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By the time the Mockingbird underground newspaper folded, in 1973, I was aware that I was learning a lot, but it didn’t lead me to any higher level of understanding. I couldn’t say, just because everything I had tried didn’t work, that I knew something that would work. I only knew a few things that wouldn’t work, not something that would.
I decided it was time for me to start doing some serious study about social change. I knew better than to look to my course of study at the University for enlightenment, because I had figured out that the University was, like almost everything else involved with knowledge, a product and a tool of corporate control.
One of my University of Thought free community classes was “How to Make a Revolution in the United States.” It was taught by a member of the Socialist Workers Party. I attended every class. The text was a pamphlet by the same name. There was no further reading. As I recall, I spent most of the time arguing with the teacher, even though I noticed everybody else in the class, all members of the SWP, were in perfect harmony with the instructor.
Ideologically, I fell completely in love with Monsignor Ivan Illich. Illich had written a controversial book in which he argued that education was a commodity paid for by the poor through regressive taxation but mostly used by the rich. In other words, property taxes pay for education and renters pay the most property taxes. Their kids are lucky to finish 12 years of school, and many of them don’t even do that. The wealthier kids soar on through college and graduate school.
Illich had an education center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, so I hitch-hiked down there to study. I spent 5 weeks, but only got to see Illich once. I took whatever courses sounded helpful, but didn’t learn much beyond what I had read from Illich.
Ivan Illich blasted the commodity known as education. As for a solution, he proposed an “autotelic society” where everyone would have the same amount of control over the system as the system had over them. In other words, if the question is about trash pickup in your neighborhood of 300 people, you get a 1/300 vote. If the question is about taking 250 million people into war, your vote is 1/250 million. It sounded good.
Another thing that sounded good came from B.F. Skinner, who was a popular psychologist of the period. Skinner wrote a utopian book in which he described a perfect society underpinned by what he considered solid educational principles based on the stimulus/response model.
Another book, I can’t remember the title or author, described a perfect educational system based on an enlarged version of Skinner’s ideas turned into computerized education. Children were to interact with computer terminals until they were just about perfect, in this book.
I totally endorsed all the ideas I read about, but they all had a great big missing piece.
None of them told me anything about how to get from where we were to these wonderful places they described. By this time, I’d had years of listening to hippies explain to me how things ought to be without giving me the slightest clue of how these wonderful changes were going to come about. Of course there was the “OM Collective,” whose book, “OM,” said we should stop worrying about it and just live the good life. Sooner or later, they said, all the aspects of the bad (normal) life would crash and burn, and everybody would want to emulate us -- the people living right. In other words, if you eat enough granola, everybody else will quit eating meat. If you start a good food co-op, the grocery stores will fail. If you only buy clothes from thrift stores, the textile industry will drop off the face of the Earth. If you stop blowing your money, the banks will lose their power. If you resist the draft, there will be no more war. If you smoke enough dope, you'll see "alternate realities" that are better. "Tune in, turn on, drop out!" That's the essence of counterculturalism, and it's so silly that it's hard to believe it was the underlying ideology of the New Left.
So my years of anguished struggle had netted me nothing, or almost nothing? No, looking back, that’s not what I think at all. I think it’s true that I hadn’t learned much of immediate usefulness, but I had unlearned a great deal. That hard-fought-for unlearning had brought me up from an arrogant know-it-all to a man ready to accept my own ignorance. It may seem like a funny way to say it, but that was a giant step upwards!
As I recognized myself as a completely ignorant person when it came to facilitating social change, I began to wonder who in history might have something worth saying to me. There aren’t a lot of them, because most historical figures, even the “greatest” ones, were just reacting to situations that were given to them.
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were great heroes of the time, so I read what they had to say. Malcolm couldn’t really point to any great changes he made, even though he certainly seemed to have that potential before he was murdered. King had made incredible changes, but nearly everything he had to say was based on a single strategy -- nonviolence. I thought, and I still think, that King’s nonviolence was a great tactic to deal with the uproar taking place in civil rights and would have made a great difference in the anti-war movement if he had lived. But I needed more than a single tactic. I needed a plan!
The main character that I could think of who really made a difference in his lifetime was one V.I. Lenin, architect of the revolution that created the Soviet Union. I found one of his books, “State and Revolution,” in a used book store. It was really hard to read. The author seemed to be arguing with, and even vilifying, some contemporaries of his. I can’t understand Russian names to this day, and I had no idea who Lenin was arguing with or what they had said.
Another problem I had with reading Lenin was the tremendous effect of growing up in the 1950s. I had spent my formative years in the strongest period of anti-communism in American history. Communism was one of the things that set me and my contemporaries to laughter. It wasn’t good laughter, it was the scared kind. Just picking up a book by Lenin set off all kinds of deep-seated fears that I hadn't even known I had.
Anticommunism, I think, has softened since my teenage years, although there’s still a lot of it. Some of the younger people I talk with in 2015 act as if anticommunism was long past, but I don’t think so. At least for my generation and, I think, for subsequent generations right down to the present, anticommunism is the national religion.
But I still thought that Lenin had something to say, and I was frankly getting desperate for real answers. If I couldn’t understand him, I admitted with an attitude completely foreign to me -- humility-- it was probably my fault. So, I asked the guy who had taught “How to Make a Revolution in the United States” about it, and he directed me to the Socialist Workers Party.
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