Some Thoughts on Politics
I’m supportive of politicians who are competent and make strengthening the public realm their main object. I admire Singapore, which has a first-class civil service and invests in public goods and services. Denmark may do this even better. Do their experiences apply to the USA, I wonder? The problems of scaling up may argue for devolving power here so that regions can call their own shots and build political orders to suit their situations.
California is ripe for this. Devolving power would also support goals of regional resilience and stewardship. Regions should be defined by their watersheds. Nature and urbanity should be limiting factors on their growth, ensuring that settlement is human-centered and nestled within nature, not out of scale with humanity and disregarding of the environment.
In Walter Benjamin’s early-1930s talk, “The Artist as Producer,” he critiqued leftwing intellectuals, sympathetic to the proletariat but separated from it by their bourgeois roots and their unwillingness to become activists and commit their writing to the proletariat’s cause. Benjamin visited Moscow and was tempted to move there, but didn’t. He must have wondered if he do the work he wanted to do under that regime. In the end, his work was what kept him going. I sympathize. I’m as wary of revolution as I am of reaction.
Even bourgeois revolutions were prone to recreate the aristocracy they supplanted and suppress democracy when their interests are threatened. But assertions about the bourgeoisie conflate it with “organized wealth.” I think a distinction should be made between community-based, local- and region-serving businesses, and these inevitably much larger organizations that so often engage in predatory, monopolistic, or financially dubious activities that go largely unchecked thanks to their aggressive lobbying. The pandemic has exposed the scandal of for-profit hospitals, for example: owned by private equity and forced out of business by private equity owners who refuse to shore them up, having mired them in debt. We sell off the public realm at our peril, we learned; now we need to take it back.
The bourgeoisie have a stake in their communities, because serving local, communal needs is their reason for being. Even some fairly large, cross-regional firms manage to maintain this ethos. They’re content to accept natural limits on their size and reach; “organized wealth” knows no such constraint. Its destructiveness to community-based activities and institutions is evident. Reform in the U.S. invariably seeks to curb powers that subvert democracy. The bourgeoisie has often pushed for this. Elizabeth Warren is a bourgeois candidate par excellence, a classic reformer. I don’t agree with all of her policies; she too conflates the bourgeoisie with “organized wealth,” but her emphasis on reform is appropriate. In 2020, it’s the issue.
I favor evolution and reform. Revolution and disruption make me wary, based on history and personal experience. I sympathize with peaceful protests like Occupy and Hong Kong’s Umbrella movement, and agree with Manuel Castells that despite their apparent failures, they inevitably shift opinion in their direction. A program in outline like the Green New Deal works similarly.
There’s nothing wrong with setting out ambitious goals and then working out the practicalities of getting there. A pandemic speeds this up by slowing life down sufficiently for people to reconsider things and at the same time, see through much of what is palmed off on them as news and information. The new reality ensures that what’s actually possible and what isn’t are both on view. Even before the pandemic, “disruption” was revealed as an IPO racket. Rethinking and regulation will follow, reflecting the public interest.
The arc of my life has seen the rise and decline of organizations set up to prevent another World War. The ethnic diversity of my youth gave way to all-subsuming categories. In California this is less of an issue, but it remains an aspect of a political divide whose latest manifestations are regressive and ugly, not to say unproductive. But the task ahead of us is not just to restart the progress we were making, but to grapple with issues — a threatened planet and divisive regional competition — that will hobble us if left unresolved.
Which is to say that evolution and reform are genuinely progressive, but demand a willingness to learn from experience and not just lurch forward on the basis of ideology or “genius.” So much that’s put forward as progressive is half-baked and unexamined. Its sledgehammer nature or barely hidden inside dealing give it away, and voters are starting to see this and act on it.
Activism in relation to evolution and reform is rooted in a constant sifting of polis and planet — what humanity is doing and the impacts of those activities. Activism take this seriously. It sees progress in light of it — an agenda for the future to guide the present. It looks to the public realm to focus on it and provide the political will to invest in societal transformation. If the planet needs a new operating system, as seems likely, only the public realm can bring it into being. If it’s left to fester or made even worse, then that transformation will be precipitous — revolutionary and disruptive in the most terrible sense.
