A leader in the revolutionary left in the US should feel like a fox in a chicken coop.
Increasingly large capitalists (Walmart, Enron, Wall-Street) are being exposed as so destructive to our society. The Bush administration creates global chaos and suffering. Attacks on democratic rights are expanding.
Thoughtful people in all strata of our society realize that there are dangerous trends that need to be met with positive alternatives. Young people, and leaders from all sectors, are open to new ideas including the notion of system change.
In other parts of the world resistance has and is being converted to system change. We see this taking place particularly in South and Central America as countries shift to the left.
In our own country, though, the social movement remains marginal despite deepening anxiety among the majority of our people who increasingly oppose the war, are economically insecure or in outright poverty, and witness the dangerous impact of the destruction of our environment.
Yet despite these optimal conditions, the left remains marginalized.
I believe that a major reason for this marginalization lies in the powerful intellectual influence in the liberal and left community that:
- Is comfortable in being only opposed to the current model of development, but fails to get about the work of creating a competitive model for sustainable development consistent with our vision of social justice. Finally, great numbers of people are only willing to organize and take the risks that go with change if a practical, comprehensive, and positive alternative is available; and
- Is an intellectual and liberal left that is uncomfortable with the market - seeing it only as the arena for the corrupt and greedy rather than a required terrain for our work.
To truly build a powerful revolutionary left, we must recognize that the market is not simply synonymous with Low Road capitalism.The dominant trend in today’s left regards the market only as a capitalist construct. This simplistic view reflects the intellectual superficiality of this trend on the left, as well as the powerful influence of the traditional Soviet and social democratic model for socialism that sees only the state as the defender and protector of society. The extension of this thinking is the one-sided view that the people (businessmen and women, employers, etc.) and the structures, like the “corporation,†that emerge in the market are only tools of capitalism and have no role in a socialist transformation of society. The simplistic generalization that sees the “corporation†as the enemy is the most destructive intellectual construct in our movement. It denies us critical alliances and diverts us from information and work that are fundamentally important and productive in building a competitive model to the neo-liberal capitalist policies. Of course, we have corporate enemies that must be exposed and blocked; but there are important tactical and strategic corporate allies in the business community that we must align with and bring into our movement. These include part of the 8 million privately held small companies that must find local solutions and partnerships if they are to survive. This includes innovative technology people and environmentalists that truly are inventing essential new technologies for the next century. And this includes leaders in the investment community truly committed to sustainable development.
A socialist society would use the power of the market to extend democracy and promote sustainable development.For the social movement, the market has too often been one-sidedly, simplistically and tragically viewed as only a terrain for Low Roaders. This abstention unnecessarily cedes to the Low Road capitalists the critical arenas for production, defining work, technological progress, knowledge, democracy, among other things. As the Low Road trend comes to dominate business - and engages in the predatory and cannibalistic practices so regularly exposed in stories about Wal-Mart, major oil and other extractive companies, and the investment community - this creates a crisis that begs for a revolutionary solution: a fundamental change in the social relations of production. In every revolutionary transformation, a new class needs to replace the old leaders of society responsible for creating wealth, technology, and driving development. In today’s world, this means a broad labor movement and its allies need to demonstrate their capacity to lead development and production as a pre-requisite for gaining the support necessary for a revolutionary transformation. To succeed in this effort requires the recognition that there is also a High Road trend in business that can be in tactical and strategic alliance with us and including managers, entrepreneurs, owners, investors, and consultants. New leaders in production require partners, training and resources. And it is always better to have more friends than enemies. As a movement for change, we must prove our ability to successfully contend in the market as well as the state and civil society. We must demonstrate our ability to win over key strategic and tactical allies - particularly in the business community - as a prerequisite for prevailing in the critical arena of the marketplace, as a complement to our struggle in the state and in civil society. We need to contend and not sit on the sidelines and whine.
email2friend
I agree with the analysis. I only wonder
how it will be possible to undo generations of backwards
leftwing thought and action with regards to the market.
It seems to me that we market-oriented progressives
might need to spend more time organizing with the business community
and less time with traditional left wing allies in order to get anything done.
I think it will happen relatively easily for the
small section of the left that takes ideas and critical
thinking seriously, and particularly those who
are really engaged in one or more aspects of
economic development to be won to the argument about the market.
We definitely need to spend
more time engaging the business community–particularly
the smaller firms that really depend on or could benefit
from a meaningful partnership with others.
I agree with you on your assessment about our ‘traditional left wing
allies and find that the overwhelming majority of
them are “stuck” and relatively comfortable as
part of a group with a strong social identity as
the rebels or critics. I spend very little time
with them, although as is the case with Solidarityeconomy,
we should provide access to this and other
discussions.
I’ll jump into this by reposting here a piece from a recent pre-convention debate in the CCDS (Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism) between myself and Mark Solomon, one of their co-chairs, on exactly this topic.
In response to the two previous posts, I’m for working in all sectors, but most strategically, I’d prioritize those sectors that are a) insurgent and b) younger. The reason? This is were the militant organizers and fighters will come from. Here’s our problem: many of the young insurgents are enamored with semi-anarchist, anti-market leftism of one variety or another. But I wouldn’t let that turn me away to another sector. ‘Patiently engage’ is the watchword, I think.
Anyway, here’s the back-and-forth between Solomon and myself:
The Upside and Downside of ‘Anti-Corporatism’:
More on the ‘Progressive Majority’ Discussion
By Carl Davidson
[Since our meeting is approaching quickly, I'm replying quickly. But I hope more folks soon jump into this discussion. --CarlD]
Mark Solomon: Carl is right that I would not disagree with the need for an unsparing analysis of what we in CCDS and on the left in general can actually accomplish on the critical planes of strategy, policy and organization. Nor would I disagree with his contention that the forging of that majority requires a ‘base community,’ of organized left forces and left program as mandatory starting points upon which to seek alliances…
At the same time, is ‘anti-corporate’ politics fully negative?
Carl Davidson: Of course not, few things are. Generally speaking, the history of US corporations, past and present, is full of spilled blood and outrages, not to mention the exploitation in the ‘normal’ functioning of all of them — ‘exploit’ in the strict sense of ‘used for profit.’ But that’s not really the point here.
I posed the strategic question, ‘Who are our friends, who are our enemies?’ in the fight against the right — and we can raise the same question in the fight for socialism as well.
The problem, to my way of thinking, with ‘anti-corporate’ is it’s neither here nor there. In the fight against the right, it’s too ‘left’ or narrow, in the sense that we have already agreed in the previous round. In the fight for socialism, it’s too ‘right’ in the sense of vagueness and avoiding a postive affirmation of what socialism means in today’s world, given the crisis and collapse of much, but not all, of ’second wave’ socialism.
The same can be said of ‘anti-capitalism’ or ‘anti-imperialism.’ If we mean by these terms raising people’s consciousness about the nature of corporations, or capitalism, or imperialism, then fine. I have no problem with that. But that still doesn’t deal with the question of strategy or tactics.
MS: Can it be separated from defeating the right?
CD: In a critical sense, yes. It has to be, if we are to avoid the ‘left’ cul-de-sac. In the immediate and even transitional task of defeating the right, we have to segment the business community, or capitalist class, and I suggested the ‘High Road / Low Road’ formula or, roughly, ‘productive capital vs speculative capital’ as a starting point. This is not unlike what Dimitrov did in his day, targetting not all corporations or all imperialists, but segmenting and narrowing the target on ‘the most reactionary, most chauvinist elements of finance capital’ — the ‘Low Roaders’ of his day, if you will.
This is beyond the scope of this discussion, but even in a strategy for socialism, not just defeating the right, we have to segment the world of capital. Take the ‘third sector’ of nonprofits, some of which have amassed huge quantities of capital. They have a right, center and left, and there is no reason, at least theoretically, why the left and center nonprofit corporations couldn’t be an ally even for a long period of socialist reconstruction.
MS: Isn’t a growing public animus toward corporations a key path to opening exploration of deeper systemic change? Opinion polls show that majorities across social lines view corporations as vessels of greed and unfairness. Some ninety percent believe that big business has too much influence over government while only two percent consider corporate executives ‘very trustworthy.’ Despite media disinformation, perceptions of the assaults on public health by pharmaceuticals, profit gouging by oil companies, downright criminal practices by WorldComm, Time Warner, Bristol Meyers, Hallliburton, Tyco and many more, leave little room in the public mind for the complex sorting out of the corporate world’s good, bad and ugly.
CD: Yes, but what do you make of it? Here I’m rather orthodox, in the sense that I see this spontaneous ‘anti-corporatism’ as not unlike the spontaneous ‘trade union concsiousness’ that emerges from the struggle between worker and employer. We work within it, but we don’t bow to it or tail it. It is the task of revolutionary education, in the context of mass practice, precisely to transform this consciousness into something else, into revolutionary class consciousness, at least among the advanced fighters. And I mean ‘class consciousness’ in Lenin’s sense, of understanding all the classes, their factions and their interplay, including race and gender, not just a heightened sense of ‘workerism.’
MS: Liberals tack more to the left on corporate assaults on democracy than perhaps on any other issue. William Greider recently attacked the ‘demands imposed by capital and corporations that stunt or stymie the full pursuit of life and liberty in this complex industrial society.’ Robert Borosage has written; ‘corporations build not only the ideological arsenal of the right but also the money wing of the Democratic Party.’ He goes on to say that corporate influence has been pivotal in government-fomented undermining of the labor movement and in spawning the virulent racism and sexism that produced Reagan’s ‘welfare queens’ and Clinton’s ‘welfare reform.’
CD: Yes, but these writers paint with too broad a brush. What do they make of their favorite corporations? Even though problematic, look at what George Soros alone did to fund the effort to oust Bush in 2004, or what Bill and Melinda Gates are doing with health in the third world, or what Google is doing to help Gore around ecology? Even more important, what strategic solutions do they pose? In brief, they cater to the spontaneous anti-corporatism, and fuel it, but they come up short in strategies and alternatives, don’t they?
MS: That raises a larger question not explicitly addressed in Carl’s paper: the claims of class and race in building a progressive majority. The working class may be all over the left-right-center ideological map, as Carl has claimed. But ultimately, the objective relationship of that class (including, of course, its huge awakening immigrant component) to capital makes it the most reliable agency in framing the issues that bind a progressive majority.
CD: Not ‘may be’ all over the map. The working class, qua class, IS all over the map politically today, despite it’s ‘objective relationship’ to capital. We might think it OUGHT to be, as you put it, ‘the most reliable agency framing the issues,’ but is it? Which speakers for it from which sectors? Is the working class, as a class, framing the issues most reliably on immigration? Perhaps some parts of it, such as Latinos, in a relative sense to some other grouping in some other classes, but generally speaking, I don’t think so, at least, for the class or the labor movement as a whole, in any practical leading role.
Believe me, I would like nothing more than for the working class, even its more advanced contingent, to ‘frame the issues’ in a radical or revolutionary way, and take the lead. I’ve seen it happen in how the VVAW folks in the 1960s brought a proletarian perspective into the antiwar movement, then and now, or how the Black workers movement in Detroit in the 1970s had an impact on the Black liberation movement then, so I know it can happen. But I’m long past thinking there’s anything ‘automatic’ or ‘objective’ about it, at least in the sense of dogmatically insisting on it in broader alliances when it has yet to actually emerge in practice.
MS: Similarly, the right’s racist and sexist core mandates the resolute commitment of a gathering progressive majority to nurture its unity and breadth by making anti-racism and anti-sexism institutionalized aspects of the coalition.
CD: Here we agree. The right is using, first, the restoration of an eroded patriarchy (anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-feminism), and second, racist chauvinism, especially towards the Black poor, immigrants and Muslims worldwide, as its spearhead battering rams. And the most prominant starting points for a wider alliance against the right are the women’s rights organizations, the Black church and prison rights groups, and the immigrant rights groups. Starting with our base communities in the peace and justice movement, we can form alliances with these forces, and build upwards and outwards from there.
MS: There are some questions regarding Carl’s definition of the center. Rejecting my view that the center has no systemic political philosophy, Carl claims that there is a systemic centrist politics: ‘redistributionist liberal capitalism’ joined to ‘a foreign policy to defend US interests and project the values of liberal capitalism globally.’ Isn’t that definition dated and out of step with recent shifts in the outlook of much of the political center? It is more an echo of Arthur Schlesinger’s ‘Vital Center’ of the late forties (or the ‘cold war liberals’ scorned by the sixties’ New Left) that heralded the cold war assault on the Henry Wallace Democratic Party left.
CD: I don’t think so, especially if you update your view of redistributionist liberalism through the lens of globalization. I divide the top ranks of the ruling class today into ‘globalists’ and ‘hegemonists’, depending on whether they are maining trying to maintain a ‘unipolar’ world or accomodate to a ‘multipolar’ world. The ‘center’, by its nature, has a top, a middle and a bottom, running the range of imperialists down to ordinary working-class voters and nonvoters. In this sense, the Clintons, Kerry, Soros, et al, at the top, are ‘center’ voices of the globalist faction among the imperialists, as opposed to the hegemonist faction headed by Bush today. In this sense, our goal is certainly to win over the ‘bottom’ and ‘middle’ sectors of the center, and find ways to work with as much of the top as we can. In fact, doing our work well at the center’s base will enhance our prospects at the center’s ‘top.’
MS: Today there is a resurgence of sorts of this viewpoint. New Republic’s Peter Beinart’s ‘The Good Fight: How Liberals - and Only Liberals - Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,’ tries to resurrect the muscular ‘internationalism’ embedded in the containment doctrine pressed by Truman, Humphrey, Kennedy and Johnson. (This trend is replicated in Great Britain in the ‘Euston Manifesto’ that rejects the alleged anti-imperialist ravings of the far left while opposing perceived regressive and reactionary regimes.)
This trend has not always been consistent - especially when its ‘internationalism’ degenerates into neocolonial quagmires, prompting this ‘center’ to complain that the containment doctrine had been misapplied. That happened with Vietnam, where a segment of that current broke with the war and joined left and center-left forces in an uneasy antiwar alliance. To a considerable extent that is happening again with Iraq - making it possible to forge at least temporary alliances with such forces against the war.
CD: I agree, but again, I see this as best explained by the emergence of a globalist or transnationalist sector of capital, distinct from traditional multinationals, and their conflicts with both the ’sole superpower’ mentality and the strictly nationalist sectors of capital in each country.
MS: However, the reactionary kernel embedded in the ‘defense of US interests’ most likely consigns a good part of that center defined by Carl to implacable opposition to a progressive foreign - and domestic - policy. In the wake of Vietnam, a significant segment of the Humphrey-ADA contingent, as ever committed to ‘fighting communism,’ went over to the neo-conservative right. That’s where the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick and a host of others live today.
CD: Yes, but now they’re dissolving PNAC (Project for a New American Century), the Necon home base and lobby for war with Iraq, splits have emerged, and some are heading back to the Democrats.
MS: Observers like H.D.S. Greenway of the Boston Globe and Helena Cobban of the Christian Science Monitor have commented that a consequence of the Iraq adventure is the long term weakening of centrist support for US military interventions. That is a long way from anti-imperialism, but in view of the fact that clashes over foreign policy have often been the primary obstacles to cooperation between left and center, this is a significant development and a harbinger of better days ahead for coalition building.
CD: I agree, but all the more reason to develop a ‘high road’ approach to globalization, rather than American nationalist isolationism or protectionism.
MS: Carl’s critique provokes an important exploration of what we mean by the center and where to seek alliances. For the sake of advancing discussion, I would argue that the broad center would be represented by the National Council of Churches and community-based liberal religious organizations; the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, scores of professional and service organizations, those white workers who supported Jesse Jackson in the eighties, etc. Perhaps we also need to consider literally millions who characterize their views as ‘moderate’ and how that fluid and unstructured public relates to efforts to build a progressive majority.
CD: This is OK for starters, even though I would put ‘white’ workers who voted for Jesse on the left rather than the center.
MS: Some might argue that a first-step left program would have to be more immediate and less abstract - for example: universal health insurance, restoration of labor’s right to organize, vast expansion of public sector spending on education, heath, housing, etc., a living wage in a (relatively) full employment economy, advancing and strengthening laws against racial and gender discrimination, abolition of nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction, reversal of discriminatory trade policies, etc.
CD: These are all fine, but they are limited to expanding political and social democracy, or wealth redistributionism. What’s ignored here are the critical areas of popular control in the market economy and the creation of wealth. And these latter areas, important for their own sake in empowering the working class, are also critical to transition to Economic Democracy and a new 21st century socialism. This is where we need to break new ground, and where a left can distinguish itself. That’s my point.
I completely agree with Gunn’s assessment of the causes for the left’s marginalization. Based on the network of social/environmental justice organizers that i am part of, I feel that although we are developing the next generation of leadership, as a whole we are still heavily influenced by the “old-school” vanguard and way of thinking. Those who got their political starts and were active in the 60s and were able to sustain their political engagement despite living through the very real trauma of living through a society of a revolution unrealized, they are the ones who founded the next generation of non-profits with missions based on the strategies they knew how to do best - organize working class and people of color communities - but still without any meaningful relation to the economic machinery that keeps those communities in poverty. There are of course some notable exceptions to this, but from my vantage point, the old vanguard are still the prestigious core leadership of the left, and are the revered mentors for my generation, so much so that my generation of organizers has inherited a relatively narrow view of how to organize in our communities.
But I have a lot of optimism that my generation are not yet the old dogs incapable of learning new tricks. I find that when i do talk to my peers about the need for developing the solidarity economy, the distictions between high and low road, the use of the market as a tool for our communities, they are for the most part very receptive… and it has occurred to me that the real limitation is accesss to this information. Where in the normal course of their lives have they or will they ever learn about Mondragon, economic democracy and other related case studies and concepts? We are so isolated as the left in this country that we continue to recycle strategies from the 60s in ways that keep our communities as marginal elements. Yes, there are valuable lessons to be learned from that era, but we need to really make our solidarity economy movement’s priority to get the word out, another economy is possible and is already underway. I applaud current efforts that are putting curriculums, workshops and other educational outreach together. I make that a priority in my work and look forward to helping others do the same…
When I consider that every 12-year-old girl in the country, through teaching each other and group self-organization with hardly any adult help, knows how to build online social networks using IM tools (that’s Instant Messaging for you old folks) and that the young left in Korea and the young Chicanos in LA, used precisely these tools to mount massive demonstrations, then, yes, you have a great number of ‘new tricks’ to teach us ‘old dogs.’
Carry on, comrade…
[...] More evidence that a re-alignment of sorts is already underway… Here’s some genuinely thought-provoking material from SolidarityEconomy.net: The Left, the Market and the Struggle for Socialism To truly build a powerful revolutionary left, we must recognize that the market is not simply synonymous with Low Road capitalism. [...]
[...] Much of the left and activist movement is finally only comfortable with the mechanisms of the state as the defender of public and economic interests. Not that all the aspects of redistribution aren’t important—they must remain a key foundation of our efforts. They are required but insufficient as I argue in my earlier article on markets. [...]