Over the past year or so, certain events in the politics of the developed West (particularly the passage of health care reform and the recent police brutality against G20 protests in Toronto) have made me wonder about the progressive political movement and how it has changed over history. At this point in time, people who seek progress - real, numerically quantifiable improvements in the lives of everyone regardless of country or class - have unparalleled advantages compared to our political ancestors. We have the Internet and modern telecommunications, which many in positions of power are trying real hard to keep limited so that they don’t compromise their ability to direct public opinion and popular consent, to varying degrees. (That China of all places couldn’t keep mass strikes under wraps was a surprise to me.) We have the ability to communicate ideas and do runarounds on censorship that the labour organizers of the 1800s or suffragettes of the early 1900s would have considered an answer to their prayers, and we are so saturated with that technology and infrastructure that kids around the world use it. It is more difficult than ever to hide an injustice in another part of the world, whenever the wealthy and powerful try to pass the buck. We have reached critical mass of popularity for a lot of progressive actions in many countries; homophobia, sexism, and racism are seen to correlate negatively with youth, and each generation will be less intolerant than its predecessors.
Has that spoiled us?
I started asking this question around the time the healthcare reform bill in the United States was being debated, and liberal dissatisfaction was becoming more loudly voiced. A lot of the left wing felt that they had been betrayed because they had voted an overwhelming political majority into office and were still unable to enact significant policy changes. My personal opinion was “you were expecting to vote real changes into being, just like that?”. It was cynical of me…but it was also informed by knowledge of history. Labour organizers did not just vote the right to strike and organize into being. It was bought with decades of protests, illegal strikes, organizations, and walkouts, and often with the lives of union organizers, as was the case in the Grabow Riot to list just one example. In countries where labour laws are weak, union organizers still run the risk of being murdered. Woman’s suffrage activists, by necessity, could not just vote the women’s vote into being. They paid for it with protests and hunger strikes. I have yet to hear of any health care reform activists being arrested, put in restraints, and force fed. It’s also not enough to say “oh that happened way back then”; the last atrocity is always sooner ago than we’d like to admit. The response to the recent protests in Toronto was abominable, but compared to the 1985 firebombing of the MOVE organization headquarters in Philadelphia, we got off easy. And so on. The electoral unrest in Iran should have been a reminder to everyone what the bad old days were like. (more…)
