[lbo-talk] Futility of Progress

[Carrol Cox]

If leftists believe that nothing is necessary beyond some tinkering with
the economy, some slight improvement in the Courts, and perhaps more
tactful handling of aggressive policies abroad, then we can concern
ourselves with elections, who runs, who wins. Because such marginal
changes is all that elections in and of themselves can bring about.[1]
The most important election in U.S. history, Lincoln's, actually
exhibits the trivality of electoral politics. First, he only won because
of the fragmentation of the two parties into four presidential
candidates. And that fracturing came, primarily, because a small, very
small, non-electoral movement, the Abolitionists, had driven the
southern Slavers out of their fucking minds. As Barbara Jeanne Fields
points out, the slaves knew long before Lincoln knew that he was going
to free the slaves, because the slaves knew their owners and knew that
the Union could be saved only by a complete smashing of the Slave power.
Without a non-electoral, nastily aggressive, and very offensive
movement, including John Brown's raid into Virginia, there woul have
been no Lincoln as president, and nothing to force him, were he
president, to free the slaves. 

Who was the most important poolitician to bring abut the Civil Rights
Act? Not liberals elected by hard campaigning by the Black Liberation
Movement but that slimeball Dirksen, who meant by his slogan, "An idea
whose time has come," that those people were going to wreck everything
if someone didn't throw them a few bones, and so he pushed it through
the Senate. The rioters in the northern cities were more important than
any liberal senators in getting rid of Jim Crow. 

It's not clear how conscious DP leaders over the last century have been
of their primary function in the social order, but it is overwhelmingly
clear what that function is: to absorb, deflect, splinter, and
ultimately drow all social movements threatening the quiet rule of
capital. Social Security and the Wagner Act, in their precise form, were
defeats, not victories, for working people. They were ways of quieting
the threat represented by the Townsend Plan and the CIO to actually move
the u.s. to the left. The anti-war movement of the '60s was seriously
compromised by the Clean-for-Gene and McGovern campaigns, those
campaigns probably resulting in  few hundred thousand more deaths in
Vietnam. 

The DP is mot a weak and unsatisfactory friend. The DP is The Enemy. The
RP eixts mostly to make the DP look good.

All this of course raises a question which I have emphasized for a
number of years but cannot myself answer because no one person can
answer it: it can only be answered in collective action and thought
coming from many directions: When and where does the next equivalent to
the Abolitionists, the CIO, the Civil-Rights Movement appear?

It's not just that radical change is better or faster or deeper than
"progressive" change -- it is that radical change is the only kind of
change we can have in social relations. Progress is an illusion. It is
appropriate that the original Progressive Movement had as one of its
great heroes Teddy Roosevelt, who cheered the treatment of the
Communards and thought all strikers should be so treated.

Carrol

[1] And of course what is won in elections is _never_ progress: by
progress we mean gains that are not reversible, otherwise the metaphor
of moving down a road to a destination is meaningless. But gains won in
elections can be and often are lost in succeeding elections. Some
_always_ are (e.g. Supreme Court majorities. It is still a bit uncertain
whether the English or going to be able to preserve their National
Health System, which is being battered at the edges. And as Angel
explained to us, the German medical system is seriously fucked up.) When
we say science is progressive we mean the present builds on the past and
what is gained is permanently gained. That is almost never the case in
politics.