Now there is! Actually, it may be the world’s oldest known board game.
GO, the ancient Chinese strategy game, looks a lot like Othello, with its grid board and black and white pieces. Othello is really nothing like GO and has nothing to do with the points I am leading to, but I mention it to serve as a starting visual for any potential non-Chinese or non-GO-playing readers. The goal in GO is to place your pieces strategically to control space on the board. As it is a two-person game, and as both players have the same goal—to acquire as much real estate on the board as possible—winning necessitates a strong defense and a still stronger offense.
GO demonstrates very visually the importance of strong offense in a struggle for power. There’s a word for it in the game – sente. To have sente means that you are the player who is being responded to. Your moves are strong enough that your opponent has to respond defensively, and while your opponent is responding you are thinking of the next move that they will also have to respond to. Sometimes a player will maintain sente for pretty much the whole game… if her opponent really sucks at GO.
It’s not a fixed equation, but the player who has sente for more turns in the game is most likely going to be the winner of the game. So while the goal is to control space, if a player has a choice between using her turn to fortify the barrier around her claimed territory and invading contested space, she needs to consider sente. If she can force her opponent to move defensively, she will likely have opportunity to secure that border later on, and by then her border may surround much more space.
Why am I rambling about a board game? Well, honestly, I had intended this as an aside for a very different post, but now here I am so I’m gonna roll with it – because GO isn’t just any board game. Anyone who knows of my high school obsession with Monopoly (yes, I played two different four-month seasons in a Monopoly League) knows how I can get into games. But GO is different… really, yes, I’m serious. I love GO because it teaches me a lot about power and political struggle. It gives very helpful visuals for all sorts of real-life situations, especially in the context of political struggle. You can see clearly, for example, how a lone fighter (a single black or white piece) who ventures too far into enemy territory (the other color pieces) and too far from his base or his backup (nearby pieces of the same color), is very likely doomed as an individual piece. It shows how a direct attack is often not the best option.
Most importantly though, it teaches you how to concentrate your energy into the places where you are winning—where you have momentum—to maintain sente, to set the agenda and, when you are losing, to quickly cut your losses, to only put resources into fortifying a border you can defend, and to move on to regain sente.
In short, GO helps you think like a winner, to look for the places where you can win, and to know and let go of the places where winning is unlikely.
Power struggles involve real people, real relationships, and, more often than not, real suffering and consequences. Thinking in the way described above can be brutal. The sick term “collateral damage” comes to mind. It’s not surprising then that GO—I’ve heard a rumor, but cannot confirm as true—is big on Wall St. and within the so-called U.S. intelligence agencies.
But don’t get me wrong. You Lefties should still play GO. Really. We can’t let our opponents have a monopoly on strategy. (Just because Karl Rove uses deodorant doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!)
I often feel like many in the Left in this country see the whole “board” as our opponent’s territory, that we tend to see every institution—from local government to national labor unions to churches to the Democratic Party—as filled exclusively with our opponents’ “pieces.” And we try to fight it all, all at once, all the time, always defensively. We feel overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of injustice in our society—understandably so, dammit—and we want to stand against all of it.
Well, that’s a healthy, humane impulse.
But we need to focus our energy to where we are likely to gain some momentum, to where we can make our opponents respond to our agenda, to where we are most likely to gain some ground.
Here’s what Michael McPhearson, Executive Director of Veterans For Peace, has to say:
I think about it in terms of what I call the initiative. Let’s say you’re watching boxing, and at the beginning of the fight they’re sort of feeling each other out. If it’s you and me, and all of a sudden I get a punch in and stagger you, from now on—after that punch—up until you get yourself back together, you’re reacting. I have the initiative. Once you get yourself back together, neither one of us might have the initiative, or you might strike me and then you have it. In 2005, Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey created a space where the antiwar movement gained the initiative on the Bush administration and the pro-war forces. And we kept that initiative all the way through to the midterm elections the following year. We lost it as we tried to make the new Congress respond to us. And now no one has it.
People are still looking for an answer. While we can’t control what happens in Iraq—and that can change the political environment here—we do have an opportunity to regain initiative, before events in Iraq or actions by the pro-war forces here gain it for them. We have to think about how we’re going to do that.
This quote is from when I interviewed Michael for the War Resister’s League’s Listening Process. I didn’t ask him about GO. I asked him to assess constraints and openings for antiwar organizing in the United States today.
A sad sidenote: out of the many many such interviews that WRL did with organizers from across the country, his is the only one where the recording device tragically malfunctioned, and we lost one of the most brilliant 20-minute monologues I’ve ever heard. Fortunately we didn’t lose everything. The above quote is in the report, but I remember him having a lot more to say on this concept of initiative (aka sente), and I’m going to try to get around to reviewing more of his interview and asking his permission to publish more of it.
In conclusion: I have a GO board that I often have with me. I actually brought it along to North Carolina where I’m “deployed” for the next 2+ weeks, on the off-chance that I may encounter someone who plays. Please, reader, learn or already know how to play GO and then please be around on one of the rare occasions when I have time to play. That’s my main point here, I think.
Disclaimers: I’m a pretty mediocre GO player. And none of these ideas are remotely original. Read Sun Tzu.
P.S. Another unconfirmed rumor: according to the CIA’s files, Mao Zedong’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek had something to do with Mao’s GO-based strategy proving superior to Chiang Kai-shek’s CIA-provided, Chess-based strategy. (I hope I’m not offending any Chess enthusiasts here.)
P.P.S. Credit where credit is due: All GO-related unconfirmed rumors are my probably bastardized versions of stuff I heard a long time ago from the person who taught me GO, Patrick Reinsborough. Patrick is a dedicated and very quotable organizer, as anyone who reads WRL’s full Listening Process report will pick up on. Patrick is co-founder of the smartMeme Strategy & Training Project, which you should check out – and not just because they feature GO on some of their promo materials.
