How I Became An Activist
Description: Conference: How I Became an Activist. Berkeley, California.
Source: https://study.sagepub.com/gaudetandrobert/student-resources/example-transcripts
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmAI4lMmmKE
Transcript
When people speak about how they became what they are, they usually refer to a mélange of influences and issues. “There was the teacher who did this, and then there was someone who did that,” and so forth. I’ll do the same. But I’d like us to keep something in mind. And that is, we’re not just a mixture of these influences that impact on us. We aren’t just passive receptors. What’s often left out is the individual himself or herself. The receptor, the person speaking, is not at all passive. He or she would be an active synthesizer. You take these influences and things that impact on you, and you’re not just an empty vessel that gets filled by them. Instead, you actually work with these influences. You bring additives of your own to them: you bring your own mental labor power, your own emotive concern. You bring your own innate energy and insight to an issue and a cause. And this adds to our collective impact and our collective empowerment.
People sometimes say to me – they don’t ask, they say – “You were a Red diaper baby, right?”. I guess assuming that since I hold so fast to these views I must have got them through my mother’s milk. And I say, “No, I’m not Red Diaper. My consciousness and my activism were arrived at through a very circuitous process, mostly self-education, mostly undoing my miseducation.” Quite often the most important dialogue we have is with ourselves. So remember that. It’s an interior dialogue, at least on a lot of occasions. At least it is for me. We do have evidence of people who have never had an interior dialogue. They’re all in power right now.
My home was politically relatively impoverished. It was blue-collar, Italian-American, working-class, low income. We were really poor. Money was a constant problem and a concern, which itself is a political lesson that one kind of learns, in this society, in one’s gut really, not that much in your head. There were some good knockdown, drag-out fights about Mussolini and the war – I remember those – between my uncles and various people. And then there was the Depression and the poverty and the great fear of that Depression.
But generally mine was a rather provincial existence. There was a candy store and a handball court and the backyards and the streets. I was a street kid. I hung around in the streets. I learned to fight. There were a lot of fist fights. We used to beat the brains out of each other. We had gangs, but they weren’t with switchblades or anything serious usually, although there is a story or two there I could tell, but I don’t want to start. It was very much like what Herbert Gans called the urban villagers. Gans did a study of an Italian-American neighborhood in North End Boston. And it’s a very interesting theory, which is that in the midst of large, cosmopolitan cities you have these ethnic enclaves that are recreated sort of from the Old World, and where people live in a very kind of clustered way. Everyone knows each other, and if a strange face appeared, one might ask, “Who’s that guy? We live on 118th Street. He’s from 119th Street. What is he doing there?”. You could walk pretty much freely down the streets, unless you were a kid, because there was the other gang who remembered how you beat up their guy. They might want to beat you up.
To show you how provincial I was, one year we moved to the Bronx for just that one year. It was a temporary thing. Then we went back to East Harlem in New York. And most of the kids in the class were Jewish. And here I was – what was it? – 7, 8 years-old. And I was struck by the strangeness and the foreignness of their names – Rosenberg, Rosenblatt, Feingold. I said, “What funny, strange names. Why didn’t they have ordinary, regular American names like Puzzafiore, Baciagalupe, Mazziato?”. Strange names. But the Bronx kids were nice kids. They were nice kids even though they had funny names.
So when people ask me, “How did you get from a East Harlem slum all the way up to Yale,” I always say, “I didn’t get all the way up to Yale. I don’t think it was an ascent. I got across to Yale,” as I put it. But I can sum it in one word, and that’s dogs. That is, my grandfather had a brown dog and he named him Brownie. My uncle Nick got a white dog, big, fluffy, white dog, and he named him Whitey. And we got a dog that had spots on it, and everybody called him Spotty. And that was the level of imagination in my family. And that’s when I knew I had to get the hell out and go to school. The other explanation is, I didn’t do it all on my own. How did you do this all on your own? I didn’t.
The other explanation is that it wasn’t self-made. This society is full of mythologies about the magnificent self-made man. But in truth, nobody is self-made. I could never have gotten close to getting any kind of education if there hadn’t been for generations, untold numbers of people, like a lot of the people in this room, whose names I don’t even know, who fought for the principle of public education. I was just three generations back from – not only a grade school education but a public education at the college level. That was the only way I went to college. In fact, I couldn’t even go to college at first, I’ll get to that in a minute, and then even pressuring for the stipends and the fellowships at Yale. I couldn’t have gone to Yale if I hadn’t gotten support from them.
So there are two things we’ve got to keep in mind here. First, in anybody’s socialization process there is a self-generated component to all accomplishment. There is a certain thing that the person is doing, synthesizing everything, as I said before, and putting some creative input into it. And there are other times when we so focus on the individual accomplishment that we overlook this collective effort and the social context that it takes place in. All individual human endeavor is also a collective social endeavor.
Take, for instance, skiing, which is a very individualized sport. They always focus on the skier. That great skier would never be skiing if it weren’t for generations of people who designed skis and then redesigned them, people who cleared that trail for him, people who designed clothing that was warm enough but light enough to wear, people who built and invented the chair lifts and all that. So every human endeavor also is a collective and social endeavor. The reactionaries who control the government today want us to forget this, of course. Nothing we do is purely an amalgam of environmental influences, and, conversely, nothing we do is purely our own achievement. Give some of the credit to all those other people.
When I was in high school, I began to get vaguely interested in politics, and I thought of myself as a Republican. (I thought you would give that a real laugh, but I guess not.) I leaned toward the Republicans because the only thing I read was the New York Daily News, which was a Republican right-wing rag, and the New York Journal American, which was another Republican rag. I was very afraid that Communism was going to be taking over the whole world.
Politics in our house, I guess, was electoral, as it is in most houses. People start giving it attention when an election is coming around. And the first presidential election I can remember in some detail and clarity, the one I followed and read about, was the 1948 election between Harry Truman and Tom Dewey and Henry Wallace. Henry Wallace was running as a third-party candidate on the Progressive Party ticket. My cousin Micky Luciano was the only one in my family who voted for Henry Wallace, as far as I know. I remember one day my father saying – it was just I and my mother sitting there – “Truman is finished. Truman, he’s gotten kicked up one side, down the other. He’s falling apart. He’ll never get reelected. He’s a loser. We might as well vote for Dewey who’s been governor of the state. If we’ve got to make a change, Dewey isn’t so bad.” And my mother started nodding in agreement.
And then on election day, she came back from the polls, and she took me aside, and she said, “Michael, don’t tell your daddy, but I voted for Truman.” And I know what it was. Everybody predicted that Truman was going to lose, and hers was a compassion vote. My mother was very compassionate. She was afraid that maybe nobody in America would vote for Truman, so she wanted to make sure that Truman got a vote, or at least some votes. So a little while later I saw my father, and I said, “Dad, who did you vote for?” And he said “Aaeegh.” And I said, “I didn’t know he was on the ballot. Who did you vote for?” “The goddam Republicans, you know, if they get in, we’ll have another depression. I voted for Truman. But don’t tell your mother.” You give a teenager this kind of weaponry? The very first chance I could, at dinner when they’re both sitting there, I told the both of them what they had done. And they wore sort of embarrassed grins.
So that was my first memory of an election. The point I wanted to make there was, when Truman got reelected, I found myself, despite all my Republican leanings, feeling very happy about that, that it wasn’t Dewey. So that my inchoate class experience was stronger in me than the crap that I was filling my head with from the major media. Luckily, it’s not that way anymore, because the media are now free and independent and objective [laughter].
I didn’t go to college after high school. I graduated high school a couple years after that election. And my mother was dying. We had terrible medical expenses. We had never heard of health insurance, and a lot of people today still haven’t heard of health insurance. So I went to work. I don’t want to go into all that. There were interesting things about work and where and all that, but we don’t have time. Let me just say that when I got into college (City College of New York), my first year, I remember reading something that had a big impact on me. It’s very strange that I remembered it as I was jotting down these notes. I was sitting in the subway. I think it was a literature or speech class, and there were these little readings. And the reading was an article on beauticians and saleswomen. They were all talking about the affronts that they suffered at the hands of their upper-income clientele. The working girls talked about how their clientele “think they’re better than we are” and how they will talk and say things to each other “as if we’re not even there, and the way they treated us with disregard. These working girls were talking about the hidden injuries of class. I remember reading this one little piece and feeling a surge go through me and like a weight was being lifted off my chest, because it spoke right to the class resentment that I felt, a deeply, deeply felt but inchoate feeling – the hidden injuries of class that are seldom expressed, but there are all sorts of subtle slights.
I remember one time being someplace out of East Harlem. It was somewhere in a suburban area. We were visiting somebody, and there were all these kids. And I said to someone, “Hey, trow da ball.” And the other kids said, “Trow da ball; hey, trow da ball.” And they started imitating “Trow da ball” to me. And I didn’t start swinging, but I remembered that. My diction was even rougher than it is now, and here these other kids were making fun of me. They were middle-class kids, by the way. And to actually read about an experience that others had had in a college course, where the readings are usually dismal, I can’t tell you. That was a very interesting feeling.
In college I met students who were in their own ways just as provincial as I, but some of them had exposure to music and literature and politics. And I really began to enjoy that. I would go down to the gym on 23rd Street and box, because, as I say, East Harlem, if you’re going to walk the streets with your head up, you had to know how to fight. And here I was at City College, and I would go down to box. And I never tried for the team. Just sparring, you know. And after that I would meet my girlfriend and we would go to the Irving Burton modern dance studio, and I would do modern dance with her and other people. And I said, “Boy, these are two very different worlds. I’m not sure I fit in either of them. I don’t quite know what’s going on.” But it was kind of interesting to see all these kind of new and different things and to hear some of these kids talk about things, including their political experiences.
By then I actively supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952. I was a liberal. I worked for the Liberal Party in New York. But I was still an anti-Communist. The religion of that was still there. One of the real crucibles in my life was the civil rights movement. It was really one of the great political struggles that moved me, as it did so many other people. I would take nonviolent workshops with CORE, Congress of Racial Equality. And those were interesting experiences for me, to actually sit there at a table and someone whacks you across the face or smacks you or hits you with a rolled-up newspaper. A whole different way of reacting. In East Harlem you would have gotten up swinging but in the nonviolent workshop you had to just sit and contain yourself. Inside, you might be saying, “I can’t wait until it’s my turn.” Because there was a change of places and roles, and I would check out that whoever hit me the hardest got it back. So you can take the kid out of Harlem, but you can’t, whatever, etc.
I knew very few African Americans. I had one African American buddy in high school. We lost track of each other, though. It wasn’t that I had some personal connection with the black community. It was a question of justice. It was the injustice of this racism and this separatism, the injustice of it. I just knew then and I know now that the thing I love most, more than beauty or love or happiness itself, is justice, to see justice in the world. That was the feeling I had.
In college, I guess the couple closest friends of mine were Jewish guys who had pretty interesting political backgrounds, and one or two of them actually remained friends for many years later. On rare occasions I’m mistaken for Jewish. I think that’s because I read books and I write books and I’m politically progressive and I have a New York accent and I have a Mediterranean face.
Audience: And you’re short.
And I’m short. Yes, thanks a lot. You’re Jewish, aren’t you? Ball breaker. One time I was at the Berkshire Forum giving a talk, and there was a roomful of old lefties, mostly Jewish. And one of the guys came up to me afterwards and he said, “You’re such a smart young fellow. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” His face was so beaming with ethnic pride, I almost lied about it. I didn’t want to hurt this old guy. But then the truth, since I speak only the truth, I said, “Parenti. You know, it’s an Italian name.” He said, “Italian?” And his face got befuddled, confused. And then the lights came on again, and he was beaming. He says, “Oh, of course. You’re a Sephardic Jew.” That’s what Festinger called cognitive dissonance. I think it was Festinger. It’s 40 years ago since I read his work. But cognitive dissonance is when there is a disparity between what you expect reality to be and what seems to be the evidence that’s coming in to you. So what you do is you create cognitions that will diminish that dissonance or disparity, that explain it away. And that was a perfect example of it, I thought, very creative. Again, you see people are creative in their perceptions. Sometimes too creative.
I became and I remained a liberal academic right up until the Vietnam era. I had already become an activist over the civil rights issue. I had gone out on the picket line against Woolworth’s in support of the boycott against Woolworth’s, because they weren’t hiring African American workers, Our task was to try to persuade people not to cross the picket line and support the boycott. I did the same kind of support work for the UFW (farm workers) boycott of supermarkets. And of course I started going on peace demonstrations against the Vietnam war.
Academia was a very stuffy place. I was so naïve. I went into it with an idealized notion, a romanticized notion that academe’s inhabitants were all principled and bright and dedicated to learning and concerned with problems of peace and justice and concerned with the university’s role in the society. I mean, how naive can you get? That there was a community of scholars, a universe of discourse that we would do something about. By the way, to this day, thank goodness, there are still some very good – there were then and there still are, very good, intelligent, dedicated people in academia, who carry on a very valiant and valuable struggle. I’m not painting one brush stroke on everybody.
But I found that generally I began to get a little disillusioned with intellectuals. I gradually discovered that they were often ill-informed, which is okay, because I’m ill-informed on any number of things. Nobody knows everything about everything. But they would pretend to speak beyond their knowledge. And I would catch this sometimes. I remember doing an intensive reading of Freud. And I would bring things up or something would come up, and I would get these facile comments about Freud from people who were intellectuals, who didn’t know what they were talking about, I realized, but who had to have an opinion. Wilhelm Reich I remember reading Reich’s work and people saying, “People die in orgone boxes.” Nobody ever died. But this was all said with kind of a superior, knowing, dismissive air. But the need to feel that you had an in-the-know opinion about something when in fact you didn’t know what the hell you were talking about. It’s no sin to not know what the hell you’re talking about if you don’t talk about it, okay? So remember that.
I’ll tell you, one of the worst things in academia was the academic administrators. These were often the people who really had no regard for learning of any kind. Their primary dedication was to their careers, not to the students, not to the higher values, certainly not to any kind of democracy. The university was a hierarchical, topdown rule. There was a lot of talk about the academic community, there was a lot of talk about democratic values, but life there was really not all that much different from a corporation in some respects. It was very topdown.
I’ve got a story about corporations. There is the Harvard M.B.A. intern who joins a big multinational corporation, and he goes in to see the CEO, and he says, “Sir, that was a wonderful talk you gave us about we’re all one, big, happy community here and it’s important that we communicate all the time. That was really good. But there was something you said. You talked about criticism from above and criticism from below. What exactly is the difference between criticism from above and criticism from below?” So the CEO says, “Kid, I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to demonstrate it. Get on that elevator, go all the way downstairs, and stand outside our office building.” So the M.B.A. does that. The CEO goes into his office, opens his window, looks out, says, “Is that you there?” “Yes, sir, yes, sir, here I am.” So he starts spitting at him. Ptooey, ptooey, ptooey. He says, “Sir, what are you doing? Please, sir, sir, sir.” Ptooey. He says, “That’s criticism from above. Now, criticism from below? You spit at me.”
Along with the civil rights movement and the anti- McCarthyism – I was right there at the height of McCarthyism, and we did fight all that stuff – later on was the Vietnam War. And that became the other impact on me. One of the first acts I did in the Vietnam War, after being out on some of the earliest demonstrations, I wrote a letter to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had been sort of a hero to me because he had led a lot of the civil rights stuff in the Senate and all that. Humphrey issued a statement saying the people who were out on this demonstration were the tools of Hanoi, the puppets of Hanoi. And I was shocked. So I wrote him this rather long letter saying, “As one who looks forward to the day when you occupy a still higher office, Mr. Vice President, I can’t understand why you would say that.” We sincerely wanted, the people wanted peace.” And he wrote me back an even longer letter - he was never short of words, Hubert Humphrey – and he was saying, “The people on those demonstrations were no more Communist than you or I, but they were the dupes of Hanoi. We have to be alert.” And it suddenly struck me as a shock. Well, he’s not confused, he’s not all mixed up. He really believes this stuff, he’s really pursuing this thing.
And that was a kind of an interesting insight. That is, I began to question the war. And then I began to question the leaders who produced this war. And then I began to question the system that produced these leaders. And that’s when you cross the line and you say, “What is this about?” I demonstrated, I picketed, I blocked a draft board. I remember demonstrating at a draft board center in New Haven, Connecticut, and the police grabbed me and pulled me through this hallway, one cop holding me here, one cop there. The one menacing me the most was saying, “I’m going to kill you, you dirty Communist bastard. I’m going to kill you.” And the third cop was coming and hitting me in the stomach with his club. And I suddenly appreciated all that training at the Boys’ Club and at the City College downtown gym. They used to have a medicine ball for boxing, and they would slam it into your stomach. Toughen up, toughen up. So I would do that every time he hit me, so it wasn’t too bad. But they threw us in the paddywagon. And I said, “Wow, it’s good to really firsthand experience democracy in action.”
I, with just three other people, organized the largest peace demonstration in New Haven up to that point. We had William Sloane Coffin speak, to whom I dedicated my first book, by the way. We got Arthur Miller to speak. Somebody said, “We should get Arthur Miller. We’ve got to get Arthur Miller.” I called Arthur Miller, the great playwright, Death of a Salesman and all that, much admired. And he said, “I don’t know. I’m a playwright.” I said, “No, you will do wonderful.” I suddenly was a Jewish mama here. I was saying, “You will do fine. Don’t worry. The people want you.” He said, “I don’t know. It’s outdoors.” I said, “Don’t worry. It won’t rain, you will be okay.” He came and he spoke. He loved it. He had a great time and people appreciated him being there.
I went on later to Champaign-Urbana, and during the Kent State days we had huge demonstrations. People always think because of all those documentaries on Berkeley or Madison or Columbia that those were the only places where there were protests. There were schools all over the country where things were happening. And you couldn’t predict it. It was a really remarkable, exciting time. All sorts of people. In Urbana, the fraternity guys were having special teach-ins against the war. Some of them were jocks. I remember Sandy Levinson saying to me, I went out and spoke at Ohio State, “Well, you know, these things can happen in places like” – he made a very brilliant analysis of why these things happen in places like Michigan, Madison, Berkeley. He said, “It can’t happen at Ohio State.” And I gave my talk. Four days later Ohio State blew open, and people were out on the streets fighting the cops. So it’s a very interesting thing. You can’t really predict. There is something about people where they synthesize and electrify and mobilize each other and begin to do all sorts of things that weren’t expected.
It was in Champaign-Urbana where my academic career pretty much ended, because I got beaten up by the police. We were blocking a driveway. I was badly beaten. I was hit, bloodied, my whole head covered in blood. The state troopers had clubs that were enormous in size, longer and thicker than baseball bats. They were up on the side, and one of them came right down to hit me right here on the top of the head, which would have killed me, but someone else, another trooper, hit me on the other side here. That tilted my head, so the first man’s blow hit the corner of my head. And later in jail I heard him say, “If I had gotten a good, first, clean lick on that guy, he would be a dead man now.” And then I heard a couple of other people standing there in civvie clothing saying, “That’s Parenti. Now the Chancellor will want us to throw the book at him. Let’s hit him with everything.” Plus, when you’re that badly beaten, they have to justify the beating by trumped-up charges - mob action, felonious assault, blah, blah, blah. And the Chancellor who wanted the book thrown at me was Jack Peltason. When I moved out here to Berkeley, the Chancellor at Cal here was Jack Peltason. I said, “Am I having a recurrent nightmare? What is this about?”
So I was found guilty. I didn’t get a jury trial. My lawyer, who thought he was so smart, said, “No, we’ll go for a judge.” I said, “Are you really sure? You know, 12 as opposed to 1.” I didn’t know that much. I was just being radicalized, you see. He said, “Well, Morgan” - that was the judge’s name; the judge’s name was Birch Morgan – “Morgan is a fascist, but he’s fair.” I said, “How the hell does that work?” But, you see, then again, he’s your lawyer. You learn to defer. You think these guys really know what they’re talking about. No lawyer jokes; I won’t start. And Morgan was fair. He was fair on all procedural things. And then he just wrote an opinion that was the prosecution’s case completely. They brought in state troopers who said that I had punched out this state trooper, who was 6 foot 2. Three conflicting stories about how they hit me – and Morgam believed all three. So I was sentenced to two years in prison. What saved me was I got probation. I was already out of the state and teaching at the University of Vermont. There was a big flap there. I’m not going to go into all the war stories, but there was a constant struggle and a constant fight.
And what the system does is, they attack ad hominemly. They attack the protesters. So they make the protester the issue rather than the things we’re protesting. Which is often why I don’t like to talk about myself.
So to make it a long story of struggle, those were very hard, lean years. It wasn’t that easy, as radicalized and liberal as you had become, to see colleagues, fellow graduate students you knew at Yale now getting their sabbaticals at Oxford and their chairs at Cornell and here and there and their big houses. There I was, living in a little co-op with five other people so that I could pay child support. It wasn’t easy. They were very hard years, which I didn’t put in the essay, because I don’t want to give our enemies the satisfaction, the bastards.
To make that whole long story short, I’ve been kicked out of some of the best universities in America. And all those years I also went on doing support work and boycotting, and more and more speaking and writing. That takes a lot of time and energy. To travel really knocks it out of you.
I remember that I was considered a wild man by some of my academic colleagues. “That Parenti, he’s a wild man.”. “Stop that anarchist agitation.” But it wasn’t that I was so wild; it was that they were so tame, I think. I was considered a radical. I didn’t feel I was so radical. I was coming to these things with all the innocence of a child, almost. I said, “Wait a minute. I think the Vietnam just isn’t…” People would say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I realized only in retrospect that I was becoming a Marxist without having read Marx. I would say things like, “You know, I think a lot of liberals are evading the whole issue of class power. There is class power, and that class power plays a role in foreign policy. This is really an imperialistic kind of thing we’re looking at.” And people would say, “That’s Marx. Whoa, whoa, that’s Marx.” Or I would say, “I don’t think the police are neutral. We always hear they’re neutral, they support the law here and there. I don’t think they’re neutral at all. You look at strikes. The police are always defending the factory against the factory worker. Why don’t they favor the factory worker against the factory owners?” “Whoa, that’s Marx. That’s Marx, isn’t it?” And I say, “I don’t think racism is just an attitude that people learn. It’s that, too, but I think it’s a social force that’s used and instigated and mobilized to divide people, to divide workers.” And, “Oh, that’s Marx, isn’t it? That’s Marx.” I started saying, “This guy Marx must really be something. Here I am knocking myself out to get an analysis, and they’re giving him the credit all the time. And he’s been dead for how long?” Well, as I say, I was considered a radical. I still am. But I don’t think I’m so radical. It’s that they’re so conservative, all those other people.
I still run into this with people on the left. I can take that stuff from the center and the right. It’s when people who say they’re on the left come up. At the American Political Science Convention, which I’ve got to go to in August because I’m getting an award – see, there are some good people in academia. But the other 95% - when you’re walking around the hall, and somebody says, “Parenti, Parenti, still causing trouble?” “Parenti, staying out of trouble? You still causing trouble?” From now on, when I hear that, I’m going to say, “And you, you still kissing the ass of the ruling class?” “Hey, Parenti, you old codger, you still rabble-rousing?” What is that, rabble-rousing? That’s a ruling-class term.
They paid five bucks to hear me talk about my problems. That’s a great switch. Two times I’m going to tell you about. The first time I was at, I’m not going to tell you the people’s names, the University of Colorado, Boulder. I had just given a talk. A lot of us went down to the cafeteria, and behind there were the big tables with the glass thing. And there was a guy working with the food. And I was standing there with this colleague from that university, a progressive named Ed Greenberg. He even at certain times of the year called himself a Marxist, depending on the situation. When he was trying for the deanship, he dropped that, but when he wasn’t trying for the deanship or he was talking to people like me, he might say he was a Marxist or at least a progressive of some sort. Greenberg turns to the guy who was handing out the food, who was a Latino, and he said, “Watch out for this guy. He’s dangerous. Watch out for him. He’ll take over everywhere. He’ll lead the rabble,” or whatever, making those kind of comments. I said, “What the hell is the matter with you? What are you doing?” Greenberg just started saying these crazy things. You know what the Latino guy behind the counter did? He waved away my money and let me have the food plate for free. He said, “Go ahead, take it.” And I thought that was great. He saw me as a friend thanks to the way Greenberg was carrying on about me.
About a year later I was speaking in Los Angeles. I just spoke for FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. I did a fund-raiser for them. They must have made a mint on me. After the event we all went to - is there a Bolshevik Cafe in L.A.? What’s it called? The Russian Cafe?
Audience: Gorky’s.
Gorky’s. That’s it. And he’s ahead of me. This is one of the people in FAIR. A totally different person now. He’s wellknown, writes criticisms about the media. And he turns to the young lady who was adding up our stuff and taking our money at the end of the line, and he says, “Watch out for this guy. He’s dangerous. He’s a troublemaker. He stirs up all the people. Watch out for him.” You know what she did? She waived part of my bill. She said, “Forget the drinks, forget the dessert. That’s okay.” I said to myself, “Gee, I should be taking these assholes with me more often.” And I made a mistake. I wanted to go back and ask her, “Why did you do that?” Maybe it might have been just that she felt so embarrassed or annoyed about the way this FAIR acquaintance was being so stupid toward me or something, and the free drink was just a courtesy from her to me. Or maybe there was that inchoate class consciousness. I don’t know.
What we do know is that there are left, progressive, supposedly literate intellectuals who do not see how much the dominant paradigm has seeped into their political consciousness, like so much dry rot. And by the way, it’s a constant struggle for all of us. All of us. We live in a political culture that is quite insidious, quite resourceful. It has propaganda, but it’s not called propaganda. It has images that are paraded constantly. It has duplicity. And so we have to consciously arm ourselves against it. So I was called a wild man, I was called an extremist. Let me ask you the question, and you can all answer together. Is it extremist to want peace and social justice?
Audience: Yes. No.
You see, you have to guard against it. Some of you have to learn the English language again. I can say it again. Is it extremist to want peace and social justice? I see why the funny guys said yes. Because it has become, hasn’t it? It’s been treated as an extremist position to want peace and social justice. Is it extremist and radical and crazy and all that to want a clean, ecological, sound environment? No. No, it isn’t. The extremists are already in power. These guys are not conservatives, they are reactionaries. They are reactionaries. A conservative was someone who resisted change and wanted to keep his privileges and interests intact. A reactionary is someone who wanted to unturn all these things and go back to a yet more retrograde position. These guys are reactionaries. They want to bring us back to 1900. They want to destroy all the gains we’ve made in the social net and human services, the conditions of labor. They want to destroy that. They want everything for themselves. They are ruthless reactionaries who play for real and for keeps.
Also in my later life, after I became radicalized, anti-Communism again took hold of me, but in a quite different way. First, I had become less hostile. I just didn’t think the Communist countries were the most evil, repressive things in the world. I saw that people had enough to eat in them, they had jobs, education, health care. Vietnam was a Communist country, and what was it doing? It was fighting against an imperialist power. And there was a kind of democracy in the way people were mobilized, in the way opinions were discussed and policy was developed through the cadres and the party. There was something to that. And the Communist countries, I began to realize even more, were not the ones that were aiding and arming the death squads in Central America. They were not the ones supporting the rich landlords, the big corporations that raped the land, the corrupt generals. That was the CIA. That was the capitalist “democracy” that was doing all that.
I really like what Dick Gregory said once in 1980- something. Dick Gregory got up and he said, “Why don’t they blame something bad on the Communists? We get the civil rights movement going and hear people saying, ‘Those are Communists behind that.’ We’ve got this peace movement and nuclear freeze, and you hear people saying, ‘There are Communists behind that.’ We’re organizing industrial unions. They say, ‘The Communists are behind doing that.’ Fighting segregation, all these other things, ‘The Communists are doing that.’” So Dick Gregory said, “Why don’t they blame something bad on the Communists?”
I’m going to wind it down here. In 1992, the Committees of Correspondence held a convention here in Berkeley, their founding convention. The purpose of the convention was to decide when to hold another convention. It really was. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “No, I’m not joining this organization.” But it was very interesting, because they were putting together a platform of what the organization would stand for. And somebody got up to the microphone and said, “You don’t have anything in there about the rights of gays.” “That’s right. We should have something about the rights of gays.” And then a woman got up and she said, “Excuse me. It should be the rights of gays and lesbians.” They said, “Right, that’s right.” Then a third person – I think he was a guy – got up. And transgender and transsexual were not terms yet in vogue. But what was it then that he said? Oh, bisexual. He said, “No, it should be gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.” At this point there was an old trade union lefty sitting behind me. He said it just loud enough for the people around him to hear. He said, “Yeah. How about putting something in there for the people who are too tired to have sex when they get home from work?”
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s who I speak for, the people who are too tired to have sex when they get home from work. Luckily, I don’t have a taxing commute. I work at home, so I have a little bit of energy to fight for these people. But I’m saying it allegorically. It’s all of us who are too tired for the way our society and the good things that we want and our environment have been pulverized. The struggle is between those who are dedicated to maximizing economic inequality, those who are dedicated to making the world safe for inequality, as opposed to those who are dedicated to minimizing inequalities, when they can be. The struggle is between those who want to use the world’s land, labor, technology, natural resources, and markets for a capital accumulation process that increasingly enriches the few as opposed to those who want to use these things for collective betterment for the well-being of the many.
Does it make any difference what we do? It makes all the difference in the world. If we did nothing, the reactionaries would have already had us back to 1900 in their program to third-world-ize the United States. Unless we resist and keep resisting and build our numbers, they will grind us into the dust. Does it really matter what we think or say? They ignore it anyway? They don’t care what we think? Oh, they care all the time. Oh, boy, do they pay attention. Oh, boy, are they watching. They’re crafting every statement they make. They’re crafting and manipulating and watching all the time. They’re surveiling and doing all that. They know that they stand on our shoulders, and if we ever give a collective shrug, they will be off. Ultimately, if we can change the minds of masses of people, there will be no armies for the ruling elite, there will be no taxes, there will be no instruments of repression. So we’ve got to keep fighting.
Antonio Gramsci said, “We must always have a pessimism of the mind” - realize how tough and how bad things can be – “but an optimism of the will.” So let’s have an optimism of the will because victories can be won. Thank you so much for your kind attention.