8
Lessons of the Present:
Hope and Action Today
What can be the last word of this preface to hope? Evil, in this period, certainly appears ascendant over the oppositional forces of sanity and humanity it continues to generate. Sustained by no deeply committed government or quasi-government, these wholly voluntary movements are fated to wax and wane, gain heart to lose it again, now win victories and now grow cynical with defeat. The powers that be mobilize all their formidable resources in defence of their madnesses. Indeed, freely elected, they reflect prevailing sentiments even as they shape them. Dispassionate analysis disheartens and overwhelms when it locates so few and such slight resistances to increasingly mad mainstreams.
Is a genuinely positive final note possible? Or is it a goal we pursue doggedly, without spirit, out of ideological obligation but no inner necessity? After all, isn't it disheartening to discover the evil of the last two chapters as being, in the one case, inextricably mingled with a response to even greater evil, in both cases, imbedded in societies' normal daily functioning, concepts and values? In the end, does our engaged objectivity lead us not only to clarity, to an illusion-free sense of our limits, tasks and prospects – but also, and as a result, to the verge of despondency? Think of the concluding notes of reflections on our century by earlier writers. Are we left to hope, as Marcuse quoted Walter Benjamin in 1964, only for the sake of those who have no hope?1 Thus ends One-Dimensional Man. Near the end of Doctor Faustus, published in 1947, Thomas Mann expressed unforgettably the pain of that generation and the stubborn persistence of its hope in the face of the German catastrophe. Mann's Serenus Zeitblom describes the final notes of Adrian LeverkΓΌhn's 'revocation' of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, his Lamentation of
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Dr. Faustus: 'Here, towards the end, I find that the uttermost accents of mourning are reached, the final despair achieves a voice, and – I will not say it, it would mean to disparage the uncompromising character of the work, its irremediable anguish to say that it affords, down to its very last note, any other consolation than what lies in voicing it, in simply giving sorrow words; in the fact, that is, that a voice is given the creature for its woe. No, this dark tone-poem permits up to the very end no consolation, appeasement, transfiguration. But take our artist paradox: grant that expressiveness – expression as lament – is the issue of the whole construction: then may we not parallel with it another, a religious one, and say too (though only in the lowest whisper) that out of the sheerly irremediable hope might germinate. It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair – not betrayal to her; but the miracle that passes belief. For listen to the end, listen with me: one group of instruments after another retires, and what remains, as the work fades on the air, is the high G of a cello, the last word, the lasts fainting sound, slowly dying in a pianissimo-fermata. Then nothing more: silence, and night. But that tone which vibrates in the silence, which is no longer there, to which only the spirit hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is so no more. It changes its meaning; it abides as a light in the night.'2
Although equally grounded in pain, a different sort of hope has been the driving impulse of these pages, seeking as they have done the human, social source of our century's actual and potential catastrophes. Not the Great Refusal, a defiant hope which is the last refuge of an overwhelmed and besieged humanity, but the more concrete hopes animating and generated by millennia of movements and the fruits of their struggles.3 Our appeal to praxis, to political action, has been based on the conviction that, however deviant from its origins and cut off from self-consciousness, Evil is always a human project. It can be understood and combated as intentional human action. And it will be combated. As long as people live, some of them will fight for sanity and justice and survival.
But those in the grip of madness put themselves beyond reach, they rupture with authentic discourse and alienate themselves from their reason. In power, they both reflect and create majorities behind them. The more developed their madness, the more terrifying it is. Out of touch, speaking of peace and self-defence, expressing and
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shaping significant social forces, they threaten to commit their greatest crimes – today, tomorrow.
So, when all is said and done, how can our concluding note be distinguished from the all-but-despondent last words of One-Dimensional Man, or from the final high G of Adrian Leverkühn's last composition? I spoke earlier of the impossibility of sustaining a consistent attitude towards the threat of nuclear holocaust. Today, life seems if anything more prone to disaster, to horrible reversals, to the slaughter and betrayal of hope, than in 1947 or 1964 – and so to responses that alternate bouts of intense commitment with periods of bitter exhaustion. As the nuclear threat grows, above all, life seems very frail. ... When we remember how committed are the madmen to their madness, and how sustained in it by social dynamics, when we remind ourselves of the stark reality of past histories of genocide and national suicide, can we avoid being immobilized by fears humanity has never had to live with before? At the moment are we not balancing precariously on a margin of hope even narrower than that allowed by Mann in 1947 or Marcuse in 1964?4
Yet in the end what is it that seems so overwhelming? Not only that in spite of many inspiring victories we still find ourselves having to fear and fight for our very survival. Not only that those controlling the weapons appear to be beyond our reach by any conventional political process. There is yet a further reason why we are reduced to passivity by, for example, the failure of the great anti-nuclear demonstrations throughout the West of the early 1980s to soften the us government's plans for nuclear escalation, or by Thatcher's overwhelming triumph in 1983. This is that defeats return us to a passive stance, one in which evils appear as autonomous forces, beyond our reach or intervention. We are forced back to a stance in which we disengage and observe.
The end of Progress can teach two opposed lessons – one of cynicism and quietism, and the other more fitting response of active determination to bring about survival, peace and well being. Many times the sole difference between hope and cynicism is the decision to act, the shift from contemplating the world's evils to resisting them. Much of this manuscript has been written on the reverse side of old political leaflets, the leftovers of political events in which the author has participated: commemorating the Sandinistas' victory, for example, protesting against the invasion of Lebanon, calling for an end
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to American involvement in El Salvador, remembering the desaparecidos of Chile, honouring Wayne State University's volunteers in the International Brigades in Spain. All of these are reminders of the thought, developed in Chapter Five, that we are left today with one fundamental principle of hope: action.
Our analysis of evil is, after all, only analysis. Our meditation on societal madness is only meditation. No matter how committed, each of the last two chapters is a reflection on a situation and, as such, requires a reflective stance which imposes its own demands – for clarity, objectivity and balance. Commitment may motivate each analysis, but each must stand on its own as a coherent, persuasive rendition of its situation. Each seeks in short, to convey the problem as it is, making the situation and not our commitment its decisive touchstone of validity.
Reflection therefore imposes a certain loosening of our links to the issues we seek to illuminate, a determination not to let conviction becloud our understanding. In seeking its logic we seek to view the nuclear threat as a human phenomenon independent of our will to dismantle it, as a danger quite separate from the ups and downs of movements to lessen it.
But we must now in conclusion insist that a complete perspective on the dangers facing us requires a constant and radical shift from reflection to action. The field before us must become redefined as our practical one. Inserting ourselves in its midst as actors, we see that overwhelming problems appeared as such partly because they were comprehended objectively, and thus placed for the moment beyond our intervention. In acting we see ourselves linked with situations we had separated ourselves from at an earlier stage of comprehension, or as a result of defeat. Each evil loses its apparent autonomy and becomes, once again, our enemy. Even if we never stopped regarding it as a concrete evil produced by concrete human actions and intentions, it now becomes in addition a target. While not abandoning the goal of understanding it, we now primarily seek to vanquish it. The complex historical and social field we have sought to understand once more becomes a series of guides, helps and obstacles.
As I said in the Introduction, then, hope lies outside of these pages, in action. But instead of encountering hope there, we create it each time we transform ourselves into activists seeking to change this
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or that practice, these or those trends, this or that social system. Today, hope is political practice. To shift from reflection to action is to leave behind a contemplative – and to that degree demobilized and overwhelmed – posture which emphasized observing events unfolding before us. Because it redefines the field before us precisely as our practical field, action has an energizing effect and so is often accompanied by newfound feelings of power. Indeed, even if undertaken in desperation it is a kind of self-empowerment in the face of a hostile reality. However doomed they were, in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising combatants redefined their relationship to their own fate. Action replaces the primacy of the threat with the primacy of our project to combat it.
We may recall the great reluctance Plato expected from his philosophers upon shifting from contemplation to action: for him it was a drastically inferior mode of activity and a lesser way of relating to reality. For our purposes, what counts is the radical shift Plato sees between contemplation and action.5 Certainly, his decision to compel the philosophers to govern reflects the tension between Plato's sense of the greater purity and clarity of the world of ideas and his commitment to this world of our daily life. But it also reflects the wrenching distance he perceived between them. Plato did not and could not see that across that divide lies a superior sense of reality.' Marxist epistemology suggests that without action the world cannot help but appear falsely, as a finished product separate from and imposed on us. This reified, 'normally' alienated world seems to move on its own, independently of human decision and action. The philosophical child of the strand of rationalism which tended to see the world as a human creation, Marxism seeks to undo reification by seeing the human labour behind the finished world. Today, more than ever, Marxism's further demand for political practice becomes necessary to our very efforts to understand this reality. The world has grown so threateningly out of control that only an active, political mode of apprehending it can restore a sense of it as fluid, unfinished, and capable of redirection. Its human source disguises itself until the moment we find and seek to lay hold of its levers for change. Sartre said that 'there is no non-human situation.'6 Today, as 'technology' shapes our world and exterminism moves as if on its own, Sartre's full meaning appears only through the political action which challenges and dissolves the non-human facade surrounding us on
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all sides. For example, the course of events unfolding in the Middle East since the invasion of Lebanon may seem so dismal as to encourage passivity. Israel's great upheaval of 1982 and early 1983 left the government unshaken and the architect of the Lebanon invasion in the cabinet. As intelligent observers predicted at the outset of the war, Israel's grip on the West Bank and Gaza has only tightened. The poisons of our century seem to perpetrate so deeply and extend so far that its greatest victims, and their victims, cannot – will not, it seems – find a way to share their common home.
Returning to an activist posture, however, recasts the situation. However slim at any given moment, certain possibilities remain open for action, some of these opened up by earlier actions, and dependent on yet earlier ones. In the apparently hopeless clays of June 1982, a few organizers gathered several hundred signatures on a statement denouncing the war, and with them the money to publish it in the Israeli daily press. In a country whose every previous war had been seen as defensive, where the front was only a car ride from the northern borders, where each and every military death is mourned as a national tragedy, this courageous opposition tapped and legitimized deeper, unexpected currents of resistance. Within a month of the invasion, an anti-war movement appeared which was as active and proportionally as large as the American anti-Vietnam war movement at its peak. It did not end the invasion and, even after being joined by Labour Alignment for a brief moment after the massacres at Sabra and Chatilla, did not seriously challenge a ruler who needed no consensus to carry out his plans. Discouragement at Begin's persistence and strength or at the failure of the Palestinians to hit upon a genuinely creative and challenging response – or simply sheer exhaustion – could encourage the view that, after months of upheaval, nothing had changed or would change. After all, the dominant trends remained dominant, even after the remarkable Kahan Commission Report criticized virtually the entire leadership for the massacre and recommended that Sharon be dropped. And, worse, in the wake of the destruction of its semi-autonomous territorial base the plo fragmented and largely became a captive of Syria. A year later, the hope generated in all those who acted had been frustrated. Did not the exhilarating sense of acting expose its utterly subjective roots, its episodic character? Did not the hand grenade that killed Emil Grunzweig at a Peace Now demonstration
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symbolize the profound resistance to change within Israel, the fatal power of the dominant trends? And did not the assassination of Issam Sartawi suggest the same sorry dominance of the worst trends among the Palestinians?
But 'trends' finally embody human beings, and if some have been moving further towards madness others have been struggling their way to sanity. A vitally important current of criticism among American Jews appeared in the aftermath of the invasion, reaching all the way into the leadership of mainstream organizations; the World Zionist Congress criticized the settlement policy, even if this was suppressed by leadership manoeuvres; in Israel, Begin lost personal strength and resigned. Looking for the decisive breakthrough, we correctly see these trends as subordinate, and may as a result lose heart. But in terms of a commitment to action we can see them rather differently, looking for ways to combat the negative trends, to enlarge and strengthen the peace camp. For example, it continues to promote dialogue between Jews and Palestinians after the deaths of Sartawi and Grunzweig. We continue to study the map of the situation, seeking the promising paths, watching for new weaknesses to develop on the other side, planning to exploit them.
No, by the autumn of 1983, nothing had changed decisively – but beneath the surface the ground had been continuing to shift in large ways and small. How drastically no one knows yet – and in any case only future action will be able to tell. The wave of feeling with which Israelis responded to Sadat's trip to Jerusalem in 1977 revealed their tremendous longing for peace – under what conditions will it surface again? Certainly an enormous, perhaps impassable gulf separates the reality of the Lebanon invasion from the visionary hope of Arafat's reconciliation trip. But the depths of the gulf are not set out in advance: they are human, the product of specific actions, and will be gauged, and changed, only by other actions.
Still, to return to our question, is not any action today fated to return to despair when we reach its limits and fail to achieve its goals? To drive us to the edge of despondency once again when we analyse situations anew and see just how mad they are, how far from a humane solution? In the Nuclear Freeze Campaign for example, the American anti-nuclear movement has been brilliantly successful in formulating the issue, organizing local and national campaigns, and gaining popular support for its position. It grew so remarkably in a short
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time that the massive demonstration of 12 June 1982 expressed not a dissident minority, but the national majority sentiment. The movement forced Reagan into the Orwellian doublespeak of declaring peace as the purpose of his nuclear escalation. But it could not block the development of the mx missile, or the deployment of the Cruise missiles. The high hopes aroused everywhere in the West by the great efforts of the early 1980s remain frustrated as I write this. At the end of this disastrous century are we fated to waver between energy, hope and action on the one hand and sober analysis, exhaustion and disillusionment on the other? In these concluding words I want to point beyond the endless alternation.
Living the Tension
If hope is action it is action guided, as I said in Chapter Five, by a sense of what is possible at any given moment. Is it now bearing witness, or now preparing for massive social transformation? We dream of a breakthrough, but it will happen only when the ground has been prepared. The preparation takes place in countless series of single steps, any one of which may be seen to further the cause of humanity. Any single step: those in struggle exhaust themselves by fixating on their largest goals and becoming unable to appreciate the historical importance of the small victories they do achieve.7 To make an effective contribution to the cause of humanity is an achievement, anywhere, at any time – and the limits of that achievement are set not by our own strength or weakness but by history itself. There is, no doubt, an inevitable tension between our deep longing for peace and freedom and justice and our mature calculation of what can be achieved here, by this action. The longing seems mocked by compromise, its great dignity trivialized by the smallness of these steps forward. To be sure, all partial results are hollow until Palestine and Israel live side by side in peace, creating the condition for peace in the entire region. If we do not get there, it seems, we have got nowhere. Just as all partial successes of the anti-nuclear movement have hardly any meaning so long as the bomb still exists and threatens us. Yet our inspiration and goal must not become our fetish; our sense of limits may become rather a source of strength, not the measure of our impotence. Allowing the interplay between
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vision and action, theory and practice means that hope is, finally, situated in the tension between the terms. This suggests an answer to the endless alternation of reflection and action sealed off from each other, with little learning passing back and forth. Political energy, fuelled by groundless faith, need not give way again and again to the exhausted understanding of how little we have been able to do.
It need not if we function with a realistic sense of possibility, if we gauge the limits of what can be done in any situation; if we move purposively to achieve what is possible. At the same time, if we experience, and are inspired by, its connection with the deepest human dreams; if we rejoin the movement as we struggle, incarnating it anew while connecting ourselves with its millennia. Does not any moment of success, or even hope, allow us a glimpse of the heroes that have preceded us, and of our living and renewed links with them? It is a tragedy, a cause for lamentation, that wholeness – in the specific sense of being able to sustain a living link between hope and possibility – is impossible today. It is our goal, but we must accept living within the tension it generates by being both so unreachable and so real. Every authentic collective political action, fully felt, revives the entire dream of the race, of peace and freedom, of milk and honey. It must, and yet its hope will be disappointed.
Alternating bouts of energy and exhaustion are certainly inevitable today, but their severity and mutual incomprehension can be tempered by living in the tension generated by hope, engaging in a far more complex dialogue between two quite real planes, of reflection and action, despair and hope. We know that our enemies are real, perhaps gaining in strength, and that the struggles against them cannot even glimpse their turning points. But hope is real also, a force in our lives. Indeed it is our lives, in the sense of being our intention, our project. For example, at dusk on 26 June 1982, Israelis began to fill Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv to demonstrate against the war in Lebanon. They came from all over the country, tentatively, unsure how many of them there would be, some even afraid that right-wing thugs would outnumber them and violently disrupt their demonstration. It was a risk, but the risk dissolved when they looked across the square as it filled, seeing how many they were.8 Speaking to the 20,000 were parents of soldiers killed in Lebanon, Israeli and Palestinian leaders, artists, poets, actresses, students, professors. The following Saturday, four weeks after the invasion began, 40,000
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persons were expected at a second demonstration, and 100,000 came – this time to hear returning soldiers denounce the war they had been fighting. As their placards said they hoped to stop the war, to remove Begin and Sharon, to begin the process of reconciliation with the Palestinians. They failed.
But they did break the national consensus, legitimize Jewish criticism of Israeli policies, and show the world and themselves that significant numbers of Israelis stand ready to move towards peace. For a moment, among those people, peace was possible. To tens of thousands an Arafat trip to Jerusalem was not inconceivable. This Jewish community of peace has dissolved and recreated itself dozens of times since the late 1970s, grown and shrunk and grown again, but it remains real, today, on any today when it is remembered and recreated.
With it in mind we return, one final time, to the question that has dominated this Conclusion: how is it possible to retain hope in this mad world when we know so well that the community of peace fails, is frustrated, is defeated, and disperses once again? The question can be formulated more precisely from the perspective of action: when the movement recreates itself, as in New York on 12 June 1982, how can it do so with such joy knowing what it knows about its own fragility and the limits of its effectiveness?
Certainly all action, no matter how desperate its roots, must have hope as one of its structuring elements, to the degree that it seeks to transform the situation in which it takes shape. The redefinitions indicated above – of evil into enemy, of autonomous objectivities into fluid situations, are achievements in themselves. Memories of earlier effectiveness, even if of elsewhere, of another time, of other people, expand the horizon of even the most desperate. And then the very fact of acting against evil instead of submitting to it, of doing the right thing, lends a positive tone to actions with only the narrowest prospects of success.
Yet it is the slim prospect of success today, one conclusion from our analysis of social madness in our century, that has forced us to question the very meaning of hope again and again in this chapter. If it is so largely 'subjective', how does our hope differ from Mann's or Benjamin's? In our very last note we must extend our conclusions about the energizing and redefining effects of political action to the limit and emphasize a feature not explored thus far – its collective
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character.
Acting collectively not only redefines the situation: it does so in ways that transform the participants themselves, creating and allowing the experience of a totally different reality. Such a new reality was produced on 12 June 1982 by the nearly one million people who streamed into New York from all over the United States to demand an end to the threat of nuclear war. As I have already suggested, by coming together they created new possibilities of perception. In addition to the modes discussed earlier, their assemblage made possible the collective sharing of a collective problem: we are being threatened. Normally the isolated individual cannot experience this. Collective perception, the possibility of collective experience, reveals our world as ours in a way usually inaccessible to separate atoms, no matter how politicized. Those who filled Central Park that day, awed by their sheer numbers, were able to give voice and hearing to those layers of their experience and reality which normally remain closed, lacking appropriate categories of thought and feeling. These collective modes of experience and perception point to the peculiar reality created by our assemblage: we, a collective subject.9
We is the final note of this preface to hope, the subjective-objective force in the world which not only restructures habits of perception. and experience, but which changes the world itself. Participants on 12 June could not fail to be struck the moment they arrived by the superb self-organization of the demonstration, down to the slightest detail. One's bus arrived at a pre-designated location, marshals stood at the subways to tell people which way to go. It was, indeed, a self-organization aided by local officials, who seemingly had no choice but to assist the planners so that the hundreds of thousands could enter and leave the city smoothly. One had the sense that much of the business of New York came to a halt that day, allowing the demonstration to 'take over'. Could the awareness of their own collective power be missed by the participants? Certainly this was one reason for their great good cheer, connected as it was with their perception of how many and how diverse they were. On this level it was entirely appropriate that the sense of collectivity may have eclipsed their motivation for being there, and that for many the mere warmth of community was the strongest impression they carried home. The warmth with which strangers greeted each other – moving towards the demonstration, in restaurants around the city after-
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wards – was not just that of people sharing a goal. It was the warmth of a self-activating we; aware of their numbers and potential power, above all of a we sharing a specific goal: the peaceable kingdom. The widespread sense of joy no doubt sprang from this, the momentary appearance, among, between and through the demonstrations, of the peaceable kingdom.
Certainly it was only a demonstration, and equally certainly it failed in its avowed purpose. The later frustration, the defeat, even the tragedy cannot revoke the force of this momentary incarnation of the peaceable kingdom. We may be co-opted, but we are also intransigent; we may be defeated, but we are also defiant; we may be fooled, but these moments of our self-creation give us an irrefutable touchstone of truth. Certainly we have seen humans again and again choose evil – and madness – in response to desperate situations. We have seen our century grow madder – the progress of unreason. In the end, our reason to hope is that we have always existed and – until the end of the earth – will always recreate ourselves. Calling for sanity or social justice, peace or freedom, equality or democracy – or any combination or all of these – we will first seek to realize them simply by voicing our hope. Co-opted, fooled, defeated, we will return to protracted struggle and relearn its terrain.
Our Achievements
A second reason to hope is that we have accomplished so much. Our saltiest realism must acknowledge that the 12 June demonstration so awakened public consciousness and increased the pressure on the Reagan administration that every subsequent effort at escalation has become a major political struggle. And, self-consciously international in outlook, it effectively picked up the baton from the great European movements and brought it to the American side of the Atlantic.
The real historical advances in human social morality have occurred through such struggles. Slavery has been abolished, democratic rights won, certain elements of dignity and equality promised and achieved, wars ended, other wars forestalled – only because we have acted. Projected now desperately, now with confidence, in collective visions by movement after movement, sacrificed for, agitated for, partially achieved, then legitimized by law and custom, social progress has been made true
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each step of the way. Demonstrations, movements, revolutions in each case entail a transformation of subjective awareness into objective force: a collective subject growing conscious of its power, cumulatively creating a new reality. In spite of all qualifications, and even today under the mushroom cloud, the struggle continues. It seeks to extend, to expand this reality-in-the-making: men and women capable of creating and living in a world fit for human beings.
Learning from our Disasters
But can this hope be sustained against the other fact we have seen, that the apparently collective we led by the Bolsheviks degenerated into an apparatus attacking the whole people as enemies of the people. Or, more recently, against the Kampuchean disaster, or against the Vietnamese failure/inability to realize the peaceable kingdom. Another lesson: discouraged, defeated, belayed by our own deformation, dissolving again and again, we must relax the urge to compensate by burying our heads and acting ever more mindlessly and ritualistically – or, alternatively, by withdrawing into cynicism – when our situation rather calls upon us to persist while learning from our own history.
Our capacity for evil is one such lesson. Another, our final one, is that the disasters traced in this book need not be repeated if they are recognized, comprehended, and our awareness of them allowed to guide action in the future. I have, after all emphasized the vital role played by human subjectivity – the perceptual lenses, expectations and even ghosts that guide our actions. Can our subjectivities be educated by studying our history? Can we learn to shape our own history without succumbing to the disastrous madnesses so common to our century? Can we learn Marxism's lessons about remaining faithful to reality even as we seek to transform it? Such a hope has motivated every line of this study.
More than an article of faith, this hope derives its material reality from the way in which we have responded to the terrible events of the century. Even if it is not yet disentangled from the settler-colonialism and reliance upon imperialism in which it took shape, the Jewish 'Never Again!' has produced an epochal transformation of the Jewish people into collective subjects of their own history. At the same time, many of those Israelis who demonstrated against the invasion of Lebanon, in rejecting the killing done in their name, rose above distortions of the lessons of the Holocaust by refusing to identify themselves with actions many of them saw as Nazi-
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like.
A similarly ambiguous process has developed in response to Stalinism. Even the catastrophe in Kampuchea, Stalin's partial rehabilitation in the Soviet Union, and the failure of that society to really confront and undo its past cannot nullify the force Stalinism has acquired as a negative object lesson for other revolutionary parties and states. No longer is the Party, as hegemonic force, as authoritarian structure, a self-evident norm freely accepted by a significant proportion of those who seek social change. The New Left everywhere was characterized by new modes of organizing, of conducting meetings, of creating coalitions – of formulating theory and practice – once more, in an effort to avoid recreating the disasters of the past, in a commitment to keep democracy at the heart of the movement and of any society it might build. The libertarian lessons that Daniel Cohn-Bendit drew from his study of the Bolshevik revolution10 have yet to become victorious anywhere for more than a moment, but ideas of pluralism, of decentralization, of workers' control inspire and guide the new waves of activism.
The Vietnamese war bequeaths some of the same, as well as some very different lessons. Once again, it has reminded us of the error of equating one's own movement, here, given its peculiarities and priorities, with movements elsewhere, given their particular conditions of existence. The we is in-the-making but never complete; the movement is never a given, is always changing. Our wholehearted commitment to Vietnamese national liberation did not commit us to those forms, to that party. The era of the Comintern has passed, and one of its lessons has been to make us wary of heavens on earth. Our task, rather, is to learn the moral, political and intellectual meanings of critical support; or indeed, how to oppose one side of struggle without thereby identifying with its antagonist. Another lesson of the Vietnam war concerns the success of the fluid, if chaotic power of an anti-war movement that had no single centre. Its democratic lessons of local self-organization, pluralism and genuine coalition-building have been bequeathed to, and flourish in, the anti-nuclear movement today. Finally, and above all, the victory has taught the Vietnamese, and the whole world, that human beings may just possibly be more powerful than most of their machines. Next time, for survival's sake, the task may well be to combine victory with the triumph of a human order. Difficult as that sounds, will it be any more conceivable, say, than was the Vietnamese victory?
Taken together, these diverse lessons – others can be drawn, will be
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drawn – suggest that we, acting in the present, may indeed learn from the past to create a different future. In the process, aware of it or not, toe become little by little the cumulative conscience of humanity, our victories part of its acquired social structures and moral sense.
If our final victory is not foreordained, neither is our defeat. And so we fight on, sometimes grimly but some times joyously. There are, after all, many reasons for joy. Our own self-empowerment, our learning to appreciate each half-step of victory, our experiencing the richness and depth of the we – these are some of the joys of struggle. We wish it were not so, but today the commitment to sanity, to truth, to humanity, to survival, means doing battle. Accordingly, we must learn to cultivate the pleasures of collective action.