The problem was the vast majority of the people in the country didn't know, didn't have a clear sense of what globalization was, what its impact was, what the term meant and so the action was successful but it's not the kind of success that naturally can be built upon when you have to broaden the political base. It's episodic.
R.K.: Right.
A.R.: And it's disconnected from that organizing imperative I keep harping on.
R.K.: So yes. So it seems to me that your solution to the current situation for the left which, as we started this conversation, I cited you as describing as desiccated, hollowed out and vaporous, is organization. Is people making face to face contact in communities and with labor and that's connection.
A.R.: Right.
R.K.: That's direct connection. Not digital, not online connection.
A.R.: Right.
R.K.: Or does that work, too?
A.R.: Well I don't think those are useless. I just don't think, see this is I think another problem that we've lapsed into that's maybe a distinctively American one or maybe just distinct at this moment, but a tendency to think that there could be technical solutions to what are ultimately political problems and this is the trope that runs through much of American life and has for a long time.
Like trading carbon credits can get us out of the ecological crisis, that kind of thing. But in this instance, communication technologies are useful for coordinating action. I don't think they're especially useful, or stuff like social media and Facebook, or even web-based activism although I have something else, another point I want to make about that, too.
I mean they're useful, they can be useful in exactly the same way, arguably more so, in the same way that cell phones, or the xerox machine, or the mimeo machine that you don't have to hand crank, for the older of us in your audience. And I can remember how my arm felt after cranking out twenty six thousand anti-war leaflets to pass out at a football game. So, yeah, I mean, those communications technologies make it more efficient to do some of the work of the movement, but they don't make the movement.
And that leads me to the point and click activism problem. Because that's kind of like, there's a sociologist out of Santa Cruz, UCLA named Andrew Szasz who did a really interesting book a few years ago called Shopping our way to Safety and it's an argument that he takes as the metaphor, you know some of your listeners like me, I trust will be old enough to recall this, but the bomb shelter craze in the late 50's and the early 60's because he argues that the bomb shelter mania was a direct product of the atomic energy establishment who were concerned that, sort of gave us the friendly atom also out of concern to keep the general or the level of anxiety among the general public with respect to the danger of nuclear holocaust at a level that was high enough to maintain public support for US bomb programs, but not so high that people would feel that there was imminent danger of their world ending and they had no control over it.
So the marketing of the individual bomb shelters becomes a way to buy your own way out of the nuclear holocaust. When I was a kid, I can remember my dad saying, okay that's fine, so you're down there for two weeks or two months to six months with your canned goods and whatever, and then what happens? And we see stuff like that now, people talking about getting off the grid, building-
R.K.: Absolutely. There are whole TV networks around survivalism.
A.R.: Yes, it's pretty scary isn't it? And I mean especially in so far as it marks the space where a strain of hippie merges into a strain of heavily armed nutcase survivalists out in those big empty states who live on fear that people from the cities are going to come and take their canned goods. But
I mention that because the sense that we can... and this also feeds off a sense of urgency, right?
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