Editors note: The following exchange is between 33-year-old organizer Yotam Marom and 82-year-old George Lakey, whose activism, organizing and training spans over 50 years.
Dear George,
I remember sitting at the small round table in your kitchen, with tea you had just made. It was Spring, and light was coming in through the window above the sink, where you were bustling around as you often do. We talked about life, work, politics. You were excited about something or other maybe your How We Win book tour, or something I was up to, or a new trend of growth in the movement like the Democratic Socialists of America or Sunrise. Im always mystified by how genuinely excited you are about things young people are doing. I think its part of what attracts so many of us to your kitchen table.
I think you had recently turned 82, so we were talking about your age. I like to joke that youre now only now entering your prime. (Even as we speak, you are on a 40-city book tour, no big deal.) Between your family genes and your own stubborn goodwill, youve probably got another 40 years in you!
It might have been after an aside about your age that you said something like: Im so happy to be here now. Theres no other time in history Id rather be alive for.
It feels like Im standing with my three-year-old daughter on one of those flat escalators slowly churning toward the edge of a cliff
I dont know if I thought much of it at the time. Old people say wacky things sometimes, and young people (on a good day) smile along and humor them (though Im sure that, in reality, most of the time youre the one smiling along and humoring us). But then I heard you say this again, and again I even went to one of your book events and you said it there too. In all honesty, it seemed a bit insane to me. The fact that you could feel happy to be alive in this particular historical moment was miles away from how I felt.
Most of the time, I feel pretty unlucky to be alive at this time. I wake up with the sense that could probably manage if all we had to do was overcome the many political, economic and social crises were facing. But climate change changes the game dramatically, both by making the stakes completely existential, and by putting a time limit on what we can do about it. I live with a quiet, constant sadness at the loss people around the world are already facing, a nagging fear of whats to come and a sort of ashamed hopelessness about what we can do to stop it.
I dont think Im alone in that. It seems that other folks in my peer group, people in our 30s, feel similarly. Depression is becoming more and more widespread, and younger generations kids in high school now seem to be showing even deeper signs of it.
Theres a line in the opening episode of the Sopranos, where panning over a hollow, grey suburban life in New Jersey Tony says: Lately, Ive been getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over. Its a bit harrowing, a guy really framing his whole existence inside the collapse of the American dream, and the bleakness of it all. That line now comes to me often. It feels like Im standing with my three-year-old daughter on one of those flat escalators slowly churning toward the edge of a cliff, wondering how much more life shes going to get to live before we get to the edge, what shell get to see, what shell miss, what happens to her, and after her, if anything.
So, George, your feeling that this is the best time to be alive doesnt resonate. But its also confusing.
What is the path to power in times like these? What are you seeing, George, that Im not seeing?
My general orientation about everything thats fucked up in the world is that the solution is mass movements. Want to change the world? Build a movement. And so part of what is depressing to me about this particular time in human history is that our movements are, unfortunately, not prepared for the task ahead. Our labor movement has been in collapse for decades. We have no serious political power or parties of our own to wield it at a national scale. Even our most massive demonstrations are eclipsed by the average attendance of a football game. On a good day, I can see that movements are on the rise, that we are contending for political power in a way that is actually ground-breaking, that we are building institutions, getting better and sharper. Some days, I can almost taste a Green New Deal, imagine a world in which black lives really matter, see the border wall collapse, almost believe a social democratic economy is within our grasp. But most days I think: too little, too late.
And thats where the confusion sets in: Youve been around for so many of the movement moments I envy! You helped train some of the first lunch counter sit-ins in the civil rights movement, were part of the movement against the war in Vietnam and everything that circled it, the nuclear disarmament movement, and everything between then and now. Youve witnessed entire decades in U.S. politics where millions of people regularly took the streets, where massive cultural change took place, where huge layers of the population were politicized, where it looked like there might even be a revolution. And yet, here we are, in the midst of a crisis perhaps deeper than human beings have ever faced, knowing that movements are our only hope, but living at a time in which our movements are not yet ready to organize at the scale of the crisis, and in which theres a time limit to avert the worst of whats before us.
What about that could possibly make us lucky to be alive at this time? What is the potential? What is the path to power in times like these? What are you seeing, George, that Im not seeing?
So I decided to ask you and ask you again, and again. And what has emerged is this response, for which Im grateful. May we always be lucky enough to have the vision, backwards and forwards, from mentors like you. May we have the humility to learn from that wisdom and also the arrogance to break the rules when we need to. Im sure you wouldnt want it any other way.
Love,Yotam Marom
Dear Yotam,
I first want to acknowledge your feelings of urgency and anguish. I see the grim picture youre seeing. I take it personally, as you do. My housemates sometimes see me crying as I read the morning newspaper over breakfast.
Even so, I feel lucky to be alive now because this is the best chance in my lifetime to make really big progressive change. Our difference is partly that I see powerful conditions emerging, under the surface, that open new possibilities. I call them signals of emergence. I see evidence, right now, that these trends will give us a chance to gain victories we havent been able to reach before in this country.
Please notice that I said, a chance. No guarantees. Mine isnt a new version of the old scientific Marxism I dont believe in the inevitability of progress. But thats OK because I am willing to take chances. When, at age 39, I was expected to die from a very nasty cancer, my community and I committed to the chance that I would live.
Im grateful that I went for it then, and that now Im part of your community, eager to go for it now. And because I like to argue with you, Ill point to evidence of conditions emerging that give our progressive movements the chance this time to make decisive change.
The signals of emergence are obscured by the drama of pain, from opioids to floods to shootings to the guy who occupies the White House. In all this high-decibel confusion, the signals of emergence can get lost.
The previous high-water mark: the 1960s-70s
Lets compare today with the 60s. The prelude to that decade was kicked off in 1955 by the Montgomery bus boycott, a mass movement of 50,000 black people in Alabama. Although neither political party wanted to touch the civil rights movement in the early 60s, we forced major changes.
Victories continued for Chicano and Filipino farmworkers, women, LGBTQ people, elders, mental health consumers, environmentalists, and many other groups inspired to stand up and fight for their rights. The momentum of the 60s continued well into the 70s.
We often needed the drama of direct action in order to arouse the numbers needed for success. When I joined the tiny opposition to the Vietnam War I found it hard to draw attention to something happening in a small country few people had even heard of.
Soon I found myself on a Quaker sailing ship confronting naval gunboats off the coast of Vietnam, one of the dramatic campaigns in 1967 that awakened Americans to the war. The peace movement grew massive and helped force the U.S. to give up its self-appointed mission of replacing the French Empire in running Vietnam.
Millions of Americans in that period took direct action, acting outside the box defined by high school textbooks as the proper place for civic duty: the electoral system. Inspired by the drama of nonviolent direct action, even more millions lobbied and canvassed and drove voters to the polls. It would take thousands of words to describe the progressive victories gained from 1955 to when President Ronald Reagan began the counter-offensive in 1981 by firing the air traffic controllers and breaking their union.
Whats different now?
Much of what discourages your generation is not new. During the 60s and 70s we also faced a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, armed militias, and a revival of the Nazi movement. We saw militarization of police departments and police infiltration of social movements. We saw the shooting and killing of students by Mississippi State Police at Jackson State and the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. We even saw assassinations of some of our greatest political leaders, and an all-out war by the police on black organizations and communities. In other countries, the U.S. Empire run by politicians at home in the interests of the economic elite was killing millions of people.
In those days of rampant injustice we built mighty movements that forced progressive change. Dick Cluster mischievously titled his book about those movements and the sparking role that had been played by the student sit-ins, They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee.
You and I agree that those movements didnt change the system deeply enough. This time around, with the climate crisis at our door, we need to go farther. In this letter Ill focus on what makes that possible, like the signs that the system itself is cracking.
Trends that open the door for a bigger leap forward
I see four new trends that open the door for bigger change than we could make in the 1960s: inequality-led polarization, economic insecurity, decline of federal governmental legitimacy and climate disasters. We also have assets we didnt have back in the day.
1. The two-headed impact of polarization
While traveling on book tours Ive heard a widespread belief that political polarization keeps us stuck. Intuitively, the claim sounds true. How can a country move forward if everyones shouting and no ones listening?
Historically, however, polarization has a double impact. One is stalemated governments and divided communities. The other impact is a loosening, a setting in motion. My favorite metaphor is a blacksmiths forge: polarization heats up society, making it malleable.
Were frustrated and saddened by the first impact of polarization: relationships fracture, racism becomes more overt, violence more frequent.
However, the volatility also makes positive change easier to get. In the polarized 1930s progressive movements got changes they could only dream of in the 20s, like unions, labor laws, Social Security, conservation, electricity for millions, bank regulation and better policies for family farmers.
Theres no guarantee that increased volatility will yield changes for the better. In Germany and Italy during the 1920s and 30s polarization made fascist outcomes possible.
During those same decades Scandinavian polarization predictably generated fascist growth. Fortunately, the left in those countries navigated the polarization brilliantly, using the volatility to grow mass democratic socialist movements. The result: more individual freedom than Americans have, accompanied by more equality, a stronger social safety net, and higher productivity.
The late black historian Vincent Harding likened history to a river. Remembering my experience on a class V river in West Virginia I think of activism during polarization as white water rafting. In the 1920s and 30s the river of history for Germany and Italy, the United States, and the Scandinavians all hit the turbulence of white water. The first two countries capsized. The United States navigated pretty well and made progress. The Scandinavians, with historical advantages and better strategy, made a breakthrough everyone can learn from.
Forward to my lifetime, the 1960s and 70s: racial, gender, generational and other conflicts created turbulence. Even though we lacked then some assets we have today, we made important gains.
Different now from the 1960s is the economic inequality thats driving polarization. Political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal found that political polarization correlates directly with economic inequality. The more inequality, the more polarization. The United States has now become one of the most unequal societies in history.
The 2018 tax law generates even more inequality. That in turn drives more polarization. We can expect, therefore, that the resulting volatility opens more opportunity for progressive change than Ive experienced in my lifetime.
2. Economic insecurity
In the 60s, the United States experienced an overall condition of stable prosperity. Young people in each generation expected to become more prosperous than their parents. Since then weve seen the loss of well-paid working class jobs and debt-bondage for those who try to get into the middle class through college. At the same time, a pension crisis looms.
Falling economic security compared with the 60s shakes things up. The result: more openness to new ideas and bolder approaches.
Increasingly teachers cant afford to live in growing cities where they teach. Commuting becomes more difficult the national engineers give the United States a D- grade on infrastructure. The war on immigration makes it even harder to imagine either re-populating emptying towns or re-building the infrastructure.
A dysfunctional health care system fails to control costs, leaves tens of millions uninsured, ignores untold numbers of trauma victims, and has waiting lists for the mentally ill and drug addicted. Some life expectancies are declining. Healthcare bills drive up bankruptcies, destabilizing towns already reeling from loss of jobs.
All these trends hit people of color even harder than white people.
Compare that to the 60s when the American dream was still around: Upward mobility was high, especially for white men, and life expectancies were increasing. For us social movement organizers, the situation was daunting: So many people could ignore the value of collective action for change because their individual prospects looked promising.
Upward mobility has declined. The economic dream is fading.
Many express their disappointment and rage by moving away from centrism, opening to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or, on the other hand, voting for the first time in their lives for a socialist, even an elderly Jew from Brooklyn who represents hippie Vermont in the U.S. Senate!
Falling economic security compared with the 60s shakes things up. The result: more openness to new ideas and bolder approaches.
3. Decline in governments legitimacy
In the 60s governmental legitimacy was high. When the public was awakened to the scandal of widespread poverty in the wealthiest country on earth, President Lyndon B. Johnson responded with a War on Poverty that was met with widespread approval.
At the time I heard civil rights leader Bayard Rustin cynically comment that the War on Poverty was the first time the United States is going to war with a BB gun. He was right, but an outlier. Most people had a sunny confidence that, if the federal government chose to solve a problem like poverty, it could do it.
That confidence has largely disappeared, regarding poverty (most national politicians avoid the subject) and a whole lot else. The feds have trouble simply keeping the government open to do basic functions like safety inspections and collecting taxes.
Compared with earlier in my lifetime, the loss of confidence in government makes it easier now to initiate grassroots actions.
Since 2001, the Gallup organization has sought data on how proud Americans are of our country. The polls show pride has been sinking, hitting its lowest point so far in 2019. Of the various aspects measured, pride is lowest in our political system.
Many people nowadays believe there is widespread corruption, prompting presidential candidate Donald Trump to promise to drain the swamp. A majority even of Republicans polled believe the economic elite has too much power in governmental policy-making. One poll shows a majority of Americans now believe that ordinary people would do a better job of solving problems than elected officials.
Compared with earlier in my lifetime, the loss of confidence in government makes it easier now to initiate grassroots actions, and new technology makes it easier for the actions to spread.
4. Climate the game changer
I agree with you that this is fundamental. Climate is also linked to the previous trend: government failures further undermine its own legitimacy.
Additionally, the mind-blowing nature of the climate challenge is at last impacting activists who once defined it as a single-issue effort. Now movement leadership is shifting toward those who can hold a bigger picture and design visions to fight for, like the Green New Deal.
The dynamics unleashed by climate change can promote unity in a larger, broader, and more visionary mass movement powerful enough to take on the 1 percent.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow long ago outlined a hierarchy of human needs that prioritized security as well as physiological needs like food. From extreme weather following hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the growth of severe asthma to the epidemic of wildfires, basic human needs for safety are at risk because of governments incapacity to respond to the climate crisis on the scale needed. The science is clear. To come even close to competency, the federal government would need to respond to the climate crisis the way it did to World War II: an all-out mobilization.
The government cant deal with climate because the 1 percent vetoes significant action. Its veto power is not new. According to the Princeton University oligarchy study, the economic elite was the primary player in governmental policy even before the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United ruling released even more money into elections. Thats why leading Democrats as well as Republicans have refused until now to respond to the climate crisis.
Barack Obama discovered this early in his presidency when he asked then-Sen. John Kerry to develop a climate bill (the Dems being in control of Congress at the time) and Kerry reported back that he couldnt create a bill his colleagues would support.
While part of the economic elite is doubling down on climate denial, another part is moderating on climate, as reflected in the activity of billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. That split gives permission to Democrats to shift so they can play their traditional good cop role in U.S. politics, leaving once again the bad cop role to the Republicans.
In that way the Democratic leadership, constrained by loyalty to the elite, can hope to co-opt the growing climate justice movement, as it did with the labor and civil rights movements. Its worth recalling that the civil rights movement made its greatest gains 1955-65, when it was independent, then slowed to a crawl once embraced by the Democrats.
One Democratic professional politician prominent in his state actually said to me with a cheerful grin, after I called out the Democrats for co-opting movements: Youre right about what we do, and were good at it.
Climate disasters and the decline of some prejudices mean that divide-and-rule is less available for the establishments defense of its dominance.
The traditional U.S. political division of labor is now playing out with climate: the Republicans are deniers while Democratic leadership talks climate and rejects the only proposal before them that takes the crisis seriously: the Green New Deal.
As journalist/activist Bill McKibben says, even Congress cannot suspend the laws of physics. Growing failure on the environmental front produces what political scientists consider a recipe for rapid change and even revolution: the demonstrated inability of a government to solve the basic problems faced by society.
How does all this influence me to say were facing the biggest chance of my lifetime to make breakthrough change? The dynamics unleashed by climate change can promote unity in a larger, broader, and more visionary mass movement powerful enough to take on the 1 percent.
In the 1960s and 70s we were able to generate sufficient grassroots power to change some laws and policies backed by the 1 percent, but we could not challenge the elites dominance. Although the elite was put on the defensive, it was able to use lines of cleavage in our society, especially race, to regain the offensive in the 1980s.
When he was interviewed by the New York Times in 2006 billionaire Warren Buffett described the economic elites move as class warfare, and he went on to say its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning.
True enough their counter-offensive launched in the 1980s has been winning victory after victory. The climate crisis is something new; it provides an existential basis for solidarity that did not exist previously. The third 500-year flood that hit Houston in three years hurt everyone except the very rich, as do the wildfires and floods in the Midwest.
Each crisis impacts different groups differently, but the accumulated impact is felt by all except the class that has vetoed real action for sustainability. (The very rich are currently buying property in New Zealand for their new homes.)
While climate change itself can become a force for solidarity, it comes at a time in which Americans have already reduced the lines of division that were so deep in the 1960s. Even though we are still far from reaching Martin Luther Kings dream, and classism has hardly been touched, the United States is much less racist, sexist, homophobic and elder-intolerant than it was in the 60s.
To put it together: Climate disasters and the decline of some prejudices mean that divide-and-rule is less available for the establishments defense of its dominance. Many more people are losing confidence that the masters of the universe and elected officials are able to protect life and dignity. They are looking to each other for leadership, and we see that in the emergence of more grassroots activism in the last decade. Expect these powerful trends to accelerate.
How to navigate the river
Earlier I mentioned Vincent Hardings metaphor for history as a long river. Sometimes it moves very slowly and other times quickens to white water. Ive studied and participated in movements that handled the rapids poorly and drowned, and also movements that absorbed the energy of the white water to navigate successfully.
Thats how I can picture what our successful navigation might look like. Im not predicting exactly how the river will run this time, or the exact moves well make. Im describing how I think our paddling might turn out, based on the right moves other movements made in other times and circumstances, and what moves are available to us as we hit the white water.
I picture American activists realizing how much they can learn from their mistakes, rather than repeating them. Organizers and leaders decide to base their moves on evidence-based knowledge, gained through wide use of study groups and training workshops. Movement cultures adopt a focus on our learning curve.
This makes quite a difference when it comes to the question of whether to use violence in direct actions. Organizers use the evidence produced by social scientists showing that nonviolent action is much more practical and effective than violence, even for protection. The resulting discipline frustrates our opponents, who are still sending provocateurs into the movement to try to instigate violence and make it possible to shut us down.
Training also helps us build solidarity more quickly. Prior to the 2020s some activists were unwittingly helping out the elites divide-and-rule strategy by activists using the calling out tactic to respond to oppression dynamics they found in the movement. Resorting to shame-and-blame generated a toxic activist culture in some movements and a sense of scarcity that meant any oppressed group that wasnt in the limelight at a particular moment was somehow being left out.
However, training organizations like Momentum, Wildfire, and Training for Change grow rapidly to meet the movements need to drop old divisive habits.
Activists shift from one-off protests to sustained campaigns. In nonviolent direct action campaigns organizers use a series of escalating actions directed toward deciders who can yield our demand. With campaign strategy activists move beyond protests really just the expression of their opinion to the sustained series of actions that gains actual wins.
This shift is influenced by the popularity of electoral campaigns by Bernie Sanders and other outliers. Activists watching Sanders 2015 espousal of Medicare for All grow into a major policy proposal that occupied center stage in 2019 learned how much it matters to focus on a demand in a sustained way over time.
Even though the mass media still call the campaigners dramatic actions protests, most organizers move on to the advanced technology of direct action campaigns. The wins support morale and build the spirit of unity. The community that activists experience over time by learning how to struggle together proves an excellent antidote to despair.
In addition to re-discovering direct action campaigns, activists from various movements are learning from the civil rights struggle the movement power grid. Multiple local campaigns in the South networked with each other in the 1960s. When one of them needed help or seemed ready for a growth spurt, energy could flow into that one from elsewhere, in the form of organizers, money, name leaders.
To cite just two examples, that strength of the grid made it possible for Birmingham in 1964 and Selma in 1965 to shake the national power structure. Alabama, geographically far from Washington, D.C., twice provided the pivot to force national wins!
I see national movement leaders realizing that, instead of calling national marches at this or that place, they can become strategically organic by directing energy and mass to local campaign sites. To use military terms, movement leaders shift turns the entire nation into potential battlefields instead of relying on the tired destinations of New York City and Washington, D.C. That strategy shift accelerates our struggle.
In fact, back in 2016-17 grassroots activists anticipated the strategy shift when a mass influx showed up in South Dakota at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline; it was the largest assembly of native Americans in decades, and the solidarity stimulated other pipeline fights around the nation.
Sharpening up strategy for struggle isnt enough
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Can now really be the best time to be alive? - Waging Nonviolence
