I decided I didn't want to wake up in the morning fighting capitalism anymore. I wanted to wake up thinking about how to create something new.
--Julie Graham
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on the need for a story for deep social change Part 1 is here.
In this part I will go through an entire essay that Hedges posted on October 17, A Movement Too Big to Fail, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_movement_too_big_to_fail_20111017/ . I do this because I believe that the approach he gives voice to here is both very prevalent on the Left and very dis-empowering. The difference between that and the one I am espousing is of essential importance to the deep change that both of us want to see evolve with all our being. I disagree strongly with what he is voicing, but I do it with full respect for his wisdom and what he is working for.
[If you want to cut to the chase before you jump in or in order not to read the whole thing, then go to the section I marked "MJ3: the core issue: moral righteousness disempowers, love and thinking empowers." The core my message is there.]
It is very important for me to note at the beginning that I can identify with all the thinking and feeling Hedges expresses in this piece. I feel the hatred, disgust, rage, and powerlessness he voices. I fantasize my versions of the scenarios where I vent my rage at the ?dominators' and spew my venom at the ?sycophants,' etc. And I can find joy in that. That can turn me on, but there are much more joyful and empowering ways to turn myself on.
All of us have incorporated our culture's powerful tendencies for absolutism, purism, blame and punish, dominate-and-submit that are so deeply embedded in its way of life. It's crucial for us to identify this stuff inside us, because it is thase members of this culture we reinforce and sustain it just in the ways we live our everyday lives. We are endlessly turning on each other or turning away from each other, shooting ourselves in the foot, and undermining our efforts for personal and social change. Hedges' problems are my problems, are your problems, are our problems.
My critique here is a plea to all of us: Please, let's do something different this time around.
Hedges' article is reprinted below. My responses and reflections are embedded in italics. I have sub-divided it into five parts in order to make the page more navigable.
A Movement Too Big to Fail
by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed
Monday 17 October 2011
[MJ1: this first section celebrates the moral purity of #OWS and berates the ?liberal class']
There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of "liberal" groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.
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CH begins with the first of a series of baseless claims. No one knows what is going to evolve out of the #Occupy ?movement.' He then immediately moves into targeting the ?bad guys,' who in this piece are the primary constituents of the ?liberal class.' Clearly, he is writing to the choir, and only the choir.
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Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to "clean" the premises. These protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional "liberal" establishment has steadily refused to do-fight back. And it was deeply moving to watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street. It lent a whole new meaning to the phrase "too big to fail."
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Here CH identifies what he thinks is the core work of deep social change: "resistance, real resistance" as embodied by the "protesters" at #OccupyWall Street-the ?good guys.' He goes on to note what he sees as their primary power: making "the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street. In doing this he tells us what story he tells himself and that he is going to be telling us: David felling the giant Goliath.
Is this what we, the choir, need to hear at this time? Clearly, CH thinks so. Nowhere in the article will he address the need for the creative power to build a movement. To do this would be a major distraction. I suggest that this article draws its fervor and ringing clarity from an assumption of moral certitude, not from a passion to build a movement grounded in understanding what is the case so that we can organize effectively. Righteousness will lead us where it has always led us in the past: into our self-constructed dead ends. I went there with the SDS at Columbia University in 1968. I was part of the Vietnam protests whose singular success was driving LBJ out of office and making way for a wholly unintended consequence: the election of Richard Nixon and all that followed. So: I've been there, done that, and ain't doing it again. I recommend the rest of us not follow CH's impulses in this article.
We need to be talking about where we want to go, evaluating its reasonable feasibility, and shaping experimental strategies for moving in those directions. We need to be doing this at every level: face-to-face, organizational, network, etc. And they need to be ?experimental' because nobody knows how to build a movement that can transform a society.
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Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests. The Teamsters' arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no choice.
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CH begins this paragraph with what we can at least call an empty claim: "Tinkering with the corporate state will not work." I call it empty because whatever successful efforts emerge from #Occupy will have to find ways of dealing with the corporate state. The 98% are not going to follow an oppositional 1% into creating chaos by trodding upon the richest 1%. This is a monumental challenge, and it is a monumental failing for CH to use his platform on behalf of moral posturing that utterly ignores the work we need to be doing-and are doing to a limited extent-now.
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The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. It proposes something new. It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no resources. It can't carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back. It has no other way of defying the corporate state. This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or virtual one. It affirms our dignity. It permits us to become free and independent human beings.
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This paragraph is nothing more than a series of baseless claims that are a variation on the theme of CH's perception that what we have with #Occupy is a morally pure group that will seek no compromise with any disagreeing reality. I submit that what might be a ?movement' and the 99% are utterly immersed in differing perceptions and desires. If a movement with legs emerges it will be because they have listened to and understood each other enough to forge a solidarity that can embrace a lot of disagreement among themselves and want to find ways to negotiate differences with other groups.
One more thing here: no rebellion ever built a sustainable community. I speak with some first hand experience having been in the intentional community movement for over 30 years and having co-founded and managed a 30-year alternative community. In fact, rebellion kills communities. At best this destruction can be the opportunity for building anew, but doing that requires listening to and understanding each other deeply enough to forge a solidarity that can embrace a lot of disagreement.
And that's putting it mildly.
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[MJ2: in this section Hedges attempts to strengthen his case by wrongly calling on Martin Luther King]
Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed by liberal supporters, especially when he began to challenge economic forms of discrimination, which demanded that liberals, rather than simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices. King too was a radical. He would not compromise on nonviolence, racism or justice. He understood that movements-such as the Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists, who fought for women's rights, the labor movement and the civil rights movement-have always been the true correctives in American democracy. None of those movements achieved formal political power. But by holding fast to moral imperatives they made the powerful fear them. King knew that racial equality was impossible without economic justice and an end to militarism. And he had no intention of ceding to the demands of the liberal establishment that called on him to be calm and patience. "For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there," King said shortly before he was assassinated. "Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values."
King was killed in 1968 when he was in Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers. By then he had begun to say that his dream, the one that the corporate state has frozen into a few safe clichés from his 1963 speech in Washington, had turned into a nightmare. King called at the end of his life for massive federal funds to rebuild inner cities, what he called "a radical redistribution of economic and political power," a complete restructuring of "the architecture of American society." He grasped that the inequities of capitalism had become the instrument by which the poor would always remain poor. "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism," King said, "but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children." On the eve of King's murder he was preparing to organize a poor people's march on Washington, D.C., designed to cause "major, massive dislocations," a nonviolent demand by the poor, including the white underclass, for a system of economic equality. It would be 43 years before his vision was realized by an eclectic group of protesters who gathered before the gates of Wall Street.
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The first thing-and maybe the only thing-we need to note about this paragraph is that Martin Luther King never wrote an article like the one we are studying here. He worked from a completely different platform. For example, power purposefully used out of and for love:
"Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change... And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar opposites - so that love is identified with the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. Now we've got to get this thing right. What [we need to realize is] that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic... It is precisely this collision of immoral power and powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time."
--Martin Luther King Jr., Where do we go from here? [1]
There is no love in Hedges' essay. Fear and rage and blame, but not love. If #Occupy doesn't "get this thing right" it's not going far.
Finally: Yes, as King said, there needs to be "a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values." But please note two things, and note them really well:
1) he never lost focus that we as individuals had to learn to love, to love deeply if there was going to be any fundamental social change, and
2) he didn't know how to make that happen on a large scale! He was busting his ass trying to figure it out, and in the process he allowed himself to get trapped in the same devastating trap every charismatic leader has gotten into and no movement and only a few organizations recover from.
[1] Hat tip to Leslie Greenwood.
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[MJ3: the core issue: moral righteousness disempowers, love and thinking empowers]
The truth of America is understood only when you listen to voices in our impoverished rural enclaves, prisons and the urban slums, when you hear the words of our unemployed, those who have lost their homes or cannot pay their medical bills, our elderly and our children, especially the quarter of the nation's children who depend on food stamps to eat, and all who are marginalized. There is more reality expressed about the American experience by the debt-burdened young men and women protesting in the parks than by all the chatter of the well-paid pundits and experts that pollutes the airwaves.
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I fully agree with CH here.
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What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children's children?
"America," Langston Hughes wrote, "never was America to me."
"The black vote mean [nothing]," the rapper Nas intones. "Who you gunna elect/ Satan or Satan? In the hood nothing is changing,/ We aint got no choices."
Or listen to hip-hop artist Talib Kweli: "Back in the '60s, there was a big push for black ... politicians, and now we have more than we ever had before, but our communities are so much worse. A lot of people died for us to vote, I'm aware of that history, but these politicians are not in touch with people at all. Politics is not the truth to me, it's an illusion."
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In the three paragraphs above we get to the core issue that Martin Luther King identified in the quote above: how we empower and dis-empower ourselves and how we can use power out of and for love. The eight paragraphs that follow build on the moral rage exhibited in these three and the ones before. These eight are little more than a diatribe against the ?liberal class,' although they do contain some analysis beyond CH's preferred moralizing. I will make a few comments at the end of them, but here I want to focus on what is so strategically wrong with investing lots of energy into the moral righteousness. It seems to me that the populist Left has done more and more of this over the last 175 years and which Hedges' puts on full display in this article. As they have done this they have moved further and further away from some of the powerful models of organizing for change used in 19th century, especially the Populist movement of the Farmers' Alliances.
In the first paragraph above CH uses a rhetorical question-"What kind of a nation..."-to vent his spleen. This doesn't take us anywhere toward figuring out what we need to do to make things work better for the 99%, and how we need to learn to do it. Actually it is worse than spinning our wheels. It's a big minus, a great loss. It's what King calls "powerless morality."
It's powerless because we use righteousness to raise our energy so that we can feel powerful and superior. First, feeling powerful is not being powerful. Second, righteousness is a device to make ?we the 99%' superior to ?them the 1%'.
Whenever we are in our righteous mode we are making ourselves the ?new elite'. This always brings us back to square one where people use their power for the purpose of making themselves feel powerful and superior. (Actually, this is not getting back to square one as much as it is staying on the Left's merry-go-round.) The student rebellion at Columbia University in 1968 ended on this note. The SDS went on to tragically destroy itself in a combination of violence and so-called ?leaderlessness'. If it had succeeded without ever having transformed itself in very basic ways, it would have become a new kind of exploitive hierarchy.
Righteousness-whether that of the Tea Party or the Moralistic Left-cannot move one or an organization or a movement to create the projects and institutions that can solve problems-the everyday problems of the 99% and the political and economic architecture of our society. Rather, it guarantees that the root problems will remain, that exploitation will continue and return in some new guise. Righteousness is little more than blame and punish. Blaming is a vicious cycle, a downward spiral like water swirling down a sink drain, taking all the debris with it.
But in this case it's not water that's going down the drain. It's our power to act with a moral purpose grounded in love.
Moral righteousness = either powerless morality or an exploitive hierarchy.
Moral purpose grounded in love = radical change that begins with individuals becoming the change they want to bring into the world.
George Lakoff senses this, but doesn't really get it in a way that can put us to work for radical change. Below is a brief summary of his main point in a recent article, Framing Occupy Wall Street . His vision is humble and his wisdom practical, but he doesn't see that the dynamic that drives exploitive hierarchies is within each one of us, not just out there:
Occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves and acting with both personal and social responsibility. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.
Let's re-discover King and Gandhi for out times.
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[MJ4: a long moral diatribe against the ?liberal class]
The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve. It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. This is what happened during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. Liberals in a functioning capitalist democracy are at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is King, especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader.
The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class. It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order to loot and pillage with no impediments. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And the reduction of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets. Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless political theater. But that game is over.
Human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. The liberal class, which insists on clinging to its positions of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional role within the democratic state, has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power. And as the engines of corporate power pollute and poison the ecosystem and propel us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded by both the corporate state and radical dissidents. The best it can do is attach itself meekly to the new political configuration rising up to replace it.
An ineffectual liberal class means there is no hope of a correction or a reversal through the formal mechanisms of power. It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression now in these protests that lie outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. By emasculating the liberal class, which once ensured that restive citizens could institute moderate reforms, the corporate state has created a closed system defined by polarization, gridlock and political charades. It has removed the veneer of virtue and goodness that the liberal class offered to the power elite.
Liberal institutions, including the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions, set the parameters for limited self-criticism in a functioning democracy as well as small, incremental reforms. The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.
But the liberal class, by having refused to question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did, severed itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role left to play in the battle between us and corporate dominance. All hope lies now with those in the street.
Liberals lack the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies. They have no ideological alternatives even as the Democratic Party openly betrays every principle the liberal class claims to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy to a demand for quality and affordable public education to a return of civil liberties to a demand for jobs and welfare of the working class. The corporate state forced the liberal class to join in the nation's death march that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Liberals such as Bill Clinton, for corporate money, accelerated the dismantling of our manufacturing base, the gutting of our regulatory agencies, the destruction of our social service programs and the empowerment of speculators who have trashed our economy. The liberal class, stripped of power, could only retreat into its atrophied institutions, where it busied itself with the boutique activism of political correctness and embraced positions it had previously condemned.
Russell Jacoby writes: "The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion."
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CH begins this section with a line I completely agree with: "The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve. It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact." That fact, however, is not the beginning and the end of our ?liberal problem'. At some point one would hope Hedges would say something as to how we can address the problem, but he doesn't do that, nor does he acknowledge the need. In fact, he hopes that the ?redeemer' has arrived in the form of #OWS: "All hope lies now with those in the street...It is they, and they alone, who hold out the possibility of salvation."
I wouldn't wish the destructive horrors that inhere in that role on anybody, even an enemy.
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[MJ5: onward #Occupy soldiers]
Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism comes with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion, language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class, language that defines this new movement. This does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is part of the same nightmare experienced in postindustrial mill towns of New England and the abandoned steel mills of Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, living in terror and mourning their dead, endure daily.
What took place early Friday morning in Zuccotti Park was the first salvo in a long struggle for justice. It signaled a step backward by the corporate state in the face of popular pressure. And it was carried out by ordinary men and women who sleep at night on concrete, get soaked in rainstorms, eat donated food and have nothing as weapons but their dignity, resilience and courage. It is they, and they alone, who hold out the possibility of salvation. And if we join them we might have a chance.
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CH opens this final section: "Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism comes with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion..."
Yes, language is of crucial importance. Language, perception, and act ion shape each other every step of the way. Class is as fundamental as race, gender, etc.
No, we need a new language. The "language of class conflict and rebellion" is not adequate. By itself it is rearview thinking. We need a new language that transcends and includes this old language. A new language that puts our old thinking in the context that is out in front of us on the unfolding road of possibility before us. Please, a new story for what's happening and what's possible!
I am happy to say that a big step in that direction is at hand: Ethan Miller's current essay on the GEO web site, Occupy! Connect! Create! . Please read, and let the loving-thinking roll.
I will be blogging about Occupy! Connect! Create! Over the next few days.
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