[Peace-discuss] Our Good old Paul Street

Sun May 4 22:57:39 CDT 2008

I'd like to have him back here again. He thinks straight.  --mkb

Hidden Revolutionary Sentiment in the Heartland – a Reason for HOPE*

May 03, 2008 By Paul Street
Source: Empire and Inequality Report, No. 32

Paul Street's ZSpace Page

Since its May 1st, the official day of international working class  
revolution, I thought I would relate something positive and hopeful  
relating to a speech I gave at the University of Iowa two Saturdays  
ago.  You can read an extended version of the speech at http:// 
www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17218

I'd give myself a B+ on the delivery. Part of it was the excellent  
audience - maybe a hundred or so student activists from across the  
Midwest, all of them affiliated with the Campus Antiwar Network: very  
smart, very motivated, and very progressive...more left than I had  
anticipated. There were a bunch from Madison; many from UW-Milwaukee  
and Chicago (DePaul, Loyola, UIC, more), one or two from Ann Arbor,  
and so on. Throw in a good handful of non-student progressives from  
town (Iowa City) and the local region and it was just the sort of  
people I like to talk to.

Anyway, here's the cool part. At the end, as I was winding up my big  
fancy address on "Whose Aims in What U.S. Global War Terror?," I got  
to my recommendations for antiwar activists at the end.

Here were my five suggestions:

"1. Be skeptical about getting too involved in 9/11 conspiracy  
theories. Ask me why if you want in the Q and A." [Note: only one  
person cared to object on this...I think the conspiracy diversion may  
be fading out]

"2. Avoid Obamania. Look, I like to make a little fun of it all, but  
it's a big deal. It's going to be huge on your campuses next fall and  
you're going to have to know how to deal with it in a productive and  
tactically astute way.  If you want more details ask me in Q and A  
and I'll give three of the 25 ways in which His Holiness the Dali  
Obama is in fact NOT antiwar and how he Clings to the Guns of Empire.  
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't vote to block the GOP and ‘for'  
Obama if you live in a contested state.  Wherever you live, we need  
to know how to work with and through the Obama phenomenon in a  
constructive way. It offers some opportunities. He's raising and  
surfing a bunch of expectations he's not going to deliver on, and  
that's very important." [Note: I expected Obamanist objections on  
this but there were none.  One activist outflanked me on the Left,  
saying that he thought Obama might be a worse than McCain because the  
former candidate's imperialism is cloaked and the latter candidate's  
imperialism is open].

"3. Avoid what the sociologist Charles Derber calls ‘the election  
trap:' the belief that meaningful long term progressive change can be  
achieved by going into a voting booth for 2 minutes once every 1460  
days." [Note: this was admittedly a very partial statement of  
Derber's concept]

"4. Please stay relentlessly alert to the critical distinction  
between opposing the Iraq War on pragmatic grounds and resisting it  
on principled and moral grounds.  Never let go of the difference  
between opposing it like Obama says because it is a strategic  
imperial mistake and resisting it because it is an imperialist crime."

"5. Call for revolution. I say this for two reasons.  The first  
reason and this is my personal sense...I've been around watching this  
country and world and society for a while now and I have the very  
distinct impression that we cannot meaningfully attain democracy,  
peace, economic, social, racial and gender or any other kind of  
justice or ecological sustainability under the inherently perverted  
priorities of the capitalist profit system. The second reason is more  
‘pragmatic.' History shows again and again that big and meaningful  
reforms --- and we need reforms --- are only attained when elites are  
convinced that the cost of changing is less than the cost of not  
changing. The change only comes when the governing class believes  
you're ready, willing, and able to burn down the house."

Now, here's the neat thing. All of these points elicited nice support  
- verbal agreement, heads nodding, light applause and so  
forth...except the last one.

The last point -"call for revolution" - led to an instantaneous  
standing ovation before I even got into explaining why.

I barely and not all that artfully got these three words out of my  
mouth - "call for revolution" - and the auditorium went a little bit  
crazy.

It got pretty good again after I articulated my sense that we've  
pretty much exhausted the limits of democratic progress (and social  
justice and ecological sustainability and peace and economic  
rationality) under the capitalist "profit system."

These young folks were more than a little receptive to the notion  
that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are about the underlying political  
economy of military capitalism and imperialism.

Later in the Q and A, I met strong agreement when a student-activist  
asked me about the declining state of "the economy" and I observed  
that the phrase "the economy" was routinely used by mainstream  
authorities to cloak the dark reality of the capitalist system, a  
particular historical model of political economy deidcated to  
concentration of wealth and exploitation of the many by the  
privileged few.

Listen up you discouraged thirty-something, middle-aged and senior  
American radicals out there: the post-9/11 clouds have faded. We've  
got some young people who are more than just antiwar.  We've got some  
anti-capitalists, again.

I was reminded of a large number of working-class households I  
visited as a John Edwards canvasser (I know, yes, not all that  
radical...spare me the bitter e-mails; it was totally without  
illusion) last fall. You could (I could, anyway) sense the rage over  
class inequality and imperial wars (often explained by people in  
these homes as "all about the oil") ordered by rich people whose sons  
and daughters are never sent off to die and kill (that privilege is  
reserved for thre workking class). I could feel it bubbling beneath  
the surface of superficially polite discussions over who to vote for  
in the Iowa Caucus.  On a few occasions, I heard ordinary working  
folks say basically that they we were going to have to level this  
society and get rid of "all the rich bastards...or at least cut them  
down to size."

The thing a lot of voters (and more than a few non-voters) I met  
liked about Edwards was his initially insistent rhetoric on what he  
called "the two Americas": on one hand the privileged circles of  
wealth and power and on the other hand the exploited and angry  
working class majority. That distinction makes a lot of sense to  
working-class people - imagine.

Being linked to a presidential candidate got me in the door but often  
the conversation that ensued was about a helluva lot more than  
candidates and electoral politics.

For this and other reasons, I am more optimistic than I've been in a  
while.  I have the distinct impression that many Americans (young and  
not so young) are getting ready for some serious radical action  
beyond the narrow limits of what passes for a democratic political  
culture in the U.S. Prices are going through the roof not just on gas  
but on bread and milk and other basic essentials and its got working  
people more outraged than any time I've seen in a long time. That  
outrage needs progressive channels and radical outlets.

Like the students I spoke with two Saturday nights ago, the working  
class does not seem all that caught up in "the election trap." It  
doesn't harbor many illusions about candidates Obama or Clinton being  
big parts of meaningful solutions. "It's all a big corporate farce,"  
is what one 50-something guy said to me about the presidential race.  
It's about something more significant than switching up corporate- 
vetted elites. People know the problems go a lot deeper than that.  
It's going to take something along the lines of a revolution.

* This essay was written on May First, 2008

Veteran radical historian Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is the  
author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11  
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm). His latest book is Racial Oppression in the  
Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).His next  
book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008)
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