an institution. I know there are some wonderful teachers here and there, but to me the universities are mostly dead rocks. There are some diamonds and some gold that you can discover, but basically it’s a fucking dead rock. I have a professor friend who tells me about his investment in his career. Yea, well while academics are doing their thing, some guys were down in a hole in the ground digging coal and making concrete and building your houses. Let’s think about those people. Don’t talk to me about your fucking investment. Academia was not too difficult a road. There are things worse than having to sit up at night and read books. Try ‘em. Go out and dig a hole in the ground every fucking day, eight hours a day, and then you come back and we’ll talk about it. I’m a little extreme, I must admit, but just the word academia makes me growl.
Love and anger in politics and life
RJ: It’s interesting that you talk about your politics rooted in a connection to others, but you don’t hesitate to talk harshly about others or to highlight things you think you do well, whether political work or carpentry. If someone called you harsh and arrogant, how would you respond?
AO: There’s a difference between self-confidence and arrogance, which is self-confidence that’s not well-founded. But, I have to tell you that I actually prefer being with arrogant people as long as the arrogance has some kind of foundation. That’s much better than being with people who have no reason in the world to be arrogant -- stupid people. As for being harsh, well, after 90 years and a lot of work, I figure I’ve earned the right to say whatever the fuck I want to.
RJ: Empathy also comes bundled with a little bit of anger in you, yes?
AO: Nothing wrong with anger. But as I kid I was so angry I was dangerous. In high school, I was dangerous. There was no high school in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. So I had to take a trolley, ride five miles, to Erasmus Hall. There were three Jewish kids in that school, and life was hell for us. Those fuckers -- teachers and students -- treated us like shit. I was lucky because I already was very physical, and the Catholic kids wouldn’t fuck with me too much. But I experienced extreme loneliness, and I did some things that were, under law, seriously punishable. I set fire to the school and did all kinds of shit, because I was very angry. Becoming an activist at 15, 16, gave me something to do with my anger. It was like a big valve that allowed me to be angry without blowing up.
So my first activity as a political activist -- with that mother and her children who were sitting on the sidewalk crying with their furniture sitting around them after being evicted -- was joyful. When my friends and I took that furniture back up into the apartment, it was wonderful, very healing. That was real solidarity. That’s another term that means something to me, solidarity. When I hear the term chanted it makes me sick -- solidarity forever and such. Solidarity became early in my life defined as compassion for others in action, whether it was through trade unions or helping neighbors. It’s beyond a political slogan. It’s almost an abomination hearing people singing about solidarity who don’t know shit about what it means. But at a very early age, I learned that solidarity is love in action. And if it’s not an action, I don’t give a shit about what you claim to love. Any kind of love without expression and action is bullshit.
RJ: There are different kinds of love, of course, including love for the people we know best in our lives -- our friends and family. What happens when that political love-in-action might conflict with obligations we might feel to those specific people we love in our lives?
AO: When I went to work in Holmes County, Mississippi, to build a community center, which was in 1964, I had three children. I moved with the understanding of my wife at the time; she agreed with what I was doing. At that point our baby girl was a year old, and the boys were 3 and 5. When I look back upon that, I can hardly believe that I did that the way I did it. I have mixed feelings about whether I would have gone had I thought about it the way I now think I should have, by thinking about the possible consequences.
RJ: For your kids?
AO: Sure. They asked, “Where is dad?” You cannot explain that to little kids. Daddy’s just not there. It did damage. What disturbs me is not so much that I did it -- that I left for so long for political work and that I did damage -- but that it didn’t enter my head to consider the consequences. I never thought of what it meant. That’s how fucking political I was. Some people use their family responsibilities as an excuse for why they don’t do anything, but there’s got to be some balance. Mine might be an extreme case, but I think that many activists -- the real dedicated activists -- suffer to some degree from similar things, from a kind of tunnel vision, an inability to calculate the consequences of your conduct, for people you care about and love and whose future will be somehow affected by your choices.
RJ: Looking back, do you think you did the wrong thing by going to Mississippi for so long? Or the other ways in which political activism took you away?
AO: I did the wrong thing by not thinking about it. And if I had thought about it, I don’t know whether I would have gone or not. I think activists must think about how relationships -- including marriage and children -- relate to activism. Raising good kids, for example, is a contribution to a better world.
Black and white
RJ: But you did go, to Holmes Country. How did that come about?
AO: When I left the Communist Party, I also left New York and went as far away as I could and landed in California. I was working as a carpenter, but I realized I had more to offer. I was articulate as well as being a very skilled worker. So, when people were organizing the Freedom Summer, I became involved. I went down to Jackson, Mississippi, and met with Bob Moses [of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, one of the key organizers of the movement]. I told him that I wanted to come down and make a hands-on contribution. One of the problems the movement had then is that they didn’t even have a place to meet in some of the rural areas. I told them I wanted to help create such a thing, that I would raise all the money, that I would provide the skilled labor, but I needed the community to help. And I wanted to know that if the center was really threatened, I was in a community where the people were willing to defend it. So he took me on a tour of three different places. I met Fannie Lou Hamer [another legendary organizer, known for, among other things, her work with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party], and she didn’t need me. She was a powerhouse and had more than I could offer her.
Then I came upon this community in Holmes County, where the movement was based on small, individual farmers who had gotten 40 acres and a mule in the early Roosevelt days. I put it boldly to them. I said, “I want to come down. I want to do this. I’ll need a lot of physical help. And I also want to know that if somebody comes along and wants to bomb the place, you guys will do what you can to stop them.” They agreed. It had become widely known that the black people of Holmes County were pacifists -- until you shot at them. And then they shot back. It was great. So, I went back to Moses and I told him what I wanted to do. And then I came back to California in early spring of ’64, and I quickly raised about $30,000 for materials.
I also told the community that the condition I attached to my work was that I would never come to a political meeting and judge them, and I would not permit the leaders from Jackson to come out and tell me what to do and not to do. The only people I would listen to would be the people I was working with. I never attended a single fucking political meeting for that project, and it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful, a very happy time in my life.
RJ: Did you ever feel part of that community, as a white guy in a black world?
AO: You know, to be a white person and love or to be loved by a black person, that’s very rare. There are very few whites who have had that, including whites in civil-rights circles. If you do experience it, it’s beautiful. Because that’s the closest you come to this world you want to build. When you break down that fucking wall, just momentarily even, it’s beautiful. And most white people will never know it, because if you have 20 black people in a room having a meeting, the minute you walk in their conversation changes.
But I did become part of that black community when I was in Mississippi. It wasn’t my community, but they let me in. The only time I was comfortable in that period was when I was around my black friends. When I went into white Mississippi, I was scared shitless. That was hostile territory. I felt safe when I came back to the place where I lived and worked. Everywhere else I faced danger at every little town on the way. They used to chase me like in the movies, with their pickup trucks with the shotgun, the rebel flag and they would try to run me off the road, laughing, drunk.
RJ: What did you do in response to those kinds of attacks or challenges? Did you ever fight back?
AO: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And there was one really crazy thing I did. I was in Jackson and tried to register at a hotel, and the clerk saw that I had a civil-rights button on my shirt. So he says, “I’m not going to register you. The goddamn law says that we have to take niggers in this hotel now, but that means black niggers. We don’t accept white niggers.” And he refused to register me. So, I went back to the movement headquarters and there were a couple of young lawyers there. I said that for reasons I couldn’t tell them, I needed them to register in that hotel and get me a room, and they did it.
Then I went back and I went up the backside of the hotel, because I wouldn’t have made it through the lobby. I got in the room and must’ve taken three or four baths, and I lay down on the clean sheets. Man, that was heaven, because I had been sleeping on a straw mattress. I spent the night, and then I went to the lumber yard and bought supplies -- a sack of concrete, a bag of nails and other things, with some cutting tools. And I proceeded to fuck up that room. I wrecked the television set, which was easy. Then I went to work on the electrical system and practically destroyed the electrical boxes, which were set in concrete walls. Then I packed the toilet full with nails and rapid-set concrete, which meant the only one way they could take care of it would be to jackhammer around the whole fucking thing under the floor to get to it. They had these cheap velvet paintings that I slashed. I fucked up the water supply, the electric, the TV, the radio, the furniture. I destroyed the joints of the bed. I slashed the carpet into bits. And the final thing I did was to peel back a piece of the carpet, take a shit and then, in my own shit, write on the wall, “white nigger strikes again.” It felt so good, even though I could have gotten lynched. Then I snuck down the back, got into my pickup and raced for home, and I didn’t feel safe ‘till I got there. When I got there and I told this story, to people who had never been inside a hotel, so they couldn’t fully appreciate what I had done, but they were rolling on the fucking floor. That was such a wonderful experience.
RJ: Not to interrupt that story, but do you ever get criticized for being a white guy and using the word “nigger”?
AO: Let me tell you a story about that. This is when I was a kid, before going to Spain. I went down to help organize miners in Pennsylvania in the formation of the CIO, in the early days when the union hated Communists but were willing to use us for free labor. I was Jewish, and that was a problem, too. But I managed to break in because one of the things that the miners, and steel workers in particular, did a lot in bars was hand wrestling, and until about five years ago, I had never suffered defeat in that. So, they accepted me, and said, “Hey, you’re not like a Jew-boy at all,” and that kind of shit.
One day, the mine operators locked out the workers, who were planning to strike. The miners were picketing the mine, and across the road was the National Guard. The officer in charge of the National Guard, a young pipsqueak of a guy, was trying to provoke the miners so he could have a reason to beat the shit out of them. And he singled out a black miner and baited him in particular, trying to provoke him into some sort of activity. Behind this black miner was a white guy marching, and he was like a cartoon of a redneck. I mean, he was as redneck as they come. So they baited this black guy, but they didn’t get a rise out of him. He maintained his calm and his dignity. At the height of this officer baiting the black guy, the redneck suddenly whips out a revolver, and he says to the military guy, “If you don’t stop fucking around with this nigger, I’ll blow your brains out.” Those exact words, and he was very convincing.
That evening we were at the union hall, having some shitty coffee and stale bread, and with me was a friend of mine from New York, Eddie, another Jewish kid but very small. He didn’t fit at all. So Eddie walks up to this giant of a redneck and he says, “That was a very brave thing you did today,” and the guy looks at him, “What do you mean, brave? I’m in the union, ain’t I?” He didn’t think what he had done was so special. Then Eddie said, “But you also did something terrible.” “What did I do that’s so terrible?” “You called a fellow union brother a nigger.” “Well, he ain’t a white man.” At which point, the black guy comes walking up, puts his hand on Eddie’s shoulder, and says, “Son, them were the sweetest words I ever heard.”
To me that was a very profound story. I came home and told it to a group of left-liberal friends. You know what they got hung up on? That I said the word “nigger.” I told them, “Don’t you get what I’m trying to tell you? Do you want me to translate the fucking thing for you? It’s a beautiful example of what we want people to understand.” But to them, I committed a crime because I used the word nigger. Well, when I worked in Mississippi, to call a white man a nigger was a compliment because most white people couldn’t be niggers if they wanted to be.
RJ: Back to the hotel story. Why did you do it?
AO: To deal with my rage. I was furious. I couldn’t call a meeting with the hotel manager or stage a demonstration -- none of the usual activities were possible. So, I did it out of rage, to do damage to my enemy. It was a form of warfare. It was a guerilla attack. The fact is, to this day, when I think of it, that was great. I didn’t hurt any people, but I was fucking up their property. I caused what today would have been a $40,000 repair job. I have to admit that when I was writing “white nigger strikes again” I was bubbling with joy, mixed with the fear. I had a bunch of those experiences where I only felt safe when I was back in that community, because the whites couldn’t get me there.
RJ: Were you ever afraid for your life?
AO: There was one time when someone overheard a plantation owner and a deputy sheriff making arrangements to get rid of me. I mean, bump me off. The reaction of the elders of that community was, “Abe, you’ve got to get out of here. We don’t want you killed. We appreciate what you’re doing, but not at the cost of getting yourself killed.” And I said, “Do you realize what’ll happen if I do that? They’re going to come here and bust your asses. You’ll be in a worse position in many ways.” So they put a bodyguard on me -- this is hard to conceive of, a black body guard for a white guy in Mississippi. He was tough; it would have taken the sheriff and 14 deputies to stop him. He was armed, and so was I. I had a carpenter’s toolbox, and in it I had a shotgun, and they gave me a .38 and a holster, and we publicized it.
I also had Hartman Turnbow on my side. I was staying with him, and we became very close to each other. He was a legend -- the first black guy to attempt to register to vote in Mississippi. His house was full of bullet holes because he got attacked regularly. And he used to look at the holes in the wall and say, “I live in the most air-conditioned house in Mississippi.” When he heard about the plot to kill me, he said, “Abe, I’m going to go see the sheriff, and you’re coming with me.” We walked into the courthouse, and the sheriff addresses him by his first name, which was typical. Hartman doesn’t respond. He stands there. And the sheriff says, “I just talked to you. Did you hear me? Why don’t you answer me?” Hartman says, “I won’t answer you until you call me by my name,” meaning his last name. The sheriff finally calls him by his last name, and Hartman says, “Sheriff, I’m here to register a complaint. I heard that one of your assistants and others are planning to kill my friend. No, he’s more than my friend, he’s my brother. Anybody that’s going to deal with my brother is going to deal with Turnbow. And you know sheriff, it ain’t no secret that I don’t allow such things to happen. Now you better straighten this thing out ‘cause somebody going to get hurt. There’s going to be one dead man, and it could very well be” -- and then he names the deputy sheriff. Then Hartman imperiously turns his back on him, grabs me by the arm and starts walking out. I’m waiting for them to cut us in half. And Hartman says, “Don’t worry, Abe, they’re chicken shit. You notice, they come around at night and shoot us up. They ain’t shot in the daytime in a long time. Not in this neighborhood, not in this community.” He was right. But I was scared shitless. Later I told him that he had risked our lives. Hartman said, “Yeah, I done risked our lives, but I’d risk more if I didn’t do that.” I said, “What would you have risked?” He said, “I’m Turnbow, and I’m never going to let them white trash forget it.” And that’s who he was.
God, we had an incredible relationship. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before or since. I would risk my life for him. I really loved him. He was crude. He was rough. He was mildly undemocratic. There was only one chairman in all the meetings, and when he called for a vote there were very few people who didn’t vote with him. He was dangerously authentic.
RJ: Dangerously authentic?
AO: Well, he was acting on feelings and thoughts that were very important to him to a point where he actually risked losing his life and the lives of others. He wouldn’t back down. There was no negotiating when it got to that. If you hit him in that area, his dignity, there was no compromise. There was no give or take. You either backed off or you assaulted him. And assaulting him was truly dangerous.
Hartman was a phenomenon, but his end was a very sad one, which says a lot about movements. He was a pioneering figure when they needed an ice-breaker. But when they won the initial victories and had to develop a different political strategy, he was a total loss, and little by little he fell out of center position, and finally was almost disregarded. Then he got very sick, diabetes, lost a leg. I went to visit him, and he died not long after. They gave him a beautiful funeral to which hundreds and hundreds of people came. But he had gone from being a spearhead of a movement to being rejected. When you read books, his name comes up occasionally because when he attempted to register to vote, they firebombed his house that night. He’s a part of that history in Mississippi.
RJ: Is that inevitable? The people who have the qualities lives. That’s what most important right now, I think. It’s about touching something that already was there in them. They were ripe, so to speak. Very few people in an audience are ripe like that; nobody can convince an entire audience to dedicate their lives to activism. I seek out the ones who are ready, and for the last 30 or 40 years, that’s my principal work. The reason I speak before large audiences is to find those people.
RJ: So the goal is not to manipulate the many but touch the five or six?
AO: Yes, yes. And I always find them. It’s becoming more difficult, but I’ve maintained connections over the years with a few hundred young people whose lives I have affected, not by planting new ideas but by touching their sensibility in a way nobody had touched. That’s what teaching is about. Most teachers haven’t got the tiniest fucking idea that they have the opportunity to be very important social act p>RJ: A lot of political organizers will emphasize the great rewards of struggle, about how it brings change, which it can. But there’s something about that kind of speech that always leaves me a little hollow. You are talking about the other side of it, the way in which the struggle never really takes you all the way home. I’ve given talks like that, about how great collective struggle is, and how it historically has brought progressive social change. That’s all true, but there’s the other side of it, which I find people rarely want to talk about, that sense of dreams that can’t be realized that you are speaking about.
AO: It’s one of the horrible things about being human. We are fucked by unanswerable questions. Well, you have to make an estimate the best you can of what is the capacity of the people you’re talking to. Some of the questions you are asking, other people don’t ask me. There are only two or three who will talk to me like you have. I’m pretty sure that quite a few think about some of these things but for various reasons engage in some self-censorship, because it might be costly, it might increase your loneliness.
Reactions to 9/11: Crying and organizing
RJ: I want to go back to the tension I talked about earlier, in myself. The question of having to stay open to the humanity of other people and, at the same time, developing a somewhat ruthless ability to act. You told me before that you didn’t start doing political work right after the attacks of 9/11.
AO: That’s right. For two or three weeks, all kinds of people kept calling me, asking me to come down to the federal building, to protest, to speak. But I couldn’t do it. I sat in this chair for two and a half weeks and cried. I felt so bad, not just for what happened, but because I could look down the road, and I knew roughly what was coming. I knew that a tidal wave of human suffering was coming down the road, and I felt it. The feeling is terrible, and the knowledge of it is almost a form of suffering in itself. But after a while that subsides, and you feel driven to get back to work, to have some effect on what’s going on.
RJ: That’s interesting, because my reaction was totally opposite. I went to work immediately. I wrote an antiwar piece the night of 9/11, and the next day we called an organizing meeting.
AO: I cannot understand that.
RJ: Well, for whatever reason, I did it, working with a few others. I felt a lot of emotion, and like you it wasn’t just that 3,000 people died. Three thousand people die every god-damned day somewhere because of fucked-up priorities and politics. I knew where this was all heading, toward a new level of war, and that got to me at various times. I was often very shaken by what I knew. One night I was in my office, and a small group of us were working on strategy, organizing, writing articles. I don’t remember what specifically we were doing, but it was on deadline and it mattered to us. But I was at the computer, and I started shaking, literally, and crying. I went into an emotional meltdown. And one of my friends said, “What’s going on?” And I said something like, “I don’t know, I just feel, I can’t even tell you how I feel, I feel like some kind of raw pain that I can’t stand.” And she said, “We’ve got work to do. Are you going to do the work or not?” And in that moment, I think she was right. She could see that I needed to control that crazy emotion or I would be useless. This was not long after 9/11 and there weren’t very many people publicly challenging the Bush administration, and we needed everybody to work who could. Even though we didn’t stop the war in Afghanistan, I think what we did was worth doing. And what she was telling me was, “Okay, you feel bad. I feel bad, too. We all know this is awful. But there is a task, and that task matters. Are you going to do it?” What would you have told me?
AO: That it’s okay to stop and cry. And that the more of that you do, the better prepared you will be for other things you have to do. Immediate responses are not always significant, not in that situation. There was some significance to what you did, of course. So, you should have done it. That’s all you can do.
What happened here, in Seattle, was that people had an enormous need to go down to the federal building and talk to each other, which is what the rallies were. People said, “Abe, we want you to come down. You’re so good at this.” And I said, “What is wrong with stopping and crying? Why is that wrong?”
RJ: Yes, but the two actions -- crying and organizing -- are not mutually exclusive.
AO: Sure. But if anyone thinks less of me for what I did, well, fuck them.
Movement directions
RJ: Given what has happened since 9/11 and the state of the movement, in the context of the bigger structural problems of capitalism and liberal democracy, let me come back to the question of what shape the movement can, or should, take in the future. Do you think it should take the form of an electoral party? Should there be a move for a new third party? Should it take the form of more traditional grassroots groups?
AO: I know what I want, and I can tell other people what I think they can do. If you’re a trade unionist, we’ll talk about what you can do. If you’re a member of a church, we’ll talk about what you can do. At this point, in whatever area of life we are located, the question is simple: What can we do to enrich, to strengthen the streams that are flowing in the right direction. I’m not worried about a new organization or party right now. I don’t have any political goals, in that sense, and I’m never going to. I don’t want to. I teach young people not to have them. I think we need to stay on the path of righteousness and address these problems the best we can.
Ultimately, I know what I’d like to see. I’d like to see the end of this electoral system. I think no matter what parties we create, ultimately we’ll come back to the same shit. The most productive things that ever happen in this country, in terms of moving humanity forward, are totally non-electoral -- a trade-union movement, a civil-rights movement. Yes, they had an impact on, and were affected by, the electoral process. But essentially, they worked because large numbers of people wanted something and were willing to put their asses on the line. Workers seized factories -- that’s revolutionary activity. It wasn’t planned by professional revolutionaries. It wasn’t done by the Communist Party. Ordinary black people did what they did in the civil-rights movement. And, if you look at history, that’s constantly the way it happens. Progress, when it took place in history, took place because people committed themselves passionately and in large numbers to a theme. Whether building a union, whether it was the right to vote, even though in the long run didn’t mean all that much. The right to vote, period, is not such a great achievement. The main thing is: What can you do with a fucking vote? We never really came to terms with that. We did achieve big victories, including the right to vote, and women’s right to vote. But I don’t know what the hell the political structure should be. What I do know is that unless we get on the path of big mass movements, with limited objectives, clear-cut objectives, we’re not going to go any place. I know that. I strongly believe that.
RJ: Is the current antiwar movement -- that kind of resistance to the way the U.S. operates in the world -- the place where that kind of traction is most likely?
AO: There is a growing disillusionment with the way this country is conducting its military operations. There’s the beginning of a disaster for the middle class economically. If you look up the road it is a disaster, because the children of the middle class are going to inherit a big pile of shit, an incredible mortgage on their lives that they’re going to have to pay off. The existing middle class is comfortable, but most of the kids coming out of middle class, in material terms, are going to live lesser lives than their parents. This’ll be the first time in American history. Almost every time we move forward, the generation that followed achieved higher levels of material life. That’s over -- there’s no question in my mind. And the shrinking is going to be felt, painfully felt, by the children of the middle class.
RJ: Do things have to get worse before they can get better?
AO: Putting it in that form bothers me, because it makes it sounds as if we should work for things to get worse. I think the resistance to things as they’re getting worse makes progress possible. Just getting worse can be a disaster. You need a lot of life to resist that spiral down. It doesn’t automatically follow that when people begin to suffer they will become politically active. As a matter of fact, most human beings turn to anguish, despair, they turn to drinking, they turn to therapy -- to everything but social activism. It’s our job to tell them there’s another way to fly. Really, that’s what it comes down to.
RJ: You’ve said over and over that one of the ways to reach people is by touching their humanity, engaging their empathy, which is an attempt to get people to act on the basis of the interest of someone else. You say there’s a reason to do that, which is to give yourself a sense of meaning in life, but that the motive force there is a connection with the other. On the other hand, you’re saying people are going to get active once their own material circumstances get worse. Those are two different motivations. So, which one …
AO: It’s not an either/or. You have to present both to people. They have to feel the importance of both.
Dancing without guarantees
RJ: Let’s finish with one issue in which there eventually won’t be some people on top and some on the bottom, but we’ll all lose -- the ecological crisis. On that one, as the saying goes, nature bats last. We’ve talked mostly about politics, but increasingly I think more about -- and am scared about -- the ecological crisis. Do you?
AO: All the time. The planet is being destroyed, and the indications are that we’re moving toward making the planet uninhabitable. I think the damage probably is so great at this point that there’s no real path back. The damage to the atmosphere, to nature in general, may be too much. As a species we’re not here forever, but we seem to be shortening what time we might have. Sometimes I have the overarching feeling that the damage we’ve done is not totally reversible.
RJ: So, you’re not a scientist, you’re not an ecologist. You’re talking about a feeling.
AO: Not a scientist, but I know facts and figures, and they’re frightening. But they don’t seem to frighten a lot of people.
RJ: You ever said that in public? Or do you censor yourself?
AO: No, I haven’t talked about that much in public because I can’t say that without committing myself to militant activity of an environmental character. I don’t know about the reason I don’t feel like doing that. I truly don’t understand why.
RJ: Maybe because you look for projects where there is an achievable goal, and maybe that one isn’t achievable. So, why do it?
AO: Well, you know something, I don’t think it’s achievable. Not only because of the industrial nations and their ambitions, which are fucking up things. It’s not just imperialism destroying the world. Human beings are destroying the world -- some out of necessity, others out of greed. But it’s going on. We’re poisoning the oceans. We’re poisoning the air. There’s no question about it.
RJ: Let me tell you a story, because it goes to political organizing again. I was talking to an activist who also is an environmental scientist by training. I said, “Well, you know, I’m not trained in the science of this, but I think a lot about whether the processes we’ve set in motion can be reversed.” She said, “Well, I am a scientist, and the data and all the facts are much worse than you probably understand. It’s worse than you can imagine.” She meant that if you look across the board, at global warming and groundwater pollution and resource depletion and on and on, as you say, the damage is incredible and possibly irreversible. And so I said, “Well, how do you deal with that?” She said, “I just don’t think about it.”
AO: I don’t agree with that at all.
RJ: Okay, but her point was it was too overwhelming. If she thought about it too much, it would undermine her ability to do activist work. You’re talking about a difference between really facing the facts …
AO: … probable facts. Nobody can know for sure.
RJ: That’s fine. But when I talk about this with people on the left they often say, “Don’t even bring that stuff up. It just paralyzes people.” But that’s kind of an arrogant, saying people can’t handle the truth. Do you think there are there certain truths that most people can’t handle? From an organizing point of view, that’s an important question. Are there times you shouldn’t tell people what you really know and really think?
AO: I think it’s probably true that the damage is irreversible and that, after a couple of decades, recognizing that will be unavoidable. But I can’t stop with that statement. Look, I’ll probably die in the next few years, which I know. My response to that is, I want to do everything I can to make the quality of my life, what remains of it, as good as I can make. And there are sons of bitches in my way, on the personal and political levels, who I will take on. Suppose I had definitive proof that this world we live in, for practical human purposes, would end in the next 40, 50 years. What would I tell my children, or my people I’m talking to intimately, the ones I’m trying to convince to live a certain way? Same thing, that there are things we should want to accomplish, to make the world we have left a little better for everyone. And I would say, this music is not going to go on for too long, so let’s dance and love it. Let’s dance. Let’s do the things that matter, even without guarantees. And if anybody gets in the way, let’s kick their fucking ass.