First principle
When human need confronts corporate profit, we are 4-square on the side of human need.
Politics can be a complicated business. Even using the term “business” makes us uneasy. Those of us who have been in politics for more than five minutes know that you can’t just proclaim the revolution and then sit back waiting for the castles of corporate greed to crumble. The more militant among us learn quickly that the forces of darkness can’t be swept away in one mighty upsurge. The masses do not rise up as one.
Not a good plan.
Those of us who do not learn to compromise … do not survive. If we do not learn this through our own intelligence, we have it beaten into us every day from every quarter.We learn to fight for reforms. (For those who think the word “fight” is too harsh a term, substitute “cheer on.”)
But accepting this reality, we find ourselves traversing a terrain seeming to consist of nothing but slippe
ry slopes. The road to hell, etc.
Even our grim wisdom is riddled with contradictions. The root of all political evil lies in the system of corporate profit, which we would overthrow or transform or ameliorate or something. Yet when we are successful in winning reform, we reinforce that very system. Our bitterly won successes are touted as proof of the responsiveness of the system that had just fought us tooth and nail. In making it one iota better, we make it just that much more bearable to the billions of oppressed.
At its extreme, reform as an end in itself becomes a business, an integral part of the system, otherwise known as the Democratic Party, whose operatives on the left strive for nothing more than their next gig, their next consultancy. So how do we engage in reform politics in any meaningful way?
A very useful concept was developed in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when the threat of revolution was widely perceived as a real possibility (perceived by some as the fulfillment of a dream, by others as a mortal threat). Transitional Demands. Posited between petty reform (minimum demands) and revolution (maximum demands), they occupied the political space wherein they could be realized under capitalism, but which the capitalist system would not yield to as they undermined the foundations of that system.
So the transitional demand is possible and impossible at the same time. It must be possible, to engage any but the most crazed ideologues. But it also must engage the impossible, because only under the “impossible” can human needs on this planet be meaningfully met. And as the realm of the possible shrinks daily (see Obama, Barack, for further reference), the necessity of the impossible becomes ever more pressing.
Does thinking about this make your head hurt? It should. If not, think harder.
St. Pete in transition
St. Peter contemplates his transitional demands.
The immediate goal of the St. Pete local of the Green Party of Florida is to develop a package of such transitional demands targeting the Florida State Legislature. The Plan is to entail a set of bills embracing working-class issues of healthcare, debt, homelessness, and foreclosures, particularly impacting homeowners, students and the poor. We believe this package must meet the criteria of transitional demands, but must also be one that people can actually be organized around. (See “Remarks on the Swarm”). If you can’t organize, you can only mourn.
Organizing requires developing tactics that people can be engaged in. We do not consider organizing primarily on the basis of program and platform to be particularly fruitful. That may attract the few that are most interested in program and platform, but that is too limited an audience. Two points:
- No demand is meaningful without a broad potential constituency.
- No demand is meaningful without being the basis for building organization.
- No demand is meaningful if it only falls in the forest with no one to hear.
Does all this get complicated? Absolutely.
Vision plus organization = a much better plan.
Is this plan immune from the perils of the slippery slope? Of course not! If it were immune, that would be an immediate indication that it was a bad plan. To resist the perils of the slippery slope, it has to have a solid anchor. It has to have a vision of a world transformed. And that vision has to be embedded in our everyday activity. At the same time, we have to work with all the hard-headed ruthlessness that is required to get the word out, to fight to win, to remember that what we are doing matters, and that what we are doing can impact many lives.
The bottom line, what we have to communicate at every step, is that the fundamental principle behind each of our practical demands is that human need must trump corporate profit. We can win with nothing less.
— submitted by Jeff Roby
Rose Roby
June 17, 2014
