Mark Phillips: The American Question

"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred -- by economic inequity -- faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."

-- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

"Skillful"; "adroit"; "ingenious"; "wise". By giving the bad guys far too much credit, Zinn's peroration exemplifies much of the traditional left's inability to strategize.

Zinn makes it personal: people did these devious things consciously, with skill and adroitness and wisdom. He makes it simple: these are crafty decisions, not the complex outcomes of concrete struggles. And he makes it sinister: somebody, somewhere, somehow, through genius and wisdom, is exercising their personal control.

All of this is far too generous. Real-world decision-making is far less personal, far more subject to compromise and displacement than any simple notion of sinister control can possibly grasp. Ruling elites are divided among themselves by faction, region, culture; elite strategies are contested, distorted, partially defeated, almost never implemented untouched by struggle. The same is true of resistance strategies put forward by popular movements. This is one of the great lessons of Zinn's own book. Particularly when trying to understand the ways in which rebellious energies from below are channeled, diverted, roped and domesticated, simple categories of "control", "skill", "wisdom" just won't do.

In any divided society, complexity is the great social truth. To be effective, our analytical categories and the strategies which emerge from our analyses must embrace those complexities as our starting points. We need sophisticated protocols for analyzing complexness. If we backslide to these simple categories of genius and adroitness we mythologize and empower the very people we seek to contest.

There can be no effective strategy absent the analysis of complexity. If Trouble Tickets turns out to have a contribution to make, I think this will be one of its key themes.