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Thursday, July 10, 2008 by Campaign for America's Future
From Uprising to Movement: Five Ideas
by David Sirota
Over at TPM Cafe, Jared Bernstein asks, “What steps ought we be taking
now that will ultimately give progressive uprisings a public conduit
through which their goals can be achieved?”
This is the $64,000 question -- or, in the age of the Iraq War, the $1
trillion question. Based on my re****ting for The Uprising, here are five
concepts I think we need to get comfortable with -- one is about our
focus, one is about structure, one about what we organize around, one is
about what instruments of influence we use, and one is about the methods
we must rekindle.
• Think Global, Demand Local . . . Or, Stop Obsessing About Chris
Matthews and Start Obsessing About Your State Legislator: The subject of
my upcoming newspaper column this week is the incessant focus on federal
politics to the exclusion of everything else. In the blogosphere, this
myopia is magnified, as more bandwith is spent fretting over what
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews tells his tiny, inside-the-Beltway audience than
what our own state legislator is doing to screw us over.
There is a huge amount of power at the state and local level that
progressives haven’t used effectively, in part, because we haven’t spent
much time trying to use it. According to the Progressive States Network,
more than a quarter of all Americans live in states that have both a
Democratic governor and full Democratic control of the legislature. Yet,
as many good bills that have passed through these legislatures, none of
these states have taken truly revolutionary steps. Again, that’s because
we haven’t focused nearly the resources and attention that we could --
and should -- be focusing on these arenas.
• End the Oxymoron of Autocratic Progressivism: Autocratic Progressives,
as I discussed yesterday, are those who think you can build a
progressive movement with anti-progressive, autocratic, top-down,
command-and-control structures. This is elitism at its worst. If we want
to take this uprising moment and channel it into a progressive movement,
then the movement institutions we build have to be small-d democratic.
Sadly, most of the much-vaunted new progressive infrastructure -- from
Moveon.org to well-funded left-leaning think tanks in Wa****ngton, D.C.
-- run the gamut from mostly undemocratic to completely undemocratic.
That’s not the way to build a movement -- and I say that not just from a
moral, pro-democratic standpoint, but from a pragmatic one.
There’s a reason the most durable and powerful social movement in human
history has been -- and remains -- the labor movement: it’s because that
movement is structurally democratic. The labor movement elects leaders
at all levels. Now, I’m not saying there haven’t been examples of labor
leaders trying to thwart democracy -- I’m not saying that at all. But
what I am saying is that at the structural level, the labor movement is
democratic -- and that democratic structure has given members a sense of
owner****p and control over their movement that does not exist in
undemocratic institutions. If we want this uprising to become a
progressive movement, we have to get serious about our commitment to
democracy.
• It’s the Economic Issues, Too: For about a quarter century now, the
Democratic Party has defined its orthodoxies only on social issues --
choice, civil rights, guns, etc -- not on economic ones. To know this
is true, consider this hypothetical: If a pro-choice, pro-NAFTA
congressperson was proposed as the keynote speaker at the Democratic
National Convention, this would be billed as not controversial, but if
an anti-choice, anti-gay-marriage, anti-NAFTA congressperson was
proposed as that speaker, it would be labeled a major controversy. The
orthodoxy, you see, is on the social issue -- not on the economic one.
Let me be clear -- social issues are really, really im****tant (and, of
course, I am pro-choice). But the problem is that the orthodoxy is ONLY
about social issues (the issues that are unfortunately more culturally
divisive), but not about economic issues (the issues that are more
cross-culturally unifying). To build this uprising into a full-fledged
progressive movement, that has to change. Movements are about building
wide coalitions -- and the uprising I describe in the book shows the
potential for trans-partisan, trans-geographical, trans-cultural
coalitions if progressives and the Democratic Party drop the limousine
liberalism that says as long as a politician is, say, pro-choice, it’s
OK for that politician to sup****t, say, job-killing trade policies that
have decimated the heartland. The most powerful movements of the the
past have been those that have powerful economic and class underpinnings.
• Elections Are Means, Not Ends: The flag-pin-feti****zing media tries to
make us believe that elections -- and specifically federal elections --
are the ends, rather than the means. This is amplified by a progressive
movement that is still struggling with Partisan War Syndrome -- the
sickness that says the only thing we have to do is elect Democrats and
our problems are solved. The entire frame of mind is, of course,
idiotically paternalistic -- we believe that the messianic politicians
will just hand down change from Mount Olympus, that all we have to do is
make sure the right messiah is on top of the mountain, and that trying
to use an election to pressure that messiah will threaten the messiah’s
ascent.
This is not how power works -- or has ever worked -- in American
history. Jefferson Smith is right: The most successful movements have
been those that meld the best of populism and progressivism, and I would
add to that those that have used elections as instruments of pressure:
They have used the politicians’ desperate desire to win election as a
way to get policy concessions and have seen politicians as vehicles for
change, not change unto themselves. When we tamp down that pressure
system, or try to transform a potential pressure system like the
blogosphere into merely an amplifier of one party or politician, we
ignore this history. As Dan Cantor of the Working Families Party told me
when I re****ted on third-party politics, the best kind of politician is
a nervous politician -- because you can get a nervous politician to be
your vehicle if you have done the hard, unglamorous work in the lead-up
to organize your movement.
• Remember That Thing Called Direct Action: Along with the paternalistic
view of politicians that comes from the obsession with federal elections
comes the potential to forget about direct action: the actions outside
the electoral arena that can change things. In my book, I detail a
number of these -- most prominently, the shareholder democracy and labor
movements.
The Establishment wants us to focus all of our energy on elections
because elections are the controlled space whereby popular ferment can
be contained by rules, regulations, etc. And without direct action,
republican democracy is truly disempowering: our only means of influence
are to beg the Very Serious And Im****tant Intermediary -- the
congressman, the governor, the president, etc. -- to do something on our
behalf. But there are many different methods of direct action -- i.e.
taking matters into our own hands -- that can wield a tremendous amount
of power.
Right now, the labor movement could go out and organize another 10
million workers without a single policy change in Wa****ngton, D.C. --
and if labor did that, it would increase its power not just in the
electoral arena, but in employer-employee negotiations, the place where
the real rubber hits the road on issues like wages, health care, etc.
This would be an example of direct action.
I’m not saying this would be easy -- nor am I saying labor isn’t trying
to do this already, nor am I saying who is in office wouldn’t make it
harder or easier for labor unions to accomplish this organizing task.
But when I met with organizers at WashTech (the union trying to organize
high-tech workers in the Pacific Northwest), they were way less
concerned about who is president and who is in Congress than they were
about whether they could simply go out and convince enough workers to
join their union. Same thing with shareholder activists that I
accompanied to ExxonMobil’s 2007 shareholder meeting. These activists
weren’t focused on who is ahead in the presidential polls; they were
focused on getting as many shareholders to vote for their resolution.
This is the lost legacy of direct action -- a legacy that progressives
must spend a lot more time rekindling.
David Sirota is the author of The Uprising.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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