What are Progressive Movements?Marx believed that all history was the history of class struggle. Class struggle was basic to history because all societies were class societies. Those classes that owned or controlled production, such as the factories or fields, gained disproportionately while those who worked as slaves, servants, or wage workers gained less.
Therefore, basic to the production and reproduction of life in class societies is inequality in wealth, power, and control which generates conflicts of interest. As history unfolds, these conflicts of interest spill over into mobilizations to demand change. The demands may be modest or fundamental. Sometimes mobilizations to create change, such as for a fair wage, escalate to demands for qualitative change, such as to destroy the economic and/or political system of inequality. Revolutionary movements are motivated by the belief that the basic institutions of society cause exploitation and oppression and therefore must be replaced by new institutions. Reformist movements wish to change some institutions and/or policies to alleviate human problems.
The Marxian assumption is that inequality in wealth, and therefore power, is basic to capitalist societies. As a consequence the economic organization of society fundamentally shapes all its institutions and relationships, including politics and culture. However, some inequalities, while parallel to and significant for the system of wealth and power, are derived from institutions, interests, and ideologies integral to but not necessarily derived from the economic system. Racism and sexism are vital to capitalist exploitation but have their roots in institutions and cultures preceding it. Racism is a system of control based on social constructions of race; that is institutional definitions of superior and inferior “races.” Patriarchy is a system of power and control tied to gender. In addition to the economic structures of society, systems of racial oppression, and patriarchy, institutionalized forms of domination and subordination have existed based on religious beliefs or other characteristics of difference. In other words, the basic inequalities in wealth and power generated by class have been reinforced and replicated throughout societies in different economic, social, political, and cultural realms.
Given systems of inequality in wealth and power and the negative consequences of these inequalities, demands for change of varying kinds are essential features of societies. As suggested above, individuals and groups organize from time to time to create change: workers, people of color, women, or peoples of faith, for example. Progressive movements are coalitions of groups who come together to bring about changes in policies and/or institutions to improve the lives of people and to reduce inequalities in wealth, power, and/or status. They may come together to address issues of class, race, gender, religious toleration, or specific problems such as abuse of the environment. More radical coalitions have a vision of changing several realms of economic, political, social, and cultural reality at once. Progressive movements are coalitions of groups who agree to work together because of some common purpose even if they do not share a particular understanding of history, economic and political structures, or a particular view of human possibilities. They realize that with numbers there is power and that a mass movement is needed to bring about some of the changes they desire.
Kinds of Social Movements
Political activism varies from country to country based on history and context. Some countries experience more mass mobilizations, street protests, frequent ouster of leaders, and violence than others. Also some countries have longer histories of leftwing political parties and Socialist movements than others. Despite the significant variation in political histories, it is important to remember that social movements are basic to history and historical change.
Social movements differ as to vision and purpose and strategy and tactics. Movements have been created to solve specific problems in institutions or policies. These are single issue movements. Groups organize living wage campaigns, work to end particular wars, demand environmental protections, seek to protect women’s right to choose and work on a whole host of other important issues. In societies like the United States there are literally thousands of groups seeking changes that would improve humankind in some way and single-issue groups constitute the vast majority of this organized political activity.
Other movements are multi-issue, that is, they believe that issues of class, race, gender, the environment, and peace are interconnected and require a common approach to problem solving. Political parties committed to significant change, such as the Greens, serve this kind of purpose. Most mainstream parties, while they address a multiplicity of issues, do not have a vision or commitment to significant change.
Many movements are reformist, that is they promote modest but significant changes. Usually they work toward some policy change or institutional adjustment in the polity. Others organize with the goal of radically transforming economic and political institutions. Their vision is considerably more comprehensive drawing upon a systemic analysis of the underlying flaws in the economic and political order. Of course, Socialist movements foresee the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a humane Socialist society. These movements are revolutionary.
Life is considerably more complicated than simple categorization schemes and social movements often consist of persons seeking change on individual issues as well as broader structural change. Also activists in particular social movements may be motivated by a desire to reform while others may share more revolutionary visions of change. But, it is still useful to look at the two categories raised: single vs. multi-issue movements and reformist vs. revolutionary to help to distinguish kinds of movements in U.S. history and their strengths and weaknesses.
Single-Issue Reform Movements
Throughout U.S. history, groups have formed to address specific changes in institutions and policies. Some, such as the environmental movement, have mobilized around single issues that have had long-term political and economic consequences for the nation. Most such groups have addressed individual policies of more limited impact such as supporting a clean water act or an endangered species act. Single-issue reform movements are often seen as part of the “pluralist” character of American politics, the standard social science rendition of how the political process works. Every citizen can participate in the policy process by joining a group. These groups organize around specific issues. For mainstream political scientists, single-issue reform groups are the heart and soul of US democracy.
People's WorldSingle-Issue Revolutionary Movements
Less common in U.S. history are single-issue movements that have a revolutionary agenda. Sometimes people mobilize around single issues without realizing the long-term consequences for economics and politics of their actions. Perhaps the Abolition Movement of the 19th century and the Gay Rights Movement of the 1970s are examples. What begins as specific demands for institutional or policy change leads to a growing mobilization that transforms society in significant ways.
Multi-Issue Reform Movements
These movements, less frequent, but very significant for U.S. history, involve a coming together around a variety of issues with a shared vision and purpose. For these reform movements, such as the Populists of the late 19th century, which sometimes include the mainstream political parties, institutional and policy changes are promoted with an eye towards rectifying social problems without radically changing the distributions of wealth and power. As the momentum for change escalates, significant economic and political changes might occur. Even though they are not revolutionary, the totality of the reforms add up to substantial economic and political changes. The New Deal reforms of the 1930s, discussed below, are an example.
Multi-Issue Revolutionary Movements
While having less of a presence in the United States than Europe, a Socialist left animated by a vision of radical transformation of the economy and the polity are relevant here. These movements have an analysis of the fundamental connection between capitalism and class, race, and gender that leads them to advocate a fundamental transformation of society. That is, the systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy must be overturned and replaced with a new society based on humane visions of Socialism. . At various times Socialist and Communist parties have had significant impact on U.S. politics. Paradoxically, their impacts have been to stimulate the creation of successful single- and multi-issue reform programs that have led to modest but valuable changes in institutions and policies.
Generalizations About Single and Multiple Issue Reform and Revolutionary Movements
First, the practices of all social movements are shaped by their interaction with the forces that resist them. Oftentimes groups mobilize around an issue, encounter resistance, reexamine the systemic source of the resistance, then articulate demands for more fundamental change, and develop new strategies and tactics to achieve the new goals.
Second, resistance often leads to the development of a new understanding of the problem at hand. Single-issue campaigns, about environmental policy for example, might lead activists to the conclusion that opponents of reform represent corporate capitalists who oppose any restraint on their pursuit of profit.
Third, U.S. history is replete with examples of individuals and groups becoming “radicalized” by resistance to modest demands on single issues. As activists meet resistance, they begin to see that other groups with other agendas have experienced the same problems. Usually, confrontation with state power leads reform minded activists to develop a consciousness of “layers of causation” in reference to resistance to change. What begins as a campaign against recalcitrant politicians sometimes leads to a more systemic analysis of the economic underpinnings of support for the status quo.
Fourth, the character of the state reaction in the context in which the activism occurs significantly affects the kind of activism that is advanced. Under certain circumstances, single-issue reform constitutes the most that can realistically be expected. At other times, a multiplicity of issues can be addressed in a comprehensive way and on rare occasions, analyses, vision, and tactics can take on a more revolutionary character.
Finally, “left” political activism should be based upon the historical possibilities that exist at any given time in history. Left participation in political activities of all sorts is important. The “left” contribution to building any progressive political movement should be to suggest an outlook based on a systematic theoretical understanding of society; for example, that human problems have a root cause or root causes; the variety of human problems are connected; and in the long run the solution to human problems require radical or revolutionary solutions.
Portside
Cultural Fronts, the 1930s, and Progressive MovementsMichael Denning (1996) has made an important theoretical contribution to the study of social movements in the United States. He introduced the notion of a “cultural front” to discussions about the 1930s and 1940s. He argued that in those epochs, when masses of people were organized around and sympathetic to fundamental social change, networks of influences relating class struggle to politics and to culture seemed to be prevalent.
The primary political forces in the 1930s, the labor and Communist movements, indirectly influenced popular discourse and culture and how the vast majority of people viewed their times. Hundreds of thousands of workers were marching, striking, and sitting in factories to demand the right to form unions and thousands of them were affiliated and motivated by the Communist movements of the day. In daily newspapers, the saga of the CIO unfolded regularly. In many towns and cities workers not directly involved in organizing struggles were sympathetic to those workers who were. The newly emerging industrial unions, under the banner of the CIO, published newspapers, broadcast radio programs nationwide, and, in the case of Chicago, owned a radio station.
Communists, who had played a leading role in the early days of the CIO, had for years been involved in campaigns to demand relief for workers hit hard by the Depression, such as forming Unemployment Councils to demand welfare payments for the unemployed, supporting hunger marches, and agitating for an alternative to the kind of capitalism that brought the Great Depression. The Communists also played a leading role in challenging racism in the South: organizing against the charges of rape leveled against the young men of Scottsboro, demanding federal legislation against lynching, and organizing boycotts of businesses in cities like New York and Chicago which refused to hire African American workers.
Communists, Socialists, and peace activists organized opposition to European war in the 1930s. After the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany, the Communist Party joined with many Americans to support the war against fascism in Europe and later in Asia. Also Communists played a leading role in organizing the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, young American volunteers to fight against General Franco’s fascist forces that attacked the beleaguered democratic regime in Spain.
In short, in the 1930s, class struggle was manifested in the nationwide drive to organize industrial workers in trade unions supported and encouraged by a Communist movement that had worked for years to organize industrial workers, a sector of the work force that had traditionally been excluded from unions. Also the Communist left put the struggle against racism on the agenda. As masses mobilized, the unemployed, factory workers, and farmers, class struggle became a visible feature of public life. And, workers, Communists and Socialists, and pacifists, worked to oppose war and fascism in Europe. Most of these currents were visible to Americans through the mass media. Denning suggests that the union organizing was the driving force behind the visible presence of a progressive movement in the United States.
Arts and culture were inspired by the mass movements during the decade. Through the working class balladry of Woody Guthrie, the anti-colonial and anti-racist artistic politics of Paul Robeson, the proletarian novels of Jack Conroy and James T. Farrell, the artistic imagery of war and fascism in Picasso’s Guernica, the worlds of work, politics, and struggle became the subjects of culture. Performers, as varied as Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Chaplin, and Marian Anderson, made artistic statements reflecting the progressive spirit, even though they were not affiliated with the CIO or the Communist Party. This is the point for Denning. The “cultural front” constituted a moment in history where organized movements, shaped by class struggle and Left parties, helped create a left/center political coalition and inspired the creation of a broader progressive politics and culture.
The immediate political byproduct of the cultural front was the New Deal. Legislation was passed to give workers the right to form unions, to establish a minimum wage, to require some standards of health and safety at the work place, and to provide social security for specific categories of retirees. Unemployed people were put to work to build bridges, highways, and sidewalks and to clean public parks. Others were paid to write and perform plays, to prepare histories of states, to photograph rural and urban life, and to document in writing the pain and suffering of workers experienced during the Depression. While it is clear in retrospect that many African Americans did not receive adequate benefits from the New Deal, the seeds of the idea of “positive government” were planted. The epoch-shaping era of the 1930s began with groups promoting single issue reforms and evolved into campaigns for multiple issue reforms. In the background, but not insignificant to the epoch, were those Left organizations who worked for a revolutionary transformation of American, while working with mass organizations to achieve multi-issue reforms. The Left/center coalition that developed over the decade constituted a progressive movement that significantly changed the economic, political, and cultural life of the country.
The Cultural Front, the 1960s, and Progressive Movements
The cultural front of the 1930s, including the changes in public policy brought by the epochal struggles of that time, still existed in weakened form in the 1960s. But it was a shell of its former self for a variety of reasons. Labor militancy was defused by CIO collaboration with capital during World War II. Labor/management agreements after the war defused radical labor demands for control of the workplace in exchange for wage increases and benefits. Anti-communism, the tool of repression, spread through the labor movement, schools and universities, government, and movies, radio, and television.
In sum, the shared values, beliefs, and politics of the 1930s became defined as subversive and un-American. And specifically, the Communist Party was hounded into isolation, as were any political and cultural performers and activists who had been sympathetic with it in years past. The network of connections between class struggle, politics, and culture were steadily dismantled and replaced by a “repressive cultural front” that defined progressive politics as an enemy force.
Manifestations of the cultural front of the 1930s, however, lingered on in the politics of the 1950s. Radical trade unionists continued the struggle for the right to organize and some, albeit a small fraction, of the labor movement continued to incorporate an anti-racist agenda in their work. In the South and across the nation, Tobacco Workers, Longshoremen, Packinghouse Workers, Mine, Mill, and Smelters continued the old CIO/Communist campaign; “Black, White, Unite, and Fight.” However, the mainstream of the labor movement, which became the AFL-CIO after a 1955 merger, significantly reduced its commitment to racial justice in the labor movement and the society at large.
In contrast, militant workers, committed religious leaders, and members of traditional civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and most importantly rank and file African Americans launched a new civil rights movement that would shape the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. A new “cultural front” was initiated inadvertently by the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. The working women and men who marched for miles to work instead of sitting in the back of city buses set off a nationwide explosion of forces: people of color, and youth, anti-war, students’ rights, women’s, and environmental activists.
As in the 1930s, the explosion of the spirit of activism spread throughout the culture. The politics of protest became a daily feature of electronic and print news, the subject of debate in cafes, barber shops, and legislative bodies. Folk and rock music became infused with messages of racial and social justice and peace. Movies and television, so constrained by the lingering anti-Communism of the 1950s, reluctantly and cautiously followed the music industry.
Finally, a politics of single issues shifted to a multi-issue consciousness and some activists shifted from reformism to revolution in their thinking about social change. By the late 1960s, discourse involved whether change could be brought about “inside the system” or required going “outside the system.” Words like, the “establishment,” usually ill-defined, implied an analysis of society that entailed economic and political institutions.
Importantly, the “old left,” those activists who experienced the cultural front of the 1930s and concretely who had been schooled in Marxist theory and Communist or Socialist politics, were seen by younger activists as less relevant to the activism of the 60s than the 1930s. The very label of the new movement, a label coined by maverick sociologist C. Wright Mills, reflected the disjuncture between the prior movements and the emerging one. It was Mills who called for the creation of a “new left.” For him, this “new left” would rise up out of the passions of youth for social justice, particularly youth in the universities. This conception of the new movement implied that the working class was not central to change. Rather, they were defenders of the status quo.
Despite the fatal flaw in the idea of a “new left,” that is its anti-worker character, the civil rights struggle and the inspiration it provided for students and anti-war activists created a political and cultural atmosphere in the 1960s that resembled that of the 1930s. Dr. King, Malcolm X, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Black Panther Party inspired a struggle first for basic social and economic justice and later for revolutionary change to create a system ending exploitation, racism, and war.
The civil rights and Black Power movements and the 1960s cultural front had significant policy consequences. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and affirmative action programs could not have been embraced by the Johnson Administration and the Congress if mass movements had not demanded social and economic change. The panoply of programs known as the Great Society, including day care, pre-school education, legal aid, and the modest Medicare and Medicaid programs, were reformist byproducts of the ferment. Ironically, several governmental programs were having measurable impacts but lost resources and support because of the escalating quagmire in Vietnam.
The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 symbolized the hope and the defeat of the 1960s cultural front. Dr. Martin Luther King had come to the view by the late 1960s that poverty, exploitation, racism, and militarism were interconnected. His conclusions about the interconnectedness of these issues and the need to fundamentally transform society to overcome them required the mobilization of poor people, Black and white, and progressives to demand fundamental change. His PPC was to culminate in a massive mobilization of progressive forces in Washington D. C. in May, 1968.
The development of his consciousness was reflected in his 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York, in which he linked the war in Vietnam to racism and poverty at home. In addition, his support for striking garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee reflected his efforts to link the issues of class and race. After Memphis, he was to lead the nationwide PPC walk to Washington to construct Resurrection City. He was never to make the trip and the Resurrection City that was constructed on the mall in Washington was torn down in short order after it was erected. His assassination may have been connected in some way to the threat that Black/white unity around class and race issues represented to the dominant order.
The mass movements continued but the concrete (and theoretical) anchor that the PPC would have provided was destroyed. Various left formations emerged, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) splintered, and state repression escalated. The Black Panther Party, which was providing hot breakfasts and free health care to people in poorer communities became the target of counterintelligence programs (COINTEL). Panthers were killed, arrested, jailed on trumped up charges, and their influence in the Black communities declined. Students were killed by National Guard or police authorities at Jackson State and Kent State universities. Meanwhile, products of popular culture shifted from social justice themes to interpersonal liberation. Rebellion was channeled more and more into consumerism. The United States presence in Vietnam came to an end in 1975 and so did the 60s cultural front.
Progressive Politics After the Cultural Fronts
The “sixties” connoted something special as did the “thirties” before it. As has been suggested here, mobilizations around class and race stimulated the reassertion of people’s campaigns of all sorts. Politics in turn impacted on culture and culture on politics. In terms of a mass psychology a sense of hope flowered and grew. In the 1940s and 1950s and again in the 1970s and beyond, the cultural fronts disintegrated and despair, isolation, and individualism replaced community, solidarity, and activism.
Several forces facilitated the demise of “the 60s.” First, state repression escalated. Assassinations, police violence, arrests, and incarceration of many Black and white activists reduced the ranks of the leadership of existing organizations. Second, the global economy experienced stagnation and crisis spurred by two oil shocks. In the United States unemployment and inflation together rose precipitously. Capital flight escalated such that literally millions of high paying industrial jobs were lost as thousands of plants closed. The percentage of the work force in unions began its significant decline. In the terms of the day the “economy of abundance” was replaced by an “economy of scarcity.” When Ronald Reagan came in office an active campaign to destroy the labor movement was put in place, as symbolized by the successful effort to destroy the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).
Third, a long simmering right wing backlash to the 30s and the 60s gained significant force aided by an attractive leader, Ronald Reagan. During his first term, Reagan launched a program that is still active and successful in 2005 to destroy the vestiges of positive government. Also he used the war against Communism, the “evil empire,” to rekindle national chauvinism and massive increases in military spending. New campaigns were started to repress Central American activists and groups defending civil rights. His followers created campaigns against a women’s right to choose an abortion, against gun control, for school prayer, and for the teaching of creationism to mobilize conservatives and some religious fundamentalists. The use of so-called “social issues” was designed to build a mass base of support for an economic and political ruling class that was committed to shifting the distribution of wealth and income even more to themselves by destroying positive government programs.
The quantum shift to the right nationally could not have occurred without apocryphal changes in progressive politics. Single issue politics continued, in some cases with admirable successes. Women’s and gay rights movements flourished. Anti-nuclear and Central American solidarity movements successfully mobilized millions of people in opposition to Reagan’s foreign policy. But the “old left” was in disarray; that is those multi-issue groups committed to a Socialist political vision. As the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European Socialist states experienced crises of political legitimacy and economic stagnation, the image of revolutionary Socialism became more tarnished. Most Socialist states disintegrated between 1989 and 1991, leaving only a handful committed in name, if not in principle, to Socialism. New post-Marxist theoretical currents among the academic left “deconstructed” the historical “narratives” such that the history of any revolutionary ideal became suspect. Class and class struggle as empirically grounded theoretical concepts were dismissed. Class was replaced by identities-racial, gender, sexual preference, and ethnic-as the focus of political attention. The Marxian idea of linking exploitation, oppression, domination and subordination to the economic character of the society was rejected as an intellectual tool.
The end result of the transformation and deconstruction of progressive movements was a politics of atomization: issues, identities, discourses, discrete contexts replaced a theoretical and practical understanding of history and attempts to understand the continuities between the past and the present were rejected. The dismissal of the Socialist project in general became fashionable on the intellectual left. At the level of electoral politics, the leadership of the Democratic Party shifted from being a party of opposition to being a party of centrist collaboration. The argument of those who rose to influence in the 1980s and 1990s, in the camp of President Clinton, was that electoral victory required embracing a variant of the Reagan revolution in politics to appeal to the “center.”
The end result of these two developments was that the intellectual left rejected the historical and conceptual tools that would give vision and purpose to the possibility of constructing a “new new left.” In the electoral arena, the Democratic Party, the sometimes agent of reform, embraced a new role, rejecting contestation and adopting collaboration as a political strategy. Meanwhile wealth shifted more to the top 1 percent of the population, real incomes declined for most workers, and the economic, political, and cultural manifestations of racism and sexism resembled the period before the Great Society of the 1960s.
Political Crisis in the 21st Century
George Bush won two disputed elections in 2000 and 2004. He is a creature of the neo-conservative, religious fundamentalist, rightwing faction of the capitalist class. During his reign wealth has continued to shift to the rich, workers and the poor have become as vulnerable at any time since the Great Depression, and the United States is attempting to reconstruct a worldwide capitalist empire that has been the dream of imperialists since the 1890s. This has meant unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and threats of war against Syria, Iran and North Korea. Despite extraordinary demonstrations against war and racism and the rise of grassroots organizing, the movements are disjointed, single-issue, bereaved of systemic analysis and vision. Of particular relevance is the weakness, to the point of near extinction, of the labor movement The old anti-racist movement, whose heart was in civil rights and Black Power, does not evidence the solidarity of the past, nor the solidarity with other sectors of the progressive movement.
Clearly there is a need for a new mass movement which is multi-issue and reform/revolutionary. This new mass movement needs a class base. It must prioritize an anti-racist, anti-sexist agenda. It must be anti-imperialist. And the new progressive majority needs to ground itself in the public discourse and the culture of the majority of the people. The new progressive majority cannot replicate the prior periods of the cultural front but activists can learn from the strengths and weaknesses of the prior periods.
The times are right for a new progressive beginning. The vast majority of humankind lives in horrific material conditions. Massive mobilizations are spreading around the world concerning issues critical to people’s lives. Numbers of passionately committed left intellectuals and cultural artists are growing. And, there is a history, even in the U.S., of Socialist vision and practice.
National Archives
Bibliography
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front, Verso, 1996
