Wallach: You’ve said that you still see yourself as a community organizer. Is that still the self-image?

Hoffman: Yes, absolutely.

Wallach: is there a living to be made these days as a community organizer?

Hoffman: Only very very, small numbers of people can do what I do in this society and support themselves even in the middle . . . well, this is not a palace [referring to his apartment on E. 34th Street in New York). My total worth is easily under $50,000. I’m sure I’m worth much more dead than alive. Younger organizers have a much harder time economically. The economics of the 60s – I was getting $40 – movement wages were $40 a week and you were OK. You had a good time and didn’t worry about money or anything, or careers or rent. People could volunteer themselves to a movement and scratch around at the surface and figure out how to get by. Today, that’s extremely difficult.

Wallach: You mentioned the Walt Disney ad. Do you find yourself turning down an awful lot of offers? Do you feel conflict sometimes between something that might make you commercially more comfortable and principles? You talked about how people will say, “Abbie, we’re going to make you a star, endorse this album.” Does that still happen?

Hoffman: Yes, it happens. When you fight against the system and give it as much thought and fight as hard on a pragmatic, practical level as someone like myself or any of the anti-war leaders, if you want to turn around and cash in – I’m not even talking about the fame, I’m talking about how the system works, you know how the system works! If you understand the system well enough to challenge it so effectively, it’s pretty easy for you to turn the switch.

The advertising moguls on Madison Avenue – if I went, that’s where I would go. Obviously, it’s Madison Avenue. I have a certain way with words and you can make unpopular things popular. It’s nothing to then turn around and use that ability to market things and to use your basic knowledge about human motivation and what moves small and large groups. My fantasies about being a millionaire are only in terms of winning a lottery or something like that.

Wallach: You’re comfortable then, and that’s enough for you?

Hoffman: No, I wouldn’t say that. No, because I am middle-aged and you’re not comfortable when you’re middle-aged. You have your middle-life crises. But there were a lot of points in my life over the last 10 or 12 years when I did not have to become engaged in the social battle and I chose to be engaged. It is in my nature. On two occasions I became physically ill when I did not choose to interact.

Wallach: You’ve said that generally the lifespan of an activist is about two years and after that the pressures become too much. And you’ve been doing it for 25 years! Where did the longevity come from?

Hoffman: Aside from the fact that I’m the son of God, or that I come from the planet Krypton . . . Human beings on occasions tend to get depressed. On the left you have a romantic vision of human nature. That is, it doesn’t have to be rich and poor; there doesn’t always have to be injustice and inequality; that human beings can enter a situation like the existentialist warriors they are and they can alter history with their own being. So that’s a rather romantic view.

Now, when you are depressed and you have this view, there is a strong tendency to translate that depression into your politics and so you become disillusioned. On the right they don’t have to have that because individual greed . . . there is a certain fatalism that there is always going to be rich and poor, you know there are certain things built in where the world doesn’t have to be just. So they can deal with emotions like depression a lot easier, politically. On the left it becomes a complicated problem.

Wallach: So you think it’s because you have been able to deal with depression over the years?

Hoffman: Not necessarily just that I have been able to deal with those things, but that I’ve been able to understand what is politics and what is human nature. And that you have to have a certain distance, a certain sense of humor that you develop a certain sense of spacing over the years. I don’t expect enormous social change right now in the US. In fact, I expect change for the worst. The difference between my optimism in the 80s and my optimism in the 60s is that in the 60s it was more generalized than it is now. Now it is more refined, much more specific. You have to be more specific about our questions about where there is hope and where there is not much hope.

Wallach: You talked once about how long hair has lost its social bite.

Hoffman: Doesn’t have any bite? My kid who’s a punk, america, is 15 years old, and says the hippies are the ones you’ve got to run from, man.

Wallach: What does have social bite these days?

Hoffman: If the choice is between punk and yuppie, I’ll take punk. In terms of culture for white people, that’s the choice. I sense another choice, but it may be a cop-out. I sense that the counterculture of the 80s is Latin culture, so if people want to learn the counterculture language, or the alternative culture or the hippie language, you learn Spanish. You travel to Latin America, you go to Nicaragua, you check it all out, you eat Latin food, you listen to the music. When you ask me what has bite, I have to go to the developing world to get my answers. I can’t get them in the United States.

It’s not that activism is not on the rise in the U.S. It is. I see people doing good work, they do it in a different context. They are hedging their bets with their careers. I meet somebody like Mitch Snyder (Washington, D.C., activist for the homeless) and I say, “Oh, this is great,” and he tells me he is 42, and I say “Uh-oh.” Maybe we’re two years away from national organizations and leadership in our next generation. I can’t wait. This is lonely what I do, this is lonely work. It is lonely. [2006 note: Mitch Snyder committed suicide in 1990, a year after Hoffman.]