The original article “New Kids on the Historic Bloc”  was written by Jon Liss and David Staples This article  takes off from where that one left off and  is based on an interview between Rishi Awatramani and Jon Liss.

New Kids on the Historic Bloc – Workers’ Centers and Municipal Socialism – A Summary and Postscript

Crisis, Capitalist Refounding and the Reagan Historic Bloc

Over the last 30 years capital has ‘re-founded’ itself by imposing neo-liberal programs (see Theodore/Peck) linked with imperialist expansion.  This refounding was a response to a crisis of accumulation or declining profit rates.  Components of neo-liberalism include: privatization, aggressive attacks on unions, attacks on the ‘social’ wage in general and women of color in particular.  We use a framework of ideas, institutions and program of actions to describe the New Right program for the last thirty years. The dominant ideas of the New Right include concepts that support ‘getting government off the people’s back’, stop taxing and spending, etc. Institutions that propagate and implement neo-liberalism range from the Manhattan Institute (urban policy) to the U.S. Congress, while programs have included efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy or slash welfare as we know it.  Up until the last 18 months their program could largely be classified as a smashing success.  Because of their ideological hegemony, both dominant electoral parties accept some variation of their ideology concerning the role of government in the functioning of the economy.  These politics and policies were made dominant through the forging of an historic bloc that both elects like-minded officials but also serves as a political tail wind that keeps things they way they are. By expertly blending racism with appeals to capitalist mythology, Reagan manufactured an anti-new deal majority that was tied to industrial capital, military and industrial capital, extractive industries/capital, white workers, farm owners and outer suburbanites.  In one form or another this bloc has set the parameters of dominant politics for the last thirty years.  However, the twin jolts of economic collapse and demographic shifts (massive immigration from Latin American and Asia) created the reality of Obama’s election and indicate a conjunctural opportunity to aggressively challenge the dominant ideas, institutions and program of the last 30 years.

Recomposition of the Working Class

These massive changes in the political economy had major effect on the composition of the Working Class in the US. There are a number of factors responsible for this re-composition: 1) Over the last 30-40 years, manufacturing jobs moved overseas. In this period in particular, the US experienced massive de-industrialization of sectors that had been at the heart of the economy and the main provider of stable employment for the dominant white male sector of the working class (and therefore a central site of Working Class organization and struggle). Flexible and unstable employment in the low-wage service sectors, public service  and government jobs, or some form of state welfare dependence emerged as the primary bread-winning opportunities for working-class people. 2) During this same period, there was a significant increase in immigration, due  to both the liberalization of immigration policy in the 60’s and 70’s, as well as the deepening economic crises of working people in the Third World (crises which were caused primarily by the creation of massive national debts through Structural Adjustment policies). 3) The disappearance of well-paid working class jobs and the increase in unstable, low-wage jobs meant that women of color in particular were to, more than ever before, be forced to work double time: in their unpaid labor in domestic work in their own homes and in paid work, typically in low-wage service sector positions (in some cases, doing paid domestic work for other families).

Through these changes, the working class has been recomposed, and is much more populated by immigrants, people of color, and women. Significantly, this recomposition has also created a more unstable, highly flexible, and poorly compensated working class that faces speed-up pressures, contingent work, and limited benefits.

A central task for our period, then, is to figure out which are the key nodes in this reshaped political economy at which we must build strong, fighting mass organizations, and which are the key historical actors that can build unity and lead a movement against capital and exploitation. For example, a part of our project is to develop demands for child care providers, taxi drivers, janitors, and even computer or biotechnology workers (who share the contingency of work and low/no benefits with other members of the new working class).

We face an uphill battle to achieve the key tasks of this period, as we fight against a dominant ideology which is not on our side, labor laws that do more to divide workers and protect the interests of bosses than promote workers’ rights, a historical trajectory that has left us with diminished social movements and organizations, and spatial divisions that isolate our organizations and movements.

Social Reproduction: gender, market integration, and a rising history maker!

Part of the dominant class response to the accumulation crisis was to bring fully into market conditions socially reproductive labor, or in other words, to move work that was not traditionally waged into the waged work world.  This is work usually done by  women that is involved in the reproduction (schooling, childcare, housekeeping, elder care, etc.) of the next generation of workers.  Capital continually looks to fill its insatiable need to expand by moving unwaged work to waged work.  The movement of women into the labor force, particularly its most undervalued and super-exploited sectors, expands the labor market and the production of surplus value.

Neo-liberal restructuring drove a polarization of wealth and power and created a new demand for a whole range of domestic service and services.  This emerging stratum of the working class is the lowest paid, works the longest hours and is in perennial crisis.  In addition, immigration laws further segment the labor market creating a gray market for undocumented workers who have little legal productions under the law.  At this intersection of race, class and gender has emerged the rising history maker – working women of color – who are largely the social base of the new working class organizations that have arisen in the last two decades.

In Northern Virginia this has meant immigrant women who work in hotels or the service industry who join Tenants and Workers United. Elsewhere – in urban areas throughout the country – it is women of color who have come together to motor the overwhelming majority of  New Working Class Organizaitons that have developed over the last 20 years.  Particularly for the 40 organizations who are members of the Right to the City Alliance our political demands are centered around social reproduction that is around needs and wants associated with sustaining and raising working people.  This includes fights for affordable or public housing, high performing schools and a range of social services.

Organizing During the Neo-Liberal Era: Pragmatism in Unions and Community Organizing

For decades, the old-school Alinsky form of organizing has dominated community- and workplace-based organizing, and it is time to formally declare it’s failure. The Alinsky model of organizing emphasizes a purportedly non-ideological, pragmatic approach to organizing that is ill-equipped to winning power for the oppressed people. It grew in the space created by the decline of the New Left, the rise of progressive or liberal foundations, and the decline of organized labor. The internal crisis of ACORN in some ways flows directly from the political limitations and failures of the Alinskly model, and ACORN is in the beginning of a period of serious decline in which it will lose dominance in it’s two former foundational strengths: electoral organizing and fundraising from private foundations.

At the same time, the labor movement, with few exceptions, is not organizing the most militant and dynamic sectors of the working class, and it has not adapted well to the formation of the new working class referenced above. Over 87% of the workforce in this country are not union members. The Labor Movement on the whole has not broken from a Gomperist (see Fletcher and Gapasin, Solidarity Divided) relation to the dominant class.  That is, it fights to get a slightly better deal for its members vis-à-vis the rest of the class.  It does not fight for the class as a whole, nor does it challenge the fundamental rules of capital.

Organizations for the new class: Emergence, Approach and Self-Analysis/Critique

Over the last 20 years a new urban movement is emerging in the growth of new working class organizations – such as Just Cause Oakland (now Causa Justa/Just Cause), Miami Workers Center, Tenants and Workers United, Domestic Workers United, POWER, and others.  These organizations social base is oppressed nationality women; including African American’s and others forced into the low-wage labor market because of welfare ‘reform’ and globalization-forced immigration.

These groups attempted to organize whole neighborhoods, cities, or sectors of the workforce in campaigns that raised demands against the state. Through direct action, conscious political education and raising counter-hegemonic demands (that is, framing demands in ways that challenge the dominant class’s ‘common sense’), these organizations fought for affordable housing and an end to displacement in the face of intense land privatization, recognition of domestic work as dignified work, the rights of marginal and informal workers, access to quality transportation for these new tiers of workers, and an end to the wanton criminalization of youth of color.

Perhaps most uniquely, there is a conscious effort amongst these New Working Class Organizations to link local base-building work with work against the US empire, by engaging members in struggles and solidarity actions against war, occupation, and financial control of the Third World, but also by developing a tier of leaders from this new working class that is highly conscious of the role the US plays financially, politically and militarily in the world. Whereas an most unions would focus leadership development exclusively on skills to be used for the narrow purpose of workplace organizing, these new organizations prioritized a form of leadership development that developed ‘hard’ leadership skills with ideological development and analytical skills.

This form of organization is relatively new, however, and has many weaknesses. The leadership of NWCO is primarily university educated, ‘middle class’ and oppressed nationality, with relatively few advanced leaders directly from the new class. It is dependent on foundations for its financial base, which has meant that, while most NWCO’s are organizer-centered, they are not typically funded to have a density of organizers moving any one campaign; new funding streams more often lead to more campaigns rather than a larger base organized around larger scale campaigns. As a result, most organizations have expertise in developing a small handful of very sophisticated members and very little success in organizing large organizations with large mass bases. New Working Class Organizations have generally focused narrowly on organizing this new sector of the class and has limited experience with broader formations. The financial crash and the corresponding drop in foundation funding has left many of these groups in financial crisis.

Interestingly, over the last two years an increasing number of these organizations are experimenting in electoral work.  This is creating opportunities to organize more broadly both spatially and also broader strata within the class.

Right to the City: further self defining as a new urban movement

In 2007, 40 community-based organizations – representing many of the most ideological of the New Working Class organzations – allied academics and resource allies (eg, Advancement Project, Florida Legal Services, the Data Center) met in Los Angeles and created the Right to the City Alliance.  This coming together represented a collective jumping of scales for a maturing and r9ising sector of the working class.  Organizations, heretofore, had generally just worked on demands at local and state levels.  Cominmg together we have begun to enunciate a collective vision for our cities – for all, green, feminist – as well as begun the difficult process to make national demands on the federal government and to claim political space at the national level vis a vis unions and other national formations.

The state: a new moment

One can see in the electoral majority that elected Obama the prefigurative possibility of a rising historic bloc – centered on a unified Black nation, with wide layers of immigrants and other people of color, unionists, and broad stratum of the cybertariat and new economy working class (many with self-identified as working class.  New Working Class Organizations broadly share much in our approach to organizing: a historical subject, a broad but common understanding of race, class and gender, and our strategy for change. An area where we have less in common is our analysis of the state.  We believe that our strategic approach should draw from Poulantzas and create political space that neither builds a parallel state that leads to a complete replacement  of the old with the new, nor simply elects new people to fill the existing state. By creating new structures and laws we seek to create fissures that increasingly alter the class, race and gender power disposition of the state. Examples of this may include efforts at democratizing the system – same day voter registration or mail in voting, felon voter registration (still an arduous process in Virginia and elsewhere in the south), others might work to eliminate structural obstacles that systematically disempower people of color such as statewide election of senators, non-proportional elections, or participatory budgeting. Others challenges could seek to democratize the economy through taxes on financial transactions or community control over banks or other flows of capital.

New organizing approaches with this in mind

Along with the above-mentioned aggressive, innovative forms of campaign work and organizing, many NWCO’s are engaged more and more in electoral work. For New Working Class Organizations (Right to the City organizations, for example), electoral work presents the opportunity to push our strengths in organizing to a scale we have been unable to reach up until now.

Often confused with social democracy, this work, when led by NWCO’s can allow us to:

1) Develop counter-hegemonic demands, or at the very least counter-hegemonic framing that we advance through issue-based or even candidate campaigns. While these campaigns are in some way assessed by a simple measure of success (i.e. winning the election), NWCO organizations must use their electoral efforts to challenge the underpinnings of neo-liberalism and empire.

2) Win concrete material demands that improve life for our social base, build a sense of movement for our social base and force resources to be moved from the war economy to the social wage (increasing the social wage, albeit on a smaller scale, is essentially the hallmark campaign form of most NWCO’s).

3) Advance our practice and theory through engaging broader mass forces in, what is for the most part, their principal form of political involvement (elections).  Thus we (and our allies) will be actively engaged in strategizing that will force us to continue building our base but also actively constructing a historic bloc – or ensemble of race and class forces – necessary for a new order no dominated by Capital.  This provides an opportunity for different organized sectors – unionists, teachers and students, NWCM activists and others to work together in a coordinated manner.

4) Practice limited forms of governance and power. NWCO, Alinsky organizations, and Unions have experience fighting targets and powerbrokers. We don’t have experience with even limited forms of power at his scale, and for a budding movement, it is crucial practice for different epoch in history when questions of revolutionary democracy, working class power, and organized accountability will be staring us in the face.

Finally, the scale at which our organizations must fight are always changing. While it is important to not necessarily concede political space to the ruling class, some scales of power might present opportunities at various moments in history that beckon us to action. This moment in history, due to the convergence of the economic, ecological, and political crises (the latter represents the crisis in which the ruling political classes find the legitimacy of their system of power waning) presents opportunities for struggles at the national scale which are essential to moving our base, and oppressed people broadly, into action and towards victories against exploitation. We would do well to seize these opportunities.

Jon Liss has been organizing in Virginia for almost 30 years. He was a founding member and is currently the Executive Director of Tenants and Workers United and Virginia New Majority and a founder and steering committee member of the Right to the City Alliance.   Prior to his time at Tenants and Workers United, Jon was involved in a number of grassroots organizations in Virgina, including: Proceso de Educación Popular, the Rainbow Coalition/Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign,  Northern Virginians Against Apartheid  and the Fairfax County Taxi-drivers Association.

Rishi Awatramani is Lead Organizer at Virginia New Majority (VNM). VNM is a member of the Right to the City Alliance. Rishi is on the US Social Forum National Planning Committee representing Leftist Lounge, has previously worked as a union and community organizer, and is a long-time activist with several organizations.

Joseph Phelan of Organizing Upgrade interviewed Bill Fletcher Jr. by phone in early June 2009.

Joseph: Bill, the first thing I want to get to with you is: What do you think are the most significant things happening right now in the world? What are the shifts that left organizers in particular need to be paying attention to?

Bill: We are living through the convergence of three crises: economic, environmental and a crisis of state legitimacy.  It is a moment where we’re dealing with more than a recession or even a depression. We’re dealing with these forces that are coming together and opening up tremendous possibilities in terms of the development of a new set of politics and a new political practice. But at the same time, it’s very dangerous and very scary.

Unfortunately what’s happened within the left and among progressives is sort of an unwillingness to grapple with the dynamics of this period.  Some level of denial, some level of lack of urgency. I’d say that’s what makes this particular period unusual and that necessitates a deeper level of analysis and thinking and urgency at the level of action and organization.

J: I want to come back to that urgency and even that denial of opportunities within the left.  But you said that in the convergence of these crises, there are danger and possibilities; could talk more about the dangers that we’re facing in this time.

B: The dangers exist at a number of different levels.

We are faced with a very serious threat to the future of humanity. Not to be melodramatic. Any numbers of things that could happen. During the Cold War the big worry was a nuclear exchange.  That remains a real possibility, especially with these nutcases in Pakistan and India who posses nuclear weapons.  They could end up using them against one another.  In another part of the world, Israel could end up using nuclear weapons against one of its opponents. Nuclear war is always a possibility.

But the big worry regarding the future of humans as a species is the shift in the environment.  Will these shifts make the planet inhospitable? Will we be able to stop or reverse the damage down to the environment? These are real worries and part of the three crises. So we are operating at that level of analysis and action.

We’re also operating on the level of political dangers.  One of the biggest political dangers in the Global North and the Global South are variants on right-wing populism.  Populism’s proponents often steal arguments from the left; morph them into almost their opposite and use them to touch a sentiment in the masses of people who are feeling constrained, oppressed, dispossessed.  Right-wing populism looks for scapegoats. Those scapegoats are another ethnic group or a racial group, women, gays and lesbians…it can be any number of things.  We must expect right wing populism to become stronger unless we thoroughly defeat it [ed. Note – As we have seen with the successful targeting of Van Jones and the 9/12 movement].

Given the competition for resources on a planet where resources are limited by the ecology of the planet and the economic system that we live under there is a constant danger of a war of “…all against all…”.  When you have limited resources people have two options. One, they fight the system that handles the resources in an undemocratic way, and that’s generally the way that the Left wants to go.  Two, they identify a particular “other” ,another grouping that is perceived to be the grouping that is suppressing everyone else and is hoarding resources. So right wing populism can – under those circumstances – be very persuasive.  We on the left need to better understand it and take issue with it.

J: You just identified the big global impacts on the environment and the political levels. You also identified, earlier, the crisis of state legitimacy. In all three of these there seems to be an opening for a left response.

B: There’s actually an opening for both: an opening for a left and a right-wing response.

When I talk about state legitimacy, I’m referring to the changes in that the state has gone through in the Global North and South under neoliberal globalization.   When you start thinking about the philosophy and ideology that accompanied the development of the modern capitalist state, it is important to keep in mind that it was shaped – first of all – with the idea of a nation-state, even though capitalism has always been global.  The myth of the nation state is that the state would protect the population and that protection takes various forms.  It can mean social services or it can mean military protection or whatever the case may be. That’s the role of the state.

With neoliberal globalization and the global reorganization of capitalism, what’s happened is a slow transformation of the role of the state. In the Global South, it’s very apparent that the nation-state has been significantly weakened, particularly with regard to multinational corporations and the transfer of wealth.  The capitalist state in the Global South finds itself at wits end trying to find resources to conduct services for the population.

As the state weakens, and as the state’s ability to distribute wealth in a more equitable way weakens, you then see again the rise of left and right wing alternatives. The right wing alternative in an extreme is “war-lordism.” That’s an extreme right-wing solution to the crisis of the state, and it can be justified in terms of xenophobia, etc.

A left-wing response to neoliberal globalization can be found in things like the global justice movement, which has been challenging neoliberal globalization for years and has been raising this question about the unequal distribution of wealth on this planet: who controls it and what must be done about that.  And it rises  that while the capitalist state in the Global North is not weakening in the same way that the state in the Global South is weakening, it is weakening in a different way.

In the North we see that the state is  delivering fewer resources to the people because of policies that have been voluntarily engaged the political elite. This weakening, so to speak, is taking place at the same time that the state is becoming stronger in other ways, most especially at the level of repression.  Nevertheless, these diminishing resources combined with the ideology of neoliberalism that encouraged the privatization of services has resulted in a changing state.

When you have a situation where the state is not delivering what it once was delivering, you can have a right and a left wing response.  The left wing response, as I mentioned before, includes the global justice movement, but it’s not limited to that because it also raises the question of whether or not we need something different, and that’s where the opening exists for the left.  The Right, depending on which Right one is talking about at any one moment, may advocate a stronger, authoritarian state—even if it advances neo-liberal globalization—or it might advocate more of a balkanization along regional and/or ethnic grounds.

J: We just talked about the crisis of state legitimacy. And when you’re talking about the global justice movement, you’re identifying them as people who are raising questions around the global distribution of wealth and so on.  But you’re also saying that we can push beyond a broad global justice movement and start to demand more specific changes.

B: That’s right. Absolutely. And that exists on a couple of different levels. One is that the global justice movement is a very broad movement; it that includes anarchists, socialists, progressives, i.e., a variety of forces that do not necessarily have a coherent alternative to capitalism. And that’s OK because it’s done a great job, and it’s supposed to be broad.  That said, what we need is to have an organized radical left that is in fact posing the question of an alternative, and in my opinion specifically socialism. We need to flesh out how that socialism will look different than the socialism of the twentieth century, which was a mixed bag.  So that’s one of our theoretical challenges right now. If we don’t advance alternatives, we can only continue resisting for so long till the point comes when we’re weakened and we’re tired. In that situation, the right will take advantage.

J: Within this need for a more organized left I’m curious about the danger and possibilities that you identified with the left having a lack of urgency. I’m wondering where you see that playing out, even within the broad global justice movement and where do you see that playing out in the existing radical left.  In this moment, what are the opportunities for the radical left..

B: Part of the problem at the level of the radical left is that it is content for the most part to engage in resistance struggles within the confines of existing social movements. Part of the damage that’s been done to the left over the last 25 years has been (in addition to repression in certain places) is ideological; the growth of postmodernism and post-structuralism which basically suggested that there really is no alternative. It’s a very subjective ideology: there is no alternative; there is no overarching theory or project that can link together the various progressive social movements other than some vague resistance. This ideology fits nicely in the position of resistance.

If all you’re doing is resisting, then you don’t need any higher forms of organization; you just coordinate every so often, go to joint conferences and things like that and then go back into your bunker.  The problem is that people do not operate by and large only within a particular social movement.  They operate multi-dimensionally.  There are a lot of struggles going on, and these struggles are interconnected. At certain moments, particular struggles become primary, but that doesn’t mean that other struggles ever disappear.  So you need some sort of overarching theory that is able to help link these together. You also need organization that can link these various movements and can bring together the leaders (with a small “l”) of these movements towards the development of a coherent collective vision.

There is a comfort in networks and there is a comfort in coalitions, but there is a fear of organization. Part of that comes out of a legitimate criticism of many of the organizational experiences of the twentieth century.  Part of it comes out of anti-communism and the impact that anti-communism has had over the years in  promoting the notion that all organization is dangerous and that all organization contains within it the seeds of authoritarianism and that therefore the best route is not to promote organization at all, but to remain within loose networks.

There’s a role for networks; that relates to my earlier point about the global justice movement. There is a role for networks, and there’s a role for that level of interconnection. But in order to advance mass movements, to really challenge for power, you need a much more cohesive organization and vision.

I think that many people on the radical left don’t see that.  At the same time, you have people on the radical left that do have organizations, but in many cases, those organizations are small and relatively weak. They may have good politics or they may not, but there is what Mao Tse-tung referred to as “mountain stronghold mentality”. It was a metaphor that came out of the Chinese Revolution where you would have a guerrilla band that would be literally on top of a mountain. They would secure the top of the mountain; they could keep the enemy away but that was all they could do.  Every so often, they would come out and attack. At a point when the struggle necessitated a different form of combat, these guerrilla bands would not  want to come down from the mountain and form new forms of organization.  Part of what I’m arguing is that we need different forms of organization if we’re really going to struggle for power.

J: With that, we’re in this place with these three converging crises: economic, ecological and the crisis of the legitimacy of the state, there is an international global justice movement.  Particularly in the United Sates, what do you see as the role of left organizers?  And to be specific by what I mean by left organizers, I mean people who are engaged in practical organizing work on the ground who are probably engaged in social movement work.

B: I would say that the role of left organizers in this period is primarily involves three things.

The first is identifying the real leaders of the oppressed.  That doesn’t mean that the left organizers may not be themselves leaders, but the idea is to always be looking for the new emerging struggle and emerging leaders and again, I mean leaders with a small “l,” that is, people who have followers.

The second piece is conducting educational work and engaging those leaders in a combination of struggle but also political education, helping them to develop an ideological framework to be able to look at the world and be able to analyze it from a progressive if not radical standpoint.  The objective here is that such an analysis leads to transformative action.

The third thing is the building of organization.We on the left must always be thinking about building and strengthening organizations of the oppressed; whether we’re talking about labor unions, whether we’re talking about community-based organizations, whether we’re talking about networks and whether or not we’re talking about a left political party, a party for socialism.  We’ve got to be the ones that are building and supporting  the building of institutions of the oppressed.  When we’re in the labor unions, for example, we need to be the ones that are fighting for their democratization, for their vigilance, for their outreach to other segments of the oppressed, etc. We have to fight for organizations to have breadth, that is, they really need to represent different segments of the working class and the oppressed. But we also have to be the ones that are asking the questions like “How do we get to an alternative society? What does that mean at the level of organization? Therefore, why is it necessary to build a party of the left or parties of the left?”

So I think that we have those tasks: identifying the leaders, linking real education with progressive action, and the third is promoting the development of organizations among the oppressed.

J: So these are the three things you’re seeing as the primary opportunities in this moment.  We’ve talked about the denial about what needs to happen on the left, so now let’s talk about the urgency. I’m hoping you can relate it to the three things you just laid out.  Where is the left faulting on the urgency? What are some practical things that leftists should be doing?  Can you give some real-world examples of things that you’re seeing or things you would like to see?

B: Well, much of the left is trapped in what the old man, Lenin, referred to as “spontaneism.”  Unfortunately when people read Lenin and look at the issue of spontaneity, they often look at it very narrowly.

There’s a spontaneism that exists within sections of the left when it comes to issues of organization.  I would argue that it takes the form of the idea that radical organization will emerge when the masses realize that it needs to emerge.  Therefore, according to the spontaneists, our role is essentially to be ideological gad-flies who whisper into the ears of the masses and then at the appropriate moment, the masses will awaken and say, “Damn.  Now I get it.  Let’s form a party!”  I’m obviously exaggerating it somewhat, but only somewhat, because this spontaneism is very pervasive within the left.  So you’ll have people waiting, basically, and not posing this question. This goes to this question about urgency. Not posing this question of organization and not actively building it because they actually believe that the organization will emerge on its own or that the signs will be so clear, that the sun will rise in the west instead of the east and at that point we will know it is time to form a party.

So I think that is something we have to actively defeat and realize that we have to help to put into place those institutions that can help to strengthen the oppressed and build the Left. Now you said you wanted me to be concrete about something specific, remind me again.

J: You gave these three points and touching on the urgency point, there’s this spontaneity feel among large portions of the left.  You put out these three points – identifying leaders of the oppressed, doing real educational work and building organization.  I was wondering if you were seeing real-world examples of moving towards these three things that you’re prescribing – or if you’re not seeing them, then if you could put forward some things that you see that could be good.

B: There’s a lot of good work that’s going on.

The workers’ center movement or the social wage movement has been very good at identifying leaders among the poor, of linking those leaders to action and linking that with education.  But I think that much of the social wage movement has also been trapped within a certain kind of NGOism where the activists from the middle strata remain reluctant to give up their leading roles, so the leaders from the oppressed become instruments, even unintentionally, rather than becoming self-conscious leaders. There’s a dependency relationship that develops.

So I think that there are a lot of good things that are happening that I see out there.  A lot of the attention over the last twenty years, for example, to popular education, was very good.  It was largely inspired by the Brazilian experiences (e.g., the work of Paulo Friere). The good news there is that it’s focused on the needs of the student or the learner as opposed the idea of simply pouring knowledge into someone’s head.  The problem is that some people who have adopted the popular education pedagogy have at the same time adopted a semi-anarchist view of change and have come to believe that all one needs to do is to conduct educational work and that people will move on their own.  I think that’s a very wrong read of the Brazilian experience but also of history. So I think that what we see is that there is right now a lot of experimentation.

At the level of building organization, I’d say the votes aren’t in yet frankly.  You have some good experiences within the radical left of people talking more with one another, so that’s good.  And people are friendlier.  But our level of theoretical development remains fairly low and there remains a reluctance to push the envelope on questions of moving to higher level of organization, and I think that reflects the spontaneism as well as a level of distrust.

J: OK so we have the economic crisis in the United States and then we have the election of Obama.  The election of Obama is a point of contention within the left. Some see it as an opportunity; some see it as same-old-same-old, no big thing.  It’s now past the 100 days mark, and I know that you’re involved in Progressives for Obama. So I’m wondering what are you reflections on Obama and his presidency.  And what are the opportunities for the left in this Obama moment?

B: Well I think that there are a lot of opportunities. On many levels the Obama administration  broke with key elements of the Bush administration’s approach towards governance, towards the role of government as well as foreign policy.  It doesn’t mean that it’s a complete break, and this country is still at the heart of the global empire. So we have to be clear about all of those things.

The Obama campaign inspired millions.  The biggest challenge for the left, out of the Obama campaign, is what to do with that energy, how to really tap into it, how to encourage some level of continuity from the campaign.  And don’t think that we’ve answered that question very well, in part because most of the left remains ambivalent about electoral politics.  While much of the Left may have been inspired to varying degrees by the Obama campaign, it is really uncertain as to whether that’s a realm that we want to spend a lot of time in.  So I think that is a challenge.

The Obama administration represents additional challenges. I think that – for African Americans – there is a very particular challenge because we’re going to have to figure out how to criticize Obama when he doesn’t do something, when he follows a less-then-progressive course of action. And there’s going to be – and it’s already evident – significant numbers of African Americans who are going to remain silent about things that they don’t agree with. And I think that’s a challenge for the Black left.  You have some people in the Black left who always opposed Obama and who continue to oppose Obama, and they take on something of the form of a mosquito that flies by your ear at night, making it very difficult for you to sleep.  They don’t have a lot that’s useful to say, and they certainly don’t have a lot in terms of practical direction. But it’s enough to keep people unsettled.

The role of the genuine left is to approach the Obama administration critically, by which I mean that it’s not an approach of total support or total opposition but evaluating on a case-by-case basis where we can support the Obama administration, in which case we need to support and we can’t just remain silent, and where we need to be critical like on issues like Palestine.  I think that Obama has not gone nearly far enough on this, and he has caved into anti-Palestinian forces in the United States. So we need to keep the pressure on them around Palestine. Or take with the stimulus package.  I think on balance it was important to support it, even where we disagreed with specific provisions, but the thrust of it was the right thrust.  We need to be prepared to speak out, on both counts, when we are in agreement as well as when we’re in disagreement.

J: I agree that optimism is a crucial piece of sustaining a movement and a left movement.  And victories are crucial to maintaining optimism because if you’re constantly in defeat, then you’re going to be set back. So I’m wondering right now, what are some things or organizations or movements or actions that you’ve found to be very inspiring.

B: There’s a lot that I find to be inspiring.  I think that if you want me to name names, I’d say that the Miami Workers’ Center, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, the Domestic Workers United, Tenants and Workers United, the Bus Riders Union as well as alliances like Jobs with Justice, Grassroots Global Justice and the Right to the City Alliance…I think that there are great examples. There are people who are trudging away in the labor unions who are attempting to fight the good fight like the recently formed National Union of Healthcare Workers that split off from SEIU after the unfortunate and ill-considered trusteeship of United Healthcare Workers West.  There is the on-going work of people who are in union reform movements like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union or the Longshore Workers Coalition, not to mention the critical work of those associated with the magazine Labor Notes.  I think that there are these and other efforts that are very, very important, but they are simply not enough.

All of these examples are very important and I’m not trying to diminish them. But we have to have a proactive organization and organizational practice that really is engaged in a fight for power. One level of that is certainly electoral and engaging in those politics. But the other level is much more long-term, and that’s where I keep coming back to the necessity for a party for socialism.

J: Well I think that covers about everything we wanted to cover in this conversation.  That’s a strong note to end on, but if there’s anything that you want to add, we’re open to it.

B: Very quickly.  Organizing in the United States has been dominated – since at least the 1960s or early 1970s – by what I call Alinskyism, which I would summarize as an activist practice that attempts to operate within a de-ideologized framework. It is an activist framework that borrowed organizing practice from the communists of the 1930s and 1940s, but borrowed left the ideology behind.

Alinskyism can be extremely militant and has been used by progressives and some left forces as an approach towards organizing that in its essence is another form of spontaneism, that is, that people will come to their own conclusions through struggle. The reality is that struggle is one part of the educational process, but engaging in struggle does not necessarily result in people developing an overarching view of society and the issues of oppression and emancipation. We need to recognize that people walk around with worldviews; they do not walk around vacuous.  They walk around with very complicated world-views, and part of our job on the left is to engage in struggle with people. Those views may be complicated, contradictory, etc., but that those world-views often help to explain to people why capitalism exists and why there’s nothing greater that we can ever win. And we need to challenge that.

J: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Bill.