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marmar

(76,982 posts)
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 07:50 AM Apr 2014

Richard Wolff: Why No Sustained Protests (Yet)?


Why No Sustained Protests (Yet)?

Sunday, 13 April 2014 00:00
By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed


The organized post-1945 destruction of the New Deal coalition - unionists, socialists and communists - and the failure to replace those organizations help explain the muted reaction to the bailouts, austerity and other anti-democratic policies pursued by US governments at all levels.


The post-1945 destruction of the New Deal coalition - unionists, socialists and communists - keeps influencing Americans' lives. Today, its effects help explain why popular actions have been so muted against US economic changes since the 1970s and especially against the bailouts and austerity since the crash of 2008. Those effects also suggest what could reignite sustained protests and demands for change.

First to be destroyed after 1945 were the communists. Coordinated attacks came from business, conservatives, government and media. Most academics and liberals (including many who had supported the New Deal coalition) were complicit in that destruction. Once again we witnessed that old repressive tool: rebranding domestic social movements as mere agents of an evil foreign puppet-master. More important, demonizing the communists served to tar other social criticism that included the capitalist economic system with much the same brush.

Second went the socialists, largely destroyed by being rebranded as fronts, dupes or simply equivalents of communists. In many places, even liberals who rejected socialists and communists were nonetheless equated to them. The persistent purging of the New Deal coalition traumatized the next two generations. By treating criticism of the economic system as "un-American," the purges made blindly uncritical celebration of capitalism proof of one's loyalty. Obligatory for career advancement and personal safety, that celebration disciplined politicians, journalists, and academics alike for the last half-century.

Third to be destroyed were the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and unionism generally (later AFL-CIO etc.). They declined steadily for most of the post-war period. Unions had provided the mass base for the coalition and the New Deal. Union members' votes lay behind Roosevelt's turn toward taxing corporations and the rich to fund Social Security, unemployment compensation, the federal jobs programs and so on. Thus, for employers after 1945, attacking unions complemented their assaults on socialists and communists; all three coalition members had strengthened workers in conflicts with employers. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23026-why-no-sustained-protests-yet



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malthaussen

(17,065 posts)
3. So long as the people allow the powerful to designate the enemies...
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 10:13 AM
Apr 2014

... the people will have no friends.

In fairness, though, it is true that the powerful had economic leverage to enforce their will. If one's life is contingent on following a party line, most people will wave the flag of convenience and call it patriotism.

-- Mal

 

JEB

(4,748 posts)
9. Waving the flag of convenience and calling it patriotism...
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 10:44 AM
Apr 2014

A very apt way of describing a successful corporate job interview. Toe the line or join the riffraff cross town. Thanks for your insights. People will do almost anything to provide for their families....but when will austerity drive people into the streets?

 

4dsc

(5,787 posts)
7. Don't expect anything from the sheeples
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 10:28 AM
Apr 2014

Are you kidding me. Take away a tattoo shop and perhaps you might get a reaction from the youth of today.

 

villager

(26,001 posts)
8. and of course when change / resistance started to re-coalesce in the 6O's, "lone nuts" started
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 10:40 AM
Apr 2014

... to show up like clockwork.

All by coincidence, doncha know?

socialist_n_TN

(11,481 posts)
14. Yep, except it didn't have to be that way.......
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 12:45 PM
Apr 2014

and the IDEALS of those systems don't ENCOURAGE takers. Any bureaucracy that arises under a socialist system has to be controlled and regulated by the people, just like under capitalism. Ideally, it's just not as much work under socialism.

bvar22

(39,909 posts)
13. "Why No Sustained Protests (Yet)? "
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 12:12 PM
Apr 2014

Has everybody forgotten OWS?
That was a sustained protest,
and the violent suppression by Militarized and Nationally Coordinated Police Departments were an object lesson for future protestors.


My Wife & I have been On Strike since 2006.
We quit, cashed out, burned the credit cards,
buy nothing "new" (if we can help it),
and participate in the local, underground barter market.
Wall Street can live or die without our money or concern.

Waiting for you guys to join us.

truedelphi

(32,324 posts)
15. Protests are passe! My community is building a community rights organization and that has power.
Sun Apr 20, 2014, 06:07 PM
Apr 2014

Lake County Calif will be the first Californian community that has a "right to grow" ordinance.

No longer will a housing association tell you that you don't have the ability to grow tomatoes and chard in your front yard. Nor will federal agencies be able to send in their officials to tell a small organic farmer that they need to plow under their field of organic carrots on account of how a rabbit ran across the field, and that rabbit could be carrying anthrax! (I once thought such stories were "urban, er rural, legend," but then the SF Chronicle ran the articles on how farmer s that don't have the big bucks are tormented by investigators.)

Individuals in other communities have united to pass local ordinances that really shake apart the Big Corporate Entities. There are over 150 communities in the USA who have banded together to take on Corporate Personhood.

Now if you have ever been involved in local politics, you find out rather quickly that local citizens must usually "kow to" to the elected supervisors, or city council people, or even to employees, such as city or county engineers and planners etc.

And then there are other disconnects. Your elected Board of Supervisors will never ever sit down with the US Federal Senators from your state, and rarely do city council folks or Board of Supervisors even meet with state legislators.

This furthers the huge disconnect. There are so many separate layers of government. It certainly doesn't seem like there is any way to have a Grand Over View. Nor does there seem like there is much of a way to have any re-arrangement of components that might result if the various layers of government communicated with each other.

For instance, my small, Northern Calif. community recently received "free of charge" a piece of modern military over design, this $ 360,000 MRAP vehicle which was designed to take on the IED's of Iraq warfare. This is all part of the militarization of the local police force. Meanwhile our schools have little monies, the local swimming pool may not be opened as it needs $ 40,000 worth of repairs, etc. To add insult to the injury, the state of Calif. just "awarded" my community twenty two millions of dollars to remodel and re-furbish one hundred local prison cells. Where did this amount of money come from? In part, through the state legislature and the governor knocking one billion dollars out of the state budget for health care-related matters over the next ten years. (At the very time that community clinics will need more money as they are going to be swamped by people who now have health insurance through "CoveredCalifornia.org )

People are connecting the dots, but then, what can they do? When confronted by activists wanting solutions, our elected community leaders say that all the problems are divided up in various departments of various layers of government and that you can't, for instance, transfer the MRAP vehicle's worth over to the schools. But over time, the community rights' movement could end up doing a re-arrangement of the layers so that common sense solutions could occur.

I really truly think that the community based rights movement is being designed to handle all these problems and more, including the complete dismemberment of the Corporate Beast. (Er, Corporate Personhood.)

Through community activism, connected with real political know how, a small farming community in Pennsylvania tackled the problem of keeping out a 14,000 pig, Corporate Pig Farm. The community succeeded despite the fact that elected officials said, "An American owned business, regardless of what it does, always has the right to come into a community." In other words, if you little farmers do not like the destruction of water and soil, and the ability to breath air that doesn't reek of pig shit, move somewhere else!

Their efforts succeeded. They created a community based, County based piece of legislation that kept the Corporate Pig Farm out.

A small community in New Hampshire, and despite opposition from state and federal elected officials and agencies, took on a huge Quebec -based utility and put sustainable energy in its place.

So what are the particulars of how we go about doing this? First of all, to free up your time, end the worship of individuals. The heroes we are presented with usually end up in one of two ways:

One) They turn out to be a mere "face" for the One Percent. And although the One Percent may not care for Bruce Springsteen, the elected "face" might, although they certainly don't act on Bruce's real message, once they are in office. The One percent has learned to like presenting us with a fuzzy warm "face." That way we accept what is happening to us all the more willingly.

Two) If the politicians do not sell us out once elected, they're hit with lawsuits about their illegal past behaviors. Google Maxine Waters and see what she has had to endure over the past recent bits of history. Finally she is exonerated, but at a huge expense of time and money. The time she spent on exonerating herself should have been spent on her constituents, but that is what the PTB wanted.

Once you free yourself from the worship of individuals, you will have the time to become educated about how to effectively take back your community.

For more information, google Paul Cienfuegos, and Community rights. and Youtube. Watch the videos that come up and then get together a few friends and then take back your community!

McCamy Taylor

(19,240 posts)
16. You mean why no socialist workers revolution? That's easy. Divide and conquer.
Mon Apr 21, 2014, 02:47 AM
Apr 2014

Engels said it 100 years ago. They divide and conquer by ethnicity. But it can be by age or gender or sexuality. It could be by hair color or height even. It is all arbitrary. When MLK Jr went from race to economics (a strike) he was killed. When Brother Malcolm went from race to economics he was killed. As long as you are fighting for your little group's piece of the pie, you feed the myth that when Group X gets something, Group Y loses something. If you start fighting for every worker, the way that the Wobblies did--they you become public enemy number one.

It is simple, simple, simple. There is a reason that only the Communists would defend the Scottsboro Boys. The Communists knew that racism was a bunch of hooey dreamed up by capitalists to depress all worker's wages. There is a reason why they have been able to keep unions out of the south. The bosses tell the (white) workers--"You guys are like me. The unions want to take your jobs and give them to ____" (fill in the scapegoat minority du jour. Or fill in women.)

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