Searching
For Soul In
The Progressive Wasteland
By Case Wagenvoord
16 April,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Every once in a while I come
across an article whose ideas and prose grab me by the throat and
hold tight until it is ready to let go. This happened to me, recently,
when I read Bernard
Chazelle’s piece, “Saving the American Left: The case
for a New Progressive Creed.”
Chazelle’s thesis is that Neoliberalism has succeeded in executing a contemporary enclosure act that has penned any and all political discourse into a corral called “Economics.” Like all crowded corrals, its ground is a sea of bullshit.
He argues that progressives must kick their way out of this corral and occupy three pastures: empowerment, social justice and decency. Until that happens, we will continue to justify our positions issuing dry position papers while the Right continues to frame the terms of the debate.
The French defined their revolutionary creed in the motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Chazelle calls this food for the soul.
As important as Fraternity is, it is also a potential trap for progressives. It is from Fraternity that solidarity evolves. Solidarity is an act of listening, and too many progressives stumble when they stop listening and start preaching. I become rather impatient when I hear progressives bemoan the stupidity and apathy of the American public. You don’t demean those whom you must empower if you want to have any hope of success. Until we sit down and are willing to listen carefully to the Redneck swilling beer in his shack, the fundamentalist Christian genuinely concerned about America’s moral decay, the soccer mom worried for her children’s future, and the NASCAR dad who might offer you a swig of shine from his Ball jar, we will remain an isolated and marginalized fringe group.
This is why Chazelle insists that we need a creed in order to feed the soul. And soul is what makes the difference between success and failure. Soul adds to thought the fire of poetry and music, and every successful movement must have both. What would the Civil Rights movement have been without the strains of “We Shall Overcome” filling the air? How much drier would it have been without Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream speech?” Every movement must have its poets, its minstrels and its madmen. It is not enough to quote statistics or to formulate positions.
Chazelle points to what he calls the “End of the Political,” which he describes as the “denial of human agency in the regulation of economic forces.” Neoliberals have sold us on this falsehood by successfully marketing two false premises. First, they have convinced us that economics is a science best left to the “experts.” Economics in not a science, it is a hodgepodge of ideologies that its high priests treat as scientific truths. Scientific hypothesis are those which can be proven or disproved in controlled experiments. Such controlled experiments are beyond the capabilities of the economist.
The second false premise is that the historical development of feral corporatism represents a destiny brought to fruition a benevolent Almighty who is busily dumping his derivatives. The short answer to this is that there is no destiny; there is only a blind momentum driven by ego, greed and stupidity, punctuated by occasional bubbles of decency that make life bearable.
To neoliberals, the market behaves as nature does, always seeking a state of balance. (This is true of nature, if you factor out humans.) The analogy falls apart because the market holds within it one variable that nature lacks—sustained greed. Greed in nature is short lived. The wolf greedily devours its prey until it is sated. Then it returns to its den for a long nap. The market is never sated. However, were we to teach a wolf how to sell short, nature would spin completely out of balance in no time at all.
So, here we are, a one-party country in which all three branches of government are corporate employees. The corruption is so rampant and so deep that it seems near impossible that anything will change.
The only saving grace is that corruption has a tipping point when it becomes so oppressive that the people rise up and say, “Enough!”
But this ain’t going to happen until the Progressive movement finds its soul. When this happens, we will take our cymbals and timbales, and like the prophets of old stand outside the city walls raging at the king within. At first, we will be marginalized as half-crazed by the fully-crazed pimps of Babylon within the walls. But, in time the message will penetrate. But it will not be a message couched in the dry prose of platforms and position papers. It will be a message that flies on the wings of poetry and music. Position papers spell out ideas; poetry propels them.
All we can do is cling to the slender hope that our poetry is yet to emerge. In times like this, it is tempting to look to the past for salvation. We remember the music of the Sixties, the peace and civil rights movement, Woodstock and the Summer of Love. It was a time of passion and poetry that will never repeat itself. There is no telling from where the poetry and passion that will sing to this age will come. Most likely it will arise out of the favelas of the Third World, or out of the food riots that are sweeping Asia and the Middle East. It may come from an oil-starved populace when it realizes the extent to which its leaders have lied to it. It may have emerged already, and we are not yet ready to recognize it.
I once closed a recent post with a quote from I.F. Stone that bears repeating:
The only fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing—for the sheer fun of it—to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
Revolutions begin with passion. Their ideology is an afterthought.
A system is collapsing, and nobody knows what will arise from its rubble. All we know for now is the smell and the sound of structural and systemic failure. Our leaders are tap dancers in a burning theater, tapping gamely away with frozen smiles on their faces, denying the fire even as its flames engulf them.
Case Wagenvood blogs at http://belacquajones.blogspot.com
and welcomes comments at Wagenvoord@msn.com.
