The Progressive movement stared into the abyss two weeks ago.
On November 3 the United States of America had a chance to correct its course, the first chance since things began to go out of control.
But the United States of America re-elected the Bush Administration.
In that moment, the struggle changed. You can see it all over the internet, all over the opinion media, all over the grassroots networks. If you look, if you read, if you listen you can see it happening. This is how it begins.
The election has become a symbol of what we face.
We are using the symbol to transform ourselves. The progressive movement is changing. It is realising that it must do what it hates to do: it must go to war.
A war of justice, for their culture is built on exploitation.
A war of truth, for their culture is built on deceit.
And a war of survival, for they want to wipe our culture from existence.
There is no room to negotiate – what would we negotiate away? Our belief in social justice? Our belief in the vulnerability of the environment? Our belief in human rights? We are past the point of negotiation: this is a war.
This is a culture war. We have fought these before, and we have won. We will win this time as well. Their culture must be shattered.
It will not shatter itself.
—-
Allow me to deflate my own rhetoric here. I know I’m speechifying. There’s a lot of it going around – it’s a sign of how things are changing, right now. Anyway, I’ll step down from the rhetoric.
Getting real: we’re all ordinary people with lives and commitments and responsibilities and nuanced understandings of how the world works. The question I ask in the title remains: where now? What can we do?
You tell me. Put a message in the comments, or a link to suggestions elsewhere you found useful. (Lurkers especially welcome – I know you’re out there.) This blog is one tiny bit of a very big network. But it’s part of that network. Lets see what we come up with.
15 thoughts on “[Election] Final Words – Where Now?”
Comments are closed.
By way of clarification: the enemy is not “America” or even “BushCo”.
The enemy is the culture they exemplify.
http://www.saigon.com/~anson/ebud/see-way/pain.htm
I dunno Morgue, I guess I am at heart a cynic, or even a pessimist about the state of the world. I look around me here, in India and I can’t see what good any of what you suggest would do here. Changing the culture of the west will have a limited impact on the east.
Here they take western things and Indianize them, and it happens all over the region. Actually in that sense they are doing exactly what you want done, breaking the culture of exploitation in small ways; like openly selling pirate software and hardware.
For 30 NZD I could several thousand NZ dollars worth of software here. Not that I do, because regardless of what you think of the exploitative companies it’s still theft.
But in so many other ways people are still totally exploited here. Women are still totally second class citizens, child labour abounds, millions and millions of poor people are forced into degrading jobs (until you’ve seen how sewer workers *here* have to work you haven’t seen degrading work); and little kids are sold to pimps to serve on the streets of bombay, Bangkok and Dehli.
Another way of looking at this. There is a huge left wing movement to get rid of child labour and sweat shops. But many of the people who are *against* this movement are those being *exploited*. The reality is that if the sweat shop closes there will be no work for these people. By liberating them they are thrown into even worse conditions. That doesn’t make the exploitation right, but it’s much, much more complicated than most of the rhetoric I see suggests.
I am all for fighting social injustice. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. but what I want to see is people who are willing to come to the places where people are exploited and make a difference in their lives. The poorest person in the US would be a millionairre by the standards of some I see here.
5 NZD would buy a weeks groceries for a poor local family. What do you spend it on? Having been here, as difficult as it’s been, has changed my views. In the west we have it good. So some fat cats get into parliment in the US and explot the nation and the world. Whats new? That kind of exploitation has been going on here for thousands of years, reinforced by culture and religion. Despite hundreds of years of missionary service to change the culture and allieviate some of the misery, very little has changed.
What makes you think your rhetoric will change anything.
I dunno Morgue, I guess I am at heart a cynic, or even a pessimist about the state of the world. I look around me here, in India and I can’t see what good any of what you suggest would do here. Changing the culture of the west will have a limited impact on the east.
Here they take western things and Indianize them, and it happens all over the region. Actually in that sense they are doing exactly what you want done, breaking the culture of exploitation in small ways; like openly selling pirate software and hardware.
For 30 NZD I could several thousand NZ dollars worth of software here. Not that I do, because regardless of what you think of the exploitative companies it’s still theft.
But in so many other ways people are still totally exploited here. Women are still totally second class citizens, child labour abounds, millions and millions of poor people are forced into degrading jobs (until you’ve seen how sewer workers *here* have to work you haven’t seen degrading work); and little kids are sold to pimps to serve on the streets of bombay, Bangkok and Dehli.
Another way of looking at this. There is a huge left wing movement to get rid of child labour and sweat shops. But many of the people who are *against* this movement are those being *exploited*. The reality is that if the sweat shop closes there will be no work for these people. By liberating them they are thrown into even worse conditions. That doesn’t make the exploitation right, but it’s much, much more complicated than most of the rhetoric I see suggests.
I am all for fighting social injustice. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. but what I want to see is people who are willing to come to the places where people are exploited and make a difference in their lives. The poorest person in the US would be a millionairre by the standards of some I see here.
5 NZD would buy a weeks groceries for a poor local family. What do you spend it on? Having been here, as difficult as it’s been, has changed my views. In the west we have it good. So some fat cats get into parliment in the US and explot the nation and the world. Whats new? That kind of exploitation has been going on here for thousands of years, reinforced by culture and religion. Despite hundreds of years of missionary service to change the culture and allieviate some of the misery, very little has changed.
What makes you think your rhetoric will change anything?
Bugger, I am sure you don’t need that twice. I fell afoul of the chages you made to your post rules.
Anyway, I realise that that was much more vehement than it perhaps should ahve been.
I am a little surprised at myself. I don’t take any of it back. All people who want to change the way things are should *at least* ask themselves very hard questions lke these.
One of the reasons that people in the situation Matt describes don’t want change is because they do not (or cannot) see the alternatives, or how these alternatives could work. Why would you give up what you’ve got (as little as that may seem) for somthing you do not believe can/will actually work or trust? How informed are those people? How much understanding to they have of alternatives to the current systems and structures they find themselves within?
I could say the same of republican supporters. How informed are they? Do they understand the alternatives. I may be wrong but I tend to believe that people do not always inherently know what is best for them and their community. However, people who are given full information and have a broad understanding of other systems, structures and options tend to be able to make better choices. And I believe that these better choices are the ones that would align with the values of the progressive movement.
Matt says “What makes you think your rhetoric will change anything?” I believe that culture drives behaviour, and rhetoric is one of the drivers of culture. Hard change in living conditions is one example of a more potent driver for culture change, but it is difficult to manage such effects. Even though rhetoric’s power is limited, it has immense reach and flexibility. I absolutely believe rhetoric can change culture. It has happened before – the last culture war against racism and sexism was driven by talk, by argument, by passion and logic hand in hand.
In any case, the thrust of this post is how to go beyond rhetoric – how to start building concrete actions that move towards change.
Matt, I don’t accept your assessment that “Changing the culture of the west will have a limited impact on the east.” The entire progressive movement is built on the opposite premise – that the exploitation of the third world by the first is abhorrent and only made possible by the culture perpetuated in the first world. If the culture changes, so does the expression.
[Of course there are complications. Sweat shops are a classic case of how real-world situations are complicated. The real enemy, the culture that I am attacking, is the one that frames this issue as ‘sweat shops or starvation’. There are other options that this frame excludes, for example ways and means to influence the behaviour of corporations at the trading end in the first world. These ways and means are not being deployed at present because the culture does not demand them. This culture can be changed, and has already started to.]
I also don’t accept your example of India’s centuries of exploitation as a justification for cynicism. Culture changes of the type the progressive movement seeks have occurred in the past, both distant and recent. One of the more prominent culture changes in human history happened very recently in India, where Gandhi’s movement debased the entire notion of Western colonialism.
We aren’t seeking a utopia – at least, not as an immediate goal. We are seeking to improve the real and everyday lot of people all over the world. So the young Scots soldier isn’t sent to die in a war of pointless political theatre. So the young single American mother is able to afford healthcare for herself and her children. So the young Maori woman isn’t making decisions about what to eat based on advertising instead of knowledge. So the population of Holland aren’t forced to mass-relocate as sea levels rise.
Any changes made will be small, they will be incremental, they may not become apparent over time. Some of them will be co-opted, some of them will create greater problems, some of them will fail spectacularly. But change is possible and it will only come if we fight to make it happen. As the progressive movement is so fond of saying, ‘Another World Is Possible’.
You’re living and working in India with your family, and having an experience that privileges your viewpoint on the relationship between the first world and the third. (It’s no secret that India is fast becoming a first-world nation, with a massive educated workforce and skyrocketing infrastructure, but we’ll ignore that for now.) From where you’re sitting, based on what you and Natalya see around you, what practical, achievable changes in the West would have any positive impact in the East? Can you see any, or are the connections between worlds too deeply buried for anything to be obvious?
(P.S. I’m totally coming to visit some day, by the way… we can continue this discussion over some fine whisky!)
Okay, undisciplined ramble follows. Beware.
I believe that the ideals of the progressive movement are flawed in similar ways to the ideals of the communist movement: they depend too much on the fundamental decency of human kind.
I do not believe that human kind is fundamentally decent. I believe there are decent people, and people who are shits. The shits are willing to do whatever they deem necessary to succeed, and do not care who gets hurt in the process (especially if those getting hurt are not known to them personally).
The war against racism (which is far from won, by the way) owes as much to riots as it does to rhetoric.
What we are ultimately dealing with is a never-ending struggle that will only end when the human race is utterly destroyed, either by itself (currently the likely outcome) or by external forces. Many people today – especially young people – have already lost touch with the fact that many of the things we hold dear only exist because of bitterly fought battles that took decades. There is an attitude among many people that the way things are now in the West is “the way the world works”.
But let’s put this in perspective. How long is human history to date? Next, how long has there been Western democracy? Now, how long have women been able to participate in that democracy?
The society we live in could quite reasonably be described as recent fad. If it is threatened – as it likely will be in the upcoming decades, from a number of directions – we will most likely be completely unprepared to defend it, because so much of the populace believes that it is a permanent fixture. The end of history has been once again declared, which is a very dangerous thing.
I mean, for god’s sake, there are plenty of people today who “hate unions” and would happily crush them, yet have no conception of why they only work a forty hour week.
I should have said in there somewhere:
“Have you noticed that the only member of the Bush administration who doesn’t want to eliminate human rights for homosexuals, is also the only one with a homosexual child?”
There are plenty of people who’ll only be willing to stick their neck out in any way if their own are threatened.
Every revolution will turn into a variant of the French and Russian revolutions.
Some responses and further thoughts.
Pearce wrote: “I do not believe that human kind is fundamentally decent. I believe there are decent people, and people who are shits.”
I agree entirely. In fact I would go further to say that most people (regardless of goodness and shitness) can only percieve the world from a limited view point. Me included.
And furthermore, most people, unlike the people that read and post here, probably don’t really care that they see the world from a limited viewpoint. The best analysis of the US election suggests that people voted for a candidate on one or two important issues. They didn’t even bother to find out about the whole package and how it affects others. They were voting based on their needs and desires. And why not? They don’t see any compelling reason to vote any other way. Very few people even want to look at the big picture, let alone really apprehend it (if that’s even possible).
I am not saying everyone is selfish. But Humanity tends to think in terms of “us and them”. These people are like me, and these people aren’t. We tend to care less about the people that aren’t like us. That doesn’t mean we *don’t* care about them, we just care less.
Morgue wrote:
“It’s no secret that India is fast becoming a first-world nation, with a massive educated workforce and skyrocketing infrastructure, but we’ll ignore that for now.”
Actually I won’t ignore it. Tell that to the 70% of the population that lives as subsistence farmers. To the hundreds of millions who live below the “official UN poverty line”. The only reason india is becoming a “first world”” nation is that the haves vicious exploit the have nots. If you think the gulf between rich and poor in any western society is huge, come here. It’s massive and it’s reinforced by culture and religion.
India is becoming the IT country of the world *because* it encourages western nations to exploit the cheap labour pool. I don’t know how you measure first nationness but I suspect you have been sold by the apologists and India economic zealots.
Today I met a guy who works as a lawyer for the Justice Mission. He has spent the last 5 years in Bombay fighting legal cases for children sold into prostitution by thier families.
5000 rupees (about 170 NZD) buys you a little girl from a villiage. the parents are usually ignorant, but in many cases they are complicit, because to have a little girl is more trouble than it’s worth. I look at the 7 to 14 year old girls here and my heart breaks to think there are *thousands* in bombay just like them. And they cater in a significant part to western tourists.
I son’t see how rhetoric will change this. People need to get in and get their hands dirty. They need to, like Greg, get along side the local police and track down the bastards that do this and send them to jail. They need to spend thousands setting up homes for the kids rescued from this lifestyle and teaching them new skills so that they work in a real living. Like a sweat shop.
I guess I am not saying that rhetoric is useless, but like Pearce I can’t beleive that Rhetoric alone wins wars. Martin Luther king sat down in front of sheriffs with snarling dogs and batons. It was what he did, how he stood up for what he beleived, that changed the nation (and like Pearce I don’t beleive that war is won – it’s just changed). It’s the same with Ghandi. What he did meant much more than what he said. but now they are dead we have their words left with us, and it’s those that we increasingly remember. Not what they *did*.
You want to change the world? Act. Do *something*. Find something that you can pour your energies into and *act*.
Cal Said: “One of the reasons that people in the situation Matt describes don’t want change is because they do not (or cannot) see the alternatives, or how these alternatives could work.”
I both agree and disagree. The reality here is that the options compared to the exploitative work in the sweatshops in many region are worse. Like I said earlier, until you’ve seen a guy waist deep in human excrement using his bare hands to clear a block sewer you haven’t seen degrading work, and that’s not the worst of it. A job sewing soccar balls or shoes is actually quite a good option in many parts of this country. I am not saying I agree with the exploitation, I don’t, but for many of the people the *real* alternatives are worse. When you are faced with work or starve or work for even less money you don’t have much time for fancy rhetoric about chaning society. You want to know how you will feed yourself and your family.
Morgue asked:
“From where you’re sitting, based on what you and Natalya see around you, what practical, achievable changes in the West would have any positive impact in the East? Can you see any, or are the connections between worlds too deeply buried for anything to be obvious?”
Well, first I’ll hit you in the wallet. You are rich. I don’t care how you compare with your compatriots in the west you are RICH. Filthy stinking rich. Some statistics suggest that 6% of the worlds population controls 80% of the worlds wealth, and a further 15% controls 15 of the remaining 20%. You are at least in the 15 percent if you’re not actually a 6%er.
How much of your money do you keep for yourself? Take in to account all your real expenses (food, clothing , shelter, reasonable recreation, and any other needs) and how much of the rest do you keep for yourself. 90%? 70%?
I have no clue what you earn, but for 10 pound a week you could feed and clothe a poor family here in India. For 20 pund a week you could pay for their kids to get a decent education.
Look in to it. Find a charity you think you can support (I can recommed a number fo Christian misisons working with lepers, AIDS sufferers, child prostitutes, rural farming communities etc in eduication, health, emancipation – obviously there are secular ones as well, I don’t know about them though) and support it. It costs you relatively little and it makes a massive difference to lives here.
Then encourage everyone you know to do it. And every one they know. Do just think about sponsoring a child, sponsor 5.
I never used to beleive that a dollar a day could make a difference. But I have seen that it can make a profound difference.
One pound is 80 rupees. For 80 ruppes I could by a weeks fruit and veges for a family of four and still have about half of it left over. 7 pounds a week is a fortune by the standards of Indian and Eastern poverty (it’s actually more than *I* earn at the school, and I earn quite a lot compared to the poor here).
If you can change the culture of the west to be more inclined to give just a little of their “hard earned” money (I have yet to see a kiwi work wuite as hard as the farmers scratching out an existence on dusty drought ridden farms last year) then that would have aprofound imapct on the east. People would get oppurtunities at better education, and through that better oppurtunities for careers as they grow older.
Get the rich west to start sharing it’s wealth.
Second – direct action. This has nothing to do with changing the west other than making and example of your life. Get involved in organisations that seek to support and aid the 2/3rds of the world that live for less than 2 USD a day. Come here and actually see for yourself and let it change you. Let it affect you. Get angry, get sad, get motivated.
If you come I can arrange for you to visit places that will blow you away. They’ll blow you away because you’ll see people struggling to survive, and they’ll blow you away because you’lls ee that *these* people are still people like anyone else. they laugh, they cry, they have fun, they love and live and die.
Third, find wasy to put *real* pressure on the exploiters. I am not talking about big business. Cmpanies exist to make a profit, theyw ill only be bound by external constraints.
Find ways to influence governments to influence the indian (or Thai, or Bangladeshi, or Pakistani)government. Make it real. Hit them in the pocket. Indian apolgists harp on about how India is going to become a huge force in the world economy. Well, that’s only if people will trade with them. And if people refuse to trade with them until they take real steps to stop child prostitution, to stop child labour, to stop exploitaiton of lower castes (it’s still elgal for a high caste person to rape or kill a dalit {the lowest caste} woman). Put pressure on governments to actually change laws to restrict companies. and trrade with nations that allow human rights abuses.
And four. Encourgae people from the west to come and help out. Christian organisations are still the major players in this field but they don’t have to be. Why don’t non christian ones start up to help. Change the culture of the west so that people look beyond their narrow group of friends and their family and look, and I mean *really* look at the destitution that exists here. Encourage people to come and see it for themselves. Peoplke can always rationalise what they see on TV in some way, it;s too removed. Encourage a new for of tourism. Aid tourism. Encourage people to sign up with the scores of organisations looking for volunteers to help them with projects (doctors, engineers, lawyers, administrators, just plain able bodies are needed).
Change the west from the “me first” society that it has become to one thats eeks to help others, even at personal cost.
And then you are a small way along to road to changing things here.
On a final note. I am not against rhetoric per se, and I know morgue that you are looking for more than rhetoric. It’s just that I have seen many people talk lots of talk and not many of them actually walk the walk.
How credible is someone who says you must change, you must help, you must try to make a difference when their life doesn’t show what they beleive?
Again I am not directing that at you Morgue (Though if you feel it strikes you then take it as a challenge) I am just directing it at what I have seen, and who I used to be (and still am at times).
I like a lot of what Matt said in his last couple of posts, about what we can do, and substantially agree. However: to do this involves changing the culture of the west, changing the way we overprivileged rich see the world, and understanding how we can make a difference. Rhetoric and culture building of the type Morgue was on about are a part of this.
The world can be conceived of as a system. In this case an extremely complex, fluctuating, massively unbalanced system. In any system the points at which change can be effected which will have disproportionate effects throughout the system can be identified by analysis. Removing the West’s role in overconsupmtion of utterly unnecessary products would shift the balance, for example. That is culture in the west. Changing our idea of ourselves and our perceived needs, gaining a sense of perspective compared to the rest of the world, and letting this drive our demands, instead of endless fear manipulation and creation of artificial demands, desires and needs. The enormous machinery which supplies those “needs” can be turned to other ends. If we stop buying what they sell, they must to survive.
I think you and Morgue are talking about work on different levels of the same problem. Work on different levels will have different effects within a different time frame. I have nothing but respect for those from the West who put their flesh and sweat into working directly for the third world – on this level you see results in realtime. But this is happening at the same time as a gradual cultural shift in the West, a change in consciousness we must actively embody. Every individual who makes conscious choices for a more just world, and acts on them, makes it easier for others to follow the same path.
In an information age, talk is also action. Communication and networking are modes of direct action, of reaching people, of letting them know alternatives exist. Talk can also be hot air. Some seeds fall on barren ground. Talk and the transfer of information can help prepare fertile ground. Over time, forests grow.
Instead of questioning each other’s methods, we need to ask how we can help each other. Right now, we are having a conversation from far flung places of the world. We are in different circumstances with different capacities to effect change. With information from multiple levels of the problem, what power do we gain?
Yeah – I think by the end of my last posts I had implicitly conceded the value of rhetoric with comments like “Find ways to influence governments and encourage people to come and help.”
Tp quote Jesus totally out of context “The harvest is ripe but workers are few (this quote finishes with “pray to the lord of the host to send more workers)”
I guess what I am against is people who talk and do not act. What we believe *should* inform how we act. If I beleive (to quote the rolemaster critical tables) that there is an unseen imaginary dead turtle in the room, then I, if I *really* believe this, I *will* act on it (probably by complaining about the smell.
If we claim to beleive something and that belief is not evident in our actions I would question how much we really hold that belief. Lots of people (and I am not accusing you of this morgue) and happy to sit around in cafes and at parties and go on about how the world is terible and this thing or that thing should be changed to fix things. Then they go back to thier comfortable homes and jobs, to their friends who are just like them and carry on as if they’d never said a word.
These people annoy me; at least in part because I am one of them. I see too much of myself it this.
Billy said: “In an information age, talk is also action. Communication and networking are modes of direct action, of reaching people, of letting them know alternatives exist. Talk can also be hot air. Some seeds fall on barren ground. Talk and the transfer of information can help prepare fertile ground. Over time, forests grow.”
Hmmm. Not sure that I agree. Or at least that I see it a little differently. Talk, from people like morgue is action *only* if it enables others to act. We can talk ’til we are blue in the face, but if it doesn’t change the way people act then it’s all hot air. I am not denying the value of talk. All I am saying is that at some point words must become deeds.
Like I said, Martin Luther King Jr got people to act because of what he *did* as well as what he said. If I preach a sermon on forgving others and then the people I preach too seeing me not forgiving others what possible reason would they have for accepting my words.
Now I know no one is perfect. But, by the general trend of our lives people should see that we will take a stand for what we believe in. The people who changed the world took such stands at great personal cost (often maytrdom).
So I am all for talk but I would ask the hard questions.
Do you live what you preach? Do you act according to your stated beliefs?
As for forest growing over time I would argue that the words might be the seeds. but the lives of people who hold the same beleives, no katter how flawed, are the sun and water that cause the trees to grow.
Talk without action is just that; talk. What good is it to exchange information if the people you exchange it with do nothing with it?
I also agree Billy that Morgue and I are coming at things from different angles and that they are not mutually contradictory. Morgue did ask in his initial post, what can we do about it? So I am putting in my two cents worth.
*Live it*. If you want to change the world, talk the talk *and* walk the walk. Then people will listen and act with you.
Sorry for any potential repetition:-).
Crikey, there are some great and insightful comments up there. I am not sure I can follow those up adequately. Just to return to what you said Morgue, “The question I ask in the title remains: where now? What can we do? You tell me. Put a message in the comments, or a link to suggestions elsewhere you found useful. (Lurkers especially welcome – I know you’re out there.)”
Well, here in the West, it starts with living an honest life, sorry if that sounds little earnest. It means doing your best to take only what you need. You need to ask ‘do I really need that new pair of shoes?’ It’s possible to live without that car as well eh? Your feet and public transport can carry you places, not to mention keep you fit, and even cause you to interact with the world around you. It wouldn’t hurt either if I took that plastic stuff home that I bought in town and recycled it?
Once you’ve started making those decisions about your own life you can look out at your community. There are umpteen volunteer community groups that need help. Here in the public service we need some help filling the gaps. These groups work in all sectors, environment, peace, social work, human rights and so on. The Wellington City Council Website has listings. You don’t need, at least to being with ;-), to do everything. Do a couple of things very well. If you have got some real guts you will take the fight right to the doorstep of the people causing the problems.
The following is not to point fingers, because it equally applies to me, I want to say it.
Talk is important, but it’s only *part*, maybe a small part, of the story. I keep thinking of the acronym NATO, “No Action Talk Only”. More doing less yakking, myself included.
🙂
Andrew