Over the last ninety years of this magazine’s existence, many thousands of people whose ideas were generally in tune with it have marched, rallied, sat-in, struck, petitioned, organized, and otherwise struggled for progressive social change. Other writers, perhaps in this very issue, can ponder the question of what was actually accomplished, through all this effort and agitation, in the way of laws passed, wars averted, and conditions of life improved. Here I take up a question less commonly asked about the activists of the twentieth century: Did they have a good time doing what they did?
All right, this may sound like a frivolous, even air-headed, concern, but it’s clearly related to the more respectable question of concrete gains and accomplishments. If something isn’t the least bit fun, why do it? Why, in particular, should busy grown-up people, often with jobs and families, get involved in something that promises happiness in some distant future but offers only work and sacrifice in the here and now?
Oppression is not the sole factor pushing people into activism, and even the most egregiously oppressed people have often expressed their rebellion in a way that looked, to their oppressors, like mindless hedonism. European peasants looted bakeries and manor houses, eating and drinking as they went. Caribbean slaves and French villagers used carnivals, with their masks and public processions, as occasions for revolt. In this country, slaves sometimes warmed up for uprisings with song and “ring shouts.” Considering this venerable tradition of combining pleasure and politics, only the most pinched Puritanical soul could insist that political activism be an exercise in deferred gratification.
It’s not just “the sixties” raising its impish head here. Yes, that decade was famously fun: Abbie Hoffman wrote (and largely lived) Revolution for the Hell of It. French radicals ran in the streets shouting, “All Power to the Imagination!” American campus activists made love, not war, and probably did as much recruiting at all-night dance parties as at teach-ins—not just opportunistically, but because we truly believed that the id could be a reliable guide to social change. But the sixties weren’t all sexdrugs-and-rock-’n’-roll. Most of the time, we were doing the same kinds of hard work activists have always done: Going patiently from door to door, bickering over the wording of leaflets, organizing teach-ins and rallies. In fact, most of the reputed political fun of the sixties was the same kind of “fun” no doubt experienced by activists in the thirties or teens: The thrill of solidarity, of marching and chanting together, of being caught up in a great transcendent cause, “larger than ourselves.”
But on the whole, and taking the long view, the left worldwide has been far less interested in the pleasurably emotional aspects of political involvement than has the right.
In a study of French and German mass movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historian George Mosse notes the left’s persistent neglect of “excitement, enthusiasm, and passion,” as compared to “reason,” with the result that leftwing events were far more likely to be didactic than ecstatic. The problem probably goes back to the French Revolution, whose bourgeois leaders sought to stamp out popular festivities—-with all their drunkenness, gluttony, and supposedly lewd behavior— and replace them with carefully orchestrated ceremonies in honor of “Reason” or “the Supreme Being.” It was in that revolution, with men like Robespierre, that the Leninist ideal of the unsmiling “professional revolutionary” was born—a type every bit as hostile to spontaneity and self-indulgence as the grimmest of the old Calvinist merchant class.
It was left, tragically, to the twentieth century fascists—Hitler and Mussolini—to attempt a more emotionally engaging form of politics. Hitler read Gustave Le Bon’s book on crowd behavior; he studied American musicals and was fascinated by the frenzies of American football fans. The result was the spectacular mass rally, with its torch-lit processions, its uplifting music, its liturgy of grand entrances, speeches, and chants.
Not that we should exaggerate the thrills of Nuremberg; most people were spectators, not true participants, with no role other than to stand for hours and cheer on cue. But at least Hitler knew to keep the speeches short: fifteen minutes was the limit, except for his.
Now, of course, there’s a good reason for the relative dryness of the left, its lack of attention to drama and emotional appeal: Too much drama and emotion and you get something more like a cult than a democratic political movement. Today, Hare Krishnas chant and dance, Moonies engage in rousing cheers, and no doubt they have a good time doing so, but the business of the left has always been to produce thinking citizens, not happy automatons. The mood of ecstatic self-loss that some have sought in the mass rally—or, in our own time, the rave—has never been productive of the democratic skills of deliberation and debate.
But you can go too far with the dry, rationalistic approach, and in the last two decades the American left has done just that. After the excitement of the sixties, ours devolved into a culture of meetings, in which, strangely enough, “activism” usually means sitting stock still around a table or in a windowless auditorium for hours and even days at a stretch. The format for left and progressive gatherings generally is borrowed from the academic conference— with its careful hierarchy of workshops, panels, and plenaries—or from the mainstream parties, with their dogged adherence to Robert’s Rules of Order. In this dreary context, “culture” comes to mean the folk singer before the speeches; “fun” is continuing the day’s debates over drinks at a bar. In the Democratic Socialists of America, to which I belong, the tedium of our public forums has become a kind of rueful in-joke: By the time you get halfway through the rainbow of speakers representing various— and commendable—forms of diversity, and by the time each one of them has run over his or her time limit by ten minutes or so, the audience is leaking out through the exits. Even the staunchest rank-and-file activist is likely to lose interest in a movement culture that honors only words and arguments and the individuals who most skillfully deploy them.
The problem with an overly rationalistic—or, to borrow a word from the postmodernists, “logocentric”—type of politics is not just that it is unappealing. It also fails to convey what should be a central part of our substantive message: that other people—our fellow citizens, comrades, brothers and sisters, or whatever you want to call them—can be a source, to each of us, of strength and joy.
Capitalist culture teaches that, outside of a sports stadium, the only true pleasures are private ones—family, sex, the acquisition of material goods. But there lies deep within the socialist (and feminist, and civil rights) traditions the insight that some of the most profound pleasures available to our species are those we apprehend collectively— the pleasures of solidarity and “unity in the struggle.” We need roses as well as bread, uplift for the heart as well as the mind, and occasions for the free and “festive” laughter that, according to the subversive Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, is the true sound of revolution.
There have been scattered exceptions, in the last few years, to the general joylessness of progressive politics: A new trend, at least I hope a trend, toward including at least one rousing outdoor demo in each conference program.. . . The reemergence of “happenings,” like the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, blending counterculture art and plenty of partying___A “plenary session” at a conference held last year by radical artists, which consisted of conversation over a delicious meal and wine-----The creatively disruptive tactics of the Women’s Action Coalition, before it fell apart.
But on the whole, we have barely begun to explore the politics of pleasure. For all the time spent on “principles of unity” and structures of leadership, we know hardly anything about how to make the struggle something that people might, in large numbers, actually want to join.
So to return to the original question: We don’t really know enough to say whether the progressives of the past ninety years had a good time doing all the things they did. But it’s well worth finding out, and carefully, painstakingly, studying how.