Sunday, April 4, 2021

THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT CONTINUES

Harry Targ




A NEW SPIRIT OF REVOLUTION:  2015 Observations

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.”

RECONFIGURING A 21ST CENTURY LEFT IN THE UNITED STATES: More 2015 Observations

Mapping Left/Progressive Forces

-The traditional Left         

- Issue Groups                                      

- Electoral politics

Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008 sent spirits soaring. The first African-American President had been elected. Also he had been an early opponent of the war in Iraq, indicated he supported worker rights to organize unions, and would take on the Wall Street bankers who were behind the dramatic economic crisis that was destroying the economy. Liberal pundits saw Obama’s election as a prelude to the institutionalization of a new New Deal that would reconstitute a reformist state for years to come. And, these pundits argued, the Obama electoral coalition would make the 2008 election a transformative one: liberal Democrats would dominate the federal government and several pivotal states in the East, Midwest, West, Southwest, and in a few Southern states. The eight-year foreign and domestic policy disasters of the Bush years, of necessity, would lead to a new and brighter future.

The years since 2008 did not work out the way the celebrants predicted. First, Wall Street dominance of the political system survived the public outcries to break up the banks, convict the criminal CEOs, and reestablish regulations of banking and finance. 

Second, despite demilitarization of Iraq and Afghanistan, the military/industrial complex and the advocates of humanitarian interventions around the world continued to influence the character of United States foreign policy. From the disastrous policies toward Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the use of drone warfare to avoid “boots on the ground,” to sending more troops into failed trouble-spots such as Afghanistan, the pursuit of U.S. empire prevailed.

Third, while unemployment rates dropped and the auto industry was saved, support for labor organizing continued to decline, real wages remained stagnant, and those workers who returned to employment were earning less in real wages than workers had made thirty or forty years ago.

And finally, almost literally wars on people of color, youth, and women escalated during the Obama years. Incarceration rates continued to rise. Police violence against the citizenry rose. Attacks on women’s health and reproductive services grew stronger. And new federal and state educational policies were adopted (charter schools, vouchers, egregious testing of young people) that weakened the quality of education particularly for poor, Black, and Latino children.  Vicious racism which has been a feature of United States history since the founding of the nation was rekindled by the Tea Party, rightwing media outlets, and major contingents of the Republican Party.  

Bringing the Left/Progressive Forces Together

As 2016 approaches, debates about the causes of the retaliation against the modest gains brought about by the 2008 electoral victory should shift to discussions about how to move ahead. It can be said that broad sectors of the American people—workers, people of color, youth, women—believe that creating a new society is critical and possible. But today people with a passion for fundamental social change have coalesced around a diverse array of strategies, ideas, visions, experiences, and practices. By identifying core components of those who are working for change, we can begin to see how unity out of diversity of thought and action can be achieved.

First, despite efforts of historians to deny it, there has been a vibrant Left tradition in the United States. Wobblies, Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists built the modern labor movement, struggled against racism, advocated for women’s rights, and opposed United States imperialism.  Today the traditional Left, manifested in political parties with historical pedigrees, still meet, advocate, organize, and agitate. In addition, newer generations of left activists have begun to dialogue about rebuilding the traditional Left, with 21st century characteristics. Older and younger Socialists and Communists are beginning to talk together about what was relevant from the past and what can be learned for the present and the future. Both seek to link radical theory to radical practice. The traditional Left prioritizes viewing and acting to transform basic economic and political institutions, even as it engages in a political system in which discourse emphasizes reform rather than revolution.

A second tradition, the mobilization of issue groups, is deeply embedded in American political history. Groups motivated by opposition to particular outrages--destruction of the environment, police killings of young black men, attacks on reproductive rights, efforts to reduce the rights of citizens to vote, the marginalization and deportation of immigrants—form to address immediate concrete peoples’ concerns. Most issue groups share the sense that there are deep structural causes of the problems they oppose but they believe that immediate action to address their specific problem takes first priority. The issue orientation is part of the narrative about American “democracy.” From James Madison, to Alexis de Tocqueville, to modern political science, citizens are told that things change when citizens organize around lobby groups. Issue groups implicitly, if not explicitly, embrace an interest group model of political life.

Sometimes issue group mobilizations seek to blend campaigns about interests with moral claims. Throughout American history many issue groups—such as those addressing war or racism—have organized on the basis of moral arguments.  Finally, it should be mentioned that some progressives are engaged in building alternative social institutions, such as cooperatives, to address issues of worker rights, community power, and economic justice. Here the activities seek to circumvent centers of power by working on new grassroots partnerships.

A third political tradition, also with deep roots in the American experience, prioritizes electoral politics. Sometimes progressives have sought to participate in one or both of the two major political parties. At various points in US history, vibrant third parties have formed, despite restrictive electoral laws, to articulate new policies, programs, and visions. Efforts to transform major parties or organizing alternative parties have been features of state and local political life as well. Central to electoral political approaches is the proposition that for most Americans, politics is seen as involving elections. Also, it is clear that the dramatic shift toward reaction in recent years is intimately connected to the election of rightwing politicians at the national, state, and local levels, often as a result of low voter turnout. Sectors of the political class, such as the Koch brothers, have used their enormous financial resources to transform political institutions and public policy. As Reverend William Barber and others have pointed out, contemporary politics is about the struggle between the super-rich and the many.

Having mapped a 21st century “US Left,” several tentative conclusions about political practice emerge.   

Millions of Americans identify with traditions of reform and/or revolution and that the roots of these have been deeply embedded in American history. Social and economic change has occurred because of the multiplicity of efforts from all of these traditions.

In addition, a significant portion of those who participate in issue groups and progressive electoral politics share the sentiment of the traditional Left that fundamental, systemic, and revolutionary change is needed if social and economic justice is to be achieved.

And perhaps most fundamentally, given the growing power of political reaction, the traditional Left, issue groups, and those working in electoral politics need to find ways to work together and support each other if some kind of humane and environmentally sustainable society is to be created.    

TODAY: 2021

I am coming to the view that at this stage, with all the horrors described above magnified by four years of Donald Trump and the rise of white supremacist and neo-fascists,  folks need to figure out how we can support each other in the multiplicity of honorable struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, worker exploitation, environmental despoilation and for healthcare for all, the right to form unions, cutting military spending and nuclear weapons, guaranteed income, the Green New Deal etc. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of movement organizations out there (a 2015 data-base estimated that there were 500 progressive organizations in the United States grouped in ten issue categories). Maybe a slogan like "building the progressive majority" or working with multi-issue movements such as the New Poor People's Campaign is the most effective route for most of us to follow today (whether inside left organizations, single issue groups, or not affiliated with any of these).

In the end, no matter how we do it, we need to be engaged in the struggles for humanity.

 

 

           

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.