The scenario of Revolution has long tempted left thinking. We all know that a thorough dismantling of American institutions and priorities is long overdue. But this call for decisive and dramatic transformation must be reexamined: while the revolutionary project continues to stir us this approach is incomplete and thus liable to lead our efforts astray.
To assist this reexamination, we must consider what kind of change we are after, the kind of society we want to create. If our goal is simply replacing existing institutions with new ones (as in many colonial struggles) or of additionally prescribing new social attitudes and incentives (as often attempted in modern revolutions), social transformation can be imagined as a swift undertaking. Even so, many of these modern movements fell far short of their intended objectives.
What revolutionary protagonists – including Sixties activists – asserting the transformative power of release from social chains did not account for was the kind of preparation that fundamental social change in our way of life demands. Establishing the everyday texture of new interpersonal relations and life-enhancing priorities in a just democratic society cannot be fully discerned from within the confines of the present order. To bypass the disillusionment that followed in the aftermath of these other transformative movements, we must consider how new aspirations and interconnections are nurtured into being, and how we become the agents capable of creating, living and advancing this new way of life. Simply put, if we are unable to clarify the journey involved, we are unlikely to persuade others to join us.
What I am highlighting is a third kind of transformative practice to supplement the two classic emphases: opposition or resistance, and the building of new institutions. This new practice focuses on developing our capacity as agents to create enduring movements and new social realities. The first two are well-understood aspects of revolutionary praxis. Opposition has been central to left politics since the labor and populist movements at the end of the nineteenth century, and is more critical than ever given the increasingly reactionary, authoritarian, repressive system of the late neo-liberal era.
Building new institutions has also figured centrally in the American radical tradition, engaged in during the Sixties among those who established alternative communities. But the partisans of this era were often quite naïve about the challenges of sustaining new institutions, and for many the commitment to this experimental stage waned over time. Young people today are building new communities, cooperatives, businesses, economic networks, agricultural enterprises, communal social and living arrangements, arts and cultural collaboratives, and family and educational experiments at an unprecedented pace. They are not as willing to regard rejoining a society far more repressive and far less open than in the past as an option, and their spirit of pragmatic institutional innovativeness attests to the seriousness and long-term perspective they bring to these efforts.
The third option has received much less emphasis in the past. Sixties activists typically regarded questions of psychological resilience and sustainability as peripheral, incompatible with the spirit of adventure and release, perhaps requiring a questioning of motives that were confused and unresolved. Yet when I raise this set of concerns with young activists, not in competition with the other forms of activity but as a necessary complement to them, their willingness to address them is most heartening. They sense in keeping with their pragmatic idealism that this kind of processing is necessary for transformation, that the Sixties failed to provide the internal and relational foundation for sustained change, that Occupy found itself lacking a clear perception of the steps necessary to create a long-term movement.
When I introduce myself as someone whose focus has been on psychosocial resilience and commitment since my student days in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, contemporary activists express a clear and holistic interest in the complexities of transformation. They sense that all of us are beset by the dehumanizing priorities and incentives fed to us as we grew up. We all learned to defer to these scripts and rewards from those who in their wisdom and authority instructed us how to navigate the system.
The younger generations appreciate from the complexities of their own pursuit of social innovation and personal clarification that the project of social transformation is at the same time a process of self-transformation. Interestingly, it was the leading advocates of civil disobedience, Gandhi and King, who most fully understood the moral self-clarification and human self-development necessary even for effective and sustained resistance to entrenched power, though they gave little thought to the future society and the far more extensive work required.
A sustained transformative commitment requires a willingness to challenge the internalized confines of systemic adaptation, to dismantle the embedded systemic pressures and coping mechanisms that enable and encourage us to function in the present setting. And if we are to move beyond these toward new forms of personal and social identity, we must explore how our lives might evolve beyond the system’s imputed power to justify and reward, to constrain and marginalize us. That is, we must understand the process of change as the disconnection from older meaning systems as we develop new sources of authority and meaning within ourselves and within our communities.
This approach enables us to take the initiative back into our own hands. The United States and its neo-liberal order projects itself as a great and imposing edifice, truly a wondrous Tower of Babel that is designed to intimidate us and suck the air out of all alternative thinking and acting. So long as we are uncertain about our own capacities for innovation and for creating sustainable narratives, we will defer to the size and power of the existing regime and projectively exaggerate its moral authority. We will not recognize that it is hollow at the core, its priorities and incentives no longer life sustaining but a ritualized and downward spiraling exercise in control and pacification.
At the same time, as we become more sure in our own path to sustainable lives and institutions, the present order will become an object of pathos, of lives wasted, younger generations sacrificed, resources flushed away, hypocrisies enshrined, addictive and automated behaviors celebrated, meaning devalued. It will bring into focus the humanizing role of social change, and encourage us in the collective value of our efforts. It will open us to connection with those trapped in the system, and offer the ultimate power of advocacy which is to live out the life enhancing changes we envision.
As we embrace our tangible hopes for the future, we must also acknowledge the extensive fears of change in the public and in ourselves. The refusal as in the Sixties to accept our projective submission to authority will once again reveal the inner void behind the façade of elite presumption, within authorities from families and schools to the reigning institutions of contemporary society, the faux privilege of those not only suppressing the potentiality of others, but deforming their own potentialities into hierarchical roles that they do not deserve and can not perform. Yet when the apparent goal of this dethroning – self-actualizing individuals and democratic communities – failed by the Seventies to materialize, what transpired was a loss of viable social structures and practices along with moral confusion. The fallout from this loss of way was the forty-year Reaction now going on: the blind rage of the Right, liberals drifting into conservatism, progressives paralyzed by uncertainty regarding how much change they wanted, and radicals despairing of their isolation and the endless deferral of change.
Americans, it should not surprise us, needed some direction to deal with the wholesale challenges to enduring institutional practices and to identify new priorities. This third pathway to social change needs to be understood as one powerful way of addressing these hopes and fears, a way to move us beyond resistance toward effective institutional experimentation. To disentangle from present social practices, we must consider both the broader social thinking that will generate effective concrete alternatives and the transformative organizing processes that can produce them. Let us begin with the theoretical considerations as a framework for the more practical and pragmatic work that can follow.
We must begin with the issue of scale. Future institutions and communities can promote sustainable empowerment and engagement to the extent they are accessible and immediate. Those who belong must be able to participate, to own and take responsibility for the social implementation of their ideals and needs. We must know that the priorities, the values, the framework, and ultimately the social product arise from our individual and joint activity. What might this sense of ownership look like? We have to revitalize the idea of consent: not the pro-forma acquiescence in elite control derived through coordinated pressure from the mechanisms of persuasion and intimidation that exploit the deeply cultivated passivity and fear of change as evident in the U.S. This use of the consent discourse as an ideology of elite self-justification to mobilize popular collusion in their dominance has led many – including Occupy – to conclude that consent provides no viable framework short of an unwieldy consensus for creating and sustaining communities.
What we can do to make consent more viable? How can we create inclusive, participatory communities and societies that provide citizens with ownership and empowerment to ground vibrant membership and inclusion? To achieve this, we must consider how citizens find and express their own voices, come to value and possess the capacity for writing, telling, and living narratives of their own meaning and those of their communities. To create truly consenting societies, the capacities – building on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum on capabilities – necessary for the construction of self-actualizing individuals and engaged community members need to be cultivated and provided outlets. Providing opportunities and spaces to experiment with identity formation by exploring interests, engagements, relationships, and decision-making will establish core developing capacities that will gradually substitute for the authority of elders and for the dominance of official narratives. We must encourage ourselves from an early age to participate in shaping our social realities, to collaborate but also to negotiate, advocate, dissent, form alternative groups, experiment individually and collectively, make mistakes – many mistakes – and learn to evaluate our mistakes and our successes. We should understand that our consent is not presumed or taken for granted – and that while commitments to institutions and relations are serious it is also part of the project of identity formation and full democratic citizenship to choose among and develop engagements that are sustainable over time.
In order to facilitate self and social transformation, we must realize our untapped powers to shape our worlds. Nurturing more empowered, expressive, collaborative citizens, less afraid of authority and more confident of our own experimentation and creativity, requires spaces to help citizens effectively shape and live out their identities and community roles without authoritative maps and demands, and processes for self-reflectivity and democratic engagement and decision making. The goal is to help people encounter the hurdles of internalized self-deformation, find personal and group direction, and ultimately commit to new forms of action and institution building.
This new spirit, in evidence everywhere, is symbolized by the decision of the Madrid Indignados, after occupying the central square for many weeks with a tent city, to relinquish this occupation initiative and move beyond to collective consideration of sustainable transformation. This work began with a series of study groups to engage visions of a new social and interpersonal reality and the creation of pragmatic institutional experiments. As the World Social Forum and global Occupy building upon the Sixties and the colonial struggles have affirmed, Another World is Possible, so long as we prepare ourselves to engage the creation of meaning, individually and collectively.
To undertake the work of organizing, one valuable form of engagement I urge us to consider is what I call workshops. Bringing together at different times social activists, participants in new institutional initiatives, or those simply eager to explore possible directions, workshops can encourage through dialogue and mutual exploration the uncovering of patterns of authority deferral, burdens of self-limitation, fears of embracing one’s self-authority and genuine needs for security, and anxieties about democratic engagement. Critiques of the system and of the damage it inflicts internally and politically are welcomed, but the focus is on recognizing its impact on each of us and on developing ways to diminish this impact. In this way, workshops through sharing in a face-to-face setting can gradually evolve toward a consideration of the participants’ visions of and personal hopes regarding empowerment and authentic self-actualization.
Workshops are open, facilitative processes which build the values of consent and collaboration into their structures. It is possible in these workshops to both see the seeds of new relations and communities and identify the long-term processes that these will require. Any problems or concerns raised by suggestions, possible frameworks, or even interventions from facilitators should be brought up and rethought. Where issues have not been raised, participants should be urged to raise them. Sharing of these complex and vulnerable issues does not require consensus: indeed there is no right answer, no single path. Each must be continually asking what path they can imagine as meaningful and sustainable. There is no problem with being stuck individually or as a group at any point – the process should take account of these as important junctures where significant and complex issues are at stake. And while all are encouraged to participate, those who are more reserved or hesitant should be appreciated for their own way of processing such experiences.
What often happens in these workshops is that the lingering sense of deferral to authority abates as participants increasingly follow the lead of their own priorities and the flow of group concerns. What facilitators can best do, in addition to supporting this gradual shift, is to at appropriate times encourage the consideration of issues that may open new vulnerabilities and challenges. While this can sometimes produce initial stuckness and silence, which in time provide a strong impetus for group reflection, Participants often express appreciation and surprise for the opening of difficult issues in a supportive way.
Such workshops are not themselves the ultimate path, but catalysts in providing space and encouragement and interchange among those seeking to move beyond traditional hierarchical forms of pedagogy and self-clarification. They can help participants to find their voices and to bring their lives into focus. They can enable individuals to connect in new ways and recover the need for and pleasure from such relationships. By opening up links connecting the critical process of examining and working through present limitations with the uncovering of aspirations and directions for change, the process can help participants establish their own narratives rooted in both past experience and ideals. Discussions on the development of frameworks that can facilitate this narrative creativity is one of the continuing challenges for those organizing these workshops.
Democratic and self-empowered citizens can best emerge from processes and life experiences that embody these values. We must rethink the nature of child rearing, parenting and educational strategies, for these stand at the center of the struggle for a transformed world. We will only get the societies that our young are capable of living in. As we develop these new understandings, we can help those committed to change become the agents of sustainable internal and collective transformation. By experimenting with new forms of self-empowerment and group authority, using workshops and other formats that enable us to become processers of our own experience and relations, we can become the creators of many new institutional forms and ways of living.
Occupy resisted concrete decision-making and agenda setting because it could not find a suitable alternative to the corrupted forms of consent that now dominate the social and moral landscape. The next step is to work toward a better grasp of how to facilitate the processes of transformation. Such workshops are not simply a transitional means for identifying the consensual process at the core of democratic communities. They are an initiation into the good society itself, a society that continually attends to our pursuit of meaning and collective well-being.
Jim Block teaches Political Theory and Political Culture at DePaul University, and writes for truthout and Huffington Post on contemporary political and cultural transformation. He has written two books, A Nation of Agents (2002) and The Crucible of Consent (2012), and lectures and conducts workshops on creating sustainable change.
