Starting Wednesday, October 5th, there will be General Assemblies held daily in Bushnell Park at 8am and 5pm.
Follow #OccupyHartford on twitter.
New Facebook page to Like and follow:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Hartford/115295498577478?sk=wall
Freedom from Corporate Rule.
Democracy Now.
Get Active!
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Record 46.2 Million Americans Live in Poverty
Record 46.2 Million Americans Live in Poverty, Census Bureau Says
"At the same time, analysts say other factors understate the real
level of poverty in the U.S. Many more young adults have stayed or
moved back home because they can’t find jobs, and others have doubled
up with friends and relatives. Moreover, experts agree that the
poverty thresholds, designed in the early 1960s, doesn’t capture
people’s spending and living needs in today’s economy."
Los Angeles Times
September 13, 2011
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/09/record-462-million-americans-in-poverty-census-bureau-says.html
Record 46.2 Million Americans Live in Poverty, Census Bureau Says
by Don Lee
High joblessness and the weak economic recovery pushed the ranks of
the poor in the U.S. to 46.2 million in 2010 -- the fourth straight
increase and the largest number of people living in poverty since
record-keeping began 52 years ago, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
The share of all people in the U.S. who fell below the poverty line
rose to 15.1% last year from 14.3% in 2009. That matched the poverty
rate reached in 1993 before falling steadily to 11.3% in 2000. Since
then the poverty rate has risen, accelerating after the recession
began in late 2007, and is now approaching levels not seen since
Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1965.
Last year the share of children under 18 living in poverty jumped to
22%, from 20.7% the previous year.
The Census Bureau’s report also showed an increase in the number of
people without healthcare coverage rose to 49.9 million last year from
49 million in 2009, though the percentage of uninsured was
statistically unchanged. And there was a further erosion of incomes at
the middle of the middle class.
Inflation-adjusted median household income in the U.S. fell 2.3% in
2010 from a year ago, to $49,445.
Taken together, the data all point to the severe and widespread
financial strains of a nation in the throes of an economic crisis. And
the report, coming shortly after President Obama’s proposed package of
$447 billion in tax cuts and spending to revive job growth and the
recovery, is almost certain to intensify the debate over the
government’s role in helping the poor and unemployed at a time of
budget deficits and painful cutbacks in public services. Extended
federal unemployment benefits, for example, helped some people rise
above the poverty line.
Analysts had widely expected the poverty rate for last year to edge
higher, given that the nation’s unemployment rate averaged 9.6% in
2010 compared with 9.3% the previous year. The latest jobless figure,
for August, was 9.1%.
By the Census Bureau’s latest measure, the poverty threshold last year
was an income of $11,139 for one person and $22,314 for a family of
four.
The government’s official poverty rate doesn’t count food-stamp
benefits and low-income tax credits as income. If those programs,
which totaled about $150 billion last year, were included, many more
people would have been counted as being above the poverty line.
At the same time, analysts say other factors understate the real level
of poverty in the U.S. Many more young adults have stayed or moved
back home because they can’t find jobs, and others have doubled up
with friends and relatives. Moreover, experts agree that the poverty
thresholds, designed in the early 1960s, doesn’t capture people’s
spending and living needs in today’s economy.
***
Census: US Poverty Rate Swells to Nearly 1 in 6
The Associated Press via Google News
September 13, 2011
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gFaWVNgKNKz6TVHRLhSJVGLvOosQ?docId=d10a4a8cc0d147b2a2ccab1a4d9b7b22
Census: US Poverty Rate Swells to Nearly 1 in 6
by Hope Yen
WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of the nation's poor swelled to nearly 1
in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment
woes left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number
of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in over two
decades.
The Census Bureau's annual report released Tuesday offers a snapshot
of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2010, when
joblessness hovered above 9 percent for a second year. It comes at a
politically sensitive time for President Barack Obama, who has
acknowledged in the midst of a re-election fight that the unemployment
rate could persist at high levels through next year.
The overall poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent, or 46.2 million, up
from 14.3 percent in 2009.
Reflecting the lingering impact of the recession, the U.S. poverty
rate from 2007-2010 has now risen faster than any three-year period
since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government
cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and
unemployment.
Measured by total numbers, the 46 million now living in poverty is the
largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking
poverty in 1959. Based on percentages, it tied the poverty level in
1993 and was the highest since 1983.
Broken down by state, Mississippi had the highest share of poor
people, at 22.7 percent, according to rough calculations by the Census
Bureau. It was followed by Louisiana, the District of Columbia,
Georgia, New Mexico and Arizona. On the other end of the scale, New
Hampshire had the lowest share, at 6.6 percent.
The share of Americans without health coverage rose from 16.1 percent
to 16.3 percent — or 49.9 million people — after the Census Bureau
made revisions to numbers of the uninsured. That is due mostly because
of continued losses of employer-provided health insurance in the
weakened economy.
Congress passed a health overhaul last year to address rising numbers
of the uninsured. While the main provisions don't take effect until
2014, one aspect taking effect in late 2010 allowed young adults 26
and younger to be covered under their parents' health insurance.
Brett O'Hara, chief of the Health and Disability Statistics branch at
the Census Bureau, noted that the uninsured rate declined — from 29.3
percent to 27.2 percent — for adults ages 18 to 24 compared to some
other age groups.
The median — or midpoint — household income was $49,445, down 2.3
percent from 2009.
Bruce Meyer, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago,
cautioned that the worst may yet to come in poverty levels, citing in
part continued rising demand for food stamps this year as well as
"staggeringly high" numbers in those unemployed for more than 26
weeks. He noted that more than 6 million people now represent the
so-called long-term unemployed, who are more likely to fall into
poverty, accounting for than two out of five currently out of work.
Other census findings:
* Poverty rose among all race and ethnic groups except Asians. The
number of Hispanics in poverty increased from 25.3 percent to 26.6
percent; for blacks it increased from 25.8 percent to 27.4 percent,
and Asians it was flat at 12.1 percent. The number of whites in
poverty rose from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent.
* Child poverty rose from 20.7 percent to 22 percent.
* Poverty among people 65 and older was statistically unchanged at 9
percent, after hitting a record low of 8.9 percent in 2009.
***
Rate of Poverty in U.S. Is Highest Since 1993, Census Says
The New York Times
September 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/14census.html
Rate of Poverty in U.S. Is Highest Since 1993, Census Says
by Sabrina Tavernise
WASHINGTON — The portion of Americans living in poverty last year rose
to the highest level since 1993, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday,
fresh evidence that the sluggish economic recovery has done nothing
for the country’s poorest citizens.
And in new evidence of economic distress among the middle class, real
median household incomes declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the
previous year, to $49,400.
An additional 2.6 million people slipped below the poverty line in
2010, census officials said, making 56.2 million people in poverty in
the United States, the highest number in the 52 years the Census
Bureau has been tracking it, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the Poverty
Statistic Branch at the Census Bureau. That represented 15.1 percent
of the country.
The poverty line in 2010 was at $22,113 for a family of four.
“The figures we are releasing today are important,” said Robert
Groves, the director of the Census Bureau. “They tell us how changing
economic conditions have impacted Americans and their families.”
According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male
full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually
unchanged from its level in 1973, when the level was $49,065, in 2010
dollars.
“That’s not about the poor and unemployed, that’s full time, year
round,” said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the
University of Michigan. Particularly hard hit, Professor Danziger
said, have been those who do not have college degrees. “The median,
full-time male worker has made no progress on average.”
The youngest members of households — those ages 15 to 24 — lost out
the most, with their median income dropping by 9 percent. The
recession continued to push Americans to double up in households with
friends and relatives, especially those aged 25 to 34, a group that
experienced a 25 percent rise in the period between 2007, when the
recession began and 2011. Of that group, 45.3 percent were living
below the poverty line, when their parents incomes were not taken into
account.
"At the same time, analysts say other factors understate the real
level of poverty in the U.S. Many more young adults have stayed or
moved back home because they can’t find jobs, and others have doubled
up with friends and relatives. Moreover, experts agree that the
poverty thresholds, designed in the early 1960s, doesn’t capture
people’s spending and living needs in today’s economy."
Los Angeles Times
September 13, 2011
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/09/record-462-million-americans-in-poverty-census-bureau-says.html
Record 46.2 Million Americans Live in Poverty, Census Bureau Says
by Don Lee
High joblessness and the weak economic recovery pushed the ranks of
the poor in the U.S. to 46.2 million in 2010 -- the fourth straight
increase and the largest number of people living in poverty since
record-keeping began 52 years ago, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
The share of all people in the U.S. who fell below the poverty line
rose to 15.1% last year from 14.3% in 2009. That matched the poverty
rate reached in 1993 before falling steadily to 11.3% in 2000. Since
then the poverty rate has risen, accelerating after the recession
began in late 2007, and is now approaching levels not seen since
Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1965.
Last year the share of children under 18 living in poverty jumped to
22%, from 20.7% the previous year.
The Census Bureau’s report also showed an increase in the number of
people without healthcare coverage rose to 49.9 million last year from
49 million in 2009, though the percentage of uninsured was
statistically unchanged. And there was a further erosion of incomes at
the middle of the middle class.
Inflation-adjusted median household income in the U.S. fell 2.3% in
2010 from a year ago, to $49,445.
Taken together, the data all point to the severe and widespread
financial strains of a nation in the throes of an economic crisis. And
the report, coming shortly after President Obama’s proposed package of
$447 billion in tax cuts and spending to revive job growth and the
recovery, is almost certain to intensify the debate over the
government’s role in helping the poor and unemployed at a time of
budget deficits and painful cutbacks in public services. Extended
federal unemployment benefits, for example, helped some people rise
above the poverty line.
Analysts had widely expected the poverty rate for last year to edge
higher, given that the nation’s unemployment rate averaged 9.6% in
2010 compared with 9.3% the previous year. The latest jobless figure,
for August, was 9.1%.
By the Census Bureau’s latest measure, the poverty threshold last year
was an income of $11,139 for one person and $22,314 for a family of
four.
The government’s official poverty rate doesn’t count food-stamp
benefits and low-income tax credits as income. If those programs,
which totaled about $150 billion last year, were included, many more
people would have been counted as being above the poverty line.
At the same time, analysts say other factors understate the real level
of poverty in the U.S. Many more young adults have stayed or moved
back home because they can’t find jobs, and others have doubled up
with friends and relatives. Moreover, experts agree that the poverty
thresholds, designed in the early 1960s, doesn’t capture people’s
spending and living needs in today’s economy.
***
Census: US Poverty Rate Swells to Nearly 1 in 6
The Associated Press via Google News
September 13, 2011
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gFaWVNgKNKz6TVHRLhSJVGLvOosQ?docId=d10a4a8cc0d147b2a2ccab1a4d9b7b22
Census: US Poverty Rate Swells to Nearly 1 in 6
by Hope Yen
WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of the nation's poor swelled to nearly 1
in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment
woes left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number
of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in over two
decades.
The Census Bureau's annual report released Tuesday offers a snapshot
of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2010, when
joblessness hovered above 9 percent for a second year. It comes at a
politically sensitive time for President Barack Obama, who has
acknowledged in the midst of a re-election fight that the unemployment
rate could persist at high levels through next year.
The overall poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent, or 46.2 million, up
from 14.3 percent in 2009.
Reflecting the lingering impact of the recession, the U.S. poverty
rate from 2007-2010 has now risen faster than any three-year period
since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government
cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and
unemployment.
Measured by total numbers, the 46 million now living in poverty is the
largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking
poverty in 1959. Based on percentages, it tied the poverty level in
1993 and was the highest since 1983.
Broken down by state, Mississippi had the highest share of poor
people, at 22.7 percent, according to rough calculations by the Census
Bureau. It was followed by Louisiana, the District of Columbia,
Georgia, New Mexico and Arizona. On the other end of the scale, New
Hampshire had the lowest share, at 6.6 percent.
The share of Americans without health coverage rose from 16.1 percent
to 16.3 percent — or 49.9 million people — after the Census Bureau
made revisions to numbers of the uninsured. That is due mostly because
of continued losses of employer-provided health insurance in the
weakened economy.
Congress passed a health overhaul last year to address rising numbers
of the uninsured. While the main provisions don't take effect until
2014, one aspect taking effect in late 2010 allowed young adults 26
and younger to be covered under their parents' health insurance.
Brett O'Hara, chief of the Health and Disability Statistics branch at
the Census Bureau, noted that the uninsured rate declined — from 29.3
percent to 27.2 percent — for adults ages 18 to 24 compared to some
other age groups.
The median — or midpoint — household income was $49,445, down 2.3
percent from 2009.
Bruce Meyer, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago,
cautioned that the worst may yet to come in poverty levels, citing in
part continued rising demand for food stamps this year as well as
"staggeringly high" numbers in those unemployed for more than 26
weeks. He noted that more than 6 million people now represent the
so-called long-term unemployed, who are more likely to fall into
poverty, accounting for than two out of five currently out of work.
Other census findings:
* Poverty rose among all race and ethnic groups except Asians. The
number of Hispanics in poverty increased from 25.3 percent to 26.6
percent; for blacks it increased from 25.8 percent to 27.4 percent,
and Asians it was flat at 12.1 percent. The number of whites in
poverty rose from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent.
* Child poverty rose from 20.7 percent to 22 percent.
* Poverty among people 65 and older was statistically unchanged at 9
percent, after hitting a record low of 8.9 percent in 2009.
***
Rate of Poverty in U.S. Is Highest Since 1993, Census Says
The New York Times
September 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/14census.html
Rate of Poverty in U.S. Is Highest Since 1993, Census Says
by Sabrina Tavernise
WASHINGTON — The portion of Americans living in poverty last year rose
to the highest level since 1993, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday,
fresh evidence that the sluggish economic recovery has done nothing
for the country’s poorest citizens.
And in new evidence of economic distress among the middle class, real
median household incomes declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the
previous year, to $49,400.
An additional 2.6 million people slipped below the poverty line in
2010, census officials said, making 56.2 million people in poverty in
the United States, the highest number in the 52 years the Census
Bureau has been tracking it, said Trudi Renwick, chief of the Poverty
Statistic Branch at the Census Bureau. That represented 15.1 percent
of the country.
The poverty line in 2010 was at $22,113 for a family of four.
“The figures we are releasing today are important,” said Robert
Groves, the director of the Census Bureau. “They tell us how changing
economic conditions have impacted Americans and their families.”
According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male
full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually
unchanged from its level in 1973, when the level was $49,065, in 2010
dollars.
“That’s not about the poor and unemployed, that’s full time, year
round,” said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the
University of Michigan. Particularly hard hit, Professor Danziger
said, have been those who do not have college degrees. “The median,
full-time male worker has made no progress on average.”
The youngest members of households — those ages 15 to 24 — lost out
the most, with their median income dropping by 9 percent. The
recession continued to push Americans to double up in households with
friends and relatives, especially those aged 25 to 34, a group that
experienced a 25 percent rise in the period between 2007, when the
recession began and 2011. Of that group, 45.3 percent were living
below the poverty line, when their parents incomes were not taken into
account.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
A Civil Society Strategy
Reposted from:http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/543.php#continue
Steve D'Arcy
What happened to the North American Left? Why is it that, even now, when capitalism seems so obviously unappealing, unsustainable and unfair, the Left cannot mount a more serious challenge to the Right or its grim austerity agenda?
Indeed, what happened to the Left's former ability to mobilize huge numbers into powerful social movements, to inspire working-class people with appealing visions of post-capitalist alternatives, and to strike fear into the hearts of elites who once worried that the Left posed a credible threat to their power and privilege?
If we are serious about figuring all this out, and reversing this trajectory, we have to be willing to take some responsibility for our predicament. We can't just blame the ‘propaganda’ circulated by the corporate media, the repressive role of the police and the courts, or the way electoral systems are stacked against our efforts to promote social and environmental justice and political and economic democracy. The news media, the police, and state institutions have always waged a determined struggle against the Left; but the Left used to be able to overcome these obstacles and make real gains, building powerful mass movements that sometimes racked up real victories. Above all, the Left was once able to claim the allegiance of huge numbers of people, but at least in North America this is no longer the case.
The Left's Role in Its Own Decline
My questions here can all be boiled down to this: What has the Left done, or failed to do, that might have hastened or exacerbated its own decline, and what can we do today to help turn things around?
There is, of course, a conventional answer to these questions. Some people on the broad Left, and almost everyone on the Right, would say that the Left's historic error was to articulate a political vision (‘socialism’) that strayed too far from capitalism. Its supposed aim to introduce democratic and egalitarian economic planning, they say, made socialism unable to handle the overwhelming demands of information-processing that arise in a complex modern society. Only market regulation and profit-motivated investment decisions can handle these demands, according to this view.
But I would argue that the real story is almost the exact opposite of this more familiar one. The real-world experiments in ‘socialism’ during the 20th century did not fail because the distance that separated them from capitalism grew too great, making them unworkable. On the contrary, they failed because the proximity between those efforts and capitalism made these ‘socialisms’ – Stalinism and social democracy – too difficult to distinguish from the capitalist system that they were supposed to replace. These supposedly socialist political projects actually embraced most of capitalism's worst features: its bureaucratic mode of governance, its technocratic approach to designing and implementing public policy, its hierarchical and authoritarian norms of workplace organization, its Realpolitik patterns of international relations, its cultural celebration of productivity and growth as ends in themselves, and its elitist understanding of who is best suited to exercise political power and spearhead social change.
At the heart of the problem was the Left's often uncritical embrace of one of the most oppressive, disempowering and alienating institutions that most working-class people ever have the misfortune to interact with in their lives: the modern state. At some point, the Left dropped its former aim of encouraging the ‘self-emancipation’ of working people, and replaced it with an aim that to most people seems like its opposite: technocratic ‘public administration’ by state agencies.
This shift, from the anti-statist ‘community-based socialism’ that dominated the early Marxist, Owenite, Guild-socialist, syndicalist and anarchist Left in the 19th and early-20th centuries, was replaced in the years after the First World War by the two most influential forms of ‘socialism’ in the 20th century: statist command planning, typified by the USSR, and Keynesian welfare state expansionism, typified by European social democracy.
In the course of this fateful shift, the Left gave up almost entirely on the emancipatory promise of liberation from alienation, exploitation and bureaucratic administration that had once been its stock in trade – a promise which had only a few decades earlier led European radicals to embrace the bold ‘smash the state’ ethos of the Paris Commune. In place of this earlier promise of sweeping social reconstruction based on popular self-organization from below, the post-WWI public-administration Left now promised two things: ‘development’ and ‘rising living standards.’ For a while, both Stalinism and social democracy seemed able to deliver on these promises. Later, notably during the structural crisis of Keynesian demand-management capitalism in the mid-1970s and the stagnation crisis in Eastern Europe during the 1980s, these promises began to ring hollow.
But the more fundamental problem wasn't that the Left could no longer deliver on its promises. The problem was that it was making the wrong promises altogether. The ideal of a community-based, egalitarian and participatory economic democracy that had once inspired millions had been replaced with an unappealing vision of a regime of public administration and economic management – whether Stalinist or social-democratic – that delivered ‘benefits’ to a passive, alienated, but well-fed populace.
This ‘administrative’ (or ‘coordinatorist’) vision of a post-capitalist world is not utopian or unattainable. But why would anyone be inspired to struggle for it? This, I believe, is the question that the Left must address if it is to revitalize its project and recapture the allegiance of people who have learned to associate the radical Left with government bureaucracy and alienating public administration.
A Left That No Longer Identifies With The State
Having made this fateful wrong turn so long ago, what can the Left do today to set a new course, to restore the viability and the appeal of its project?
What the Left needs above all is to rupture its identification with the capitalist state. Government is not an actual or potential ally of the Left against Big Business. In part this is because, especially in this neoliberal epoch, government is in fact already an arm of Big Business. But more importantly, it is because the bureaucratic structures of the capitalist state are incapable in principle of serving as a vehicle for the self-liberation of people who aspire not to be administered by a welfare-maximizing state apparatus, but to participate in the democratic self-organization of their own workplaces and communities. What is needed, in short, is a reassertion of the classical leftist ideal of a community-based socialism, a socialism of popular self-organization and horizontal democracy, not one of public sector maximalism.
In part, that means replacing the utilitarian and technocratic images of a post-capitalist social order with more appealing images of radically democratic forms of community-based egalitarian economic democracy. But, in more immediately practical terms, it means a strategic reorientation of the Left: a turn away from the habit of engaging primarily with state institutions (parliaments, regulatory agencies and the welfare state), toward engaging primarily with grassroots, community-based forms of popular self-organization.
A Civil Society Strategy
The Left, in other words, must turn its attention back toward civil society: union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies, and other community associations. These expressions of grassroots democracy and popular self-organization – operating independently of both the market economy and the state – offer the Left the crucial benefit that they do not replicate the alienating and disempowering character of corporations and governments (although the Left is unfortunately overpopulated with bureaucratic and staff-led union and NGO apparatuses that today emulate the administrative systems of elite institutions). Instead, these grassroots civil society organizations embody the ‘every cook can govern’ spirit of the classical (pre-WWI) Left.
When the Left does engage with the state, as it sometimes must, its default demand should be to transfer power from corporations and the state to civil society. Such a civil society strategy is arguably already implicit in the notion of a community-based socialism. For example, whereas a statist strategy would demand that the government's budget adopt welfare-maximizing priorities, a civil society strategy would demand that budgeting power be ceded to a grassroots participatory budgeting process, centrally involving open public assemblies. Whereas a statist strategy would demand ‘public housing’ owned and operated by the state, a civil society strategy would demand that state funds be used to establish democratically self-governing non-profit housing cooperatives, collectively owned by their members. And whereas a statist strategy would demand ‘nationalizing’ banks as ‘public enterprises,’ a civil society strategy would demand that banks be dismantled and reconstructed as genuinely democratic and member-controlled financial cooperatives (‘credit unions’), operating in the public interest. This transfer of power and control from corporations and governments to civil society associations should be seen as the main aim of the Left. From this point of view, ‘winning’ for the Left means replacing the power and prerogatives of corporations and governments with empowered participatory self-governing associations within civil society.
How We Resist Neoliberalism
There is no doubt that a civil society strategy for the Left raises a number of difficult questions. Above all, it poses a very serious set of questions about how the radical Left should fight back against neoliberalism, notably in its contemporary guise of the ‘austerity’ agenda. Given that neoliberalism's primary policy aspiration is to privatize public services, and to replace public administration (the ‘public sector’ economy) with market regulation (the ‘private sector’ economy), shouldn't the Left be defending the state (the public sector) against neoliberal privatization?
For better or for worse, what the Left needs in addressing this question is nuance. We have to be able to distinguish between (for example) transferring control of a public housing complex to a private landlord (‘privatization’), in pursuit of the corporate/neoliberal agenda, and transferring control of that same public housing complex to the residents themselves (‘cooperative conversion’), under pressure from grassroots popular mobilization. If we refuse to make this distinction, either by celebrating privatization as a victory against the state or by vilifying cooperative conversion as if it were itself a type of privatization, we fall into one of two familiar traps: the temptation to see the state as the main enemy, letting corporations disastrously off the hook, or (more likely among leftists) the temptation to align ourselves politically with the ill-fated project of ‘public administration socialism,’ in which the Left plays the role of supporting the capitalist state as a bulwark against corporate power.
This is at the heart of the Left's historic failure to champion freedom and democracy against not only their corporate enemies, but their bureaucratic-statist enemies, as well. Once taking this path, the Left quickly finds itself defending the state against the negative experience of it that so pervades the lives of poor and working-class people, even to the point of championing the increase of taxes on workers as ‘progressive’ because it supports the state.
The Left, or at least the radical Left, needs to remember that its project by definition demands that sweeping social reorganization and reconstruction from below be entertained and where possible carried out. Sometimes, this means tactically defending public services, run on a non-profit basis by the state, against the immediate threat of profit-motivated privatization, which we rightly oppose as a step in the wrong direction altogether. But ultimately, the Left must aim higher than state-administration: the Left must aim to replace both the profit-motivated private sector economy and the bureaucratically administered public sector economy, in favor of a community-based, democratic and egalitarian post-capitalist economic democracy. This means that we must admit the obvious: that publicly owned enterprises and public services offered by the capitalist welfare state do not meet this standard by any stretch of the imagination. Our project demands a civil society strategy, not a statist one. What we fight for is not a bigger, more expansive state, but more democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots popular self-organization: a more participatory and community-based set of economic and political institutions, controlled from below by working people themselves.
Above all, a civil society strategy is necessary because our world needs a Left that can inspire hope, not just for a more productive and well-administered society, but for a freer, more democratic, less alienating society, controlled directly by its members, as opposed to being controlled by administrators, supposedly acting in the public interest. This ideal of a ‘community-based socialism’ was a vision that once united the entire radical Left – Marxists and anarchists, guild socialists and Owenites, syndicalists and council communists – and I think there is reason to hope that it could some day do so again. •
Steve D'Arcy is a climate justice and economic democracy organizer in London, Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at steve.darcy@gmail.com. This article appeared as part of Rabble's “Reinventing democracy, reclaiming the commons” series
Steve D'Arcy
What happened to the North American Left? Why is it that, even now, when capitalism seems so obviously unappealing, unsustainable and unfair, the Left cannot mount a more serious challenge to the Right or its grim austerity agenda?
Indeed, what happened to the Left's former ability to mobilize huge numbers into powerful social movements, to inspire working-class people with appealing visions of post-capitalist alternatives, and to strike fear into the hearts of elites who once worried that the Left posed a credible threat to their power and privilege?
If we are serious about figuring all this out, and reversing this trajectory, we have to be willing to take some responsibility for our predicament. We can't just blame the ‘propaganda’ circulated by the corporate media, the repressive role of the police and the courts, or the way electoral systems are stacked against our efforts to promote social and environmental justice and political and economic democracy. The news media, the police, and state institutions have always waged a determined struggle against the Left; but the Left used to be able to overcome these obstacles and make real gains, building powerful mass movements that sometimes racked up real victories. Above all, the Left was once able to claim the allegiance of huge numbers of people, but at least in North America this is no longer the case.
The Left's Role in Its Own Decline
My questions here can all be boiled down to this: What has the Left done, or failed to do, that might have hastened or exacerbated its own decline, and what can we do today to help turn things around?
There is, of course, a conventional answer to these questions. Some people on the broad Left, and almost everyone on the Right, would say that the Left's historic error was to articulate a political vision (‘socialism’) that strayed too far from capitalism. Its supposed aim to introduce democratic and egalitarian economic planning, they say, made socialism unable to handle the overwhelming demands of information-processing that arise in a complex modern society. Only market regulation and profit-motivated investment decisions can handle these demands, according to this view.
But I would argue that the real story is almost the exact opposite of this more familiar one. The real-world experiments in ‘socialism’ during the 20th century did not fail because the distance that separated them from capitalism grew too great, making them unworkable. On the contrary, they failed because the proximity between those efforts and capitalism made these ‘socialisms’ – Stalinism and social democracy – too difficult to distinguish from the capitalist system that they were supposed to replace. These supposedly socialist political projects actually embraced most of capitalism's worst features: its bureaucratic mode of governance, its technocratic approach to designing and implementing public policy, its hierarchical and authoritarian norms of workplace organization, its Realpolitik patterns of international relations, its cultural celebration of productivity and growth as ends in themselves, and its elitist understanding of who is best suited to exercise political power and spearhead social change.
At the heart of the problem was the Left's often uncritical embrace of one of the most oppressive, disempowering and alienating institutions that most working-class people ever have the misfortune to interact with in their lives: the modern state. At some point, the Left dropped its former aim of encouraging the ‘self-emancipation’ of working people, and replaced it with an aim that to most people seems like its opposite: technocratic ‘public administration’ by state agencies.
This shift, from the anti-statist ‘community-based socialism’ that dominated the early Marxist, Owenite, Guild-socialist, syndicalist and anarchist Left in the 19th and early-20th centuries, was replaced in the years after the First World War by the two most influential forms of ‘socialism’ in the 20th century: statist command planning, typified by the USSR, and Keynesian welfare state expansionism, typified by European social democracy.
In the course of this fateful shift, the Left gave up almost entirely on the emancipatory promise of liberation from alienation, exploitation and bureaucratic administration that had once been its stock in trade – a promise which had only a few decades earlier led European radicals to embrace the bold ‘smash the state’ ethos of the Paris Commune. In place of this earlier promise of sweeping social reconstruction based on popular self-organization from below, the post-WWI public-administration Left now promised two things: ‘development’ and ‘rising living standards.’ For a while, both Stalinism and social democracy seemed able to deliver on these promises. Later, notably during the structural crisis of Keynesian demand-management capitalism in the mid-1970s and the stagnation crisis in Eastern Europe during the 1980s, these promises began to ring hollow.
But the more fundamental problem wasn't that the Left could no longer deliver on its promises. The problem was that it was making the wrong promises altogether. The ideal of a community-based, egalitarian and participatory economic democracy that had once inspired millions had been replaced with an unappealing vision of a regime of public administration and economic management – whether Stalinist or social-democratic – that delivered ‘benefits’ to a passive, alienated, but well-fed populace.
This ‘administrative’ (or ‘coordinatorist’) vision of a post-capitalist world is not utopian or unattainable. But why would anyone be inspired to struggle for it? This, I believe, is the question that the Left must address if it is to revitalize its project and recapture the allegiance of people who have learned to associate the radical Left with government bureaucracy and alienating public administration.
A Left That No Longer Identifies With The State
Having made this fateful wrong turn so long ago, what can the Left do today to set a new course, to restore the viability and the appeal of its project?
What the Left needs above all is to rupture its identification with the capitalist state. Government is not an actual or potential ally of the Left against Big Business. In part this is because, especially in this neoliberal epoch, government is in fact already an arm of Big Business. But more importantly, it is because the bureaucratic structures of the capitalist state are incapable in principle of serving as a vehicle for the self-liberation of people who aspire not to be administered by a welfare-maximizing state apparatus, but to participate in the democratic self-organization of their own workplaces and communities. What is needed, in short, is a reassertion of the classical leftist ideal of a community-based socialism, a socialism of popular self-organization and horizontal democracy, not one of public sector maximalism.
In part, that means replacing the utilitarian and technocratic images of a post-capitalist social order with more appealing images of radically democratic forms of community-based egalitarian economic democracy. But, in more immediately practical terms, it means a strategic reorientation of the Left: a turn away from the habit of engaging primarily with state institutions (parliaments, regulatory agencies and the welfare state), toward engaging primarily with grassroots, community-based forms of popular self-organization.
A Civil Society Strategy
The Left, in other words, must turn its attention back toward civil society: union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies, and other community associations. These expressions of grassroots democracy and popular self-organization – operating independently of both the market economy and the state – offer the Left the crucial benefit that they do not replicate the alienating and disempowering character of corporations and governments (although the Left is unfortunately overpopulated with bureaucratic and staff-led union and NGO apparatuses that today emulate the administrative systems of elite institutions). Instead, these grassroots civil society organizations embody the ‘every cook can govern’ spirit of the classical (pre-WWI) Left.
When the Left does engage with the state, as it sometimes must, its default demand should be to transfer power from corporations and the state to civil society. Such a civil society strategy is arguably already implicit in the notion of a community-based socialism. For example, whereas a statist strategy would demand that the government's budget adopt welfare-maximizing priorities, a civil society strategy would demand that budgeting power be ceded to a grassroots participatory budgeting process, centrally involving open public assemblies. Whereas a statist strategy would demand ‘public housing’ owned and operated by the state, a civil society strategy would demand that state funds be used to establish democratically self-governing non-profit housing cooperatives, collectively owned by their members. And whereas a statist strategy would demand ‘nationalizing’ banks as ‘public enterprises,’ a civil society strategy would demand that banks be dismantled and reconstructed as genuinely democratic and member-controlled financial cooperatives (‘credit unions’), operating in the public interest. This transfer of power and control from corporations and governments to civil society associations should be seen as the main aim of the Left. From this point of view, ‘winning’ for the Left means replacing the power and prerogatives of corporations and governments with empowered participatory self-governing associations within civil society.
How We Resist Neoliberalism
There is no doubt that a civil society strategy for the Left raises a number of difficult questions. Above all, it poses a very serious set of questions about how the radical Left should fight back against neoliberalism, notably in its contemporary guise of the ‘austerity’ agenda. Given that neoliberalism's primary policy aspiration is to privatize public services, and to replace public administration (the ‘public sector’ economy) with market regulation (the ‘private sector’ economy), shouldn't the Left be defending the state (the public sector) against neoliberal privatization?
For better or for worse, what the Left needs in addressing this question is nuance. We have to be able to distinguish between (for example) transferring control of a public housing complex to a private landlord (‘privatization’), in pursuit of the corporate/neoliberal agenda, and transferring control of that same public housing complex to the residents themselves (‘cooperative conversion’), under pressure from grassroots popular mobilization. If we refuse to make this distinction, either by celebrating privatization as a victory against the state or by vilifying cooperative conversion as if it were itself a type of privatization, we fall into one of two familiar traps: the temptation to see the state as the main enemy, letting corporations disastrously off the hook, or (more likely among leftists) the temptation to align ourselves politically with the ill-fated project of ‘public administration socialism,’ in which the Left plays the role of supporting the capitalist state as a bulwark against corporate power.
This is at the heart of the Left's historic failure to champion freedom and democracy against not only their corporate enemies, but their bureaucratic-statist enemies, as well. Once taking this path, the Left quickly finds itself defending the state against the negative experience of it that so pervades the lives of poor and working-class people, even to the point of championing the increase of taxes on workers as ‘progressive’ because it supports the state.
The Left, or at least the radical Left, needs to remember that its project by definition demands that sweeping social reorganization and reconstruction from below be entertained and where possible carried out. Sometimes, this means tactically defending public services, run on a non-profit basis by the state, against the immediate threat of profit-motivated privatization, which we rightly oppose as a step in the wrong direction altogether. But ultimately, the Left must aim higher than state-administration: the Left must aim to replace both the profit-motivated private sector economy and the bureaucratically administered public sector economy, in favor of a community-based, democratic and egalitarian post-capitalist economic democracy. This means that we must admit the obvious: that publicly owned enterprises and public services offered by the capitalist welfare state do not meet this standard by any stretch of the imagination. Our project demands a civil society strategy, not a statist one. What we fight for is not a bigger, more expansive state, but more democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots popular self-organization: a more participatory and community-based set of economic and political institutions, controlled from below by working people themselves.
Above all, a civil society strategy is necessary because our world needs a Left that can inspire hope, not just for a more productive and well-administered society, but for a freer, more democratic, less alienating society, controlled directly by its members, as opposed to being controlled by administrators, supposedly acting in the public interest. This ideal of a ‘community-based socialism’ was a vision that once united the entire radical Left – Marxists and anarchists, guild socialists and Owenites, syndicalists and council communists – and I think there is reason to hope that it could some day do so again. •
Steve D'Arcy is a climate justice and economic democracy organizer in London, Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at steve.darcy@gmail.com. This article appeared as part of Rabble's “Reinventing democracy, reclaiming the commons” series
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
