1972

NEW QUESTIONS FOR AN
AMERICAN REVOLUTION

     Section 1
   Turning Point in History
 

  In our 1970 Conversations, "Toward a
New Man,*" we emphasized the difference
between rebellion and revolution. We
determined that a revolution is not just to
deal with past injustices. A revolution
begins a new stage in the evolution of
mankind.
  In our 1971 Conversations, "Changing
Ourselves First," we began to realize how
much we have to change our own thinking
in regard to such basic concepts as politics,
truth, freedom and equality. We need to
develop a new notion of politics as creative
human activity to supplant the one that
most radicals have of politics as "super-
structure," and the one which most
Americans have of politics as "dirty" or at
least less worthy of human endeavor and

'In regards to the use of the word "man" see the
editors' preface, p. xx.

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pursuit than economics or private happiness. We made distinc-
tions between truths of fact and truths of conviction. We
contrasted the freedom which relates people to one another, with
the inner, subjective freedom that an individual feels. We empha-
sized the importance of recognizing the diversity between
individuals in contrast to perceiving everybody in terms of some
abstract concept of equality, which thereby reduces to a least
common denominator. Note: We are grappling with these funda-
mental concepts as people who have come out of and are part of
the revolutionary Movement, and who recognize the need to
make radical changes in our own thinking if we are to help bring
about radical changes in society.
  This year we have to go deeper and wonder about the nature
of man, not from the outside as an anthropologist does, but from
within, in terms of how man conceives of himself.
  Men and women have been exemplifying this nature for fifty
thousand years, but most people today know little about those
fifty thousand years, and therefore know very little about the
nature of man except as illustrated by their father and mother,
their brothers and sisters, and themselves. If you ask someone
"What do you want?" he or she is always going to answer in terms
of yesterday or the immediate past, never in terms of tomorrow--
until they have a notion of tomorrow. Our job is to project the
concept that there is a tomorrow, and that the revolution is not an
expression of the past or the present; it is an expression of this
desire for tomorrow.
  Have there ever before been so many people saying, "We are
in the struggle," without any common notion of what the struggle
is for? The Crusaders knew they were out to convert everyone to
Christians. Today people in the movement have no unifying idea
of what kind of "whole new person" will create, or will be created,
in the process of revolution. And yet precisely because in the U.S.
there is such a deep cult of the individual and because people have
so many different points of reference, we need a unifying view as
to what kind of more human, human being will create, and will be
created in, the course of revolutionary struggles.

Since the Rebellions
  In the Russian Revolution it wasn't so necessary for people to
have a concept of the nature of man, of what man has done down
through the ages. In the past, acting out of material necessity and
with standards and traditions still remaining from the past, people

     New Questions for an American Revolution 83

could move almost reactively and by their reactive actions advance
society? They were pursuing a course of history whose direction
was already to some degree set by the pursuit of economic
necessity and which they were only in a sense improving.
  In the past we never asked workers whether they were for a
revolution. The very fact that they rebelled against present
conditions, that they thought of themselves as "us" versus
them, was enough for us to be sure that they were for the new
society. In a sense it was not until the United States experienced
an extended period of continuing rebellion as over the last ten
years--reaching the point where rebellious masses feel that
because of the despicableness of the present society, they have the
fight to do any thing--that we were able to arrive at a really
serious evaluation of the difference between rebellion and
revolution.
  Unless we are willing to make this evaluation now, we can
`only wind up making excuses, rationalizing why we didn't
succeed--which is what radicals generally do--if we had only
,reached more people," or "if we had only gone deeper" etc., etc.
What we have to re-examine is our major premise which has been
that "the masses are ready," and all we had to do was get to them
and stir them into motion. Their momentum would then bring out
the instinctive and elemental drive to reconstruct society which
was already within them. Hence the typical radical emphasis on
"militancy" as the measure of how revolutionary an individual or
the masses are.
  Blacks took this assumption even further, particularly after
the rebellions of the late sixties. They assumed that all blacks were
really for revolution, or that all blacks are beautiful, which is
another way of saying that all blacks are the same: "All blacks are
Oppressed; therefore all blacks are beautiful." Yet, precisely at this
Point of greatest apparent unity among blacks, or of greatest black
identity, of greatest assumption of the sameness of blacks or of
the possibility of uniting all blacks in the wake of the rebellions, all
the differences that are within blacks were beginning to come out.
It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of differ-
ence. For example, if you ask one black guy "How would you like to
live," he might say, "I would like to live like Adam Clayton Powell
with a mistress, a house in the Bahamas and a guaranteed salary
from Congress." Another guy might answer, "I want a Cadillac
and a million dollars in the bank, and I am ready to push dope to get

84 CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

want to live like Eldridge Cleaver because he is a revolutionist and
Martin Luther King was just a Christian liberal." Each is
describing the difference which resides within him; also, of
course, the differences socially inculcated by his father and
mother, what schools he went to, or whom he met or didn't meet;
but essentially the differing answers to these questions spring
from within the nature of the individual. Richard Wright was
Richard Wright, and the only one from his family and community
who emerged. The rest were submerged by their oppression.
There was in Richard Wright something that said, "I am not going
to be oppressed; I am not going to be shaped by my conditions."
Revolutionary thinkers, revolutionary theorists and leaders, or
revolutionary individuals who can give leadership--we are not
talking about revolutionary masses because there aren't any such
things in the U.S. at this point--are made up of people who are
 different in that sense. We can't begin to move until it is clear that
 that is where we are moving from.

 "Things Fall Apart"

  What is the despicableness of our society today! In the
 thirties you could start out with pure economics; even as late as
 1969, it was possible to believe that you could make a radical
 change in the social, economic and political fiber of this country
 within the old framework of economics? Today you would have to
 start by talking about the "quality of life." Everything is breaking
 down. Why? People find it easy to blame the moon program or the
 war in Vietnam. We are again, both--but we also are convinced
 that not going to the moon or ending the war will not stop the
 breakdown--as long as there has been no serious thought given to
 alternatives That is why the question "Whom would you like to
 live like?" is such a revealing one. Or "Who do you think is moral?
 We have to reveal people to themselves--and also to discover the
 people who are different, who are not shaped by their conditions,
 who are determined not to be shaped by them.
   We can say that certain things are not worrying the American
 people as a whole. For example, "inequality" bothers specific
 groups but not the American People as a whole; and it bothers
 specific groups chiefly because they "want in." "Quality of life" is
 too depersonalized a term to describe what is bothering people It
 is the kind of discursive word used mostly by professional intellec-
 tuals in order to talk about the prevailing disintegration The
 average Person experiences this breakdown, this deterioration,

       New Questions for an American Revolution 85

  this disintegration, in far more basic human terms.
    People feel that this "falling apart" syndrome is contrary to
  the nature of a society, that a society should be "a coming-
  together" 'rather than "a falling-apart," that centripetal forces
  rather than centrifugal forces should be at work. They feel that
  the whole situation is beyond human control, that nobody is
  controlling anything and that it is wrong for things to be going in
  all directions with nobody at the helm. If you probe, you find that
  what bothers people most is the purposelessness, the meaning-
  lessness of existence. "Why am I doing what I am doing? Why does
  anybody do anything7" Today the only answer people can give
  you or themselves for what they do is "why not!" If we once begin
  to see that this is what is really bothering people, we might be able
  to arrive at some fundamental concept about what people need
  and the absolutely crucial role that the search for meaning plays in
  human life.
    If we take European history alone, not even considering
  Oriental or African history, we would discover the fantastic
  things which happened during the last two thousand years; for
  example, the Crusades, the dance mania, the French Revolution;
  literally hundreds of expressions of man's strivings to discover
  and create meaning in human life. But by and large, as a people we
  are ignorant of human beings having striven for anything beyond
  the material--and of what human beings needed to make their
  lives meaningful throughout human history. The only way we
  judge anything today is by looking at what is happening in
  Northern Ireland, or Detroit or Los Angeles. We don't have
  enough awareness of the incredible, the indominatable power of
  man's search. The average person doesn't have any idea that
  anybody ever did anything.
   We have to look at the U.S. today in fundamental terms--not
  just in terms of economics, e.g., high prices. In this connection, it is
  not so much the actual highness of prices which bothers people so
  much. It is rather that there seems to be no end to the price rise.
  The whole thing seems so senseless and irrational. In the U.S.
  Prices never go down, no matter how much is produced or how
  quickly more is produced. It is the irrationality of this which is so
  destructive, because unit costs should go down as more is
  Produced more efficiently. What is so disconcerting is the
  apparent impenetrability, the meaninglessness, the senselessness
  Of the whole situation. We live in a Kafka-like world in which what is happening seems to be brought about by nameless shadows.

      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

  We are trying to discover something new about man. Until we
begin to learn more about this, it is impossible to have programs-
because any program would lust be based upon what we have
already determined, i.e., on the past. The past paralyzes all of us. A
vision enables you to escape paralysis.

The Technological Revolution

  Seventy-five years of technological revolution have created a
completely new situation. The Industrial Revolution--two, three
hundred years ago--did one thing, it completely shattered the
world of its time, because prior to that things had been practically
the same for thousands of years.
  Now all of a sudden, the technological revolution has burst
upon us and has done something else: it permits us to create
material values without limit. It permits us to pollute our planet. It
permits us to do a thousand things. And it also compels us, for the
first time in history, to wonder where man wants to go. Up to
now, man has known where he wants to go, but where does he
want to go now! Suddenly you can have Cadillacs and food. What
the technological revolution does is require man to ask himself
some questions which in the past were asked only by very
particular individuals. Now all of a sudden, man-in-general is
being asked, "Where do you want to go now is" Who is going to help
man-in-general decide this!
  The technological revolution is so totally embracing, the
powers which have burst upon man so great, that man suddenly
has to discover what does he want to do with those powers. He has
never been asked the question before that way--imperiously!
What does man want to do with these powers? He has to discover,
"Are we going to have morality! Or are we only going to have
greed!" The answers which Marx gave to the questions of his
epoch are no longer adequate to the issues of this epoch.
  We are not trying to deny Marx, but there is no question
that Marxism is limited by the historical determinism that has
become Marxist thinking. Most Marxists have believed that if you
could only sneak up on the masses, prod them into motion around
their grievances, then, as a result of their objective social condition
in production, they would keep moving in such a way as to create a
socialist society.
  Everything that has happened in the last fifty to one hundred
years has demonstrated that this is not true. We have to repudiate
this concept that the consciousness of the masses doesn't matter;

      New Questions for an American Revolution 87

  that they don't need advanced ideas; that their physical energies
  and their obiective situation in production are all that matter; that
  the self-interest of workers--or of any social group, per se--
  objectively and automatically coincides with the advancement of
  the human race.
   Essentially the people who are relying upon Marx for
  theoretical and political guidance are still trying to communicate
  on the basis of a vision from the past, when in fact the task of the
  revolutionist is always to communicate on the basis of a vision of
  the future, a vision as yet unthought of.
   The important thing today is not to wonder about what one
  doesn't like but to wonder about what one does like, about how
  one wants to live. "How would you like to live otherwise!" That is
  the question. Is the new society going to be an air-conditioned
  society? Are we all going to live in cities under plastic domes, with
  everything in the environment, including climate, controlled!
   The vision we project can't be a purely physical vision,
  although obviously it will have to achieve physical embodiment.
  Essentially it must be of a certain kind of human being, the way he
  or she lives in relation to nature, to other people, past, present and
  future; the things for which he or she has reverence. That is what
  philosophy is--a way of thinking about man's nature, his
  relationships to the cosmos, to others, to human history and to
  human destiny. That is why philosophy becomes so important in
  Periods of great historical transition.

  Getting Rid of Determinism

   We cannot repeat too often that we have a responsibility to
  discover and to project new concepts of man that will be
  appropriate for this period, this specific stage of human develop-
  ment. Seventy-five years of technological revolution have
  Outmoded the concepts by which man has lived, struggled and
  Cared in the past. The technological revolution has totally and
  Completely changed the historical situation just as the
  Renaissance destroyed the Middle Ages. The technological
  revolution is the contemporary equivalent of the Renaissance.
   At this conjuncture, as at every great historical conjuncture,
  man has to bring about a great change in his concept of necessity,
  in his assessment of his power to shape his destiny. At the begin-
  ing of the Industrial Revolution, man was able to abandon his
  previous concept of religious determinism. He was able to
  recognize that man had created the gods. Now, what man has to

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get rid of are the concepts of economic determinism and historical
determinism. He has to stop thinking about man as completely
shaped by his circumstances. He must begin to think and to project
to others the idea that man can change his circumstances, and that,
in fact, man s circumstances were made by man himself. Just as
through technology, man has practically remade the world, so
man can remake himself. The system is man-made, just as
technology is man-made, just as the gods were and just as the
church was. What man is going to be, what society is going to be, is
going to be determined by man. But he can't do this until he stops
seeing himself in the role of creature and sees himself in the role of
creator, stops seeing himself in the role of victim and recognizes
himself as truly self-determining.
  Modern American man has lost the notion that he is the
determiner of anything. If the degradation around us is the act of
man, then man can come to the conclusion that it isn't right, that it
isn't necessary and that he is going to change it. We have to reef-
firm that nothing exists on this planet except as man makes it so.
  One of the reasons why the radicals have failed is that they
think of the revolution as a struggle to reach an end, a closed
system--to prove a theory--rather than to make another
beginning. They have not been able to project notions of and for
tomorrow. Tomorrow's ideas depend on our recognizing that
what we have been trying to achieve is no longer right: that we
have to aim for something new and that this process never ends.

Language
  A similar process of unending creation is involved in
language.
  For about one hundred years there have been two ideas about
language among linguists. One school believes that we are not
really different from animals, that we only have more of the
qualities that they have. They have mouths and larynxes, their
speech organs are shaped like ours. Nobody has been able to find
any difference in their frontal lobes. They can make noises and
tools, e.g., put sticks together. So this school of linguists, who
have been dominant in the U.S., believe that we are only quanti-
tatively greater apes.
  On the other hand, Noam Chomsky believes that we are
qualitatively different from animals because we have genetically
inherent in us, first of all, a generalized capacity to symbol--which
is a creative capacity expressed in language as well as in ritual and

     New Questions for an American Revolution 89

in art. You can it have the idea of sin or of the flag, for example,
without an idea of symbol. Helen Keller describes in her life story
how she felt repentance and sorrow for the first time on the day
she learned about symbols. One morning she had broken a doll in a
fit of temper. She had been playing with it, and then in anger
smashed and kicked it aside. Later that same day she learned about
"water" and had gone around touching "tree," "grass," "ground,"
mother," "father," "teacher," and had burst into a storm of tears,
overcome with emotion because she could communicate. When
they took her back into the house, she saw the doll and, as she
says, "I felt great repentance in my heart. I felt an emotion I had
never felt before, and I knew what I had done." She "crossed the
threshold of reflection," in Chardin's phrase, that day.
  Chomsky also believes that somewhere in our brains are
implanted certain particular ways to form grammar. He thinks
that all the languages are related, that they are not just learned,
that there is something about grammar which is inherent in the
human mind--innate forms of associating and separating
concepts, of constructing syntax.
  Among Chomsky's highly technical theories, one part is
fairly simple--his idea that talking involves a kind of segmenting
process. A sentence is made up of words, but words are made up of
sounds; so you have a box within a box, and you can't have human
communication without this one-inside-the-other relationship.
Apes can only have the whole sound by itself; it is the whole thing
to them. We have words (e.g., "water") which are made up of
several phonemes and we have sentences that are made up of
blocks (words in some languages, phrases in others). All human
symbolization consists of these two parts, regardless of language.
  Without this innate capacity to segment, we could not learn to
speak. We do learn to speak quite automatically; children create
sentences very early that they have never heard before. These
Sentences are usually incorrect grammatically, but the children
are creating. Every sentence is a creation that is being said for the
first time. Speech is absolutely open-ended; and the same
construct of words can mean something completely different,
depending on how you accent each word. For example, "He is
leaving tomorrow," means something completely different each
time you accent a different one of the four words in the sentence.
  Emily Dickinson caught this when she said, "A word is dead,
Some say. I say it just begins to live that day." The whole notion of
its being said leads to something else being said, to the expression

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of other reflections. "In the beginning was the Word."
  At the same time there is a basic contradiction to language: Once you
have taken something concrete, with all its uniqueness and indivi-
duality, and fixed it by putting a word to it, you have to keep in
mind always that what you pinned down, fixed with a word, still
goes on living and moving and changing and growing. It is difficult
to keep this in mind unless you begin with the concept of th,
fundamental contradiction in the use of words. Lao Tze
recognized this when he said, "The Tao [way] that can be thought
of is not the eternal Tao." So did Hegel when he fought against the
"fixed concepts" of the understanding.
  This contradiction becomes especially important when you
are dealing with something as overpowering, as crying out for
thought and analysis, and which sets such a fine example for
future development as a great revolution: the French Revolution
or the Russian, Vietnamese or Chinese Revolutions. When the
Russian Revolution took place, progressive people all over the
world grasped and embraced it as an advance in the evolution of
mankind.
  Radicals and intellectuals are inclined to believe that they
know what a revolution is, when, in fact, every revolution is
unique, happening for the first time. When we struggle for a
revolution, we are not struggling for something fixed or general
but for something that is "open-ended." We don't know the
answers--otherwise it wouldn't be a revolution.

The Dynamic Role of Man
  Objective thinking about human beings has been relatively
recent. Perhaps it comes out of the rationalism of the last few
hundred years and the transference of the concepts of causality
and Newtonian physics to the social sciences (especially by
scholars and intellectuals). Also in bureaucratic societies like ours,
our daily lives are to a large extent determined. In past ages, what
they couldn't do anything about they attributed to gods or to
magic; yet they did think in terms of a large area of choice?
Shakespeare expresses the two opposing attitudes: "As flies to
Want on boys are we to the gods They kill us for their sport ~~ This
is the victim speaking, the attitude of the determinist. And then
the other side: "Men at some times are masters of their fate. The
fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are
underlings." Shakespeare was writing at the beginning of the
revolution in England, and he saw these two attitudes and created
-
        New Questions for an American Revolution 91

   in his plays those who thought they were masters of their fate,
   and others who thought of themselves as victims. Marx combined
   the two attitudes: man creates his own destiny, but he doesn't
   create it just as he chooses.
     Whether we like it or not, or whether or not we know what
   we are doing, we do create our own destinies, just as we keep
   speaking sentences that have never been spoken before. We also
   create the s.o.b.'s who tell us what to do.
     Most people living before the Industrial Revolution thought
   that God determined a great deal of what happened and that there
   were certain things you couldn't do much about. At the same time
   they believed that "God helps those who help themselves." Every
   society has known that gods don't determine everything, that
   magic doesn't work unless you do the gardening. Yet there has
   been a fatalistic element in relation to things you couldn't
   control--like when the rains came or the sun shone. It is when we
   get to the era of science that people come along with the idea that
   everything is determined. Some, like Marx, replaced God with
   natural law or objective conditions, but they also knew about
   choice and that you continually took both into account. Marx was
   not a determinist the way Marxists have been. Perhaps we can say
   that determinism has ruled thought to the degree that people have
   been of small mind, without much hope or perspective. On the
   other hand, everybody who has been revolutionary in the sense of
   carrying on real struggles for the involvement of great masses of
   people in making large scale changes, has thought in what has
   been called "voluntaristic" terms--in terms of the capacity of man
   to shape his destiny. (The Peking Review is full of articles on
   philosophy, which always begin by emphasizing the "dynamic role
   of man.")
    Rigid determinism is relatively recent. It seems to have
   appeared at roughly the same time in both the U.S.S.R. and the
   U.S., when both were becoming heavily machine-oriented and
   bureaucratized--in the thirties, forties and fifties. This is still the
   dominant trend of thought in U.S. social science, although it is
   being challenged. It is not only a question of social sciences
   however; the masses also tend to think of themselves chiefly as
   victims. So that whenever you talk to people about what they need
   to do, they say, "They do such and such, what can we do?"
   Determinism becomes a very real enemy the moment you begin
   any kind of practical political work among the masses. You are
   immediately challenged to break through the concept of victimiza-

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tion. Determinism is a very real question of revolutionary
politics. It is not an abstract philosophical question. This is why
the Chinese place so much emphasis on workers, peasants and
soldiers studying philosophy (in order to appreciate "the
subjective, dynamic role of man"), and also why they are so much
harder on their Western-trained social scientists than on
Western-trained physical scientists (Richman, Industrial Society in
Communist China, p. 219).

Man Created the Gods
  Determinism is the negative of revolutionism: "I have been
determined; I can't do anything." If somebody says he can't do
anything, he isn't going to do anything. To do anything, you have
to believe that man can do things.
  In the beginning man created gods. That is why "religion is
the opium of the masses" is a very bad formulation. It puts man in
the role of victim. On the other hand, we must understand that
man created the gods; therefore he can create anything, including
himself. (If you're hooked, you hooked yourself.) If you don't
think this way, you're not going to do anything. It is easy, and in a
sense comforting, to believe that you are determined by objective
social forces beyond your control. Most Marxists encourage the
masses to think this way and thereby encourage the passivity of
the masses. The responsibility of a revolutionary leader is to
encourage just the opposite; the self-concept of the self-
determining, creative individual, capable of choice. Marxists think
that they are encouraging the masses, but the very use of the
word "system" imprisons people, drowns them under a heavy load
of something they can't get out from under.
  It is also dangerous to give people the impression that they
already have the ability, the capacity to do anything, an illusion
that's reinforced every day by push-button technology. If, side by
side with a deadening determinism, you have a kind of naive
reformism, the illusion that you can change anything, do anything
just by pushing a button, this contradiction explodes in a kind of
rebellious anarchism: i.e., the assumption that you can create a
revolution by running out in the middle of the street, or by saying
things on TV, or by planting bombs.
  Whatever the risks, we have to believe that man can; that it is
the fantastic capacity of man to do anything he sets his mind to;
that the objective social forces are his own creation--so that the
destruction of the objective social forces is also his own creation

     New Questions for an American Revolution 93

First, modern man has to have a philosophy, a conviction. We have
to be evangelists to persuade or project to modern man this philos-
ophy: "You can do it. It isn't going to be easy. But first you have to
believe you can do it. Then you can discover how to do it."
  Why don't people do very much? Because they don't believe
that they made the gods; they don't believe that they made this
society They don't believe that they are responsible for the objec-
tive social forces that are oppressing them.
  Obviously we are not asking blacks to believe that they
created the white man who brought them into slavery--because
they didn't do anything of the kind. But now that they are here,
blacks have to be able to shatter the notion that "the man" controls
everything they can think or do about revolution (we are not
talking about making money or running a grocery store). As long as
blacks think this, they will never be anything but protesters. Our job as
revolutionists is to persuade every man and woman: "You are the
master, nobody else--not the capitalist, not the boss, not the
white man. Man is not a victim except as he creates himself as a
victim." Only then can people say, "Yes, the problems are
enormous; they are formidable, but we can solve them. We can
change the way it is." Because if people don't think that they can,
they are not going to try, and all we are going to get are sporadic
rebellions or bomb-throwing.


          Section 2

     Man's Continuing Search for Self
  In the last century we have become accustomed to thinking of
man as a toolmaker. Mumford says in Myth of the Machine that
nothing could be more incorrect. Twenty-five thousand years ago
man painted the cave, invented dance and gesture, and then
invented language--his greatest creation. If five thousand years
ago he was still ploughing with a crooked stick, isn't it obvious that
he was not chiefly concerned with perfecting his tools, but rather
with discovering himself! Inseparable from whatever man has
done to survive down through the ages have been his rituals, art
forms and value systems. It is modern social science which has
Split man up into so many parts, which has made the concept of his
Survival separate from his art, his artistic endeavor and his
concepts of human destiny. Man himself has not made this
Separation. In whatever he has done, he has always expressed his

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essence.
  The understanding of this process of man's continuing search
for self and for identity is absolutely crucial to understanding the
humanity we are talking about. Humanity isn't what we have
been thinking it was for the last hundred years. Humanity is an
incredibly creative expression. It isn't just a search for well-being
or material goods. Man's symbols go back thousands and
thousands of years. They illustrate what he has been thinking
about, what has been on his mind. When man called the moon the
"lunar goddess," he wasn't filled with moon madness. He was busy
creating another symbol, something that sprang out of himself,
not from fear but from within himself. Man's symbols don't
express outward things imposed upon him by voodoo doctors and
the like. They are an expression of what man thinks of himself.
The symbols are infinitely more important than the words. Jung in
Man and His Symbols illustrates what man has been doing with
symbols. A lot of modern painting is symbols; it isn't language.
Without imagination, man wouldn't be a man; he would lust be
another animal.
  How should man live! We have to be enormously imaginative
and creative in dealing with this question. Most people don't have
any idea of what their imagination is. Some think that by taking
LSD they stimulate their imaginations. Jesus and various
medieval saints imaged quite specifically. They didn't have psych-
edelic dreams. They imagined a new world, a new set of relations
for their time. They knew what it was; they could tell you. We
can't tell anybody for our time--yet. Jules Verne had incredible
imagination: he imagined trips to the moon and under the sea. But
now that we have been to the moon, what will we imagine?
  Most people don't have any idea of their creative capacities
because they don't know anything about man's past, about
Angkor Vat, Versailles, Shakespeare, Bach's music. They have no
idea what man was capable of, let alone, is capable of today.
  All we can be sure of at this moment are some visions of
tomorrow that we don't want to waste time struggling for
because they are based upon the past. E.G. Bellamy's air-cond-
itioned world, or the nineteenth century socialists' "planned
production" as contrasted to anarchic production. Our problem is
not production at all. Similarly with the communist vision of "to
each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities"
Not that we are against planned production or against each having



     New Questions for an American Revolution 95

according to his needs and giving according to his abilities. But the
concept of man that is embodied in these slogans is just much too
narrow in relationship to his potential at this stage in history. "To
each according to his needs" was a vision for a society just begin-
ing to sense the possibilities of abundance. It is based on scarcity-
thinking?

Abstract or Concrete
  Which "human being" is abstract, and which is concrete?
Most people will say "I am a human being" or "I am"--meaning
living and breathing, eating and sleeping. This is really an abstract
or superficial concept of a human being, in that it reduces human-
ness to its lowest common denominator.
  People who think of a human being in this way haven't given
any thought, any imagination, to what it means to be human.
They haven't wondered what a human being is. Man started some
fifty thousand years ago to become somebody. That historical
process is as concrete as anything can possibly be.
  We can't make a Chinese Revolution or a Cuban Revolution
in the U.S. We are going to make a completely new revolution, the
revolution of tomorrow, the revolution of an advanced industrial
country. Nobody has done that yet. The only way we can do it is to
shatter yesterday's generalizations about revolution. We have to
create completely new aspects of revolution. Mao did that in
China--but China is an agricultural country. And also the
Chinese people are very different from the motley crew which
inhabits the U.S. We are trying to do something incredibly
difficult, which requires a much deeper penetration than anybody
has yet given to the problem. Which is why "put human beings
above material things" isn't a very deep penetration. It isn't right
because it isn't enough--we can't persuade people to make revolu-
tion just on that concept. And we have yet to discover the concept
which will inspire people toward revolution; or rather inspire
people to become the kind of people who will make the revolution.
We want to illuminate the incredible, the unique grandeur of man,
to recognize that when man crossed the threshold of reflection, he
became something.
  Most people haven't the faintest idea that they have crossed
the threshold of reflection. They haven't any idea that they are
unique. They just keep on living as if they were earthworms. Man
has never lived like an earthworm. But most people don't know
that.

96      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

 Better Way to Live?
  Is there anything which unifies the American people today!--
apart from individuals like Henry Kissinger who is really a non-
person in the sense that he doesn't care what the historic (human)
goals are. He is just doing a job; you tell him what you want--to
present Nixon as a great man or bring the U.S. out on top in the
current negotiations with Hanoi--and he comes back with a
worked-out plan of how to achieve short-range goals. In this sense
Kissinger is not a modern American. More typically, a modern
American is someone who somehow feels that there should be a
better way for people to live--as when john Updike's Rabbit says,
"There should be a better way for a man to live than demonstrat-
ing some gadget in a variety store and coming home to find his
wife drunk." Most people are on the verge of asking themselves
some very basic questions. What we need to do is discover some
fundamental concept of the way to live that would unify
Americans, regardless of race, sex, national origin, social status or
what-have-you. Then, having given everybody an adequate
opportunity to see what is involved, we unify with those who are
prepared to struggle along the lines of this concept and to fight
only against those who oppose the concepts.
  But first we have to discover what unites us all as human
beings in this new epoch, without worrying about the sensibilities
of any particular group--and in confidence that we have reached
the point where modern man is searching for that which is new.
At this stage we have to discover what is right--and not be tied
down by the concept that one group of people is automatically
right, that its interests and grievances automatically coincide with
the interests of all humanity. We must first discover what is right
and what is wrong, rather than who is right and who is wrong.
Then we can judge people not based on their birth or conditions
beyond their control, but by their convictions, by the truths they
are prepared to exemplify in their lives.
  How ready are we to decide on a set of values? Don't we first
have to get into people's heads that they can determine which set
of values they want to fight for! Modern man is not yet aware that
he creates values; he thinks values are things. At the same time we
must not underestimate the new situation that has been created
by the Movement of the sixties. It is true that people have by no
means arrived at the conclusion that they can shape the future.
But when a group of whites gets mad at blacks for upsetting the
status quo and even talks about those "damn blacks," there is more

     New Questions for an American Revolution 97

chance for movement than in their just getting mad at capitalism.
Capitalism is so anonymous. How can you get at it! Martin Luther
King and Malcolm X were human beings, and if human beings can
mess things up, then maybe some other human beings can also
mess things up-O' put them right. In other words, the whole
situation has been brought down (or up) to human scale.
  In this country it is very important that human political
energies be set into motion--which is what the sixties achieved. It
is better for people in Pontiac, Michigan to begin organizing
against busing than it is for them to sit at home believing that their
destinies are being shaped by economic development or by
Rockefeller?
  The unshakable confidence that men and women are capable
of shaping their own destiny is a vision that is part and parcel of
any great revolutionary leader or organization. No revolutionary
leader has ever been able to touch the masses of people without
this vision. Fidel gave the Cubans the confidence that they could
change Cuba; but he could make a four-hour speech in Union
Square and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the people of
this country. What is our vision for the United States of America!
In the United States no revolutionary leader has been able to pose
the vision of "everyman or everywoman can." Yet even a
bourgeois like Robert Kennedy sensed the need for a vision when
he said, "I look at the problems of man. Most people ask'why'! I
ask,'why not'?" We must never forget also that common denem-
inator of the people who make up the U.S.--which emerges when
we as revolutionists come among them and say, "you can fight
City Hall" and they look at you and say "but look at the other
people who tried," or "I am ready, but what about the other guy?"
  When a worker or a black or anybody complains about the
war or about work or about discrimination, the average radical
tells them that they ought to join the movement or the
organization to oppose capitalism because the capitalists are
screwing up society. What do we tell them? We have to tell them
that nobody is going to shatter capitalism until they want to live
differently. And we have to get them to begin wondering, "What
do we mean by living differently!"

Ideas Move People

  Modern man isn't going to change anything, he isn't going to
Struggle to change society just because he wants more things.
Difficult as iit may be for the average radical to understand this, it


98      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

represents an advance in revolutionary struggle. "Peace" (stop the
misery of war), "bread and land" were a bunch of things in Russia.
On the other hand, as Hannah Arendt points out, the American
Revolution was the only revolution made on ideas. However, the
ideas we have to project today are so extraordinarily more
difficult, more profound, than the classical ones of 1776 or of
1848. That is why we are having so much trouble and must take
enough time to develop them. We have spent thousands of hours
of thought and effort searching, and we still haven't gotten there.
We would like to get there sooner. But if we are in a hurry, we
block ourselves from getting there.
  This is a moment in history--like that in Lorenzo's court. But
while they were trying to place ancient classical history in
relationship to the development of Italian civilization, we in the
United States, at a different moment in history, are trying to
figure out the relationship of technology to the future of man, of
humankind. People like us must do something comparable to the
way Italians started the Italian Renaissance.

Americans and the War in Vietnam

  Einstein said that when man split the atom, he changed
everything but the human mind.
  Can we say that when the atom was split, the mind of man
was changing, only not in the West but in China and Vietnam, the
countries receiving the full brunt of Western technology? That in
these countries, alternatives were being created which were in
fact inventions of the human spirit: great unselfishness, new
relations between men and women, a great sense of international
solidarity, whole new ways of looking at the relations between
people, both inside and between countries? So that in China and
Vietnam, people were not just making "third world" revolutions
aspiring to where the West is. Can we say, therefore, that since,
dialectically, mankind is one and we are all tied together, the mind
of man has been changing?
  Nobody can become a human being who is not totally and
absolutely opposed to the war in Vietnam, to what the U.S. is
doing in Vietnam. If you can't recognize that, you can't think
anything human at all. But to go on from there and say"therefore
the primary task of Americans is to end the Vietnam War" is to go
from a judgment to an action, which doesn't necessarily follow?
Unless there is a revolution in the U.S., the U.S. isn't safe for the
world. But the Vietnamese can't make the U.S. revolution-

     New Questions For an American Revolution 99

Americans have to make it. In that sense the revolutionary
struggle in the U.S. takes priority over all other struggles.
  To talk about our ending the Vietnam War because the war
should be ended is an abstraction. The Vietnam War expresses the
fact that we, Americans, still don't know how to be human. How
else could the Vietnamese War go on? It is being waged by this
country because this country is made up of a bunch of people who
are damaged human beings. Nixon is trying to end the war before
the elections; but if he does, that will not change the way that the
American people think about anything. Being against the Vietnam
War doesn't mean that you have any notion of a new way in which
human beings should live together. If Nixon ends the war, it won't
change any American by a hairsbreadth. We change ourselves;
Nixon doesn't. The only way that one approaches the question of
genocide is by dealing with how to change the people who tolerate
genocide.
  Americans have to solve the problems of the world in this
country--precisely because every problem facing man is focused
here. We have a melting pot which didn't melt; we have thoughts
which nobody else has; we have a kind of materialism which
nobody else has. We are facing every problem man has right here.
That is why the American revolution is the most important
revolution in the world.
  We must remember also that, if Nixon ends the Vietnam War,
it will be chiefly because the Vietnamese people defeated the U.S.
by revolutionary struggle--not because the people in the U.S.
changed. An important part of the Vietnamese revolutionary
struggle was to undermine the morale of the U.S. in the most
fundamental sense of the word. The Vietnamese carried on a
moral struggle, and as a result, this itsy-bitsy nation was able to
defeat the most powerful country in the world. The Vietnamese
People are telling the Western world "don't talk about civilization
until you can talk about morality." We have reached the stage in
revolutionary struggle, in revolutionary thought, when it is
impossible just to talk about facts. We are forced to wonder about
morality. Who has what morality? What is morality? That is what
this war means: whether Nixon ends it or not doesn't mean a
thing except in the politics of being re-elected.

100      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

          Section 3

        The Triple Revolution

  The technological revolution poses three areas of problems
that have to be surmounted; and they can be surmounted only by
creating something new: First, there is the technology of produc-
tion; automation and cybernation pose totally new problems of
work. Second, there is military technology. This poses the end of
the nation-state and war. They just don't make sense any more;
and they are so dangerous, as we pointed out ten years ago in The
Decline of the State and the Coming of World Society. The third problem
area is the technology of reproduction, of maternity and of child
care. This poses a whole new set of challenges that underlie the
women's movement. The pill, the fact that we are getting close to
overpopulation and can't go on having all these children, that
children live longer because they are not carried off by childhood
diseases, that abortion is simple and safe--all this means that
unless women find a new role for themselves, they will stagnate.
This challenges us to change the old relationship between men
and women and poses the possibility of the simultaneous develop-
ment of men and women. These are not "women's" questions any
more than the question of work is a question only of the working
class.
  Thus, the technological revolution has created critical
questions in three spheres: work, the state, the family, economics,
politics, and social relations. Up to now we have tended to think of
these as distinct categories, with economics as the foundation and
everything else as superstructure. Now we can see how they are
interrelated, and we can think about them more concretely in
relation to the daily lives and the search for human identity of
people.
  We are facing all three questions at once, and they are inter-
related. They pose the possibility of our moving again to the evo-
lution of humankind--as before the rise of the state; the possi-
bility of both men and women contributing equally as they have
not been able to do for the last five thousand years--in ways that
have been possible before.
  We must never forget that the state is only a moment in the
evolution of humankind. It only emerged five thousand years ago,
and already it is outmoded. Before that, ninety-nine percent of
human development had already taken place, including the rise of
Home sapiens, let alone those who preceded him. So the period in

     New Questions for an American Revolution 101

which men have been dominant hasn't been very long--although
it is still with us and therefore dominates our thinking (and our
language) Hence if we are referring to historical development
over the last five thousand years, we cannot lightly substitute a
non-masculine word for "man" or we will be misrepresenting
what actually has taken place historically. We have to be careful
not to be looking at these questions only from the point of view of
the woman's question. Obviously it is ridiculous to denigrate
women? It is also obviously impossible to discover what a human,
human being is at this moment by discussing whether God took
Eve out of Adam's rib or vice-versa. What we are talking about is
the creation that people, humankind, men and women, make of
themselves.
  For the average person the idea of five thousand years is
difficult to imagine--it is like a million dollars. At the same time
we must realize that the momentum, the tempo, the pace of
?development has been speeding up. During the first half million
years, the pace was so slow that it seemed nothing was happening.
Yet human beings were probably busy inventing language and the
family! If you look at what was happening in terms of the size of
communities or level of politics or technology, it was very poor. In
the last five thousand years, the more we have moved, the faster
we have moved. Almost everything we use in the Western world
was developed in the last hundred years.
  Chardin said that man will probably live for another seventy-
five million years. Which is why, in one sense, five thousand years
are insignificant; but in another sense, it is urgent for us to think
about another direction now. Einstein said that when man split
the atom, he changed everything but the human mind. How are we
going to make the tremendous leap to that kind of expansion of
the human mind? The reason we seem to be going back to this
question repeatedly in these conversations is because it isn't easy
to grasp the magnitude of the leap in human thinking which is
required, the kind of leap that we need to make in order to expand
the human mind in this direction. How do you make such a leap?
How do you get your mind to break out of old patterns! The only
thing we can be sure of is that when you reach a threshold like
this, you can't make the necessary leap just by brooding over your
grievances, by thinking like a victim--by arguing, polemicizing,
defending your own position and stating your disagreements
With others.
  That is why it is necessary not to be impatient; not to be in a

102      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

hurry to do something when we are not at all sure where we are
headed. Modern man has not even asked, let alone answered the
question, "Where should man be going!" Man knew the answers
to this in the past; he doesn't know them now, especially in the
U.S. That is why the U.S. is such a fantastically important place.
We can have everything we want--and then discover that this
isn't what we want. What do we want!
  We are at a turning point in history. We are not just trying to
deal with topical issues, topical grievances, e.g., we are not trying
to prevent corruption in the New York Police Department. The
problems of the new epoch are not just a continuation of the
problems of the old epoch-food, survival, a roof over one's head.
Obviously we are talking about the U.S.-not about India--
although the solutions we come to here are going to affect the
entire rest of the world. For example, every country in Africa
looks at what is happening to the U.S.

          Section 4
         The Word "Man"
  Last year we raised the question of discovering another word
for mankind to make clear that "man" does not stand for "male"
but for human species, for Home sapiens. We said that we would
not prejudge the question by saying "the word doesn't matter" nor
would we just adopt another word.
  We have been very conscious this year of the importance of
language and of formulations. Earlier we discussed how when we
use the word "man" or "mankind" we clearly refer to the historical
developments of man or the advances human beings have made
since they crossed the threshold of reflection. "Human beings," on
the other hand, suggests zoological or anthropological species
who made the transition from apes to humans. Also the word
"man" by being singular conveys the notion of the individual and
hence the uniqueness of every individual member of the species.
  When we write and speak these days, are we going to talk
about the evolution of man or mankind, or are we going to talk
about the evolution of humanity and humankind? Are we going to
hesitate to use the word "man" for fear that we are accepting a
male chauvinist interpretation of history? At what point does one
retard one's own and other people's understanding of the overall
Movement by being overly sensitive to a particular movement's
grievances and its (often transitory) insistence upon the use of

     New Questions for an American Revolution 103

a particular word, e.g., black rather than Negro. Is it possible to
get so bogged down in the particular that we can't look at the
generai7
  Note on the cover of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways the quote
from Melville reads:

  If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and casta-
  ways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though
  dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most
  mournful, perchance the most abused, among them all,
  shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
  touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I
  shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then
  against all mortal critics bear me out of it, thou just Spirit
  of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of
  humanity over all my kind.

 Most people understand the last word as "mankind." But
Melville said "my kind," which is quite another thing.
 Obviously only a patriarchal society could have created the
myth of woman coming out of the rib of man. Equally obviously,
the idea that one existed before the other is a myth. But, at the
same time, isn't it true that the dominant political-cultural forms
of the last ten thousand years since the rise of the state, the years
which we refer to when we speak of the history of civilization,
have been created by men? For example, if the world had been run
by women for the last ten thousand years, would the state have
emerged independently seven times as it has! Or, again, what
great symphonies have been written by women up to this time?
  Language is very meaningful. For example, in China today,
instead of using the old phrases for husband and wife, both are
referred to as "ai-ren," meaning "loved one." But the Chinese do
not talk about the past as if the husband-wife relationship has
always been based on equality or on love. They don't try to
extrapolate from the present to the past. They recognize that
there was a different reality in the past. Similarly, if we begin
talking about the evolution of humankind in relation to the past,
we are implying that we can disregard what has happened in the
Past and remake the past in terms of the present or future.
  Almost all the early inventions, especially in the passage from
hunting to horticulture, were certainly created by women. This
includes almost every important craft: pottery, basketry, cooking
and storing food, spinning and weaving, sewing, housebuilding,

104      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

all the equipment for tending babies, medicine. The situation i,
less clear in relation to fine arts; e.g., men did paintings of th,
hunting of animals. Almost everything except killing animals,
fighting other men, and boat-building, seem to have been done by
women.There is no question but that women invented horticul-
ture and agriculture. In early times women were the ones with the
spatial stability and the leisure which are both necessary to create
new art forms, new technology, new thoughts.
  It is only after you get to advanced horticultural and horti-
cultural-pastoral societies--when populations become concen-
trated on valuable land, and around irrigation sites, and other
property that was scarce and fought over--that the military arts
become important and men come to the fore. Also you began to
have full-time specialization. In the early period of part-time
specialization, spinning, weaving, pottery, etc. were done by
women in addition to cooking and caring for babies. But once you
get to metallurgy, it is complex and time-consuming enough that
you have to have people doing it full-time--so it becomes an
inherited craft. You get men doing it because women do not have
the time. They have too many other things to do. So you get the
conditions for the rise of the state. And from then on, men become
the advancers of civilization while women become more the
conservers, the links, the peacemakers sometimes, and the
traditionalists.
  It seems obvious that in the earlier stage women played a
tremendous role in advancing society. Then at a certain stage,
men took over. It is not a question of whether it was good or bad. It
happened. But now we are at a technological stage where we are
free to wonder what is the appropriate relationship between men
and women! Who does what? We don't need men for protection in
the sense in which we used to. What is the problem we face now!
The issue is not whether women preceded men or Adam preceded
Eve. What do we need to do to advance humankind!

          Section 5

        Confronting Ourselves
  Why is man/woman's mind lagging so far behind the
splitting of the atom was the culmination of a method of thought,
the scientific method, which had been developing and had been
achieving wonders for nearly four hundred years. This method of
thought, while concentrated and achieving its highest


       New Questions for an American Revolution 105

  professional development in people like Einstein, also shaped the
  thinking of most everybody else in the Western world.
    But now all kinds of questions are being asked, precisely by
  those who, like Einstein and the atomic scientists, achieved the
  breakthrough of splitting the atom. Einstein recognized that
  those who were the culmination of this kind of thinking probably
  would not be the ones to break loose from it with a new kind of
  thinking and provide the answers.
   How can we expand our minds? How can we expand the mind
  of modern man? How can we help people in the modern world to
  break out of old patterns of thinking? Individuals have to confront
  themselves. Nothing could be more important. Anthropologists,
  sociologists talk about the nature of man/woman as if it were a
  matter of looking at somebody else. But it is a question of looking
  at ourselves. Until we have stimulated enough people to think
  about themselves, to confront their selves, we won't be able to
  wonder about new human relations.
    In 1970 we talked about a new man rather externally. In 1971
  we talked about changing ourselves. This year we're beginning to
  discuss how we can bring people to confront themselves as a step
  towards creating their new selves.
    How does one bring about confrontation? By creating a sense
  of duality, of conscious polarization between the negative and the
  positive. What kinds of confrontation are we trying to stimulate in
  the U.S. today? Between bourgeois and socialist attitudes!
  Between the subjective and the social!
    All socialists up to now have conceived of man & woman as
  either subjective, selfish, bourgeois or as a communist who didn't
  have any sense of self except in relation to the communal. This has
  been proven to be nonsense. Mao isn't trying to create a new
  man & woman who doesn't have individuality or subjectivity. He is
  trying to advance the idea that new men and women in their
  subjectivity can recognize community. Mao is trying to create an
  Opportunity for people to be individual and subjective without
  being anti-communal-because being communal satisfies their

  subjectivity. He has refused to accept the duality of subjective and
  Objective--the basis of so much Western thought which hampers
  OU' minds and our communication with people so that we can't
  appeal to the creative and dynamic energies within them. We can't
  rule out the subjective because each individual is a subject. We
  have to appeal to and arouse the subjective will.
    What is a socialist? We have used the word for a hundred

                        ill
106      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE
years, and yet nobody really knows what a socialist is. We are not
going to get anywhere until we have put together a bunch of
people each one of whom decides individually, subjectively, what
kind of a person he/she wants to be and what kind of society
he/she wants to see and what he/she is willing to do for it. Each
one has to do it. Talking about "socialist man/woman" in general is
an evasion of individual responsibility. It is easy to join a socialist
party, but you haven't done anything by signing the card until you
have internalized something. People have talked about being
socialists without any personal definitions being involved.
  It is always a person, an individual who decides. But he/she
has to decide with regard to the transition from one kind of person
to another and to understand that these two kinds of persons are
in opposition to one another. There has to be a concept of
historical transition, you must feel that you are part of it, and that
your decision to be one kind of person rather than another kind is
not only a personal but a historical decision. But it has to be
someone with a concept of self-worth who makes the decision.
  We have to transcend the traditional Western dualism
between the subjective and the objective. Of course, it is possible
to be subjective in the sense of not being objective--looking at
things only from your personal point of view. This is what we
mean when we accuse a person of being subjective. But a
man/woman is automatically subjective. How he/she uses his/her
subjectivity, responsibly or irresponsibly, grandly or meanly, is
another question. What we have to do is recognize and welcome
subjectivity and to insist that people take responsibility for their
"I"--not slough it off. We are rejecting the old dualism between
the personal and the political.

"Choosing"
  In medieval Europe people built Gothic cathedrals--the most
fantastic things that people have ever built. The incredible thing
about them is that nobody knows who designed them; there
weren't any known architects or engineers. In a sense every stone
in the Gothic cathedral is different from every other. They were
not mass-produced, and there are hundreds of thousands of them?
The cathedrals were built by the people of the area. Maybe it took
a hundred years to build, but they did it. Nobody stood around
with whips, but for some reason these people contributed their
knowledge, their skills. They felt something for their creation?
This is an aspect of role rather than rights. These folks wanted to do

     New Questions for an American Revolution 107

it. They chose it.
  We have to find reasons for people today in the U.S. to want in
this way--at a time when apparently nobody wants to do
anything? Whereas people in the past wanted to do such things as
build cathedrals under very difficult conditions, today under far
better conditions people don't want to do a damn thing. We face
the awesome challenge of discovering how to give people the will
to build when there are constraints in society which do not allow
you the freedom even to go into the country and cut down a tree to
build a cottage.
  Suppose we said to some folks on welfare, "instead of
demanding more welfare, why don't we take over all the chores
that have to be done in the community, including getting rid of
dilapidated buildings, cleaning up lots and building playgrounds in
them, carrying out community campaigns for birth control,
administering to the sick and the old, setting up small scale
community clinics is And, wherever these activities conflict with
activities already categorized as paid jobs, let that conflict be
recognized as one that we will have to work out in order to
establish new relations."
  This might be a form of expressing the same creativity that
people used in building the cathedrals. These people didn't live in
cities; they lived in small towns of 1000-2000 people. Sometimes it
took them a hundred years--but they had a goal of some kind.
Maybe it was to praise God or the Virgin Mary, but it was a goal
that expressed their humanity as they understood it.
  Can people on welfare do what we outlined above? It depends
upon whether they feel they want to do it as an expression of their
own humanity, their selves. You can't ask anybody to go out and
clean up a lot and build a park out of it if all he/she is thinking is
"Why should 17 I am not going to get paid for it. I can sit home and
do nothing and get the same amount of money." Or who says,
"My brother is a park worker. If I do that, I will put him out of a
iob"(even though he knows his brother won't do it because there
isn't any money to pay him at the rate he is accustomed to).

For One's Own Sake

  Workers, as well as those on welfare, need to examine their
attitude towards work. Take, for example, a garbage collector who
doesn't give a damn because he/she has the nastiest job. So he/she
Spills half the stuff in the gutter and doesn't bother to pick it up.
He/she doesn't think of or care about the rats that will have a

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chance to feed and breed as a result of carelessness. A person who
has that attitude to a job, no matter what job, can't possibly build a
socialist society. A person with an attitude like that isn't an asset
to any society.
  Does it do any good to accuse a person like this of "not
thinking about society?" Wouldn't it create more movement, more
movement of self if we were to say, "You are permitting yourself
to do a lousy job, and you don't give a damn; that is a helluva way
for a person to live." Then, when he or she replies, "Why should I
give a damnt I'm being exploited. All I care about is my eight
hours," we say, "For your own sake you should give a damn."

What Mao seems to be saying, and what we are still trying to
discover how to say in this country, is "I'm sorry, you are not a
member of the working class or of any advanced class, if you
behave this way. You are not standing for anything, neither for
yourself nor for society." This is the kind of thing that is involved
in confronting one's self.
  The question is legitimate whether we should continue to use
the words "bourgeois" and "socialist" to distinguish between the
"don't give a damn, I'm only concerned with my eight hours"
attitude, and the opposite attitude which cares about one's self and
society. In favor of its continuing use (although not for a broad
mass audience) is the responsibility to tradition and to define
ourselves in relation to that tradition-in order to make clear
what is being preserved and what is being changed and why. We
have to make the definitions. We don't just throw out words and
start afresh (as with the use of the word "man") because we
recognize that the words came from somewhere. So, through an
enormous amount of effort, we arrive at what we mean and don't
mean by "socialist," and thereby we also help those with whom we
are working to understand that nothing remains the same, and
how and why changes take place in concepts along with changes in
 society. Hence we should clearly establish our definitions of
 socialism, boldly accepting our responsibility for redefining it
 because of the differences between nineteenth century Europe
 and twentieth century America, making absolutely clear what we
 mean and what we don't mean by socialism, bourgeois society, etc.
  So we say to a person who is doing a lousy job,"Your attitude
 to work is the attitude of this lousy society which you have
 accepted. You are thinking only a bout your own lousy self and not
 about your job in relation to other people or to yourself as a
 creative human being. Therefore, you are defining your self as

       New Questions for an American Revolution 109

  mean and petty Just because this society defines human activity in
  terms of exchange value doesn't mean that you have to accept that
  definition? There is another attitude to work which each of us has
  to do and can discover for our own dignity, our own selves--our
  own concept of self."
    Radicals who are still talking to workers (including women
  workers) of revolutionary struggle in terms of going on strike
  completely misunderstand the present stage of society and human
  development? Going on strike is what workers had to do in the
  nineteenth century or as late as the 1930s in order to get
  recognition as human beings. Today, going on strike is what
  particular groups of workers do to "get theirs"--without giving a
  damn about other human beings, with no concern for anybody
  but themselves. Therefore for revolutionaries today to talk to
  workers in an advanced country like the U.S. in terms of going on
  strike shows absolutely no understanding of the way the human
  personality is being torn apart these days because of the lack of
  perspective for the whole society, or of what is involved in the
  development of a whole new person.

  Towards a New Work Ethic

    The Puritan work ethic contained within it a certain
  rationality. There was not only the discipline from without but an
  intrinsic rationality about what was involved. It is perfectly
  legitimate to say to everyone that he/she has to contribute to
  society. What you do contribute may be subject to a great deal of
  choice or differentiation as the society develops; but, for your own
  sake, you have to accept the fact that, if you want to live, you have
  to do something besides lust be--like a vegetable. This is also part
  of confronting one's self. Those radicals who believe that the
  Puritan work ethic is completely outmoded by the technological
  revolution are thinking like the slaves in all societies who begin to
  fantasize the new society in terms of the leisure and uselessness
  they envy in their masters. It is dehumanizing to inculcate in
  anybody the idea that they can live without working. We have to
  recognize that, despite the technological revolution and indeed as
  a result of it there are a million new things that can be called work.
    There is no job, no activity, in which you are not relating to
  Somebody, if only to yourself. If you become sloppy in your work you
  become sloppy in everything else. You can't divide yourself. You
  become . sloppy person. Just as you become a criminal if you do
  criminal acts--even if your crimes are against your oppressors.


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  Today, as a result of the rebellions and the identification of
work with slavery and white oppression, blacks have developed an
antagonism to work which has to be fought in a revolutionary
way, by insisting that the socialist attitude to work involves
working well. Anyone who says, "I am a victim of bourgeois
society, of white oppression, and therefore whatever attitude I
have towards work is legitimate, whether it be leeching or
stealing" is accepting the dehumanization of bourgeois society or
of white oppression. Most people who are just rebelling against
the old society think that under the new society they won't have to
work. That is why the notion of the relationship of work to human
creativity and the very nature of man/woman is so important.
Note: We are not saying that "if you don't work, you starve." We
are saying that if you don't work, you don't express yourself as a
human being and if you don't work well, you are a lousy human
being.
  This is another way of saying that anybody who accepts the
victimization of society is not going to change that society. All
he/she is going to do is remain a victim and perpetuate the society.
The socialist work ethic involves tremendous creativity,
tremendous self-reliance, rather than reliance on others to do
things for you.
  The Movement in the U.S. today does not exist, and will not
exist until some very fundamental ideas of the new kind of human
being we are striving to become have been developed and
propagated. There is nobody else in the U.S. today except
ourselves who is systematically trying to develop these new ideas
and with a real relationship to the victims. When slaves develop or
grasp advanced ideas, they have a contribution to make which is
different from that of "free men" like Lewis Mumford or Lancelot
Whyte. When Martin Luther King was ready to give leadership in
1962, practically everybody who was progressive (although not
the radicals) was ready to follow him. Today the search for
direction is in much wider sections of society--not only among
"progressives" but even among the Rabbits (hence the importance
of Updike). As we seek to develop these ideas of polarization and
confrontation, we should recognize that we are doing so for large
sections of society.

Why Philosophy?

  We have been discussing the "bourgeois work ethic" versus
the "socialist work ethic." Neither exists. The Puritan work ethic

     New Questions for an American Revolution 111

did exist. The question today is "What is your ethic!" The Biblical
saying, "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you
sounds fine until one asks, "Well, what would you have them do
unto you!" Then it is obviously only another way of defining what
you want to do unto them. This is not an abstraction. What to do
unto others? Ethics is always specific. Ethics is not a thing to be
discovered? It is created over and over again down through history
by individuals discovering and defining and redefining what they
mean. It is a subjective relationship to necessity and responsibility
and to one's capacities and desires.
  There is no abstract "ethics;" but there is a need in people in
periods of great historical transition to discover the human
reasons for their actions--"rites of passage" for humankind
analogous to rites of passage for individuals and groups--valid
reasons for the human race, through which they can establish
their bond with humankind, past, present and future. When one
set of human reasons goes into decline, people feel the need to find
another. That is why philosophy itself was born of crisis at
approximately the same time in both the East and the West and
why people create new philosophies in times of crisis.
  In the past, especially in the village, life depended on what
each individual did. As long as a tremendous amount of
cooperation was so necessary to survival, a work ethic did not
have to be so consciously worked out. The Puritan work ethic
evolved out of a situation in which the external necessities for
working together, in towns, were not so pressing. Now, once
again, we are in a major transition, brought about by the
technological revolution, which demands that we establish the
human reasons why people should work. Men and women have to
arrive at these reasons consciously and philosophically and not
wait until material conditions compel them to move or think in a
specific direction, which they must then follow--after the fact.
  This is why the Biblical saying, "Do unto others etc." is
meaningless until one has decided what one wants to do unto
one's self. What does one owe one's self as a human being, as a
Person with bonds or ties that bind one to humankind, past,
present and future? At the present time our society is drifting
without a philosophy, without a work ethic. People either repeat
the ethic of the past, "They ought to go to work" (which is no
longer a bond and is, in fact, a statement of division: "they" versus
"us"); or they see no ethic possible at all--it is everybody for
him/herself.

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  Why does a Richter work his ears off to learn to play the
piano, or a Henry Moore to sculpt7 Why do they work that way!
Not just to earn money nor to increase the totality of goods and
services but because they feel that their work expresses the
human personality. (This is why the phrase "socialist work ethic"
is too abstract; it still suggests a society trying to overcome
scarcity and economic underdevelopment.) Creative work cannot
be restricted to work that can be quantitatively measured. The
reasons for work will have to come from within. So to the kids
who say, "I don't have to work, the machine will do it all," all we
can say is "if you are going to sit around and enjoy the fruits of
other people's work, if you can't think of any work you want to do
for your community, for other people, for your self, then you are
destroying your self." At the same time we realize that it is not
going to be easy to start the multitude thinking this new way,
when they have been used to thinking of work only as being
enslaved.

The Nature of Work
  Marx opened up the contradiction within the work process at
the very beginning of Capital when he drew the sharp distinction
between use-value and exchange-value, between concrete labor
and abstract labor. The concept of the human nature of work is
even clearer in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Hannah
Arendt points out in ~he Human Condition, "Every European
language has two etymologically distinct words for what we have
come to think of as the same activity, and retains them in the face
of their persistent synonymous usage." Thus, the Germans
distinguish between werken and arbeiten; the French between ouvrer
and traDailler. In each case, one word suggests a form of human
creativity; while the other suggests pain and travail.
  Nothing is more demeaning than to go into a workplace and
be told to do this and that, and not have any idea of the connection
of what you are doing with the rest of society. You can't be
creative under such circumstances. In an agricultural society,
people had more opportunity to be creative because at least they
had a picture of the relationship of what they were doing, e.g.,
sowing, harvesting, to the whole process and to nature. If it didn't
rain, you had no crops. But the moment you are into an industrial
society, that link to nature is gone. For example, Chrysler
concentrates its production in the heart of winter when the
weather makes it most difficult to get parts from all over the
herself.

     New Questions For an American Revolution 113

country? Nature, in an industrial society, is no longer the
deterrent or directly helpful factor that it was in agriculture--so
the average person doesn't think about nature. We can't go back to
what was, but we do have to wonder about what new forms we
will have to create for human beings to live creatively and in
harmony with nature today, and we will have to struggle to be
free to be creative.
  In the past work was to a large degree governed by the whip,
either in terms of actual, undisguised force (slavery) or in terms of
wages. Obviously we must get rid of this completely. Already, as a
result of an economy of abundance and welfare, this kind of
necessity is no longer with us in the same sense, although a lot of
people are still thinking in these terms. We can't move one step
until we recognize that exploitation is actually decreasing,
although the human condition of people is worsening. What are
the new necessities for living like a human, human being under
these new conditions! How do we resolve this new, unprece-
dented contradiction!
  In the past people could see what they were doing as socially
beneficial, even if it was for wages or if it was dirty or menial work.
The scale of what they were doing was small enough to be
comprehensible by the human eye, e.g., cleaning away trash from
railroad tracks provided safety for trains. Today the huge scale of
operations, the destructiveness or wastefulness of so much that is
produced, all make it difficult to see one's activity as part of a
meaningful whole.
  So, generally speaking, we can say that work is necessary to
the development, the creation of one's humanity. But that is not
saying enough. We have to be specific about which fundamental
ingredients should be incorporated and which eliminated to
enable people to develop, to express their humanity through
participation in work. It is clear that one has to have some pur-
poses--not necessarily directly utilitarian--but as some kind of
contribution to society, to humankind. There has to be an element
of self-determination in relation to purpose. One must also be able
to see the relevance of the methods one uses to the goals or
Purposes one is seeking to achieve. There has to be some sense of
process--that doing things takes time--and of the logical and
temporal relationship between the various steps of the activity,
Some coming before and some after others. And there has to be a
Sense of workmanship, that the excellence of the results depends
Upon the effort.

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The Welfare State
  In the past there were people who did chiefly creative work:
artists, musicians, and others who did utilitarian work, who
still tried to the best of their ability to put into this work some of
their humanity even though the chief motivation for it was social
necessity. We have come now to the point where a lot of folks feel
that social necessity in the old sense no longer holds.
  How did we in the U.S. get so many people on welfare
Welfare is one of the most degenerating, destructive institutions
in this country today. Welfare came out of struggles for
reform--but now it is a permanent fixture which is destroying
human beings. We have reached the point where all the reformist
thinks about is more welfare. What do we think!
  We have to see first that the concept of society's responsi-
bility for taking care of people outside of institutions is an extra-
ordinarily recent phenomenon. Before this, poor people went to
the poorhouse or a madhouse. Now suddenly, we are facing the
fact that what we have created--through caring more for and
about people--stinks! Even though what we have created is a
fantastic innovation over what existed historically. What would
be better than welfare? We must be prepared to deal with this
question, recognizing clearly that the folks on welfare aren't at
this point ready to deal with it themselves. Originally people on
welfare were those in dire need. Then came the Depression, and
there were lots of people in dire need, and WPA and welfare were
created. WPA was a transmission belt back to work. When, after
the Depression we cut out WPA, everybody went directly to
welfare with no transmission belt back to work. Since that time
there has been developing a welfare culture in this society. People
began thinking, "If I can be on welfare and make $350 a month,
why should I work at a job paying only $550?" People became
choosey about whether they would take a job or not. It is going on
in millions of cases all over the country. People are into the whole
victimization complex to justify being on welfare and being
parasites. Now, as a result of the coincidence of the technological
revolution and the culmination (in blacks) of the long, hard

struggles against the compulsion to labor, people have lost sight of
the human reasons for work: to develop, to express and to create
the human personality.
  How can we persuade people on welfare to want to rediscover
their humanity? Because they are the ones we have to persuade
They are the ones who are in most urgent need to find a new,

       New Questions For an American Revolution 115

   enlarged human identity, enlarged concept of themselves as
   human? When you accept the parasite's role in a society, you are
   destroying Your humanity and destroying society at the same
   time. We are accustomed to thinking that people only lose their
   humanity when they commit a crime. But we have to realize that
   people on welfare are losing their own humanity in a very deep
   sense. Welfare has become a crutch for not participating in
   society. It has become a right, like the right to speak your mind; it
   has acquired the status of a universal, of a philosophy.
    Note: We are not talking about objecting to welfare. We are
   talking about how one frees oneself from being so wound up with
   and imprisoned in the past that one can't think about the future,
   about a new way to live, a new way to care.
    What do we tell somebody on welfare! We can't just say,
   "Make a revolution, and you won't need welfare." That is just an
   evasion. We have reforms today that Marx couldn't possibly have
   envisaged, because they didn't exist in his day any more than
   television or satellites or trips to the moon. We have no doubt that
   Marx could have encompassed these changes--if he were alive
   today. Our job is to try to do what he might have done. The
   Marxists have failed because they weren't ready to recognize the
   tremendous changes that have taken place since Marx.
    It is all connected. You can't persuade anybody to be a socialist
   just by yelling about socialism. You have to persuade people that
   something of their human identity is embodied in the concept of
   socialism. The new work ethic involves trying to persuade
   somebody, not that they should take a dirty job and keep their
   mouths shut, but that unless they have a job and do the best they
   possibly can do in that job, they are demolishing both their selves
   and society.
    How does one explain to somebody that we are asking, almost
   imploring, them to join us in understanding that human life does
   not go on in the way they now think it does--by living on welfare;
   that people have to work, even though their definitions of work
   may be very different from those of the past.
    The average person might say about a guy like Richter or
   Louis Armstrong, "That guy isn't working; he is playing music, he
   is having fun." Our job is to persuade that person that everybody
   who is trying to be creative in any possible way, whether by
   playing music the best he/she can or by picking up the garbage
   he/she drops, is working.
    But since some people just make garbage and others see their

   116      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

whole lives as picking up the garbage that others throw out the
window, it is almost impossible to persuade anyone to do the best
possible job in their work. The people who have been working at
picking up garbage then begin to lose some of their humanity too.
So it has to be related to a whole lot of other things.
  A few years ago we were saying, "all we need is the socialist
revolution and everybody will enjoy working for the communal
good." Now we know that isn't so. Unless we persuade people to
think differently about work in relation to their selves, all we
would end up with would be somebody ordering others to do what
has to be done. What we are trying to discover now is how to
persuade people that we are going to be ordered about unless we
are willing to reconsider which responsibilities to ourselves and to
others we are willing to accept.
  This is why the whole question of the work ethic is so
important. If you say "the hell with work," you get totalitarianism,
not socialism. In Marx's time, there was the need to work in order
to produce goods and to achieve direct utilitarian results. Now the
need to produce no longer exists in the same direct way. This is the
dilemma of the U.S. Under capitalism today, it is possible for
vast numbers of people to say "the hell with work," and society
still goes on. There are enough people on welfare today who
accept the way things are, not to want to change a bloody thing.
They will be a barrier in the road toward any fundamental change
unless they first begin thinking about themselves in completely
new ways. What we have to realize is that anybody who accepts
welfare as a way of life isn't going to be for any kind of new
society. He/she is helping to demolish society as well as
him/herself.

          Section 6

           Methods
  When one is dealing with kids, does one have to start with
concrete problems, in order to give them a sense of time in relation
to human development! Our friends in Muskegon were first able
to give their kids an enlarged conception of their humanity in
relation to getting or not getting a snowmobile to take the
groceries up the hill. The issue was discussed not as one of
economics but of human development. The parents explained to
the kids that if they bought the snowmobile today, they would end
up buying Cadillacs tomorrow--that they would be ruled by


     New Questions for an American Revolution 117

things? So they all sat down together and began to examine what
they were trying to achieve, apart from the immediate question:
what kind of people they wanted to be, what kind of household
they wanted to achieve, how to live, work together as a household
in order to develop into the kind of people they wanted to become.
In other words, the solution of the immediate, utilitarian problem,
was placed within a human context. The solving of the technical
problem was not separated from the problem of human self-
becoming
  Effective as this may have been in dealing with children in a
household, how does one address the multitude of people in
today's society who think their problem is "more things?" How
does one start them in another direction!
  First, we have to ask them to begin to look at themselves, and
wonder whether in the present expression of their selves, they
consider themselves to be human.
  Next, we have to ask them to look at the forms in which
people have expressed their humanity through the ages. We have
to ask them to look around for people who may not even have as
much in material things as they have, but who have rejected just
seeking material things, who exhibit their human abilities in their
work, their lives and their communities--people who by not just
sitting around and waiting for their checks are keeping
themselves part of the mainstream of mankind.
  We have to bring about a polarization in people's thinking, a
duality, asking them whether they think they are worse or better
than these people. Do they have a sense of integrity, of wholeness,
of pride, and in a sense, joy in what they are doing now! Or don't
theyl It isn't a matter of making a revolution around these people,
but of getting them to look at themselves.
  On the other hand, since there are so few people who are
exhibiting human abilities in their lives today, doesn't this sound
unrealistic? Don't we have to approach the question in terms of
actual problems, making clear at the same time that these are not
problems to be solved immediately but that they pose the kinds of
human beings we want to become, the kind of society we want--
as in the case of the snowmobile?

Not "Problem-Solving"

  There is a danger of being too concrete, of taking too much of a problem-
solving approach. We want people to open up their minds, to help
them to see that there are other ways of resolving issues than the

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particular track they have been on, that other ways existed in the
past and can be created in the present.
  In the August Intellectual Digest, there is an excerpt of a letter
from architect Lawrence Halprin to Mayor Teddy Kollek of
Jerusalem. Halprin tells Kollek, "You people in Jerusalem embody
almost everything most important in all religions and in different
peoples. But in your plans to extend the city, what you are
thinking is one hundred percent wrong. Because you don't even
look around to see how, for hundreds of years, people in your area,
in villages and small communities, have discovered solutions.
Why can't you think that way is? Why do you in Jerusalem have to
look for solutions from Detroit or in the latest issue of Architectural
Forum or from Corbusier? How can you persuade people to think
that way if they haven't ever conceived of community except as an
auto traffic community?"
  How do we get people to want to get off welfare! The
Muslims, for instance, don't believe any of their people should be
on welfare, but they have given them the "work ethic" of the small
business person--which, when put into practice only turns into a
hustle--to get people to buy the little things one makes or grows.
Perhaps we should suggest that everybody on welfare go to work
in some way that will benefit the community. In other words, we
could begin to project a concept of work as self-determined human
activity and not just as labor.

Rights Versus Roles

  We said earlier that welfare was originally a question of need
and that it has now turned into a culture of rights. It is a way of life
which has now acquired a mystique. To get yourself on welfare
and get more welfare is considered part of the struggle to advance
humanity, something to be proud of. So what we have to do is not
only explain to people how welfare destroys their humanity, but
also to put another concept in place of rights, which is only a way of
degrading people at this stage in contrast to what it was a hundred
years ago. We have to get into people's minds the concept of roles,
in every relationship-whether it is welfare or sex.
  The concept of rights is based upon a quantitative comparison
of what a particular individual or group enjoys, in contrast with
what other individuals or groups enjoy. Hence it contains within it
the potential not only of struggles for equality, but also of envy
and competition. The conception of roles, on the other hand,
involves appropriate social relations between individuals or groups



     New Questions for an American Revolution 119

  All previous societies have had a concept of roles rather than
rights? Only bourgeois society has developed a concept of rights,
and nowhere has it been more developed to the extreme than in
the U.S. Because nowhere have people been so concerned with
equality--everyone on the same level--and nowhere have people
been so conscious that certain groups are deprived of equality.
  How can people in this society develop a concept of roles?
Maybe we need to have another of what, let's say, a Chinese person
thought two thousand years ago about roles; otherwise our
concept of roles is a product of this society, not of the previous
development of man/woman during whose evolution the idea of
roles was elaborated.
  From there we can begin to explore the need to develop a
concept of roles as a further enlargement of the concept of
appropriate social relations, and as a fundamental advance over
previous societies in which roles were fixed by birth or assignment,
where individuals had no part in determining their roles and no
possibility of a variety of roles, as we have today.
  We today can conceive of a new society in which people
understand, determine and accept roles through democratic
decision making, conscious of the tremendous opportunities now
available for virtuosity in roles and at the same time of the actual
differences that exist between people. Thus we move from the
question of democratic rights (a concept of bourgeois society) to
the concept of democratic decision-making which is organic to the
new society. We must bear in mind also that in any society people
must conceive their roles in relation to contemporaries as well as
to the past and future of humankind.
  We have to be wary of the problem-solving approach. People
who are solving problems communally begin to learn that the
problems are communal--which is an enormous advance. But if
we approach solutions to problems without having any idea of
how people have solved them before, the likelihood is that we are

going to solve them incorrectly. In modern society almost all
problems are "solved," but they are solved incorrectly. That isn't
bourgeois particularly. It is just that people haven't enlarged
themselves to solve problems in ways other than they have solved
them heretofore: so to get more people into a given space, they
build skyscrapers. Or to get more traffic moving, they build
expressways. People only think fundamentally in relation to
Where they are now; they have not freed their minds to think
differently. In Focus and Diversions, Lancelot Whyte says that at a

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certain point Einstein couldn't think freely because his mind
remained in the classical framework. People have to struggle, yes,
but lust struggling doesn't necessarily mean you arrive at the
right answers. You can be struggle over real problems and be
struggling incorrectly, "treading water" and not making any real
advance.

"Chiding"

  It is necessary to struggle with one's self. But it is impossible
to arrive at some confrontation with yourself if you haven't the
slightest idea of your heritage, if you don't know that man/woman
has lived a million years, or that humankind has "crossed the
threshold of reflection," or if you think that the way you are is
the only way man/woman has been or can be. Individuals can try,
but they can't really struggle with themselves unless they are
aided by having some idea that their struggle is infinitely richer
than they think it is, infinitely larger than their present selves.
  We have to "chide" people, telling them things about their
selves, making them face their selves as they are. (Malcolm X was
a master at this kind of chiding.) Because they don't believe
anything is now happening to them, they don't believe anything
can touch them. We have to combine this "chiding" with
illumination of where they have come from, because they don't
know what they are doing to their selves until they put their
present selves in relation to where man/woman has come from.
Otherwise they can't really have any idea of the self they are
destroying: It is a whole lot bigger than they think it is.
  We might say, "So this is happening to you. You can't do this
and you don't have that. Now let me tell you something else that
human beings have been doing down through the ages." We lay
out a panoramic picture to them. Then we bring them back to
reality, to today, to what they are doing, and we tell them, "If you
keep on like this, it represents such and such."
  We are searching for the process by which to relate people to
their selves. This is what we are getting closer to this year. Last
year we were examining concepts. Now we can see that a lot of
people think they are getting their rights: equality, their freedom,
by being as they are, e.g., on welfare. That is what freedom,
equality, rights mean to them. We have seen how these concepts~
which were once the basis for concrete progressive struggles
have become abstractions that enable people to see themselves as
victims rather than masters, as creatures rather than creators, as products rather

     New Questions for an American Revolution 121

than makers; and we are clear now that at this stage, victims, as such,
do not contribute to the advance of society.

Self-developing Movement
  Thus, we see that we must have 1) a historical concept which
relates to the past; 2) a conception of negation and polarization--
of struggle and confrontation between different concepts of what
advances a human being, e.g., between rights and roles; and 3) a
process of chiding or confronting people in relation to their own
selves on fundamental questions like work. If we just seize upon
issues and try to exploit them to mobilize people, we can't develop
within people the new concept of self that is necessary for any
self-developing movement. Moreover the projects we mobilize
them for will inevitably turn out to be failures, and we end up
demoralizing people and immobilizing them even more than they
are now.
  To give people a reason why they should care about their
selves is incredibly difficult. People have so little conception at this
point of the potentiality of human beings, of what they have in
their selves, of where they have come from and where they can go.
  Aspects of human society are fragile, but human society
itself is not. It has lived a million years inventing language, etc.
Among the things we have to project to people is an incredible
pride in being a member of the human species. If one wants to be a
human being, one has to exhibit and maintain some of that
incredible pride and indominatable spirit that the race has
previously exhibited. "Are you just going to sit around on welfare
and say that you are a human being? It is an outrage not only to
Yourself but to the human species!"
  We are not trying to persuade all people on welfare of this
possibility. We are rather projecting the idea that this kind of
Project is possible. We are asking them to consider: "You are
getting paid, you have a certain amount of free time. Would you
care to use it in a community effort without worrying about union
Scale--and with the understanding that you are going to have to
Struggle with people who consider this their turf--in the course of
getting such a thing under way?"
Unions Today
  All of us know, but few of us want to face that the union is
also part of our entrapment today. We can't forever evade the ~act
that unions, which were formed in the era when exploitation was

122      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

getting worse, have (in this era when exploitation is decreasing
but dehumanization is increasing) become one of the instruments
of our dehumanization. They are able to do this, not only because
of their physical power but because of the concepts of work and of
class on which they are based.
  One of the important things a revolutionist is going to have to
do in the next period is confront the attitudes that unions
represent. Because unions, in the most fundamental sense,
represent the attitude "get ours" regardless. Unions also
represent the attitude of "don't work, because by working you
increase profits," without consideration of what the process of
work, the nature of work, means to human rationality. What the
unions are doing also gives the impression, creates the attitude,
that somebody else, the system, can do things for you. The
radicals, in criticizing union bureaucracy, reinforce this attitude
by giving the impression that somebody else beside you, the
protester, is to be held responsible for important decisions.
  In all these ways that affect the very essence of the self-
concept of people in daily life, unions represent all the worst
attitudes. It is very difficult to accept, when so many struggles
have gone into their organization, that unions today are the
culmination of reformism, and that we have reached the point in
history in the U.S. where the more you reform, the worse things
get. It has never been so before. In the past, it was inconceivable that
struggles for higher wages could act to destroy human rationality.
Such struggles were revolutionary in the past in the sense that the
changes they engendered advanced everybody in society. But look
at the constitutions of most of the unions, particularly the AFL
unions. They read like a combination of Karl Marx and the
Declaration of Independence. The concepts behind them are all
pre-technological revolution.
  Unions are not the only examples of this kind of destruction
of human rationality, but they are an important example. We are
not advocating an attack on unions; we are discussing
understanding, internalizing, recognizing that we are at the stage
in the U.S. today where the changes which have to be undertaken
are not going to be undertaken by reformists, or by people who are
thinking about how to "get ours." They can be undertaken only by
people who know what they want to change.
  One of the things we are attempting to clarify is that the only
basis on which the next development of the human race can take
place is through identification with the human race through

        New Questions for an American Revolution 123

   establishing your human identity--not as a restrictive class, race,
   or sex identity. At this stag