Today marks the second anniversary of the 'Women's
March', sparked by and immediately on the heels of the 'election' of
our Caesar Disgustus. Like my daughter, I took part in that march,
she in joining the throngs in Washington D.C., while I marched with a
large, albeit more modest gathering in Grand Rapids Michigan. (1)
We gathered at the Fountain Street Church and
marched to Campau Square, gathering at the Rosa Parks Circle. I was
interviewed, so some unfathomable reason, by WOOD-TV, the local NBC
television outlet for it's evening coverage of the local news while
we gathered at the church and, after the march and the protests at
Rosa Park Circle I made my way back to the church once again
encountering the reporter who had put me before the cameras. We
spoke about the gathering and its possible significance and I
commented that if the movement is to succeed, it will have to
articulate an agenda.
This weekend, they gathered again, in fewer numbers,
about the country. The movement is said to be fractured; riven by
rival factions one of whom has embraced the Nation of Islam leader
and black nationalist Louis Farrakhan,(2) an association repugnant to
others in the movement.
For this reason, it is held by many, the movement has
faltered.
I'm not convinced.
Addressing this issue in The New York Times, David
Leonhardt observes: “When I've spoken to people from other
countries over the past couple of weeks, they have been shocked that
Americans have not begun protesting the shutdown in large numbers.
About 800,000 federal workers have now gone almost a month without
getting paid. Some are struggling to pay their rent or buy
medications. Some have gone to pawn shops to get cash. Major
functions of government—airline security, food safety, mortgage
processing, farm assistance and so on—have been impaired.
“If this were happening in Europe, as Luigi
Zingales of the University of Chicago told me, people would be
pouring into the streets. And yet in the United States, there has
been nothing but a few small scattered rallies.
“Instead of lining up to protest, hundreds of
federal workers in Washington lined up last week to eat at makeshift
soup kitchens, the photos of them doing so were a study in
powerlessness” (3)
Imagine, wrote Leonhardt, a progressive movement large
enough to bring pressure upon our Caesar and force capitulation?
Indeed, imagine a progressive movement.
What we are witnessing here isn't simply the mendacity
of a cabal hell-bent on inflicting pain. We are witnessing pain
inflicted upon a segment of the population long reviled by the idiot
wrong. One has only to hearken back to that old racist George
Wallace to find the roots of this crisis. One of the standard
bromides of every Wallace stump speech was to rail against those
faceless “briefcase totin' bureaucrats who somehow stood between
the great unwashed and their American Dream. This bit of buffoonery
happily coincides with the Capitalist's drive to strip the agencies
of their regulatory power. So we find the happy marriage of Donald
tRUMP with the Koch Brothers and other billionaires, just as Wallace,
when he wasn't busting unions at home, would fly about the country in
planes provided by Colonel Sanders, all the while posturing as the
tribune of the underclass.
But I digress. Public employees have long been the
whipping boy of the conservative movement because they are the last
bastions of organized labor. If we can get the rubes to revile them
by pointing out their job security while they increasingly have none,
and remind them, not so subtlely of the evils of affirmative action,
then the face of public employment is no longer the face that White
America sees in its mirror. Once again the race card is played and
the last bastion of the middle class becomes ever more vulnerable.
Leonardt quite rightly suggests a series of one day
strikes. National strikes are a staple of European politics and can
be very effective. But our masters have, it should be obvious, long
mastered the arts of divide and rule.
But the question begs itself: to what end? End the
shutdown? Perhaps, but then what? The reason, I suspect, that
people are not taking to the streets is that like the “Occupy
Wall Street” and the “99 Per Cent” movements, the
“Resistance” has no agenda.
Yes it has inspired many women to get into the political
arena, and this is an accomplishment that deserves its recognition.
But it is not enough.
Today the nation gathered once again to honor Martin
Luther King. As we mark the half-century of his passing it is worth
noting how the power structure has transformed King and what this day
now represents.
King comes down to us now as an apostle of peace,
adherent of non-violence, who quietly pressured the establishment to
let his people go. A kind of Moses, a nearly universally revered
figure who led his people and the nation out of the darkness and into
the promised land. In this way King has been, in the hands of the
dominate white culture, transformed into that knighted state in which
he represents not the struggle of the underclass but the eternally
transcendent America. In the hands of Corporate America, King has
undergone a metamorphosis with a face as white as the marble statue
that graces the Washington Mall. A non-threatening Martin. A Martin
who spoke in moral platitudes about some distant goal, like Jesus
about the Kingdom Come.
But that wasn't King at all, and that wasn't the essence
of the movement. It was about the urgency of now, real goals in real
time. It was more like Moses speaking about the promised land and
taking the people there.
The essence of the movement was not justice in service
of morality; but morality in service of justice; and by that he meant
economic justice. King understood that in order to exploit a human
being one has to degrade him. Slavery was, after all, first and
foremost an economic system. Accordingly, he drew deeply upon the
religious and political tenets of our culture to justify a movement
that demanded justice—foremost economic justice.
It was the bus boycott in Montgomery where it began, and
the demonstrations on behalf of the sanitary workers in Memphis where
it ended. And when it ended, King was already deep in planning a
March On Washington with full intention of building a tent city on
the Mall of the poor and dispossessed of ALL RACES from around the
country in an effort to force the issue of the maldistribution of
wealth into the national consciousness.
To achieve these ends, King would not only demonstrate
but would do so in an effort to bring attention to and demand remedy
for specific issues whether it be voting rights, school
integration, public housing, jobs, or the ending of real estate
practices that segregated neighborhoods.
And he would break the law in order to achieve these
ends, because justice demands a higher service, a higher
morality than currently codified in the law. It was ugly. He called
upon the nation to face itself, to live up to its promises, to be
what it pretends to be. In so doing he was, and had to be,
intentionally confrontational, and the confrontations provoked often
violent eruptions. The racism that pervades this country was put on
television for the nation and all the world to see.
These are radical ideas and strategies. Indeed, they
are revolutionary. So confrontational that violence was King's—and
the movement's—constant companion.
For his efforts, King was hated and reviled. It was
after he was safely dead that his image was scrubbed white.
Progressives need to learn from the entire history of
the Civil Rights movement, as well as the Progressive, Anti-slavery,
Suffragette, and Labor movements. Nothing is gained without
struggle; nothing is gained without putting your body on the line;
nothing is gained without cost. Foremost, nothing is gained without
an agenda. You cannot win protesting platitude. You must make
demands.
Our ancestors understood this. The Progressives sang
“We will have our eight hours” and organized unions and
took to the streets to get it. Likewise the suffragette in the
streets to get the vote. But it was to get the vote—not simply to
draw attention to the evil. One must organize around specific
remedy.
The fear among the progressives is that if we take a
stand on specifics the movement will splinter and die. This is not
the lesson of Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement, or any
effort to achieve justice. To not put forward a list of demands will
ensure the withering of the movement for there will be nothing about
which to rally.
Just ask Martin Luther King or, for that matter, Martin
Luther.
Impeach and Imprison.
_______________
- See. February 26, 2017: Support and Rememberance, To The Ramparts, Seeking Ablution
- Leonhardt, David. “Where Have You Gone, Resistance?” The New York Times. Monday, January 21, 2019. Page A19
