Harry Targ
(The essay below was written in January 2018, I found it by accident and decided to repost it as we move beyond the 2024 elections. The ideas of Sanders and Barber still make sense to me as a vision and basis for tactics and strategy. November 9, 2024).
An article appeared recently on the internet
announcing a public conversation to be held January 19, 2018 at Duke University
between Senator Bernie Sanders and Rev. William Barber. The discussion, “The Enduring Challenge of a Moral
Economy: 50 Years After Dr. King Challenged Racism, Poverty, and Militarism,”
will be moderated by Duke University Chapel Dean Luke A. Powery.
As prior dialogues between them suggest, this
conversation will not be a debate but an articulation of parallel theoretical
and practical insights about politics by two of the most compelling progressive
leaders today.
At root, but not in so many words, Sanders offers a narrative about a class
society in which one class, the one percent, exploit and oppress another class,
the 99 percent. Implicitly this dynamic is driven by the pursuit of profit. For
him the antidote to this system is democracy and socialism.
The Sanders vision draws from the Marxist theoretical
tradition but more importantly it is infused with the historic US tradition of
populism and the socialism of such prominent and diverse political leaders as
Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Sanders prioritizes in his analysis, the capitalist
system, autocratic political institutions, “false” ideologies that only
recognize individuals, not communities or society, and institutionalized greed
and immorality. Change, he believes, requires the mobilization of the 99
percent in the electoral arena and the streets to transform societal
institutions.
Rev. Barber’s Moral Mondays movement, begun over a
decade ago, was inspired by the dramatic rightward shift in North Carolina (and
later national) public policies which effectively increased poverty, diminished
access to health care and education, suppressed the right to vote, and in other
ways attacked workers, people of color, women, and gays. Moral Mondays
catalyzed a variety of groups who were morally outraged about the substantial
increase in varieties of pain and suffering of vast majorities of people. And
Rev. Barber realized that while groups and communities were angry over a
variety of issues, their concerns overlapped. He was convinced that various
angry constituencies could be brought together to collectively challenge an
immoral system that hurt everybody; workers, people of color, women, LBGTQ
individuals, and people of spiritual or secular traditions. Thus, the idea of
“fusion politics” was articulated.
Moral Mondays was initiated by the spiritual community
and it was motivated by the basic proposition that what was happening to
people’s lives was immoral. Rev. Barber, therefore, built a movement based upon
ethical systems derived from constitutional and/or theological premises that
promoted social justice, human rights, and human dignity.
The Sanders campaign was grounded in material
reality: economic exploitation, profit seeking at the expense of human
development, and the maintenance of an economic system based on
institutionalized avarice. Rev. Barber’s campaign was based on an ethical
reality; that is that exploitation, poverty, racism, sexism, and homophobia
were morally wrong. Although the basic constituents of each campaign varied
(Sanders supporters tended to come from the working class, labor, and young
people interested in socialism while Barber’s constituencies included leading
civil rights organizations, faith communities, and issue-oriented advocacy
groups) the constituencies overlapped.
At the dawn of 2018 (now 2025), most human beings,
workers, people of color, women, gays, and almost everyone alive who lives in a
physical space threatened by environmental change, have a stake in resisting
the shift toward an apocalyptic economic, political, cultural, militaristic,
and environmental universe. They could support a vision of a new society that
prioritizes community over individualism, participatory democracy over
authoritarianism, and human solidarity over hate.
Consequently, the movements coming out of the two
currents (Our Revolution out of the Sanders candidacy and the New Poor People’s
Campaign out of Moral Mondays) should join hands in a common struggle. Analyses
of public troubles can begin with stances on political economy or public
immorality but they cover the same ground AND they propose the same solution; a
caring, participatory, just society.
So the vision of this latest dialogue between Senator
Sanders and Rev. Barber should be inspirational. It should stimulate both
communities to act in unity.
That is the political task of 2025 and beyond.
