Hope

I agree that it’s high time for the left to assert itself. But I think an organizational and/or electoral strategy is at least as important as policy goal-setting. Look at the teabaggers. There’s much disagreement about what they want, but nobody can doubt their existence. Bodies in the streets or votes on election day are ultimately more important than well-formulated manifestos.

And, like it or not, the Hope meme is now 100% associated with Obama and his centrism, so we may need to look elsewhere for a unifying theme.

Writing this kind of thing, I can sense the feeling that it’s naive/utopian/pointless.

There was a time when starry-eyed idealists like Reagan advocated arbitrary violence as a tool of foreign policy, and proposed the massive redistribution of wealth to the top 1%. Sometimes these things take awhile. It took Bush II to truly realize The Dream.

“I agree that it’s high time for the left to assert itself. But I think an organizational and/or electoral strategy is at least as important as policy goal-setting. Look at the teabaggers. There’s much disagreement about what they want, but nobody can doubt their existence. Bodies in the streets or votes on election day are ultimately more important than well-formulated manifestos.”

Well, right, there are still elections to win, and one vote equals one vote, etc. But putting a huge premium on electoral organization and ignoring the development of a good system of public policy is pretty much exactly the Obama for America playbook. If the left shouldn’t blindly follow President Obama, then likewise it shouldn’t try to raise up a clone of him to follow blindly.

Let me add: developing an alternative financial system. Something that can take over piecemeal, rather than all at once. The financial wizards screwed us, left us no choice but to bail them out, and now the talk is of how to save that same system with, at best, regulations to hopefully prevent the need for another bailout. Instead, every aspect of that system should be re-evaluated in terns of whether it is actually creating value for the general public or not. It controls a huge share of international wealth, and the utility of much of it is very questionable.

Destroying the military-industrial complex for starters, then the multinational capitalist behemoths.

Oh, and learning from these guys might help:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=113749985304255

But putting a huge premium on electoral organization and ignoring the development of a good system of public policy is pretty much exactly the Obama for America playbook.

I really can’t agree to this. One of the fairly satisfactory aspects of the Obama administration^1^ is the swiftness with which it pursued meaningful policy details; the small stuff which doesn’t get airtime. I am thinking of the re-toothing of regulation agencies, in particular the retoothing of OSHA. And I remember his public policy proposals website, in the election season, being fairly well-stocked with details.

^1^(not balanced out by his decision to sustain and even amplify human rights abuses in anti-terrorism and war)

How about reviving the idea of a shorter working week? I know the French Socialist attempt to reduce the working week was criticised for not providing the employment dividend which the government decided to make the key selling point. However there are other justifications for less working time. All the talk of reviving community, volunteerism, family friendly society etc falls flat if people don’t have the actual time to participate in ‘social’ activities after spending too long at work. The flipside for the unemployed is that they have the time but not the resources

For example, the late Andre Gorz advocated a ‘1,000 hour year’:

“If the working week were reduced to under twenty-five or thirty hours, we could fill our disposable time with activities which have no economic objective and which enrich the life of both individual and group: cultural and aesthetic activities whose aim is to give and create pleasure and enhance and `cultivate’ our immediate environment; assistance, caring and mutual-aid activities which create a network of social relations and forms of solidarity throughout the neighbourhood or locality; the development of friendships and affective relationships; educational and artistic activities; the repairing and production of objects and growing food for our own use, `for the pleasure’ of making something ourselves, of preserving things we can cherish and hand down to our children; service-exchange cooperatives, and so on. In this way it will be possible for an appreciable proportion of the services currently provided by professionals, commercial enterprises or public institutions to be provided on a voluntary basis by individuals themselves, as members of grassroots communities, according to needs they themselves have defined. ”

http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/gorz.html

Sort of related to your 4th bullet, getting people to think of something other than the percentage pay increase/adjustment factor as the default way of changing wages, salaries, and pensions. A more efficient way of preserving relative inequality and increasing absolute inequality has never been found. And unions play along with it as much as anybody.

He could start reclaiming some meaningful credibility in my eyes by nominating Diane Wood to the Supreme Court instead of Kagen. Not holding my breath.

I don’t think that it is utopian or pointless to try to think of some major goals. It is a useful exercise because then one can work backwards to work out how to get there – a process sometimes known as critical path analysis (in project management) or backwards induction (in game theory).

I would like to suggest as a goal that we manage (and ultimately end) the mass extinction that the earth is experiencing at the moment.

As a teacher, I’d like to emphasize the 3rd point, “A decent opportunity in life for every child.” As a matter of constitutional principle, this could not speak more to every promise our nation was built upon.

Yet we are failing it big time. A simple thought experiment: what will the average life be like for a young boy growing up A)in a middle class home, with educated parents who love him and guide him for the first 18 years of his life, or B)in a ghetto home with a father gone or imprisoned, little family education and likely drug use or violence in or near the home? The obvious answer is two very different lives.

Yet for 10,000’s of children, these are the statistical facts. Aside from the purely moral problem, these children are an economic tragedy. Not only a lost opportunity for productivity, they will grow into adults who do not possess the social capital (emotional, cognitive, social, etc. skills) to be successful. They will burden the economy with higher health care costs, criminal justice costs, and ultimately a perpetuation of the cycle as their children enter the system in Kindergarten.

I promise I say this with all due respect – I have had these students in my class. I have hugged them and comforted them after they fought. I have stayed in with them during lunch. I have called their parents at home and tried to explain in broken Spanish how they might help their children succeed. The parents are trying their best. But they themselves were never given a fair chance.

Sadly, the current momentum in education reform is no where near to addressing in a real way this problem. Arne Duncan’s main talking points are: teacher performance, content standards, charters, and accountability. None of that is going to do much at all without serious structural reform.

The good news, is that we know what we have to do. The bad news is we lack the political and philosophical will to do it. We need to readjust our resources so that they heavily target the neediest schools. We need to follow evidence-based practices that have proven to effect change in these populations. The parents need to be pulled in, and these communities need to be nurtured.

I don’t want to take up too much more space here – getting into policy details would go on for much longer. For those interested I blog regularly on these issues at http://supervidoqo.blogspot.com/

I really appreciate the whole concept – this is why I voted for Obama and despite my disagreements with his administration on education policy I actually think he, on some level, “gets it”. But this is a movement that still has decades to go. NCLB was in many ways only the beginning.

JQ: The goals you list are admirable of course, just as they were in the 1960s, and in the 1930s. The Left hasn’t really changed- what changes is the receptivity of the public (and of elites) to these ideas.

One dispiriting thing now is to see that “health for all”, a very good goal, has the ability to get lots and lots of Americans (extent unknown) enraged and taking up guns to meetings and marches.

And, like #15- “40 hours pay for 30 hours work.”

And finally, can the Left come up with slogans or pithy goals that can’t and won’t be co-opted by the Right. “Let the people decide” won’t work any more.

…unless, of course, your vision of “capitalist oppressors” is jewboy banksters, as it may well be for some…

What 9 said: less sexy but more leverage.

Also, 1 thing of what John said: education, all foreign policy/development aid should be about 1 thing only: education.

But most importantly, the left should stop being so damned shortsighted. I mean it is only six or so months ago that at the mere mention of Obama a pouring of hate would happen on the left on which they could compete with some Tea Baggers. You can be ambitious without going around making hysterical claims of ‘Injustice! – Injustice!’.

In the end the original message of the left is one of liberation: one of educating people to make it to making their own mind up. The left should stop meddling with what people should think – and be content with the fact that more people dó think.

Pr Q said:

I’m not looking for debate on the specifics of these goals or the feasibility of achieving them (again, more on this later). Rather, I’d welcome both discussion of the general issue of what kind of politics the left needs to be pursuing, and suggestions of other goals we ought to be pursuing.

Writing this kind of thing, I can sense the feeling that it’s naive/utopian/pointless. But I think it’s precisely this kind of feeling, hammered into us by years of retreat that we need to overcome.

Not at all. Whats refreshing about Pr Q’s shopping list of hopeful policy aims is that it is progressively Left-wing without being reflexively liberal. No more cultural “isms” please if you want to bring the general populus and realistic socio-biologists along with you!

Far from being “naive/utopian/pointless” many of the suggested goals are already on the path to achievement. Partly because retrogressives have failed and partly because their is a giant engine of progress now on-line.

A minor cause for hope is that the Anglophone Right-wing is in intellectual and ideological dissarray after the colossal failures of the noughties, particularly in it home-ground advantage issues of national security (Iraq) and economic prosperity (GFC) issues. Bush, Goldman-Sachs, neo-cons, who can think of them without a shudder of horror. So the Right-wing adversary, whilst not on the canvas, is definitely on the ropes.

A major cause for hope is that the ancient Oriental civilization of China is developing into a pretty decent superpower. It has a rich tradition to draw on, a huge reservoir of intelligent and co-operative people and a fairly sensible management team. It is focused on largely rational and useful goals that will lift its own and associated populations to higher levels of development. One cheer for the CCP, two cheers for the PRC.

Points #1 (ameliorating global poverty) and #3 (enhancing educational opportunity) are orthodox Left-wing aims that were uncontroversial among Johnsonian Great Society progressives about fifty years ago. They are achievable. In fact they are being achieved.

Asian imperialism is already making great steps to reduce poverty in Africa. The PRC is investing hundreds of billions into African industry and farming. A fair amount is trickling down, certainly better than aid. Africans will benefit by learning management and technology skills.

Universal education is alot more doable now that the internet is being laid down. Wireless hand-held technologies are alot more user-friendly for Less Developed Countries and people. Again this is already happening in Africa.

Point #2 (mitigating global warming) has teething problems. But it has wide-spread political support amongst voters, universal support amongst scientists and, most of all, it can’t be fudged by spin. Chinese people, in particular, yearn to breathe clean air. And again, I forsee the PRC coming to the rescue with carbon sequestration and renewable technologies.

Point #4 (reducing economic inequality) is a harder sell for obvious reasons. Alpha-males will not be keen on giving up their advantages. And they have the support of beautiful women. But focusing on dismantling the institutionalised kleptocracy of financial markets is bound to tap into every ones instinctive distrust of money changers. Just keep talking about Goldman Sachs and watch the MoU squirm.

The big thing missing from the shopping list is foresight on emerging key technologies that can reform human nature ahead of social structure. We know that gadgets are always being hyped which tends to dampen hope over time.

But progressives, whether Right- or Left-wing stripe, should keep one eye focused on revolutionary technology. In particular technologies that can reform or restore the human person at different scales:

– genotype: recombinative genetics, eg gene therapy
– phenotype: regenerative “cytotics”, eg stem cells
– memotype: re-cognitive cybernetics, eg robotics, mind-brain interface

It is inherently difficult to predict the likelihood of these technologies emerging. (How many social scientists in the eighties predicted the internet in the nineties?) And it is easier for journos like Horgan to make a living taking cheap shots at techno-futurists.

But the odds are that some revolutionary technologies will come to fruition in the next decade or so. And when they do they will make many the social effect of economic policies look lame and feeble by comparison. So it is important for rational progressives to hasten this date and be on their toes when the fateful days come.

Foreign aid does not have a very good record of actually making things better, and arguably, very often makes things worse, by making corruption worse, because crooked officials stealing from foreign ngo’s do not piss of the locals as badly as crooked officals stealing from them. The only example of outside intervention actually making things better, is the Acquis communautaire, which was constructive by providing a blue print for how to build a functioning state – The EU accession process worked amazingly well, in that regard. (Economic crisis or no, compare the eastern EU states with those that eh, did not go through that process. Its a very sharp contrast).
Question being, how the heck do we apply that success to the rest of the world? “Union universalis?”

“Ending extreme poverty in the world.”

This seems to already be happening. I’m sure we can all argue about the cause (is it that horrible neo-liberalism? Is it NGOs? Government action? Infant industry protection? Take your pick) and even that we’d like it to be happening faster.

But as Sala i Martin keeps pointing out (along with others) the last 30 years have seen the greatest reduction in such poverty ever and the process doesn’t seem to be slowing down any. Whatever it was that we ought to have done we do seem to have actually done it.

“After that, assuming plausible technological progress, it would be possible to gradually reduce concentrations, ultimately back to pre-industrial levels”

My day job’s on the periphery of these technological processes (the weird metals that some of them use). I don’t think that it’s “possible”. I think it’s absolutely certain. I really don’t think that the world in general has quite woken up to how quickly non carbon energy generation (and storage etc) technologies are advancing. Or decreasing rather, decreasing in price.

John Hempton for example has been showing how Solar PV (the cells, rather than the installations as a whole) have been decreasing in production cost by 4% a quarter. It reaklly doesn’t take long with that sort of cost reduction for a new technology to become cost effective.

My own work is more to do with solid oxide fuel cells but there are similar, if not in fact greater, changes happening there as well.

Bearing on this is the extreme reaction of the right. To an outsider (Australian) it appears that there is very little room for rational debate. I understand the mechanisms of American politics – the emotional context continues to escape me.

$854 Billion Removed from Africa by Illicit Financial Flows from 1970 to 2008:
Examining data for a 39-year range from 1970 to 2008, key report findings include:
* Total illicit financial outflows from Africa, conservatively estimated, were approximately $854 billion;
* Total illicit outflows from Africa may be as high as $1.8 trillion;
* Sub-Saharan African countries experienced the bulk of illicit financial outflows with the West and Central African region posting the largest outflow numbers;
* The top five countries with the highest outflow measured were: Nigeria ($89.5 billion) Egypt ($70.5 billion), Algeria ($25.7 billion), Morocco ($25 billion), and South Africa ($24.9 billion);
* Illicit financial outflows from the entire region outpaced official development assistance going into the region at a ratio of at least 2 to 1;
* Illicit financial outflows from Africa grew at an average rate of 11.9 percent

I posted a comment but it does not seem to have made it through. I am hoping it was not deemed offensive in any way.

My larger point, the letdown that is Obama aside, is that the manifestoes and the organisation have both existed, but that both are undermined by a willingness of the leaders elected to execute on this agenda, to fold under pressure of some unseen forces/ new realities once they find themselves in office.

This not only breeds a lasting cynicism in the electorate, but more perniciously makes ideas such as are listed in JQ’s opening post seem extreme or utopian.

Let’s try that “economic agenda” link one more time:

http://nontrivialpursuits.org/printer_friendly_unemployment.htm

I plan to talk about the specific issue of nuclear disarmament in more detail in a later post. The bigger point for me is that after decades in which the left has been on the defensive, it’s time for a politics of hope.

I think a big part of the problem here is that “the left” refuses to take yes for an answer. On a good many issues that people use to rate themselves as liberal, the majority of the American public agrees with them. Being against school vouchers, or for a public health care option is not the sin qua non of the liberal, but instead the moderate view held by most people.

The sooner this elementary fact soaks in and is accepted, the sooner the real work can get started.

MIT’s Center for Collaborative Intelligence has a site that allows people to design their own greenhouse gas reduction strategies and compare them:
http://www.climatecollaboratorium.org/

My own particular contribution is a zero emissions policy starting NOW. Even that seems to mean a 2º C rise in temperature by 2100 according to the projections. If you want to vote for or comment on my proposal, I’d appreciate it.

I like this initiative, especially since the ingenuity and invention I’m seeing coming out of Africa is blowing me away:

“Our fellows in the first world often come to visit and give us their well intentioned but often very problematic “solutions”. We thought, why don’t we pay back? Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems.”

http://designforthefirstworld.com/

Alex Prior wrote, ” I understand the mechanisms of American politics – the emotional context continues to escape me.”

All of the ’emotion’ that you see at Tea Party rallies is intentionally orchestrated by Republican Party strategists who know quite well from past experience that the best way for them to win the votes of Swing Voters is not via logical arguments, but through displays of emotion which serve to reduce the “us” vs. “them” decision to the simplest of terms.

Who, Mr. and Mrs. America, do you want to identify with? Us good Americans or those America-haters who are such a great threat that they arouse great anger and resentment in good people.

That is to say, they are modelling the kind of feelings/behavior they want the Swing Voters to feel/carry out. Demonizing the Democrats with strong emotion is a favored strategy that has always worked quite well on the local and regional level.

There is no other form of politics that they trust any more to get themselves elected.

Alex:

All of it? The whole tea party phenomenon is a GOP front-operation?

Of course not all of it.

The organizers have been able to rely on a great many easily-led anti-abortion activists to swell attendance; individuals who have little worry about re: potential tax hikes, but are more than happy to serve God by angrily denouncing those abortion-loving liberals.

Then add a sprinkling of pure party-identity enthusiasts who have accepted whole the demonizing rhetoric of Beck, et al., and who are always happy to take a loud vocal stand against those damned liberals at any invitation. It’s really not all that difficult to rally most of the local party activists to a given rally on a given date.

This post, and in particular JQ’s stipulation that “feasible in the sense that they are technically achievable and don’t require radical changes in existing social structures, even if they may set the scene for such changes in the future. On the other hand, they ought not to be constrained by consideration of what is electorally saleable right now” is obviously resonant with Erik Wright et al’s “Real Utopias” project.

Speaking of which, universal basic income is an idea which seems like it could be leveraged to help achieve all of JQ’s goals plus the reduced working time advocated by several people in the thread.

Corporations no longer to be accorded legal personality.

I’ve never really understood how a universal public income doesn’t just immediately cause large enough inflation to dramatically undermine its effectiveness.

Of course not all of it.

This poll is the tea party primer folks should prime themselves with :)

“Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in … the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”

That matches my Unassailable AnecData[TM]. Also, a common sentiment:

Kathy Mayhugh, 67, a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville. “He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.”

Yeah, I hear that kind of thing a lot, but not often so explicitly. More frequently, statements like “he’s not a Christian, how can he be?” followed by some kind of reference to a chain email or rumor or whatnot. The ‘he didn’t get sworn in for realz on a Bible’ thing is really popular.

57- if that were true, many Western European countries would be unsustainable as what we do have is something close to a de facto basic income.

#59.

‘When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents said that the movement’s goal should be reducing the size of government, more than cutting the budget deficit or lowering taxes.

And nearly three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”’

Of course, this above quote demonstrates one of the key findings of modern social science, which is that some people are really fucking stupid.

“Corporations no longer to be accorded legal personality.”

I’ve heard this idea floating around for a while, and finally realised what’s stupid about it:

The corporation is no longer able to assume liability for anything if it doesn’t have a legal personality. Limited liability is ended. If you buy a product and it goes wrong, you have to make your legal claims against the individuals involved in its manufacture and distribution. It becomes impossible to work as a checkout clerk without professional indemnity insurance (which you have to buy from a rich individual, as there would no longer be insurance companies).

Heck, how common is it for boards of directors to be held responsible for corporate misdeed? And theoretically, they are the people responsible to the stockholders for running a corporation – they appoint the CEO, and (I think) approve his choices for other top executives.

Enough of this “naive, Utopian pointless! We need a ringing manifesto and a determined, non negotiable stance. Raise high the banner. A las barricadas! As Mother Jones said, “let’s go and the get the sons of bitches”.

Because, obviously, if you believe any of that end-of-progress stuff, you can’t be a progressive. You might want to be one, might hang round with that crowd, but it’s just a logical contradiction, like a Christian Buddhist or something.

Someone who happens to believe there’s is going to be an inevitable total race war, and the only societies that survive will be those who reorganise their society on military lines under a competent leader might be in all respects a nice person, and could well not self-identify as a fascist. But they can’t be a liberal. Not because of the things they would identify as their values and assumptions, but because of the things they think to be simply factually true.

I think there were a lot of such people in the 19430s, just as there a lot of the new liberal reactionaries now. Hopefully it’s just a passing phase.

What if you want to *avert* a race war brought on by global resource scarcity? Does that make you a non-progressive because you aren’t boundlessly optimistic about the future?

Also, I think the two points at 70 are linked. You can’t have a serious political agenda and propose making do with less because too much of the electorate petulantly reject inconvenient truths. If they had more respect for truth and truth-seeking you might be able to get further politically by taking on big challenges instead of bowing to the desire to pretend they don’t exist.

“Laws which assert that only human beings may hold assets in a corporation”

Abolish pension funds, insurance companies and investment banking? Unwinding that will be messy..

I note that the UK has managed to establish the crime of “corporate manslaughter”, although I don’t know much about its actual impact. Litigation in the Trafigura case is still pending and still secret.

Suggestion: get out of politics and get into a field where a marginal person can make a big difference.

Diomedes your faith in high modernism is certainly charming, but you should really check out Seeing Like a State by James Scott.

One of the problems to deal with is Americans usually want their children to have a better life then they did. This is usually measured not by how the kids will measure success but by how the adults measured it. Thus, “why would you live in the city near lots black people, when I spent my whole life trying to get away from them.” for folks my age who grew up in suburbia and moved back to the city that our parents (or grandparents) left. I’m already intent on my children having more financial stability than my wife and I have because we invested in cultural capital (advanced degrees in art and humanities) and are paying a far steeper economic price than we anticipated because we failed to see a) the introduction of Photoshop and b) the collapse of tenure track jobs. I’m going to push them far harder to get high paying careers. Likewise, a plumber doesn’t want to hear about equity, he wants to hear about how to make more money so his kids can go down the shore next summer at a house at LBI instead of motel in Wildwood. (Insert your own appropriate beach references here). He wants his kid to be able to get a union card like his dad without having to be on a wait list for the training program for a number of years. There’s a working mom who doesn’t want to work, and a stay at home mom who wants to go back but can’t afford the childcare. Equity arguments, fairness arguments are going to fall on deaf ears. As anybody with kids will tell you, “it’s not fair” gets old quick.
Which is why something like “everyone deserves a chance, even you” might work.