When I talk to friends and family, when I read news stories in which reporters interview people distressed by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it’s evident that anger and discouragement is widespread. It’s hard not to get angry when my partner and I listen to a podcast in which the speakers delineate how an extreme right-wing faction has captured the U.S. Supreme Court and many positions in the lower courts and are continuously undermining fundamental rights.
How do we combat an increasingly rigged system that favors the corporations and the political right? How do we counter the military-industrial-intelligence complex that continues to dominate foreign policy making and budgetary decisions?
What gives me hope is my faith in the fundamental decency of most people. If we can let people know that despite the overweening power of the rich, we the people also have power, the power of numbers and the power that comes with our willingness to keep fighting for what is right and what we need. Peace and social justice.
My experience as a scholar and an activist tells me that progressive and pro-working class forces need to strengthen their organizations, their unity in coalitions, and their flexibility in reaching out beyond their ranks. In addition to campaigning against the multiple dangers we face to our democratic rights, the left and progressives can help sustain themselves and their supporters by being visionary advocates of a world in which caring for one another and especially the least among us prevails. In our conversations, our prose and poetry, our demonstrations, and acts of defiance we should imaginatively seek the kind, peaceful and cooperative world of our dreams.
Civil rights activists in the 1960s spoke of the goal of creating a “beloved community.” In recent years, radical and revolutionary activists have called for seeing beyond capitalism to a new world based on cooperation and equality. A few months after Trump was elected president, Susan M. Shaw, professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University, wrote, “we must engage in love as a political act that refuses the current moment’s framing of us vs them and its attendant willingness to dehumanize and delegitimize those with whom we disagree.” Considering paths to a socialist or communist future can help to sustain us in our struggles.
Visionary left and progressive activists in the past won important gains. Recalling those achievements can also help us to carry on. Pushing for radical programs that benefit the masses of ordinary people in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike needs to be coupled with our efforts to defeat Donald Trump and his supporters and their attacks on reproductive rights and other democratic rights.
The most significant gains for working-class people in the twentieth century came in 1935 with passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and an executive order establishing the WPA (Works Progress Administration) and in 1964 and 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare. In both periods, the Democrats had very large majorities in the Congress. Coupling the defeat of Donald Trump with providing Democrats and allied progressive independents decisive control of both houses of Congress is the likeliest path toward making the changes we need. Experience indicates the bigger the turnout, the bigger the gains for progressives. It may seem circular, but having hope for the future can propel the large turnout we need to have a better future.
In fashioning programs for radical change, it may be helpful to revisit the stories of previous radical reform efforts that fell short. In 2017 I published an essay entitled “Five Forgotten Reforms Worth Remembering.” The fundamental problems those reform movements addressed remain with us today so I’m concluding this blog post by asking you to read or reread it today. We need visionary programs that would guarantee jobs and income for all without discrimination, shorten the hours of work, provide to all working people government-supported high-quality childcare, and strengthen the right of workers to join unions.
In addition to the reforms that the U.S. came close to enacting in the past, additional ideas in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights address of 1944 should be put into practice as well:
· The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
· The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
· The right of every family to a decent home;
· The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
· The right to a good education.
We are working hard today to stop Donald Trump and to pressure the Biden Administration to embark on a diplomatic solution to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. At the same time, let’s reclaim a focus on establishing a more cooperative and caring society and establishing a path to citizenship for the immigrants who do the most difficult jobs in our economy.
Five Forgotten Reforms Worth Remembering
(originally published on CounterPunch, September 28, 2017 and on History News Network, October 22, 2017).
Progressives today are rightly focused on combatting the authoritarian Trump Administration. Trump’s encouragement of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, his misogynistic and racist policies, and his attempts to shred social programs and environmental protections are opposed by a decisive majority of the U.S. public. In earlier periods of U.S. history, progressive forces have been most effective in inflicting defeats on reactionaries when they coupled their resistance with a positive program that met the needs of millions of working people. Some of these campaigns achieved signal victories. Others fell short but are worth remembering today when many millions are mobilizing to defeat the right and looking to construct a better country out of the ashes of the Trump era.
The achievements resulting from the struggles of the 1930s and1960s and early 1970s are well known. Legislative victories included the Social Security and Wagner acts (1935); Fair Labor Standards Act (1938); Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act and Medicare (1965); Clean Air and Occupational and Safety acts (1970); Title IX and the Clean Water Act (1972); and Women’s Educational Equity Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974). Union membership rose dramatically in the 1930s and 1940s and political representation by women and minorities expanded in the wake of the egalitarian struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. There were important legal advances in dismantling legal segregation, advancing the principle of one person, one vote, providing the right to birth control, including abortion, and guaranteeing equal rights to women and minorities. The conservative offensive that began around 1978 and has persisted until today has led to a loss of the gains in unionization, weakening of the Voting Rights Act, and limitations on abortion rights, among other setbacks. Nevertheless, beachheads such as Social Security and Medicare have been held to date and even strengthened.
Given the diversity and complexity of the country and the many challenges we have faced over the last several decades, the question of where progressives go from here to create positive change is not easily answered. A part of the answer may lie in an examination of some important but forgotten efforts of the Franklin Roosevelt era and the era of the 1970s and later years that fell short, as they may provide models for present-day struggles. Among these earlier campaigns are the 1932-1933 Black 30-Hour-Week Bill; the 1934-35 Lundeen Workers’ Unemployment, Old Age, & Social Insurance Bill; the Comprehensive Child Development Bill of 1971; the campaigns in 1945 and the 1970s for full employment legislation that would guarantee a right to a job for all; and the campaigns in the 1970s, 1990s, and the 2000s to strengthen the right of workers to unionize.
In the early 1930s, the U.S. faced its deepest crisis since the Civil War with millions of people destitute and thousands facing starvation, particularly in minority communities. It was a time of elite repression of working people and minority communities. Tens of thousands of Mexicans, including many who were U.S. citizens, were denied relief benefits and many were forcibly repatriated. African-American workers on Southern railroads were murdered by white supremacists who wanted their jobs. Lynchings were again on the rise after a decline in the 1920s. However, minority workers fought back against the repression and went on strike both by themselves in the fields of California, Texas, and Alabama and alongside non-minority workers elsewhere. Many workers joined unions and left-wing movements and organizations.
Labor unions and left-wing groups initiated two important legislative campaigns.
In the opening days of the Roosevelt Administration, the leadership of the American Federation of Labor sought to address the problem of unemployment by reducing the weekly hours of work from 40 to 30 without reduction in pay. The 30-Hour Bill sponsored by Senator Hugo Black, later Justice of the Supreme Court, (D-Alabama), had wide support from labor and liberal groups. Although it passed the Senate by a 53 to 30 vote, the House of Representatives failed to vote on it. Efforts to reduce the hours of work have occasionally erupted in subsequent decades but have not been sustained. U.S. workers tend to work long hours and have little paid vacation, sick, maternity, or holiday leave. A campaign to reduce the workweek and to increase paid vacation and other paid leave time, if successful, would expand employment and lead to a healthier and more contented work force.
Another early Great Depression campaign that spread throughout the country was that of grass roots movements for unions and for relief, jobs, and unemployment insurance. Hundreds of organizations with millions of members campaigned for the Lundeen Bill. Minnesota Farmer Labor Representative Ernest Lundeen’s bill proposed a comprehensive social insurance system “for all workers, including all wage earners, all salaried workers, farmers, professional workers and the self-employed.” The bill provided for compensation equal to average earnings for wages lost due to layoffs, injuries, illnesses, maternity, and old age. Mothers of children under eighteen also would receive allowances if they lacked male support. The proposal included a provision against race, sex, and age discrimination, leading historian Alice Kessler-Harris to comment that the bill, “threatened to override gender and racial proscription by defining work capaciously enough to include virtually everyone.” Financing the universal and egalitarian system envisioned in the Lundeen bill would have come from general tax revenues.
The Lundeen Bill was reported out of the House Labor Committee in 1935, but Congress failed to enact it. Instead, the Congress passed and President Roosevelt signed the more limited Social Security Act, which initially excluded many workers, especially women and minorities, from its coverage and provided separate systems for those covered by employment and those covered due to specific needs. Considering the fact that the U.S. had no social insurance system, the Social Security Act represented a meaningful advance and, in many respects, has been improved. Unfortunately, the Social Security Act’s initial division between needs-based and employment-based benefits has persisted and led to the weakening of needs-based benefits over time. Moreover, the unemployment compensation system enacted as part of the Social Security Act has numerous restrictions and provides no benefits to the long-term unemployed and those not seeking work. Currently, one quarter of those counted in official unemployment statistics receive benefits. Returning to the vision of the Lundeen Bill, that all of us are entitled to a decent standard of living, would provide grass roots movements today with a comprehensive program to make the United States a healthier and happier place.
The struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s led to important civil rights, feminist, labor, and environmental advances. One vital reform that failed of enactment was a national child-care program. Critical players in developing and supporting the Comprehensive Child Development Act were the AFL-CIO and women's, child advocacy, and welfare rights groups. The measure passed the Congress in 1971 but was vetoed by President Richard Nixon. The failure to enact a national high-standards, well-funded professional child care program has kept the child care industry a low-wage arena and left most working parents to struggle with haphazard, inadequate, or bad care. Placing this legislation back on the national agenda would give working families hope for improving the quality of their lives.