—EDUARDO GALEANO
A few years ago I made a presentation at a weeklong writers conference in Idyllwild, California, where I also taught poetry to aspiring writers. In my talk I broke down the main tenets of indigenous thought. Afterward, a kindly older man walked up to me. He said he was a retired marine, interested in writing, and enjoyed my talk. However, he wanted me to accept that the best thing the United States ever did was the US Constitution. Although he didn’t say this, I could extrapolate that he meant what “white people” in the United States ever did.
I waited a beat before responding, as calm and centered as I could be, commensurate with his manner. I told him the US Constitution was an undeniably important document—the law of the land. And yet its major ideas and philosophies, including about democracy and representative government, were already in existence before any European set foot on these shores.
The man’s face grew puzzled. He then thanked me and stepped away.
There’s been a case made that the so-called Founding Fathers borrowed from Native Americans’ existing governing principles, in particular from the Iroquois Confederacy (People of the Longhouse). Perhaps, but if they did, they didn’t incorporate the more equalitarian aspects. For example, the Five Nations of the Iroquois (which later added another tribe to become six) were matrilineal; clan mothers chose the leading representatives. Most historians conclude, however, that US governing theorems were modeled from the patriarchal mindset of the Greeks, the English, and other Europeans. And, as in most of Europe of those times, inequality was built into these ruling systems.
For Native Americans, the US Constitution was for all intents and purposes a limited warranty. It spelled out “rights” that actually curtailed the freedoms indigenous people already enjoyed, even if unwritten. The first peoples here didn’t need a piece of paper to recognize, nurture, and live by essential agreements. For them, nature—everything from the smallest organisms to the vast cosmos—was their constitution.
When ratified in 1788, the US Constitution also circumscribed voting rights. Most states insisted on enfranchising only white men with property. There were also compromises with slaveholders, like counting enslaved Blacks as three-fifths of a person to give Southern states more congressional representation, even though enslaved people weren’t considered human and couldn’t vote.
After some 240 years, several battles, mobilizations, rulings, legislative amendments, marches, riots, and war, the country extended constitutional rights to women, who gained the right to vote in 1920; Native Americans, who weren’t considered “citizens” until 1924; Blacks, Mexicans, other communities of color, and the disabled, who received civil and voting rights in 1964 and 1965; and LGBTQ persons, who finally saw a Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in 2015.
I’ll quote none other than Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, from his 1987 speech during the Constitution’s bicentennial:
I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.
Nobody gave anybody anything—every extension of rights had to be fought for, at the cost of thousands of lives. Whether de jure or de facto, by law or by practice, discrimination and disenfranchisement had to be named and justice actively pressed for.
Obviously there’s immense value in the US Constitution. But, again, we should stop whitewashing history. It’s also a negligible argument that these rights have to be “earned,” something early European settlers never had to do in relation to their Native and Black brethren.
For all its importance, the US Constitution can’t seem to stop the rise of autocratic presidents and narrow-minded governing bodies. Using the Constitution, the most deceptive of politicians or agency officials skillfully attempt to pull a fast one on most of us. The current political and economic order has now become the order of chaos, wherein the natural laws that can help everyone are discarded for capricious laws that cause more damage. Chaos and instability are characteristic of the prevailing administration, Congress, and even the Supreme Court.
Checks and balances? These are largely nonoperational.
Even with all the mountains of tax revenues flowing into government coffers, we still don’t have a right to the best possible healthcare or free and quality education for everyone. Laws should guarantee freedom from insecurity for all people, not just to those who can afford it. How does an advanced and developed country continue to tout itself as the “best” in the world when our reality is lacking a moral, humane foundation?
The crux of our social, political, and economic crises is linked to our coerced allegiance to empire. The US military budget is bigger than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy, and Brazil—$682 billion to $652 billion. The United States is going the way of all empires, into an implosion amidst a growing stridency. Empires are said to last, at the most, around a thousand years. Hitler’s Third Reich was supposed to last as long but didn’t go beyond a dozen years thanks to successful opposition (although at a loss of sixty million lives). The United States can also fall into this ensnarement—or we can curtail our decline by rising up to meet this country’s great promise and hope. Estimates now claim that US-involved or -orchestrated wars, invasions, coups, interventions, and proxy wars may have led to twenty to thirty million deaths since the end of World War II.
The real battle is for the soul of America.
In 2014, I managed a seemingly foolish move, against all odds and with literally no chance of success: I ran for governor in the most populous, costliest, and most economically divided state in the country—California.
I decided to undertake this campaign when every political party and movement in the United States was deeply in crisis—when society was rent with irreparable economic and political ruptures, when outmoded industrial capitalist models/concepts were dying, while new forms of organization, relationships, and governance struggled to be born.
I couldn’t have done this without the support of my family—who backed me knowing I’d put in inordinate time and effort, which pretty much truncated my ability to hustle work, thus affecting whether I could keep the household going.
I couldn’t have done this without the well wishes of the community centered around Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore. Although the Centro didn’t endorse me or use its funds or offices for the campaign (it’s a tax-exempt corporation), I ran knowing the space might suffer—since our inception I had helped do outreach and fund-raising with our board and other volunteers (although Trini and her staff were the ones who actually made everything happen).
I had already run for US vice president in 2012 on the ticket of the Justice Party USA, with Salt Lake City’s former mayor Rocky Anderson as our presidential nominee. I traveled to a few cities and received coverage in important progressive media outlets such as Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! Rocky represented a strong voice against corruption in politics and against the “duopoly”—one party with two faces, masquerading as choice. The Justice Party was able to make the ballots of fifteen states, and obtain write-in status in fifteen additional states, to garner around forty thousand votes in the national election.
So, just before I turned sixty, I offered this potent sacrifice—in the sense of a sacred act—for a new campaign. At the time I felt that after more than forty years of revolutionary teaching, organizing, and writing, I had to take all this to heightened levels of influence and impact. This wasn’t about being a better governor; I offered myself as a different kind of governor.
I understood the electoral platform had for the most part lost major relevance in the country. It was a feeble and largely inapt space, but one I didn’t think should be turned over to corporate interests without a fight. I’m also aware of Republican efforts to purge voters from the rolls and set up obstacles to voting in mostly poor communities of color. And evidence has been found of Russian trolls and others influencing campaigns. All these efforts, in my view, were to push aside revolutionary visions and voices, new ways of thinking and articulating.
What underlies this imbalance is deeper, wider, and cannot be corrected within the current capitalist system—a just, peaceful, and green world is simply irreconcilable with a profit-motivated paradigm. Still, we must stretch the system beyond its limits. We must try. We must actively pursue this within the reality that democracy has been largely bought and sold.
Reforms should push forward revolution, and revolution should complete all reforms.
The Democratic and Republican Parties have become drenched with big money. With the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, upholding the “right” of corporations to make political expenditures, obscene amounts of capital entered even the smallest, and seemingly most inconsequential, elections. Elections are another industry—the 2016 national election was the most expensive yet, costing around $2 billion, while mass media made a killing on ads and commercials.
Campaign-finance reform arose to limit the way corporations, banks, and lobbyists swayed and controlled the American vote. The more control big money had in voting, the more removed the process had become from the majority of the American electorate, especially its working class, now being driven to abject poverty and homelessness. The pervading economy in the country’s most deprived areas has been dominated by Walmart, which became the largest employer in many of the formerly industrial and agricultural powerhouse states of the Midwest and the South. Nobody employs more people in the private sector throughout the world than Walmart. The world’s largest government employer is the US Department of Defense.
That’s not to say there aren’t decent and principled Democrats, or even Republicans. But despite courageous politicians who still understand the selfless nature of public service, the institutional powers are not really interested in true representation.
At the time of my campaign, California was the sixth largest economy in the world, the most developed and wealthiest state, yet with a 24 percent poverty rate—higher than the poverty rates of Mississippi and Georgia. The state had a multibillion-dollar prison industry that garnered more tax dollars than colleges and universities. It had opened the door to “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) that poisoned land and water tables with hundreds of cancer-causing chemicals and tons of gallons of waste water blasted to extract oil from shale while energy companies extracted vast profits. California also had the most migrants to the country, yet was seeing increased deportations and the building of privately owned detention centers alongside the fact that many of its major businesses, particularly in agriculture, were dependent on low-paid migrant labor. Here was a state with the largest companies in the defense industry plying for a war economy while core urban areas became battlegrounds for street and drug gangs—with law enforcement agencies as the largest “gangs” to curtail them. We were also the fiftieth worst state when it came to arts funding—and forty-eighth worst in education funding.
I love California, its people, the land, but not everything it had become. The state’s economic and political difficulties could not be solved by superficial economic or political policies, or by passing laws or initiatives that kept the system intact. Something bigger was missing—an imagination for a new California.
I asked my friend of four decades, Anthony Prince, a revolutionary lawyer and strategist, to be my campaign manager. He was actually my campaign manager in 1976–77 when I ran for a Los Angeles school board seat (I was twenty-two then, living in Watts). For the new campaign, we had a number of volunteers meet regularly at the guesthouse in my backyard. We embarked on a journey of no return—with little in the way of funds, around $30,000 at the end, against an array of fifteen candidates whose frontrunner had up to $20 million at his disposal. We ran against a relatively popular sitting governor, Jerry Brown, on his fourth run for the office since he first became governor in 1975.
In tiny, cramped rented cars, Tony and I (as well as activists of the northeast San Fernando Valley) drove up and down the state a dozen times—to the Central Valley, the Sacramento Delta area, the Bay Area, the Inland Empire, and other parts of Southern California, including the border area, coastal cities, and deserts. We faced a new primary structure where only the top two candidates (regardless of party) would make the ballot in the general election. Of course, I wouldn’t take corporate funds. We had to go grass roots all the way.
Since party-nominated candidates were no longer allowed to run, I had to get the endorsements of important parties and organizations. Even though I ran as an “independent,” I received the invaluable endorsements of the Green Party of California, the Justice Party USA, the Mexican American Political Association, and El Hormiguero (the Anthill), an activist collective, among other individuals and organizations. Even the “Dean” of Chicano Studies, Professor Rudy Acuña, who rarely gave such support, endorsed me.
Although I had a hard time attracting major media attention, since my money didn’t talk loud enough for them, I did pull off coverage from the Huffington Post, Fox News Latino, the Los Angeles Times, Truthout, MintPress News, Radio Bilingue in the Central Valley, KPFA and KPFK radio stations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and others.
I also ran for governor of California at a time when the country felt divided between the “good” guys and “bad” guys. The “good” guys—the so-called functional and “normal” people—supposedly have rights over everyone else, though they are often behind some of the most maddening and destructive ideas, acts, and laws in this country.
As far as the NRA is concerned, they are the “good” guys. The Second Amendment allows for a carefully regulated militia against tyranny, our right to “bear arms.” But many Americans are more worried about the tyranny of the NRA, which pays government officials millions of dollars—including $30 million to Trump’s campaign—for the “freedom” to own as many guns, including assault rifles, as possible, which is not part of the Second Amendment.
These “good” people include the Confederate flag–waving Americans who’ve idealized a past that never existed while going to war against a present and future they’ve distorted to fit their ideological prism. They include major sections of law enforcement, our “protectors,” who are trained to kill at any sign of danger, yet “danger” isn’t hard to find, judging by the many instances where unarmed people—mostly Black, but also poor brown and white persons—have been killed by police. They include Americans applauding “smart” bombs and sending our young men and women to wars that destroy other people’s homes, families, and cities to protect our so-called interests—oil, commerce, and power. They include law-abiding members of our urban, suburban, and rural communities, also struggling, also struck hard by economic disasters, yet secluded and often kept ignorant, since learning is for the “educated elite.”
As one racist Mississippi sheriff told a reporter following the lynching of two Black teens in 1942, hung from a bridge before a throng of spectators, resulting in no arrests: “We’re all for law and order here. But, of course, we got some good folks who get kind of wild.” (Emphasis mine.)
The “bad” guys are the rest of us who may not fall into the above categories: so-called inner-city folk, migrants of color, the mentally ill, organized labor, trans folks, the so-called “entitled” poor accepting welfare and other social services . . . I can go on and on. Just having different ideas can place you in this excluded group. Just not loving America the way “good” people say you should can get you shouted down with “Leave it!”
I’m tired of living under the oppression of hypocritical, superinflated, self-proclaimed “good” people and their politics of rage.
We’re told to believe capitalism has mystical powers. But there’s nothing magical or sacred in the so-called marketplace. In fact, capitalism is not the same as the marketplace, which has to do with exchange and has been around since before capitalism and will be there afterward. Capitalism is primarily a unique relationship based on the large-scale theft of surplus value—the amount workers are not paid for their labor, generating incalculable profits. A small (and decreasing) number of the rich and powerful end up controlling land, minerals, air, water, oil, factories, etc. as private property. To hide this relationship, capitalism upholds illusions that are meant to appear formidable and irrevocable; mortgages, the stock market, borders, money, credit, and wage systems are all deceptions cloaked in life-and-death garb. These concepts are made up—as are white supremacy, the rule of wealth, and often the explanations for when and why we go to war. We should remember that to remove illusions about any situation is to remove situations that require illusions.
With this understanding, in my campaign I also called for the eradication of poverty. I knew this required bold imaginings and systemic changes. An economy so dramatically transformed by automation and globalization demands an equally transformative vision for jobs, housing, healthcare, and education. The yardstick for this new economy should be simple: decent working and living conditions for all. I had to make a case that the social inequities we currently face are not natural disasters. They are human-made and can be changed by human minds, hands, hearts, and technology.
For example, after a spate of bad subprime mortgages and other made-up financial instruments sparked the Great Recession of 2008, millions of people lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases their lives. This didn’t happen overnight. The groundwork had been laid decades before. This included the 1978 legal challenges to state usury laws, allowing banks to promote credit cards to consumers; the 1982 congressional deregulation of the savings and loan industry; and the repeal in 1999 of most of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking.
While millions of households suffered, a few wealthy investors benefited, including real estate magnate Donald Trump. The Great Recession became a monumental transfer of wealth from the so-called middle class to the richest percentile. Government should have been there to help those most affected. Instead the US Treasury Department in late 2008 paid out $700 billion to bail out banks (the full commitment since then has been calculated at close to $17 trillion!). Big banks got bigger—they got rewarded—despite their complicity.
What keeps the majority of American people from rebelling, from upturning all the tables on the corporations and their congressional and media henchmen? As before, we are mostly in a fog of delusions that keeps us bailing water in the face of a sinking economic Titanic.
In the California governor’s campaign I proposed four pillars of a thriving and healthy society. Martin Luther King Jr. proposed such pillars just before his death in 1968. He knew any new societal structure had to have strong supports to hold everything on solid footing.
Here, in summation, are the pillars: 1) A clean and green environment for all; 2) Social justice, including an end to mass incarceration, police killings, and discriminatory practices; 3) The end of poverty, since whenever any people are poor, no matter what society claims, we are all poor in moral as well as material ways; and 4) Peace in the world and peace at home.
All of this should be undergirded by a truly transparent and publicly financed corporate-free democratic process.
As King also stated, these pillars cannot be built under capitalism. They are contrary to a system of production and politics based on the bottom line. Further, all the pillars are linked. They are inseparable as we go forward—we cannot have environmental health or social justice as long as there is poverty, and there can be no peace without environmental health and social justice . . . Every pillar is intertwined with the need for fundamental systemic change.
I felt we needed to connect the dots and not be divided by “my” issue over “yours.” I had to illuminate a vision to fully address the earthquakes shaking up the state—not just the natural ones but the economic, social, and political quakes millions had already suffered through, and the many more to come.
There were many highlights of the campaign, like when I spoke at a candidates’ event at Los Angeles Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley—the school where my father worked as a laboratory custodian for fifteen years. Or when I visited a couple of times with family and supporters in the vacant lot where a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy in Santa Rosa killed thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez when the deputy mistook Andy’s toy gun for the real thing. Similarly, I went to the memorial site where San Francisco police officers killed an unarmed security guard, Alex Nieto, in Bernal Heights. And I marched with hundreds against the police killing in LA’s Venice community of an unarmed homeless man as gentrification threatened to throw more people into the streets.
I marched through housing projects and streets in Watts with students, parents, and teachers for resources to help our schools. I received a great response from African American and Chicano Studies classes at Fresno Community College. I spoke out against the removal of poor and elderly people from their homes in the rapidly gentrifying city of San Francisco, including to a rousing gathering in old Manilatown. I addressed the largest homeless enclave between San Francisco and Los Angeles in Salinas, whose leaders are now part of one of the most important organizing efforts by the displaced, a National Union of the Homeless. In addition, I marched with four thousand people protesting the police murders of five unarmed Mexican and Central American farmworkers within two years in that city.
Corazon Del Pueblo, Brooklyn & Boyle magazine, and others from Boyle Heights organized an astonishing event called The Poetry Locomotive. Supporters jumped on the Metro in East Los Angeles, reading poetry on the trains while making various stops at stores, taco shops, and community centers. From there community members and myself read poetry and spoke on the issues. The locomotive ended at LA’s Union Station, where a growing number of people amassed to hear poetry, speeches, and words from key supporters as well as Trini and myself.
In the end, with hardly any funds but tons of energy, ideas, and volunteers, we beat out all candidates but five with close to seventy thousand votes. We were first amongst third-party and independent candidates. In San Francisco, I finished second after Brown. And I won precincts along the Mexican border. Of course, I didn’t make it out of the primary elections, but we changed the larger conversation on the issues.
We made a case that a new economic and political reality was possible.
Every age has its story—the mythology of the day, if you will—which corresponds to real, objective forces. I’m trying to get at the unfolding revolutionary process from another angle, one that maintains the content of our times, based on what’s actually happening, and examines how this intersects with story, the imagination, the subjective.
I’m trying to see spirit and science properly joined.
An important aspect of any story that dares to indicate where we are as a culture and a people, as well as where we’re going, is how imagination intersects with the revolutionary potential in society. This includes the thorough integration of the arts into daily life, and not just as a nice thing to do, for pleasure, or to pass the time (although the arts provide all these things). As society moves toward a more creative/inventive stage in history—based on digital modes of production and other advances—we can enliven this statement: to become a complete human being is to become a complete artist.
The path out of chaos is not order. It’s creativity. We need a society that applies its wealth and production to this aim—that every human being should be healthy in body, mind, and spirit, able to access their innate genius to make their creative and indelible mark in this world.
We are living in perilous times. Most everything is up in the air—economies, politics, families, work, structures, and ideologies. At the same time, antiquated philosophies are being given new life (white supremacy, for one). The past is tearing apart the present. The present appears to be on skates, racing downhill with no brakes. And the future looms with a challenge—can we make the right societal choices, move away from contrived scarcity into plenitude, strengthening crucial relationships that renew life and our humanity?
Can we have healthy and strong people on a healthy and strong planet?
Even before my run for California governor, it became evident to me that the global “left,” whatever had resulted from revolutionary thought and organization during the last two centuries, was floundering. If everything is in crisis, so are organizations that claim the mantle of revolution. This makes sense and is quite necessary. Much of the left acts as if it is immune from a process affecting all institutions and organizations.
Revolutionary organizations must change or die—change the form to save the content. The content, however, is shifting as the economic base of society shifts: robots in the workplace and computers at home. Revolutionaries and activists that are succeeding understand that motion isn’t about how fast things are going but their direction—and how we can invigorate new ways of getting there. As the ancients have done in other times of crisis, at other social crossroads, they turn to creativity.
Art is the pathway.
The next stage of human development is integrality, the unison of science, art, and morality. This dynamic development can only happen when society is no longer based on class rule or private property—the private ownership of the principal means of production, but also of Earth’s minerals and energy. There are means and energy that are common to all of us—and they should remain as part of the commons to be safeguarded.
The resulting degree of wellness must guarantee everyone has their own authority, the clarity of their own minds and hearts, and is allowed to tap into their own unlimited capacities, while at the same time it must propel the collective to ensure everyone is taken care of materially, spiritually, and psychologically.
Again, all of this is unequivocally incompatible with global capitalism. Therefore the predicament we face is this: Can humanity continue to move forward while in the stranglehold of an economic and political system whose driving force is obtaining maximum profit regardless of its impact on people and planet?
The simple answer: no, we can’t.
For the first time, humanity is faced with the need for evolutionary growth of our planet that is not just contingent on organic biological changes (following Darwin’s law of natural selection), wherein external pressures force corresponding internal alterations so a species can persist or perish. Today aligned ideas, plans, technologies, and governance must be brought to bear, or we will fail to move to the next stage of our existence.
Consciousness and creativity are now vital to our future.
We are in a time of a true awakening: a time to know instead of to believe, to think instead of react, to imagine better instead of staying caught in a discordant class-based matrix. Certainly, the paradigm shift is a weighty proposition, full of risks, with seemingly insurmountable complications and no palpable guideposts. This is because we are embarking on what Joseph Campbell called a “pathless path.” It’s not a road less traveled but one we have to make ourselves: untrodden, its endpoint appearing as a question mark. Most people talk about this path as it relates to individuals. I apply the principle to societies as well. While this is untried territory, there are echoes of this journey from deep in our past.
It’s time for revolutionary activists, thinkers, and artists to help draw out the multiplicity of powers within everybody, including the genius for social revolution. We need to teach each other and engender another generation of visionary and practical leaders to contend with and counter the unraveling social fabric. Our goal must be to unite the scattered movements whose shared aim is to honor humanity and the earth into a powerful moral force to realign the prevailing system of production, distribution, and rule. And as everything changes, we must maintain the rhythm of alignments as needed.
In this quest, we must not fall into the traps of the old left, which generally defined itself as against the political system, as anticapitalist, but was largely unable to envision a new reality—unless it was within the strictures of the industrial stage of development. This is quite a jig to dance, one that promises many slipups and stumbles. But stumble we must if we are to go forward into the spiral of advancement.
To reiterate, the once heroic and amazingly responsive left—socialists, communists, radical Christians, anarchists, antifascists, and all stripes in between—have been largely placated. At the same time, far too many revolutionaries are characterized by infighting, big egos, and self-sabotage, even beyond that caused by police agents and disrupters. Some of the bickering that prevails on social media is childish and debilitating, exhibiting the same contempt toward allies we disagree with as toward the foremost perpetrators of social inequities. When we treat the not-so-cool progressives as badly as we treat the social class enemies trying to cut our throats, most people can’t tell the difference between them. The result is a deepening rift among masses of people, communities, and objective movements, rather than organic, lasting bonds.
Just the same, the recent rise of the alt-right has put some steam into activism, more animated now than in decades past. And there are people on the left who continue to forge those bonds between allies, who are moving roughly but steadily into the wealth of imagination and ideas we need for a new America.
How to proceed? What stories can possibly carry the vigor and appeal of what must be done?
First, the divisive racial story we have long told ourselves cannot hold as firmly as before. Neither can the “there are no classes” story or the concept of the trickle-down “generosity” of the capitalist class. The distractions are endless. Even if many of these narratives still gather momentum, those trains are, for the most part, coming to a halt.
This is not just about competing narratives—it’s about clear lies versus clear truths.
Second, it’s important to note that churches, unions, community organizations, nonprofits, trailer parks, and other similar spaces often not considered part of the revolutionary milieu also have the potential for stirring new ways of thinking, organizing and change. We have to go beyond preconceptions and consider the very real, although perhaps hard to fathom, prospect that revolutionaries may also come from among evangelicals and conservatives.
What’s happening right now is the right is hell bent on blaming the left—and minorities, migrants, and movie stars— and bending the truth to do so. And the left is keen on targeting the right, which at times can be a more precise aim. But the point is, right or left, we’re all screwed.
Going after each other on this basis gets us nowhere. The economy doesn’t care if you’re Tea Party or Green Party or no party. It doesn’t care if you are white, black, brown, red, or yellow, doesn’t care what religion you abide by or if you abide by no religion, doesn’t care if you like hamburgers, tacos, or jerk chicken. It doesn’t care. As in a flood, if you get caught up in the torrent, those factors, which many people allot grave importance to, won’t stop you from drowning.
For sure the most conscious among us will have to sway millions of religious people. And they can’t be berated, knocked around, or scared into going along. All of them are gathering at the crossroads of change with the rest of us. Many are already reimagining their circumstances by returning to the revolutionary tenets within their own doctrines.
And yet there are already communities pissed off and moving—the undeterred women, youth, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, communities of color, the artists, the unemployed, students, and more who are in some ways the least invested in keeping capitalism going. They run the gamut from class conscious to variably socially conscious to downright apathetic. They number in the millions.
What stories and strategies can possibly pull together such a range of people in the United States? This requires reaching out beyond the obvious differences to the pressing concerns affecting most everyone—again, ending poverty, peace at home and abroad, environmental health, and social justice; the pillars that hold up sustainable and equitable societies.
Splintered responses to these concerns only hurt us.
Our stories can continue to cherish the long-held US ideals of freedom, fairness, and equity, not the ciphers and codes that have kept us divided. We must make sure our future is in accord with our best natures, of being wholly conscious, philosophically mature, global in content, local in form, and unable to be taken off track.
We are following a historical gradient. Doing so means we can’t be afraid of mistakes. Fear of mistakes is tantamount to fear of growth. Yet grow we must. The point is to make mistakes in a principled way, toward more inclusive and widening nets, instead of mistakes in the direction of subterfuge, disguise, living in fear, essentially being “safe” at the expense of making history—what I call the politics of paranoia.
This isn’t a call for provocative, heavy-handed, or reckless tactics—or to be naïve about the power of government to crack down on dissent and strategic activism. This is a call to be bold, to think big but also in steps that “aim little to miss little” (words from Rev. William Barber).
Our gauge should be the revolutionizing practice of the working class and poor—the more conscious and united they become, the better we will know our influence and strength. Any self-respecting revolutionary has no other measure. Either our ideas are grasped by a significant number of people who are prepared to carry out corresponding actions, or we have not done what we set out to do. There can be no more schizophrenic divisions between “leaders” and “followers,” teachings and practice, “authoritative” people and so-called nonauthoritative people, theory and reality, a “mass” way and a “class-conscious” one.
Again, we need stories, which are also schools, but we also need other sense- and spirit-activating mediums. Stealth is the way to do battle under the radar, so to speak, without drawing unwanted attention, yet spreading ideas through the powers of the pen, the paintbrush, the drum, the dance . . . as well as the Internet, smart phones, apps, and podcasts. Subtlety is the art of refinement, the way to wield effective language, aesthetic qualities, and resonating designs. This is battle without doing battle.
And still the war is upon us.
Of course, we should prepare for actual battles. We can’t doubt the ruling class will react as they always have—with fear, force, and deflection. They are doing so at this moment. The growing militarization of the police, whereby the brutality of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is replicated at home, is their answer to increasing poverty and growing discontent. Their answer includes the gathering armies of white supremacists and right-wing extremists. People are being killed. The police juggernaut strikes hardest at the Achilles heel of US capitalism, the African American people, who are disproportionately targeted by police and mass incarceration, and who have historically had the most consistent response to oppression.
But the long-range target is the rest of us.
My campaign for governor was worth every mile traveled and dollar expended. It proved to be a milestone. The campaign provoked exhilarations and disappointments, but also critical lessons that could serve as a foundation for other campaigns. We won without winning. Right after the elections we began gatherings of the California Network for Revolutionary Change. A few people running for office in other parts of the state, and even a campaign in Chicago, told me the “Imagine a New California” campaign served as their model.
One thing I learned was that reaching people by way of stories means they plug into revolutionary politics and activities by connecting to their own stories, regardless of ideologies or beliefs. This approach is different than using ideology as the main way to plug people in, since the latter requires they only do so by accepting one “idea,” one way, one connection—extremely limiting. Although ideology is important, it cannot solely determine our overall interests, strategies, and motion—real things in real time do.
Monotony expresses the concept of “one tone,” which is tiresome and repetitive. We need to speak, write, and act in many tones, reaching through a range of sentiments, to move in many rhythms.
We must also master how to speak, write, teach, and organize, driven by the artful competence in each of us. Complex ideas must be expressed simply and clearly and resonate with emotional depth. We must use “aesthetic arrest” to get people to stop and think; we must be heartfelt to reach millions.
Art is the nexus of imagination and technique.
I learned on this governor’s campaign that we don’t have to be “amateurs”—as if all this is new. Humanity has been struggling for justice and equity since time immemorial, albeit at lower levels than we are now. But we also can’t act like we know it all—there has to be room for innovation. New times call for new tactics.
Young people have this quality: they want to be part of something earth-shattering but shaped by their own authentic powers and imaginations. Elders can guide, teach, impart knowledge, hold the ground, but they can’t lead everything. We must challenge the official stories as well as the scarcity thinking and living within the framework of the fear-driven precepts of the prevailing ruling class, its political parties, and its mass media. This is not an attempt to move toward “the middle,” which politicians generally do, not fundamentally changing their positions but only their message so they can attract voters. Nor is the goal to be “populist,” sacrificing long-range values for short-range acceptance.
Going back to the US Constitution, we may not be ready to face this, but after more than two centuries we should consider a new constitution, incorporating the most enlightened, encompassing, and equitable knowledge about matters of civil rights that has been accumulated from around the world, not just the United States. We need a document indicative of a time when we didn’t need papers to convey what should be, by birthright, everybody’s freedoms, while pointing to a time when government stops managing people and instead manages social structures for the enhancement, benefit, and health of all people and the living Earth.
To borrow from John Lennon: Imagine a world free of banks, corporations, high-end developers, wars, and poverty; imagine a world free of hunger, injustice, homelessness, and despair. Imagine a new Congress that honors ancestors and the living, made up of decent, dynamic men and women, representative of the country’s vast expanse of skin tones, tongues, cultures, genders, and faiths. Envision what kind of world is arising, already pulsing through its people, including the poor, the deprived, already beating in their hearts, in their songs, in their best dreams for America and the world.
If all life is made up of stories, there is a story we are living out now. It has a three-act structure, with beginning, middle, and end, as well as setting, characters, conflicts, crisis, motive forces, more crisis, fatal flaws, resiliency, catharsis, and resolution. Like most stories in our culture, it has an intention—figuring out how to get us back home. Reaching back to Homer’s Odyssey, getting home has been a recurrent theme in most of modern literature—home not just as a place but inside oneself, in our own hearts and at the heart of who we are as a people.
There’s an ending to our story. Like all endings, it’s also a beginning. Still we have a charge: To make the well-being of every child, adult, elder, family, and community the corner-stone of any new social compact, any new society, and the central quest of a new story. Any political party, news medium, organization, nonprofit, religion, or business must take this into account to be part of this great adventure.
It’s time, finally, to come home.