Originally Written 10 November 2004 --
I have read and heard election comments from many friends and correspondents and, quite frankly, most of them don't make sense to me. Many people are depressed by Bush's re-election. People here in New York City, where 75% of the voters voted for Kerry, look at themselves as somehow different and despised by the rest of the country. I don't understand the reason for the depression and sense of alienation of so many of my friends or why people believe that things are so much different this week than they were last week. I agree that the people who are currently the governing fraction of the ruling regime in the United States are thugs and rightwing authoritarians; we could better serve humanity by putting Bush and his cronies in front of a war-crime tribunal than placing at the head of the governing councils of the most powerful state the world has ever known. Yet, still, I must emphasize that the tasks remain the same today as they were two weeks ago or 4 years ago. And they would be the same tasks that would have remained before us if Kerry had been elected instead of Bush. Kerry, if he had been elected, would have been the same kind of right-wing president that Clinton became, unless a mass movement had appeared that might have changed the ground that Kerry stood upon. The last "liberal" president the United States elected was Richard Nixon. I am no admire of Nixon. He was one of the worse war-criminals of the past century. He was not a liberal because he cared for the health and wealth of those of us at the bottom of society, but simply because he couldn't be the right-wing nut he would have been in different times. There would have been too much of a reaction in society as a whole if he did not continue the same kind of guns and butter programs that were started by Lyndon Johnson.
What most people of the left who write about the election and are depressed by Bush's second term don't accept is that elections in our society are mostly a public relations problem and at best are surface reactions to what is underneath in society as a whole. Equating an "election" with politics, and then thinking that every kind of political organization that doesn't relate to an electoral politics is a distraction from "real" politics, is one of those middle-class doctrines that only shows that most people who become "professional" loose a good proportion of their capacity to think. Perhaps this is because among our middle class "professionals" every kind of politics that is not electoral politics is simply too messy. It stinks of the "mob". The point I want to make for those on the left who are not afraid of the mob is that elections in our country have become more and more divorced from actual politics. It is true that small changes in the councils of power can make a meaningful differences in limited areas, but the real changes only come when there are larger social movements pushing politicians into making concessions to the rest of us. Only larger social movements, which establish long lasting institutions, can change the ground on which the politicians stand. The last report I read in the "Wall Street Journal" stated that approximately 56% of the electorate voted, which means that Bush was elected by approximately 29% of the electorate, which seems to me to generally reflect his support in society as a whole. Also, the approximately 27% of the electorate that voted for Kerry I think accurately reflects the support for the conservatives in the Democratic party. The rest of us may vote in disgust for what ever candidate seems to hurt us least but let us not think that the simple act of voting tells us anything about politics or the general condition of the United States at this moment. The task that is the same today as it was yesterday is that we have to organize and educate and finds ways to act that gives us all something meaningful to do in changing our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, churches, etc. The best election comments I have read simply state this obvious fact. The right has spent the last forty years organizing grass-roots organizations, turning apolitical church groups into organizations that educate people into a certain worldview and then mobilize them for the purpose of the powerful. Our task is harder. It is not the task of the Democratic party or any other ruling group. We are not mobilizing people for the sake of the powerful. We are mobilizing people for the sake of spreading power and equality throughout our relations. The right-wing Christian organizations can dictate what is good and bad, and what to do about it. We cannot.
But the question we should be thinking about is the basic one of how, where, and what kind of organizations we should build. There are no simple solutions here and no substitutions for the hard work of everyday self-education and activist self-help. Organizations evolve in the course of building them and often we are unable to see what we are making when we begin. Reality surprises. Yet if we are going to help build the kind of society, based on human values of solidarity, human decency, the end of suffering amid abundance, etc -- the society most of us long for, we must have lasting social and educational institutions of our own. I am just stating the obvious. In our society the two sectors that provide stable venues for organizing are the work-place and the various churches. These are the two major choices for places to spend our organizing time. There are of course other choices but the problem with them is that with out outside institutional support human rights organizations, civil rights organizations, etc. are not self-supporting. Unless they are very small and local they quickly become dependent on institutional forces that influence their direction away from grass-roots activism. On the other hand small local organizations rarely develop into the kind of national network we need except in regard to narrow issues -- reproductive rights, environment, Central American Intervention, etc.
There are many "progressive" church organizations in the U.S. so there is no need to reject religious organizations in a dogmatic manner, but it is hard to see that in the long run Church organizations will be the major institutional support for progressive organizing. One reason for this is that a Church organization is by definition concerned with doctrinal issues that can only be called sectarian. Church organizations can help provided a space for progressive political and worker's organization but I doubt that in our society they will be the major institutions of the "left." I may be wrong. I certainly saw a contrary example in Central America in the 1980s. But I think in our society, even the Civil Rights movement of the post war era (which may be taken as a church based progressive movement to a large extent) of necessity became a secular movement when dealing with larger social and economic issues that formed the foundation of racism. I think that this is only saying that our society is so diverse that organizing around progressive social and economic issues is necessarily secular.
Traditionally the most stable support for "left" and "progressive" issues has been workers organizations of various sorts. This is simply a truism. Also the most stable worker's organization have been unions. Here is where we are stalled. We must continue to organize people around their work places and we must continue to educate people on the values of solidarity, etc., but for the moment, for most of us, this is a limited possibility. I do not discount international solidarity groups, civil and human rights groups, etc. We must continue to work to build such organizations. Yet without the institutional support of a strong union movement or of work-place based organizations of some sort, without the education and resources such organizations can provide, there will be no stable progressive organizations that serve the left in the way right-wing church organizations serve the right.
This is where I run into trouble with some of my "liberal" friends and maybe even with some who would label themselves "radical left." There are so many people in their 20s and 30s who simply think that it is either impossible to form a union (they may be accurately judging reality) or believe that unions are a conglomeration of gangsters or that they are stodgy old conservative organizations. There is some truth to these criticism, but when one sees the courageous attempts of mostly African-American workers to form a union in a chicken processing factory in the south and the brutal tactics the owners use to crush such attempts one does know which side to choose in such struggles. So may I suggest that we try to stick our necks out at our own workplaces and try to form groups to talk about these issues? May also suggest that we try to educate our liberal friends on the need for all of us to have more power through organization among wage earners in our work places. Finally, I would like to say that organizing around our workplaces does not only mean trying to organize a union. Who knows what kind of future organizations we can evolve? They may not be unions. But I am at a loss to think of what other kind of stable organizations we can support that will provide a longer term institutional foundation for the "progressive" agenda except for workplace based organizations.
I hope I am only stating the obvious.
Postscript:
Barbara Ehrenreich has a good article on what I would call the infrastructure of the Christian Right in the Nation. It can be found at the Nation's website or at http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm . The good point that I wish everyone on the left would contemplate is that "today's right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on "faith" but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients." What I would like to point out is that this kind of self-help has been the foundation of every popular movement of "right" and "left" from ancient Rome to the modern working class movement. The left must find ways to organize self-help that is both democratic and educational or else we will not make progress.
Jerry J. Monaco
New York City
10 November 2004
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco
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