At the US Social Forum 2007, in the city that hosts CNN and Coke, in
hotel venues where debutantes ironically were on parade, the
progressive community stood tall and steadfast, proud and capable. The
forum’s over 900 sessions were truly diverse in those presenting and
those attending. Indeed, I cannot remember - going all the way back to
an also highly diverse Black Panther Party Constitutional Convention
held in Philadelphia in September 1970 - any other large leftist event
in the U.S. as consistently multi-cultural as USSF 2007. More, I can
remember very few that were as gender and sexuality balanced. And the
USSF 2007 even had youth in abundance, a feature sorely lacking in
recent activist conferences.

I spent most of my time at the conference following two main themes:
SDS and Solidarity Economics. SDS, standing for Students for a
Democratic Society, was re-born a bit over a year ago and has been
growing rapidly since. At the USSF perhaps 75 of its members were
present and they did a few sessions as well as attending many others.
What I saw of them gave me great hope, and it was informed hope, I
think, not Pollyanna hope. To start, they had a couple of sessions on
intergenerational organizing, one of which I attended. The panel had
six participants, three from today’s SDS and three from SDS and the
Panthers from decades ago. The latter group were quite excellent, I
thought, which was quite an achievement because as they themselves
wisely and comprehensively noted, when you put together a bunch of
activists from back then, with all their baggage - not to mention the
residues of confused allegiances born then and in many cases barely
transcended since - you often get something unseemly or even downright
ugly. But not with these three participants; they were eloquent,
moving, and self critically humble. But even so, the other three folks
on the panel, the three SDS members from today, trumped the old
timers. The youth could reasonably be expected to have more buzz and
jazz, more energy and militancy. But that wasn’t their only advantage.
They seemed also to have more sense of themselves, and especially more
sense of the tasks that now need doing. They seemed intent on
unrelentingly mastering whatever approaches are required to succeed. I
don’t know where they have accumulated the wisdom and confidence they
seem to embody, and I don’t want to imply there aren’t problems as
well, but hope is birthing anew with these young folks.

SDS also participated in a panel put on by the War Resisters League on
what it would take for the anti war movement to end the war in Iraq.
This had an SDS member as the moderator, asking questions. The
panelists - I think there were seven - would reply to the questions
asked, and would then discuss them with each other, and then field a
new question. The panelists represented a range of major antiwar
organizations, vets against the war, UFPJ, Witness for Peace, etc.
Among them they must have had over a hundred and fifty years of left
organizing experience. Nonetheless, it was both sad but also inspiring
to realize that the host’s questions were beyond their ken. Each
question, well conceived, succinctly put, and utterly on target
regarding movement problems and possibilities, was focused on
developing overarching strategy in accord with both needs and assets.
Questions that should have been familiar fare for highly experienced
panelists elicited long pauses, often with a little chuckling before
anyone would hazard a reply. Replies, when they came, often had
insightful content but also repeatedly side-stepped the questions.
What was going on was a new generation intent on very seriously and
ruthlessly evaluating what we have done so as to find problems that
can be corrected to actually win change rather than simply fight the
good fight and lose, met representatives of movement organizations
that for too long have narrowly attended to day to day pressures
without adopting an overarching viewpoint. Further, of the panelists,
the one who had the least prior political background, an Iraq war vet,
seemed to be most in tune with the motives of the moderator. The hope,
again, seemed to reside with the young, as it hasn’t for quite a few
decades now. This is very good news.

My second substantial involvement was with a group sponsoring a set of
sessions around what they call Solidarity Economics or SE. SE is a
large umbrella project that exists around the world, most notably in
Latin America and Southern Europe. Recently, roughly a dozen folks
have begun spiritedly trying to bring SE to the United States.
Solidarity Economics, as defined abroad and imported here, seeks to
incorporate within its broad network pretty much any project or
activity that plausibly sees itself as furthering at least one of the
broad values characterizing the entire SE community. These values
seem, from presentations and some essays to be solidarity,
sustainability, equity, participation, diversity, and democracy (or
perhaps even self management). The idea seems to be that if an effort
is furthering any of these values; it can become a part of SE. Thus,
if even a large capitalist firm, for example The Body Shop, is making
strides in one respected dimension, it can come on board. An
experiment like participatory budgeting, now operative not only in
Brazil but in many cities around the world, or alternative currency
experiments popular in some parts of the U.S. such as upstate New
York, or a company that claims to engage only in fair trade or to be
ecologically concerned, can join. And obviously so too can co-ops,
much less what I would call classless (or pareconish) firms that seek
internal equity and self management. Finally, within this broad range
of projects that can reside under the Solidarity Economics umbrella,
there is not only a degree of shared agenda but, importantly, each
project is expected to urge others to do better on matters they are
not yet addressing well.

This idea of a broad community of projects banding together and
striving to improve economic life seems to me to be a good way of
developing a sense of shared mission, exploration, and debate among
folks trying to improve the economy - and one could imagine a similar
approach on other fronts such as family, culture, and politics, or
even in more narrow domains, say education, health, science, or art.
But beyond the benefits, a concern I had, as I listened to this
fledgling U.S. attempt at SE, was that the desire to retain those
participants who have most assets, such as larger businesses, will
cause a severe blunting of forward-oriented discussion regarding what
a desirable economy ought to be and what steps ought to be undertaken
now to move toward one. I feared that SE advocate/members would hold
back on their criticisms of less progressive SE projects, causing
still flawed and even horrible aspects of larger scale member projects
to go uncommented for fear of alienating those members. I worried that
as a byproduct this laxity would produce rationalizations and habits
that would constrict even the best participants’ aspirations and
finally their thoughts. My own attempt to contribute to the SE
discussions at USSF 2007 was to urge that participatory economic
projects that reject private ownership of capital, corporate divisions
of labor, remuneration for property, power, or output, hierarchical
decision making, and markets, should be welcome in SE, including
welcoming pareconists who respectfully point out that real solidarity
requires fundamental changes, and that small positive steps are truly
exemplary only insofar as they aid a continuing, diversifying, and
enlarging process - rather than being end points in themselves.

My detailed involvements with SDS and SE aside, getting back to the
forum at large, it was noteworthy that there were no stars at the
USSF, or, to put it more accurately, that there were only stars. The
forum demonstrated that the old civil rights wisdom that we are the
leaders we have been waiting for is not only correct, but we are also
the stars we have been waiting for. And in Atlanta the spectacle of
10,000 stars produced a lot of energy.

The component sessions of USSF 2007 were varied and insightful. Panels
focused on every side of life including economy, polity, race and
culture, gender and kinship, ecology, war and peace, and international
relations, and then, within each broad area there were myriads of more
focused sessions addressing everything from housing to taxes, income
distribution to prisons, legislation to demonstrations, education to
art, Iraq to Venezuela to Palestine, and much more.

It is a monumental understatement to say that the organizers deserve
great thanks for the scope and quality of their efforts. Attendees
also deserve praise for travelling to Atlanta, heat and all,
overcoming the feeling that "this gathering won’t be worth it, this is
the U.S., after all, and it can’t happen here." In 2007, to have hope,
faith, fire, and passion, is not the movement norm. Indeed, I am
embarrassed to admit that I was almost in the camp that didn’t go to
Atlanta for USSF 2007, but hope prevailed, and I ultimately went - and
hope was borne out.

Still, accolades for the organizers aside, in a commentary for
activists what always matters most is not praising ourselves, however
deserved the praise may be, but finding problems that we can correct
to do better next time. And while I think the faults of USSF 2007 had
little or nothing to do with the organizers’ efforts, there were,
nonetheless, at least a few faults for us all to work on fixing in the
future.

There were 900 sessions in three days and I can only report on the
relatively few sessions I could attend, look in on, or at least hear
about from others. My impressions, therefore, may be artifacts of a
narrow experience, and if they are wrong on that account, or any
other, my apologies.

First, in nearly all the sessions I attended or heard about, those
presenting were from diverse race, gender, and sometimes even class
backgrounds, with wide age variance too. This was also the case for
audiences, which for all but a particular subset of the sessions were
often even a majority people of color. The subset of sessions that
were differently composed, however, was troubling. Thus, a panel on
getting beyond neoliberalism, though diverse in its speakers’
backgrounds had a nearly entirely white audience. The same was true
for panels I spoke at or attended on economic vision, on strategy for
the anti-war movement, and on directions for alternative media. I
heard as well that this was true for many panels that were explicitly
and primarily on vision or even strategy including crossing bounds of
specific focuses. In contrast, sessions I attended or heard reports
about that addressed more pinpointed areas of concern and conflict,
whether it was housing, water, income, or Katrina, were a majority and
sometimes a large majority people of color. The only way to
distinguish sessions from one another was by their titles. The
schedule didn’t tell who was presenting at each session, though it did
indicate a sponsoring organization. In any case, as best I could
discern, the issue wasn’t the composition of panelists, which was
almost universally culture- and gender-balanced. The issue was the
topics the panels addressed. My impression, admittedly anecdotal, was
that when the focus was overtly about longer term vision and strategy
and exploring direction and methods for the left writ large, the
audience became more white. In contrast, when the focus highlighted
specific currently pressing economic and social problems, including
their roots and implications and also how to address them right now,
the people of color representation was higher.

One possible explanation for this is that the people of color
constituencies were correct in staying away from the broader sessions
because attention to broader matters of goals and strategies for large
movements have typically been hot air largely or even wholly unrelated
to actual conditions and possibilities that people can act on, and
therefore not worth one’s time. But another possibility is that such
explorations aren’t, or shouldn’t be, hot air. Due to being centrally
important, they should be centrally insightful and relevant both to
the long and to the short term. If so, we are left with the problem of
improving vision and strategy discussions including expanding their
range of sponsorship and participants. If, as I believe is the case,
vision and strategy are essential, then we should respond to poor past
efforts in those directions with more and better new efforts, not
less. Additionally, potential participants who bring to the table
diverse comprehension both of what we now endure and also of what
better relations we desire, need to be involved at every level -
whether we are talking about working people, women, gays, people of
color, or young people. For activists repelled by irrelevance and
academic posturing to avoid overarching vision and strategy reminds me
a bit of activists repelled by authoritarianism leaving overarching
vision and strategy to Leninists on grounds that vision and strategy
writ large can be hot air, un-rooted, sectarian, authoritarian, and so
on - thereby increasing rather than diminishing the likelihood that
vision and strategy will have all those flaws.

Another pattern, also familiar from other social forums and also in
part correct and sensible, but at the same time also in part self
defeating, was the extent to which people coming to share experiences
were overwhelmingly interested mostly or even only in their own
priority concerns. Housing activists frequented, at least in my
anecdotal polling and querying, housing panels. Women doing feminist
work frequented feminist panels. Young SDSers frequented SDS panels.
Coming from New Orleans tended to cause one to spend more time on
Katrina sessions. With a background of years spent working on ending
the war, one attended mostly or even only anti war panels.

On the one hand, what could be more sensible then this kind of
specialization? All social forums are massive gatherings of folks
often separated by great distance, or even just by lack of connection
within a shared city. Attendees go to the forum largely to get
information, ideas, and connections that will aid the work they do.
Attendees thus focus their energies on the sessions related to the
work they do, feeling that these are the sessions where they can meet
others with related ideas, learn of possible new ways to tackle
problems they face, find help, etc. On the other hand, however, if a
main problem for the left as a whole is a mammoth fragmentation and
unrelenting insularity of contending components, then this pattern of
being most interested in one’s own focused area of involvement
reproduces our distance from one another, rather than helping to
overcome it.

Third and last in my little list of hurdles to overcome next time,
there is the matter of what we want and how we expect to get it. Under
the surface of USSF-2007’s discussions, debates, and celebrations, I
think it was clear that very nearly everyone attending would be
ecstatic to become part of a growing, militant movement that not only
had very clearly green, anti racist, anti sexist, anti heterosexist,
anti authoritarian, anti imperialist, and anti capitalist politics,
but that also had very explicitly positive aims on each of those axes
– a revolutionary movement seeking immediate gains also aimed toward
transcendent transformation in the future. Yet despite this
subterranean desire, this sentiment, at least in it most unequivocal
form, was rarely voiced. It was as if everyone was afraid of the
R-word: Revolution. How many revolutionaries have to get together,
congenially, mutually supportively, before we will openly admit what
we are? At any rate, I would have very much liked to have heard a
talk, perhaps at the final plenary session, more or less like what I
offer below, to intellectually and emotively “spin” the event in a way
that was otherwise, I think, implicit, but not explicit.

So, imagine a speaker at the closing session of a social forum taking
the microphone and with unrestrained passion addressing the audience
more or less as follows. On reading it, consider if you agree that
putting out in the most prominent and aggressive fashion this type of
sentiment would be a big step forward. If so, let’s make it happen,
repeatedly, at forum after forum, though more eloquently, more
passionately, and with more insight than the hypothetical words below
convey.

A (Hypothetical) Closing Talk for a Social Forum

Welcome to this incredible final plenary gathering of so many fired up
people committed to social change. What an incredible sea of
consciousness and courage. What incredible inspiration we can take
from our exciting time together. What incredible potential we can see
here in our allies all around this great hall.

We must be vigorous, self critical, and steadfast, together - but
where are we going?

We must work together, with assertive force - but how do we reach our
destination?

We must together advance to our destination - but why?

At this great forum these past few days, I found as I am sure you all
found too, that there exists an emerging set of shared views on where
we are going, how we will get there, and why we will make the effort.
Can we together solidify these emerging shared views into lasting
unity? Can we solidify these emerging shared views into mutually
supportive activism that we all commit to? The shared views that can
unite us, at least as I have heard them shaping up in my travels
through this forum, might sound something like this, once we all
together say them aloud:

We are trying to create a new and vastly better world for ourselves
and for our offspring to inhabit.

We are seeking that new world by struggling in every venue that we can
find and with every ounce of strength we can muster, directing all our
efforts not only to winning improvements in people lives today but
also to winning a better world tomorrow.

We are doing it for the memory of those who have gone before, and for
the well being of those who will come after.

Okay, we can all agree, I suspect, that those are nice sentiments.
They sound appealing to me and I bet to you too - but wouldn’t you
agree that they are also quite vague? To flexibly assure our unity, we
need more substance, don’t you think?

Maybe when we further unearth our shared agreements, further substance
will sound more less like this:

We are trying to win a new economy, a new realm of daily life and
love, a new culture, a new polity, a new ecology, a new
internationalism, all without hierarchies that condemn some people to
subordination. We reject roles unsuited for humanity - the role of the
owner, boss, manager; the role of the patriarch, misogynist,
homophobe; the role of the racist, religious bigot, fundamentalist;
the role of the denier, decrier, decider, dictator; the role of
polluter of air, sea, and land; the role of bombardier, cultural
commissar, empire expander. Gone with all of that.

We are pursuing this better world that will leave behind these
horribly oppressive aspects by seeking improvements in people’s lives
right now, from the washed out streets in New Orleans to the porn
strewn back alleys in Chicago, from the black lunged mines in West
Virginia to the dignity destroying commercialism of billboards and TV,
from rural poverty to urban blight, from self-imposed diets seeking
false beauty to society-imposed diets imposing criminal starvation,
from the flesh houses of Los Angeles and its glam and glitter to the
cardboard homes under bridges in Philadelphia, from the miles of AA
meetings to the miles of local bars, from the capacity crushing
horrors imposed on eighty percent of our school’s students to the
elite Ivy farms spewing out scholars who lack sense and humanity, from
the modern slave houses called prisons to the court houses that
function like auction houses, from elections that are bought and sold
by rich corporate executives investing in their preferred paths of
domination to acres and acres of misguided commodity production
remorselessly destroying our weather and water, from the endless
skyways of half empty hotels to the endless alley ways of homeless
children, mothers, and fathers.

We seek more income for the poor, more power for the weak, more status
for the forlorn, more social ties for the lonely, more responsibility
for all our crying souls. We seek equitable material well being, self
managing influence, and mutual fulfillment of all kinds. We seek, as
well, to ensure that our demands today not only partly redress the
suffering caused by the world we now inhabit but also move us toward a
better future in which worldly and spiritual benefits of society reach
a high level and then persist due to the intrinsic logic of our new
institutions rather than only when we win against harsh opposition.

And why we are doing all this? We are doing it tirelessly,
steadfastly, and vigorously, for the memory of revolutionaries and
visionaries and humanists from history past, for people all around us
now, and for history’s and humanity’s future.

Well, okay, that version would be a little better. It certainly has
some spunk, but I think perhaps we can also agree that beyond its
passion, it is still mostly sentiment - very nice sentiment, for sure,
but lacking institutional substance.

Maybe that’s just the way it is with speeches, or maybe as we
collectively address what we share as our vision, strategy, and
motives, our words will gain some additional depth, some additional
tissue and fabric, and then maybe our answers to what we are doing,
how we are doing it, and why we are doing it, might go something like
this:

We are trying to win a new economy in which there are no classes. No
one in the better world we seek will own workplaces, resources, or
other people’s ability to do work. There will be no owners of Walmarts
or Microsofts. There will be no private profits. There will be no wage
slaves, working under the dictates of others. Further, no one will
monopolize empowering conditions at work, as doctors, lawyers,
engineers, and managers so typically do now, and on that account rule
over those left only menial and obedient tasks. No one will earn
inequitably whether from property, power, or output. No one will have
more say over decisions than the fair share that we all are entitled
to in accord with how much we are affected. There will be no top and
no bottom of who decides what for whom. There will be no order giver
and no order taker about production, allocation, or consumption. There
will be no class responsible for decisions while another class is
suppressed and responsible only to obey. We will all be elevated to
use our fullest capacities and express our fullest desires, rather
than most of us learning only to endure boredom and to obey orders
showered down on us by the anointed masters of all that occurs. Our
new economy will be classless, at last. Out with the old boss - and
out with any new boss, too. We will enjoy a participatory economy,
operating as one part of a participatory society.

But our project is not just about economics - we are not economistic.
We realize that life is not working and consuming alone. For example,
we are trying to win a new polity too, that will incorporate the will
of all citizens in legislation, that will adjudicate disputes to
produce justice, that will respond to violations to attain
rehabilitation and liberation rather than vengeance and retribution.
Our new polity will have citizens of diverse age, belief, experience,
and knowledge, but will not have rulers and ruled. We are not merely
seeking new Presidents and Senators because we understand that our
political problem is government by a few - not simply the oddities of
any particular few who happen to be prowling around the White House
and Senate at any particular moment. We won’t have political choices
mediated by dollar bills but by the will of informed citizens, each
with equal rights and comparable means. We will have in our new
society’s new polity, participatory democracy and self management. We
won’t have information conveyed by agents of corporate power. We will
have education, communication, and popular participation that together
prepare all citizens to be full participants in social life and
decision making. We will build and responsibly contribute to
assemblies that express our informed desires for legislation allowing
us to self manage our political and social life. We will build media
that conveys expert information so we can function wisely. We will
adopt decision methods that apportion influence over outcomes to those
affected in proportion as they are affected so that we collectively
self manage our conditions and projects. We might well call all this
participatory politics, one more part of our new participatory
society.

Beyond economy and polity, however, we are trying as well to win a new
realm of sexuality, nurturance, socialization, and daily life. Do the
roots of sexism reside in nuclear marriage as we know it? Do they stem
from a gender division of labor that is women mothering and men
fathering rather than both parenting? Is sexism born in a disparity in
who does caretaking work and who doesn’t? Are there other roots of
sexism, other structures that continually toss misogyny up into our
lives, reproducing its contours year in and year out, and thereby
subverting our potentials for sharing and caring? Whatever the roots
of patriarchy are, whatever produces and reproduces sexism, it will
all be transcended in a new world. Sexism will be only a memory in the
new world we will win and celebrate. Will we need communal living
arrangements, new modes of parenting, new ways of apportioning the
labors of life, all even beyond the obvious need for fair and free
access for women to all positions in society? If we do, then that’s
the feminism we must and will achieve in our new participatory
society. If something more or other is needed, then that too will be
done. We will have participatory kinship, participatory living, in our
new participatory society, nothing less is acceptable.

We are trying to win a new culture, as well, that celebrates cultural
diversity while defending each community’s every participant. Our
preferred new society will include social structures and relations
that welcome spirituality and religious sentiment even as our new
approaches escape the strictures of fundamentalism of all kinds and
respect atheism as well. In our new society, we will all still
celebrate, communicate, identify, and forge ways of seeing and
understanding ourselves and our communities - but we will do it with
mutual respect, taking pleasure not only in our own solutions but in
admiring, learning from, and enjoying the rich variety of other
people’s solutions too. We will choose our cultural communities
freely, move among them as we choose, and refine and enrich our ties
to them over the course of our lives. Racism, religious bigotry,
ethnocentrism, and all kinds of self identification based on or
presupposing the inferiority and subordination of others will have
become a thing of the past, and our ways of constructing our
communities and the institutions we adopt in our new cultural
relations will have to respect, abide, and propel that outcome. New
cultural institutions, that is, will guard the rights and norms of all
communities, but particularly of the smaller in disputes with the
larger. The name for all this might be multiculturalism or perhaps
intercommunalism, another leg for our new participatory society to
stand on.

We seek a greener world too, but not just sustainability. We are not
content with the idea that the best we can do is to avoid suicide,
which is what sustainability literally mandates. Rather, in our
participatory society not only will our culture and daily life respect
our natural environment, but our legislation will freely and
effectively protect it and our economy will properly discern its
interconnections and their value. Likewise, even beyond our own
shores, we seek a community of countries that goes beyond being at
peace to attain a condition of mutual benefit. We will have war no
more - of course - but we will not dispense with global ties. On the
contrary, we will enrich and extend global ties so that countries
freely share their lessons and virtues, protect one another from harm,
and exchange not according to competitive norms that ensure that trade
benefits accrue mostly to whoever is richer and more powerful, but
instead exchange in a way that always reduces disparities in wealth
and power. In the time-honored tradition of our predecessors, we can
call this internationalism, but it is ultimately just participatory
societies participating in cooperative solidarity with one another.

But how do we win all this, that’s the question, isn’t it? We know we
must. We know we will. But how? Of course, we only know some things
about this massive question - the rest will be revealed only in the
clash and jangle of struggles and constructions as we pursue the road
forward. But, even now, there are some insights we can commit to, as
we develop and share more.

In our future there will be participatory self management via worker
and consumer councils in the economy, via people’s assemblies in the
polity, and via new personal and collective arrangements in culture
and in kinship as well. We can’t grow that kind of future
participation using movements that are harshly hierarchical. No more
of that. We can’t attain equitable remuneration, self management,
classlessness, women and men in partnership, sexual liberation,
political participation, wide dispersal of information, cultural
intercommunalism, a wise relation to nature, and internationalism, if
we use movement vehicles that incorporate the ills of the present. No
more of that. We can’t have racism, sexism, or classism in our
movements. No more, no more.

We will win a better world by winning sequences of improvements in
people’s lives within existing society which also win our movements
ever more consciousness, ever more commitment, and ever more
infrastructure of struggle, until they are powerful and wise enough to
win not solely modest elixirs for pain, but also the infrastructure of
full freedom and liberation.

We can’t create a society of sharing souls by having fragmented,
alienated movements. We can’t generate responsibility and initiative
with movements that denigrate and debilitate. We can’t sustain
participation with movements that are as oppressive as society at
large - indeed we can’t win with these flaw in our movements since
winning entails a movement of perhaps a hundred million involved
participant leaders. Without movements that give their participants
better lives than they would have outside, more friends, more love,
more dignity, more empowerment, more knowledge, more confidence, we
can’t win. So we must create such movements.

We can’t use anti democratic means to produce democratic results. We
can’t use anti egalitarian norms to produce equitable distribution. We
can’t use authoritarian culture and conceptions to produce
participation. We can’t maintain soul wrecking values much less
elitist and egocentric behaviors to produce intercommunalism.

We need to have our eyes on the real prize which is to enlarge
membership, enlarge consciousness, enlarge commitment, and enlarge
infrastructure, all consistent with our long term aims and not solely
our short run priorities and tactics.

And finally, as we close out this social forum together, and as we
further refine and enrich our shared views in coming months and years,
for whom do we commit to this mammoth task, this revolutionary
pursuit?

We do it for workers on the line, bored, tired, impoverished, and
robbed of their creative days. No more Maggie’s Farm for us,
insteadcsslessness.

We do it for women door-opened, pinched, decultured, feminized,
impoverished, beaten, raped, advertised, psychologized, ball and
chained. No more hustle and no more Hustler for us, instead Feminism.

We do it for Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians.nameless,
robbed of dignity and means, legally lynched, harassed, low paid,
running, jailed. No more plantations in the midst of plenty for us,
instead Intercommunalism.

We do it for the drunks and addicts, the worn out and the never
lively, for the old and ill who should be long lived and wise, for the
forgotten, the dispossessed, the lonely.

For the young, schooled and unschooled, enduring boredom, sniffing
glue, stealing sex and losing love, trying to escape or trying to find
a way in, whether they exist under a massive thumb or are trying to
grow a massive thumb with which to hold down others.

We do it for those on welfare or off it, looking into the mall or
looking out from it, employed or unemployed, alone or crowded beyond
sanity, hiding their sex or flaunting it, angry, sad, or mad.

We do it for all those who feel less than they could feel, for all
those who have been made less than they could be in this rich land,
the United States - and -

We do it for the Colombian, Paraguayan, Guatemalan, Haitian, South
African, Congolese, Liberian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Iranian, Palestinian,
Pakistani, Indian, Thai, Malaysian, and Chinese exploited, robbed,
starved, cheated, tortured, ambushed, kidnapped, and death-squadded.

We do it for all the world’s citizens suffering the brutality and
indignity of electric shocks and murdered relatives, suffering secret
or public bombs, suffering Guantanamos and Abu Ghriabs, suffering
poverty and even starvation, suffering the military boot and the
cultural stamp.

We do it for the empire’s citizens, proud but beleaguered, and also
for the empire’s enemies, our forebears:

We do it for the strikers, the saboteurs, the feminists and
anarchists, the Marxists and nationalists, for those with no ideology
but liberty, and for those who had too much ideology as well.

We do it for the memory of Che and the Cuban freedom fighters - we
will be “guided by great feelings of love.”

We do it for the memory of Amilcar Cabral and the liberation of Africa
– we will “tell no lies and claim no easy victories.”

We do it for the memory of Rosa Luxembourg and the revolutionaries of
Europe - we will move, and therein we will notice and break our
chains.

We do it for the memory of Alexandra Kollantai and Russians in revolt
– we will not only create direct means of popular rule, we will
preserve, revere, and utilize them.

We do it for Emma Goldman and the anarchists in struggle - we will
dance on our way to, on our arrival at, and in celebration of our new
world.

We do it for Simone de Beauvoir and feminists everywhere - we will
accept no biological, psychological, or economic fate deterring women
in our future.

We do it for Ho and the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese who yesterday
taught us all, and who will have their day too, around the corner,
over the hill, when we win the world we all desire.

We do it for r Martin Luther King Jr. - his mountain is our mountain,
his vision looking into uncharted mists will become our daily
pleasure, surrounding us during each breath of our lives. We will win
for Martin too.

We do it for Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Righters, for Dave
Dellinger and the new leftists, for Fred Hampton and the Panthers, for
Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers, for Lolita Lebrón and the Puerto
Rican nationalists, for Leonard Peltier and the fighters in AIM, and
for all the fine souls who resisted and died in the past and who
nonetheless live on.

We do it for the young who dodged the draft. For the young who went to
war and disrupted. For the young who went and died - or lived. For the
Vietnam Veterans against war, and especially for the Iraq Veterans
against war.

We do it for the French in the streets of May and the Italians in
Autumn, for the Mexicans in the summer, and the Czechs and Chinese,
for the Nicaraugans, the El Salvadorans, the Haitians, the Bolivians,
and the Venezuelans. For the ANC and landless peasants movement. For
the anti globalization veterans of Seattle and Prague. For the
camepasinos in Brazil and the piqueteros in Argentina, for the
Zapatistas in Mexico and for movements all over Asia, Africa, Europe
and the Americas - for the millions who opposed the Iraq War before it
began and the many millions more who oppose it now.

We do it for everyone who has fought, fights, or will fight for a
better wage, a better home, more dignity, more respect, a better life,
a better world than they were, are, or are going to be bequeathed.

And at the same time, necessarily:

We do it against the Rockefellers, the Waltons and Buffets, the
Somozas and Pinochets, the CIAs and FBIs, and the Bushs, Clintons, and
Kissengers all.

We do it against the doctors coerced by their positions to deal in
dollars but not in dignity, against the landlords, the corporate
lawyers, and the politicians with their eyes closed to injustice or
wallowing in its waste.

We do it against the owners, administrators, bosses, rapists and
racists, those on top and those who aspire only to be on top, against
all the dealers of bad hands, against the stacked decks.

We do it against the social ties and unties that breed the pain and
all who grow ugly by benefiting from its continuance, one step above
those suffering below.

We do it against the intellectuals who keep information as it if were
their little toy, who enshrine their ignorance under false halos and
who hide it behind big words, who justify barbarism or technically
dissect it as their interests require, never shedding a tear, never
raising a fist.

We do it against the media liars, the news pimps, the career thinkers
with brains the size of cornflakes, the academics - left and right -
who propagate propaganda to preserve this system or some other, and
yes, we do it against the academics who call themselves socialists and
always do nothing, the ones who succeed but don’t stay angry, the ones
who don’t really care.

And finally, we will make this new world for our parents, our friends,
our children, our children’s children, and for ourselves too.

To succeed, we must all soon agree on at least the essential core
aspects of what a better world can and will embody.

To succeed, we must flexibly agree on what it will require to make it
so, what skills must be learned, what tasks accomplished, what
obstacles overcome, and to succeed, we must act, and act, and act, and
refine our awareness as we learn from our actions.

Let us not mince words. Let us not call ourselves less than we are.
The name for all this is revolution.

The name for those who believe in it, who aspire to it, who devote
themselves to it, is revolutionary.

Till when there will be fewer acquaintances and many more friends and
lovers, we must be revolutionary, we must be revolutionary, we must be
revolutionary - to win our new world.

Remember this Forum, and bring it home!

Embrace Revolution, and bring it home too!