Mark Rudd, ex Weatherman, on Organising

http://www.markrudd.com/?organizing-and-activism-now/1968-organizing-vs-activism.html


"If they’ve thought about the problem at all, the activists seem to believe that their repeated expressions of opposition to the war will eventually draw people in. Grimly soldiering on, they have run out of ideas, tactics, strategy. Activism, the expression of our deeply held feelings, used to be only one part of building a movement. It’s a tactic which has been elevated to the level of strategy, in the absence of strategy.


What’s happened is that we’ve lost the models of organizing that we once had. Those of us who were young in the anti-Vietnam War movement had the benefit of both the labor and civil rights movements contiguous in time with us. From veterans of these movements who were fighting the war we learned that we needed to build a base through education, agitation, and, most of all, direct connection with people. But there’s been at least a thirty year gap between the last successful mass social movements and young people now. A generation, maybe two, has come of age without knowing what organizing is, or even knowing what questions to ask. Most young activists think organizing means making the physical arrangements for a rally or benefit concert. And the words base-building and coalition are not even in the lexicon.


No wonder we don’t have an anti-war movement, even as public opinion has turned against the war and as the Republicans self-destruct. But public opinion is not a movement: it’s not organized for political action. 


I hold my generation responsible for the lack of a movement now. After Vietnam and Watergate, too many of us retreated into our small personal and family concerns, perhaps tired of the demands of organizing. By and large we ceased working in our communities. Meanwhile, the Republicans didn’t give up on mass organizing—far from it. Under the tutelage of aggressive Young Republican organizers like Karl Rove, they learned from their early defeats and went on to master the arts of engagement, communication and coalition building. They were the ones who eventually seized state power, in case you hadn’t noticed, not the old SDS’ers.


Our efforts didn’t stop completely. We were able, from time to time, to organize small and influential movements, such as the one against nuclear power in the late seventies, which stopped the industry cold, but these efforts were sporadic and circumscribed, and they didn’t last as models. The same can be said of the Central America solidarity movement of the eighties, which was less successful. I was active in both. 


Since then the left has lost the ability to speak with people unlike ourselves or even to contemplate the problem of strategy. It’s a caretaker operation at best. The millions of my generation who used to be active against the war stay home and listen to the latest Bush atrocities on NPR, Air America and Democracy Now. In Albuquerque, thousands, literally, turn out for Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman when they come to town, but try to get them to walk precincts for a progressive Chicano candidate for mayor, forget it.


But there are hopeful signs. A new generation of young organizers asking the right questions has begun to emerge. The media hasn’t yet discovered them, and when they do, it’ll be a giant surprise, just like we were forty years ago. One of the best sources I can recommend to you, if you haven’t already seen it, is Letters from Young Activists, by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow. I learned the distinction between “activism” and “organizing” from Andy Cornell’s “Letter to Punk Activism.” He gave a name to a problem I’d been sensing, but was unable to describe until I read his critique of punk activism. Buy the book, read it. We can all learn something from these young people.


The new SDS organizers are very savvy. They’re not falling for the self-defeating sectarian ideological debates we ran aground on, nor for the dead end of hyper-militancy and violence which was Weatherman. They will have nothing at all to do with totalitarian ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or the bizarre organizations that continue to push them. They’ve gone back to participatory democracy, a lovely concept still to be defined in practice."