Towards a Movement for Democratic Development [by BC Editor-in-Chief Glen Ford]
Almost two years ago, I was invited to Chicago to speak to the Wal-Mart issue. The question for me was, How do we create the conditions in which citizens can effectively determine who can do what in their city? - a larger subject than just Wal-Mart's attempt to invade Chicago. We at BC had decided that this larger question led logically to the creation of a Movement to allow people to determine how their cities are developed.
Since we're at the end of Martin Luther King week, it's proper to discuss Wal-Mart in the context of the Black Movement.
Unfortunately, there is no Black Movement.
I'd like to talk about Wal-Mart in the context of the U.S. Labor Movement.
Unfortunately, there is no U.S. Labor Movement at this time, worthy of the name.
Instead, there are various campaigns undertaken by Blacks and by labor - and sometimes jointly by Blacks and labor. But campaigns are not Movements.
Campaigns have beginnings and ends. Victory is declared when limited objectives are achieved. Campaigns are not self-regenerating. When one is over, another has to be kicked-started into existence.
Campaigns can become Movements. The campaigns against Wal-Mart have that potential, if they can be linked in the public imagination to life-transforming objectives.
The Katrina catastrophe has great potential to give birth to a Movement. There are literally thousands of Katrina-related projects operating throughout Black America. But they are not connected to one another, either through coordination, or by a shared vision of what the political response to Katrina should be. Beyond horror and outrage, what does the Katrina experience call upon us to do, other than help the evacuees?
It is good and necessary to help the evacuees. But that's a campaign, not a Movement.
It is also good and necessary to resist every effort to plant Wal-Marts in Chicago, or to tailor specific legislation that impedes Wal-Mart from invading New York City, or to rein in its abuse of employees and taxpayers in Maryland. These are worthy campaigns.
But they do not directly confront growing corporate hegemony over all aspects of American life. The campaigns point out that Wal-Mart is the worst of a bad crowd. But they do not place the entire crowd in context, so that large numbers of people will see "Wal-Mart" in a whole range of corporate behaviors.
Once that type of vision takes hold, people who have little or no contact with anti-Wal-Mart organizers begin to contemplate anti-corporate actions on their own, in sectors unrelated to retail.
At that point, you have the makings of a Movement.
I'll give an example from the Civil Rights Movement. The original idea for the Montgomery bus boycott was for a short action with very limited goals. More conservative elements of the local NAACP envisioned a brief demonstration boycott. The goal was to tweek Jim Crow so as to allow Blacks to fill up the bus from the back, while whites filled it up from the front. The two groups would meet somewhere in the middle, depending on ridership - but there would be no empty seats reserved for whites while Blacks stood.
If that was the way things had worked out, we would not recognize the Montgomery bus boycott as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Instead, the Black people of Montgomery decided that, if they were going to do all that walking and risk losing their jobs, it better be for total desegregation of the busses. And suddenly, there emerged a mass vision of the total destruction of Jim Crow, rather than a gradual easing of its more savage aspects.
Eight years later, there were 10,000 separate civil rights related actions in 1963, alone. The SCLC couldn't do that. CORE couldn't do that. SNCC couldn't do that. And the NAACP wouldn't do that.
The people were investing in a Movement that would fundamentally change their lives. The "civil rights" agenda was essentially completed in a little over one decade. The last important civil rights legislation, the Fair Housing Act, was passed in 1968.
So, what's that got to do with Wal-Mart, 2006, you say? Why is Glen going off-subject? I'm trying to paint a broad picture, here.
I'm talking about how we got to this dark and scary point in history, and why we need a real Movement - what we at Black Commentator call a Movement for Democratic Development.
But we still have to go back to 1968. Dr. King had already written his book, "Where Do We Go From Here?" What he meant was, "Where do we take the Mass Movement, from here?" King had no intention of shutting down the Mass Movement. Rather, he would direct it against the Triple Evils: Racism, Militarism, and Economic Exploitation.
King played a huge role in getting southern Blacks the right to vote - but he didn't believe that electoral politics was sufficient for real social transformation.
King supported Blacks who climbed up the corporate ladder, or made lots of money in business. But that doesn't put much of a dent in the Triple Evils.
King didn't get far in his redirection of the Mass Movement before he was shot down. And, almost immediately, the aspiring Black office holders and corporate actors seized the stage and proceeded to shut the Movement down. Some of these players came from King's own ranks.
For many of those seeking political office, the Black masses are only useful on election day. The rest of the time, they are nuisances. And Black business types don't want mass action unless it is in support of them getting a contract.
These elements were as responsible as Cointelpro for the demise of the Movement.
Black politicians gained control or great influence in cities with no plan at all except to give contracts to Black businesses. Their only idea for coping with corporate divestment of the cities was to auction off, give away, and even pay corporations to take city assets.
The cure for what ailed the cities, they thought, was the return of capital, and the return of whites.
When the cycle of divestment finally exhausted and reversed itself, these electoral leaders continued to give the city jewels away - including tax revenues for a generation into the future.
This political class is more than useless - it is bankrupt and must be replaced. They have made careers selling off the assets of the people. They will ultimately sell out any progressive popular initiative. Getting rid of them will require a Movement.
At the center of any Movement is a principle that is popularly understood. For the Movement for Democratic Development, that principle must be: No project can be called "development" unless it benefits the existing population of the city. Not new populations, but the existing population. Otherwise, it is destruction - not development.
We are now speaking of the context in which Wal-Marts should be evaluated, here in Chicago and anywhere else. Yes, we know that Wal-Mart is a Death Star that destroys jobs and all economic activity but its own within a wide radius of the store. But what about all the other corporate players? Why just Wal-Mart? What is the best Grand Plan for the city, one that serves the existing population? And how are the people's aspirations - their dreams for their neighborhoods - made central to the larger scheme?
If the focus is Wal-Mart, then we are engaged in a campaign. If the goal is to empower the people to fight Wal-Mart and any other corporate predator - to democratize planning and development - then we are talking about building a Mass Movement, one that can regenerate itself. Because the people never run out of dreams.
To create a Movement for Democratic Development we need more than general loathing, disgust and anger over Wal-Mart, although that's a good start.
We need information on every aspect of the city. We need information so that people can develop their own plans for the city.
Corporations know everything they need to know before they target a city - infinitely more than the city officials with whom they "negotiate," if you can call it negotiation. The actual process is more like corporate bullying and extortion.
Activists seeking to build a Movement must know as much as the corporations about the city's assets: public and private, infrastructure and installations, vistas and brownfields. A basic task is to do an audit of the city's assets, as the basis for people-oriented planning, and to bargain competently with corporations. This requires assembling teams of experts from many disciplines - civil engineers, architects, progressive city planners, educators - people who collectively understand what makes a city tick. Plus organizers, organizers, organizers.
The task doesn't require a large group, or prohibitive amounts of money. SNCC damn near changed our part of the world with relatively small numbers and almost no money. Today, Black progressives and their allies are represented in all the necessary disciplines - and I am confident they are willing to work, cheap.
The consequences of not having a plan for your city were made horrifically clear in New Orleans, recently. The American Institute of Architects and the Urban Land Institute had collaborated with big capital to devise a "plan" for the new New Orleans - half the size of the old New Orleans and missing most of its Black population. It was a detailed plan, adopted by the Mayor's Commission and released as if it were the product of a governmental process.
New Orleans activists held their own conference. It featured a handful of experts, none of whom had done a real study of the city: an urban expert from Sydney, Australia, an MIT guy who used to be New York Mayor David Dinkins' housing aide, and a brother who helped rebuild the small town of Princeville, North Carolina, after a flood in the Nineties.
It was a very uneven match.
The window that slammed suddenly shut on Black New Orleans is incrementally closing on Black and brown populations in many other cities. Gentrification accomplishes over years what Katrina did in days. When the window closes - when there is no longer sufficient critical mass of Black people in the cities - the Great Game of this epoch will be over, and we will have lost.
And we will have lost no matter how much frustration we may have caused Wal-Mart before the window closed.
We only win in the long run when we inspire masses of people to think of the struggle as their own. A Movement for Democratic Development would place Wal-Mart in the context of the full range of capital's destructive activities in urban America. It would come to grips with gentrification, the phenomenon that impacts each inner city household and the political and geographic destiny of the whole people. Such a Movement would aim to seize control of city and county governments, so that the people would have the tools to transform their entire city - to make it a decent place for the existing population.
That's something folks can get their teeth into. If we are consciously pursuing such a goal, we might just get ourselves a real Movement - one that will spawn a whole new political leadership.
Amidst these disjointed campaigns orbiting Wal-Mart, Katrina and other struggles, there is the stuff of a Movement out there - the stuff of human inspiration.
To paraphrase Dr. King, I envision a situation in which the activist engages the citizen and says: "YOU have a dream. Let's get to work on it."
BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a book to be titled, Barack Obama and the Crisis in Black Leadership.