Harry Targ
Step by Step
Step by step the longest march
Can be won can be won
Many stones can form an arch
And by union what we will
Can be accomplished still
Drops of water turn a mill
Along with the extraordinary organizing talents of Stacey
Abrams and a variety of grassroots groups, it is useful to reflect on a
December 15, 2020 statement by Senator-elect Warnock: “As I think about it I think of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman,
two Jews and an African-American who died fighting for voting rights. I think
about Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel said when I
marched with Dr. King, I felt like my legs were praying” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency).
While progressives need to support the solidarity of all oppressed peoples (including the just cause of the
Palestinian people), the solidarity of Georgia’s African-American and Jewish
communities and Blacks and Whites uniting to defeat racism and reaction is a
small but critical “step by step” in a long historical process to radically
transform the institutions described below (January 6, 2021, 10:30 am EST).
Yesterday was a day of contradiction: the victories of the two Senatorial candidates and the terrorist insurrection against the United States Congress in Washington DC. This is the contradiction of the US economic and political system today; thus the title "societal decay and renovation." The role of progressives is to stand for and work to achieve the changes embedded in the meaning of Georgia. Another world is still possible. (January 7, 2021, 9:07 am EST).
************************************************************************
A Repost from October 29, 2018
We are mourning again. Violent deaths continue:
African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Gays and Lesbians, Women, Youth, Jews, and
the list goes on. And the media pontificate about root causes: guns, a divided
society, hate speech, the internet, and politicians. Analysts usually lock onto
one explanation and deduce one or two cures. But there are other analysts, for
example “realists” and religious fundamentalists, who say there will always be
violence. There are no solutions.
The reality that undergirds the killing of masses of people
on a regular basis is not easily discovered. That is, there are “deep
structures” that have created a brutal and violent world. And movements to
transform these deep structures, although complicated, can have some
substantial success.
First, and I write this at the risk of being dismissed as an
ideologue, the contemporary state of the capitalist economic system must be
examined in rigorous detail. What might be called “late capitalism” is an
economic system of growing inequality of wealth and poverty, joblessness,
declining access to basic needs-food, health care, housing, education,
transportation. The increasing accumulation of wealth determines the
ever-expanding appropriation of political power. In the era of late capitalism,
economic concentration resides in a handful of banks, hedge funds, medical
conglomerates, real estate developers, technology and insurance companies, and
media monopolies.
Second, late capitalism continues to marginalize workers of
all kinds. Agricultural and manufacturing work, the staple of two hundred years
of economic development, is disappearing. Highly skilled electronics workers and
others with twenty-first century skills are employed as needed by corporations,
with little or no job security. Once secure workers who have lost their jobs
live in communities with declining access to food, growing environmental
devastation, and limited connection to information and the ability to
communicate with others. And, of course, conditions are worse for workers of color,
women, the young, and the old. A new working class has emerged, the
“precariat,” with skilled but insecure jobs; the service sector, workers in
health care, home care, fast food and other low paid and overworked
occupations; and workers in the “informal sector,” desperate people who take
short-term jobs or are forced to sell drugs, peddle products on the street,
engage in prostitution, or engage in other activities so they and their
families can survive. In addition, the most marginalized are homeless and
hungry. Late capitalism has increased the marginalization of majorities of
working people, in core capitalist states and the Global South.
Third, the history of capitalist development has paralleled
the development of white supremacy and patriarchy. If capital accumulation
requires the expropriation of the wealth produced by workers, what better way
to increase profits can be found than marginalizing sectors of the working
population and setting them into competition and conflict with each other by creating
categories of difference. Racism, sexism, homophobia, the demonization of
immigrants, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Muslim hysteria all serve, in the end,
profit and the accumulation of wealth and power.
Fourth, systems of concentrated wealth and power require the
development of political institutions, institutions that enhance the control of
the behavior of workers. From monarchies, to constitutional democracies, to
institutionalized systems of law and custom, such as segregation, voter
suppression in our own day, the behavior of the citizenry is routinized and
controlled. In most political systems electoral processes create some
possibilities for modest, but necessary, policy changes. However, as Nancy
MacLean points out in Democracy in Chains, economic and political
elites use their resources to restrict and limit the influence of democratic
majorities.
Fifth, this economic and political edifice requires an
ideology, a consciousness, a way in which the citizenry can be taught to accept
the system as it is. This ideology has many branches but one root, the
maintenance and enhancement of the capitalist economic system. The elements of
the dominant political ideology include: privileging individualism over
community; conceptualizing society as a brutal state of nature controlled only
by countervailing force; acceptance of the idea that humans are at base greedy;
and, finally, the belief that the avariciousness of human nature requires
police force and laws at home and armies overseas.
Sixth, a prevalent component of the political ideology is
the idea that violence is ubiquitous, violence is justified, and violence is to
be applauded. The trope of living in a violent world pervades our education
system, our toys, our television and movies, our sporting activities, and our
political discourse. Violence is tragic (we pray for the victims) but it is
presented in popular culture as liberating and justifiable. And to survive in
this world of evil and strife, everyone needs to be armed.
These are the backdrops, the “deep structures,” that frame
the contemporary context. And this context includes a politics of economic
super-exploitation-destroying unions, fighting demands for economic justice,
shifting wealth even more to the super-rich, and taking away basic rights and
guarantees, such as healthcare, education, water, and even the air we breathe.
And to justify the growing immiseration of everyone, the Trump Administration,
most of the Republicans and some of the Democrats justify their policies by a
racism, sexism, homophobia, and virulent rightwing nationalism not seen since
the days of racial segregation in the South. And Anti-Semitism, long a staple
of political ideology in Europe, reached its most virulent form in the United
States in the 1930s, when Father Coughlin’s nationwide Anti-Semitic broadcasts
found their way into many households. As late as the 1950s, property deeds
included “restrictive covenants” forbidding the sale of homes in specific
neighborhoods to Jews or people of color. Local political initiatives led to
whole communities excluding African Americans from living there (“sundown
towns”) and racial segregation exists today in virtually every United States
city.
Given these deep structures is it any surprise that brutal
violence flairs up against sectors of the population? Is it any surprise that
targeted groups feel intimidated, threatened, and angry? Is it any surprise
that volatile and life-threatening cycles of economic insecurity facing most
people create fears leading some of them to follow false prophets? Is it any
surprise that the economic and political institutions in which we were born and
raised, justified by powerful ideologies about the “realities” of life develop
in us a propensity to be taken in by arrogant, racist, classist, sexist, and
ignorant politicians? In addition to national politics, people at the state
level and in their local communities accept unquestioning leadership in
economic, political, and cultural institutions that in subtler ways promote the
agenda of the rich and white.
The problem is historical, structural, political and
cultural. Identifying the “deep structures”- economic, political, ideological,
and cultural-masses of people can begin to mobilize around change. Social
movements may begin by addressing political ideology, or addressing public
policy concerns, or participating in the electoral arena. Each is of vital
importance. However, progressives need to recognize that the violence and
poverty today, the racial hatred, the environmental crises are connected to the
deep structures. They must work today on what is possible to change right away.
In addition, progressives must organize, over the long run to radically
restructure society, challenging the capitalist system and the political
institutions that maintain it.
