February 19, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Portrait by Robert Shetterly / Americans Who Tell The Truth
Bill Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a co-founder of the Weather Underground.
“Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength,” claims Bill Ayers. A retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ayers is infamous for being a co-founder of the Weather Underground. Founded in 1969, the Weather Underground bombed various public buildings (most prominently the Pentagon and the Capitol) throughout the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to combat American imperialism and racism. Ayers resurfaced in public view during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign due to his loose connection to Barack Obama. Further, Ayers is a prolific author. His latest book, When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, was published last fall. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Ayers. Even at the age of 80, Ayers is still every bit as passionate about issues regarding education, colonialism, white supremacy, and war. In this interview, Ayers specifically provides indispensable insight on the nature of grassroots activism and on the necessity of remaining hopeful even under the contemporary threat of fascism.
Richard McDaniel (RM): You’ve called the concept of the “white working class” a “fiction built with white supremacy.” Why?
Bill Ayers (BA): Well, because I think that the idea that you can separate the working class into these neat categories around race is a fiction. I think that we settle too often for labels that might be useful in terms of our conceptions, but are actually fundamentally weak. I think that white supremacy is foundational to this country. As I’ve often thought (in my recent book this is kind of a big theme), all Americans are touched with the idea of freedom. We all think that freedom is the best thing in the world. Well, what anybody means by it is a mystery. So, we have the Black Freedom Movement, which means one thing to me, and then we have the Freedom Caucus (the right-wing group in Congress), or the insufferable Ron DeSantis’ [book] The Courage to Be Free. Or, I just got a new Visa card called “Freedom Unlimited.” That just made me want to jump off a bridge. This is ridiculous! What is freedom? And so, foundational to the American experience is a freedom for the conqueror, [which translates to] murder and mayhem for the conquered.
We are a country built on two original sins. One is the sin of slavery, and the other is a sin of settler-colonialism: conquest, murder, mayhem, annihilation. We have to keep that in our minds as we think about moving forward. So, the working class. What is the working class? Well, the working class are those who have to sell their labor in order to live, and they sell it to capitalists (typically). So, the working class is complex, multi-layered, difficult to understand, difficult to contain in a single slogan. But, people start talking about the “white working class,” especially the Democratic party officials when they start saying: “Well, our problem is we lost the white working class.” To me, that is absolute fiction. It defines something that’s not defined in the actual world. If you go to the UAW, there’s not the “white working class” and the “black working class.” There are white people and black people, and race is a fundamental dividing line in our country. There are people who are seduced by white supremacy into working against their class interests. There’s no question about that, but that doesn’t make an entire hegemonic reality called the “white working class.”
I want to trouble that notion because I find the opportunism of the leaders of the Democratic party to be overwhelming and appalling. In their looking at this last national election, for example, they’re all obsessed with: “What was wrong with our message? What was wrong with our…?” They become both narrow and opportunistic, and they fall into all the traps that make this country a problem, both for people here and in the world. What I would rather people spend time thinking about is: What do we stand for in principle? What do we care about ethically, morally? What are we willing to fight for? If you think about the “why” of building a social movement or a political party instead of always thinking operationally–What do I do? Where do I look? How do I appeal?–[that makes] a much stronger basis. Let me back up again. Another thing that I would say is that we have two major political parties in this country. The Republican party was captured a long time ago, but it’s been captured by a populist, racist, white supremacist ideology–a kind of ring-wing populism. It has now transformed in the last few months–we’ve watched it happen–into a constitutional fascist party. By that, I mean it’s using the levers of power and the levers of the law to remake the country so that it is run by and for oligarchs. It is standing firmly against the needs of the masses of people, the working class included. I think that’s the reality we have to look at. The Republican party is now–its recent history as a right-wing populist party, which has now transformed into a constitutional fascist party.
On the other side, we don’t have a party of opposition. We have a series of blocs that come together as a coalition called the “Democratic party.” It is not a vehicle–it’s not a party in the sense that it has a political line and it has a disciplined structure. It’s not like that at all. The Republican party is much more in that realm. So, that means that the Democratic party is a frail instrument of opposition. In fact, I think that you could argue that the Democratic party, in many ways, laid the foundation for a lot of the worst things we’re seeing as this constitutional fascist party goes to work. The Democratic party laid the groundwork for the genocide in Gaza, laid the groundwork for undoing some of the progressive moves that had been made in both the 1930s and the 1960s and ‘70s. I have no allegiance to or affection for the Democratic party as it exists, and I’ve never been a Democrat. So, I’m not as freaked out as some people. I think what we need to do is build an irresistible mass movement of opposition to this fascist movement, but also to the consensus between the two parties around world domination, around militarization. We will oppose these things by building a mass opposition, not by throwing in with the Democratic party.
One last thing on the party politics. You know, the fact that we have normalized the idea that we all get solicitations from candidates, and that we’ve normalized the idea that, in order to run for office, your main job is raising millions and millions of dollars. That is an atrocity. That has nothing to do with democracy, nothing to do with freedom. Yet, that’s what we’ve normalized. I’m still getting texts from the Democratic leadership saying: “We just need you to kick in $20 and we’ll turn this seat.” It’s an obscene idea that the way you participate, and the way you show that you’ve got popular support, is by how much money you raise. That is really a perversion of any notion of democracy.
RM: In an effort to combat the roughly 6,000 Vietnamese that were murdered every week by American imperialism, the Weather Underground famously destroyed government property. How did the Weather Underground succeed in smuggling bombs into the Capitol and the Pentagon? Was there just a lack of security in these government buildings?
BA: There was a lack of security for sure. First, let me backup a minute. Yes, 6,000 people a week were being killed by our government in Indochina, and that went on for ten years. I was first arrested opposing that war in 1965. I was arrested many, many more times. I did organizing work full-time as an anti-war activist and organizer. But, we couldn’t stop the war. By 1968, it was clear that the war was lost. Yet, the killing went on. So, the questions were: Where do we go from here? How do we oppose this regime when it’s already been defeated politically and ethically, but still continues its murderous path? For the left, and even for the country, there was a crisis because a majority of the country opposed the war. Those of us who had sacrificed and worked hard to end it felt, in 1968, for a minute that we won a victory, and then the war escalated. So, what do you do? One of my brothers joined the Democratic party and tried to build a peace wing. One went to Canada and opened a home for deserters. One went to the communes.
There were many things to do, but I became part of a group out of Students for a Democratic Society. We built an organization away from the eyes of the state, and we felt that we had to find a way to survive in what we thought of as impending American fascism. So, we began to build an underground. When three of our comrades were killed in an accidental bombing explosion, we went underground. We wanted to take the war to the warmakers. We wanted to issue a screaming response, and so we figured out ways to destroy property. It was extreme vandalism, [which] is one way to think about it. It was extreme vandalism with a political message. We weren’t the first or the last people to engage in extreme vandalism, but ours was focused on two things which are still the focus of my politics. One was U.S. imperialism abroad, and one was white supremacy at home. So, we built the capacity to commit illegal, some would say insane (but I don’t think they were insane), actions that destroyed government property or that destroyed a police station.
How did we do it? We figured out ways to breach the security of places like the Pentagon. Now, one could argue that it would be impossible to do today, but that’s not true. But, I’m not that interested in tactics. I’ve never been much of a tactician or much of a person who knows how to do those kinds of things. Rather, I think we should be thinking about: How do we build mass consciousness around the evils of war and racism? I think that’s the most important thing. Figuring out how to evade capture and so on is not that important, actually. In fact, let me transition into [a] slightly different space. I actually think that if you ever start to think that our military versus their military, that we could win, or if you think that our spycraft versus their spycraft gives us an advantage, you’re way off-base. The reality is that, if it’s a clash between their army and our army, we lose every time. If it’s a clash between our imaginations and their imaginations, or our ethical stance and their ethical stance, I think we have a very–not only a good chance of winning, but we will win. That means that we can transform society into a peaceful, just, balanced world if we have large numbers of people involved.
So, I know everybody in the anti-war movement has figured out how to use Signal on their phones. I hate Signal. But, I mean, I have it, [and] I’ve used it. I used it when we were involved in an illegal action shutting down a war munitions plant in Chicago. Everybody wanted to be on Signal, so I was on Signal. There were also a lot of things that I learned in that demonstration. But, once the encampments happened in universities–[after] the encampments were crushed by the fearful, backwards university administrations, to then say: “We’ll meet in small groups on Signal.” [It] makes no sense to me. That’s a time when you should have a big meeting, [and] invite the entire university to an auditorium, because our strength is in numbers. It’s not in Signal. I may have gone off on a tangent, but I think it’s important that militants today (and organizers today) can’t get caught up in the idea, because they’re savvy about technology, that somehow technology is where our strength lies. That’s not where it lies. Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength.
You asked initially about the Weather Underground and a tactical question, which I really don’t have much knowledge of or ability with. But, I wanted to move away from that and say: If you focus on [tactics] in your organizing or in your thinking about how to organize, you will go down a dead end. They have all the strength, and we have all the weaknesses. Our only strength is in talking to people and building bigger and bigger coalitions of people who see that their lives could be materially, spiritually, and ethically better without the capitalist, greedy, acquisitive, militaristic, predatory system that we live in today.
RM: In a 2012 interview, you rightly stated that “you can’t be free if you’re not enlightened.” Why does the United States have such a hard time at granting equal education to all students?
BA: That’s why. You answered the question by asking it! I mean, one of the things we’re witnessing right now that I think is really important to name is that one of the hallmarks of fascism, or any autocratic rule, is to destroy the university. One of my messages as a teacher, and I write about this in everything I write, [is] that free people read freely, that you need no one’s permission to interrogate the world. That has to be the major message that teachers in a free society give to their students: “You have a right to be here. You have a right to read freely. You have the right to investigate the world, and, in fact, your responsibility is to try to understand what’s going on around you.” As Charlie Cobb said in 1963 when he wrote the proposal for Freedom Schools: “The black children of Mississippi have been denied many things: fully funded education, fully trained teachers, [and] decent facilities. But, the fundamental injury is being denied the right to think for themselves about the circumstances of their lives and how they could be otherwise.” That’s the most radical thing a teacher could say: “You have a right to understand the circumstances of your lives and how they could be otherwise.”
So, who’s afraid of that very sensible thing that I just said? People who are afraid of it are the people in 1963 in Mississippi who ran the plantations. They’re afraid of that because an enlightened group of workers will overthrow the plantation. That’s why reading was outlawed during slavery. Frederick Douglass famously tells the story of his master’s wife teaching him to read, and the master finding out about it and exploding, saying: “You can’t teach him to read! That will unfit him to be a slave.” Exactly. Reading, education, [and] knowledge is liberating at its best. That means you can’t have any restrictions on how you interrogate the world. You don’t need your parents permission, you don’t need your teacher’s permission, [and] you certainly don’t need the government’s permission to interrogate the world. So, what are we witnessing right now? Banning books in Florida and Oklahoma, closing libraries in Arizona and Georgia, firing teachers all over the place, [and] fighting the teachers unions because the teachers unions are standing up not just for wages and benefits, but for kids’ right to learn.
We’re seeing this attack on universities, which now has taken on a whole new dimension and is attacking research, attacking graduate schools, attacking the bank accounts of the universities (so the endowments are now under siege), and so on. The big research universities are the product of the 20th century, and I can give you my critique of them. I have an endless critique because I lived in them for a long time. Of course, I’m very critical of the universities as they are, but what we’re witnessing is not the undoing of the universities as they are for a more liberatory, participatory move. We’re witnessing the undoing of them precisely so that people can’t think, can’t learn, can’t know, [which makes people] have blinders on that will limit their capacity to act. That’s the fundamental feature we’re witnessing when I talk about the drift, or now the lurch, toward fascism. The attack on the universities is clear.
One more [thing]. In the spring of last year, we saw the creation of encampments all over the country to deal with a fundamental, major political issue that was rocking the world and rocking the nation. Kids took the initiative to say: “Let’s start a conversation. We’ve got an encampment here.” I went to five of them. They were absolutely utopian communities. People were taking care of each other. There were free libraries. People were reading. People were asking questions. People were learning at an incredible rate, and it’s exactly what you want a university to be. The administrations could’ve said: “These kids have highlighted a major issue of our times. Let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation throughout the university.” Instead, they went to Washington, they cringed in front of the no-nothings, they came back to their campuses, [and] they called the cops on American universities. Then, when the students and teachers were away (when people weren’t paying attention), they changed the rules about when you could speak up, how you could speak up, what you could speak about, and they fired several faculty members, including Katherine Franke, [who was] a tenured law professor at Columbia University. They fired her. How is that possible? Some places that I know of closed departments as a way to fire a tenured professor.
The university presidents could not go before Congress and do what you and I could do easily, which is not just to defend the first amendment (it wasn’t about the first amendment), but to also defend academic freedom, which means the freedom to learn, the freedom to teach, [and] the freedom to think. That’s academic freedom. It goes way beyond the first amendment. [The] first amendment is that the government “shall make no laws.” That’s easy. The right to think, the right to teach, the right to learn–those are fundamental to a free society. That’s what was under attack last spring. That’s what’s under attack in a systemic way as the fascist constitutionalists take power. They’re going to undo the Education Department. Why? Well, because education is their enemy. Reading is their enemy.
The other thing that I would say about the spring and about what’s going on now is [that] there’s been a lot of comparisons to McCarthyism. There’s some truth in that. The universities were pathetic during the McCarthy era as well, as were many businesses and many other places. But, there’s a difference. McCarthyism was about: “What are your associations? Are you in the communist party? Do you associate with communists?” This is about: “What book are you reading? Let me look at your curriculum.” We had university presidents like the president of Columbia naming professors who were teaching the wrong things. That’s just unprecedented, and it’s outrageous. It is the hallmark of fascism.
RM: In your book, Demand the Impossible, you wrote that hope is “an antidote to cynicism and despair” and is the “capacity to notice or invent alternatives” to the existing world. Unfortunately, however, many Americans feel pessimistic and are discouraged to take the steps necessary for change. How do we cultivate a culture of hope in the United States?
BA: Well, we have to, first of all, advocate for it and believe in it. I’ll tell you a couple of things. One is–I think I might’ve written about this somewhere, but I’m often accused of being an optimist, and I’m not an optimist. My mother was an optimist. Karl Marx was an optimist. I used to accuse my mom of being a Marxist because she thought she knew how things were going to turn out. I have no idea how things are going to turn out, and neither do you, the pundits, nor the people who are analyzing why the Democrats lost. Nobody knows how things are going to be tomorrow. That gives me hope because both the pessimists and the optimists are determinists. They know what’s going to happen. The pessimists sit on their couch, smoke a joint, and watch the world go to hell. The optimists wave cheerly from the window into the sunshine. Both are wrong because we don’t know. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to build a movement. We don’t know whether catastrophic capitalist climate collapse is going to do us all in sooner or later. We don’t know.
But, what we do know is, because we don’t know, we could choose to be hopeful. It’s often been said [that] the day before any revolution, the talking heads are certain that it’s impossible, and the day after they can explain why it was inevitable. That’s incidentally why I don’t find the debriefing of the Democratic party’s loss to be that interesting or illuminating because people go on MSNBC and pretty much bullshit. They don’t know. They would be better served if they were out organizing for a vision of a new world that is within reach. I always say to myself: “I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist.” I choose hope precisely because I don’t know what’s coming. Try and fail and try again and fail again, but fail better–that, to me, is the rhythm of a real radical or a real revolutionary. You have to keep trying because you don’t know what’s coming and you know what exists is unacceptable. The mayhem and the murder and the cruelty is unacceptable, and we have to find a way to do our work. For me, as I’ve often said, I get up every morning and think: “Maybe today we’ll overthrow capitalism.” Then, I go to bed every night disappointed (a little bit), but I get up the next morning and say the same thing. Why not? Because you don’t know. Why not get busy with projects of repair, reimagining, and revolution? That’s how I want to live my life.
I had dinner with Eduardo Galeano (the Latin American revolutionary from Uruguay), who wrote the book Open Veins of Latin America. He’s passed away. But, twenty years ago I had dinner with Eduardo, and we were exchanging views on a lot of things. We got to talking about how we both were often accused of being romantics, optimists, utopians. I feel like I’m not guilty of being an optimist. I’m guilty of being a bit romantic, being hopeful, all that. But, Galeano told me the best story. He said that a person he met accused him of being a utopian, and the guy said to him: “What good is utopia?” Galeano’s response was: “Well, it’s true. I take two steps towards utopia, and utopia walks two steps away. I walk ten steps towards utopia, [and] utopia walks ten steps away. It’s good for walking.” I thought that was marvelous. It keeps you going because you have a north star, not a dogmatic fixed image of what we could build. You have an idea that we could move towards more participation, more transparency, more democracy, more mutual aid, more mutual regard. That’s where I want to go: more peace, more justice, more joy. That gives me the ability to keep on walking.
I would say the issues that you raised, and that have been my issues my whole life (war and white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism), are the core issues that we are facing today. So, you think about the Black Panther party. How did the Black Panther party get started sixty years ago? It got started around the killing of black youth by the police in Oakland. That’s still an issue, and that’s only the tip of an iceberg of what white supremacy is. But, I think that I’m deeply involved–in my active work now, besides teaching and writing–in the anti-mass incarceration movement, the peace movement (the anti-genocide movement), the climate catastrophe movement, [and] with working on questions of homelessness. These are all things that matter. From my way of thinking and talking about how we get people hopeful, I would say that if you spend all of your time looking at the sites of power you have no access to (the White House, the Medieval Auction bloc called the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street), you’re bound to feel hopeless. The powerful will not make you feel hopeful. But, if instead you spend your time in the sites of power you have absolute access to (the classroom, the house of worship, the street, the community, the workplace, the neighborhood)–you have access to all of that, so why aren’t you spending your time there rather than watching MSNBC or reading The New York Times and feeling like shit all day?
To me, we have to stay hopeful because it’s the logical thing to do, and it’s the only way to live because you don’t know. The other way of saying it that [Antonio] Gramsci put it that a lot of people quote is to be a “pessimist of the head and an optimist of the heart,” or something like that. The idea being that you can be analytical and make sense out of all the stuff that’s going on, but you still have to have a heart that yearns for something better and that can find energy to organize for that something better. That, I think, is where we should all be living.
Portrait by Robert Shetterly / Americans Who Tell The Truth
Bill Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a co-founder of the Weather Underground.
“Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength,” claims Bill Ayers. A retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ayers is infamous for being a co-founder of the Weather Underground. Founded in 1969, the Weather Underground bombed various public buildings (most prominently the Pentagon and the Capitol) throughout the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to combat American imperialism and racism. Ayers resurfaced in public view during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign due to his loose connection to Barack Obama. Further, Ayers is a prolific author. His latest book, When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, was published last fall. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Ayers. Even at the age of 80, Ayers is still every bit as passionate about issues regarding education, colonialism, white supremacy, and war. In this interview, Ayers specifically provides indispensable insight on the nature of grassroots activism and on the necessity of remaining hopeful even under the contemporary threat of fascism.
Richard McDaniel (RM): You’ve called the concept of the “white working class” a “fiction built with white supremacy.” Why?
Bill Ayers (BA): Well, because I think that the idea that you can separate the working class into these neat categories around race is a fiction. I think that we settle too often for labels that might be useful in terms of our conceptions, but are actually fundamentally weak. I think that white supremacy is foundational to this country. As I’ve often thought (in my recent book this is kind of a big theme), all Americans are touched with the idea of freedom. We all think that freedom is the best thing in the world. Well, what anybody means by it is a mystery. So, we have the Black Freedom Movement, which means one thing to me, and then we have the Freedom Caucus (the right-wing group in Congress), or the insufferable Ron DeSantis’ [book] The Courage to Be Free. Or, I just got a new Visa card called “Freedom Unlimited.” That just made me want to jump off a bridge. This is ridiculous! What is freedom? And so, foundational to the American experience is a freedom for the conqueror, [which translates to] murder and mayhem for the conquered.
We are a country built on two original sins. One is the sin of slavery, and the other is a sin of settler-colonialism: conquest, murder, mayhem, annihilation. We have to keep that in our minds as we think about moving forward. So, the working class. What is the working class? Well, the working class are those who have to sell their labor in order to live, and they sell it to capitalists (typically). So, the working class is complex, multi-layered, difficult to understand, difficult to contain in a single slogan. But, people start talking about the “white working class,” especially the Democratic party officials when they start saying: “Well, our problem is we lost the white working class.” To me, that is absolute fiction. It defines something that’s not defined in the actual world. If you go to the UAW, there’s not the “white working class” and the “black working class.” There are white people and black people, and race is a fundamental dividing line in our country. There are people who are seduced by white supremacy into working against their class interests. There’s no question about that, but that doesn’t make an entire hegemonic reality called the “white working class.”
I want to trouble that notion because I find the opportunism of the leaders of the Democratic party to be overwhelming and appalling. In their looking at this last national election, for example, they’re all obsessed with: “What was wrong with our message? What was wrong with our…?” They become both narrow and opportunistic, and they fall into all the traps that make this country a problem, both for people here and in the world. What I would rather people spend time thinking about is: What do we stand for in principle? What do we care about ethically, morally? What are we willing to fight for? If you think about the “why” of building a social movement or a political party instead of always thinking operationally–What do I do? Where do I look? How do I appeal?–[that makes] a much stronger basis. Let me back up again. Another thing that I would say is that we have two major political parties in this country. The Republican party was captured a long time ago, but it’s been captured by a populist, racist, white supremacist ideology–a kind of ring-wing populism. It has now transformed in the last few months–we’ve watched it happen–into a constitutional fascist party. By that, I mean it’s using the levers of power and the levers of the law to remake the country so that it is run by and for oligarchs. It is standing firmly against the needs of the masses of people, the working class included. I think that’s the reality we have to look at. The Republican party is now–its recent history as a right-wing populist party, which has now transformed into a constitutional fascist party.
On the other side, we don’t have a party of opposition. We have a series of blocs that come together as a coalition called the “Democratic party.” It is not a vehicle–it’s not a party in the sense that it has a political line and it has a disciplined structure. It’s not like that at all. The Republican party is much more in that realm. So, that means that the Democratic party is a frail instrument of opposition. In fact, I think that you could argue that the Democratic party, in many ways, laid the foundation for a lot of the worst things we’re seeing as this constitutional fascist party goes to work. The Democratic party laid the groundwork for the genocide in Gaza, laid the groundwork for undoing some of the progressive moves that had been made in both the 1930s and the 1960s and ‘70s. I have no allegiance to or affection for the Democratic party as it exists, and I’ve never been a Democrat. So, I’m not as freaked out as some people. I think what we need to do is build an irresistible mass movement of opposition to this fascist movement, but also to the consensus between the two parties around world domination, around militarization. We will oppose these things by building a mass opposition, not by throwing in with the Democratic party.
One last thing on the party politics. You know, the fact that we have normalized the idea that we all get solicitations from candidates, and that we’ve normalized the idea that, in order to run for office, your main job is raising millions and millions of dollars. That is an atrocity. That has nothing to do with democracy, nothing to do with freedom. Yet, that’s what we’ve normalized. I’m still getting texts from the Democratic leadership saying: “We just need you to kick in $20 and we’ll turn this seat.” It’s an obscene idea that the way you participate, and the way you show that you’ve got popular support, is by how much money you raise. That is really a perversion of any notion of democracy.
RM: In an effort to combat the roughly 6,000 Vietnamese that were murdered every week by American imperialism, the Weather Underground famously destroyed government property. How did the Weather Underground succeed in smuggling bombs into the Capitol and the Pentagon? Was there just a lack of security in these government buildings?
BA: There was a lack of security for sure. First, let me backup a minute. Yes, 6,000 people a week were being killed by our government in Indochina, and that went on for ten years. I was first arrested opposing that war in 1965. I was arrested many, many more times. I did organizing work full-time as an anti-war activist and organizer. But, we couldn’t stop the war. By 1968, it was clear that the war was lost. Yet, the killing went on. So, the questions were: Where do we go from here? How do we oppose this regime when it’s already been defeated politically and ethically, but still continues its murderous path? For the left, and even for the country, there was a crisis because a majority of the country opposed the war. Those of us who had sacrificed and worked hard to end it felt, in 1968, for a minute that we won a victory, and then the war escalated. So, what do you do? One of my brothers joined the Democratic party and tried to build a peace wing. One went to Canada and opened a home for deserters. One went to the communes.
There were many things to do, but I became part of a group out of Students for a Democratic Society. We built an organization away from the eyes of the state, and we felt that we had to find a way to survive in what we thought of as impending American fascism. So, we began to build an underground. When three of our comrades were killed in an accidental bombing explosion, we went underground. We wanted to take the war to the warmakers. We wanted to issue a screaming response, and so we figured out ways to destroy property. It was extreme vandalism, [which] is one way to think about it. It was extreme vandalism with a political message. We weren’t the first or the last people to engage in extreme vandalism, but ours was focused on two things which are still the focus of my politics. One was U.S. imperialism abroad, and one was white supremacy at home. So, we built the capacity to commit illegal, some would say insane (but I don’t think they were insane), actions that destroyed government property or that destroyed a police station.
How did we do it? We figured out ways to breach the security of places like the Pentagon. Now, one could argue that it would be impossible to do today, but that’s not true. But, I’m not that interested in tactics. I’ve never been much of a tactician or much of a person who knows how to do those kinds of things. Rather, I think we should be thinking about: How do we build mass consciousness around the evils of war and racism? I think that’s the most important thing. Figuring out how to evade capture and so on is not that important, actually. In fact, let me transition into [a] slightly different space. I actually think that if you ever start to think that our military versus their military, that we could win, or if you think that our spycraft versus their spycraft gives us an advantage, you’re way off-base. The reality is that, if it’s a clash between their army and our army, we lose every time. If it’s a clash between our imaginations and their imaginations, or our ethical stance and their ethical stance, I think we have a very–not only a good chance of winning, but we will win. That means that we can transform society into a peaceful, just, balanced world if we have large numbers of people involved.
So, I know everybody in the anti-war movement has figured out how to use Signal on their phones. I hate Signal. But, I mean, I have it, [and] I’ve used it. I used it when we were involved in an illegal action shutting down a war munitions plant in Chicago. Everybody wanted to be on Signal, so I was on Signal. There were also a lot of things that I learned in that demonstration. But, once the encampments happened in universities–[after] the encampments were crushed by the fearful, backwards university administrations, to then say: “We’ll meet in small groups on Signal.” [It] makes no sense to me. That’s a time when you should have a big meeting, [and] invite the entire university to an auditorium, because our strength is in numbers. It’s not in Signal. I may have gone off on a tangent, but I think it’s important that militants today (and organizers today) can’t get caught up in the idea, because they’re savvy about technology, that somehow technology is where our strength lies. That’s not where it lies. Our strength lies in a large political message, a large moral vision, a large mobilization of people, and that’s our only strength.
You asked initially about the Weather Underground and a tactical question, which I really don’t have much knowledge of or ability with. But, I wanted to move away from that and say: If you focus on [tactics] in your organizing or in your thinking about how to organize, you will go down a dead end. They have all the strength, and we have all the weaknesses. Our only strength is in talking to people and building bigger and bigger coalitions of people who see that their lives could be materially, spiritually, and ethically better without the capitalist, greedy, acquisitive, militaristic, predatory system that we live in today.
RM: In a 2012 interview, you rightly stated that “you can’t be free if you’re not enlightened.” Why does the United States have such a hard time at granting equal education to all students?
BA: That’s why. You answered the question by asking it! I mean, one of the things we’re witnessing right now that I think is really important to name is that one of the hallmarks of fascism, or any autocratic rule, is to destroy the university. One of my messages as a teacher, and I write about this in everything I write, [is] that free people read freely, that you need no one’s permission to interrogate the world. That has to be the major message that teachers in a free society give to their students: “You have a right to be here. You have a right to read freely. You have the right to investigate the world, and, in fact, your responsibility is to try to understand what’s going on around you.” As Charlie Cobb said in 1963 when he wrote the proposal for Freedom Schools: “The black children of Mississippi have been denied many things: fully funded education, fully trained teachers, [and] decent facilities. But, the fundamental injury is being denied the right to think for themselves about the circumstances of their lives and how they could be otherwise.” That’s the most radical thing a teacher could say: “You have a right to understand the circumstances of your lives and how they could be otherwise.”
So, who’s afraid of that very sensible thing that I just said? People who are afraid of it are the people in 1963 in Mississippi who ran the plantations. They’re afraid of that because an enlightened group of workers will overthrow the plantation. That’s why reading was outlawed during slavery. Frederick Douglass famously tells the story of his master’s wife teaching him to read, and the master finding out about it and exploding, saying: “You can’t teach him to read! That will unfit him to be a slave.” Exactly. Reading, education, [and] knowledge is liberating at its best. That means you can’t have any restrictions on how you interrogate the world. You don’t need your parents permission, you don’t need your teacher’s permission, [and] you certainly don’t need the government’s permission to interrogate the world. So, what are we witnessing right now? Banning books in Florida and Oklahoma, closing libraries in Arizona and Georgia, firing teachers all over the place, [and] fighting the teachers unions because the teachers unions are standing up not just for wages and benefits, but for kids’ right to learn.
We’re seeing this attack on universities, which now has taken on a whole new dimension and is attacking research, attacking graduate schools, attacking the bank accounts of the universities (so the endowments are now under siege), and so on. The big research universities are the product of the 20th century, and I can give you my critique of them. I have an endless critique because I lived in them for a long time. Of course, I’m very critical of the universities as they are, but what we’re witnessing is not the undoing of the universities as they are for a more liberatory, participatory move. We’re witnessing the undoing of them precisely so that people can’t think, can’t learn, can’t know, [which makes people] have blinders on that will limit their capacity to act. That’s the fundamental feature we’re witnessing when I talk about the drift, or now the lurch, toward fascism. The attack on the universities is clear.
One more [thing]. In the spring of last year, we saw the creation of encampments all over the country to deal with a fundamental, major political issue that was rocking the world and rocking the nation. Kids took the initiative to say: “Let’s start a conversation. We’ve got an encampment here.” I went to five of them. They were absolutely utopian communities. People were taking care of each other. There were free libraries. People were reading. People were asking questions. People were learning at an incredible rate, and it’s exactly what you want a university to be. The administrations could’ve said: “These kids have highlighted a major issue of our times. Let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation throughout the university.” Instead, they went to Washington, they cringed in front of the no-nothings, they came back to their campuses, [and] they called the cops on American universities. Then, when the students and teachers were away (when people weren’t paying attention), they changed the rules about when you could speak up, how you could speak up, what you could speak about, and they fired several faculty members, including Katherine Franke, [who was] a tenured law professor at Columbia University. They fired her. How is that possible? Some places that I know of closed departments as a way to fire a tenured professor.
The university presidents could not go before Congress and do what you and I could do easily, which is not just to defend the first amendment (it wasn’t about the first amendment), but to also defend academic freedom, which means the freedom to learn, the freedom to teach, [and] the freedom to think. That’s academic freedom. It goes way beyond the first amendment. [The] first amendment is that the government “shall make no laws.” That’s easy. The right to think, the right to teach, the right to learn–those are fundamental to a free society. That’s what was under attack last spring. That’s what’s under attack in a systemic way as the fascist constitutionalists take power. They’re going to undo the Education Department. Why? Well, because education is their enemy. Reading is their enemy.
The other thing that I would say about the spring and about what’s going on now is [that] there’s been a lot of comparisons to McCarthyism. There’s some truth in that. The universities were pathetic during the McCarthy era as well, as were many businesses and many other places. But, there’s a difference. McCarthyism was about: “What are your associations? Are you in the communist party? Do you associate with communists?” This is about: “What book are you reading? Let me look at your curriculum.” We had university presidents like the president of Columbia naming professors who were teaching the wrong things. That’s just unprecedented, and it’s outrageous. It is the hallmark of fascism.
RM: In your book, Demand the Impossible, you wrote that hope is “an antidote to cynicism and despair” and is the “capacity to notice or invent alternatives” to the existing world. Unfortunately, however, many Americans feel pessimistic and are discouraged to take the steps necessary for change. How do we cultivate a culture of hope in the United States?
BA: Well, we have to, first of all, advocate for it and believe in it. I’ll tell you a couple of things. One is–I think I might’ve written about this somewhere, but I’m often accused of being an optimist, and I’m not an optimist. My mother was an optimist. Karl Marx was an optimist. I used to accuse my mom of being a Marxist because she thought she knew how things were going to turn out. I have no idea how things are going to turn out, and neither do you, the pundits, nor the people who are analyzing why the Democrats lost. Nobody knows how things are going to be tomorrow. That gives me hope because both the pessimists and the optimists are determinists. They know what’s going to happen. The pessimists sit on their couch, smoke a joint, and watch the world go to hell. The optimists wave cheerly from the window into the sunshine. Both are wrong because we don’t know. We don’t know whether we’ll be able to build a movement. We don’t know whether catastrophic capitalist climate collapse is going to do us all in sooner or later. We don’t know.
But, what we do know is, because we don’t know, we could choose to be hopeful. It’s often been said [that] the day before any revolution, the talking heads are certain that it’s impossible, and the day after they can explain why it was inevitable. That’s incidentally why I don’t find the debriefing of the Democratic party’s loss to be that interesting or illuminating because people go on MSNBC and pretty much bullshit. They don’t know. They would be better served if they were out organizing for a vision of a new world that is within reach. I always say to myself: “I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist.” I choose hope precisely because I don’t know what’s coming. Try and fail and try again and fail again, but fail better–that, to me, is the rhythm of a real radical or a real revolutionary. You have to keep trying because you don’t know what’s coming and you know what exists is unacceptable. The mayhem and the murder and the cruelty is unacceptable, and we have to find a way to do our work. For me, as I’ve often said, I get up every morning and think: “Maybe today we’ll overthrow capitalism.” Then, I go to bed every night disappointed (a little bit), but I get up the next morning and say the same thing. Why not? Because you don’t know. Why not get busy with projects of repair, reimagining, and revolution? That’s how I want to live my life.
I had dinner with Eduardo Galeano (the Latin American revolutionary from Uruguay), who wrote the book Open Veins of Latin America. He’s passed away. But, twenty years ago I had dinner with Eduardo, and we were exchanging views on a lot of things. We got to talking about how we both were often accused of being romantics, optimists, utopians. I feel like I’m not guilty of being an optimist. I’m guilty of being a bit romantic, being hopeful, all that. But, Galeano told me the best story. He said that a person he met accused him of being a utopian, and the guy said to him: “What good is utopia?” Galeano’s response was: “Well, it’s true. I take two steps towards utopia, and utopia walks two steps away. I walk ten steps towards utopia, [and] utopia walks ten steps away. It’s good for walking.” I thought that was marvelous. It keeps you going because you have a north star, not a dogmatic fixed image of what we could build. You have an idea that we could move towards more participation, more transparency, more democracy, more mutual aid, more mutual regard. That’s where I want to go: more peace, more justice, more joy. That gives me the ability to keep on walking.
I would say the issues that you raised, and that have been my issues my whole life (war and white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism), are the core issues that we are facing today. So, you think about the Black Panther party. How did the Black Panther party get started sixty years ago? It got started around the killing of black youth by the police in Oakland. That’s still an issue, and that’s only the tip of an iceberg of what white supremacy is. But, I think that I’m deeply involved–in my active work now, besides teaching and writing–in the anti-mass incarceration movement, the peace movement (the anti-genocide movement), the climate catastrophe movement, [and] with working on questions of homelessness. These are all things that matter. From my way of thinking and talking about how we get people hopeful, I would say that if you spend all of your time looking at the sites of power you have no access to (the White House, the Medieval Auction bloc called the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street), you’re bound to feel hopeless. The powerful will not make you feel hopeful. But, if instead you spend your time in the sites of power you have absolute access to (the classroom, the house of worship, the street, the community, the workplace, the neighborhood)–you have access to all of that, so why aren’t you spending your time there rather than watching MSNBC or reading The New York Times and feeling like shit all day?
To me, we have to stay hopeful because it’s the logical thing to do, and it’s the only way to live because you don’t know. The other way of saying it that [Antonio] Gramsci put it that a lot of people quote is to be a “pessimist of the head and an optimist of the heart,” or something like that. The idea being that you can be analytical and make sense out of all the stuff that’s going on, but you still have to have a heart that yearns for something better and that can find energy to organize for that something better. That, I think, is where we should all be living.
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