This open letter was originally written and circulated on 23 June, 2020 in the wake of #MeToo and the George Floyd Protests but It is not until recently that we had a space for it. We hope that it is an accurate reflection of our thoughts and feelings of the summer of 2020.
Comrades,
We are writing to share our concern about the direction of the anti-capitalist opposition. Like you, we have been greatly heartened by the explosion of Black Lives Matter to a truly mass movement, uniting black and white protesters. Racism is not only at the core of our numerous social maladies. It was the original sin and birth defect of the American socialist and trade-union movements.
What disturbs us is the pattern of opposition in which one cause after another exhaustively engages our consciousness and our energies, only to cede to the next big thing: first immigration policy, then #MeToo, and now BLM. This pattern results in part from the structure of the media that crave the new and invest all resources in whatever is immediate and of greatest financial benefit, particularly when it lends itself to visual representation—but with little or no context. This pattern frustrates consolidation and generates false remedies. As one all-absorbing issue after another divides the good people from the bad, our polarizing pattern of opposition tolerates no space for a gradual evolution of many people between the polarities of all wrong and all right. The pattern causes whiplash as the Left discontinues hard work in one area and starts from scratch in another; and it prevents us from creating a consistent and all-inclusive message like the campaign around Medicare4All.
Consider for example, the evil that best demonstrates the injustice of American capitalism, racism. Let us suppose that the current movement establishes Juneteenth as an official holiday (a good idea) and leads to reparation payments to every black American (a demand long overdue). Implicit in the concept of negotiated reparations is the assumption that the aggrieved party is ready to express its satisfaction and to consider itself appropriately compensated. Otherwise, one cannot in good faith accept compensation. We know that there are various ways of according reparations. But suppose that a substantial amount were paid to every affected individual. Most of us know from experience that a financial windfall solves few problems. It would, however, bear the implicit obligation to stop citing past grievances, while the roots of oppression would remain untouched. There are similar problems with other single-constituency movements, as well as with the proposal for a Universal Basic Income. Indemnities and entitlements leave an unjust and unequal capitalist order unchanged.
We and our working-class brothers and sisters, regardless of immigration status, race, sexuality, or gender must work for a living under often degrading and dangerous conditions. It is unfortunately difficult to capture this in terms of visual representation and a compelling narrative. It is difficult—but is it impossible? Climate science addresses complex chains of cause and effect and likewise relies on the findings of experts. Workers’ oppression, though less visual, connects with other concerns. Meat processing workers for example, many of whom are immigrants and women, face death and exploitation in an industrial process which is concentrated to maximize profits even while failing to deliver wholesome and abundant supplies in a crisis, and while contributing to the degradation of the climate. The image of George Floyd being strangled to death or of a drowned child on a Texas border has vastly more impact than the image of an unprotected worker on a meat processing line. Is that difference an accurate measure of injustice and suffering? We are not arguing here against the attention given to constituencies but against the complex system which makes the exploitation of all constituencies possible and necessary. This is well known and no doubt as obvious to you as it is to us. Ways must be found to dramatize less visible conditions and forces of oppression.
Take for example the sexual exploitation of women. Attention must be given to rapists and abusers. But what about the role of systematic discrepancies of power and wealth? After 1989, Czech roads and streets were suddenly lined with Czech women and girls selling their bodies to West Germans who cruised across the border in their BMWs and Mercedes. Was this because of an insufficient sensitivity concerning proper male conduct or a sudden and free female choice of sex work? Vast systematic discrepancies in power and wealth exert an invisible power over all constituencies and ensure exploitation and humiliation. At what point does our personalization of sexual misconduct (the fat-cat millionaire, the salacious mogul) cover deeper causes by magnifying photogenic faces, thereby diverting us from those invisible forces? We know of coursethat #MeToo organizers try hard to demonstrate the problem of power imbalance, while the corporate media tend to neglect it in favor of stories of lascivious bad actors preying on beautiful women.Our point is that the power imbalance affects women and men in many ways which cannot be solved by litigation or sensitivity training. One doesn’t deny the suffering of an abused actress in asserting that the low-wage workers or the unemployed are humiliated and destroyed by the same profit-driven, male-dominated system.
In raising these questions, we are telling you nothing that you do not already know and agree with, perhaps nothing you haven’t said yourself. But if you have said it, it hasn’t penetrated to the level of the target audience that perceives—not without reason—an array of pure negatives: don’t abuse, don’t be biased, don’t pollute, de-fund the police. By venturing to set forth a positive program, premised on the fact that we work for a living (and have to live in order to work), the zero-sum competition for a fairer share of the increasingly rancid pie not only becomes less all-absorbing. All sorts of positive alternatives can be imagined. What if racism and sexism were taken up, not between the unreformed and a shaming public or punishing state, but between colleagues who share collaborative objectives? What if employees were furloughed to be trained and serve in rotation for security duties in place of the police with its ingrained authoritarianism? What if a global environmental clean-up effort created jobs, aimed, not at personal restraint, but at cleaning the rivers, oceans, and atmosphere of the earth? There have been precedents from the CCC to the Peace Corps. What if the public were encouraged to apply the standards of common decency to the criminal behavior of the financial, pharmaceutical, and real estate sectors? Common sense dictates that a ship captain who runs aground and loses crew or passengers must be relieved of command. Why shouldn’t the same standard apply to the captains of industry and finance? An opposition that lacks thought and imagination is doomed to lose against an opponent who lacks decency and restraint. An opposition that ignores the most general terms of oppression, that of having to work for a living under conditions over which we exercise no control, loses itself in pursuit of demands that only promise a fairer share of the pie. The problem is that the pie is poisonous.
Again, we do not claim the Nobel Prize for originality. We do not offer a solution. We are, however, disappointed as cause after cause creates an uproar, stirs up indignation, elicits action—without ever calling into question the system that reduces us to precarious workers, consumers, and commodities.
In solidarity,
Andrew (Pfannkuche), YDSA
Andrew (Weeks), DSA
Normal Thoughts 