Wonks Anonymous still has a bit of nostalgia for his past as a leftist academic, back in the day when we wrote for journals like Socialist Revolution - later renamed Socialist Review. It is with some sentiment therefore that he discovers that Francis Piven, very famous in our circles, is still writing in The Nation.

The piece in question jumps off from Piven's original work about poor people's protest movements as the vanguard of the Revolution that we almost had during the Great Depression and it is quite a stem winder featuring passages such as this:

Sometimes, encouraged by electoral shifts and campaign promises, the ordinary people who are typically given short shrift in political calculation become volatile and unruly, impatient with the same old promises and ruses, and they refuse to cooperate in the institutional routines that depend on their cooperation. When that happens, their issues acquire a white-hot urgency, and politicians have to respond, because they are politicians. In other words, the disorder, stoppages and institutional breakdowns generated by this sort of collective action threaten politicians.

Emphasis is mine.

Now Wonks Anonymous would like to point out that we tried this in the 1970's on numerous occasions. He remembers one incident when volatile, unruly and impatient individuals entered the main library at Berkeley and dumped out he card catalogs. He recalls being confronted by various volatile and unruly folk on Telegraph Avenue who demand that he directly address the problem of financial inequality by coming across with some spare change.

He does not recall that any of these incidents left him any better disposed toward the revolution. He is in fact a bit surprised that he managed to preserve his bleeding heart liberalism through all of this bad behavior.

Revolutions are very romantic and attractive from a distance. Up close, not so much. Right now we need serious action directed at the immediate goal of getting people to work, promoting peace and protecting human rights. This action needs to be careful, sober and considered. It needs to be like the protests against the Iraq War rather than the childish emotional outbursts of the 1970's.

Wonks Anonymous recognizes that growing up in a society as unequal as ours can cause serious emotional distress. Wonks Anonymous believes that the public discharge - perhaps rehearsal -  of this distress is not productive. By all means we should let our voices be heard but let's keep it rational and controlled.