The New Emerging Blank
by Chris Bowers, Tue Feb 01, 2005 at 10:54:57 AM EST
I feel there is a clear connection between the booming SEIU culture and Stern's focus on finding a politics that directly relates to the way people live now. I believe that the SEIU member and activist culture of clothing, poetry and food that Bai describes in his piece can be best understood not as a cult of personality, but instead as just one part of a larger attempt by SEIU to be a meaningful and satisfying part of the lives of its membership. In addition to finding new organizing solutions so that workers can have a voice in their job and improved living conditions, Stern and SEIU seem to work to provide an important psychological element in the everyday lives of its membership. This not only allows the union to be an important service to its members, but that actually allows both its members and the union to become more human. In order to do this, it is always important to find new ways to speak and work to people that relate to the way they live now, rather than the way they lived in the past.
To me, it sounds like the search for a new, emerging solidarity. Then again, since when we find it that word will no longer be accurate, for now I will just call it the new emerging blank.
The problem I am trying to describe is that concepts like solidarity are part of the language of the past that is being used to describe a movement of the past that has lost much of its meaning today. Bai writes:
The economic policy of the Democratic Party, he says, ''is basically being opposed to Republicans and protecting the New Deal. It makes me realize how vibrant the Republicans are in creating 21st-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending 60-year-old ideas.'' Like big labor, Stern says, the party needs to challenge its orthodoxy -- and its interest groups -- if it wants to put forward a program that makes sense for new-economy workers. Could it be that the Social Security system devised in the 1930's isn't, in fact, the only good national retirement program for today's wage earner? Is it possible that competition is the best way to rescue an imperiled public-school system? Stern, I do not believe, is honestly suggesting that we scrap Social Security in favor of privatizing accounts. The point isn't that he accepts conservative economic ideas, but that he believes Democrats and progressives need to develop new ones: This spring, Stern plans to convene an eclectic group of Democrats to begin outlining a new economic agenda. ''We don't want it to be the same old people,'' Stern told me. ''We want people who might say, for example, 'Maybe privatization isn't such a terrible thing for people,' even if that's not what the Democratic Party thinks. Or, for example, 'Wal-Mart isn't the worst thing for the economy after all.' '' He laughed heartily at that one. ''We need to shock people out of their comfort zone and make them think.''. It might be a bit of an extreme analogy on my part, but surely if words and concepts like "solidarity" are no longer an accurate expression of the feelings and desires of those either in or outside of the labor movement, then it must be reasonable to suggest that New Deal and Affluent Society economic policies are also no longer an accurate expression of the economic needs and desires of those both inside and outside of the Democratic Party. This is not to say that conservatives or "New Democrats" are right about economics, but simply that we are unable to articulate our new ideas, or express our new solidarity. Conservatives know how to talk contemporary conservative, but we do not yet know how to talk contemporary liberal, contemporary labor, or contemporary progressive. Perhaps we cannot yet speak these languages because we have not yet developed the ideas, beliefs and emotions they would be used to describe. We drone out horrific butcherings of "Solidarity Forever" because the language of the past does not describe our contemporary experience, however communal it may in fact be.In Jerome's excellent post this morning, he described growing group of partisan Democrats who, at least right now, are united simply in our opposition to the conservative agenda, but have not yet formed a new alternative. We cannot yet speak our new language or fully live our new experience, and this prevents us from finding a more direct way to connect with "people who go to work everyday." While I have complained in the past about the disconnect between labor and the netroots, both SEIU and the netroots seem actively involved in a desperate search for the ideas, words and experiences that will allow us to do so in the future. Much like how everything we seem to do on community blogs or what we did in the Dean campaign was very much about finding new means, words and ideas to connect with people and engage in politics, so to are many of Stern's actions. After all, the nascent SEIU culture described above can also be seen on blogs. More from Bai:
The big conversation going on in Democratic Washington at the moment, at dinner parties and luncheons and think-tank symposia, revolves around how to save the party. The participants generally fall into two camps of unequal size. On one side, there is the majority of Democrats, who believe that the party's failure has primarily been one of communication and tactics. By this thinking, the Democratic agenda itself (no to tax cuts and school vouchers and Social Security privatization; yes to national health care and affirmative action) remains as relevant as ever to modern workers. The real problem, goes this line of thinking, is that the party has allowed ruthless Republicans to control the debate and has failed to sufficiently mobilize its voters. A much smaller group of prominent Democrats argues that the party's problems run deeper -- that it suffers, in fact, from a lack of imagination, and that its core ideas are more an echo of government as it was than government as it ought to be.Virtually everyone in the upper echelons of organized labor belongs solidly to the first camp. Stern has his feet firmly planted in the second.
Personally, I am not sure if I accept this binary distinction, because as far as I can tell it will take a lot of imagination to get our message out and counter the Republican Noise Machine, and just as it will take quite a message machine to disseminate the products of our imagination once developed. Both message and imagination are needed, and like our many inventive ideas, Stern and SEIU are also in the process of exploration. For example, Stern has suggested moving entirely to ballot initiatives rather than working on behalf of candidates. He was talked of labor becoming a sort of left wing Club for growth that challenges a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans. In addition to the extensive overhaul of the AFL-CIO's structure that he is demanding, he is simultaneously making very real alliances with foreign unions. SEIU has done inventive things like run ads in French newspapers to take on a French multinational during an organizing campaign in New Jersey. It is all very forward looking, very pro-reform, very new.If and when we do find our new solidarity, that will not be the word we use to describe it. When we eventually find our ten-word slogan or elevator pitch it will not sound very much like FDR, Kennedy, or Clinton. All of this will take some time, but we are now finding some words, like Fainthearted Faction, and we are finding new experiences like Meetup and citywide collective bargaining. Our new experiences and our new language are out there, and if there is one definition of reform Democrat or reform unionist that I find the most appealing, it is the overwhelming desire to continue the search for the new emerging blank.
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