# Celebrate survival. Then organize for justice.

# Celebrate survival. Then organize for justice. I was arguing politics with a friend. Democratic action is for losers, he said. Look at history: one rebellion after another, millions of people slaughtered, and what did they get out of it? The lords almost never lost. The thieves who run our government and economy now almost never lose. Or we get even worse dictatorships than before the revolution. People who fight against the powerful are naive and their sacrifices futile.

That's silly, I said. We don't see many examples of a perfect democracy replacing dictatorship in one step. Instead, we see small advances from generation to generation, that add up to important freedoms. How many revolutions took place in England before they had a system that could abolish slavery? How many mass movements did it take for men without property, then black men, then women, then young soldiers to get the vote here? It's true, the Tennessee militia did smash the miner's uprising at Coal Creek-- but that governor lost the next election, and the state had to drop the system of leasing convicts to mine operators.

I said, even in the worst jails of the worst dictatorships, people fight back individually and in organizations. Peasants hunting in the lords' forests, slaves and factory workers in slowdown, deserters from armies of conquest, underground railroads, fighters in the Warsaw ghetto, IMF riots, the songs and fables and carnivals that mock the powerful-- somewhere there are always people fighting to take back what's been stolen.

They always get crushed, my friend insisted. Round and round we went.

There's a somewhat different argument on the left, mostly among professors, as far as I can tell. In this story, the fact that corporados and their servants in church and government have not wiped every last one of us is itself a great advance. In fact, just belonging to an oppressed group is a victory. "Being a Muslim in the United States is revolutionary," a friend told me. "For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance. . . . No matter how a woman lives out her lesbianism --in the closet, in the state legislature, in the bedroom-- she has rebelled against becoming the slave master's concubine, viz., the male-dependent female, the female heterosexual" (C. Clark 242). I agree: building democracy and justice depends on our ability to survive (and in the long run, vice versa). It's a very minimalist position to suggest that one is the same as the other.

Sometimes the argument verges on the claim that the struggle for justice is the same as justice itself; or, even further, that struggle within institutions of domination means that those institutions of domination are really institutions of freedom.

For example, there seems to be a lot of talk and literature that portrays women's ability to survive in subordinate roles as liberation. The story of women's hidden power must be very old: My husband thinks he's in charge, but I can wrap him around my little finger whenever I want. Scholars reinforce the idea with research on, for instance, the women's councils of the Haudenosaunee , which advised the men who had formal decision-making power. Tsing describes how some Indonesian women interpreted their service as concubines of Japanese officers or Chinese lumber camp bosses: "In describing the men’s unfailing love, the women turned the focus of the stories from victimization toward alien romance gained through bravery and travel” (227). Others stress the autonomy of women shut in convents (Furlong) and harems (Ahmed, cited in Bulkin 167). And I remember meeting women in Atlanta who had a lot of influence on the preacher who spoke for their environmental group, and were grooming a local young man for a staff role.

Of course women are powerful. When they may not hold power officially, when they have to couch their ideas as suggestions, when they have to wheedle and plead, when they have to act through men, when they are treated as property, when they are assigned by men authority over other women to keep them in line, I don't see how anyone can claim these women's positions are anything but subordinate.

We see similarly optimistic claims about the struggle over ideas. When a woman spiritual leader of the Dyaks in Borneo continually borrows ideas and trappings from the dominant culture, Tsing describes it as resistance: “People play with, pervert, stretch, and oppose the very matrix of power that gives them the ability to act” (232). But adopting another culture is not the same as being able to keep one's own. The Irish used English to fight the English, but can it be called progress that they lost their old language? Meanwhile, among the English English, intense interest in the loves and death of Princess Di has been seen by some academics as a sharp rebuke to the uncaring Establishment; the princess herself a kind of spokesperson for the oppressed (Greenhalgh 49-51; Richard Johnson 25-32).

Harvey Cox writes of the complicated relationship between religions and democracy, and finds that, on balance, Christianity has helped:

Though many writers have seen in the black Christianity of America only a cruel hoax foisted on the slaves to keep them in line with promises of happiness beyond Jordan, that is only part of the story. Any subjected people must first survive before it can fight back. Black theologians are demonstrating today how the slaves staved off both extinction and absorption in part because of their religion. Their inventive adaptation of the distorted Christianity to which they were subjected by the masters helped keep them from falling to pieces psychologically and culturally despite the efforts of whites to make that happen (119).

He gives a personal example of the liberating force of faith, when the police shut down a boisterous Easter ritual.

Can the police stop a worship service because they don't think it seems religious? But the discotheque staff members were looking at me with silent, pleading eyes: Don't ruffle the fuzz. So I nodded and ambled over to the microphone. I announced to the saints that the celebration was over. At least for now. . . . Later on, as I climbed into the car to drive home, I felt a little sorry. But then, as I glanced down to where my hands rested on the steering wheel I noticed something I had almost forgotten. On the backs of my hands, earlier in the evening, someone had painted a Z ('He lives') and a peace sign. I turned on the ignition and smiled. I knew that, for that moment at least, I believed in the Resurrection (159-160).

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General, I can’t destroy your fleets or your tanks
and I don’t know how long this war will last
but every night one of your orders dies without being followed,
and, undefeated, one of my songs survives.
--Herberto Padilla, “Song of the Juggler”
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It's true, wherever they can, people use the weapons of the powerful against the powerful. It could be the idea that we are all God's children, or that, high above the murders of the local lord, there is a Just King who would protect us, if only he knew the truth. We wave flags to show that we are just as patriotic as war contractors. When we're fighting for our lives, it's no surprise that we raid the masters' armories whenever we can. And we fight fiercely within the killer institutions, establishing little refuges for resistance, be they prison schools, labor unions, or sewing circles.

In writing about such wondrous triumphs of the human spirit in the midst of disaster, folks must be trying to strengthen the hope we need for this work. But it is a disservice to confuse survival (the survival of some of us) with progress. It's not progress, it's the status quo, business as usual. We already know some of us will survive; until they perfect the diaper-changing robots, the rich won't kill us all. For hundreds of millions of our brothers and sisters, physical survival is the #1 daily challenge. Building democracy, real democracy, is our only chance of pulling them back from the brink.


It hurts our work even more to suggest that, because people can fight back even from within armies, corporations, and priesthoods, we should somehow see those institutions as the avenues for democracy. We might as well argue that, because slaves have revolted again and again, more slavery will produce more democracy. Many institutions are a mix of helpful and corrupt elements; for instance, the government of my country. I can imagine my government becoming more democratic, not least because it is officially based, in part, on those principles. I can imagine businesses that put as much into the community as they take out-- without robbing someplace else. I have seen schools that help students think for themselves, and care for each other. I have seen community groups and union locals where the membership, not well-paid staff, have the final say on policy.

I cannot imagine that institutions established as hierarchies, depending on hierarchy, can become democratic. Augustine wrote about the Church that it doesn't matter so much if the institution is corrupt or misguided, so long as it keeps bringing people to the Faith. But the way I figure, there has got to be some consistency of means and ends. I can't imagine transnational corporations that would prioritize the good of the community over their own profits, can you? Have you ever seen such a thing? John Paul Vann, one of the most respected, fearless officers of the U.S. military in Viet Nam, imagined U.S. generals and technocrats, in partnership with the military dictatorship of South Viet Nam, could spearhead social reform in the countryside (Sheehan). Does that sound like a good bet?

We don't need sentimental confusions. We don't need to invent victories, or the reasons for them. The real history of democratic struggles offers plenty of evidence that we can make a difference. So let's celebrate survival, then organize for justice.


# Walk the walk. This can mean a lot of things. In general, each of us has to disentangle ourselves from the values and practices of the corrupt society around us--the way we deal with our neighbors, partners, bosses and employees. Good stories and good action go together.

One central way to do this is to stick up for each other, to resist the bullies who target our neighbors and co-workers. More than once I’ve been in situations where we complain about our jobs, the curriculum, the few choices we have--but when it comes time to speak to the people in charge, many complainers shut up and let a few people stick their necks out, without allies. This is crummy behavior. Let’s not do it.

Most of all, we have be democratic in our organizations. We can’t make democracy as we trail after charismatic leaders, or exclusive cliques of fast-talking white boys, or the self-appointed Vanguard of the Revolution. How many times have we overlooked the egomania of leader types, how many of their messes have we cleaned up without complaint, because they talk good and work hard? How many times have coalition partners gone off on their own without notice or consultation? Poor practice undermines our understanding and gives the lie to our promises. We challenge mainstream politicians who operate this way.

Likewise with the groups that claim to act in our name. Once I heard a foundation staffer mention the activists who’d been arrested for sabotaging power lines in the Southwest. The suggestion was that the environmental movement needed to campaign for their release. I questioned the obligation. As far as I knew, they’d acted on their own, following their own strategy, without consulting other groups or communities. That might be the only way to proceed in a police state, but the first duty of a revolutionary is to understand the real circumstances. The people longing to pull a Che without bothering to consult membership organizations seem to operate under the same fantasy propagated by the Black History Month version of Rosa Parks: that spontaneous action needs no context, no explanation, and no organizing, to spark the general uprising.

Keeping to our word does not require, however, that individuals junk their cars to postpone climate change for a millisecond, that chemical workers to quit their jobs today, consumers grow all their own food, or liberal politicians suddenly stop buying TV ad time. The despoilers like to point to our daily collusions in injustice as hypocrisy. That’s nonsense. It denies the structural nature of our problems, and the hard choices we have to make as a community. It’s just another way of blaming corporate depredations on individuals at the receiving end. We are going to have to make drastic changes in the way we live. The question is, do we do it together, fairly, or do a few parasites impose dump all the costs on us?


# Explain how we apply our standards in different situations. In 2005 the single left councilperson in my town introduced a resolution welcoming all kinds of people to our community. It passed, too, 5-4-- after all mention of groups by race and gender had been deleted. It was the usual claim (by Chief Justice Roberts, among many many other old rich white men) that fighting racism is racist. Still, for the folks who never had occasion to think about their privilege, we have to explain all over again why we address these issues.

We do fairly apply somewhat different standards to different groups of people, and to all of us at different times. People with more power and resources have more responsibility. Social change requires different policies at different stages. That's why we fund Social Security benefits for old people and sick people, tax breaks for middle class homeowners, student loans for college kids, etc. That's why we reserve tobacco and pornography for adults. It's no coincidence the folks who always claim there's already a level playing field are also those who do their best to reduce government to war contracting.

So when, for example, white male job applicants complain how unfair affirmative action is, how it contradicts the principle of treating everyone the same way, we have a good counter-argument to make-- and need to do so, vigorously.


Telling the truth, as much of it as we know, seems to me very important. People in power have built such a culture of organized lying--whether TV ads, contemptuous evasions (“That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”) or outright fabrications. I’m not writing about the excuses you give your boss when you’re late-- what does he care, so long as you add more to the bottom line than some teen in Viet Nam?

What’s much more dangerous is the extent the habit and expectation of lying are central props of the regime. In places even more walled than our own --Russia, say, theocracies, or Mexico the way Oppenheimer describes it (ch. 13) --the brazenness with which public figures lie and contradict their own previous words, the profusion of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, the inability to rely on almost any political information, the relentless training to make us accept secrecy, all these make organizing resistance very difficult, because folks there don’t know who to trust, who to focus on, or how to judge the results of their efforts. There was just a story about how Iran’s government arrests whistleblowers and rape victims, for the crime of reporting crimes. It’s not that bad here, yet, but democratizers need to be reliable when the ruling institutions are not.

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“ . . . the harm lies not in the ad itself; the harm is in the exchange, in the collision of ad language, ad imagery, with other sorts of language that contend with it in the public realm. When Apple reprints an old photo of Gandhi, or Heineken ends its ads with the words ‘Seek the Truth,’ or Winston suggests that we buy cigarettes by proposing (just under the surgeon general’s warning) that ‘You have to appreciate authenticity in all its forms,’ or Kellogg’s identifies itself with the message ‘Simple is Good,’ these occasions color our contact with these words and images in their other, possibly less promotional applications.” The real violence of advertising, Dee concludes, is that “words can be made to mean anything, which is hard to distinguish from the idea that words mean nothing” (Kilbourne 74-5).
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If “the truth will set us free” hasn’t quite panned out, I offer: telling the truth will help set us free.