Left as an Exercise

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.

Even more disturbing than this ignorance of history among the left was the willingness to ‘take our toys and go home’ among some elements. The Democrats don’t give us health care or cap and trade in the first two years of the Obama administration? Vote ‘em out and we’ll get real Democrats next time!!!…as though any progressive policy victory in history could have been possible without long and continued legislative and public pressure. There never was any option besides a tentative first step, and that’s what I felt the HCR bill should have been viewed as. Celebrate its passing, and get ready to fight for the next one as soon as possible. If Americans want that public option, it will probably be another several major Senate crises before they get it. Likewise energy policy reform. That is going to be at least three major policy battles, each one I predict being covered as “the last great step in energy policy reform” by the media. Hopefully we’ll get them out of the way in the next ten years. A single definitive victory just doesn’t happen for progressive causes, even when major legislation is passed; did racism disappear with the Civil Rights Act?

I apologize for the stream-of-consciousness structure of this piece, and the departure from the more reasoned essays on this site for a simple opinion dump. But I’ve had trouble finding the words to express my concern that progressivism has forgotten how to employ radical actions. I use “radical” in the sense that Howard Zinn used it, as someone who believes the political system is fundamentally compromised (as opposed to a “liberal” who thinks progress can come from within the system alone). By endorsing this radicalism I am not saying we shouldn’t bother with the system; you can be pragmatic, and you should always vote for the causes important to you. I merely hold that working within established political systems is nowhere near sufficient. I also want to state that being radical doesn’t mean endorsing violent action. On the contrary, violence in the name of progressive causes would not only be immoral but counterproductive. The “system”, as much as there is one, has law enforcement and the state military on its side, along with a media that loves stories about dangerous extremists to sway public opinion with. Violent action is still playing by the system’s rules, and as the recent events in Toronto demonstrated, it’s better at that game than us.

Real radical action, outside of the permitted boundaries of political activism, has been marked by an ingenuity and determination that refuses to let anti-progressive forces frame the conflict, as they do so easily now. Strikes. Walkouts. Boycotts. Humiliating satire as performed by the Yes Men. In the case of HCR, I considered the possibility of forming extralegal health insurance cooperatives, where populations of middle class earners agree to pool funds to pay for each others’ medical care in case of emergency, managed in the style of consumer and labour cooperatives like Mon Dragon. It probably wouldn’t be a viable alternative, and it would be vulnerable to extralegal fraud, but if phrased in terms of “would you rather be screwed by your neighbours or insurance company execs?”? If you found an alternative that could drive consumers from the private companies, you’d see a lot of the resistance to a public option weaken. Alternatively, there would likely be attempts to make these cooperatives illegal, which would be easy to exploit politically at best (”Senator X voted against hard-working Americans just trying to take care of each other!”) and political suicide if the cooperatives were actually popular enough to make an impact. That is the kind of creative, outside-the-rules, hit-them-in-the-wallet thinking that I don’t feel there is enough of in progressive discourse today. It’s just an idea, and not a very good one, but it illustrates what is lacking in our political discourse and strategy.

We need to realize that there is a lack here and it must be addressed. Let’s face it: if tweeting, voting, and making angry blog posts is all progressives can use in terms of strategy, then we have been crippled, in a devastating way, at a very bad time.