Random Remarks for Radicals, Part 1

No. 1. Hairdressers and Architects

We hunger for meaning. We want to know that what we do makes a difference and that it means something. We want to feel effective. This seems universal. This general need is even more acute for the activist. She wants to feel that she is having an impact; advancing the cause; making a difference to people, animals, precious things that are threatened or oppressed. But there is a real problem of trying to find ways of being effective and even more with feeling effective. For the radical political activist, who does not want simply to stop wars, change laws and so on, but who wants to overturn or transform dominant institutions, the problem is still more acute. How to feel you are having an impact on an entrenched tyranny, or a transnational corporation?

Things are perhaps easier when you are focused on incremental changes, and the situation of particular human beings. An Amnesty International group writing to a particular prisoner of conscience cannot overthrow a dictatorship but can improve the conditions of that prisoner, perhaps save their life, perhaps free them from imprisonment. That is a powerful form of effectiveness.

I read once that hairdressers come high in terms of job satisfaction. I could imagine that, say; architects come pretty low in the rankings of self-assessed job satisfaction. Architects, many of them, perhaps most of them, spend a lot of time putting together proposals that are never built. Like actors, models, artists, advertisers and other ‘creative’ folk, there are a lot of rejections and failed presentations/ auditions. Furthermore, many architects will spend much of their working lives planning ducts and light fittings and other barely-noticed features of our new buildings. Incidentally I once met a pipe fitter – I may have forgotten his proper title – who told me he had a lot of job satisfaction. He was a highly paid specialist who was widely respected. He would be called in when architects plans for ducts, pipes, wiring and so on –which looked perfectly reasonable on paper – proved to be impossible in practice. His job was to visualise three dimensional spaces – often barely accessible – and figure out how to get cables, pipes and ducts through the spaces available. That’s what I call intellectual work. Now contrast the architect’s job with the pipe fitter. The vast army of architects (not the chief architect directing construction) work on abstract forms of hidden features which they may never actually see. The pipe fitter has a hands-on effect, solving major problems with an immediate tangible result, greatly appreciated by the builders they work with.

There is something here in this contrast about our sense of effectiveness.

Let’s go back to the hairdresser. Each and every hairdresser works with something that is highly visible and of enormous value to their client. Instead of an architect slaving away for hours on a project that, if it is built, will not be implemented for months if not years, the hairdresser can finish their work within an hour (or perhaps two) directly and tangibly having an effect, and then receiving feedback, praise (and payment) immediately. The hairdresser also works in a convivial atmosphere of friendship and intimacy, which must also, increases the sense of job satisfaction. So we see a spectrum of perceived effectiveness. The single architect working on air conditioning and heating ducts in a large building is remote in space and time from the finished article – if it is ever built – and has no hands on experience of making her ideas into reality. Crucially, the architects plan relies on many intermediaries to make it happen, supervisors, fenders, clients, builders and so on. In contrast the hairdresser is one-to-one with the raw material/client/finished product. Effectiveness felt with the immediacy of impact.

Where does this leave the activist confronting climate change or the occupation of Iraq or the nuclear weapons establishment? Well the first thing to say is that ‘the hairdresser’ and ‘the architect’ are not two different kinds of activists in different movements. They are two different modes of action, two different scales of intervention, two different time periods, two different frameworks for activism, which can operate simultaneously in the same movement and the same group. They can be two different sides of the same person. Amnesty International, for example, has person-focused letter-writing campaigns, and at the same time campaigns for an end to the death penalty world-wide. This is somewhat abstract, large-scale, and it is hard to feel you are having an impact.

Coming back to wider movements for change, it is often difficult to find hairdresser effectiveness in the midst of ‘architect’ campaigns. How do we cope with this sense of ineffectiveness –of powerlessness? When change comes slowly at the level of government policy, and has no perceptible link with grassroots action, how does a grass roots activist cope?

No. 2 Truth and Consequences

One way of coping is of course not to cope, to withdraw from action. This is often entirely rational as an assessment of the prospects for change, but can be harmful both for those at risk (perhaps future generations) and for the activist who withdraws.

Another way of coping is to detach from the consequences. There are a variety of ways of doing this. One way is to say: what I do will have no effect on what is going on, but it is important that someone registers a protest against it. Another is to say: what I made may have effects I cannot foresee, it seems pointless but I act without demanding any particular outcome and I allow the possibility of changes unknown. Sometimes what underlies either/both attitudes the imperative: I feel guilty, and what I need is to do some thing that will make me feel less guilty, regardless of the consequences. At different times in my campaigning life, I have done things with each of these attitudes, with a mix of these attitudes. The action which has led to my imprisonment now was an act of despair, not an intervention with any hope of protecting the people of Fallujah from disaster. It was a mix of these things, but in essence a feeling that something unbearable was being prepared, and it was not possible to stand aside, almost regardless of the consequences.

Detaching from consequences is characteristic of, though not confined to, faith-based activism. This kind of religiously inspired commitment can cope with a lack of tangible progress better than many secular forms of activism. In the peace movement for example I understand that the steady, unshakeable efforts of the Quakers have enabled the movement to survive rocky periods over decades. The problem with detaching from consequences is that this distancing can often be simultaneous detachment from morality. Morality is about intended consequences, about foreseeable consequences. If in the midst of an argument with your partner, you accidentally knock a knife off the table, and it falls cutting his foot, there is no moral judgement. If, in the midst of the argument, you grab a knife and plunge it into his foot, there are moral questions, to do with the kind of provocation suffered and so on.

Morality is about what you knew about the situation, the problem, and what you knew, or reasonably could have known, about the different options open to you and the consequences of each possible action. It is possible, for example, to act without knowing the consequences of your action by refusing to be aware of them. When money is tight, it is possible to blank out the consequences of buying that desirable purchase, and only later apologising that now the family has not got enough money to pay for something necessary or something promised. You could have reasonably been expected to know what would happen. You chose not to know.

This kind of behaviour occurs all the time in politics. People (and I am now talking about the general population) continually choose ‘not to know’, ‘not to think’ about painful or difficult political issues. What is remarkable is that as years go by, due to the activism of ordinary citizens, Western societies(and perhaps those of the global south, though I know too little to generalise) choose to know and think more about more of these formerly taboo issues.

In the case of the activist, however, we are talking about the ‘detachment from consequences’ that can follow from frustration or despair. If that detachment from consequences leads to a wilful recklessness about consequences, a decision not to consider the possible consequences, then that is a retreat from moral action to immoral action.

No. 3. Primary Concerns

Here as so often, I am merely expressing in my own way what I understand to be the position of Noam Chomsky on these matters. What Chomsky says is that what should be our primary concern in political action is the effect we have on those under threat (possibly future generations). The kind of action we carry out, and the way we carry it out, has effects for the people or other living beings, or previous matter, we are seeking to protect or liberate.

Now it is possible to set other primary criteria. One attractive criterion is to try to choose action that is ‘commensurate’ to the crime in progress. When there is mass killing, or mass torture (perhaps of animals), or mass destruction (as in the normal, legal operation of a logging company or an oil major) there is a temptation to seek action that is as intense, dramatic and forceful as the outrage. During the campaign against economic sanctions on Iraq, we were often discussing the gap between the crime we were confronting – the economic slaughter of thousands of children every month – and the protests we were able organise. It was in part to fill that gap that over a dozen people from the UK consciously and openly broke the sanctions on Iraq, by taking medicines and other humanitarian supplies there without authorisation. Many more did the same from the US, where Voices in the Wilderness was founded in 1996.

In passing, let us note that hand-carrying medicines to a sanctions-bound hospital, as a political action, as an act of civil disobedience, and delivering it to grateful doctors, was towards the ‘hairdresser’ end of the spectrum of felt effectiveness. This does not mean, however, that it was effective in terms of its external consequences, which Chomsky quite rightly says are primary. We will return to this tension.

The problem with putting ‘commensurate-ness’ as a primary criterion is that the consequences for those you are concerned with can become not merely secondary but irrelevant. It is easy to think of socially disruptive actions that one could take in relation to the war in Iraq, or climate change, which would be highly intense – like the problems they address – but which would have very little direct effect on decision-makers and would have entirely damaging effects on the general public and on opinion-formers. During the Vietnam War, another massive assault on a largely defenceless country, there were student anti-war activists who, for example, blew up student toilets in protest against the war. Compared to a march or an office occupation, that is undoubtedly a more dramatic and intense action. But it is hard to see positive consequences and easy to see many negative consequences for the people of Vietnam, and for the movement that was there to assist them.

Chomsky points to a second world war example of a Nazi who was assassinated by a young Jew (I think the Nazi was Heydrich). It is difficult to condemn this desperate action, but the consequence was that several Jewish communities were devastated in retaliation. Chomsky points out that middle-class western activists, particularly white ones, are enormously privileged in relation to the victims of western power, and can escape from the consequences of their action, very often, or mitigate them considerably. We can have enormous effects positive or negative on the prospects for our communities of concern. The question is whether we will put this responsibility at the top of our agenda. To be frank, there is a temptation in activist circles to seek action which is emotionally satisfying for the activist rather than effective for the victims of power. This is the third option.

For many of those who advocate violent protest, it is hard not to believe that what is underlying their argument is the desire to retaliate against the forces of violence- with violence; to impose to impose some undeniable cost on the perpetrator. If we focus on the nature and extent of the evil that is being perpetrated, it is not difficult to slip into the argument that the perpetrator ‘deserve’ punishment of a similar nature (we see traces here of the ‘commensurate’ perspective).

The problem here is that this obscures the situation of those still in danger. How in the future can those still in danger be brought as quickly as possible to safety? That is the primary moral question before the activist. To punish perpetrators appropriately for what they have done in the past is perhaps satisfying, but a focus on this can lead to action which damage the prospects of those who survive (or future victims). What is needed for moral action is a judgement as to the possible or likely consequences of our actions for those who we wish to assist. Reasonable will differ in making these judgements, they are difficult to make, but what is critical is that we try to make them before we act. Detaching from these questions and refusing to know withdraws our actions from the moral sphere.

SECOND LETTER

Thursday 17 November 2005

Random Remarks for Radicals, Part 2

In Bow Street Magistrates Court, I stood and listened to the evidence against me. In contrast to previous cases I offered no counter- evidence, no counter- arguments, and no legal defence of my actions. I am sure the magistrates and the clerk were puzzled. If I was not offering a legal excuse for my actions, why was I pleading “not guilty”? At the end of the trial, I was allowed to make what is called a “statement of mitigation”. This is supposed to be when you plead with the magistrates to go easy because of special circumstances of your life, or special circumstances during the events that led to your arrest.

I was thinking about of the events in Fallujah, and I spoke to the magistrates about why I had gone to the Foreign Office and painted on the front of the building, “Don’t attack Fallujah: Black Watch out” “No More War”. I said that I was pleading guilty- of doing too little too late to protect the people of Fallujah from the US violence. I said that everyone in the court was also guilty. I said that I believed my actions were morally and legally justified, but that I was fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions. Thinking of the devastated city, my voice was choking and I had to stop constantly.

The three ‘lay’ magistrates (non-professionals) withdrew with the clerk (the legal advisor who is effectively in charge when the magistrates are part-timers). In the court, as we were waiting, there was an atmosphere I’d never experienced before. The court ‘ushers’ (the stewards) were talking to me in a friendly way, as was the prosecuting lawyer, in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The magistrates returned and said there would be no fine, no court costs to pay, a ‘conditional discharge’ (which is ‘no action’), but that I would have to pay the Foreign Office £2100 to clean up paint and fake blood. The Foreign Office is made of Portland Stone, which requires special chemicals and expert treatment to clean. I said I would not pay the compensation. The magistrates ignored this and gave me 28 days to pay. I said I wouldn’t pay in 28 days. They released me from court. I received property from a police officer, property that had been seized as evidence (shoes, trousers, fleece covered in fake blood). He was genuinely friendly. He assumed I’d given a false address to the court- he was unconcerned about that. I hadn’t given a false address- which is why I am now in cell 28, F wing, Her Majesty’s Prison Lewes.

Going into court I had half braced myself for being sent to prison. If I had been brought before a full-time professional (“stipendiary”) magistrate, I think that would quite likely have happened. Bow Street stipendiaries are battle- hardened veterans, legal machines chopping out what they see as justice. There were a dozen or so people in court, people who in some cases had travelled quite a way to support me in court. We retired to a nearby flat for a sharing of biscuits and tea and other refreshments. This is one of the costs of civil disobedience. It takes time and energy from the movement to support people through court, to raise money for fines, to support people in prison. When you do an action, you are dragging these consequences after you. Is the benefit to the movement, to the people you’re trying to help, greater than these costs, when everything is taken into account? It can be. It’s partly what you do with your action and it’s partly what other people do with your action. And I’m wondering what is happening in Fallujah, in the refugee camps, in western Iraq.

Random Remarks for Radicals, Part 3

“The Stars”

Grassroots activism has changed the world. Grassroots activism has made the world we live in. But grassroots activists in the West – particularly in the urban West, perhaps – must struggle with strong currents of powerlessness.

One of the sources of these feelings of powerlessness is the dominant culture, which is deeply authoritarian. The popular culture which has been constructed by corporate advertisers and the entertainment industry interlocks with and reinforces the political culture created by the major parties, and an intellectual culture created by universities, thinktanks and powerful intellectuals. The fundamental character of society in Western society is the tension between top-down authoritarianism, embodied in the corporation, and the striving for personal empowerment and autonomy, exploited and manipulated by the corporation.

The cultural scene is dominated by the star system. The basic message is that there are a few significant figures: The Few or more often, The One. The rest of us are spectators who observe, appreciate, sometimes vote for, and even more rarely interact with The Star. The world is saved by Luke Skywalker/Neo/Harry Potter who is destined to take The Action that will change history (often The Star is unaware until it happens of the nature of the magical Action). In history, the story is of equally magical characters – Nelson, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler – and so on, who move nations and alter events. In truth, there is only one historical character – Adolf Hitler – alongside whom all other historical figures are treated as secondary in mainstream culture. Hitler is the magician who bewitches a nation and carries out world-changing events all by himself.

What is missing from the conventional history story is all those powerful people who assisted Hitler with money, influence, media access and so on, because they thought he could be useful. What is missing is the hordes of disaffected men and women – often from the middle classes – who made Hitler’s party made strong. What is missing is the willing army of intellectuals and professionals whose skills in urban planning, computerised identification systems, transport logistics and so on were fundamental to the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust.

The idea of “The One” is exceptionally powerful. But it is a lie that obscures historical and present-day social realities. It is a lie that is useful to those who hold power.

What we are constantly being told is that there are certain people who are truly beautiful, truly funny, truly powerful and the rest of us can merely imitate, admire and support. In the world of politics, there are a handful of people who count, and the rest of us are irrelevant (unless it is election time, when we are of significance only in marginal races, not in safe seats).

Matthews D’Ancona of The Sunday Telegraph said that the Labour Party accepted Tony Blair as a kind of extraterrestrial who landed with extra-sensory powers over the electorate. In reality though, as Bob Worcester of the MORI polling organisation showed in his analysis of the 1997 election (explaining Labour’s landslide), the first New Labour victory could have been won by Neil Kinnock’s brand of politics, and possibly even by Michael Foot.

Yes, leaders make a difference. It would fly in the face of reality to say that individual leaders or major figures do not make a difference, but what makes someone a leader or a figure?

Chomsky has often said that if it were not for the strength of popular movements in North America, organising speaker meetings and so on, he would not be a “major figure” on the political scene, he would just be discussing politics with his friends.

Grassroots activists change the world, but we are edited out of the picture of the world constructed and transmitted by corporations, advertisers, corporate media, corporate entertainment, corporate-funded politics and the state. Our feelings of powerlessness are to a large extent the intended results of a conscious (and unconscious) campaign against the public mind, against our self-confidence, against our need to be effective in altering the world in accord with our conscience.