Frankly--go with me on this ridiculous analogy for a second: if the American political spectrum is a raised land mass, like the rocky plateau that simba was held off of in the beginning of the lion king, i feel like i've fallen off the left edge of the cliff, and am now in a valley below, frolicking in a hippie meadow with some illegal immigrants and marijuana legalizers, the Yes Men, this professor i kind of have a thing for, and maybe rafiki, that crazy monkey. i bet he was an anarchist.
(This is turning into a political Fantasia.)
Anyway, from here, looking up at the democrats on the cliff, it's pretty hard to idolize obama, or invest in him the sense of hope that apparently inspire so many of my peers. Additionally, i was in India for much of the campaign. I didn't even vote. I tell poeople that's because my absentee ballot didn't arrive on time... but that was probably because someone else ordered it for me days before the election because i couldn't decide if voting was something I wanted to participate in. Kind of ironic because it was the most important election in us history, and one that my generation made happen, but it's also pretty telling.
After interning last fall for a presidential candidate whose goals are more closely aligned with my own, and whose campaign was woefully ineffective and inefficent, i kind of lost faith in bureaucracy and top-down structures. It's funny that that's how it happened, because I think many people would have concluded that the problem with that campaign was that things weren't top-down enough. And they'd be right. Top-down tends to be efficient; Obama is one of many examples of that. Yes, i know there was a lot of talk of his "grass-roots" campaign, but let's clarify the definition of grass roots, for a second: it means regular people, on the ground, outside organized politics, initiating and controlling a movement. Regular people did a lot for obama's campaign, maybe unprecedented amounts of people doing extraordinary amounts of stuff, but they were getting their orders from people above them, who were listening to the people above them, and so on, because they were running a presidential campaign. By nature, that is not a grassroots endeavor, because it didn't begin with the people, no matter how much you need and use that grass to support the candidate.
The campaign I was a part of, like most structures in American society, was supposed to work similarly, with people getting information and instructions from the people above them. The problem was that the chain-of-command wasn't very well-defined, partly because there wasn't enough money to hire enough people, and partly because of a disturbing, ever-shifting system of alliances and animosities--and information didn't make their way down it, to us, or to the volunteers who called us yelling because their T-shirts never arrived, very efficiently.
So I think the political conclusions I came to from that experience (i.e that i'm not cut out for top-down politics) aren't really proportionate or even directly-related to it. I think they have more to do with how I felt there:
What I liked about the campaign was the sense of community us interns had, all banded together in a run-down old 20's building in Cleveland, drinking boxed wine, and talking about our ideals and ideas. The office was somewhere people didn't care as much about those ideas. And even when they did--which did happen much, much, much more than it would have in a more traditional, better-funded top-down campaign, our ideas still became embroiled in intra-campaign politics, caught in some creaky Cleveland pipe of our poorly-funded leftist bureaucracy.
Before I left for Cleveland, I was already pretty inspired by anarchism, or at least the little bit I'd heard and read about it. Not so much by its goal of no-government, but by my vision of what could exist in its place. As I understand it, and my understanding is limited:
Anarchism doesn't believe in any hierarchy--no president; but also no bosses at work; no sexism, racism, homophobia or heteronormativity-- In short, no coercive and unequal forms of power. In our democracy, the vote of the majority determines the lives of the minority. Anarchism sees that as a form of tyranny for the other 49%--a power dynamic that is unjust and unequal. Additionally, modern electoral politics create a sense of competition that brings out the worst in people. The goal is to win, to gain advantage and power in the race, but not to constructively address the issues opponents share the responsibility for, as American citizens. This competitive rather than creative mindset makes every piece of proposed legislation an uphill battle of winning votes, often at the cost of morality. It's ugly.
Anarchism instead envisions people organized in small, self-sufficient communities that are freely chosen by the people in them. (So, if you want to live in a religious society, for example, you find 20 people who share your ideas and create your own.) These groups make their decisions collectively, by consensus. They problem-solve constructively. They treat each other with respect. They control their own economic lives--run their own factories and farms, without private proverty. They live in a face-to-face society, a direct democracy. I've got this Utopian vision of a bunch of people sitting on the ground, maybe in the woods, a farm in the background, and they're figuring out how they'd like their lives to be run, treating each other equitably, creatively discussing the best place to plant tomatoes. If that sounds idealistic, it is: anarchism places extraordinary faith in the creativity, empathy and ability of human beings. I guess I do too.
I think I the sense of community I found among the interns in the Kucinich campaign was a taste of that experience for me, psychologically at least. It was my first time living in a community I'd chosen for myself, and I could imagine our conversations on cardboard furniture mutating into discussions of where to plant the tomatoes.
I think I was also able to extrapolate that even if the bureaucracy in the office wasn't as creaky as the pipes in the building, the experience of being at the bottom of a chain of command, trying to enact a political agenda I didn't personally create with people I personally knew... just wasn't for me.
After the campaign, I went to India to study abroad, and I returned there this past fall, to live on an ashram that was a living example of the kind of community I imagined, although it wouldn't have called itself anarchist.
It was started by a guy named Vinoba, who was Gandhi's spiritual and political successor. Gandhi appointed him to determine what India's political-economic system would look like, once it had attained independence. Gandhi believed India shouldn't be organized like its former oppressors' government. He saw democracy, and its tyranny of the majority, as a subtle form of violence, and therefore counter to the principle of non-violence that he lived by. After Gandhi's death, Vinoba expanded upon this idea. He saw any political or economic inequalities as a form of psychological violence--a system of fear and intimidation predicated upon unequal and coercive forms of power. He wanted India organized at the village level, the way it had been organized for millenia, before British rule.
At least into the 1960's, many villages in India had never seen money. One of the sisters on the ashram, who was probably 50, told me she didn't know it was possible to buy mangoes until she was in her teens. The experiences of older Indians I've met, in these real-life utopias surprisingly free of conflict and social problems, challenge the notion that anarchism is too idealistic to work. The fact is its model has worked for thousands of years.
Vinoba wanted villages to collectively own property, and form self-sufficient agrarian economies based around the cow rather than industry. Villagers would farm together, divide labor equitably, treat each other with love, and make decisions by consensus, in direct democracy.
I see Vinoba as the Eastern counterpart to the American 60's counter-culture movement. He said a lot of the same things as the New Left, partly in response to the same issues, like the Nuclear arms race, but he came from a different cultural perspective, that of a Hindu mystic: he believed people were equal because they were all God, all capable of acting with divine love, if they were only given it. Within his country, he also had a lot more pull than the US counter-culture did in this country. As much as he eschewed power, Vinoba was an important public figure in India. He was on the cover of Life magazine in the 60's. When Nehru invited him to an important summit on the other side of India, Vinoba insisted on walking there. National and International leaders waited 3 days for him to arrive. Can you imagine President Kennedy doing that for Mario Savio?
So, sometimes I imagine what India would look like if Vinoba's vision had won, the example it could have been for the world.
It wasn't too hard to do that because the ashram I lived on was established by Vinoba as a "laboratory" of what he wanted the country to look like. There were 20 or so sisters--it was a women's ashram; Vinoba was a feminist, the first notable person who proclaimed Indian women have the right to spiritually renounce the world and their families the way men do--living on a farm that kind of resembled my utopia. It's not that there weren't problems, but people had overwhelming faith in each other's basic goodness, their godliness, and so everything else seemed small in comparison. Living there was catching a rare glimpse of the potentialities of human love. The quote in the masthead of this blog is from one of the sisters there, when I was complaining about how often I fall short of my ideal of non-violence.
Adjusting to life back here--I've been back about 6 weeks--has been difficult. In my time there, which was only about two months, a lot of the things that preoccupy my thoughts on a daily basis just didn't exist: there was no gender, little real conflict, no consumerism or materialism.
Back home, just knowing about that alternate universe, I have found the ground has shifted under me.
On the one hand, I feel a lot more courage to live off the edge of the cliff, be honest about my radicalness, no longer feel the need to "pass" as a member of a society I don't feel an affinity with, because I know my vision for the world is attainable, and I know there are 30 wise old Indian women rooting for it, and me.
On the other hand, I'm still here, in a society vastly different from the one I'd like to live in, and I've got to cope with that reality and make the best of it.
So, to come back to Obama: he's somewhat irrelevant to my view of the universe. I'd like to work on forming my own communities and shaping my own culture more directly than I could through American politics. That's kind of the point.
So, yea, there are obvious structural changes I'd love to see happen that Obama doesn't have the power, or will to make happen, like the end of free trade and US hedgemony-- and, while we're at it, installing a direct democracy would be really fucking nice. But I'm not working toward that, because I'm looking for a smaller-scale society, so I'm going to do that on a smaller scale, through non-violence and basic human kindness, and maybe I'll grow some tomatoes. (I haven't done enough of that since I've been home. I'm party writing this to remind myself to move in that direction.)
But, here's the thing about Obama: politics are psychological at their core. Modern capitalism relies on a psychology of competition and consumerism; neo-conservativism relies on a psychology of force; and anarchism would requires a profound psychological shift towards love and creativity.
And Obama's presidency has changed more than the rhetoric, even if he doesn't change a single policy: he's changed the way that people think. If it didn't do that, the rhetoric just wouldn't have worked.
This speech is an indication of that:
It's a nuanced 30-minute political speech about race that doesn't objectify anyone, even racists. That was an oxymoron, an impossibility in American presidential politics, and yet, people ate it up: 5 million views on Youtube. This represents a psychological change in the people I share this country with.
We're not going to attain my ideal society through this president's actions, but I think he has the ability to create a greater sense of community through his words. It's not everything, and it's not necessarily anything tangible, but it would still be nice.
I think this clip, from 3:47 to 4:32, sums up why Obama won, and why he has the potential to continue to inspire and unite the country, more insightfully than any other commentary I've seen:
If Ken Burns is right, and I think he is, I gotta say I kinda like what America's wishing for these days. :)
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