Welcome to the first edition of These Revolutionary Times, a project of The Political Revolution, a Daily Kos group.
Each Sunday, one of us will be taking a look at a small selection of papers, articles, and essays published in various publicly available sources that reflect political change already happening or that we think ought to happen or ought not to happen in 21st Century America. Our goal is to spur people to read these pieces with an open-minded but critical focus and engage here in an interchange of ideas about the issues raised in them.
We expect disagreement. After all, in TPR we don’t always agree among ourselves. Each of us is dedicated to our own unique set of overlapping but also sometimes conflicting political priorities. Out of respectful, constructive disagreement can emerge better ideas, more polished policy proposals, and inspirational goals that unite us in the continuing centuries-long struggle to make America live up to its ideals. Emphasis on respectful and constructive. Personal attacks, grudge-matches, aggressive dogmatism, derailing, and the internet version of screaming serve only to make America’s (and the rest of the planet’s) chronic problems harder to talk about, much less solve.
One disagreement that may arise is over the very name of our series, These Revolutionary Times. Some people consider “revolution” a dirty word. To them, it inevitably means blood in the streets. So let’s get that out of the way from the get-go.
We’re not talking about a revolution that leads to the guillotine or the gulag.
We’re not talking about a revolution that is crammed down people’s throats, but rather one that is built out of our experiences and collaboration. A revolution that recognizes the needs of everyone. A revolution of intersectionality that doesn’t demand this or that group should “wait for its turn.” A revolution which recognizes that matters of race, gender, economics, and environment must be resolved together—without downplaying, denigrating, or ignoring one or another of them—else none of them will be resolved.
Given that perspective, here are four famous Americans for whom revolution was not a dirty word.
• “A revolution is coming—a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough—but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability." ― Robert F. Kennedy (1966)
• “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
• “A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)
• “Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.” ― Joseph Campbell (2004)
Without further preface, here are this week’s selections:
In the 1960s and ‘70s, urban renewal dislocated the poor and communities of color in the heart of many U.S. cities with projects backed by vast amounts of corporate-friendly government spending designed to leverage investments in these neglected areas. The people most devastated by this were not asked for their input on these projects, and when they were compensated at all, it was nowhere near enough to replace what they lost.
That loss wasn’t just the property they owned or rented but quite often the very fabric of their lives. Their social networks and even their families were shattered by these changes forced upon them by technocrats and financiers. It wasn’t that all these planners were malignant destroyers. Many were well intentioned. But they paid scant notice to turning those intentions into projects that included the most vulnerable people affected by the “renewal.”
Today scores of cities are being “redeveloped” and gentrified. And once again, the most vulnerable are often being left out of the picture. Affordable housing has in many places become a joke. In cities from coast to coast, but especially on the coasts, teachers can’t afford to live where they teach, police can’t afford to live where they patrol, firefighters can’t afford to live where they save lives.
At Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine, Philip Conklin and Mark Jay write about Opportunity Detroit—Detroit's glittering revival isn't just leaving most residents behind — it's premised on their impoverishment:
A century ago, Detroit turned itself into a mecca of Fordism. Now, after seven decades of capital flight that cost the city more than 90 percent of its manufacturing jobs, Detroit is being remade again — this time into a mecca of post-Fordism.
There is perhaps no greater emblem of this highly touted turnaround than the $900 million Hudson’s siteproject, which broke ground last month in downtown Detroit. Once the world’s largest department store, Hudson’s closed in the early 1980s, and the city imploded the building about a decade later. At the time, downtown Detroit stood so empty that photographer Camilo Jose Vergara proposed a public art project: “an American Acropolis,” with “a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers . . . left standing as ruins.”
Since the mid-2000s, most of those vacant buildings have been converted into high-end retail and residential space and offices for white-collar firms. The Hudson site — a gift from the city to real-estate mogul and Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert for relocating his company downtown — will follow the same playbook. Gilbert is transforming it into the state’s tallest skyscraper, complete with pricey retail space and hundreds of luxury apartments.
In the national folklore, it is Gilbert — Detroit’s “superhero,” according to the Atlantic — who helped Detroit escape its downward spiral by investing billions in the real estate market when other capitalists scorned it. He now owns at least ninety-five buildings in Detroit and wields immense influence over the city’s future. Even many of his critics admit that he’s had a positive impact. Sure, they say, he owns a huge chunk of downtown and enjoys incredible power over the local economy. But what would Detroit look like without him?
This is a false premise. The choice isn’t between billionaire-led investment and the destitution of the city. On the contrary: the revival spearheaded by people like Gilbert is made possible by, and depends upon, the poverty and dispossession of working-class Detroiters.
•••
The post-New Deal assault on organized labor that began in earnest with the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act—known to workers at the time as the “slave-labor act”—is now in its eighth decade.
To address this assault, the On Labor blog of lawyers, professors of law, law students, and others “is devoted to workers, unions, and their politics. We interpret our subject broadly to include the current crisis in the traditional union movement (why union decline is happening and what it means for our society); the new and contested forms of worker organization that are filling the labor union gap; how work ought to be structured and managed; how workers ought to be represented and compensated; and the appropriate role of government—all three branches—in each of these issues.”
Last week, Andrew Storm—a senior contributor at On Labor and the Associate General Counsel for Service Employees International Union, Local 3BJ1—wrote an essay, Janus Should Lose, and the Justices Know It, on a case soon to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Janus v. AFSCME. If AFSCME loses, it would be worst anti-union ruling in four decades. Public sector employees could choose to quit their unions and not pay dues or fair-share fees, but the unions, financially hamstrung by the decision, would still be legally required to represent them. Here’s Storm:
Most of the coverage of Janus v. AFSCME, like this recent piece in USA Today, simply (and perhaps correctly) assumes that the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court will use the case to overturn Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the 1977 case upholding fair share fees for public sector workers. But, now that the briefs have been filed, it is more clear than ever that those five Justices will have to put their thumbs heavily on the scale for the petitioner, Mark Janus, to prevail. [...]
Again, ordinarily, the conservative Justices would be exceedingly deferential to arguments regarding the rights of States to manage their own affairs.
••• •••
America’s love of mass incarceration, which disproportionately afflicts the poor and people of color, particularly African Americans and American Indians, has generated all kinds of evils from voter suppression to rancid plea-bargaining deals forced onto innocents to an immoral bail system.
One such affliction is the incarceration of people who can’t afford to pay fines, court fees, or charges for their own supervision during probation or parole.
Sarah Gelder, author of The Revolution Where You Live: Stories from a 12,000-Mile Journey Through a New America, and a co-founder of the outstanding Yes! Magazine, has written Yes, Lots of People Go to Jail Because They Can’t Pay a Fine:
Nearly 5 million people are under some sort of parole or probation supervision in the United States. That’s a fourfold increase since 1980, according to anew report released this week by the Columbia University’s Justice Lab. During that time, the requirements for people under judicial supervision have become more stringent. The number of conditions people must adhere to has increased, for example, as has the length of supervision required. As a result, many people wind up in jail—not for committing another crime, but for a technical violation of probation or parole conditions. [...]
In some cases, the infractions that send someone back to jail are as simple as coming late to a meeting with a parole officer or failing to make payments on a fine. Being a person of color increases the odds of winding up in prison for a parole violation, according to a study by the Urban Institute.
One of the most chilling reasons for being sent back to prison is failure to pay a fine or court or supervision fees, payments that can be out of reach for the low-income people most likely to be caught up in the criminal justice system.
In some jurisdictions, about 20 percent of those serving time were incarcerated because they didn’t pay their criminal justice debts, according to a Council of Economic Advisors issue paper. [...]
The Justice Lab report shows that jurisdictions that have taken this route have seen reductions in crime, reductions in spending, and fewer people locked up. A win-win-win, except for those who profit from the prison-industrial complex.
•••
Gar Alperovitz, historian, professor of political economy, and long-time activist who was recently featured in The New Yorker as one of a small band of people who risked years in federal prison to help Daniel Ellsberg release the Pentagon Papers, has written at the democratic socialist magazine In These Times a piece titled A Tale of Two Localisms with a subhead of “While CEOs and other elites set out to remake their cities, grassroots organizers are building a ground-up alternative.” It’s not readable at ITT unless you subscribe, but it’s been republished by Yes! Magazine:
With both houses of Congress and most state governments captured by the Republican Party, those opposed to Trump and Trumpism are looking to cities. This strategic choice is increasingly being made not only by the Left, but by the careful center as well, a fact shown nowhere more clearly than in The New Localism by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, urban policy experts at the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think tank.
Katz and Nowak offer a window into the mindset of elite resistance to Trump. While they don’t like the nationalism and nativism of right-wing populism, their interest lies with leadership by and largely for those at the top. As Donald Trump tears down what remains of the welfare state, local elites are working hard to save their cities.
While this certainly may sound like a good thing, the term “their” is used advisedly: What they are after are high-tech metropolises whose upscale tone and glamour can bypass and obscure the deepening pain of those left behind. A rumbling, anger-driven and increasingly sophisticated alternative, however, based on grassroots experimentation and organizing, suggests the developing possibility of something very different.
Also worth reading:
• From The Nib The Good War: How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience
• From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: In Trump Era, ‘Both Sides’ on Immigration Includes White Nationalists
• From The Root: The Wire, the Best Show in History, Ended 10 Years Ago and Changed TV Forever
ACTION ACTION FEBRUARY ACTION ACTION
• February 5 to 11: Peace advocates are organizing a number of actions this against the military-industrial-congressional complex this month. The campaign to divest from the war machine kicks off from February 5 to 11 highlighting the economic cost of war.
• February 12: Thousands of fast-food cooks and cashiers plan to walk off their jobs and protest nationwide February 12, which is the the 50th anniversary of the historic Memphis sanitation strike, which was a fight for higher wages and union rights led by hundreds of black municipal workers and became a rallying cry for the Poor People’s Campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Workers in the Fight for $15 plan to engage in six weeks of direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience beginning on Mother’s Day as part of the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, uniting two of the nation’s most powerful social movements in a common fight for strong unions to lift people of all races out of poverty.
• February 23: A global day of action against the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo Bay and the continued presence of the military prison on the island is being planned for February 23, the 115th anniversary of the U.S. seizing Guantánamo Bay through a “perpetual lease” forced upon the Cuban people under the Platt Amendment.
• February 24: Working People’s Day of Action, Thousands of working people and their allies will stand up for worker freedoms. You can find local actions at the link. The organizers’ agenda: Fight for the freedom to come together in strong unions. Fight for equitable pay. Fight for affordable health care. Fight for quality schools. Fight for vibrant communities. Fight for a secure future for all of us.