[Election] That Progressive Movement

The global progressive movement is not the US Democratic Party.
The US Democratic Party is not the global progressive movement.
The extent to which these two are getting mixed up in discourse concerns me.
An interest in the Dems is important for those on the left. We want them to be strong, and smart. We want them to field electable candidates. Faced with a choice between them and the Republicans, we want the Dems to win in any contest you’d care to name.
But the Dems are not the progressive movement.
We should care about the Dems, try and make them strong, because at this point in time they are the best hope the world has for redirecting the US. But first we need to look to ourselves.
We need to expand the progressive movement. We need to make it larger, more robust, more certain. We need more people aware and involved. We need to find the common ground that its many elements share and articulate clearly what we want.
We need the movement to become an undeniable and major political constituency.
The Democratic party will not become a party of the left again with political reality as it is now. Every political indicator says that all it can do is keep colonizing further rightward. To call for them to move left is to ask them to reduce their share of voter support – a futile call. In a game like this one, with players like these, principles are negotiable.
We cannot shift the Dems to the left from within. We need to expand the progressive movement in the real world. We need to bring more people around to our understanding and our values.
We need to grow into a constituency that will swing elections.
We aren’t there yet, but we’re growing. Look back just a few short years to Seattle and the WTO protests. Since that time we have grown beyond any expectation. Our literature, our arguments, our information, are spreading everywhere. In parts of Europe we are mighty. It will be the same everywhere, in time. Even in the US. The US will not be easy to crack – it is in fact our greatest challenge because of its singular command over the heavily-mediated reality of its citizens and its skill in exercising this command – but it too will fall. In time.
It is inescapable. We in the progressive movement understand the true, long-range cost of our current global system. We have exposed the exploitation and unsustainability on which this system stands. The lies of our opponents will not survive against our truth. The cog-blindness of those who do not understand us will not survive against our truth.
This isn’t a political struggle of two equivalent poles offering different models for political decision-making and resource-distribution. This is the survival struggle of a system that is breaking the world and its peoples. The system will change, perhaps piece by hard-won piece, perhaps in massive revolution, but it will change, because as it is it cannot last.
The only question is how long it will take for us to win, and whether it will then be too late to repair the damage already done.
We are right. And that is our strength. That is what will help us grow. As we grow, our political strength increases. As our political strength increases, the political landscape will begin to change. Our task isn’t to make the Bush-supporter down the street love the Dems – it is to make her see the truth about international exploitation, environmental degradation, the deceiving myths of the system’s controllers.
The failure of the Democratic party in the US is not the failure of the global progressive movement. It is a sign that there is more work for us to do.
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In the last entry, Matt interrogates the use of the term ‘Progressive’.
“Progressive is a fairly bad word, in my opinion, to call anything because Progression is defined in terms of the goal. I could be a totally and extremely right wing and call myself progressive because I am moving towards a political goal.”
The word ‘progressive’ is an umbrella term. I’m not sure of its provenance but it’s a recent coinage. It is used for the wide range of groups and ideologies that support the notion that ‘another world is possible’. It is a positive phrasing – one of the noxious memes of the current global system is equating itself with progress, and progress with the greater good. Movements that oppose unfettered globalised capitalism are thus de facto tarred as luddite, backward and working against the greater good out of fear or intellectual failure.
The ‘progressive’ label stakes different ground, challenging the notion that corporate primacy is the end of history. It is a positive framing, rife with meaning, and a significant and useful term that cannot be as easily undermined as, say, the word ‘liberal’ has been.
It isn’t a satisfactory term. All the concerns Matt has are legitimate ones. At some point in the future, what is now known as the progressive movement will have to divorce itself from that term, and that divorce may well be difficult and even costly. Nonetheless, at this stage in the political struggle, it is the best name we have.
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There will be some non-election stuff soon, I promise. I’m not even thinking about the election 24/7 any more, and that’s got to count for something, right?

10 thoughts on “[Election] That Progressive Movement”

  1. Hey Morgue, if we could build that kind of progressive political movement, the last thing we should be doing is telling them to vote for the Dems… wouldn’t that be kind of like a huge sell-out?… shouldn’t such a movement (at the very least) be fielding their own candidates and emphasisng that Dems and republicans are sides of the same coin??? Do you really think the Dems will ever jeopardise their own capitalist interests with realistic social change??

  2. Karen: the only answer is, one step at a time. We need to be strategic, tactical and pragmatic as well as idealistic. The movement in 2000 could and should have thrown its weight behind Nader (and, in large part, did) precisely to start building a viable alternative to the Dems and Repubs. In 2004 – and, in all likelihood, in 2008 – the priority was and will be to prevent a continuation of the Bush administration. That trumps everything else.
    I have no faith in the Dems, long-term. I want Bush gone so we can get back to the business-as-usual of debased corporate-controlled US politics. Then we can set about developing third options. But as long as Bush and co are in power, I don’t think we have that luxury.

  3. I guess one of my concern is that people could make a huge effort to get rid of a right wing administration (eg Bush, Tories, Nats), vote in the supposed left wing alternative (Kerry, Blair, Clarke) and find that their lives aren’t appreciably different or better (okay, so actually, Labour in NZ have done some useful stuff recently… I for one am grateful for paid parental leave). So people have mobilised… they’ve made the effort… then what. I think there needs to be a better alternative than the Dems… and that if you don’t want people to become rapidly demoralised/disenfranchised again, they need to be able to SEE that there is a viable alternative… I’m just remembering all the effort that went into getting rid of the Lange/Douglas etc “Labour” government, only to replace it with the Bolger/Richardson/Shipley National government… okay, so from a leftist point of view, there’s a clear flaw there… and the Democrats are at least superficially better than the Republicans, but…

  4. You think America will suspend it’s constitution to give Bush a third term?
    I doubt it, I don’t think they’ll get away with that.
    But then again it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.

  5. I am still not particularly clear on what this “progressive movement” stands *for* Morgue. You have well characterised what it stands against, but there are a plethora for left wing views, some of them mutually contradictory.
    It seems to me that the way you use the term it encompasses all left wing movements.
    If that’s the case then there is a very difficult future to be had. Assuming you are right, which is debateable (okay you’re right about the evils of capitalism, but are you right about what should replace it – that is mich more debatable), what happens when you “win”?
    How do you marry the ideology of the socialists and the political anarchists? Now you have a common cause, a revolution as it were, but what happens when you finally take power? Which cause is given preeminence? Which ideology will be imposed upon the world?
    Of course if you eman, by “Global Progressive Movement” something else, some particular movement5 tied to a particualr ideology, then all of the above doesn’t stand. But I don’t think you mean this from what you say.
    History shows us that coalitions such as the one I suspect you’re talking about face almost insurmountable problems and internecine fighting one they actually take power.
    Forgive me for playing Devils Advocate here, but I am trying to understand.

  6. Agree with Matt… one thing I learnt from my Bolshevik Club days, is the need for a common programme… ie a set of concrete goals you are fighting for, rather than just a vague sense of leftist anti-capitalism. In my experience it’s possible to get people to unite around one or 2 issues, but overall, lefties have very different ideas about where they are headed. I think you need at least to have some clear specific interim goals rather than all being anti-capitalism but meaning different things… that’s where the splits start… (“oh him, he’s the People’s Front of Judea” or words to that effect)

  7. Matt: “You think America will suspend it’s constitution to give Bush a third term?”
    Nope. But the same dirty crew will have a followup sock puppet primed and ready for the next election.

  8. Regarding the issue of the ‘progressive movement’ and its fate in the end – well, this is a huge question, one that the left has struggled with a lot lately. Books have been written about it (best known is “One No, Many Yeses”) and endless argument, debate, thought and worry.
    But at this point I don’t think it’s worth thinking about.
    Fact on the ground: there is a progressive movement, singular, made up of many many left-wing movements. It exists. While it is useful to know what lies ahead, the most important thing is to support it now.
    Will this movement splinter in the future, should it start to succeed? History says that’s likely. Will this splintering be disastrous? I doubt it.
    The truth is that the progressive movement’s many voices are almost entirely united under one clear and common purpose: to get democracy working as it should. Even the Marxists and the Anarchists, I believe, are supporting this purpose. And it is this purpose that is giving the movement its popular appeal.
    That is all the common purpose we need. We can, and should, think carefully about tomorrow, but we must never let it get in the way of what we can achieve today.

  9. I agree that: “We can, and should, think carefully about tomorrow, but we must never let it get in the way of what we can achieve today.”
    I was, am, just throwing out all sorts of questions in an effort to really understand.
    So now another one (probably several).
    ABout you Mr Morgue; where do you stand? Are you simply a “progressive” or do you give alliegience to one of the many left wing movements who makle up the progressive movement?
    Also, what do you mean by getting democracy working right? There are many ideas about how democracy could and should work? Are there any specifics?
    I do find it hard to beleive that really serious Marxists and Anarchists are actually working to get dmeocracy working right. At the mooment you have a common goal of undermining the *current* corrupt form of democracy, if that ever happens (I hope it does) than I suspect that they’ll be less interested in democracy working right and more interested in their own ideas of a good political system.
    In fact it actually serves them to have democracy going patently wrong and to have lots of people jumping up and down about it. That way they can point ot the failings in the system and say “our way is better.”
    And one last question. Why democracy? What’s so great about it? There are other forms of government (political anarchy for example) that have many attractions. We seem to have this idea that democracy is the only way to represent the will of the people, I’m not sure that is true. Why fight for democracy when it so patently doesn’t work as it should? Why not struggle for a different form of government altogeather?
    Matt
    PS, you should ask Mike Sands about politcal Anarchy, he has been very convincing on the subject in the past, I dunno if he still hold to it, but he certianly knows a lot about it.

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