CLASS NOTES
Reed, Adolph Jr.
CLASS NOTES Adolph Reed Jr. Lessons from a Demonstration On June 17, we had what is by our standards in Chicago a major march and rally for jobs and justice. The turnout of about 3,000 was larger...
...We need to be clear and honest about what this point really means...
...German fascism was embodied in and driven by the Pat Buchanans, Newt Gingriches, Robert Dor-nans, Phil Gramms, Williams Welds, Antonin Scalias, Connie Macks, Clarence Thomases, Beverly La Hayes, Ralph Reeds, Helen Chenoweths, Charles Murrays, and Peter Brimelows of the day...
...There seems to be a tendency among union activists to assume that gaining the support of leadership of popular organizations automatically trickles down to mobilizing their membership...
...The need to give Newt Gingrich a proper reception in Chicago when he came for a public appearance on June 5 led us to make one exception...
...Nevertheless, we have to craft a strategy that proceeds from recognizing that we are marginal in American politics, even among those we think are more likely to support progressive interests...
...The Jobs with Justice coalition, the labor movement's initiative for forging labor union/community alliances, was already planning a jobs march in mid-June as part of a national campaign...
...The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, recently merged with the International Ladies Garment Workers and soon to be rechristened UNITE, has for some time maintained a Caribbean Basin-wide organizing project...
...We don't look for fascism or fascists in the process of development, in the mundane-ness of the neighborhood, or in a disposition toward governance...
...But this means that we only imagine them in power and through their own mystified self-perceptions...
...The United Electrical Workers and the Teamsters each have developed joint organizing campaigns with fraternal unions in Mexico...
...Our hope must lie in our recognition that a bleak present isn't the product of abstract social laws...
...Berlusconi in Italy and the Thatcherite right in Britain equally join a general social authoritarianism with idolatrous faith in the free market...
...Although I'm not prepared to accept responsibility for Timothy McVeigh, I think radicals of my generation had a lot to do with cheapening this linguistic currency...
...They would refocus the labor movement as a more broadly based social movement...
...A related practical lesson is the importance of classic, old-fashioned, street-level organizing...
...Successes like our march are important building blocks, but they also remind us just how weak we are...
...One of our speakers on June 17 was a representative from one of the Mexican unions...
...This bowdlerized view overlooks the most significant and frightening point about fascism—its roots in self-righteous ordinariness...
...teaches at Northwestern University and is co-chair of the Coalition for New Priorities...
...Facing up to our utter weakness and isolation on the current political landscape is frightening because doing so seems to court demoralization...
...Several groups had planned a variety of separate events to mobilize local opposition to the Republicans' Contract on America...
...We had a classic Jesse Jackson moment, however: on the morning before the march, his deputy called to say that Jackson would be in Chicago the next day and would like to speak at the rally...
...The stakes are too great...
...It ain't necessarily so, and the only way to make sure it happens is to do direct, grassroots organizing ourselves...
...Political will and action shape the concrete limits of possibility.* Adolph Reed Jr...
...Those who spearheaded and ran National Socialism in Germany were haberdashers, osteopaths, third-rate academics, lawyers, and physicians, as well as enthusiastic patrician reactionaries...
...At a time when most progressive organizations are either highly dependent on a small pot of private foundation funds for their support or must five without staff altogether, the unions represent the only alternative base of support for the kind of full-time organizing we need...
...We don't have time for the luxuries of mystification or self-delusion...
...This is a tough fact for those on the left to confront, and we can produce any number of reasons to explain it away or to deny it...
...That's right...
...Key among them is the insurgency within organized labor...
...Yet American exceptionalism may not apply even in this domain...
...We worked ceaselessly for what seems like much more than two months—no one harder than the staffs of the Service Employees International Union (especially Local 73's Phil Martini) and the Coalition for New Priorities—to organize the march and rally...
...In this regard as well, a revitalized labor movement is our most important ally and foundation...
...And we certainly can't accept the notion of political realism that concedes the terrain to the forces of hatred and oppression...
...Fascists appear to descend on society like extraterrestrial invaders...
...As I watched him at the podium, I couldn't help noting that he was responsible for no more than five bodies in attendance—himself and his entourage...
...We publicized one another's actions, which had been scheduled through mid-May, but the feeling grew among us that it would also be good to stage one large, collective undertaking, a major demonstration...
...That's what optimism should mean for the left...
...Nor can we afford the pretense that national initiatives of the left are anything other than hollow fictions at this point...
...Yet he swooped in to plop down on the event while even some who had spent months of their own work to make it happen acted as though it was Jackson's deigning to associate himself with us that gave our effort luster and legitimacy...
...Guess who now controls the United States Congress and sets the terms for national political debate...
...The unions also still have greater capacity to turn out bodies for mass actions than other left organizations...
...Our work in Chicago both reflects and reinforces other, potentially more exciting shifts on the political landscape...
...In any event, we must acknowledge that we have to build a movement from scratch in a political climate dominated by these frighteningly nasty forces...
...Now least of all can we succumb either to the politics that pretends to find political resistance lurking in every mundane social act or the inane solipsism of identity politics...
...To most Americans, fascism evokes images owing more to art than politics—from GALE Leni Riefenstahl's films to Hogan's Heroes, depending on one's artistic preferences...
...They were distinguished by adherence to crackpot social theories, deep mean streaks, and more than typical greed...
...The link to fashion also provides a reassuring distance by both freezing fascism to a sort of art deco/Bauhaus moment and providing a set of comfortingly anachronistic warning signals—no jackboots, everything's cool...
...Just as outfielders are trained to go to the wall first on deep fly balls, we have to take realistic stock of the worst aspects of present conditions and adjust to them...
...Whatever national objectives we have must proceed from a real social base...
...There is no progressive movement that exists as a practical force in American political life...
...Admitting that progressive politics has no effective, popular constituency also seems to come uncomfortably close to a main justification of the Democratic Leadership Council's line about the need for a "new liberalism" that sheds all association with commitments to social justice and equality in the name of pragmatism...
...In addition, the California Council of Carpenters and scores of significant union locals have endorsed Labor Party Advocates, the group organizing for the convention...
...The demonstration grew from a loose coalition of groups that began meeting together after last November's elections...
...It's unfortunate that the charge of fascism, now that it most nearly describes the dominant thrust in American politics, has become so inflated by cavalier use...
...The turnout of about 3,000 was larger than the left has been able to generate here in some time...
...I discuss these developments in the labor movement because our work for the June demo underscored the absolute cen-trality of organized labor for sustaining any progressive political activity on a significant scale...
...Ironically, by so thoroughly demonizing fascism, this imagery also pacifies it by divorcing it from specific historical conditions and social relations...
...He did show up to give his standard speech, pressed the flesh for a few minutes near the stage, then left...
...Fascism is sleek, chrome and leather, larger than life in its demonic, Teutonic, vaguely yuppie efficiency and its unemotional, well-organized, and gratuitous cruelty...
...This could be the most important development in the mainline trade-union leadership in more than half a century...
...These insurgents want to revitalize the labor movement by adopting a strategy of mass organizing...
...It can't be hopeless in part because we can't allow it to be...
...That's daunting, but hardly a call for surrender...
...Our only possibility is to go back to the very basics and to focus on trying to build a coherent political movement in specific places and from the bottom up...
...The real pessimism is insisting that things are rosy in conditions like these when we secretly fear that the truth is hopeless...
...This event, for instance, cost thousands of dollars even before taking staff costs into account...
...This is the environment in which we must operate, one in which even what passes for liberal political discourse is polluted by this updated brand of free-market fascism that seems particularly American...
...As we made our plans and established our goals, it was clear that we could work to gain endorsements from the leadership of existing organizations, but we didn't have the capacity ourselves to make certain that our message was getting out at the level of direct contact by connecting with people face-to-face at public libraries, supermarkets, shopping centers, block clubs, and neighborhood groups...
...A challenge slate, headed by SEIU's John Sweeney, is likely to win leadership of the AFL-CIO, running on a platform of support for mass organizing...
...This work included not only the standard tasks of acquiring endorsements, publicizing the event, planning its themes and structure, and trying to mobilize as much support as possible but also the delicate work of maintaining a fragile, embryonic coalition whose participants weren't equally cooperative or trusting of one another...
...More significant than the numbers, though, was the kind of coalition that attracted them: an alliance of labor and community activists that's necessary if we are to build a social movement...
...Similarly, momentum has accelerated in the effort to create a real Labor Party...
...The current situation is ugly and dangerous, but not hopeless...
...At least three international unions have endorsed the idea and have committed substantial resources to build for a founding convention in the late spring of 1996...
...However, we'll never be able to improve the current situation until we do face up to this most unattractive reality and act accordingly...
...In the process, we made contacts and formed solid working relationships among organizations and individuals that can give us a foundation for subsequent, ultimately more ambitious undertakings...
...There are other signs that labor is stirring finally from its lengthy doldrums...
...We all decided to broaden the focus of that march, to work aggressively to expand its base, and not to schedule any significant action between mid-May and mid-June...
...But the fact that we had to work so hard to turn 3,000 people out for this event points up another lesson: just how thin our base is...
Vol. 59 • August 1995 • No. 8
