Silly Thinking
*with Jim Farris*
2011528 Curiosities served
Analyzing the Movement-Looking Back at PPRC 6
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Posted by Douglas Lain
"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement; this is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies." -Philip K. Dick, Valis, 1983
Breaking away from linearity I want to outline what I saw at the very last PPRC Friday rally I attended before I tell you about the first one. I went to this last rally in late August of 2003 because I was called out, emailed an invitation to show solidarity with the Friday afternoon marchers. Two weeks earlier the protest had been attacked by a group of about eight young thugs. PPRC was moved to sound the alarm by a physical assault that included one of the protesters being momentarily choked in the crook of a thug's arm.
There was a chance that the thugs were sent by the government:
A member of PPRC wrote on Indymedia:
"In Germany in the 1930s, the marginalized of the community were recruited to attack leftists and those who opposed the Nazis. The same is true of attacks on labor organizers here in the US. In East Timor, it was drug addicts, petty criminals and folks who were otherwise the injured and underclass of the society who were drafted into the militias, their anger and frustration channeled against the people fighting for independence."
We could not back down, our strength was in our numbers, and everybody who was remotely connected to the Peace Movement was asked to show up.
I turned up a week late, two weeks after the attack. But the feeling of martyrdom was still palpable, especially amongst the organizers.
The first thing I noticed was that the faces hadn't changed in the two years since the Friday rally was created. While the PPRC general meetings had emptied out, the rally itself was static. I hadn't been to a Friday rally since April, but when I came back it was like I hadn't missed a day. It had been the same thirty or so people, every week, for two years.
I spent the march talking to a fellow-traveler who only attended the protest in order to give out Trotskyite literature from the World Socialists Web Site. We agreed that PPRC was not a revolutionary organization, and argued about everything else.
Back at the square a PPRC organizer who I'll call W led the march to the middle. He had everyone join hands, everyone that is except for the Trotskyite and me, we hung back and watched.
Everyone formed a circle, joined hands, and W started to chant.
"What do we want?" he screamed.
"Peace," the marchers said less audibly.
"When do we want it?"
"Now," the crowd mumbled.
Nobody broke rank; nobody even let go of a hand in order to cover his or her face from embarrassment. Nobody said anything without first receiving a cue from W.
Looking down on the scene, literally above it on the steps of Pioneer Square, I felt sick. When would W ask these people to drink the Kool-Aid?
The PPRC Friday rally had become a spectacle. It operated on the level of myth and emotionalism. Like everything else in the political realm it seemed designed to limit participation while flattering it's audience. Like a Volvo or a pair of Nikes PPRC rallies offered only the momentary confirmation of a predetermined set of values that the individual marcher could self-righteously consume but never act upon.
Why did this happen? It's not what was intended, not what we wanted to create in the beginning, but perhaps it was the logical outcome of the earliest decisions PPRC leaders made.
By opting to work on "educating the public" and building a mass movement through media events, PPRC started out already accepting that the majority of its members would be spectators.
And while perhaps nobody consciously realized what we were doing, what dynamic we were setting up, that does not mean that everyone involved was innocent. PPRC fell into a spectacular or propaganda mode without any thought at all, but that doesn't meant that there weren't a few people like W who benefited from the dissolution of the group and who actively pushed the organization towards this endpoint where it became a cultish façade hiding a total lack of real engagement.
Let's go back to a point just after the beginning.
I was talking to the new head of PPRC, although I didn't know it at the time. The Anti-authoritarian Caucus had quit, walked out en masse, and I was trying to tell all the activists at the bar that this was, perhaps, a bad thing. The kids in the Anarchist Caucus were obnoxious and a bit absurd, mostly punks and would be punks. But, when they all left at once I felt off balance. They at least tried to talk a good game. With them gone we were in danger of not even having conversations about democratic participation and the need for radical change.
"It's all right if we lose some people, it happens all the time. This kind of activist group always shrinks down to the truly committed few," W said.
"Listen, I consider myself to be a kind of anarchist and I find it troubling that these people felt they couldn't stay in PPRC and remain true to their principles," I said.
"I understand. We're all anarchists really," W told me.
It was, of course, both a completely vapid thing to say, and also a lie.
A lot of what I heard from PPRC leadership, especially in private, was vapid, disingenuous, and often smugly authoritarian:
"People won't be ready to really run their own lives, they can't be expected to participate in shaping society, for at least a hundred years. We'll need that long to educate people. Working on more participatory forms of activism now is a joke," one PPRC and Green party leader told me.
"Now that the anti-war position is more popular we've opted to take a more cautious and conservative approach," another leader confessed.
"I don't know if another big protest will do us any good," a very prominent activist leader told me after the war on Iraq had started.
I tried to argue. People wanted another large protest, they needed the sense of momentum and solidarity large rallies are all about.
"People need to feel like there is somewhere to go, like the Peace Movement isn't going to pack it in and go home," I told him.
This leader who I'll call H looked at me warily. "I don't know," he said. What he didn't say, but what I understood, was that he was afraid of what thirty thousand pissed off protesters might do. What he didn't say, was that the he didn't trust these people who were showing up to oppose the war, and wasn't willing to damage his reputation by organizing a protest that he couldn't control.
The real question is how these few people managed to gain such a disproportionate amount of authority. Why is it that groups like CNPJ or PPRC, groups with a collective membership of maybe thirty people, could dominate so completely at a time when there was more widespread interest in peace protests, when there were thousands of people who wanted to be involved? Why did so few make the decisions for so many?
"A final psychological effect of propaganda is the appearance of the need for propaganda. The individual subjected to propaganda can no longer do without it [... ]The more the individual is captured by propaganda, the more sensitive he is--not to its content, but to the impetus it gives him, to the excitement it makes him feel."-Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965
Propaganda runs deep. It is not merely a matter of lies told to convince the masses to go to war or buy a Buick. In a society like ours, a society where local cultures and communities have shriveled up or been bulldozed into the ground, in a world without smaller and more natural systems of authority, there is nothing to connect to, nothing to relate to, except the mass culture. And there is no way to develop a relationship with this mass society except through its propaganda.
It was December 2001 and I was talking to W. We were sitting in another bar, talking under a poster of the Twin Towers with the word "Peace" at the bottom. There were about 20 of us that Friday night, and the conversations were fast and furious. If you weren't aggressive in this crowd you could easily end up on the outside of all the conversations, barely able to make one out from the others in the din.
I was aggressive. "I want to talk to you," I told W.
He put down his beer and made space for me on the bench at his table.
What I wanted to talk to W about was the need for ambition. I wanted to find out what he thought was realistic to try for, and perhaps convince him that changing the social/economic system should be the real goal of the peace movement. We had to at least advocate for democratic control of the workplace, had to aim at abolishing private tyranny in the form of corporations. The Peace Movement, as far as I was concerned, had to be an anti-capitalist movement.
"I agree with you, in theory," W said. "When I was young I used to think that people were good, that these problems could be changed. I'd get upset when my friends would tell me that people were inherently greedy and corrupt. I'd get livid when people told me there was no way to change human nature.
"I'd tell them that we didn't have to change people, we just had to get rid of some of the people in power. 'It's not all people, it's these people.'" W said. "But, you know, I've been an activist for 20 years now, and I think it really is everyone. It's all people. I just don't expect as much as I used to expect." W told me that I couldn't expect too much from people.
We couldn't expect that activists would be activists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. People needed to just be. People needed to go on vacations, enjoy a day out, go to a movie.
"That's what activism is really about. We're fighting for people who are starving and dying, but we can't forget what life is in the meantime. What gives life its purpose, you know? What makes it bearable? It's just these kinds of things that people want. To go to the movies, to go to the beach."
I understood what he meant, but I wasn't sure how it was relevant to my argument that we needed to make radical changes and soon. I'd gone to him to ask him what we should, he was obviously more experienced than I was, knew more about how to organize, how to do this political stuff. I recognized that the way the world was what with wage slave jobs and thousands of public humiliations that pile up all the time, people did indeed need leisure time. People needed a break from the constant struggle. And if you were lucky enough that you could find a way to take a break, go on vacation, then you should take care of yourself and get away every once in awhile.
Still, I was reminded of a conversation I'd had with a high school friend of mine months earlier. We were at a mutual friend's wedding, hadn't seen each other for years, and I had to explain that I was struggling with low paying jobs and intended to write for a living eventually. This friend of mine, another professional in the high-tech sector, asked me how many books I'd have to write before I could afford to retire. He had clearly missed the whole idea behind my struggle to write for a living, even though I tried to explain it to him.
I would never need to retire because I would be making a living doing something I actually enjoyed.
W was saying that activism and social change were about improving people's "quality of life" and he saw going to the movies, saw leisure time itself, as a sign of improvement. If we were successful people in the third world, in places like Afghanistan, would be able to afford occasional breaks from their jobs, breaks from their real lives.
His revolution was about giving everyone a life from which they could afford to retire.
What I was hoping for was changing the world, changing our lives, so that we might enjoy life itself. I wanted a world without leisure time, because I wanted a world without compulsory work.
This kind of thinking was deemed completely inappropriate inside of PPRC. It was so inappropriate that, at the time, I had difficulty communicating my ideas to people. I was constantly reaching the same impasse I'd met with W.
It was impossible to sell such utopian nonsense to the masses. Who would believe that such a life was possible? Who would become a member of a group that was that was so far outside the mainstream? Even the socialists were more down to earth.
PPRC was started in order to fight the propaganda of war, and was eventually poisoned by propaganda's derangement. It's a paradox. I don't know what should have been done differently. The Empire forces its form on its enemies. You can witness this truth every Friday evening at Pioneer Square.
Perhaps the only hope we have is to remain on our guard, to ask ourselves what we get out of participating in the propaganda system, to challenge ourselves to try to reconnect to reality, to life.
I'm not sure it's possible, but it's all we've got.
"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement; this is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies." -Philip K. Dick, Valis, 1983
Breaking away from linearity I want to outline what I saw at the very last PPRC Friday rally I attended before I tell you about the first one. I went to this last rally in late August of 2003 because I was called out, emailed an invitation to show solidarity with the Friday afternoon marchers. Two weeks earlier the protest had been attacked by a group of about eight young thugs. PPRC was moved to sound the alarm by a physical assault that included one of the protesters being momentarily choked in the crook of a thug's arm.
There was a chance that the thugs were sent by the government:
A member of PPRC wrote on Indymedia:
"In Germany in the 1930s, the marginalized of the community were recruited to attack leftists and those who opposed the Nazis. The same is true of attacks on labor organizers here in the US. In East Timor, it was drug addicts, petty criminals and folks who were otherwise the injured and underclass of the society who were drafted into the militias, their anger and frustration channeled against the people fighting for independence."
We could not back down, our strength was in our numbers, and everybody who was remotely connected to the Peace Movement was asked to show up.
I turned up a week late, two weeks after the attack. But the feeling of martyrdom was still palpable, especially amongst the organizers.
The first thing I noticed was that the faces hadn't changed in the two years since the Friday rally was created. While the PPRC general meetings had emptied out, the rally itself was static. I hadn't been to a Friday rally since April, but when I came back it was like I hadn't missed a day. It had been the same thirty or so people, every week, for two years.
I spent the march talking to a fellow-traveler who only attended the protest in order to give out Trotskyite literature from the World Socialists Web Site. We agreed that PPRC was not a revolutionary organization, and argued about everything else.
Back at the square a PPRC organizer who I'll call W led the march to the middle. He had everyone join hands, everyone that is except for the Trotskyite and me, we hung back and watched.
Everyone formed a circle, joined hands, and W started to chant.
"What do we want?" he screamed.
"Peace," the marchers said less audibly.
"When do we want it?"
"Now," the crowd mumbled.
Nobody broke rank; nobody even let go of a hand in order to cover his or her face from embarrassment. Nobody said anything without first receiving a cue from W.
Looking down on the scene, literally above it on the steps of Pioneer Square, I felt sick. When would W ask these people to drink the Kool-Aid?
The PPRC Friday rally had become a spectacle. It operated on the level of myth and emotionalism. Like everything else in the political realm it seemed designed to limit participation while flattering it's audience. Like a Volvo or a pair of Nikes PPRC rallies offered only the momentary confirmation of a predetermined set of values that the individual marcher could self-righteously consume but never act upon.
Why did this happen? It's not what was intended, not what we wanted to create in the beginning, but perhaps it was the logical outcome of the earliest decisions PPRC leaders made.
By opting to work on "educating the public" and building a mass movement through media events, PPRC started out already accepting that the majority of its members would be spectators.
And while perhaps nobody consciously realized what we were doing, what dynamic we were setting up, that does not mean that everyone involved was innocent. PPRC fell into a spectacular or propaganda mode without any thought at all, but that doesn't meant that there weren't a few people like W who benefited from the dissolution of the group and who actively pushed the organization towards this endpoint where it became a cultish façade hiding a total lack of real engagement.
Let's go back to a point just after the beginning.
I was talking to the new head of PPRC, although I didn't know it at the time. The Anti-authoritarian Caucus had quit, walked out en masse, and I was trying to tell all the activists at the bar that this was, perhaps, a bad thing. The kids in the Anarchist Caucus were obnoxious and a bit absurd, mostly punks and would be punks. But, when they all left at once I felt off balance. They at least tried to talk a good game. With them gone we were in danger of not even having conversations about democratic participation and the need for radical change.
"It's all right if we lose some people, it happens all the time. This kind of activist group always shrinks down to the truly committed few," W said.
"Listen, I consider myself to be a kind of anarchist and I find it troubling that these people felt they couldn't stay in PPRC and remain true to their principles," I said.
"I understand. We're all anarchists really," W told me.
It was, of course, both a completely vapid thing to say, and also a lie.
A lot of what I heard from PPRC leadership, especially in private, was vapid, disingenuous, and often smugly authoritarian:
"People won't be ready to really run their own lives, they can't be expected to participate in shaping society, for at least a hundred years. We'll need that long to educate people. Working on more participatory forms of activism now is a joke," one PPRC and Green party leader told me.
"Now that the anti-war position is more popular we've opted to take a more cautious and conservative approach," another leader confessed.
"I don't know if another big protest will do us any good," a very prominent activist leader told me after the war on Iraq had started.
I tried to argue. People wanted another large protest, they needed the sense of momentum and solidarity large rallies are all about.
"People need to feel like there is somewhere to go, like the Peace Movement isn't going to pack it in and go home," I told him.
This leader who I'll call H looked at me warily. "I don't know," he said. What he didn't say, but what I understood, was that he was afraid of what thirty thousand pissed off protesters might do. What he didn't say, was that the he didn't trust these people who were showing up to oppose the war, and wasn't willing to damage his reputation by organizing a protest that he couldn't control.
The real question is how these few people managed to gain such a disproportionate amount of authority. Why is it that groups like CNPJ or PPRC, groups with a collective membership of maybe thirty people, could dominate so completely at a time when there was more widespread interest in peace protests, when there were thousands of people who wanted to be involved? Why did so few make the decisions for so many?
"A final psychological effect of propaganda is the appearance of the need for propaganda. The individual subjected to propaganda can no longer do without it [... ]The more the individual is captured by propaganda, the more sensitive he is--not to its content, but to the impetus it gives him, to the excitement it makes him feel."-Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, 1965
Propaganda runs deep. It is not merely a matter of lies told to convince the masses to go to war or buy a Buick. In a society like ours, a society where local cultures and communities have shriveled up or been bulldozed into the ground, in a world without smaller and more natural systems of authority, there is nothing to connect to, nothing to relate to, except the mass culture. And there is no way to develop a relationship with this mass society except through its propaganda.
It was December 2001 and I was talking to W. We were sitting in another bar, talking under a poster of the Twin Towers with the word "Peace" at the bottom. There were about 20 of us that Friday night, and the conversations were fast and furious. If you weren't aggressive in this crowd you could easily end up on the outside of all the conversations, barely able to make one out from the others in the din.
I was aggressive. "I want to talk to you," I told W.
He put down his beer and made space for me on the bench at his table.
What I wanted to talk to W about was the need for ambition. I wanted to find out what he thought was realistic to try for, and perhaps convince him that changing the social/economic system should be the real goal of the peace movement. We had to at least advocate for democratic control of the workplace, had to aim at abolishing private tyranny in the form of corporations. The Peace Movement, as far as I was concerned, had to be an anti-capitalist movement.
"I agree with you, in theory," W said. "When I was young I used to think that people were good, that these problems could be changed. I'd get upset when my friends would tell me that people were inherently greedy and corrupt. I'd get livid when people told me there was no way to change human nature.
"I'd tell them that we didn't have to change people, we just had to get rid of some of the people in power. 'It's not all people, it's these people.'" W said. "But, you know, I've been an activist for 20 years now, and I think it really is everyone. It's all people. I just don't expect as much as I used to expect." W told me that I couldn't expect too much from people.
We couldn't expect that activists would be activists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. People needed to just be. People needed to go on vacations, enjoy a day out, go to a movie.
"That's what activism is really about. We're fighting for people who are starving and dying, but we can't forget what life is in the meantime. What gives life its purpose, you know? What makes it bearable? It's just these kinds of things that people want. To go to the movies, to go to the beach."
I understood what he meant, but I wasn't sure how it was relevant to my argument that we needed to make radical changes and soon. I'd gone to him to ask him what we should, he was obviously more experienced than I was, knew more about how to organize, how to do this political stuff. I recognized that the way the world was what with wage slave jobs and thousands of public humiliations that pile up all the time, people did indeed need leisure time. People needed a break from the constant struggle. And if you were lucky enough that you could find a way to take a break, go on vacation, then you should take care of yourself and get away every once in awhile.
Still, I was reminded of a conversation I'd had with a high school friend of mine months earlier. We were at a mutual friend's wedding, hadn't seen each other for years, and I had to explain that I was struggling with low paying jobs and intended to write for a living eventually. This friend of mine, another professional in the high-tech sector, asked me how many books I'd have to write before I could afford to retire. He had clearly missed the whole idea behind my struggle to write for a living, even though I tried to explain it to him.
I would never need to retire because I would be making a living doing something I actually enjoyed.
W was saying that activism and social change were about improving people's "quality of life" and he saw going to the movies, saw leisure time itself, as a sign of improvement. If we were successful people in the third world, in places like Afghanistan, would be able to afford occasional breaks from their jobs, breaks from their real lives.
His revolution was about giving everyone a life from which they could afford to retire.
What I was hoping for was changing the world, changing our lives, so that we might enjoy life itself. I wanted a world without leisure time, because I wanted a world without compulsory work.
This kind of thinking was deemed completely inappropriate inside of PPRC. It was so inappropriate that, at the time, I had difficulty communicating my ideas to people. I was constantly reaching the same impasse I'd met with W.
It was impossible to sell such utopian nonsense to the masses. Who would believe that such a life was possible? Who would become a member of a group that was that was so far outside the mainstream? Even the socialists were more down to earth.
PPRC was started in order to fight the propaganda of war, and was eventually poisoned by propaganda's derangement. It's a paradox. I don't know what should have been done differently. The Empire forces its form on its enemies. You can witness this truth every Friday evening at Pioneer Square.
Perhaps the only hope we have is to remain on our guard, to ask ourselves what we get out of participating in the propaganda system, to challenge ourselves to try to reconnect to reality, to life.
I'm not sure it's possible, but it's all we've got.
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