Harry Targ
(This May Day is complicated. Despite the pandemic we see and know of more grassroots mobilizations than perhaps any time in US history. The new president, while steeped in the tradition of an imperial foreign policy, has advanced an extraordinary array of domestic proposals that could be truly transformative. And there seems to be enormous support among majorities of people for a Green New Deal, canceling student debt, some kind of Medicare for all, the right of workers to form trade unions, raising the minimum wage, supporting public education, and more. And these have all been part of programs progressives have demanded for years.
However, there is an enlarged and growing reactionary movement, from the grassroots to local, state, and federal governments which want to reverse years of struggle to achieve economic and social justice. Many people, and there is debate about what percentage of the population, embrace white supremacy, the reversal of democracy, and the expansion of the repressive arms of the state. Near majorities in the United States Congress, and a majority of state governments support a neo-fascist agenda. Paradoxically US political institutions give excessive power to those who oppose democracy: the filibuster, lifetime appointments of the judiciary, gerrymandering, an electoral college system which was designed to overrepresent slaveholders and reactionaries, and powerful and non-transparent military and domestic security institutions that remain beyond control of common people.
Therefore, this May Day is complex with the prospect of moving forward to create a more humane society or moving backward to deeply dark times. The reprinted essays below remind us of some of what progressives have envisioned about a better future since the 1886 protests that led to the adoption of May Day to recognize the working class.
The post ends with inspiring advice from Fernando Gapasin about what needs to be done in the days after May Day, 2021).
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MAY DAY BRINGS THOUGHTS OF SOCIALIST
ALTERNATIVES: And Thoughts about Moving Ahead
(Originally posted on May 1, 2009)
Harry Targ
Sketching Today’s Global Political Economy
During the latest phase of monopoly and finance capital (1945- to the present)
enormous changes occurred in the global political economy. First, the United
States emerged as a superpower and in an effort to crush the threat of
socialism around the world committed itself to constructing a “permanent war
economy.” This permanent war economy would create the military capacity to
destroy alternatives to global capitalism, stimulate and maintain a high growth
manufacturing economy, justify an anti-communist crusade to crush the left in
the United States, and co-opt and/or repress working class demands for change.
In addition, the permanent war economy would occasion the perpetuation of
racism and patriarchy in public and private life.
As the years passed corporate rates of profit began to decline as a result of
rising competition among capitalist states, over-production and
under-consumption, an increasing fiscal crisis of the capitalist state, and
rising prices of core natural resources (particularly oil). With a growing
crisis, global corporate and finance capital shifted from investments in
production of goods and services to financial speculation. Thus capitalist
investment steadily shifted to financialization, or the investment in
paper-stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds and other forms of
speculative investment. Financial speculation was encouraged by state tax
policies, “free trade” agreements, an expanded international system of
indebtedness, and increased reliance on consumer debt.
Multinational corporations which continued to produce goods and services sought
to overcome declining profit rates. This, they concluded, could only be
achieved by reducing the costs of labor. To overcome the demand for higher real
wages, health and other benefits, and worker rights, manufacturing facilities
were moved from core capitalist states to poor countries where lower wages were
paid. Thus, in wealthier countries millions of relatively high paying jobs were
lost while production of goods increasingly moved to sweatshops in poor
countries. Wealthy capitalist states experienced deindustrialization.
Finally, assisted by technological advances, from computers to new forms of
shipping, financial speculation and deindustrialization fueled the full
flowering of globalization, or the radically increased patterns of cross border
interactions-economic, political, and cultural. Globalization began to
transform the world into one integrated global political economy.
In short, we may speak of a four-fold set of parallel political and economic
developments that have occurred since the end of World War II, in which the
United States has played a leading role: creating a permanent war
economy, financialization, deindustrialization,
and globalization.
Should We Be Thinking About Socialism Today?
A rich and vital set of images of a socialist future comes down to us from
the utopians, anarchists, and Marxists, the martyrs of the first May Day, and
the variety of experiments with socialism attempted in Asia, Eastern Europe,
Western Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Extracting from the multiple reasons
why individuals and movements chose socialism one reason stands out; that is,
that capitalism historically is and has been a cruel and inhumane system, a
system borne and fueled by slavery, genocide, super exploitation of workers,
tactics of division based on race and gender, and an almost total disregard for
the natural environment that sustains life. Building a permanent war economy,
financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization are merely extensions
of the cruel and heartless pursuit of profit which has been the fundamental
driving force of the capitalist mode of production.
Drawing on the history and the images of a better future coupled with the
brutality of the capitalist era, we might conceive of a 21st century socialist
future that has four main dimensions.
First, we need to create institutions that are created and staffed by the
working classes and serve the interests of the working classes. While scholars
and activists may disagree about what “class” means in today’s complicated
world, it is clear that the vast majority of humankind do not own or control
the means of production, nor do they usually have an instrumental place in
political institutions. Therefore, socialism involves, in the Marxist sense,
the creation of a workers’ state and since most of us are workers (more than 90
percent of the US population for example), a state must be established that
represents and serves the interests of the many, not the few.
Second, our vision of socialism is a society in which the working classes fully
participate in the institutions that shape their lives and in the creation of
the policies that these institutions develop to serve the needs of all the
people.
Third, socialism also implies the creation of public policies that sustain
life. Socialism in this sense is about good jobs, incomes that provide for
human needs, access to health care for all, adequate housing and
transportation, a livable environment, and an end to discrimination and war.
Fourth, socialism is also about the creation of institutions and policies that
maximize human potential. A socialist society provides the intellectual tools
to stimulate creativity, celebrate diversity, and facilitate writing poetry,
singing and dancing, basking in nature’s glow, and living, working, and loving
with others in humanly sustainable communities.
Today we remain terribly far from any of these dimensions of socialism. But
paradoxically, humankind at this point in time has the technological tools to
build a mass movement to create a socialist future. We can communicate
instantaneously with peoples all over the world. We can access information
about the world that challenges the narrow ruling class media frames about the
human condition. We have in the face of brutal war, environmental devastation,
enduring racism, super exploitation of workers everywhere mass movements of
workers, women, people of color, indigenous people, and youth who are demanding
changes. Increasingly public discourse is based upon the realization that our
future will bring either extinction or survival. Socialism, although it is not
labeled as such, represents human survival.
Where do we who believe that socialism offers the best hope for survival stand
at this critical juncture? We are weak. Many of us are older. Some of us have
remained mired in old formulas about change. Nevertheless, we can make a
contribution to building a socialist future. In fact we have a critical role to
play.
We must articulate systematic understandings of the global political economy
and where it came from: permanent war, financialization, deindustrialization,
and globalization. We need to articulate what impacts these processes have had
on class, race, gender, and the environment. In other words, we need to
convince activists that almost all things wrong with the world are connected
and are intimately tied to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode
of production.
We need to take our place in political struggles that demand an expanded role
for workers in political institutions. We need to insist that the working
classes participate in all political decisions.
We need to work on campaigns that could sustain life: jobs, living wages,
single payer health care, climate change etc. Our contribution can include
making connections between the variety of single issues, insisting that
participants in mass movements take cognizance of and work on the other single
issues that constitute the mosaic of problems that require transformation. We
must remember that in the end the basic policies that sustain life require
building socialism. Most struggles, such as those to achieve living wages or a
single payer health care system for example, plant the seeds for building a
broader socialist society. We can incorporate our socialist vision in our
debates about single issues: if we demand a living wage, why not talk about
equality for example?
We need to rearticulate our belief that human beings have a vast potential for
good, for creativity, and given a just society, we all could move away from
classism, racism, and sexism. We could pursue our talents and interests in the
context of a sharing and cooperative society.
By working for institutional incorporation (empowerment) and life-sustaining
and enhancing policies we will be planting the seeds for a socialist society.
“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the
old.
For the union makes us strong”
From “Solidarity Forever,” Ralph Chaplin lyrics, 1915.
MOVING THE VISION FORWARD: WHAT WE WERE
THINKING ABOUT THEN THAT STILL MAY BE RELEVANT
(reposted from The Rag
Blog, November 8, 2011)
Moving the vision forward: Building a new society
A powerful concept animated the vision of young people
in the 1960s, the idea of community. Many of us came to that decade with little
interest in politics. We were not “red diaper” babies but we became outraged by
Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and war. Our education had communicated an early version
of Margaret Thatcher’s admonition, “ there is no alternative,” and our impulses
told us then that “another world was possible.”
New and old ideas about a better world began to circulate from college
campuses, the streets, some churches, and popular culture. A whole body of
engaging literature caught the fancy of young people. For me Paul Goodman’s
description of youth growing up in the sterile 1950s, Growing Up Absurd,
resonated. He wrote about alternative possibilities in such books
as Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals.
Perhaps most startling to a young reader was the earlier analysis Goodman
published with his brother Percival, Communitas. In that book the
Goodman brothers argued that societies, big and small, were products of values.
Architecture and the organization of space, social, and political forms, and
the ease with which people could communicate and interact with each other
varied. And the variations created in space and social forms affected whether communities
valued life and sociability or consumption and profit maximization.
The Goodmans opened up new intellectual doors for me. I looked at earlier
anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, who argued that humans -- if not separated
by time, space, and power structures -- often lived in solidarity with their
neighbors. A “mutual aid” principle was natural to human existence. And, as a
result “the state" sought to stamp it out and replace it with top down
authority.
Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, identified a “centralistic political
principle” that emerged when groups and states sought control of markets and
natural resources and “the most valuable of all goods,” the lives of people who
lived with each other changed as “...the autonomous relationships become
meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit of...” being
human “...hires itself out as a functionary.”
The alternative for Buber was what he called a decentralized social principle,
or community which is “...never a mere attitude of mind” but of “...tribulation
and only because of that community of spirit; community of toil and only
because of that community of salvation...”
In 1974, I wrote in summation about these theorists and many others that the
architectural forms and social structures of the Goodmans can profitably be
blended with the spiritualism and socialism of Buber to construct a synthesis
of all that the utopians and anarchists set out to achieve. The Goodmans show
how community can be created in the industrial age and Buber illustrates how
the best features of the entire community tradition fit together.
The ideas of community, empowerment, and social
justice spread from these and other sources. They were articulated for the
Sixties in the Port Huron Statement, written by founders of the Students
for a Democratic Society. While written by and for a relatively privileged
sector of disenchanted youth in a period of booming economic growth and
military expansion, the document spoke to the passion for justice, participation,
and community, and an “…unrealized potential for self-cultivation,
self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.”
It called for the creation of “human interdependence,” replacing “...power
rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance...” by “power and uniqueness
rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.”
By the late Sixties many of us were identifying a new society that must be
built on core principles. These included:
local control and participatory democracy;
racial justice;
gender equality;
equitable distribution of resources and the collective
product of human labor;
commitments to the satisfaction of minimal basic needs
for all of humankind;
the development of an ethic that connects survival to
human existence, not to specific jobs;
human control over technology; and
a new “land ethic” that conceives of humankind as part
of nature, not in conflict with it.
Many of us began to explore the impediments to the
construction of a society based on human scale that would celebrate both
individual creativity and community. Growing familiarization with the critique
of capitalism suggested that the capitalist mode of production, dominant over
two-thirds of the world, was based upon the exploitation, oppression,
dehumanization, and repression of the vast majority of humankind.
Incorporating an understanding of the workings of capitalism did not contradict
the vision that Buber called the decentralized social principle and the many
eloquent calls by others for “community.” It did suggest that building a new
society entailed class struggle which would manifest itself in factories and
fields, in rich and poor countries, and in political venues from the ballot box
to the streets.
Bringing about positive change was a much more complicated affair than
activists originally thought, but the sustained and sometimes brutal opposition
to our visions validated the general correctness of them.
Today, new generations of activists, along with older ones, are reflecting and
participating in diverse social movements in our cities and towns. They observe
with enthusiasm the mobilizations, the militancy, and the passion for justice
still unfolding in the Middle East.
The efforts of Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and the Cubans who inspired
us so much over the years are applauded. Important debates about social market
economies, workers’ management of large enterprises, this or that candidate or
political party, are occurring on the Internet and in the streets.
Although the times are so different from the 1960s, perhaps the vision of
community that animated our thinking then (which we in turn learned from those
who preceded us) may still be relevant for today.
Without creating new documents or dogmas perhaps it can be proclaimed that we
remain committed to the sanctity of human life, to equality, to popular control
of all our institutions, to a reverence for the environment, and to the idea
that the best of society comes from our communal efforts to make living better
for all.
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FERNANDO GAPASIN ON
MOVING AHEAD
“At 74, I keep organizing and learning. My advice? Memorialize victories attained through collective struggle, share lessons, and when possible institutionalize social movements. Be willing to step back from what you think you know in new situations. Seek truth. Workers begin to organize because of other organizers. Organizers, like leaders, need training. Do not assume workers know what you know. Learn about the community and its history of struggle, build on local history and progressive values, make your organizing local and global in a practical sense. For example, when organizers beat city council candidates backed by Chevron in Richmond, California, they were part of a global climate justice movement.
Organizers need to develop strategy
based on analysis and remember that workers and communities win when the
community is invested in the outcome of worker struggle. Create local culture
with social justice as the norm. Communities of solidarity permit labor,
environmental, racial, and gender activists to maximize their collective power
to change their piece of the world.”
