A protest against urban renewal called by JOIN. (Photo: Nancy Hollander)

The authors intentionally challenge published history that emphasizes working-class white opposition to civil rights and radical politics and attributes most white radicalism to students.

By Maya Pisel

“Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times” presents the histories of five organizations that fought racism in the 1960s and ’70s by organizing communities of poor whites. Grounded in struggles for health, welfare, housing, jobs, recovery from addiction and safety against the police, these organizations asserted poor and working-class white people as actors, not just allies, against racist imperialism.

The authors are veteran activists. Amy Sonnie co-founded the national Center for Media Justice and compiled an anthology by queer and transgender youth, “Revolutionary Voices.” James Tracy founded the San Francisco Community Land Trust and edited two activist resources: “The Civil Disobedience Handbook” and “The Military Draft Handbook.” A forward by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes the history of America’s frontier poor, where empire is a way of life. The author of three historical memoirs of white poverty and resistance, as well as academic work in ethnic studies, Dunbar-Ortiz’s support gives weight to this book. She frames a social context in which the white poor become trash from white supremacy’s dirty work. Perpetrating genocide, policing ghettos, serving in wars for empire — we are the mechanics and mercenaries of white supremacy, and how are we paid?

The authors describe how, in the mid-20th-century, millions of southern-born whites migrated from home. So many of them arrived in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood that rich whites bemoaned a “hillbilly invasion.” At the same time, many radicals confused class privilege with progressive potential and blamed poor-white Southerners for racism. In this context, picture a black man in 1969 wearing a leather jacket and a beret. He stands next to a white man in a denim vest, a confederate flag patched in the center. Both men cross their hands behind their backs and look ahead. They are allies and peers in the struggle against racism and imperialism: a Black Panther and a Young Patriot.

The Young Patriots came together as an organization by, for and of poor whites. They saw the Black Panthers as brothers and joined with the Puerto Rican Young Lords in the Panthers’ “Rainbow Coalition.” Modeling their own 10-point plan after the Panthers’, they ran a health center, free breakfast program and collective action against police brutality.

Around the same time, Jobs or Income Now (JOIN) united under the leadership of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to run grassroots programs in Uptown like a community school and community theater. The authors highlight that JOIN organized around welfare rights and formed tenant unions to collectively withheld rent until landlords improved unsafe conditions. Young men took to street corners and bars to organize against police brutality.

In 1969, some former members of JOIN launched Rising Up Angry. Rising Up Angry waged what they called anti-imperialist neighborhood organizing among poor and working-class whites throughout Chicago. Culture was their weapon of resistance. Alongside legal education and tenant organizing, whole families came into the fold for dances, parties, music and education. The “Rising Up Angry” newspaper celebrated white working-class culture and greasers alongside radical politics. They resisted the war but supported enlistees, so much so that Vietnam Veterans Against the War distributed “Rising Up Angry” as their own paper.

The authors also venture outside of Chicago. In Philadelphia, October 4th Organization (O4O) blended labor activism and community organizing in the Kensington neighborhood. Under the reign of fear-mongering Mayor Frank Rizzo, O4O said  that racism wasn’t the answer for poor whites like themselves. They even took a tour of the suburbs and visited the homes of 19 especially exploitative rich people.

In the Bronx, White Lightning waged a different kind of war on drugs. At the time, heroin ravaged poor communities and Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s drug laws established long mandatory minimum prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders. The drug trade and recovery programs were already interracial, so White Lightning seized the opportunity for anti-racist solidarity among poor white, black and Puerto Rican addicts. They saw political consciousness as essential to recovery and sobriety as a project of resistance. Their perspective on “chemical fascism” contradicted student radicals who used drugs for personal liberation but put them in line with the Black Panthers.

Then as now, poor whites and people of color shared different experiences but common preoccupation with drugs, violence and policing. The authors emphasize that activists used these realities to interrupt racism. Rising Up Angry used the metaphor of a “trick bag” to describe white supremacy; like bad drugs, racial superiority was a sad and dangerous deal. When Young Patriot Chuck Armstrong served prison time, he organized inmates and co-authored a lawsuit alleging racism in prisons. In today’s context of mass incarceration, radicals can learn from these histories to engage the white poor in critical resistance.

In their heyday, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program [COINTELPRO] targeted and infiltrated each organization. City government and police harassed, raided and even terminated their community programs. At one point the entire central committee of New York Patriots was arrested at once, only to have all charges dropped.

But the struggle to voice a radical agenda of the white poor did not live and die with COINTELPRO. The authors intentionally challenge published history that emphasizes working-class white opposition to civil rights and radical politics and attributes most white radicalism to students. Did you know that in 1968 Peggy Terry, a white woman who left school after fifth grade, ran as vice-president to Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket?

With the stories of these five organizations, the authors suggest that poor whites do not support racism more than rich whites. Rather, poor whites play different roles and reap different benefits from institutional racism. Because anti-racist organizing today rarely emerges from white experiences of dispossession, “Hillbilly Nationalists” is a radical contribution to the Left.

Most of the book is compiled from interviews and personal archives. The authors also provide a superb set of endnotes that fill in background information and offer direction for further reading. Written as a narrative history, the book uses accessible language and comfortable structure. It is open to students of many ages and academic experiences. And there are pictures!

What is the legacy of the hillbilly nationalists and addict radicals? The authors suggest these organizations’ genuine home in working-class culture engaged families and communities first, regardless of global revolution. Yet the authors never address why some activists stayed in the movement and others retreated, or what happened to radical white poor communities after organizing. Perhaps we can disentangle some of the answer through a question the authors frame but never ask: Who are our people, us white poor revolutionaries — not today or tomorrow, but in the family tree of American culture and radicalism? Do the white poor represent a diaspora or a circumstance? And if radical poor whites are rarely heard in the struggle against racism and imperialism, who gains by silencing their voices?

These questions bring the book home to today, when Americans struggle to define class in a context of “the 99%” that emphasizes a new sense of precarity among much of the middle class, while some white people who never ascended to the middle class continue to sleep in prison cells, alley doorways and double-wide trailers. The concept of the 99% envelops the white poor along with their middle-class and affluent neighbors, and as a result hides the poor’s presence and their stories. The 99% critiques injustice from the middle out, feeling entitled and wanting to regain what was lost. But from the bottom, the white poor see that everything that seems permanent, seems necessary, was built by people who lived without it — including whiteness. From the bottom, the white poor see that police, drugs, housing, welfare, industry and, most importantly, race pull communities apart into injustice. Long the hired help of empire, the experiences of the white poor can remind us how and why America has been occupied for a long time.

Peggy Terry said on Solidarity Day, June 19, 1968, “We the poor whites of the United States, today demand an end to racism, for our own self-interest and well being, as well as for the well being of black, brown and red Americans who, I repeat, are our natural allies in the struggle for real freedom and real democracy in these, OUR, United States of America.”

The dispossessed search for a community — should it be a white one? For the white poor, sharecroppers of imperial conquest, “Hillbilly Nationalists” offers us a political and cultural “home” in anti-racist radicalism.

Maya Pisel is a third-year American Studies major at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and a Bonner Community Scholar at Amicus.

Before the year was over, Occupy books were already being published.

Lists of the best books of the year are an exercise in hubris. Even if I was to narrow things down to the relevant books for this site — most of the works published by independent left publishing houses like South End Press and AK, a sizable number of titles from academic publishers like Temple and University of California, as well as the occasional book from a major publishing house or an independent not associated with the left — the amount of printed matter far exceeds what one person, or even a small committee, could reasonably absorb in a year. So the following is instead a few notes on trends, highlights and directions that became visible during 2011. I welcome your additions in the comments.

I’ve already described elsewhere one of the most important trends — books illuminating the history of the U.S. in the ’70s, which culminated in a decisive defeat for labor and a turn towards finance that has set the stage for our current predicament. Relevant titles included Judith Stein’s “Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies,” Jefferson Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class,” Aaron Brenner and Cal Winslow’s “Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s” and Joseph A. McCartin’s “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America.”

A second striking trend was the almost simultaneous publication of three works, “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” by Corey Robin, “The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant 1789-1914” by Immanuel Wallerstein and “Liberalism: A Counter-History” by Domenico Losurdo, that took long views of the political ideologies that have dominated the modern world. Of the three, Corey Robin’s received the most attention. He argued that rather than standing for tradition, or some policy goal (“small government,” “the free market,”) or a philosophical attitude (“the importance of society over the individual,” or perhaps the opposite), what unifies reactionary thought is the attempt to maintain or reconstitute hierarchy in the face of challenges from below. Reactionary thought re-emerges as more vital, dynamic, modern and, it should be said, sinister than it is usually imagined to be. Immanuel Wallerstein, on the other hand, focuses on the rise of centrist liberalism, a concept he has been working with for years, but here is finally fleshed out in historical detail. As a result of the French Revolution, the concepts of progress and the sovereignty of the people were well entrenched. Centrist liberalism responded to these concepts with limited reforms, even while reaffirming the supremacy of the capitalist economy.  Hopefully this book will strike a death blow to the hoary notion of “classical liberalism” in the 19th century, in which, supposedly, the individual, the free market and the limited state were valorized. What emerges in Wallerstein’s detailed historical study is a very different liberalism of the 19th century, one nearly as committed to limited reforms as that of the 20th. Like Wallerstein, Losurdo focuses on liberalism to call attention to the conservative features of this ideology. I have not had a chance to read this work, but Paul Heideman summarizes its main argument: “Losurdo shows that liberalism historically has functioned by establishing a ‘community of the free,’ to whom the vaunted promises of rights and privileges correspond, while those outside that restricted community were entitled to no such enjoyments.” Reforms mostly appear when the efforts to suppress popular aspirations start to impinge on the freedom of the “community of the free.” Between Robin, Wallerstein and Losurdo, there is a great deal to think about with regards to liberalism and conservatism. What is now manifestly needed is a fresh examination of the demand for liberation, not reforms, i.e. the left. For starters, a new perspective would decenter  the trajectory of various socialist internationals.

A third trend involves books which examine recent art history by considering artists as social groups rather than as individual geniuses, or even members of stylistic schools. These books turn away from the fetishized, overvalued items at the center of the contemporary art world in favor of the flow of ideas and practices among the ever growing numbers of artists. According to the publisher’s description of “Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era” by Julia Bryson Wilson, “In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period — American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard — Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that ‘art works.’ She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the ‘art worker’ identity, including participating in the Art Workers’ Coalition — a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists’ rights — and the New York Art Strike.”  “Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City” by Alan W. Moore looks at the different collectives, such as Art & Language and Group Material that shaped the art world during the seventies and early ’80s, a politically vital and experimental time. Although this milieu withered with the onset of the hypercommercial atmosphere of the ’80s, political art remained an important counter-practice to dominant art world trends, paralleling the non-disappearance of ’60s social movements. This brings us to the last book I am noting here, Gregory Sholette’s “Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture.” Sholette begins in the early ’80s, discussing an effort he was involved in to create an archive of political art. Both a history and a theoretically ambitious work, Sholette develops a theory of the mass of artists, mostly not legitimated by the commercial world, as the “dark matter” of culture. Although not honored, their work is necessary for the production of the art that is monetarily valued. Now, in part because of the new technologies, it is becoming more difficult to keep the “dark matter” hidden. He also considers the way practices of political art have changed as the traditional, bureaucratic, coherent project of the old left has given way to the new politics of the multitude. It’s impossible to do justice to the work in this space, but suffice it to say that this was perhaps my favorite book of the year.

Occupy Wall Street has focused the attention of the left public since its initiation in September, and already there are a number of books illuminating the movement, most notably “Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America” edited by Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Marc Grief and Sarah Leonard and “Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America” by writers for the 99 percent. But here I want to call attention to a number of books that were completed before the movement began but may help to grasp the context for the movement. First and foremost is “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” by David Graeber.  Graeber highlights the use of debt to create fundamentally unfree ties of dependency. The author himself played a significant role in Occupy Wall Street, although the claim that he introduced anarchism to the United States is exaggerated. For example, Barbara Epstein’s “Political Protest and Cultural Revolution,” published in 1991, described similar movements in the ’80s. The movements Epstein documented  inspired many of the participants in the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests that  helped shape Occupy Wall Street. “Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink” by Louis Hyman examines a much shorter period than Graeber’s opus, roughly the last 80 years. Hyman tracks the history of consumer debt, from a practice that enabled consumers to afford industrial goods to a highly profitable end in itself, as it has mutated in the last 50 years. Meanwhile, a revised and expanded edition of “Debunking Economics” by Steve Keen should provide ammunition for what has emerged as the key intellectual project of Occupy Wall Street, a frontal assault on neoclassical economics. Not yet drawing the mainstream attention that Graeber has attracted, but widely read among anarchists involved in the Occupy movement, is a volume from Minor Compositions, edited by Benjamin Noys, called “Communization and Its Discontents,” which attempts to take stock of the theoretical innovations by Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee and others to theorize new practices of “‘human strike’, autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection.” Finally, it should be noted that novelist Gary Shteyngart proved far more prophetic than many social scientists: his slightly futuristic novel “Super Sad True Love Story,” published in 2010, envisioned two protest encampments in New York City. After the encampments are destroyed through repression, the protesters are never heard from again. In this respect, I think his vision of the future will prove to be inaccurate.

Not quite a trend, but surely the strangest coincidence of the year was the publication of two books with the title “The Beach Beneath the Street.”  MacKenzie Wark subtitled his “The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International.” As implied, it is a history of the group of artists and intellectuals, the Situationists, who were a key inspiration of protests in the ’60s. Some would say their influence is visible in Occupy Wall Street. Wark’s book has been widely acclaimed. Benjamin Shepard and Gregory Smithsimon’s book, subtitled “Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces” has gotten much less attention. But its analysis of the creation of largely privatized “public” spaces, like Zucotti Park, the home of Occupy Wall Street, and their contestation by social movements, might also be of interest to occupiers.

Yusef Bunchy Shakur (photo Karen Gagne)

By Karen M. Gagne

I am here with Yusef Bunchy Shakur, author of “Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation from a Zone 8 Thug to a Father and Freedom Fighter”, to talk about  the book “Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther,” by Marshall “Eddie” Conway, former minister of defense of the Black Panther Party, who remains a political prisoner after 41 years, and Dominique Stevenson, director of the Maryland Peace With Justice Program of the Middle Atlantic Region of the American Friends Service Committee. We both read the book this summer and I knew he would have a lot to say about it.

KMG: Yusef, thank you for agreeing to talk to me about Marshall Conway’s book. I was excited that you were reading it at the same time that Left Eye on Books asked if I would review it. I had only recently read your own book “Window 2 My Soul.”   I thought it only proper to ask you to comment on what you thought of the book. As a book seller, collector and voracious reader, what caught your eye first about “Marshall Law”?

YBS: What caught my attention on reading “Marshall Law“ was the opportunity to read the accounts of a political prisoner and I had strong interest in hearing how he was able to maintain his political activism within the belly of the beast. I know the story of guys becoming political that entered as criminals, but never read from the perspective of one entering prison and remaining political while dealing with the prison politics of the guards and prisoners who are not politically consciousness.

KMG: How representative would you say are Conway’s descriptions of the framing of political activists from the Black Panther Party (BPP) by the FBI’s COINTELPRO?

YBS: His description is the most accurate I have read, directly from a political prisoner telling his/her own story and also in describing the motives of why he was target for not only his political consciousness but for exposing a police agent who became a high ranking member of the BPP.

KMG: I was struck by the chapter titles. Particularly telling are “Door of No Return” and “Slave Ship” to “The Bowels of Hell.” Others, such as Elaine Brown,  have made this link from the ships to the modern prison, including you in your book, “Window 2 My Soul.” In the prologue of Conway’s book, he makes that link explicit, “Imprisonment is slavery and the enslavers have long been opting to pack the ships as tightly as possible. Block after block of this nation’s prisons are flowing with black and brown bodies. And after thirty years of capturing the strongest of the stock, the system now satisfies itself with our children.” Not only are the stories very similar in the process of enslavement, but they are also similar in the path to freedom once “in the belly of the ship.” On the next page he reminds us of the Underground Railroad and that prisons have required the building of a similar system “comprised of relationships and routes that help the prisoner escape the inhumanity of incarceration.” How do you understand this journey?

YBS: I think it was important to make those connections with the titles to able to penetrate the minds of the readers—to able to absorb his message of educating people to the daunting truth that slavery still exists, but educating people in a real way to overstand how it is true and the titles spoke to that.

KMG: I especially love the title “After George” in the middle of his story. How important was George Jackson, as well as his death on August 21, 1971, on Conway himself and his comrades?

YBS: George Jackson is phenomenal and set the bar of what it meant to be a revolutionary in every sense of the word. I can only imagine what the impact his death had on Eddie and other people of the era because George was huge in a very human way. He challenged you to be a better revolutionary and a more committed revolutionary.

KMG: It is in this same chapter we begin to get a real look at the inside of the prison, after his death, it “signaled the beginning of the end for the movement.” He noted that drugs would soon “sate the appetite of the rebellious prisoner” helping them to escape the reality of extremely hard times. Still, he adds that for a few extra coins they “like modern day Judases” were helping the government in its genocidal plan. This was of course, parallel to what was happening in the communities. How was the introduction of heroin in Baltimore (like that of cocaine and crack in Detroit and other cities) testament to that continued bondage? Conway suggests that Baltimore in 2011 is “more south” than Mississippi in 1962 and that the connection between drugs and the violence between blacks and whites are not a coincidence. How would you respond?

YBS: Heroin impacted Detroit in the 60s and 70s like every other major urban city crippling it to its knees, and opened the doors of crack cocaine to come in and rip the heart of Detroit and put her on her death bed, which we are still attempting to recover here in 2011. The majority of urban cities are a reflection of what the south was and still is: segregated cities bathing in self-hatred that is perpetuating the violence that we are witnessing across the nation while these cities are being manipulated and control by white people with the end goal being genocide of Black people.

KMG: I heard that in fact heroin, too, seems to be making a “comeback” (if it ever left). This has been in recent news regarding Madison, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois, for example.

YBS: The drug trade has become a part of the urban fabric in amerikkka. It is business in the Black ghettos of amerikkka that offers jobs for people who don’t need to know skills besides selling. As long as the imagination of people in this country is as a slave to the materialistic culture in this society you will have people who will explore drugs as a means to make fast money. The reality is the drug culture is a bastard version of capitalism in its rawest form.

KMG: Very well put! Thank you. I wanted to touch on a topic I thought Conway wrote eloquently about, which is family life and what he is able to see in retrospect about his relationship to his family as he entered the political movement and then again after he is incarcerated. He talks about his new role in the political movement, which he always saw as working toward making life better for him and his family simultaneously resulted in their separation and a distance between them. This happens when Conway first leaves for Europe. He notes that he “lacked the necessary balance to create a strong family unit” and that he lacked understanding of what it meant to be a father and husband. Later in the book, he notes a similar distance as a result of the pain of his family having to see him through glass and concrete. Do you think that Conway’s ability to reflect on the importance of balancing one’s involvement in the movement with family life comes from simply “growing up” or are there things that happen while serving a long prison sentence that make one have to see things in a new way? I also wonder what wisdom he wants to share with the new generation of Black Panthers, to suggest that this balance is necessary for long term struggle. How do you see this in your own experience not only in surviving a lengthy prison sentence but also in becoming more and more active in the movement?

YBS: The social break down of Black families has played a crucial role in the destruction of Black neighborhoods, and the fabric breakdown of Black neighborhoods has contributed to the destruction of Black families. We have to find the balance as activists to not only fight for a better world but fight for better families through productive fathers and mothers as well as being on the frontlines of the struggle. Finding that balance is essential for leading us to victory and for maintaining a strong morale.

KMG: There is a passage in the chapter entitled “Home is Where the Hatred Is” when Conway talks about coming home from the Army and trying to find a job. He went to the employment office and was immediately sent over to the pipefitters and general labor area. He challenged them and said that he wanted a firefighter position. The scene is straight out of the pages of the novel “The Spook Who Sat By The Door” by Sam Greenlee. Despite attempts to integrate the fire and police departments, he was given the run around and told that he needed to be “qualified.” Even after he passed all the tests they still resisted him at every step. When he finally was let in, he was among six African Americans out of 101 firefighters and would get “most of the isolated duty at the outpost or fire patrols of the shipyard.” This is when he becomes angry and politicized–he was working here when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

YBS: Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s required a young teens to be politicized even when they didn’t think so. The movement and struggle were completely part of everything happening, and this challenged you as a human being either to get involved or sit on the sideline. With history being his guide, this led him into the movement. We have to recreate and redevelop a culture of revolutionary struggle today that will help shape the next generation of activists to lead the revolution.

KMG: Even though there are a couple of decades difference between you and Conway, how do you connect with his experience—both before you entered the prison system and during your incarceration…And now that you have been back in the community for eleven years?

YBS: I connect with bro Conway on many different levels. Historical, personal and political. History-wise he and other political prisoners/prisoners of war (PP/POW) are living testimony of the struggle of justice, equality and freedom in this country. Reading his story for me was like reading my father’s story. My father, Ahjamu Baruti, is a political prisoner here in the State of Michigan. He taught me about what endurance it takes to be a PP/POW under constant repression everyday while being surround by ignorance. Also, reading Conway’s book added fuel to my fire to continue to fight the here in the 21st century and reinforced that I made the right decision by joining the fight even though we are in a low tide. But Conway’s story inspired me that we have to continue to fight no matter what. That is our obligation to humanity.

KMG: I thought about your father when I was reading the book, and how he also is one the elders and “griots” now on the inside. Can you talk more about this connection you see between Conway and your father? How do you see them in this light? How are they influencing the youth, both inside and outside?

YBS: It is because of men like Eddie Conway and Ahjamu Baruti in prison that a Yusef Bunchy Shakur could exist [see Baruti’s book “Scribes of Redemption: Letters from and Incarcerated Father to His Incarcerated Son”]—because without them I still would be an undeveloped human being labeled a criminal. These kinds of men provided me with the models, and the care and love to rehabilitate, redeem and transform myself in prison. These type of men are holding down the mandate of reeducating and rebuilding as many of the broken and lost young men entering prison as they can.

KMG: You recently attended the 45th anniversary of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. What did the contemporaries of Conway—the original members who are still alive—share with you about their activity in the movement and about what wisdom they’ve gained now 45 years later? How are they still connected to those like Conway, who remain incarcerated?

YBS: For me it was more about what I saw as well as what was conveyed to me. To see the comradeship amongst them that was built out of blood and strength is something to respect and admire. Many of them know the struggle continues and that the job is not finished with so many of their comrades trapped behind the enemy’s line and communities across this country still oppressed. They all were still committed, dedicated and educating.

KMG: Conway writes much about the issue of FBI informants within Panther meetings and activities. They would also be sent inside the prison, and even to bunk with him in his same cell. This part of the “Door of No Return” chapter is very interesting. Further, we know that the trials were rigged when it came time for the members to go to court. Can you talk about this history in the context of the 1970s, but also as it continues through the decades? How does this work once someone is already convicted to ensure his long stay behind bars?

YBS: The oppressive climate in which he was tried and convicted is the same in all the cases of PP/POW here in amerikkka, and prisons are nothing but an extension of that oppression. The terrain may change but the oppressive system remains the same and prison offers an opportunity to bury revolutionaries alive by cutting them off from the people.

KMG: But, this is where the paradox is in the system. In its attempt to bury revolutionaries they also cultivate the environment for them to collect their thoughts, build coalitions within and between POWs inside and out, as wells as individuals who would normally never associate with each other on the inside. Maybe this is what is making for a new day?

YBS: Those of us who are politically aware overstand rather that we are in prison on the streets—the oppression continues by our oppressors, so the struggle to continue to fight lives within every revolutionary. They can never be buried under those circumstances. The spirit of the people is too strong. The ideas they are committed are too strong. You can kill a man but you can’t kill the ideas that created him. That is what is fueling a new day—a day that is connected to the past.

KMG: Speaking of a new day, Yusef—I know that you have been working hard on a new book as well. Was reading “Marshal Law” in any way inspirational or motivating in moving on that? Can you say a little about it? Will Left Eye on Books be looking forward to reviewing this book as well?

YBS: Yes reading “Marshal Law” was a huge inspiration because I was anxious to read his story and see how he maintained his political activity while in prison. I wanted to convey the challenge of becoming political aware in prison and making the transition to the outside–of how I was able to emerge despite the many social challenges I faced coming home and engaging in revolutionary activity. There have been thousands of men who have come home from prison prior to me with the same mission and 95% of them have failed for whatever reason. My new book “My Soul Looks Back: Life After Incarceration” (forthcoming in February 2012) is a compelling journey of my 11 years of facing social rejection as I emerged as a father, college graduate, author, business owner, national speaker, author and respected community activist. It would be an honor.

KMG: Thank you, Yusef, for talking with me about “Marshall Law”. I hope people will pick up a copy. And yes, we will look forward to reading your new book and talking with you again very soon!

 …..

Karen M. Gagne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. She teaches about the Prison Industrial Complex in her Contemporary Social Problems course. Her publications: “’I Arrived Late to This Book’: Teaching Sociology with Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”, the ‘Novel.’” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge,” Spring 2008; “On the Obsolescence of the Disciplines: Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter Propose a New Mode of Being Human.” “Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge,” vol. V, Summer/Fall 2007; “Fighting Amnesia as a Guerilla Activity: Poetics for a New Mode of Being Human.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, vol. IV, Summer/Fall 2006; “Falling in Love With Indians: The Metaphysics of Becoming America.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3:3 Fall 2003; and “On Coloniality & “Condemnation”: A Roundtable,” Discussant. “Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Politics, Culture and Consciousness,” vol. 1, no. 2. 2003.

In prison before he was 20, Yusef Bunchy Shakur would meet the father he never knew behind bars. The father that had been foreign to Yusef was now determined to reshape his lost son – not into a hardened criminal – but into a responsible man and leader.

Since being release from prison 10 years ago, he has overcome many challenges to emerge as a college graduate, author, business owner, inspirational speaker, community organizer/activist and father are some of the significant roles taken on by the dynamic and inspiring Shakur. He has been instrumental in making a significant change in the community since his release through embarking on his mission of restoring the neighbor back to the hood by helping to transform the lives of misguided young people in inner city Detroit by using his life as a testimony of transformation.

Shakur’s notable accomplishments and recognitions include: being elected as chair of H.O.P.E. (Helping Our Prisoners Elevate), receiving the 2008 Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony Social Activist Award, Silent Hero Award 2009, Leaders, Legends & Luminaries Award 2010 and receiving the Local Hero Award from Bank of America 2010.

Shakur tells his story of redemption in the critically acclaim self-published “The Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation from a Zone 8 Thug to a Father & Freedom Fighter”, released in 2008 that has been used at the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Wayne State, Wayne Community College and Merritt College in Oakland, California. Also, in 2010 he released “The Window 2 My Soul Curriculum Guide Designed for Middle School, High School & Mentorship Programs.”

While Barack Obama and the Democrats triumphed at the polls in 2008, their ascent did not result in a dramatic swing to the left. (photo: realjameso16/Creative Commons)

In light of the popular movements of today and the debate on democracy they triggered, we don’t even know if traditional party politics will be the most adequate vehicle to address the challenges related to globalization, financial capitalism, inequality or the environment. But, thanks to “What is Left of the Left?” we have a better grounding and knowledge about where the Social Democratic parties stand and the path that they have covered so far.

By Katerina Svickova

To state that the political left is searching for its soul is not particularly revealing  to informed  left-leaning readers. A look at the political map of Europe these days shows that the electorate is not convinced about the capacity of the left to steer their societies through this economic downturn. In the United States too, support for the Democratic administration and the Democratic Party is low. Numerous books, including “The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism,” reviewed on this site, are asking why neoliberalism gained such a grip on power and on the minds of decision makers, opinion makers and large shares of the general public. So where to has the Left (seemingly) disappeared? What is left of the Left?

“What is Left of the Left?” is also the title of a volume edited by James Cronin, George Ross and James Shoch, three distinguished U.S. scholars. Cronin is a historian specializing in modern British and European history, Ross is a political scientist with rich expertise in European studies and Shoch is a professor of governance with a publication record on American economic, trade and industrial policy. Accordingly, the volume is a sound piece of academic work and a very matter-of-fact  exploration of the ups and downs of the left since the 1970s. It offers well researched and well presented insights into the struggle of the European and U.S. left-wing parties to get a grip on major challenges facing them since the ’70s.

These challenges include: the end of capitalism’s “golden age” and loss of faith in Keynesian policies, the collapse of Soviet communism and its disenchanting effects, the globalization of the economy, the acceleration of the trend towards post-industrial employment and shifts in social structure and demography. The assessment of how European and U.S. left-wing parties coped with these challenges is conducted from two perspectives. Several chapters trace the development of Social Democratic parties in specific places (U.K., France, Sweden, U.S. and Central and Eastern European countries) while other compare responses of left-wing parties in several countries to particular issues (new social risks, immigration and European integration). Further, the volume contains chapters that ground these contributions in a longer term account of the fate of the left. Lastly, the well written introduction and conclusion distill and bind together insights from the individual contributions to ensure that the volume is not just a set of disparate chapters.

What are some of the overarching insights? First, mainstream left-wing parties today are more center-left than left. The contributions in the volume make this clear and underpin empirically the shift of socialist parties to the center over time. This shift was particularly profound in the U.K. Labor Party as Cronin shows. However, it is also visible in the Swedish Social Democratic Party, still the bastion of true Social Democracy as Jonas Pontusson argues. Also in France, starting with the famous U-Turn under President Francois Mitterand (from a socialist economic program to a strongly neoliberal policy), the center-left became not so different from the political center-right in economic policy and the direction of reforms. A chapter on the left in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, now all Member States of the European Union, also indicates that most of the left-wing parties are left-wing largely just in proclamations but not in action. They became advocates of the same economic policies — liberalization, privatization and marketization — as the center-right. However, it would be simplistic to assign a common, universal underlying reason for this shift. The chapters show the specific challenges that the left was facing in their particular national contexts and to which the parties then tailored their responses.

The second overarching message is that the challenges lying in front of the left — in the form of globalization and shifts and changes it brings along — are not the first ones of such profoundness. The chapter by S. Brenan on “Social Democracy’s Past and Potential Future” shows the learning process and the internal discussions and divisions in Europe’s socialist parties since the end of the 19^th century. Back then, as now, socialists also had to find a response to globalization. And they were not spared difficulties after that, including the need to find a response to the catastrophe of the World War I, the economic depression and the carnage in the wake of World War II.

Brenan argues that the adaptation and response was successful when Social Democrats managed to thwart the orthodox Marxist doctrine, which condemned them to passively waiting for capitalism’s end and accompanying class conflict. Instead, they had to accept that capitalism was not dying and that it generated much desired wealth, albeit while causing a lot of dislocation. An important lesson learned was that rather than waiting until capitalism discredits itself and collapses, a more appropriate and more electorally rewarded response was activism, regulation of capitalism and the protection of vulnerable from the negative consequences thereof. Rather than conflict, cross-class cooperation offered a better ground for the acknowledged need to control the economic forces by political ones. Capitalism and markets were to be tamed rather than defeated or abandoned. This shift in the vision of Social Democrats could be also epitomized by the words of  French poet Paul Eluard, “There is another world, but it is in this one.”

However, this shift, and finding appropriate concrete responses to concrete issues, has not been an easy process, as the studies of individual countries demonstrate. It was accompanied by internal fights, a superficial embrace of new ideas on creative reformism of the markets or, conversely, becoming too comfortable in the mixed economy. In such situations, cynicism within the party transposed into a public perception of the party as emptied of a vision, becoming a status quo defender that protects vested interests. This is, however, not inevitable, as the chapter on the Nordic model by Jonas Pontusson demonstrates. In the Nordic countries and in Sweden in particular, Social Democracy flourished and managed to influence the whole atmosphere and thinking, including that of the right-wing parties. Pontusson argues that the social democratic Nordic model remains viable under the conditions of globalization and liberalization and supports his argument by empirical evidence showing superior performance of Nordic countries in terms of economic growth, employment or educational attainment compared to liberal market economies, like the U.K. and U.S., and the continental social market economies, like Germany. He shows how the egalitarianism of the Nordic countries contributed to their success. A crucial message is thus that social solidarity, equality and economic growth are not contrasting goals but can go hand in hand.

The third important point that the volume makes regards the difficulties of nationally based parties to cooperate and coin policies at the transnational level. This is probably no revelation but a case study written by Ross on the left parties’ response to European integration helps to explore the facets and roots of the challenge and to understand the barriers involved.

The insights of the volume do not only apply to European Social Democratic parties. Three chapters of the book explore the situation of the Democratic Party in the U.S. The chapters address directly the challenges identified in the introduction of the whole volume. R. Teixeira presents an analysis of the evolution and transformations in the Democratic coalition — the various social groups that form the electorate of the Democratic Party. If the insights and conclusions of the author are correct, the outlook of Democrats in prospective elections is a positive one as demographic developments and social changes seem to be in their favor. C. Howard provides a fine-grained analysis of the American welfare state. Howard paints a more complex picture of U.S. social policy whereby both Republicans and Democrats support welfare but within the overall frame of mind of distrust in big government. He shows how Democratic officials changed their approach in recent decades, shifting from social insurance to tax expenditures and social regulations. In his account, the American welfare state is larger than generally perceived in terms of the level of spending (because he also adds tax-related measures). Yet it achieves relatively little in reducing poverty and inequality as it is designed mostly to cater to the middle class and upper middle class, i.e. to the most active members of the polity. This suppression of the issues of poverty and inequality has now, though, returned with a vengeance through the Occupy movement, which rightly calls for putting the issue of inequality back on the public and government agenda. Finally, the third chapter presents the ambivalent response of the Democratic Party to issues related to globalization and, specifically, free trade.

So overall, what can we say, after reading the volume, about for what the current center-left stands? The response can be boiled down, in brief, to recognition of the “variety of lefts.” The analyses have shown that in each country, the Social Democratic parties target differently composed constituencies, face  historically and contextually influenced problems and identify their own solutions. There is no simple pattern and no one-size-fits-all recipes to the individual and overarching challenges. Jane Jensen very nicely illustrates this in a chapter on new social risks, showing the diversified responses of Social Democratic parties in Sweden, Germany and the U.K.

From a volume of this type, one could always ask for more depth, more comprehensiveness or for other comparisons. A reader concerned about the fate of the leftist policies might also yearn for more clues about where the left could go and what responses it could present. Yet the book does not do this job for the social democratic parties or movements. It does not suggest a vision that they should consider. Moreover, it does not diminish the challenges standing in front of social democratic parties. So even having read the volume, we still don’t know where the left should concentrate its effort and how to re-kindle the enthusiasm and inspiration among people as the left used to do. In light of the popular movements of today and the debate on democracy they triggered, we don’t even know if traditional party politics at the national level will be the most adequate vehicle to address the challenges related to globalization, the excesses and dislocations of financial capitalism, social transformations, inequality or the environment, or whether the future of the leftist ideas lies in alternative movements or more cooperation at the transnational level. But with this volume, we have a better grounding and knowledge about where the social democratic parties stand and about the path that they have covered so far.

The insights from the volume can help us set more adequate expectations from what political parties and party politics can and cannot achieve. Despite being very straightforward about the challenges, the volume carries also a positive message. Left-wing parties already stood in front of tough challenges and managed to find viable solutions. It has traditionally been the job of the left to show that a better world is possible and to activate, mobilize people around this vision. In the past, it managed to do so. So chances are that today and tomorrow, it ultimately will be able to do so, too.

Katerina Svickova holds master degrees in European Studies, European Economic Integration and International Relations from the University of Economics and Charles University in Prague and the Central European University in Budapest. She has worked in the non-profit sector supporting social enterprise. She currently works for the European Commission. Opinions presented in her posts and articles represent strictly her personal, and in no way an institutional, perspective.

We are going to go out on a limb here and declare Occupy Wall Street the top news story for the American Left in 2011. (Photo: David Shankbone/Creative Commons)

Looking back on our first year of blogging, we got some things right and some things wrong. Most notably, long before Occupy Wall Street exploded, we insisted on the prospect that the American left would revive itself. This didn’t seem particularly counterintuitive, but there were plenty of experts stating otherwise. We are also happy to note our discussions of the importance of social media. This, too, should be a less controversial point than it actually is. On the other hand, we underestimated the short term obstacles, most notably a U.S.-Saudi backed counter-revolution, to a more unified and democratic Middle East. Here are some highlights from 2011:

January 12:  We decry the fashionable demand for more civility in American discourse:  “So instead of less anger, let us resolve to put forth analysis that is as truthful, focused and angry as the moment requires.”

January 24:  Disputing N+1′s claim that cultural anti-elitism constitutes the last unconquered redoubt of class struggle in the U.S., we argue instead that “anti-business elitism looks… like the future.”

January 29: Perhaps overly optimistic, we predict the wave of protests in the Middle East will produce liberal democracies open to social movements, greater autonomy from the U.S., and regional integration.

February 17: We repudiate the notion that social media constitutes a distraction from real politics. Not only is social media important to contemporary activism, but activism is important to the development of media:  “As much as “the market,” which may be the more visible factor in the world today, social struggles are crucial to the entire story of media itself.”

February 20: Registering the importance of the mobilization in Wisconsin, we declare it the first “event” of the Obama era, and anticipate a left bloc composed of public sector workers, African Americans, students at state universities, industrial workers, the anti-war movement, anarchist direct action types, and undocumented immigrants. At the time, we could not yet see the non-sectoral element, the constitution of the 99%, that would be so critical to Occupy Wall Street’s success.

June 18: We note that capitalism has largely superseded the laissez-faire form that is the focus of critiques of neoliberalism.  We will return to this point, undoubtedly.

June 21: Twenty minutes of research on the Internet enables us to debunk the rumor that Lady Gaga and Slavoj Zizek are “friends.”

July 18: We return to this topic to dispel new falsehoods generated by misreadings of our original post:  “Deterritorial Support Group never suggested that Zizek and Gaga were romantically involved, never suggested that they were having romantic evenings together, and it is not at all clear that they “hate” Zizek (today on Facebook, DSG helpfully stated, regarding this comment, “We don’t hate.”). ”

September 28: Eleven days into Occupy Wall Street,  we argue even more forcefully that a left upsurge is in the making, highlighting the largely unheralded protests that had already occurred:  “In the last year or two, we’ve seen the two biggest prison revolts in decades, and a notable upsurge of labor struggle. The latter includes not only Wisconsin, but striking Verizon workers, Ikea workers winning a union,  strikes of  California nurses, of teachers in Tacoma,Washington and more…Nor should we discount the effort to “Occupy Wall Street,” which is now being replicated in a number of cities around the U.S.”

September 29: Two days before the Brooklyn Bridge mass arrests, we published our first post devoted entirely to Occupy Wall Street.  We stand by our statement that “It may be relatively small and inchoate at first. But watch.  It may do more than anyone anticipates to spur the growth of something much larger.”

October 23: Using the perhaps infelicitous terms “Social Democratic Anarchists” and “Communist Anarchists”, we highlighted the way radicals and liberals have both strengthened the movement.

November 18: We compared social movements to different aspects of social media, noting Occupy’s resemblance to Twitter:  “The archetypal prop of this movement is a cardboard sign with a handpainted slogan on it. This makes Occupy feel a lot more like Twitter (than Seattle-style mobilizations, which brought together groups more than individuals). Although Twitter at first seemed primarily a site for individuals to say their piece, often about trivial matters, most organizations, large and small, have  adjusted their communication strategies and now use it. By the same token, there are few left-leaning conventional organizations entirely uninterested in the Occupy movement by this time, although Occupy Wall Street only began two months ago.”

For all of our blog posts, click here.

Unions participated in the large rally on October 5 called by Occupy Wall Street (photo: David Shankbone/Creative Commons).

Although labor unions and Occupy groups are beginning to work together, differences in their approaches and attitudes are creating tensions. Two months ago, we argued that Occupy movements were likely to trigger the next upsurge of working class strike activity. Since then, it has become easier to see some of the ways this is playing out and some of the challenges that will be faced. It has become common to hear about labor unions participating in marches called by Occupy groups, or Occupy groups turning out to support labor actions, such as the picket line at Sotheby’s auction house called by the Teamsters in support of locked-out art handlers.

Yet two recent developments highlight tensions between Occupy and unions.  On November 17, Occupy and unions co-sponsored a demonstration that would march to the Brooklyn Bridge. Reportedly, in planning meetings, it was agreed that the march would be “lightly marshaled,” that people participating would judge for themselves whether to risk arrest by marching in the road rather than the pedestrian walkway. Organizers close to labor, the Beyond May 12 Coalition, had stated on Facebook that this was likely to be a disruptive protest.  As it happened, protesters stayed on the pedestrian walkway, because the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) produced a wall of marshals, in effect doubling police lines, and eliminating the option of taking the streets.  This was not the only way that the unions reneged on their agreements with Occupy. The plan was to have a “people’s mic” magnifying the voice of speakers by the crowd repeating their words, as  is done in many general assemblies and Occupy protests. Instead, there was a very loud, electric amplification system that left little doubt about who was doing the speaking and who was supposed to be listening.

Last week on the West Coast tensions of a different sort surfaced. Occupy Oakland called  to shut down the ports. The goals of this action include a show of strength after the wave of police repression of encampments, support for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in its struggle with the employer EGT Development, and support for non-unionized port truck drivers. The call was picked up and endorsed by numerous Occupy groups on the West Coast and even further afield. But the ILWU, ostensibly one of the groups that will benefit from the action, and a union with an impressive history of militancy, issued a couple of statements disavowing the action. It is not entirely clear what the union’s position is. Some have suggested that they must legally distance themselves, even as they encouraged their members to respect this “community picket line.” Others have suggested that the union was frustrated with this effort, which they saw as interfering with the strategy they have developed to combat EGT. A number of writers used the appearance of a gap between the unions and the Occupy movement to denounce “adventurism” (in Doug Henwood’s words) or “lack of democracy” (according to Cal Winslow) in Occupy Oakland. On the other hand, some close to the action are claiming that Occupy Oakland, as well as other Occupy groups, is working closely with a network of port workers who strongly support the action. Although I strongly supported the ports action, it is difficult to shake the impression that the connection to unions, whose members work in the ports every day, could have been handled better.

What should one make of these two incidents? First, Occupy groups and unions are very different sorts of organizations. Unions are composed of dues-paying members. Their leadership is well paid and professionalized. Lawyers are closely consulted, and alliances with elected officials patiently cultivated.  Unions are well prepared to negotiate contracts and address grievances. By contrast, Occupy groups don’t really have members. Everyone is welcome at general assemblies, and even, for the most part, in working groups. Officially leaderless, the networks of activists in general assemblies and key working groups who de facto lead groups are unpaid and accessible, even if formal lines of accountability are lacking. Occupy groups have only the most tentative links to the legal system and elected officials. These differences help explain their different attitudes and tensions that have emerged and will likely continue.

Unions will always ask about any action, “How does it fit into our larger strategy?  Does it benefit our members?” Caution is one trait that is endemic among unions these days, particularly given the poor track record of bold strikes and ambitious organizing campaigns over the last three decades. Unions also have a great deal of trouble convincing the wider public (or even the unorganized majority of workers) that they are acting in a general interest, rather than pursuing the narrow interests of their members. Their greatest achievements sometimes seem behind them, but these achievements, including decent wages, job security, and grievance procedures, are substantial and will not be risked lightly. The Occupy movement has shown considerable elan positioning itself as a fighting force for the 99 percent, precisely what unions have been unable to do. Occupy groups embrace daring tactics, such as calling general strikes and leading snake marches that confound police efforts to keep protesters on sidewalks. At the same time, Occupy has difficulty translating its tactics into material improvements in the lives of the 99 percent. It may attempt to blockade Wall Street, but does this change the overwhelming burden of debt and job insecurity? Add together the concrete benefits Occupy has attained for people — it has moved some families into foreclosed homes, its encampments were sometimes a welcoming place for homeless people otherwise abused and unwanted — and it would be difficult to not conclude that even in their shrunken, defensive state, labor unions currently make a bigger difference in more people’s lives in this sense of material benefits. At least at this time, the Occupy movement does not substitute for this function.

Labor unions and Occupy groups complement each other, even if the sort of conflicts described above may be foreordained in their differences. Labor unions will want to tap into the widespread moral outrage generated by Occupy, but they will temper their actions as they seek to maintain legalistic strategies and political alliances. Occupy groups sympathize with labor and envy the union’s grounding in working class communities, but the desire to use audacious tactics will likely lead to fresh tensions. Best to keep our eyes on the prize and not let the inevitable tensions and frustrations on both sides derail the larger movement gathering steam.

After all, it has been a remarkable couple of months. Occupy Oakland has brought the concept of a general strike back into the realm of possible tactics to employ. Notwithstanding the tensions with the ILWU, the ports shutdown was a remarkable demonstration of collective power, involving groups from Anchorage to Houston. Voters in Ohio, reportedly influenced by the Occupy movement, voted down an effort to revoke collective bargaining for public sector workers. And even as unions disregarded some of their agreement with Occupy Wall Street on November 17, they abandoned the traditional format of having labor leaders offer fiery denunciations of bosses culminating in calls to defeat Republicans in favor of using the speakers platform and sound system to communicate individuals stories – a remarkable embrace of Occupy culture.   All of this has left both the Occupy movement and the labor movement stronger than they were two months ago.

Patience, respect and flexibility are necessary now and in the future. Because if you think the tensions described above were frustrating, just wait. The next couple of years will see the initiation of a debate about what, if any, of the features of post-war unions (union bureaucracies, legalistic orientation, collective bargaining, focus on dues-paying members’ wages and benefits, etc) are appropriate to the present-day struggle of the 99 percent. It promises to be an even tenser period.

On November 15, Occupy Wall Street was evicted by the police from Zucotti Park. What's next? (Photo: David Shankbone/Creative Commons)

A recent panel discussing what is next for Occupy Wall Street was diverse in ethnicity and age of the panelists, but narrow in political perspective. The shared belief that legislative reforms would constitute victory for the movement was disappointing. Sponsored by the journals Jacobin and Dissent, the stated purpose of the panel was to reflect on “Phase II” of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), as many people feel that the wave of evictions, including from Zucotti Park in New York City, marked an end to the first phase of the movement. In some ways, there was admirable diversity in the panel. It was not a sea of white faces. Furthermore, there was substantive debate, particularly about how to conceptualize the relationship of the Occupy movement to the labor movement. Sociologist Frances Fox Piven emphasized the conservatism inherent in the structural position of labor leaders, and the need for bold tactics to be injected from elsewhere. Mike Hirsch, who works with the United Federation of Teachers, argued that Piven’s view of the leadership of the union movement was accurate twenty years ago, but that there has been movement at the top, as awareness of the crisis facing labor sinks in. On the other hand, Dorian Warren, a professor of political science at Columbia University, suggested that the most reliable allies for OWS in the labor union might be found among younger, less institutionalized unions like Domestic Workers United. These three tendencies — mobilization among the grassroots, in alliance with OWS, to pull labor unions out of their complacency; a more liberal leadership gradually moving towards the OWS movement; and younger, more activist-style unions working closely with OWS — aren’t mutually exclusive. Together, they may map out labor responses that are already emerging and will play a more prominent role in the next year or two.

On the other hand, the overall political perspective of the panelists was not very diverse at all. All the panelists seemed to subscribe to a similar perspective about what would constitute movement success: the passage of major legislation (or even constitutional amendments) that would address the primary concern of the movement, economic inequality. This perspective was reinforced by a number of references to historical movements, most notably Great Depression-era struggles of workers and poor people, and the Civil Rights movement of the late ’50s and ’60s. In both of these cases, the movements could claim victory in the sense the panelists were discussing. The rebellions of the ’30s produced an improved legal climate for unions and crucial reforms like social security. The civil rights movement is typically seen as triumphing with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Strangely absent from the discussion was the anti-war movement and other movements of the late sixties, such as Black Power and feminism. Had they been included, the understanding of what constitutes movement success might have been richer. Although there were some achievements of top-down reform associated with these movements, such as the end of the draft, the withdrawal from Vietnam, and the election of African American mayors in most major cities, it is fair to say that these were not the primary way these movements changed the United States. In fact, what should have been the crowning legislative achievement of this wave of feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, failed. Yet these movements changed American society, a lot. They did so primarily outside of the state.

What I’m suggesting here is related to, but not the same as, the distinction between prefigurative and instrumentalist approaches to movements. The ‘instrumentalist” approach focuses on the ends. How can we get this law, for example, campaign finance reform, passed? What alliances should we create? What should our message be? “Prefigurative” approaches attempt to put in place the sort of social relations we would like to see right now. For example, notwithstanding the huge problems with the formal democratic realm of electoral politics, we can create real democracy in the present through general assemblies. Instrumental attitudes tend to point towards the state: how do we change it? Prefigurative attitudes tend to lead away from the state: let’s make it right ourselves. But the sort of social movement victories I’m thinking of are more enduring than is implied in the prefigurative focus on general assemblies. For example, one of the victories of the movements of the late sixties was the transformation of a number of academic disciplines in the United States, including American History, Sociology, and Anthropology. A new discipline, Cultural Studies, was created which was heavily soaked in the values of the movements. As a result, the experiences of marginalized peoples are now much more openly discussed in universities. The workings of power — in the rhetoric of OWS, the machinations of the 1%, although there are also more complex ways to think about power — are also studied, although it was almost a taboo subject in the ’40s and ’50s. Many on the left trivialize this achievement, but the right has understandably been alarmed by it, and has worked hard, so far unsuccessfully, to reverse it. The spread of food co-ops and alternative bookstores in college towns and cities was another achievement of the movement. Right up to the present, they provide both a visible reminder that non-corporate ways of doing things are possible, and are often an important launching point for social movements.

These sorts of achievements are also relevant to other movements. The consolidation of industrial unions was a key victory of the ’30s. This is not simply because unions facilitated the creation of relatively well-paying jobs with some security and decent benefits. The existence of the unions themselves was (and is) a very good thing. Unions are a continual reminder, above all to their members, that collective struggle has its virtues, practically a radical statement in the intensely individualistic culture of the United States. They provide much of the political base for economic liberalism in the United States. Again, less attention should be paid to left complaints about the unions, and more to the tireless efforts of the right to destroy them. That is a clue to their importance.

These sorts of non-state achievements are all the more significant at this time because it is not at all clear that state-based reforms are likely in the next decade or so. On the panel, Piven alluded to this prospect when talking about education. “Forty years ago, there were all these books talking about how elites wanted public education, because they wanted their factory workers to be properly socialized”, she said (I’m quoting loosely). “But now the elites don’t own factories in the U.S. and are trying to destroy public education.” Reforms come if a substantial minority of the elite recognizes that they can preserve most of their wealth, power and privileges by accepting certain popular demands. It isn’t clear right now that that will happen in the near future. Particularly given that reality, it is crucial to be clear about the importance of building powerful alternatives in a non-state manner. This may occur by creating alternatives outside of traditional institutions, and it may occur by transforming institutions, including universities, and even corporations, without some green light from the state. If elites don’t choose to endorse reforms, those alternatives might provide the launching pad for a revolutionary movement to overthrow them, another alternative strangely unmentioned at the panel.

“Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies” written by Judith Stein, history professor at the City University of New York. Although her main points sometimes get buried in the details of this history, primarily focused on economic policy-making, Stein’s argument that morally gratifying anti-corporatism at times obscured discussion of how to save U.S. industry may be worth considering by the Occupy Wall Street generation.

“Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt From Below During the Long 1970s” edited by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner and Cal Winslow. This collection highlights revolts led by workers. Although not widely discussed these days, a strike wave rocked the U.S. in the early ’70s, often led by rank-and-file against the wishes of the union leadership. Reviewing the book on ZNet, John Borsos praises in particular Frank Bardacke’s “examination of the United Farm Workers from the ground up which captures the power of the farmers at the point of production in establishing a power base. This is set in relief with the union’s bureaucracy that developed an independent power base from the national, liberal support and backing generated by the boycott apparatus.” He concludes that “one is struck by how the entrenched union leadership was too weak, compromised and conservative to fight employers, and yet institutionally strong and motivated within their own organizations to either co-opt or ruthlessly squash the workers’ rebellion.”

“Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class” authored by Jefferson R. Cowie, professor of history at Cornell. Cowie includes considerable cultural history in his discussion of the challenges faced by the working class in the period. Writing in New Politics, Steve Collatrella praises the book for transcending the current academic sub-specialties that have undermined labor history, declaring that the book “might be the most groundbreaking and original national history of a working class since E.P. Thompson’s ‘Making of the English Working Class’.”  Collatrella mildly faults the book for its adherence to the “somewhat arbitrary border of the calendar line” between the ’70s and ’80s, which means the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike of 1981 is not included, despite its relevance. This brings us to our final book in this survey.

“Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America” written by Georgetown history professor Joseph Anthony McCartin. While, as noted above, the PATCO strike occurred in 1981, the life-span of PATCO, which forms much of the content of the book, from its founding in 1968 to its decertification in 1981 might be a useful definition of “the long 1970s.” The defeat of PATCO truly marked the end of an era when labor unions were relatively confident of their role, even if subordinate, in U.S. political life. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Bryan Burroughs explains that McCartin blames the strike and its failure on overreaching by the union (not everyone on the left would agree with this interpretation, to say the least. Indeed, having read about two thirds of the book, I am not sure it is an entirely fair summary of McCartin). When Reagan fired the strikers, the public applauded. The story resonates with the challenges unions have faced over the last 30 years connecting their demands to a sense of the greater public good.

The 1970s are not a happy time to ponder for those sympathetic to working class struggle. The strike wave of the early part of the decade did not result in a lasting increase of power for workers in relation to union bureaucrats or employers. And the period ends with the historic defeat of the PATCO strike. The energies of the struggles of the ’60s, including anti-war, feminism and African American struggles, persisted in the new decade without connecting to the working class. But as economic struggle returns to the foreground with the “fantastic success” of the Occupy Wall Street movement, perhaps it is worth looking back to understand what happened and increase the odds of a more positive resolution this time.

Writing in The Christian Science Monitor, Marjorie Kehe says “Horwitz’s description of the little band of idealists and adventurers who signed on for Brown’s offensive – including five black men and two of Brown’s own sons – is both fascinating and touching. His careful recreation of the bloody events of October 16, 1859, the day of Brown’s disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry, is both suspenseful and heartwrenching.” She also praises Horowitz’s description of  the months following the raid, when Brown was sentenced to death and executed, but not before scoring a “propaganda victory” by virtue of the “courage and comportment” he showed as a prisoner. Publisher’s Weekly adds “[Horwitz’s] vivid biographical portrait of Brown gives us an American original: A failed businessman and harsh Calvinist with a soft spot for the oppressed and a murderous animus against oppressors … Brown’s raiders – a motley crew of his sons and various idealists, adventurers, freedmen and fugitive slaves — come alive as a romantic, appealing bunch; their agonizing deaths give Horwitz’s excellent narrative of the raid and shootout a deep pathos.”

We need a reviewer for this book. Reviewer gets a free copy.