Harry Targ
David Harvey has written about a
“co-revolutionary theory” of change. In this theory Harvey argues that
anti-capitalist movements today must address “mental conceptions;” uses and
abuses of nature; how to build real communities; workers relations to bosses;
exploitation, oppression, and racism; and the relations between capital and the
state. While a tall order, the co-revolutionary theory suggests the breadth of
struggles that need to be embraced to bring about real revolution.
Harvey’s work mirrors many analysts
who address the deepening crises of capitalism and the spread of human misery
everywhere. It is increasingly clear to vast majorities of people, despite
media mystification, that the primary engine of destruction is global finance
capitalism and political institutions that have increasingly become its
instrumentality. Harvey’s work parallels the insights of Naomi Klein, Joseph
Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Noam Chomsky, and a broad array of economists,
historians, trade unionists, peace and justice activists and thousands of
bloggers and Facebook commentators.
Of course, these theorists could not
have known the ways in which the connections between the co-revolutionary
theory and practice would unfold. Most agreed that we are living through a
global economic crisis in which wealth and power is increasingly concentrated
in fewer and fewer hands (creating a global ruling class). Human misery, from
joblessness, to hunger, to disease, to environmental devastation, to state
violence, is spreading. And as events since Ferguson have pointed out, the
links between class exploitation, structural racism, and patriarchy are
inseparable.
But history has shown that such
misery can survive for long periods of time with little active resistance. Even
though activists in labor, in communities of color, in
anti-colonial/anti-neo-colonial settings are always organizing, their campaigns
usually create little traction. Not so since 2011. Tunisians rose up against
their oppressive government. Larger mobilizations occurred in Egypt. Protests
spread to Yemen, Algeria, Oman, Bahrain, and Libya.
Assuming that working people, youth,
women, and various professional groups would remain quiescent in the United
States, right-wing politicians saw the opportunity to radically transform
American society by destroying public institutions and thereby shifting
qualitatively more wealth from the majority to the minority. In North Carolina,
Wisconsin, and later in Ohio, Indiana, and around the country a broad array of
people began to publicly say “no, enough is enough.” Even those with criticisms
of President Obama continued their mobilization to secure his reelection and
the defeat of the right-wing. Youth, particularly African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans,
and Native Americans, have risen up angry all across the United States,
increasingly deepening their understanding of and demands for fundamental
institutional changes.
The resistance in the Middle East launched
in 2011 was about jobs, redistribution of wealth, limiting foreign financial
penetration, and democracy. In the United States the issues have been even more
varied: the right of workers to collectively bargain, Right-To-Work laws, defending
public education, free access to health care including the defense of
reproductive rights, and greater, not less, provision of jobs, livable wages,
and secure retirement benefits. Police accountability, mass incarceration, and
an end of the “schools to prison pipeline” have been increasingly prioritized
in mass movements.
Where do progressives go from here?
I think “co-revolutionary theory” would answer “everywhere”. Marxists are right
to see the lives of people as anchored in their ability to produce and
reproduce themselves, their families, and their communities. The right to a job
at a living wage remains central to all the ferment. But in the twenty-first
century this basic motivator for consciousness and action is more
comprehensively and intimately connected to rebuilding trade unions, opposition
to racism and sexism, and support for education, health care, sustainable
environments, and peace. All these motivations are part of the same struggle.
It is fascinating to observe that
the reaction to the efforts of the economic ruling class and political elite to
turn back the clock on reforms gained over the last 75 years have sparked
resistance and mobilization from across an array of movements and campaigns. And
activists are beginning to make the connections between the struggles.
It is too early to tell whether this
round of ferment will lead to victories for the people, even reformist ones.
But as Harvey suggests, “An anti-capitalist political movement can start
anywhere…The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to
another in mutually reinforcing ways.”
