by Osha Neumann
As we expanded the definition of what was political we simultaneously narrowed the area of what we considered legitimate political action. All those activities that were not total, that did not call into question the very existence of those who participated, were illegitimate. Any act that lacked the element of ultimate risk was hopelessly compromised. Electoral politics, letter writing, peaceful demonstrations confined within the barricades set up by the police, were worse than useless. Civil disobedience became progressively less civil.
Only a total transformation of society would do. And the only organization worthy of allegiance was one that was committed to that total transformation and which required from its members a corresponding total commitment. These organizations risked becoming cults, tense pressure cookers in which their members were largely isolated from the everyday life of ordinary people.
Infantile rage is a fuel that is easily exhausted. It will not sustain a lifetime of commitment. Only structure in the personality and organization in the movement allows growth over time. We need organizations that are capable of exercising some authority but avoid reproducing the authoritarian modes of the dominant society. We need organizations that can link generations, providing a way for revolutionary Peter Pans to grow up. Without such institutions, “growing up” will continue to seem an inevitable conspiracy of biology with the forces of reaction.
The movement of the Sixties sought to reveal denied truths, not by developing a comprehensive theory, but in molten hand to hand struggle with the system of lies in which we lived. By joining that struggle, we believed we were placing ourselves where truth lived. We broadened the zone of political activity in all directions—inward into the “personal” and outward into a critique of daily life. The System was an integrated totality that subordinated all aspects of experience to its destructive purposes. The transformation of that system would transform the deep structures of society—and of consciousness. The false smile of commodities would be extinguished. The real face of the world would emerge, washed in possibilities.
By defying the System we would force the truth into the open. All would be revealed in an ecstasy of clarity. The System was a lie. We stood for truth. It was ugly. We were beautiful. It was evil. We stood for justice. It was a prison. We would be free. It was irrational. We were supremely sane.
But, of course, there were murky edges to our ecstasy of clarity. Our vision attracted craziness as shiny bobbles attract magpies, as the open flame attracts moths. Having seen so many revolutionary moths crashing into the flame, many of us have reexamined our rhetoric and tempered our expectations. We purged as an infantile aberration the extravagant imagination of unlimited possibilities that inspired our most heroic—or foolhardy—acts of disobedience. But the vision doesn’t really die. The wet dream of possibilities imagined by the counterculture of the Sixties is real, even now, as we struggle to avert an equally real nightmare: fascist regression, the triumph of unreason, the death of nature, the extinction of hope. Our flame smolders underground, waiting for the wind that will fan it back to fury.
Nothing to lose but our chains.
THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH AS AN UNVEILING
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
—Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
I once was lost but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.
—John Newton, “Amazing Grace”
Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage all down the cave. Here they have been from childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they can not turn their heads.
—Plato, The Republic, Chapter XXV (VII. 514 A-521 B), The Allegory of the Cave
The Motherfuckers on St. Marks Place, philosophers in their dens, therapists in their offices, penitents in their confessionals, artists in their studios, all strive to reveal a hidden truth, be it the brutality of the System, the unexamined assumption, the repressed desire, the sinful act, the form within the flux. They all, in one way or another, seek to strip away the disguises worn by reality. In order to truly see, we must be free from the whip of the overseer, from illusion, from neurotic symptom, from sin, from conventional forms of perception. The connection between the throwing off of chains and the unveiling of truth is implicit in Plato’s allegory, Marx’s battle cry, and the hymn of the sea captain who is done with the slave trade and longing for grace.
Insofar as truth is hidden, we are unfree. Insofar as we are unfree, we are kept from the truth. And insofar as the rebel, the philosopher, the therapist, the priest, and the artist promise to liberate us, once and for all, they fail. The world the rebel hopes to free remains enslaved, the truth the philosopher hopes to reveal slips from his grasp, the patient on the therapist’s couch remains unhappy, the penitent sins again, the beauty the artist creates remains locked within the frame. Our efforts to reveal and uncover become themselves disguises and concealment. Our struggle never ends.
Schoolchildren will rip out their desks and throw ink at stunned instructors, office secretaries will disrobe and run into the streets, newsboys will rip up their newspapers and sit on the curbstones masturbating, storekeepers will throw open their doors making everything free, accountants will all collapse in one mighty heart attack, soldiers will throw down their guns.
—Abbie Hoffman28
The movements of the Sixties, at least those in which I participated, strove to undermine the foundations of the System and thereby liberate repressed truths and possibilities. Disruption, transgression, and violation of boundaries, were preconditions for a fresh encounter with reality. Explosive energy was needed to break the public and private fetters that prevented us from reaching the truth. In struggle with the System we would strip away disguises, unveil the naked truth, and show that the emperor had no clothes. When we ceased to be obedient, the masks would drop, not only from the faces of our treacherous leaders, but from the ordinary and familiar face that the world turned to us in our day-to-day. Our true friends, our real enemies, hidden horror and concealed beauty would be revealed.
As a child I listened to the dinner table conversations of my parents and came to believe that reason was the ultimate test of truth and the sole instrument of its discovery. In the Sixties I came to a different conclusion: Truth was hidden. It would be revealed through action. I was impatient with theory. It was more important to be raging in the streets than studying in the library.
I was not alone in my impatience. Students in the university were abandoning their classes impatient with theory that had no visible relation to practice. Reason was a shrinking violet, fearful of violence and loud noises. Reason did not provide a reliable map of the terrain of revolution. It was useless in probing the weak spots of the enemy. Analysis, study, large theories, and explanations involving a great deal of reading, ultimately resulted in inaction, or the irrelevant gesturing of the Old Left. In other parts of the movement they may have read books on the theory of revolution and the nature of capitalism. In my corner we read next to nothing.
When I dropped out of graduate school to become a painter and went to live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I felt myself letting go of the thread of reason that kept me from sinking into the underworld of those who experience, but do not know. Angry with my mother, filled with self-loathing, I exiled myself from my parents’ world.
In exile, the image of the homeland remains fixed and immutable. The blasphemer, by the vehemence of his blasphemies, reveals the continuing power of his faith. In my exile I have been the model of piety. I may have rebelled against reason, but my apostasy, even then, was never complete. Amidst all the fervent unreasonableness of the Sixties, I would have fallen into despair, had I allowed myself to believe that what I was doing was not in the service of reason. I wore the disguise of a crazy Motherfucker, but I thought our goal was completely rational: to oppose with the utmost energy an insane destructive
menace and to awaken concealed and denied possibilities for happiness.
We might have appeared unreasonable, but we were not irrational. Finally, and with great difficulty, I have come to realize that the images of Auschwitz and of my father’s book-lined study do not suffice to express the polarity of reason and the irrational.
There is a difference between irrationality and non-rationality. Reason falls silent before the melody sung by an open window, the jamboree of color in a mountain meadow, the lovers shedding their clothes as they make their way to bed. There is nothing irrational about art, music, or the beauty of nature. Quite the contrary. Irrationality is a wild upsurge of destructive temper, in nations and in people. To foul one’s own nest, to hurt oneself or those one loves is irrational. As opposed to the irrational, the non-rational is rationality’s silent mirror, a model for the right ordering of the world.29
THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS
One evening, a number of years back, I was sitting at my desk in my office when I heard music coming from the street outside my window. I got up and went out onto the front porch. A few yards down the block four men were standing in a loose circle on the sidewalk under a street lamp. They were singing a gospel song in four-part harmony. I have sometimes seen egrets standing in the slough by the side of the freeway, all elegance and grace, in the muck and stagnant water. Their song was like a gorgeous migratory bird that had chosen our block to rest awhile. The men’s voices were the best of friends. They could not have been better suited to each other had they dreamt each other into being. “I was lost, my sweet brother,” each voice said, “and you have found me.” A car stopped. A woman asked what church they belonged to, and complemented them. She sat for a while, listening with the window rolled down, resting her head on the steering wheel. And I stood on the porch, suddenly and unexpectedly happy.
Their song made everything all right. It opened a space within which a fragrant grove sprung up, and we were brought in among its sheltering boughs. The men sang for a while, and then they stopped and continued on their way and when their song ended the space the song created closed up again. And we were left to our own devices.
Most of the time we take our relationship to things—lampposts, sidewalks, doorways, telephones, keyboards, billboards, baskets of laundry—for granted. We expect little of them, and they give back little in return. They tend to be just there, giving us at best a flaccid handshake, staring at us blankly as if they didn’t know us. Numerous, monotonous, lacking in conviction, things press up close against each other but avoid touching, like strangers in a crowded elevator. Art allows us to touch the inner thigh of things. It turns a marriage of convenience between the self and the world into an extravagant love affair. The partner we have long since ceased to admire and cherish becomes the embodiment of our dreams.
The Promise of Happiness.
“Art,” wrote Stendhal, “is the promise of happiness.”30 Politics, like art, should be a promise of happiness, the promise that the space a song can open up will not disappear when the song stops. At times, running in the streets during a demonstration, I have felt something of that promise, the same promise I felt in that song those men sang as I listened on the porch of my office.
Seattle. November, 1999. Demonstration against the World Trade Organization. I am running or rather hobbling through clouds of tear gas and pepper spray, feeling my old Motherfucker love of riots rekindled. My eyes burn. Tears stream down my face, obscuring my vision. Behind us the police are hurling concussion grenades and shooting rubber bullets into the crowd. I pass a young man. He’s just standing there. He’s been wounded just below his lower lip by a rubber bullet. It has made a hole through to his gums. I look back to see a line of police advancing. They are dressed in black and encased entirely in bulky body armor. Their movements are jerky and stiff like the monsters in old Frankenstein movies. Their faces are hidden by the visors of their helmets. Behind them comes an armored riot control vehicle. A cop is standing on its hood, firing what looks like a mutant Gatling gun with a cluster of revolving barrels.
In the lulls between attacks by the police I have time to wander through downtown Seattle. The stores are deserted. Our hand-painted banners hang from their balconies. Many of their windows were broken early in the morning by a roving band of anarchists—the dreaded “Black Block”—shouting slogans and concealing their faces with bandannas. I recognize them. They’re the modern day Motherfuckers, reveling in the sound of breaking glass.31 I admire the shattered windows of the Starbucks outlet, Niketown, and the Gap.
On the corner of the FAO Schwartz megastore, adjacent to an enormous two story high bronze teddy bear, someone has spray painted “We are winning.” We are winning. Or so it seems. We have prevented one of the most powerful organizations on earth from holding its meeting. We have held Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state of the world’s dominant superpower, a virtual prisoner in her hotel room. And we have all, it seemed to me, been aroused to a great aliveness by the threat of danger and the thrill of victory.
Late in the afternoon, I stop at an intersection to watch a group of young, mostly brown-skinned women (the demonstrators have been predominantly white) dancing in the middle of an intersection. As they dance, they sing:Wood, Stone, Feather and Bone,
Roar of the ocean guide us home.
River, Sea, Ancient Tree,
Howl of the wind gonna set us free.
On “Roar” they extend their arms in front of them. On “Howl,” they reach towards the sky and spread their hands. On each word they move in unison and turn—back, forward, left, right—accompanied by a young man drumming on a dumbec. They laugh as they move and smile at us and take time to teach us the words. They are vigorous, graceful, open, and nonviolent—everything the Robocops are not. I find them achingly beautiful. The moment is fragile. I know it can’t last. Soon the intersection will be overrun by police. But for now the dancing has made it ours. And I think and feel—there is no higher art, no greater reason, no better politics, no other place on earth I’d rather be.
A HIDEOUS RATIONALITY
“[The] idea of Reason comprehends everything and ultimately absolves everything, because it has its place and function in the whole and the whole is beyond good and evil, truth and falsehood. It may even be justifiable, logically as well as historically, to define Reason in terms which include slavery, the Inquisition, child labor, concentration camps, gas chambers, and nuclear preparedness. These may well have been integral parts of that rationality which has governed the recorded history of mankind.
—Herbert Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic” preface to Reason and Revolution32
“Be reasonable,” we are told if our demands upon the System become too insistent, our voices too strident. By which is meant: Be patient. Defer gratification. Acquiesce. Play by the rules. Do not rock the boat. In short—accept the limits of the possible as defined by the System. The patronizing voice of reason whispers in our ear to mind our manners. But in a world hurtling towards nightmare, it is not irrational to be unreasonable.
The increasing rationality of the System is accompanied by an increasing irrationality. The more complete the System’s ability to control our lives, the more it spirals out of control. Science furnishes the tools by which people and things are manipulated, without commenting on how those tools are used. It prepares the world for exploitation as a nurse prepares a patient for her examination. The nurse takes her clothing from the patient leaving her near naked and shivering in one of those flimsy paper gowns that tie awkwardly in the back. Science takes from nature the clothing of subjectivity, leaving her bare and unprotected. It reduces quality to quantity just as business translates all value into dollars.33
The claim of reason to universality becomes a disguise for the System’s self-serving agenda. The naked pursuit of profit is unseemly. As conquistadors slaughtered under the banner of the universal religion of Christ, so modern nations slaughter under the banner of universal reason. Reason may not
be directly invoked, but the children she bore in the eighteenth century—the liberal ideals of representative government and individual freedom—are constantly trotted out as justifications for the theft of resources, the destruction of trade barriers, and the imposition of market discipline. “This is our opportunity to provide an impetus to freedom and democracy in Latin America and create new jobs for America as well. It’s a good deal, and we ought to take it,” crowed Bill Clinton at the signing of the North America free Trade Agreement.34 “Now, as before, we will secure our nation, protect our freedom, and help others to find freedom of their own,” proclaimed George Bush in the run up to the Iraq war.35
All opposition to the agenda of domination and control of resources is characterized as irrational—hidebound, narrow, and parochial. No wonder that reason and its vaunted universality have fallen into disrepute. Too many people have suffered at its hands. Too many have seen their communities torn apart, their wells poisoned, their livelihoods destroyed, their cultures trampled. They are left exposed and vulnerable. As their worlds disintegrate, they are integrated into the modern world, as fodder is “integrated” into the cow fattened for slaughter.
The progress of capital accumulation is proclaimed by those who reap the profits to be the progress of democracy, freedom, and human rights. But the benefits of freedom and democracy are enjoyed by only the narrowest stratum of privileged dwellers in the upper reaches of certain western societies. The pain imposed by those western societies has been felt in the vast reaches of Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in the ghettos and wretched backwaters of the world’s richest nation. Beyond the narrow circle of “owners of the means of production” and their faithful flunkies all the talk of rights, democracy, and freedom is just so much chatter accompanying campaigns of plunder, pillage, and genocide. The world shaped by the irrational pursuit of profit is a world mercilessly divided between the exploited and the exploiters, a world in which the gap between rich and poor grows ever larger, a world of vast unnecessary misery, a world in which the very biological basis of life is threatened.
