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"That’s why we organized a public debate and panel discussion in Manhattan last Friday about Occupy Wall Street and left politics and strategy. Held at Bluestockings, a radical bookstore on the Lower East Side, the event was packed, the audience overwhelmingly young, and the atmosphere electric: just that morning, thousands had gathered to lock arms and defend the occupiers from Bloomberg’s threat to evict them, and the mayor’s last minute decision to back down had been cause for jubilation."
by Todd Gitlin
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IN this recent incarnation, anarchism, for the most part, is not so much a theory of the absence of government, but a theory of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of Lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with the time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time — at least until the first frost.
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This new protest style is more Rousseau than Marx. What the Zuccotti Park encampment calls horizontal democracy is spunky, polymorphic, energetic, theatrical, scattered and droll. An early poster showed a ballerina poised gingerly on the back of Wall Street’s bull sculpture, bearing the words: “Occupy Wall Street. September 17th. Bring Tent.” It likes government more than corporations, but its own style is hardly governmental. It tends to care about process more than results.
And oh, how it loves to talk. It is no surprise that it makes fervent use of the technologies of horizontal communication, of Facebook and Twitter, though the instinct predated — perhaps prefigured — those tools. Not coincidentally, this was also the spirit of the more or less leaderless, partyless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt that are claimed as inspiration in Lower Manhattan. An “American Autumn” is their shot at an echo of the “Arab Spring.”
OCCUPY Wall Street, then, emanates from a culture — strictly speaking, a counterculture — that is diametrically opposed to Tea Party discipline.
"Open Left is a project aimed at renewing the thinking and ideas of the political Left. We seek an open conversation across the Left about the kind of society we want and how we can best bring it about." - by Demos in London.
The present break down of political forces follows three different views of this thesis. The first view is that the land casino merely needs to be allowed to run. This is the "Confederate" wing of American politics. The second view is that the land casino can continue longer, but only if carefully managed, this is the "Moderate" view. The third view is that it requires careful management to transition away from the land casino, or the "Progressive" view.
The difference between then and now is that we don't have any third parties any more. The two parties have professionalized and are no longer dependent on graft in the strict sense of the word, but the party pros are still non-ideological mercenaries chasing after the dollar.
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Millard Gieske, Minnesota Farmer Laborism, Sheldon Hackney, Populism: The Critical Issues, John Earl Haynes, Dubious Alliance, Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, Robert Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion and A Godly Hero, Robert McMath, Populism: A Social History, Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America, Martin Ridge, Ignatius Donnelly, Lyman Tower Sargent, Extremism in America*, Richard Vallely, Radicalism in the States, Wikipedia, Richard Hofstadter, C. Van Woodward, Tom Watson and Thinking Back.
On the main point, I totally agree. We really need to hear leftwing voices in the mainstream media. Where we may disagree is, to some extent, on a labeling or definition refinement... liberals are not leftists.
Delineates some strains of progressivism: administrative, collaborative, and personalist.
David Sirota responds to Nate Silver post on rational v. radical progressives
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If American history teaches anything, it is that the "dangerous" epithet is the last and most banal refuge of those who seek to preserve the status quo. From Joe McCarthy slandering progressives as dangerous communists to George W. Bush saying anti-war activists were dangerous terrorist sympathizers, Estasblishmentarians have been painting their foes as threats to the nation for decades.
response to Nate Silver article on rational v. radical progressives
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This chart can be critiqued at two levels, from within its frame (the outcome-oriented vs. process-oriented pairing seems to be flipped, as can readily be seen by comparing that with the conversation vs. action-oriented pairing) and from outside its frame: Nate naturally takes an abstract analytic approach, whereas I introduced a somewhat similar distinction in terms of historical processes, contrasting the "progressivism" of the post-60s era (which named itself in opposition to the Cold War liberals who brought us Vietnam) with the "classical progressivism" of the early 20th Century, that was a modernizing, rationalizing philosophy that existed in tension with populism,
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This is further complicated by the fact that Nate's so-called "rational progressives" tend to deny that politics is a battle at all. Isn't that, after all, the whole point of Obama's bipartisan crusade? In contrast, I've been going on for quite some time about politics as a battle of ideas--an idea that comes from Gramsci, just the sort that Nate goes on to warn against:
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The majority of Americans, even during the conservative years, were never against big government; they were against big government that provides special treatment whether to minorities, illegal immigrants, or the CEOs and shareholders of Wall Street firms that are too big to fail. What wrecked the Democratic Party was the public’s perception of double standards.
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Two factors, however, might help blunt the damage to the Democrats when the populist waves come rolling over the beach. One might be the division of the Republicans between social-issue populists like Mike Huckabee and free-market libertarians like those of the Club for Growth.
Another is the presence in the Democratic Party of populist liberals, many of whom defeated incumbent Republicans in 2006, including Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Virginia Senator Jim Webb. The Democrats owe their majorities in both houses of Congress in part to politicians like these, whose criticism of US trade policies alarms the Rubinesque neoliberals around Obama and whose hard line toward illegal immigration upsets the liberal left. Absent these politically incorrect populists, however, the Democratic Party would be a coalition of socially liberal fiscal conservatives and pro-welfare social democrats with little appeal to the socially conservative, economically liberal white working class.
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The first type of progressivism has its philosophical underpinnings in 18th Century, Enlightement-era thought. It believes that politics is a battle of ideas. It further believes that through the use of reason and the exchange of ideas, human society will tend to improve itself through scientific and technological innovation. Hence, it believes in progress, and for this reason lays claim to the term “progressive”. Because of its belief and optimism in the faculties of human reason, I refer to this philosophy as rational progressivism.
Rational progressivism tends to be trusting, within reason, of status quo political and economic institutions -- generally including the institution of capitalism. It tends to trust these institutions because it believes they are a manifestation of progress made by previous generations. -
The second type of progressivism is what I call radical progressivism. It represents, indeed, a much more radical and comprehensive critique of the status quo, which it tends to see as intrinsically corrupt. Its philosophical tradition originates in 19th Century thought -- and specifically, owes a great deal to the Marxist critique of capitalism and the Marxist theory of social change. It also finds inspiration in both the radical movement of the 1960s and the labor and social movements of late 19th and early 20th centuries (from which it borrows the label "progressive").
Radical progressivism is more clearly distinguishable from "conventional" liberalism and would generally be associated with the "far left" -- although on a handful of issues such as free trade, it may find common cause with the "radical" right. Radical progressivism embraces the tradition of populism and frequently adopts a discourse of the virtuous commoner organizing against the corrupt elite.
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The Spirit Level
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