(4) Building political movements in an affluent society

RJ: Let's talk about movement building, about the tension between the need for people like Turnbow, with all that energy and passion, and the need for discipline and organization. For years you were a member of the CP, which was highly disciplined and organized. After leaving, you've mostly worked on your own politically -- with people, in groups, but not in that kind of disciplined organization. Is there a way to balance this? Can we have structures that bring people in and organize the energy, without restricting and limiting people in the way institutions sometimes do?

AO: Well, we may never achieve that. It may not be possible to balance those things. In fact, it's not sensible to believe it can be achieved. Rather than a goal you think we'll get to, it's a direction in which we have to move, to build a movement that keeps those things in balance. But I have to tell you, at this moment, I can't think of a movement that I would want to be a member of.

RJ: Do you mean a recognizable political movement in the U.S.?

AO: In the U.S. at the moment, I have two options. I can do what I'm doing, which is working somewhat independently, or I can quit. There's no movement that exists out there for me to join. The way I look at my work, frankly, I feel like I'm helping -- together with others -- to plant the seeds for a different type of movement. To me, a lot of my work is a seeding operation. What I think we need is -- something that's always been absent in American political life -- is a conscious attention to activism as a way of life and as a vehicle toward achieving some kind of structure for society which will be of use, historically. Right now, that structure does not exist, and it will not come into being by declaration, or by a handful of people desperate to have some kind of movement who institutionalize one. There's no basis for that right now in this country.

RJ: No basis for...

AO: A movement, a real movement. There are a lot of people in motion, doing all kinds of things. But there's nothing that represents them -- not the Communist Party or the civil-rights movement, or anything like that. There's a void.

RJ: Do you mean that there just doesn't happen to be an existing structure, or that the conditions are such that you don't think one is possible right now? I agree there's no movement in any serious sense. But are you saying you think the conditions are such that one can't exist right now?

AO: I think right now it's kind of fruitless to work at creating such a thing, at least for me. It seems to me there's no way in the world it could happen right now. If others see it, I'd love to learn about it, but I don't see it.

RJ: What's missing that makes that impossible right now?

AO: Well, the big thing that makes everything difficult is that the so-called movement in our country consists basically of middle-class people, who are fairly comfortable. That's what most of the movement is. And such a movement has its value, but it's not exactly a durable basis for building things. I'm not going to negate it; there's a great deal happening. But it cannot result in real positive growth. We have a thing here in Seattle called SNOW -- Sound Nonviolent Opponents of War, as in Puget Sound. It's based on consensus. It became a wheel, with spokes, a coalition with no hub, no axle, and it's in a constant state of crisis and disarray. I mean, we don't deserve the reputation we've got in Seattle for activism.

RJ: When you say middle-class, is it U.S. affluence that stands in the way of a real movement?

AO: I think that's part of it. I sometimes get a bit sick and tired of Americans; I view most of them as spoiled babies. People on their way to a restaurant won't just say, "It'll be nice that we get to have a meal." They'll say, "I'm starving." That's not an accident; it's because their experience of suffering is that being a little hungry feels like they are starving, because most have never come close to starving. Very few Americans are really at dead ends. There are some places, some people, like the ones living in Appalachia maybe or places like that, who don't have much hope. But in general, we're a soft people. We can't blame them for it, but it's a fact that as a country right now we don't know what the fuck human suffering is about. Americans can be just as good and as generous and as warm-hearted as any other people, but they have many things that cushion them from that experience.

RJ: How can we overcome that problem of affluence?

AO: Well, the first thing is to do as much as you can by personal example, though I never totally succeeded. I still feel guilty about living in this house, for example.

RJ: This house you're in, which is a very modest bungalow?

AO: Yeah, but this house can certainly support more than two people. When I was a kid we had a one-bedroom apartment with no private bathroom for four people, and we had a good life. We thought it was pretty good. My mother could turn the handle and water would come out, and she had just come from a place where she had to walk a half a mile with a couple of buckets. You know, people on welfare in America have a richer life than more than half of the people in the world. We have to remember that once in a while.

RJ: There's a UN statistic that half the people in the world live on less than $2 a day.

AO: That means they don't have clean water, they don't have medical attention, they sleep on the fucking ground. In the U.S., we whine all the time, but a skilled worker in this country lives like aristocrats used to live. They buy cars, buy a house.

RJ: So is this the problem of greed? Is that simply an enduring reality, that people will...

AO: I don't want to put it that way.

RJ: Then should we call it self-interest? You're saying that whatever calculation we make, our own self-interest is going to be part of the mix?

AO: Exactly, exactly. We have to get people to understand that it is in their self-interest not to yield to that crasser kind of greed. Let me give you an example. When I was young I was offered an uncontested seat in Congress by the Democratic Party in Brooklyn. This was an era in which there was no Republican Party there, and the machine decided who the candidate would be. They came to me and said, "You are our next congressman. All you've got to do is publicly separate from what you've been doing."

RJ: Which would have meant denouncing the Communist Party, to which you belonged at the time, yes?

AO: Yes, and even more than that. But that was pretty easy for me to turn down because at that point my Marxism was almost an obsession, almost a religious experience. But later, when I lived in California, in Venice, I had a much tougher decision. We fought a land redevelopment project, a multi-multi million-dollar project. We lost, but we held them at bay for about seven or eight years and protected that community for those years. These were very poor people living on the banks of shitty canals, but it was in many ways a nice place to live, and it had a good community life.

During that battle, a member of City Council offered me a bribe. In a very private discussion, isolated from any possibility of observation, he offered me two corner lots in the canals, which today would go for between $2 and $5 million. They offered me a house built to my specifications. They offered me a dock and two boats, sail and motor. And I'll tell you, it took me a hard, painful night to turn that down.

RJ: If you had taken it, the deal would have been you that would abandon the organizing? And that was an offer you had to think about before saying no?

AO: That's it. I was the principal organizer in that struggle. And I did think about it. I was very tempted. It appealed to a side of me that wasn't totally gone. I'd love to get into a powerful position. I'd love to design the house I'm going to live in. I love the idea of my kids being guaranteed certain things. There's a part of me -- it's not a big part of me, but I was surprised to find that it was still a part of me -- that wanted all that shit. And if it's a part of me, with my politics and background, then it's a bigger part of a lot of other people. I could see that my real self-interest was with the people in my community, that was where love and affection come from, but it was tempting.

Part 5 - Human nature and "enlightened selfishness"

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