The Real Movement

I have been reading a pamphlet on police abolition, A World Without Police, in conjunction with an essay by Scott Jay, “The real problem with Jill Stein”.

The essay highlights a real paradox in the thinking of what I will for the purposes of this comment call the radical Left. By the term, ‘radical Left’, I mean those activists and thinkers who are explicitly committed to a socialist future and who see this coming into being outside the existing state and the two major political parties. The term, ‘socialist’ is used here loosely, but roughly correlates with what Marxists would define as the end of the system of wage labor.

The pamphlet, ‘A World Without Police’ touches on one aspect of what this loosely defined socialist future would look like, public safety. In this vision a socialist future is one in which the public function of the police has lost its character as a special body of individuals. That function is now carried out directly and immediately by the members of society. It is, of course, tentative, as should be expected: It is impossible to say how those who have never grown up with armed men and women patrolling a community will function in absence of those men and women. But, the pamphlet tries to paint a realistic picture of what this looks like for those of us for whom the police seem as necessary as food and water.

Read the rest of this entry »

Given that this election season is over except for the crowning of one of the two major candidates, I assume many third parties will now be looking to the 2018 and 2020 election seasons. So I thought I would spend some time looking at the Green Party program. As the largest radical Left party on the scene, they bear watching.

*****

Some significant radical measures

The Greens have a very good platform that includes:

1. Radical restructuring of governance
2. Reduction of labor hours
3. Worker-owned cooperatives
4. Workplace democracy
5. Labor law reform

The Greens appear to have given a lot of thought to their platform in an attempt to develop a fully rounded approach. The most important measures they propose concerns the radical restructuring of governance: community assemblies that appear to echo the Paris Commune. The community assemblies would serve as local legislative bodies with power to “monitor, instruct, and recall representatives elected to municipal, state, and federal office.”

Also included under this section is a proposal for reducing the salaries of elected officials to that of an average worker.

It is unclear from the platform if this body carries out its duties alongside the existing local, state and federal government or replaces it entirely. In other words, it is not clear if the Greens want to add another layer of administration to the existing state or abolish it. If it is the latter, the Greens propose to go much further than anything radical governments have attempted in decades.

Read the rest of this entry »

A month ago, I was asked by a commenter to expand on the argument I made in an earlier post on the failure of Marxist economists to offer any policy useful recommendations to radical activists trying to organize among the working class.

I offer this post as an answer to that request.

*****

A changed political landscape

There is something of a distinction between the generations raised before Reagan and Thatcher and those who came after that suggest radical politics is now on an even footing with bourgeois politics. Allow me to oversimplify this argument for purposes of brevity.

Read the rest of this entry »