Intellectuals and the Struggle for Socialism from Below

I've been thinking a lot of about the role of intellectuals (and theorists in particular) in the struggle for socialism. There has been a lot of ink spilled over this question within the Marxist tradition and beyond. I don't pretend to address this topic in any comprehensive way. What follows are merely a couple of reflections aimed at helping me clarify my thinking about these matters.

One way to get into this problem would be to frame it in terms of theory and practice. To ask what role theorists should play is, in some sense, to ask what role theory should play in revolutionary practice. As far as I'm concerned, some of the best things said about this particular topic are addressed in Alasdair MacIntyre's short pamphlet, "What is Marxist Theory For?". Of course, there are plenty of other, more detailed treatments around. Those theorists interested in working-class self-emancipation tend to give the best accounts here, in my view. Michael Löwy's The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx and Hal Draper's work on self-emancipation, and Norman Geras's excellent essay "Marxism and Proletarian Self-Emancipation" all give detailed treatments of the problematic of theory and practice in Marxism with an eye to do justice to the ideal of working-class self-emancipation. Lenin's discussion of these questions in What is to be Done? is helpful. So is the work of Lukács and Gramsci.

Interesting though these questions are, I don't want to talk about the role of theorists in these particular terms. It's not for any systematic or political reason that I want avoid addressing the problem in these terms. It's just that my particular academic sphere of activity requires that I articulate myself in other ways, and I think it's worth attempting to think through these problems in vocabularies other than the standard Marxist lexicon.

One way to gloss the core of self-emancipation and the notion of socialism from below would be to read it as a democratic approach to social transformation--as opposed to the technocratic, administrative, and elitist approach known as socialism from above. Now, don't misunderstand me. By "democracy" I mean something completely different from the electoral procedures and political institutions that we see in many capitalist societies. In other words, by "democracy" I don't mean bourgeois democracy. Neither do I have in mind the typical liberal conception of democracy--often called the "aggregative" model of democracy--according to which democracy is merely a fair procedure for the aggregation of pre-political individual "preferences" (no different from consumer "preferences"). This aggregative conception understands democracy as a kind of market, takes individual "preferences" as given, assumes that individual preferences are merely private wants, and attempts to "reconcile" these conflicting individual preferences with each other through an aggregative mechanism such as voting. When I say "democratic" I have nothing like the above in mind.

When I say that socialism from below is radically democratic, it is because it involves a class-for-itself actively participating in and (determining the course of) the struggle to create society anew. It involves the conscious, deliberate action of the mass of working people who bring the basic structure society under their direct democratic control.

Contrast this with two other views of what socialism is and how it is won: utopian socialism and Stalinism. The utopian socialists started off with a blueprint of what a new society should look like down to every last detail. Fourier, for example, had a detailed system for how garbage collection would work that involved only children because, he reasoned, children liked to play in the dirt so why shouldn't they like to be the ones to handle all of the garbage in society? There are lots of things to say about the schemes of the utopian socialists, but what we want to say here is that they were all to some extent elitist or paternalistic. They didn't look to the masses of working people as a source of energy, insight and transformative power. And why should they have? They already had all of the substantive details worked out--what kind of lives people would live in a properly socialist society, what they would do, how they would do it, what they would produce, etc. etc. Accordingly many of the utopians detested genuine democracy. Many of them looked to the powers that be--kings, capitalists, state administrators--in an effort to win them through persuasion to implement their favored blueprint for a new society.

Stalinism is a complex phenomenon, but for our purposes we can boil it down to some rather simple elements. Whereas Marx and Engels distinguished themselves in the 19th Century by opposing the utopians, the Blanquists, and everyone else who chafed against the ideal of working-class self-emancipation, Stalinists cast all this aside. They reverted to pre-Marxist ideas that saw socialism nothing more than a specific form of bureaucratic administration from above. So long as private ownership of the means of production was abolished, and a form of bureaucratic state administration put in its place, a society was "socialist". The only question for Stalinists is: what sort of policies should the administrators implement from above? In some ways, their question had the same structure as the utopians. Both presumed that a layer of elites should sit above the masses and decide substantive matters such as what sort of life people should lead, what should get produced, how it should be produced, etc. etc. Socialism, for both of them, becomes little more than a social-engineering problem best solved by "experts" and technocrats.

In obsessing over the first-order question "what, substantively speaking, should society be like in all its details?" they completely elide the second-order question "but who should decide this?". It is sensitivity to this second question that distinguishes those who advocate socialism from below.

This brings me to the role of radical intellectuals (theorists, academics or whatever).

What we can already see is that socialism from below, in being radically democratic, refuses to put forward a substantive blueprint that pre-empts the collective deliberations of radicalized workers involved in the fight for a new society. Theorists take on an elitist, technocratic perspective when they pre-empt the decisions of a mass movement and propose a substantive picture of what people's lives should be like in a new society. Part of the point of socialism--genuine socialism--is to give the masses of people (for the first time) the power to genuinely control their own lives and determine collectively the course that society will take. It is about bringing the basic structure of society under the collective control of the activated masses. Now, there may be some role for intellectuals to play in proposing various institutional schemes to their fellows in the midst of collective discussions among workers engaged in building a new society. If these proposals find favor then it's possible that they might be implemented. But this is the sort of collective discussion that one has after the revolution. That's not where we are right now.

What, then, is the role of radical intellectuals qua intellectuals? Social criticism has got to be part of what they do. That can take many forms: immanent critique of dominant ideologies, criticism of ideas that function to stabilize or legitimate the status quo, criticism of historical narratives that obscure material conditions and class struggle, etc. Radical intellectuals can contribute to a better understanding of the status quo (the better to change it). But is the role of radical intellectuals purely negative or merely descriptive?

I don't think so. Radical intellectuals--qua intellectuals--can and must do more than criticize. But, and this is crucial, what they say in a "positive" spirit must be mediated by the sorts of criticism outlined above. Whatever they say in a positive spirit must grow out of a critique of the dominant order, it must be rooted in the practical activity of movements engaged in challenging it. It can't issue from nowhere and neither can it be the mere daydreams of the theorist.

What do I have in mind by "positive"? Let me introduce a distinction here to try to sharpen my claims. Call a positive claim "substantive" if it has determinate content that has to do with precisely what kind of life people should live, what activities they should be involved in if they are to flourish, etc. A substantive question might be: "What kind of clothing should be produced in a socialist society?" That is not a question intellectuals can answer a priori--that is a question that people must determine themselves, democratically, in a socialist society. Contrast that with "procedural" claims that are formal and lack determinate content about the good life, etc. Procedural matters have to with form and structure, not content and substance. A procedural/formal question might be: "what form of social relations among persons would have to obtain for a society to properly be called socialist?".

What I want to say is that, by and large, intellectuals (or anyone else for that matter) should not be in the business of deciding substantive matters themselves--substantive matters should be determined by the masses of working people themselves. Procedural matters--that is, formal or structural matters--are better suited to intellectual reflection. Of course, socialist democracy can not be conceived as purely formal or procedural--it would necessarily exclude certain kinds of substantive outcomes (i.e. those that involved oppression, exploitation, alienation, etc.). But socialism from below requires leaving a space open for people to determine the vast majority of substantive matters themselves.

Radical theorists, as I say, have no business pre-empting the democratic deliberations of workers by attempting to settle substantive matters ex ante. There are normative and epistemic reasons why they can't do this. Normatively speaking it is elitist and paternalistic, as we've seen. Epistemically, however, theorists can't know everything they'd need to know in order to get these questions right. Many of the concrete practical questions of how to build certain kinds of new, radically democratic social institutions is not one that can be fruitfully addressed from where we stand today.

However, radical theorists should, I think, see themselves as involved in the project of thinking through formal questions such as "what sort of social relations would obtain among persons in a socialist society?". Now, the way they address such questions cannot be abstract or idiosyncratic. It must be closely tied to the critical enterprise and the practical activity of movements on the ground. We only learn about what kind of social relations we want by seeing, in practice, what we don't want: exploitation, oppression, domination, etc. Only a critical analysis of exploitation and oppression in all of their material richness could put intellectuals--or anyone for that matter--in a position to address questions about the form of relations that would characterize some of the basic structural features of a socialist society.

Defenders of capitalism and the status quo attack socialists for advocating an impossible ideal. They say that there is no possible or desirable alternative to the market. They say that a complex society cannot be structured in any other way. They say that genuine socialist democracy would be nothing but the rule of the ignorant and irrational, so they extol the virtues of "experts". Others argue that socialist democracy is itself oppressive because it elides difference.

Radical intellectuals can and must see their role--in part--as dispatching these claims. Socialism is not impossible, and it is a worthwhile exercise to say why not. Genuine democratic planning of production is both possible and desirable, and there is nothing utopian or elitist about attempts to show that that is so. Showing that democracy is desirable involves clarifying and defending the democratic ideal. It doesn't involve giving a blueprint of socialist institutions, but it does mean explaining that democracy is not aggregation of fixed individual preferences. It does mean distinguishing real democracy from the institutions of bourgeois elections. It means showing the epistemic benefits of real democratic deliberation as embodied in practices such as collective assessment. It means emphasizing the collective learning process that occurs in and through mass movements that democratically self-determine their course of action.

Real democracy is deliberative and takes as a basic assumption that people's individual "preferences" aren't fixed. It assumes, rather, that they can change in the course of argument and debate (and through struggle). This model of democracy doesn't, of course, mean that the way we ought engage with the ruling class (or any oppressor) through patient argument and deliberation. The ruling class has to be removed by a movement that forces them out. But within that movement, and within the new society brought under the democratic control of the working class, we need democracy. We don't need "neutral" or "fair" procedures that attempt to reconcile fixed individual preferences. Democracy is much more than the simple act of voting. Neither is it mere discussion--because not all discussions are democratic. We need collective, deliberative processes aimed at producing action, whereby the better argument carries the day, where all of the relevant perspectives and experiences and ideas can be put forward free from oppression, marginalization, and all the rest. Clarifying our thinking about basic form socialist democracy--while steering clear of pre-empting matters of substance best decided by workers themselves--does not seem to me out of the reach of the radical intellectual engaged in the struggle for socialism from below.

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Are Campus Police Necessary?

At my college, campus police were commonplace. For most of my time as student, it never occurred to me to question their existence or their authority. Like the classrooms or the library, I assumed that the university police had a justifiable (perhaps even necessary) role to play on campus.

What led me to question their role was political activism. We're constantly told what a "free" country we live in, but you learn how deeply conditional this freedom is when you actually try to change the way things are. That is, we're "free" to do as we please on the condition that we don't... protest, demand reforms from ruling elites, organize ourselves, assemble with large groups of fellow citizens, or otherwise resist existing relations of power. That is, so long as we calmly walk through the shopping mall with a big smile on our face, we're free to do whatever we like. But the minute we gather with others to ask why we're, so to speak, locked inside of a privately-owned shopping mall with rules that we did not choose, we're faced with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets.

Millions of people are seeing the function of the police (campus or otherwise) for what it is. And, with the recent wave of repression on campuses in particular, many are wondering whether campus police are necessary at all.

It's worth noting, before getting any deeper into this question, that universities haven't always had private police forces of their own. Indeed, many universities around the world lack them. In Britain, for example, the vast majority of colleges and universities lack campus police forces. Indeed, before 2003, Oxford had no campus cops. But how is it that Oxford was able to stop itself from sliding into a den of chaos, violence and disorder before 2003? Without a powerful coercive force dedicated to maintaining campus security, how was a war of all against all averted?

These questions are, of course, absurd. But they are part of a common rhetoric of law and order that is used by University administrators (and their loyal police regiments) to justify the need for a coercive security apparatus on campus.

This is exemplified by the interesting stories campus police often tell about themselves to justify their existence. Take the following (disturbing) excerpt from the University of Pittsburgh Police Department's website:

From the very beginning, the University of Pittsburgh Police Department has steadily progressed into a premier state of the art law enforcement agency. With the constant support of the university community, the police department has utilized educational and training opportunities to become a contributing and well-respected part of the community.

In the mid 1950's, the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, which is home to Pitt Campus, experienced the same problems as any other inner city neighborhood throughout the country. Vandalism, theft and parking problems became a concern for the university, and so, the first Pitt Security Department was created. This small group of individuals became the foundation of what is now the University of Pittsburgh Police Department.

In the 1960's, the department dealt with unrest and other civil problems that plagued America. Like all campus police organizations, the University of Pittsburgh Police Officer's were often on the front lines of the conflicts and learned to deal with the students with fairness and authority. By the late 1960's, the university became a state related institution that eventually, in turn authorized police officers with the same powers and duties as Pennsylvania Capitol and Commonwealth Property Police.

In the early 1970's, the department was restructured and grew in number. Pitt's Department of Public Safety, as it was then called was recognized as the third largest police organization in Allegheny County. In 1974, the first acting Chief was named and the agencies official title became the University of Pittsburgh Police Department. Modernization was the theme of the department as computers and state of the art security systems became an integral part of police work.

I was struck by two things in particular about this story (which, as a casual survey of other university police websites reveals, is rather typical). The first is the heavy emphasis on "modernization" and "state of the art" tactics and technology. This fits neatly within the technophilic, robo-cop rhetoric of contemporary representatives of the military-industrial complex. One almost expects Pitt cops to wander around with laser guns and hover-boards, all the better to deter would-be "bad guys" from disturbing the serenity of campus life. This rhetoric of "modernization" is also indicative of the neoliberal turn toward re-establishing structures of authority during the 1970s and 80s by technologically upgrading, militarizing, and growing police forces across the board. It's not for nothing that incarceration rates literally skyrocket starting at the dawn of the neoliberal era. In the aftermath of an era marked by urban revolts, organized revolutionary groupings, strikes and mass protests, it is unsurprising that our rulers decided to resort to increased policing and imprisonment to re-establish "discipline" and deference to their authority.

The second thing is how remarkably blunt the Pitt cops' story is about the 1960s: "In the 1960's, the department dealt with unrest and other civil problems that plagued America. Like all campus police organizations, the University of Pittsburgh Police Officer's were often on the front lines of the conflicts and learned to deal with the students with fairness and authority." "Civil problems plaguing America", huh? What might those "problems" have been? Mass protests and marches, sit-in's against Jim Crow, student occupations of campus buildings, and resistance of all kinds against war, racism and the political/economic domination of the 1%. Predictably, the role of the police was to ride in on horses and re-establish authority by meting out discipline and "fairness" from above.

Combine this view of the 1960s with what campus cops are being asked to do all over the country right now and we see their role for what it is: a bulwark against student/faculty/staff resistance meant to stabilize and enforce the power of administrators on university campuses.

And it's worth noting that college administrators aren't acting alone here. The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA) was formed in 1958 in order to "discuss job challenges and mutual problems, and to create a clearinghouse for information and issues shared by campus public safety directors across the country." The IACLEA even has a corporate partnership program, which helps with "strategic initiatives" to help advance the "educational mission" of the IACLEA. It's refreshing how blunt the cops are here about their "educational mission", i.e. to instill a sense of respect for existing power, etc. See below:

IACLEA has established the Corporate Partnership Program to support the implementation of IACLEA's strategic initiatives, to further its educational mission, and to enhance the ability of campus public safety agencies to protect institutions of higher education. We can tailor a partnership program that meets your company’s values, mission, and business goals.

A couple of things come to mind here. First notice the comfortable fit between "company values", "business goals", "corporate partnerships", and the language of "educational mission", "protecting higher education" and so on. Second, on the face of it, why should corporate entities have an interest in involving themselves with campus policing? What shared interests might these two groups have? And through what lens do corporate firms see institutions of higher education? To answer the last question is simply to re-state the basic priorities of the capitalist system: profit-making and the bottom line. The university, from the perspective of capital, is two things: One, a potential factory to manufacture future employees with certain dispositions (docile, obedient, hard-working), competences and skills. Two, a potential threat to the continued reproduction of the capitalist system insofar as universities can (gasp!) lead people to think for themselves, criticize the status quo, and sometimes organize themselves to resist it collectively. Before the 1960s, the potential threat posed by the populations on campuses across the country was largely overlooked by the ruling class. But they have learned well the lessons of that era.

This brings us to the question posed in the title of this post. Are campus cops necessary?

It certainly depends on who you ask. They probably are a necessary factor in the continued corporatization of the university system. And they are surely a powerful tool in the hands of administrators intent on keeping students from rocking the boat.

But are campus cops necessary to further the real mission of universities, namely to facilitate higher learning, human development, free inquiry, and community? No, they are not.

Defenders of campus police are likely to object here in one of two ways. They might take a paternalistic line and say that students are children and, as such, require the disciplinary power of a police force to keep them in line and "on task". Without threat posed by SUV's roaming around campus filled with armed police, students will be unable to look out for their own best interests. Drunkenness, drug abuse, and lawlessness will rule. This argument, be it noted, is pitched more to parents than to the actual residents of college campuses.

Students will be unmoved by this paternalistic nonsense. College students are legal adults, they have the right to vote (and they can be drafted) even if the law restricts them from having a beer until age 21. They often juggle multiple jobs on top of a demanding set of courses. They are also deemed old enough to be saddled with massive amounts of debt. Moreover, many students take it upon themselves to get involved in political organization and "extra curricular" of various kinds. Students don't need a "stern father" looming over them with billy clubs, pepper spray and guns. We can handle ourselves just fine, thank you very much.

The second argument is more subtle than the first. Defenders of campus police can argue that campus police are needed to protect students against robbery, mugging, rape and sexual assault. In fact, they'll say something stronger: without an extensive (and "state of the art") campus police force, these crimes are likely to increase dramatically.

There are, of course, the racist incarnations of this argument that aim to convince well-to-do white parents that their sons and daughters will be "protected" from the people of color living in close proximity to their university. But let's focus here on the problem of rape and sexual assault on campus to see whether there's any merit to the pro-police claim.

First of all, very few (if any) US campuses are without a small army of "modernized" and "state of the art" university cops. Yet, for all that, rape on college campuses is at epidemic levels. The majority of rapes go unreported. Of those that get reported, few press charges against their assailants. Of those that press charges, even fewer actually secure convictions against their assailants. And of those that successfully press chargers the first time round, even fewer see that ruling upheld in a court of appeals. Often the victims of rape are ridiculed, pressured not to continue prosecuting or are forced to endure a drawn-out process that merely exacerbates the pain caused by the assault in the first place. None of that has anything to do with police tactics.

But, of course, all of the above problems have to do with the inability of existing institutions to successfully deal with rape once it has occurred. This to say nothing at all of the campus organizations, norms, and conditions that encourage rape on a wide scale. What do I have in mind? I wont get into all of it, but surely fraternity culture is high on the list. We all know the drill: frat parties invite women with the understanding that the drunker they get, the better. Date-rape drugs are commonplace. All of the norms that prevail in these well-funded and entrenched institutions at US universities tend to reproduce this sordid state of affairs. Another related feature of campus culture that reproduces this problem is the typical media (campus or otherwise) reaction to rapes. The typical response is dismissive, even accusatory, and involves the usual litany of bullshit questions: "what was she wearing?", "how drunk was she?", "did she lead him on unfairly?", etc.

The bottom line is this: rape is a social and political problem, not a law-enforcement problem. Through mass emails detailing crimes on campus, universities often suggest that rape only occurs when a stranger jumps out of a bush to attack a woman walking alone on a dark street. But, in fact, the vast majority of rapes are committed by fellow students and co-workers. That is, the vast majority of rapes occur between people who already know one another.

So how do we make war against the rape crisis on U.S. universities?

Not with campus cops. The first step might be to abolish the Fraternity system. If that's too ambitious, then we could also institute mass education campaigns in which incoming students are taught about rape statistics and how sexist campus culture contributes to them. I'm not talking about giving women prudential advice about how they must always walk in groups at night or whatever. I'm mostly talking about how to educate everyone--especially freshmen--about the social and political causes of the problem and how the victim-blaming "what was she wearing?" nonsense perpetuates it. SlutWalks across the country have already raised many of these issues so that they are fresh in many people's minds. It only remains to pressure universities to change their ways. Another step would be to actually punish rapists on campus. "Yes means yes" policies are helpful in shifting the burden of proof off of women and onto the offender. I can't emphasize enough: none of these changes have anything to do with campus cops. If anything, the discretionary powers of campus police create the possibility of more rapes, not less. If you think I'm being cynical, take a look at the statistics on police sexual assault. The cops are more a part of the problem than they are a part of any viable solution.

So why not abolish campus cops altogether? Their main function is to do the bidding of those empowered by the corporatized status quo of US universities. They exist to prevent the legitimate organization and protest of students, faculty and staff. When struggle escalates enough to actually threaten the power of administrators, the campus cops will be called upon to brutally repress democratic forms of social protest. They do almost nothing to serve and protect students. The fact is that they simply aren't necessary (unless you're a university administrator looking for shock troops to stabilize your power.) Students, faculty and staff simply don't need campus cops. (We don't need a layer of bureaucrats and administrators looming over us either). We can run the university by ourselves, in our interests.

And, let it be known, campus cops ain't cheap. In an era in which we're told that tuition hikes, scholarship cuts, layoffs, and all the rest are "inevitable", I think we'd do well to look at the "state of the art", ultra-modern police forces roaming around campus. The London Review of books reports that the cop that sprayed mace in the faces of protesting students at UC Davis made himself $110,000, which is more than all but the most highly-paid professors. UC Davis employs over 101 police personnel, which is bigger than any university department. Let's leave aside here the related problem of bloated administration and non-academic bureaucracy. Just think about the scholarships that could be funded with the money saved by axing the police force.

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Voluntarist Currents in the Occupy Movement

Check out American Leftist for an excellent roundup (and commentary) on recent events relating to Occupy Oakland. I won't weigh in specifically on anything that's going on there, simply because I don't know enough about the situation on the ground there. I would, however, like to make a rather general argument about the occupy movement as a whole and what it needs to do push the struggle to the next level.

First, all eyes were on Oakland because of the size of the protests, the numbers of people drawn into the movement, and the explicit call for a general strike. As countless commentators have reminded us, the last gen strike in the US was in Oakland in 1946. We've clearly entered a new era of class struggle not seen in a generation or more. Class struggle, on order to be such, has to draw large numbers of working people into a fight against some segment of (or, better, against the entire) ruling class.

Likewise, OWS was able to defend itself from Bloomberg's bid to destroy it because it mobilized huge masses of people, many of them union workers, to defend Zuccotti Park in its moment of need.

Succinctly put, the most exciting thing about the entire occupy movement is that it is --quite explicitly-- about drawing the whole 99% into the fight against the 1%. It's primary strength is that it is a mass movement against a political and economic system of, by, and for the 1%.

It goes without saying that this is an exciting time to be on the Left (and I mean the real Left, i.e. the anti-capitalist Left). Finally, a movement has broken through and challenged the legitimacy of the system through direct actions of various sorts, unpermitted protests and marches, occupations of public space, and now strikes and labor actions.

Still, countless challenges and obstacles remain. How, for example, can the continued occupation of a public space help us to win the changes we're fighting for? And, in cities where the authorities have physically prevented an encampment from taking hold, to what extent is it important to continue trying to occupy a public space on the model of OWS? Or, if occupations are meant to be a spring board for growing mass demonstrations (and, potentially, even mass strikes), how do we get from here to there? Finally, how do we build successful general strikes that have the potential to shut down entire cities? These are not easy questions to answer.

However, in a context where newly radicalized people have had their expectations about what's possible raised astronomically, there are bound to be folks who think that must be easy answers to these questions. There are bound to be folks whose legitimate excitement is driving them toward a position of impatience. This is understandable. All of us surely feel this way to some extent or other. I can say, for one, that this movement has electrified me politically in a way that no other movement has.

Nonetheless, I think we need to focus on how we got where we are in order to see where we need to go. As I described above, we didn't get where we are by way of small-scale provocations attempted by folks who feel that they can, through sheer will-power, force the movement into a more radical direction. That is, we didn't get here by way of voluntarism. Voluntarism is a politics that takes it to be possible for a small group, or even an individual, to more or less will a large-scale social change into existence through clever actions or provocations.

The trouble with voluntarism isn't that the individuals attracted to it lack motivation, political energy, or enthusiasm for changing the world. They have all of that and more --and that is not what I aim to criticize. The trouble with voluntarism is that it presupposes a perspective on social change that is problematic. As I described above, progressive social change happens when masses of people --in open defiance of the powers that be-- pour out onto the streets, occupy parks and factory, blockade capital flow, etc. In short --it happens because of some accumulation of people power that has the potential to threaten the powers that be. The 1% in Chicago, for example, isn't afraid that a small group of activists might roam the city performing street theater, banner drops, or other spontaneous or unpredictable actions. The 1% in Chicago is afraid of a mass movement drawing tens of thousands of working class people into the streets to oppose its continued dominance. That is why Rahm cleared out Grant Park by force and arrested hundreds of protesters.

But, and I'm speaking exclusively about the movement in Chicago at the moment, I think some occupiers have drawn the conclusion that because mass actions aimed at occupying Grant Park were met with police repression, they were failures. Because those actions didn't successfully "take the horse", some are now beginning to wonder whether mass movements are actually the way to change things. Understandably, this has led some to veer toward voluntarism, wherein the way forward involves pulling off unpredictable, small-scale and spontaneous actions (rather than public, mass actions drawing in as many participants as possible). In other words, this sense that we were defeated has led some to lower their expectations about what is possible. I think that perspective is understandable, but it should be re-thought. We have no reason, given what's happening all over the world right now, to doubt that a mass movement is both possible and worth fighting for.

I think we have good reason to be excited about the two failed attempts to take Grant Park. Those attempts weren't unqualified failures at all --both actions drew out more than 5,000 people to march, without a permit, through the heart of Chicago's financial district. Both actions won the movement international attention and coverage. And both actions, where over 300 people were arrested in defiance of the police order to clear the park, have elevated sympathy for movement among ordinary Chicagoans. A crew of nurses got arrested in defiance of the City's hard-line refusal to grant OC a space. A poll after the second attempt to camp at Grant Park revealed that 79% of Chicagoans stood in support of the movement, with only 8% opposed. Those actions were not failures. We should not lower our expectations in their wake --we should collectively assess them so that we can learn from their mistakes.

But why didn't those actions succeed in winning Occupy Chicago an encampment? It's hard to say exactly. For one, we would have needed more people there to actually force the cops to back down from mass arrests. The second attempt to take the horse was voted on 4 days before it went down --and as of the Friday before the action there was still no official flyer, no official Facebook group, no organized publicity or outreach. And nonetheless 6,000 people turned out. It could have been much bigger if we'd have had more time to consciously build the event by handing out leaflets at subway stations, making posters and flyers, etc. One lesson we should learn from the second attempt to take the horse is that the more time we get to build an event the bigger it has the potential to be.

We need the movement to be big if its going to succeed. OWS didn't hold Zuccotti Park because it was the perfect strategic location in all of Manhattan. It held the park because a hundred thousand people turned out to defend it. The cops, and the powerful billionaire mayor who called on them to attack OWS, were forced to back down by the sheer numbers of people who turned out to defend it. That is our fundamental strength as a movement of, by, and for the 99%: we are the vast majority of society!

So, whatever we decide to do to take this movement to the next level, it has to take stock of this fundamental fact: our strength is in numbers. If some folks want to organize small-scale, spontaneous actions meant to raise awareness and critical consciousness, they should go for it. If some want to do banner drops, small-scale bank protests, street theater, public guerrilla art projects, etc. etc. they should be cheered on for their enthusiasm and fighting spirit. But we also have to be clear: these actions are only worthwhile if they encourage more people to join and participate in the movement as a whole. Any action meant to substitute itself for a mass movement is a step in the wrong direction. Any action that discourages mass participation, is a waste of precious time and energy. Any action that isn't building toward the kind of mass 99%-strong occupy movement we all need is counter-productive.

We can't let discouragement or impatience get in the way of fighting for the kind of movement we need. Voluntarism is tempting, but revolutionary patience is what we need. Not passivity, not complacency, not conservatism. Just a sober, patient perspective that enables us to see that building this movement will not be easy. I'm not suggesting that we set aside our sense of urgency. On the contrary, I think we have to be patient in order to think through and discuss precisely how we can convert all of the excitement, energy, and urgency into a victory for our side!

Neither I am saying that we must "work within the system" or ask for modest demands. On the contrary, I am suggesting that we need to think through how to build this movement as big as possible so that it has the power and militancy to challenge the foundations of the system itself.

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Herbert on the Weakening of US Democracy

As Bob Herbert writes in his most recent column:

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

Read the rest here. Herbert has been steadily moving Left in the last year or so. Unlike most of the usual suspects on the Opinion pages (Paul Krugman included), he is sober about the Democratic Party, and he is right on target about how progressive changes are brought about:

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”

I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.

I must admit that Herbert's reaction to the (ongoing) Egpytian Revolution resonates with me. And he's drawing the right inference here: we need to learn from Egypt, not break our arms patting ourselves on the back for allegedly "showing them the way to freedom". We need to see Egypt as an example that impinges on the ways in which the status quo right here at home is legitimated by those in power. Though those in power will attempt to appropriate recent events in Egypt in order to encourage us to reaffirm status quo beliefs, in reality the events in Egypt should lead most Americans to drastically revise their basic beliefs about their own society and their own political process.

What the Egyptian people are learning in the course of struggle is what we need to learn as a society right here, right now: without struggle, there is no progress. Acquiescing to the barely "lesser evil" and settling for a few stale crumbs from those in power is not tantamount to struggle; this is resignation. We need social movements that are organized independently of the two major corporate parties which can force the system to honor its demands. We need to model progressive activism on the labor movement of the mid 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 60s. The cynical, conciliatory "credit card" activism of Moveon.org is not a way forward, but the surest means of thwarting real change.

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What we can learn from Egypt

Egyptians are revolting over rising costs of living, soaring unemployment, economic misery, and an ossified political system that is hardly democratic and which is unresponsive to their needs. They're sick and tired of crony capitalism imposed on them from above.

How different are things right here in the good ol' USA? To be sure, we're better off with Obama than with Hosni Mubarak. But that doesn't obscure the fact that many of the deep problems facing Egyptians are afflicting our society as well, and for similar reasons.

As Bob Herbert makes clear in a recent column on the suffering caused by the crisis in the US:

What’s really happening, of course, is the same thing that’s been happening in this country for the longest time — the folks at the top are doing fabulously well and they are not interested in the least in spreading the wealth around.

The people running the country — the ones with the real clout, whether Democrats or Republicans — are all part of this power elite. Ordinary people may be struggling, but both the Obama administration and the Republican Party leadership are down on their knees slavishly kissing the rings of the financial and corporate kingpins.

I love when the wackos call President Obama a socialist. Wasn’t it his budget director, Peter Orszag, who moved effortlessly from his job in the administration to a hotshot post at Citigroup, beneficiary of tons of government largess? And didn’t the president’s new chief of staff, William Daley, arrive in his powerful new post fresh from the executive suite of JPMorgan Chase? And isn’t the incoming chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness very conveniently the chairman and chief executive of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt?

You might ask: Who represents working people? The answer, as Tevye would say with grave emphasis in “Fiddler on the Roof,” is, “I don’t know.”

He's talking about the US, not a the strange "Other-ized" image of Egpyt produced by mass consensus media.

And, as I said in a recent post, the inference to draw from Egpyt isn't that we should pat ourselves on the back and rejoice in how eager the Egyptians are to join us in the world of freedom and prosperity. No, the inference to draw is that the Egyptians are showing us something about how power works and how social change happens. They are standing up to an uncaring political/economic strata of elites who have profited from their immiseration for decades. It's time for Americans to do the same. Real change, the sort of change we can really "believe in", is not going to come from on high by way of the usual suspects in the two major corporate parties. It will not be handed to us after a mass email-campaign to our senators or a funding-drive organized by MoveOn.org. It will be won in the same way that all progressive changes have been one in this country: through hard-fought struggle.

The sooner that ordinary people in the US begin rising up, demanding that their government assuage their suffering and economic misery, the better. The sooner we begin demanding real health care reform for all, full employment, and a re-investment of war funding in education and infrastructure, the better. Tunisia and Egypt are teaching the world a valuable lesson. The first step to understanding it is to open ourselves to the raw facts of our situation in the US, and those facts are not pretty.

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US State Dept: Egypt Not Ready for Democracy

(Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for this video). Al Jazeera is great. Wow. How refreshing is it to see an anchor actually take a clear look at what's going on in the world.

Yes, doesn't this make it clear just how much of a beacon from "freedom" and "democracy" the US is all over the globe? Every time there has been a progressive uprising anywhere, they have tried to sabotage it or put on the brakes. To tell the Egyptian people that they should take it easy and put on the brakes is beyond offensive, particularly given Washington's relationship with the repressive, autocratic Mubarak regime.

Now, Washington isn't stupid. Of course, Obama will come out and say something vague about the need for reform and blah blah. But the facts are rather clear cut here:

"The U.S. does not want to see the Egyptian regime fall any time soon,’’ Hamid said in a telephone interview. “But people who are protesting, the tens of thousands, do want to see the regime fall some time soon. They are diametrically opposed interests."

It hardly needs repeating that Mubarak has been propped up single-handedly by the US, from whom he receives the tidy sum of $1.3 billion each year (his regime received the annual aid every year since 1979, and he's been president since 1981... you do the math). The US doesn't do that for nothing- and it's not as though they don't already know that the $$ they give to Mubarak has been used to torture and repress the Egyptian people in order to legitimize his autocratic rule. Egypt is the second-largest recipient of military aid from the US behind Israel, and a close third is Colombia, the most right-wing and repressive government in all of South America by a large margin.

It will be interesting to watch how much longer the US foreign policy elite can successfully walk this delicate tight rope of sponsoring Mubarak's repression while appearing to take a "moderate" stance vis-a-vis the protesters who are demanding real democracy and freedom.

Obama has come out and patronizingly admonished the Egyptian protestors to be "peaceful". "Violence is not the answer" he said. It's interesting that someone who has authorized far more drone bombings than Bush is all of the sudden a fan of avoiding violence. It's interesting that someone who gladly has paid for and loaded the weapons being used against the protesters should have the audacity to tell the protesters to "calm down". It's interesting he's all of the sudden for "non violence" given that Obama, "winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has, ...in his first eleven months in office, ordered troop escalations in Afghanistan of 21,000 and 30,000, to effectively double the U.S. fighting force—while military contractors will continue to outnumber those in uniform." As unemployment tears through millions of lives accross the US, Obama still found it in his heart to increase war funding by $100 billion in 2010. That's a lot of money to spend on devices and training devoted to exterminating human beings in a foreign country. Funny that such a person can be taken seriously for suddenly coming out in support of "peace".

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Seymour on the "fear of democracy"

DEMOCRACY IS supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to.

In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express.

Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure--by the threat of disruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. To the extent that the parliamentary system is ever really democratic, it is parasitic on a much more fundamental popular democracy.

Frances Fox Piven (along with her late partner Richard Cloward) has long argued that the electoral-representative system is most democratic when the working class and the poor are deliberately disruptive--when they are organized, but not institutionalized.

Read the rest at SW.org.

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How not to criticize the two-party straightjacket

When I criticize the Democrats from the Left, I want to make clear what I'm not saying.

• I'm not claiming that we simply need to vote a different way.
• I'm not claiming that simply withholding a vote from the Democrats is sufficient.
• I'm not claiming that withdrawing from politics is the best course of action.
• I'm not claiming that our primary task should be to build an electoral alternative to the Dems.
• I don't think that defying the Democrats and withholding a vote (or voting Green or something) is a radical act.
  

On the contrary, I think the entire problem is the assumption (which we're encouraged to believe from day one) that the nexus of our political power is exercised by voting and writing checks to campaigns.

When I criticize the two-party straightjacket, I'm not recommending that we opt for "less relevant" politics and retreat from the public political sphere.

On the contrary, I think that the only way to be relevant, the only way to make a difference politically is to build grass-roots organizations and movements and win people to the idea that even modest reforms are often won by hard-fought struggle.

The claim is that we need a more appropriate conception of what "political" means so that we can break free of the constricting straightjacket imposed by the Democrat vs. Republic disjunction. We need to stop self-censoring and settling for tepid crums so that we can begin organizing and demanding that things change.

There are no shortcuts here and I don't have the experience or know-how to say exactly what form such struggles and movements might take (and I'm inclined to believe that anyone who says they do have all the answers here are cheating you). But the basic idea here was put well by Fredrick Douglass many years ago:

"The whole history of the progress of human a
liberty shows that all concessions yet made
to her august claims have been born of
earnest struggle.... If there is no struggle,
there is no progress. Those who profess to
favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation
are men who want crops without plowing up
the ground, they want rain without thunder
and lightning. They want the ocean without
the awful roar of its mighty waters. The
struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a
physical one, and it may be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will."

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Who Cares about Colorado? Against Electoral Politics Part II

NYTimes is thrilled about this, but I don't see what the big deal is. Who gives a shit?

Ostensibly, elections are held to elect representatives so that they will pass legislation that the people want. People wanted an end to occupation and war, significantly increased social spending (in particular on health care and education), increased taxation for the rich, and so forth (polls repeatedly bear this out). None of these social needs have been satisfied.

Instead we got a smooth continuation of Bush's policies re: Wall Street, increased aggression in Afghanistan, attacks on Medicare and Social Security, a tepid health "reform" bill with not even a Public Option, broken promises to labor and glbt movements, 180 on oil-drilling, and so on.

But according to the NYtimes, this is the wrong way to think about elections. Elections aren't for the sake of something else (e.g. social change); on the contrary, elections are important for their own sake. A sports analogy will help: mainstream media act as though we should take the same interest in electoral politics that we do in, say, baseball. It's an endless cycle of seasons and games, where the rules are fixed in advance, and the only two legal teams are managed by wealthy elites. If you don't like this kind of "politics", well, then too bad for you. You must just have different "entertainment preferences" in the "marketplace of political ideas".

So, rather than being about social change, fighting oppression, justice, what have you, politics is only about elections. And what are elections about? The NYTimes would have us believe that elections are about the reproduction of some party's power as an end in itself. It's not what a party does, it's not what their principal goals or values are, it's not whose interests they represent... no, no politics is merely a matter of latching onto the narrow strategic maneuvering that the political class employs to keep their own power intact (war-chest spending, rhetorical packaging, marketing, PR, etc.). The result is that politics is no longer about people having some external claim or demand on the system itself. On the contrary: politics is only about internalizing the narrow strategic calculations made by wealthy, "visible" campaigns waged by one or other of the two big corporate parties. This is, in essence, the subject matter of the "political" coverage on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NYTimes, WaPo, etc. etc.

Rather than being a mere means to some end, elections come to be ends-in-themselves. This is completely ass-backwards.

"Progressives" or people on the Left in general, have no independent interest in seeing the Democratic Party reproduce its power as an end in itself. The liberal argument was supposed to be that left-leaning people ought to support the democrats because they will allegedly pass progressive legislation.

Of course, when the Democrats don't do anything progressive (but do quite a lot of damage in the meantime), that is, when they show their true colors as an organization enthusiastically committed to Wall Street and Big Business, the liberal argument above should be obviously refuted. There should no longer be any good rationale to uncritically support the Democratic Party as an agent of progressive change.

The correct inference to draw here is this: Left-leaning people shouldn't throw their weight and resources behind a basically conservative, pro-Business political organization that has too much invested in the status quo to change it.

But this isn't the inference we're encouraged to draw by the mainstream liberal press. There, the political line is identical to the one described above in the NYTimes: left-leaning people have an interest in the continued reproduction of Democrat control of congress, as an end in itself. It matters not what they do. "Left" doesn't connote some determinate set of political principles or demands; on the contrary, "Left" just means "whatever the Democrats do". Thus the grounds for criticism melt away, and the status quo is insulated from serious scrutiny. How can the Democrats do anything wrong if whatever they do is ipso facto "Left"?

Once you accept this bit of sophistry, you're prepared to accept another bit: if whatever the Democrats do is automatically "Left", then any criticism of them must be from the Right. In other words, any critique of the politics of the Democrat establishment only helps the Right wing. Hence, the media obsession with the Tea Baggers (while excluding innumerable expressions of popular left-wing anger), appear to license the inference that left-wing people must uncritically return to the Democrats in order to stave off a right-wing backlash. The message is clear: sit down, shut up, and vote Democrat because we don't want a "Tea Bagger Nation".

How long are we prepared to continue this never-ending cycle of conservatism? Republicans get elected --> Democrats pose as the agents of progressive change --> infuriated voters reject GOP --> large Democrat majorities emerge only to demonstrate the obvious: the Democrats basically keep the political program of the GOP intact and shamelessly bow to Business --> GOP poses as populist critics of the Democrat Machine --> repeat cycle ad infinitum.

As Peter Camejo observed, "every major gain in our history, even pre-Civil War struggles such as the battles for the Bill of Rights, to end slavery, and to establish free public education -as well as those after the Civil War, have been the product of direct action by movements independent of the two major parties and in opposition to them".

Just to name two of the most obvious recent examples: the Social Security Act arose in a context created by militant sit-down strikes in 1934 that put the fear of God in the Ruling Class; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was reluctantly passed after massive extra-electoral struggle and unrelenting black rebellion against the existing order forced the issue.

The formal political system in the united states is a symptom of other factors: shifts in economic configuration, the level of class struggle, the power and organization of social movements, etc.

The electoral system is not a prime-mover; the big shifts in policy arise from shifts in economic power and social struggle. Focusing intensely on the symptoms to the exclusion of the causes is a recipe for perpetual political exclusion.

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Authorized Media: "Banks Dodged Bullet"

Read the BusinessWeek article here. Here's an excerpt:

"A deal reached by members of a House and Senate conference early this morning diluted provisions from the tougher Senate bill, limiting rather than prohibiting the ability of federally insured banks to trade derivatives and invest in hedge funds or private equity funds.

Banks “dodged a bullet,” said Raj Date, executive director for Cambridge Winter Inc.’s center for financial institutions policy and a former Deutsche Bank AG executive. “This has to be a net positive.”

Before we know it, election season will be upon us and we will be aswim in calls to support Democrat incumbents. Presumably, the Dems won't try to sell their (basically conservative) politics as "change" this time around. They'll sell their ticket as a bulwark against Tea-bagger reactionaries.

But what happened during the two years of massive Democrat House majorities, a supermajority in the Senate, and an initially popular young president who was talking about fundamental change?

We saw the reactivation of the US's Latin American military strong arm in 2008, escalation in Afghanistan, complete continuity with the Bush years in terms of treasury policy, quick surrender on the already compromised "public option", failure to repeal anti-union laws that prevent organization of workplaces, increased drone attacks on Pakistan, severe cuts to public services, spending freezes for everything except the defense budget, refusal to enact progressive reform on the GLBT-rights front, a U-turn on off-shore drilling and an embrace by Obama of "drill baby drill", deference to a for-profit oil company that has devastated the Gulf of Mexico, etc. Now we have, basically, a failure to even secure adequate window-dressing to cover the fact that serious regulatory reform will not be passed.

It is more clear to me than ever that all progressive and left-minded people in the US need to organize independently of the Democratic machine, build existing social movements, and start new ones. We need to follow the example of the Black freedom movement of the 1950s and 60s- and, as Sherry Wolf has recently put it, "make them do the right thing". Of course, the ultimate aim must be to eliminate a social system in which there is a "them" who need to be made to do what's in the interest of the vast majority of people.

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Angela Davis: How Change Happens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc6RHtEbiOA

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When Wall Street loves reform

Read SW editorial on the health bill here. Here's an excerpt:

Indeed, for many people who are sick and tired of conservatives getting their way, the bill's passage signaled a potential shift in the political winds in Washington. So after months when it appeared that the right was making a big comeback, the health care reform could translate into a growing confidence that working people can make real progress today after all.

The question is, how are such gains to be made? If matters are left to the Democrats, we'll see a repeat of the health care reform debacle, in which widespread demand for fundamental change is diverted into weak legislation that leaves powerful economic interests unchallenged.

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Political Questions We Cannot Raise

I just ran across this excellent video of Chomsky on the political system in the United States.



One moment of his talk that I found particularly striking was his claim that "most of the issues that the public cares about...weren't even allowed to come up (in discussion surrounding elections" (5:01).

As Chomsky puts it, "many major issues that the public cares about... are big economic issues...issues on which the public has extremely strong opinions...but none of it could be brought up in the election" (5:38).

This is a key point in making sense of politics in contemporary societies. It's not just that we are encouraged to internalize the wrong answers to political questions (e.g. we shouldn't want single-payer health insurance because that means "big government"). The most damaging problem is that we aren't even able to raise the most important political questions at all.

Some social scientists have called this phenomenon "nondecision-making":

Nondecision-making is a means by which demands for change in the existing allocation of benefits and privileges in the community can be suffocated before they are ever voiced; or kept covert; or killed before they gain access to the relevant decision-making arena; or, failing all these things, maimed or destroyed in the decision-implementing stage of the policy process". (see Bachrach and Baratz (1970: p.44))

But this analysis of politics is not one we obtain by default. If one were to simply internalize what's said about politics in, say, the New York Times, they would have an entirely different analysis of politics from the one above. The default understanding of power that we are spoon-fed in Civics textbooks and mainstream news media is as follows. The boundaries of what is to count as a political issue are set by the established political system. Politics is simply the narrow agenda discussed among elites in existing political institutions.

Now, take note of what this excludes. Among other things, this entire approach to politics completely ignores potential issues that the established political system prevents from becoming actual. As Bachrach and Baratz point out, this approach to politics totally ignores many key issues, especially issues that "...involve a genuine challenge to the resources of power or authority of those who currently dominate the process by which policy outputs in the system are determined". Merely raising certain question that pose a threat to existing relations of power is proscribed from the agenda.

This method of exclusion is precisely how our electoral system functions. We have two more-or-less pro-Business parties with minor differences (there are, of course, differences, but they are minor all things considered), and political questions are restricted to rather small set of relatively uncontroversial matters. We are asked to focus in on disputes over minutiae, whereas the big questions about which the public has strong views are frozen out of the discussion. For example, polls have shown for many years now that the idea of single-payer (or Medicare for all) is popular with the public (something like 60% support it, which is more support than Obama got in the 2008 election).

Of course, the public is never asked to vote on whether we should have a for-profit, market-based healthcare system or a public, single-payer system. What they are asked to do is to choose between a Democrat or a Republican every election cycle, neither of whom desire to challenge the powerful position of the private health insurance industry (which is what it would take to get single-payer passed). Thus there is a large gap between what the public wants and what they are able to ask for via the electoral system.

What can we do about this gap?

I'll weigh in on what I think about what we can do in a moment. But if you ask certain Democrat-friendly liberals, they'll tell you that we just need to elect a couple more "progressive" Democrats to office in a handful of states. Perhaps we could exchange a Joe Liberman for a Ned Lamont, they'll argue, and that would more or less solve the problem.

This is preposterous. Notwithstanding the utter powerlessness of the existing bloc of "progressives" in the House and Senate, the problem isn't the lack of a couple of "more progressive" individuals in the Democratic Party. The problem is a systemic one, that has more to do with institutions and practices than the preferences of any one individual in the Party. You can waste valuable resources and time trying to elect a person that starts off supporting single-payer. But in order to function within Washington and the Democratic Party apparatus that person will have to conform to protocol and the requirements of operating within this instutional backdrop.

What, then, should we do about this massive gap between public preferences and a political process dominated by elites?

I find myself returning again and again to two important examples. I'll restrict myself to the first, which is the Civil Rights Movement (or, what, at the time (according to Angela Davis) was simply called the "freedom movement"). (The other example I find particularly interesting is the massive wave of labor militancy in 1934 that led to the passage of the most progressive elements of the New Deal).

First of all, consider where the politics of race stood in the 1940s-50s in the United States. The "major political issues" defined by the agenda set by the established political process and mainstream press did not include the problem of racism as a major concern. The interests of the masses of ordinary black people were simply not on the radar of the established political system. Despite a couple of landmark events and Supreme Court decisions, the issue was by and large pushed aside by the political system.

But by 1964, there was enough pressure on the entire political system to force the passage of major civil rights legislation, against the default prerogatives of the ruling party (i.e. the Democrats).

How was this massive gap closed?

First, consider how it wasn't closed. The political movement for racial justice that began to pick up steam in the early 60s did not directly focus on electoral politics at all. They did not focus on creating PAC's to funnel funds to the Democrats, they did not focus primarily on lobbying elected officials, and they did not emphasize playing within the conventional political rules. They did not simply ask nicely and sit back and hope that elected officials would "do the right thing".

They formed organizations and social movements independently of the political system and by means of direct actions, marches, agitation, consciousness-raising, organizing, propagandizing, and so on they put the problem of racism on the table in a way that the political system could not ignore.

Visionaries like MLK and Malcolm X did not go on TV and talk in the narrow terms of electioneering and Congressional maneuvering. They did not accept the constraints of what was then considered "politically realistic" or prudent. They challenged those very constraints and in-so-doing altered the horizons of what was politically possible.

Malcolm X did not attenuate his own criticisms of the existing order so as to avoid pissing off elites. He didn't think of those determined to maintain racial hierarchies as potential "stakeholders" in a public discussion about policy: he publicly challenged the very legitimacy of their authority.

Yet this entire political orientation, which could instructively be applied to many other political situations, is foreign to the default conception of politics pedaled by politicans, pundits and the mainstream news media. The default conception teaches us to think of ourselves as isolated consumers, not as potential participants in a collective project. We are told to think highly of such vacuous notions as "centrism", "moderation", and "bipartisanship". Oppositional politics are shunned as "divisive" or "polarizing". The result is that any serious criticism of the status quo is frozen out of the discussion: you simply cannot raise such objections at all, no matter how much public support they may have.

Ask yourself this: If we had a vote tomorrow, a national referendum, on whether or not we should have stay in Iraq indefinitely or get out immediately, what would the outcome be? If polls and the discussions during the 2008 election are any indication, an overwhelming majority of Americans would not vote in support of Obama's extension of Bush's foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Or, take Obama's proposed spending freeze. Obama has suggested that we totally freeze all social spending, except for defense spending (which should be allowed to continue to increase). Now, if there was a national referendum asking people whether or not the United States should spend the billions slated for the Pentagon on (A) funding uncessary foreign wars and occupations or (B) on schools, public transit and public services... which do you think people would choose?

But neither of these are questions that can be raised within our political system. These questions do not map onto the disagreement between Republicans and Democrats since both of them more or less agree that we should buck the public will on both counts. That's part of what it is to have two different factions (with a small set of distinguishing features) of what is in effect one pro-Business party.

Although there were massive shifts in electoral balances of power (think of the makeup of the Senate in 2004 vs. 2008), there have not been corresponding shifts in policy. Despite the fact that the country completely repudiated the GOP at the ballot box two election cycles in a row, the Democrats have basically kept the agenda set by Bush intact. The Paulson Plan for bailing out Wallstreet was continued, EFCA was suffocated and set aside, Immigrant Rights were ignored, foreign wars and occupations were escalated, drone bombings increased, freezes on social spending were proposed, etc.

If the Democrats cannot deliever when they have control of every major branch of government, with super-majorities in the Senate, when can they deliver? What do we have to look forward to? Should we hold our breath until they finally get back to the point when they obtain a super-majority again? Isn't this supposed to be the end of the rainbow in terms of electoral power?

I think it's time to divest from the Democrats and start exploring oppositional, independent political organizations that empower ordinary people and enable democracy from below.

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Kucinich Sucks

Read this, for instance. This actually isn't news to me. I thought the guy was a turd way back in 2004. Recall that he ran a presidential campaign on two planks: 1. ending the Iraq war and 2. single-payer health care. Of course, in deference to the time-honored tradition of getting progressives prepped for acquiescing to the Democratic Party, Kucinich ended up endorsing pro-war, anti-health care candidate John Kerry with a big smile.

Couldn't he at least have tried to make some demands? Joe Lieberman just about single-handedly axed the provision in the Senate bill that would have lowered the age requirement for Medicare. Couldn't Kucinich at least have exacted some compromises in return for rolling over like a docile old Labrador?

The Democrat establishment loves Kucinich. He gives the people who believe in, say, education and health care fodder for nourishing their illusion that the Democrats are actually a progressive force in US politics. Kucinich is a marginal force in the party, and he always has been. But the worst part is that he (and his ProgCaucus counterparts) are content being marginal. They are comfortable being irrelevant and co-existing with the forces that demand that they stay irrelevant.

The Dems have got to have a clown like him around, just to keep up appearances. And it's important that he's a clown... because they need someone who folds easily and makes no fuss when it's all said and done. Can the same be said for the right-wing of the Democratic Party? No. It seems to me that when those blue-dog fuckers talk, the Party bosses listen. And my sense is that when your politics are in step with Big Business (as the blue dogs and all right-wingers very much are) you have a lot more power and influence with Democrat leaders.

My view is that progressives need to divest from the Democratic Party. Even the most cursory glance at history tells us that real change does not happen merely at the ballot box. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed reluctantly when there was a large Democratic majority in both chambers and the most leftwing President ever to hold office. It was passed because the people in Washington did not have a choice: they were faced with a massive, independently organized social movement that was demanding (not sending checks, not asking nicely) that things change.

The same can be said of the militant, labor activism that paved the way for the Wagner Act and Social Security.

Progressives need to stop:

1. apologizing for the Democrats on blogs and in op/ed columns
2. self-censoring in writing in order to "be realistic" about the Democrats
   
3. sending money to organizations that are not independent of the Democrats
4. volunteering for and funding Democrat candidates
5. defending center-right measures (like the health care bill) from far-right critics (like Tea Baggers)
6. heavily investing themselves in the short-term success of the Democrats
   

Notice what I'm not saying: I'm not saying that we need to be stubborn "purists" who never support any measure unless it is 100% in-step with their preferred political solution. I am not against assessing a concrete situation and deciding what's possible and what's feasible: on the contrary, I think that we need to divest from the Democrats because I think this is the most realistic, feasible way to get even the modest reforms that most Americans want.

What's unrealistic, is electing a massive numbers of Democrats to office and then sitting back and just hoping that they will do the right thing. It's not going to happen.

Notice also that I'm not claiming that we should simply stop voting, or vote for some non-Democrat. I am making an entirely different kind of claim. What I am claiming is that we need to stop putting so much emphasis on elections when it comes to organizing, activism, and funds. We need to direct our energy, time, creativity and money elsewhere: the Democrats are a political black hole.

We need to build the social movements and be involved in starting new ones.

There are plenty of existing organizations, movements and fights that are already underway that we can be part of. Look around. No matter where you are there are struggles going on. For example:

Health Care:

• Physicians for a National Health Program
• Health-Care Now!
• California Nurses Union

Education (fighting school closings, cutbacks, etc.)

• See the movement that is underway after the national March 4th day of action.

Campaign to End the Dealth Penalty

• Here's the IL org, but I'm sure there are others.

Immigrant Rights

• Immigrant Solidarity.org
• Join the movement spurred by the recent march on Washington.

Housing and Tenant's Rights

• Join local struggles against evictions and foreclosures. Here's notes from a recent struggle in Boston. Here's the low-down on a successful struggle in Rogers Park, Chicago.
  

Fighting for LGBTQ Equality

• Join the movement that grew out of the Prop 8 struggle.
• Help build for the Equality Across America conference coming up.
  

All-around Left-Wing Organizations

• See the International Socialist Organization's activist news page

This list doesn't even begin to cover the ground. There are many, many more excellent, independent organizations I'm forgetting.

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A Solidarity Tax?

Just to get a grip on how tepid and worthless the Democrat Congress and Obama are, consider the following.

EXHIBIT A

Right now, state governments across the country are facing major budget crises as a result of the economic downturn caused, crudely speaking, by bankers. Working people are being hit the hardest.

California is the eye of the storm, where there is a $42 billion deficit that grew out of a convergence of decades of regressive taxation, crashing financial and construction industries, and the bursting of the housing bubble.

Across the US, all 50 states are facing a combined $180 billion budget gap . What that means is that if they don't get that amount of money, they won't be able to maintain their (already inadequate, as the result of three decades of attacks from Democrats and Republicans alike) public services.

Teachers are being laid off, schools are being closed, public transit is being massacred, tuition is being hiked, public workers are being fired, patients are being thrown out on the street, libraries are being boarded up, infrastructure is rotting. There is mass unemployment all over the country, but the jobless rates for people of color are heart-stopping.

EXHIBIT B

At present, the top marginal rate of taxation is 35%. President Reagan lowered it from 70% to 30% from 1980-83. George H.W. Bush raised it slightly, and Bill Clinton raised it a touch more so that it was 40% in 1993. And W. lowered it in 2001 to 35%.

The current holdings of wealth (not income) of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans adds up to $21.9 trillion.

Just for the sake of argument, ignore the $1 trillion in military spending alotted for 2010.

ENTER OBAMA

Obama campaigned on the "radical" program of reinstating the pre-Bush Jr. tax rates (top marginal rate of 40%) for the rich in order to pay for more extensive public spending on health care. People turned out in droves to vote for him.

Now, I'm told that a small windfall tax on corporate profits or a one-time 3% tax on the wealth of the wealthiest 1% would more than double the amount of money that state governments have on hand right now.

Moreover, we can do a little mental math and quickly see that a, shall we say, "solidarity tax" that increased the top marginal rate of taxation by 5% would raise the money to stave off all cuts to public services, infrastructure and employment. An increase of 10% could even expand and shore up already anemic services in a time when more and more people are falling back on public services.

This is not even a radical proposal. It's simple math: we could slice and dice public services (education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc.) or we could simply raise the marginal tax rate on the very very wealthiest of the wealthy.

Yet voters are not asked to weigh in on these issues (except in Oregon, where they supported it).

Instead, they are asked to support one of two pro-business parties, both of whom are happy to eviscerate public goods and bow down to the wealthy and powerful.

It is the heavily Democratic Congress who are cutting public transit, slicing the social safety net, busting teachers unions, laying off public workers, raising tuition and closing schools. And before the much-hyped and overblown "Scott Brown Incident", don't forget that the supermajority-wielding Democrats couldn't even put together a stimulus bill that covered the state budget shortfalls since they were so keen on including tax breaks in the bill. And don't forget: Obama has proposed a freeze on discretionary spending (except for, of course, military spending).

I ask you: what is the purpose of supporting the Democratic Party? This is what they do when they wield the largest Congressional majorities I've seen in my lifetime.

What progressive and left-leaning people need to do right now is, first of all, completely divest from the Democratic Party and organizations subservient to it. The next goal has to be to build on (and forge new) movements already under way against budget cuts. If we ever hope to see important reforms like single-payer or fully-funded public transit in our lifetimes, we're going to have to form independent social movements to place demands on the existing order. Asking nicely and sending money to Moveon.org isn't a case of "not doing enough"; on the contrary, this kind of "activism" is precisely what's preventing meaningful change.

Can there be any doubt, even among liberals, that the function of the Democrats, intentionally or not, is to keep existing political arrangements intact?

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Things are more complicated than economists would lead us to believe

“The way people think about things is appropriate or not depending on the nature of the things in question; the way people think about people, themselves, is part of the reality about which they are trying to think in appropriate ways. The concepts which we employ to grasp what we are become part of what we are; or rather that we use them in this way becomes part of what we are. Thus in social theory we are using concepts to understand beings who define themselves by means of their use of concepts, in some cases the concept that we are using in trying to understand them. So to construct a theory and to propagate it is to afford people a new means of self-comprehension; to give the theory currency may well change the very behavior which the theory attempts to describe. Hence social theories can play a role in their own verification and falsification.” -Alasdair MacIntyre "A Mistake about Causation in Social Science" (1958)

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Black America in Free Fall

Reading things like this, this or this are, to say the least, jaw-dropping and enraging. It's no accident that Obama's approval ratings are the lowest of any first-term president at this point since Eisenhower.

As the percentage of Black children living in poverty soars in the direction of the heart-stopping figure of 50%, one wonders what to make of Jesse Jackson's recent decision to give a major speech at the Left Forum in March in New York City. While it has always been the case that Jackson has been, in some broad sense, a man of the Left, a venue like the Left Forum is a touch more radical than is usual for him.

My general experience with Jackson, things like this notwithstanding, is that on the one hand he often makes critiques of the status quo that are powerful and insightful. Unfortunately, these critiques often end with a coda like "but, nonetheless, we have to support the Democratic Party and help persons X, Y and Z get elected". His decision to oppose the Democrats in the 80s was, on my view, politically important and courageous. But since then he hasn't really been a figure with the independence from the Democrats to have any hope of challenging their conservatism.

Thus I'm interested in why he's speaking at the Left Forum, and particularly why he's speaking there now. I don't think he would've done this sort of thing in 2008, nor do I think that the figures discussed in the news articles above about Black suffering are irrelevant here.

The sticking point, for me, is whether (1) Jackson will push for independence from the Democrats, or (2) if he will try to quell dissatisfaction on the Left (particularly the Black Left) with the Democrats and try to bring them back aboard. My hope is that it is the former. Whatever else is true, there's no sense in supporting the Democrats if you believe in healthcare, racial justice, full employment, stopping unjustified wars, workplace democracy, or women's rights. You might add public transportation and public universities to the list of things the Democrats don't care about. If these important initiatives wither on the vine when we have a Democratic President, Democrat super-majority in the Senate, Heavily Democratic House and so on... what's the use of electing Democrats? It shouldn't even be a dilemma for those on the Left anymore: the Democratic Party is not worth one ounce of support from progressive and left-minded people. In order to get the things we care about (e.g. healthcare, jobs, education, and so on), we're going to have to organize independently of the Democratic Party and demand them. This isn't a utopian idea: the Wagner Act and the Civil Rights Act both have extra-electoral struggle to thank for their passage.

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