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Letters to a Young Activist

by Sarahana | July 2005

Drawing from his experience as an activist in the sixties, Todd Gitlin puts together a collection of anecdotes, advice and cautionary warnings in his book Letters to a Young Activist, part of "the Art of Mentoring" series modeled upon Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. While Gitlin's letters pale in comparison to Rilke's, in inspiration and style, what's particularly interesting is the kind of activist Gitlin wishes to make out of the reader, presumably a young person interested in changing the world, often encountering frustration and confusion. Gitlin's overall tone is perhaps too much of a lecture, but if the reader is able to work past that, the ideas he thus offers—with activism in America as a point of reference—are worth building upon for a young activist in any part of the world.

The most useful advice Gitlin provides is that of expectations. He warns against the danger of expecting to set the world right—once and for all—when one decides to take actions; "The activist works towards improvement, not salvation," he writes, "To be resolute is to face the reality that the fight at hand may fail—at least partly—but no defeat is definitive. You rethink. The world changes and you rethink again. You're never finished." The importance of this acceptance is that when young, energetic people with the right intentions encounter the real world and meet with frustrating obstacles and indifference, this frustration can easily materialize into violence and radicalism. Whether it be young Nepali Maoists or young Palestinian suicide bombers or young Americans who died at the explosion of their own bombs, the emergence of radicalism makes the movement that much ugly.

The decision to act, however, is not a leap into oblivion and futility either. Gitlin asks, "Where would the world be without agitators? Great ideas wouldn't stand a chance. Radiant goals that conservatives say they hope to conserve are not and cannot be achieved by conservatives. The Confederacy would not have abolished slavery. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, Social Security, public funding for medical care and higher education, clean water, rain forests and species preserved were not dreamed up by corporations or status quo governments. The federal bureaucracy and pharmaceutical companies did not put anti-AIDS drugs into the hands of millions of infected people out of good will, without a raging activist movement. It's obvious when you think about it but neglected in the conservatives' self-congratulation: without the disrupters, campaigners and ideological pests, all noble words amount to nothing but blackboard dust."

With this in mind, Gitlin sets out to recommend a certain kind of an activist: a realist, as opposed to a mere theorist; someone who is guided by sound morals and ideology, but at the same time is willing to be taught by the real world, willing to work with the imperfections, willing to work with the insiders, and not willing to put the immediate future at risk in a pursuit to secure larger ideological goals. If there is a lesson to be learnt from the sixties, Gitlin suggests, it is that the "genius lay in applying ideals to activity. The movement understood that what makes the world move is not wanting the right ideals, not even wanting them intensely, but intelligently turning ends into means." In other words, idealism needs to be completed by action, and the question is not what we want, but how we propose to get it. He further explains, "If you secede from politics because you'd rather stay home and live a quieter, sweeter life or stick to your last or cultivate your garden, in effect you leave politics to the blindest, most unbalanced, meanest-spirited people. So if you want to make the world more tolerable, you really have no choice but to discipline yourself to collaborate with imperfect allies, not angels."

In pushing for such realists, Gitlin leans toward discrediting the purists/theorists throughout the book: "If you greenwash yourself in the name of pure virtue, you get two things: first, the good feeling that comes from the pleasure of enlisting in the army of pure virtue, and second, Republican rule." However, as Gitlin himself points out, a real challenge for the left of the center against the right (or the far left) is the inherent liberal tendency to differ, welcome diversity and dislike power. Overall, the left is more likely to produce filmmakers, philosophers, writers, musicians and artists rather than people in power, whereas the right is driven by unity for the sake of power itself (at the end of Left Forum 2005, Bill Fletcher warned, If the left is not interested in power, then this is all a game). One might argue, however, that although to make actual differences the left must collaborate with imperfect allies and be willing to translate ideals into actions, it is perhaps not a bad idea to have some purist force within the left. Gitlin is understandably weary of the Green's "demonstrated spoiler capacity," but along the way, how far to the center or the right of the center will the left have to adjust itself to in order to achieve realistic goals? The Chomskys, the Naders and the Roys, therefore, are not quite as disposable even if the dire need for realistic activism can hardly be argued. (For the theorists, the Art of Mentoring also has a "Letters to a Young Contrarian," which will be reviewed next on this site.)

Spread across several chapters, Gitlin warns of other tendencies to be aware of, pointing out the difference between passion driven by hate vs. that driven by love, the problematic nature of identity politics in the context of racism and other biases, the need to love what is not perfect and to criticize what is loved, the correlation between patriotism and criticism of one's country, and that crucial to saving a movement is making it fun, and being fresh and innovative. On that note, Gitlin recalls the sixties throughout the book, reminding the reader that they were not quite as glorious as they have been packaged to be, that the good and the bad were not distinctly clear amongst the public, and that the anti-war movement was always met with popular opposition. In this aspect, anytime is a good time to try to change the world, he suggests, and that "There's no wrong time to live, only the right way to live your one and only life at the moment you're living it."

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