(10) Organizing struggles

RJ: This is getting at things that I really struggle with these days. I'm trying to figure out ways to be more effective politically.

AO: That's okay. Don't worry. At your age, I was even more backward.

RJ: Thanks a lot. That makes me feel a lot better. But what I wanted to talk about was the ways I have failed as an organizer. I get frustrated with myself, and I don't like it. Here's an example. One of things I've failed at is organizing on my campus. When I got tenure, in about 1998, I made a choice to give up on scholarly publishing. I haven't published traditional academic research since, because I spend all my extra time doing political work and writing for the general public, not for academics.

AO: I'm very glad to hear that.

RJ: Well, it's not so noble; it's what keeps me sane. But because I made that choice, it opened up a lot of time and energy for other things, such as trying to organize faculty on my campus for left politics, and there are left faculty on my campus. But I got frustrated with other faculty who identified as left but were much more hesitant to be publicly political, for whatever reason. I should have cultivated people, gone slowly, tried to create a climate for politicizing them. Instead, I was so full of piss and vinegar and, probably, so angry that I wasn't good at creating conditions so that others who needed to make smaller steps could make those steps. In fact, I think eventually what happened is that my participation in any particular project became a disincentive for some of my colleagues. Now, if there's something going on around campus, I'm almost afraid to attach my name to it because I'm afraid people will back away. So I failed. If people don't act the way I want them to, I don't just get to say, "Well, fuck them. That's their problem." I failed, as an organizer.

AO: You're talking like Abe Osheroff, quite a few years ago.

RJ: In what sense?

AO: Same shit. I was very bad at that myself, until recently, to the point that, if people didn't respond the way I thought they should, I almost felt a certain contempt. There are professors on this campus [University of Washington] who I still feel contempt for. And it's a problem, because they are people in process, struggling between a narrow concept of selfishness and a social conscience, which they also can't get rid of. Sometimes they resolve it by giving me $100 for a project. By the way, that's always been my principal source of money for projects -- guilty liberals.

But, you know, there's no crime for a soldier to have a furlough, to get away from the battlefield for a little while and look back on it. It took me a long time to accept that, but that's important. Okay, so you're driven, and a lot of that is good. But it is hard to get away and take a break if you're driven, and you would probably experience quite a bit of guilt if you weren't doing what you're doing. And I remember when I did too, but I don't feel guilty about shit these days. If I decide not to do shit for the next year or so, then fine.

RJ: How do you feel about your life's work?

AO: I really don't know how to summarize it. All I know is that deep down I believe it's the right path, not just for me, but the right path. And, at the same time, there's nothing that guarantees the survival of the fucking universe. That's the quandary we're stuck with. But let me throw a question, a more fundamental question, back at you. What brings you here to see me? You fly all the way from Texas to talk to me. Why?

RJ: There are probably two levels of answers to that. The easy answer is that in my life I'm partly an organizer, and I am struggling to think through ways to organize more effectively. And since you've organized people over decades, I want to learn something from you. One of the things that frustrated me when I got politically active was how little institutional memory there was. There was no place for me to go and ask someone with experience and wisdom how to do radical political work. I had a few friends, but no place to go beyond that. There are all sorts of organizers around, of course, but I couldn't find all that many people who had that experience and also shared my politics. So, part of my motivation in coming here was to get information that will help me, and by extension help other people struggling with the same questions. That's the easy answer.

AO: Did you get some?

RJ: Sure, I got some information that's helpful. But that's only part of it. The other thing that brought me here is my internal struggle. I don't find many people in the world I can talk to about that, and it does feel lonely.

AO: I know what you're talking about.

RJ: One thing about you that's interesting to me is that to be politically effective in a left context, you have to be motivated by a sense of empathy. We've been talking about that. But sometimes it's so overpowering, the pain of the world. I don't want to sound self-indulgent, but sometimes I wish I didn't feel these things. It's too painful. Day in and day out, it wears me down.

AO: I can see that, that it's doing that to you right now.

RJ: And at the same time, to be politically effective in the world we live in, sometimes you have got to be a cold, mercenary son of a bitch who can look at three choices and say, "This one might work, this one will, this one clearly won't." It's a different mode of being. What draws one in is this deep human emotion, but then to be effective you have to become almost a machine that can make decisions without emotion trumping reason.

AO: Well, my response to that is: Yes, it's tough. But for me, it's tougher not to struggle with it. Look, your options are to do what I'm doing or to retire and start dying.

RJ: I'm not saying it's a question of whether or not to do it. One does it because one has to.

AO: But that's a choice.

RJ: Maybe, but for me it no longer seems to be a choice. I feel like I know too much and that I don't have anywhere else to go. If you want to put it in blunt terms, I said goodbye to being a normal person a long time ago. So this is what I'm stuck with. Even if I wanted to abandon left politics, I don't know that I could. What am I going to do? Go back to being a professor whose biggest concern is advancing his career?

AO: Why not?

RJ: I just can't do it anymore. But what makes this so complicated is that, at the same time, I don't like losing. And you and I both know perfectly well that in the United States left politics -- real left politics, anti-capitalist and anti-empire politics, based on a deep sense of justice and equality -- isn't going to triumph anytime soon.

AO: Of course. So you have to accept failure and at the same time keep trying to win. It's also very true personally. I never learned that until late in life. You learn from failure. I did.

RJ: That I understand. I can see many of my own failures, and at least try not to repeat them. What I'm struggling with is how to keep all this in balance -- the humanity and the need for calculated efficiency. I realize this is an old problem, but if you abandon the humanity that drove you into the process in the first place ...

AO: You're fucked.

RJ: That's right -- you're fucked. And I worry that people sense that I have become that -- too cold and calculating. And if I were going to be more honest about why I'm here ...

AO: How could you not be honest?

RJ: Well, because you know perfectly well that being honest is sometimes painful. I think the reason I'm here is because in the past six months or so, I could feel myself moving out of balance. I can feel myself losing connection with my own humanity. I can feel myself becoming a calculating machine. Because I've taken on too many projects and am trying to do too much. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You heap on yourself so much work that the only way you can do it all, the only way you can do what you promised people you were going to do, is to become that calculating machine.

AO: That won't work, you know.

RJ: You're right -- it won't work. My point is that it's a very delicate balance. I don't mean balance in the sense that people talk about having more time for oneself. I don't mean balance between political work and having leisure time. That's all pretty much irrelevant to me. I mean that balance between giving up some of my own humanity for the sake of efficiency.

AO: When you do that, you're fucked. Look, well-meaning people constantly get caught in various human dilemmas. It's always a struggle. Not just the one you portray, but also the relationship of an individual to the collective. I've got quite a bit of experience in the collective, and it doesn't work the way people wish it did. You start with people with a certain shared dedication to the same thing, and everybody gets an equal slice of the pie. But after a while, people look around, and wonder why I'm busting my ass, and I'm getting exactly the same thing he's getting.

RJ: That is what every capitalist in the world says. Does that mean capitalism is inevitable?

AO: No, but some features of capitalism are. I don't think we will ever eliminate a certain competitiveness. It's part of being human. A large part of my life is a search for an alternative. And that search, for me, is not a collective search. I can't do it collectively. I just can't. I can't keep my head straight collectively. Other people maybe can. And I have to be honest, that I certainly need the people I work with. Even the ones who are not going forward to help the way I think they should, I need them. They support the things I do. I could not have done without the support of liberals because I do things sometimes that need a lot of money. Building things costs money. Where was I going to get that money? I needed $70,000 to build houses in Nicaragua.

Part 11 - The enduring, and unanswerable, questions

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