You’ve always seen top-down strategies and movements as
inherently doomed.
They can succeed very well at exactly what they’re designed to
do—maintain top-down leadership, control and authority. It shouldn’t
have come as a tremendous surprise to anyone that a vanguard party
would end up running a totalitarian state.
Howard Zinn suggests that we need to recognize that real social
change takes time. We need to be long-distance runners, not
sprinters. What do you think of that?
He’s right. It was very striking in parts of the student movement
in the 1960s. There wasn’t an organized, well-established, popular-
based left for the students to join, so their leaders were sometimes
very young people. They were often very good and decent people,
but the perception of many—not all—of them was quite short-range.
The idea was, We’ll strike Columbia, close down the buildings for a
couple of weeks, and after that we’ll have a revolution.
That’s not the way things work. You have to build slowly and
ensure that your next step grows out of what’s already established
in people’s perceptions and attitudes, their conception of what they
want to attain and the circumstances in which it’s possible to attain
it.
It makes absolutely no sense to expose yourself and others to
destruction when you don’t have a social base from which you can
protect the gains that you’ve made. That’s been found over and over
again in guerrilla movements and the like—you just get crushed by
the powerful. A lot of the spirit of ’68 was like that. It was a disaster
for many of the people involved, and it left a sad legacy.
Are you aware of different sorts of responses you get from
different audiences?
Over the years, I have noticed a very striking difference
between talks I give to more or less elite audiences, and meetings
and discussions I have with less privileged people. A while back I
was in a town in Massachusetts at a meeting set up by very good
local organizers in the urban community—people who were pretty
poor, even by world standards. Not long before that, I spent time in
the West Bengal countryside. Then I was in Colombia, talking to