(1) Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, Remembering Tomorrow, is about? What is it trying to communicate?
Remembering Tomorrow is a memoir that looks personally at events, processes, and people to inform insights and activism.
It focuses movements and organizing, both during the Sixties and later. It tries to convey the times – sex, drugs, and rock and roll included – and mostly what was in people’s minds and hearts. What we thought, what we did, what was done to us, what resulted, what lessons we can take from it.
The book also features education, learing and teaching, and building institutions, both publishing and movement, as well as media generally and especially ideas and their creation and employment.
All kinds of people pass personally through the pages – good ones like Muhammed Ali, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Dave Dellinger, and especially Noam Chomsky, and bad ones too, like Hubert Humphrey and James Killian, for example.
All kinds of events get attention, from massive demonstrations in diverse cities to civil disobedient and even violent confrontations, to smaller gatherings and even meetings, not to mention funding fiascos, disputes, debates, alliances, and partnerships – made, lived, and broken.
All kinds of big and small projects are addressed highlighting finances, organization, motives, emotions, and social relations from creating SEP and Z Magazine to dealing with the IRS and the WSF, and from trying to address the left’s problems by navigating new options, to living a life with relatives and friends and neighbors while true to one’s values.
Countries are traversed too, from home in the U.S. to Australia and Brazil, Italy and Korea, Turkey and Poland, Egypt and Venezuela, and many more.
The thread that I hope holds it all together is relevance to understanding history and society to revolutionize them. There is a book page at https://www.zmag.org/remtom.html that has the full table of contents, index, introduction, quotes from readers, and other materials further revealing the broad content.
(2) Can you tell ZNet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?
I have been author, co-author, or editor of nearly twenty books, and this was the hardest to complete. Partly I was intimidated by some of the material.
I felt like you can’t convincingly and compellingly convey the logic and lessons of the sixties and of activism more generally unless the prose matches the topic, but arriving at that correspondence was very hard. And the same held for the history of South End Press or Z, or the history of the development of the ideas of participatory economics, or radical theory or the unfolding of personal relationships on the left. For these cases too, I wanted to convey many actual feelings and thoughts, byways and misturns that arose along the way, not just the final results.
It was also hard to remember the actual content, to weed out lots of events that mattered to me but that weren’t more generally valuable, to sign off on parts rather than endlessly fine tune them. With a book like this, for the duration of owrking on it, and even after, it is hard not to be dredging up past events and assessing them, and then fine tuning your exposition over and over, which is not my usual approach. It just was much harder than writing a more analytic work.
(3) What are your hopes for Remembering Tomorrow? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?
I hope the book will help its readers understand why people are radical, some of what it is like to be radical, and some radical merits and failings, both in the past and now. More I hope it wi compellinglyll convey some of our ideas, visions, worries, frustrations, hopes, and expectations.
For those who read Remembering Tomorrow and are not leftist or radical, but just curious, I hope it will open them to a new attitude and agenda. For those who already are leftist and radical, I hope it will inspire them to volunteer more energy and focus, perhaps even bringing some readers out of despair or at least skepticism, while helping others find new ways of acting and thinking that are highly suited to their aspirations.
I of course hope Remembering Tomorrow will give momentum to particular organizing methods and visionary aims that I advocate and thereby contribute to building related movements, but, even more, I hope that it will inspire its readers to think such things through for themselves and to arrive where they will, and then, however, and this is the key mark of success or not, act on the results rather than only cogitating about them.
Gauging the value of any communicative undertaking is hard. Suppose you travel a long way and give a talk and there are ten people there to hear it. They listen quietly. They ask few questions. They leave. Next month you travel similarly and give another talk. Thousands are there to ehar it. They react with great gusto. They ask many questions. It is almost unavoidable to feel that the first effort was a relative failure while the second was a big success. But what if one of the ten people at the first talk had a life altering experience and became the modern day equivalent of Rosa Parks? And what if for the thousands of people at the second talk, much as they enjoyed your words and applauded their hands raw, they weren’t altered by it a bit. They heard something they liked, but it was familiar and added nothing to their lives or social struggle. Now which talk was the success?
It is like that with a book too. Do I want more readers than less? Of course I do. I would celebrate Remembering Tomorrow climbing up book lists and the like. Do I hope for wide discussion and debate about the book’s contents. Of course I do, that’s the point. Do I hope that this very personal work will in turn engender many people to pick up, for further investigation, less personal works works on parecon, etc., which they might otherwise have ignored. Absolutely.
But is all that essential for Remembering Tomorrow to be a success? I don’t know but I have to admit that in the absense of the visible indicators of success I will have to work hard to take my own advice and not get too down about it. If the audience proves tiny and the discussion barely audible, it will be hard not to feel I missed my mark. I guess we will see.
[Please visit the Remembering Tomorrow Book Pages at http://www.zmag.org/remtom.html