Then and Now

I was recently invited to give a talk at MIT on campus organizing and battling against Trumpism. This was because in 1965, I entered MIT as a Freshman and was thrown out three and a half years later. Would I talk about those times, differences between then and now, and possible lessons? The format was on-line interview so attendees in a room at MIT saw me answer questions on a movie theatre-like screen.

Were you political, in 1965, when you came to MIT?

No, I certainly wasn’t political, but that seriously understates it. In 1965, I believed in the virtue of everything around me. I gave society, as best I can remember, not a thought. I had barely a whiff of wider social concern.

So what about MIT politicized you? You became radical and very militant. How did that happen?

Just after I graduated High school, a student from MIT’s AEPi fraternity visited. He was a junior and we became friends. Well beyond my awareness, MIT fraternities sought to recruit some incoming students and, for whatever reasons, AEPi decided they wanted me. So this guy sought to become friends so I would join AEPi.

Fall came and I saw various houses to possibly join. I was especially wined and dined by AEPI, and chose to join. A few months later having gone through pledging, I’m to become a brother and there’s a ceremony where each incoming brother goes off with one or two upper class brothers who tell us things we didn’t earlier know.

I was told that during rush week AEPi tapped the phone I used and bugged the rooms I stayed in. They listened for things I didn’t like or felt missing. If I said there isn’t enough interest in physics, the next morning some hot shot physics student would take me aside and give the impression there was plenty of physics. If I felt, I’m into tennis and they don’t seem to care,  by 10 the next morning I’d by playing. They gave us what we wanted regardless.

When we heard that none of us rebelled. As far as I’m aware, nobody ever did in prior years either, nor at other fraternities. If two weeks into my freshman year they told me they tapped my calls to my girlfriend, and bugged my room and arranged my situation to induce me to join, I would have been furious and left. But since they told us after three months of hazing during which we pledges had to clean up the house every Friday night until 3 in the morning, we wanted to be part of what we had worked to be part of. On top of that, these were our friends. If anybody needed help with courses or even personal stuff, brothers helped. It was a pretty communal living situation. So by the time we learned how we had been manipulated, we alibied it away. But when I went home for the summer, I thought about what had been done and I decided to quit the fraternity.

I returned for my sophomore year and sat outside the house and told freshmen who were about to be wined, dined, bugged and tapped what was going on. In minutes a bunch of brothers emerged to physically stop me but another bunch realized if the first batch succeeded the publicity would be terrible and the administration would have to intervene. So the second batch stopped the first batch from getting to me until the police came and I was taken away.

A few days later I got a call from my father. He was at a nearby motel and would I come over and see him? I went and he’s in a room rented by the fraternity, and then starts a parade. First some freshmen, my classmates, urge me to stay in the fraternity because we’re all friends, but I’m not convinced. Then some upperclassmen fruitlessly do the same. After awhile graduates and the current senior office holders of AEPI arrive, and these older guys start being honest whereas the sophomores and even the juniors didn’t really know what was going on. So the last guys said to me of course you’re right, what we’re doing is maybe illegal. It’s certainly immoral and it’s arguably even disgusting. Except for one thing. We did it for you. You’re the beneficiary. You don’t just get into the house, your whole experience at MIT will be better. It’s done by us to benefit you. They had earlier planned out what organizations I was going to be part of at MIT. They saw it as them clearing a path for me to become a known public person at MIT. Their goal was for me to become the Undergraduate Association President when I was a senior.

You asked what about MIT politicized me? Well, one thing was what my AEPI experience taught about my gullibility and the brothers’ hypocrisy and how I began to understand institutional pressures. Another thing was Noam Chomsky. He was at MIT and became a very big factor in my life and the lives of nearly everyone I knew. And then there were other students in the emerging movements of the times. In any event, In a matter of months I went from apolitical naïveté to being angry, to being really angry, to dissenting, to being ideological, to being what we considered revolutionary.

What surprising things did you learn about MIT? 

Here was this world-class university, and I found the teaching pretty vapid. Faculty would often read a textbook to students. They didn’t get up in front of the room and say, okay, if you have any questions ask them, but what I’d like to do is talk to you about the work that people like me do. What life is like as a researcher, experimentalist or a theorist. How we use our knowledge. There was little of that, which struck me as very strange.

I also learned the extent to which liberals molded their perceptions to correspond to what they wanted to do regardless of facts. That too seemed strange, but undeniable. In a way It extended the AEPi experience. My classmates were good people. I thought I was a good person. So I had learned a good person could get sucked into a rabbit hole of peculiar commitments that were contrary to their own values and to their own underlying aspirations. That happened in the fraternities and i saw in the classrooms too.

The Undergraduate Association president had to give an incoming welcoming speech to the new freshman class. So the president of the university, Howard Johnson, gave a welcoming speech. Then I hopped up on the stage and gave my welcoming speech. I called MIT Dachau on the Charles. I directed militant anger at MIT, corporations, racism, and sexism. The freshmen hadn’t ever seen anything like this and I warned them what’s coming. Be with us or against us. We’re not going away.

I leave the stage and walk to leave the auditorium and a guy is standing at the exit, very spiffy looking, probably in his 30s or 40s and he comes toward me and it’s just like the movie, The Graduate. In the movie the guy says “plastics,” but my guy says “chemicals.”And I say what are you talking about? And he says I would like you to come back to Germany with me to become a vice president at my big chemical company, and I look at him like I’m dealing with a lunatic, but it’s evident that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Why was that a lesson? Because this guy had just heard me curse out capitalism, and thus what he was offering me, but he thought he could buy me off in two minutes. That’s how confident these guys are that their money and their wealth and their power is so attractive that it will buy anybody off.

Chomsky in a talk or class or something explained how Harvard graduated the money grubbing, power grabbing Masters of the Universe while MIT graduated socially backward, amoral, but very competent engineers to fulfill the Master’s wishes. Because I often visited friends at Harvard it immediately rang true. The art, the rugs, the rooms, the classes, the culture of the place, compared to MIT the different agenda was obvious once stated. So I visited Boston University, and saw a new set of differences. Harvard was a finishing school where you made contacts and learned how to dress for success. MIT was a long gray machine that spat out obedient technocrats. Hey, Henry K., you want smart bombs to kill peasants and bomb dikes. Sure. I’m on it. And if the master were to ask instead for hand held rifles that Vietnamese peasants could use to shoot down B-52s, again, sure—but of course the master would never request that. And BU and some other schools I visited: huge classes, still less opulent housing, perfect to prepare students to be low level functionaries. And of course before all that is public school to teach most of its students to obey orders and endure boredom.

How did you and others organize a movement at MIT?

We held teach-ins, mostly about Vietnam, and we stayed up all night mimeographing leaflets to put under doors and hand to people to convey information about the war and MIT. We asked how can we build a movement able to win at MIT, and we decided we had to reach the student body which, however, initially hated us. So we picked out actual specific students to gain credibility to organize other students: the best player on the basketball team, the well-known student on campus, dorm presidents, the president of the interfraternity conference. And, as we grew, we did direct actions.

MIT had a rather antisocial environment, so one direct action we did was to take couches and chairs out of Department offices and put them in relevant places in MIT’s really long, sterile corridors so people could sit and talk. Then we hung on walls large sheets of paper with a marker attached, and on the paper we put a quote, provocative claim, or maybe a demand, and we invited people to add their own thoughts and talk about them. As we grew we also added marches, a riot, less clever stuff like that.

What mistakes did you make?

All of these answers could go on much longer, but one mistake was that while we effectively altered people’s consciousnesses we didn’t as effectively win institutional changes to sustain their new consciousnesses into the future. We changed minds about Indochina, corporations, MIT and the way the world works, but we didn’t change institutions that would later reclaim those minds.

The universe of people relevant for dissent and resistance in those days had two main parts. One part was overtly anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, feminist, anti-racist and so on. The other part was people who discovered society’s lies but rebelled by trying to step outside the usual way of living. They weren’t overtly political, but were highly dissident in the sense that they rejected life as it was known and tried to create alternative ways to interact. We political folks did too much of our organizing among the counterculture folks. Why? Because they were already halfway to us. Our mistake was we didn’t do enough organizing in other hostile constituencies we really did need to reach.

When we organized against the war, people would sometimes deny its horrors, or say if they were happening it was on behalf of the Vietnamese to fight the evil communists. And as we would slowly peel away their many rationales for inaction, we would come to an underlying reason, which was, and I quote, “people are crap.” War, violence, and exploitation. That stuff exists because people are crap.”

People would also ask, “what are you for? What do you want? Why should I join your movement when it is not obvious to me what you’re seeking?” Some meant that sincerely, but we always took it as “what are you going to replace war with? What are you going to replace capitalism with? You can’t answer, so get out of my face. I want to go back to class.” We didn’t hear the sincere and justified aspect when people asked what is all this time and effort and struggle going to yield that’s better than what we have? And we also often couched everything in negative terms, which only added to that problem.

When we tried to shut something down, or to occupy something, or even just hold a big rally, too often we would judge our efforts by the parameters of the event. Did we shut the thing down? Did we occupy something? Was our rally really big?—and we didn’t pay sufficient attention to the consequences of what we did for the people doing it, the people who experienced it, and the people who saw it? To the extent we underplayed future consequences and overplayed the immediate events, we got a trajectory of activity which didn’t develop a large, committed, persistent, visionary movement.

I know you’ve written about Weatherman and factions and the rest of it. Were you guys all congenial with each other or were you fighting with each other?

Weatherman tried to recruit me and Robin Hahnel, a close friend, so they asked us to come along on an action. These were people we knew they took us to recruit us, sort of like a fraternity, except we weren’t wined and dined. On the subway going to our destination, one of the Weathermen stood on a chair to get everyone’s attention and gave a speech. He screamed, “country sucks, kick ass.” Four words. He was oblivious to the impact on the subway readers. He thought himself a highly committed revolutionary.

We got to the event, a mixer, which was a dance where come as a single and you mix so people get to meet each other. Robin and I look at each other like what the hell are we doing here? And then the Weathermen show us. They circulate around the room and break up the couple’s dancing. They separate them chanting “smash monogamy.” They thought we’d be impressed. That’s what I mean by doing things that you think evidence true radicalism while ignoring actual consequences.

Soon after, the Boston chapter of Weatherman went to a working class beach and planted in the sand a tall NLF flag. Regardless of what the people there thought of the war, a lot of them had brothers or friends in the army in Vietnam or dead, or they were getting ready to go themselves.

What were the Weathermen doing? They told me that to organize working people they had to prove to them they were not just gutless college students who didn’t know how to fight. So they planted their flag, formed a circle around it and invited a fight to show they were serious. They thought it would be admired and after they and those who fought them would go to a bar and talk politics. They got beat up and that was the end of it, but the point is their divorce from reality.

One really late night I hear a knock at the apartment where I was living. I answer the door, and about ten Weathermen march in. They act like I don’t know them, and they whispered can we stay here for a while? They said, “we are the Viet Cong. Hide us.” So I could have concluded they were lunatics, but I knew they were not lunatics. These were committed, courageous, in some respects very knowledgeable and caring people who were, however, way down a rabbit hole. So I learned a lot from all that about being too sure of one’s own wisdom and being blind to reality.

What other lessons were learned?

We learned about what we in those days called the “totality of oppression.” It meant racism, sexism, corporate exploitation, and authoritarianism, the whole system we were against. It later informed my whole political belief system, but in those days another mistake was seeing one or another aspect as above all others.

We learned what wins demands. It was not educating the MIT administration, much less the U.S. government or head of General Motors. We had to coerce them. But what could achieve that? What could coerce elites who have the authority to make the changes we were demanding? We realized we had to impose costs that they didn’t want to bear. We had to threaten that if they didn’t give in they would lose more than if they did give in. To not give in would cause our movement to keep growing and diversifying, and they would lose more. We realized if you’re trying to win a stoplight at a corner, you’re trying to win a higher minimum wage, or you’re trying to stop your campus collaborating in genocide with Israel, no static movement would convince the authorities they had to give in. Growth was the real threat.

Then there was the issue of “by any means necessary,” and at first we thought it meant do violence, do whatever you want. But we later realized that it was more subtle. Because of the role I had I would often talk in a dorm to 50 or 100 students assembled to listen, and I would often get asked questions about violence. Would you burn down a library to end the war? I would answer of course I would, and so would you to prevent millions of lost lives and massive uprooting of people. But it’s a stupid question. Burning down a library would not only not help end the war it would make it harder to build a movement that can end the war. And therein was the “by any means necessary” lesson. By any means necessary didn’t mean do anything that’s warranted. It meant do things that are warranted but also necessary—and stupid choices were not necessary choices.

Another lesson we learned was the importance of movement culture. Political insight was not just a multi-paragraph analysis of injustice, or even, had we had it, a multi-paragraph exposition of vision. It was also how you interact. I was on a panel at a Green Party conference around 1990 and when I wasn’t talking, I was thinking about how many people had been in the vicinity of the left since 1960. Not how many had been staunch activists, but how many had simply come into the vicinity of the left. They were in the anti-war movement or even just near it. They had a radical teacher. They were in the no-nukes movement, the womens’ movement, a labor struggle, at a March or demo, and so on and so forth. And I thought to myself, 10 million is a low estimate. Then I asked myself, where are those 10 million people? Once in the gravitational field of the left, shouldn’t people be drawn further in and remain a part of it? The movement in 1990 didn’t have those 10 million people. And then I thought wait a minute, if those 10 million people hadn’t left, they would have attracted other people. So it’s not where are the 10 million people, it’s  where are 30 or 40 million people?

I realized with a jolt that what I called the stickiness problem was a lot more important than most of what I ever talked about. Instead of attracting people in its vicinity to become and stay members, the left, which is supposed to be good, moral, humane, and caring, repelled people. I realized partly this was the movement being insufficiently good on race and gender and not sufficiently clear on vision, but that it was also the movement being insufficiently good on class. Yet we understood capitalists. We were strong on that. So what was it?

I taught in a prison for a while a very radical course on modern American society which about 50 prisoners attended. When I discussed capitalists, people agreed, but there was no passion. When I discussed doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, managers, wardens and the whole set of people I call the coordinator class, and I described it as people who have a monopoly on empowering positions and who use that monopoly to get way more income, status and influence than other disempowered working people, passions exploded. The scale and intensity of class consciousness about the coordinator class was eye-opening. Working people never directly encountered owners. Certainly not a big capitalist. But working people did encounter doctors, lawyers, engineers and managers and did encounter their thinking themselves to be superior.

So I learned just as you can’t have a racist movement that’s going to sufficiently welcome and elevate blacks in the United States and you can’t have a sexist movement that’s going to sufficiently attract and elevate women, the same holds for class. So this awareness is crucial for addressing movement culture, behavior, and policies to make them elevate working people and not just coordinator class people.

We get the need to reach out, but how do we do that and not compromise? And how do we communicate but not use our language?

I think a lot of people think to seek a reform is to compromise. But to fight for a reform can make people’s lives better and provide the opportunity to learn more. What’s bad is to fight for a reform and then go home. What needs to happen to not compromise is to say what you really want, to say what you really believe, and to fight for attainable reforms always in a way designed to raise consciousness of greater gains and to develop structure and commitment to fight on for those gains.

Regarding language, left thinking isn’t like microbiology or quantum mechanics. There’s no need for arcane language. To use words that don’t convey what you really mean will cause people you’re trying to communicate with to think that you want something you don’t want or, alternatively, to not have any idea what the hell you’re saying and to think you’re obnoxious and elitist. It’s essential to communicate, but to also avoid in-group language.

How do you view this moment? 

A lot of what I hear now, is people asking about Trump’s victory and the current moment who’s at fault but looking in every direction except at themselves, and I find that very frustrating. I started in the movement in 1966. So for almost 60 years I, and whoever among my cohorts stuck with it, have been trying to organize a left. Yet half the working class voted for Donald Trump. How was that possible after all that organizing? I think we have a lot of culpability and it pays to recognize that, to do better.

What I see now is that Trump developed support and took over and transformed the Republican Party. And now Trump won an election by only 1%, and with a constituency only part of whom are all the way with Donald Trump. A lot voted about inflation and about feeling removed from influence. They voted about the fact that MAGA and Trump gave them a sense of being able to impact society. They voted for lots of reasons and so I think a lot of his support is unstable. He’s got a base that’s not going anywhere, and it partly involves racism and sexism, but significantly involves fear, alienation, cynicism and wrong-headed hope that this strong man will do something beneficial. But beyond that base, lots of trump voters are soft supporters.

AOC made visible that there were a lot of people in her district who voted for Trump for president and for her for representative, and we have to think about that. There are also a lot of people who describe themselves as supporting Trump, but say they would have liked to vote for Sanders.

I don’t know if I’m right, but I feel Trump has made perfectly clear that he means to reconstruct the government to be compatible with fascist repression. And I think he’s either going to try and do it all at once or he’s going to try and do it step by step, where he starts by deporting prisoners, and then people who have been accused or already tried. And he starts with cutting departments and trying to reconstruct the infrastructure of the government, but not first Social Security and the education department, but first agencies people aren’t very familiar with. And each time he succeeds in some relatively modest step, he will celebrate it as a gigantic victory for his people and he will say that the pain that arises when he institutes tariffs or the strife and so on are all a function of the fact that he hasn’t yet dealt with his enemies—and then he will start doing that. So I feel that there’s an urgency to stop his fascism before it gets entrenched.

This piece first appeared on Znet.