Where do we go from here?

During the past few election cycles while canvassing in working class neighborhoods, I have often wondered how workers I was speaking with might respond if I were advocating more far-reaching solutions to their economic grievances instead of the liberal-centrist solutions I spoke on behalf of. This question became more relevant in the fall of 2008 as mass layoffs swept through working class communities. I was then canvassing in working class neighborhoods in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota for a democrat contending for an open House seat.

Voters’ responses to the crisis were at the core anti-corporate; they were outraged at Wall Street banks and repeatedly suggested the responsible bankers should go to jail. There was also a mixed bag of irrational explanations and blame; and I detected an already existing cynicism about government and politicians’ roles that can only have grown deeper. To a person people asked the right questions: Where did the money go? Why should we pay for their mistakes? Where were the regulators? They wanted to know what happened, but didn’t believe the truth would come out and assumed no one would be held accountable. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions their assumptions were proven correct.

The political gridlock this past year has convinced me of the necessity of trying to raise the stakes by injecting into the debate bold pro-working class solutions to the economic crisis. This blog is my suggestion for an experiment in how this might be accomplished. In it I propose that activists’ conduct a grassroots canvass in working class neighborhoods to test the response to the solutions and explanations discussed here. I elaborate on this in some detail in the pages that follow. Hopefully the experiment will spark interest and possibly yield an answer to the proverbial question: Where do we go from here?

I believe that many blue and white-collar workers are open to more advanced explanations of the current economic crisis and remedies for it; including a dialogue about how capitalism works and why it causes economic insecurity and crisis. Both of these ingredients—advanced demands and economic education about capitalism—are necessary to motivate workers to demand more from capitalism and to join the struggle for economic justice.

I invite your comments, criticism and feedback following each section. Or if you wish email me at: wanealis@gmail.com. This opening analysis is the political and strategic context for the experiment—and contains many of the talking points for the canvass. The other sections with links in the archive are:

1. A grassroots organizing experiment: A political canvass in working class neighborhoods. (See this for a quick summary).
2. Thoughts of how the canvass might be conducted, its organizational auspices and popular educational ideas.
3. Working class solutions to the economic crisis: Raising the ante on capitalism.
4. Possible electoral approach to further test and advance ideas.

As the jobless crisis lengthens, there is an urgent need to get bold, far-reaching solutions into the public debate to wrest control of the discussion from the stale, inadequate liberal remedies. As people loose hope in liberal-centrist solutions it raises the possibility that millions more will turn to the simplistic ideas offered by right wing demagogues and the elite who fund them. Bold solutions that can inspire people can forestall this and reverse the current trend of people sinking into despair and cynicism.

As serious as the threat of right wing activity could become, an equally grave problem are indications that people in a variety of socio-economic groups are loosing faith in the legitimacy of the economic system and government to function and deliver. For whites who are being thrown into the ranks of the poor or working poor and who have long had confidence in the system this loss of faith can be coupled with a feeling they are being betrayed. Who they blame for their fate could decide our nation’s future.

The pivotal factor in the current political struggle is whether social change agents and organizations can get alternative explanation and solutions into the public arena that will inspire workers to fight back against the real cause of their impoverishment and frustrations. My experience gives me faith in the practical sensibility of working people and that many will respond positively to the messages of this experiment. However, this will not be accomplished by activists talking to each other or to other like-minded individuals. For this reason this project demands face-to-face organizing.

My proposal should not be mistaken as a rejection of the Obama presidency. Where his legislative agenda will improve the lives of working families even incrementally it deserves the support of social change agents. However, this proposal does recognize the limitations of the Obama agenda and the Democratic Party’s centrist leadership who hold the reigns on what are deemed acceptable solutions. The history of labor and civil rights struggles in America shows that victories are won when more advanced demands gain enough support to compete with those offered by the center. This is what is missing from the current political struggle for economic and social progress.

The elite who manage and mismanage the economy must be amazed that they are not under more pressure, given the severity of the crisis of unemployment, falling wages and crumbling retirement plans. They must wonder how much crap workers will take before workers hit the streets. In these circumstances there is no reason for the elite to act to placate workers with universal health care or other concessions that might reduce corporate profits or impinge on their authority.

I believe one reason for the relatively low level of struggle is the belief that eventually the economy will recover again, just as it always has. This belief was recently dealt a blow by a sobering conclusion by the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Janet Yellen, who said she expected “unemployment to remain painfully high for years.” Furthermore, to assume the economy will recover any where near the previous level of employment and wages is to misread the systemic nature of the crisis and the history of increasingly frequent bubbles and steeper downturns. Each recovery since the 1981-82 recession has left more workers chronically unemployed, relegated to the temporary workforce or thrown into the class of the working poor. Yellen’s candid appraisal suggests this jobless “recovery” will be worse.

The canvass will also test the chief reason I think that accounts for the low level of struggle: that many of the current solutions that labor and progressive organizations are asking workers to fight for are too tepid to motivate and inspire people to participate. Workers are not likely to take hours of their time to fight for legislation they have little confidence will solve the problems their families and communities face. In effect, solutions that are not proportional to the crisis will not inspire mass support. The crisis is systemic; so must be the solutions.

A case in point is health care reform. I venture to guess that if labor were leading a fight for single-payer health insurance (a systemic solution), as well as working for the best possible compromise legislation, labor would not have found itself wasting time and resources fighting against a tax on so-called “Cadillac” benefits. Labor would have had the power to keep it out of any bill because of the threat that single-payer could catch on across a broad section of Americans.
Corporations are waging class warfare even against Obama’s weak health care reform initiative and labor should not hesitate to call for eliminating private health insurance as a counter offensive.

A promising initiative to organize unemployed workers as a political force via the Internet was recently launched by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). I hesitate to be critical of such an important effort, but it is example of a promising experiment that is organizing support for tepid legislative solutions that again do not speak to the systemic roots of the crisis. The initiative named, Ucubed, even has great slogan “Take control;” it is spot on. It would be interesting to see if more workers responded were the IAM to list advanced solutions like those suggest here.

After what we have witnessed in Congress this past year, it should be clear that to count on an alliance with the center of Democratic Party to get things done is a poor strategy. What is needed is independent action by labor and other economic and social justice forces to organize the political sentiment and power that can threaten the power of the political center of the Democratic Party if it does not act. The fear that such a strategy might cause the loss of some Democratic senate seats was laid to rest in Massachusetts. The centrist Democrats managed to do so on their own. I am convinced that had a strategy been followed for more advanced demands, we would not be facing the possibility of a right wing comeback in 2010 and a Democrat would have won in Massachusetts and perhaps a progressive candidate.

The most important dialogue to have with workers is how their economic future, and the nation’s, is dependent on who controls, owns and makes decisions about capital investment. Nothing makes this more evident than the consequences for workers of the 2008 financial crisis. While reforms and regulation of the financial system are needed, it would be naïve to trust that new regulations alone will protect the value workers create or will chart a path toward a full employment economy. There are always loopholes built in. Given the entrenched nature of Wall Street gambling games (the so called “instruments” like CDOs) masquerading as investment strategies it is time to start demanding democratic input, social ownership, and control of increasing amounts of capital as serious, meaningful, rational responses to the criminal rip-off that has taken place.

The key to raising workers curiosity about such a radical sounding idea is to tie it to jobs and economic security. Canvassers, for example, might ask workers to think about the possibility that full employment would be possible today had the estimated $3 trillion in capital squandered between the dot.com and real estate bubble been prudently invested in value producing industries and converting to a green economy. This gets to the heart of the matter and the reason that input into how capital is invested is the most important strategic concept on which to build a movement for systemic solutions.

Currently, the public treasury is starved for capital that could put people to work while billions of dollars sit idle in US Treasury bonds earning from near zero to 3 percent interest waiting for high, risk-free returns once again. According to Robert Pollin banks alone are holding on to $650 billion in Federal Reserve accounts that could be put to use (The Nation 3/8/10). Mass transit, high-speed rail and rebuilding schools do not generate returns for individual or institutional investors, but they would lead to long term ROI for the nation and citizens in reduced energy costs.

The 10-year one trillion dollar tax break Bush gave to the richest five percent and another half trillion for the next 15 percent was capital the nation should have invested in such public projects. Instead this money fed the real estate bubble helping precipitate the economic crisis. It is time to recover some of this and put it to work.

It is also time to demand that tax rates on the wealthiest Americans return to the pre-Reagan era of 70 percent. This gift Reagan and Congress gave the rich in 1981 has not yielded the return on investment and full employment as was promised. Instead it was used to finance moving manufacturing plants, battling unions and making risky investments. The tax cuts and corporate policies drove down wages, destroyed communities and contributed to creating two recessions and the current financial collapse. And each time workers have been forced to pay the price with unemployment, wage reductions and plant closings. This time the wealthy should pay.

Instead of government borrowing money to finance building a national high-speed rail system or new urban mass transit, the wealthy should be cajoled into doing their patriotic duty to fund such investments and put Americans back to work. Why not issue transit bonds at just three percent interest and expect the wealthy to buy $50 billion a year? If they don’t like that deal then the demand should be raised to levy a surtax on wealth to acquire the necessary capital. The wealthy have already made enormous sums on interest and speculative profits from the handouts the GOP gave them in 2001-2003. Again, the message workers need to hear is that had this windfall been invested properly, we would have a full employment economy today.

In the aftermath of the recession in the early 1970’s, Democratic-Socialist leader, Michael Harrington lamented the opportunity lost to educate workers about the real cause of the economic crisis. Harrington said: “…in the tumult of the middle seventies, when a sense of foreboding and fear has seeped through the Western consciousness, it still does not seem that these new troubles are the product of an economic system….” [He mentions high oil prices, soaring food costs and incompetent economic management by Nixon and Ford administrations]. “This means that the real history of the crisis of the seventies is still a secret kept from most of the people who must suffer from it. All explanations to the contrary notwithstanding, it is a crisis of the capitalist system.” (Harrington 1976). And so it is today.

Today social change agents have another opportunity to advance workers political and economic understanding using real life experience as the text and the economic crisis as the classroom. It would be a shame and a historical failing if we repeat the history Harrington speaks of. Many people want to learn and understand what has happened and why. The news media is even asking the questions: Why did capitalism fail us? What is wrong with capitalism? Why did the system that “won” the Cold War fail? Right wing politicians and media are accusing Obama of being a socialist and warning that America will become a welfare state like those of Western Europe if we have universal health insurance, use direct government investment to create jobs, and re-regulate the “free” market.

These can be opportunities to talk to workers about the power of European trade unions to win social benefits that American workers lack and why corporate America is so bitterly opposed to advancing economic security for workers. We need to make the argument that instead of workers in Europe moving in our direction; we should move in their direction. European labor has been waiting for American labor to raise the ante on U.S. corporations to relieve the pressure they are under to relinquish benefits to be “competitive” with the U.S. So raising advanced demands is an act of solidarity that is long overdue. For this and the other reasons discussed above the current crisis presents an opportunity and an urgent need to bring new ideas and solutions to American workers. Not to try is to accept there will be another crisis, workers will suffer again and workers will still not have the tools to apply the brakes to end the race to the bottom.

In solidarity, for a better world that is possible,

Wayne Nealis, Minneapolis, Minnesota