Need for Economic Justice Agenda

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16355



Why the Left Needs an Economic Justice Agenda Now
January 30, 2008 By Michael Hirsch


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Addressing a rally at the old Madison Square Garden at the tail end of his first presidential re-election campaign, Franklin Roosevelt caught the ethic of what I'll call the enlightened wing of the ruling class -- even if that wing was just Franklin and Eleanor.

Standing in front of 18,000 screaming supporters, including a solid contingent of members of the newly formed American Labor Party -- formed precisely to boost Roosevelt in New York State and take votes away from socialist Norman Thomas --FDR also gave them a little of the red meat they were hoping for.

"We had to struggle with the enemies of peace -- business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," Roosevelt said about his first term in office. "They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob."

Now those of us who are socialists would take exception to FDR's casual treatment of "the mob," not to mention his bristling at "class antagonisms." After the work of Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude and Jesse Lemisch and other modern left historians and scholars of crowds and collective behavior, we don't conflate "the mob" or "class struggle" with witless, disaggregated actors united only by demagogues. Working class self-activity always looks like frenetic mob action to those with something to lose.

But FDR certainly got the "government by organized money" part right. It's not the whole of a socialist critique, but it's a good start. It certainly situates the role of democratic socialists, at least in the short run, as unifiers in challenging and reversing the control of government by organized money.

That's the political context in which DSA's Economic Justice Agenda (pdf | Powerpoint) was written and which it addresses.

It's a historical context in which an unremitting corporate offensive beat down people for more than three decades. It's a politics of cuts in social spending, of deregulation and privatization, of tax relief for the rich and wars on unions.

It's what the Agenda calls "a conscious government policy of redistributing income and wealth and power upward." It's a dogmatic defense of "free trade" but not of fair trade or labor rights, either at home or abroad. It justifies a war that would turn Iraq into a gusher for U.S. oil interests and a growing private military that would secure those interests.

It's the mammoth cost of growing and maintaining an empire that is contributing, as the Agenda argues, "to the demise of social and economic democracy at home."

If the left is to be faulted in the U.S. for failing to organize effectively against the corporate offensive, at least two reasons stand out: its estrangement from electoral politics and its single-issue focus. Worse, the left in the U.S. -- certainly the radical left that claims it understands class and racial antagonisms -- does not follow-up and do what parties on the left in Europe, Canada and much of Latin America do: advocate for and create state policies that guarantee labor rights; militate for raising government revenues through progressive forms of taxation; and use those revenues to fund high-quality universal public goods. These neglected things include free public education from pre-K through graduate school, job creation, long-term unemployment insurance and retiree benefits, accessible low- or no-cost health care, affordable housing, and quality child and senior care.

So much of what was going on as FDR addressed the crowd in NY is present yet again today with a government of organized money, union busting, corporate crime, etc. The last paragraph of the portion that you pasted is very true. So far, there is no real legislation happening on behalf of labor and the people at large. The neocons have managed to distract the electorate with the old glory, patriotism, support the troops, and other meaningless drivel about nothing at all that is real or authentic. I have always believed that a day would come when the people at large would finally hurt enough to wise up and speak up. It hasn't happened yet.