Social movements develop in the space between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Movements are rooted in the present and stretch out to fashion an alternative future. But the present itself is deeply influenced by the past. In the 1930’s capitalism had failed. The Cooperative Commonwealth vision offered a view—though hardly a road map—to one version of that alternative future. The New Deal welfare state became that alternative future. In promoting the common wealth, Farmer-Laborites helped create something more modest; a state political culture which featured (in U.S. terms at least) an unusually strong emphasis on the common good.
Today we are facing another crises in the system. The neo-conservative drive to “enclose” just about everything has radically weakened public institutions, threatened our common natural resources and damaged our economy. The crisis is both structural and ideological. We need to think and act anew. The Farmer-Labor movement engaged thousands in re-thinking their social world and acting to create a new world. How did they do it? What can reflection on this—and many other social movements—teach us about the dynamics and patterns of movement building.
I think the author makes a great point that what we can learn from this social movement and other previous movements is how they visualized a better world and a coherent alternative to the current grim reality. But more importantly with such lofty visions, how do we put them into action through politics and institution building on the local level. I believe this must be part of any activism responding to the current terrible economy we are suffering through. We can't just settle for band-aid solutions and regulations for the problems that can be revoked and manipulated later. This terrible downturn is the product of 30 years of right wing ideological ascendancy in politics and culture that has warped our collective sense of common good to serve corporate and upper class interests while causing a decline in standards of living for many others in the US.
To challenge and change this, we need a coherent alternative that only a strong, grassroots social movement can bring about. Alternatives not only in terms of policy proposals, but also in terms of how we visualize a better world that can capture the collective imagination. This was true of the vision of a "cooperative commonwealth" that animated and drove the farmer-labor movement as the author put it:
The cooperative commonwealth was a powerfully evocative phrase. Like the commons itself, it was suggestive, but not definitive. The worldview it conjured was roomy—a big tent that could hold working class socialists, urban progressives, rural populists.It is up to us to do that:
As a writer for the Farmer-Labor Leader put it back in 1936, “Don’t envy the old timers who got their experience in building the foundations of the movement. Get in yourself for the building that is ahead.”
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