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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The Importance of Movement Democracy

I think it's good that there is so much debate ensuing around tactics and strategy within Occupy right now. Movements only move forward if they are able to vigorously deliberate about their own strategy and goals. Avoiding debate and discussion means leaving our views unexamined and uncriticized. It means allowing the inertia of the status quo to set in and dampen progress. When this happens, movements wither on the vine. To the extent that the arguments about Black Bloc tactics have ignited discussions of this sort, they are productive for the movement as a whole.

Still, there are several unfortunate consequences of the framing of many of the debates raised by Chris Hedge's polemic against Black Bloc tactics. Some of the debates appear to have devolved into a shrill, abstract and moralistic back and forth about non-violence/violence. Others ignore matters that deserve a lot more attention than they're getting from the media. As a result of the framing of the "Black Bloc debates", a number of crucial questions have been lost in the fray.

What do I have in mind? The question of movement democracy, on the one hand, and the related question of how consciousness changes, on the other, are two deeply important questions that are not well-served by the debate instigated by Hedges's polemic.

As many have pointed out, the "Black Bloc" is a tactic, not an organization. Many who employ the tactic seem to have a roughly similar set of politics, but there is nothing like political homogeneity among the Bloc's participants. Different people employ the tactic in different contexts for different reasons. I'm inclined to say that any sweeping, abstract assessment of the Black Bloc as a tactic is bound to get things wrong. Only by conducting, as Lenin puts it, a "concrete analysis of a concrete situation" can we hope to get things right here. But what would a more concrete assessment of the tactic look like?

In order to answer this question, we have to back up for a moment. Who is it that's supposed to be doing the assessing here? And what method or practices for assessment should be used? There has been a lot of general debate over whether Black Bloc tactics are effective or justifiable. But the question of who should make this decision (and how they should make it) has been largely ignored. Before we can know which tactics are the right ones, we have to be clear about who should make that call.

One perspective here would be the following: the question of Black Bloc tactics is a matter best handled behind closed doors by activists already committed to using such tactics. According to this perspective, Black Bloc tactics should be employed whether or not the rest of the movement is won through dialogue and debate. Perhaps an attempt to win the rest of the movement should be tried, but if, in the end, that argument isn't won at a G.A., those who prefer Black Bloc tactics should simply go ahead with their plans anyway. Thus, activists of this persuasion see movement democracy as a mere means to achieving their pre-deterimined goals, rather than a genuine deliberative process where their own minds might change in the course of collective discussion with their comrades. Ultimately, this perspective assumes that decision-making power about movement tactics should rest with a relatively narrow group of people who decide internally what to do. I use the example of Black Bloc tactics, but this perspective could just as well be employed in support of any tactic whatsoever.

I'd like to suggest that this is a deeply problematic position.

A far better perspective would be one in which movement democracy is central. It is deeply undemocratic to use democratic bodies (like a G.A.) as mere means to achieve pre-determined goals (which can be discarded if it proves to be an unreliable means). The person who approaches movement democracy in this way says, in effect, "I'm for democracy only if it means I get my way, otherwise I'm against it." In the end, this person will say "I don't care if most people disagree with me about what this movement should do, at the end of the day I don't have any obligation to justify myself to fellow activists." This is not a democratic approach in the least. This individualistic/strategic perspective brushes against the grain of the cooperative and deliberative attitudes necessary to the flourishing of movement democracy.

But why is movement democracy important? It's worth going through the most significant reasons why effective mass movements have to be internally democratic.

First of all, an internally democratic movement draws everyone involved into active participation in the determination of the goals and tactics of the movement. Rather than allowing a self-appointed clique of "experts" to issue orders from on high, vigorous movement democracy mobilizes and activates all participants and enables them to be the co-authors of the movement (rather than mere followers or sympathizers). People have a much stronger stake in a movement when they are actively involved in running it. Mass participation goes hand in hand with genuine movement democracy.

Mass participation is key because it fosters that crucial element of all successful social struggles and revolutions: self-activity. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once put it, a "vibrant and active democracy" is needed within movements so that all members can "participate actively and consciously in working out its views and in determining its course of action." The point isn't that democracy is the most fair procedure in some abstract sense; rather, the idea that democracy is an essential political element of active social movements from below. Mass participation generates political energy and an anti-conservative spark that cannot be achieved in any other way. All of the most successful and inspiring social movements in history have created radical new forms of democracy from below that draw everyone into active participation (the revolutionary workers council is a key example). The success or failure of Occupy depends on its ability to draw the masses of people into active participation in determining its course of action.

Furthermore, a movement that eschews vigorous internal democracy risks running aground on the shoals of substitutionism. Substitutionism is the political mistake of substituting oneself (or one's small group) for a mass movement. Without vigorous movement democracy, where everyone debates publicly and openly what their common course of action should be, the door is left open for a group (or competing groups) to substitute their own perspective and goals for the perspective/goals of the movement writ large. Substitutionism is problematic for at least two reasons. First of all, it it elitist. Rather thank seeing liberation as a process in which the masses collectively emancipate themselves through their own self-activity, substitutionists assume that a minority must step in to grant the benighted masses liberation from on high. Second, substitutionism has the effect of de-mobilizing people. By drawing a sharp line of demaraction between themselves and the rest of the movement, substitutionists give others the impression that their active participation lacks value and importance. Substitutionist posturing does not win new people to the struggle. It doesn't radicalize the masses and encourage revolt from below. It tends to be perceived as top-down, insulting and de-mobilizing by those outside of the substitutionist clique.

Substitutionists aren't always self-professed radicals, although many are. Gradualist, conservative groups who have a stake in the status quo (esp. groups close to the Democratic Party) can step in and substitute themselves for the movement just as easily as ultra-left radicals. The key to preventing substitutionism is unfettered, vigorous movement democracy. That way, the direction of the movement is, ideally, determined by nothing except the unforced force of the better argument in mass deliberative bodies like G.A.'s. Of course, organized radicals can and must participate in those debates and deliberations. The experience and depth of politics they bring has a lot to offer the movement. But they must do so as participants in the collective-self governance of the movement, not as "experts" standing above and outside of the movement purporting to show the "ignorant masses" the unvarnished truth.

Finally, direct participation of the masses in intra-movement democracy is essential because of the collective learning process that it makes possible. This brings us to the question of how consciousness changes and how people are radicalized.

According to some, the best way to radicalize people is through provocative, small-scale actions that suddenly shake ordinary people from their "dogmatic slumbers". By witnessing daring examples of the "propaganda of the deed", people are radicalized and drawn into participation in struggle.

Now, I think it would be abstract and unhelpful to say that small-scale, bold actions have no progressive effect on consciousness. Everything depends on the form and content of the action and the context in which it occurs. But if there are examples of successful political interventions of this kind, there is also a long list of examples in which this approach resulted in spectacular failure. And even the most successful examples of the "propaganda of the deed" pale in comparison with the radicalizing effect of direct participation in collective struggles against the 1%. People are radicalized in the course of actively fighting back in concert with others. In a society in which people are bombarded everywhere they turn by advertisements and injunctions to buy this or that, it is unreasonable to expect that a mere slogan or image will be enough to win people to joining the fight for their own liberation. Drawing people into participating in struggle is the key to changing consciousness.

But how are people drawn into mass action and participation in struggle? Worsening material conditions and discussion/direct-engagement are essential here. Peoples daily lives are being shaken by brutal austerity from above, worsening living standards for the 99%, mass layoffs and unemployment, foreclosures and school closings, etc. They don't need a small clique to tell them that something is wrong with society. What they need is someone to engage them critically, to talk to them, to challenge them in discussion to link arms with others in struggle. Radicals need to talk to people in their own communities, to meet them half-way and engage them directly. This is all the more important if the Occupy movement is going to successfully collaborate and integrate itself with communities that face racial oppression, residential segregation and police intimidation. It's not enough to pull off creative political stunts that, in effect, fly the flag and demand that people rally to it. Direct political discussion with the 99% is essential to building mass movements.

Importantly, political discussion has to begin from where people's heads are at; if it abstractly sweeps in from elsewhere it is unlikely to get any traction. What's more, this dialogue has to draw on people's concrete experiences. Take the question of the role of the police. It would have been abstract to aggressively scold and berate new activists who were sanguine about the police in the early days of the movement. To be sure, raising objections to their attitudes toward the police was necessary, even at the beginning, because the cops never have been, and never will be, on our side. But things have changed drastically since then. After all of the repression from the police that the movement has faced, radicals are now very well-positioned to draw on those people's experience in arguing that the cops aren't on our side. Without a democratic forum for debate and dialogue that can draw on the collective experience of the movement, we can't expect to win fellow occupiers to the perspective that the police aren't a force for social justice. People's views are not set it stone; they are liable to change rather quickly on the basis of political debate and concrete experience through struggle. There's no substitute for engaging people in critical political dialogue in a way that draws on their own experience and concerns.

Now, critical dialogue doesn't mean that activists should leave people's existing views intact or simply pander to what they already think. This would be conservative and ultimately antithetical to the entire spirit of activism itself. Activists try to change the world, not merely interpret it as it is. Critical discussion and dialogue should be a combination of listening to people's concerns and questions, on the one hand, and challenging them to be more militant and active on the other. In the context of escalating attacks on the 99% from above, people's consciousness can develop extremely quickly. Seeing others engaged in mass struggles is a radicalizing force as well, which is all the more reason to build a mass, vigorously democratic movement from below.

This kind of critical discussion and debate can only flourish in the context of a democratic mass movement. If everyone simply does their own thing, without discussing among one another which way forward is best for all, these discussions may never transpire. If some groups, under the guise of a "diversity of tactics", simply opt out of democratic deliberation when they feel they won't get their way, this thwarts the capacity of the movement debate out and discuss tactics effectively. As a result, we can't generalize from each other's experience or learn from each other's mistakes.

The collective learning process that mass movement democracy makes possible is impossible to experience any other way. As socialist Norman Geras describes it, with mass movements:

"...the end must already be operative in the means employed, the liberation of the masses can only be their own work, and it it is in this very process of achieving it that they must develop those qualities which will sustain a socialist society. Thus, for Trotsky, mass participation in the political forms thrown up by a revolution is not only a manifestation of the widespread desire to assume more active control over political and economic life, it also promotes and consolidates that desire. Revolution is consistently seen as an educative process, in which the same mass actions which are necessary to destroy the existing economic and political structures, also have the effect of delivering the working class from bourgeois ideology, of making it conscious of its interest as a class, of raising its confidence in its own ability to organize and decide, and of providing it with the experience of these activities."

This educative process, where we learn from each other and radicalize through the course of struggle and collective self-determination, is impossible if some groups regularly opt out and decide that tactics are best determined by small groups who separate themselves from the movement.

So, the question of "Black Bloc: Pro or Con?" is not one that can be answered abstractly. It should only be answered by direct participants in a mass movement who collectively debate and deliberate together in an open, democratic spirit. To think that a few self-apointed "experts" could answer this question for everyone in a couple of widely-publicized internet debates misses this crucial point.

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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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Is the Problem the 1% or the System?

The occupy movement has brought the issue of class power to the forefront in an unprecedented way. The entire framing of the movement's politics --the 99% against the 1%-- speaks against a political and economic system dominated by a wealthy ruling class. If the media was all-consumed by the ideologically-tendentious issue of deficit reduction only a few months ago, that focus has been shattered (or at least destabilized) by the rapid proliferation of occupy movements from Portland, OR to Orlando, FL.

But within the movement, questions remain. The vast majority of participants agree that the 1% enjoys a concentration of economic and political power that is highly unjust. A key goal of the movement everywhere is to challenge the entrenched power of an unelected dominant group --the 1%-- that lords over us. There is also a sense that the 1% is responsible for the crisis (and should therefore be made to pay for it). Among the most popular chants at Occupy Chicago are "banks got bailed out, we got sold out!" and "how to fix the deficit? tax, tax, tax the rich!".

But it is also commonplace for participants to argue that the problem is our broken economic and political system. This is an argument familiar to many on the Left who have argued that it is the internal contradictions of capitalism, not a failure of regulation or a climate of greed, that produced this economic crisis. But on the face of it, this emphasis on the system doesn't appear to cohere with the "dominant group" perspective that pins responsibility for the crisis --and the push for austerity-- on the ruling class (the 1%). Why? Because the "it's the system" perspective seems to suggest that the ruling class isn't responsible for the crisis in the sense that they made imprudent or unethical decisions. The "it's the system" perspective emphasizes the ways in which the system pushes individuals in the ruling class to act in ways that produce deep recessions and crises.

So, is it the system that's the root of the problem? Or is it the dominance of the ruling class? You probably saw this one coming, but I'm going to argue that this is a false dilemma. It is both the system and the dominant group within that system that is at the root of crisis.

Before I say what I think about this, I'd like to flag the fact that these questions have a long history in the Marxist tradition. The system vs. dominant group question was taken up in the famous Miliband-Poulantzas debate that raged in the pages of New Left Review in the 60s and 70s. This sparked several other debates internal to the Marxist tradition on the question of the state, the most interesting of which (in my view) being the arguments among German Marxists in the 1970s involving Hirsch, Offe, Altvater, and others. For an excellent introduction to these debates, see Simon Clarke's overview here, or read Martin Carnoy's The State and Political Theory (esp. chapter 5).

First, let me say a little bit about the 1% as a dominant group. We all know that the 1% has colonized the political system in the US for its own purposes. This is uncontroversial. The 1% spends vast sums each election cycle funding the candidates of both major parties. Presidential campaigns are simply a struggle between the Democrats and Republicans to garner more support and funding from corporate elites. The 1% also spends vast sums on PR and propaganda (this includes political advertisements as well as ostensibly non-political commercials, e.g. an Exxon-Mobil ad that ends with the jingle "Energy for a stronger America"). We can also add here that the 1% spends vast sums on pro-business interest groups (e.g. the US Chamber of Commerce, etc.). In addition to dominating the election system, the 1% also spends vast sums on lobbying efforts to fight for legislation friendly to their interests. Even when popular demands for reforms surface, the 1% uses its influence and power to mold reform proposals to fit its interests as much as possible. Consider, for instance, the Sherman Act, which was ostensibly passed to break up industrial monopolies, but ended up being used to break unions rather than business cartels. Or, take the following example. Commenting on the popular demand for a public Commission to regulate railroad corporations, an earlier U.S. Attorney General said that:

It satisfies popular clamor for a governmental supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a Commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests... The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission but to utilize it. (quoted from Charles E. Lindblom's excellent Politics and Markets).

It is also well-known that government and industry interpenetrate one another through revolving-door arrangements. The person regulating a particular industry ends up as a highly-paid employee of that industry. High-ranking officials in a particular industry wind up with the public job of regulating that same industry (only to wind up, once again, with a cushy position in private industry afterward). This is a basic feature of how the political system in the US functions. Virtually all elected officials are either already wealthy businesspeople before they get elected, or they become wealthy business people in the course of their tenure.

There's still more to say here, however, about the various ways that the ruling class has colonized the state to serve its interests. Businesspeople have, as Charles Lindblom famously argued in Politics and Markets, a privileged position within government. They are not just another "special interest group". They stand above all other "interest groups" because of their position in society. They have direct access to governing politicians in ways that no other citizens have. Why? Because business leaders are, more or less, unelected public officials who make big decisions about the direction of our society, whether it be decisions about investment, employment, wages and benefits, location of factories and production, etc.

In any society, certain basic decisions must be carried out. Decisions must be made about what is to be produced, how it will be produced, according to what organizational structure, by whom, etc. Decisions must be made regarding the investment of capital in production, the allocation of resources, whether to use certain technologies, the amount of money devoted to innovation, etc. Decisions must be made regarding where plants and factories will be located, how many workers they will employ, whether workers will be laid off if profits fall, etc. Decisions must be made about how much compensation and bonuses executives should be paid. All of these decisions must be made by someone, no matter what kind of society we live in. And what's more --these are hugely important decisions that have massive consequences for the well-being and life chances of all of us. They have a huge impact on the standard of living, employment levels, wages, economic growth, prices and so forth.

But who makes these decisions in our society? Unelected business people. The majority of us do not have any say in these matters. The majority has no means of making the unelected public officials of the 1% accountable to our interests. This is not a new development. By definition, a capitalist society is one in which the basic structure of the economy --the means of production-- is privately owned and controlled by a small class. The productive instruments, the resources, the capital and so forth are all privately owned and controlled by a small class of owners --the 1%. According to our present legal/political system, to allow the democratic will of the people to determine these decisions would be to interfere with the private property of the 1%. Genuine democracy of, by, and for the people is incompatible with the private property of the 1%. In other words, the class power of the 1% is fundamentally at odds with the ideal of a democratically self-governing society.

So, business people (or, if you like, the ruling class, or the 1%) are basically unelected public officials. They make decisions of huge importance for all of us. Unsurprisingly, then, elected officials take the class power of the 1% seriously. They know that if business turns against their government, bad consequences will follow: rises in unemployment, stagnant growth due to a failure to invest, capital flight, etc. They know that they must try to induce (not command) business --with tax breaks, subsidies, lax regulations, etc.-- to fulfill its function in the system so that the economy does well according to its own standards. Whether elected officials in capitalist societies like it or not, they must take seriously the structural economic imperative to make the 1% happy. This is an example of how the power of the 1% places constraints upon what governments can and cannot do.

Governments have, since the very beginning of capitalism, taken on a basic supportive role vis-a-vis business. Costly investments in fixed capital and infrastructure, because they are not profitable in the short term, are often taken on by government in order to grease the axles of private businesses. Likewise with "early federal policy on banks, canals, and roads; governmental profligacy in indulgences to railroads; the judicial interpretation of anti-monopoly legislation to restrict unions rather than industry; the deployment of Marines to protect American enterprise in Latin America; the use of public utility regulation to protect business earnings; and the diversion of fair trade laws from their ostensible public purposes to the protection of monopolistic privilege" (Lindblom, p.174).

This leads us into a discussion of the system. Thus far, we've seen how the State in capitalist society is a class State. We've seen the multiple avenues through which a dominant group, i.e. the ruling class, can directly influence the actions of government. When government officials aren't themselves former (or current, or future) ruling class members, they are subject to the influence of corporate campaign finance, intense lobbying efforts, as well as influence generated by the concentrated economic power of business people. We've also seen that the class power of the 1% places constraints on what governments can and cannot do, no matter how strong its popular mandate from the people. But now I'd like to connect this discussion to an indictment of the system.

The first thing to say is that the sorry state of affairs discussed above didn't come about by accident. Nor did it come about in a vacuum. It is not the result of a co-ordinated conspiracy by people who know one another personally and communicate regularly about how to maintain their dominance. This state of affairs is the result of hundreds of years of capitalist development.

Capitalism is a system in which the basic structure of the economy is privately owned and used for the sole purpose of accumulating profit. Whether capitalists like it or not, they are compelled to maximize profit. They are forced, on pain of insolvency, to compete against other capitalist firms in order to survive. And winning out in competition means accumulating large profits, and reinvesting those profits in expanded production to accumulate still more profit. "Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate!" more or less summarizes the basic priorities of the system.

When the accumulation process is interrupted, the system seizes up and goes into crisis. There are many different reasons why interruptions occur, but one important reason is overproduction. Overproduction occurs when capitalists accumulate more capital, resources, or means of production than they can profitably make use of. So, when sufficient profitable investment opportunities are not forthcoming, what do capitalists do? They hoard their capital and try to wait out the storm. It doesn't matter whether mass unemployment or food shortages ensue: in periods of economic crisis the ruling class will hoard its wealth until profitable investment opportunities re-emerge.

So, in order for a capitalist system to function (in order for people to have jobs, in order for people to be able to purchase the necessities of life, in order for tax revenues to be generated to fund government salaries, the legal system, roads, the military, etc.) the accumulation process must be in full swing. When accumulation is disrupted, crisis ensues and the vast majority suffers as a result.

Now, at this point, we have to ask: if the above is true, what does it say about the basic function of the State in capitalist societies? The answer should be clear. The capitalist State's function is to cultivate and maintain favorable conditions for accumulation. In short, the fundamental role of the State in capitalism is to secure the conditions for profitability.

Let's expand upon this a bit. We've already established that the State is structurally dependent on the accumulation process. That is, the State is funded through resources derived from the private accumulation process (collected via taxation). Moreover the viability of a particular governing group within the State is dependent upon economic "success" (as opposed to stagnation and crisis). In this context, State officials are compelled --by their own institutional self-interest-- to try to ensure that the accumulation process runs smoothly. If they don't, they are liable to face sharp drops in tax revenues as well as other bad economic consequences (e.g. unemployment, stagnation, capital flight, etc.). This is what politicians --from both corporate parties-- mean when they talk about "creating a good business climate", or adopting policies that are "pro growth". This need to ensure that the accumulation process continues is what drove the construction of the Interstate Highway System as well as other big public works projects in U.S. history. The goal was to socialize the costs overhead and infrastructure to encourage private investment for profit. Likewise, this basic role is what explains the massive bailouts of financial institutions, the giveaways dolled out through "quantitative easing", and the big tax breaks handed out by Obama and the Democrats. Governing officials are trying to find ways to jump start the accumulation process --no matter what the human cost.

So, as we've seen, the function of the State is to secure the conditions for the accumulation of profit. But in order to do that well, the State has to act in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. And what is in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole may not be the same as what is in the interest of some particular capitalist firm. Recall that capitalists confront one another in the marketplace as rivals in competition. Let us add here the Marxist complaint that capitalist production is anarchic, haphazard and unplanned. Although the capitalist class a whole may act together to secure legislation on shared goals (e.g. union-busting), there will a lot that they disagree on, given that their priority is maximizing their own profit and bumping off competitors. What this makes clear is that the self-interest of a particular capitalist firm may not coincide with the class interest of all capitalists.

But the basic role of the State is to ensure that the accumulation process runs smoothly, i.e. to serve the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. Thus we should expect the capitalist State to periodically do things that buck the will of a particular capitalist firm. In fact, this happens all the time. Alternatively, because of special direct access and influence to State officials, sometimes capitalists are able to persuade governing officials to serve the interests of their particular firm more than the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. The point is that there may be a contradiction here: between the basic function of the state and the ways that particular members of the ruling class influence the state directly.

This isn't the only contradiction. The State in capitalist societies involves electoral competition. That means that different factions of establishment groups, organized into dominant political parties, compete against one another to determine which will head up the State. Regardless of which of them governs, of course, the basic function of the State remains the same. But the cycle of elections every four years in the U.S. means that particular governing officials can be removed from office and replaced by others. Thus, governing officials are compelled to seek popular support in order to reproduce their own power. In a word --their continued existence as public officials requires that they seek legitimation from the public. That doesn't mean that the rule of State officials must actually be legitimate --it merely means that their rule must appear to be so. If a governing party does not secure legitimation, it threatens to lose power to representatives from another establishment party. So, for reasons of self-interest, elected officials in capitalist societies must try to make it appear as if they are uniquely qualified to fulfill their role in the system. The need to secure legitimation also means that the State must speak in the language of universality and general interests. When it advertises itself publicly, it will always say that it stands for generalizable interests and popular goals --as opposed to the goals and particular interests of the capitalist class. If the capitalist state advertises itself as what it really is, it would not be able to secure legitimation. Thus, as Claus Offe puts it, "the State can only function as a capitalist state by appealing to symbols and sources of support that conceal its nature as a capitalist state; the existence of a capitalist state presupposes the systematic denial of its nature as a capitalist state."

However, in periods of social struggle, sometimes governing officials are compelled to grant concessions to popular movements in order to secure legitimation. But many --indeed the vast majority-- of reforms demanded by the population brush against the grain of the accumulation process. This reveals a profound contradiction in capitalist societies, i.e. the contradiction between accumulation and legitimation.

On the one hand, the capitalist State has to secure legitimation from the population. That doesn't mean that it has to actually be legitimate --it means that it is compelled to secure the appearance of being legitimate. In periods of intense struggle, this means granting concessions to popular movements (because otherwise it would reveal that the State doesn't serve the interests of the majority). But granting concessions or passing reforms contradicts the need to ensure that the accumulation process runs smoothly. Hence the contradiction and all of the instability that comes with it.

Austerity is an excellent example of how this contradiction manifests itself. Take Greece, where a nominally "socialist" party is in power. Presumably, it is not part of the party's program that their basic goal is to gut the welfare state and lower working-class living standards. Presumably the party is committed in writing to favoring basic center-Left demands, including maintenance of the welfare state. But, nonetheless, the ruling PASOK government in Greece is caught between the need to secure legitimation and the need to secure the conditions for the accumulation of profits. Through its actions, however, we see very clearly which conjunct of the contradiction has a stronger pull on the government. PASOK has pushed through a punishing program of deep cuts, austerity, layoffs, union busting, and tax increases on workers. But it is doing all of this in order to try to protect the profits of the European ruling classes and to re-establish the conditions for steady accumulation. But in doing this, the Greek state is showing itself for what it is: a class state. Hence, it is losing legitimacy by the day. As a PASOK MP describes the situation,

"The anger over the austerity measures is so deep that many PASOK MPs no longer dare to appear in public. “We can’t even leave our homes to go to a taverna any more,” the Guardian quotes an anonymous MP of the governing party as saying. “You’re called a pig or a traitor for passing measures none of us wanted to pass. It’s not a life.”

I don't doubt that many of the PASOK MP's didn't want to pass the punishing austerity packages. But they passed them nonetheless, because of the web of power relations in which the State is situated. The EU, dominated by French and German capital, has been pushing hard to protect the assets of the European ruling classes. They have made economic threats: capital flight, economic misery, inflation, isolation, etc. They have made political threats some of which hint at the possibility of military coercion and "regime change" if their harsh conditions are not met. At the same time, PASOK is under the tutelage of domestic Greek capital as well. Whatever the aims of the PASOK government officials themselves, the systemic pressure --and the pressure of tremendously concentrated class power coming from France and Germany-- are forcing them to put profits over the vast majority of the population.

So let us take stock of what's been said above. How is the dominance of the 1% related to the system? The 1% are dominant in virtue of their role within the system. If the particular individuals in the 1% simply disappeared, others would take their place and the problems would remain. Their position of dominance is facilitated by the structure of the system in such a way that we can only oppose their rule if we oppose the system that makes it possible. Furthermore, we see that the particular interests of individual members of the 1% sometimes contradict the overall interests of the whole 1%. This fact is, again, true because of the competitive, anarchic nature of capitalist production. This compels ruling class members to push very hard for subsidies, tax breaks, no bid contracts, etc. and milk the government for money and favors. This would be true even in a perfectly competitive "free" market, because the very nature of the capitalist system compels them to do this.

Finally, the connection between the dominance of the ruling class and the capitalist system explains why it is pointless to expect moral suasion to move the 1% to change its ways. The system isn't in crisis merely because of callousness and greed --though these vices are no doubt highly prevalent among the 1%. The system is in crisis because of its irrational drive to accumulate for its own sake in the face of growing contradictions and environmental limits. And the ruling class is forced --by competition-- to participate in this mad race toward destruction. Appealing to their conscience is pointless --we need to change the system. You don't ask Kings to be more benevolent and less cruel --you demand that they be dethroned. Likewise, we shouldn't ask that our rulers be more "socially conscious" or "less greedy". We should instead demand that the system that facilitates their dominance be overturned.

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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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Straight Dope Chicago Responds

Read Cecil Adams's response to my post here.

I appreciate the response from Cecil. It is far more measured and charitable than my post was. Still, although I would be the first to admit that my initial post was a touch on the polemical side, I stand by what I said there. For example, I still disagree, as Cecil said in the original post that "The lesson many drew [from the "Time of Troubles" when Washington was mayor] is that meaningless elections = peace and prosperity, whereas democracy = bad". Perhaps the 25-30% who supported the Two Eddies crusade against Washington would endorse this claim. But I doubt that the majority of ordinary Chicagoans would.

That said, I felt partially vindicated after reading how much clarification there was in Cecil's response. I felt vindicated in the sense that the response largely argues that Cecil agrees with what I was saying (for the most part), whereas I'd construed him as disagreeing. I'm pleased to see that we're in agreement on more than I'd previously supposed, but I'm not convinced that we agree on everything.

Although this wasn't perhaps clear in my initial critique, part of the problem with Cecil's column on non-partisan elections had to do with what it didn't say. What I mean is this. If you didn't know the facts about Washington, race and politics in Chicago, you wouldn't walk away with a very accurate view after reading the column. Absent Cecil's recent clarifications and qualifications, the original column would leave you with the impression that Washington was a "problem" best avoided in the future. Compare and contrast Ira Glass's excellent piece on Harold Washington with Cecil's original column and tell me that the latter doesn't miss the mark.

Some of Cecil's points are well taken. I wouldn't want to argue that non-partisan elections are inherently racist. However, in certain contexts, when put to certain uses, they may absolutely be an instrument of perpetuating racial subordination. And in our case in Chicago, they are such an instrument. Using them cynically in order to prevent a non-Machine-sanctioned Black reformer from taking office again seems to fit the bill here. Cecil seems to agree with this much.

But Cecil's "second point" is that despite this unsavory history, non-partisan elections have their own merits as well. But what are these merits? This is where I get a bit confused.

In the original column, Cecil argued that the merit of non-partisan elections is that they force candidates to appeal across racial lines, whereas the older procedures didn't. I don't think this is true. To be sure, the old procedures had plenty of problems. But it isn't true that the old system didn't require candidates to appeal for support across color lines. The story of Harold Washington, as Cecil himself agrees, invalidates that worry. Furthermore, it isn't even obvious to me that "non partisan elections" encourage candidates to appeal across color lines. I don't see how eliminating primaries is a step in the right direction here, but I'm open to changing my mind. I do think that the non-partisan procedures were implemented to dilute the black vote, and I don't think they were ever drawn up to increase democracy. But I concede that the one-party Machine domination of Chicago politics may have been aided by the previous set-up (though it remains to be seen whether the new rules will have any effect on the health of the Machine... my own thought is that it will take a grass-roots struggle from below to really shake things up in Chicago).

One final thought about the idea of "appealing across racial lines". There is a reasonable sense of this idea and there is one that is problematic. The reasonable version is this. People of different races should be fully equal co-legislators, and should relate to one another on terms of respect. I myself endorse this rather abstract and idealized version.

But the problematic version is sneaky. It trades on the appeal of the idealized version above, while actually apologizing for already existing oppression. The problematic version basically interprets "appealing across racial lines" as "appealing to the prejudices and existing privilege of white people". In other words, "appealing across racial lines" means "appeasing those sitting atop the existing racial status-quo".

Thus asking white and black people to appeal to one another is not an identical request. Asking whites to appeal to black people means asking the historic oppressors to listen to, and take seriously, the needs and interests of the oppressed. Asking black people to avoid talking frankly about racism in order not to alienate mainstream whites is a different requirement entirely.

Of course, the most fundamental reason to combat and fight racism rests mostly on the "reasonable version" of the idea that I laid out above. You fight it because you care about the bigger struggle of fighting for an egalitarian society in which human beings encounter each other as equals in the fullest possible sense.

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Racist Bullshit in "Straight Dope Chicago"

From "Straight-Dope Chicago":

The idea of a nonpartisan mayoral election with a runoff if no one got a majority was first bruited in 1986, during the runup to the 1987 mayoral contest. The intent clearly was to avoid splitting the white vote again and letting Washington be re-elected. Richie Daley among quite a few others supported the plan, but an attempt to put it up for a city referendum failed...

A 1988 effort to push nonpartisan elections through the state legislature died, but the idea came up again in 1995, when Republicans took control of the General Assembly and the governor's office for the first time in 25 years. They used the opportunity to push through a long list of cherished measures that had gone nowhere while the Democrats were in control, one of which was nonpartisan mayoral elections in Chicago.

...Pretty much everyone else was in favor, and how could they not be? David Axelrod, who had worked for both Washington and Daley, told the Tribune, "It forces you to appeal to a broader constituency than to one ethnic or racial group."

Hard to argue with. Governor Jim Edgar signed the measure into law, and it's what we're using now. Is it fair? Yeah, it's fair. The fact remains that had nonpartisan elections been the rule in 1983, Harold Washington wouldn't have been elected, and breaks like the one that enabled him to become mayor are precisely what the system is intended to prevent.

Straight dope my ass. Straight racist crap is more like it. Here's some bits from earlier in the article:

For many Chicagoans, [democracy] is a frightening prospect. Those who've been around for a while recall that the last seriously contested elections took place during that brief period in the 1980s when the mayor of Chicago wasn't named Daley. This is now widely thought of as the Time of Troubles. The lesson many drew is that meaningless elections = peace and prosperity, whereas democracy = bad...

...However virtuous the system may look now, it wasn't put in place because of saintly considerations. Rather, it was meant to ensure that an electoral outcome a lot of people weren't too happy with never happens again.

The most famous mayoral election in Chicago history … well, I shouldn't say that; all the inter-Daley elections were pretty memorable. But certainly the one with the most dramatic consequences took place in 1983...

...white Chicagoans may not have been wild about the city's first woman mayor, but better her than the first black one.

Before I rip this article apart, just ask yourself this: to whom is it written? Who does the author mean when he talks about "most Chicagoans"? Who is "a lot of people" in Chicago?

[For a far more accurate account of the Harold Washington election in 1983 please listen ot the following excellent edition of This American Life on the subject here.]

Though the gloss given in "straight dope" suggests otherwise, the fact of the matter is that the way that most of white Chicago reacted to Harold Washington, who won the mayoral election fair-and-square (with far more grass-roots organizing and support than any Daley could ever hope to obtain), was absolutely outrageous and self-consciously racist. The way that the white-controlled City Council tried to thwart his reformist agenda was criminal and reprehensible.

But the tone of the straight-dope piece expresses none of this obviously unsavory truth. It adopts a tone of faux-objectivity that paves over the very real, disgusting attacks that Washington faced. It tacitly endorses the disgusting attacks by giving the voice of white outrage a veneer of credibility and universality. You'd hardly know from reading the article that white people make up only 1/3 of the population of Chicago- the article makes it sound as though "most", "many", "a lot of" Chicagoans are white, whereas a small fringe aren't.

Strangely, at one point the article complains that Harold Washington "split the white vote", but later on it defends the new (quite obviously racist) "non-partisan procedures" on the grounds that they force candidates to "appeal to more than one ethnic or racial group". This is flatly contradictory.

If Harold Washington indeed "split the white vote", then in what sense didn't he already have to "appeal to more than one racial group"? Moreover, if the "problem" for those wishing to maintain white political hegemony in Chicago was that Washington won by "splitting the white vote", in what sense were "non-partisan" procedures (which, if we believe Cecil Adams, are supposed to split the white vote) the "solution"? This is obfuscatory non-sense. On the one hand, the "straight dope" story is that Washington committed the sin of "splitting the white vote" and was, therefore, attacked by the Machine for having done so. On the other, we're told that the "solution" to the Harold Washington "problem" was the "non-partisan" mayoral procedure, which, we're told, has the virtue both of solving the Washington "problem" and forcing candidates to appeal to voters across racial divisions.

The fact is that the "power brokers" that the article seems to side with did not want there to be a Black mayor and they used every available means to try to thwart his plans and have him removed.

The article also suggests that most white Democrat Chicagoans voted for Washington, whereas some voted for the white Republican. In fact, 90% of white Democrats defected from their party to vote against Washington for the (white) Republican, whose campaign slogan was "Epton for Mayor: Before it's too late".

The bottom line is this. As I've noted elsewhere, the typical white racist line in Chicago is a Hobbesian one. Their paranoid, irrational view is that Chicago can either have (a) a chaotic, disastrous "rule of barbarians" if it allows full democracy, or (b) it can have an autocratic white ruler who "maintains order". Though some white apologists for the Machine may reproach Daley in certain respects, most consent to its top-down domination of politics insofar as it ensures the political subordination of the "barbarians", i.e. the people of color in Chicago who make up 2/3 of the population (1/3 Black, 1/3 Latin@). This is the politics of white paranoia playing itself out (listen to the This American Life episode for more details here.)

Despite the actual divisions, inequalities, and the demographics and history of Chicago, most of the mainstream white population in Chicago thinks it deserves permanent domination over the municipal and county government. Thus when a white candidate runs for Mayor, that's just "normal". But when a person of color runs it's "divisive" and "racially exclusive". As the "Straight Dope" article suggests, it's a "problem", it's "an outcome a lot of people weren't too happy with", which they want to make sure "never happens again".

This "analysis" of recent Chicago electoral politics seems rather nakedly racist. And it appears in affiliation with Chicago's so-called progressive publication no less. While The Reader is easily the best leftish news and analysis one can find in Chicago (certainly it's many, many light-years ahead of worthless tripe like the Trib or Sun-Times), I'm always bothered by how goddamn white (in the pejorative sense) the publication is. What I mean is that it is consciously written by and for a slice of the white population in Chicago but nonetheless understands itself to be a publication representative of the city writ large.

In reality, The Reader does not really express the needs or interests of people of color in Chicago. Indeed, even when it adopts a sympathetic attitude towards the other 2/3 of Chicago, it typically does so from an outsider, observer perspective, rather than from the perspective of fellow city-dwellers and comrades. It's not that I'm arguing that the Reader should focus exclusively on the topic of race and nothing else --but I think it's problematic how little it reflects the social or political interests of black Chicagoans. That can and should change.

Most of the time, there is not a lot of discussion of race in the Reader. So far as I'm aware, there is no regular input from a person of color in the paper about issues facing people of color. In a city so segregated that sociologists had to invent a new word to describe it ("hyper-segregation"), you'd think that the allegedly progressive publication in the city would be a bit more sensitive to the historic and ongoing subordination of black people in the city of Chicago. But apparently not. Hence you find ridiculous "maps" of Chicago among some of these folk which don't even bother to include much of the west-side or south-sides on the map of the city.

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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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