One of the saddest things to watch is dedicated people in education and human services burn themselves out for lack of a winning strategy.
In the U.S. “playing defense” has dominated liberals and centrists since Ronald Reagan became President. Canadians started that disastrous policy more recently. This summer, I learned that in the United Kingdom the British have joined the defensive trend, along with too many places on the continent.
On its face, anyone who’s ever played checkers can see what’s gone wrong for advocates of public education, health care and other services. Gandhi said it long ago: you can’t win until you go on the offensive.
The strategy of the right wing is to put the left on the defensive by using every opportunity to cut the budget. In Reagan’s day it was the so-called necessity of buying missiles to prevent the Soviets from invading. Under George W. Bush we heard the arbitrary claim that Amtrak should pay its way, while in Canada at the same time there was a similar claim for the postal service. A long time ago the strategy of the U.S. auto industry was to buy public transit companies, cut the service and therefore force frustrated riders to buy a car.
Now we are told (in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.) that the 2007-08 economic crisis has left our nations poor, although the 1 percent has never been wealthier.
The rationale keeps changing but the strategy is the same: starve the budget and run down the service until so many people get fed up that capitalist-friendly “solutions” — like charter schools and vouchers — start to look good by comparison.
Today we’ll use the analysis of class culture to turn this situation around and put the left on the offensive, the only place from which it can win.
In public education today, from preschool to university, we see middle-class people following their class script: work harder and “make do” in order to fulfill their mission. Principals in battered urban high schools hear about heroic colleagues who somehow make their schools work. Teachers, who are also fed stories about magician colleagues without textbooks and materials, are encouraged to dip into their own pockets to make exciting activities for their swollen classes.
Libraries, swimming pools, public transit, assistance for mentally handicapped, addiction rehabs — you name it, the story is similar. Middle-class professionals whose job is to teach and manage the working class, are stretched to the breaking point.
Those lucky enough to still have a union can fight a rearguard action, but the “educational alternatives” like charter schools are specifically designed to weaken unions. And chances are that the union is also dominated by middle-class tunnel vision, a fatal condition in the middle of class war.
In workshops, we do a simulation of class dynamics in which the game at one point sends the individuals representing the owning class out of the room to decide how the game should proceed from there. This leaves the two groups playing the roles of middle class and working class to their own devices. The facilitator gives them nothing to do. After a period of uncertainty, the two classes often come together, realizing that they are the numerical majority and that when the owning class comes back into the room with new rules, they can refuse to go along and play a more egalitarian game.
Another breakthrough insight happens later, during debriefing. Someone remembers that the initiative to get together to overpower the owning class usually comes from the working class!
The strategically disabling condition of middle-class people is the belief that they are in it by themselves, subject not only to individual isolation but also to the failure to look around for allies. That’s how deep the programming is: If you’re middle class you are supposed to be managing — in control — and if you are at a loss (and there’s not an owning-class presence telling you what to do), passivity is your lot.
Now we understand why college faculty members are so often passive when student movements emerge on campus and why public school unions often fail to make common cause with parents and other unions.
The good news is that even middle-class people can break out of cultural scripts; even professors can use critical inquiry to ask why they remain passive in the midst of the sharpest class struggle the U.S. has had since the 1930s, a war that targets them.
Working-class tunnel vision
The cultural attributes that go with being working class can also hurt strategy. A Canadian example is a militant union that for decades has extended its resources and energy to assist anti-poverty groups, aborigines and many other causes that are marginalized in that country.
Recently that union was thrown on the defensive and forced into a strike. Remarkably, the union failed to create a movement by gathering around itself the forces that it has helped.
To do so would have been a strategic no-brainer. But just as middle-class people are disabled by their own class training, so also are working-class people. The training goes something like this: “We are the hardy and resilient ones; it is for us to fight; we know how crucial our solidarity is for others but we can’t really expect and demand that they come through for us.”
It’s the attitude seen in the stereotype of the exhausted working-class housewife who “doesn’t want to be a burden.”
I see only two alternatives for us in what Warren Buffett describes as a class war: either we become strategically sharper, or we become aware of how much our class conditioning makes us duller, and then develop work-arounds.
Invite from the owning class its capacity for vision
“Inclusive strategizing” looks for ways not only to break out of middle and working-class constraints but also to enroll gifts from owning-class culture. The crucial gift at this time in history is vision. “Making the welfare state a little bit better” is not a vision.
The saddest thing for me about consulting with Wisconsin working and middle-class progressive leadership a year ago was the premise that “getting back to Democratic rule” was the implicit goal. That was nice for the Democrats and the 1 percent, maybe, but a goal for Wisconsin? How easy it is to disrespect the historical legacy of Wisconsin when we’re feeling desperate and have so thoroughly lost touch with vision.
A vital theme of owning-class culture is the “big picture.” The right wing easily puts us on the defensive because they know what they want. The counter-offensive that gives parents, school unions and others their only chance awaits the creation of vision. It’s vision that inspires people to go to the level of sacrifice that is necessary to win.
It’s no accident that the most militant segment of the Quebec movement that just won its five-month campaign against tuition rises was also the part that was visionary. According to an earlier report on this site, CLASSE organized half the strikers and most of the direct actions. It went beyond the defensive demand of “stop fee rises” and demanded an end to tuition entirely. (Long before it was a wealthy country, Norway had free higher education.)
I am not arguing that there is never a time for resistance with a goal of maintaining the status quo; a population might be so beaten down that the wise strategist knows that winning this modest victory is the main task for now.
In the larger context of class war, however, the defensive posture is for losers. To win, movements must take the offensive and fight for a compelling vision.
Of course there are some working-class and middle-class people whose temperament turns toward envisioning. If owning-class volunteers aren’t stepping forward in our movements, then movements need to learn how to support the visionaries wherever we find them.
To your article, my visioning of the past has been tempered by the poverty of the present. The ‘wishing for’ phase has been replaced by more realistic views, although generally of a larger scope. I’ll not shrink from stating what I see as necessary, within reason, and achievable. The achievable part is fortified by the necessity considering historical and present conditions, in both the nationally and the worldly spheres.
With the continued disregard of certain peoples here, the decades of wealth redistribution ( according to the plan ), the continued detriments explained in the 1960s of our impact on the planet and usage of resources, with the uncertain, but noticeable, climatic changes, combined with the political/governmental situations here and abroad – too numerous to list – leads me to state, much work is needed.
An understatement and vague. But the true words shock from the extent I see as required and necessary. But if a person were to grasp these factors in one piece, I think the same conclusion could reached in part, or in whole.
Although I’ll state with certainty my proposal is not the only one which will work, it can be reasoned as, at least pointing others in the right direction of concern.
The work needed requires re-evaluating many parts of what we do, and what we have become as a nation. I could list some solutions, but I’ve done so before, and I’d rather others pitch in too.
Not to shrink efforts of those in the Activism area, but does the need for Activism indicate a failure of government, or our society, in some way?
I think it’s a mistake to separate activism from society, certainly, and perhaps even government. A healthy society needs activism nearly as much as an unhealthy one. Society will not respond, and government will not act, according to the needs of those who aren’t in the positions of highest privilege unless those people find ways of building and asserting their own intrinsic power.
I agree that Activism will always be required, but it’s not enough now. I see Activism as a side-effort of sorts for small-time changes. The great active force to oversee government is nowhere.
What I see as a larger systemic problem is how the Republic is now, and has been, a nationalistic dictatorship of sorts.
Just because people accept these grave transgressions, does not make them right or legal. After all, the Constitution is still intact. These alterations lie outside our Supreme Law.
Does anyone read our founding documents anymore? ALL Activists whom I’ve encountered, rudely deride the Constitution, yet can not point to a single fault. Their rudeness extends to not even discussing what changes they deem required. But, I hold no grudge.
I will provide a separate post as to where, in historical terms, I view the divergence of the people away from bothering with overseeing their common government occurred.
While enough people will be perpetuating our UN-Constitutional, near, if not so, dictatorial centralized national government, I have accepted the job of ending this usurpation of my lawful authority by these ‘people’ in Washington DC.
I’ve yet to find a single person who understands the Constitution to the point of seeing this same conclusion, other than a few in scattered web sites.
My Dear Professor,
I recently re-discover some pertinent information concerning Personality Types.*
If 70% of the population** does not have much, if any, interest in the theoretical, abstract, or conceptual, my job/efforts are not only difficult, but might your work also suffer some?
Shouldn’t Personality Types be factored into the equation, somehow?
* “Do What You Are” Teiger, Barron-Teiger 1999, Ch.4 p.55.
** Combined total of the two largest groups of the basic four Personality Types.
As promised, A Short View on Civic Absence, and the outcome…
While not comprehensive, this tries pointing to some factors, which may indicate why I say the People lost control of their federal government.
With the large influx into the country, before and after the Civil War, of immigrants who grew our now new nation, the result of that war, their education was shorted in Civics. I emphasize the large influx into the country of new people. This influx continued into the 20th Century, with most, if not nearly all, into bustling cities.
During this period, our ever increasing representation in the House of representatives began to slow. We must recall that members in the House were to keep increasing with the population, at 1 rep. per ~30,000 persons. But, it slowed during the mid to later 19th and early 20th Centuries. I’ll not hazard as to why this became so. But, I’ll mention this, “Did these people get properly educated in civics?
So, the slowing of representation continued until 1929, when it was fixed at 435. Today we have three times the population, yet we have received no new representatives. The 435 only get moved around the country as though pawns on a board.
Then, the aftermath of WW2 created our current “Perpetual State of War” society. The country’s population doubled since the mid-1950s, the times were booming, people were busy living “the good life” with less time to be concerned about…what they weren’t being educated in, or educated enough in – Civics. City life can leave less time to contemplate and ponder the issues.
Yes, this is an incomplete picture, and I carry on at times, reminiscent of Gibbon, but it does illustrate some of the reasons why control is now lost. From a designed 1 per 30K, to 1 per ~700K, so goes being heard to be represented. Decisions in Congress become the one-size-fits-all variety, with pork on the side.*
So, the reduction in our voice in the People’s branch of Congress, and a lack in teaching the people their citizenship duties and responsibilities, not that there’s any written law stating such, but there was a time when these things were much better held by the People – having a much higher voter turnout than the past 60-90 years, helped to produce the current national government. And so, several generations are absent enough knowledge to take command of their common government, including those elected to office.
I stress there’s a general lack of knowledge in early constitutional history by the bulk of today’s Americans. The founding era must be read and re-read. Their despicable faults aside, will reveal what was proposed, to what is today. While slavery continued then, what new evil continues today? This absence of knowing, along with the Cold War ‘crap,’ gave us the following.
Far too long, we have looked ‘up’ to a “Leader” to solve problems. It’s a most dangerous aspect of and to our system, with Congress creating a virtual “Office of the Dictator” thus bringing on the “Supreme Leader” syndrome – in which anything is said to be within the ability of our national “Leader.” I do stress this ability is unacceptable, and beyond reason too. It matters not who is given this ability, or why, or even by a carefully reasoned requirement for it to be so.
What does matter is the casual acceptance of this obscene power by my fellow citizens, confirming the depths we’ve collectively sunk by Congress passing the War Powers Act, and others before and since. These are un-Constitutional violations of our trust. Yet, we yawn, and doze off, with neither a care in the World, or for the World.
The People created this country. The country turned into a nation. The nation, however, is expendable. Nations are lifeless things with no soul. The People have souls, are never expendable unless they choose so. The choice is yours dear reader, continue on downward? or find a different path?
* For a fuller explanation on this point and more, see
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/documents/TTO_Pamphlet.pdf
Eric,
It’s true that the Federalist Papers argued for increasing the number of representatives in the House to keep pace with population growth, but in Federalist No. 58 James Madison points out that the number of representatives must be limited, as follows:
“The people can never err more than in supposing that by multiplying their representatives beyond a certain limit, they strengthen the barrier against the government of a few. Experience will forever admonish them that, on the contrary, AFTER SECURING A SUFFICIENT NUMBER FOR THE PURPOSES OF SAFETY, OF LOCAL INFORMATION, AND OF DIFFUSIVE SYMPATHY WITH THE WHOLE SOCIETY, they will counteract their own views by every addition to their representatives. The countenance of the government may become more democratic, but the soul that animates it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged, but the fewer, and often the more secret, will be the springs by which its motions are directed.”
One solution is to make the 435 representatives more responsive to the will of the people by making the will of the people visible on House bills and comparing it to House votes. That’s what the prototype at Ppoll.org is trying to do.
Peace be with you,
Pablo
The increase in representation is to be disbursed into from 4 to 12 new Regional Capitols, thus effectively splitting the country up.
Regional government will be more responsive because it will be closer to the people. Disbursal of current ‘power’ is a wise move, I think. Since the federalist system of states died with the Civil War, our Republic died too. I’m a Westerner who demands equal access to a higher government than these straight-lines-on-a-map state governments.
Out West, the 9/11 attacks were no big deal. Washington DC is a cesspit, inaccessible, full of itself, and operating with illegality from unconstitutional output from Congress.
This vision is the result of my concerns being prompted by Occupy last November, after Thanksgiving – a Humble Day of Reflecting on Rights and Wrongs.
It was seen as a way to move away from what is wrong, while retaining what Americans are familiar with, and it introduces much needed localized control through the Regional system. Washington DC will not be the Capital of a Region, Congress moves to its separate regions.
But, this is just one idea. My life is not dependent on achieving this. If others want to weigh in, fine.
However, retaining this current system is a non-starter. There’s been too much infection for too long. If people want to keep supporting it, that is their choice. But the longer people keep supplying it, and supporting it, it will keep harming us and the World.
The choice? I it made 8 years ago. Who will join? Who has joined?
Disclaimer Alert
While the Regional idea is mine, the basic idea came from thirty-thousand.org which mentioned,
“…establishing several federal cities around the country, each with their own capitol building….”
Correction Note: I made it 8 years ago.
Also Pablo,
100 years –
3 times the population –
ZERO increase in OUR presence, voice, and will
in the House is unacceptable by any standard.
This is our government, not what those in government say it is. Do you or anyone else understand this? No, I you don’t nor anyone else it seems from the utter lack of interest.
This attitude by you and others is political and civic immaturity. An unwillingness to advance yourselves is why these troubles are. Think and reason.
Again silence fills the air, nothing can live in what my fellow citizens prefer – death of self just to conform, because it is the easy way only.
My friends,
we are a dictatorship which rules over us, just like those of the 20th Century. We kill absent lawful authority, we torture absent moral substance, we bankrupt millions of people absent conscious.
This is the USA you have chosen, accept, and support. I stand against your decision.
I see vision as the product of imagination, not theory. I see vision as guided by values, not theory. Visioning can, though, be influenced by theory, by empirical research, by history, by the emotional capacity for empathy, and other things. The key to envisioning as a process is the intuitive leap, related more to the artistic world than to the scholarly world.
Where democracy enters is not at the point of creating visions. I’m a diversity-friendly guy; for it, it’s all good that some people (by personality as well as by encouragement from their class position, life experience, etc.) are good at vision while others incline toward cleaning up and others toward generating venues for sociability and others toward nurturing children and others toward doing theoretical work and others toward managing projects and others . . . . You get the idea. Democracy is emphatically not about sameness — of skills, inclinations, or anything else. Neither is equality about sameness. I am so not an athlete, and am grateful that other people are, and an egalitarian society in my mind will not make us all athletes Nor will a real democracy.
My point is simply that social movements fighting for and building a new society need many gifts, including vision, and that in the U.S. at least that vision is hard to come by.
Where democracy comes in is that movement A lifts up its vision, and movement B lifts up its vision, and movement C lifts up its vision, and the people get to choose, in terms of their values and their interests and their best guesses about how a particular vision will be implemented.
Democracy, to me, is choice-making, whether on a neighborhood level (would we rather have a new school for young children or a new resource center for greening our infrastructure?), or on a larger level of decision like state or nation. In my book Strategizing for a Living Revolution I propose a way that people could democratically make choices even on a global level.
But where the imagination is so stultified, or bought off or co-opted, that there is no vision, the people will surely perish.
George
Mr. Lakey,
Agreed. Vision is lacking. But classes do not provide vision. Artists and prophets do. Not only do they provide vision, they give sight to the blind by making injustice visible. This is precisely what Gandhi and Martin Luther King did.
Both Gandhi and King articulated this strategy during the course of their careers. “It is necessary to dramatize an issue,” King explained, “because many people are not aware of what is happening,” implying that without a picture of injustice we are blind to it.
“A reformer’s business,” Gandhi said, “is to make the impossible possible by giving an ocular demonstration.” Not only must the freedom fighter make injustice visible, she must also show how to defeat it.
Ken Butigan reinforced this point on Waging Nonviolence earlier this year by quoting art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson:
“Let’s say it’s the year 2300 and we’re looking back at the art of the 20th century. My guess is that the most influential artist of the past hundred years will not have been Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, or Pablo Picasso. That distinction will belong to Martin Luther King Jr., a visionary performance artist …”
The middle and working classes may be some of the first to see and embrace a vision of a more just society, but that vision comes from a visionary, not from a class.
Pablo del Real
http://www.aurorasvoice.org
Continue the work of Gandhi & King
Documentatii de urbanism (P.U.G., P.U.Z., P.U.D. si R.G.U.).
If the Left is the side of freedom, equality, and peace, then for the Left to go on the offensive does not mean putting energy into a restoration of the social democracy — that is defensive and conservative — but into socialist, communist, and anarchist movements, according to taste. The social democracy of the West was introduced and expanded by Capital precisely to counter such movements, not out of the goodness of ruling-class hearts, and since Bismarck has been associated with imperialism and war. We need to front the question of what society and the state (if any) are for; whether we can’t do better than piling up numbers for the rich and work, junk and pollution for everyone else, along with the occasional military disaster.