Learning from social movements of the past

Great article called "The Commons Wasn't Born Yesterday" about the Farmer-Labor social movement in Minnesota during the Great Depression (which I knew little about) and how their struggle for a Cooperative Commonwealth applies to the present:

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.”

Personal political thought and organizing

I randomly stumbled on this blog entry "How to Think About Politics" by Ryan McCarl which I found interesting and worth posting, especially this excerpt:

Question yourself, your ideology, your vocabulary, and the beliefs behind your beliefs. And also question every overt and covert political statement, every candidate’s speech, every newspaper opinion column, every dinner-table rant, every historical narrative, and even every piece of art or literature. Politics touches everything and everything touches politics. Cultivate your awareness of the political dimension of the world, a dimension that is often hidden beneath the surface of things.

I agree with the author to a certain extent that critical thinking and self-education are important to developing one's political thought. What I believe he's missing is when political thought translate into action. It's great that you continually self-educate yourself on political issues ( I do regularly) but politics aren't simply an individual intellectual exercise. Local, state and federal politics effect our lives in numerous ways. We as citizens must be involved in shaping them towards our common good through organizing and activism or else only the big money interests will dominate our government and its policies. Thus one's political views are irrelevant if you don't do anything about them. It won't matter what you'd like to see happen, if you aren't willing to not only do something about it but reaching out to and motivating others as well to get involved. This is the essence of organizing, bringing people together around shared issues and mobilizing them, and the key to putting political thought into action.

Social movements and "reclaiming public values"

I found this article Reclaiming Public Values in the Age of Casino Capitalism by Henry Giroux really interesting. It speaks to the cultural challenges in the US facing progressive climate justice/green jobs, health care, economic justice/ financial reform activism that have sprouted in recent years in their efforts to create larger social movements. This part was especially poignant:

At this time of national crisis, we need to recognize that the current economic recession cannot be understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself. It is all the more crucial, therefore, to recognize in a post Gilded Age moment that those public spaces that traditionally have offered forums for debating norms, critically engaging ideas, making private issues public and evaluating judgments are disappearing under the juggernaut of free-market values, corporate power and intense lobbying pressure on the part of the country's most powerful financial institutions. Schools, universities, the media, and other aspects of the cultural education apparatus are being increasingly privatized or corporatized and removed from the discourse of the public good. Consequently, it becomes all the more crucial for educators, parents, social movements, and others to raise fundamental questions about what it means to revitalize a politics and ethics that takes seriously "such values as citizen participation, the public good, political obligation, social governance, and community."[2] The call for a revitalized politics grounded in an effective democracy substantively challenges the dystopian practices of the new culture of fear and neoliberalism - with their all-consuming emphasis on insecurity, market relations, commercialization, privatization and the creation of a worldwide economy of part-time workers - against their utopian promises. Such an intervention confronts Americans with the problem as well as challenge of developing those public spheres - such as the media, higher education, and other cultural institutions - that provide the conditions for creating citizens who are capable of exercising their freedoms, competent to question the basic assumptions that govern political life and skilled enough to participate in developing social movements that will enable them to shape the basic social, political and economic orders that govern their lives.