THE POLITICS OF FEAR: A BASIC TOOL OF REACTION

Harry Targ

“Scare hell out of the American people.” (attributed to Arthur Vandenberg, Senator, Michigan, February, 1947)

“Ridge writes that there was a ‘vigorous, some might say dramatic discussion’ about raising the threat level. The former Republican governor of Pennsylvania (and first secretary for Homeland Security) says his aides told the White House that doing so would politicize national security.” (‘Ridge Felt a Push to Politicize Alert Levels,” Boston Globe, August 21, 2009).

A basic tactic used by American politicians to marshal support for policies and politicians that ordinary citizens, given their common sense and self-interest would never support, is to create a sense of fear. The “politics of fear” has a long and venal history in American political life. We can point to warnings of the penetration of foreigners into our public life before the civil war, to dangerous Reds in the struggle for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, to the Red scares of the post-World War I and II periods. The politics of fear has always used class hatred and class envy, racism, sexism, homophobia, and a sense of the “alien” to create enthusiasm for policies that are backward and inhumane.

After World War II, opinion polls indicated that most Americans hoped for a period of peace built upon the continued collaboration of the powerful wartime allies, the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Great Britain. But, as President Truman articulated in a relatively unknown speech to a gathering at Baylor University on March, 6, 1947, the United States was committed to the creation of a global economy based upon private enterprise, foreign investment, and free trade. He alluded to forces in the world that sought to organize economic life around different principles, national autonomous development and state directed economies.

What the Truman administration had been discussing in private was not a public debate on the virtues of free markets versus national planning, but a global crusade against “communist tyranny.” At an apocryphal meeting of key aides and politicians in February, 1947, before Truman’s famous “Truman Doctrine” speech of March 13, the formerly isolationist senator from Michigan, Arthur Vandenberg, reportedly declared that he would support a global policy, presumably to promote free market capitalism, but he advised that the president should “scare hell out of the American people.” Why? Because the American people still thought peace was possible between the East and the West. In March, Truman warned Congress that the United States was going to be engaged in a long-term struggle against the forces of tyranny in the world, the international communist menace.

In the 1950s, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, warned that President Jacob Arbenz, of Guatemala, constituted a threat to the Central American isthmus, and eventually the United States itself. Since Arbenz supported the expropriation of unused land owned by the United Fruit Company, the administration claimed he was moving toward communism.

Candidate John Kennedy framed his campaign for president around the fears of a “missile gap” that had allegedly opened up between the United States and the Soviet Union and the spread of communism to 90 miles off our shores on the island of Cuba.

Ronald Reagan, another presidential candidate, powerfully introduced the idea of a “the window of vulnerability” to popular discourse on the dangers to American freedom if the incumbent candidate Jimmy Carter was reelected and the government did not dramatically increase military spending.

With the end of the Cold War, new enemies needed to be constructed. And, indeed they were. They were more diabolical, less tangible than the Soviet Union and international communism. These included “failed states,” “rogue states,” and “terrorists.”

So, in a new book, not to anyone’s surprise (except for the dense mainstream media), a former Bush official, Thomas Ridge, reports on the latest gimmick in the politics of fear tool kit, color coated signals of threat levels. And in this case, once again the threat levels were designed and used, not only to engender fear and quiescent support for insane war policies but to support candidates who created these policies.

Reflecting on the politics of fear and its long history, we can extrapolate some core ideas about it and how it works. The politics of fear creates demonic enemies such as communists, terrorists, foreigners, or people who are defined as different. The politics of fear requires an implied or stated prediction of doom. If the people do not support what is being advocated, the consequences for human survival would be in jeopardy. Only clear and total support of the policies and politicians promoting it can save us from the apocalypse. Finally, in most instances the politics of fear relates to war and militarism.

The Nixon administration added to the politics of fear the militarization of domestic policies as well. For example, the US needed to commit to a war on cancer or a war on drugs. While military images verbally have not been added to the debate about health care reform today, some opponents have begun to carry guns to places where debates are occurring, suggesting that this debate is indeed a prelude to war.

What are some lessons that this argument raises for progressives to consider? First, we must recognize that the politics of fear undergirds much of our political discourse and it has for a long time. Second, the politics of fear is based on distortions of other peoples’ thoughts and behaviors and other countries’ intentions and what their actions might mean for us. Third, we must be ready to challenge virtually every instance in which the politics of fear is used to coerce and manipulate people. Fourth, we need to articulate more vigorously our own public policy proposals and our own vision of how we can build a society that is based on social and economic justice rather than fear, enemies, and the prospects of doom.

HIGHER EDUCATION TODAY: THEORY AND PRACTICE

In the Beginning

I am a child of the cold war. I was born in 1940, was an adolescent in the 1950s, and devoid of political consciousness when President Eisenhower warned of the "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex" in 1960. I was modestly inspired by the young President Kennedy's admonition to "ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country." In fact I have thought a lot about that exhortation recently as I compare the enthusiasm with which young people embraced the Kennedy campaign in 1960 and the way young people today are energized by Barack Obama. While most of us did not realize then that JFK spoke for American empire, he helped mobilize young people who throughout the 1960s fought against it.

I was not just an empty vessel, ready for cooptation, however. I read and heard about the courageous people organizing and participating in the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins, and the freedom rides in the south. And I slowly but significantly drifted into the cognitive orbit of the melodies and messages of Pete Seeger and the Weavers, but the politics of social change only marginally entered course work in high school and college. As a student of foreign policy and diplomacy and international relations I gravitated toward the most "radical' paradigm reflected in curricula at the time, "the realist" perspective. This view suggested that all nations, even our own, were driven by the pursuit of power. Defending freedom, fighting totalitarianism, standing up to communism, the realists said, was the discursive "cover" for the drive to power for which all nations were driven.

I attended a graduate program in political science that was in the forefront of the new "behavioral science" revolution. We were told we were scientists in the academy and citizens when we returned home. As scientists we were engaged in the pursuit of the construction of empirical theory about human behavior. Our task was to better describe, explain, and predict -- not change -- political behavior. The unverifiable "laws" of human nature, embedded in the realist logic, were to be replaced by rigorously acquired data and verifiable knowledge claims.

When I came to Purdue University in 1967, assigned to teach courses on international relations, I was troubled by the fact that neither the realists nor the behaviorists helped me understand the escalating war in Vietnam. I was also increasingly troubled by the assumption that it was not my place as a professor to do anything about the war, as teacher or citizen, presumably armed with a body of knowledge that might have value to the debate about the war.

I started teaching a course with the ambiguous title "Contemporary Political Problems," and through it my students and I explored the writings of the day that we thought bore upon our place in the world. These ranged from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), to the Port Huron Statement (1995), to Camus' The Rebel (1992), to C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite (1959), to William Appleman Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1972). Later on I organized courses around anarchist and utopian thought. My exposure to the Marxist tradition came later.

Almost invariably, our discussions ended up exploring what the various theorists and activists we read thought about education. We added to our readings in these courses essays on education by Paul Goodman (1964), Ivan Illich (1999), Jonathan Kozol (1968), Herbert Kohl (1988), Robert Paul Wolff (1970), and such eclectic writers as Lewis Mumford (1963). And this was before the availability of the works of Paulo Freire in the 1970s, and followers such as Henry Giroux (2007), Peter McLaren (2000), and other radical educational theorists. Out of all this, I began to develop an analysis of the political and economic contexts of higher education; a sense of the contradictory character of education, particularly higher education; a conception of how my education had been shaped by the cold war and U.S. empire; how the modern university was "contested terrain," as to ideas and behavior; how "theory and practice" were connected; and, for me, what the obligations of the educator were in the modern world.

For the full article, go to http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/targ100809.html

You may also download this article as a pdf here.

BLOCKADE ON CUBA STIFLES INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE

(The Obama administration has begun to make modest changes in United States policy toward Cuba , such as easing travel to the island by Cuban Americans and transferring money to relatives, but the economic, cultural, and educational blockade of the island remains. The mainstream press continues to publish decontextualized accounts of "dictatorship," "bureaurcracy," and"economic chaos" on the island.

For example, The New York Times published a story recently pridefully announcing that with US Homeland Security support "6,000" Cuban doctors and other health professionals have fled the island or their humanitarian assignments in other countries to come to the United States since 2002. The article, by Mirta Ouito, "Doctors in Cuba Start Over in the U.S."August 4, 2009, does mention that Cuba has sent 185,000 health professionals to 103 countries over the last 50 years. But she writes: "Yet for many Cuban doctors, who earn the equivalent of $25 a month, the lure of a life of freedom and opportunities in the United States is too strong to resist." She sites an American Medical Association official who estimates that one of four doctors in the United States was trained overseas. While the author describes the difficulties Cuban medical defectors face in pursuing their profession, she seemed undisturbed by the irony of a US government program designed to attract trained health professionals from doing important work in countries of the Global South at the same time that the most developed country in the world has to increasingly rely on international doctors to meet the needs of the American people.

Below is reprinted a 2004 article that described one example of literally hundreds of academic exchanges that flourished before former President George Bush tightened the blockade of Cuba. The 50-year blockade must end and egalitarian exchanges between the people of North America and Cuba must be reestablished for the benefit of all).

Harry Targ
June 17, 2004

Fourteen students and two professors returned to Purdue University on June 9 from an 18 day study abroad trip to Cuba. The students, from the Schools of Agriculture and Liberal Arts, completed an interdisciplinary course called “Experiencing Cuba.”The course included four days of formal instruction at the Agrarian University of Havana, an institution much like Purdue. In addition site visits were made to a tobacco farm and factory, an urban garden where the new Cuban commitment to sustainable agriculture was illustrated, an ecological preserve, and a botanical garden specializing in exhibiting and studying tropical plants. Students also toured a special facility for Cubans with mental and physical disabilities. As to politics, culture, and history, students visited museums specializing in Cuban history, religion, and the arts. The Purdue group had occasion to interact with Cubans in many places including the university, in neighborhoods, and in other urban and rural settings. The trip was capped by a six-day 700 mile ride across the island from Havana city to Santiago de Cuba on the Caribbean.

The course was organized by faculty in the School of Agriculture and Liberal Arts as part of a project to link Purdue University to appropriate academic institutions on the island. The project would link Purdue and Cuban faculty with interests in collaborative research, graduate students who wish to pursue research projects involving Cuba, and undergraduate students who wish to study in Cuba. It is hoped that at some time Cuban faculty and students will be able to study at Purdue University when United States policy toward Cuba changes.

The organizers of the Purdue/Cuba project launched the program because Cuba has had special historic ties, positive and negative,with the United States that warrant study. Also, Cuba for the last 45 years has been a social laboratory for the development of diverse social, economic, and cultural policies that interest peoples around the world as well as the United States. For example, Cuba’s health and educational programs have long been of interest. In the 1990s Cuba’s adoption of policies to promote sustainable agriculture have been seen by some as a possible model for other developing countries.

The Purdue study abroad course in Cuba was not among the first. In fact, over the last decade the Treasury Department has issued education licenses to over 750 colleges, universities, and high schools to develop such courses. During the Purdue visit to the island, for example, there were faculty/student groups from the University of Georgia, the University of Charleston, Duke, and William and Mary. A University of Michigan group was to arrive in June.

Treasury Department licensing of university programs is required because the United States has had a 40-year economic embargo and travel ban on free and open exchange with the island nation. Established by President’s Eisenhower and Kennedy, the embargo and travel ban were designed to cause economic and political chaos in Cuba that would lead to the collapse of its revolutionary government. Since the policy never led to the desired outcome, the U.S. in the 1990s began to modify the policy to let selective groups of people travel to Cuba, and in 2001 to allow so-called humanitarian sales of food products to the island on a pay-as-you go basis. U.S. academic institutions and other organized trips to the island would be authorized by Treasury if the programs had a clear educational purpose. Just during the first quarter of 2004, 1,300 Americans participated in 60 educational programs in Cuba.Despite the broad based support by liberals and conservatives,Democrats and Republicans to abolish the economic embargo and the travel ban, the Bush administration piece-by-piece has been eliminating the minimal educational and economic connections with the island.

In early May, 2004, the administration announced that it would accept a series of draconian recommendations from an appointed task force on Cuban policy to stimulate “regime change” in Cuba. Universities which in the past had been issued two-year licenses for educational travel would now have to apply for a new license each year. Educational programs shorter than a full semester would require special permission and would have to adopt the goal of U.S. policy toward Cuba, that is “regime change.” Faculty who engage in research on Cuba or who travel to the island to arrange for educational programs will be further limited in their right to travel.

Along with the efforts to eliminate the academic exchanges with Cuba, the new Bush policies cut dramatically the rights of Cuban Americans to travel to visit relatives on the island. Heretofore, they could travel once a year and such travel could be to visit extended family members. Now Cuban Americans can travel to the island only once every three years and to only visit parents or children. The amount of money Cuban Americans can send to their relatives on the island was radically cut as well.

In 2003, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is charged with enforcing sanctions against several countries and terrorist networks and drug traffickers, as well as overseeing travel to Cuba, spent $3.3 million of its $21.2 million budget on Cuba. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security has used extensive personnel and resources to interview travelers to and from the island. Enforcing the archaic ban on Cuba has used disproportionately large amounts of resources compared with the struggle against terrorism and drugs in the world.

Almost all the Purdue students who traveled and studied in Cuba reported that the experience was intellectually stimulating. While student evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses of the Cuban experiment varied, most shared the belief that free and open exchange of experiences between peoples is truly educational. It is time to end the U.S. blockade and travel ban on Cuba so that two peoples, so close and yet so far from each other, can learn from each other’s experiences.

"SELLING FREE ENTERPRISE" AGAIN

Harry Targ

Less obvious…was the struggle led by national business leaders…to reshape the ideas, images, and attitudes through which Americans understood their world, specifically their understanding of their relationship to the corporation and the state. … The struggle to undercut organized labor’s and the state’s ideological hold over the working class and to protect this vision took place within a variety of contexts (Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-60).

Progressives are so engaged in battles over such issues as health care, climate change, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that they forget the fundamental “battle of ideas” that shape the ways in which working people understand their connections to government, unions, community, and the economic system. In two brilliant books, Selling Free Enterprise (1994) and Waves of Opposition (2006), Fones-Wolf describes the public sphere, media, education, religious institutions, and political assemblies as sites for critical debate about the kind of society that can best serve workers. The histories she presents cover the 1930s through the 1950s, but the lessons of her history bear upon the ideological struggles in our own day.

In the first book, the author describes the open-ended possibilities for political change, it was hoped, which could have been crafted as World War II ended. The war began at a time when workers, through their own mass action, had created the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a militant federation of four million factory workers in electronics, steel, auto, meat packing, mining and smelting, and other industrial and white collar unions. To help the war effort, CIO unions pledged to avoid strikes in the name of national security. But, when the war ended, workers expected to play a significant role in constructing public policy and shaping the kind of political and economic system that would serve their needs.

Fones-Wolf documents the worldview that guided workers and their unions after the war. They believed in the right of workers to form unions that would represent their interests at the point of production. They believed that government must play a basic role in promoting an improved quality of life for all. They believed that workers derive their freedom and happiness from active participation in communities at the local and national levels. And the character of “free enterprise” was to be circumscribed by the common good. The public good was more important than private property.

The capitalist class, Fones-Wolf argues, had a diametrically opposed view of the political, economic, and even cultural world that needed to be created after the war. Unions represented tyranny, not the interests of workers. Government was a hindrance to human well-being. The more government insinuated itself into the lives of people the worse off they would be. Community, unless it was organized by human relations offices of big corporations, restricted freedom. Individualism, not community, was the bulwark of a free society. And basic to individualism, the capitalists argued, was the “free market,” “free enterprise,” and private property.

Selling Free Enterprise describes the battles over these two fundamentally different worldviews, community versus individualism, in factories, in schools, in churches, in local elections. Such capitalist arms as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce employed factory owners, clergymen, educators and think tanks, the press, radio and television to promote their vision of post-war America using millions of dollars and penetrating every city and town across the United States.

Although the labor movement, peace and justice activists, moderate church people and others challenged the “free enterprise” model of society from 1945 until 1960, they were no match for the money and power of big capital. The free marketeers also utilized the Cold War and the specter of “worldwide communism” to purge those forces that sought to create an egalitarian and communitarian America. While the different ideologies were contested in the 1940s and 1950s, by the early 1960s the capitalist class had achieved ideological hegemony.

Fones-Wolf wrote Waves of Opposition to describe the efforts of labor and progressive groups to have their voices heard on radio, the dominant medium for news and culture from the 1930s until the late 1950s. Corporate elites, CEOs of the major radio networks, and government agents limited the rights of trade unionists to have access to the air waves. Exceptions were noted in the post-war period when AFL and CIO paid programs appeared on national radio and a few union locals were able to buy air time in their communities to run programs describing the activities of their locals. In a few instances, local labor owned or operated radio stations. One of the longest running efforts was WCFL, out of Chicago. It was a “voice of labor” station operating from the 1920s to the 1970s. But, Fones-Wolf points out, it took major struggles for labor to gain recognition and access to the air waves. With corporate media concentration, the modest foothold labor had in radio, and even less in television, was lost.

The struggles, so graphically described by Fones-Wolf, are being played out today. The age of “neo-liberalism,” ushered in by the Reagan administration was sold to the American people in ideological terms. A worldview based on individualism, free enterprise, private property, limited government, and the magic of the marketplace was slickly packaged and sold while state/corporate power was used to crush the labor movement. Even the modest “welfare state” model of public/private sector collaboration was challenged by neo-liberal spokespersons.

With increasing media concentration, approximately ten media conglomerates control about fifty percent of all we read, see, and hear, neo-liberalism crushed any alternative visions that stepped in its path. Even when policies are discussed, neo-liberalism reflected in talk radio and rightwing television dominates what and how issues are debated.

While Fones-Wolf’s story is about the defeat of workers, it does suggest two things. First, struggles for a better future must be fought on the ideological as well as the policy levels. Fundamental concepts such as community versus individualism, government versus free enterprise, and worker rights versus corporate control must be debated. The case should be made that the communitarian, participatory, egalitarian vision of a just society is deeply embedded in United States history.

Second, in the past workers and progressives used a variety of techniques to bring their message to the people including demanding access to major media. In our own day struggles to gain access to and control of media outlets, including television and the press, remain important. In addition, the vision of community once again needs to be brought to union halls, churches, public libraries, and all other social institutions and open spaces where people must decide on their collective future.

WHAT HOOSIERS KNOW ABOUT HEALTHCARE

Harry Targ

My own preference would be — and you may have found common ground here this morning on Easter, which is appropriate — deal with the inefficiencies, figure out a way to make the private marketplace accomplish our public good, only have the government role as a backstop, as a last resort, if the private sector has just failed to meet the challenge. (Evan Bayh on Fox, Sunday, April 12, 2009)

Senator Evan Bayh is one of those so-called “blue dog” Democrats who remain ambivalent about parts of the Obama political agenda, particularly the Employee Free Choice Act (despite his long-time popularity with Indiana trade unionists) and health care reform. Hoosiers see through Bayh’s principles for opposing these centerpieces of economic and social reform. Evidence is particularly clear on what is behind Bayh’s opposition to any change in health care policy in the United States.

For example, Fort Wayne’s Journal Gazette reported on December 15, 2007 (Sylvia A. Smith, Washington editor) that the senator’s wife, Susan Bayh, earned $248,700 from stock options she “earned” from participation on the corporate board of WellPoint, Inc. and sold when the stock was at its highest price. Over the prior four years, the paper reported, Bayh earned money from sales of stocks eight times from Wellpoint, the health insurance giant; Curis Inc., a pharmaceutical developer, and the E-Trade bank. She gained $1.7 million in pre-tax earnings from seven of these transactions. The story also listed Susan Bayh’s 2007 public transactions including, in January, the purchase of 3,333 shares of WellPoint stock at $44.18 per share and selling them for $78 earning $112,722, and, in May, the acquisition of the same number of shares and selling them for $84.98 per share earning $135,978.In 2006, Bayh bought 20,001 shares of WellPoint and sold them earning $796,078.

The Lafayette Journal and Courier (Maureen Groppe, Gannett Washington Bureau) reported on June 15, 2009 that Susan Bayh owns between $500,000 and $1 million in employee stock in the “Indianapolis-based insurance giant,” WellPoint. WellPoint is one of eight corporate boards she sits on including the Curis, the pharmaceutical developer.

Daniel Lee, Indianapolis Star columnist reported on May 17 that the WellPoint executive board is trying to influence the public debate on health care to forestall the emergence of a “public option.” If that is not possible, Lee suggested, private insurers would want to create a system in which private companies control the public option. Lee quoted Common Cause CEO, Bob Edgar, who said that “many of the corporations who benefit from health care have come around to realize that while they may lose some of the things they were hoping to protect, if they move to universal coverage there will be more money across the board for everybody.”

WellPoint, with 35 million customers, is the largest commercial insurance provider, controlling Blue Cross and Blue Shield. The company made $2.5 billion in profits in 2008. Spokespersons have said that they could support expanding coverage to the 45 million without coverage and even could drop restrictions on coverage to people with pre-existing health problems. Brad Fluegel, Chief Strategy Officer of the company, said that “we can do it in a way that’s fair and equitable for folks. There is no need really for a government-run plan.”

As to WellPoint’s political activity, in 2006 the company gave $430,580 to federal candidates; 16% to Democrats, 82% to Republicans and two percent to Joe Lieberman. Lee indicated that in 2008 WellPoint spent $4.33 million on federal lobbying and made three million calls to consumers.

And then there are critically placed political influentials such as Susan Bayh. Although the Senator is “agnostic” on health care, his aides point out that the couple do not discuss any issues related to WellPoint.

If any one believes these spokespersons, I have a Hoosier bridge I can sell them cheap.

For information about healthcare reform contact Central Indiana Jobs With Justice http://www.centralindiana.jwj.org and the single payer movement contact Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan http://www.hchp.info

ON SOCIALIST EDUCATION

Harry Targ

(I belong to the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism which is having its national convention from July 23-26 in San Francisco, www.cc-ds.org One workshop will address the issue of socialist education. The comments below were written for that workshop but address the more general question of how any progressive organization might address the educational component of their political work).

Almost a decade ago, one of the leaders of a socialist group I belong to (the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism or CCDS) proposed that the organization develop a Socialist Education Project. The proposal came at a time when the promise of the “new economy” built on the growth of the Silicon Valley had begun to fade. Neo-liberal globalization, so much celebrated by every administration since the late 1970s, continued to generate inequalities in wealth and income all around the globe. Despite the short Clinton administration economic recovery unemployment rates of five or six percent continued. The process of financialization, that is a systemic economic shift from the production of goods and services to financial speculation, undergirded the growing pathology of capitalist development. In this economic and political environment mainstream commentators began to write about the insights that Marx and his followers brought to the study of capitalism. So it seemed to us in CCDS that a socialist political organization needed to explore rigorous study of the evolution of capitalism, Marxist analysis of how it works, and the logical possibilities for alternatives to it, particularly socialist ones.

The SEP then began. Local CCDS activists launched study groups. Members of the SEP committee generated reading materials to support local study groups. Some materials were assembled as “modules,” or integrated short courses with readings, questions for study, and bibliographic suggestions. These were placed on a new SEP web page. Study groups on the West Coast, the Midwest, and the South came and went. Only a few still survive.

The political and economic landscape has changed from the point at which the idea of a SEP was first conceived. The economic crisis today is considerably more dramatic and far-reaching than a decade ago. Real unemployment rates, hitting peoples of color the hardest, approach 15 percent. The financialization of the economic system has reached new levels, institutionalizing the ruling class power of the financiers. Internationally, the United States has embarked on at least two wars this century and nearly 800 U. S. military bases can be found around the world. “Normal” military budgets and war costs approximate a $1 trillion a year.

Politically resistance to neo-liberal globalization and finance capital has grown as well. Many nations of the Global South have begun to organize against western imperialism. In the United States itself, an extraordinary mobilization occurred, particularly among youth, to elect the first African American president of the United States. The political terrain today has shifted from an environment in which progressives must “fight the right” to one in which U.S. politics is more opaque; some times progressive, sometimes centrist, sometimes right wing.

In this context a renewed, revitalized SEP is more relevant than ever. Those of us who are interested in envisioning a socialism for the twenty-first century must ask ourselves what we want to achieve in such a project and how we might go about trying to achieve it. We need to address three basic sets of questions.

1. What do we mean by socialism? How is it created? What is the system (capitalism) that demands the creation of socialism as an alternative? How does this system work? What kinds of political movements are needed to move history from the capitalist system to socialism? What theories, commentaries, books, articles, videos etc. can help us address how capitalism works and the socialist alternative?

2. If socialism is a way of acting in the world, what can socialist pedagogy, or ways of learning, help us to build socialism. In other words, what in the process of education teaches us about being socialists and organizing as socialists.

3. What specific educational tools can we use to explore the first set of questions about the nature of capitalism and the meaning of socialism? How do we use books, articles, videos, music, debates in our study groups? Fundamentally, what are study groups? How do we create them? How do we recruit participants? What is most likely to attract them? Do they have to be face to face encounters? What role for electronic interactions?

I want to address the question of pedagogy, or the process of learning specifically. I want to argue that there is a socialist practice that is relevant to how we behave in all social and political settings, including educational ones. In other words, when we form study groups we need to act like socialists. People learn political principles through practice as well as through theory.

Professors of education and educational practitioners, either through formal training and/or intuition come to the realization that teaching and learning are done in different ways and these different ways affect what is learned. One of the most influential educational theorists from the vantage point of radical socialist change was Brazilian educator Paulo Friere. His book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, influenced revolutionaries and reformers around the world, particularly at the grassroots in the Global South.

Heather Clayton explored five main points embedded in Freire’s work. According to her, Paulo Friere emphasized;

1. the importance of dialogue and the fact that the dialogue was two way, contained in a respectful relationship. It meant that people worked with each other.

2. ‘praxis’-action that was informed by knowledge and should be linked to values. But it wasn’t knowledge for knowledge sake; it was to empower people to use the knowledge to make an impact on their world.

3. building hope for the oppressed. As consciousness is increased, society can be transformed.

4. the importance of linking education with the real world experiences of the students.

5. trying to highlight and minimize the differences between teachers and learners (Heather Clayton, “From the Ideological to the Concrete: Ideas from Paulo Friere, Understanding by Design and the Ontario Curriculum and Their Implications to Layered Curriculum,” http://www.help4teachers.com/heatherpaper.htm )

Exploring these points we might suggest the following. First, socialism is not an idea, “a thing,” but a set of relationships built on mutual respect, even among those with different points of view. It might be worth mentioning in our groups that mutual respect is the inter-personal cornerstone of socialism as a process. The group environment that is based on both equality and the possibility of self-realization is basic to the kind of society we want to achieve.

Second, the knowledge we seek, we seek because we want to change the world. Books and articles, lectures and videos are tools to help us define our values, assess our historical circumstances, and guide political action. We engage in study because what we learn and how we learn will have utility for our practical political work.

Third, knowledge can be empowering. Knowledge provides an explanation of why human beings are in the situations they are in. That knowledge leads to explorations about how to change reality. In the sense that knowledge proceeds action, it is empowering. The more we know, the more likely we will be able to act effectively in the world.

Fourth, each participant in any study group brings to the group a lifetime of experience. Economic survival, political activism, and organizational commitments, all framed by various educational backgrounds insure the richness of discussion and debate. Since socialist study groups are motivated to understand the past and the present and to figure out ways to shape the future, the connections between study and the realities of peoples’ lives is vital.

Fifth, given what has been said already, each study group participant is a teacher and a learner. Traditional models of education are often hierarchical, The teacher brings wisdom, knowledge, and methodological skills to the classroom setting and the students are receptors of the wisdom. While this model of education has its place, it is clearly inappropriate for socialist study groups. It reinforces status differences and presumes the teacher is the repository of all knowledge while the other participants have nothing special to contribute to discussion and debate.

I would like to raise a series of questions that bear on defining socialism, socialist pedagogy, and practical education.

1. Should all study groups be face-to-face or are there reasons and occasions for study groups using new technologies? Could SEP organize a nation-wide reading group using listservs for discussion of readings as an alternative?

2. What is the optimal size for local study groups? Is there a size that
exceeds effective interaction?

3. What kinds of materials should be used in study groups and if there are a variety of resources what is the most appropriate mix to stimulate discussion? These might include books, articles, videos, You Tube interviews, music, newspapers, blog essays, novels, poems etc. Are there any guidelines that could be prepared to suggest amounts of reading, level of complexity of reading, and optimal mixes of print and visuals?

4. How should study group interactions be initiated and carried out? Should there be teachers and students? Should such roles be circulated? Should everyone be responsible for starting a discussion? Or only those with special experience and knowledge? How are materials for use chosen?

5. What are the goals of the study group? Should they be discussed at the outset? Does the study group wish to acquire information and/or analytical and methodological skills? Does the study group want to identify a political project-a petition campaign, a rally, a letter-writing program for the group? In addition, should the group seek to recruit more members? If so, how?

6. Having reflected on socialism, pedagogy, and practice what should the role of organizational projects, such as the SEP in CCDS, be in fostering socialist education nationally, regionally, and locally?

BRING A LITTLE POLITICAL "SCIENCE" TO THE TABLE

Harry Targ

I teach Political Science. I have been doing that for over forty years. I studied the subject as an undergraduate student in the 1950s and as a graduate student in the 1960s.

As I became politically active I began to realize how the Cold War shaped virtually all of the social science and humanities disciplines. Various theories and perspectives in these disciplines became dominant and legitimate for research, study, and teaching and others were dismissed as “unscholarly,” or “ideological.” The content of fields as diverse as English, philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology reflected the needs and ideology of the United States in its struggle against “communism.”

Political Science as a field was central to the development of a United States narrative about how political institutions work or should work. Political scientists endorsed a theory of democracy that emphasized the activities of "interest groups." According to this theory, in a democracy people participated in the political process by being members of groups. Public policy was the outcome of conflict among these groups. Government, from this view, was more the arbiter of competing interests than the reflection of any of the constituent groups. Virtually every undergraduate textbook (a very few exceptions slipped through the cracks) used this “group theory of politics” to explain the political process in the United States. The group theory also served as a standard by which other governments could be evaluated.

By the 1970s, some modest additions to this dominant way of thinking in political science emerged. Still acceptable to the mainstream, an approach we might call “bureaucratic politics,” gained adherents. Bureaucratic politics, borrowing liberally from theories of how organizations of all kinds work, emphasized the characteristic ways in which organizations within political systems operate. Paraphrasing one prominent political scientist, organizations have their own “standard operating procedures.” They act in ways to maximize the interest of their particular organization to the exclusion some times of the interests of other organizations in government and the government as a whole. Concretely this means that the Department of Defense has its own agenda as does the Air Force, the Army, and the Navy. Security agencies behave in predetermined ways to exercise what they are programmed to do. From this view government is a collection of semi-autonomous, some say feudal, organizations that are barely controllable by political elites or economic ruling classes.

For theorists of groups or bureaucratic politics, their explanations were basic to understanding the political universe. Capitalism to them constituted no more than one “variable” manifest through groups or bureaucracies. While both approaches saw politics as driven by interests neither saw the centrality of understanding how capitalism works and its connection to the state, how change was connected to classes and class struggle, and the relationship between the expansion of capitalism and imperialism.

Why reminisce about old-school academic political science in 2009? Well it may be that as we strategize about building a progressive agenda and particularly map a set of tactics to achieve both short and longer term goals, we might find a bit of wisdom embedded in the old ideology. Reflecting upon interest groups and bureaucracies may make a contribution to our political practice. As we challenge increasing military spending and making wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; and promote legislation reducing greenhouse gas emissions and changing health care policies; and seek to uncover Bush/Cheney covert operations and torture, identifying and seeking understanding of groups and bureaucracies might make our work more effective.

Of course, gaining insights about how particular groups are operating in the political process and how bureaucracies are programmed to act does not replace an understanding of finance capital and deeper class forces internal to ruling classes and between them and masses of people but may enrich it.

So I say “two cheers” for Cold War Political Science.