4. Interview with Harry Kreisler, from Political Awakenings

March 22, 2002

How do you think your parents shaped your perspectives on the world?

Those are always very hard questions, because it’s a combination of influence and resistance, which is difficult to sort out. My parents were immigrants, and they happened to end up in Philadelphia, as part of what amounted to kind of a Hebrew ghetto, Jewish ghetto, in Philadelphia. Not a physical ghetto—it was scattered around the city—but a cultural ghetto.

When my father’s family came over, for whatever reason, they went to Baltimore, and my mother’s family, from another part of the Pale of Settlement, came to New York. The families were totally different. The Baltimore family was ultra-orthodox. In fact, my father told me that they had become more orthodox when they got here than they even were in the shtetl in the Ukraine where they came from. In general, there was a tendency among some sectors of immigrants to intensify the cultural tradition, probably as a way of identifying themselves in a strange environment, I suppose.

The other part of the family, my mother’s, was mainly Jewish working class—very radical. The Jewish element had disappeared. This was the 1930s, so they were part of the ferment of radical activism that was going on in all sorts of ways. Of all of them, the one that actually did influence me a great deal was an uncle by marriage who came into the family when I was about seven or eight. He had grown up in a poor area of New York. In fact, he himself never went past fourth grade—on the streets, and with a criminal background, and all [the things that were] going on in the underclass ghettos in New York. He happened to have a physical deformity, so he was able to get a newsstand under a compensation program that was run in the 1930s for people with disabilities. He had a newsstand on 72^nd Street in New York and lived nearby in a little apartment. I spent a lot of time there.

That newsstand became an intellectual center for émigrés from Europe; lots of Germans and other émigrés were coming. He wasn’t a very educated person, formally—like I said, he never went past fourth grade—but maybe the most educated person I’ve ever met. Self-educated. The newsstand itself was a very lively, intellectual center—professors of this and that arguing all night. And working at the newsstand was a lot of fun. I went for years thinking that there’s a newspaper called Newsinmira. Because people came out of the subway station and raced past the newsstand; they would say “Newsinmira,” and I gave them two tabloids, which I later discovered were the News and the Mirror. And I noticed that as soon as they picked up the “Newsinmira,” the first thing they opened to was the sports page. So this is an eight-year-old’s picture of the world. There were newspapers there, but that wasn’t all there was—that was the background of the discussions that were going on.

Through my uncle and other influences, I got myself involved in the ongoing ’30s radicalism, and was very much part of the Hebrew-based, Zionist-oriented—this is Palestine, pre-Israel—Palestine-oriented life. And that was a good part of my life. I became a Hebrew teacher like my parents, and a Zionist youth leader, combining it with the radical activism in various ways. Actually, that’s the way I got into linguistics.

You actually wrote your first essay as a ten-year-old, on the Spanish Civil War.

Well, you know, like you said, I was ten years old. I’m sure I would not want to read it today. I remember what it was about because I remember what struck me. This was right after the fall of Barcelona; the fascist forces had conquered Barcelona, and that was essentially the end of the Spanish Civil War. And the article was about the spread of fascism around Europe. So it started off by talking about Munich and Barcelona, and the spread of the Nazi power, fascist power, which was extremely frightening.

Just to add a little word of personal background, we happened to be, for most of my childhood, the only Jewish family in a mostly Irish and German Catholic neighborhood, sort of a lower middle-class neighborhood, which was very anti-Semitic, and quite pro-Nazi. It’s obvious why the Irish would be: they hated the British; it’s not surprising the Germans were [anti-Semitic]. I can remember beer parties when Paris fell. And the sense of the threat of this black cloud spreading over Europe was very frightening. I could pick up my mother’s attitudes, particularly; she was terrified by it.

It was also in my personal life, because I saw the streets. Interesting—for some reason which I do not understand to this day, my brother and I never talked to our parents about it. I don’t think they knew that we were living in an anti-Semitic neighborhood. But on the streets, you know, you go out and play ball with kids, or try to walk to the bus or something; it was a constant threat. It was just the kind of thing you knew for some reason not to talk to your parents about. To the day of their death they didn’t know. But there was this combination of knowing that this cloud was spreading over the world and picking up, particularly, that my mother was very upset about it—my father too, but more constrained—and living it in the streets in my own daily life, that made it very real.

Anyhow, by the late ’30s, I did become quite interested in Spanish anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, where all of this was being fought out at the time. Right before the World War broke out, a kind of microcosm was going on in Spain. By the time I was old enough to get on a train by myself, around ten or eleven, I would go to New York for a weekend and stay with my aunt and uncle, and hang around at anarchist bookstores down around Union Square and Fourth Avenue. There were little bookstores with émigrés, really interesting people. To my mind they looked about ninety; they were maybe in their forties or something, and they were very interested in young people. They wanted young people to come along, so they spent a lot of attention. Talking to these people was a real education.

These experiences we’ve described, you were saying they led you into linguistics, but also led you into your view of politics and of the world. You’re a libertarian anarchist, and when one hears that, because of the way issues are framed in this country, there are many misperceptions. Help us understand what that means.

The United States is sort of out of the world on this topic. Here, the term “libertarian” means the opposite of what it always meant in history. Libertarian throughout modern European history meant socialist anarchist. It meant the antistate element of the Workers’ Movement and the Socialist Movement. Here it means ultra-conservative—Ayn Rand or Cato Institute or something like that. But that’s a special U.S. usage. There are a lot of things quite special about the way the United States developed, and this is part of it. In Europe, it meant, and always meant to me, an antistate branch of socialism, which meant a highly organized society, nothing to do with chaos, but based on democracy all the way through. That means democratic control of communities, of workplaces, of federal structures, built on systems of voluntary association, spreading internationally. That’s traditional anarchism. You know, anybody can have the word if they like, but that’s the mainstream of traditional anarchism.

And it has roots. Coming back to the United States, it has very strong roots in the American working-class movements. So if you go back to, say, the 1850s, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, right around the area where I live, in Eastern Massachusetts, in the textile plants and so on, the people working on those plants were, in part, young women coming off the farm. They were called “factory girls,” the women from the farms who worked in the textile plants. Some of them were Irish, immigrants in Boston and that group of people. They had an extremely rich and interesting culture. They’re kind of like my uncle who never went past fourth grade—very educated, reading modern literature. They didn’t bother with European radicalism; that had no effect on them, but they were very much a part of the general literary culture. And they developed their own conceptions of how the world ought to be organized.

They had their own newspapers. In fact, the period of the freest press in the United States was probably around the 1850s. In the 1850s, the scale of the popular press—meaning run by factory girls in Lowell and so on—was on the scale of the commercial press or even greater. These were independent newspapers that [arose] spontaneously, without any background. [The writers had] never heard of Marx or Bakunin or anyone else, yet they developed the same ideas. From their point of view, what they called “wage slavery,” renting yourself to an owner, was not very different from the chattel slavery that they were fighting a civil war about. So the idea of renting yourself, meaning working for wages, was degrading. It was an attack on your personal integrity. They despised the industrial system that was developing, that was destroying their culture, destroying their independence, their individuality, constraining them to be subordinate to masters.

There was a tradition of what was called Republicanism in the United States. We’re free people, you know, the first free people in the world. This was destroying and undermining that freedom. This was the core of the labor movement all over, and included in it was the assumption, just taken for granted, that those who work in the mills should own them.

In fact, one of their main slogans was a condemnation of what they called the “new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self.” That new spirit, that you should only be interested in gaining wealth and forgetting about your relations to other people, they regarded it as a violation of fundamental human nature and a degrading idea.

That was a strong, rich American culture, which was crushed by violence. The United States has a very violent labor history, much more so than Europe. It was wiped out over a long period, with extreme violence. By the time it picked up again in the 1930s, that’s when I personally came into the tail end of it. After the Second World War it was crushed. By now, it’s forgotten. But it’s very real. I don’t really think it’s forgotten; I think it’s just below the surface in people’s consciousness.

You examine in your work the extent to which histories and traditions are forgotten. To define a new position often means going back and finding those older traditions.

Things like this, they’re forgotten in the intellectual culture, but my feeling is they’re alive in the popular culture, in people’s sentiments and attitudes and understanding and so on. I know when I talk to, say, working-class audiences today, and I talk about these ideas, they seem very natural to them. It’s true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring up the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work—you built it, but you don’t own it—that’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.

So coming out of this tradition, being influenced by and continuing to believe in it, what is your notion of legitimate power? Under what circumstances is power legitimate?

The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it should be dismantled.

Can you ever prove it? Well, it’s a heavy burden of proof to bear, but I think sometimes you can bear it. So to take an example, if I’m walking down the street with my four-year-old granddaughter, and she starts to run into the street, and I grab her arm and pull her back, that’s an exercise of power and authority, but I can give a justification for it, and it’s obvious what the justification would be. And maybe there are other cases where you can justify it. But the question that always should be asked uppermost in our mind is, “Why should I accept it?” It’s the responsibility of those who exercise power to show that somehow it’s legitimate. It’s not the responsibility of anyone else to show that it’s illegitimate. It’s illegitimate by assumption, if it’s a relation of authority among human beings which places some above others. Unless you can give a strong argument to show that it’s right, you’ve lost.

It’s kind of like the use of violence, say, in international affairs. There’s a very heavy burden of proof to be borne by anyone who calls for violence. Maybe it can be sometimes justified. Personally, I’m not a committed pacifist, so I think that, yes, it can sometimes be justified. So I thought, in fact, in that article I wrote in fourth grade, I thought the West should be using force to try to stop Fascism, and I still think so. But now I know a lot more about it. I know that the West was actually supporting Fascism, supporting Franco, supporting Mussolini, and so on, and even Hitler. I didn’t know that at the time. But I thought then and I think now that the use of force to stop that plague would have been legitimate, and finally was legitimate. But an argument has to be given for it.

You’ve said, “You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry and it will be refuted tomorrow.” How does your approach to the world as a scientist affect and influence the way you approach politics?

Nature is tough. You can’t fiddle with Mother Nature, she’s a hard taskmistress. So you’re forced to be honest in the natural sciences. In the soft fields, you’re not forced to be honest. There are standards, of course; on the other hand, they’re very weak. If what you propose is ideologically acceptable, that is, supportive of power systems, you can get away with a huge amount. In fact, the difference between the conditions that are imposed on dissident opinion and on mainstream opinion is radically different.

For example, I’ve written about terrorism, and I think you can show without much difficulty that terrorism pretty much corresponds to power. I don’t think that’s very surprising. The more powerful states are involved in more terrorism, by and large. The United States is the most powerful, so it’s involved in massive terrorism, by its own definition of terrorism. Well, if I want to establish that, I’m required to give a huge amount of evidence. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t object to that. I think anyone who makes that claim should be held to very high standards. So, I do extensive documentation, from the internal secret records and historical record and so on. And if you ever find a comma misplaced, somebody ought to criticize you for it. So I think those standards are fine.

All right, now, let’s suppose that you play the mainstream game. You can say anything you want because you support power, and nobody expects you to justify anything. For example, in the unimaginable circumstance that I was on, say, Nightline, and I was asked, “Do you think Kadhafi is a terrorist?” I could say, “Yeah, Kadhafi is a terrorist.” I don’t need any evidence. Suppose I said, “George Bush is a terrorist.” Well, then I would be expected to provide evidence—“Why would you say that?”

In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can’t produce evidence. There’s even a name for it—I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It’s called “concision.” He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn’t have me on Nightline. First of all, he says, “Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands it.” But the other answer was, “He lacks concision.” Which is correct, I agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can’t say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can’t talk.

I think that’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

What is your advice for people who have the same concerns, who identify with the tradition that you come out of, and who want to be engaged in opposition?

The same as the factory girls in the Lowell textile plant 150 years ago: they joined with others. To do these things alone is extremely hard, especially when you’re working fifty hours a week to put the food on the table. Join with others, and you can do a lot of things. It’s got a big multiplier effect. That’s why unions have always been in the lead of development of social and economic progress. They bring together poor people, working people, enable them to learn from one another, to have their own sources of information, and to act collectively. That’s how everything is changed—the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the solidarity movements, the workers’ movements. The reason we don’t live in a dungeon is because people have joined together to change things. And there’s nothing different now from before. In fact, just in the last forty years, we’ve seen remarkable changes in this respect.

Go back to ’62, there was no feminist movement, there was a very limited human rights movement. There was no environmental movement, meaning rights of our grandchildren. There were no Third World solidarity movements. There was no antiapartheid movement. There was no anti-sweatshop movement. I mean, all of the things that we take for granted just weren’t there. How did they get there? Was it a gift from an angel? No, they got there by struggle, common struggle by people who dedicated themselves with others, because you can’t do it alone, and [their efforts] made it a much more civilized country. It was a long way to go, and that’s not the first time it happened. And it will continue.

You believe that when we focus on heroes in the movement, that’s a mistake, because it’s really the unsung heroes, the unsung seamstresses or whatever in this movement, who actually make a difference.

Take, say, the civil rights movement. When you think of the civil rights movement, the first thing you think of is Martin Luther King Jr. King was an important figure. But he would have been the first to tell you, I’m sure, that he was riding the wave of activism, that people who were doing the work, who were in the lead in the civil rights movement, were young SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] workers, freedom riders, people out there in the streets every day getting beaten and sometimes killed, working constantly. They created the circumstances in which a Martin Luther King could come in and be a leader. His role was extremely important, I’m not denigrating it, it was very important to have done that. But the people who were really important are the ones whose names are forgotten. And that’s true of every movement that ever existed.

Is it the case that by seeing so much you understand that very little sometimes can be accomplished, but that may be very important?

I don’t think we should give up long-term visions. I agree with the factory girls in Lowell in 1850. I think wage slavery is an attack on fundamental human rights. I think those who work in the plants should own them. I think we should struggle against what was then the “new spirit of the age”: gain wealth, forgetting everybody but yourself. Yes, that’s all degrading and destructive, and in the long term—I don’t know how long—it should be dismantled. But right now there are serious problems to deal with, like thirty million Americans who don’t have enough to eat, or people elsewhere in the world who are far worse off, and who are, in fact, under our boot, we’re grinding them into the dust. Those are short-term things that can be dealt with. There’s nothing wrong with making small gains, like the gains that I was talking about before, from the ’60s until today. They’re extremely important for human lives. It doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of mountain peaks to climb, there are. But you do what’s within range.

The same in the sciences. You might like to solve the problems of, say, what causes human action, but the problems you work on are the ones that are right at the edge of your understanding. There’s a famous joke about a drunk under a lamppost looking at the ground, and somebody comes up and asks him “What are you looking for?” He says, “I’m looking for a pencil that I dropped.” They say, “Well, where did you drop it?” He says, “Oh, I dropped it across the street.” “Well, why are looking here?” “This is where the light is.” That’s the way the sciences work. Maybe the problem you would like to solve is across the street, but you have to work where the light is. If you try to move it a little farther, maybe ultimately you’ll get across the street.