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Class Rules:
Utopia On Hold
“Nothing that has
ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” History and Memory
istory is written by the victors. They define what counts as history, what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is important and what is not and, most crucially, what is usable for informing the relationship of the present with the future. As Walter Benjamin has noted, an important element in the class struggle is to reclaim history for the excluded by capturing historical memory from the rulers. What is worth remembering in the first place, are the “crude struggles” for material things: “The class struggle . . . is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless it is not in the form of spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle, as courage, honor, cunning and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism, the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history.” From the perspective of the rulers, framing the past by focusing on events and personalities removes movements from below from consideration. Thus we conveniently talk of the “framers” as the “great men” of the American constitution and virtually identical with the rise of the American nation. Playwrights and historians tell the story of the French Revolution in terms of the conflict between the Crown and the “third” estate, an unspecific conglomeration of commoners, but speak of the days of the first Republic as an internal conflict of two great revolutionary leaders: Robsepierre and Danton; in turn, the post-revolutionary decades in France are called the “Napoleonic” era, and our image of the period is intimately bound up with the personality of its main protagonist. Most historians capture the essence of the Civil War by referring to Lincoln’s heroic act of freeing the slaves and, as we have already seen, “Roosevelt’s” New Deal is grasped as the context for Depression-era reform. Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency helps explain the “Reagan Revolution” of the last two decades of twentieth century when the doctrine of minimum federal government disguised the fact that his administration was one of the most profligate spenders in recent American history. Hans Zinnser noted that biography replaces social commentary—in fact it is the preferred form of any political discourse—and also displaces the novel as the main literary genre that illuminates the social and historical roots of our time. Of course the rulers rarely speak for themselves; their perspective is filtered through the political directorate and the intellectuals who rewrite history. The relation between them is not one of command but elective affinity. For it is intellectuals who elaborate the “imagined community” of the nation-state and history is among their main weapons. The elite universities are the incubators of the “organic” intellectuals of ruling classes as well as the opposition. The intellectual opposition contests the main narrative on several planes: among them it proposes a different past than that promulgated by the leading institutions of collective memory, chiefly the book, the school and popular media. And they elaborate a cultural and social imagination that contradicts prevailing common sense. So in the last half of the twentieth century, radical democrats have, through meticulous archival investigation, attempted to demonstrate that history was made from below, and made a large difference in the way we live now. The degree to which their effort succeeds depends less on the talent of the historian or the uncovered facts than on the whether the subordinate classes are contesting power. Flushed with victory over its ideological as well as economic and military opponents, rulers and their ideologists are prone to declare that their regime stands at the end of the evolution of human societies. Just as Voltaire satirized Pangloss who declared pre-revolutionary France the “best of all possible worlds,” Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history,” arriving on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states, is surely one of the most significant intellectual events of the 1990s. (Even before the collapse his celebrated article published in 1989 provided economic liberals and political conservatives with a Grand Narrative which, despite its conservative worldview, refuses to succumb to ordinary left-bashing.) On the contrary, as Jacques Derrida observes, his account of the demise of “actually existing socialism” of the Soviet variety is a form of mourning insofar as, under the sign of liberal democratic capitalism, the future is bound to have the characteristics of everyday banality.
For Fukuyama, Communism was more than
an “evil empire” in Ronald Reagan’s simplistic terms. Although as a force
of evil it endowed humankind with the gift of undergoing an epochal
struggle worthy of Hegel’s fight to the death between the dominator and
dominated. Fukuyama’s essay set the terms of the debate: What we may be
witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such;
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western Liberal Democracy as the final form of human
government. Mixed in with exhilaration, Fukuyama judged the twentieth century’s communist revolutions as well as its ideological inspiration, Marxism, as a massive failure. In concert with earlier prophets of endings, notably Daniel Bell, whose influential End of Ideology announced the eclipse of class and ideological politics. Fukuyama acknowledges that there are still conflicts, but no contradictions; present and future battles have no historicity. Social formations will fight for greater shares of the expanding pie and cultural differences will endure. Some societies will remain mired in backwardness owing to the strength of their premodern cultural traditions such as religious fundamentalism and the patriarchies that sustain them, and are doomed to dwell outside the modern world. What is forever gone are the epochal revolutionary struggles that punctuated almost the entire twentieth century that vowed to abolish capitalist social relations and establish collective or, more accurately, state ownership of the means of industrial and agricultural production. But even before the collapse of the Berlin Wall it was evident to many that the dream of a communist utopia had given way to dystopia. As the Soviet system entered its long descent, many who had been inspired by its early triumphs recognized that the present did not forecast a different future for humanity. Instead of hope for a better world, we are condemned to go through life without “impossible” dreams. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, even if some parties calling themselves Communist remained in power, their “experiment” in the abolition of private property, state-owned means of production, and largely non-market modes of exchange have, in a large measure, given way to private property and the capitalist market. And the dream of radical democracy, in which the major institutions of society would be controlled by committees elected by workers and other citizens in the workplace and in the neighborhoods, and enjoyed a flicker of life in the Paris Commune of 1871, reinforced by the formation of workers councils in the 1905 Russian revolution, and was the benchmark of many general strikes from Seattle in 1919 to the May events in France almost a half century later, seems to belong to a bygone era. No organized force—except the growing battalions of anarchist, anti-globalization activists—maintains even the dream of a radical democratic future. China’s embrace of capitalist market modernity initiated in 1978, a few years after the death of Mao, has been only partial: as it entered global markets, opening its doors to foreign private investment, downsized its state-owned industrial and agricultural enterprises and created a huge private capitalist sector. And as recently as 2001, the Communist Party considered admitting private employers into its ranks, a proposal that was finally thwarted by the whisper of a dying tradition that only workers, peasants and intellectuals can belong in the party. But in China, liberal democracy, let alone radical democracy, remains a distant shore. One-party rule, the policy of large-scale enclosures in the countryside that have driven more than 100 million peasants from their ancestral lands, state imposed human rights violations such as the suppression of the student protest at Tiananmen square, continued imprisonment of vocal dissenters, and severe press and media restrictions, attest to the persistence of authoritarian rule. Russia, by far the largest nation in the former Soviet orbit, has experienced a precipitous decline of living standards. Under the influence of Harvard and Chicago neo-liberal economists, its first post-Soviet president, former-Moscow Communist leader Boris Yeltsin swiftly dismantled many state enterprises and handed them over to ex-communist managers who have, characteristically, milked their assets for private gain. Meanwhile, plagued by poverty, rampant alcoholism and heavy pollution—the legacy of Soviet-era industrialization distortions—infant and adult mortality rates have skyrocketed. Russia’s infant mortality is the highest in Europe. An average Russian man can expect to live 55 years, a drop by ten years since the Soviet collapse. Income inequality between the new capitalist class created with government support and the impoverished working class approaches that of the United States, but without the lure of consumer society to allay popular anger. As a result, the Communist Party which, in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union had been discredited, regained considerable ground in the last half of the 1990s and is today the largest party in the Duma, although its program dare not speak the name of socialist revolution. In effect, the party has, at least for the time being, accepted the political framework of liberal democracy, as have the leading socialist and communist parties of Europe, Japan and Latin America.
Even as he celebrates the end of utopia, that is, of creative history in which the idea of a revolutionary future informs the present and inspires people to take action against hierarchy and domination, Fukuyama exhibits not a little nostalgia for the years when capitalism trembled at the prospect of socialist revolution and, during the Cold War, devoted most of its economic, political and ideological energy to “containment” of the perceived Soviet threat to western capitalism. Now that Communism has been defeated, what remains is to clean up the debris left by premodern and antediluvian regimes. Accordingly, this debris includes the arduous tasks associated with bringing liberal democracy to totalitarian and authoritarian Third World societies like those that are strewn throughout Africa and the Middle East. Fukuyama interprets the Gulf War and the post-September 11 United States’ anti-terrorist campaign that began with overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan not as a repudiation of the end of history thesis, but a vindication; but only if these states evolve into capitalist democracies from their recent totalitarian past, an eventuality that, even for the most devout conservatives, is highly dubious. Answering his critics who claim that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, refute his claim, Fukuyama insists that “modernity is a very powerful freight train that will not be derailed by recent events, however painful. . . . We remain at the end of history because there is only one system that will dominate world politics, that of the liberal democratic west.” Judging from post-communist and postcolonial experience, the burden of proof is on those who celebrate the triumph of the West and claim that capitalism is an entailment of liberal democracy. Certainly any concept of economic democracy is missing from most capitalist countries. For capitalism without democracy seems as prevalent as the conservative claim that they are mutually dependent. The easy refutation is to adduce evidence that gross inequality remains in much of the world. Reliable statistics show that a third of the global working population is unemployed or underemployed. Billions suffer poverty and hunger and this condition is especially widespread among children. In dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America the mortality rate among children of all ages in far larger than in Russia and the gap between life expectancy in the North is much larger than in the global South. Workplaces in most of what are termed “developing” countries are often marked by physical coercion of workers, long working hours, unsafe working environments and abysmally low wages. Workers subjected to these conditions have responded by staging mass strikes in Korea, Mexico, Brazil, China and many other countries. Some strike leaders have been murdered or imprisoned for attempting to withhold their labor. But factual refutations have failed to penetrate public discourse for Fukuyama, who is often invited to address global financial organizations such as the World Bank and IMF, who has crafted an ideology that has become the new common sense. Ideological hegemony trumps facts, which lacking the weight of political resistance, empirical counterclaims are ignored. If those who control the means of information and public communication have determined that resistance to global neo-liberalism and its practical consequences is only residual, rear guard action by desperate people destined to be brought into the liberal capitalist camp, even when reported as news, is rarely given the significance accorded to a genuine opposition It does not matter that few in the general population even know who Fukuyama is. What counts as political truth is the embrace of his concepts. He is an organic intellectual of the new world order; his constituency is, in the first place, the managers of the global ruling bloc and then his fellow intellectuals of whatever persuasion. And the measure of its dissemination is the degree to which those who would oppose his motives have, nevertheless adopted the line of “endings.” Left intellectuals such as Russell Jacoby confirm this common sense when they write, ruefully, of the “end” of utopia. Other erstwhile intellectual radicals, notably Sean Wilentz, Paul Berman, Michael Kazin, Todd Gitlin and many others who are resigned to the prevailing framework, would vehemently deny their complicity with the “end” ideology or of history, but spare few occasions to bash those who refuse to recognize the ineluctability of the liberal consensus or, more exactly, to the populist faith in electoral or statistical majorities. Thus, some of these writers condemned their fellow intellectuals who supported the anti-corporate 2000 presidential campaign of Ralph Nader on the grounds that, in Florida and a few other states, his votes had defeated the Democrat and, in effect, elected George Bush. This is not the place to rehash the issues in that event. I invoke the controversy merely to indicate the degree to which the conception of anti-utopian liberal democracy frames the political strategies of a growing number of left intellectuals whose oppositional fire has been tempered by political pessimism. Has the distinction between inside and outside been overrun by modernity? Put another way, has the “other” of modern societies upon which a possible radical future is always based, disappeared? Fukuyama assumes, as did all modernity theorists of the Cold War era, that actually existing socialist countries could not withstand the “freight train” of an economically and politically superior liberal capitalism. That is, once having embarked on the road to industrialization which entails technological innovation, mass consumer society and broad educational opportunities that enables a substantial portion of the population to attain class mobility, these societies could not long resist the inevitability of the capitalist market and of liberal democracy. The events of the last fifteen years appear to confirm this judgement. The fabled popularity of Calvin Klein jeans, television, e-mail and other ornaments of American culture in the most economically starved Third World nations seems to attest to the inevitability of capitalist culture, if not freedom. If consumer culture is present, can the economic and political relations that sustain and follow from it be far behind? Or does the new global context portend new forms of struggle which may lead to new institutions and social arrangements? While it is typical of modernity boosters to code terrorism as “premodern,” it is more plausible to view its rise as a symptom of the incompleteness of modernity or even as a sign of its failure. Perhaps we may understand terrorism, which is always the strategy of the weak in the face of a global system that ratifies economic and political domination, as a wake-up call. Surely there is no justification for acts of terrorism that punish innocent civilians for the calumnies perpetrated by transnational ruling classes in alliance with local and regional despots. But it is unlikely that military reprisals, however legitimate they may be for an aggrieved nation to undertake, will solve more than the surface of the issues that produced terrorism in the first place. A mighty military machine may be able to smoke Osama bin Laden and his associates from their holes or crush thousands of Palestinians into the dust. The more urgent question is whether Western powers and their allies in the developing world have the capacity to take measures to overcome the blatant inequalities that mark the world system and have fomented forms of resistance, including terrorism, that often emanate from religious fundamentalism throughout the developing world as well as the metropoles—the leading nations and corporations that rule the empire. There is mounting evidence to show that new challenges face a triumphant West not only from the Southern and Eastern world where development problems and economic and social inequality have become nearly intractable, but also from semi-peripheral societies where economic crisis is born, in part, from their own relatively successful but distorted development, which can be attributed to the effects of their subordination to globalization. In many of these semi-peripheral societies such as Argentina and Brazil, the economic and political crisis is already tearing at the social fabric and threatening political stability. The late 1990s were marked by a resurgence of both left and right movements which emphatically denied the ideology of endings. The emergence of new social movements and those of so-called “anti-globalism”—really the resistance to the attempt to establish the new world order—is grounded in the widespread perception and well as scientific evidence that the planet’s ecosystems are in serious trouble, that capitalist globalization has sharpened inequality, not only in economic and political systems but in the everyday lives of masses of people, and that the predominant western style of “tinkering” is simply failing to adequately address the apocalyptic implications of the situation.
In power, at least temporarily, the
right in the United States has responded to the interlocking economic and
social crises of the system by testing the limits of liberal democracy.
Congress lost no time after September 11 passing the Patriot Act which
severely restricts immigrant rights and extends these restrictions to
citizens who may criticize the war policies of the government. After two
months of investigation seeking a tie to Islamic terrorism or to Saddam
Hussein, the villain of the Gulf War, American security agencies concluded
that the anthrax attacks in the aftermath of September 11 had been
conducted not from central Asian terrorists but probably from elements of
the American right. Bombings and threats to legal abortion clinics,
anti-Semitic defacements and intimidation of native and immigrant
residents of Middle Eastern and Central Asian citizens and residents were
indications that despite early White House pleadings, anti-immigrant
sentiment was rising. The Ideology of Endings The fundamental defect of the ideology of endings whose explicit assumption is that class and class struggle are relics of a bygone era, lies not only in the action-critique posed by social movements to this mode of reasoning, but in the view that history has a fixed definition that precedes its making. Like the preponderance of Marxist thinkers, Fukuyama agrees that history consists exclusively of epochal change. And epochal change means a transformation in ownership of productive property and the political and juridical relations that emanate from the economic infrastructure. Given the sweep of Fukuyama’s concept of history and its finality, anything short of revolution that seizes and holds state power in the image of great evolutionary transformation from one stage to another is consigned to modernity’s housekeeping. There will always be “hotspots,” military action to discipline or topple rogue regimes will continue to be part of the new world order’s police-keeping function, but capitalism, according to this thinking, has overcome all threats to its existence. Here I advance the idea that through their practices, “history” is constantly being made by humans, and not necessarily in terms that can be identified with the idea of progress. History is made when, through self-constitution, the subordinate classes succeed in changing the mode of life in significant ways. That these changes rarely involve transformations in the ownership of productive property does not disqualify them from being historic. Moreover, rulers make history when they are able to abrogate previous gains made by insurgent social formations and return to some previous time. In this sense Nietzsche’s comment that nothing disappears but, instead, returns to bite us, is entirely vindicated by current events. The form of the return is never identical to its previous incarnation but it is recognizable as the past. Whether lurking or not, it is not ordained that history proceeds in cycles, as Arnold Toynbee and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have claimed. Making history is a creative act, but is constrained, in part, by conditions already in existence. Since change is self-generated by social formations, it is always different in many respects; it is always new. What is at issue is: What counts as “history?” Are the innumerable changes that occur in everyday life wrought by the actions of people creating their own environments or struggling to preserve their self-created forms of association that are frequently disrupted by political decisions over which they have little control, by war and war preparations, and by changes in the economic conditions, historical? Thus, when feminist and black freedom movements lay claim to have “made” history by changing the terms of political, social and cultural relations, especially in law and everyday life, these are viewed by theorists of modernity—left as well as right—as reforms that “correct” certain inequalities but fail to change things in any fundamental way? Do the vast changes that have occurred in the technologies of information and communications which have transformed much of industrial production, business administration and, equally striking, the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people over the last half of the twentieth century amount to real history? Scientifically-based technological innovations such as the computer, laser technologies, genetic engineering and new modes of organization linked to them, constitute nothing less than an historical break with the past. Geographic vertigo has become a way of life for many among us. Moreover, the idea that we are born, raised, raise our own families, and work in the same city or town or even region for most of our lives, is rapidly becoming an expectation of fewer people. For it is not only rural China or Mexican and Brazilian peasant regions that are in upheaval: the whole of humanity, including those in the United States, are frequently obliged to leave their dwellings and consequently are experiencing a loss of the sense of place. Social and biographical time is different, as well. In contrast to a half century ago when, typically, a child spent eleven to thirteen years in school and only a small fraction attended college, more than half of the young people in the United States attend school for as much as twenty years. We enter the full-time paid labor force as adults later than in the past, and for this reason, remain unmarried and often without children longer. While many of our predecessors became parents before age 20—and some people still do—the age of parenting is older than at any time in history. It is not uncommon for women to have their first child in their late 30s or early 40s, a condition that reduces the chances they will be able to retire from paid labor before reaching seventy. Perhaps equally important— since we can’t earn a living performing only one job, or working eight hours a day, more of us take on two jobs; industrial workers accept all the overtime they can get just to pay the bills, so that life is experienced as work without end. Many professionals and managers take their work home and spend the time once reserved for “rest”—the necessary duration of reproduction of our physical and mental capacities—working into the night. As a result, we have become a nation of pill poppers because many of us suffer from severe stress due to overwork born of mounting bills amid job insecurity
Of course this brief catalogue of
temporal and spatial anxiety still requires explanation. The optimism of
modernity theory is belied by its performance on the ground. And from the
rise of religious fundamentalism, at home as well as abroad, to its
rejection by some societies and cultures, the events of September 11 have
revealed how profound is the discontent fomented by modernity’s new form,
globality. We can no longer remain indifferent to what is happening
thousands of miles beyond the water’s edge. Some will interpret this
imperative to mean that we must reconcile ourselves to permanent war, to
long-term sacrifice in our public goods and our living standards, to
indefinite surrender of our liberty. Others, notably the leader of the
AFL-CIO, are not convinced that workers should surrender their living
standards in the corporate interest. Speaking at the AFL-CIO convention in
December 2001, its president John Sweeney, condemned these assumptions.
While praising U.S. foreign policy in the war in Afghanistan, he said: “In
the months ahead, we must take the offensive in a war here at home.
President Bush and his administration are doing an excellent job of
waging war on the terrorists and we commend them for that. But at the same
time, he and his corporate backers are waging a vicious war on working
families . . . and we condemn them for that.” Are populations destined to permanent migration? Is a life without genuine and enduring social ties to be endured as the inevitable price of capitalism’s economic viability? There are still parts of the world where the whole population treasures long periods of social time away from paid labor. For example, from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic and Aegean seas large sections of the nations of Southern Europe and of North Africa have held fast to cultural traditions that provide two or three hour lunch periods, strictly prohibit most Sunday store and factory labor and have enacted laws that mandate five or six week annual vacations for the whole working population. That this culture of self-controlled time is under assault from global capitalism testifies to one of its fundamental aims: to break social practices that resist accumulation, social practices that safeguard workers’ health, preserve the elements of conviviality and maintain a measure of horizontal social relationships that are independent of capital’s logic and sometimes constitute the glue for collective action against capital investment that results in the destruction of cities and towns and destroys the ties of community life. The idea of progress is supplemented by that of cost containment. While those whose admiration for modernity is unconditional may snort that sentiment must not be permitted, to stand in the way of progress and point out that the old ways tend to perpetuate material deprivation, it must be pointed out that predictions to the contrary notwithstanding, capital has not succeeded in melting “all that is solid . . . into air.” The United States is, perhaps, the leading society, organized almost entirely according to capital’s logic. Not the least of its accomplishments is to have turned work from a necessity for life, into a way of life. Capital’s once severely contested historic doctrine of boundless work-time has overtaken the efforts of the labor movement and of workers themselves to institute a different ethic. The fifty-year struggle, begun in the 1880s for shorter hours, exemplified in the American labor movement’s pioneering fight for the eight-hour day, was once a beacon to labor throughout the world. Through mass strikes, demonstrations, and public statements Labor urgently called upon Congress and employers to accede to labor’s demand. Finally, after rejecting the Black Bill which mandated a six hour day introduced by Alabama Senator Hugo Black and passed by the Senate, Congress enacted the wages and hours law in 1938 which embodied a severely modified version. It provided for time and a half pay after forty hours but did not extend this regulation to the working day. It was left to collective bargaining agreements to improve on this framework. Still, the concept of limits on working time had been established. By the 1980s, this stricture was in ruins. The labor movement was no longer the bastion of shorter hours, as a combination of coercion and cultural shifts prompted many to climb aboard the non-stop workhouse. Indeed, we are in the throes of “24/7”—the sign of work without end—where everyone is always on call. Many people walk around all day, every day with beepers and cell phones. This is the era of the 24-hour supermarket, of Sunday store openings. If the law provides for six national holidays, they are honored in the breach as much as their observance and nobody protests. But labor’s acquiescence was not secured mostly by persuasion. After the onset of world economic instability in the 1970s, capital launched an offensive which still reverberates today. With the “Reagan Revolution,” capital openly threatened labor with joblessness in the form of capital flight to greener domestic as well as foreign venues when workers struck or otherwise protested against its demands for “flexibility,” a key precept of neo-liberal economics. Flexibility entailed wage and benefits cuts, enforced overtime, relaxation or repeal of hard-won work rules to facilitate the reorganization of the labor process by piling more tasks on workers. To this must be added the efforts by conservatives to roll back the once formidable welfare state or social wage. After nearly two decades of retreat, at the turn of the twenty-first century, despite indications that some in organized labor, among movements of the aging, and in the black freedom movement, were gearing up for battle, it is plain that a new culture of subordination had taken root. The culture was grounded more in fear than in the so-called work ethic. For the love of labor has never been prevalent among working people; the idea of work as a redemptive activity is the imposition of a quasi-religious morality from the state and its ideological apparatuses, especially schools and the media, and of their intellectuals. The heavy hand of neo-liberal economics was felt widely after Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in August 1981. This bold stroke was followed by a series of employer demands for concessions from union and non-union workers. At first many locals resisted these demands: in the mid-1980s, Stacey, Caterpillar, and American Home Products workers in Decatur, Illinois, struck to preserve their gains. In Austin, Minnesota, Hormel’s meatpackers struck when the company demanded wage reductions, a measure that was supported by their international union. Continental Airlines management took a long strike by unionized workers but succeeded in breaking the union for fifteen years. In nearly all instances where they stood up against concession bargaining, union militants were defeated in part because their national unions were unprepared for the intensity of the employer offensive and intimated by the conservative political climate, and for these reasons became habituated to granting concessions to the employers. Meanwhile, the class struggle raged unabated: employers still fiercely opposed union organization and capital flight left many communities bereft and hopeless. The boom didn’t deter neo-liberals from welfare state dismantling, and they forced Bill Clinton to repeal income supports for the long-term unemployed when he signed the Welfare Reform Act in the face of the 1996 election. And, for the overwhelming majority, concession bargaining and betrayal still fresh in memory, risk-taking was not on their agenda. Wages stagnated as the long economic boom of the 1990s was not accompanied by a concomitant rise in real wages. Month by month, year after year, the conservative chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan gloated that wage restraint acted to moderate inflation and keep interest rates lower than would have been necessary if workers had done what they nearly always did before—initiate a wave of mass strikes to take advantage of the boom. Stricken by fear, many raised their incomes by putting in fifty, sixty even seventy-hour work weeks where, at least in durable goods such as auto, steel and electrical industries, their gross pay often approached $80-100 thousand a year. During the 1980s and 1990s, America was at work. Women entered the paid labor force in record numbers; by the end of the decade, more than two thirds of adult women were holding part or full-time jobs or were looking for paid work. Some men said they were happy to be making enough money to pay bills and send their kids to college, and a few preferred the comradeship of the shop floor to the tensions they found at home. But the unpaid labor of homemaking and child rearing did not abate. What Arlie Hochchild termed the “double shift” became a new source of discontent among women. Of course, noting the burden that women have been obliged to assume does not speak to the conservative call to return women to the home. In addition to economic necessity, women entered the paid labor force in the quest for financial independence and to have the opportunity to acquire technical and professional credentials. Women who have the means to support themselves and their children are less likely to submit to the unreasonable demands of their husbands because they have freed themselves from dependency. Moreover, that more than half of American women hold jobs strengthens their argument that household tasks be shared by their partners. It has also resulted in a rising divorce rate and placed women in a better position to resist male violence in the household because they have the option to exit. The conjunction of recession and war in the fall of 2001 accelerated the attack against workers’ rights and hard-won gains. When 1,000 teachers struck for pay and to preserve their health benefits in Middletown, New Jersey, parents sided with the courts which quickly jailed more than 100 teachers for violating a state law prohibiting strikes by public employees. The teachers and their union were severely criticized for conducting militant action in a time of national emergency, a refrain often heard under these circumstances in American history. As a result, the strike was broken. In Hartford, the huge Pratt and Whitney corporation, one of America’s leading producers of aircraft engines and spare parts, announced it would reduce health benefits for its workers in order to save money. Workers and their union prepared for a strike and succeeded in holding the line. In the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, after reconciling himself to the Bush administration’s broken promise to provide aid to the city and Congress’s dawdling, New York’s outgoing mayor Rudolph Guiliani announced a fifteen percent budget cut for all city agencies except police, fire and Board of Education, a reduction that would inevitably lead to significant layoffs and cutbacks in services. This order was issued at a time when the city was facing a major health crisis as the Mayor and his Health Department were forced, after initial denials, to admit that the World Trade Center rubble had produced serious environmental problems in far flung areas. Meanwhile, there were no real plans by federal and state governments to address the hardships suffered by nearly 80,000 employees whose jobs disappeared with the destruction of the WTC or the 70,000 workers who made their living from the decimated tourism industry now reduced to three and four day weeks. By spring 2002 the official national jobless rate rose to 6% while workers braced for new assaults on wages and benefits as employers sought to transfer the burden of the recession on their backs.
Since the early 1970s when
conservative economic doctrine ruled politics and policy, western nations
have experienced little economic and social reform and have slowed the
pace of cultural transformation, signified principally by the advances
made by women, immigrants, and minorities against flagrant discriminatory
practices in employment, personal security and everyday relationships. The
weakness of the social movements, including the trade unions, to maintain
the tempo of social reform that marked the 1960s, resulted in a thirty
year hiatus, even in the ability of the ecological movements to protect
safeguards to air and water they had previously won against the ravages
of industrial development. The 1990s witnessed a desperate struggle, not
to extend ecological law, but to prevent the neo-liberals from rolling
back regulation in the name of the free market. Combined with the collapse
of Communist societies and their transformation into neo-liberal poster
children, the stalling of reform has given rise to a new surge of
radicalism that has, for the first time since the mid-1960s, raised the
question of whether capitalism itself is subject to substantive reform.
But a new generation of social activists—chiefly students and younger
trade unionists—have framed their protests in distinctly anti-capitalist
terms. While rhetoric still exceeds genuine strategies of change even
after September 11, conferences as well as militant demonstrations at
sites of world economic institutions have resumed and taken on new
urgency. Testing the Limits of Liberal DemocracyLong working hours, the breakup of long-term personal associations, and most important, the disappearance of women from neighborhoods during the day, have accelerated the decline of civil society, the stuff of which the amenities of everyday life is made. In the 1980s and 1990s, membership in voluntary organizations such as the PTA, veterans’ groups and social clubs declined, but perhaps more to the point, many of them lost activists, the people who kept the organization together. Labor unions, whose membership erosion was as severe as it was disempowering, became more dependent on full-time employees to conduct organizing, political action and other affairs as rank and file leaders disappeared into the recesses of the non-stop workplace. The cumulative effects of this transformation is the hollowing out of participation and democracy where it really counts, at the grass roots. For the democratic polity cannot alone be defined and measured by the percentage of eligible citizens who exercise their vote. Indeed, since less than half of eligible voters turn out for state and local elections and only half participate in presidential polls, the United States has chronically lagged behind other capitalist democracies. As Benjamin Barber, Robert Putnam and others have argued, the measure of democracy is the degree of participation by ordinary citizens in the social, cultural as well as the political institutions of society. A vital liberal democracy is one in which representatives are selected in an electoral process that is the outcome of a series of intense discussions and debates over issues that affect the polity at every level of social rule. This would apply to the workplace, school boards, the leadership of voluntary organizations as well as national and international institutions that control or otherwise regulate economic and political life. The democracy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries bears little resemblance to how democracy worked in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the 1920s, John Dewey’s rueful meditations on the decline of the public still held out hope for its revival. Reflecting on his own late nineteenth century Vermont upbringing, Dewey recalled the tradition of direct democracy and argued that our social arrangements and political jurisdictions needed to be scaled down in order to implement democratic aspirations. But almost eighty years after his The Public and its Problems appeared, in the era of mass democracy, concepts such as direct participation in the decisions affecting the collective life are no longer in our political vocabulary. The town meeting in which all members of the local polity makes the decisions affecting the community survives in some New England villages and small towns, but at best, “participation” in cities and suburbs is confined to testimony at public hearings conducted by elected councils, boards—of education, of energy and other locally-based utilities—and in voting. While a relatively small fraction of the underlying population participates in various institutions of local government, and a larger group participates mostly through their membership in voluntary organizations such as parent associations, the social programs of churches and other charitable agencies, chambers of commerce, or unions, for tens of millions of Americans, democracy consists almost exclusively in the ritual of voting; only opinion surveys mitigate, to an extent, our sense of distance from the process of political decision-making. The texture of life is as different today as was everyday life in the nineteenth century from the years when almost everybody was a farmer or connected to agriculture in some way. But however weak is liberal democracy, the United States has by no means tested its institutional limits. In fact, of the leading capitalist societies, our political system is, perhaps, the least democratic. Undoubtedly influenced by religious objections, Tuesday rather than Sunday is the conventional voting day. The president is elected by an electoral college in which—because members are selected on the basis of who wins the popular vote in a given state and gives disproportional weight to states with smaller populations—may give rise to an outcome in which the victor—in 2000, George W. Bush—receives a minority of the popular vote. And unlike some other countries whose constitution and practices are to insure representation by minority parties in legislative bodies, the United States is dedicated to a “winner take all” system of representation which, for all intents and purposes, excludes minor parties which, in some states and localities, receive as much as 15-20% of the vote, a showing which is not uncommon in recent elections. State and federal election laws provide that the party winning a majority or plurality of the votes has been elected to office and the other parties are excluded from governance. The same system has informed the development of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy in the unions as well which only a system of term limits can hope to remedy. But term limits only restrict the prerogatives of individuals, not self-perpetuating ruling parties. Even where majorities are required to elect an office seeker most statutes mandate a runoff between the two top vote getters. As a result, a substantial minority of citizens are routinely deprived of representation and this situation militates against pluralism in the electoral and legislative process. The mantra of electoralism is that voters should not “throw their votes” away by selecting the candidate(s) of parties which have no chance of winning. As a result, we are saddled with “lesser evil” politics. Faced with the prospect that one’s vote for someone who holds political views close to or identical to our own might, in close races, elect a candidate whose views are entirely unacceptable, we tend to hold our noses and vote for the least objectionable candidate.
Imagine an electoral system based on
proportional representation (PR). Like many other countries such as Italy,
Israel and Germany, Congress and state legislatures would be more broadly
representative, and the major parties would be obliged to form coalitions
in order to rule. While some argue that European systems introduce
instability into politics—this is especially the case in Italy—a little
uncertainty would make social reform more likely, even if not inevitable.
In any case, PR, a system that insures representation for minorities who
achieve a minimum percentage of the popular vote, might energize those who
have decided that the narrow differences between the two major parties do
not warrant exercising their franchise, let alone participating in the
political process in other ways. As Jean Baudrillard has perceptively argued, abstinence from the shriveled institutions political and governance may signify neither apathy nor consent but may be coded as a form of resistance. The “silent majorities” who fail to go to the polls or to participate in a rigged civil society are neither left nor right in their sentiments but have determined, often tacitly to be sure, that the institutions of liberal democracy, including unions and many voluntary organizations which, in the end, are extensions of the state, are irrelevant to their lives, or worse, impediments to their interests. Indeed if it can be shown that the fabled “deadlock” of democratic institutions has produced very little to advance the general welfare in the last thirty years, if Congress and European parliaments are subsumed under a centralized executive authority that in turn is deeply beholden to the network of transnational corporations and international bureaucratic economic institutions, the act of voting simply legitimates the swindle that “representatives” are accountable to their constituents at least on matters that affect their modes of life. While Baudrillard may have overstated the case for abstinence as a form of resistance, many young people and a considerable fraction of the poor share the assessment that given the alternatives provided within the electoral system, their participation simply legitimates a process that does not serve them. These views may be mistaken. But unless we accept the theory according to which legislative bodies are generally responsive to active constituents, a theory which is unable to explain the disparity between a high level of trade union and middle class liberal voting and the gross indifference to their needs and their views of Congress and most state legislatures, the abstainers act not only out of indifference but also skepticism. During times of emergency many Americans seem prepared to concede more authority to the executive which hastens to suspend the autonomy of representative institutions and, as Eric Foner has shown, tends to “shred the constitution.” The Bush administration is not alone in this regard: the Alien and Sedition Laws, enacted during John Adams’s presidency, the federal government’s jailing war opponents during World War I, its internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the McCarthy era’s attack on labor and radical movements, which received the approbation of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, all circumvented the constitutional rights of individuals and organizations in the name of national security. We may learn from Benjamin’s remark: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception, but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is on keeping with this insight.” The new movements directed against capitalist globality, but also the new libertarian right have adopted elements of the analysis that liberty under liberal capitalist democracy is fragile and while frequently protected by courts, democracy itself is chimerical. There are signs that a new wave of activists is changing the political map.. While the traditional left is generally programmatic, the new opposition is issue-oriented and is not content to use the familiar tactics of petition and lobby to achieve its aims. The new activism is discontinuous with the social reformism of the social democratic and liberal organizations for which seeking legislative remedies are the typical form of participation. Instead it has a distinct direct action orientation that was recovered from the feminist, gay and lesbian, and black freedom movements, and in the mid 1990s by the anti-AIDS movement, ACT-UP. Reflecting their suspicion and even disdain of the tools of liberal democracy, direct action rather than petition and legislation has been the hallmark of the anti-globalization movement as well, and this strategic shift is evident in campus-based anti-sweatshop groups who have used the labor and civil rights tactic of the sit-in in college presidents’ offices to replace entreaties to academic authorities to change their procurement policies. These differences may be dismissed on the ground that the resistance has not advanced to alternative; the opposition rarely proposes new arrangements that depart substantially from reform. In fact, many environmental protesters who engage in direct action still hope that nations will come to their senses and enact a series of treaties to remedy global warming and other ecological hazards. Moreover, the discrediting of socialism and Communism has left a huge vacuum in alternative, let alone utopian, thinking. If there is a crisis of the intellect, it resides in the bereft imagination. Collectively we are still unable to imagine a qualitatively different future. Indeed, radical democracy itself lacks contemporary specification. The Soviet constitution, which promised a new form of social rule, was betrayed by its own authors, and contemporaneous with the events, John Dewey could offer only a rural miasma of democratic participation. Since the New Left’s notion of participatory democracy achieved a degree of influence, especially more widely in the black freedom movement, radical democracy has been largely an intellectual discourse. Put simply, utopia is on hold with the partial exception of the imagination of social ecologists who have proposed bio-regionalism, where agriculture and manufacturing would be integrated within a restricted geographic space, and radical democratic municipalism to replace the prevailing centralist business-oriented metropolitan governments whose development policies are destructive of natural and urban environments. Social ecology has gone beyond the slogans of libertarian Marxism to propose alternatives, but thought is not equal to its practical challenges. In the near future we are likely to see concepts of decentralization, economies of “human scale,” demands to ban vehicular traffic except buses, taxis and trucks—but only for limited hours—from large cities, and varieties of neighborhood governance jurisdictions to encourage broader participation. Given the American way, we are not likely to see these proposals attain practical urgency until another disaster befalls and even then with our penchant for denial and forgetting there is no assurance that the climate will be favorable to changing our poisonous environmental practices. Yet what is entirely new is the perception (curiously reinforced by the Gulf and Afghanistan wars) that even though they are worth preserving, appeal to the institutions of liberal democracy within the nation-state is no longer the exclusive context for politics and class struggle. One of the effects of the protests at Seattle, Washington, Quebec and Genoa was to “smoke” international economic organizations which affect the global population out of their secrecy. Monetary and economic policy in general is no longer the sovereign function of nation-states, especially in the global south and east, but neither is it in the West. For this reason, what happens to labor in, say, Mexico or Korea, is the concern of workers in the United States. That the American labor movement has not yet fully grasped this development detracts neither from the salience of the fact of interdependence nor what seems the likelihood that, eventually, labor and other movements will recognize the multinational context of their struggles. If North American labor is still mired in the necessary, but incomplete step of trying to limit imports in order to protect its dwindling jobs, surely the next step is to adopt the only viable strategy, movement toward global equality in living standards, including wages and social protections Upon this platform we can expect instances of coordinated direct action on a global scale that will be based on the recognition that living standards in all countries will continue to deteriorate as long as the bulk of humanity is held in economic and political abjection. An equally urgent task is to reflect on the forms of power itself. How can the opposition address the subordination of the vast multitudes of humankind, the hollowing out of the state’s social functions, and its reduction to a fortress of national security? Beyond individual liberties, certainly worth protecting for the ability to speak without fear, to act without police intimidation, to assemble without incarceration, and to think beyond the prison-house of the politics of the possible, is the necessary condition of forming a democratic society. The sufficient condition is to establish the basis for freedom. Beyond liberty, how can the elusive goal of freedom be pursued? At the outset it must be recognized that the libertarians on the right more than the statist left has been concerned with this question. Libertarians have distinguished themselves from conservatives by defending abortion rights, opposed draconian drug laws and sometimes advocated legalization of these controlled substances and, during the recent war, were vocal in their opposition to the Bush administration’s attempt to restrict civil liberties for domestic as well as immigrant groups. Their defense of liberty has, on the whole, been more forthright than any other ideological tendency. But the major flaw in the doctrines of right wing libertarians is that they insist, with Adam Smith, that only a market unfettered by state regulation, can guarantee freedom. Like Fukuyama and other neo-liberals, they accept the oxymoron, the phrase “free market.” The market for commodities and ideas is never really free but is lopsided in favor of those who own and control the preponderance of productive property. Like Anatole France’s bitter quip that the law in its majesty forbids, equally, the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges, paraphrasing A. J. Liebling, the market, like the press, is free for those who own one. When the economy is in recession and many small businesses face ruin because of declining demand, their alternative is often to “choose” bankruptcy. But when the airline or auto corporations face declining profits, they can and do seek partial protection from the market’s vicissitudes by securing subsidies from the federal government. When the small independent farmer is plagued by lower prices imposed by processors or wholesale corporations, he sells the farm to a real estate developer. When an agricultural corporation is faced with rising costs and stable prices, it appeals to the government for subsidies or invests in technology to reduce its labor costs. Competition among equals is generally confined to property owners, but small businesses confronting large corporations and those whose only property is their skills and credentials only occasionally enjoy an advantage over the buyer. For the most part, the small proprietor is either forced out of business or, if the holder of a patent is obliged to allow himself to be absorbed by the larger competitor. As for the worker, even in so-called good times only collective organization is usually capable of giving her or him some edge and, as we have seen, even this weapon is not always sufficient. But freedom is not identical to liberty or to the exercise of human rights such as speech and assembly. As an individual I cannot achieve freedom, if by that concept we mean the ability to control the conditions of life by making those decisions that affect it. Freedom cannot be legislated and liberal democratic institutions are hostile to its precepts because they rest on formal representation by organized political parties which are beholden to economic and other powers. Freedom is the outcome of the direct exercise of autonomy by individuals and groups, and in the self-constitution of institutions and practices that form social arrangements. Freedom is therefore an effect of collective self-creation and presupposes a break from the social and historical context of its institution. To be sure, nothing is forever. Since the context within which labor and other social movements operate is generally hostile to direct, radical democracy, and the political environment can, in relatively short term, turn one hundred eighty degrees, in order to save themselves movements tend to become institutions controlled from above. These organizations often adopt systems of representative governance, hire staffs who effectively control their programs and the leadership becomes more or less completely severed from the activist base. Whence, as often as not, rumblings from below explode in either of two forms: internal revolt against the leadership, as in the rank and file union caucuses; or breakaways such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee which, in the early 1960s, rejected the legalistic, go slow policies of organizations such as the NAACP. There are many instances of such creativity where people generate alternative institutions, usually on a relatively small scale, but these innovations are often not in the public eye. For example, dissatisfied with the local school or available day-care options, a group of Brooklyn parents and teachers start their own institution that adopts a somewhat different curriculum and hires teachers who care about pedagogy. Moreover, for a substantial time the school is jointly run by parents and teachers who, on the basis of criteria they have a voice in establishing, select the director. In most instances parent-teacher run schools must address the constraints of law and of established practices. Before they are able to operate they must procure licenses from Health, Buildings and Education departments. These documents entail undergoing inspections and, the case of education, credentials and curricular reviews which usually involves a prolonged series of meetings, sometimes confrontations, with the authorities who are prone to protecting their turf. When they win approval it is often at the expense of their autonomy, although the extent of victory depends on the extant political and cultural environment. Nevertheless, more often than not something new is created that does not depend on the initiative of the bureaucracy. Dissatisfied with their union’s bureaucratic, top-down practices, workers may form a caucus that seeks to replace the existing national or local leadership in favor of a more democratic union that attempts to share power broadly among rank and file members. Rather than remaining an organization dominated by full-time officials it decentralizes functions and power to make decisions. Like their educational counterparts, the victorious slate invariably faces the problem of reconciling their intentions with the hide bound rules and practices of the established international union leadership and staff but, perhaps more urgently, the constraints of law which has turned unions from autonomous movements into apparatuses, ideological and political, of the state. The extent to which they are able to pursue their own star depends on a variety of factors, the most important of which is how far they are willing to go to defend their principles. Risk is the rock against which innovation falters. But all over America there are local unions and even some national unions for which rank and file participation is both an end and a means. We have the rich experiences of the feminist, ecology and black freedom movements of the late twentieth century. These movements were largely self-created, advanced their own leaders and, at least until they were integrated into mainstream politics in the 1980s, were much more democratic than traditional voluntary organizations. It is important to continue to reach into the deep recesses of repressed memory and be prepared to conduct the class struggle on the terrain of historiography. While the moment of September 11 seems to have temporarily foreclosed the possibility of a new class politics, we have seen these traditions live in movements which recreate them, sometimes consciously drawing from the experiences of earlier generations. The impulse to freedom, however feeble in some historical moments, is inextinguishable. For centuries this impulse has driven the struggles of insurgent classes against entrenched power. For since it consists in imposing constraints, enforcing established rules and punishing those who insist on challenging authority, power is always inimical to freedom. And there are no guarantees that having been subordinated for generations, the powerless in power will not reproduce the conditions of domination, both of their own and of their adversaries. The failsafe, whether making history issues from a new institution or political insurgency, is that the unconscious, which has a welter of historically induced scars, is made an object of reflection by the insurgencies and that the past and present are subjected to ruthless critique. This would entail adopting a notion of education, not as the transmission of ideologies and other received truths, but as a process of constant examination of social practice, in the institutions of governance and of everyday life. What are the prospects for the formation of a class alliance that can contend for social and political power? By “class alliance” I refer to social formations which, because of their economic, political and cultural exclusion from power organize into movements that seek to change the conditions of life. That social formations and the movements emanating from them have historicity signifies that in every space of social time some will be more crucial for challenging prevailing authority than others. In this respect there is always the possibility that one or more insurgent movements of the past will be made part of the hegemonic power bloc while others will remain on the “outside” and form an opposition. Within the vast multitudes of those whose interests coincide with social and political transformation, only a specific constellation of social forces is likely to put these tasks on the historical agenda. But the agents of a new alliance must be identified in a global, rather than national context. The uneven development of an alliance between some factions of the labor movement, and those of women, blacks, youth and ecologists will remain an enduring feature of the coming period. That is to say, we are not on the verge of a new, stable “Grand Coalition” on a global level. To ask the question of “prospects” is to assess the possibility that the opposition will at any time soon go on the offensive, an eventuality that presupposes a fairly long period of refusal and resistance to prevailing power and debate about alternative futures not only among intellectuals but among activists as well. We live in a time when the traditional left is exhausted, intimidated by the rightist surge, or has joined the anti-utopian consensus and the new activist legions are still in the midst of defining resistance as the farthest horizon of politics. For the time being it is likely that the alliance will continue to take the form of global combinations of trade unionists, sometimes supported by official labor federations, students, the growing number activists who gave life to social movements and remain committed to direct intervention, and radical intellectuals. So this is a time for analysis and speculation as much as organization and protest, a time when people have a chance to theorize the new situations, to identify the coming agents of change without the illusion that they can predict with any certainty what will occur, and by whom. It is a time to speak out about a future that is not yet probable, although eminently possible. The new venues for discussion will be found on-line, complemented by print journals, magazines and newspapers. Moreover, the complexity of issues and the novelty of the situation demands new ideas that traditional lefts seem incapable of providing But some parties of opposition will become tribunes of new thought. These ideas will be labeled “utopian” by those who have determined that power is too overwhelming to rethink their options and, for this reason, have decided either to abstain or to become loyal supplicants of liberal democratic regimes in the hopes of reducing their venality. And it is surely a moment for political organization, stretching the limits of electoralism without relying on liberal democratic institutions to provide the vehicles for change. Having said this as the events in Seattle in December, 1999, Genoa in 2001 and the struggles to come attest to the fact that people have a way of creating history without much preparation and setting new conditions for political struggle. As the opposition matures it will find the new paths not only of resistance but of alternatives.
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