There has been over the last three decades a huge loss of perspective in thw U.S. among sections of the center and center- left. I saw this clearly in the oral arguments last week concerning the University of Texas attempt to maintain its affirmative action enrollment policy
First Texas as the defender is really an odd place for a major decision concerning affirmative action, but one is expected soon and, from the oral arguments a very negative one.
In those arguments, Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Kennedy threw darts at the attorneys for the university, who, in the tradition of the Bakke decision of the lat e1970s, a "compromise" which objectively was a major victory for the enemies of affirmative action, sought to maintain an admission policy which made provision for the inclusion of minorities based on the slippery principle of diversity.
Alito even asked this question. What sense would admitting Latino and Black applicants from “privileged” economic backgrounds over “Asian” and “White applicants “ from average economic backgrounds have and the attorney hemmed and hawed around diversity.
Of course, the original Great Society directives concerning affirmative action for minorities(1965) and women(1967) as clarifications of the Civil Rights law of 1964 banning discrimination in public accommodations, and employment and the administration of publically funded activities including education, was aimed fostering economic integration and social justice for previously excluded minorities. That was the rationale that fell in the Bakke decision, thanks to the attack of conservative justices appointed by Richard Nixon. And that was the argument dredged up and used as a weapon by far more conservative Justices, the appointees of Reagan, and the two Bush presidents.
And as the remnants of affirmative action fall by the wayside, liberals continue to make the diversity argument in a vacuum, neither explaining the social value of ethnocultural diversity to society itself(as against social ,homogeneity, which often leads to repressive social institutions and, even if that is not true, to a traditionalism that produces cultural stagnation,) but simply as a status quo to be maintained.
Isn't it time to say that affirmative action is really about economic integration and social justice. That long excluded minorities, women, and labor for that matter deserve admission and representation in the student bodies, faculties and administrations of all businesses and institutions which accept public funding or receive indirect public subsidies. That is certainly a left interpretation of affirmative action, well beyond what the Great Society administration of Lyndon Johnson had in mind when it issued its original directives in the late 1960s.
But it is far closer to what those directives were trying to accomplish than the present position, which the Roberts Court is expected by most analyists to soon eas Justice Sotomayor said angrily in the oral arguments, to gut. . And this is but one telling example of where the loss of perspective has led us to in 2012
This loss of perspective(represented by accepting of ideological constructs of conservatives, for example, defining rights as “entitlements” along with defending affirmative action in terms of “diversity” rather then social justice categories of people subjected to lonterm institutional discrimination, minorities and women, has produced a practical politics of responding to major losses by fighting for small gains. It has also bred as a backlash on sections of the left a sectarianism that wastes its time in self-righteous attacks on the rest of the left and the center left and sentimental journeys back to anarcho syndicalism.
Among workers and students I find today a real hunger for understanding, for an appraisal of both what is to be done and what can be done. This is evidenced in the exhilaration around the Occupy Movement, the belief that something new is beginning that people are fighting back and being taken seriously.
As an historian, I understand that the unemployed councils and the hunger marches of the early 1930s led by the CPUSA, had a similar effect on large numbers of people, even though the CPUSA at the time was advocating unrealistic confrontationist strategies based on a class against class approach and confusing many workers with internationalist appeals involving China, Nicaragua, Cuba, etc. These appeals which were justified in terms of fighting American imperialism but which had limited value in the fight against home evictions, foreclosures, unemployment, hunger and homelessness.
Fortunately, the CPUSA developed a much better focus for its education and organization of workers and the unemployed by the second year of the New Deal government, and began to win the victories that led the administration to change its emphasis from saving capitalism by bailing out corporations and banks in exchange for serious regulation and limited protections for labor to labor legislation that would enable the trade union movement to rapidly grow and defend itself, and social legislation that would reduce capital’s ability to play various categories of workers against each other and most of all the employed against the unemployed.
Take the question of taxes then and now for example, which the Republican Right uses most effectively when progressive taxation is weakest, as it was in the 1920s and as it has become over the last three decades. There was no system of progressive taxation in the U.S. until WWII enabled the New Deal government to enact progressive income and corporate taxes, so called “wealth taxes,” which both Republicans and Democratic congressional leadership(beholden to corporate interests, had blocked during the Depression. These taxes are so far in the past that most "right Republicans" today probably don't remember the old right slogan, "soak the rich" against such progressive taxation.
President Obama has vowed to end the Bush tax cuts and the Republicans are committed to a broadening and deepening of those cuts in a Romney administration. Ending the Bush tax cuts, which were the second wave of Reaganite cuts, is one step forward after two long steps backward. Repealing the Revenue Act of 1986 and re-establishing graduated progressive taxation on personal and business income is the only way to seriously reduce deficits, which are in effect interest payments to capital, without harming working people.
But mass support must be built for such a program, and such support can only come from both educating working people about what taxes are, and organizing them to support a program of sharply increasing progressive taxes and sharply reducing regressive taxes (property taxes, sales taxes, tolls, licensing fees) a program which would give them more purchasing power and give government more revenue to both reduce deficits and fund programs
A society with rising incomes and greater income equality, with progressive taxation, is the only effective way to both contain deficits while fostering “economic growth.” Those policies in effect worked to achieve relatively high levels of employment, greater overall income equality from the period 1945-1975, even with the deleterious effects of cold war military spending. The Reagan Bush policies of detaxation, deregulation, aggressive union busting and an all out war on social benefits, have produced economic stagnation and spectacular increases in the export of capital and debt
The labor and social welfare advances advances were made initially against a rightwing dominated Supreme Court (1935-1937) who sparked the greatest battle over the influence and size of the Supreme Court in U.S. history. While that battle did not initially change the composition of the Court by expanding its membership or its influence by restricting its non constitutional power of judicial review, it did set the stage for both the Court’s conservative majority’s acceptance of this legislation (fearing the strength of its center-left enemies) and a long-term liberalization of the federal judiciary in both legal theory and practical decisions—a liberalization which has been reversed over the last four decades.
What does this history have to do with what is going on today—or with the issue of affirmative action? The broad left of which we are a part, all segments of the labor movement, are gearing up for a crucial election in which the Republican Right is seeking to regain the presidency and strengthen its power in Congress. We are all in the thicket of the forest, striking at Romney’s and Ryan’s lies, phoning and walking as human truth squads against the National Republican Party.
But what are we for? The Affordable Health Care Act? Yes, we are for the legislation, unlike the sectarians, who simply want to call Obama names concerning the legislation (much like the Republicans) without even spending time on the need for a national health service, a single payer system, which the rest of the developed world has? But Affordable Health Care has both its contradictions and its loopholes for the insurance companies and the pharmaceuticals. We must without attacking the administration educate and organize around the principle that it it is a stepping stone to a social security-Medicare based national system.
And of course, there is the trade union movement, which has dropped to single digits in membership of privately sector unions and will probably drop to pre 1933 single digit levels for the entire labor movement if the right Republicans win. But what should we be calling for today in these last weeks in preparation for an Obama victory.
First a serious commitment to enact the Employee Free Choice Act as a minimum program assuming the Democrats regain control of the House, and a serious national jobs program, not stimulus that can be sabotaged by reactionary state governments but new and updated versions of the Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure, along with a restructuring and expansion of national programs for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, in the tradition of the various cultural agencies.
Infrastructure, education, and culture are first and foremost labor issues. If labor and the left don’t fight for them, capital will take them over, as it did most of the funding for the “bailout” which was necessary thanks to the predatory and corrupt activities which deregulation opened for them. Also, labor has a role to play in the defense of the American public university, not the self-congratulating “public research university” which provides cheap to free research and development for corporate capital while mimicking and burlesquing in its exploitation of debt-ridden students and in Its expansion of parasitic administration and inequalities among various programs, faculty and staff— the favoring of business schools over schools of public administration and general liberal arts schools, the support generally for scientific research the serves immediate corporate interests as against basic scientific research and scholarship in the social sciences and humanities.
Without major increases in public funding, the public sector and the society itself will continue its stagnation and decline. But what are needed most of all, and what only the left today can provide, as a purpose and a plan to create new programs to establish a full employment society, education which serves individuals, families and society at all levels.
If we fail to fight for such policies in a second Obama administration, the door will close on what remains the best opportunity we have had to advance the interests of the working class since the end of WWII. And the forces of reaction will be around to pick up the pieces, as they were in the early cold war years and as they were again in the late 1970s.
