• All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion, Mark Andersen. Punk Planet Books, 2004.

• Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice, Edward T. Chambers. Continuum International Publishing Group,  2003.

Five years ago, when protests against the WTO escalated into the “Battle of Seattle,” it looked like political activism was entering a new golden age. Instead of tepid, pro forma gatherings of the usual suspects, street demonstrations once again had a chance of influencing policy. Although the breathtaking thrills of Seattle weren’t duplicated in subsequent actions by the anti-globalization movement, hopes remained high. All that changed on September 11, 2001. Since then, the expansion of the security state has driven many activists to abandon mass protest for less politically and personally risky forms of public expression. This is the background necessary for understanding Mark Andersen’s All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion and Ed Chambers’ Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice. Although both would have made sense prior to 9/11, their earnestness and distaste for drama resonate differently in our present-day climate of fear.

Stereotypes die hard. Seeing that All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion is published by Punk Planet Books, many people are likely to think that the book is a critique of 60s-era idealism, an in-your-face defense of “hard” activism, or a call to separate true radicals from the wannabes who make too many concessions to mainstream taste. But it is none of these. Reflective and conciliatory in tone, All the Power breaks the punk mold. While Andersen is sympathetic to the fury of the young people who sustain punk communities—he repeatedly draws upon his own experiences in the Washington, D.C. scene of the 1980s and 1990s—he makes it clear that the coupling of punk and politics works best not when it inspires people to shout along with the Sex Pistols (“Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it”), but when it moves them to promote intergenerational solidarity with measured passion.

As in his previous book, Dance of Days: Two Generations of Punk in the Nation’s Capital, Andersen regards the output of the independent record label Dischord as an example of how to do things right. “One of the lessons I relearned from Fugazi—especially singer-guitarist Ian MacKaye—during punk’s fractious post-Nevermind era was simple but saving: Keep the focus on your own side of the street. The idea of checking out your own actions and letting them stand as your message, while largely refraining from critiquing others, suggested how punk might find its way past either sell out or self-destruction.” Though some of Andersen’s best writing is devoted to the band Nirvana’s sudden and unexpected rise to massive popularity and its effect on the independent music world they represented to the mainstream, All the Power is not about punk per se. Andersen insists on writing from a position of strength, reflecting on what he knows best. But his message, stated repeatedly throughout, is that, “as powerful and transformative as the punk scene has been for many of us, in order to truly ‘revolutionize,’ we need to step beyond.” It’s not that the punk scene is lacking when compared to other alternative communities, but that the experience of tightly knit togetherness it provides frequently hinders the formation of ties that cross ethnic and religious lines.

Though Andersen is wary of programmatic advice—if anything, All the Power demonstrates too much self-doubt—the trajectory of his argument suggests that the easiest and best solution to self-marginalization is membership in multiple, overlapping groups. By telling stories of his work in a Catholic church group as well as the punk underground, Andersen testifies to the importance of not letting devotion to purity overwhelm pragmatic political concerns. He has little patience for the more-radical-than-thou posturing of extreme activists. “Street violence will not be inviting to neophytes or even, generally, the less privileged.”

Ed Chambers echoes these sentiments in Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice. “The people you’ll meet in these pages don’t dress in black, wear masks, or kick in shop windows.” To label these individuals “radicals” is to insult the hard-working activists who are in it for the long haul. “Radical means going to the roots of the matter and the roots of the spirit. A radical is a person who searches for meaning and affirms community.” Successor to Saul Alinksy at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the now grandfatherly Chambers wants his book to be a worthy sequel to Alinksy’s massively important Rules for Radicals. Like Andersen, he draws upon personal experience in order to reinforce his points. Unfortunately, the results are mixed.

Roots for Radicals is the sort of book you want desperately to like. And so long as Chambers is writing about the nuts-and-bolts work of the IAF or his Depression-era childhood, it’s not difficult. Though his prose inclines more towards the desert rather than the rainforest, its matter-of-factness is refreshing. “Thinking and calculating go into preplanning an action, but not much thinking goes on during the action itself. We cannot think and act simultaneously. Try rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time.” This is the sort of world-worn advice we expect from our elders. The problem is that its appeal comes at the expense of nuance. While it may be impossible to write a book in the heat of the moment, reflection and action need not be mutually exclusive. If basketball players can make split-second decisions, surely activists can do the same. Do we really want an activism that is too inflexible to make changes on the fly?

It’s telling that Chambers reserves as much vitriol for scholars as window-smashing anarchists. “Avoid Ph.D.s. They get lost in writing books for one another. They are good at a certain kind of analysis but never have a workable solution in the last chapter. For better or worse, at least a medical doctor gives you a prescription.” While this attack on scholars is as American as apple pie—Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is one famous example—it sounds a false note here. Chambers ends up reducing the concept of action to something that would please an unreconstructed behaviorist. As a consequence, the helpful tips he provides throughout Roots for Radicals are suspect. His lack of self-reflexivity—this is a book, after all, and one filled with judgments undermines the goodwill that both his own story and the story of the IAF inspire. His book would have been a great deal stronger and more inviting to the people who most need to read it—those who have trouble translating thought into thoughtful action—if he had heeded the same advice as Mark Andersen: Keep the focus on your own side of the street.

Charlie Bertsch (cbertsch@comcast.net) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he specializes in twentieth-century American prose, cultural studies, and the history of aesthetics. He also teaches film.