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WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM AARON BUSHNELL’S SELF-IMMOLATION?  
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Max Elbaum
March 14, 2024
Convergence
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_ Aaron Bushnell’s call to action pushes us to consider the
relationship between individual moral commitment and collective
political action. _

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Twenty-five-year-old Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell’s
February 25 self-immolation was an urgent call to act against US
complicity with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

What does it mean that someone committed to ending the Gaza genocide
believed the most effective way he could contribute was to raise his
voice while dying a terribly painful death? What is then expected of
those of us committed to collective political action? This knotty
question has cropped up for me at various times since the
self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City)
first put Vietnam on my mental map 61 years ago.

With admiration for those monks, for Norman Morrison
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whose self-sacrifices jolted my conscience in my formative years, and
for Aaron Bushnell, I will take this opportunity to reflect on the
contributions and the limitations of individual acts of protest, the
urgency of mass political organizing, and some things the Left can
learn from Aaron Bushnell, Norman Morrison, and Thich Quang Duc
[[link removed]].
 

Making a difference via moral witness

Like so many others of my generation who did not grow up in a
left-wing family, television images first put social and political
conflict high on my mental map. I turned 16 in 1963 to a screen filled
with police dogs attacking civil rights protesters in Birmingham,
Alabama and Buddhist monks immolating themselves in Vietnam. Two years
later, Quaker pacifist Norman Morrison immolated himself outside
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office in the Pentagon.

As I got increasingly involved in antiwar activism in the following
years, I encountered numerous activists whose commitment was based in
one or another religious tradition and whose action strategies mainly
involved acts of moral witness, including civil disobedience and other
actions that risked long-term jail sentences. These included a group
of people who came together at the Casa Maria Catholic Worker House in
my hometown of Milwaukee. They entered the offices of Wisconsin draft
boards, took about 10,000 files, carried them outside and then set
them on fire with homemade napalm. The “Milwaukee 14
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known, then remained at the site, reading from the gospels and
singing. Most of the 14 were subsequently sentenced to two years in
jail for theft, arson, and burglary.

I admired the courage and commitment of all those who took such
actions. I recognized that their deeds touched the conscience of many
people (including me) and prodded us to act. But the deeper I plunged
into the then-surging movements against racism and war, the more I
found that reaping the urgent call embedded in acts of moral
conscience completely depended on those of us prepared to engage in
the rough-and-tumble of real-world politics and mass political
organizing.

Mass politics, collective action

What became steadily clearer to me is that it would take concerted
action on the part of millions of people to shift government policy
and the course of the country. The practitioners of moral witness
played a role in awakening those millions. But they had little to
offer in terms of making political action accessible to “everyday
people” or guiding organizations that were engaging the complexities
of a political system with real but limited democratic space.

I was also uncomfortable with the undertone of elitism among some in
the moral witness community who valued those who made the most
sacrifices above those most effective in making social change. In
morality-based protest, there was no common reference point or
criteria to guide action; decision making defaulted to an
individual’s sense of what was most pure, what did or did not
constitute complicity with or opposition to ongoing injustice.

Moreover, the urgency of the fight for peace and equality convinced me
that making a difference would take far more than awakening a moral
response. We were immersed in a clash of social and political forces,
and different people’s sense of morality varied by their location
within an unequal social system. What was the underlying nature of
that system? What were its weak points? Which constituencies within
that society had the most potential power to change it? How could a
political force be built that had not just the sympathy but
the _participation_ of people whose choices were constrained by
their need to work and fulfill family responsibilities?

The people I met (and readings I devoured) with the most to offer on
these questions came from the world of organizers, many of them
Marxists and people influenced by Marxism or other mass political
engagement traditions. These included numerous activists and leaders
who spoke clearly of their deep moral/religious motivation (first and
foremost the towering figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) while
focusing their public activity on building mass political action.

In that context—and in a time when Marxist-Leninist movements had
great prestige as leaders of liberation struggles around the world—I
embraced a version of that framework. I continued to respect those
practitioners of “moral witness” but found their protests
insufficient. What mattered was “getting it right” on questions of
political analysis and strategy and conducting extensive practical
work building both broad mass movements and some kind of collective
revolutionary formation.

My sense of the centrality of these matters was reinforced in the late
1980s and 1990s when, along with others, I took stock of the failure
of the “new communist movement”
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which I had participated. Our overestimation of the Left’s strength
coming out of the 1960s, plus our underestimation of US capitalism’s
resilience and the momentum behind a resurgent right wing, had trapped
us in the margins. I was determined not to mis-assess the moment and
the balance of forces again, and to contribute to meshing class and
democratic struggles in a more effective way.

People’s capacity to change

I have stayed on that path for the last three decades. But Aaron
Bushnell’s call to action stirred some thoughts that have been
gnawing at me beneath the surface since 2016. I have been concerned
that in the Left’s efforts to resist the authoritarian Right and
build progressive political power we have not fully appreciated the
complexity of different individuals’ thoughts and actions. I worry
that we have become a bit too quick to put individuals—including
those who are active in politics —into static pigeonholes, assuming
that they cannot change.

In our doctrine, we on the Left of course assert that people can
change. But is our belief as generous as Aaron Bushnell’s? He
believed the current circumstances are extreme and hence required an
extreme act—but it seems clear he also believed that in filming that
act he could reach large numbers of people, and at least some portion
of them would respond.

When we work from that same generosity, we do all we can to provide
on-ramps for those who respond, so they can bring their views and
talents into ongoing political engagement. Having confidence in
people’s capacity to change is a crucial element in doing so
effectively. That confidence underlies “Organizing 101” best
practices: “meet people where they’re at” and “listen as much
or more than we talk.” It steers us away from focusing on whatever
prejudices or “backward ideas” people bring with them, toward
embracing the positive reasons they are getting involved and
proceeding from there. And within the ranks of those who have
committed to left activism, can we do better at assuming good faith,
and be done with purer-than-thou thinking that attributes political
differences to other people’s failures of commitment or character
flaws?

Put out the welcome mat

And for gaining the high ground in our fights against genocide,
racism, and war, an expansive view of who can and should be part of
our movement is of great value. Certainly, each individual in US
society is shaped by their experience in a particular location in the
socio-economic system. But no one is completely defined by that.
Individuals can and do change in unexpected ways, as Aaron Bushnell
himself
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And even the best analysis of class, race, and gender dynamics in US
society cannot explain why the one-time head of a moderate caucus of
Republicans (the Tuesday Group
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Stefanik, has become one of Donald Trump’s leading toadies, while
arch-conservative Liz Cheney has sacrificed her political career to
crusade against Trump and all who enable him.

Such individual variations do not invalidate Marx’s “materialist
conception of history”; they bring it into closer alignment with the
often-mysterious ways that specific events unfold and specific
individuals interact with the circumstances in which we find
ourselves. Marx himself made this point:

“World history would… be of a very mystical nature, if
“accidents” played no part. These accidents themselves fall
naturally into the general course of development and are compensated
again by other accidents. But acceleration and delay are very
dependent upon such “accidents”, which included the “accident”
of the character of those who at first stand at the head of the
movement.”

_–Karl Marx, ‘Letter to L. Kugelman in Hanover,’ in Marx and
Engels: Selected Works in One Volume, p. 681. _

Implications for a perilous time

We live in a terrifying time. A genocide is taking place in Gaza.
Right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. A US variant of
fascism is moving aggressively to capture full state power in this
country. 

It will take effective political strategy and a massive collective
effort to turn the tide. Without a ceasefire movement and a Left doing
mass organizing and fighting for political power, the energy and
commitment generated by actions of moral witness, even those that
resonate as widely as Aaron Bushnell’s has, will dissipate. And our
movement will gain strength when it welcomes everyone whose conscience
has been jolted, and demonstrates that there is a vehicle to change
the world that does not require exceptional individual acts, but
rather offers a community of solidarity for the long-haul struggle
ahead.

Building that kind of movement for a ceasefire in Gaza and for all the
challenges that will face us once that is won seems to me to be the
way we can best heed the call issued by Aaron Bushnell.

_Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board
and the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to
Lenin, Mao and Che 
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Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New
Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is
also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power
Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections 
[[link removed]](OR Books, 2022)._

_Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We produce articles,
videos, and podcasts to sharpen our collective practice, lift up
stories about organizing, and engage in strategic debate — all with
the goal of winning multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic
economy._

* resistance
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* collective action
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* Self-immolation
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* peace movement
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* Anti-Fascism
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