Groups working to put ‘justice’ in ‘criminal justice’ face choices about how to frame the issues and focus their efforts. Many groups join movements out of concern for racial equality or racial justice. And many of us know the criminal justice treats black Americans worse than whites. But I’ll point to a tension in some of these issues – one that shows the benefits of a transformative justice approach. Only by working for transformative justice as its primary goal will leftists achieve what they have in mind.
Category: Activism (Page 23 of 30)
These are posts on activism from the blog Base and Superstructure. This takes many forms. The focus here is on political activism, above all on activist organizing and base-building. One concern is how to build effective movements. There’s also a need to create solidarity with fellow members and build coalitions with other groups. The main aim of good movements is to work together to advance material interests. This section also includes critiques of electoral work, and discussion of how and when to use elections to advance activist goals. Navigating the balance between grassroots work and electoral work is difficult for everyone.
The U.S. left – especially the leftist factions most excited about Bernie Sanders – never figured out how to handle Joe Biden. Sanders folded right away. He endorsed Biden, and then he spent endless hours campaigning for him. Most progressive advocacy groups did the same. As usual, they dropped any and all non-electoral work to focus once again on electing Democrats. Now they’ve got a Biden presidency on their hands.
I won’t remind readers what I think of all this. If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you know I think progressive advocacy groups fuck up by focusing on electing Democrats to office. They fail over and over, and they’re the Charlie Brown of politics.
But as Biden’s inauguration proceeds after the Trumpist insurrection, many issues remain unsettled. What should we expect from the Biden presidency? What kind of job will he do in office? And do progressives have any chance at all of ‘pushing Biden to the left’?
Any reader not living off the grid knows about the Trump insurrection on January 6 (and second impeachment). Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol. And they did so with a bit of help from some police officers and violent conflict with others. The Trump insurrection involved a conflict between QAnon conspiracy theorists, other Trumpists, and the police. Insofar as that’s true, I’m inclined to grab and modify Trump’s ‘very fine people on both sides’ remark.
In the Trump insurrection there were, indeed, very bad people on both sides, i.e., Trumpism and policing. We might say a great deal about how the left should respond. But I’m inclined to say the left shouldn’t directly involve itself in a fight between a Trump insurrection and police officers. Because that’s not really our fight.
We’ve seen a flurry of activity on the left. Yes, this includes activism on a wide range of issues. But I’m not talking about that here. Here, I’m talking about a flurry of new ways to label or describe our actions. The left increasingly uses elevator words to do these things.
What does that mean? The left uses loftier words for its actions than those actions warrant. It inflates the language. During the early months of COVID-19, activists proposed modest, temporary rent subsidies. But they called those subsidies ‘cancel rent.’ Even though the subsidies would do no such thing. I’ll post plenty more examples below. For now, I’ll note that things like this happen a lot these days.
I want to ask why. And not only why, but is it a bad thing? If so, how bad is it?
Earlier this week, I wrote a post on Marx and the ‘rights of man.’ I want to continue the theme by applying it to free speech and the left. Free speech is kind of a hot topic on the left. Some leftists come out pretty hard against something they call free speech. Other leftists, like Noam Chomsky, defend it (they mean something a bit different, as we’ll see).
Part of what makes this issue difficult is that the U.S. far-right poisons the well. It shrouds itself in the language of ‘free speech,’ but it does so dishonestly. It pretends to be persecuted. And we do find some hard anti-speech attitudes within certain ‘left’ identitarian movements. But these elements hold little real power. The left shouldn’t cede the ‘free speech’ label to the political right because of this.
How should we think about it, then?
