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July 21, 2002
The personal is political
Michael Albert explains that society does not function on the basis of personal, individual, totally atomized choices. If it were to be so then politics would lose its collective and strategic impetus
I think that we 1960s’ radicals have done a pretty poor job of communicating with the next generation about a lot of issues. I say that because I encounter a lot of young people who feel that they’re transcending the ills of the 1960s — which would be a good thing, if it were true. It would be a very good thing indeed to transcend the ills of the time, but actually very often they are reproducing them. The real ills of the 1960s, or least many of the real ills, are rarely labeled as such.
One of the kinds of ills that we had was something called sectarianism. Sectarianism is generally thought to arise from automatic reflex adherence to a perspective. But that’s not an adequate explanation. It seems to me that, in practice at least, one of the things that has a great deal to do with sectarianism is somehow connecting your personal identity to a set of ideas, so that if anybody challenges something that you think, it is taken as a devastating attack upon your being.
People tend to equate themselves with the current ideas that they have, and if somebody says they disagree with those ideas, it is taken as equivalent to saying, “You’re a schmuck. You’re a fool. You’re an idiot. You’re a decrepit slob, because I disagree with a belief you have.”
So then the ideas have to be defended in the same way that one would defend one’s soul, because the ideas have become entwined with one’s soul. But that’s not the way we ought to defend ideas. Souls deserve that kind of defence, and perhaps human personalities do, too, but not ideas.
I don’t think young people have understood that about ideas because I don’t think it has been conveyed well. It’s not something that’s easy to convey.
It’s a lot harder to convey than the insight that US corporations are going to control job opportunities, or the state will operate to repress movements, and so on. That’s easy. These more experimental lessons are harder to convey, and my generation hasn’t done a very good job of it.
Another idea that we haven’t conveyed well, especially to young people, is about another way we went wrong. There’s tendency philosophers call a slippery slope. We take what we do, and always push it to some kind of an extreme. We see some good idea, and then we take it to this fantastic extreme in which we reduce the original value of the idea or even make it counterproductive.
The way we understand consumerism is an example. The slope goes sort of like this. Consumerism is a bad thing. Consumerism involves a degree of advertizing manipulation. Consumerism means that people have been tricked. Consumerism means people are fools and therefore we shouldn’t consume.
You see how we’re slowly going down a slope in which we have taken an insight, that consumerism (whatever that might be) is bad, and instead of refining it and benefiting from it, we have made it so extreme that it literally gets in the way of existence. In fact, it’s impossible to live if you don’t consume. Yet we come to this view that everybody who consumes more than some minimum is a fool and has been tricked.
This is not a good slope to go down. And this is just one of many that we go down where we take good initial insights — there are bad technologies, reforms can be cooptive, institutions can delimit our options, and so on — which are, however, very incomplete and partial, and take them so far that they are no longer valuable. Thus we end up with the view that technology per se is bad, or that seeking reforms is inevitably selling out, or that we should reject all institutions.
Another thing that we came up with — or, more specifically, that the women’s movement came up with — was a recognition that “the personal is political”. This was a very powerful insight 30 years ago. “The personal is political” then meant something very different from what I think many people now think it means.
“The personal is political” meant that there are many things in people’s personal lives that have political causes and dimensions that are wider than the individual. So, “the personal is political” meant rape, something personal, is political. Battering, something personal, is political. For that matter, poverty, something personal, is political. Racial hatred, something personal, is political.
These were valuable insights. But it if we start down the associated slippery slope, “the personal is political” can get exaggerated, can be distorted, and eventually can come to mean almost the opposite of what was intended, that the essence of politics is personal. The meaning has been almost exactly reversed, so that now we begin to have the feeling that everything is a function of personal, individual, totally separate, totally atomized choices.
Do we or do we not consume? Do we or do we not use lipstick? Do we or do we not smoke, or eat meat, or watch TV? Politics loses its collective and strategic impetus and we drown in interpersonal judgmentalism.
This trend is partially embodied in many sides of contemporary thought and activism, not least, for example, in elements of what are called “third wave feminism”, “identity politics”, “food politics”, “lifestyle politics”, and so on. The problem is two fold. First, this type of approach generates a highly judgmental mindset in which each individual begins to see her or his own choices as superior and those of anyone who chooses differently as inferior. Second, this type of approach denigrates what ought to be primary: people grouping together into collective shared struggle for change.
Something went wrong with the slogan “speak truth to power”, too. “Speak truth to power” does not mean try and convince power by the logic of your truth. If it means that, it’s a slogan we should dump, because power doesn’t listen to logic. Power doesn’t give a damn about truth. The phrase just meant stand up with the truth and assert yourself with it. But somehow it got screwed up into “speak truth to power”. Spend a lot of time trying to convince power of what the truth is. But that’s a total waste of time. Power only responds to raising social costs, to force, basically.
How do we know what we each ought to be doing? A lot of people in my generation sort of beat themselves up answering this question. Somebody figures out that it’s a good idea to be a community organizer. It’s a good idea to be a labour organizer. It’s a good idea to go into the police and organize the police. It’s a good idea to organize whatever it is. And then everybody has to do that. Because that’s the right thing to do. Do the right thing. That’s the right thing.
But what if some people aren’t very well disposed to do the thing that was just mentioned? What if it just doesn’t fit their personality, character, traits, or skills? That goes by the wayside and the people beat themselves up to do the thing that’s at the top of the list of important things on that day — a list which keeps rotating, by the way. That’s a horrible mistake.
When I say that today’s youth are repeating our errors, I mean they are repeating mistakes like that. It seems to me that we should have conveyed the understanding that revolution isn’t apocalyptic. It doesn’t happen tomorrow. It’s a long process. One has to be in it for the long haul, and one has to carve out a space in which one can function, be productive, and live a life. Even if it isn’t revolution, even if you just believe in making the system less oppressive, the same thing holds. You have to carve out a spot in which it’s possible to function and to be effective.
That means you don’t just do what somebody else says is most important. You do things that you can do. You do things that will sustain you. We’re each different, and so we have to figure out where we fit. Not according to some abstract pronouncement that “it is now proper to go into such-and-such type of community and be such and such type of organizer”. If that’s not who we are, we won’t do a good job. In fact, we’ll do a crummy job and we won’t last long.
There’s another slogan that came out of the period when my political activism was born. That was the slogan “dare to struggle, dare to win”.
That’s not from here in the United States but from China. I don’t know what it meant in China, but I assume it meant what I take it to mean here. And it seems to me that it’s a very wise slogan. It actually is a very profound and wise little instruction. It doesn’t make much sense, on the face of it. Why would you have to dare to struggle and, in particular, why would you have to dare to win? It’s because you don’t have any confidence in yourself. It’s because you don’t believe that, in fact, you can do anything any better. You don’t believe in yourself, or we don’t believe in ourselves. And there is really a lot of insight in that, I think.
For some, “dare to struggle, dare to win” translates into the slogan, now Americanized, “we are the leaders we’ve been looking for”. These are not trivial notions. In many ways, they are more profound and they embody more wisdom than an analysis of how US corporations work, or patriarchy works, or racism works, or authority works — not least because understanding these issues alone doesn’t necessarily help you become an effective, powerful, lasting organizer.
Excerpted with permission from
The trajectory of change: activist strategies for social transformation
By Michael Albert
South End Press, 7 Brookline Street, #1, Cambridge, MA 02139-4146
Website:
www.southendpress.org
ISBN 0-89608-662-3
174pp. $9.00
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