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from starving to death but has also increased the dependence of
these millions on the U.S. and at the same time expanded
American production, American profits and the American
standard of living. We tend to think of victimization as a static
situation, whereas it is a relationship which is self-perpetuating.
When you help somebody, you may also help them to become a
victim. What then does one do? Just say, "We have been
victimizing you all this time; now starve so that you can face your
own responsibilities." Or can we ask Americans to do something
different because what we have done is make others more
dependent.
  If the Americans don't have a 200 miles fishing limit, they
won't starve to death, even though they may have to reduce their
standard of living. But if the Peruvians don't have a 200 mile
fishing limit, they will starve to death. Can't we say to Americans,
"Doesn't that mean anything to you--or don't you give a damn!"
That question can't be answered economically. The only way to
answer is to think in terms of human beings. What do you want
Peruvians to live on if Americans fish up all the fish! That means
facing Americans with their responsibilities to make some choices.
Why can't we accept a twelve mile fishing limit for ourselves and a
200 mile fishing limit for Peruvians!
  We must all begin to do, even if with less efficiency and with a
lower standard of living.

Todays Lion's Dens

  This summer we are beginning anew, not with what we are
against but what we are for, not rejections but projections, We are
searching for the fundamentals, the elements of the new. We have
been searching in unexplored territory, and some of it has Seemed
hit and miss.
  We have stressed what the founding fathers were doing in
1787-89 more than in 1776, that is, seeking a better way for people
to live together. But they were doing it for their world, the world of
the 1780s, expressing this as profoundly as they were able to do at
that time, while we have to do it for our world, the world of the
1980s.
  We have stressed the need for a certain kind of people, those
interested in ideas, capable of passionate conviction, and
concerned to persuade others to examine their own ideas and
explore other ideas. We believe that this kind of person is to be
found in the community as much, if not more, than among intel-

        Projections Not Rejections      269


lectuals who have a careerist interest in ideas.
  How do we persuade others to become participants in this
search, to become aware of their psychic hunger? We have
suggested that this might be done by asking people what do you
miss in life? rather than by asking them what is wrong?--which
leads to complaints and blaming others or just trying to get others
off your back.
  We have been going back to the basic social groupings in
which people have lived together and learned how to live
together--families, communities, nations, looking at these not in
terms of Marx's concepts of history as class struggle or of
exploited versus exploiters but in terms of man/woman's search
for community--better ways to live together.
  Some people think of "we" as just my immediate family. For
others it means their community, race, or sex--or only those who
agree with them. Most people who think of human beings as "we"
still think of human beings on one side and the environment on
the other. When we look at the pictures of Earth taken from outer
space, we should be able to see that we and our environment are
inseparable. We belong to a common unit of survival. We have to
see ourselves in an alienated relationship with nature rather
than as part of nature. They talk of a battle with nature, forgetting
that even if we win that battle, we would find ourselves on the
losing side. If we are not going to lose that battle, we have to
change a lot of ideas about ourselves.
  Freud in the nineteenth century was trying to make
manlwoman realize that their biology and their psychology were
much more interrelated than we realized. He focussed on sex as a
manifestation of our biological nature.
  In a sense what Freud did for sex, Marx did for the belly.
Against the young Hegelian idealists who lived in the realm of
ideas, he tried to relate man/woman to our biological nature. But
when, in the Commnunist Manifesto, he said that as a result of
capitalism, "all that is holy is profaned and man must face with
sober senses his conditions of life and his relations with his kind,"
he was not talking about the belly at all.
  We are beginning to discover that maybe the ancients or the
American Indians knew a lot of things that were sacred which had
noihing to do with the belly. In fact they were willing to starve to
death for these because they were qualities or relationships that
had developed within manlwoman when we crossed the threshold
of reflection. How do we persuade people of the importance of

270      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

these? How do we get back to these without saying that "I can't eat
steak unless everybody in the world is eating steak?" which is a
quantitative notion? How does one think "I can't go to bed happy
at night unless I am at peace with the things that are sacred to me."
  Maybe it is necessary to go backward materialistically. Maybe
it is our job to persuade people that this is not going backwards at
all but that in a spiritual way it is going forwards--in terms of
things that human beings have always held most sacred. Maybe
people can realize that mobility isn't what I am looking for. I am
looking for place. How do we proiect to people that if we want
some of the things we miss in life, like community and
comradeship, we have to accept a diminution in material things!
  We have to arrive at the point where we can be very free
without being afraid of being called Jesus freaks or reactionaries.
If a bourgeois like John Gardner comments on the environment,
we don't have to say that he can't possibly mean it or that he can't
do anything about it because he is a reactionary, but rather that
what he is saying we will have to face eventually.
  How do we persuade ourselves first of all that "man/woman
does not live by bread along." And if not by bread alone, what is it
other than bread that man/woman lives by!

History as Struggle

  One of the things we have been trying to say this summer is
that instead of seeing history as class struggle, we must see it as a
continuing struggle to create human social relationships, and that
the struggle for those has been as important, most of the time
more important, than the struggle for material things. If we don't
see this throughout the history of humanity, we will think that it
is only yesterday that man/woman got rid of the belly hunger and
caught on to psychic hunger, and we will not understand this
psychic hunger deeply enough. Insofar as we have accomplished
anything, it is because we have recognized that the very family
unit has been an expression of the human need for community
and that human needs cannot be compartmentalized into material
needs on the one side and spiritual needs on the other. We look at
the family unit not in terms of exploitation but of the positive
human need for community because we look at history and the
basic struggles of society in a different way.
  We have to be careful not to idealize existing families or
former families or existing or former communities. We are talking
about the need for community which has been manifested in



        Projections Not Rejections      271

human development. The idea of community is not just
something we pulled out of our hats. But you can't just create a
family or a community from your idea or your ideal of a family or
community. We have to start from what is, from the communities
within which we live and from the contradictions which are either
destroying them or can possibly lead to a transformation of these
communities.
  We have stressed the difference between networks and
communities. Networks are the criss-crossings created by and
between individuals with common interests from various already
existing communities. Communities tend to be conservative but
they also contain prophetic elements which try to transform
them--who are not to be confused with the "community agent."
  Suburban communities tend to center around the raising of
children. It is always easy to get a community together around the
question of a light in the corner or a block party, but today we have
to challenge people to create communities around issues and
questions on a higher level.
  Our discussions show how free we must make ourselves in
order not to be limited by previous concepts. All previous revolu-
tionaries have judged themselves by their perseverance and
dedication in fighting against capitalism, and by how single-minded
they were in their rejection of capitalism and being on the right
side (that of the workers). We will judge ourselves rather by our
perseverance and dedication in fighting for something, and if in the
process of fighting for something, people discover how much they
are against capitalism, then they will make a revolution against
capitalism.
  We have been discovering what we are fighting for on four
levels: as individuals defining themselves anew, as families
making new sets of values, as communities extending the human
values discovered in the family, and as nations. The family, the
community and the nation are all human social units which
human beings have created in their struggles to create more
appropriate relations among themselves.
  Radicals are constantly trying to reach the human being from
the economic standpoint. We are convinced that you can only
arrive at the human by beginning with the human.

Soul

  If you have only so much territory and you have run as far as
you can go until you reach the ocean and folks are crowding
behind you, then you begin to realize that it may be necessary to


Soul

  If you have only so much territory and you have run as far as
you can go until you reach the ocean and folks are crowding
behind you, then you begin to realize that it may be necessary to



272      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE


restructure your relationships. That doesn't mean you are
running backwards. The sheer quality of people and the advances
of technology have put us in this strange dilemma where we have
to think of human relationships in different terms than the
relatively simplistic answers of Karl Marx. Because we are the
most technologically advanced people in the world and have
enjoyed the highest standard of living, we are the first to discover
through experience that "more" isn't "better." As of now in this
country there is no concept of limit, no concept of enough, only
the idea of "more." Somewhere along the line we have to
introduce the concept of limit. The solution is not in science, it is
how we look at "we."
  Do we believe that there is an unlimited supply of energy for
our knickknacks and gadgets? Do we believe that science is going
to solve all our problems? Do we accept science as our God? What
did Einstein really mean when he said that when man split the
atom, he expanded everything but the human mind?
  We could say that Einstein was absolutely correct, and then a
man like Billy Graham comes along and says, "I agree with that;
the reason we haven't discovered our minds is because we haven't
discovered Jesus." How does one go about discovering what is in
man/woman's mind or what this mind is? It isn't that we don't
recognize Jesus who, according to Billy Graham, understood
everything that is in man/woman's mind and in fact put
everything there. Our problem is to persuade people that they
have minds and that the most important thing human beings have
done down through history was to use their minds. However,
during the last couple of hundred years, we have been using our
minds only scientifically and technologically, leaving out every
other aspect of the human mind altogether. Now we have to
rediscover our minds or our hearts or souls-we should not be scared of
the word "soul." And after we discover that, we will have the courage
to say to a Bolivian, "Don't be in such a rush to build an oil refinery
or an eight-lane highway to Brasilia, that hair-raising manifest-
ation of the misuse of the human mind."
  How does one go about persuading each person that "you are
a helluva lot nicer person than you think you are, than you believe

is possible. You just don't know much about yourself." That is
what the communes and the youth movement were trying to
discover in their way, and we are trying to discover in another

way.
  We have to do it in a political framework, rather than just in a

        Projections Not Rejections      273

rebellious framework. We are trying to discover how to liberate
people to think about their minds or their hearts or their souls, so
that out of that liberation will come all kinds of forms of which we
know nothing as yet. We may call these forms "socialism" or
"communism" but we will never get them until people discover
that they have to look inside themselves for what they miss in life
and not outside themselves.
  Up to now philosophers have understood that the human
mind, in addition to functioning analytically and scientifically,
functions in two other ways. We exercise moral judgment--which
enables us to relate to our fellow human beings. This is the realm
of social relationships, and morality essentially involves the
creation of appropriate relationships with one's kind, putting a
value judgment on one's relationships with one's kind. You have
to have a certain concept of your humanity and of the history of
humanity in order to establish these values.
  Then there is aesthetic judgment which is essentially the
recognition of the sacred or of the totality which is greater than
man/woman. Because art expresses and appeals to such deep and
as yet uncategorized feelings in people, it tells us more about the
grandeur of which human beings are capable than any other use of
the human mind.
  Kant recognized these three aspects of mind: scientific
reason, moral judgment and aesthetic judgment. Could we say
that there is also a fourth capacity which is the capacity for
politics, which on the basis of these three other aspects of mind,
engages in discussion, debate and struggle in order to arrive at
appropriate decisions in regard to social relations!
  We have to begin by recognizing these capacities of the mind
and that most human beings don't begin to exercise these
capacities, which is why we must struggle to get people to utilize
them.
  If you asked a guy or gal on your block, "What does joy mean
to you? He/she would probably translate joy in terms of posses-
sions. "I have my two beautiful children" or "I have a nice house
car." Not "I feel joy" or "I like looking at a plant growing." Our
political job is to persuade people that the search for joy is, as it
were, the aim of man/woman, and that if you constantly search
for ii in the wrong way, you will never get there. In order to get
there, you have to look differently at practically everything you
have ever looked at in your life. You can't look for it in material
things, although, of course, you have to have bread and butter and



274      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

shoes. But you have to look at things differently than you have
looked at them up to now.
  One of the great horrors of the socialist movement is that it
has presupposed, in accordance with the "fallen angel" theory,
that workers really understand all this and are only prevented
from arriving at it because of the capitalist monkey on their backs.
And for nearly 200 years everybody in the Western world--and by
osmosis most of the rest of the people in the world--has been
persuaded of this. So that we have barricaded ourselves against an
investigation or a search for the basis of joy by assuming that it
has something to do with the method of production or with what
is produced. This is the watershed we have arrived at. So we (now)
sound as if we were talking like the apostles, Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John--but we are not. We are advancing the very latest
scientific approach to man/woman, scientific in that we recognize
that we have a mind and a heart and a soul. That is scientific.
  We are confronting the way that we have been thinking, not
confronting our minds as things. Mind is minding; it is a way of
knowing, a way of thinking, a way of appreciating, and a capacity
for thinking a million different ways. Most people don't utilize
their minds for anything more than reacting. When man/woman
crossed the threshold of reflection, we became the heirs and
heiresses to a fantastic accumulation of values and forms none of
which we really know anything about as yet. When we do
beautiful things, it is because it is in our human nature to do these
things, and when we don't, we are being false to our human
nature. We are false to our human nature maybe 98 percent of the
time.
  When you get to the point of believing, as we do, that you
have to confront people with the way that they have been
thinking, particularly if they have been thinking that "all men are
equal" or that everybody is entitled to anything he or she wants to
do, you are bordering on impeachable offenses. You are not only
confronting people, you are affronting them. We have to tell
people in New York, for example, that there is a limit to our
material expectations and that from now on it is not so much a
choice between different forms of more as it is between different
forms of less: And that in the process of making these choices,
and only in such a process, will we have the opportunity to
discover or re-establish those links with others that have been
missing in our lives, because up to now we have chosen ways of
life which preclude making these links even though our psyches
cry for them.



        Projections Not Rejections      275

  How do we concretize this? What do we actually say to our
friends and in our communities? Why shouldn't it be possible for
us to talk to people with the same kind of passion and conviction
that was in "the Sermon on the Mount!" We are not saying that
we should go around like Jesus freaks. But we are at a period in
history like that when Jesus was preaching that the rich person
can't enter the kingdom of heaven: And he was appealing to
people's psychic hunger. It was never so true as today that people
can experience in their own lives that you can have three Cadillacs
and ten fur coats and still be miserable because you lack that which
is most essential for your humanity. We are not talking about
going around the streets, saying "the end is at hand" or that
everybody should love one another, as the flower children did
essentially.
  What does one say! Could we ask people "What are your
Values? as a beginning--and if they answer: "whatever puts me
ahead of everybody else" then we could say "your values stink."
  Let's say the president makes a speech on TV and says, "We
have to husband all our resources." Maybe five percent take him
seriously and the rest say,'f--- it."' He has all this power, the
exposure on TV, and he gets a five percent response. Let's say one
of us goes on TV. Would we say, "We have to husband our
resources!" That is much too abstract. We would explain more
exactly what it means to husband, why we have to do so, and
why it is absolutely impossible for every single one listening to be
richer tomorrow or have more goods or more energy at his/her
disposal. The response would still be only five percent, but it
might be a different five percent and they might have learned
something different. We would also say that we don't just want
agreement from individuals, even though there has to be
agreement before we can move. "We want you to have a block
meeting or church meeting to talk to others about this." There
never is any effort to get people into this kind of political motion in
the U.S. Instead what we always get next is legislation, and
legislation doesn't influence people to think and practice what
they think. What we should say is, "If you agree, don't write your
Senator. To hell with your Senator. First of all, you have to
internalize and believe what I have said so passionately that you
want to go out and tell it to somebody else. That is what we call
political action." We are saying, "this is the situation. We have to
change our course completely; we are not going to get richer and
richer. Now let's start a movement to face everybody with this


276      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

situation. Every one of us is participant in this. You can't delegate
it to somebody else, and you can't blame somebody else."
  Somebody has to say these things rather than lust cheer
people up because the GI bill ran out or a project wasn't refunded.
What we don't want to do is commiserate with people. We want to
tell them, "You are only looking for your own private satisfactions
and asking me to help you get your private satisfactions."
  There have to be people in the community who can back up
this kind of talk, people who have confidence in the capacity of
other people to change. One has to say more than "you're not
going to get richer," one has to be quite specific--to say, for
example, "Every community in the U.S. is not going to get new
housing. You are going to have to keep up those you have, paint
the house you are living in, and you are not going to be able to
move into another community and benefit from what they have
done to keep their community up and run away from what you
have done to put your community down. It is time you put your
roots down and re-made your own community." Maine citizens
can't say, "We don't want an oil refinery here but we need more
heating oil, so let's put one in the state of Delaware." That is an
impermissible thought. You have to make up your own mind that
if you want to use oil, the oil refinery has to go up in Maine. You
have to pay the price of what you want.
  We have to know that what we are saying goes beyond
generalization. It isn't enough to say that we are destroying the
planet. Everybody can say that. We have to be so specific that the
average guy or gal can understand that he/she plays a role in it,
including the guy in the ghetto who wants to go to college. So one
asks him, "Why do you want to go to college? To get a job at
$18,000 a year"
  Husband your resources, don't destroy the planet, are so
abstract that anybody can agree. The first thing to tell people is
that what you are going to tell them is not what they want to hear.
"But it is about time we started listening to things that we don't
want to hear because we are going to have to face them anyway.
We have to begin looking at ourselves as a community which is
going to disagree about many questions before we can arrive at
some kind of decisions. Questions of this kind are being faced all
over the country in one form or other. Essentially it is the same
question but each community, and each individual, has to begin
looking at the world and what we have been doing differently."
From there we can begin dealing with specifics, e.g., the oil

        Projections Not Rejections      t77

refinery. They either are willing to have the oil refinery in their
own backyard or they are willing to live on less oil. All sorts of
changes are coming in our lives. Eventually we will have to face all
these questions in their totality but it is fortunate that this issue
now allows us to look at concrete problems in a new way.
  If we could do a lot of this kind of talking all over the place, we
could begin to answer the question, How does one persuade
people7 The opportunities are enormous for this kind of confron-
tation. If we take the issues as they arise, then all the general
questions we have been raising take on life and meaning.
  What do we say to the teacher's union? "It is about time
everybody stopped thinking that they are going to get theirs, that
they can complain about inflation but think that their wages and
their demands for more don't play a role in inflation." We really
have to say the impeachable things. Twenty years ago, if
somebody got up and made a speech like this at a union, you were a
reactionary Birchite s.o.b. We have to confront the idea of unions
as fundamentally an agglomeration of people with vested
interests who don't give a goddamn about anybody else, partic-
ularly those who don't belong to unions, like housewives or old
people or kids or the community. For maybe a hundred years the
notion of the struggle to create unions was an enormously pro-
gressive struggle. Now we have to create something else. A
direction can be progressive for a certain period of time and then
become reactionary. To go forward teddy we have to go against
some things that were progressive at one time. We have to do
things which some people will think are backwards in order to go
forward.

Walking Into the Lion's Den

  We can't make a distinction between what we would say on
TV and what one of us would say in the community or to our
friends and co-workers. We should all be saying the same thing. It
is so easy to think that when you are talking one-to-one with a
friend or relative, you are dealing with personal or individual
problems. But on the one-to-one level, we should be saying that if
you want to solve your personal or individual problems, maybe
you ought to start with the problems that are not personal and in
that way solve your personal problem. The president should be
saying this also. At this juncture we need to be clear enough in our
own heads to be able to say this kind of thing, to a friend or at a
teacher's convention or a Teamsters convention. Raising big



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controversies is exactly what we need to do.
  When we ask a worker whether he/she would take a cut in
wages in order to lower prices, he/she is going to say, "They are
not going to cut prices." It is always a question of "they"-and this
is what we have to deal with.
  We have to be willing to walk into the lion's den as well as talk
one-to-one. Twenty and thirty years ago a lot of us walked into all
kinds of lion's dens. Thirty-five years ago it was walking into the
lion's den to say to the guys working at Ford, "We need a union."
People got their heads knocked off for that. What is so difficult to
realize is that the lion's den has to be a different kind of den at each
stage of development. So that what we have to say now is entirely
different from what we said thirty, forty years ago. This is part of
the historical process. It was one thing for Marx in 1848 Europe
still trying to evaluate the French Revolution, to have said that all
history is the history of class struggle. To say the same thing
today, at the end of the twentieth century, is like saying that
history stops once you have socialism or communism. History
goes on continuously; we are trying to discover the next stage of
radical or philosophical or human history here in the U.S.--
realizing also that we are surrounded by a world which is
becoming more and more Americanized, Westernized.
  One doesn't keep making the same speech in the same den.
We are trying to discover what are the lion's dens today. Maybe it
isn't the Rockefeller family or the Ford Motor Co. whose workers
we are trying to organize against them. Maybe it is the workers
themselves on the line or in the oilfields. So the speech is an
entirely different one from the one we would have made twenty-
five years ago. We are still searching for that speech, sure that
fifty years from now someone will make a still different speech.
We are not trying to guess what kind of speech they will make,
because to some degree that speech depends upon the speeches we
make today.

Projections, Not Rejections
  What we have been saying about the family and the
community is still much too abstract. Up to this time, we, like most
radicals, have believed that in order to establish a better society, all
we have to do is smash up the present society.
  We are not trying to reconstitute the family. It is bullshit to
say that. We are saying that maybe in order to build a new society,
in order to talk about new social relations concretely and not



        Projections Not Rejections      279

abstractly, in order not to be talking like evangelists or giving the
impression that the human spirit is ephemeral like the holy
ghost, we can use a molecular beginning like the family as an
illustration of the kind of human relations that people have been
seeking to establish over millions of years.
  The difference between the Chinese and the Russian
Revolutions is that in the Chinese Revolution the concept of
building up the people, mobilizing them to develop and transform
themselves, anticipates and precedes any questions of power and
confrontation. The Chinese Revolution was successful because
the party did not try to attribute to the masses its own abstractions.
  When a radical asks us, "Which do you mean, the capitalist
community or the socialist community?" we have to be able to
reply confidently, "We are trying to build communities now,
under capitalism, not because we accept capitalism but because
unless we try to build something with people where we are, we
and they can't discover what is wrong with capitalism except
abstractly."
  We are not saying that we don't give a damn what the
Marxists think. What they think is not just what some screwy
individuals think--the thinking of Marxists is not some crackpot
thinking, but a thinking which has developed over the last 2OO
years in response to the French Revolution. It permeates the
society and therefore it is unlikely that it doesn't influence us. It
permeates those who are oppressed--it is the victim thinking.
  We have to take the stand that if we cannot persuade people
to think in this society about another way to live, if we can't, in this
society, develop drives in people to want to live another way, then
we will never be able to get rid of the inhuman relations within
this society. We will always be prisoners of this society.
  Richard Cloward and Frances Piven are perhaps the best
examples of people who believe that you can get a new society by
fucking up or smashing capitalism. Their strategy has been to get
more and more people on welfare on the assumption that this will
mess up the mechanisms of the capitalist system. We are
absolutely opposed to that kind of thinking. As long as you do that
kind of thinking, you increase the victim mentality of people, mess
them up, and make it impossible for them to do anything to build a
new society.
  We ale not trying to mess up capitalism. We are trying to get
people to create communities--new relations which in the end will
make it necessary for people to go beyond capitalism. We are not



280      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

going to be deterred, for example, by those who say that trying to
get people off welfare rather than on welfare means that we are
supporting capitalism.
  The first need is to get people moving in their minds, to
believe that it is possible to live better--not that something or
somebody else is the obstacle in the way of our living better. We
are not trying to raise the political consciousness of the masses, as
Lenin was trying to do and as most radicals in the U.S are still
trying to do, to recognize capitalism as the obstacle in the road to
their getting the "Bread, Peace and Land" they want and need. We
are trying to change the consciousness of the American people to
recognize that what they have been wanting and still want is the
greatest obstacle to their satisfying their deep human need for
community and for new social relations.
  Why is it so important to make this break in our thinking!
Because for the last 200 years the French Revolution has been the
model of revolution. Basically that model is based on the concept
of the unity of opposites whereby the masses and the bourgeoisie
overthrow feudalism, which then leads to the emergence of the
antagonism between the masses and the bourgeoisie. This was the
French scenario from 1789-1795 which was the background of
Marx's thinking. That is why he put so much emphasis on the sans
culottes. That is why C.L.R. James did so much work on the
French Revolution. Basically it was the material wants of the
oppressed masses and their demands which intensified the class
struggle during the French Revolution and this has been the
general model of revolutionary thinking.
  We are saying that this model of class struggle represents
only rebellion and not revolution--only the anger of the masses
against those who have oppressed them and not the vision of a
new society which motivates revolutionary struggle. Revolution
only begins when people begin to think about how they can create
a better set of human relations and begin to try to create them.
  In the American Revolution, for example, the colonists
struggled to redefine themselves before they arrived at the
Declaration of Independence and the military struggle for
freedom against Britain. You had the attempt to set up new
political relations involved in the writing of state constitutions
which culminated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and
the Federalist papers which debated the new structures and the
new relations before the whole people.
  Which model is more important to us--not in India but in the


        Projections Not Rejections      281


U.S.--the model of the French Revolution or that of the American
Revolution, the model based upon the militancy of oppressed,
impoverished masses--or the model based on people blessed with
material plenty but struggling to define their identity and develop
a structure for their social relationships and their political
relations. Obviously we will not try to structure relations as they
structured them in 1787 any more than we are struggling for
liberty and equality as they were in 1776. But it is how we think
about the sequence of struggle which is important--the under-
standing that in the U.S where we have not had to worry about
material necessities in the way that they have had to do elsewhere,
physical struggle cannot begin until there has developed clarity
about the human identity for which one is struggling.
  We are trying to set up a process in motion in a certain
direction. Then, if people want to continue in that direction, they
have to struggle. Advance takes place through conceiving the
positive concretely. Creating a new sense of society, a new sense
of humanity, a new set of human relations in this country, will
depend not upon the extent of one's antagonism to the capitalist
system. It will flow from what we arrive at in terms of a positive
vision. Bombs are not going to destroy capitalism. People who
want to live differently are the only ones who can create some-
thing different from capitalism.

One Small Step Forward

  While we were in Maine, we read in the paper that James P.
Cannon had died. When the Trotskyites split from the U.S.
Communist Party in 1928, James P. Cannon was one of the leaders
of the split. He had the courage to say, "I think that Trotsky is
right." So they split or got thrown out. Trotsky got thrown out of
Russia shortly thereafter. Cannon believed almost explicitly in
everything Trotsky said, including Trotsky's almost mechanical
notion of the role of the proletariat in the class struggle which he
had taken from the October Revolution. Cannon was an utterly
forthright and courageous man. But Cannon knew almost
nothing about blacks or about minorities in this country. He didn't
know anything about complexities.
  He represented a proletarian quality which we could never
have absorbed through, for example, someone like William Z.
Foster. Because, although Cannon was a proletarian type, he was
the kind of proletarian who could co-exist with a Max Shachtman
or an intellectual like James Burnham as long as these intellectuals

282      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE


did not become too flighty. Cannon was not a small or a mean
man; he had a basic faith in the proletariat, but he sensed that
there was much more to life, to history, to politics and to
revolution than lust the proletariat. He welcomed intellectuals as
long as they did not go off in all directions. C.L.R. James used to
say of Cannon that he was not the kind of man who would trample
on a minority. He would not line up his majority against you
unless you got too far out of line and forced him to do it.
Everybody who has a political party has to do that at a certain
point. You can't let it be torn apart from whim. So Cannon was a
man who had a great deal to teach about how to live within a party.
He was the kind of chairman who could sit back and not have to
interfere with everything going on. He was not an insecure
person.
  Between 1938 and 1940 there were all kinds of struggles in-
side the Trotskyite movement inside the U.S. In 1938 there was
not only the battle about what the Red Army was doing in Finland
but about the role of the black man in America. Cannon didn't give
a damn about the Negro struggle--all he cared about was the class
struggle. Not that he was prejudiced; he just took the old socialist
position.
  C.L.R. James came over in 1938 and while he didn't know
what Cannon knew, he knew a lot of things Cannon didn't know.
James knew a lot about history for a thousand years back. He was a
West Indian who went to Europe from Trinidad, that peculiar
crossroads of Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Africa, and
then through the Trotskyite movement came to the U.S.
  By 1936 C.L.R. James had thought about all the important
things in European civilization and then he wrote World Revolution.
Having written it, it crystallized in him the idea that the ideas in
that book were permanent. So he became a preacher of world
revolution, something like Trotsky. But he was a man of extreme
breadth. He knew European history, he knew literature, he knew
music, he wrote plays. Without C.L.R. James none of us would be
talking the way we are talking today. It has nothing to do with his
being right or wrong. We were able to go beyond the proletarian-
ness of Cannon because of C.L.R. James.
  C.L.R. began to realize, the moment he came to this country,
that you can't make a revolution thinking as categorically and
inflexibly as Cannon thought.
  So the struggle got hotter and hotter between him and the
categorical abstractions of Cannon and his boys. Cannon was

        Projections Not Rejections      283


perfectly willing to use a whole lot of people who didn't know
anything except how to defend Cannon and the party--much like
Nixon's boys. They didn't care whom they slaughtered--which is
one of the reason why polemics in those days were really so
murderous. Shachtman was a genius at this kind of slaughter
because he was bright as hell--he could demolish you with a
crack--and he had no moral standards at all. It isn't a question of
whether an individual has morals. It is a question of whether
individuals think that morals matter. And in those days no radicals
thought that morals mattered. That is why Trotsky wrote "Their
Morals and Ours"--which most of us thought marvelous at the
time.
  C.L.R. James said that morals did matter, civilization
mattered, what had been happening to blacks mattered. The
whole concept of class struggle had to be enlarged, enriched by the
values which had been created by civilization over the years. You
don't just plow ahead and make the revolution by setting up
barricades at factory gates--which is what a lot of radicals still
think. So C.L.R. and Cannon drew further apart, fundamentally
on the question of whether the class struggle was as clear-cut as
Cannon thought.
  It was on this basis that the split took place between Cannon
and ourselves in 1940, leading to the formation of the Workers
Party in 1940 under the leadership of Shachtman, C.L.R. and
Marty Abern. Cannon was left with the legitimate Trotskyite
movement and we began looking for new ideas.
  Muste was part of this search, even though he had split before
then. In 1939 Muste went to Europe and saw the clouds of war
piling up. He had been a minister, a very religious man. When he
came back in the fall of 1939, he said, "I am splitting with you. " He
provided a kind of spiritual basis for the split because he gave us an
idea of the things that were happening in and to Europe and
which he realized couldn't be solved by hanging on to the old
classical notion of the working class, coming out of the October
Revolution and making the revolution on "Bread, Peace and
Land."
  Muste went back to God, very beautifully, much the same
way that Duke did in his Sacred Concert, without getting on his
knees. But his leaving the Trotskyites had been a kind of shock. So
that when the Workers party was formed, it was with the idea of
injecting a greater sense of civilization and of history into the
Movement and a sense that things were different in the U.S. than

284      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE


in Russia in 1917. C.L.R. was crucial to this because in a sense he
embodied the idea that it had been all right to be a Wobbly back in
1912 but that didn't mean that Wobblies could run the world in
1940, which is where many radicals still are.
  C.L.R. became a leader of the Workers Party only two or
three years after he came to this country, which was something of
an achievement. Shactman was the one who held the party
together--by his rhetoric, but C.L.R. held it together by ideas.
Then this broke up because C.L.R. couldn't see eye-to-eye with
McKinney, a black man who was a continuator of the trade union
tradition. McKinney really believed that there was no "Negro
Question;" that it was only a question of the workers versus the
bosses. It should be noted, however, that the last thing C.L.R. said
about the "Negro Question" was back in 1948, and today he (or
Bewick Press) is still saying the same thing, even though three
decades have passed, and the whole world has changed.
  So there wasn't a nice straight line in the Trotskyist
movement in the U.S. Because the Communist Party was so tied
up with the zig-tags of the Kremlin, their experiences were not as
meaningful to the development of the struggle around the
American Revolution as those in the Trotskyite movement where
we were grappling with the new developments that were taking
place and splitting over them. In many respects Cannon, who was
thirty-eight at the time of the split between Stalin and Trotsky
and who had been shaped by the experiences of the first World
War, remained at the standpoint of the solidarity of the workers.
But at the same time he understood his limitations as a proletarian
and therefore welcomed intellectuals into the party. He was very
happy that he had Trotsky to line up with on a world scale, so that
the proletarian movement in the U.S. had this kind of cultural
depth and internationalism which Trotsky represented. During
this whole period you could feel a kind of psychic hunger on the
part of proletarians who came to the radical movement, e.g., from
the American Workers Party or the Conference of Progressive
Labor Action, for politics, ideas, greater breadth. They would get a
certain amount from the party, and then events themselves would
get too complicated and there would be a split. The ideas from
Trotsky were too narrow, because although he was a very
developed individual, he still thought in terms of the October
Revolution and couldn't respond to what was taking place in
Germany except in the 1917 concepts of the class struggle.
Trotsky had very little sensitivity to what was happening to

        Projections Not Rejections      285


European civilization in the post-World War I years. In 1934
Trotskyism had represented a broadening of the horizons of those
coming from the American Workers Party but no longer by 1939.
  Although he was an organizer, Marty Abern also understood
his limitations. He was hungry for the sort of thing which he
thought C.L.R.- offered. He was a great respecter of Muste; he
regretted very much that he had to break with Burnham; he
couldn't stand Shachtman whom he saw as a smart aleck from the
Bronx. There was something about Cannon's boys which
offended him. They were Nixon people like Ehrlichman and
Haldeman, while he had come from the old socialist movement.
  In the years after the split from Cannon, the Johnson-Forrest
tendency was actually an intellectual faction within the Workers
Party. Throughout the World War II years we made an intensive
effort to understand Marx in the light of European history and
civilization, German Classical Philosophy, English Political Econ-
omy, and French politics in and after the French Revolution. We
carried on studies that were fantastic: Adam Smith, Ricardo, and
Capital in light of the development of German Classical Philos-
ophy and English Political Economy, dialectics, Shakespeare,
Beethoven, Melville, the Abolitionists, Negro history, Marcus
Garvey. We did a huge intellectual work during these years be-
cause we thought it was necessary to the American Revolution
and because we saw the American working class as heirs to all this.
Rays Dunayevskaya is still living on that work today. Only C.L.R.
could have given us the leadership in this.
   Inside the Workers Party, from 1943, we tdok a position
versus McKinney on the "Negro Question," versus Shachtman
and Gates on the Russia question, versus Emie Lund on the
American question, versus the retrogressionists on the question
of the national liberation struggles in Europe, which we saw as
containing the potential for the European socialist revolution.
  In 1946 or 1947 Cannon made a speech entitled the Coming
American Revolution and C.L.R. said, "There is no use having
two groups who both believe in the coming American Revolu-
tion," so we went back to the SWP. We foresaw the workers
striking after World War II; black proletarians in Detroit look-
ing for a revolutionary movement that would take them beyond
where the union was going to the SWP. So after an interim
period of`several months, during which we published the
American Workers pamphlet, the Invading Socialist Society, etc., we
went back into the SWP. Cannon was glad for us to come in and


        Projections Not Rejections      287

But the decline began taking place even before the 1960 accident.
  When C.L.R. left this country in 1953, he left behind his base
and became a cosmopolite. In the U.S., although he had been to
some extent underground, he had an organization of Americans
of very different types, blacks, women, middle class professionals,
intellectuals, youth, workers, who were passionately concerned
with the American Revolution, even though we had some
idealistic views about American workers derived from reading
Marx. But in 1953 C.L.R. was already becoming a Marxist
egocentric, something which, strangely enough, Cannon never
became. Cannon never tried to ballyhoo Cannon. C.L.R. chose to
write chapter 7 of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Up to that point
the book was beautiful. Then suddenly it began to focus on the
suffering of a particular guy on Ellis Island. What compelled
C.L.R. to think of himself as a political prisoner? He wasn't one, he
was completely free as soon as he left the borders of the U.S. That
chapter is a fantastic illustration of the role of subjectivity. True,
C.L.R. used to hold forth, lying on the couch, but he had never
been subjective to the degree that he was in chapter 7 of Mariners.
It was almost as if he was thinking about making the revolution in
order to prove that he was the leader of the revolution rather than
to advance the revolution.
  After 1953 C.L.R. didn't have the challenge of the United
States which had never failed to excite him. He went to Trinidad,
formed a group and then left. It seemed as if he was experimenting
because he was never really passionately concerned with the
Trinidad Revolution as he had been with the American
Revolution. His intervention in Trinidad was based on class
struggle being the answer to everything: "I am on the side of the
oil workers." Period. He lectured about the West Indian
Federation, brilliant lectures, but they lacked the feeling he had
had for the American Revolution which was fed by the passions of
those of us in the organization who were very much a part of his
life and of whose life he was also very much a part.
  We broke from Cannon in 1951 and from C.L.R. in 1962. Now
we are trying to make clear the need to advance beyond the idea
that all radicals have held--that in order to advance socialism, you
must first smash capitalism. We have to advance towards the new
society by projecting an entirely different way to live and by
building new social ties.
  One of the reason why we are so alive and so vibrant and so
important is that we still believe that we are at the beginning. We

288      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE


believe that when Duke Ellington says in his concert of Sacred
Musk "In the beginning, God" he is saying, "In the beginning,
Humankind." He is saying, "Hey, man or woman, I am trying to
project to you that there are mysteries you don't know anything
about at all. But they are there or you wouldn't be here." He
recites the books of the Old and the New Testiment: "These were
forms of which there may be a million others. The very fact that I
am putting these to jazz is another form. So when I say'God,' I
don't mean a person with a white beard. I am saying that there are
mysteries in each of us which we have to solve in ourselves." That
is why he ends with that fantastic dance by Bunny Briggs.
Everybody can praise what he/she thinks is God by doing what
He/she thinks would praise his/her God. And if you don't do what
you think praises your God, then you have demeaned yourself.
  This year we are beginning anew, going into unexploied
territory, starting at the bottom in the basics of human needs,
before they were categorized and rigidified into compartments by
sociologists and then institutionalized. We can do this only
because we came from somewhere. We couldn't begin anew if we
weren't also a continuation. We are continuing lifelong struggles
that we realize did not start with us but started back a million
)rears ago and have no end. The day we give up we will have ceased
to be what a human being ought to be.



________________________


          Postscript


  When we started these conversations ten years ago, we were
not thinking about publication. What we were trying to do was re-
examine for ourselves the ideas that had motivated us for the
greater part of our adult lives as they had motivated other
dedicated persons for over a hundred years. It has never been our
intention to take anything away from their dedication--or from
ours.
  In the course of our explorations, we concluded that, whether
we liked it or not, the epoch had come to an end when it was pro-
gressive to think of the history of humanity as the history of class
struggle. The process of questioning our previous thoughts has
been painful; but it has also been joyous because we have been
searching for another way to view the history of humanity which
could inspire as much commitment from ourselves and others as
Marx's ideas have done. Through our explorations we have
arrived at the conviction that the American Revolution 200 years
ago is the key to this other view of history because it was made not
to create a system or an "ism" but a new kind of person: a citizen.
  Why did the Conversations start when they did? To ask that
is a little like asking why the American Revolution took place
when it did. Like anything important, our conversations were be-
gun for a variety of very particular reasons, coincidences, person-
alities and efforts. Our experiences and interrelationships over

                       2P1



292      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE


the past thirty or more years had provided us with the opportun-
ity to ask questions that others had hesitated to ask because they
didn't want to be considered anti-Marxist. We had gone through
the Marxist experience for more than thirty years, as the Ameri-
can colonists had gone through the experience of settling the new
continent for 150 years. Suddenly we (it could have been some-
body else, but it wasn't) said, "There are some questions to be
asked here." This is exactly the kind of thing that happened to
Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, the Adamses and others when
they began to make the American Revolution. After 150 years in
which hundreds of thousands of people had undergone a wide
range of new experiences, a few individuals began to wonder how
their ideas differed from those they had been accepting from
European philosophers.
  The analogy isn't far-fetched. Since the Russian Revolution
those Americans most passionately committed to economic and
social justice in this country have been attracted to the Marxist
movement. Then a few of us for some reason said, "It is time to ask
some questions." That is the dynamics of the human process. A
philosophy is not some sort of abstraction that one discovers like a
crocodile as one is going up the Nile. It is the culmination of
experiences and thoughts about those experiences.
  We came together because of the coincidence of our private
and political lives and the situation in which we found ourselves.
In 1968, finding ourselves on a little island in Maine where we
could relax and reflect away from the immediate pressures of daily
existence, we decided that our questions mattered. We decided
that. Objective social forces didn't make the decision because
objective social forces don't decide what a person thinks. The four
of us, with similar political experiences but otherwise as dissimilar
as four individuals could possibly be, decided that what we were
thinking so coincided that we wanted to talk about it. That was the
beginning.
  In 1968 the United States was coming to the end of a decade of
unprecedented demonstrations and rebellions. In addition, the
many revolutions taking place world-wide, especially the revolu-
tion in China, were making it evident that the Russian Revolution
had not been the final revolution. The coincidence of what was
taking place in the United States with what was taking place in the
world gave focus to the questions which had been at the back of
our minds for many years. So we could ask ourselves whether the
class struggle or the rebellions of oppressed masses against their



          Postscript 293


oppressors was, in fact, the basis for a revolution in the United
States.
  This kind of radicalism was experiencing a revival among
movement activists in the United States precisely because the
rebellions of the oppressed and Third World revolutions had
played such a key role in the movements of the 1960s. Meanwhile,
because we had already dedicated so much of our lives to building
organizations on this kind of thinking, we had arrived at the point
of wondering whether our country--the technologically most
advanced country in the world--could make a revolution based on
theories drawn from the European experience. Even then, it took
us two summers before we were able in 1970 to draw a clear dis-
tinction between rebellions and revolutions.
  Today we can say unhesitatingly that revolutionary change in
this country will be brought about not because of people's class
but because great numbers of Americans, regardless of class, have
begun to demand more of themselves as persons and as citizens. In
other words, we have finally freed ourselves of Marxist or
European theories of class and faceless masses.
  All revolutions are changes but not all changes are alike. The
American Revolution was such a profound revolution because it
changed people's concepts of what it means to be a human being.
The Russian Revolution wasn't trying to change human beings. It
aimed to change the relationships of social forces and to develop
the productive forces.
  The uniqueness of the American Revolution was that it was
based upon a redefinition of human beings. Our Declaration of
Independence wasn't anything like Rhodesia a few years ago
telling Britain that it was cutting off all ties. Ours was a
declaration of aspirations for humankind. The motion for in-
dependence had actually been passed on July 2, 1776. So what
we celebrate on July Fourth is not a declaration of independence
but a declaration of principles. The fact that Americans today do
not behave in accordance with principles is precisely our
challenge. What we have to do is use the American Revolution as
history is always used: to make clear to Americans our unique and
elemental strength as a people and why our nation matters to the
human race.
  The American Revolution was the result of a 'fantastic coinci-
dence of circumstances. We are not trying to reproduce it 200
years later. Americans in the eighteenth century were capable of
understanding that they would like to be independent, to be free,



294      CONVERSATIONS IN MAINE

to be democratic. Because of their circumstances they compre-
hended these ideas in a way that no Englishmen or Frenchmen
could have. It took them a long time to arrive at these ideas--but in
1776 they signed the Declaration of Independence.
  The average American today hasn't the slightest idea of what
we mean by aspirations for the whole human race or that the
distinction between the American Revolution and all others was
that our revolution was based upon principles for humankind and
not upon animosity or class struggle. If Americans today do not
think about principles in this way, how do we reproduce this
attitude! That is the question uppermost in our minds. It is
precisely because Americans don't think this way that we need an
organization of people who do and who are ready to dedicate
themselves to persuading others that this, the American tradition,
is the only way to begin resolving our problems.
  In building a core of people who are ready to assume this
challenge, we have to go beyond not only the notions that Marx
projected but the forms in which Marx's notions have been carried
out. (At this stage we have to think about the form as well as the
content because otherwise somebody is going to get the form
mixed up with the content, insisting, for instance, that we should
build little revolutionary cells.) What the new form will be we
don't know, except that we have to be careful that it doesn't
emulate the old form just as the content does not emulate the old

content.
  We believe that if we can discover how to persuade the
American people to explore the opportunities we now have to
intervene consciously in advancing the evolution of the human
race, we can change the United States and thereby the whole
world.
  This is a philosophical question, not a material or economic
one. The American Revolution was not made for subjective
reasons, except in the sense that its proponents were subjective
individuals who cared. It was a historical coincidence that this
phenomenon happened in North America. But it did happen. We
are saying to every American, "We have one hair-raising responsi-
bility because we created one hair-raising new kind of nation.
Don't keep talking about your grievances. You as an American,
without even knowing it, did something that up to now no one
else in history has done. What do you think about that?"
  What would happen if everybody thought and talked that
way? How can we get people to understand what we mean when



          Postscript 295

we say that a revolution must be made on a declaration of
aspirations and not upon bitterness?
  Every nation has ideas in its past, achievements in its past,
which remain with its people so that if you address them in terms
of these ideas and achievements you evoke a resonance. For
example, if you talk to the Chinese in homilies (as Mao under-
stood very well), they will respond because of what they have been
raised to appreciate as their national identity. We believe that
despite all the cynicism, opportunism and reductive thinking in
the United States today, the American people can begin to think
differently about themselves and the future of humanity if we
challenge them in terms of principles and aspirations for the
whole human race. They may relapse into sociological jargon and
victim thinking, but our job is to keep posing to them this other
kind of thinking and evoke this resonance. Not everybody is going
to talk this way to the American people. It must begin with those
few individuals whose thought-processes are no longer paralyzed
by the leftist notion that workers are going to change society just
because they are workers.
  We hope that those of you who read these Conversations will
get from them some insight into the process by which we have
arrived at this point and that they will stimulate you to begin re-
examining your own thinking so that you can go beyond what we
have done. Perhaps in the future we can find the form through
which together we can advance our thinking and the thinking of
the American people.
                  Grace Lee Boggs
                     James Boggs
                     Freddy Paine
                     Lyman Paine

Sutton Island, Maine
September 3, 1977