Harry Targ
These are indeed hard
times for the vast majority of humankind. And the times are troubling for a
number of reasons.
First,
communities, nations, and the planet face the possibility of extinction of all
life forms. Warning signs are seen everywhere: drought, fires, heat, cold, and
the prospect of large swaths of land being flooded by global warming. And as
has been the case for hundreds of years, the greatest threats and immediate
suffering is impacting particularly on the peoples and lands of the Global
South.
Second,
despite years of wise counsel, mass movements, campaigns, and demands, the
danger of nuclear war continues. Indeed, many experts and peace activists
believe the danger of nuclear war is as serious now as at any time since 1945.
Ironically, leaders of the G7 countries meeting in Hiroshima now are discussing
what amounts to further fueling the war in Ukraine.
Third,
along with these two life-threatening issues, every country and people have
experienced poverty, inequality, anomic violence, and weakening educational and
health care institutions, Pundits from the Global North report on food, health
care, and educational deserts. But because a small number of conglomerates
control more and more of what we know, what might be called media deserts
reduce the possibility of people having knowledge about the crises facing them,
their communities, and the planet. The metaphor of the “desert” speaks to the
scarcity of peoples’ access to information about the viability of human life.
Fourth, and
to some extent “the good news,” masses of people are rising up angry within the
United States and around the world. Workers, students, people of color, women,
and other oppressed groups are making their voices heard. And in some places
movements have been impactful. In the United States elections have mattered:
some for good, others for evil. And, in general, if the planet survives,
so-called minorities will be majorities by 2050 (the rightwing fears this
referring to what it calls “replacement theory”).
Fifth, one
manifestation of people rising up angry is a new emerging sensibility and
organizations coming from “the Global South.” The Global South, an imprecise
construct, consists of all those peoples, territories, and nations that have
been victimized by capitalism for hundreds of years. Today leaders of
governments of various ideologies from the Global South have organized around
trading zones, dedollarization and new military security arrangements, and the
construction of new international organizations. They have revitalized demands
for a New International Economic Order and a New World Information Order.
But sixth,
while people are rising up angry all across the globe (and in the
belly of the beast the United States), they are doing so in an array of
competing organizations characterized by a multiplicity of ideologies, issue
priorities, and even multiple interpretations of the historical past and the
present. As so often happens, many of these organizations claim that they are
prepared to lead to a new world order. Organizational interest and individual
egos get in the way of the broader project; that is saving humanity.
And this is part of the
context of “Left” organizing in the United States today. It leads to raising
again questions of our history, tactics and strategy, elections, street heat,
and education.
Therefore, a number of
issues of strategy, tactics, and thought need to be reexamined.
First, sectors of progressive movements use a catch-all term, “fascism,” to describe those political forces that are reactionary in vision and policy. The word “fascism” provides a kind of release for sincere frustrations but is counter-productive for a variety of reasons. The term is usually not defined. The user and the target of the label logically think of Germany and Italy before World War II, but it is unclear that a comparison of the US political context today with the European countries in the interwar years is apt. Further, the concept usually suggests an inextricable connection between corporate control of the economy, an autocratic state, an armed mass movement and a racist ideology. While elements of these unfortunately exist in the US today the economic and political context is much more pluralistic than was the case in the 1930s in Europe.
Most importantly, the
fascist label is resented and opposed by the targets of such a label. If the
goal is to organize masses of people, particularly those who have become
economically and politically marginalized by the system, such labeling creates
enemies not friends. And polling data has shown repeatedly that majorities of
Americans support progressive social and economic policies and even to some
degree racial justice.
From the pre-civil war
period until today approximately 20-25 percent of Americans have held and hold
reactionary and white supremacist perspectives. Recent data suggests that some
45 percent of voters identify as Democrats, a few percentage points less Republicans,
and about ten percent independents. Those who identify as independents have
been less likely to vote. While reports of political surveys vary, the point is
that the electorate and those who hold political views are varied and
contradictory. And we should always keep in mind that the corporate media
communicates, portrays, and sometimes exaggerates violence as the norm.
Second, much
research suggests that there does exist a “politics of resentment” across the
country, a resentment of alienation, powerlessness, and recognition that wealth
and power are grotesquely unequal in its distribution. Often this resentment
leads people to find solace in demagogues or more often to choose to not
participate in what they regard as an unfair system.
The politics of
resentment in this country led the Roosevelt Administration and the Democratic
Party to begin to address real sources of economic pain and suffering in the
1930s. The Democratic party of the New Deal, The Fair Deal, and the Great
Society was built around addressing some of the economic and political needs of
the people. And as a result, on the national level, the Democratic Party became
the majority party.
But in the 1970s, the
Democratic Party tilted toward neoliberalism, primarily policies of austerity
and deregulation of the corporate sector, a neoliberalism that was fully
institutionalized in the 1980s Reagan Revolution. And it is important to note
that the Reagan Revolution was sanctified by the Clinton/centrist wing of the
Democratic Party which has become the dominant faction of that party ever
since.
In short, there has been
an inextricable connection between the rightwing thrust of national and state
politics in the United States and the shift of the Democratic Party away from
the New Deal tradition. For today and tomorrow, demanding a return to the
reforms of the New Deal/Great Society period provides the only way to defeat
the Right.
Labeling extremists as
fascists, ridiculing Trump and MAGA, and rewriting narratives of US history
will not defeat reaction. Only a progressive agenda will. And those
progressives in the Democratic Party, in the labor movement, and among the
sectors of the Left must demand that their candidates uncompromisingly stand
for economic and social justice. For sure, there exist vital and popular
movements around healthcare for all, women’s rights, the right to form unions,
climate change, increased voting rights, support for public institutions such
as schools, libraries, and transportation systems, immigration reform, and
underlying each an end to the long, painful, and immoral history of racism in
the United States.
Finally, and
this is critical, a careful review of twentieth century US history shows that
domestic and foreign policies are connected. In critical periods, US foreign
policies have been used to crush progressive politics at home. As historians
such as Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz and
others have shown there was no Soviet threat to US national security when
President Truman warned of the “international communist threat” in
his famous Truman Doctrine speech of March, 1947. But there was a threat at
home. That threat was a strong, militant labor movement that sought co-equal
input in the making of public policy.
In addition, from 1947
until 1991 the “communist threat” was the device used by policymakers to weaken
or destroy a progressive and pro-labor agenda at home, and with decolonization
around the world from the 1950s through the 1970s, socialist militancy all
around the Global South.
Most importantly United
States foreign policy became the rationale for trillions of dollars being spent
on the military, creating images of diabolical enemies in education and popular
culture, and normalizing the idea of war.
All this suggests that a
progressive agenda in the years ahead requires:
1.A systematic
progressive economic and political program that prioritizes the fulfillment of
human needs.
2.A unified political
movement that organizes around this program or at least building an alliance of
Left groups that share this common vision even as they work on particular
issues.
3.A grassroots
organizing strategy that in word and deed does not prematurely identify critics
with pejorative labels. Certain sectors of the population already embrace a
progressive agenda, others are not yet decided, and a smaller percentage have
embraced rightwing fascism. The task of the left should include mobilizing
those who agree, convincing the unconvinced, and finally respectfully seeking
to change the minds and actions of the minority who are reactionary (including
those who believe only violence will protect them).
4.A progressive movement
that reaches out to, participates with, and learns from the literally millions
of people that are rising up all across the globe. At this stage in human
history the campaigns of people of color and various nationalities in the Global
South matter. And these movements parallel those of the poor and oppressed in
the United States as well.
5.Finally prioritizing in this progressive project an anti-militarist, anti-war agenda. It is clear that the “permanent war economy” constructed after World War II robbed the world’s citizens of resources and hopes for a better future. A just world is a disarmed world, a world of peace.
In his speech in Detroit last night, President
Biden laid out an agenda for the first 100 days of his second term. Among other
initiatives it included:
- Restoring Roe v. Wade
- Signing the John Lewis Voting
Rights Act
- Expanding Social Security and
Medicare
- Ending all medical debt
- Raising the minimum wage to a
living wage
- Passing the PRO Act to enable
workers to organize
- Banning assault weapons
- Leading the world on clean
energy
- Lowering childhood poverty by
restoring the child tax credit
- $35 insulin cap for all and
lowering prescription drug costs
- Building more affordable
housing
- Investing in childcare and
elder care
