Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Letters to a Young Relative" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 252-258). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Letters that Clara wrote to her nephew Josh, November 10, 1994 -; February 21, 1996
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Dear Josh,
. . .You’re an impressive nephew—one who’s a fine practitioner of the dying art of letter writing. . .
Since you’re thinking about life and trying to figure out how to make the world a better place, you’re growing up in the right direction, with a social conscience that does you credit.
When you entered this world as a baby, you were aware of just yourself, your state of comfort—hunger, warmth, pain, fear, etc. A baby starts out as the center of its own universe. That’s the nature of an infant. Mercifully, that state doesn’t last in most people. As we grow up, we realize that we’re on this planet with others. What we do affects them; what they do affects us.
Sadly, today many people your age take one look at the sorry state of the world and throw up their hands. They retreat into drugs, cynicism, narcissistic absorption in themselves (which is regression into infancy) or, as you put it, “are on some other trip.” This is doubly tragic because not only are their own lives wasted but they waste their chance to improve society.
And we all lose.
It’s very fashionable today to say that the rebellious youth of the 60’s were naive and that they didn’t make any real difference. Nonsense! I should know; I was there.
The young people of the 60’s were the driving force in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement, the environmental crusade and the fight for lesbian/gay liberation. They and their like-minded elders helped to break a brutal U.S.-style apartheid in the South, end the war in Vietnam, develop an environmental consciousness and win abortion rights and many other reforms for women and sexual minorities. Not to mention significantly altering the popular culture in terms of movies, literature, art, dance and theatre. No small potatoes in my book!
That’s just more proof that determined people can have a vast impact on an apparently rigid system.
You can work to transform the system by yourself or, hopefully, with others, which is much more effective, efficient and fun. That’s why I’m in the Freedom Socialist Party, and other organizations dedicated to the betterment of the human condition. I cannot accept the planet as it is and find my greatest pleasure through altering its political and economic shape. I think you might experience the same reaction.
I’m glad you’re into music. It is a wonderful, expressive and powerful medium for social change. Historically it has spread ideas, influenced thinking and affected politics. The Beatles were vital in the development of the peace movement and popularizing a vision of a world that could be beautiful. And Dylan, in his good days, before he found Jesus and lost his soul, was a tremendous voice of protest.
Have you heard Pete Seegar, Holly Near, Woodie Guthrie, Sinead O’Connor and some of the less violent and sexist rappers? Of course we can’t forget Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, and others—what they created had volcanic effects on politics and revolutions.
Seattle grunge, which you like, has a two-fold aspect—it cries out in anguish against injustice, but it also dissolves in despair à la Cobain (who, incidentally, lived about a mile from me). Suffering is no substitute for organizing.
The best art is inherently subversive because you cannot reach for beauty without shaking up the present state of affairs. To compose is to rebel, and music that is humane and sensitive packs a mighty social wallop, even if it is underground and suppressed. To be a good musician and composer, you must become widely educated, well-read and experienced in activist struggles on the political front. In order to express something with your music, you must have something to say; you have to know what you believe and you have to believe passionately in your own convictions. It is the passion that reaches out, communicates, and strikes a connecting chord in others like you.
Please, Josh, understand that there are millions of others like yourself! I assure you, you are not alone in your feelings, yearnings and worries. There are countless Josh-like individuals out there all feeling isolated and out of the mainstream only because they haven’t yet met and connected. The youth who feel like strangers on the earth right now will become comrades-in-arms in the mass movements of tomorrow.
The road isn’t easy and it isn’t always a rose garden, but since life is a struggle anyway, you might as well direct that struggle to worthy causes and to something larger than yourself. Involvement in a group is the highest manifestation of individuality and the greatest contributor to personal growth and development.
Where to start?
Write a letter to your school paper, daily press, radical papers or the music media (try Rolling Stone) and ask for likeminded people to contact you for the purpose of forming a discussion club or a support group to talk about their ideas and feelings. Or hang around clubs where musicians congregate and get to know some of them. You’ll soon find kindred spirits, since musicians love to talk philosophy and concepts.
Discussion is the mother of concerted action. Decide what issues most interest you and become an expert on them. Seek out other experts in those fields. Go to meetings of organizations dealing with issues that interest you.
Don’t worry about your shyness; there are plenty of extroverts around to draw you out if they see enough of you! I’m sending you a copy and a one-year subscription to our Freedom Socialist newspaper and would be delighted to know what you think of it.
I’d love to hear some of your original compositions. Do send me a tape when you can and I’ll share it with my son Jonny. He is a jazz trumpeter, pianist and guitarist living in Boston.
L’Chaim to an eloquent young man who’s well on his way towards making his life count by standing up to be counted.
Love,
Aunt Clara
Dearest Josh,
. . .I truly enjoy hearing from you and am delighted that you read and react to the literature I send. You ask why afflicted and disenfranchised people do not unite, rebel and make change. The reasons have been the same throughout the ages:
1. They don’t think it’s possible.
2. They have no clear image of a goal, of a different kind of social structure.
3. Lacking the above, they don’t want to replace the rascals with themselves and become the new stinkers.
4.They are divided by fierce internal hatreds and clashing customs. Ruling classes have always promoted disunity precisely in order to divide and conquer (through racism, sexism, homophobia, religious mania, caste distinctions and bigotries of all hues and stripes).
5. They are demoralized, despairing or just plain exhausted from the sheer effort of trying to survive. It takes energy and time for thinking and planning to achieve change.
6. There are few or no role models on hand to inspire, teach and point the way.
7. The best and brightest of the oppressed, and the most concerned among the intelligentsia, have not built a leadership based solidly on an effective program and action.
8. Corruption and seduction: enough of the oppressed are bought off and given super-status to remove possible future leaders and to tempt everybody else with the generally vain hope of stardom or success in some field. A few crumbs are flung to the hungry to keep them pacified along with dope, alcohol and artillery to turn against ourselves.
Hence, what’s totally remarkable since class divisions first arose in society (they were not always there) is not that the disaffected were isolated from each other but that at decisive points they actually found the ways and means to leap over all these hurdles, achieve solidarity, engage in victorious struggles against the established order and carve out areas of power for themselves and even create totally new social structures. That’s what a revolution does. And we are who we are, living the way we do, precisely because of our revolutionary forebears who won expanding freedoms for us with their brains and blood.
These peak movements in the chronicle of humanity’s rise from the ocean and descent from the trees only happen at certain conjunctures of circumstances—at times when all the right elements come together, elements like the economic situation, the political scene, cultural developments, morale, and decisive current events. It’s almost impossible to predict in advance what particular issues will trigger a mass uprising. The Vietnam War, Rodney King beating, Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, the Stonewall riots, assembly line factories, on-the-job brutality or low wages, slavery, colonialism, etc., etc., etc. But once something ignites large groups and they move into a resistance mode, they win adherents from sympathizers with grievances of their own who can identify. And if there is thrown into this mix, educated and trained political leaders capable of articulating a new course and persuading people to hang on and fight to the finish, great revolutions happen.
So in the final analysis the key problem is not “why don’t the masses all unite,” but when will the advanced thinkers organize themselves into larger radical political parties than currently exist and play their part in teaching workers that hope and transformation are eminently possible.
The road to the masses lies through the leadership. Spontaneous eruptions will fade away without long-term programs to help people maintain motivation and drive. I personally have found the life of a revolutionary committed to making things different and better to be the only way to live in a world as vicious and violent as ours. To me, the stance of the rebel makes it unnecessary for you to hate yourself in the morning and connects you indissolubly with real life all around you and globally as well. I’ve never been anywhere out of the country except for Canada and Tijuana and yet I feel strongly that I am a citizen of the world.
Which leads me to ask you to tell me about your trip to Israel. I’m very curious to know of your observations and conclusions. As you know I’m not a Zionist, I support the Arab liberation movement and my party has, from the outset, called for a bilateral, jointly-governed, Palestine.
On the matter of grunge, suffering and organizing: I may have confused you by what I said. Indeed suffering is no substitute for organizing, but that doesn’t mean that suffering shouldn’t be expressed. We’re talking apples and oranges here. What I object to is making any form of culture a substitute instead of an aid and illuminator of political action. I heartily approve of Pearl Jam’s battles against Ticketmaster and their appeal to Congress; I welcome all the benefits that contemporary bands perform for important political causes. I would never shoot down any art form that expresses the ideas and passions of a generation, or a particular group of people, or a country; I myself love New Orleans jazz, the blues and boogie-woogie, but I hardly expect them to change the world the way the New Left of the 60’s thought rock ’n’ roll would do. My comment was derived from IWW leader and poet Joe Hill’s famous last remarks before a firing squad executed him in Utah in a frame-up, “Don’t mourn, organize!” I have always admonished the women’s movement, “Don’t agonize, organize!” I believe in affirmation, not resignation, even though the self-expression of resignation and raw anger is part of the process.
. . .I want to invite you to visit me this summer, stay here as long as you want. You’ll have scores of people to talk to and interesting political activities and rallies to be involved in first hand. You would have your own small room and my old car at your disposal and all the food you can eat. Seattle is a beautiful place with a rich cultural life.
I’m sending you some more subversive reading material. Please don’t hesitate to tell me frankly what you think of it. . .
Love,
Clara