quote (Henwood, Featherstone & Parenti):

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Philanthropy's role in structuring activism is rarely discussed, because almost everyone wants a grant (including us). But it should be. Foundations like focused entities that undertake specific politely meliorative schemes. They don't want anyone to look too closely at the system that's given them buckets of money that less fortunate people are forced to pay for.

Activistism is contaminated by the cultural forms and political content of the non-profit sector. Because nonprofits are essentially businesses that sell press coverage of themselves to foundation program officers, they operate according to the anti-intellectual logic of hyper-pragmatism and the fiscal year short-termism generated by financial competition with their peer organizations. When nonprofit business leads, the whole left begins to take on the same obsessive focus with "deliverables" and "take aways" and "staying on message." For many political nonprofits, actions - regardless of their value or real impact - are the product, which in turn promise access to more grants.

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quote (Louis Proyect):

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This objection apparently did not persuade Christian Parenti from turning down an offer as a fellow at George Soros's Open Society.

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quote (Louis Proyect):

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It is interesting that the most serious challenges to neoliberalism have come from governments of the left in Latin America that are held in such disdain by anarchists and autonomists. Ultimately the only way that the IMF can be forced to retreat is when it is confronted by a state with armed bodies to back it up rather than by symbolically tearing down a chain-link fence.

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quote (Louis Proyect):

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Finally, there is not simply a need to study Karl Marx, who the authors note is found on the bookshelves of European activists. There is also a need to *apply* his theories in a creative manner. This means engagement with the body of Marxist literature that lives through the ages, including those works written by V. Lenin, the arch-demon of the "acceptable" left. Lenin's writings were consumed with the question of what to do *next*. Unless the radical movement in the USA begins to think in such terms, the task of ridding the world of capitalism will remain a fantasy at best.

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quote (Shawn Ewald):

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I am writing this as someone who wants to win and who has grown unsentimental toward aspects of the activist world that, I think, prevent us from winning.

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Has it occurred to anyone that we (meaning the full broad spectrum of the Left) might be doing something wrong? I'm sure it has occurred to some, but from what I've seen, they're keeping mum about it.

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Now, having said that, it also must be said, in spite of all these forces arrayed against us and our own limitations, we collectively have a tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot before we ever enter the battle. What's worse, nearly every faction of the Left, with a few welcome exceptions here and there, are practically allergic to self-analysis and self-criticism of any depth. Still, there comes a point where, after witnessing failure after failure, any rational person would be forced to look inward and around themselves to determine whether what they were doing, or not doing, might play a part in why everything that we all have been doing just hasn't worked. I also think that people on the Left should ask themselves how we've arrived at this state of affairs after decades of gains through the first two thirds of the twentieth century.

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I'm not calling for some kind of viper pit of recrimination, but for a serious pull-no-punches review of what we're doing, what we think, how we think, how we communicate with people outside of our activist milieu, and if any of this is really effective.

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Let's start with protesting and direct action, the bread and butter of grassroots activism, and the default response to pretty much any issue that the Left wants to address. Frankly, I have come to question the value of protest as an effective means of social change. More to the point, I think protest and even what is often mistakenly called "direct action", as it is practiced on the Left, is often worse than useless, except when it is focused on a discrete, single-issue campaign. Generally I think protest as the sole expression of dissent is not nearly enough.

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However, if all you do is protest, if protesting constitutes the bulk of your activist work, what your protest shows is that your support is only skin deep. The fact that a group can get thousands out into the street really means very little at the end of the day if the people that show up are not involved in day to day struggle.

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In a sense, the anti-globalization movement, the Anarchist movement, and a lot of other Left movements, share much in common with dead heads or renaissance fair geeks—they are self-organized mobile communities based on common interests. There can be a lot of solidarity within a community like that, but such communities are also extremely insular and out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, often willfully so.

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What's important about local activism is not that you're somehow down with the common folk, but that you view yourself as one of them. It's not about “helping” people like some missionary, but acting like a stakeholder who's going to be around for awhile and helping each other. Does any of this sound like something that the glory-hounds and rockstars, the adrenalin junkies and handcuff fetishists, the scenesters and gadflys in our movements could ever hope to be serious about?

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When we talk about an activist who is not a labor organizer or a community organizer, we are talking about someone who not only has little experience dealing with ordinary people, but probably actively avoids dealing with ordinary people. In fact, such a person has probably spent a good deal of their lives actively running away from their ordinary families and their ordinary hometowns. People don't move to college towns and big cities to live amongst the common folk, they move there to live amongst other people like themselves...

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But seriously, the fact that there are places where people can be a part of a community that holds different values than the dominant culture is mostly a good thing, but these places also can (and do) serve as enclaves where people can escape the world and immerse themselves in their little scene. The fact that these lefty enclaves exist can be credited to the 'cultural revolution' of the 1960's and, to a much lesser extent, the DIY punk movement of the 70's and 80's. The Left has managed to carve out these enclaves for themselves but, instead of using these places as footholds for the spread of different values, they have served instead as protective cocoons, as ghettos.

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The trouble is that the Left wants to change America but they don't want to deal with all those icky, backward, reactionary people that make up the majority of the US population. Who among you wants to live in Harrisburg, PA when you can live in Ithaca, NY? Or Bakersfield, CA vs. Berkeley? Or Binghamton, NY vs. Brooklyn? I don't blame anyone who chooses to live in a place where they feel comfortable, I would choose the same way, but there is such a gulf between what was once called the counter-culture and the rest of the country that we may as well live on different planets. This isn't necessarily a strike against people who live in leftist enclaves, though these enclaves do tend to show the true face of the contemporary Left—educated, generally affluent, and mostly white. These places have all kinds of problems and contradictions, but the biggest problem they have regarding the stagnation of the Left is a general sense of contentment and self-satisfaction. After living in an enclave like this for awhile, it becomes easier to just stay within its boundaries and deal only with each other—people who generally share our values and beliefs. We all end up living in our own little world, our own little sub-culture, and dealing with people who do not believe what we believe becomes more and more problematic, it becomes easier to avoid these skirmishes with reality and just hide in the safe cocoon of the leftist ghetto.

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We carry around our outrage and our crazy ideas about how everything would be better if we all lived in a big happy commune or a socialist workers paradise and yet we have no clue how to communicate with the immigrant guy who bags our groceries at Whole Foods. To most leftists, the immigrant guy is not a person, he is a member of the oppressed, he is a recruitment opportunity, he is the object of their guilt, he is any number of things but he can never simply be a human being. Maybe he beats his wife? Maybe he hates black people? Maybe he's a raving religious fanatic? It's better to not get too close because it may spoil the illusion of a tidy black and white world that we have created.

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Does anyone ever think about why it is that we have to go undercover as working class people to understand how working people live? Do we wonder why self-appointed representatives of the proletariat are able to pontificate to the Left about what we should be doing? Could there be a more obvious indication that we don't know what the fuck we're talking about when it comes to understanding what our fellow Americans think? The fact is, most of us are so comfortable in our sub-cultures and our scenes and our politically progressive, eco-friendly neighborhoods that we don't even know how to interact with someone who has no experience with the way of life we've adopted. When you reject the system, you inevitably disconnect yourself from the people who are still stuck in that system and who may not have the luxury of rejecting it. This is a difficult fact to face. What's good about the “counter-culture” is that it has the potential to point a way towards better ways of living; unfortunately, it has mostly become a self-serving, insular ghetto where we can willfully shut out the world. If our lefty hubs could be a place where ideas are born and grow instead of stagnate and atrophy, that could be the start of something useful.

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I think most people tend to care about things they actually need or use. Most people are absorbed with their own lives and if something doesn't affect them directly, they don't care. I think if we are going to expand the left and actually be effective again, we are going to have to work on projects that are useful to people and projects that people will want to be involved in.

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We have all unconsciously resigned ourselves to having low expectations. We all have accepted the constraints of simple rebellion, of mere dissent, of harmless objection. The left as a whole is gripped by a culture of impotence. We talk, we complain, we rave, we rage, we snipe, but few of us build anything, we have grown so used to complaining that we don't know how to do anything else.

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We have to focus on what we can do that actually helps right now. Claiming everything will be better and we'll all be happy after the revolution does not help anyone right now. Starting a community radio station, founding a clinic, starting after school programs, founding community centers, establishing credit unions, starting a co-op, starting a community supported agriculture program, starting an employee-owned enterprise, unionizing your workplace, even joining your local volunteer fire department, could help a lot sooner than any revolution that may or may not be down the road. Imagine if, in every city, activists chose one long term project to develop—maybe one of the examples listed above, or maybe something else—and that project became their primary activity for however many years it took until the project reached completion. Imagine also that these activists helped and encouraged other people in the community to start similar projects that involved anyone who wanted to participate and resulted in institutions that served the community. Imagine how even working on one major project could have a more positive impact on real people's lives than half a lifetime of holding signs and chanting. We have to stop waiting for things to get worse and start working to make things better. If we want to change this society, we have to start building the infrastructure that will take the place of the society we now live in.

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We have to use all the tools at our disposal in order to make change happen: Direct action, civil disobedience, protests, lawsuits, lobbying, sabotage, ad campaigns, boycotts, or our own labor—all of these tools should be at the disposal of activists of any political persuasion...We need to be unsentimental about particular tactics and focus on what will actually get the job done in a particular situation.

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The bottom line is we don't have time to be failures anymore. The earth is rapidly being made unlivable for most of humanity. Our country is run by bloodthirsty maniacs and there is no other force in the world to keep our empire building rulers in check. We owe it to ourselves and to the rest of humanity to bring down this imperial system. Dealing a death blow to this system is the best single thing we can do for all the victims of the American empire in this country and around the world. There has to be a better way to do it than the way we have been going about it.

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