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The Trajectory of Change | Excerpt
From Chapter 11 What Are We Waiting For?
Our commitment to ultimately revolutionize all aspects of life should affect how our immediate campaigns are defined, what immediate goals we seek, and how we seek these goals. It should inform what we talk about when we organize, write, speak, and teach—what ideas we try to convey, what commitments we try to elicit. This is what seems missing from progressive and Left activism, and from our very lives, today.
The absence of unifying goals, of shared long-term commitment, and of attention to communicating these forthrightly at every opportunity weakens not only our prospects of organizing usefully toward a distant end, but also our near-term efforts to reduce pain today. Today’s activism, for want of revolutionary designs and spirit, is often ill-informed, frequently lacks integrity, and virtually never incorporates the kind of logic, solidarity, and spirit that can sustain long-term involvement by suffering constituencies.
Current movements are most often too narrow, too lacking in scope and in spiritual and moral appeal to attract wide support. Remarkably, they often celebrate their very weaknesses, their lack of vision, their lack of breadth, and their lack of anything resembling audacity and passion as if these debits were virtues. At the level of feeling, of emotion, and of consciousness, our projects often do little to overcome (and sometimes even contribute to) the main hesitancy that impedes most people today from taking a progressive stand: the belief that nothing significantly better than what America offers is logically possible. Or, even if it is logically possible, the belief that certainly nothing significantly better than what we endure can actually be attained — so why bother?
Our projects rarely convey a broad understanding of systemic causes of problems and almost never offer positive institutional alternatives to the status quo that can provide hope and motivation. From the outside (and often from the inside too), our efforts look just like or sometimes even worse than the status quo, so they are generally powerless to address the average citizen’s deep-seated cynicism.
A Left worth joining in the United States today should be fighting vigorously for immediate gains that can alleviate suffering and advance a degree of immediate dignity and justice for people, of course. We should be trying to win a 30-hour work week with full pay, full employment, real affirmative action, a comprehensive housing program, a humane health care program, a rich preschool and public education program, a real living wage, electoral reforms that empower disenfranchised constituencies, a non-intrusive foreign policy, workers’ and community rights over corporate greed, and many other reforms.
We should communicate not only how these changes are each good in their own right, but how they gain immensely when linked together as part of a process of developing movements and organizations capable of attaining a new society whose broad character we need to be able to lay out in clear and reasonably concise language, and whose details we need to evolve through our practice.
Once one has understood even the most elementary truths about capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and authoritarianism, as so many of us have at one time or another in our lives, I don’t see how less than the above is honest, just, or strategic. Optimistically, I also think the public is more ready than it has been in decades for a movement that clearly and passionately offers long-term vision and commitment, as well as immediate short-term benefit.
So what are we waiting for?
We need to replace all the timidity, the defensiveness, the worry about being thought juvenile or irresponsible that has grown since the 1960s with bold, honest, forthright statements of what is oh so obviously true, now as before.
This country needs a revolution, the most profound and broad revolution in history, and people of good will and clear vision need to be working for it. People need to be working on vision, on strategy, on program, on building alliances and organizations, on winning immediate reforms and parlaying them into greater power to win still more gains in a continuing trajectory of struggle, now and hereafter. We need to know what we want. And we need to live and fight for it. Entirely.
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