In the 1930s,
Langston Hughes wrote a poem, "Lenox Avenue Mural":
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
The following is from the compelling book, "A People's History Of the United States" by Howard Zinn.
With the
Establishment's inability either to solve severe economic problems at home or
to manufacture abroad a safety valve for domestic discontent, Americans might
be ready to demand not just more tinkering, more reform laws, another
reshuffling of the same deck, another New Deal, but radical change. Let us be
Utopian for a moment so that when we get realistic again it is not that
"realism" so useful to the Establishment in its discouragement of
action, that "realism" anchored to a certain kind of history empty of
surprise. Let us imagine what radical change would require of us all.
The society's
levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led
to the present state-the giant corporations, the military, and their politician
collaborators. We would need-by a coordinated effort of local groups all over
the country-to reconstruct the economy for both efficiency and justice,
producing in a cooperative way what people need most. We would start on our
neighborhoods, our cities, our workplaces. Work of some kind would be needed by
everyone, including people now kept out of the work force-children, old people,
"handicapped" people. Society could use the enormous energy now idle,
the skills and talents now unused. Everyone could share the routine but
necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for
enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and
ample distribution of goods. Certain basic things would be abundant enough to
be taken out of the money system and be available-free-to everyone: food,
housing, health care, education, transportation.
The great
problem would be to work out a way of accomplishing this without a centralized
bureaucracy, using not the incentives of prison and punishment, but those
incentives of cooperation which spring from natural human desires, which in the
past have been used by the state in times of war, but also by social movements
that gave hints of how people might behave in different conditions. Decisions would
be made by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods-a
network of cooperatives, in communication with one another, a neighborly
socialism avoiding the class hierarchies of capitalism and the harsh
dictatorships that have taken the name "socialist."
People in
time, in friendly communities, might create a new, diversified, nonviolent
culture, in which all forms of personal and group expression would be possible.
Men and women, black and white, old and young, could then cherish their
differences as positive attributes, not as reasons for domination. New values
of cooperation and freedom might then show up in the relations of people, the
upbringing of children.
To do all
that, in the complex conditions of control in the United States, would require
combining the energy of all previous movements in American history-of labor
insurgents, black rebels, Native Americans, women, young people-along with the
new energy of an angry middle class. People would need to begin to transform
their immediate environments-the workplace, the family, the school, the
community-by a series of struggles against absentee authority, to give control
of these places to the people who live and work there.
These
struggles would involve all the tactics used at various times in the past by
people's movements: demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience; strikes and
boycotts and general strikes; direct action to redistribute wealth, to
reconstruct institutions, to revamp relationships; creating-in music,
literature, drama, all the arts, and all the areas of work and play in everyday
life-a new culture of sharing, of respect, a new joy in the collaboration of
people to help themselves and one another.
There would
be many defeats. But when such a movement took hold in hundreds of thousands of
places all over the country it would be impossible to suppress, because the
very guards the system depends on to crush such a movement would be among the
rebels. It would be a new kind of revolution, the only kind that could happen,
I believe, in a country like the United States. It would take enormous energy,
sacrifice, commitment, patience. But because it would be a process over time,
starting without delay, there would be the immediate satisfactions that people
have always found in the affectionate ties of groups striving together for a
common goal.
All this
takes us far from American history, into the realm of imagination. But not
totally removed from history. There are at least glimpses in the past of such a
possibility. In the sixties and seventies, for the first time, the
Establishment failed to produce national unity and patriotic fervor in a war.
There was a flood of cultural changes such as the country had never seen-in
sex, family, personal relations-exactly those situations most difficult to
control from the ordinary centers of power. And never before was there such a
general withdrawal of confidence from so many elements of the political and
economic system. In every period of history, people have found ways to help one
another-even in the midst of a culture of competition and violence-if only for
brief periods, to find joy in work, struggle, companionship, nature.
The prospect
is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also inspiration. There is a chance that
such a movement could succeed in doing what the system itself has never
done-bring about great change with little violence. This is possible because
the more of the 99 percent that begin to see themselves as sharing needs, the
more the guards and the prisoners see their common interest, the more the
Establishment becomes isolated, ineffectual. The elite's weapons, money,
control of information would be useless in the face of a determined population.
The servants of the system would refuse to work to continue the old, deadly
order, and would begin using their time, their space-the very things given them
by the system to keep them quiet-to dismantle that system while creating a new
one.
The prisoners
of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen,
at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that
they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been,
for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not
only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren, or our
great grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.
Percy Shelley
was a radical poet, polemicist and political activist. Jacqueline Mulhallen
traces the revolutionary thread that ran through this extraordinary writer’s
life and work;
Rise like lions after slumber
In unfathomable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
That in sleep have fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few.
That verse is
perhaps one of the best known pieces of poetry in any movement of the oppressed
all over the world. The Chartists knew it in the 19th century and so did the
striking women garment workers in 1909 New York. It was chanted on
demonstrations in Tiananmen Square (1989) and Tahrir Square (2011).
Rise like lions after slumber
In unfathomable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
That in sleep have fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few.
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