Harry Targ
But
we also believe in something called citizenship – citizenship-- a word at the
very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the
idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one
another and to future generations.
….
We,
the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our
destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for
me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity
or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died
in their defense.
….As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe. (Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, September 6, 2012)
Most political and cultural historians argue that
the United States has not had a strong socialist tradition, at least compared
to European countries. While this view has some merit, these commentators
ignore the deep communal traditions of Native peoples, the founders of utopian
communities in the nineteenth century all across the Northeast and Midwest,
radical socialists in the labor movements of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the large Socialist Party led by Eugene V. Debs, and the Communist movement
of the twentieth century. These pundits also ignore violent state repression in
virtually every period of American history that has been targeted against Socialist
dissenters.
However, despite state police, the FBI, strike
breakers, and repressive cultural institutions such as churches, educational
systems, and the media, the vision of community, sharing, and public purpose
have survived.
Survival has taken many forms—political parties,
mass movements, religious and secular campaigns for social and economic
justice. President Obama was not talking about Socialism in his acceptance
speech at the Democratic National Convention September 6. Indeed, he would
reject any suggestion that his political vision has a commonality with that of
Socialists. But he did offer an insightful rendition of values embedded in the
American experience. He called it “citizenship.”
What is citizenship about? For starters, it implies
the idea of a public purpose. A society consists of persons of all races,
genders, classes, sexual orientations, and ethnicities who are, of necessity,
bound together to sustain life. The President is arguing that at a fundamental
level human survival requires some sharing of pain and work as well as the
enjoyment of life. It is inevitable that a nation’s people, indeed global
citizens, share space, water, the air we breathe, the roads we travel on, and
virtually every physical, social, and economic institution and process beyond
our most intimate and private lives. Ultimately citizenship is about human
community.
In American political history, groups of people have
had to struggle to get recognition of citizenship and community. In the
nineteenth century, educational reformers had to campaign to establish public educational institutions.
Reading, writing, research on agriculture and medical science was vital to
human community. The success of the public school movement and the passage of
the Morrill Land Grant Act for higher education are examples of the realization
of the needs of human community.
Citizens also came to realize that access to printed
material, books, magazines, newspapers, was critical to an informed public and
to human community. Public libraries were
created to provide reading materials, public space for discussion, and meeting
centers.
In urban areas, people came to realize that human
community, the practice of citizenship, required space for people to meet, to
argue, to play dominoes, to lecture in front of interested audiences on the
topics of the day. Human community meant “hanging out,” in parks, on street corners, in empty lots.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, in response to
the rapacious, unplanned spread of capitalism, it was recognized that rural
space needed to be preserved. National
parks were created to encourage the use of what remained of the natural
environment, much of which had been destroyed when the colonists conquered the
people and occupied the land on which they already had been living in harmony. The
original dwellers would be forbidden from regaining what was stolen from them
but efforts were made to return some of the land to its pristine beauty.
In addition to schools, libraries, urban spaces, and
national parks, human community, it was realized, required social, economic,
and political rights. Citizenship for people living in various geographic areas
and working in various manufacturing and service venues required the right of people to associate with whomever they chose, in unions,
churches, civic organizations, and interest groups. Citizenship meant coming
together with like-minded others, particularly those who had economic interests
in common. No human is “an island.”
In a modern society where human community cannot be
based solely on direct, interpersonal interaction, voting was necessary to allow the full expression of the sentiments
of the human community.
So when President Obama spoke of citizenship,
whether he realized the full implications of his remarks or not, he was
speaking of human community, education, public space, the freedom of
association, and the right to vote. All
of these core values embedded in American history and culture are under
fundamental threat today.
“Market fundamentalist” ideologues argue that there
is no such thing as citizenship, human community, and a public sphere.
Advocates for the privatization of public
schools--from vouchers in Indiana and charter schools in Chicago to the
privatization of higher education by business model university
presidents--forget that education has been a public good, not a commodity for
sale in the market.
Those who call for the selling off of public spaces
in cities and the countryside are advocating robbery of land for profit.
And those who challenge the right of workers to form
trade unions and associations and those who seek to repress the right of people
to vote are advocating the destruction of the most fundamental conceptions of
citizenship and human community.
These are very dangerous times. Whether activists
want to call themselves socialists, anarchists, occupiers, liberals,
progressives, or whatever, the task is clear. We must unite to save our
citizenship, our public space, and human community.
