NORTH
COAST
T IM E S
P A G E 15
E A G L E ,JABRUARY 2005
American society operates essentially on the basis
of capital, accumulated and exchanged, its caveat emptor
morality justifying any means toward monetary profit, its very
nature based on competition and self-repression, threading
its malignancy through class, racial, and sexual segregation
and repression to the very isolation of each person from
another. The economy itself is expansionist, otherwise it would
collapse upon itself (as it is presently doing anyway), heighten­
ing the desperation and repression at home and overseas. In
the Pacific Northwest alone, jobs are becoming more scarce
with each passing week, hundreds of thousands laid off which
creats personal and economic crises that only get worse.
We are all born into this artificial climate, regardless
of race, gender or economic class. We are programmed to
compete with each other, by any means fair or foul, regardless
of social level — trapped and manipulated by anciently absurd
and unbending concepts of religious, cultural and economic
obligations into mutilating ourselves (by our own hands) into
unhappy, grotesque creatures endlessly pursuing and justifying
vacuous illusions. American society has itself lost whatever
intrinsic mobility it might have had, if it ever did have any; the
class lines are rigid, race more than ever determines class
position and privilege.
In the past, American society proved too heterogeneous
to form any cohesive solidarity among blacks, Chicanos,
Indians, oriental Americans, women, workers, farmers and
everybody else. American capitalism and its concomitant
imperialism has been too strong to break, resilient enough to
come through the worst economic crisis.
Perhaps even more inclusive, American political rebels
have continually failed to see future social development within
contemporary society, unable to keep pace with its tremendous
changes, sometimes able to respond and patch an impairment
or another, but never ready to build a lasting entity that would
successfully defy the expanding misanthropy.
Restricted by its generally middle-class base, the white
reformist movement in this country — which has been, however
unintentionally, a perpetuation of white preeminence (perhaps
more humane, but white supremacy nonetheless) — eschewed
methods it could have adopted that were germane to primarily
white-oriented groups, and instead impotently caricatured styles
and goals of the black movement.
Not a bad thing in itself, giving whites an enlightened
empathy they might otherwise have ignored, the danger lies in
the inability of white radicals to approach such groups as labor
on their own grounds and deal with their individual problems,
bringing them in successive stages into at least an understand­
ing and sympathy with the third world, if not actual affiliation and
identification, the central purpose.
The black movement itself grew into the most powerful,
most original, creative and dynamic radical movement in the
history of this country.
For three centuries New World whites butchered and
manacled blacks, who in spite of tremendous oppression yet
managed to develop the richest culture in the Americas outside
the Indian. Up against the wall for our crimes, whites angrily
whisper the black must not seek revenge but instead accept
tepid apologies by our newly enlightened politicians.
Whites have failed to understand why American blacks
disassociated from them. Black culture is far more vibrant and
real, while white American culture is sterile, impersonal and
bleak in style and philosophy, Its true god money and profit.
There is hardly a comparison; what good whites might offer,
blacks accepted while whites were losing it.
White American culture has transposed material
abundance for liberty and equality. Alduous Huxley suggested
the industrial revolution was the downfall of humanity. Means
became ends, and the human spirit suffered for it.
Black American culture is often called Soul. Soul is its
very essence. The same can also be said of American Indian
culture, and Asian American culture, and not least the fused
Chicano/Latino/Hispanic approach to American life.
Perhaps a deep sense of soul was what was missing
within the white radical movement of the 1960s, its Achilles
heel the clinging to a middle class base, a germ that became
the diseased Yuppieism that replaced It.
A distinct Puritan streak was likewise its downfall.
A mistaken impression that white radicals were the only true
missionaries of liberty and justice for all, a maverick contra­
diction if not actually their undoing as a positive political force,
certainly a perpetuation of arrogance and elitism that proved
decidedly counterproductive and unable to resist the lure of
Yuppiedom, equity and democracy ceremoniously played out
for the sake of ritual.
The 1960s anti-Vietnam War war movement was a
direct outgrowth of radical tradition in this country dating far
back beyond its first European settlers escaping old world
repression — forget for a moment the indentured servants,
white slaves the white race no longer wishes to admit it chained
and used to create and refine tortures later used against blacks
— before Spartacus even, or Moses, a great radical who
managed to set his own people free prior to their crucifixion of
another radical who offered them no material advantages for
throwing off their Roman conquerors several centuries later,
however obscured both Biblical liberators have become through
religious myth and invention.
However great and abundant American white radicalism
of the past, it yet found itself justifying too often the annihilation
of the Indian, the enslavement of the blacks who constantly
rebelled against white feudal domination, the bigotry towards
newer groups of immigrants clambering off ships at Ellis island:
the Irish, the Italians, the Slavs and other Eastern European
peoples, Jewish of any ethnic nationality in particular — and
especially the Chinese and Japanese who landed on the West
Coast and Hawaiian Islands and promptly became virtual slaves
and victims of white-nativist oppression.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Although there had been a tradition of white radicalism,
forlorn and compromised it might have been, it yet reemerged
from a vacuum that spanned more than a generation.The older
radicals on the far side of the generation gap are most certainly
dead now, old age or otherwise, disgraced if ever mentioned
(or so institutionalized their examples have no relevant mean­
ing, the truth of their purpose so perverted or equivocated only
vacuity remains). The combined legacy of their works and
aspirations, perceptions and truths, are almost entirely buried
in obscurity.
In their relative immaturity, their grasping, confused
adolescence, young white radicals of the 1960s were in the main
rather ahistorical, if not anti-intellectual in the tradition of their
parents (who unconsciously maintained their children in cocoons
of narrow perspectives), committing the same mistakes as their
historic predecessors:
The secular Utopians of the 1830s and 1840s who did
not in their equally ahistorical consciousness concede the false
yet enticing seduction of industrialization;
The abolitionists who failed to see social transformation
the implications of emancipation provided for a socio/economic
base for blacks and whites to live and work together;
The late 19th century agrarian radicals who strove too
late to save the vanishing aesthetics and verities of a rural life
already gobbled up by the ever expanding urban-based indust­
rial economic system;
The old socialists of the World War 1 era who concen­
trated upon building a strong force of organized skilled laborers
and ignored the latest batch of immigrants who were hungry and
eager enough to force basic labor changes through the newly
organized Congress of Industrial Labor (CIO);
The communists of the 1930s who discarded cultural
reality and creativity to meet changing problems for Russian
methods and phraseology, constructing a popular front whose
very existence depended wholly upon the continuance of the
New Deal;
The German radicals fleeing the Nazis in the early and
middle 1930s who infused the decaying movement with a new
and real vitality, but whose effect culminated in the hopeless
crusade and draining off of the best, most intelligent, sensitive
and creative men of that rejuvenation to the civil war in Spain
and death, the survivors for the most part too shocked and
disillusioned to have any continuing consequence, many of
them abandoning all radical causes, catalogued and repressed
as communists ("premature anti-fascists") by the American
government.
The short-lived, drug-inspired counterculture of the
‘Beats” that arose in the 1950s as a direct result and antagonist
of the McCarthy purges, more disposed toward Eastern philoso­
phies and unorthodox styles of life and art than towards overt
political involvement;
The Civil Rights activists of the early 1950s and 1960s,
both black and white, who stood up against Jim Crow in the
South, integrating schools and registering blacks to vote.
the white American radical movement of the 1960s and early
1970s faltered by essentially institutionalizing itself.
The older groups, such as Students for a Democratic
Society, begun so imaginatively, became increasingly rigid in
scope, concentrating upon single issues — the Weather faction
demanded the privilege to use the state’s violence against itself,
holding it accountable for the desperation leading to those acts;
but went no further, calling for revolution without substance,
parroting third world styles not particularly applicable to this
multiple-jointed, heterogeneous society as a whole.
Some of the old self-styled leaders buried themselves
in quick and easy solutions, washing their hands of winning
over the labor movement, considering it hopelessly privileged
compared to third word peoples, or dismissing it with traditional
Stalinist demonology, ignoring the obvious historical and
contemporary fact that the mass of American labor holds the
ultimate key to which way “the revolution' goes.
Others of the old leadership swallowed centrist theory
or mad elitism; still others gathered such a following and
prestige with their radicalism they evolved into establishment
liberals dependent on the system they purported to abhor,
shrinking from thoughts of its overthrow (partly as a result of not
hypothesizing a bearable alternative), cautioning the disgusted
and oppressed from asserting too strongly or effectively their
goals, philosophizing issues to a point of nullity.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the resurrected,
struggling antiwar movement from its inception was its middle
class base and organizing around college campuses, insulating
itself from the average American working person who was for
the most part unable to identify with the so-called New Left's
goals, instead resisting them to long-range detriment.
As a result of not gearing its purpose toward the great
mass of American labor which was even then alienated and
insecure, and by perpetuating among themselves myths of an
intellectual elite while augmenting delusions offered by official
America and Red Russia relative to labor, ignoring labor's goals
that promote grassroots collaboration rather than corporate
schemes based on war and imperialism, the American radical
movement gave piously fraudulent politicians an edge toward
manipulating the working class into a tool of its own oppression.
Old traditions, ideas and institutions die hard, stingy
and prolonged deaths.Those who would change cutthroat rivalry
into cooperative magnanimity were yet children of their parents,
responding instinctively to parental patterns taught so rigorously.
Yet as a spark of change, as a counterculture of unique and
unifying forms, they were flowering seeds of the first multiracial
transgender culture this ruptured society ever forged.
Often isolating themselves and repressing one another,
they sometimes lost sight of their overall objectives, which were,
as simply as I can define them, a world of women and men of
all creeds and races equal in a social, cultural and economic
sense, working for and not against each other, appreciating
and encouraging diversity whether cultural, racial or individual,
with a common understanding humanity is a single species
that can survive only through harmony, depending upon and
thus cooperating with one another.
One of the most treasured and enduring myths is that
civilizations or nations collapse when they have become permis­
sive, immoral and lacking the will to fight any perceived enemy.
That is simply untrue — nations and states fall when they have
lost faith and trust with their peoples, when they no longer even
pretend to meet or respect the most basic material and philos­
ophic needs of their citizenry, when they have lied to them and
used them badly, when they have become repressive and over­
extend their oppression to satisfy the empirical ambitions of a
insatiably privileged minority.
So it is happening within this country. It has stretched
itself too thin, it has ruled highhanded over too many people for
too long. It has substituted artifice for substance, defrauding
its citizens with bright baubles of mediocrity, claiming material
prosperity while hundreds of thousands lose their jobs either
because the overburdened economy is unable to support them
or indifferently exports their jobs overseas. Repression escalates
against the desperate and hungry, imperialism intensifies its
attempts to dominate other peoples politically and economically
in order to stave off internal collapse at home.
Yet the country resists progressive change. Change
creates chaos. History, while refusing to honestly chronicle the
lives of the great mass of ordinary people, perpetuating instead
elitist perspectives, does at least present some examples of
response toward chaos.
Faced with social chaos and the break down of order,
ordinary people grasp desperately at oppression simply because
it purports to be a base of stability and order. But the history we
think we know betrays us. The chaos during times of change is
not from the new and rising ideas and forms but comes directly
from the decaying institutions committing suicide to stay alive
through absolute repression.Yet when so many demand change,
there is obviously a desperate need for it, and it must be met.
The angry leaning pressure of increasing humanity will
have the last word. It will seek to rectify the monstrous inequities
between the world’s haves and have-nots simply to survive,
overthrowing their governments and privileged institutions if
their fundamental needs are not met. On such a low intellectual
level will come the dynamics of revolution.
We are
all in waiting
to see if something
will take
us and melt the past
which is only
a reminder to a
place where we
listened and
decided our futures...
-SHARE ZANERA
And the offspring of the Beats and civil rights activists,
the Vietnam antiwar movement. The surviving white veterans of
those idealistic years and the more recent war dissenters formed
the first wholly radical structures in decades — by then even the
old hardline American Communist Party was as wornout and
conservative as the established power structure itself.
Yet for all its reasoning as an antagonist to established
order, its opulent idiosyncrasies, internal splits and factions,
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