Part I: Go with Thoreau or the CIO? Free Your Mind As Well

From Alchemically Braindamaged, "Amplified Reality for Dummies"

( http://uroboros.wordpress.com/2005/08/04/112317738201331379/ ):

it’s an article of faith amongst most of us that we operate from a more attuned sense of awareness to the world and it’s happenings than the guy who sits there numbing himself with reality TV and junk food. Which is fine but it raises the question of what you’re doing with all that extra awareness? Are you using it to find reasons to be scared, anxious, angry, oppressed and hopeless? Or are you using it to find reasons to be open, hopeful, ecstatic, loving and inspired? Is the world a good place at every turn, or a threatening and evil place?

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I've been wondering lately, off and on, about a few conundrums (conundra?) of the proper direction of politically "subversive" activities -- a.k.a. hippie stuff.

1. Should we go with Thoreau or the CIO? That is, should our resistance to capitalism include a refusal to provide jobs for workers? This question was raised for me by an essay in Harper's entitled "The Spirit of Disobedience," written by Illinois State University professor Curtis White (pages 31-40).

To be fair, White supports an ideal in which 'we can confront work in a way that reconnects us spiritually with human "fundamentals."' (40). This sounds close enough to an opposition to "wage slavery" that a unionite can dig it. Also to be fair to White, I cannot fault him for criticizing Marx, 'cause God knows Marx deserves criticism from even the most steadfast labor radical. However, what really bugs me is a passage in the essay. I will quote it below, and watch out for White's quote of Emerson within my own quote of White, as well as for the bold type (but not capitals) that is my own emphasis, not White's:

There is a line in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men that begins to capture my sense of what is necessary to confront our culture of duty and legality: "What is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse." So the question we might ask of the future is, "When will we again share the same impulse?" Now, this might sound like a merely self-absorbed wondering after and waiting for the next zeitgeist, the next Age, the return of the '60s counterculture. It will certainly disappoint the more practical and ideological on the left. But I would contend that what is needed is not simply the overthrowing of the present corrupt system in the name of an alternative political machinery that will provide something like "authentic participatory democracy. The appeal of this familiar leftist position is that it can tell you what needs to be done NOW: Take to the streets. Overthrow state power. But I think that part of our reluctance to share this particular revolutionary impulse is that we remember the little Lenins and their big ideas, and we remember where these guys led us: group gropes on the Weathermen bus as a prelude to bombing a post office. Or, worse than that, endless boring meetings with the next "progressive" Democratic candidate who is going to "turn this country around" and "return it to the people." Right. All you really need to ask the John Kerrys or Howard Deans of the world is where they stand on free-market trade issues. They're all ultimately for it, the whole complex scheme of World Banks, NAFTA, WTO, etc. And they're for it out a sense of duty to "national interest," "jobs for working people," or whatever other shameful thing it is that they use to paper over violence. The rest--corporatism, militarism, environmental disaster, human disaster--follows automatically.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Since when are "jobs for working people" a "shameful thing"? How dare White pass himself off as someone the left should look to if he dismisses the actual needs of actual working people so damn casually?

This passage starts out good, from my standpoint. The thing is, I don't think we have to necessarily choose between taking to the streets and freeing our minds. I agree with White that too much emphasis on what to do tactically can and most likely would lead us the way of either Lenin or John Kerry, and that we do need to work on what White calls "a return to the fundamentals of being human." (39). I am glad White refuses to be sucked in by either the temptation of the Democratic Party and its global-capitalist apologists, or by the temptation of bombing post offices. Furthermore, I think consciousness raising and engaged Buddhism and Ralph Waldo Emerson are the shizz-nit. In fact, I have very little to say against most of that paragraph of White's essay.

For awhile, I've liked to tell myself that "the revolution is every breath" -- in part to justify myself for not rushing to the barricades, yes, and in part to console myself for not knowing which barricades to rush to -- but also because I believe that how one lives one's own life is an important part of bringing a "revolution" of values to the world. I just don't see where White gets off both dismissing the need for participatory democracy and, even worse, calling "jobs for working people" something "shameful".

It's one thing to call for the revolution to be inner as well as outer, and for a rejection of greed. It's a whole other bag of organic potatoes to just totally wave off the bread-and-butter issues facing working people. That'll really swell the ranks of the Reagan Democrats here in the 21st century, now won't it? Jeez, mister college professor, could you possibly do any more to alienate regular paycheck-to-paycheck Americans from the left than they already are?

"Free your mind and your ass will follow," says the old saying (was that George Clinton who first said that, or who was it?). I believe that freeing your mind is at least a necessary path to pursue if you want to change the world and shit; at most it could be argued that you need to free your mind before you even start changing the world, or else you'll either be coopted like Kerry or corrupted in your opposition like the Weathermen. However, I'm afraid that if we all wait until we reach Nirvana to take to the streets, we'll let social injustice pass us by. Enlightenment is said to take countless reincarnations over eons to attain. What do we do in the meantime?

There seem to be so many wrong ways to go in terms of politics that there doesn't seem to be any right way -- not even the choice of not choosing. Go one way, and you're Stalin. Go another way, and you're a Democratic-Party sellout to the capitalists. Go still another way, and you're just another Curtis White, and the workers whose jobs you so cavalierly dismissed the need for will kick your pansy ass and burn down your cabin. Of course, you could always be conservative, but that makes my stomach turn, too. It's like how I can wonder at the basic sanity of the various subculture groups made fun of by Encyclopedia Dramatica (www.encyclopediadramatica.com ) and still feel that they're somehow preferable to being normal.

Again I state the conclusion I used to make to resolve this debate with myself over internal vs. external change: that both are necessary and complimentary. But is this true?

On the one hand, I feel like joining a union picket line or IMF protest might be yet one more thing that would make me a bad Buddhist (if that's what I should be). On the other hand, I feel like being a true Buddhist as Gautma meant might lead me down the path of "pie in the sky when you die" that stifles actual dissent, and thus make the Curtis Whites just a different type of John Kerry.