It’s not violence, insurrection. It’s not guns and bombs and prison camps and purges. The conventional wisdom is wrong and ahistorical. There is only one defensible means of social change at the general level. That is the use of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation.
For info about nonviolent resistance- the popular seizure of political power through mass democratic action- check out Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy(free PDF, just under 100 pages) and the superb new book by Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution. I read the latter over the weekend, it’s a quick, funnier, and less technical version of From Dictatorship to Democracy.
There’s a nice three-minute video released today by Al Jazeera America, part of a much wider collection of material on the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It’s about playground accessibility, which is a struggle that has emerged largely in the aftermath of the ADA. Indeed, in the year I spent on a county disabilities commission, the ADA compliance committee (its most important part, since they decide how to spend limited grants from the state and federal governments) spent a huge chunk of time on playgrounds. Basically no playgrounds created prior to the ADA met code. Like all other structures, they have to evolve with the many amendments to the Act, which have made many new areas in violation.
How tax money is spent is a reflection of a society’s commitment to their ideals. The United States prioritizes defense spending above programs that would help implement what the Constitution and American idealism espouse. Indeed, how much time and attention is paid to playgrounds can tell us much about the larger social justice struggles of the 21st century.
The news of a third bailout deal for Greece has been a dagger in the heart of many on the left- not only in the country itself but all over, including in America. Facing an incredibly powerful, entrenched economic system, success against banking interests elsewhere are an important morale booster. The joy of SYRIZA winning the January election has been completely wiped clean. Its campaign promise of ending “blackmail” and “humiliation of the Greek people” are proven hollow. The only successful response to the financial crisis in Europe was the decisions of Iceland to nationalize banks, forgive debt, and strict capital controls. Other countries in Europe recovered quickly, yes, but creditor countries like Germany with strong control of the financial institutions that dictate monetary and fiscal policy are different from countries like Spain and Greece drowning in debt.
The path of Iceland seems similar to what has been proposed by SYRIZA’s Left Platform. What will become of the Left Platform? It seems that they are likely on the way out- many were rebelling at a previous, less harsh austerity package put before Parliament. For the past few years I have been impressed at the degree of left-wing unity within the party, with social democrats existing in the same structure as hard-left Maoists and eco-socialists. However, the last few months have shown that the largest component, the Prime Minister’s more moderate group, has carried the day and negotiated something similar to what center-left Pasok has. It serves as a warning to all attempts to construct a popular front- socialist unity is key to creating legitimate political alternatives, but if the party itself has a very fundamental divide, the radicals may end up providing political support for something they would never have tolerated if it has come from the usual sources.
Shining like ten thousand suns is the truth about SYRIZA: it is unable to have a coherent, substantively different alternative about austerity. In a country like Greece where austerity is the driving force of all social and economic issues- from poverty to the rise of far-right politics- there is no policy position more important.
Beyond Greece, radical politics in other countries like Spain are dealt a terrible blow. The Podemos party along with the socialist left were looking to be the “Spanish Syriza“. It is jarring to see that phrase turn toxic so quickly. Seven years into the debt crisis and there has still not been a major country in Europe that has developed a plan for liberation. The technocrats in the European Central Bank and the IMF carry the day, having never truly been challenged.
There will be more chances, of course, because austerity will drag this crisis out for many, many years to come. These zombie banks in debtor countries that are being eternally propped up with borrowed money, allowing finance to be valued above people.
Neoliberalism has been one of the most destructive ideologies in the past century. While the club is mostly just fascism and Stalinism, neoliberal policies by the IMF completely destroyed countries in Africa and Latin America. Note that when Greece missed its payment to the IMF a few weeks ago, the phrase was that Greece was the first developed country to default. Developing countries have default dozens of times, some like Argentina have do so often that it becomes predictable. The sun rises in the east, the Pope is still Catholic, and Argentina is underwater financially again. What has been different about neoliberalism from fascism is a sense that fascism could be (and has) been defeated- both in war and through regular politics. Because of the sorta-factual, academic veil that exists with neoliberalism, the narrative has always been it is an inevitable progression of human civilization. Phrased that way it is a capitalist clone of the Marxist theory of history, which is similarly rigid and presented as science.
A reason I joined a socialist organization is that there are now real attempts to go on the offensive and dispute the seeming inevitability of globalization, a race to the bottom, and stark inequality. The move for a $15/hr minimum wage all over the United States is a very rare thing indeed: business interests, large corporations, conservative politicians and everyone else who made a huge fuss about it didn’t win. They won some caveats, but they lost the biggest battle. It was an offensive campaign by workers and regular people.
SYRIZA did not find their own offensive campaign against austerity. A group within their own party had a plan, but the economics of the banks and their political allies won out over resistance.
It is a sad day for Greece, but it is not the end. If the people do not end austerity, austerity will end them.
Corporate takeover of Pride illustrates a new victory of capital, that in the process excludes everyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of acceptability.
This pie chart of the groups listed on the website of Chicago Pride, which was held last month. The actual portion of a modern major-city pride parade that is specifically about LGBT+ communities and their struggle is tiny. As was seen with the legalization of same-sex marriage, a portion of the least radical sections, whose demands avoid issues of class and race, are now a market for the same regular capitalist crap as everyone else. This pie-chart shows an event about the queer community, but dominated by corporations, politicians, and institutions that are still in the hands of white, heterosexual men. Being “gay-friendly” and marching in the parade has gone from being a political and moral statement to something to put in the annual report brochure.
Never mind that millions of queer individuals, who don’t fit into the gender binary or the heterosexual institutions like marriage that form the narrow bounds of acceptability. The renaissance of alternative pride events attests to the contradictions of the mainstream ones. Simply put, the forces of capital cannot share a stage with radical, anti-oppression, anti-capitalist groups. Any event with fancy multinational conglomerate sponsors has to be swept clean of ideas and ideologies that challenge the basis of racism, homophobia and transphobia. To the newly gay-friendly corporation, things are also best done without a serious conversation about intersectionality, an issue that is often ignored even in non-corporate settings (for instance, a long-running conflict in the feminist movement about who sets the tone, and how oppression is not uniform among all female-identified people). The new capitalist LGBT+ construction is simple (not really interested in most gender identities and sexual orientations), uniform, and commoditized.
But this is the battle that all civil rights movements have to eventually deal with. Martin Luther King is often used in commercials these days, after all.
I finally wrote a full post on this tension I’ve had since September 2014 when I gave a guest sermon. This is based on “Not my father’s religion”, published in 2007. The contradictions in what UUs promise to do in the world and the distance they’re willing to do the radical things required is difficult. As an impatient young UU this bothers me- lots of people who were 60s radicals but have now settled down and ditched the needed politics.
Here it goes.
May 28, 2015
“Nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines (and dead armadillos)”
This is not a lovely, soft sermon like many here. They are beautiful, but certain issues require a hardened tone. Do know that this is in the vein of Frederick Douglass, the greatest black orator in American history, when he told a group of Unitarian abolitionists, the UUs of their day, that he loved them all but would give them Hell for these twenty minutes.
The issue starts as the central point of “Not my father’s religion” by Reverend Doug Muder, from UU World. In it, he explains why his working-class factory worker father goes to a conservative Lutheran church, and not the one he preaches at. The article, which a masterwork of cutting through assumptions and stereotypes, comes to the conclusion that UUs have very few working-class members, and their beliefs contribute to that.
From an upper middle-class professional core, members don’t see the insecurity and danger in the world that regular laborers do, and often spend more time talking about the homeless than the near-homeless. There is always a danger of hidden elitism- when we use the term “flipping burgers” we often devalue that working at a Wendy’s is hard, unrewarding toil.
This taps into what I’d like to talk about, something that guided a 2014 guest sermon I gave called “And Society at Large”, which was about that Principle Five of the Seven Principles we cherish calls for democracy in all of society, including economic democracy. For the purposes of the sermon and the fact that “economic democracy” is a wide-ranging term, I didn’t use words like “socialism”. But the message that many got was clear- the church needs to live up to its radical talk. This is a church that, bluntly, is the radical children of the 1960s teaching a much more watered-down set of values to their own kids.
One person who sat up after the speech to make an announcement irritated me. Two things were annoying- first, she was making a regular political announcement (though I know the contradiction given my sermon) in the church sanctuary that is normally done outside. And secondly, she credited me as the inspiration to talk about how she needs everyone to go to the Democratic Party offices to work on the elections.
The biggest blow was not that I think the Democratic Party is a dead-end for the radical and religious, though I do. It’s that she took my leftist message and turned it into the kind of milquetoast liberalism that gives the Party its nickname- the graveyard of social movements. It’s the repeated appropriation- of gay liberation, of black resistance, of the mass left-wing movements that defined the twentieth century in many places, including the United States. These groups become cogs in a party machine and lose their independence. The black American experience we are seeing with police violence is clear- some leaders have long since joined the party apparatus, and thus their criticisms have evident limits. The young insurgents that I admire so much have sometimes booed Al Sharpton off the stage, because they’re too smart to be sold on a plan that doesn’t work. Smaller groups cannot influence large machines in the way that big money and white voter issues do.
The organization I am a part of rejects the two parties and sees that the only way to gain economic democracy, egalitarian society, and all these things that by the Seven Principles we are morally obliged to strive for- is to build a working class alternative that lacks the compromises that define the two big parties. And I felt our 2013 campaign in Seattle was an example of what many UUs may one day see as necessary- a challenge to liberal Democratic politics that are too tied to businesses and interest groups to achieve change.
Running under the then-insane demand of a $15 an hour minimum wage, our candidate Kshama Sawant- an immigrant woman of color, organizer, and professor- beat him out by the slimmest of margins, winning almost 94,000 votes.
And what happens with that radical alternative. The $15 an hour wage became a reality in Seattle, and now spread to San Francisco and Los Angeles, coming soon in Chicago and Minneapolis, New York and Berkeley. A ordinance was passed to stop landlords from raising rents by more than 400% (!) to keep gentrification at bay. Homeless encampments are allowed to stay rather than broken up by police every week or so. And the new budget is the most progressive in the country, including record funding for homeless LGBT youth and looking to invest in mass transit. Currently the struggle in Seattle is over a large oil rig headed to drill in the Arctic- given the chance by the Obama administration- where hundreds of indigenous people and environmentalists block the way out with their kayaks and banners.
Idle No More indigenous activists in Canada block a highway.
In essence, the UUs need to change their principles or change their tactics. Many UUs will support the Democratic candidate, and I understand that. But without our own political power we will never win the victories that match our moral expectations. Indeed, when Democratic clubs all over Seattle held their 2015 endorsement meetings, they all came back with an endorsement in our district of “none of the above”- since our non-Democratic candidate cannot be directly endorsed. There is a split available more than ever in recent time between the establishment and the activists.
Unitarian Universalism would benefit from class diversity, just like it would from racial diversity, and more immigrants, and other things we discuss all the time. But class diversity is not going to be gained by tabling outside union halls and pawn shops. Our ideas are great but their expression is biased in favor of the well-educated, and those in communities that are not in crisis. I don’t see how a black janitor in a community where young men are being shot in the back will find our progressive ideals right for him, because they’re never communicated in the way he might see things.
Standoff between protesters and armed police in Ferguson, Missouri. 2014.
As the new generation, I understand that I will be on the radical fringe until I settle down, have kids, and pay dumb taxes. But since what the UU needs are people who might see my worldview as better aligned with theirs, I can’t just be flatly ignored.
We can do this. Let’s be the radical kooks that our ancestors were when they said that slavery was an abomination and rose up as whole towns to chase slave catchers out of the North. They were one moderate reformers, but they saw the Light that radical solutions were needed to serious problems. Abolition stopped being symbolic the moment it became extralegal.
The fist
clenched
is only a sign of strength
if done by thousands
and not ones and twos
isolated and rageful,
the injustice flowing like
table wine at a summer picnic
the flag
brilliant red
is only a sign of unity
if flown over streets
taken by pedestrians
turned rulers of the asphalt
for all this is their land
the revolution
true and lasting
is only a sign of progress if
we join together for a cocktail afterwards
to say that we did this.
It’s good to see Bernie Sanders go beyond the liberal Congressional ideas about reducing loan rates and providing tax credits, calling for free tuition that would end the United States’ status as a dinosaur in college affordability and availability.
SFT logo. Created by Andrew J. Mackay
The group I’m a part of, Students for Free Tuition, is about real solutions in education. These planks of free education aren’t even radical- it’s just an attempt to get back to higher education of yesteryear, when it was more affordable, and government assistance came from grants and not loans.
There’s a frame of thinking that voting and political participation is low because people are stupid or duped. I think it’s more so that the tepid, halfway solutions proposed won’t work, and most people know that. Free tuition makes all the sense in the world.
The new poll that finds almost half of UKIP voters admit to racial prejudice, but a large chunk of those don’t believe themselves to be racist. This goes beyond voters to the many UKIP officials at the local level who have been expelled for racist views, like Rozanne Duncan this month. Again, she says she’s not racist despite not apologizing for what she said.
This seems to be part of the larger devaluation of words in political discourse. If one can admit openly to prejudice but deny they are racist, the whole debate on what constitutes a racist loses its mooring and floats in the void.
Even more extreme individuals use terms like “racialist” or “racial realist” to describe themselves. People who use race to structure their view, and value one conception of race above another, find the word too toxic to apply. This is why language keeps migrating- political correctness has changed over the decades in part because terms gain toxicity from being used as insults, necessitating new, previously unused language. Racist is used as an insult in a way that racialist is not, because racialist was more or less invented in recent times. In that sense, words gain new meaning over time- and what constitutes a racist seems to change by the year. Apparently UKIP voters aren’t racist- they’re some new, replacement word.
Thanks to all who have read some part of this blog in 2014. Though this isn’t a blockbuster website, traffic did quadruple from 2013, which itself quadrupled from 2012. There is now a fairly active Twitter account tied to the blog (@MackayUnspoken), and almost 300 people subscribe through WordPress.
More content in 2015. There’s still chaos in central Africa, eastern Ukraine, and the Rohingya areas of Myanmar. Mass protests have stalled in Hong Kong, while radical left-wing party are on the brink of seizing power in Greece and Spain. We still live in an age of austerity, growing inequity, and environmental disaster. There is so much more to write about, because so much lies beyond the scope of cable news and social media. Immense problems need radical solutions.
Take care, looking forward to all this.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 8,100 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.
(article)
Unspoken Politics 