Ballots for Equality: An Approach to the Radical Tradition in U.S. Electoral Politics (original) (raw)
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This text examines the political legacy of the New Left on the alterglobalization movement and Occupy Wall Street in the United States. It argues that the U.S. New Left’s transformation from participatory democracy to Maoist sectarianism constituted a trauma deeply inscribed on the formation of subsequent social movements in the United States, especially its direct chronological successors in the New Social Movements of the 1980s and 1990s. This synthetic movement milieu was characterized by commitments to feminism, antiracism, and ecology coupled to a critique of economic reductionism, an aversion to ideological sectarianism instantiated in a turn to culture and single issue campaigns, and a preference for prefigurative political forms which embodied a consistency of means and ends. This political constellation would become definitional for the alterglobalization movement that emerged on the streets of Seattle in 1999, and, after a period of movement abeyance, would re-emerge later in Occupy Wall Street alongside new populist themes. By charting the development of groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Abalone/Clamshell Alliances, Direct Action Network, this paper explores how the New Left’s discourse of “the personal is the political” evolved into the neo-anarchism that became hegemonic within the alterglobalization movement and later OWS. It also contends that the same challenges and limitations that demobilized the early New Left, New Social Movements, and the alterglobalization movement persist in Occupy Wall Street. Exploring the continuities and ruptures between these movements, I argue that the “prefigurative politics” now hegemonic within the North American left, by overcorrecting for the failures of 20th Century Marxism, poses formidable theoretical and practical problems for social movements today.
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This essay examines the relationship between the left and the Democrats by undertaking a strategic assessment of the challenges facing left political power in the Democratic Party that draws on the mixed results of various challenges the left has presented inside the party historically. That strategic assessment must be based, I argue, on an institutional understanding of the Democratic Party as an organization, requiring the development of more sophisticated analytical tools than those typically employed by scholars on the left. The fundamental point to be drawn from this analysis is that while a robust, well-organized left can conceivably exercise power inside the Democratic Party, that power is unlikely to serve socialist ends of building the collective power of the working class due to the way the party is organized. Past efforts to transform the party organization into a party of different type, culminating in the New Politics movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrate the difficultly of overcoming this problem. Coupled with the unlikelihood of producing the labour-based third party that has eluded the American left for well over a century, the analysis presented here suggests that the American left must rethink which kinds of goals can be accomplished in the realm of party politics and which cannot.
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By virtually any definition of the term, the US left is not doing well. In the sixties the left was intertwined with a series of progressive social movements; these movements and the left within them attracted enormous numbers of young people, many of whom changed not only their ideas but the way they led their lives through this experience. A vibrant left politics and culture flourished in every major city in the North and in many in the South; few college or university campuses were untouched by it. The left was a major presence in national politics and in intellectual life, outside as well as within academia. The left brought a freshness, honesty and moral integrity to national discussion that compelled attention and respect. Today this is virtually all gone. Though there are many organizing projects concerned with specific social problems, there are only the remnants of a left able to link these issues and call for systematic social change. In national politics the left has little if any influence. There is a subculture that identifies itself as left, but it is insular and dispirited, and too often preoccupied with policing the attitudes and language of those in or close to the left. The staleness of the left's perspective and its political marginality in the nineties stand in sharp contrast to its attractiveness and influence in the sixties. The mistakes of the left are only one reason for its decline: the left has also been undermined by the rising power of global corporate capital and discouraged by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent victory of capitalism over socialism. But this article will focus on what the American left has contributed to its own marginalization because while the left cannot reverse these trends, it can rethink its own perspective. In the sixties, the left was intertwined with a set of social movements. In the nineties, the left has come to be an intellectual milieu, a climate of opinion, with no coherent, collective relationship to movements for social change. What holds this milieu together is a common memory of or identification with the radicalism of the sixties. Many of the ideas that the left has drawn
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