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The creativity that we are studying belongs to the approach of the individual to external reality … Contrasted with this is a relationship with external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation … In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine
How does an individual obtain a sense of possibility; a realization that external reality can be changed, can be subverted; and how do we block ourselves from developing this sense? Questions like these have haunted me for about six years now, as it started to become clear to the left that recession was not bringing revolution to the West, but despair and fatalism. Throughout the early 1970s I had flitted from one revolutionary grouplet to another, constantly being amazed by their unfailing ability to crush the imagination of activists who came to them. Briefly in the late 70s, I stumbled upon a few kindred spirits, and for a while I felt we soared high above the orthodoxy of revolutionary activism, on the one hand, and the ‘Marxism as a profession’ that was flourishing in the universities and polytechnics, on the other. I have never been interested in academic exercises, in mating Marxism with psychoanalysis, but I have long felt that both perspectives can provide vital guides for action, if not considered as abstract political frameworks, but as tools for addressing current practical questions posed to us in our work as revolutionaries.
And this is where I began. What was happening to us in the late 70s? Why were we losing any sense of possibility, that sense