Michael Yates
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [The Mumia stuff starts about 2/3 of the way down.]
>
> The Progressive - October 1995
>
> Martyrs and false populists.
> (Class Notes)(Column)
> Adolph Reed Jr.
>
> In desperate times we strain to find something to celebrate. There is
> an understandable tendency to romanticize the oppressed, and to grasp
> at anything that looks like alternative politics.
>
> Hence the recent, disturbingly knee-jerk reactions within the left to
> such disparate phenomena as the militia movement and the Mumia
> Abu-Jamal case.
>
> I was surprised by the letters in The Nation and The Progressive from
> readers who were affronted by negative coverage of the militias in
> each magazine. I've heard the same kind of position taken in
> conversations with people I know personally who identify with the
> left. The substance of this ostensibly progressive defense of the
> militia movement goes something like this: the militia supporters are
> by and large working class; they often are recruited from especially
> depressed local economies; their membership expresses their
> alienation from politics-as-usual; therefore, we shouldn't dismiss
> their populist frustrations.
>
> It is true that militia members want to curtail the repressive power
> of the state and complain about the predatory power of large
> corporations. They oppose NAFTA and want to assert popular, community
> control of government. But defending them on these grounds is naive
> and short-sighted, and reflects a broader, perhaps more insidious
> tendency--including a kind of accentuate-the-positive bias toward
> whatever looks like autonomous, populist action. This is the same
> tendency that willfully inflates any sort of apparently
> group-conscious activity--for instance, youth fads--into the status
> of political movements.
>
> On the militia issue, the first problem is that class origin, or for
> that matter class identity, isn't an adequate criterion for making
> judgments about political positions. The principle that if it comes
> from the oppressed, there must be something OK about it is not only
> simplistic; it can have truly reactionary implications. This kind of
> thinking has too often led down the road to complete accommodation to
> the worst strains arising from working classes. In fact, it's almost
> routine now that calls for sympathetic understanding of working-class
> bigotry--"we need to recognize the genuine fear of loss of control of
> the family, traditional values, close-knit neighborhood, jobs, way of
> life etc., etc."--are the first steps down the road to full-scale
> retreat from commitment to equality and social justice. Think about
> the Democratic Leadership Council.
>
> There is a long history of rationalizing working-class nativism and
> racism. It helped sanitize the regime of terror that was the Southern
> Redemption, restoring unadulterated white-supremacist rule after
> Reconstruction. The architects of that restoration's ideology
> characterized the racist putsch in the South as a revolt of the
> common people against a corrupt elite that cynically used blacks to
> further unpopular aims.
>
> The same mindset counseled sympathetic understanding for labor's
> rabid anti-Asian racism in the West in the late Nineteenth Century,
> and tolerated the New York draft riot of 1863, anti-feminist and
> anti-abortion activism, and whites' anti-busing riots. One version
> even sympathized with official resistance in Yonkers, New York, to
> court-ordered remediation of a lengthy, nefarious history of racial
> discrimination. Yonkers, the line went, was being penalized as a
> working-class/lower-middle-class suburb that can't afford to use
> exclusionary zoning to keep blacks and Hispanics out.
>
> Of course, most leftists who have a warm spot for the militia
> movement would not support these positions. But the differences are
> more of degree than of kind. Today, we hear arguments that we should
> focus on common class interests like living-wage jobs for all rather
> than affirmative action, and "universalistic" rather than
> "race-based" social policy. In his new book, Turning Back: The
> Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy, Stephen
> Steinberg discusses how this ostensibly farther-reaching alternative
> often masks a retreat from the struggle for equality within the
> working class. Sometimes, he notes, it yields a racial trickledown
> argument that the best way to fight racism or sexism is to direct
> benefits or strategy to whites and men.
>
> Racist and fascist movements always have some popular, working-class
> base. Mussolini came out of the Italian Socialist party, and National
> Socialism sought actively to compete for the hearts and minds of
> politically unsophisticated German workers disposed to authoritarian,
> conspiratorial, and scapegoating theories. In both cases, the
> movement drew energy from the same kind of superficially
> anti-capitalist rhetoric that the militias project--complete with
> their versions of "black helicopter" fantasies. The Nazis also
> pioneered, in their conspiratorial mythology about German defeat in
> World War 1, the "stab in the back" theory that underlies the POW/MIA
> lunacy running through the ideological pools in which the militia
> movement swims.
>
> And, besides, their anti-statism really isn't the same as ours, or it
> shouldn't be anyway.
>
> But confusion on this score points up another problem in the left. We
> often aren't clear enough about distinguishing opposition to the
> actions of particular governments and regimes from hostility to the
> actions of government in principle. As a result, we sometimes
> over-value anything that looks like an insurgency against
> concentrated power.
>
> It's easy, for instance, to paint ordinary Not In My Back Yard
> politics at the local level as something grander and more
> progressive. Mobilization by residents of a threatened neighborhood
> to stop a corporate development project can be a very good thing. But
> the visions that support such mobilizing aren't necessarily
> progressive; they can rest on the same kind of parochial
> territorialism that prompts demonstrations against housing
> desegregation. In fact, opponents of open housing routinely see
> themselves as the victims of oppressive government and evil realtors.
> Even the slow-growth movement in local politics isn't unambiguously
> democratic or anti-corporate. Often enough it simply represents the
> efforts of those who arrived last week to keep anyone else from
> arriving next week. We have to recognize such struggles' ambiguity if
> we are to realize their best tendencies.
>
> We have to recognize that not every popular mobilization is
> progressive just because it arises from the grassroots. Having
> experienced the underside of populist rhetoric in segregationism and
> opposition to civil rights, I'm perhaps especially sensitive to the
> fact that a lot of nastiness can lie under labels like "the people."
> Lynch mobs were, after all, a form of popular, direct action.
>
> No matter what Alexander Cockburn says, I haven't seen anything to
> suggest that I shouldn't judge the militiamen by the company they
> keep politically. Nor have I seen any signs among them of a
> substantive vision for political and economic reorganization that
> would allay my fears.
>
> I confess, as well, to being toward the statist end of the left, at
> least among those of us whose politics were formed in the 1960s and
> after. I'm always uneasy when we get fuzzy about the distinction
> between our objections to actions taken by those who control the
> American state and a more general objection to the State as an
> abstraction. Yes, government is ultimately a means of coercion.
> Therefore, it needs to be accountable to the citizenry. At the same
> time, government needs to be insulated from the whims of fleeting,
> potentially tyrannical majorities.
>
> The experience of being black in the United States highlights the
> dangers of a simplistically majoritarian notion of democracy.
> Decentralization of public authority in the name of popular
> democracy--from "states' rights" to the "new (and newer)
> federalism"--has been a rallying cry of opponents of black civil
> rights for more than a century and a half.
>
> The state is the only vehicle that can protect ordinary citizens
> against the machinations of concentrated private power. Even though
> it does function as an executive committee of the ruling class, the
> national state is the guarantor of whatever victories working people,
> minorities, gays, women, the elderly, and other constituencies we
> embrace have been able to win--often enough against the state itself.
> And this applies both to formalizing those victories as rights and
> using public policy to redistribute resources that make them
> practical reality.
>
> The public sector is the area of the economy most responsive to
> equal-opportunity employment. And the national state--ours as well as
> others--is the only entity powerful enough to control the activities
> of piratical multinational corporations. That's what the fights
> against NAFTA and GATT are all about--preserving the state's capacity
> to enforce social, economic, and environmental standards within its
> own territory.
>
> And that's just the defensive side of the struggle. We need to press
> for a more active use of the state in international economic and
> foreign policy to combat the multinationals' depredations across the
> globe.
>
> It always seemed to me that our struggle, to rehearse a long-outdated
> slogan, wasn't really to smash the state, but to seize it and direct
> it to democratic and egalitarian purposes.
>
> I don't get a sense of anything compatible with this perspective from
> the militia movement. Empty cliches like, "The government is the
> child of the people and has to be spanked when it gets out of line,"
> don't inspire confidence. Who do the militiamen have in mind when
> they evoke the image of "the people" What do they consider
> appropriate uses of public authority?
>
> As Chip Berlet and others point out in the June issue of The
> Progressive, there's not much reason to think that the militia
> movement's politics are anything other than paranoid proto-fascist.
> To say that they're not all racist, sexist, or xenophobic is both
> bizarre and beside the point. Organizationally and ideologically
> they're plugged into the most vicious, lunatic, and dangerous
> elements of the right. No matter that some individuals may think, or
> want to think, or want gullible journalists to think that they're
> just out playing a more strenuous version of Dungeons and Dragons.
>
> So what if this puts me on the same side as the Justice Department?
> We're also on the same side when we demand enforcement of voting
> rights or redress from Ku Klux Klan violence or prosecution of
> corporate criminals. And, even if I weren't a former object of
> COINTELPRO-era surveillance and harassment, I would have no illusions
> about the really existing law-enforcement authorities--at whatever
> level of the federal system--being dependable allies. I grew up in
> inner cities where municipal police were clearly an occupying force.
> I lived through the civil-rights movement when the state police and
> FBI worked hand-in-hand with the Klan. Nevertheless, it's important
> for us to recognize that in principle at least the state belongs to
> us as much as to any other interests in the society, and part of our
> fight must be to make it responsive to us.
>
> The issue of our relation to the criminal-justice system highlights
> another problematic tendency in the left, one that appears most
> topically in the Mumia Abu-Jamal support movement. We often have
> trouble keeping straight that being a victim of injustice has no
> necessary relation to the quality of one's politics or character. A
> friend in Atlanta, in the aftermath of Wayne Williams's conviction in
> the city's missing-and-murdered-children case that drew national
> attention in the early 1980s, observed that the state probably had
> just railroaded a guilty man. We have to recognize that that is
> always a possibility in the messy world of social experience.
>
> This is true of organizations as well as individuals. Members of the
> MOVE cult in Philadelphia certainly should not have been bombed by
> the city, but it was reasonable to evict them after years of their
> neighbors' complaints of harassment and public-health violations.
>
> I don't presume to pronounce on Abu-Jamal's guilt or innocence. At
> this moment only three issues should concern us: that there are very
> persuasive reasons to believe that he didn't receive a fair trial,
> quite likely for political reasons; that his freedom of speech has
> been violated; and that he is an atypically visible victim of the
> barbarity of capital punishment. We must avoid the temptation to
> exalt him as a symbol of progressive politics. All that most of us
> know about his politics, apart from his speaking out against police
> brutality, is that he has some connection to MOVE--a group with
> pretty wacky ideas. Certainly he is an activist, but there are a lot
> of activists, some of whom have bad politics. Being victimized by the
> state should not in itself confer political stature.
>
> First of all, the evidence to which we have access leaves open a
> possibility that Abu-Jamal could actually be guilty of the crime with
> which he is charged. Second, whether he's guilty or innocent, his
> ordeal doesn't indicate anything about the substance of his politics.
> It's certainly right and important to rally and organize to support
> his case. But we must take care neither to rush to make him a hero
> nor to let his appeal as an individual divert us from broader, more
> complex concerns.
>
> Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade), in her recent conversion to
> Operation Rescue's brand of holy rolling, should give us pause about
> loading too much significance onto individuals whose personal
> circumstances momentarily embody larger political concerns.
>
> Some of us can recall as well the case of Joanne Little in the 1970s.
> Little's was an especially tragic story of an impoverished young
> woman from a small North Carolina town. While incarcerated on a
> breaking-and-entering charge, she escaped from jail after killing a
> white jailer who allegedly attempted to rape her in her cell. The
> state declared her an outlaw, which amounted to a shoot-on-sight
> order. Little became a cause calibre for the women's movement in
> particular. But she was in far over her head as a celebrity. Her
> subsequent forays into petty criminality left the movement with egg
> on its face.
>
> Even under the best of conditions a movement built around a single
> individual can go only so far. This approach trades on the imagery of
> martyrdom; yet its goal is to ensure that the putative martyrs are
> rescued. Rescued martyrs, however, are always a potential problem
> because they live on as fallible human beings.
>
> The difference between James Meredith, who integrated the University
> of Mississippi and was later shot on a solitary march through the
> state, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X is instructive. Unlike
> the others, Meredith survived and went on to follow the twists and
> turns of post-segregation politics in increasingly pathetic and
> perverse ways, bottoming out as an aide to Jesse Helms. Martyrs work
> best when they're dead.
>
> The cause-calibre phenomenon, like fuzzy-mindedness about the militia
> movement, reflects a romantic, almost opportunistic tendency in the
> left. It is part of a soothing, "warm-bath" politics, a politics that
> is counterproductive because it imagines a specious, quick-fix
> alternative to the tedious, frustrating work that we most need:
> building support by organizing to create a base for a concrete,
> coherent political program.
>
> Especially now, in this most dangerous of times, we need to be much
> clearer than that.
>
> Adolph Reed Jr. teaches at Northwestern and is co-chair of the
> Chicago-based Coalition for New Priorities.