We Need a Radical Left
by Ellen Willis
The Nation magazine, June 29, 1998
The Nation's introduction to its "First Principles"
series convey a revealing double message. On the one hand we are
called on to think about "fundamental questions," to
ask what we believe, what kind of society we want and how we can
build it. Yet at the same time we are informed that the left has
contributed to its current weakness by "failing to unite
around economic issues of fairness that join together the interests
of all but the wealthiest Americans." In other words, we
believe in economic fairness, and the way to achieve it is through
appealing to the majority's economic interests while (it is implied)
avoiding other issues that are potentially divisive. But why bother
to ask fundamental questions if we already know the answers? What's
left to discuss except details? In my view it's exactly this kind
of thinking that needs to be challenged if the left is to revive.
While I regard economic inequality as a national emergency and
a priority on any serious left agenda, I don't agree that "fairness,"
in itself, is a principle that can successfully combat right-wing
ideology and mobilize an effective movement for change. Nor do
I think the way to build such a movement is to look for issues
that "unite" people. By definition, the project of organizing
a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas
and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human
needs, interests and desires, end therefore will be persuasive
to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different
matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed
(accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already
believe.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, a wide assortment
of liberals and leftists called for unity around a campaign for
economic justice. Since then, as the country has moved steadily
rightward, I have heard this call repeated countless times, along
with many hopeful announcements of projects designed to put it
into practice. Each time the right wins an egregious victory (as
in the Congressional elections of 1994), dozens of lefty commentators
rush into print with some version of this proposal as if it were
a daring new idea. You would think that if economic majoritarianism
were really a winning strategy, sometime in the past eighteen
years it would have caught on, at least a little. Why has it had
no effect whatsoever? Are people stupid, or what?
The culprit the majoritarians seem to have settled on is cultural
politics. The cultural left, they argue, has given left politics
a bad name because of its divisive obsession with race and sex,
its arcane "elitist" battles over curriculum, its penchant
for pointy-headed social theory and its aversion to the socially
and sexually conservative values most Americana uphold. As a result,
the right has been able to distract American workers with the
culture war, while pursuing class war with impunity. Some anti-culturalists
further claim that cultural radicalism is the politics of an economic
elite that itself has a stake in diverting the public from the
subject of class to, as Michael Lind put it, "inflammatory
but marginal issues like abortion." But note the elitist,
condescending assumptions embodied in these very arguments : that
for two decades most Americans have been manipulated into abandoning
their true interests for a cultural sideshow; that they don't
have the brains to tell one kind of leftist from another, let
alone come up with their own ideas about what kind of politics
might improve their condition.
I 'd suggest a different explanation for the majoritarians'
failure: Their conception of how movements work and their view
of the left as a zero-sum game-we can do class or culture, but
not both-are simply wrong. People's working lives, their sexual
and domestic lives, their moral values, are intertwined. If they
are not ready to defend their right to freedom and equality in
their personal relations, they will not fight consistently for
their economic interests, either.
In any case, class is itself a cultural as well as an economic
issue. The idea that a heterogeneous population is naturally inclined
to band together on the basis of its declining share of income
relative to the rich makes sense only on the same bonehead premise
advanced by the right's "rational choice" theorists:
that human beings are economic calculating machines. In fact,
a powerful ideology of meritocracy divides people of different
socioeconomic strata as effectively as (and usually in combination
with) racism or sexism. While large percentages of the working
and middle classes may tell pollsters they think CEOs make too
much, on a deeper level most people tend to admire the rich, to
see them as somehow smarter or better, just as they tend to despise
the very poor. Nor is class politics less susceptible than racial
or sexual politics to the temptations of cultural nationalism,
which is why blue-collar unions have been reluctant to organize
white-collar workers, and why in certain circles preference for
beer and pretzels over wine and cheese is elevated to a political
badge of honor. To argue for a solidarity that transcends these
divisions is to challenge deeply ingrained cultural patterns.
No mass left-wing movement has ever been built on a majoritarian
strategy. On the contrary, every such movement- socialism, populism,
labor, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, ecology-has begun with
a visionary minority whose ideas were at first decried as impractical,
ridiculous, crazy, dangerous and/or immoral. By definition, the
conventional wisdom of the day is widely accepted, continually
reiterated and regarded not as ideology but as reality itself.
Rebelling against "reality," even when its limitations
are clearly perceived, is always difficult. It means deciding
things can be different and ought to be different; that your own
perceptions are right and the experts and authorities wrong; that
your discontent is legitimate and not merely evidence of selfishness,
failure or refusal to grow up. Recognizing that "reality"
is not inevitable makes it more painful; subversive thoughts provoke
the urge to subversive action. But such action has consequences-rebels
risk losing their jobs, failing in
school, incurring the wrath of parents and spouses, suffering
social ostracism. Often vociferous conservatism is sheer defensiveness:
People are afraid to be suckers, to get their hopes up, to rethink
their hard-won adjustments, to be branded bad or crazy.
It's not surprising, then, that those who stick their necks
out to start social movements tend to be in certain respects atypical.
Paradoxically, they are likely to have economic and social privileges
that free them from an overwhelming preoccupation with survival,
that make them feel less vulnerable and more entitled. Or, conversely,
they may already be social outcasts or misfits in one way or another
and so feel they have little to lose. Often they have been exposed
to alternative worldviews through a radical parent or an education
that encouraged critical thinking. Such differences are always
invoked to attack radicals on the grounds that they are not "ordinary
people" but middle-class intellectuals, cultural elitists,
narcissists, weirdos, outside agitators. Yet rebellious minorities
are really just canaries in the mine. When their complaints speak
to widespread, if unadmitted, disappointments and desires, it's
amazing how fast "ordinary people's" minds and the whole
social atmosphere can change, as happened between the fifties
and the sixties.
My experience as an early women's liberation activist was
dramatic in this regard. At first we were a small and lonely bunch;
our claim that heterosexual relations were unequal everywhere
from the office to the kitchen to the bedroom was greeted with
incredulity, laughter and blunt aspersions on our sexual and emotional
balance. I had many passionate arguments with women who insisted
they loved to cook and cater to men. What was I doing, they demanded-trying
to destroy sex and love? Two years later feminist groups were
erupting all over the country, and it was not unusual to see women
turn up at demonstrations who had once denounced the whole enterprise
in the most withering terms. Suppose we had reacted to that first
wave of hostility (as of course many liberal feminists urged us
to do, and many liberal men no doubt wish we had) by concluding,
"This will never fly-let's stick to 'equal pay for equal
work"'?
It's not necessary, as many leftists imagine, to round up
popular support before anything can be done; on the contrary,
the actions of a relatively few troublemakers can lead to popular
support. The history of movements is crowded with acts of defiance
by individuals and small groups-from the 1937 sit-in of workers
in a Flint, Michigan, auto plant to Rosa Parks's refusal to get
up to radical feminists' disrupting an "expert hearing"
on abortion reform-that inspired a wave of similar actions and
a broader revolt. When militant minorities also have radical ideas,
they capture people's imaginations by presenting another possible
world that appeals to the secret hopes of even the resigned and
cynical. They mobilize people by providing the context in which
winning small changes is worth the time and effort because it
is part of a larger project. They attract publicity and make it
difficult for the authorities to keep on telling the lies whose
credibility depends on uncontradicted repetition. The people in
power know all this and are quite wary of the potential threat
posed by an organized minority; their impulse is to make concessions
(albeit as few as they can get away with). As a result, radical
movements that articulate a compelling vision have an impact far
beyond their core of committed activists.
American left politics generally works this way: As radical
ideas gain currency beyond their original advocates, they mutate
into multiple forms. Groups representing different class, racial,
ethnic, political and cultural constituencies respond to the new
movement with varying degrees of support or criticism and end
up adapting its ideas to their own agendas. With these modifications
the movement's popularity spreads, putting pressure on existing
power relations; liberal reformers then mediate the process of
dilution, containment and "co-optation" whereby radical
ideas that won't go away are incorporated into the system through
new laws, policies and court decisions. The essential dynamic
here is a good cop/bad cop routine in which the liberals dismiss
the radicals as impractical sectarian extremists, promote their
own "responsible" proposals as an alternative and take
the credit for whatever change results.
The good news is that this process does bring about significant
change. The bad news is that by denying the legitimacy of radicalism
it misleads people about how change takes place, rewrites history
and obliterates memory. It also leaves people sadly unprepared
for the inevitable backlash. Once the radicals who were a real
threat to the existing order have been marginalized, the right
sees its opportunity to fight back. Conservatives in their turn
become the insurgent minority, winning support by appealing to
the still-potent influence of the old "reality," decrying
the tensions and disruptions that accompany social change and
promoting their own vision of prosperity and social order. Instead
of seriously contesting their ideas, liberals try to placate them
and cut deals, which only incites them to push further. Desperate
to avoid isolation, the liberal left keeps retreating, moving
its goal post toward the center, where "ordinary people"
supposedly reside; but as yesterday's center becomes today's left,
the entire debate shifts to the right. And in the end/ despite
all their efforts to stay "relevant," the liberals are
themselves hopelessly marginalized. This is the sorry situation
we are in right now.
Yet despite defeat after defeat, liberals retain a touching
faith in their modus operandi. In the thrall of historical amnesia,
they seem to have the impression that both the post-New Deal welfare
state and the post-World War II era of high wages, job security
and an expanding middle class came about because voters elected
liberal Democrats who enacted government social pro. grams, union
organizing rights and so on. In fact, the corporate elite actively
collaborated in the creation of welfare state liberalism and mass
prosperity in order to stave off the threat to its very existence
posed by the crisis of the Depression, the strength of the labor
movement and of radical movements domestic and foreign and, crucially,
the Soviet Union. (I don't want to be misunderstood as defending
the gulag, but there is no denying the irony: By showing that
another system was not only possible but able to compete for world
dominance, the Soviet regime forced Western capitalists to adopt
more humane policies.)
At present, capital faces no significant left opposition to
its I expansion and consolidation all ova the world, and so has
no incentive to embrace liberal constraints. With their enormous
resources and their power to invest or disinvest, give or withhold
credit, transnational corporations are more powerful than any
national government and have shown their readiness to retaliate
against any government that defies them. The states of Western
Europe, which have much more developed social democratic traditions
than ours, are still under relentless pressure to reduce their
social benefits and worker protections. American leftists who
imagine that we can reverse growing income inequality simply by
passing laws that we can somehow force the corporations to be
"fair" in the absence of any broader attack on their
power-are suffering from a serious confusion between tail and
dog.
Instead, we need to think about how we can confront the power
of capital at a time when state socialism in all its versions
has proved a dead and. The way to start, I believe, is by forming
a radical labor movement that claims as its constituency everyone
subjected to corporate domination-from "workfare" recipients
to well-paid but regimented professionals-and organizes wherever
possible across national boundaries. Such a movement would demand
an active role for workers in all corporate decisions that affect
our daily working lives and the entire social landscape, including
decisions about investment, trade, technology, production, hiring,
the structure and conditions of work. It would challenge not only
low wages and insecurity but the repressiveness of long hours,
authoritarian work rules, hierarchical management and women's
"double shift." In short, it would be a movement not
merely about fairness but about democracy, freedom and the pursuit
of happiness. As such it would transcend the majoritarians' untenable
distinction between economics and culture and regard movements
for black, women's and gay liberation as its natural allies rather
than competitors and antagonists.
The real political function of majoritarianism is maintaining
that distinction without having to defend it on its merits. Some
majoritarians are cultural conservatives who are sympathetic to
much of the right's pro-family, nose-to-the-grindstone program
but don't want to be attacked for saying so. Others are satisfied
with the cultural status quo-OK, it's not perfect, but hey, what
is?-and are baffled and irritated that these "marginal issues'
should steal attention from what matters to them. (In this vein
Richard Rorty lectures Nation readers, "We need to stop airing
these doubts about our country and our culture"-in other
words have your damn doubts, but don't frighten the horses. Apparently,
he has decided, like former Speaker of the House Tom Foley on
the occasion of the 1989 invasion of Panama, that "this is
not the time for a lot of complicated debate.") Still others
have concluded that in light of past crimes committed in the name
of utopia, raising the possibility of social transformation is
out of the question. I can't help detecting in this cluster of
stances something that might be called a comfortable-white-male
syndrome. Who else, after all, would project their own straitened
worldview onto "the American people," instead of simply
speaking for themselves?
Ellen Willis directs the cultural reporting and criticism
program in the department of journalism at New York University.
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