Questions on the Freedom Budget
Simon, Bob
The Freedom Budget is a coherent, pragmatic, democratic, non-apocalyptic program for political action. Unfortunately, the Vietnam War makes it far more utopian than anything proposed by...
...We know that most Americans, including Negroes, labor, and the poor, are only peripherally concerned with Vietnam...
...We did not create the subtle link between anti-Communism and anti-anti-poverty...
...Rustin and his colleagues want a national program for the broadest possible movement and they begin with sound assumptions...
...Attacks on the refusal to be anti-Communist in any situation are not relevant here...
...Of course, a war's effect on domestic progress is not the final criterion for its justification...
...the Welfare State is far more than a myth...
...There are no sources of economic intelligence, known only to your President, that compel him, in all candor, to tell the people he can't spend the money and have his war too...
...Our opponents did...
...generally, no more than an expensive mopping up of destructive, privately generated social costs...
...Which war...
...But it is a timid variant compared to others in the West...
...They are not in a bargaining position now and it is incontestable that, in the immediate future, demonstrations won't put them into one...
...White middle-class America is moving to the Right—not toward garrisonstate fascism, but toward an endorsement, no matter how apathetic, of an indefinite future of urban decay, repression of the ghettos, welfare doles, and donations of armed self-determination to Asian peoples...
...But Rustin could also be on his way to a convincing demon stration of Carmichael's thesis that they won't give you what you need and have earned, not because they can't afford it, but because you're black...
...Paradoxically, socialists define with scholastic precision who they will coal esce with and on what issues— it seems to matter...
...Politics based on strenuous, self-conscious purity are consumed in instant publicity—the first sign of early extinction...
...2) Why should radicals agree with the right-wing myth about the political power of labor on tap for liberal causes...
...By now these confusions are so much a part of our national thought that nothing will be clarified by radicals wearing one hat for the anti-war movement and another for poverty and civil rights...
...The Budget will be an educational holding action, but its initial, partial implementation must await the coming end of the war...
...The Administration and Congress agreed last session that ex cessive domestic spending and Asian land-wars lead to inflation...
...Some will resign because trends are inevitable, "nothing can be done...
...For every voter on our Left, there are a thousand on our Right...
...Republican voting among the rank and file was embarrassingly heavy...
...The subliminal message goes to the Far Left: Vietnam is not the inevitable result of the System's holding on to markets while expending its surplus in imperialist war...
...These premises seem to require a "realistic" strategy...
...This is not the fault of Bayard Rustin (who has been caricatured by Staughton Lynd as a "labor lieutenant of capitalism...
...The Rustin-Keyserling strategy is a crippling refusal to confront this tenacious complex of ideology, ritualistic political responses, and economic interests...
...But even if significant political action cannot be mobilized on this issue, there will be no serious advances toward economic democracy until the problem of American interventionism is permanently solved...
...Unfortunately, the Vietnam War makes it far more utopian than anything proposed by Narodnicki students who allegedly don't understand politics...
...The Establishment is to be disarmed in advance...
...The political uses of anti-Communism have created an automatic system of false choices and resolutions that are reproduced in every major domestic conflict...
...Concentration on Vietnam is said by coalitionists to be the kind of oneissue politics that insures that Negroes and white poor will bear the cost of the war...
...About immediate questions, what to do this year, the strategists for the Freedom Budget ought to be able to tell us: 1) What can they expect from this Congress...
...Rustin is committed to getting what people need to reconstruct their lives through tactically sound politics...
...Parochial conservatism, routine racism, liberal default, corporate influence, world "crisis," and war endlessly reduce practical expectations to uselessly low levels...
...Rustin and Randolph are openly dubious about the wisdom of mass demonstrations as leverage in bargaining situations...
...Some transcend limited options with unlimited ideological frenzy, "first the fascists, then us...
...Vietnam, the emerging struggle against aggression from the north in Thailand...
...Whether in any single election the majority of middle-class voters moves Left or Right, fundamental political obstacles are never really eliminated...
...Will the Civil Rights Bill be renewed, crippling appropriation cuts for community ac tion be restored, Harlem's democratic right to elect a bad congressman be reconfirmed, etc...
...Radical responses to this exhaustion of the progressive impulse are predictable...
...3) What is to be the precise role of the civil rights movement...
...Here, it is Rustin who is taking an ahistorical position...
...America is committed to welfare capitalism...
...Leon Keyserling demonstrates how a "national growth dividend" can pay for Vietnam, the rebuilding of cities, and the eradication of poverty...
...Five years from now, will we be arguing about coalition strategy during the pacification of Nepal...
...Perhaps it is expected that the sym pathies of civil rights leaders, com bined with fears of crime in the streets, will shame the already be leaguered liberals into doing their duty...
...Influential liberals, including supporters of the war, join labor and civil rights spokesmen in signing the Freedom Budget...
...Socialists have for years been against totalitarianism, against American interventionism, and against political manipulation of democratic ideals...
...In November, 49 of them lost their House seats...
...This time, fortunately, radicals are not compelled to offer critical support in the struggle against the invisable Chinese hordes...
...The Freedom Budget is a coherent, pragmatic, democratic, non-apocalyptic program for political action...
...Others will continue grass-roots projects with the poor under increasingly debilitating and isolating conditions...
...This is far more mystical than conclusively proving whites can't un derstand nitty-gritty and hog jowls...
...Al though SNCC has withdrawn as a co sponsor of the Budget, it could be of positive importance in orienting the movement toward a concrete social program for jobs, housing, schools, and income...
...Congress has come to reject the repeal of 14-B with bored complacency...
...Yet they seem to think it is impractical to work at getting our society out of this false dilemma for good...
...In the last session most of the COPE-backed congressmen supported Johnson's request for a ceiling on domestic spending...
...Nothing more can be expected "now...
...Real options for action are being constricted by a deteriorating national situation rather than by leaders "selling out" the movement...
Vol. 14 • July 1967 • No. 4
