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December 10, 2004 | Pages 6 and 7
WHEN SOCIALISTS talk about the need to transform society, we're often
accused of being unrealistic and utopian. ALAN MAASS answers this
objection.
ONE SEGMENT of progressives reacted to George Bush's victory in the
2004 presidential election with despair.
"Maybe this time," Nation magazine columnist Katha Pollitt commented
bitterly, "the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism,
pre-emptive war, order not justice, ?safety' through torture, backlash
against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government
largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway president."
Liberal author Garry Wills concluded that "Enlightenment values" have
been abandoned in the U.S.--and that the vote was driven by "the
fundamentalism of the American electorate." A Progressive magazine
editorial singled out "the American superiority complex, a profound
affliction that distorts our perceptions and enables manipulative
presidents to give the marching orders."
Such pronouncements fit with the cor****ate media's take on the
election--that the rural backwaters rose up against the cities, that
Bush's appeal to "moral values" and social conservatism was the secret
of his success and so on.
Actually, these claims are mostly wrong. For example, the much-hyped
statistic that 22 percent of voters said "moral values" was their
prime concern turns out to be the same result as the last three
presidential elections, according to the Los Angeles Times--including
two that were won by a Democrat. And Bush's biggest gains over his
showing in 2000 came not in rural areas, but urban centers--that is,
the places where John Kerry should have been strongest.
That's the real secret of Bush's success--the fact that Kerry and the
Democrats didn't give people reasons to vote for them.
Still, the election result will have led some people to wonder if the
goal that we socialists set for ourselves--a revolution to overturn
the power of a minority ruling class and establish a new system based
on democracy and equality--has at least been pushed off into the
future, if not proved unrealistic.
This highlights a point that is more im****tant than any analysis of
exit polls--that the 2004 presidential election is so different from
anything socialists mean by a revolution that drawing conclusions
about one from the other is pretty useless.
Election 2004 was a lifeless non-debate between the candidates of two
pro-capitalist parties who shared more in common than they differed
on. A socialist revolution is about political debate thriving in every
corner of society--and m***** of people taking action to use their
collective power to set entirely new priorities. Comparing the two is
like comparing a bushel of apples and an orange grove.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BUT ISN'T it utopian to talk about a revolution in the United States
in the first place? That's an objection that socialist hear all the
time.
Actually, the question isn't whether a revolution can take place in
the U.S. It's whether another revolution can take place--America has
already had two.
One of the strangest things about the U.S. is the fact that its
political leaders are committed to social order and the rule of
law--yet they regularly celebrate the origins of this country in a
bloody revolution that declared independence from British rule. The
American Revolution wasn't accomplished by signing the Declaration of
Independence, but through mass resistance and a years-long war of
liberation.
The revolution ended in the establishment of a radically new system
of representative government and probably the widest democracy known
anywhere in the world to that point. The new United States wasn't
consistently democratic--above all, the bloody crime of slavery was
left untouched. But it was a revolutionary advance over what came
before it.
The U.S. experienced another social revolution 90 years later--the
Civil War of 1861-65, which destroyed the Southern system of slavery.
The im****tance of this war is covered over today by myths about the
generals who fought it, nonsense about "Southern culture" and other
trivia. In reality, by freeing the slaves, the Civil War marked the
largest expropriation of private property at any time in world
history.
Credit for this revolutionary outcome usually goes to Abraham Lincoln
and perhaps a few army generals. But this ignores the role played by
countless other people. Black slaves themselves played a crucial part
in the struggle, as did the agitators of the abolitionist movement in
the North. So did the soldiers of the Northern army, who fought and
died to defeat the Confederacy.
These weren't socialist revolutions. Both left the capitalist system
of private property altered, but intact. But no one can claim that the
War of 1776 and the Civil War didn't fundamentally transform American
society--and not gradually either, but in one great convulsion.
The century and a half since has also been marked by enormous
upheavals. In 1919, for example, in the aftermath of the slaughter of
the First World War and despite a right-wing hysteria whipped up
against immigrants and radicals, the U.S. was swept by an
unprecedented strike wave that involved one in every five workers.
The high point was the Seattle general strike of 1919. Partly
inspired by the 1917 revolution in Russia, more than 100,000
workers--in a city of 250,000--honored a call by the Seattle Central
Labor Council for a general strike to stop the bosses of the city's
huge ****pyards from breaking the union. Suddenly, Seattle was
paralyzed--its rulers powerless to re-impose order. But even more
impressive was the way workers organized to provide essential services
during the strike--essentially running the city collectively through a
General Strike Committee made up of representatives from the striking
locals.
There are other examples from 20th-century America. The 1930s was the
decade of the Great Depression, when millions of families were plunged
into poverty and desperation. But it was also the decade when workers
won unionization in basic industries.
The 1950s are remembered for McCarthyism and the anti-communist
witch-hunts. But they were also the years when the formative struggles
of the civil rights movement took place. In the decade that followed,
this movement rose up to smash the apartheid system of Jim Crow
segregation in the South--and inspire other struggles that shook
American society to the core, from the movement against the U.S. war
on Vietnam, to the women's movement, to the struggle for gay and
lesbian rights.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MANY OF the claims that America is deeply conservative and its
population content have been heard before--especially during the
1950s, the era of the so-called American Dream.
In those years following the Second World War, there was an element
of truth to this. For a majority of U.S. workers--certainly not all,
but a majority--the system seemed to deliver modest increases in
living standards and the promise of a better life for themselves and
their children.
But the American Dream is dead today. The last 25 years have seen a
huge ****ft in income distribution in favor of the very richest
Americans. In the four years since a recession began in early 2001,
median household income has declined once inflation is taken into
account.
For those who were always stuck with the short end of the stick,
conditions are worse. African Americans continue to suffer an
unemployment rate twice as high as the national average--while bearing
the brunt of the politicians' law-and-order incarceration boom.
Meanwhile, many of the reforms won as a result of the civil rights and
Black Power movements--from affirmative action to overcome
discrimination, to poverty programs to give a small leg up to the most
vulnerable--are being dismantled but fast.
Given all this, it would absurd to claim that U.S. workers are
content with their deteriorating living standards today--much less the
more violent, war-filled and polluted world they live in.
Opinion polls show that ordinary Americans are far from devoted to
the priorities of the Bush administration. One survey by the Wall
Street Journal, for example, found that more than half of those asked
would be willing to pay $2,000 a year extra in taxes to guarantee
health care for those who don't have access to it. The same sentiment
exists around funding for public education.
And for all the ranting of the Christian Right, a consistent majority
of Americans believe that abortion should remain legal, and more than
half sup****t some form of official recognition--either marriage or
civil unions--for gays and lesbians.
This last issue--gay and lesbian rights--is especially im****tant
because it represents a dramatic ****ft in attitudes in just the last
decade--despite the continuing backwardness of the political debate in
Wa****ngton, under both Bill Clinton and George Bush.
There's no reason to believe that working people have been hoodwinked
into accepting declining standards of living. And the truth is that
these conditions are growing worse over time, not better, and with no
sign of a turnaround.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE POTENTIAL exists for our side to take action over many, many
issues. What determines the level of struggle is confidence and
organization. And the last several decades have been a period of
retreat for the labor movement, the struggle for African American
rights and other progressive causes. This has had an impact on how
people organize to fight--even whether they fight.
Unions, for example, have been hammered by Cor****ate America's
attacks since the late 1970s, with the pro****tion of organized workers
dropping steadily to 13 percent today--even less in the private
sector. One major reason has been the passivity of union officials in
the face of this offensive. The leaders of organized labor believe
that strikes and militant action--especially when that means breaking
the law--are methods of the past that do more harm than good. Instead,
they've devoted their resources to winning favor in Wa****ngton.
Backing Democrats has been disastrously ineffective for unions. But
organized labor's defensiveness is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Every
battle with employers that unions duck with only a token fight or no
fight at all adds to the strength and confidence of the other
side--and weakens ours.
These are the cir***stances that lead people to conclude that they
can't win--and are better off making some concessions in order to keep
their jobs, rather than take the risk of striking for more.
But saying all this doesn't mean we should accept the stereotype that
working people in the U.S. are apathetic and conservative. The level
of class struggle remains low, but in every city in the U.S., there
are fightbacks all the time, around many issues--strikes, protests
against police violence, demonstrations for gay marriage, opposition
to anti-immigrant attacks.
The most obvious example is the opposition to Wa****ngton's war and
occupation of Iraq. When the Bush gang was preparing for its invasion
in early 2003, millions of people turned out for demonstrations and
protests across the U.S.--not to mention the rest of the world. This
prompted the New York Times to declare that "there may still be two
superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public
opinion."
Unfortunately, the U.S. election put a brake on antiwar activity this
year--most of all because leaders of the movement threw themselves
into sup****ting John Kerry, even though he was pro-war. But this
doesn't mean that the Bush administration has succeeded in making its
war and occupation popular. Far from it. The brutality of the
occupation--and the ever-growing number of casualties among U.S.
soldiers--has set the stage for the movement to take off again.
When struggles do emerge and link up, they can develop with
remarkable speed. This was the case, for example, when the Teamsters
went on strike against UPS in 1997. In the midst of the so-called
"miracle economy," the mainstream media were forced to stop their
happy talk and investigate the issues of cor****ate greed and declining
living standards that the strike brought to center stage.
On a bigger scale, something similar can be said about the high
points of struggle in U.S. history. The great labor uprising of the
1930s was preceded by the 1920s--when the ruling class was on the
offensive, and the established labor movement seemed to be bankrupt
and dying. Likewise, the radicalism of the 1960s was preceded by the
conservatism of the 1950s.
Im****tantly, the civil rights struggles of the 1960s were born years
earlier with lesser-known fights, involving modest numbers of people,
initiated during a period we remember as profoundly conservative. For
the individuals who were willing to make their voices heard, there was
no guarantee that they would eventually defeat Jim Crow. On the
contrary, the racist system appeared to be all-powerful, capable of
defeating all challenges. But it was defeated--and history was made.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE IDEOLOGUES who defend the status quo are always ready to proclaim
the "end of history"--a period of social calm and conservatism. But a
society built on injustice and inequality will never be entirely
pacified. That is the lesson of the most brutal police states, and it
is also the reality of societies like the U.S. that present a veneer
of democracy and liberty.
When struggles do emerge, they always start small. But these early
battles are crucial in forming the ideas of people who will go on to
take the larger steps. For example, the Black college students who
joined the civil rights movement in the early 1960s were motivated by
relatively conservative ideas about taking their place in the
capitalist system.
A few years later, many SNCC members considered themselves
revolutionaries. They had been through the Freedom Rides to
desegregate interstate bus lines, the murder of civil rights workers
during the Freedom Summer voter registration project in 1964, and the
Democratic Party's betrayal of civil rights delegates at its 1964
national convention. These experiences convinced them that the
struggle against racial injustice could only be won by linking it to
the fight against other injustices--and by fighting for a different
kind of society altogether.
This transformation was repeated throughout the 1960s and early
1970s. College students who volunteered for Freedom Summer used the
skills they learned from the civil rights movement to organize the
struggle against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Veterans of the antiwar
movement in turn launched the struggle for women's rights, including
the right to choose abortion. The modern gay and lesbian movement was
born in 1969 with the formation of the Gay Liberation Front--an
organization named after the liberation army in Vietnam.
The media love to heap contempt on the struggles of the 1960s today.
But they are proof that ideas can change with enormous speed. In
periods of such upheavals, millions upon millions of people who
focused their energy on other things suddenly turn their attention to
the question of transforming society.
This is what makes revolution possible--mass participation. The
caricature of revolution passed off by many historians is of a small
group of armed fanatics seizing control of the government and running
it to enrich themselves. But this has nothing to do with genuine
socialism.
The decisive moment of any real revolution comes, as the Russian
revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote, when m***** of people "break over
the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside
their traditional representatives, and create by their own
interference the initial groundwork for a new regime."
This moment is only the final act of a revolution--the climax of a
much longer period of struggle in which the rulers of society face a
growing crisis, at the same time as workers become more confident of
their own power.
At the beginning of the process, the goals for change can be
modest--a few reforms in the way the system operates. But the struggle
raises deeper questions, and people begin to see the connections
between the struggles that they're involved in and other issues--and
the nature of the system itself.
Obviously, we are years away from upheavals on this scale. In fact,
the difficulty today is that so much of the organization and
initiative for struggle has to be started from the ground up. But
given the history of this country, it would be foolish to claim that
revolution is impossible-- however passive the media ****trayal of
society is.
Revolution is not only possible in the United States, but it's
absolutely necessary and urgently needed to put an end to poverty, war
and oppression--and create a new society dedicated to justice and
freedom.
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/523/523_06_Revolution.shtml
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