The interviewer: Justin Clark, InTheFray Literary Editor
The interviewee: Benjamin Weissman, Author, Headless

Headless has been compared to the writings of Henry Miller and Philip Roth, both authors whose works shocked their readers. The scatalogical and sexual themes in your fiction seem to aim for something other than shock value, however. It’s almost as if there’s a desire to show the innocence of serial killers and rapists, to fuse together the homicidal and the infantile.  Is your work about breaking taboos, or showing the comedy of transgression, or something else?

I’m not interested in shocking people. And I don’t think people are shockable … We’re trained to consume anything, and it’s all art.  But I think the art-viewing and the reading public are different.  Sometimes the public is freaked out right away; I’m trained genetically to write about stuff like this, it’s in my blood from childhood.  I have an autobiographical inclination to go there: [My] mother … was really morbid, and I was predisposed to this kind of material.  I don’t want to go the obvious routes.  I’m also thinking about murderers who will kill somebody and then eat their food, and I also think that’s so remarkable.  I’m always trying to go less predictable routes, and I do think that killers do have human sides, but I’m not trying to make them friendly or palatable.  It’s almost like trying different textures — if I’m going at you with something hard and sharp, I want to break in some soft things to break up the monotony.  The same thing happens in films I like.

In “Marnie,” a much more traditional story concerning the death of a friend, you seem less concerned with displaying a less perverse vision.  Other than the ski slope setting, [which is present in many of the stories in Headless], what ties ”Marnie” to the [other stories in the book], and how do you know when all of the violence and bodily fluids have gotten to be too much?

I think the bodily fluids thing is spontaneous, and it’s just about what fits or belongs or what seems fun to go into and explore.  I kind of don’t think too much about the reader, ever.  I’m just trying to make a story that works.  Maybe the reader is a couple of trusted friends.  Marnie is a story that afflicted me — it reads like it really happened, and it did really happen, and it was the kind of thing I put down to honor a friend who died.  I just sort of worked on it endlessly, and [the final text of “Marnie”] was a lot longer than the published story …  I was talking to a lot of people, and it was really slowing down my whole life. And I was reading the things they carry, and I was thinking this was my kind of Vietnam, the first time I’d experienced someone dying in front of me.  I wasn’t trying to write a story to make people cry, although I know that’s the effect it has on people, even though it works me up because I have vivid memories of what happened. At one point I thought I was just going to write a personal essay about it.  I was asked why I was struggling — the first time I saw [Marnie] naked was when the paramedics were cutting her clothes off — the friend said, “That’s your first sentence, and if you don’t use it I will.” You can be a perfectionist to the point where you don’t write and don’t publish anything, and I wrote something that was close to it. I think I was excited by putting that story next to others that were completely over the top.  I wanted to make it a less predictable collection.  Each story was going to push you in a different direction.  Me as a reader, I kind of want that from a writer.  It’s a horrible thing for readers to put down books.  It seems to happen so much, people who can’t get through a lot of really good books.  I originally had the story later on, but Dennis [Cooper] was smart enough to throw it in the middle … section [with the] family stories.  But that in itself was very different.

You seem particularly interested in the banality of evil.  How does your vision of evil compare with that being promoted in American popular culture and by American politicians?

I feel America is my homeland; my grandparents are from Austria.  When I’ve gone there and done exhibitions, [I notice that in] the work I’ve seen with other artists, there’s a graphic weird mixing of sexual violent things, and I’ve always been floored by that work and [the feeling that] I was among my brothers and sisters.  When you talked to someone with a high-pitched voice, doctors will ask, “Why did this voice stay with them?” And [the doctors will] ask if this is some kind of trauma that was locked in at a particular age.  Maybe there was a time when I was a kid and listening to stories from my peculiar mom and that became a story mode I was going to replicate later on.  Violent stories, stories of fear and paranoia.  She would cut articles out and send them to me.  Lots of strange things about killers, and the family would totally ignore it … Trying to comprehend … where inappropriate humor comes from … was a constant at the dinner table, talking about Nazis — it’s a coping device.  I think for me the stuff was so far removed that Hitler was as bland as a glass of water or as gigantic and horrible as he is.  We had relatives that were killed on both sides of the family [in the Holocaust].

I think I’m pretty motivated by writing about terrible experiences.  A good happy life — I can’t write about them, I have no use for them except to have one.  I feast on for my writing the way the world is tearing itself apart and people are just ripping each other to shreds.  I’m amazed at the weird position people are in, where your life is placid and safe and just outside or several thousand miles away, or an hour from now it’s absolutely violent and atrocious.

There are some differences in the prose style between Headless and Dear Dead Person, your previous collection. Your sentences seem to be more syntactically complicated — lush even — with more adjectives and clauses.  What inspired you to use a more literary voice with this collection?

I think it’s the evolution for me or just growing up; I think [during your] evolution … as a writer, you’re pushing yourself to deal with sentences differently.  I haven’t looked at Dear Dead Person in so long, but I imagine the sentences were short and blunt.  I took a lot of pleasure out of it.  I’m glad that you said that.  In a way I feel a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing is pretty intuitive, of one’s language getting more sophisticated as one grows up.  I didn’t think in this book I wanted this language.  I just think it happens with maturity.  I’m not sure what I picked up from Robert Walser, but I couldn’t get rid of it.  There’s a child-like thing that happens in a lot of his work, and in Thomas Bernhard[‘s] work, and Lydia Davis’ work that I can’t get rid of. Those writers mean so much to me, and they are my ideals.”

Justin Clark

The Interviewer: Laura Nathan, InTheFray Managing Editor
The Interviewee: Shola Lynch, Director, Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed

(This is the complete transcript of the interview. For the highlights, click here.)

Tell me a little bit about the response you received when you screened your film here [at the South-by-Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas] on Monday.

It was actually Monday at 11 a.m. I was a little worried, but we had a great crowd, and we got a standing ovation. That was awesome and totally unanticipated.

It premiered at Sundance before, right? Did you get a similar response there?

It had a great response, people stayed by a Q&A, but a standing ovation. That doesn’t happen all the time. It wasn’t a concert. It wasn’t mandatory; there’s no encore in film. I’m sure if Shirley Chisholm was there, there would be an encore every time, but I’m just the filmmaker. It’s great for her, though.

That’s great. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to make a documentary about Shirley Chisholm.

Well, you know, I didn’t really remember that she’d run for president. I knew that she was the first black woman elected to Congress, and I don’t even really remember 1972. I was really young. It hadn’t really been pointed out to me, and I’m very interested in history. I’m really interested in African American history and women’s history, but she’s kind of left out of that landscape. She’s mentioned in passing though. I was familiar with her name, but nobody has really done an in-depth study of her political work. Or even a biography, for that matter.

She wrote –

Her own. She wrote Unbought and Unbossed about her run for Congress. She had a really difficult run. That actually is a really fascinating story. And she wrote The Good Fight, which is about her run for president.

But those were both written back in the 70s, right?

Exactly. The year after the race. So in ’69, Unbought and Unbossed, and The Good Fight in ’73. It was published in 1973. And in many ways, that presidential campaign took so much out of her. Emotionally, financially.

And she was attacked several times, right?

Yeah, she was attacked several times. I mean, it was scary, and it was definitely supposed to be a warning to her that she was transgressing her place and that she was really not fit for being there. And some of it was out and out intimidation of her.

Do you think that that was the case because she was a woman of color, or was it due to either her race or gender specifically?

You know, you can’t separate the two. Would it have happened if it was just a man? Probably. But in some ways it was more offensive to think that you had both a minority race and gender classification or guidelines or you know, she shouldn’t have been there.

I don’t remember – when did her political career end?

She retired in ’83 from Congress. She was in Congress from ’68 to ’83, and she retired because of the Reagan era, and she said it was very difficult to work across the aisle and have bipartisan legislation. She was always very issue-oriented and relied on that work across the aisle. And with whoever. She didn’t tow the party line. Nobody really owned her, which is great and really frustrating, you know [Laughs].

Were there certain political pet projects that she had? I mean, I know she wanted to make democracy more representative, but were there certain pieces of legislation that she worked on to do that?

Well, I talked to her senior legislative aide during that period. She’s actually in the movie – Shirley Gaines. She was interested in education. And there were a couple of bills that she had passed on health care and things that had to do with issues related to the people in her community. They were largely a group of people not making a lot of money, just trying to get by in Brooklyn. And she was very aware of the need for after-school programs and for passing legislation related to that in the New York state legislature and also in the U.S. Congress.

She spoke out against the Vietnam war on the floor of Congress when nobody else did.  She worked for women’s rights and the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment], [she] and Bella Abzug, it was a joint effort.

In a way, it’s very fascinating to me because she comes out of a Christian tradition. We always think of Christian tradition as very fundamentalist and very right-wing. Her Christian tradition was humanistic, and because of that, she defended broad kinds of legislation and was for human rights, and there wasn’t really such thing as gay rights, but gay rights folks loved her. I mean, she wasn’t advocating a gay rights lifestyle, but she was advocating human beings’ rights, and whatever fell under that broad umbrella was really important to her.

It’s fascinating to me because I’ve grown up thinking the Christian tradition can mean only one thing. So it’s fascinating to take a look at her.

Yeah, certainly. Tell me a little bit about the effect you think Shirley Chisholm had on her constituents and her colleagues.

Everybody that we talked [to] who had worked with her in Congress or on her campaign was so incredibly impacted by her energy, her commitment, her follow-through, and were completely inspired in their own lives in that way. And to a T, every person has been involved in either local politics or their own work community and shaping rules, trying to change things. It’s almost like they have a real sense of citizenship and duty from seeing her in action as young kids, well, not kids, college-age. And they are always impressed with [her] forthrightness. We think of politicians as trying to figure out how to spin things, but she just had her mind set on something. She was the same person, who believed in the same legislation and said the same thing whether she was in front of a white Southern audience or a black Baptist audience or an urban audience anywhere in the country.

And it’s this funny friendship that gets struck up between her and [George] Wallace for that very reason. Because Wallace, you know, was on the complete other end of the Democratic and political spectrum in so many ways. But he didn’t mend his words either, so in a funny way, he actually said on television that he had a lot of respect for Shirley Chisholm. He said, “If you’re not going to vote for me, vote for Shirley Chisholm. She’s at least telling you how she feels. There’s integrity in that.” [Laughs].

That’s great.

Yeah.

When I spoke with Larry [Meistrich, CEO of Film Movement, distributor of Chisolm ‘72], one of the things he mentioned when we discussed your film was that they’re marketing it as a film about electability rather than a story about an African American woman. Is that how you want to see your film marketed as well?

Yeah, you know, I think too often you can get pigeonholed by your race and gender [Laughs]. And while it’s interesting and it’s good and it’s important, it is. And nobody wants to give it that short shrift.

The reason the movie is important to me is not because of her race and gender, but it’s because of her political action and the kind of politician she was. Given that time period, it’s amazing, including the race and gender stuff. And I really appreciate that about Larry’s approach to the material in the film because it is a political story. And that’s the more interesting story. I mean, it’s like “yeah, great, she’s black and she’s a woman. Yeah, great.” That story’s done in 30 seconds. Cheers! [Laughs]. And I think too often people forget that any story, if it’s told well, has broad appeal because it strikes a human chord.

And that was her big thing. She wanted to hold democracy accountable and guarantee equality for all people.

Yeah, she never denied who she was in the process.

One of Shirley’s gripes with the political system was that it wasn’t equally accessible to everyone. Would you say this still seems to be the case now? Obviously, it still seems to be.

Yeah. It’s even worse now because it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. More people now than they did in the 50s obviously and even in ’72 feel like they cannot affect any kind of change. Whereas, back then, it was kind of the tail end of that feeling, like we can make the system moral. If you think about the civil rights movement, which was started in part by adults, a lot of the change came from protesting in the streets by young people. And the civil rights laws passed, and the Voting Rights Act passed. The ERA almost passed, or it passed in Congress, but then it didn’t get ratified by the states. [Laughs]. Then Vietnam was a huge issue.

And the voting age had changed from 21 to 18, and ’72 was the first election where all of these people were allowed to vote. That’s a huge part of the story in that it’s a historical moment that allowed her to run. You’re talking about 10 million new voters that were crazy enough to be attracted – many of them – to a candidate like her.

Ann [Hinshaw, Shola’s publicist] mentioned that you’ve also been very politically active yourself, but she didn’t say what that was. She just said I had to ask you about your activism. So tell me a little bit about some of the projects you’ve worked on.

[Laughs]. Well, I don’t know, how do I put this? I am politically involved. I am definitely politically involved. I believe in voting. I believe in participation, and I mean participation in a big sense, like I’ll go out and vote. And I mean participation in a smaller sense. Any organization or community or work environment that I belong to, I will be an active member of that community, and that includes making it a better community, which in some ways is above and beyond the call of duty. It’s not something I get paid to do. I don’t know where I get that from, but it is instilled in me, and it comes out in various ways.

I was an athlete here at the University of Texas; I ran track for the Lady Longhorns. There was actually an incident that happened; it was Greek Week, I think. The parades, blah, blah, blah. And there was one – I think it was the Fiji House – [that] kept opening and closing a trunk. Inside, they had a noose and “Die nigger,” and they just had some horrible racial slurs in there. And somebody from The Daily Texan saw it and happened to have a camera and took a photograph, and so there was a big debate on campus about this. And the president was asked – he had to react. So he called all of these people into his chamber, and said, “I want to read this speech to you, who are part of this community of the university.” A lot of them were athletes, a lot of them were football players, these were all guy athletes. You know, professors. And what he did is he came out late, and he said, “Oh, you know, we don’t have time for this discussion, let’s just go to the podium. Come with me.” So he was basically making it seem as though he had this community of people behind him, and he gave the most kind of “boys will be boys, you know, it’s a shame, but boys will be boys” speech. And those of us that were in the audience that were on the mall and the athletes were up there were mortified, and they were embarrassed. They were angry, and they felt used. So one of the things that always comes up from the athletes is, “You know, we’re here to do our job [representing the school], so if you need anything …” So a swimmer and I, along with a couple of other organizations, organized a rally, and we got about 200 athletes – I mean, some of the biggest guys and some of the ladies. [Laughs]. And we marched from the stadium all the way to the mall and gave these passionate speeches. It was great, and that propelled me to be in student government, which at UT is really hard. But because of that, a lot of the guys decided to go out and vote – and vote for me. That was the only way I could win because I wasn’t a part of a sorority or anything. So athletes were my community. I remember this one guy came up and said, “You know, I never would’ve voted, but I like you, and you want to win, so I’m gonna vote for you.” He was this big Texan with an accent. So things like that.

One of the things you mentioned earlier is the increase in political apathy and the feeling of powerlessness. Do you think that that will change this coming year, especially after a lot of people in Florida weren’t allowed or encountered physical barriers that prevented [them] from getting to the polls in 2000?

Yeah, I hope so. And that’s part of the reason I felt that it was important to finish a film like this before a presidential election. Not only is it about a woman who runs for president, but the way in which she does it and the spirit in which she does it is really inspiring. I think there are a lot of people who feel that [change has to happen] and who are trying to work through whatever organizations they belong to, or Internet communities, which is a big thing now.

The other problem with politics is the huge amount of money that’s involved in running a presidential campaign. I mean, she ran her presidential campaign with very little money, which in a lot of ways is bad. She was very frustrated by that, you know. And campaign finance was actually a huge issue back then. Thirty years ago. By comparison, they were probably spending chump change, even if you do the monetary conversions.

Carol Mosley Braun ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this past winter, but she has since bowed out of the race. Do you think the same barriers exist to a woman of color getting elected to the White House for women like Carol Mosley Braun as they did for Shirley Chisholm, or do you think those barriers have changed in some respects?

Well, I think they have changed to a degree in that because there are more women and women of color involved in all aspects of political life – not to say there are huge amounts – but it’s not as shocking. Think about Congress. Four hundred-some-odd congressmen. Think about what a group picture would have looked like for Shirley Chisholm. I mean, the people she had to work with every day. She was the first, so it was really uncomfortable. I mean, she told all kinds of stories – we couldn’t put all of them in the film – about ways in which people really felt uncomfortable around her. And in some ways, it was isolating. I mean, she built her own community through her office. It was really draining in a lot of ways.

Now there are more women in Congress, and it’s not as shocking. But there are still huge barriers because of the idea of leadership that we have – I mean, there are even barriers for some men. Everyone can’t style himself as Indiana Jones, and so if you’re a guy who doesn’t exude that kind of masculinity, you’re going to have a lot of trouble. So what does it mean if you literally you don’t have the cahones? I mean, what is that? [Laughs].

In the film world, women of color lack a visible presence as well. There aren’t that many films about women of color. Did you find that that makes it difficult for you? I guess most of the funding for your film came from organizations with a vested interest in promoting Chisholm’s message. But did you find that you had trouble initially getting that story out and garnering support for your project?

Well, I found that I had trouble fundraising because people really wondered. I had to craft my proposals knowing that people were going to craft the relevance of it.

That’s so ridiculous.

It is, and it isn’t. Yes, it is. I didn’t want it to be a biography for that reason. Not that I think a biography is a bad way to go, but she is really a woman of action. This is a story about her run for president. So it’s easier to stay away from just general celebration and uplift, which happens a lot. And I think that does a disservice because people who participate in making history don’t think of themselves as making history. There are all of these moral dilemmas and choices that they’re responsible for. And they have to think about what those choices are and act on them. And that’s the same kind of thing we all do every day whether we choose to ignore the choice or not, which is easier in a lot of ways. Does that make any sense?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So I wanted it to be about that process. And the other thing about it is that because I am a black woman, I knew I could raise money for a film about a black woman. And that because she was not historically contested territory – in fact, the territory didn’t exist – people were like, “Oh, how nice.” And there was that assumption that this would be a nice documentary as opposed to a good political story. I mean, I knew I couldn’t make a story about the ’72 presidential election … Now I hope that this gets easier and that I don’t have to work as hard to find funding. There are so many great documentaries I’d love to make.

So do you have any future plans? Are there any projects that you’re currently working on?

Yeah, I have a bunch of ideas, but you know, I really enjoyed doing a film about somebody who is still alive because they can participate in telling the story.

I agree. I’m sure it was really great to work with Shirley. Is she in her 80s now?

She’s 79. She’ll turn 80 soon.

She’s still active?

Yeah.

In talking to her, did you get a sense of what she thinks are the problems with the political system today and what she thinks the current barriers are to representation and equality?

Well, we tried to focus on ’72, but her main complaint was that there was no working across the aisle any more. And when you strictly go along party lines, you’re not really going to get anything done.

Right. And that’s still true today.

Yeah, actually, she’s really frustrated by that.

Are there any politicians or activists that you think have really embraced Chisolm’s message? Can you think of anyone who might be the next Shirley Chisholm?

That’s a hard question, by the way, because I’m not aware of everyone doing her work. But Congresswoman Barbara Lee from Oakland, California, actually as a young college student helped run the Chisholm presidential campaign and was so inspired by Shirley Chisholm and Ron Delam and by community activism in the Bay Area that she became a politician. She became involved in local politics, and then decided to run for Congress. And she stood up, she was the lone voice on the floor against giving unilateral power to our president after 9/11. You know, wow!

That’s great.

It is, and it’s inspiring! And she also has put a bill on the floor a couple of years ago to recognize Shirley Chisholm [H.Res. 97, March 21, 2001, referred to the Committee on Government Reform but never considered]. I mean, it’s not legislation. It’s a public record. I think these examples are important for women, for women of color. These women are righteous in a lot of ways. You don’t always agree with them, and that’s part of the fun, too. But they’re doing what they think is best, and there’s real appeal in that.

Oh, absolutely. One of the biggest criticisms of both the mainstream feminist movement and the racial equality movement, if you’d call it that, is the failure of these movements to recognize various other aspects of identity. Do you find that this is still a problem, particularly for women of color? And do you think there is a way for women of color to successfully work with mainstream feminist movements and racial equality movements?

Yeah, you know, the thing is, it has always been an issue, and it will probably always be an issue. And it’s a matter of how open the dialogue is in many respects, and Shirley Chisholm said this, too. The idea was that she could bring a coalition of people together, and then the reality was that coalition-building was really hard. Because women’s groups didn’t necessarily want to deal with black issues, and black folks didn’t really want to deal with women’s issues, and it was difficult. It was difficult. And so black women were feeling kind of left out. And Paula Giddings, who wrote When and Where I Enter, which is a history of this subject. The subtitle, I think, is The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. It’s a great book. I don’t think anybody’s written anything since then that’s been influential. It’s really fun to read a survey about how black women have been the fabric of American history. And she doesn’t do it with uplift and celebration, but in showing their work and showing how they’ve been able to navigate race and gender in the 18th century, in the 19th century, and the 20th century. In fact, it’s the only place where I found more than passing mention of Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for president.

Wow.

Granted, it’s just two-and-a-half pages. It’s just a survey, you know. She points out that in the 70s, you see black women finding their own voice, and you see that happening in literature and in politics. For instance, Color Girls by Shengei, I think, Maya Angelou, and then also Shirley Chisolm in politics. It’s like, okay, we have identity other than just our gender or just our race. And that’s the fascinating part. People will fixate on only one aspect of someone’s experience. It’s limiting because no one walks through the world just as their race or just as their gender. There are all kinds of ways in which you identify. I identify – I used to identify – as an athlete and as a scholar and all of the things that make up our personalities.

Documentaries, some say, have a better chance of raising consciousness and sparking activism –

I don’t necessarily believe that at all. I mean, good storytelling is good storytelling, and I think documentaries have been given a bad rap because often they will be good subjects, but they will not necessarily be good stories. We can think of documentaries with good stories, and we can make documentaries with good stories. But then you can also see where the drama is, and good stories also make good movies. The best example recently is Lumumba by Raul Peck. And he made a documentary about Patrice Lumumba, and then he made a narrative. And the narrative was just unbelievably moving. I mean, Oliver Stone has made a career on it! [Laughs].

All of that being said, what is it that you would ideally like to see your audience take from Chisholm ’72?

Oh, gosh, that’s a really hard question! A little bit of hope, a little bit of optimism that could be translated into their own lives and their own communities. Yeah, if you think about it, you know, “democracy, citizenship, and participation.” [Laughs]. And what it means applied to us as individuals. But it’s not an abstract idea – well, it is an abstract idea, but it also translates into everyday life.

What would you hope other filmmakers might take from your story and from your work?

Yeah, I’m not as presumptuous. [Laughs]. Well, I will say that what we tried to do was tell a really good story and were aware of that and didn’t want to just rely on the fact that we had a fascinating subject. I mean, you see it happening for a lot of the documentaries now. You have to tell a story. It’s not just information strung together.

You have to connect with the audience.

Exactly. You have to make it emotionally compelling. And how do you do that to a character? There are great characters out there that are participating in Hollywood and in documentaries. And then any project can be fascinating. I mean, who knew Dogtown and Z-Boys could be such a great movie? Well, why is that a great movie – are you familiar with it?

I’m not.

It’s about skateboarders. That movie is fantastic because the characters are so compelling. I don’t give a flying cahoots about skateboarders, but those guys are so much fun to watch. The story was really well done, so then all of the sudden, skateboarding becomes a cool thing. [Laughs].

Is there anything you hope political aspirants or people in politics would take from your story about Shirley and her career?

Well, in a lot of ways, they’re the ones who can make the fastest, most effective changes right now. You know, politicians as a breed do not have to be bad people. You don’t have to agree with them, but if politicians actually behave in a way that they believe is actually good and right rather than just trying to win a game, then I think we make our world a better place. There are a lot of people on both sides, throughout the political spectrum that feel that way. I mean, there are a lot of people who just care about winning and making sure you have a job. It’s about money and corporate interests and lobbyists. Oh my gosh. I don’t know quite how to put this. Politics shouldn’t be just about winning. It should be about doing good, but you want to win also. So I’m not quite sure.

One last question. Has Shirley seen the film? What does she think about it?

She has not seen the film.

Oh, really?

She has a very interesting relationship to the film. She almost didn’t let me do it. I had to talk her into it. So I talked her into it, and we went down and did one interview with her so we’d have a trailer to show people. She humored us basically because when we showed up, I said, “We’re going to use this [trailer] to fundraise, so I’ll be back. It might take a year. It might take two.” She never really expected me to come back, which is why she humored us. She’s good at that actually, but she’s also a woman of her word. So when I did come back, she had to do it.

And so when we told her we got into Sundance [Film Festival], she said, “Oh, that’s nice.” But I had to explain to her what that meant because she had no conception of what Sundance was. She was like, “Oh, have fun, dear!” And I wanted to show her the film before we went to Sundance, but she said, “This isn’t a good time.” She had just moved. She had just built a house, and she wanted to move all of her books out of storage. She wanted to be surrounded by her books. And so, finally, I’m going down to show it to her next week actually.

Why didn’t she want you to make the film? Did she just think it wouldn’t be interesting to other people?

In some ways, she didn’t feel it was very relevant. I had to remind her. She said, “That was 30 years ago; I’m not sure if I want to go back to that.” She had real resistance to doing that. But I was able ultimately to convince her because I said, “It’s not really about you. It’s about future generations and making sure that they have great examples, great stories about people who tried to do good things.” Basically, I appealed to the schoolteacher in her.

Oh, that’s right. She was a teacher before she ran for Congress.

Yeah, she was a schoolteacher for a very long time. She was in her late 40s when she ran for Congress. She had lived a whole life. That’s the other thing. We think that once we hit 30, life is over. But [former Texas Governor] Ann Richards did the same thing. There are all of these women who do not find themselves or their stride until they’re old enough to say, “I don’t care what you think,” and stop trying to please people.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Shirley Chisholm 1972 (photo by Rose Greene)

“I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that … I am the candidate of the people of America.”

–Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, announcing her bid for the U.S. Presidency

Desegregation may have been positive for many people to the extent that it theoretically broadened the scope of opportunities for people of color. And by rejecting the notion that separate was equal, the Brown decision, along with the Civil Rights Acts that became law a decade later, forced whites to recognize the existence of blacks, if nothing else. They attended the same schools, ate in the same restaurants and were citizens of the same nation.

Or so Shirley Chisholm wanted to believe. The first black woman elected to Congress and then to seriously run for president in 1972, this Brooklyn Democrat sought to make democracy live up to its name by making the U.S. political system more representative, humane and inclusive. But for all of the recognition – much of it negative and degrading – Chisholm received during her political career, she, as a historical subject, couldn’t overcome the virtual invisibility that women of color have been plagued with, even today, 50 years after the Brown decision.

It is for this very reason that Shola Lynch decided to make Chisholm’s 1972 run for the White House the subject of her first feature film. When I sat down with Lynch to discuss the making of Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, she relayed that she knew of Chisolm prior to making the film. But because Chisholm is rarely mentioned – much less discussed extensively – in history books and in film, Lynch’s knowledge about her was extremely limited.

And Lynch, it goes without saying, was certainly not the only one who knew so little about a woman who has struggled to contribute so much to the American people – be they black, white, gay, women, rich, poor or any combination thereof. Perhaps now that Lynch has made this film, which will be released nationwide by Film Movement in September, this historical error can begin to be corrected.

The Interviewer: Laura Nathan, InTheFray Managing Editor
The Interviewee: Shola Lynch, Director, Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed

(The text below includes highlights from the interview. For the complete transcript, click here)

Shirley Chisholm at a press conference with Congressman Ron Dellums in 1972 (photo courtesy of Shirley Chisholm)

Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to make a documentary about Shirley Chisholm.

Well, you know, I didn’t really remember that she’d run for president. I knew that she was the first black woman elected to Congress, and I don’t even really remember 1972. I was really young. It hadn’t really been pointed out to me, and I’m very interested in history. I’m really interested in African American history and women’s history, but she’s kind of left out of that landscape. She’s mentioned in passing, though. I was familiar with her name, but nobody has really done an in-depth study of her political work. Or even a biography, for that matter … [She wrote her own, though]. She wrote Unbought and Unbossed about her run for Congress. She had a really difficult run. That actually is a really fascinating story. And she wrote The Good Fight, which is about her run for president.

But those were both written back in the ’70s, right?

Exactly. The year after the race. So in ’69, Unbought and Unbossed, and The Good Fight in ’73. It was published in 1973. And in many ways, that presidential campaign took so much out of her. Emotionally, financially.

And she was attacked several times, right?

Yeah, she was attacked several times. I mean, it was scary, and it was definitely supposed to be a warning to her that she was transgressing her place and that she was really not fit for being there. And some of it was out and out intimidation of her.

Do you think that that was the case because she was a woman of color, or was it due to either her race or gender specifically?

You know, you can’t separate the two. Would it have happened if it was just a man? Probably. But in some ways it was more offensive to think that you had both a minority race and gender classification or guidelines. [People at that time thought Chisholm] shouldn’t have been there [running for president and speaking out against social and political norms].

I don’t remember – when did her political career end?

… She was in Congress from ’68 to ’83, and she retired because of the Reagan era … She said it was very difficult to work across the aisle and have bipartisan legislation. She was always very issue-oriented and relied on that work across the aisle – and with who[m]ever. She didn’t tow the party line. Nobody really owned her, which is great and really frustrating …

Were there certain political pet projects that she had? I know she wanted to make democracy more representative, but were there certain pieces of legislation that she worked on to achieve that end?

Well, I talked to her senior legislative aide during that period. She’s actually in the movie – Shirley Gaines. She was interested in education. And there were a couple of bills that she had passed on health care and things that had to do with issues related to the people in her community. They were largely a group of people not making a lot of money, just trying to get by in Brooklyn. And she was very aware of the need for after-school programs and for passing legislation related to that in the New York state legislature and also in the U.S. Congress.

She spoke out against the Vietnam War on the floor of Congress when nobody else did.  She worked for women’s rights and the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] …

In a way, it’s very fascinating to me because she comes out of a Christian tradition. We always think of Christian tradition as very fundamentalist and very right-wing. Her Christian tradition was humanistic, and because of that, she defended broad kinds of legislation and was for human rights, and there wasn’t really such thing as gay rights, but gay rights folks loved her. I mean, she wasn’t advocating a gay lifestyle, but she was advocating human beings’ rights, and whatever fell under that broad umbrella was really important to her …

Shirley Chisholm 2003 (photo by Sandi Sissel)

… Tell me a little bit about the effect you think Shirley Chisholm had on her constituents and her colleagues.

Everybody that we talked [to] who had worked with her in Congress or on her campaign was so incredibly impacted by her energy, her commitment, her follow-through, and were completely inspired in their own lives in that way. And to a T, every person has been involved in either local politics or their own work community and shaping rules, trying to change things. It’s almost like they have a real sense of citizenship and duty from seeing her in action as young kids, well, not kids, college-age. And they are always impressed with [her] forthrightness. We think of politicians as trying to figure out how to spin things, but she just had her mind set on something. She was the same person, who believed in the same legislation and said the same thing whether she was in front of a white Southern audience or a black Baptist audience or an urban audience anywhere in the country …

Are there any politicians or activists that you think have really embraced Chisholm’s message? Can you think of anyone who might be the next Shirley Chisholm?

That’s a hard question, by the way, because I’m not aware of everyone doing her work. But Congresswoman Barbara Lee from Oakland, California, actually, as a young college student, helped run the Chisholm presidential campaign and was so inspired by Shirley Chisholm and Ron Delam and by community activism in the Bay Area that she became a politician. She became involved in local politics and then decided to run for Congress. And she stood up; she was the lone voice on the floor against giving unilateral power to our President after 9/11. You know, wow! … And she also has put a bill on the floor a couple of years ago to recognize Shirley Chisolm [H.Res. 97, March 21, 2001, referred to the Committee on Government Reform, but never considered]. I mean, it’s not legislation. It’s a public record. I think these examples are important for women, for women of color. These women are righteous in a lot of ways. You don’t always agree with them, and that’s part of the fun, too. But they’re doing what they think is best, and there’s real appeal in that.

One of Shirley’s gripes with the political system was that it wasn’t equally accessible to everyone. Would you say this still seems to be the case now? Obviously, it still seems to be.

Yeah. It’s even worse now because it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. More people now than …  in the ‘50s, obviously, and even in ’72 feel like they cannot affect any kind of change. Whereas, back then, it was kind of the tail end of that feeling … If you think about the civil rights movement, which was started in part by adults, a lot of the change came from protesting in the streets by young people. And the civil rights laws passed, and the Voting Rights Act passed. The ERA almost passed, or it passed in Congress, but then it didn’t get ratified by the states. [Laughs]. Then Vietnam was a huge issue.

And the voting age had changed from 21 to 18, and ’72 was the first election where all of these people were allowed to vote. That’s a huge part of the story in that it’s a historical moment that allowed her to run. You’re talking about 10 million new voters that were crazy enough to be attracted – many of them – to a candidate like her …

Carol Mosley Braun ran for the Democratic presidential nomination this past winter, but she has since bowed out of the race. Do you think the same barriers exist to a woman of color getting elected to the White House for women like Carol Mosley Braun as they did for Shirley Chisholm, or do you think those barriers have changed in some respects?

Well, I think they have changed to a degree in that because there are more women and women of color involved in all aspects of political life – not to say there are huge amounts – but it’s not as shocking. Think about Congress. Four hundred-some-odd congressmen. Think about what a group picture would have looked like for Shirley Chisholm. I mean, the people she had to work with every day. She was the first, so it was really uncomfortable. I mean, she told all kinds of stories – we couldn’t put all of them in the film – about ways in which people really felt uncomfortable around her. And in some ways, it was isolating. I mean, she built her own community through her office. It was really draining in a lot of ways.

Now there are more women in Congress, and it’s not as shocking. But there are still huge barriers because of the idea of leadership that we have – I mean, there are even barriers for some men. Everyone can’t style himself as Indiana Jones, and so if you’re a guy who doesn’t exude that kind of masculinity, you’re going to have a lot of trouble …

Oh, absolutely. One of the biggest criticisms of both the mainstream feminist movement and the racial equality movement, if you’d call it that, is the failure of these movements to recognize various other aspects of identity. Do you find that this is still a problem, particularly for women of color? And do you think there is a way for women of color to successfully work with mainstream feminist movements and racial equality movements?

Yeah, you know, the thing is, it has always been an issue, and it will probably always be an issue. And it’s a matter of how open the dialogue is in many respects, and Shirley Chisholm said this, too. The idea was that she could bring a coalition of people together, and then the reality was that coalition-building was really hard. Because women’s groups didn’t necessarily want to deal with black issues, and black folks didn’t really want to deal with women’s issues, and it was difficult … And so black women were feeling kind of left out. And Paula Giddings, who wrote When and Where I Enter, which is a history of this subject … [shows] how black women have been the fabric of American history. And she doesn’t do it with uplift and celebration, but in showing their work and showing how they’ve been able to navigate race and gender in the 18th century, in the 19th century and the 20th century. In fact, it’s the only place where I found more than passing mention of Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for president …

Granted, it’s just 2 ½ pages … She points out that in the ’70s, you see black women finding their own voice, and you see that happening in literature and in politics. For instance … Maya Angelou and then also Shirley Chisholm in politics. It’s like, okay, we have identity other than just our gender or just our race. And that’s the fascinating part. People will fixate on only one aspect of someone’s experience. It’s limiting because no one walks through the world just as their race or just as their gender. There are all kinds of ways in which you identify. I identify – I used to identify – as an athlete and as a scholar and all of the things that make up our personalities …

Shola Lynch on location in Barbados (photo by Sandi Sissel)

In the film world, women of color lack a visible presence as well. There aren’t that many films about women of color. Did you find that that made it difficult for you to produce this, your first film? I guess most of the funding for your film came from organizations with a vested interest in promoting Chisholm’s message. But did you find that you had trouble initially getting that story out and garnering support for your project?

Well, I found that I had trouble fundraising because people really wondered. I had to craft my proposals knowing that people were going to craft the relevance of it … I didn’t want it to be a biography for that reason. Not that I think a biography is a bad way to go, but she is really a woman of action. This is a story about her run for president. So it’s easier to stay away from just general celebration and uplift, which happens a lot. And I think that does a disservice because people who participate in making history don’t think of themselves as making history.

There are all of these moral dilemmas and choices that they’re responsible for. And they have to think about what those choices are and act on them. And that’s the same kind of thing we all do every day, whether we choose to ignore the choice or not, which is easier in a lot of ways … So I wanted it to be about that process. And the other thing about it is that because I am a black woman, I knew I could raise money for a film about a black woman. And that because she was not historically contested territory – in fact, the territory didn’t exist – people were like, “Oh, how nice.” And there was that assumption that this would be a nice documentary as opposed to a good political story. I mean, I knew I couldn’t make a story about the ’72 presidential election … Now I hope that this gets easier and that I don’t have to work as hard to find funding. There are so many great documentaries I’d love to make …

When I spoke with Larry [Meistrich, CEO of Film Movement, distributor of Chisolm ’72], one of the things he mentioned when we discussed your film was that they’re marketing it as a film about electability rather than a story about an African American woman. Is that how you want to see your film marketed as well?

Yeah, you know, I think too often you can get pigeonholed by your race and gender [Laughs]. And while it’s interesting and it’s good and it’s important, it is. And nobody wants to give it that short shrift.

The reason the movie is important to me is not because of her race and gender, but it’s because of her political action and the kind of politician she was. Given that time period, it’s amazing, including the race and gender stuff. And I really appreciate that about Larry’s approach to the material in the film because it is a political story.  And that’s the more interesting story. I mean, it’s like “Yeah, great, she’s black and she’s a woman. Yeah, great.” That story’s done in 30 seconds. Cheers! [Laughs]. And I think too often people forget that any story, if it’s told well, has broad appeal because it strikes a human chord.

All of that being said, what is it that you would ideally like to see your audience take from Chisholm ’72?

Oh, gosh, that’s a really hard question! A little bit of hope, a little bit of optimism that could be translated into their own lives and their own communities. Yeah, if you think about it, you know, “Democracy, citizenship, and participation.” [Laughs]. And what it means applied to us as individuals. But it’s not an abstract idea – well, it is an abstract idea, but it also translates into everyday life.

What would you hope other filmmakers might take from your story and from your work?

Yeah, I’m not as presumptuous. [Laughs]. Well, I will say that what we tried to do was tell a really good story and were aware of that and didn’t want to just rely on the fact that we had a fascinating subject. I mean, you see it happening for a lot of the documentaries now. You have to tell a story. It’s not just information strung together.

Is there anything you hope political aspirants or people in politics would take from your story about Shirley and her career?

Well, in a lot of ways, they’re the ones who can make the fastest, most effective changes right now. You know, politicians as a breed do not have to be bad people. You don’t have to agree with them, but if politicians actually behave in a way that they believe is actually good and right rather than just trying to win a game, then I think we make our world a better place. There are a lot of people on both sides, throughout the political spectrum, that feel that way. I mean, there are a lot of people who just care about winning and making sure you have a job. It’s about money and corporate interests and lobbyists. Oh my gosh. I don’t know quite how to put this. Politics shouldn’t be just about winning. It should be about doing good, but you want to win also. So I’m not quite sure.

One last question. Has Shirley seen the film? What does she think about it?

She has not seen the film.

Oh, really?

She has a very interesting relationship to the film. She almost didn’t let me do it. I had to talk her into it. So I talked her into it, and we went down and did one interview with her so we’d have a trailer to show people. She humored us basically because when we showed up, I said, “We’re going to use this [trailer] to fundraise, so I’ll be back. It might take a year. It might take two.” She never really expected me to come back, which is why she humored us. She’s good at that actually, but she’s also a woman of her word. So when I did come back, she had to do it.

And so when we told her we got into Sundance [Film Festival], she said, “Oh, that’s nice.”  But I had to explain to her what that meant because she had no conception of what Sundance was. She was like, “Oh, have fun, dear!” And I wanted to show her the film before we went to Sundance, but she said, “This isn’t a good time.” She had just moved. She had just built a house, and she wanted to move all of her books out of storage. She wanted to be surrounded by her books. And so, finally, I’m going down to show it to her next week actually.

Why didn’t she want you to make the film? Did she just think it wouldn’t be interesting to other people?

In some ways, she didn’t feel it was very relevant. I had to remind her. She said, “That was 30 years ago; I’m not sure if I want to go back to that.” She had real resistance to doing that. But I was able ultimately to convince her because I said, “It’s not really about you. It’s about future generations and making sure that they have great examples, great stories about people who tried to do good things.” Basically, I appealed to the schoolteacher in her.”

Laura Nathan-Garner

Colored Waiting Room. Rome, Georgia, September 1943. (Library of Congress, courtesy of Images of American Political History)

The interviewer: Laura Nathan / Austin, Texas

The interviewee: Rachel F. Moran, Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member, Center for Social Justice, the University of California at Berkeley / Berkeley, California

Fifty years removed from that fateful May 1954 day when the Supreme Court ruled that separate is not equal, scholars and people outside of academia frequently refer to the present epoch in American social history as the post-civil rights era. But what exactly does the post- entail here? How do we describe the post-civil rights era? Certainly, we can agree that the notion of “separate but equal” that maintained the black/white divide for over two centuries is no longer legally permissible. But did the Court’s ruling ensure full equality for all U.S. citizens, or did the Brown decision merely raise new questions about what should succeed “separate but equal” as the primarily social descriptor for the diverse collection of people residing in the United States? When I spoke with Rachel F. Moran, Robert D. and Leslie-Kay Raven Professor of Law and Executive Committee Member at the Center for Social Justice at the University of California at Berkeley, she shared her thoughts on the end of segregation and suggested that racial, ethnic, and class differences continue to alienate millions of people residing within U.S. borders. In fact, as she suggested, events and cultural trends of the past fifty years have not ended the debate on equality in the United States.  Rather new questions and conflicts concerning race and ethnicity have predominated the post-civil rights era.

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision is often heralded as the most decisive legal victory in the struggle to end segregation. But how effective do you think the Brown decision has been in altering attitudes about race?

Brown alone was limited in its ability to alter social practices. It was only after the Executive Branch and Congress backed the Supreme Court’s decision with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enlisted federal agencies to enforce this law that Brown’s broad [influence and significance could be grasped].

Some people say that Brown didn’t make a difference because schools have since re-segregated. But I don’t think this is the case. Many people have had newfound opportunities to occupy positions of authority and importance due to the end of segregated practices. That is, Brown adopted an individualist model, so now everybody has a right [to attend a given public school, regardless of their race]. There are, however, limits to the individual’s ability to alter racial and class differences, and the best prepared individuals change [and benefit] the most.

Although certain structural issues were not accounted for by Brown, the decision played a significant role in revising notions of what individual opportunity required. You still couldn’t undo structural vestiges as easily because the [U.S.] Constitution is built upon individual rights and limits the extent to which the federal government can regulate the states and tell them what to do. So there are gaps, but by rethinking individual rights and opportunities, people can influence these structures through the new opportunities [they gained from the Brown decision.] Those benefits are real and will be long-standing. We won’t see the black middle-class disappear. We won’t see a reversion back to pre-Brown segregation practices.

Do you think that race continues to play as prominent a role in the United States as it did during the mid-1950s? In what ways have white privilege and more covert manifestations of racial alienation become a means of perpetuating racism?

Well, it’s really difficult for people who didn’t grow up during the 1950s [or weren’t alive during that time] to remember how difficult things were and realize how much things have changed. It used to be that blacks would travel across state lines, uncertain as to whether there would be a hotel where they could sleep or a restaurant where they could eat on the other side. Black families would have to strategize about where they would sleep and eat.

People tend to forget that race was inscribed in ways that were deeply humiliating and very pervasive. There was a Denver hotel owner, for instance, who said [his hotel] would tolerate pets but not blacks or Hispanics.

Racial groups are not as stratified as they used to be; the civil rights model has become so engrained that people forget these things. That doesn’t mean race is unimportant, but the official participation in racial segregation is far less prevalent than it was in the ’50s. Even though the changes aren’t huge across the board, there are changes. There are black CEOs in major corporations. Blacks are now partners in Wall Street [law and stock brokerage] firms. In the [pre-civil rights] era, they couldn’t even get an interview.

This, of course, has created new dilemmas. Blacks have since found some kind of an identity built around race [through hip hop and other cultural phenomena]. Now there are questions about preserving this identity that they value while also participating in institutions that are predominately white. So these new dilemmas have … happened because change has occurred. Today race still affects the way we identify ourselves and relate to each other, and inequality is still real.  But if you did not grow up with Jim Crow segregation, you can’t imagine what that was like.

We don’t know now what the endpoint is; we still don’t know what racial utopia is or what it should look like. The worst transgressions of treating race as a caste system are over, so now we have to ask all of these questions. But we still haven’t arrived at a full understanding of what we’ll end up as. Will we be multiracial? Colorblind? Or something else?

Saint Louis children and their parents protest transferring to a school open to black children. March 1933. (Library of Congress, courtesy of Images of American Political History)

What impact do you think the contemporary debate concerning affirmative action in higher education and the rhetoric used by both its opponents and proponents has on the quest to achieve racial equality and privilege?

Well, I’m of the view that a lot of this debate [over affirmative action in higher education] is [actually] about access to elite institutions. Nearly everyone who is eligible to attend these institutions is privileged at some level. They have completed high school, and in the case of graduate admissions, college. And these applicants have [achieved] a level [of success] that makes it plausible for them to go on [to college or graduate school]. So it’s a fairly privileged cross-section of people who have an education and are successful and ambitious.

The rhetoric [surrounding affirmative action in higher education] focuses on leadership, so that the debate shifts from diversity as an internal pedagogical strategy to [understanding] elite institutions of public education and higher education as the training ground for leadership in various universities. This suggests that these institutions are the gateway to higher opportunities. There’s a huge [opportunity] gap between someone with a high school diploma and someone who doesn’t [have a high school or college degree]. [The disparity] is [growing], so the stakes … are higher. There’s a sense of scarcity; the costs of not making it are very high. People feel very vulnerable. There’s a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. So the affirmative action debate is really as much about how race affects who gets ahead. With fewer manufacturing jobs today, more people feel [like they have to get a college or even graduate degree]; there’s a feeling that it’s all or nothing. This bigger gap [between the haves and have-nots] gets masked, however, by the way that the affirmative action debate gets framed with regard to higher education. Centering the debate on a group of people who are academically competitive — regardless of their race — ignores the people who are left behind without meaningful access to educational opportunity.

African Americans often hear that they have been displaced by Hispanics as the largest minority group in the United States. How has the increase of Latinos affected the national conversation on race, which has historically been primarily a black/white dialogue?

Well, up until the 1970s, it was demographically a black/white dialogue. Back then, only one out of ten [people in the United States] would identify themselves as non-white, and nearly all non-whites considered themselves black. Today, far more Americans say they’re non-white, but the portion of the non-white group who identify themselves as black is smaller. And many issues affecting race relations and racial equality still haven’t been resolved.

It’s almost a bicoastal issue. On the East Coast, they’re still looking at the [U.S.] population in primarily black and white terms. But on the West Coast, they can’t [talk about race in those terms]. Latinos are now the majority in some parts of California. [There’s] a lag on the East Coast to come to grips with this presence [of other sizable minority populations in the United States]

African Americans [have] a unique history and connection. Many worry that their [history] will somehow get lost in the numbers, and problems they have as a community won’t get addressed. There is also some concern that African Americans won’t be able to build coalitions.

Although blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans share a number of concerns related to discrimination, Latino and Asian American communities also have some distinct concerns from blacks. Both groups have grown dramatically through immigration, and so they face language and cultural barriers, internal diversity because of a range of countries of origin, and the challenges of dealing with non-citizen status and naturalization. Relatively few blacks are immigrants, and so most are native-born, speak English, and are American citizens. The challenges for black immigrants are sometimes forgotten, just as the problems facing native-born Latinos and Asian Americans are ignored at times.

Latinos disproportionately find themselves in the ranks of the working poor, and so they often emphasize class-based concerns — lack of access to health care, inadequate job protections, insufficient resources for schools and neighborhoods — more than race issues.  

Asians, because such a high proportion are recent immigrants, worry about being treated as foreigners. Also, some Asians are affluent and highly successful. Consequently, Asian groups worry about hitting a glass ceiling, being told that there are too many Asians at the top. So, a black/white model that is wholly preoccupied with race won’t last. What takes its place is the question, and I think that’s a complicated question. Unexpected events like 9/11 could change everything. Think about the way that Arabs have suddenly become a suspect class after September 11.

School segregation protest. (National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy of Images of American Political History)

That raises another question. What impact do you think racial politics and white privilege are playing in post-9/11 America? In Bush’s America where partisanship reigns and you’re either “with us or against us,” do you get the sense that more people are interrogating racial stereotypes and what constitutes race? Or have people in the United States become more complacent, questioning racism and race consciousness less frequently and less critically?

Issues of racial profiling for national security have prompted questions about what race means. The debate [over racial profiling and civil liberties after September 11] shows that it is very difficult to define what constitutes a protected category. It is not just a racial issue; these questions also have to do with national origin, immigration, religious issues, and questions of what constitutes a relevant form of identity for intrusive practices. These are tricky questions.

But [these complicated issues are] not what most people are talking about. They’re asking whether [one’s racial or ethnic identity] is a legitimate consideration in predicting dangerousness. They’re asking what kinds of evidence [should be admissible], how useful [such evidence] is, and how we should balance individual rights against the national good. Now there seems to be more of an instrumental balancing approach. Many people [characterize this approach as one concerning] foreign nationals and [the] threat [they pose to the United States]. Here you can see that race is being treated as distinct from national origin, religion, and political ideology, yet many Arab Americans feel that they are being racialized by these practices. This debate demonstrates how difficult it is to characterize difference in general and racial identity in particular.

Consider how politicians and the media often talk about “the Latino vote,” “the black vote,” “the female vote,” and “the Jewish vote,” stereotyping or playing up just one aspect of the identities of the people who identify themselves as such. To what extent do you think the parameters and interests of these communities become oversimplified as a result of the media’s characterizations of particular categories of people?

Politics has always had that feel for ethnicity, [where a politician’s message changes] depending on [his or her] audience. You always [have] a way in which you want to reach people [by speaking to their interests] in hopes that they’ll vote for you. So [politicians look at the ways in] which [particular] characteristics will reach people and make them sign on.

It’s even trickier now. We live in a world with all kinds of media. Now there are also so many more TV stations. But newspapers and television news no longer predominate. They are being replaced by the Internet. So there’s no way to compartmentalize the way you behave with one group and keep other groups from finding out.

[Politicians] must think about how [the way that they] cater to one audience will be perceived by others; they often say the most innocuous things to avoid angering [other elements of the population]. Now politics is more impersonal than ever. Candidates don’t connect with you; instead they have to create the illusion of connecting with the little audience at a rally as well as the whole world that might see [or hear sound bites from the rally] later [in the media’s coverage of the event].

People used to say that [President Bill] Clinton felt everybody’s pain. Politicians take on personas like that [by speaking in] very general and generic [terms] and [creating] a brand of self [that makes] it seem like you’re someone’s friend, emptying out concepts of friendship, identity, [and] community. Everything you do is replayed on C-SPAN and the six o’clock news, so it’s hard to have a [public] personality that is real. You only have a persona, an image that’s managed … That makes it harder to do racial politics; you can’t do anything that will alienate the middle. The Democratic Party feels [like it has] been hurt by doing racial politics and then losing the white male swing vote. This has created a conservatism regarding difference. Because you have to make everyone like you, you can’t tailor your message to any group.

… Recently, there was a study that said single women don’t vote as often as married women and tend to be more progressive [than married women]. So people started asking why the Democratic Party doesn’t reach out to [single women] and mobilize them. And the Democrats said they couldn’t do that because they’d look anti-family. It’s a case of leveling out politics to the blandest common denominator. The same is probably true for race, ethnicity, class, and other categories as well.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR >

The writer
Laura Nathan, InTheFray Managing Editor

TOPICS > BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION >

Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education May 17,1954.
URL: http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html

TOPICS > POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA >

Racism in the post-civil rights era
URL: http://www.fetchbook.info/Racism_in_the_Post_Civil_Rights_Era.html

Laura Nathan-Garner

Vandana Shiva talks to reporters in Cancún during last September’s World Trade Organization ministerial. (Victor Tan Chen)

When tens of thousands filled the streets of Seattle to protest a summit of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, many news reports focused on the spectacle of the moment — the tear gas in the air, the smashed storefront windows, the clashes between police and black-garbed anarchists. Drowned out were the issues that had sparked the mass demonstrations. On the streets, protesters were denouncing the WTO’s role in overturning a range of local laws (from regulations protecting sea turtles to bans on hormone-laden beef) and its “undemocratic” means of making decisions that affected billions of people. The activists shouted; few heard.

Seattle was the birth of a “new democracy movement,” Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva wrote at the time. Shiva was present in Seattle, making her case in public against the genetic engineering of crops, the patenting of seeds, and other attempts by corporations to establish “control over every dimension of our lives — our food, our health, our environment, our work, and our future.” She praised the demonstrations in the streets, and argued that they represented history in the making. Citizens around the world, in poor as well as rich nations, would no longer “be bullied and excluded from decisions in which they have a rightful share,” she said.

If Shiva and other critics were largely ignored by the mainstream media in Seattle, they have doggedly persisted in making their case against “corporate-controlled globalization” in the years since. The author of the books Stolen Harvest and Water Wars and the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”), Shiva has become one of the most quoted spokespeople of a protest movement that prides itself on its leaderless, democratic structure — and one of its few voices from the “global South,” the so-called “Third World” where the poorest people on earth reside.

Shiva was born in northern Indian city of Dehradun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Trained as a physicist, she eventually left the academic world for life as an activist, and in the two decades since then has worked primarily on issues of biodiversity, the earth’s variety of plant and animal life. In her native India, the fifty-three-year-old activist is best known for founding the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology and the national movement known as Navdanya, both of which work on behalf of agricultural diversity and farmers’ rights. One of Navdanya’s more recent initiatives is Diverse Women for Diversity, an international campaign on behalf of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food security.

When trade ministers met in Cancún, Mexico, for another WTO ministerial this September, Shiva and thousands of other protesters were there to greet them. Once again, violence dominated the headlines — this time, the suicide of a South Korean farmer, Kyung-hae Lee, who killed himself at the police barricades in an act of political protest (the agricultural policies of the WTO, Lee had claimed, were “killing” small farmers like himself). InTheFray Editor Victor Tan Chen caught up with Shiva in Cancún for a chat about the current state of the world’s social movements, the recent struggles against corporate power, and the meaning of one man’s ultimate sacrifice.

Q: What changes have you seen in social movements over the last several decades?

A: Well, all the new social movements that have emerged — even in the South, even movements that are terribly local — have been able to sustain themselves and build strength through global solidarity. And that’s partly because beginning with the eighties, the worst problems we face do not get created from within our societies. They get created because of World Bank lending, IMF lending, World Trade Organization rules, global corporate crimes — and to deal with these global risks you need global solidarity. And movements have been extremely ingenious in creating new strategies, new styles of actions, new combinations of intellectual work and research and grassroots actions. My own institutions that I founded — one in 1982 [the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology], the other in 1987 [Navdanya] — are both children of globalization, of responding to globalization, and both of them work very much at the local level and at the national level, through advocacy and influencing parliament, and at the international level, through global solidarity. They also combine, I believe, the highest quality intellectual work with the deepest engagement in society. And I think those are totally new trends.

Q: Do you think it’s an energetic time for social movements today in the world?

A: I think it’s the only place where there is energy. At least energy that deserves to be called energy. Because in India, fortunately, we have different terms for destructive energy and creative energy.  We don’t use the same word for two. But in the West, you only have one word. So the energy of Mr. Bush bombing Iraq, is still energy. The energy of a Monsanto wiping out agriculture is still energy. But we have a different word for that. And for us, in my view, social movements are the only place for positive, creative energy.

States are failing in their duties. [They] are either failing because they are prevented from acting, through these very, very dictatorial rules, or they’re volunteering the sacrifice of their power. But their power is not their power in total sovereignty; their power is the … power of the citizens. So when states give up their power, they’re giving up the rights and powers of their citizens, which is an illegitimate step. So we have crippled states or corporate states — the only actor states are corporate states. The other states are crippled states. And social movements [are] the only place where a future is being shaped because the corporations are shaping an annihilation of the future.

Q:  What do you think the biggest challenges are facing activists for social justice today?

A: I think the biggest challenge is the fact that never before has humanity needed to respond to assault on the very basis of life. To patenting of seeds, to privatization of water, to total takeover of agriculture. As movements and political organizations, we’re geared to fighting for better wages, freedom of speech. And now we have to fight for survival. And fighting for survival is the common bottom line for everyone, and yet we are divided by the legacy of a divided world between rich and poor.

The biggest block social movements face is not addressing the issues of survival of the species but slipping into the polarizations, where the biggest corporations use the richness of the North to prevent solidarity and engagement of citizens of the North with citizens of the South.

And you can just notice after Seattle how campaigns and movements of the North are constantly criminalized [as] “rich people,” “white people,” “anti-poor.” And the “pro-poor” are precisely the corporations that are wiping us out. So I think that’s a huge leap we need to make in our political analysis and in our action strategies.

Q: Do you think movements are doing a better job organizing across lines of nationality, race, gender, class?

A: I think we need to do an even better job. And that’s why I formed Diverse Women for Diversity. I believe we do still have divisions on the basis of race and class, and that’s precisely what we need to transcend.

Q: Are women’s issues becoming more prominent, do you think, in the global justice movement?

A: Well, the thing is women’s leadership is prominent. And women are defining all social issues as their issues — food, water, the destruction of livelihoods — and you can see that everywhere, at least at the grass roots, women are shaping the agenda.

Q: What kind of advice would you give to activists today who are struggling for social justice?

A: To have sustainable energy — it’s a long, drawn battle. To stay cheerful, have joy in their struggle. To not be overburdened by the struggle itself. To relish their humanity, and not let political activism dehumanize them. To be engaged passionately, but be detached while engaging passionately.

Q: Do you have any words for people here protesting the WTO?

A: My main words are we all need to pay deep homage to the Korean farmer who gave his life for all of us, and through it wanted to focus that this is about life. And I would just say if we can keep our minds and hearts focused on that sacrifice and move from there. And not be distracted by [this question of] “oh, does market access help the Third World?” And the nonsensical diversions that divide the movement. I think we need to just focus our energies on Mr. Lee and say, “This is what it’s about.” He gave his life to remind us; let us not forget.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Diverse Women for Diversity
A global campaign of women on behalf of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and food security.
URL: http://www.diversewomen.org

Navdanya
An Indian movement to conserve agricultural diversity. “Navdanya” means “nine seeds,” a reference to India’s collective source of food security.
URL: http://navdanya.org

Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (RFSTE).
Organization that “works on biodiversity conservation and protecting people’s rights from threats to their livelihoods and environment by centralised systems of monoculture in forestry, agriculture and fisheries.” Based in New Delhi, India.
URL: http://www.shiva.net

The Right Livelihood Award
Considered the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” an award established that recognizes “outstanding vision and work on behalf of our planet and its people.” Presented annually since 1980 in Stockholm at a ceremony in the Swedish Parliament.
URL: http://www.rightlivelihood.se/recip/v-shiva.htm

PEOPLE > SHIVA, VANDANA >

“Short Curriculum Vitae of Dr. Vandana Shiva”
Biography of the Indian environmentalist. Published by her organization, the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (RFSTE).
URL: http://www.vshiva.net/vs_cv.htm

TOPICS > GLOBALIZATION >

“Enough IMF/World Bank Policies”
By Scott Harris. Published by AlterNet. April 1, 2000.
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=31

“Globalization: A Primer”
By Mark Weisbrot. Published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. October 1999.
URL: http://www.cepr.net/GlobalPrimer2.htm

“The Historic Significance of Seattle”
By Vandana Shiva. December 10, 1999.
URL: http://lists.essential.org/mai-not/msg00181.html

“Interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva”
Broadcast on NOW with Bill Moyers. September 5, 2003.
URL: http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_shiva.html

“The Long Arm of the WTO”
By Jim Hightower. Published by AlterNet. April 26, 2000.
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=4866

“Monsanto — World’s Most Unethical and Harmful Investment”
Compiled by Ethical Investing.
URL: http://www.ethicalinvesting.com/monsanto

“World trade barricade”
By Dustin Ross and Victor Tan Chen. Published by InTheFray Magazine. October 27, 2003.
URL: content/view/84/39

“

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

The New York Times Book Review has called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today,” and the “foremost gadfly of our national conscience.” He is one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities — just one notch below Freud on a list that includes Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible. A giant in the field of linguistics, a prolific and uncompromising critic of American foreign policy, a radical activist for social justice — Noam Chomsky has managed to cram several lifetimes of intellectual and political labor in the span of his seventy-four years. He has also stirred several lifetimes’ worth of controversy: His political opponents have denounced him as a ringleader in the “blame America first” crowd, or a “self-hating Jew” who is dangerously critical of the Israeli state. Even one of the Times reviewers who heaped praise on him went on to call his political writings “maddeningly simple-minded” — a quote that Chomsky himself is fond of citing.

InTheFray Editor Victor Tan Chen met up this month with Professor Chomsky at his MIT office for an hour-long conversation on the state of today’s social movements. The focus of the interview was the recent growth in activism around the world, especially coming out of the massive popular protests against the U.S.-led war on Iraq. But in true Chomskian fashion, the discussion ranged widely — from Brazilian landless workers to sixties activism to free-trade economics to, yes, the elitist agenda of The New York Times.

(This is the complete transcript of the interview. For the highlights, including links, click here.)

Q: What do you think the present state of social movements around the globe is right now?

A: Well, it’s hard to think of a time when there has been anything approaching this level of activism, participation, and, in particular, interaction. That’s something quite new. The kinds of interaction that are reflected at the World Social Forum, for example, or at the international demonstrations at Cancún. There had never been anything like that in the past. The popular movements in the West, at least — the labor movement, the left movements from the nineteenth century — were always talking about internationalism. That’s why every union is called an international. And you have that series of [Communist] Internationals. But they were never anything remotely like internationals. Either unions, or the First and Second and Third Internationals were very localized and narrow.

Q: There wasn’t that kind of communication between national lines.

A: There was some but not much interaction. The unions are where they are: The international connections are very limited, even if they call themselves international. In Europe, there’s some integration, so the First International was a mixture of German, French, English. But, well, as you know, it just broke up. I think Marx destroyed it pretty much by moving the center to America and trying to get rid of it because he didn’t like the French influence. The Second International was substantial, but it was destroyed by the First World War. The Third International was just an agency of the Russian government. It meant nothing. The Fourth International were scattered intellectuals, mostly.

Q: So it was very top-bottom, it seems, very much centralized.

A: Well, the First International — which was the more serious one — broke up over the issue of centralization. I mean, Marx just didn’t wanted to relinquish control. And he didn’t like the French anarchists. There was a lot of Franco-German conflict. The Second International was also pretty much centralized. I mean, there were a lot of interesting people, and it was a huge organization, with huge mass parties. But it didn’t last very long; the others, not anything. These were the early attempts, in the early modern period. But then nothing much came of it. And it’s picked up through the growth of — first of all, through decolonization. Which didn’t mean necessarily throwing out foreign troops. Brazil wasn’t technically colonized, but it still had a kind of quasi-colonial relationship to the Western industrial powers. And of course, India was brutally colonized. But as decolonization and independence began to develop, and the Non-Aligned Movement developed, and the South Commission, and others, you started getting — these were reflections of popular activism throughout the South, which reached enormous proportions.

In Brazil, for example, it’s beyond anything in any Western country. In fact, what just happened in Brazil was historically pretty amazing. It’s the first time that popular movements reached this scale. A number of them: the Workers Party, the unions, the Landless Workers Movement — which played the most interesting role in many ways. They reached a sufficient scale so they could naturally take over political power over enormous odds: the centralization of capital and rich-poor gap and so on … What they can do about it is another question. There were efforts in this direction in the past. Forty years ago they did actually elect a mildly populist president — nothing remotely like Lula [Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, president of Brazil], and nothing like the populist Workers Party. But then it was just overthrown quickly by a military coup, organized from Washington and celebrated by American liberals as the greatest thing that ever happened.

Q: So there’s these external dangers that social movements face.

A: Well, that’s changed. There’s not going to be any military coup to overthrow Lula. For one thing, because the population no longer would accept it, either there or here. There’s been enough changes in popular consciousness, both in the South and, by now, in the rich countries, in the North. You couldn’t get away with a military coup now the way you could forty years ago when nobody paid attention. But it’s just almost unimaginable now.

The other, negative side is that they don’t need it now. Because the neoliberal mechanisms of the past thirty years have created conditions which undermine — severely undermine — the threat that democracy could actually function. So international financial markets have a stranglehold over Brazil and other Third World countries thanks to these measures. It’s almost unnecessary to think in terms of military coups. In fact, Lula is being compelled to follow policies more reactionary than the preceding government, the Cardoso government. It’s making it a little bit interesting to watch, and unpleasant to watch. Unless they want to pull out of the international financial system — like they create an independent new bloc of countries that just don’t want to accept these rules — unless they do that, as long as they decide to play by the rules, they have to maintain what’s called their “credibility,” with banks and foreign investors and the IMF and so on. And they have to work harder to do that than a reactionary government does, because the investors are always waiting to pounce on them if there’s any minor move towards social reform in health services or wherever. The result is he’s [Lula] got to go beyond the Cardoso government: raise interest rates higher, so on and so forth. So in a sense, they’re even harsher than the more center-right governments. And that’s coming to a crunch right now for the major players.

The point is, these things have developed in the South, in India and South Africa and other places, and there’s an enormous mobilization in the North that’s never existed before. And furthermore, there is solidarity. So at Cancún, where you were, there’s interaction among people. I mean, in Porto Alegre, when I got off the plane, I didn’t go to the World Social Forum, I went to the Via Campesina meeting — the international peasant movement, workers from all over the place. It’s alongside the World Social Forum, and interacts with it, but not the same. And it’s a powerful movement which could get participation by even Northern farmers who are, at a very different level, facing other, similar problems that are crushing them. The huge mass peasant movements in the world, which is probably more than half of the population of the world, is mirrored in the rich countries. Take a look at the food chain: There’s tremendous profits at both ends. The energy corporations, Cargill and those guys, are doing fine. But if you look at the middle, even rich countries’ farmers, the people who actually produce the food, are being crushed. Not in the sense that peasants get crushed … but the same phenomenon happens, and they have similar interests.

Q: What’s the situation for social movements in the United States right now? Is it favorable right now, the conditions for social movements?

A: The conditions are such that they ought to be able to achieve a lot. The United States is a complicated country. It’s very disorganized. There’s little in the way of political parties, the political system is almost unrelated to popular movements. On the other hand, there’s a tremendous amount of energy and activism, just very disorganized.

I travel a lot, and give talks. And one of the main reasons I go to give talks — and the organizers know it, we agree on this — is that, you know, I’ll go somewhere for a fundraiser or something, and one of the things it does, it just brings together people from that town or city or even region who are working along pretty similar lines, or at least parallel lines, and don’t have much to do with each other. But these events kind of bring them together and contribute to some further integration. This is a very disorganized, scattered country. If you just take Boston. Lots and lots of groups. But they barely know about each other. They’re doing their own thing, here, there, and the other place. I mean, the total level of participation is probably quite substantial. On the other hand, the degree of integration is slight, and the degree of involvement varies. And that means there’s not much in the way of long-term thinking or planning or strategy and so on.

Q: Why do you think there is such fragmentation within social movements within the United States?

A: In other industrial countries, these movements have tended to coalesce around the labor movement or social-democratic political parties or some kinds of ongoing institutions that maintain themselves. The United States does not have those institutions. So if I give a talk in some other industrial country, it’ll often be in a union hall. I almost never give a talk in a union hall [here] — occasionally, but it’s not a phenomenon that exists. Or even if it’s in a town hall, it’s set up by the labor council or labor party activists or something like that.

And that has both a positive side and a negative side. The positive side is that the movements here are not under the control of pretty autocratic, bureaucratized institutions. On the other hand it means there’s no center you can keep coming back to, there are no learning experiences. What was done ten years ago is forgotten because the people who did it are now somewhere else and you have to start over again and learn the same techniques. I mean, there are things you have to know: how do you distribute leaflets, how do you get people organized, how do you talk to people. And there’s just a lot of lore that’s involved in continual activism that gets lost because of the lack of continuing institutions.

In the United States, the one continuing institution is the church. The churches, a lot of the churches. So as a result, just because they exist, and they continue, a lot of the organizing and activism is around churches. I mean, just take Boston. Where do the groups have their offices? Usually in one or another church. But they’re there.

Q: [It’s] an institution to base your movement.

A: Well, there’s something there. There’s a church on Garden Street which will give you an office or something … But that’s unusual in the United States. And it’s also a big country, a very insular country, that doesn’t pay attention to the outside. There’s a tremendous amount of mobility as compared to other industrial countries — people don’t live where they grew up, others come from outside the country, and it means there’s a lack of ties.

And also this is an unusually business-run society. Other industrial countries are also largely business-run, but here it’s extraordinary. It shows up through the whole history. The U.S. has a very violent labor history. The major business-run propaganda institutions, the public relations industry, are in the U.S. or, secondarily, Britain, which is also where they had their major origins as part of the effort to control attitudes and beliefs.

And there’s enormous efforts going into trying to undermine popular organizations. And they are very centralized, and they are continuing, and they have an institutional base, and they have learning experiences — they pick up from last time and so on and so forth. So in terms of institutional structures it’s an extremely unequal battle. On the other hand it’s a pretty dissident population. And there’s plenty to be concerned about. So if you look at people’s attitudes, it looks like it ought to be an organizer’s paradise.

Q: In what sense?

A: For example, I remember on the Bicentennial, in 1976, there were lots of polls about people’s attitudes and all sorts of things. And some of them were pretty striking. One Gallup poll or something asked people, gave people slogans basically. The question was, “Is this in the Constitution?” Of course, nobody had a clue what’s in the Constitution — maybe they looked at it in eighth grade but forgot about it. So when you ask people is this in the Constitution, what you’re really asking them is this such an obvious truth that it must be in the Constitution. One of the questions was, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Fifty percent of the population thought that’s in the Constitution. Because it’s such an obvious truism. And you look at that, and you think, “Well, what are the organizers doing?” [laughs] Nobody, virtually, hears articulate support to this. Well, that’s what people think.

It’s the same on a lot of issues. Take, say, the Vietnam War. I mean, there was a huge amount of activism on the war, and there’s been a lot of studies of people’s attitudes on it. Because of the indoctrination in the academic world, people don’t go there, they don’t pursue the answers to the questions to find out what they mean, so all you know is the answers. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, for example, does regular polls on people’s attitudes towards international affairs every four years. And some of the questions are always about the Vietnam War. And there’s an open question, “What do you think of the Vietnam War?” And there’s maybe ten choices. And the one that’s had an overwhelming majority since 1969 is, “Fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake.”

If you did a poll in the Harvard Faculty Club or editorial offices or something, nobody would say that. Everybody says, “It was a mistake. It was right, but it was a mistake. It was wrong because it cost us too much, but it was a mistake, it was a disaster, it got too costly, we got into a quagmire” — and that sort of thing. Well, apparently, that’s not the popular attitude. Now, what do people mean when they say, “Fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake”? Well, in order to find that out, you have to ask the further questions. But those questions don’t come to the minds of investigators — academic investigators.

And in fact, if you look at their interpretation of it … what they say is, well, this must mean that people didn’t like the casualties. Well, maybe. But that’s not the obvious interpretation. “Fundamentally wrong and immoral” might mean something beyond just too many American casualties. But it’s been built up in the doctrinal system to be something called the “Vietnam Syndrome,” meaning you don’t want to take casualties. Actually, the polls that have been done on that show that that’s not true. Recently, the main polling institution in the country — academic one — the Program on International Policy Attitudes at Maryland — has investigated this, and they consistently show that people don’t think that casualties are a cost they’re unwilling to accept if the cause is just.

And it goes across the board. Seventy-five percent of the population before the last election — there was a Harvard project on this, [Thomas E.] Patterson’s project — they found that before the last [presidential] elections, 75 percent of the population regarded it as a farce. That’s before Florida, before the Supreme Court. In fact, if you look at this whole stolen election business, it’s of great concern among intellectuals, but there’s almost no popular resonance. They don’t care.

And I think the reason is — if you look at the Vanishing Voter Project you can see the reasons: Before the election people weren’t taking it seriously, because it’s just rich people and public relations operations and so on and so forth. If you ask people, “Is the economic system fair?”: overwhelmingly, it’s unfair. Ask people about national health insurance: There’s been very consistent support for it, some of the latest figures are about 75 percent. If it’s being discussed, it’s called “politically impossible” — meaning, the insurance companies won’t accept it. It doesn’t matter if the population would. We could go across the board. These are things that people can organize about.

Q: Why aren’t they organizing? If there’s such a degree of grievances about health care, about the minimum wage, about the lack of a U.N. role in foreign policy, why aren’t the people agitating?

A: Take the U.N. role in foreign policy. In April, before the whole thing started becoming a catastrophe, there was still about two-thirds in favor of the U.N. taking over reconstruction and the U.N. taking the lead — not the United States — in international conflicts. Take, say, Cancún. They ask the questions in skewed ways, but what basically it comes down to is that people are largely opposed — pluralities, or majorities — are opposed to the international economic agreements. But these don’t come up in the political system, and they don’t come up in media debates and so on, because the sectors that have power concentrations, including educated sectors, are almost uniform on the other side. So therefore these things just don’t come up.

At the year 2000 election, for example, the big issue that ought to have been right at the core of it, was the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which was just coming along. Nobody even mentioned it. And the reasons are simple: The population is opposed, the elites favor it. So therefore it isn’t part of the political system. It’s not part of the debate. It’s like national health care. If someone mentions it, it’s “politically impossible.” If it turns out that 75 percent of the population supports it, it doesn’t matter, it’s still politically impossible. Well, that’s the way our system works. But it means that there’s a potential for organizing which is quite substantial.

Q: Can you talk a little about your own background in social movements, the ones you’ve been involved with in the past, and what lessons you can draw from that that could apply today?

A: Well, I was very active and political as a child, as a teenager and so on, but then it was mostly Palestine-related. I was all involved in what was then called Zionist movements — they’d now be called anti-Zionist. And then in the sixties I just kind of joined in with the stuff that was going on. The civil rights movement. I was very active in organizing resistance, to try to organize national tax resistance in the sixties — organizing resistance against the [Vietnam] War. Then just hung out from there.

In the eighties, I was very heavily involved in the solidarity movements in regard to Central America. Which were a real breakthrough. They were what people would call conservative in many respects — the church, the Midwest. But it was the first time in the history of Europe or the United States ever, as far as I know, that large numbers of people from the imperial society went to live with the victims. Very courageously. To help them, to offer some protection because there’s a white face around. And a lot of them stayed. By now they’re all over the world. That’s a real breakthrough, and it’s part of the mood that led to the international solidarity that is now manifesting itself in coordination with these big Southern movements which were around building for some time.

Q: Do you see some continuity to the global justice movement?

A: The global justice movements, yeah. And they sort of grew out of this, in a kind of unplanned fashion, they just developed into these further interactions and developments. People think of the global justice movements as originating in Seattle. But that’s very misleading. They were much more powerful in the South. But they were kind of disregarded. When it hit a Northern city, you can’t disregard it any longer. So then, you know, Seattle, Genoa, Prague, Quebec — that’s visible, you can’t say I don’t see that. But if it’s peasants storming the Indian parliament and getting them to vote down the Uruguay Round — it might make a small note on the back page, even if though it’s a much more powerful movement.

Q: Because of the parochialism of Americans, or Northerners in general?

A: People in the rich countries didn’t care. Take the probably millions of people who have been killed in the Congo in the last two years. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. You can say, well, we’re sending troops to Iraq for humanitarian reasons. Whatever you think of that argument, a fraction of those forces in Eastern Congo would have deterred and maybe stopped huge massacres, way beyond anything there [in Iraq]. Of course, they don’t have oil wealth and are too unimportant to control and so on, so it doesn’t come up.

Probably the biggest international issue in the 1980s, the one that dominated the press more than anything else, was Nicaragua. A large part of the country didn’t know which side we were on. Many people thought the U.S. was supporting the government. Because the U.S. supports governments, and the guerrillas are the bad guys. And a lot of people didn’t know where Nicaragua was. An island somewhere maybe in Africa, or something like that.

There’s a lack of interest and concern about the rest of the world. When people here are asked, for example, about national health insurance. What they’re really asked about is, do you want the Canadian system? Because these people know Canada is there. But if you ask people, do you want the French system, they don’t know what you’re talking about. So these are things that have to be overcome if there’s going to real international solidarity. And the social justice movements have done it for a lot of people. They do reach out to plenty of people now who know a lot about the world. For example, by now there are plenty of people who are getting their information about ongoing events in the world through the Internet. I don’t know what the numbers are, but it’s not insubstantial. Whereas if you went back ten years, the number of people who even knew that the BBC or a foreign newspaper existed was extremely small.

Q: What kind of contribution do you think social movements can give to this distressing picture globally? What can social movements do to change the situation?

A: The bounds are endless. I mean, pick what you like. People are in favor of democratic control, they don’t want to work in corporate tyrannies, they don’t like aggression and massacre, they’d like to have social services.

Just run across the board. Every one of those things is a possibility for organizing. And nothing’s graven in stone. These are very fragile systems of control and domination. And the people in them know that — they’re always deeply concerned about any manifestation of popular activism, and react very powerfully to try to crush it. And there’s now pretty good scholarship on this, for the period after the Second World War … One of the results of the anti-fascist war was a growth of strong, kind of radical, democratic sentiment — including in the United States. You were hearing calls for worker takeover of industry, and things that went pretty far-reaching. And it struck a real panic in elite centers. And they organized huge campaigns to try to crush it. I mean, I thought I knew something about it until some of the scholarly work started to come out, and it’s shocking to see the extent and coordination and the concentration on trying to overcome what they called, “the hazard facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses.”

And through the fifties it kind of calmed things down. Then the sixties came along and everything just blew up. And it had the same reaction. We’re right in the middle of that right now. There’s tremendous fear of a “crisis of democracy” — too much democratization. The right-wing think tanks got organized to try to shift the political spectrum. The spectrum of discussion and debate changed. The educational system changed.

In fact, a lot of the neoliberal programs which come from the early seventies — you can debate what their economic impact is. It’s pretty negative, in my opinion. But it’s debatable at least. However, what’s not debatable is their effect in undermining democracy. Almost every element of them is designed to reduce the arena of popular participation and decision-making. And that runs from free financial flows — as [economist John Maynard] Keynes knew all along — to privatization. So, reducing the arena of popular choice. And you can see it dramatically in places like Brazil. You can see it here, too. The fact that people may care about Social Security and the environment and health care and so on, is just gradually squeezed out of the public arena as much as possible.

Q: And social movements can provide some antidote to that?

A: Well, you can see the fear there is among highly concentrated — and very class conscious — business and elite interests, managerial interests. That’s in business, politics, education, and media. There’s a lot of interaction. There’s high class consciousness, high degree of commitment to preventing another “crisis of democracy” from developing. And the social movements, the only answer they have to that is to have the population on their side.

And the same is true of elections. Take, say, Brazil, which is democratic in a sense that we can barely aspire to at this point. I mean, the concentration of capital that dominates the electoral system is enormous. How are they able to counter it? Well, just by having mass popular movements of pretty poor people who combine and balance, counterbalance, capital concentrations.

We don’t have that here. So here the elections are just bought. If a candidate happens to represent the interests and concerns of maybe even a large majority of the population, he can’t even enter the political system. Because they’re not organized enough to counter the concentration of capital, media, propaganda, and other mechanisms. Well, you know, that all has to be developed.

Q: Do you think that people will, if given a chance, actually organize to change some of these things? Or do people really do crave submission, like [Russian novelist Fyodor] Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor says?

A: You know, Grand Inquisitor is kind of a caricature. I think more to the point is to say what Josh Cohen and Joel Rogers wrote about twenty years ago. It’s not so much people crave submission. It’s just that the individual costs of opposition are reasonably high, and there’s a free-rider effect. Others can profit from the gains if somebody sacrifices themselves. And that makes it a hard choice for people to make that decision. Say you want to become a union organizer. You may have a rotten time of it, but the working people who you succeed in organizing may be better off at the end. But that kind of mechanism tends to dampen participation for an individual.

An individual is making a real choice that may be complicated and — by some measures — difficult. But if you measure the nature of your life by the standard criteria that are imposed on you by the doctrinal system — meaning make a lot of money, live in a nice house, don’t have people yell at you, and get a good job — if those are the criteria of what makes a decent life, then you pay a cost if you decide to become involved in a global justice movement or something else. On the other hand, there’s no reason why we should accept those values. The people who do it, they just have a different concept of what’s a decent life. But it’s drilled into you from childhood. It has a certain logic to it. And it’s easy to submit to it. And those mechanisms, much more than Grand Inquisitor-style subordination, I think are very real.

So I think Cohen and Rogers make a very convincing statement of that. They don’t think, and I don’t think, it necessarily immobilizes people. But it does reveal some of the impediments to participation as long as you subordinate yourself to the values that are imposed on you by massive propaganda systems. And they really are massive. I mean, if you look at the impact of television and commercialization and so on and so forth, it’s just enormous. It has an overwhelming effect, particularly on young people.

Go to part two

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Go to part one

Q: And that could have led to some of the misconceptions, for instance, about the Iraq War — people believing that the weapons of mass destruction had already been found.

A: Well, there, it’s pretty dramatic. There are cases, and that’s one of them, where you can see the effects of the propaganda showing almost immediately. So like in September 2002, when the propaganda began — the war drums began to beat — within a month, they had a majority of the population believing that Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States. The commitment — belief — that the weapons of mass destruction and connections to 9/11 and so on were there are so high that Bush can just say it, and there’s no reaction.

Like this morning, I was listening to the radio on the way in. The reaction to the Kay Report, was, “Okay, this proves our point.” And he can say it without real fear of contradiction, even though it’s so outlandish. On a radio address a week or two ago, the president’s Saturday radio address, the theme was that the war was justified because we removed a tyrant who was developing weapons of mass destruction, and plotting with international terrorists. Every one of those claims has been totally exploded. The only known connection to terrorism is that the war increased it, exactly as every intelligence agency predicted it was going to do. But the president can say it without fear of contradiction. That’s real propaganda. And it’s very striking because the U.S. is alone in the world on this. There’s no other country in the world where the majority of the population thought that Iraq was a threat to them.

Q: On February 15, you had millions of people around the world, and hundreds of thousands in the United States, protesting the war in Iraq. And yet some people came out of that saying, “Well, I protested, and nothing changed. The foreign policy didn’t change.”

A: You see, that goes back to the earlier discussion, where we were talking about before about institutional permanence and continuity. I mean, in the United States, where there is very little continuity of social movements, and little permanence, and no institutional base, the attitudes that people have are, “We’ll try, we’ll put out a lot of effort for the next couple months, and if it didn’t work, that shows everything’s impossible.” You know, that’s not the way any social movement’s ever worked. I mean, abolitionism, women’s rights, labor rights, anything you take — you have to expect to keep at it day after day. You have partial successes, failures — you pick up and go on. You figure [out] what did you learn last time, how you’re going to do it better next time.

But the idea that you’re going to have some kind of instant gratification, or else it was worthless, is a very typically American idea. And it’s deep in the history, it’s in the nature of the way the country works. There’s a ton of propaganda about it. You’re supposed to look for instant gratification. And if it didn’t work, well, it’s useless. Quit. I remember, for example, at the time of the Columbia strike in 1968, the students were very excited. I had discussions with them, trying to dampen down the enthusiasm. Same with France in ‘68. I, other people, were trying to dampen the enthusiasm. Because the young people involved were very dedicated, very brave, and they really believed that if they sat in for a couple of weeks, or did their thing on the streets of Paris, the whole system was going to collapse. That’s not going to happen, you know? You may make a dent. But you’re not going to achieve long-term institutional changes by sitting in a Columbia president’s office.

And when people failed to achieve the long-term goals, they regarded it as a failure. And right at that point, the massive popular movements here — the young ones — a lot of them went off into very self-destructive directions. Here, the Maoist groups, PL, the Weathermen. “We’ve shown that reform doesn’t work.” You haven’t shown anything. You’ve shown that one demonstration didn’t work — but when did it ever?

And the same is true in February. These were unprecedented protests. Of course they’re not going to stop power systems, and anyone who participated should have understood that. But they might be a barrier to the next step, if you persist with them. But you have to have a realistic understanding of where power lies, how it can adapt to large-scale protests, and where they must go if they want to really change things. This should have been used for ongoing organizing efforts. To say, yeah sure, we didn’t stop the war, we didn’t really expect to, but we want to make it harder for those guys to run the next war. And we want to make sure that we’re going to work to change the system of power which even allows them to make such decisions.

Q: Do you think that movements today are getting better at building bridges across lines of race, class, gender, religion, other lines of identity?

A: There are some that are pretty successful at it. How much that generalizes is really hard to say. Because it’s also quite easy for systems of power and domination to separate people on these issues. Take the Immigrant [Workers Freedom] Ride. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to get immigrants and workers to be on opposite sides. Same on international trade issues. I mean, there are real issues involved. If jobs are lost here, they’re going somewhere else. Well, how do you deal with that? The people and peasants in China have to eat too, so you can’t just disregard that question.

It was interesting in NAFTA — NAFTA was kind of narrow enough so that you could actually face the questions concretely. And it was quite interesting to see the debate about NAFTA, to go through it. It’s virtually unknown that the labor movement had a position on that. That was suppressed. I don’t know if you know the background of that, but it’s pretty interesting. You know, there is a Labor Advisory Council, which is the labor union groups, basically. And according to the congressional trade laws, they’re supposed to be consulted on any trade-related issue. But they weren’t even advised that NAFTA was being discussed until about a day before the congressional vote. I think they were given like twenty-four-hours notice.

Well, they did meet, nevertheless, and put together a pretty interesting proposal for a North American Free Trade Agreement — but not this one. It had other devices in it. They pointed out that this one was going to be an investor rights agreement, it’s going to harm working people — but it could be done differently, with compensatory funding, a partially European union model where they brought in Spain and Portugal and Greece, in such a way that it wouldn’t undermine Northern workers’ rights. A lot of ideas spelled out. Well, it was distributed. Never reported. The only mention of it I’ve ever seen is in stuff I wrote in Z Magazine at the time.

Their proposal happened to be almost the same as one done by the OTA, the Office of Technology Assessment, which has since been disbanded, but at that time was the congressional research organization. They did a detailed analysis of NAFTA, which reached pretty much the same conclusions: Namely, NAFTA could be good here, but not this one, because this one was aimed at low-wage, low-growth, high-profit outcomes. And it could be different, it could be done in a way that would lead to higher growth, higher wages, maybe lower profits, and that’s the way it ought to be done. Well, these are not radicals; this is OTA. Their report was never — I don’t think it was ever mentioned.

So here you have the congressional research office, the mass labor movement, giving alternative proposals for NAFTA. If you look at popular opinion, it was mostly opposed to the official version of NAFTA, either in majorities or pluralities depending on how you asked the question. Nothing in the press. I mean, the labor movement was bitterly condemned in the press by the so-called left commentators, like Anthony Lewis. But they were condemned for things they didn’t say. They were condemned for crude nationalism, and all kind of denunciations. No mention of what they actually proposed. And it died. To this day, nobody knows that any of this happened. Well, you know, if there were activist popular movements, they could have broken through on that. And you could have had a very different kind of NAFTA, which maybe would have benefited people instead of harming them.

The same thing happened at the Quebec meetings, at the summit in April 2001, where the top issue was the FTAA, which was going be modeled on NAFTA, and the declarations of the trade ministers and the headlines in the press hailed the great successes of NAFTA. The summit, first of all, never came up in the presidential campaign or election — which was interesting enough, because the issues in it are of major importance to people. They are high priority issues in polls. It never came up. Along comes the Quebec summit. You couldn’t suppress it, because there were massive protests, people breaking down the barricades, and you got to have commentary on them, and there was press commentary. But the commentary was almost entirely, “The model for the FTAA is NAFTA, which was a great success, and now we have to bring it to the hemisphere. And these crazy protesters are trying to undermine the poor, and so on and so forth.”

Well, you know, there were two major studies of NAFTA that were timed for release at the summit. They were on every editor’s desk in the country. One was Human Rights Watch, which is hard to ignore. The other is the Economic Policy Institute, which they all know … The Human Rights Watch report was on the effect of NAFTA on labor rights in the three countries. And it found negative in all three countries: It [NAFTA] harmed labor rights. The EPI report was an interesting and detailed study by specialists on the three countries about the effects of NAFTA on working people. And the conclusions were it was harmful in all three countries, and very harmful in Mexico — and not just on working people, but on businessmen and everyone else.

You know, here’s major studies by well-known organizations, timed for release at the summit, where the issue was the great success of NAFTA and can we extend it to the hemisphere. I had a friend do a database search afterwards. There was one mention of it in a column in a small newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. That’s a level of discipline — and nobody is giving them orders, nobody is saying don’t report it. It’s just the level of internalized discipline is so enormous, that you don’t mention what was obviously highly topical, very important, but the wrong conclusion. It was redoing the NAFTA story.

Q: So bringing people on the streets can actually insert those issues onto the radar screen?

A: It didn’t. The only thing it did was allow the picture to be created of crazed protesters and odd Hippies and people with funny hats who were trying to harm the poor, because they’re trying to prevent the benefits of NAFTA. But a different kind of organizing could have forced this onto the agenda. And sometimes it works. Like on the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, it did, in fact, work.

Q: What kind of organizing would say would be more effective?

A: It’s got to be something that’s not just directed to a demonstration in Quebec, and then when you fail, you say, “Okay, we gave up.” It has to be day-to-day, ongoing organization. Delegations going to the Boston Globe editorial office and saying we want you to report the result of these reports, and if you don’t, we’re going to leaflet the whole city and say you’re a bunch of this, that, and the other thing. You know, that kind of pressure could work, and could break through. Alternative journalists could have done it. Very few did. Very few even knew about it. Again, you could read it in Z Magazine or probably IndyMedia and stuff like that. But it doesn’t reach people because we don’t have the regular, continuing organizations.

If you go back to an older period — take, say, the period when the Communist Party was alive. And there’s lots and lots of things wrong with the Communist Party, Stalinism and everything else. But it was a very important organization, because it existed, and it was continuing. And you had the same guys coming around to grind the mimeograph machines week after week, even if you lost the last battle. And I remember from my own childhood — my family was mostly unemployed Jewish working class. And they were mostly in and around the Communist Party. They didn’t give a damn about the Stalinist purge or anything else — if they had to nod at the right point, they’d nod at the right point. But they cared about those issues that were being struggled about here. So my aunts were seamstresses working in what amounted to sweatshops, but they got a couple of weeks in the summer at the union summer camp, and they got some protection at work, and some health care. And they had workers’ education. This was elite culture, incidentally. It would be normal to listen to the Budapest String Quartet, or go to performances of Shakespeare plays. And a lot of this was around the periphery of the Communist Party.

The fact that they had terrible attitudes toward Russia and hopeless misunderstanding of what was going on there — some of them at least, not others — was wrong, but irrelevant to most of the participants. And in the civil rights movement, it was a major phenomenon, in the revival of the labor movements in the thirties and so on. There were continuing resources. It wasn’t the whole story — there were lots of other things going on, too. But it was one part of it. You don’t want to reconstitute the old Stalinist Party, obviously. But you want to know what was right about it, as well as what was wrong about it. And what was right about it was things like this.

Q: So there’s a need for organization that the movements of today are lacking, but there’s also a need for democracy that the movements of old were lacking in some ways.

A: You’re looking at completely top-down hierarchies, arranged orders from the Kremlin, and so on. But at the sort of grassroots level, it might have been fairly democratic and participatory. You have to look closely to know. These are hard things to develop. They do require instilling the understanding that if you go to a demonstration and you didn’t win, it doesn’t mean everything’s hopeless, and now we join the Spartacist League or something.

Q: What role does democracy play in social movements today?

A: Unless they are really participatory, they’re not going to have staying power, and shouldn’t. And these are not easy things to develop. Anybody who’s been in any popular movement, whether it’s a group of twenty people or something larger, knows that there are internal tendencies that lead to hierarchy. People’s boredom level varies. There are some who are going to stick it out for hour after hour in meetings, and others who say, “I can’t take this anymore,” and who will end up with the former types being the decision-makers. And it goes from interpersonal things like that, to just the easy tendency to delegate authority and go do something else and let them run it.

Q: And that doesn’t work either, to let people run things.

A: No, then it’s just going to become hierarchical and bureaucratized and dominated, and you’ll end up being a servant again. And that’s true in any kind of organization. It has to be struggled with all the time. I mean, it has to be internalized, it’s part of the understanding of participation in a movement, that this is what it’s going to take.

Q: It has to be this consciousness among people, to make them creative, active citizens in a way, then?

A: It has to be a consciousness, yes. I mean, just as a massive propaganda system, that everyone’s subjected to from infancy, is trying to drive them to become what are called “rational wealth maximizers” — maximize your own wealth, and don’t give a damn about anybody else — there’s huge pressures to turn people into that, and there have to be equally huge pressures, or bigger ones, to bring out other aspects of human concerns and capacities. But it takes work.

Q: The New York Times is talking about the emergence of the “other superpower” to contest American power.

A: They were worried about it. Just like they were worried about the crisis of democracy. That one sentence in The New York Times represented real fear that the world may be getting out of control. And it shows up in other respects, too. Take this whole Old Europe, New Europe business. What was that all about? And in part, it was just the expression of the absolute, passionate hatred of democracy among American elites, which is really remarkable. I mean, the fact that Old Europe is denounced because the governments took the same position as the majority of the population, and New Europe is praised because the governments overrode an even bigger majority of the population — I mean, what that tells you is amazing, as is the fact that there’s no comment on it, that it’s just taken for granted.

But there’s much deeper issues than that. Old Europe is France and Germany. That’s the industrial and commercial and financial heartland of Europe. And the concern over that, reflects an old concern — going back to the Second World War — that Europe was going to strike an independent course. And if it does it’ll be led by its heartland, France and Germany. So when they get out of line, and if they don’t follow orders from Crawford, Texas, it’s really dangerous. Because they might take Europe along with them into an independent course in world affairs. A lot of the concern about China and Japan is the same. Northeast Asia is the most dynamic economic region in the world. Its GDP is much bigger than that of the United States. It’s potentially integrated. It could go in an independent direction.

So it’s not just the second superpower — you know, popular opinion. It’s also the fact that the world has conflicting centers of power. The U.S. happens to dominate militarily, but not in other dimensions. And this is a longstanding concern. Mostly with Europe, throughout the second half of the last century, but you will remember the concerns about Japan in the 1980s — “Japan is No. 1, what’s going to happen to us?” and so on and so forth. The idea of losing control is very frightening, whether it’s control of domestic population, or control of the world system and so on.

And international policies are very heavily geared toward this. Say, taking control of Iraqi oil, or making sure that Caspian Sea pipelines go to the West. A lot of this is based on the concern that Northeast Asia might seek energy independence. Which would mean the loss of a very powerful lever of control. On the other hand, if the U.S. has control over the levers of energy, and makes sure they basically decide what happens to it — that’s a way of blocking more independent development in economic and political and social centers that are on par with, or even greater than, the United States. So all this is being thought about all the time.

Q: When some Americans see the protests around the world against, for instance, the Iraq War, they see that as anti-Americanism.

A: That’s the way it was described.

Q: Do you think that’s a valid concern?

A: The very notion is interesting. The very fact that that notion exists is interesting. Concepts like anti-Americanism only exist in totalitarian states. Suppose people in Italy protest against Berlusconi. Is that called anti-Italianism? In Russia, it was called anti-Sovietism. In Brazil, under the generals, if you protested you were anti-Brazilian. But the only way that concept can exist is if you identify the leadership with the society, the culture, the people, their aspirations, and so on. If you do that, if you accept that deeply totalitarian doctrine, you can have notions like anti-Sovietism, anti-Brazilianism, anti-Americanism, and so on.

So the very existence of the concept reflects a deeply totalitarian streak in American elite thought. I mean, you’d laugh about it if you had a book in Italy called Anti-Italianism, referring to people who protest Berlusconi’s policies. People would just break up in laughter. When you have a book in the United States called Anti-Americanism, by Paul Hollander, referring to people who criticize U.S. policies or something, people don’t laugh, it gets a favorable review in The New York Times.

So you’re right about the concept, but you should think about what it means. The concept reflects the deep-seated conception that you must subordinate yourself to the leadership: If you’re critical of the leadership, even if you think this is the greatest country in the world, you’re anti-American.

Q: What do you think the future of social movements will be, and are you optimistic or pessimistic?

A: I think the tendencies over the last thirty or forty years are pretty hopeful. But it’s really a question of trajectory. I mean, there are very competing trajectories in the world. There’s one towards centralization and militarization and domination. And disaster, because it is facing disaster. There’s another towards increasing concern over human rights, over issues of peace, over — you know, “Is this going to be an environment for our grandchildren to live in?” — and so on. And the question is which of these trajectories dominates.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

The New York Times Book Review has called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today,” and the “foremost gadfly of our national conscience.” He is one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities — just one notch below Freud on a list that includes Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible. A giant in the field of linguistics, a prolific and uncompromising critic of American foreign policy, a radical activist for social justice — Noam Chomsky has managed to cram several lifetimes of intellectual and political labor in the span of his seventy-four years. He has also stirred several lifetimes’ worth of controversy: His political opponents have denounced him as a ringleader in the “blame America first” crowd, or a “self-hating Jew” who is dangerously critical of the Israeli state. Even one of the Times reviewers who heaped praise on him went on to call his political writings “maddeningly simple-minded” — a quote that Chomsky himself is fond of citing.

InTheFray Editor Victor Tan Chen met up this month with Professor Chomsky at his MIT office for an hour-long conversation on the state of today’s social movements. The focus of the interview was the recent growth in activism around the world, especially coming out of the massive popular protests against the U.S.-led war on Iraq. But in true Chomskian fashion, the discussion ranged widely — from Brazilian landless workers to sixties activism to free-trade economics to, yes, the elitist agenda of The New York Times.

(The text below includes highlights from the interview, as well as links and the Story Index. For the complete transcript, click here.)

Lost in ‘paradise’

Q: What do you think the present state of social movements around the globe is right now?

A: Well, it’s hard to think of a time when there has been anything approaching this level of activism, participation, and, in particular, interaction. That’s something quite new. The kinds of interaction that are reflected at the World Social Forum, for example, or at the international demonstrations at Cancún [against the World Trade Organization]. There had never been anything like that in the past. The popular movements in the West, at least, were always talking about internationalism. That’s why every union is called an international. And you have that series of [Communist] Internationals. But they were never anything remotely like internationals. Either unions or the Internationals were very localized and narrow. [Click here for more on the Communist Internationals.]

In Brazil, for example, it’s beyond anything in any Western country. In fact, what just happened in Brazil was historically pretty amazing. It’s the first time that popular movements reached this scale. A number of them: the Workers Party, the unions, the Landless Workers Movement — which played the most interesting role in many ways. They reached a sufficient scale so they could naturally take over political power over enormous odds: the centralization of capital and rich-poor gap and so on.

What they can do about it is another question. There were efforts in this direction in the past. Forty years ago they did actually elect a mildly populist president — nothing remotely like Lula [Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, president of Brazil], and nothing like the populist Workers Party. But then it was just overthrown quickly by a military coup, organized from Washington and celebrated by American liberals as the greatest thing that ever happened.

Q: So there’s these external dangers that social movements face.

A: Well, that’s changed. There’s not going to be any military coup to overthrow Lula. For one thing, because the population no longer would accept it, either there or here. There’s been enough changes in popular consciousness, both in the South and, by now, in the rich countries, in the North.

The other, negative side is that they don’t need it now. Because the neoliberal mechanisms of the past thirty years have created conditions which undermine — severely undermine — the threat that democracy could actually function. So international financial markets have a stranglehold over Brazil and other Third World countries thanks to these measures. It’s almost unnecessary to think in terms of military coups. In fact, Lula is being compelled to follow policies more reactionary than the preceding government, the Cardoso government. [Click here for more on how foreign investors constrain the actions of developing countries like Brazil.]

The point is, these things have developed in the South, in India and South Africa and other places, and there’s an enormous mobilization in the North that’s never existed before. And furthermore, there is solidarity. I went to the Via Campesina meeting [in Porto Alegre this year] — the international peasant movement, workers from all over the place. It’s alongside the World Social Forum, and interacts with it, but not the same. And it’s a powerful movement which could get participation by even Northern farmers who are, at a very different level, facing other, similar problems that are crushing them.

Q: What’s the situation for social movements in the United States right now?

A: The conditions are such that they ought to be able to achieve a lot. The United States is a complicated country. There’s little in the way of political parties, the political system is almost unrelated to popular movements. On the other hand, there’s a tremendous amount of energy and activism, just very disorganized. Just take Boston. Lots and lots of groups. But they barely know about each other. They’re doing their own thing, here, there, and the other place. And that means there’s not much in the way of long-term thinking or planning or strategy and so on.

Q: Why do you think there is such fragmentation within social movements within the United States?

A: In other industrial countries, these movements have tended to coalesce around the labor movement or social-democratic political parties or some kinds of ongoing institutions that maintain themselves. The United States does not have those institutions. And that has both a positive side and a negative side. The positive side is that the movements here are not under the control of pretty autocratic, bureaucratized institutions. On the other hand it means there’s no center you can keep coming back to, there are no learning experiences. What was done ten years ago is forgotten because the people who did it are now somewhere else and you have to start over again and learn the same techniques. [Click here for discussion of the role of U.S. churches in promoting activism.]

It’s also a big country, a very insular country, that doesn’t pay attention to the outside. There’s a tremendous amount of mobility as compared to other industrial countries — people don’t live where they grew up, others come from outside the country, and it means there’s a lack of ties.

And also this is an unusually business-run society. The major business-run propaganda institutions, the public relations industry, are in the U.S. or, secondarily, Britain, which is also where they had their major origins as part of the effort to control attitudes and beliefs. And there’s enormous efforts going into trying to undermine popular organizations. On the other hand it’s a pretty dissident population. And there’s plenty to be concerned about. So if you look at people’s attitudes, it looks like it ought to be an organizer’s paradise.

Q: In what sense?

A: For example, I remember on the Bicentennial, in 1976, there were lots of polls about people’s attitudes. One Gallup poll gave people slogans. The question was, “Is this in the Constitution?” Of course, nobody had a clue what’s in the Constitution — maybe they looked at it in eighth grade but forgot about it. So when you ask people is this in the Constitution, what you’re really asking them is this such an obvious truth that it must be in the Constitution. One of the questions was, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Fifty percent of the population thought that’s in the Constitution. Because it’s such an obvious truism. And you look at that, and you think, “Well, what are the organizers doing?” [laughs]

It’s the same on a lot of issues. Take, say, the Vietnam War. There was a huge amount of activism on the war, and there’s been a lot of studies of people’s attitudes on it. Because of the indoctrination in the academic world, people don’t go there, they don’t pursue the answers to the questions to find out what they mean. [Click here for more on public attitudes toward the Vietnam War.]

And it goes across the board. [Harvard’s Vanishing Voter Project] found that before the last [presidential] elections, 75 percent of the population regarded it as a farce. That’s before Florida, before the Supreme Court. In fact, if you look at this whole stolen election business, it’s of great concern among intellectuals, but there’s almost no popular resonance. They don’t care.

And I think the reason is — if you look at the Vanishing Voter Project you can see the reasons: Before the election people weren’t taking it seriously, because it’s just rich people and public relations operations and so on and so forth. If you ask people, “Is the economic system fair?”: overwhelmingly, it’s unfair. Ask people about national health insurance: There’s been very consistent support for it, some of the latest figures are about 75 percent. If it’s being discussed, it’s called “politically impossible” — meaning, the insurance companies won’t accept it. It doesn’t matter if the population would. We could go across the board. These are things that people can organize about. [Click here for more on how important issues are kept out of the public arena.]

Democracy as a weapon

Q: Can you talk a little about your own background in social movements, the ones you’ve been involved with in the past, and what lessons you can draw from that that could apply today?

A: Well, I was very active and political as a child, as a teenager and so on, but then it was mostly Palestine-related. I was all involved in what was then called Zionist movements — they’d now be called anti-Zionist. And then in the sixties I just kind of joined in with the stuff that was going on. The civil rights movement. I was very active in organizing resistance, to try to organize national tax resistance in the sixties — organizing resistance against the [Vietnam] War. Then just hung out from there.

In the eighties, I was very heavily involved in the solidarity movements in regard to Central America. Which were a real breakthrough. They were what people would call conservative in many respects — the church, the Midwest. But it was the first time in the history of Europe or the United States ever, as far as I know, that large numbers of people from the imperial society went to live with the victims.

Q: Do you see some continuity to the global justice movement?

A: The global justice movements, yeah. And they sort of grew out of this, in a kind of unplanned fashion, they just developed into these further interactions and developments. People think of the global justice movements as originating in Seattle. But that’s very misleading. They were much more powerful in the South. But they were kind of disregarded.

People in the rich countries didn’t care. Take the probably millions of people who have been killed in the Congo in the last two years. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. You can say, well, we’re sending troops to Iraq for humanitarian reasons. Whatever you think of that argument, a fraction of those forces in Eastern Congo would have deterred and maybe stopped huge massacres, way beyond anything there [in Iraq]. Of course, they don’t have oil wealth and are too unimportant to control and so on, so it doesn’t come up. [Click here for discussion of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.]

There’s a lack of interest and concern about the rest of the world. These are things that have to be overcome if there’s going to real international solidarity. And the social justice movements have done it for a lot of people. They do reach out to plenty of people now who know a lot about the world. For example, by now there are plenty of people who are getting their information about ongoing events in the world through the Internet.

Q: What can social movements do to change the situation?

A: The bounds are endless. I mean, pick what you like. People are in favor of democratic control, they don’t want to work in corporate tyrannies, they don’t like aggression and massacre, they’d like to have social services.

Just run across the board. Every one of those things is a possibility for organizing. And nothing’s graven in stone. These are very fragile systems of control and domination. And the people in them know that — they’re always deeply concerned about any manifestation of popular activism, and react very powerfully to try to crush it. [Click here for discussion of the backlash against popular uprisings since World War II.]

We’re right in the middle of that right now. There’s tremendous fear of a “crisis of democracy” — too much democratization. The right-wing think tanks got organized to try to shift the political spectrum. The spectrum of discussion and debate changed. The educational system changed.

In fact, a lot of the neoliberal programs which come from the early seventies — you can debate what their economic impact is. What’s not debatable is their effect in undermining democracy. Almost every element of them is designed to reduce the arena of popular participation and decision-making. And that runs from free financial flows to privatization. So, reducing the arena of popular choice. The fact that people may care about Social Security and the environment and health care and so on, is just gradually squeezed out of the public arena as much as possible.

Q: And social movements can provide some antidote to that?

A: Well, you can see the fear there is among highly concentrated business and elite interests. There’s high class consciousness, high degree of commitment to preventing another “crisis of democracy” from developing. And the social movements, the only answer they have to that is to have the population on their side.

And the same is true of elections. The concentration of capital that dominates the electoral system [in Brazil] is enormous. How are they able to counter it? Well, just by having mass popular movements of pretty poor people who combine and balance, counterbalance, capital concentrations. We don’t have that here. So here the elections are just bought. If a candidate happens to represent the interests and concerns of maybe even a large majority of the population, he can’t even enter the political system.

Q: Do you think that people will, if given a chance, actually organize to change some of these things?

A: It’s not so much people crave submission. It’s just that the individual costs of opposition are reasonably high, and there’s a free-rider effect. Others can profit from the gains if somebody sacrifices themselves. And that makes it a hard choice for people to make that decision. If you measure the nature of your life by the standard criteria that are imposed on you by the doctrinal system — meaning make a lot of money, live in a nice house, don’t have people yell at you, and get a good job — if those are the criteria of what makes a decent life, then you pay a cost if you decide to become involved in a global justice movement or something else.

[Joshua] Cohen and [Joel] Rogers make a very convincing statement of that. They don’t think, and I don’t think, it necessarily immobilizes people. But it does reveal some of the impediments to participation as long as you subordinate yourself to the values that are imposed on you by massive propaganda systems. And they really are massive. I mean, if you look at the impact of television and commercialization and so on and so forth, it’s just enormous. It has an overwhelming effect, particularly on young people.

Q: And that could have led to some of the misconceptions, for instance, about the Iraq War — people believing that the weapons of mass destruction had already been found.

A: Well, there, it’s pretty dramatic. There are cases, and that’s one of them, where you can see the effects of the propaganda showing almost immediately. So like in September 2002, when the propaganda began — the war drums began to beat — within a month, they had a majority of the population believing that Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States.

Like this morning, I was listening to the radio on the way in. The [president’s] reaction to the Kay Report, was, “Okay, this proves our point.” And he can say it without real fear of contradiction, even though it’s so outlandish. On a radio address a week or two ago, the president’s Saturday radio address, the theme was that the war was justified because we removed a tyrant who was developing weapons of mass destruction, and plotting with international terrorists. Every one of those claims has been totally exploded. The only known connection to terrorism is that the war increased it, exactly as every intelligence agency predicted it was going to do.

A culture of instant gratification

Q: On February 15, you had millions of people around the world, and hundreds of thousands in the United States, protesting the war in Iraq. And yet some people came out of that saying, “Well, I protested, and nothing changed. The foreign policy didn’t change.”

A: You see, that goes back to the earlier discussion, where we were talking about before about institutional permanence and continuity. I mean, in the United States, where there is very little continuity of social movements, and little permanence, and no institutional base, the attitudes that people have are, “We’ll try, we’ll put out a lot of effort for the next couple months, and if it didn’t work, that shows everything’s impossible.” You know, that’s not the way any social movement’s ever worked. I mean, abolitionism, women’s rights, labor rights, anything you take — you have to expect to keep at it day after day.

But the idea that you’re going to have some kind of instant gratification, or else it was worthless, is a very typically American idea. There’s a ton of propaganda about it. You’re supposed to look for instant gratification. [Click here for discussion of the 1968 Columbia University strike.] And when people [in the seventies] failed to achieve the long-term goals, they regarded it as a failure. And right at that point, the massive popular movements here — the young ones — a lot of them went off into very self-destructive directions.

These were unprecedented protests [in February]. Of course they’re not going to stop power systems, and anyone who participated should have understood that. But they might be a barrier to the next step, if you persist with them. But you have to have a realistic understanding of where power lies, how it can adapt to large-scale protests, and where they must go if they want to really change things.

Q: Do you think that movements today are getting better at building bridges across lines of race, class, gender, religion, other lines of identity?

A: There are some that are pretty successful at it. How much that generalizes is really hard to say. Because it’s also quite easy for systems of power and domination to separate people on these issues. Take the Immigrant [Workers Freedom] Ride. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to get immigrants and workers to be on opposite sides. Same on international trade issues. If jobs are lost here, they’re going somewhere else. Well, how do you deal with that? The people and peasants in China have to eat too, so you can’t just disregard that question. [Click here for discussion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).]

Q: What kind of organizing would say would be more effective?

A: It’s got to be something that’s not just directed to a demonstration and then when you fail, you say, “Okay, we gave up.” It has to be day-to-day, ongoing organization. Delegations going to the Boston Globe editorial office and saying we want you to report the result of these reports, and if you don’t, we’re going to leaflet the whole city and say you’re a bunch of this, that, and the other thing. You know, that kind of pressure could work, and could break through. Alternative journalists could have done it. Very few did. Very few even knew about [the demonstrations surrounding the 2001 Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec]. Again, you could read [about] it in Z Magazine or probably IndyMedia and stuff like that. But it doesn’t reach people because we don’t have the regular, continuing organizations.

If you go back to an older period — take, say, the period when the Communist Party was alive. And there’s lots and lots of things wrong with the Communist Party, Stalinism and everything else. But it was a very important organization, because it existed, and it was continuing. [Click here for discussion of Chomsky’s family and their involvement with the Communist Party.] You don’t want to reconstitute the old Stalinist Party, obviously. But you want to know what was right about it, as well as what was wrong about it.

Q: What role does democracy play in social movements today?

A: Unless they are really participatory, they’re not going to have staying power, and shouldn’t. And these are not easy things to develop. Anybody who’s been in any popular movement, whether it’s a group of twenty people or something larger, knows that there are internal tendencies that lead to hierarchy. [Click here for more on the importance of democracy in movements.]

Q: It has to be this consciousness among people, to make them creative, active citizens?

A: It has to be a consciousness, yes. Just as a massive propaganda system, that everyone’s subjected to from infancy, is trying to drive them to become what are called “rational wealth maximizers” — maximize your own wealth, and don’t give a damn about anybody else — there’s huge pressures to turn people into that, and there have to be equally huge pressures, or bigger ones, to bring out other aspects of human concerns and capacities. But it takes work.

Q: The New York Times is talking about the emergence of the “other superpower” to contest American power.

A: They were worried about it. Just like they were worried about the crisis of democracy. That one sentence in The New York Times represented real fear that the world may be getting out of control. And it shows up in other respects, too. Take this whole Old Europe, New Europe business. In part, it was just the expression of the absolute, passionate hatred of democracy among American elites, which is really remarkable. I mean, the fact that Old Europe is denounced because the governments took the same position as the majority of the population, and New Europe is praised because the governments overrode an even bigger majority of the population.

But there’s much deeper issues than that. Old Europe is France and Germany. That’s the industrial and commercial and financial heartland of Europe. And the concern over that, reflects an old concern — going back to the Second World War — that Europe was going to strike an independent course. And if it does it’ll be led by its heartland, France and Germany. So when they get out of line, and if they don’t follow orders from Crawford, Texas, it’s really dangerous. Because they might take Europe along with them into an independent course in world affairs. [Click here for discussion of the growing power of Northeast Asia.]

So it’s not just the “second superpower” — you know, popular opinion. It’s also the fact that the world has conflicting centers of power. The U.S. happens to dominate militarily, but not in other dimensions. The idea of losing control is very frightening, whether it’s control of domestic population, or control of the world system and so on. And international policies are very heavily geared toward this. Say, taking control of Iraqi oil, or making sure that Caspian Sea pipelines go to the West. A lot of this is based on the concern that Northeast Asia might seek energy independence. Which would mean the loss of a very powerful lever of control.

Q: When some Americans see the protests around the world against, for instance, the Iraq War, they see that as anti-Americanism. Do you think that’s a valid concern?

A: The very notion is interesting. The very fact that that notion exists is interesting. Concepts like anti-Americanism only exist in totalitarian states. Suppose people in Italy protest against Berlusconi. Is that called anti-Italianism? In Russia, it was called anti-Sovietism. In Brazil, under the generals, if you protested you were anti-Brazilian. But the only way that concept can exist is if you identify the leadership with the society, the culture, the people, their aspirations, and so on. If you do that, if you accept that deeply totalitarian doctrine, you can have notions like anti-Sovietism, anti-Brazilianism, anti-Americanism, and so on. [Click here for more on anti-Americanism.]

Q: What do you think the future of social movements will be, and are you optimistic or pessimistic?

A: I think the tendencies over the last thirty or forty years are pretty hopeful. But it’s really a question of trajectory. I mean, there are very competing trajectories in the world. There’s one towards centralization and militarization and domination. And disaster, because it is facing disaster. There’s another towards increasing concern over human rights, over issues of peace, over — you know, “Is this going to be an environment for our grandchildren to live in?” — and so on. And the question is which of these trajectories dominates.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen