By Carl Hintz
On January 18th George Lakey, a long time activist and author, visited the Raleigh (Quaker) Friends Meeting to share from his new memoir Dancing with History: A life for Peace and Justice. Lakey spoke movingly about some of the highs and lows in his life including his fear and sorrow when his daughter was hospitalized, the story of his first arrest, and a beautiful story about the joy of using music to make community and to show love. The conversation with George Lakey that followed was sparked by audience questions about his work as a sociologist, activist, and author. In George Lakey’s view, the US is even more polarized now than it was in the 1930s and 1960s. However, polarization creates an opportunity for dramatic social change. A student of history, George Lakey reminds readers of the power of social movements, the effectiveness of nonviolent direct action campaigns, the importance of vision, and the perils of cooptation.
Things are so fraught, the environment, the state of our country, world, what gives you hope?
My biggest hope springs from the biggest professional mistake I ever made as a sociologist, which was to misread polarization. The conclusion I drew was that increased polarization was bad news because if people have profound disagreements and are fighting then how are they going to make agreements to move ahead in our society and to deliver more justice. My research indicated that polarization is actually related to economic inequality. Even a dozen years ago we were on a road toward more and more and more economic inequality which would lead to more and more and more polarization.
At that time I was also researching for the book I was working on then which was “Viking Economics,” which is about Scandinavia. This is what I found out. They made their biggest leap forward which was in the 1920s and ’30s in a period which was the greatest polarization in modern times for those countries. Nazis marching on the streets in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and communists busy organizing for the dictatorship of the proletariat inspired by the recent Russian revolution. I would call that polarization.
Polarization is a social version of the forge, it melts norms, institutions get all squishy, elections even get challenged. Heating up institutions and making, heating up and making malleable society. That was going on in the 1930s and 1960s in America, and we were able to make a leap forward. Another useful thing about the forge as metaphor is that a forge couldn’t care less what you do with the melted metal. That’s why in Germany at the very time as the Nordics were making their leap forward, the Germans were also polarizing like crazy and they went to Hitler. In Italy, tremendous polarization, it was communists versus fascists there, and they went to a fascist solution in Mussolini.
My family can tell you, they’ll walk into the kitchen in the morning and there I am crying over the newspaper while I eat my granola, because it hurts my heart to see what the forge is putting us through, it hurts to see all that misery and pain. But at the same time then I get up from my granola and coffee and go to work to help people develop the mass movements that are necessary to make the next round of changes.
How do you think Norway made changes during that time?
What they did was non-violent campaigning. Even though they didn’t have that phrase. They didn’t have the civil rights movement to learn from, but they figured it out. They did very many campaigns. Each year in the ’20s, but especially in the ’30s, each year there would be twice as many strikes as the year before. A strike is a nonviolent campaign and the Norwegians understood how important it was that a strike remained nonviolent. That was their major power tool. The Norwegians were very clear, as we get confused, that it’s the economic elite that is benefiting from the status quo, and that we have to go after the economic elite. One way you can do that is to withhold labor power, so the economic elite can’t make money. So that’s what they did over and over and over, and that’s how they made their struggles.
The economic elite was not able to get together enough to use the army in Norway. In Sweden which was even more top heavy in terms of the elite, they did use the army. They called out the army to suppress and kill workers who were on strike and were being supported by the surrounding population. That was an interesting point from a Quaker point of view because at that point in Sweden, 1931, it was really tempting with the troops coming up and just firing on all these unarmed strikers who were picketing, the temptation was to use a violent response. The leader of the labor federation of Sweden, realized it was a critical moment, and called for a general strike, which is a huge escalation over the strike on that particular corporation. Not only workers responded all over Sweden, but also the general population stopped going to school, stopped going to the office, and basically Sweden stood still and the economic elite was defeated and they made their transition that put them on the road to an economic democracy.
What kind of activism is likely to be effective?
I’ve over the years noticed a lot of times activists will go through the motions and not do the thing that’s most powerful available for them to do. I went ahead and wrote a handbook called “How We Win.” It’s like a red cross handbook. What to do when the forge heats up and we have opportunities. We don’t want to waste time doing stuff that’s been done before that isn’t effective. I was just a few days ago reading Dr. King and he was saying one-off demonstrations are useless. I’ve gone to a lot of one-off demonstrations. They’re useless. What works is campaigns. You choose a target where you think you can get something and you decide what it is you want. And then you campaign over and over and over and over. We need to develop campaigns that create power, because this is a power struggle. The people with the most power now know its a power struggle.
Have you or your students been successful advocating through elected positions?
No, because the electoral system is dominated by the big political parties, and both political parties are dominated by the economic elite. It’s going to have to be a power struggle and we’re going to have to win a power struggle in order to put this country on the right course. Let me tell you an example, I was asked to keynote, in Maine, a statewide meeting of all the climate people, so the place was full of all the organizations and also I noticed that there were a number of politicians present including people running for governor and senate and so on because it was electoral season. I thought well if the politicians are here I better warn them about something. So I said, in Maine, you’ve got a growing climate movement that’s of great interest to the electoral politicians because they would love your support. Here’s the thing to remember about their job, their job as politicians is to co-opt you. So they promise you enough to get your support and then don’t deliver. They offer a seat at the table. So it can look attractive. They will try to co-opt you. They did that with the labor movement. They did that with the civil rights movement. That’s what they do. There’s a division of labor between these two major parties, and the Democrats’ job is especially to do the co-optation job.
What is the thing that we should do with our time? How do we best use our energy?
One reason for why I called this book dancing with history is because I was looking for a metaphor that would suggest at least one way of solving that question. Paying attention to intuition. Probably all of us who have danced at all, have felt more like dancing at one point than at another point. I do believe that we need to search ourselves. It is not only a question of reading a handbook or knowing history of what is effective in social change, but also what calls us. What beat gets our feat tapping. To me it matters hugely if there are other people tapping their feet at the same beat. And if I’m the only one whose foot is tapping, I don’t tend to do that project. Because polarization is so hard on us, hard on our hearts, I think that’s extra reason to want to work with others and be in comradeship, be a team. Because teams can put up with so much more stress than individuals can.
Carl Hintz is a contributing editor at Triangle Free Press. He teaches public school in Raleigh, NC.