RADICALS AND Cont. from REGIONALISM p a 9e 4 20th century radicals followed Marx in becoming victims of his fascinating combination of capitalist assumptions and socialist utopianism. The assumptions lulled him into neglecting the rigors of the dialectical process, and the projectionist utopianism led him to believe that a change of class at the center of the metropolis would change the inherent nature of the system. Unhappily, it was wrong and wrong again. For if capitalism leads to increasingly destructive demographic imbalance, and the super-centralization of power, then surely a rigorous radicalism is defined by decentralization and the diffusion of power. And if capitalism moves inexorably toward global hegemony, then surely such a radicalism is defined by regionalism in the international arena. To change rulers without changing the basic structure of the political economy can at best serve only to ameliorate the failures, costs, and limits of life within such a system. What begins as socialism drifts off into a leftish New Dealism or into a kind of nationalized syndicalism of interest groups. And, at worst, we forget about socialism and concern ourselves with surviving within capitalism. But socialism is not more: socialism is different and better. The point is not to damn Marx. The point is to be Marxist about 20th century radicalism. Marx did the magical things: He explained the implacable logic of the capitalist political economy, and he taught us to ask the right questions. And he was adamant about human beings making their own history.I I ny consequential radical alternative must be defined by those primary variables, Time, Place, Space and Scale. Let us put our minds to examining that proposition. TIME. Politely, we 20th century radicals are aging. Hence we must win time in the short run so that our children have long range time to refine our thoughts—and add their own wisdom. Hence we must concentrate our immediate political effort on stopping the momentum of egoistic, nationalistic confrontation which leads on to a nuclear war which will destroy our children and grandchildren. If we fail, we will destroy time. Winning time is the strategic imperative. Radicals must build a constituency on the cornerstone of Time. PLACE. The tactical and pragmatic politics of Time is Place. Given Limited Time, radicals must focus their energy in their local and regional Place. Specifically, radicals in the Pacific Northwest must define and evoke a movement which says to centralized power that egoistic and mindless nuclear confrontation will have to proceed without support from a significant proportion of the population and productive capacity of this nation. We cannot rouse a continent by marches on Washington; but we can shake The Establishment by stopping Boeing, Hanford, and related military bases and operations. Here we can learn much from the nuclear-free Europe movement. Those millions of people, by no means all of them radicals, are saying NO: they are saying that they refuse to acquiesce in the centralized and arbitrary definition of their Time and Place, their Space and Scale, as a ‘theater’ for so-called limited nuclear warfare. Even the lead editorial of the Weekly Manchester Guardian of April 26, 1981 grants the central point: “the orthodox creed for a generation" has produced this result. "The armouries have never been so gigantic. The talks to reduce them have never been so ineffectual. ” That brings us right back to the old homestead. For surely the Pacific Northwest is as much a theater for limited nuclear war as Western or Eastern Europe. Boeing and Hanford are unquestionably as important as any Russian centers west of the Urals. So let us play seriously at this game of ‘limited’ theater nuclear warfare. First we exchange reciprocal missiles into Western and Eastern Europe. Then we launch some from England into high priority targets in the Ukraine, or perhaps further north. (There’s a gentlemen’s agreement, of course, to preserve historic monuments— living as well as limestone, and managerial as well as marble—in Moscow and Washington.) So in the logic of linkage, we lose Seattle and Hanford for Leningrad and Murmansk. Granted: it is all very civilized. Nothing so crude as instantaneous mass suicide. If we radicals take all that seriously, as we should, then we can perhaps recognize the importance of organizing each American ‘theater’ just as Western Europe is being organized. The issue is no longer a matter of ‘Hell, NO, We won’t GO!’ It involves the plans and the willingness to close down operations that make each and J^egional Motive I notice a prevalent tendency among my contemporaries to think of existing conditions as if they were not only undeniable, but unassailable as well, as if the highest use of intelligence were not the implementation of vision but merely the arrangement of a cheap settlement. by Wendell Berry /n thinking about myself as a writer whose work and whose every region a ‘theater’ for limited nuclear war. Beyond that, American radicals must redefine the nature of the unthinkable. The unthinkable as nuclear war was always a shell game without any pea. It has never been unthinkable. American leaders thought about the bomb, built the bomb, and used the bomb—twice. They threatened to use it again more times than we know. Our ignorance defines our impotence. The truly unthinkable is to change the system which has brought us to the brink of collective capitalist suicide. The League night in Richland, Washington life have been largely formed in relation to one place, I am often in the neighborhood of the word “regional.” And almost as often as I get into its neighborhood I find that the term very quickly becomes either an embarrassment or an obstruction. For I do not know any word that is more sloppily defined in its usage, or more casually understood. There is, for instance, a “regionalism” based upon pride, which behaves like nationalism. And there is a “regionalism” based upon condescension, which specializes in the quaint and the eccentric and the picturesque, and which behaves in general like an exploitive industry. These varieties, and their kindred, have in common a dependence on false mythology that tends to generalize and stereotype the life of a region. That is to say it tends to impose false literary or cultural generalizations upon false geographical generalizations. unhappy truth is that American radicals, along with American liberals and conservatives, have always lusted for saving the world. We have no tradition of leaving other people alone in order to find ourselves. We have always defined our purpose as bringing them up to our level. What nonsense, what arrogance, what lack of any sense of ourselves. We have failed to imagine, let alone realize, any conception of how to live. We are terrified of the present and so flee ever forward into the future. We have no comprehension of space and scale. The regionalism that I adhere to could be defined simply as local life aware of itself. It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in. It pertains to living as much as to writing, and it pertains to living before it pertains to writing. The motive of such regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, for its quality but also for its continuance, upon local knowledge. Some useful insights into the nature and the value of the sort of regionalism I am talking about can be found in the world of Thomas Hardy. In The Woodlanders, comparing Dr. Fitzpiers’ relation to Little Hintock with that of the natives, Hardy writes: Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is 6 Clinton St. Quarterly Photograph by Mark Albanese
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