If you are fortunate enough to be on his list, you would have received from him some half- dozen emails today, for that matter, every day-- unless he happens to be in jail. He can't remember the exact number, but he has been arrested 60 to 70 times. For his widely circulated mailings, he combs the straight and the progressive press, and he pulls down materials from liberal and radical news sites on the web. His missives are a virtual anthology of the news stories of importance to activists for social change. But Max O is not a movement librarian or computer geek, he is a political activist of more than 20 years standing. His emails are a part of his work as a political activist.

His political activism is built on a montage of seemingly unrelated experiences, although when you talk with him it does seem to neatly fit together. Raised in a conservative working class community of Erie, Pennsylvania, Max's family lived above their small business, a tavern started by his great-grandmother. It was his growing up in an environment of hard drinkers and drunks that led him to be a nondrinker. The vegetarianism would come later.

College was an unlikely choice for someone with his background, but Max got a degree in electrical engineering and went to work for Pennsylvania Electric Co. in Johnstown. On the death of his father, Max quit his job going home to help his mother run the tavern. While tending bar, he went to Gannon College (now a university) and earned an MBA. While the tavern was being sold, Max went off to the Peace Corps, a lure to small town folks everywhere. He Max signed up for a two year hitch in Botswana where he helped the locals set up small businesses. The Botswana experience sensitized him to the apartheid policies of neighboring South Africa. It all begins to fit, though not obviously so.

While tending bar and going to school, he became involved in a local Freeze group--the Nuclear Freeze was a national movement against the proliferation and testing of nuclear weapons which was to reach its peak on June 12th, 1982 when a million people assembled in Central Park, spilling some 20 blocks south in to the west fifties. He talks with some pride at the 75 percent of Erie County that voted for a freeze and the fact that this small working class community sent two buses to New York to participate in the demonstration.

The MBA, his revulsion at bar life, and his African experience led him to answer an advertisement for an internship with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility in New York City which, then, was a major figure in the movement for divestment of corporate investments in South Africa. The ICCR was also involved in exposing companies doing business as nuclear weapons suppliers. His time there, roughly 1982 to 1983, finished his basic training.

Max had graciously come to my office for this interview. There is a general graciousness about him, although it is often hidden by an interpersonal awkwardness. He seems unaccustomed to talk about himself and, when he does, he talks about politics. Of course, that is his life. He is not a party animal and has been known to go to parties with a pile of political readings. Politics for Max is about "civil resistance." He doesn't like the term "civil disobedience." Disobedience, he explained to me, was an attack on the law, an attempt to dramatize the need to change the law. On the other hand, he said passionately, "resistance is sometimes about getting people to uphold the law."

The path from ICCR and the Freeze led effortlessly to Baltimore where Max became #2 in the two-person office of Nuclear Free America. It was there that I first met Max. We think it was the summer of 1985; I had been hired to write grant proposals and later, with Max, to produce a pamphlet on General Electric, one of the top 50 nuclear weapons contractors, then and now. The office, like the board of directors, was polarized on the matter of political strategy. Albert Donnay, the #1, was fresh out of school with his M.P.H., brilliant and energetic. As Max put it, he was "hung up on great victories." For Albert, and most of the board, the goal was to help people organize their communities into Nuclear Free Zones. Although its opponents, who were the major nuclear weapons systems contractors, would deride the program as a meaningless verbal umbrella offering no protection from the outcome of nuclear war, it was far more serious. NFZs, as we called them, could be established by the vote of a city or county council responding to the usual politicking of such decisions or they could be established by organizing a citizen's referendum. Obviously, a "vote"was simpler and it allowed the organizers to rub shoulders with the politicos. The referendum meant long hours organizing and collecting signatures on often difficult-to-manage petition drives. As Max put it "winning or losing was a sidebar." What was important was that "you got people involved who took on the political establishment." And taking on the political establishment is precisely what Max Obuszewski is about. He is fond of quoting W.E.B. DuBois's dictum, "speak truth to power."

One of the pathologies that full-time organizers often develop is a brittle zeal leading them to demand constant support, and sometimes sacrifice, from others. Max's commitment is so intense--he will sometimes leave one meeting early just to make it to the ending of another--that you expect to be guilt-tripped for your relative inactivity. Not so. Although he worries "how we go beyond being a small group," he tries not to push people. Like most anarchists-- and that's how he identifies his politics-- he strongly believes that people must be self-directed and committed to a participatory democracy. Revolutionary change, Max declares, is going to be "hard, hard work," and people will have to do it "on the streets." He mentions one of his models, Daniel Berrigan, who asserted that "no change is going to happen until we have the same fervor as 'the warriors'," meaning the police and the military. But Max's warriors are going to be practicing a revolutionary nonviolence. He worries, though, that "there are so many fields for farmers to plow and not enough farmers." Although the expression may be folksy and likely reflects his small-town background, the questions of who's going to do the necessary political work and what is it that they are going to do rests heavy on his chest .like Churchill's "black bear of depression." The long-time activists, he tells me, are dying out and "political change moves like a glacier."

Talking political strategy with Max almost always means talking about nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants and exposure to radiation, and, these days, the presence of depleted uranium weapons and the consequences of their use. "We need to get people to realize that the nuclear issue is an environmental issue-to bring it down to breast cancer and the degradation of the immune system caused by radiation exposures." Max has been reading Jay Gould's The Enemy Within which documents the impact of proximity to nuclear reactors on the incidence of breast cancer, AIDS, low birthweights and other radiation-induced immune deficiency effects.

"People need to understand we are now at war. We have to concentrate on that." I asked him how he chooses his targets, and he threw the question back at me. "Is one target more worthy than another?" When he answers, it is in the affirmative, and he uses the organizing around saving Woodbury Woods as an example of misplaced political energy. While acting locally is a key element of his activism, there is for him a clear difference between saving the woods and doing battle with his long-standing target, the Applied Physics Lab (APL) and its parent Johns Hopkins University. The APL has long been involved in weapons research, delivery systems for nuclear missiles, and, quite likely, biological weapons. Now ranked 83 among defense contractors, Hopkins is the classic case of the interlocks between universities and the military. For years, Hopkins ranked much higher, so much so that Max wonders out loud, "Is there a secret budget?"

Another aspect of his political strategy is his concern about how we move beyond being a small group of activists and get people to see the antidemocratic character of the society. On the first International Monetary Fund/World Bank protest in Washington, Max says, there were only nine Blacks in the march and that the White student organizers who tried to organize in Washington's Black neighborhoods were very naive, "pimping for protest" and failing to develop organic relations in the community.How do we move beyond our small groups? "It's very, very difficult."

Because it is part of my own search, I asked Max "How do you know, how do political activists know if they have been effective? How do you evaluate what you are doing?" Max brushed the questions aside. "Don't let ineffectiveness stop you. I've never been one to get hung up on effectiveness."

This is not the way you expect political organizers to talk. I pushed, "What do you mean?" His answer surprised me. "Speaking for myself"--he frequently uses this preface whenever he's about to say something controversial--"there's only been two political victories in my lifetime, the farmworkers organizing drive and the anti-apartheid movement." Both movements had changed the distribution of power and both had moved people to a more democratic organization. A major problem of organizing is that Americans have it too good. "They're too comfortable." Of course, that is part of Max's "job" to make them uncomfortable and to recognize why they are so.

As an anarchist, Max Obuszewski falls more on the spectrum of Peter Kropotkin, the gentle prince, and Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. He shares with Kropotkin a philosophy of nonviolence and a commitment to communalism and mutual aid. With Dorothy Day, he models her magnanimous acceptance of others. At the next demo, look for a tall, rangy guy with straight brown hair most likely wearing a T-shirt with a political slogan and possibly accompanied by an Australian shepherd named Bert. Bert will bark; Max will welcome you.