Editor's Blog

By Sam Diener, Peacework Co-Editor

At the opening ceremony on Wednesday June 27, 2007, the speaker I looked most forward to hearing was C. T. Vivian, the legendary civil rights activist and brilliant nonviolent strategist.

Some of what he said was marvelous, including a challenge to us to work for fundamental, revolutionary social change '“ to reclaim liberty, reestablish voting rights, and focus on the long-haul work of ending poverty in the US and around the world. He said, 'The thing about being a revolutionary is that you can' t be happy in a world in which people are oppressed. You can' t stand it. You have to do something.'

Yet, Vivian' s legacy of heroism can not render his remarks immune to critique. Below the fold...

He claimed, for example, that in the US 1-3% of the population controls almost 100% of the wealth. In fact, according to Edward Wolff, author of the book, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It, and an economist at NYU, interviewed in Multinational Monitor, the top 5% in the US owned 59% of all wealth. The disparity in reality is appalling. We don't need to exaggerate. When we' re not accurate with our own facts, it undermines our credibility.

But a larger problem was his uncritical embrace of a romantic view of Castro and Mao, without nary a word of critique. He quoted Che' s famous saying, that true revolutionaries are motivated by love (although Vivian incorrectly attributed it to Castro), and described in admiring terms Castro' s example as a person of privilege who successfully waged revolution. Similarly, he glowingly described Mao going into the countryside in the Long March to listen to and learn from the people how to wage revolution.

This is not the basis for creating Another World, just a rehash of the politics of replacing exploitative repressive capitalist men with guns with exploitative and repressive pseudo-socialist men with guns.

By exploitative I mean that both these capitalist and so-called socialist leaders repress worker' s democracy and attack (or in Castro and Mao' s case, destroy) trade unions, so that captains of the economy can impose conditions on workers.

If Rev. Vivian was alone in this, it would be less consequential, but of course he is not. At the USSF opening march, for example, there was a contingent from World Can' t Wait (a front group, along with Not In Our Name, for the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party) and from the Trotskyist Workers World Party (who support the Castro regime, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, among other repressive positions) and some of its front groups, International ANSWER and the International Action Center. I know many folks with World Can' t Wait and ANSWER are doing good work and aren' t necessarily fully aware of the RCP' s and WWP' s controlling roles. But, with all that has been revealed over the years about the mass murders committed by the Maoist dictatorship (tens of millions killed, particularly during collectivization, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution), how can people in 2007 still call themselves Maoists? It' s an ongoing mystery to me,

With regard to Cuba, I believe it is the responsibility of US activists to pull the US out of Cuba, and to be aware of the importance of reversing the history of US colonial occupation and decades-long aggression. The US should close down the prison, and then pull the base out, of Guantanamo Bay. I don' t understand, though, how activists such as Vivian can quote, approvingly, the idea that revolutionaries are motivated by love while ignoring that Castro has installed a dictatorial regime in Cuba for over four decades? See also Eduardo Galeano's piece reprinted in Peacework about the tragedy of Castroite repressiveness.

Fundamentally, I have two intertwined but opposite fears about these groups. My more realistic concern, because I know it happens often, is that these groups will drive many potential allies away from us, people who come to a rally or march for the first time for example, are committed to freedom, who want to work for anti-repressive social change, but who mistakenly believe these folks represent the whole spectrum of the movement, or who don' t understand why the rest of us allow our message of creating a world of peace and justice to be swamped and undermined by people and organizations who are advocating neither. We need to attract more people to the movement, not drive people away, if Another World is going to be Possible. More fundamentally, this is not just a problem of public relations, but a problem of the fundamental ethical imperative of speaking up for justice everywhere, and of articulating a liberatory vision of social change which deserves support.

My second fear is more unrealistic (as John Lennon said, in his song, Revolution, 'But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.') but its that these folks might somehow actually succeed at getting some power (after all, they have in other countries, including China and Cambodia, after starting out as fringe groups), and then would act consistently with their ideology, and unleash the repression their dictatorial leaders advocate.

I agree with Rev. Vivian that to be revolutionary means that we shouldn't be happy, or silent, when people are oppressed. I believe this includes our responsibility not to be silent when human rights are violated anywhere, starting in our own country, of course, but not excluding from our moral imagination people anywhere in the world.

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