The Grand Comparison

Of course, the images of the Sixties mostly do not reflect reality very well. Much of what younger activists "know" about the Sixties comes from mass media accounts, which are not only flawed, but flawed in specific ways. And much of what they "know" leads these young activists to feel that they can never measure up -- that they can never accomplish what was accomplished in the Sixties, that activists then had heroic qualities that can never be matched today. (It's not hard to figure out why the corporate media would want to portray the Sixties as an incomprehensible melange of forces that could never happen again.)

For those activists who get past this trap, another trap lies in wait -- the trap of ignoring the Sixties. It's tempting to do so -- since that decade clearly couldn't have been the mythical heroic moment often portrayed, maybe it was just like any other decade, and there are no lessons to learn from it. Those who look back at the Sixties with rapt attention, by this reading, are simply nostalgic idiots. (And some of us are.)

The Sixties were just like any other decade in many ways -- but they were also a time when certain changes occurred or were consolidated that continue to be key social justice battlegrounds. There is a reason why creatures like Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay hate the Sixties so much.

More importantly, those changes were ones whose lessons and struggles social justice activists have since built on. If the Sixties were heroic, and in ways they were, they were also pathetic and underdeveloped politically. But beginnings were made that have not been lost, that are part of our lives and struggles today. (Here's a book review that makes this point.)

Disclaimer: This Web page consists of mostly my opinions and thoughts, as refined in conversations with younger activists over especially the last decade. I expect it will show gaps due to my race and gender status, among others, and I welcome your comments, criticisms and corrections by e-mail.
 

Numbers

My personal revelation on this point came in 1995, when I heard about a meeting of Asian-Pacific Islander progressive activists in the Midwest, which drew 300 activists. In other words, a (relatively) small ethnic classification in only one region of the country drew together as many activists as the archetypal white radical Sixties organization at its height.

While it's hard to compare "apples to oranges," I think it's pretty clear there are a lot more progressive activists today than there were in 1969.

Mass rallies are also seen by many folks as a unique feature of the Sixties. But much larger mass rallies were a very significant force in the 1980s. What I believe was the largest rally ever in the U.S., against Reagan's nuclear policies, was part of a global movement, centered in Europe, that led to the end of the Cold War.

I do not know any city in the United States that does not have its Peace Center, or any good-sized town that does not have its facility for abused women, or any good sized community of color that does not have its neighborhood leaders -- all of whom are on the front lines. In most cases, these people represent new forces that have emerged since the Sixties.

Activists of the 1980s and later have nothing to apologize for in terms of numbers compared to the Sixties.
 

Process and Sexism

For thousands of male activists in the Sixties, women were an invisible element who existed only to be exploited for the "unskilled" labor of typing, cooking, making copies -- and of course for sex and romantic fantasies. While these sentiments and this problem still exist, no rational person considers feminist women a joke any more.

There were many reasons why a number of Sixties organizations collapsed around 1969-70. Certainly police repression, discussed below, was one of them. Another reason was that unskilled and inexperienced leaders simply reached the limits of their competence. But I don't think we can discount the feminist argument that women, both key leaders and those seen as "the troops," moved from male-dominated radicalism to their own movement, then known as Women's Liberation. In other words, the movement did not stop, it transformed itself.

While the struggle against sexism continues, all of us, especially radical activists, have benefited from some basic feminist-driven ideas -- that individual activists deserve respect, that personal oppression matters, that just having a few "rock star" leaders is a lousy idea, just to pick a few examples.

For example, when we compare the practice of the Ruckus Society to that of the Weathermen, we see in the former a compassion and intelligence that has enormous strategic power -- compared to a guilt-driven approach that had little understanding of what winning actually involved, but that was gloriously macho. Though there were strong women in the leadership of Weatherman, it had a style that had not integrated feminism.

The influence of Gandhian nonviolence, of earth-based spirituality and of the Quaker tradition, among other influences, have also made a lot of difference. But where these were good practices which many have adopted, feminism represented  an actual political force against the bad practices of radical Sixties activists -- the force of people who acted for their own needs and self interest to transform and correct the movements as we knew them.

Without devaluing the sacrifices and victories of the Sixties, I think it is fair and appropriate to say that the gains of feminism since that time have resulted in major improvements in how we all fight for social justice.

Race

There is one important lesson about race, though, from the Sixties. Of the three major accomplishments or "wins" of that period -- ending Jim Crow or legal racial segregation, helping to end the Vietnam War, and winning welfare, Medicare, Community Action Agencies and other Great Society programs -- the first and third were won almost exclusively by mass action, largely illegal and disruptive action, by people of color, especially African-Americans. And the end of the Vietnam War was certainly hurried along by urban rebellions at home, and by rebellion within the armed forces, in which enlisted men of color were key leaders and actors.

The media image of the Sixties focuses on a long-haired white guy -- like I was. But if we see that era as one of social justice victories, our image should be of an angry and focused working-class young African-American woman or man, in most cases never known to history by name. Those were the people who won those victories.

Visibility

People like Martin Luther King, Abbie Hoffman, Huey Newton, and the Redstockings were not better at getting press than many of us are today. They simply were activists in a time when the media was (briefly) open to radicals, as long as they were not explicitly Communist. The long repression that extended from the Truman presidency into the Johnson years had lulled the media and others in power into carelessness. And activism emerged in the Sixties in forms substantially different from the Marxism that had been the leading force in the 1930s and 1940s. So the media did what they do so well - focused on the most sensational and exciting events -- events like the attack on youth marchers in Selma, the armed presence of the Black Panthers at the California State Capitol, or the costumed testimony of witnesses before the House un-American Activities Committee. For a moment in history, it was possible to frame such an event and have it move the entire nation.

This couldn't last. The corporate media, while less concentrated in 1970, was still concentrated enough to make a collective decision, undoubtedly with guidance from the federal government, to stop giving a platform to radicals. This was then, and continues to be, a key factor in how movements spread across the nation. For example, there were more campus rebellions in 1971 than in 1970 -- but they got less coverage in the press. Convinced that they were part of a dying trend, campus activists soon did fewer of these actions.

Today, it is essentially impossible to get the media to recognize and cover any radical or progressive trend. The anti-nuclear movement broke through this barrier to some degree in 1979, because of two unavoidably visible events -- the Three Mile Island accident and the movie, China Syndrome. But in most cases the media avoids coverage of any radical effort, especially a coordinated and pro-active one. (they will cover problems and threats, because these fight an image of victimization. Thus they will cover, for example, to a limited extent, attacks on women's health care facilities -- but they will not cover organized clinic defense as a story in itself.)

I expect the day will come when corporate media will be forced to face the fact that peoples' movements exist. But that will certainly not come easy. Until then, we must be very clear about the difference between what actually exists in the world, and the distorted image that the media show us of that world. And we must not be ashamed of the fact that we cannot claim a national pulpit as Dr. King could. We live in different times.
 

Economics & Incarceration

The economic picture for young activists is very different today. And so is the incarceration picture, though mainly for young people of color. A lot more people are going to jail these days. And while people remember those who did go to jail in the Sixties, it's actually pretty amazing that a lot more of us didn't.

Just to get to the point where you can be an activist is hard today for a lot of folks, though, for many reasons I describe here, once they make it they are going to be a lot more productive than we were.

Policy Impact

Of course, this atmosphere was a product of mass action, as described above in the section titled Race. Entities from Congressional Committees and the Supreme Court to local governments and nonprofits were pushed, intimidated or delighted to take on an agenda of change. In 1974, following Watergate (a failed semi-fascist coup that treated mainstream politicians and media the way the government already treated left activists and people of color), Washington DC in particular was a very different place.

Now, after Reagan and Gingrich and in the days of the Bush-Cheney junta, it is clear that the power elite has regained control of the various judicial, administrative and regulatory mechanisms. As in the Sixties, there is only one reliable way to make change for social justice -- through mass action and grassroots-based power.

Government Interference and Repression

These tools -- assassination, massive surveillance, long prison terms for First Amendment protected activity, torture, break-ins, and the use of agents provocateurs -- will almost certainly be used again on a massive scale in this country. (Of course, imprisonment on a massive scale for victimless crimes is already happening on a scale unknown in modern times.)

This is a frightening thought. But it is also important to understand why Cointelpro etc. worked so well. Some of the reasons were the following bad practices by people working for social justice, some of which were unavoidable in 1969, but all of which can be avoided now:

• allowing oneself to be "dared" into taking reckless action
• relying on people with whom you do not have long term relationships or connections
• using quick "gut" based tests, or political slogans, to decide who to trust
• forming political relationships mainly around sex, drugs, style or appearance
• equating militancy of tactics with radicalism of strategy
• putting people in positions of responsibility because of extraneous qualities, such as military experience
• not communicating honestly across lines of race, gender, ideology, etc.
• basing decisions about people on rumors and gossip

So -- there are lessons to learn. And they boil down to -- if you do good organizing, you are much safer than if you prance around like a macho idiot. (I do not mean to say that militant action is wrong -- but it's only right if it is part of a strong movement.)

Ignorance and Experience

The left movements of the 1930s and 1940s had literally been driven underground in this country. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I probably met no more than three people who had been left activists in that period -- and one of those was so scared he never explicitly admitted to me his membership in the Communist Party -- even though it was obvious to both of us that is what we were talking about.

So people like me and those slightly older had to make up the movement as we went along, or find models from other countries, especially Cuba and Vietnam. One result was what I call "Boris and Natasha" revolutionaries, people who at their worst acted like those two cartoon caricatures of Soviet spies -- because those were the role models they had of how to be anti-US policy.

Obviously, some wonderful and creative things happened. US activists went to Vietnam for solidarity visits while the US military was bombing and assaulting Vietnam. Voters were registered in numbers sufficient to transform a sixty year old apartheid police state back into a place where the Constitution had some meaning. Symbols like Miss America, the Presidency and the Confederate flag suffered cultural blows they have yet to recover from. Government programs for poor people of color were established.

But the main thing that was important about what we did was that, since that time, there has been an unbroken tradition of a left or progressive or anti-corporate and anti-racist movement. In the early 1920s and again in the early 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover and others like him essentially demolished the left. That did not happen in the 1980s -- in fact victories were won in limiting intervention in Central America and South Africa, in reining in the nuclear establishment militarily and in terms of reactors, and in grassroots fights on housing, the environment, women's issues, etc. Sometimes, they were inadequate victories -- but the critical thing was that the tradition of struggle did not falter.

This has enabled activists to build on what we did, and vastly improve on it. For example, there are now a large number of organizing institutes around the nation, many of them modeled on what was unique in the Sixties -- the Highlander Folk School, as it was then known. Certainly there was nothing like the Ruckus Society in the Sixties, or the National Organizers Alliance. And the idea of the AFL-CIO actually being in the serious business of training and dispatching organizers into communities of color is one we could not have imagined in the 1960s, even though labor activists played a key role in civil rights struggles.. There are many other examples.
 

Do Activists Really Become Stockbrokers?

It is true that a lot of Sixties radicals, including me at one or two points, became essentially liberal bureaucrats -- often of the more progressive variety. I am not trying to say that everybody -- or even most folks -- continued to operate at the same political level for decades. That's very rare.

Obviously, every human being is distinct and unique. But, depsite the conservative myth to that effect, there is no invisible force which is driving radicals to become conservative and acquisitive in their old age.
 

Hip Culture/Music

Professionalizing Social Justice Work

The downside of this is that we have something to lose. Some of us have fairly nice homes and other stuff -- and more important, we have reputations and networks that connect us to the corporate world.

This is a change from the Sixties, and one that in many ways makes radical social change a little less likely in the short run.

On the other hand, when radical social change starts to happen, entire chunks of the society will simply break loose and move to the left. After all, college campuses in say 1962 were hardly a hotbed of radicalism across the nation.

Another interesting phenomenon is that the lazy-unfair thinkers who dominate the Republicrat Party are quite willing to turn over vast segments of the society to nonprofits to run. For example, the whole homelessness sphere is largely administered by nonprofits, mostly run by people with fairly radical opinions. So far, this system has worked fairly well for the people in power. Idealistic people spend 18 hours a day trying to meet the needs of the very poor, while the corporations continue to ensure there will be plenty of needs to meet and needy to have them, and the most desperate people in our society are managed and given often illusory hope that they can succeed as individuals, instead of seeking collective solutions. But one can imagine a change, can't one?
 

Many Movements

This section is modified from a piece of mine that will be published in a book on housing issues. It speaks to the evolution of many movements from "The Movement" of the Sixties, which to many folks is a problem of today's left. I guess I see it more as a response to conditions.

In 1970, the then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, answered a press question about "young dissenters"  with the words "If it takes a blood bath, let's get it over with." Within a month student activists were shot dead by authorities on the Jackson State and Kent State campuses. Of course, these killings followed the more targeted murders of Malcolm X, Dr. King and other leaders.

Rather than respond in kind, which would have meant essentially a civil war, most activists narrowed their focus, either to one community or to one issue. Radical author and teacher Carl Boggs described the result as "new movements [that] uphold, in different ways, the ideal of transforming daily life that was only implicit in the sixties" and, that, though typically "more 'moderate' and less disruptive,"  are "a mature elaboration -- not a reversal -- of important sixties themes." [ "From New Left to Social Movements," Carl Boggs, p. 34, Radical America, Vol. 21, No. 6.]

Of course, we all want these movements to come together in one powerful unified movement. But that can only happen when enough of them find common ground in an intelligent and heartfelt approach, based on the different experience that each has gathered. What a moment that will be.
 
 

 Closing Words