Z MAGAZINE INTERVIEWS TOM HAYDEN ON THE PUBLICATION OF HIS NEW BOOK

WRITINGS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
The Tom Hayden Reader (City Lights Books)

“Q: Your lifework has been shaped by working both within radical social movements that placed pressure on the electoral politics as a means of winning change, and within electoral politics itself. After the Chicago Conspiracy Trial your writing was very much part of the anti-Establishment revolutionary consciousness of the time. Later you made your way into electoral politics as a California state senator. At this point, where do you place emphasis for advancing progressive issues like the abolition of structural racism, the advance of environmental justice, and ending the war?

A: There is no end of confusion on these questions within the American Left, if there is a Left in comparison with other countries. My life makes sense to me but I realize that it is completely blurred by the categories people bring to these subjects. My friend Carl Davidson, a leader with Sutdents for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s and a Marxist theorist of the new working class, and presently at work for Obama, clarified it best for me when he recently said that I always have been “a radical reformer in the American populist tradition,” nothing more, nothing less.

My priorities are:

[1] sorting out my own beliefs independent of any gurus or ideologies,

[2] participating in the building of social movements not only as pressure groups but for their own sake which is the value and dignity they bring to our lives, and

[3] competing for the democratic mandate of voters where possible in the electoral process.

I am an outsider who seeks the democratic affirmation of the voters in order to create a role on the inside. I have survived as an insider only because of the voters in my district. You could say I have been an outsider on the inside, or in Havel’s formulation, an anti-politics politician.

Every other country on earth seems to have both radical social movements and radical or reformist political parties, with millions of people floating in between the categories. All the recent political triumphs in Latin America have been by political parties loosely rooted in social movements. True, there are those who propose a complete abstention from political action, and their critique of political parties must be taken seriously. My experience has been that the voters I most care about—working class, black, latino, environmentalist, women, gay/lesbian and so on—tend to gravitate around both independent organizations and Democratic primaries. Where it’s possible to compete without bringing about the election of worse candidates, they—and I—will be supportive of Green candidates too.”

Thats it for me from Malaysia. More tomorrow. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org