7. The Means Are the Ends

In colonial India, the British forbade Indians from making their own salt, and charged steeply for it as a form of indirect taxation on the subject people, a tax that hit the poorest especially hard. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi decided to attack this injustice directly, and organized a march to India’s coast, where salt could be made from seawater—for free—directly challenging the British monopoly of salt production. Gandhi’s “salt march” or “Salt Satyagraha” is rightly renowned as one of the most important acts of political protest in recent history.

Gandhi chose to attack the salt tax, against the advice of some of his political colleagues, because it was both a tool and a symbol of Britain’s oppression. Thus, the action to undermine the tax assumed both a practical and symbolic value. Gandhi carefully planned the march, choosing only his most disciplined cohorts from his own ashram, and sending scouts to reconnoiter villages ahead. He built up public expectations and attention with press conferences before and during the march. The salt march above all manifested a core principle of Gandhi’s political philosophy—that of satyagraha—a synthesis of the Sanskrit words satya (truth) and agraha (holding firmly to). In the common shorthand of today’s times, Gandhi’s philosophy is often summarized as “nonviolence” or “passive resistance,” and indeed it encompasses these elements. But for Gandhi, satyagraha had a deeper and more positive significance, not merely an absence of violence but more a strength. In his words:

Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or nonviolence, and gave up the use of the phrase “passive resistance,” in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word “satyagraha.”[128]

Above all, Gandhi believed that means were intimately connected with ends. Indeed, they were to him the same thing, as connected as a tree to its seed. If you used violence, you could expect nothing but further violence in return. Satyagraha by contrast engaged a force—love—to which there was no resistance. The salt march demonstrated clearly how these concepts, combined with an acute political intelligence, played out in practice.

The British, at first dismissive, were confused as to how to respond to the march, which gained huge publicity in India and worldwide. It was reported that sixty thousand Indians came to hear Gandhi speak on the eve of the march. Not one to eschew melodrama, Gandhi warned that his speech might comprise the last words of his life; he invoked a compelling spirit of self-sacrifice: “My task shall be done if I perish and so do my comrades.” As the march progressed, crowds of tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands gathered along the way. Gandhi’s marchers slept in the open in the villages they passed through, asking only food and water, the better, Gandhi judged, to recruit India’s poor whose support would be vital to imperialism’s defeat.

After a march lasting nearly three weeks and nearly two hundred fifty miles, building up expectations and political tension all the way, Gandhi arrived at the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat, where raising a handful of mud which he then boiled to make salt, Gandhi declared, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.” Gandhi implored his followers and all Indians to follow his example and make illegal salt, breaking the British monopoly and depriving the empire of an important source of revenue. In the weeks that followed, sixty thousand people were arrested for making salt. At Peshawar, British troops killed over two hundred peaceful demonstrators. Gandhi was arrested while planning his next satyagraha at the Dharasana salt works. The march went ahead, eventually under the leadership of Sarojini Naidu, a female poet and freedom fighter. She warned her fellow Satyagrahis to expect to be beaten, but that “you must not even raise a hand to fend off blows.” Sure enough, soldiers beat the marchers with steel-tipped clubs. As United Press reported:

Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down.[129]

Despite its receiving worldwide attention, this sacrifice failed to win any immediate concessions from the British, and it would be another seventeen years before India would at last be independent. Though India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, acknowledged the enormous importance of the salt march in mobilizing India’s masses around the goal of independence, his Congress Party, to which Gandhi then belonged, eventually abandoned satyagraha as a political technique. Historians today tend to view the Second World War as the more significant factor in ending imperial rule in India.[130] But the Salt Satyagraha is remembered still for its signal achievement in one crucial aspect. As one British colonial administrator noted at the time, “England can hold India only by consent; we can’t rule it by the sword.” And thanks to the salt march, they had lost that consent.

Though technically the more powerful of the two antagonists—with the power of the state, of arrest and ultimately of force—Britain lost the contest against Gandhi’s force of will, satyagraha. Those who were clubbed to the ground ended up victorious, for by their reaction to the march, the British lost the consent of the Indian population, upon which they relied to maintain their colonial rule. The Salt Satyagraha thus qualifies as one of the most effective political actions of recent times. It is worth summarizing why:

• It confronted its political target—Britain’s colonial rule—directly: The goal of the salt march was to make salt, directly confronting the British salt tax and denying the colonialists revenue, thus the action itself contributed to the political result intended.

• It confounded and confused the British by using nonviolent methods; one British administrator later confessed in an internal memo that they would have preferred violence.

• By combining means and ends nonviolently, the march attracted and created enormous moral force, which not only helped recruit followers but was also crucial in garnering massive international attention and sympathy.

In an age of terrorism and violent counterreaction, such examples can seem quaint and irrelevant, but surveys suggest that even in the Muslim world, Al Qaeda’s use of violence, and in particular its targeting of civilians, alienates more followers than it attracts. The persuasive power of self-sacrifice and nonviolence remains undiminished, even if violence seems once again the more fashionable.

In his short manual Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara dismisses terrorist violence as ineffective:

We sincerely believe that terrorism is of negative value, that it by no means produces the desired effects, that it can turn a people against a revolutionary movement, and that it can bring a loss of lives to its agents out of proportion to what it produces.[131]

Guevara preferred direct military confrontation with the repressive forces of Batista, Cuba’s then dictator. In modern Mexico, recognizing that conditions, though unjust, were less repressive than in prerevolutionary Cuba, the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico’s Chiapas region, Subcomandante Marcos, prefers irony and nonviolence to bring home the Zapatistas’ message of the exploitation of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. As Marcos put it:

We don’t want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don’t see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.[132]

Gandhi himself sometimes despaired of the Indian people’s propensity for violence. Exploiting his immense public standing and moral authority, on several occasions he used hunger strikes as a tool of political persuasion, including to seek an end to fighting between Muslims and Hindus.

This technique too has modern relevance. The hunger strikes by Republican inmates in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in 1981 resulted in the deaths of several strikers, most famously Bobby Sands, who was elected as a member of the British Parliament during his hunger strike. After ten inmates died, the British government offered some concessions. The most lasting impact, however, was, like the Salt Satyagraha, deeper in its effects on that intangible: will. By 1985, the British government, had negotiated the Anglo-Irish agreement that gave the Irish Republic for the first time a consultative role in the government of Northern Ireland, and heralded the peace process that resulted in the Good Friday agreement of 1998, which largely brought an end, though sadly not yet final, to the violence and sectarian strife that had benighted the province for over thirty years.

In 2009, a forty-two-year-old woman named Aminatou Haidar used the hunger strike for similar effect. A native of the Western Sahara, which has been occupied by Morocco since 1975, Haidar has ceaselessly campaigned for the right of her people, the Sahrawi, to self-determination.[133] For these efforts, she has been repeatedly imprisoned and abused. Returning from the United States, where she had been awarded various human rights prizes, Haidar was prevented by Morocco from reentering the territory where she and her children live. The Moroccans seized her passport and demanded she sign an oath of allegiance to Morocco’s king in order to get it back. Haidar refused and went on a hunger strike to demand its return. As Haidar approached death, international efforts on her behalf stepped up and even Morocco’s allies, France and the United States, were forced to intervene. After thirty-two days without food, Haidar was taken to the hospital, her respiration and blood pressure dangerously low. She remained, however, committed to the end, determined, she said, to return unimpeded and without conditions or to die in dignity. Morocco at last capitulated and permitted her return, a public humiliation for a monarchy that had sworn it would not back down. Thanks to her willingness to starve herself to the end, Haidar not only secured her own return to her homeland, she also succeeded in attracting unprecedented international attention to Morocco’s occupation of Africa’s “last colony.”

Sometimes protest can take the simplest form. In East Timor, then occupied by Indonesia, the indigenous East Timorese would approach every Indonesian soldier or settler they came across and ask, “When are you leaving my country?”[134] The most basic declaration of discontent, repeated, sends a signal that the status quo cannot endure.

In the summer of 1964, about a thousand American students mainly from northern colleges—most of them white—traveled to Mississippi as part of a campaign by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to fight against racial segregation in the southern states. The students lived in communes—“Freedom Houses”—or with local black families. They registered voters and taught in Freedom Schools. In one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era, three recently arrived students were beaten to death by segregationists assisted by the local police, killings made famous in the movie Mississippi Burning. The murders shocked the world. As with Claudette Colvin, who refused to change seats on her bus, the students’ actions directly contributed to the repeal of the notorious racist Jim Crow laws and the end of legalized segregation in the South, a reminder that laws follow action, not vice versa.

These dramatic actions were often taken to address grave injustices, like occupation and systematic repression. The hunger strike is an extreme action taken in response to extreme circumstances. Moreover, as Gandhi and Haidar both illustrate, it helps that the striker already enjoys some standing in public, and ideally, as in both cases, moral authority.

Political actions which produce, even in small part, the political end they seek carry a persuasive force far greater than any mere campaign, both for their demonstrative and symbolic force, and for the simple reason that such actions, even if only on small scale, contribute to the desired solution.

For example, in New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, after a spate of robberies, a group of local men decided to escort pedestrians home from the subway. One of the founders of “We Make Us Better” said, “I decided we can’t have these people terrorizing our young women and children, and we’re not speaking up and making our presence felt.” The members of the group don’t regard themselves as political or activist; they are just trying to make their community better by their example.[135] They plan soon to set up a mentoring program.

This illustrates an important message—that it is changing attitudes and demonstrating new forms of behavior, as much as laws, that matters. This lesson is also evident in Naples, the heartland of the Camorra organized crime ring. Here, local people have taken the initiative to resist extortion and corruption, some pasting “anti-pizzo” stickers on their shops to indicate that they do not pay “protection” money, and as a signal of solidarity with those who do the same. Others are establishing cooperatives to run the farms and businesses seized by prosecutors from the mafia.

In a country where several legislators and the prime minister are accused of links to the mob, a judge made the same point, “The battle is not just won by force and sequestrations, but by a social struggle. It is a cultural battle.”[136]

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has made great play of a concept he calls “The Big Society,” offering a rather sketchy blend of a vague localism with more familiar Conservative moral philosophy about individual responsibility. At the same time that the government has made severe cuts in public spending, Cameron has argued that people should play a greater role in local activities, hitherto the preserve of government, including schools, parks and other public services. The conjunction of cuts with the moral sermonizing is not the only aspect of the Big Society that jars. This book argues that people will benefit by taking charge of their shared affairs locally, but crucially this means that they must also have agency over these decisions: control. The benefits outlined here—of better and more equitable outcomes, and social consensus—from local and participatory decision making are not available in the Big Society because in Cameron’s vision, central government retains overall control. If taxes and revenues are collected and distributed centrally, it is impossible for people at the local level to have real control over budgets and thus policy.

The Porto Alegre experiment described earlier is an example of what real local agency looks like, and its benefits are clear—above all in the more equitable distribution of government services, but also in greater social consensus underpinning policy choices. The Big Society, by contrast, has yet to amount to real autonomy at the local level. Local people may provide, but not decide. It is this contradiction that perhaps explains Cameron’s inability to explain his concept with any clarity, and suggests that it will amount to little more than encouraging volunteers at the local library. For this half-baked philosophy entirely misses the point of real devolution of power. Indeed, it represents no such devolution in substantive terms at all. All that it offers is responsibility without power.

In 1980, CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of forty-two times as much as the average worker; in 2001, they earned 531 times as much. It is hard to imagine that these bosses have in twenty years increased their contribution to company performance by such a remarkable degree. Instead, there appears to be an emerging culture among the top executives that, because they can pay themselves so much, they should. This self-interested belief piggybacks upon and exploits a vague cultural notion that competitive economies somehow require exceptional rewards for the successful. Thus capitalism takes on the qualities not only of an economic system, but also a moral code.

There is nothing inevitable about such excesses, or inequality. Such irresponsible greed is not necessary for a competitive company, nor intrinsic to an efficient economy. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. Some economists, including a former IMF chief economist, now believe that America’s gross wealth inequality lay at the root of the financial meltdown: Middle-class families, whose incomes have been stagnant for a decade, were forced to borrow more and more to buy houses and maintain acceptable living standards.[137] Meanwhile, the rich, who enjoyed a far greater share of the rewards of America’s economic growth over the last decade, spend far less as a proportion of their overall income, depressing the consumption necessary to fuel sustained growth.[175]

But what might be done?

John Lewis set up his first draper’s shop in 1864. His son Spedan joined the business toward the end of the century. While convalescing from a riding accident, he realized that his father, his brother and he together earned more than all the hundreds of other employes in the family’s two stores put together. Spedan Lewis instigated new systems and practices as soon as he returned to work: He offered shortened working days, set up a staff committee, and a third week’s paid holiday, an innovation for retail trade at the time. He founded a house magazine, The Gazette, which is still published today.

In 1920, Spedan introduced a profit-sharing scheme. Twenty years later, it was expanded into a partnership: In effect, Lewis handed over the business to its workers. Today, nearly seventy thousand partner employes own the scores of major stores and supermarkets operated by John Lewis across Britain. Every branch holds forums to discuss local issues. These aggregate to form divisional councils; partners elect the large majority of members of the Partnership Council. The councils have the power to discuss “any issue whatsoever”; the partnership puts “the happiness of Partners at the center of everything it does.”

The partnership’s constitution sets out to be both commercial and democratic. The annual bonus for partners in 2008 was equivalent to ten weeks’ wages. The partners own two country estates, sailing clubs, golf courses, hotels and other extensive recreational and social facilities. Pension schemes are generous; after twenty-five years’ service partners are rewarded with six months’ paid leave. With its well-known slogan of “Never knowingly undersold” and a guarantee that it will repay customers the difference if they can find a lower price elsewhere (though not online), John Lewis has been consistently profitable, despite the cutthroat competition of the retail sector. Its revenues in 2008 were nearly £7 billion.

Speaking in 1963, shortly before he died, Spedan Lewis explained why he set up the partnership and handed over what had been the family business to its employes.[138]

It was soon clear to me that my father’s success had been due to his trying constantly to give very good value to people who wished to exchange their money for his merchandise but it also became clear to me that the business would have grown further and that my father’s life would have been much happier if he had done the same for those who wished to exchange their work for his money.

The profit… was equal to the whole of the pay of the staff, of whom there were about three hundred. To his two children my father seemed to have all that anyone could want. Yet for years he had been spending no more than a small fraction of his income.

On the other hand, for very nearly all of his staff any saving worth mentioning was impossible. They were getting hardly more than a bare living. The pay-sheet was small even for those days.

Note that Lewis suggests that his father would have been happier himself if he had paid his workers more fairly, an observation borne out in the 2009 book The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (Penguin), which found that everyone in society is better off—in terms of mental health, crime and other indicators—in economies with greater wealth equality. Spedan Lewis continued that the state of affairs in the country was a “perversion of capitalism”:

It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums. Capitalism has done enormous good and suits human nature far too well to be given up as long as human nature remains the same. But the perversion has given us too unstable a society. Differences of reward must be large enough to induce people to do their best but the present differences are far too great. If we do not find some way of correcting that perversion of capitalism, our society will break down. We shall find ourselves back in some form of government without the consent of the governed, some form of police state.

Cooperative businesses, such as John Lewis and Spain’s Mondragon, which pays its executives no more than eight times its lowest paid employes, have shown that businesses owned by their employes can be as successful as the most hierarchical, profit-driven enterprise. At such companies, wage differentials are lower, benefits are more widely shared and, above all, employes who are also owners feel not only more agency over the future of their business, and thus their own, but also more satisfaction. These companies are not compelled to a more egalitarian approach by legislation; they were set up that way by the free choice of their founders.

Founded in 1884 by Karl Eisener, who wanted to provide long-term jobs to discourage the Swiss from emigrating because of poor economic conditions, the knife company Victorinox is going strong, with a respected global brand nearly a hundred twenty years later.[139] Still, it suffered a severe crisis when penknives were banned from airports, hitherto important sales channels, under post-9/11 airport security measures. The company responded by referring to its values of inclusiveness and loyalty to its workers. Despite a steep decline in sales, no one was laid off. The company instead stopped hiring, encouraged workers to take early vacations and reduced shifts, while expanding its product ranges, particularly in watches. The company had suffered similar crises before, such as a sharp decrease in orders from the Swiss army after the First World War.

Victorinox, in contrast to the prevailing hire-and-fire model, treats its workers the same, in good times as well as bad. It acts according to its pronounced values (means and ends again) by establishing employee-oriented management schemes and an integration policy that better incorporates younger and older workers, immigrants and people with disabilities. It pays the highest paid workers no more than five times the wages of the average.

In the financial sector, mutual banks and insurance companies endured the depredations of the financial crisis much better than publicly owned banks and companies. Mutuals, by their very nature, discourage excessive risk-taking and indeed excessive pay. They return banks to the old-fashioned notion that lending should not grossly outpace deposits. The trouble is that stock-market listing encourages the emphasis on short-term profits—and thus risk-taking—that contributed to such problems in the credit crunch. The ensuing government bailout of the banks reaffirmed the implicit guarantee that no major bank would be allowed to fail and risk wider economic meltdown. Thus, the current system, even after the much-heralded “bill to control Wall Street” in 2009, and thanks to government action, rewards the most destructive Wall Street behavior.

Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff has proposed that all financial products be mutualized as “limited purpose banking” (LPB) with benefits in reduced risk, greater transparency and less excessive executive compensation. Under LPB, mortgage lending, for example, would take place through “mortgage mutual funds” whose managers would pick loans to invest in. Mortgage applicants would provide the information they do today, and different funds could bid for their custom. The lenders would be investors owning shares in the mutual funds. At no point would any bank actually hold the mortgage on its books. Indeed, banks would not hold anything on their books at all except the modest assets needed to manage a fund—computers and offices—and the matching equity. They would neither borrow nor trade with borrowed funds. Kotlikoff extends this principle to all of finance, including insurance and derivatives. His proposed system, crucially, would mean that all contingent liabilities would be fully backed by capital.[140]

In defending the inequities and excesses of the current system, the beneficiaries of these injustices tout half-baked economic arguments remarkably often—such as the economic necessity of enormous executive “compensation.” In public debate, the merits of private enterprise are invariably presented as superior to government provision. These arguments come to a head over “public goods” such as the nation’s health or the world’s oceans, where the choice is usually presented as between private ownership or public provision and regulation: market versus the state. Evident in these debates is an assumption that there are only two options—public or private—to resolve the “tragedy of the commons,” whereby common resources such as water, land or oceans will be abused by some, and neglected by all, without some form of order.

In fact, pioneering economists have shown that other spontaneous forms of voluntary management and sharing of such resources have sprung up and are, if anything, more successful at husbanding these common goods than either of the two conventional models. One such economist was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009. Professor Elinor Ostrom’s work has shown that societies and groups regularly devise rules and enforcement mechanisms that stop the degradation of nature. The traditional theory holds that pollution and depletion of resources would occur because individuals fail to recognize—or do not care about—their effect on others. However, her research has shown that people can manage resources tolerably well without rules imposed by the authorities if rules evolved over time, entitlements were clear, conflict resolution measures were available and an individual’s duty to maintain the common resource was in proportion to the benefits from exploiting it. Notably, she found that the most important criterion for the success of such schemes was this: active participation in setting and enforcing the collective rules to manage the common good.[141]

The tortured debate over health care illustrates this problem. In the U.S., a system dominated by massive private insurance companies has created enormous and escalating costs for American business and many other distortions and inequities, particularly for the poor, who have been excluded from private insurance provision. Vast sums may be spent to prolong the lives of the well-insured for merely a few days, while many millions of the poor endure chronic or even fatal illness without treatment. Ideologues from the right, but also the heavily lobbied representatives of both Democrats and Republicans, successfully destroyed the “public option”—that government should provide insurance—in the 2009 health care bill. Needless to say, the enormous health insurance industry spent over $600 million on lobbying in the two years before the bill.

Meanwhile, in the UK, where public provision—and universal coverage—of health care is entrenched in the form of the National Health Service, there is very appropriate concern, among both doctors and patients, at the overweening and barely accountable bureaucracy seemingly necessary to run the system, and the sometimes arbitrary choices it must make, for instance, that certain drugs be denied to the sick because they are too expensive.

In both countries, the fundamental truth of any health care system, whether public or private, is barely acknowledged—that there must be some system of rationing care. Otherwise, demand for health care is insatiable; its costs would eventually consume the entire economy, as the costs of America’s insurance-based system indeed threaten to do if unchecked.

Arrangements to include both doctors and patients equally in the provision of health care have worked in the past, and work today. In earlier eras, cooperative or “friendly” societies pooled the contributions of working families to provide care when illness or death struck. Today, health care cooperatives are able successfully to manage and deploy their available resources according to what their members (i.e., patients)—and not the insurance companies or bureaucrats—regard as important. This possibility is barely mentioned in the U.S. debate, presumably because cooperatives have no lobbyists. If it does arise, the idea of cooperatives is often hysterically attacked by both the insurance industry, which claims cooperatives are public provision in disguise, or by advocates for the “public option,” who argue that nonprofits cannot possibly compete with the massive cartels of the insurance giants. Neither argument stands up to scrutiny, for cooperatives would operate without taxpayer support, and by their nonprofit nature would be less expensive than profit-maximizing private insurance companies: The CEO of one of the largest U.S. health care companies earns over $33 million.[142]

The company, the primary unit of economic activity, is not a fixed entity; it can be, and is being, transformed. The distinction between for-profit companies and not-for-profit charities is blurring as companies incorporate social and environmental responsibilities into their business model, not as addons but as intrinsic to the way that they work. Chris Meyer of the Harvard Business Review has called this “internalizing the externalities” of the traditional economic model of the firm. While it is easy to be cynical about this development, and it is right to criticize the “greenwashing” of otherwise unchanged corporate practice, there is also here unarguably an opportunity. Encouraged by an NGO, scores of companies are choosing to eschew high carbon fuel sources, like oil sands.[143]

In another initiative, thousands of the world’s largest companies are voluntarily publishing data on their electricity consumption and carbon emissions in a collective effort to reduce emissions, organized by another small NGO, the Carbon Disclosure Project.[144] Utilizing the power of peer and investor pressure rather than government regulation, the project organizes letters to companies representing investors holding $55 trillion, pressing them to participate and thus be scrutinized on their environmental records. Other banks are ceasing to lend to the mining companies that blast the tops off Appalachian mountains in Virginia, not because this activity is illegal—it is not—but because of the growing damage to their reputations.[145]

Consumers through their own choices can reinforce these trends: “When you’re buying, you’re voting,” as the founder of Stonyfield Farms, the organic dairy producer, once exhorted. Every choice carries economic, political and environmental effects. It will soon be easy to monitor the labor and environmental records of manufacturers on the Web, and perhaps at the point of purchase. At projectlabel.org and other sites, the embryonic form of such indices is already visible.[146] The space is available to rethink what companies do, to realize at last that their impacts are inherently political, but also to embrace and exploit that reality. Whether this transformation is positive or negative will be determined by simple, small everyday choices: the actions of those who compose these new commercial, social and in fact highly political entities.

A French philosopher was once asked about the significance of May 1968, the demonstrations and eruption of spontaneous public anger in France and elsewhere.[147] He replied that the importance of May ’68 was that it was the opposite of what the Communists had said was the correct manner of the revolution. The Communists had said that the revolution should be:

Not here but somewhere else, like Cuba, Vietnam or elsewhere.

Not now but tomorrow, in the future.

And not you but the Communists instead, the appointed cadres.

Rejecting this injunction, the May ’68ers had declared instead, “Here, Now, Us!”

The next chapter suggests some core principles that might guide an individual or group wanting to take up the flag on any issue. This is a politics that offers the possibility of yet-unimagined outcomes, not those defined by our current structures and ways of doing business.

This manifesto is rather short and simple. It does not proclaim a particular end-state or utopia, but instead a series of methods for how the individual might engage upon the issues that most concern them. The methods themselves are the message: a way of doing things that promises greater mutual concern, meaning and community of purpose.

The ends are indeed the means.