Was It Good for You?

• Author: EHRENREICH, BARBARA
• Position: Political movements should be emotionally engaging

Over the last ninety years of this magazine's existence, many thousands of people whose ideas were generally in tune with it have marched, rallied, sat-in, struck, petitioned, organized, and otherwise struggled for progressive social change. Other writers, perhaps in this very issue, can ponder the question of what was actually accomplished, through all this effort and agitation, in the way of laws passed, wars averted, and conditions of life improved. Here I take up a question less commonly asked about the activists of the twentieth century: Did they have a good time doing what they did?

All right, this may sound like a frivolous, even air-headed, concern, but it's clearly related to the more respectable question of concrete gains and accomplishments. If something isn't the least bit fun, why do it? Why, in particular, should busy grown-up people, often with jobs and families, get involved in something that promises happiness in some distant future but offers only work and sacrifice in the here and now?

Oppression is not the sole factor pushing people into activism, and even the most egregiously oppressed people have often expressed their rebellion in a way that looked, to their oppressors, like mindless hedonism. European peasants looted bakeries and manor houses, eating and drinking as they went. Caribbean slaves and French villagers used carnivals, with their masks and public processions, as occasions for revolt. In this country, slaves sometimes warmed up for uprisings with song and "ring shouts." Considering this venerable tradition of combining pleasure and politics, only the most pinched Puritanical soul could insist that political activism be an exercise in deferred gratification.

It's not just "the sixties" raising its impish head here. Yes, that decade was famously fun: Abbie Hoffman wrote (and largely lived) Revolution for the Hell of It. French radicals ran in the streets shouting, "All Power to the Imagination!" American campus activists made love, not war, and probably did as much recruiting at all-night dance parties as at teach-ins--not just opportunistically, but because we truly believed that the id could be a reliable guide to social change. But the sixties weren't all sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll. Most of the time, we were doing the same kinds of hard work activists have always done: Going patiently from door to door, bickering over the wording of leaflets, organizing teach-ins and rallies. In fact, most of the reputed...