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In times of crisis you either deepen democracy, or you go to the other extreme and become totalitarian.
And we have seen the U.S. government fail to meet our urgent domestic needs for meaningful work, for green energy, or for infrastructure because it is squandering trillions of dollars on unwinnable wars in the Middle East and on hundreds of military bases all over the world.
We must begin reorganizing our local, state, and federal budgets so that we spend public monies not for military domination and to support the Mubaraks of the world but for constructive human and domestic needs.
With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.
We need to encourage the creation of work that not only produces goods and services but also develops our skills, protects our environment, and lifts our spirits.
We are making a life and not just a living, by feeding ourselves, educating our children, and taking more responsibility for each other and our communities.
Instead of relying on an industrialized food system that keeps us ignorant and powerless about what we take into our bodies, we will be producing most of our food locally, not only growing vegetables on neighboring lots, rooftops, and balconies but also raising chickens in backyard coops and fish in local and home aquariums. This is not just a question of physical health but also one of spiritual values.
By making the tackling and solving of community problems a normal and natural part of the school curriculum from K-12, our schools will empower children and young people, showing our respect for them as fellow citizens.
As terrible as the walls crumbling around us look and feel, we must avoid falling into total dismay.
“Just coming out of your mother’s womb does not make you a human being.”
Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And
The only certainty with capitalism is that it never stands still. It mandates that all who partake in the system engage in a process of constant and unending accumulation lest they be bulldozed in the path of creative destruction.
Thus, all who have defined ourselves as the “oppressed” will be increasingly empowered to break free of what Jimmy Boggs called the underling mentality of a minority and to become what Grace calls “active citizens, builders of a new America that all of us will be proud to call our own.”
She is thus less than content with the liberal/progressive demands for the federal government to provide a bigger stimulus, boost consumer spending, expand health insurance, and increase the competitiveness of U.S. industry. In her eyes they are, at best, Band-Aid reforms and, at worst, distortions of the task at hand.
These perilous times call for us to be both imaginative and generative. Time is precious. History awaits our response.
Where will we get the imagination, the courage, and the determination to reconceptualize the meaning and purpose of Work in a society that is becoming increasingly jobless?
What is going to motivate us to start caring for our biosphere instead of using our mastery of technology to increase the volume and speed at which we are making our planet uninhabitable for other species and eventually for ourselves?
And, especially since 9/11, how are we to achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that increasingly resents our economic, military, and cultural domination? Can we accept their anger as a challenge rather than a threat?
the survival of life on Earth depend on our willingness to transform ourselves into active planetary and global citizens who, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.”2
Growing inequality in the United States, which is now the most stratified among industrialized nations, has made a mockery of our founding ideals.
Yet rather than wrestle with such grim realities, too many Americans have become self-centered and overly materialistic, more concerned with our possessions and individual careers than with the state of our neighborhoods, cities, country, and planet, closing our eyes and hearts to the many forms of violence that have been exploding in our inner cities and in powder kegs all over the rest of the world. Because the problems seem so insurmountable and because just struggling for our own survival consumes so much of our time and energy, we view ourselves as victims rather than embrace the power
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For our own survival we must assume individual and collective responsibility for creating a new nation—one that is loved rather than feared and one that does not have to bribe and bully other nations to win support.
Each of us needs to stop being a passive observer of the suffering that we know is going on in the world and start identifying with the sufferers.
The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world.
too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens.
You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it.
Art can help us to envision the new cultural images we need to grow our souls.
The America that is best known and most resented around the world pursues unlimited economic growth, technological revolutions, and consumption, with little or no regard for their destructive impact on communities, on the environment, and on the billions of people who live in what used to be called the “Third World.”
That is why “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Radical social change had to be viewed as a two-sided transformational process, of ourselves and of our institutions, a process requiring protracted struggle and not just a D-day replacement of one set of rulers with another.
Practicing methods of nonviolence that transformed themselves and increased the good rather than the evil in the world and always bearing in mind that their goal was not only desegregating the buses but creating the beloved community, they inspired the human identity and ecological movements that over the past forty years have been creating a new civil society in the United States.
But they are joined at the heart by their commitment to achieving social justice, establishing new forms of more democratic governance, and creating new ways of living at the local level that will reconnect us with the Earth and with one another. Above all, they are linked by their indomitable faith in our ability to create the world anew.
Normally it would take decades for a people to transform themselves from the hyperindividualist, hypermaterialist, damaged human beings that Americans in all walks of life are today to the loving, caring people we need in the deepening crises. But these are not normal times. If we don’t speed up this transformation, the likelihood is that, armed with AK-47s, we will soon be at each other’s throats. That is why linking Love and Revolution is an idea whose time has come. We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We
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We are in the midst of a process that is nothing short of reinventing revolution. For much of the twentieth century the theory and practice of revolution have been dominated by overarching ideologies, purist paradigms, and absolutist views of a static Paradise; arguments over which class, race, or gender was the main revolutionary social force; and binary oppositions between Left and Right. Big victories have been prioritized over small collaborative actions that build community and neighborhoods: the end has been valued over the means. We rarely stopped to wonder how much this view of
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we are beginning to understand that the world is always being made and never finished;
This is the kind of transformational organizing we need in this period. Instead of putting our organizational energies into begging Ford and General Motors to stay in Detroit—or begging the government to keep them afloat—so that they can continue to exploit us, we need to go beyond traditional capitalism. Creating new forms of community-based institutions (e.g., co-ops, small businesses, and community development corporations) will give us ownership and control over the way we make our living, while helping us to ensure that the well-being of the community and the environment is part of the
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Instead of buying all our food from the store, we need to be planting community and school gardens and creating farmers’ markets that will not only provide us with healthier food but also enable us to raise our children in a nurturing relationship with the Earth.
we need to recognize that the reason why so many young people drop out from inner-city schools is because they are voting with their feet against an educational system that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like products of a factory because it was created for the age of industrialization.
This kind of organizing takes a lot of patience because changing people and people changing themselves requires time. Because it usually involves only small groups of people, it lacks the drama and visibility of angry masses making demands on the power structure. So it doesn’t seem practical to those who think of change only in terms of quick fixes, huge masses, and charismatic leaders.
realities, because revolutions are made not to prove the correctness of ideas but to begin anew.
In this scenario everyone has a contribution to make, each according to our abilities, our energies, our experiences, our skills and where we are in our own lives. When I was much younger, I used to recite a poem that goes: “So much to do, so many to woo, and, oh, we are so very few.” As I go around the country these days, making new friends and talking to people about the challenges of the new millennium, I still recognize that we have much to do and many to woo, but I no longer feel that we are so very few.
Meanwhile, leftists, and many people who are not leftists, have tended to hold onto the concept of revolution created in the early twentieth century that involves the seizure of state power by a party representing the working class or “the oppressed masses.” Those leftists who pride themselves on being “revolutionary” have usually sought to distinguish themselves from liberals and social democrats who are “reformists” and lack the will or chutzpah necessary to seize state power
That is why those of us who are serious about transforming our society—socially, culturally, and politically—need to clarify what we mean by “revolution.” We especially need to explain how and why the ideas of most leftists about revolution have become narrow, static, and even counterrevolutionary.
By contrast, many leftists cling to a nineteenth-century ideology that forecasts the future. Then they view everything that happens as a sort of validation of what they think. That was very much the way most of us in the radical movements thought for much of the twentieth century.
was acutely aware of the power of ideas to be both liberating and limiting.
Challenging the view held by most radicals that they were building the vanguard party needed to lead the masses to play some historically prescribed role, they celebrated and encouraged the self-activity and self-organization of workers and marginalized people, seeing them as the force to bring about real social change.
The important thing for us was to see the oppressed not mainly as victims or objects but as creative subjects.
When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers and to relate to other human beings.
These two notions—that reality is constantly changing and that you must constantly be aware of the new and more challenging contradictions that drive change—lie at the core of dialectical thinking.
At a time when so many radicals in the United States were saying and thinking “I hate this lousy country” and looking all over the world for models of revolution—China, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, even tiny countries such as Albania that were nothing like the United States—Jimmy and I also set out to understand in a deeper manner what was exceptional about U.S. history and therefore what would distinguish the next American Revolution from revolutions in other times and other countries.
