[ssf] Random Remarks for Radicals

[Mr Jase Malgod]

Milan Rai - HMP Lewes 

Wednesday 16 November 2005 

Random Remarks for Radicals, Part 1 

No. 1. Hairdressers and Architects 

We hunger for meaning. We want to know that what we do makes a difference 
means something. We want to feel effective. This seems universal. This 
general need is even more acute for the activist. She wants to feel that she 
is having an impact; advancing the cause; making a difference to people, 
animals, precious things that are threatened or oppressed. But there is a 
real problem of trying to find ways of being effective and even more with 
feeling effective. For the radical political activist, who does not want 
simply to stop wars, change laws and so on, but who wants to overturn or 
transform dominant institutions, the problem is still more acute. How to 
feel you are having an impact on an entrenched tyranny, or a transnational 
corporation? 

Things are perhaps easier when you are focused on incremental changes, and 
the situation of particular human beings. An Amnesty International group 
writing to a particular prisoner of conscience cannot overthrow a 
dictatorship but can improve the conditions of that prisoner, perhaps save 
their life, perhaps free them from imprisonment. That is a powerful form of 
effectiveness. 

I read once that hairdressers come high in terms of job satisfaction. I 
could imagine that, say; architects come pretty low in the rankings of 
self-assessed job satisfaction. Architects, many of them, perhaps most of 
them, spend a lot of time putting together proposals that are never built. 
Like actors, models, artists, advertisers and other ‘creative’ folk, there 
are a lot of rejections and failed presentations/ auditions. Furthermore, 
many architects will spend much of their working lives planning ducts and 
light fittings and other barely-noticed features of our new buildings. 
Incidentally I once met a pipe fitter – I may have forgotten his proper 
title – who told me he had a lot of job satisfaction. He was a highly paid 
specialist who was widely respected. He would be called in when architects 
plans for ducts, pipes, wiring and so on –which looked perfectly reasonable 
on paper – proved to be impossible in practice. His job was to visualise 
three dimensional spaces – often barely accessible – and figure out how to 
get cables, pipes and ducts through the spaces available. That’s what I call 
intellectual work. Now contrast the architect’s job with the pipe fitter. 
The vast army of architects (not the chief architect directing construction) 
work on abstract forms of hidden features which they may never actually see. 
The pipe fitter has a hands-on effect, solving major problems with an 
immediate tangible result, greatly appreciated by the builders they work 
with. 

There is something here in this contrast about our sense of effectiveness. 

Let’s go back to the hairdresser. Each and every hairdresser works with 
something that is highly visible and of enormous value to their client. 
Instead of an architect slaving away for hours on a project that, if it is 
built, will not be implemented for months if not years, the hairdresser can 
finish their work within an hour (or perhaps two) directly and tangibly 
having an effect, and then receiving feedback, praise (and payment) 
immediately. The hairdresser also works in a convivial atmosphere of 
friendship and intimacy, which must also, increases the sense of job 
satisfaction. So we see a spectrum of perceived effectiveness. The single 
architect working on air conditioning and heating ducts in a large building 
is remote in space and time from the finished article – if it is ever built 
– and has no hands on experience of making her ideas into reality. 
Crucially, the architects plan relies on many intermediaries to make it 
happen, supervisors, fenders, clients, builders and so on. In contrast the 
hairdresser is one-to-one with the raw material/client/finished product. 
Effectiveness felt with the immediacy of impact. 

Where does this leave the activist confronting climate change or the 
occupation of Iraq or the nuclear weapons establishment? Well the first 
thing to say is that ‘the hairdresser’ and ‘the architect’ are not two 
different kinds of activists in different movements. They are two different 
modes of action, two different scales of intervention, two different time 
periods, two different frameworks for activism, which can operate 
simultaneously in the same movement and the same group. They can be two 
different sides of the same person. Amnesty International, for example, has 
person-focused letter-writing campaigns, and at the same time campaigns for 
an end to the death penalty world-wide. This is somewhat abstract, 
large-scale, and it is hard to feel you are having an impact. 

Coming back to wider movements for change, it is often difficult to find 
hairdresser effectiveness in the midst of ‘architect’ campaigns. How do we 
cope with this sense of ineffectiveness –of powerlessness? When change comes 
slowly at the level of government policy, and has no perceptible link with 
grassroots action, how does a grass roots activist cope? 

More at http://www.j-n-v.org/Mil_Prison_Diary.htm