Harry Targ
Protest
Movements in the United States
In
addition to anecdotal evidence, aggregate data confirms the continuation and
expansion of activist groups and protest activities all across the face of the
globe. For example in the United States, Mark Solomon in an important essay
“Whither the Socialist Left? Thinking the ‘Unthinkable’” (March 6, 2013, www.portside.org) discusses the long history of socialism in the
United States, the brutal repression against it, damaging sectarian battles on
the left, the miniscule size of socialist organizations today and yet
paradoxically the growing sympathy for the idea of socialism among Americans,
particularly young people. He calls for “the convergence of socialist
organizations committed to non-sectarian democratic struggle, engagement with
mass movements, and open debate in search of effective responses to present
crises and to projecting a socialist future.”
The Solomon article does not conceptualize “left unity” and “building
the progressive majority” as separate and distinct projects but as
fundamentally interconnected. For him, and many others, the role of the left in
the labor movement and other mass movements gave shape, direction, and
theoretical cohesion to the battles that won worker rights in the 1930s.
Solomon’s
call has stimulated debate among activists around the idea of “left unity.” The
appeal for left unity is made more powerful by socialism’s appeal, the current
global crises of capitalism, rising mobilizations around the world, and living
experiments with small-scale socialism such as the construction of a variety of
workers’ cooperatives.
Effective
campaigns around “left unity” in recent years have prioritized “revolutionary
education,” drawing upon the tools of the internet to construct an accessible
body of theory and debate about strategy and tactics that could solidify left
forces and move the progressive majority into a socialist direction. The
emerging Online University of the Left (OUL), an electronic source for
classical and modern theoretical literature about Marxism, contemporary debates
about strategy and tactics, videos, reading lists, and course syllabi,
constitute one example of left unity. The OUL serves as one of many resources
for study groups, formal coursework, and discussions among socialists and
progressives. Those who advocate for “left unity” or left “convergence”
celebrate these many developments, from workers cooperatives to popular
education, as they advocate for the construction of a unified socialist left.
A
second manifestation of political activism, the Occupy Movement, first
surfacing in the media in September, 2011, initiated and renewed traditions of
organized and spontaneous mass movements around issues that affect peoples’
immediate lives such as housing foreclosure, debt, jobs, wages, the
environment, and the negative role of money in U.S. politics. Perhaps the four
most significant contributions of the Occupy Movement have been:
1.Introducing
grassroots processes of decision-making.
2.Conceptualizing
modern battles for social and economic justice as between the one percent (the
holders of most wealth and power in society) versus the 99 percent (weak,
economically marginalized, and dispossessed, including the “precariat”).
3.Insisting
that struggles for radical change be spontaneous, often eschewing traditional
political processes.
4.Linking
struggles locally, nationally, and globally.
During
the height of its visibility some 500 cities and towns experienced Occupy mobilizations
around social justice issues. While less frequent, Occupy campaigns still
exist, particularly in cities where larger progressive communities reside.
Calls for left unity correctly ground their claims in a long and rich history
of organized struggle while “occupiers” and other activists today have been
inspired by the bottom-up and spontaneous uprisings of 2011 (both international
and within the United States).
A
third, and not opposed, approach to political change at this time has been
labeled “building a progressive majority.” This approach assumes that large
segments of the U.S. population agree on a variety of issues. Some are
activists in electoral politics, others in trade unions, and more in single
issue groups. In addition, many who share common views of worker rights, the
environment, health care, undue influence of money in politics, immigrant
rights etc. are not active politically. The progressive majority perspective
argues that the project for the short-term is to mobilize the millions of
people who share common views on the need for significant if not fundamental
change in economics and politics.
Often
organizers conceptualize the progressive majority as the broad mass of people
who share views on politics and economics that are ‘centrist” or “left.”
Consequently, over the long run, “left” participants see their task as
three-fold. First, they must work on the issues that concern majorities of
those at the local and national level. Second, they struggle to convince their political
associates that the problems most people face have common causes (particularly
capitalism). Third, “left” participants see the need to link issues so that
class, race, gender, and the environment, for example, are understood as part
of the common problem that people face.
A
2005-2007 data set called “Start” (startguide.org) showed that there were some
“500 leading organizations in the United States working for progressive change
on a national level.” START divided these 500 organizations into twelve
categories based on their main activities. These included progressive
electoral, peace and foreign policy, economic justice, civil liberties, health
advocacy, labor, women’s and environmental organizations. Of course, their membership, geographic presence,
financial resources, and strategic and tactical vision varied widely. And, many of the variety of progressive
organizations at the national level were reproduced at the local and state
levels as well.
In
sum, when looking at contemporary social change in the United States at least
three tendencies have been articulated: left unity, the Occupy Movement, and
building a progressive majority. Each highlights its own priorities as to
vision, strategy, tactics, and political contexts. In addition, the relative
appeal of each may be affected by age, class, gender, race, and issue
prioritization as well. However, these
approaches need not be seen as contradictory. Rather the activism borne of each
approach may parallel the others. (the discussion of the three tendencies
of activism appeared in Harry Targ, “The Fusion Politics Response to 21st
Century Imperialism From Arab Spring to Moral Mondays,” ouleft.org, and was
presented at the “Moving Beyond Capitalism” Conference, Center for Global
Justice, San Miguel de Allende Mexico, July 29-August 5, 2014).
Building the Progressive Majority in
2016
The statement above from CCDS was
published in 2009 and the description of the three political tendencies in the
United States was presented in 2014. Since then, the Moral Mondays Movement in
North Carolina captured national attention and stimulated a growing campaign
around Reverend William Barber’s narrative of United States history referring
to the “three reconstructions” and the articulation of his theory of “fusion
politics.”
The egregious police violence
against African Americans, particularly young men and women of color, has
sparked a vibrant Black Lives Matter campaign that has caused a renewed
interest in understanding the functions the police serve, the role of white
supremacy, rightwing populism, and Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” in
America.
Militant workers in growing sectors
of the economy are rising up. Fast food workers are organizing around the “Fight
for 15.” Health and home care, and other service sector workers are demanding
the right to have their unions recognized. And teachers, transportation
workers, and state employees have hit the streets and legislative assemblies to
demand worker rights.
The peace movement has begun to
resuscitate itself challenging a new cold war with Russia, boots on the ground
and drones in the air to fight ISIS, and the unbridled growth of the
military/industrial complex.
Finally, environmentalists have made
a convincing case that the connection between neoliberal global capitalism and
environmental catastrophe “changes everything.”
The three tendencies presented
above—left unity, the Occupy Movement, and building a progressive majority—continue
to be reflected in different kinds of organizing around the country based on
the issues, levels of organization, predominant ideological manifestations,
local political cultures, and the composition of movements in different places
based upon class, race, gender, sexual identity, religious affiliation and
issue orientation. And all these
tendencies are worthy of attention and support, particularly in the 21st
century “time of chaos.”
But a new campaign (potentially a
movement) has emerged since the summer, 2015. Bernie Sanders, an aging
left-oriented Senator from Vermont began his long uphill march to secure the
Democratic Party nomination for the presidency. A sixties activist on civil
rights and peace, a populist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a Congressman and
Senator from that state, Sanders, since his early days of political activism, has articulated an anti-Wall Street,
anti-finance capital mantra that has its roots in various progressive currents
in United States history, These include the populist campaigns of the 1890s, the militant workers struggles of the Wobblies during the Progressive era, the
popular electoral campaigns of five-time Socialist Party candidate for
President, Eugene V. Debs from 1900 to 1920; the industrial union movement
of the 1930s which built the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) and support for the New Deal legislation that
provided some measure of economic security to many workers; to the civil rights
and anti-war movements of the 1960s and beyond.
Sanders has proceeded to excoriate
finance capital and to link the enormous accumulation of wealth and income at
one pole of American society and the maintenance and growth of the misery of
the masses on the other. He has advanced his narrative by linking class, to
race, to gender issues, and has begun to incorporate the apocalyptic
possibilities of a future without addressing climate change. In a word, he has
articulated a program that the CCDS program defined as the vision of “the progressive
majority.”
The vision of a progressive majority
is one that emphasizes the systematic articulation of the causes of human
misery and what needs to be done to overcome them and the belief that the vision already
exists among the majority of the American people. So far, the popularity of
the Sanders campaign, the particular enthusiasm it is generating at the
grassroots, including from youth, labor, feminist, anti-racist, and
environmental organizations, and the demographics reflected in the Iowa caucus
turnout and polling data, suggest that activists from the three tendencies
identified above should direct their energies to supporting the Sanders presidential
run. Most importantly, the Sanders campaign has inspired the possibility of
building a long-standing progressive movement that will survive and grow until
the November, 2016 election and beyond.
