[div class="excerpt"]http://socialistworker.org/2009/09/02/why-we-need-rebels

At the Socialism 2009 conference in San Francisco, two of California's best-known radicals, Mike Davis and David Bacon, led a discussion about the causes of the crisis and the struggle ahead. Here, we publish the presentation and concluding statement of Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, a brilliant social history of Los Angeles, and more recently, the essay collection In Praise of Barbarians.
------------------------------------------------

Why We Need Rebels

September 2, 2009

I TOOK my 15-year-old son last night to the movies in Berkeley to see the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. I kept thinking: is this set in Sacramento?

Here you have the governor and his gang of Republicans, and they're holding the people captive and threatening to shoot them one by one unless their demands for budget cuts and a new stage in the Republican fiscal revolution occurs. And then on the other hand, you have the leadership of the Democratic Party in Sacramento, Karen Bass and Darrell Steinberg, and they're saying "Oh, no, no, no, don't shoot all the passengers, just shoot half the passengers."

If you compare--as the California Budget Project has--the governor's proposals for destroying what remains of the social safety net in this state with the Democratic-dominated Budget Conference Committee in the legislature, you come up with the following proposals: the governor wants to eliminate CalWORKS [the state's version of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families], home support services, healthy families, maternal and child health, domestic violence, rural migrant clinics and poison control.

If these programs are just shut down completely, it would affect a million poor kids, half a million poor families, and doom as many as 400,000 people to the possibility of early death from disease for the lack of access to medical services or home care.

The Democratic response to this has been to say, "Oh no, don't do that--cut these programs by margins of 20 percent to 60 percent." [/quote]


[div class="excerpt"]From Davis' concluding statement: At the end of the day there's no way that some of the largest science-based corporations in the world are going allow a bunch of hick-town, conservative Republican, anti-abortionists to dictate the future of California.

So some kind of constitutional reform is going to happen. I just don't believe that it's likely to happen on the terms of the left wing--if there is such a thing--of the Democratic Party or the California labor movement.

I think what you're going to see is probably an unprecedented mobilization of Silicon Valley and California's advanced industries to try to deal with the central contradictions that such industries cannot coexist with a society reduced to Third World, or Mississippi levels, of social welfare and education.

But I think the deal that will be eventually be cut will offer very little in the way of ameliorating inequality or injustice in California. In my mind, there's very little reason to believe that either the Democrats or labor leaders have the ability to broker this account at all.

If you can't resist these cuts and you can't resist Schwarzenegger, when he should be actually an impotent and easy target, there's no way you're going to engineer a process like the progressive movement did in 1910 and carry on a constitutional revolution in California.

It's not going to happen unless you change the chemistry of the state and change the balance of social forces. That involves uniting and coordinating resistance across the state in high schools, in forgotten suburban communities, in plants full of workers about to be downsized. Until that happens, we can't conceive of any kind of leadership from the Democrats for a larger reorganization or re-modernization of California's political economy or state system.

The same thing, of course, applies on a national scale. I set out the position in an article that I wrote a few months ago that the Obama administration more than anything else is a project for the re-modernization of the role of the state and the corporate economy on the basis of the needs of the most advanced corporations.

I don't know if it's possible or not. I don't know if it can happen at the same time that every resource has been put into saving Wall Street. But it's certainly not a process driven by the needs for immigration reform, for labor reform or for other interests, even though they may be personally embraced by President Obama and his wife. That's irrelevant when there's no pressure from the base--when there's no pressure from the left.

Here I disagree--I'm sure David won't mind--with him and many people in the audience. I think that we have been misled by a belief that movements as movements can self-organize themselves.

Even if you say that the whole legacy of Leninism was a historical disaster, you're still faced with exactly the same questions posed in Lenin's What Is To Be Done. That is, the need to create some organization of organizers that provides a framework for young people willing to make extraordinary sacrifices and dedicate their lives solely to the fight of the poor and the working class. The need organize a cadre of people able to exchange and generalize and coordinate experiences across the struggle so that some kind of genuinely left agenda--which means a pro-working class agenda--becomes possible.

The Bolshevik Party may not be the only route to this. The anarchists in Barcelona did a pretty good job in a different way of bringing together and coordinating a relentless struggle for their principles and the principles of the working class.

But the question is inescapable. You have to talk about this question. You have to talk about the creation of organizations. I'm not arguing to revive the little red book or the thoughts of Leon Trotsky, but we need organizations that can allow such dedication to exist.

Such organizations always existed in some critical tension with the inherent possibilities of sectarianism, dogmatism, the lack of democracy. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bay Area attracted an enormous number of people--at least by my reference point of San Diego--who dedicated themselves to the left. There was an enormous amount of hard work, and they had very bruising, and sometimes shattering, experiences.

I'm not saying that they should abandon common sense or try to reinvent models that were demonstrably wrong. But you still cannot escape the sociological necessity of the need for what we used to call a cadre organization--I'll prefer the euphemism tonight of an organization of organizers--trying to operate democratically internally in relationship to other forces, but able to allow people to live these lives of struggle.

I will say that for your generation, the task is easier now because my generation has completely screwed up your future and left you with so little options. Why the hell not join such an organization?

The final point is that it's not only necessary to build organizations based on principle and program. The left needs to sociologically more resemble that portion of the American working class which demonstrates the greatest militancy and possibility for changing history.

I sit on my porch in San Diego, and it's just extraordinary to me to see the drama that's happening right now on the border. Both the kind of nightmarish aspects of the tens of thousands of people losing their jobs, as the economy has plunged into chaos, but also just the recognition of the possibilities.

This generation will fight. It will change history. We need to speed history up. Much of the left--particularly old farts like me--is used to moving at a glacial pace, talking for 25 years about regrouping the far left. The younger people in the room need to push us out of the way, and begin to act with the urgency that's truly required in this situation.[/quote]

reprinted with permission

or, well, the sister conference in Chicago anyway but then my friend in Chicago backed out and my injuries sort of caught up with me where traveling would have been difficult at the time.

This is the companion piece to the Mike Davis article posted above. I'm a fan of both Davis and Bacon, and don't think their areas of disagreement are large. I'm including a few paragraphs from Bacon's remarks, more can be found at the SW link. It's worth looking at the piece, if only to get a (very) brief overview of the last 50-60 years of AFL-CIO & CTW line on immigration policy.

At the Socialism 2009 conference in San Francisco, two of California's best-known radicals, Mike Davis and David Bacon, led a discussion about the causes of the crisis and the struggle ahead. Here, we publish the presentation and concluding statement of David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants and Communities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/09/03/time-to-be-audacious

It's time to be audacious

"So this is also a question of not only what do we want, but when can we get it--and what do we have to do in order to get there? In some ways, we need to look at our own history to help us to answer that question.

There are three ideas to keep hold of here.

One point is that basically, under capitalism, migration and immigration is a labor supply system. Today, we have trade agreements and neoliberal economic policies that produce the displacement in countries like Mexico or El Salvador, and then we have our immigration policy that regulates the flow of people. That's one part of it. This is what capitalist migration looks like.

The second thing is that, looking at our own movement as working people, especially our labor movement, we have a working-class movement in this country that was organized by immigrants or by the children or grandchildren of immigrants, almost all of it, but in a country in which our working class is very, very, very divided by race and national oppression.

This has been a characteristic of our labor movement for its entire history. The whole 180 years that we've had unions in this country, there's been a question of who does the labor movement belong to? Who does the working class movement belong to? Is it an inclusive movement that belongs to everybody? Or is it only for some people?

And the third thing is how we answer this question--"we" being the labor movement in this country. I'm a labor activist, and was a union organizer for 25 years, so I still think that way. Our attitude towards this question is connected to the political times, the political context--for instance, the attitude of our labor movement towards foreign policy, or its cooperation with employers versus struggle against them."

"Actually, I do agree with you Mike. I think that radicalization, or a large mass movement, doesn't necessarily produce radical change. You need to have a left.

Having come out of the left, I see many things that we did in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, and I don't really want to repeat them, and I don't see why other people should have to, either. When I think about what divided us--members of the organization that I belonged to and members of other organizations--we looked at each other more as enemies than we did the system or the employers.

One lesson I took from being a union organizer is that it's always easier to fight with each other, or to fight with your union, or with some other group out there, because the consequences aren't nearly as terrible as losing a fight with the people who actually have power.

I don't know what the answers are that young people are going to come up with for organizing organizations of professional revolutionaries, or conscious organizers, or whatever the phrase that we want to use. I do think that we have to have some kind of connection with the past."

There is a need for reflection and introspection and retrospective analysis. Normally though, even when this happens it tends to duck the central question of WHY nothing is happening.

Davis and Bacon aren't doing that, which is a good start. To some extent we know the answer -- labor has been thoroughly gutted, the International movement is basically crushed -- but the question still lingers. Conditions in the United States are deteriorating so rapidly, and have been for years, that it seems the bough simply MUST break eventually. But from a different viewpoint it seems that is the one thing that is precluded from happening.

There is much bush hoggin' to be done..