RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Author and Labor/Social Justice Activist Bill Fletcher Jr.

Rag Radio podcast:
Noted author and activist Bill Fletcher Jr.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime author, commentator, and labor, racial justice and social/economic justice activist, and an international solidarity leader.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 2, 2013

Noted author and activist Bill Fletcher Jr., was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 21, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Bill Fletcher Jr. here:


Bill Fletcher Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Sudies, an editorial board member and columnist for BlackCommentator.com, and past president of TransAfrica Forum. A graduate of Harvard University, Fletcher is a longtime labor, social and economic justice, and racial justice activist and an international solidarity leader.

After graduating from college, he went to work as a welder in a shipyard and has worked for several labor unions and served as a senior staffer for the national AFL-CIO. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns.

Fletcher is the author of "They’re Bankrupting Us" and Twenty other Myths about Unions, co-author (with Peter Agard) of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941, and the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social justice.

He is a syndicated columnist and a frequent commentator on radio, television, and the Internet. Find articles by Bill Fletcher Jr. on The Rag Blog.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

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Labor Activist : Bill Fletcher Speaks to Austin Audience

Bill Fletcher. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.
Bill Fletcher speaks to Austin audience:
Union organizing and class struggle

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 29, 2009

On Sunday night, March 28, Bill Fletcher, Jr. -- union organizer, historian, and strategist, and progressive political activist -- spoke at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin as part of the Third Coast Activist Final Sunday series. Responding to questions from UT-Austin Journalism Professor and Rag Blog contributor Bob Jensen, Fletcher said he’d be glad to take Glenn Beck on in a televised debate on class struggle.

Fletcher went on to discuss his views on working class organizing, coalescing with the community-based organizations, global capitalism, and the unprecedented income divide in this country.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr., is the co-author of Solidarity Divided, a book about labor’s role in the struggle for social justice, and is executive editor of The Black Commentator. He will speak again tonight, Monday, March 29, at 6:45 p.m., at the National Association of Letter Carriers Union Hall at 604 Williams in Austin. The event is open to the public.]

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : 'Flip the Script': Jobs over Deficits

Image from The Fiscal Times.
The Republican lock on Congress
means a strategy for the cities

If we are to fight it out on the economy, this will not happen in the Republican Congressional Districts. It is a fight that we will have to take up in cities around the country. It means social protests which are disruptive.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

There is a strategic question that faces progressives, one that is receiving increased attention. Due to the 2010 elections and the Republican domination of state legislatures, Congressional Districts have been gerrymandered in order to guarantee a lack of any significant electoral challenges. In other words, these Districts have Republican Congresspeople who are not worried about opposition.

As we saw in the lead up to the "fiscal cliff" negotiations/resolution, most Republicans felt no internal pressure to compromise. It is quite likely that they will feel little pressure in their districts for at least 10 years. As a result the sort of pressure that they must feel must transcend their districts and actually be more at the societal level.

What this means is that while progressives absolutely need an independent electoral strategy that builds locally-based organizations capable of successfully running candidates for office -- both inside and outside of the Democratic primary system -- that is insufficient.

In fact, it is the Occupy Movement that pointed us in the direction of the other leg of such a movement. What the Occupy Movement accomplished, among other things, was to change the social discourse. Despite every effort by the mainstream media to dismiss the Occupy Movement, it not only grew but forced the country to start to address the question of economic inequality.

In the current context the implications should be clear. If, for instance, we are to fight it out on the economy and specifically on unemployment, this will not happen on the basis of fights in the Republican Congressional Districts. It will be a fight that we will have to take up in cities, including but not limited to state capitols, around the country. It means social protests which are disruptive.

In order for this to happen we must actually re-train many social movement activists and thinkers in the lessons of the 1930s labor movement, the 1950s-1960s freedom movements (including but not limited to the Civil Rights Movement), the movement against the Vietnam War, and the work of the early environmental movement.

Occupy, in that sense, was onto something. We must carry out a fight for space as part of the fight for power. Land occupations, eviction blockades, boycotts, as well as mass demonstrations, are all critical. [Note: in fact, we need, right now, a series of REALLY mass marches for jobs.] In other words, the sort of pressure that needs to be brought about must be something that Republicans AND Democrats feel, and in fact, becomes a serious source of concern.

Before we find ourselves wallowing in self-pity as we worry about the Republican "lock," let’s rethink our strategy and tactics. We may be able to flip the script, and sooner rather than in the distant future.

This article was originally published at billfletcherjr.com and was distributed by Progressive America Rising.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a racial justice, labor, and international writer and activist. He is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com, the co-author of Solidarity Divided, and the author of They’re Bankrupting Us: And Twenty other Myths about Unions. He can be reached at billfletcherjr@gmail.com. Read more articles by and about Bill Fletcher on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Response to Bill Fletcher on Rethinking 'Hope'

Obama landscape: seeing the forest for the trees? Photo by Mark Wilson / Getty Images.
Returning to a grass roots agenda:
A response to Bill Fletcher
on Obama, 2012, and rethinking 'Hope'

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / April 27, 2011

[This is Tom Hayden's response to "Obama, 2012, and Rethinking 'Hope,'" by Bill Fletcher, Jr., posted to The Rag Blog, April 21, 2011.]

I agree with Bill Fletcher’s essay on how to approach Obama in 2012. I only wish to add these thoughts.

First, I knew very well that Obama was a centrist, because he declared himself to be at the midpoint between Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and “Tom Hayden Democrats” such as myself. I knew where things stood from the get-go. No matter how reasonably I described my beliefs, Obama would keep moving to the right of them in order to maintain his role as a centrist.

Aside from the frustrations this would mean for progressives like myself, it also meant that Obama was defining “center” in an unfortunate way. He apparently didn’t mean a midpoint between the 75 percent majorities and 25 percent minorities on taxing the rich, saving Medicare and Social Security, and getting out of Afghanistan. He meant staying in the middle between the poles he chose to consider relevant, which meant the far right and the middle, leaving the Democratic Party liberals stranded on many issues.

His call.

But now Obama has stranded himself, with a majority of Americans favoring “another candidate” in 2012, and a fall-off of about 30 percent among all Democrats and Latinos. His strategy obviously is to get Democrats and Independents to hold their noses and vote for him against an obnoxious Republican in 2012.

This, folks might do. I certainly will. On the other hand, Obama will have an impossible time mobilizing the same level of resources, organizers, and energy of his grass-roots campaign of 2008. So he could lose in some of the dozen states where he won by 1-3 points in that historic year.

I attended an Obama rally in Culver City, California, the other night. There were 2,500 people gathered at Sony Studios, in the district of progressive Congresswoman Karen Bass. The crowd was loyal, caring, supportive, but not inflamed as they were in 2008. The speeches, which were supposed to galvanize, were somewhat flat. People had the president’s back, but all were well aware that the road ahead would be hard and uphill.

I certainly don’t think that the President should throw red meat to his base if it harms him among the independents. But I think he should be aware that his careful parsing of words and positions leaves many people lacking their previous level of faith.

To be specific, does he really mean that he will let the tax credits for the rich expire in 2012, no matter the outcome of the election and negotiations with Republicans? Or is he open to an extension? No one knows, because Obama loathes absolutes.

On Iraq, will he really withdraw the remaining 50,000 troops, or is he open to a deal extending the occupation? On Afghanistan, does he plan a significant withdrawal beginning this July, or will American combat troops remain through 2014? Again, no one can be confident that they know.

On immigration rights, does Obama really have a plan to implement a “path to citizenship," or does he mean to make this a wedge issue with Republicans? Did he do all that he could for the Dream Act students? Or is he just trying to bring back the Latino vote in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada?

On Wall Street reform, will Obama really protect us against the return of the vulture capitalists? On campaign contributions, does he really intend to reverse the Supreme Court over Citizens United, or will he focus on raising 1 billion dollars for his re-election? On green jobs, does he seriously believe we can accept coal mining, deep water drilling, and more nuclear plants as part of the bargain?

Serious questions all. By keeping his base uncertain, Obama lowers our commitment to a point where we are going through a shared uncertainty about each other. If he seems to hedge his bets, so do many of us.

Back in 2008, we thought there might be a progressive upsurge that would keep Obama accountable to our agenda. It was a provisional experiment.

As things turned out, however, the big constituencies of the Democratic Party [like labor] have failed to come up with effective strategies to turn the economy around and end the wars. Perhaps the most interesting success of progressives, in my mind, was that of the brainy and well-financed LGBT network, which maintained the pressure to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." It was a remarkable victory, but even so the legislation contained loopholes actually allowing the military to stall.

In 2012, like most of us, I will campaign and vote for Obama, not because he is the Second Coming, but because the alternative is unimaginable, and his administration is staffed with all sorts of intelligent and creative people who are open to progressive pressure and thought.

In fact, I will take pleasure in trying to engage the American public in a debate about Tom Payne versus Ayn Rand, Keynes versus Milton Friedman. I think we are at a historic turning point in our culture when so many white people are incapable of accepting the election of a black president. For these extremist “birthers," Obama is symbolic of the Illegal Aliens undermining traditional white culture. They pose a serious internal threat; even the Homeland Security Agency warned in 2009 of the rise of right-wing violence due to the election of a black president and an economic recession.

Like Bill Fletcher, I hope we can return to the grass-roots agenda of trying to shift public opinion and building state and local power bases capable of creating blue-state models of social change and competing with the corporations to push Obama towards applying his experience of community organizing to making the presidency a progressive bastion.

Most on the American Left have internalized the idea that only social movements can make a president progressive, citing the examples of abolitionist pressure on Abraham Lincoln and workers’ pressure on Franklin Roosevelt. That’s a huge step towards understanding how history works from the bottom up.

But the plain fact is that the American Left, unlike our counterparts in Latin America and Europe, has been unable to build an infrastructure of parties, unions, media, and artists capable of the daily work of organizing to compete politically while fostering counter-communities of lasting meaning.

The reason that education, health care and social services are more affordable, that green politics is more viable, that labor protections are stronger on other continents is that there are stronger social-democratic, radical, and green parties with popular support in those parts of the world. They resisted the impulse to empire and war, and tried to develop and improve their lives at home.

There is little Obama can do about that. He plays with the cards he is dealt. He is both the commander-in-chief of a global network of power, and a leader elected on promises of deep reform. He cannot be both.

We cannot fight wars over oil and make the deep commitment to energy conservation that is necessary. How do you reform empire when we are four percent of the world’s population consuming 40 percent of the world’s resources? When becoming more “competitive” means keeping the rest of the world at bay and at risk?

Obama is the symbol of the new globalization processes unleashed in the world, still under excessive influence of those banking elites who Lula refers to as “white people with blue-eyes." Perhaps the American Left needs to study the political experience of social movements in countries where, when forced to leave their empires behind, a better quality of life was discovered, waiting all along.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published at TomHayden.com. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Alice Embree on Political Activism : Carry it On

Alice Embree, holding sign, participates in anti-war vigil at Texas State Capitol, March 19, 2008. Photo by CodePink/Austin.
On my political activism:
Carry it on

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2010

[On March 30, Long-time Austin activist David P. Hamilton wrote an article in The Rag Blog announcing his "retirement" from political activism. He discussed his disillusionment with Barack Obama, whom he worked hard to elect, and with American democracy, which he considers "irretrievably corrupted." For David, the passage of a health care reform bill that he considered a sham was the final straw, and -- at 66 -- he said he's "passing the torch."]

I’m responding to David Hamilton’s retirement notice posted on The Rag Blog last week. Everyone should get to retire or take leave from the movement for social justice. It’s never been a paid job and the benefits certainly haven’t included major medical or dental care.

We don’t need burn-out. But we desperately need persistence. We all must find a balance between what replenishes and what depletes us. For years I have identified with Marge Piercy’s poem, “To Be Of Use.” But, her guidance in “Spring Offensive of the Snail” may be more important.

I cannot live crackling
with electric rage always.
....
This time we have to remember
to sing and make soup.

We can’t lose faith in the struggle for social justice because Obama delivered an expanded war and a Wall Street bailout and failed (never really trying) to deliver a public option for health care. If our faith was in electoral politics, it was misplaced.

My post-retirement activism has been both rewarding and difficult. Bush’s election in 2000 was discouraging, but was nothing compared to watching the hopes of a worldwide peace movement dashed in March 2003 and Bush re-elected in 2004.

I have found strength in the efforts of others -- Cindy Sheehan sitting in a ditch near Crawford; CodePink with their theatrical stunts and dogged determination. I’ve found hope in an emerging GI movement that I support with work on a Killeen coffeehouse. I’ve turned out for Texas State Employee Union campaigns and felt the solidarity of a statewide union. I’ve supported the organizing efforts of immigrant workers. I’ve picketed a private prison that housed children and seen it shut down by persistent community organizing and dedicated attorneys. In El Salvador I was an election observer to an historic left victory. I’ve chronicled some of this for The Rag Blog.

At the same time, I’ve been dismayed by the escalation of war and the inept presidential leadership on health care. I’ve been saddened by the earthquake in Chile and truly disheartened by the election of a right-wing president in a country I care for. There have been plenty of setbacks.

In Austin, the beloved “progressive” city, I’ve watched East Austin get re-shaped by developers with hardly a murmur from progressives. Dismissing the term “gentrification” as too polite, union organizer and writer Bill Fletcher, says: “We need to stop the class and racial cleansing of our cities... where workers are being driven out of cities...” A piece of this might be ending -- in the simple name of democracy – the costly, at-large electoral system here. Austin is the only large city in Texas with this legacy representation.

Decades ago, Mariann Wizard wrote a farewell poem to Austin entitled “Sweet Suck City.” That is what I often think of this town, so steeped in its own coolness.

On March 8th, I was impressed by the International Women’s Day event in San Antonio -- it’s 20-year staying power, its link to the current struggle of hotel workers, its multiculturalism. I’m sure it’s easier to admire that coalition from afar than to invest the day-to-day effort it takes to maintain unity. But, trust me, I haven’t seen anything like that kind of coalition work in Austin, Texas.

So where does this take us? What is to be done? For starters, make some soup, tend the basil, and then read Howard Zinn’s, You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train.

Walk the dog and then think about what small thing you can do. Give a donation to the Workers’ Defense Project. Host a fundraiser for Iraq Veterans Against the War. Help Killeen’s Under the Hood Café. Help subsidize community organizers who want to attend the next U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

This struggle isn’t about Obama. I heard Bill Ayers describe Obama very well at a SXSW panel. “He’s a centrist and an ambitious politician.” Ayers recounted Obama’s answer to a campaign question about whom Martin Luther King, Jr. would support. Obama responded, “He’d be building a movement.”

Bill Fletcher, a labor union strategist, said Monday, “As a socialist, I know something about socialism. Obama is not a socialist.” But, Fletcher didn’t apologize for voting for Obama. During the election season, I registered voters, made some calls, walked some precincts and went to a county convention. Those hours spent were a drop in the bucket compared to meetings, vigils, marches, fundraisers, and other events invested in social justice causes.

I believe that electoral politics is a game stacked for capitalist centrists. We don’t have proportional voting in this country that allows smaller parties to gain some long-term representation and traction. We have a winner-take-all, electoral-college system. And now, with the Supreme Court decision, corporations will be given even more decisive electoral power.

Progressive change has always happened in this country through organizing and demanding change of politicians. What we need even more than activists at this time are organizers. We cannot concede organizing to the right wing.

A union friend of mine reminded me that the left often likes to hold up a flag and see who will come to them instead of going to people. Whether it’s through “working people’s assemblies” as Bill Fletcher suggested or through other means, this is a time not to mourn, but to organize. Fletcher reminded a roomful of union folks that F.D.R.’s New Deal didn’t happen in a vacuum. Union leaders came to him with a set of demands and he said: “Make me do it.” They organized. He responded. That’s how change happens.

But do remember to tend the basil, enjoy the grandchildren, and make the soup.

[Long-time Austin activist Alice Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and a member of the board of the New Journalism Project.]

Also see "David P. Hamilton : On My Retirement from Political Activism" by David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2010

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Betsy Leondar-Wright : Class and the Political Moment

Protester in Olympia, WA, February 16, 2010. Image from the Washington State Wire.
Five well-known leftists, five strong opinions:
What’s needed at this political moment?

I was struck by how openly they disagreed [and] by how passionate all five of them are about creating a more just society.

By Betsy Leondar-Wright / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2012

Betsy Leondar-Wright and Gail Leondar-Wright will be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, June 22, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live on the web. Betsy and Gail will discuss their marriage, the gay marriage and LGBT movements in America, and the larger issues of class and progressive social change. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday, June 10, at 10 a.m. (EDT). After broadcast, all Rag Radio interviews are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

[The following article by Betsy Leondar-Wright was first published on June 12 at ClassismExposed, a blog published by Class Action, a nonprofit organization that was set up to provide a framework "for people of all backgrounds to identify and address issues of class and classism." The Working-Class Studies conference was organized by the Center for Study of Working Class Life at Stony Brook University in New York.]

At the Working-Class Studies conference on Friday, June 8, I heard an amazing dialogue Friday, June 8, about class, race, and movement-building by five progressive journalists and activist scholars: Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now!, Frances Fox Piven, Bill Fletcher Jr. of Blackcommentator.com , and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert of Demos, with conference organizer Michael Zweig, author of The Working Class Majority moderating.

I was struck by how openly they disagreed with each other in front of us 200 listeners, by how passionate all five of them are about creating a more just society, and by what vast depth of experience they brought to the panel. Here are some highlights:


Juan Gonzalez: We have to start saying “working class” again. When politicians say “the middle class,” their purpose is to exclude poor and immigrant labor from the American people. The key responsibility of progressives is to reject this concept of the middle class.

Frances Fox Piven: The Citizens United Supreme Court decision (allowing corporate personhood and unlimited secret spending on elections) raises the problem of propaganda in the U.S. We’ve always had corporate and elite propaganda, but now the problem is much worse. The complexity of the financial crisis makes populist organizing difficult. The Citizens United decision is responsible for the defeat of the Wisconsin recall vote (to remove anti-union Governor Scott Walker); we are watching the downfall of representative democracy. A disruptive movement is needed.

Bill Fletcher: Just as in the movie When Worlds Collide, in which only a few people can escape a collision of planets, the capitalist class senses an impending disaster -- and the disaster is all of us! They learned from Obama’s election and the Wisconsin recall (47% is a lot of people) that they can no longer rule through electoral politics, and they are debating among themselves what other means they should turn to. That’s the implication of the Citizens United ruling. The chickens are coming home to roost on unions’ failure to educate their own members.

Bob Herbert: The U.S. is in much worse shape than the media reveal. My next book is called The Wounded Colossus. 100 million people are poor or near poor, one-third of the U.S. population. Even the solidly middle class are in deep trouble, heading towards poverty, with the cost of college, homes under water, debt, health care costs, and no job security. We already were not a functioning democracy before Citizens United. President Obama won’t even say the word “poor,” only “the middle class.” There’s no way to replace 14 million lost jobs.

Frances Fox Piven: To revive working-class movements, don’t start with existing unions.

Juan Gonzalez: Latin America has broken free of the U.S. and gone in a different direction; so have parts of the Arab world, charting their own course. U.S. capitalists are desperate and are turning to re-conquering Europe by taking away its social progress. Immigrants are the most progressive portion of the U.S. working class. Think about the Republic Windows and Doors occupation!

Bill Fletcher: Economically precarious white people must come to see that Mitt Romney is not their champion. How can that happen? The difficulty in building working-class solidarity is race. Saying “middle class” symbolizes escape from the bottom, from poverty. It’s not about tactics; first we have to re-shape the concept of unions by re-defining class.

Bob Herbert: There’s no coherent message, no definition of “working-class.” The one unifying issue is employment. If you don’t address race you’re lost from the jump. If people aren’t educated about divide and conquer tactics, about how their interests coincide, about the common interests of all who work, we won’t be able to fight back against divide-and-conquer.

Michael Zweig: If we buy into the idea that “most Americans are middle-class, except for the poor and the rich,” we’re buying into a racialized concept, because “middle-class” is presumed white and “poor” is presumed black. It’s wrong: two-thirds of the poor are white, and three-quarters of African Americans are not poor. In New Orleans, John Edwards stood in the Ninth Ward [a mostly black neighborhood] to announce his “Two Americas” campaign, but there are more poor whites than blacks in Louisiana. When you allow that to stand, then poor whites say, “What about me?”

Bob Herbert: That’s an intellectual argument that won’t persuade white racists. Some whites don’t want to be associated with poor blacks. Just talk about jobs for all.

Frances Fox Piven: Bob says the two unifying issues are jobs and avoiding divide-and-conquer -- but jobs have long been the Right’s issue; stressing them will lead to President Romney. We over-rely on jobs, but we do care about what kind of jobs, paying how much, producing what, how ecologically. Pay more attention to race. When the Tea Party members yell “Take it back!,” they mean take it back from people of color. We have to have a dialogue on race to get solidarity across race.

Bob Herbert: It’s not going to happen. Racism is too entrenched. The evil-doers are too well-funded. Blacks will get more by fighting for themselves, like in the 1950s and ‘60s. We have a black president who won’t even say the word “black”! Cross-race solidarity won’t happen.

Bill Fletcher: A militant African American movement is not inconsistent with working-class solidarity. When blacks are passive, racism and division increases. When blacks are active, they chip away at racism. A majoritarian block won’t include all whites, but will include some. To deconstruct the racial myth held by so many whites, we need a strong left, not wishful thinking about a “kumbaya moment,” but really dealing with the class divide.

Bob Herbert: They are still two separate issues: a militant black-initiated movement for racial justice and a working-class movement. If you focus on race, whites will bolt; they won’t enter.

Audience member: There were several historical moments when many whites stood up for black rights, in the 1930s, the 1960s.


Bob Herbert: I vehemently disagree. Most whites voted against Barack Obama. Look at the voting rights attacks now, and the police doing stop-and-frisk in New York City.

Juan Gonzalez: The persistence of racism is amazing. It used to be that the U.S.was segregated in two homogeneous worlds, white and black. Today’s young people are different, even young whites; they live mixed-race lives. But the ruling circles need those divisions. We fail to understand the critical role of the mass media, the absence of working-class perspectives in the media. What newspaper is waging a campaign against inequality? We need independent media. Democracy Now! is a phenomenal success, but it’s just one show.


The discussion after the panel was heated, with lots of arguing about racism, unions, and movement-building strategy.

I noticed that the most pessimistic panelist, Bob Herbert, was also the one with the least activist experience; the most hopeful panelists were those who have been social change practitioners as well as political observers.

For myself, my reaction was to agree with Bill Fletcher and Frances Fox Piven that the solutions won’t be found just in electoral politics and existing unions; change will come primarily from movement-building and strategic campaigns of (nonviolent) disruptive direct action.

[Betsy Leondar-Wright is the Project Director of Class Action. She is the author of Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists and the co-author of The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Boston College.]

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Bill Fletcher : 'Enthusiasm Gap' and the Threat from the Far Right

Enthusiasm and voting:
The Far Right, and the immediate challenge

This is not the boy who cried wolf... There is an energized, right-wing army waiting to turn back the clock.

By Bill Fletcher Jr. / The Rag Blog / October 28, 2010

There has been a lot of discussion about the apparent enthusiasm gap between Democratic voters and Republican voters. While it is beyond question that the Obama administration has accomplished significant reforms in its first two years, the manner in which these have been accomplished, combined with the fact that they were generally not deep enough, has led many liberal and progressive voters to despair.

So, what should we think as we quickly approach November 2nd? First, there were too many magical expectations of both the Obama administration and most Democrats in Congress. Many of us forgot that while they represented a break with the corrupt Bush era, they were not coming into D.C. with a red flag, a pink flag or a purple flag. They came to stabilize the system in a period of crisis.

President Obama chose to surround himself with advisers who either did not want to appear to believe or in fact did not believe that dramatic structural reforms were necessary in order to address the depth of the economic and environmental crises we face. They also believed, for reasons that mystify me, that they could work out a compromise with so-called moderate Republicans.

The deeper problem, and one pointed out by many people, is that the Obama administration did not encourage the continued mobilization of its base to blunt the predictable assaults from the political right. As a result, many people sat home waiting to be called upon to mobilize. Instead, we received emails or phone calls asking us to make financial contributions, or perhaps to send a note regarding an issue, but we were not called upon to hit the streets.

Unfortunately, the main problem rests neither with the Obama administration nor the Democrats in Congress. It rests with the failure of the social forces that elected them to keep the pressure on. Too many of us expected results without continuous demand.

Ok, so now that we have gotten this out of our system, we have to face the immediate challenge. I am not going to list the positive things that have been produced by the Obama administration. I am also not going to list the bad calls or stands with which I disagree. I am focusing on those on the right attempting to move in, and frankly they are an unsettling bunch.

You see, my enthusiasm for voting rests on the fact that I am not interested in people who worship ignorance, intolerance, war, and the strengthening of a plutocracy increasing their grip on power and pulling this country any further to the right than it currently is. In other words, the challenge for progressives is two-fold: one, to beat back the irrationalist right; and, two, to move against the right-wing of the Democratic Party and to push for real change.

Liberals and progressives get called out every election cycle to defend the Democratic Party against the barbarians at the gates. We often do that and then turn away in disgust. Rarely do we either take on the right-wing in the Democratic Party or build up social forces that are energized about keeping elected leaders accountable. We keep talking the talk, but we do not follow through with the walk. When we get angry we talk about creating a third party, but we don't move a strategy to put the heat under the Democratic Party.

Well, we are now facing a moment of truth. This is not the boy who cried wolf. In addition to the Democratic Congress as a whole being under assault from the Republicans, there are some liberal and progressive Democratic elected officials who are under siege, and about whom we should be concerned. There is an energized, right-wing army waiting to turn back the clock. So progressives should be enthused right now; enthused to defend our friends, but also to defeat our enemies.

But we should also be motivated to put into practice a different set of politics. We have got to get off the defensive and promote a different sort of vision, an inspiring, progressive vision. That may mean that we part company with some elected leaders who call themselves Democrats, but the time has come when we cannot afford to simply push the button because we see a donkey. Frankly, I am tired of being kicked in the ass.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and the co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice. He can be reached at papaq54@hotmail.com. This article was also published at Progressive America Rising.]




Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : Obama, Progressives, and the White Nationalist Backlash

Image from Reckless Eyeballing.
Task for progressives in 2012:
Monkey-wrenching the white united front

It has been striking that many progressives have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2011

In the context of the criticisms that many of us have of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda, and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans, there is something that I have seen few progressives address.

To borrow from a comment offered by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Given this, what are the implications?

It has been striking that many progressives, particularly those who have not only written off President Obama but also written off all those who offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008, have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

We have witnessed the first Black president of the United States questioned about his citizenship and birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was put in a place where he had to file a petition in order to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate.

The murmurings do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other opportunists started asking questions about how it was that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten into those schools?), for most of us enough was enough. Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.

The white nationalist backlash is using Obama as the target but they are attempting to create a white united front to, in their minds, take back the United States. Part of this agenda means delegitimizing the democratically elected President, but it also goes towards tampering with election laws and voting processes in state after state.

In case you have not noticed, in many states where there is a Republican majority in control, efforts are underway to restrict voting, whether by further limiting ex-felons from voting, to eliminating same-day voter registration, to the demand for picture identifications at the time of voting, to the shortening of periods of early voting.

The objective is to reduce the potential anti-Republican electorate. This is being done by demagogically and inaccurately crowing about alleged voter fraud. But this happens through the Right racializing alleged voter fraud. In other words, as opposed to a discussion about real voter theft, e.g., the Republican theft of the 2000 election, the right wing uses black and brown characters as the way of convincing segments of the white populace that something needs to be done, otherwise these colored peoples will be taking over.

The racist attacks on Obama, then, fuse with the larger right-wing narrative: the United States of America is being lost to white people. This has been the core of the Birther message, but it has also been the core of the attacks that contributed to the collapse of ACORN, as well as the blitzkrieg effort of the Right to overturn voting rights.

In its more extreme version it is the core of the message that comes out of the fascist and semi-fascist movements among white nationalists such as the Sovereign Citizens (the subject of a segment of the May 15th episode of 60 Minutes).

What we are witnessing is disturbingly similar to the period of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the building of the Jim Crow segregationist system in the South. Appealing to fears among whites, and in a frantic effort to destabilize any efforts at unity between the black and white poor in the South at the end of the 19th century, white Southern elites moved an agenda of voter disenfranchisement, hiding behind various coded concerns such as the literacy of the electorate.

African Americans were completely disenfranchised, and quite ironically, so were many poor whites.

Despite our knowledge of history and awareness of the antics of white right-wing populism, few progressives are discussing the implications of any of this for the 2012 elections. The implications, it would seem to me, are quite profound, and range from what this means about HOW to criticize the Obama administration, to how to ensure that the elections are not outright stolen by the white Right.

Just to be clear before some of my critics start yelling that "Fletcher is covering for Obama," this column is about racial politics in the USA. The particular flashpoint happens to be Obama but what is at stake, as I have attempted to elaborate, is far more than the political future of a corporate liberal president.

Silence on the part of progressives in the face of this situation, despite our own legitimate criticisms of Obama, misses the larger picture. Yes, we must criticize Obama; yes, we must push this administration; yes, we must protest any retrograde domestic or foreign policies. But in the end, we need to be discussing how this is done in the context of fighting a white, right-wing populism that is arguing that Obama is an alien and that he (and the changing demographics of the USA) represents the end of the white "American Dream."

We should have no illusions that the Republican candidate for the presidency, irrespective of who gets it, will center their campaign on anything but this one, critical message.

I think it is time to talk about strategy and tactics in the fight for power and against the Right, and not only about matters of policy. Politics is dirty, but it is also very complicated, that is, if one exists in the real world rather than in one's own playpen.

[BlackCommentator.com editorial board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. This article was first posted at BlackCommentator.com and was distributed by Progressive America Rising.]

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : Rediscovering 'The Souls of White Folk'

Mural in Great Barrington, Mass., honoring African American author W.E.B. Dubois. Image from Progressive America Rising.
90 years later in the era of the Tea Party:
Rediscovering 'The Souls of White Folk'

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / November 22, 2010

"But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?" Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

--W.E.B. Dubois, from “The Souls of White Folk”

I am not sure what led me back to it. I had read W.E.B. Dubois’s "The Souls of White Folk" (originally published in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 1920) years ago. At the time I was moved by this often ignored essay but simply filed it away in the recesses of my memory.

Yet I returned to it. I had been thinking about right-wing populism and white nationalism in the USA and at some point I found myself Googling this piece. There were three things that immediately struck me: (1) by coincidence, it was published exactly 90 years ago; (2) it read, in many respects, as if it had been written yesterday; and (3) it was both passionate and poetic in its style, but equally biting in its critique of white supremacy and imperialism.

“The Souls of White Folk” was an essay written in the aftermath of World War I and the despicable Versailles Treaty of 1919 which formally ended the war. Mainstream historians often focus on the mean-spirited punishment that the Allied Powers brought upon Germany, thereby laying the foundation for World War II. Little attention is given, however, to the hypocritical attitude of the Allied Powers with respect to the colonial world, the "darker races," to borrow from the title of Vijay Prashad’s excellent book.

Representatives of the colonial world (including from Black America) gathered in Versailles to ascertain whether the Allied Powers (USA, Britain, France, Italy) would be true to their commitment to support the right of national self-determination. The future leader of the Vietnamese Revolution, Ho Chi Minh, was one such person who made the trek to Versailles, hoping that Vietnam, and the rest of Indochina, would secure self-determination.

Instead of receiving justice, the colored peoples of the world were ignored. The former colonies of Germany were either handed over outright to other colonial powers or they were placed into a League of Nations trusteeship, but in neither case were they able to secure independence.

Dubois observed this first hand, having attended the Versailles conference. He subsequently helped to convene a Pan African Congress in order to address the fact that the African world had been so overlooked.

“The Souls of White Folk” takes as its starting point an analysis of the origins of World War I. Rather than accepting the established notion that it was a war for democracy and self-determination, Dubois embraces the assessment that it was an imperialist war focused on the objective of gaining greater portions of the colonial world for this or that imperialist power. This was an analysis advanced by Russia’s V.I. Lenin at the start of World War I and for much of the Left it has subsequently become a basic truism.

“The Souls of White Folk” would be a powerful document if it simply stopped there, but Dubois goes further and in doing so makes this document one that cannot be read simply as an historical piece, but one that remains critically important today.

Dubois turns to the question of race and, in fact, white privilege, and demonstrates the linkages between race and imperialism. Dubois notes, for example: “Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo?”

For those not up on their World War I history (and no criticism is implied), much was made of the German subjugation of Belgium. Yet Dubois asks about the Congo, and this is not simply a throw-away line. Belgium, through King Leopold, controlled the Congo during which time it put to death 10 to 12 million people.

Dubois, of course, could not know what was soon to be facing European Jews and the annihilation of 6 million of them at the hands of the Nazis (who in 1920 were just getting organized), but that Holocaust received international attention, whereas the holocaust inflicted on the Congolese people was all but ignored at the time that it happened, in the aftermath of World War I, and, indeed, in the aftermath of World War II. For Dubois, imperialism was not racially blind.

Dubois situates the matter of race directly with modern imperialism. He makes the point that the degrading of this or that part of humanity has been with us for thousands of years, but that it is with the rise of modern Europe that we see the rise of what he terms “the eternal world-wide mark of meanness,--color!”

Race (or racist oppression) becomes a process of dehumanizing the targets of colonial oppression, turning them into something less than men and women and thereby making it easier to overlook their suffering.

This is what was powerful in his example of Belgium. It was not that Dubois was ignoring the suffering of the people of Belgium. Rather he was focusing on the fact that the so-called civilized world could so easily ignore the suffering and murder of so many millions of people in the Congo and elsewhere, people who happened to be black, brown, yellow, and red.

There is another piece to race that Dubois suggests, i.e., that it also dehumanizes so-called whites. Over the years this concept has gained greater scholarly attention, though for the "darker races" of the world it was a piece of common sense. We grew up with our parents suggesting “...in order to keep someone in the sewer you have to stay there with them...” and other such aphorisms.

As part of his critique of imperialism and racism, Dubois holds a mirror to the USA and says, much as Dr. M. L. King would say slightly more than 40 years later: “It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role.”

In reading this I found myself thinking about the role of the USA in the talks between the Israeli government and the Palestine National Authority, claiming to be the honest broker while ignoring Israel’s further aggression, most recently in the form of the expansion of the illegal settlements. But it is more fundamental than that: the actions of the Israelis represent a replication of those taken by U.S. settlers as they expanded West, taking lands from the Native Americans and the Mexicans.

“The Souls of White Folk” riveted me because of its continued relevance. At a moment, in the aftermath of the November 2010 elections and the victories (albeit complicated) by the political Right, I found myself thinking about the "souls" that inhabit so many white folk in the USA, souls that have been shaped by a perception of their own alleged superiority and infallibility as white Americans in comparison to the entirety of humanity.

These souls, however, resemble ghouls rather than angels as they haunt not only the victims of centuries of white supremacist terror, but also haunt the owners themselves, disfiguring them and, as Dubois so poetically puts it, rendering them less than human.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and the co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice. He can be reached at papaq54@hotmail.com. Fletcher is a member of the editorial board of The Black Commentator, and this article appears in the Nov. 18, 2010 issue of that publication. It was also posted to Progressive America Rising.]

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : Obama, 2012, and Rethinking 'Hope'

Taking a second look. Barack Obama "Hope" poster by Shepard Fairey. Image from afagen / Flickr.
Focusing 'Hope':
Obama and the 2012 elections

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / The Rag Blog / April 21, 2011

Rather than dwell on the question of whether we can bring Obama home, whether he ever was home, etc., I want to refocus on this question of how to respond to him, particularly as we start to think about 2012.

First, what do we now say about 2008? Contrary to those who have thrown up their hands and feel betrayed by what the Obama administration has not done, I start in a different place. I continue to assert that Obama was knowable in 2008. He was a charismatic, smart candidate who made the right call on the Iraq War and stepped out on the issue when it was necessary.

He was also, as I said at the time, someone who could appear to be different things to different people. The problem was that too many of his supporters saw what they wanted to see rather than what existed.

What existed? Well, from the beginning he was a corporate candidate. We knew that. The question was not whether he was one but the extent to which his views could be shifted in order to take progressive, non-corporate stands.

Second, he was a candidate who was going to avoid race as you or I would avoid a plague ship. He went out of his way to prove that he was not an "angry black man" and that race was not going to be an issue that he would harp on.

Third, he was clear that he wanted to change the image of the USA around the world, but it was not clear to what extent he wanted to change the substance of the relationship of the USA to the rest of the world.

Raising these and other issues in 2008 was exceedingly difficult. Raising concerns regarding Obama and his views in 2008, even when one offered critical support to the campaign (as did I), was often met with accusations of throwing a wet towel on a fire, and other such metaphors.

Of course, there were those who denounced Obama all the way, but they offered very little as an alternative, with the exception of what we must frankly characterize as symbolic political action. What these fierce critics failed to address was how to account for and speak with the masses of people from various social movements who were gravitating toward Obama’s campaign, individuals and groups looking to create something very different in the USA (and around the world).

In fact, it was because of these masses of people, incorrectly described as a “movement” by some but certainly an energized base, and the potential of that base to become a transformative force, that it was correct to critically support the Obama campaign, despite the limitations of the campaign and the candidate.

What did we learn? We learned immediately that it was a mistake to give any elected official, but particularly someone reflecting more "center" politics, a honeymoon. Virtually every social movement and organization stepped back in the interest of providing Obama space. It did not work. There was space, alright, but the political Right seized it.

We also should have learned that it is not about the "man" but it is about the administration. We African Americans tend to focus too much on Obama-the-man. We like his speeches. He is smart and seems to have a great family. He sounds so sincere. He understands and appreciates our culture.

That is all well and good, but Obama-the-man is not as important as Obama-the-administration. This became all too clear during the Honduras coup in 2009. A democratically elected government was overthrown in a coup. Obama initially condemned this but then did nothing to unseat the "coup people" (a term made famous by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, describing those who overthrew President Gorbachov in the then Soviet Union).

Not only that, his administration took steps to keep the democratically elected president out of office and came up with a so-called compromise that resulted in the forces of the wealthy elite returning to power. In that sense, it does not matter whether we like Obama as a person; it is a matter of what we say about the policies of his administration.

Of course, we had a more recent example of this when no one from the administration could quite explain why the return of Haitian President Aristide from South Africa was being opposed by the U.S. government. Does Obama like or hate Aristide? It does not matter; what matters are the actions of the Obama administration.

What should we do? First, we have to focus on policies rather than intent. Those who uncritically supported Obama in 2008 should not feel ashamed but neither should they now flip into despair or abstentionism.

We have to keep in mind that this administration, as all administrations, is affected by pressure. This administration SEEMS to be more affected by pressure from the political Right than pressure from progressives and those on the Left but that is largely because the left and progressives have failed to offer sustained pressure on the administration.

At each moment that many left and progressives stand up to the administration, they are more often than not met with bared teeth and a growl, which then results in silence on our part. The political Right understands that pressure is not about barking. It is about biting.

So, in this sense, it is not about bringing Obama home. It is about pressuring him not only to do what he has promised but to go beyond what he has promised. This will not come about through email exchanges or social media, but it will come about through building mass pressure. What could this look like?

1. Forget running a candidate against Obama in 2012. That would be a sure way to alienate much of his black and Latin base. Instead, there needs to be a progressive strategy focused on Congressional races. That means identifying key races to run genuine progressive candidates against conservative Democrats and/or Republicans.


2. We need to build an electoral organization that can run such candidates. There are examples of these around the country but we need to expand, ultimately building something at the national level that rivals the vision of the National Rainbow Coalition from the late 1980s. It needs to be an organization that has a mass base and can run candidates inside and outside the Democratic Party.


3. We desperately need mass action. Wisconsin was wonderful for many reasons but one important one was the sustained presence in the capitol. A protest movement focused on power needs to be prepared to break the law, not through the actions of a few individuals, but much as happened in Wisconsin, as well as in the Civil Rights movement, with masses of people making a situation untenable.
   
   But we also have to develop key strategic targets for our actions where we are clear on what we want them to do. This will largely happen at the local level at first, but it can also happen at the national level, such as through selective boycotts.


4. We have to think and act globally and locally. We must link with social movements around the world challenging U.S. foreign policy, providing such movements with whatever level of support we can. We cannot allow more Honduras coup situations, and we have to make it clear that U.S. policy in Afghanistan is a disaster.

None of these “to do's” had Obama’s name on them. That is because we are not simply confronting or attempting to influence an individual. We are up against an empire and the spokesperson for that empire happens to be someone in whom many people placed excessive hope. The hope should have rested with the millions who supported him and were seeking a better day. Those are the people upon whom we need to focus so that we can go beyond the Obama moment and move in a progressive direction.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Fletcher is a member of the editorial board of The Black Commentator, where this article was first published. It was distributed by Progressive America Rising.]

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BOOKS / Bill Fletcher Jr. : Gar Alperovitz and Visions of a New World

What Then Must We Do?:
Political economist Gar Alperovitz
and visions of a new world

The struggle for structural reforms is essential to changing the 'common sense' of the U.S. political arena. But it is not enough to wound the rabid beast; one must ultimately bring it down.

By Bill Fletcher Jr. / Jacobin / May 13, 2013

Gar Alperovitz, author of What Then Must We Do?, will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, May 17, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live to the world. They will be joined by Rag Blog economics writer Roger Baker. The show will be rebroadcast by WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday morning, May 5, at 10 a.m. (EDT), and the podcast will be posted at the Internet Archive.

[What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution, by Gar Alperovitz (2013: Chelsea Green); Paperback; 224 pp; $17.95.]

I read Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution with a level of skepticism. He set out to make an argument as to what can be done right now to demonstrate to a growing population weary of neoliberal capitalism that another world is not only necessary and possible, but that one can already see the first glimmers of that new world.

Alperovitz’s views are shaped by several assumptions. First, that actually existing capitalism is not working. Second, that socialism, as we have known it in the 20th century did not work. Third, that people need to actually see what an alternative world would look like in order to be encouraged to fight for one.

He then proceeds to identify actual examples of different struggles and projects that have been undertaken by progressives that show that a different way of organizing life and the economy is not only a great idea, but living realitiy.

Alperovitz spends little time critiquing 20th century socialism. For the most part he is interested in demonstrating that capitalist dogma, in particular neoliberal capitalist dogma, is both a myth as well as fundamentally unworkable. He suggests that there are projects that can be undertaken -- like worker cooperatives -- that will build power for the everyday person and actually move towards social transformation.

Advocating for these institutions, Alperovitz helps the reader to understand the differences that exist under the rubric of worker ownership, showing that there are forms of alleged ownership that really do not amount to control while at the same time there are processes that can be undertaken that alter workplace dynamics as well as the relationship of an enterprise to the broader community.

Alperovitz links his proposed process with what he sees as the next American Revolution. In that sense he believes that it is critically important that new transformative change in the United States must be rooted in lived reality in the country and also viewed by the public as “American.” For that reason, demonstrating to the “99%” that alternatives are underway and that they are not the creatures of foreign ideologies and foreign powers is absolutely essential.

What Alperovitz proposes are the equivalent of what has been traditionally known as “structural reforms” or in some cases “non-reformist reforms” along with a variation on what the Black Panther Party once called “survival programs.” This is reason enough that this book should not only be read but studied carefully.

The structural reforms and survival programs that Alperovitz is suggesting respond to the irrationality of neoliberal capitalism and the inability of the existing system to meet the needs of a growing percentage of the population. The reforms proposed are both clear and compelling and, in many cases, achievable.

In reading What Then Must We Do? I found it less a platform for revolutionary change than a platform for a frontal assault on neoliberal capitalism. To borrow the terminology of activist Carl Davidson, it is a program of a “popular front” against finance capital. It is the sort of platform and approach that can help to unite a broader progressive movement and make it more than the sum of its parts.

Alperovitz’s concern that the “99%” needs to see examples of the future is not grounded in 19th century utopian socialism. This book is not suggesting that various alternative experiments can be built, exist alone, and somehow convince the larger population -- by their example -- that this is the way to go. Rather he is suggesting that progressive and left forces undertake a multi-decade process of expanding democracy at all levels, within which the various experiments in alternatives are actualized.

Again, this is very much in line with certain more traditional leftist strategic directions regarding structural reforms and survival programs that can be fought for within the context of democratic capitalism.

But is this enough?


In the fall of 1988, I had the opportunity to tour Northern Ireland, meeting with the leaders of Sinn Féin. One of the areas to which I was introduced were worker cooperatives that had been established by Sinn Féin or its allies.

I arrogantly asked Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams what these cooperatives had to do with the liberation of Ireland from the British. Adams, very patiently, explained to me that, while these cooperatives would not liberate Ireland, at the same time the nationalist population was impoverished and needed a way to survive. With my tail between my legs I acknowledged the profundity of his point.

One of the strengths of What Then Must We Do? is that, much like Sinn Féin in the late 1980s, it is responding to an immediate challenge among the population. It is suggesting that there are things that can and must be done right now particularly within sectors of the population that have been largely written off by either the state or by private capital. The “dead cities” of this country come to mind, like Camden, which have become modern reservations for redundant populations.

A second strength is that the objectives that would fall more within the rubric of structural reforms actually do link with a larger democratizing movement that is necessary to take this country away from its drift toward neoliberal authoritarianism (or, for that matter, right-wing populism).

If thought of as part of a larger strategy, struggles around genuine healthcare reform, banking reform, or alternative economic development become battlegrounds not only in favor of the “99%,” but sites where the people are actually engaged in their own liberation.

But Alperovitz does not answer key questions. What, for example, is neoliberal capital doing while we are moving this democratization process? Alperovitz acknowledges that there remain dangers from the Right, including the use of violence. But this factor is critically important for all leftists and progressives.

The ruling power bloc has largely consolidated around a notion that huge chunks of this population -- at least 47%, according to Romney -- are nothing more than parasites and should be written off. They see no need, at least at the present time, to construct anything approaching an alliance with the working class generally, or organized labor in particular, along the lines of the New Deal coalition. Rather they seek to either crush the organized forces of the working class altogether or completely marginalize them.

While Alperovitz is correct to argue that this platform can be critical for a progressive movement, he may understate the challenges that face the Left. At each moment when we win, the forces of reaction not only seek to overturn the victory, but they also seek to overturn the means through which the victory was actually won.

None of this is to suggest that anything other than a movement for consistent democracy should be proposed. Rather, that the struggle that is undertaken in the name of structural reforms, survival, and democracy will inevitably reach a fundamental impasse with capital over the basic rules of society. At that point there should be nothing to lead anyone to believe that capital will handle this peacefully and humbly.

As a result What Then Must We Do? seems incomplete. I was persuaded by Alperovitz that a glimpse into the future is critical largely due to reality of the failure of 20th century socialism, or more accurately, what is better described as the crisis of socialism.

We are not, in other words, starting off with a clean slate. There are experiences with socialist and so-called socialist projects and those experiences are uneven in their outcome, and failed over the longer term to provide an alternative to capitalism.

Yet this does not mean that an evolutionary path into the future is realistic. That may sound contradictory since the direction proposed by Alperovitz is one that I praise. But one must remember the context: his book serves as a platform for a popular front against finance capital. It is not, however, a platform for a new society.

Where Alperovitz and I disagree seems to be on the question of how “elastic” democratic capitalism is and will be over the coming years. I think that democratic capitalism is far more flexible in adjusting to circumstances and crises than many of us on the political Left have believed over the decades.

At the same time, the combination of the economic and environmental squeeze leads me to believe that the ruling elite is on a mad dash to secure as much as it can while it can. If this means political disenfranchisement of millions through voter suppression and other efforts, or more direct forms of terror, there is nothing in the history of capitalism that leads me to believe that they will fail to exercise such an option.

Given this, Alperovitz’s platform is at best one component in a much more long-term socialist strategy. By this I mean not only the vigorous fight for structural reforms, but a level of popular organization and mobilization that ultimately pushes for a different constitutional framework, a fundamentally different arrangement in favor of empowering working people, an end to imperialism, and a new relationship between humans on planet Earth.

Such change necessitates a revolutionary transformation and an active process of eliminating the forms of oppression central to capitalism.

In using the term “revolutionary” I am emphasizing a break with actually existing capitalism rather than a slow transformation away from the current toxic system. Such a break, however, is not something that can be led by a small yet spirited sect, and neither is it something that is simply proclaimed. In that sense what Alperovitz suggests at the level of timeline is correct; we are speaking about a process over decades that is then followed by a process of actual transformation lasting decades into centuries.

For many this may all seem like a distinction without a difference, but the importance of clarifying this lies in both matters of expectations as well as strategy. The “Chilean option” succeeded in part because the forces around Allende underestimated what it would take to defeat the political Right. The struggle for structural reforms and survival presented by Alperovitz is essential in cornering the political Right and changing the “common sense” of the U.S. political arena. But it is not enough to wound the rabid beast; one must ultimately bring it down.

This article was first published at Jacobin / a magazine of culture and polemic." 

[Bill Fletcher Jr. is a racial justice, labor and international writer and activist. He is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com. His latest books are They’re Bankrupting Us!: And 20 Other Myths about Unions and Reimagining Labor Unions: Busting Myths, Building Movements. Find more articles by Bill Fletcher Jr. at The Rag Blog.]

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Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr. : Reimagining Socialism

Graphic from The Yellow Brick Road.
Rising to the Occasion: Reimagining Socialism

We see a tremendous opportunity in the bleak fact that millions of Americans have been rendered redundant by the capitalist economy and are free to dedicate their considerable talents to creating a more just and sustainable alternative.

By Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.

[This article appears in the March 13, 2009, edition of The Nation. The editors of The Nation preface it as follows: "Socialism's all the rage. 'We Are All Socialists Now,' Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists... have to say about the global economic crisis?]

If you haven't heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of capitalism, it isn't just because there aren't enough of us to make an audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say, 2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism--its ability to regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last three recessions.

But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how many times the electroshock paddles of "stimulus" are applied. We seem to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment. Any schadenfreude we might be tempted to feel as executives lose their corporate jets and the erstwhile Masters of the Universe wipe egg from their faces is quickly dashed by the ever more vivid suffering around us. Food pantries and shelters can no longer keep up with the demand; millions face old age without pensions and with their savings gutted; we personally are consumed with anxiety about the future that awaits our children and grandchildren.

Besides, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion--preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently--and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of--among other puzzle pieces--unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over or "seize" the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism--the "means of production"--and start putting it to work for the common good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas--to China, for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories, studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos, would require major retooling to make something we could use--not more cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

Let's just put it right out on the table: we don't. At least we don't have some blueprint on how to organize society ready to whip out of our pockets. Lest this sound negligent on our part, we should explain that socialism was an idea about how to rearrange ownership and distribution and, to an extent, governance. It assumed that there was a lot worth owning and distributing; it did not imagine having to come up with an entirely new and environmentally sustainable way of life. Furthermore, the history of socialism has been disfigured by too many cadres who had a perfect plan, if only they could win the next debate, carry out a coup or get enough people to fall into line behind them.

But we do understand--and this is one of the things that make us "socialists"--that the absence of a plan, or at least some sort of deliberative process for figuring out what to do, is no longer an option. The great promise of capitalism, as first suggested by Adam Smith and recently enshrined in "market fundamentalism," was that we didn't have to figure anything out, because the market would take care of everything for us. Instead of promoting self-reliance, this version of free enterprise fostered passivity in the face of that inscrutable deity, the Market. Deregulate, let wages fall to their "natural" level, turn what remains of government into an endless source of bounty for contractors--whee! Well, that hasn't worked, and the core idea of socialism still stands: that people can get together and figure out how to solve their problems, or at least a lot of their problems, collectively. That we--not the market or the capitalists or some elite group of über-planners--have to control our own destiny.

We admit: we don't even have a plan for the deliberative process that we know has to replace the anarchic madness of capitalism. Yes, we have some notion of how it should work, based on our experiences with the civil rights movement, the women's movement and the labor movement, as well as with countless cooperative enterprises. This notion centers on what we still call "participatory democracy," in which all voices are heard and all people equally respected. But we have no precise models of participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for, involving hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, of participants at a time.

What might this look like? There are some intriguing models to study, like the Brazilian Workers Party's famous experiments in developing a participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Z Magazine founder Michael Albert developed a detailed approach to mass-based planning that he calls participatory economics, or "parecon," and one of us (Fletcher, in his book Solidarity Divided, written with Fernando Gapasin) has proposed a locally based network of people's assemblies. But all this is experimental, and we realize that any system for mass democratic planning will be messy. It will stumble; it will be wrong sometimes; and there will be a lot of running back to the drawing board.

But as socialists we know the spirit in which this great project of collective salvation must be undertaken, and that spirit is solidarity. An antique notion until very recently, it flickered into life again in the symbolism and energy of the Obama campaign. The Yes We Can! chant was the slogan of the United Farm Workers movement and went on to be adopted by various unions and community-based organizations to emphasize what large numbers of people can accomplish through collective action. Even Obama's relatively anodyne calls for a new commitment to volunteerism and community service seem to have inspired a spirit of "giving back." If the idea of democratic planning, of controlling our destiny, is the intellectual content of socialism, then solidarity is its emotional energy source--the moral understanding and the searing conviction that, however overwhelming the challenges, we are in this together.

Solidarity, though, is an empty sentiment without organization--ways of thinking and working together, and of connecting the social movements that are battling injustice every day. We see a tremendous opportunity in the bleak fact that millions of Americans have been rendered redundant by the capitalist economy and are free to dedicate their considerable talents to creating a more just and sustainable alternative. But if we are serious about collective survival in the face of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop leadership and advance local struggles. And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we--progressives of all stripes--are now the only grown-ups around.

[Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation. Bill Fletcher Jr. originated the call for founding "Progressives for Obama." He is the executive editor of Black Commentator, and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal.]

Source / The Nation

Thanks to Dorinda Moreno / The Rag Blog

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