Fresh Start For the Left: What Activists Would Do If They Took the Social Sciences Seriously
by G. William Domhoff, March 2005 -  abridged version, click on the link for the full text -
The failures of the American left are not in its egalitarian values, but in the means it uses to realizes those values. This document suggests the strategies the left could follow in the United States if it took the findings of the social sciences more seriously than it currently does. There are links throughout to other documents on this site that provide greater depth on specific topics, and an annotated bibliography at the end.

Background/Context
Due to the setbacks suffered by activists because of the Nader presidential campaign of 2000, the aftermath of September 11th, the invasion of Iraq, and Bush's reelection in 2004, perhaps more new activists will find what the social sciences have to say of more interest. These several setbacks were all the more disheartening for activists because the American left seemed headed for a revival after a long drought that began in the mid-1970s at the latest. Hope sprang anew in 1999 with the creation of the Teamsters and Turtles coalition, which generated massive demonstrations and shut down the WTO meetings in Seattle. This surge of new hope was reinforced by the excitement generated by Ralph Nader's presidential campaign on the Green Party ticket in 2000, which seemed at one point like it might receive as much as 8-10% of the vote and lead to a viable left third party.

But as so often in the past, the hopes were soon dashed. The Teamsters, and most other bread-and-butter unions, went their separate ways from the environmentalists once again. Then the small outbursts of property damage and physical confrontation with police in Seattle came to be the dominant features of subsequent anti-WTO protests in Québec City and Genoa, especially in the eyes of the media, leading to the further alienation of the labor unions, the death of a protestor in Genoa at the hands of the police, and widespread public rejection of the demonstrators. Meanwhile, the Nader campaign bitterly divided most segments of the left into warring camps, drawing the opposition of most feminists, civil rights leaders, and environmentalists, and ended up with a meager 2.7% of the vote.

By early 2001 the American left was back to where it started from in 1999, only to be further marginalized by the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11th that caused new outbursts of patriotic nationalism and decreased any tolerance for the property destruction and attacks on police that had come to epitomize global justice demonstrations. The mobilization of large-scale anti-war demonstrations in early 2003 raised hopes once again, but Bush ultimately ignored those efforts and went to war anyhow. Then a new surge of leftist energy went into the attempt to defeat George W. Bush in 2004, but all to no avail, and the basic problems of the left remain unresolved.

This recent cycle of rise, decline, and new hope repeats the basic pattern of American left politics throughout the past century, although the momentum sometimes lasted a little longer in the past and included some notable successes, such as women's suffrage, industrial unions, and greater civil rights and opportunities for people of color, women, and gays and lesbians, as well as new environmental laws that cleaned up many waterways and improved air quality in some parts of the country. But even given these sporadic successes, the American left never has been able to attain its overriding goal, which is to build itself into a larger movement for greater economic equality and social justice.

Could the left do better? This document suggests it could if it took the findings of the social sciences seriously. The problem is not the egalitarian values that underlie the left and energize the activists who so often spearhead important social movements, but the methods by which leftists have tried to realize their values. They have made many wrong choices in terms of the strategies that could lead to a larger and more effective left, and the result is one disappointment after another despite promising starts and much public support for egalitarian values.

Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that activists will ever take social science findings seriously. Despite the strong intellectual orientation of most leftists, they seem to prefer high-level theorizing in philosophy and history, usually based on new interpretations of classic texts, to the mundane results of empirical studies using methods they often criticize. Some express contempt for what they call "bourgeois social science" or "positivist social science." Some postmodernists even dismiss the social sciences as just another "narration," or maybe another myth, in a fragmented and decentered world. Why so many leftists reject the social sciences for one reason or another is a bit of a mystery.

What follows are ten key points that would put the left on its way to a more sustained movement.

#1. The People Are Not Bamboozled
Faced with their many failures to convince even a significant minority of the American population to act in ways that they assume are in the best interests of the overwhelming majority, many leftists tend to blame this lack of success on the fact that most people do not understand the nature of the social system or their class interests. These failures on the part of ordinary citizens are said to be due to the overwhelming ideological and persuasive powers of the capitalist class and its ideological allies. Although the argument is cast in terms of concepts like "false consciousness," "ideological hegemony," "regimes of power/knowledge," or "cultural logics," it says in effect that people are being bamboozled or brainwashed by the powers that be. Thanks to the sophistication of this argument, as legitimated by famous theorists and philosophers such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, leftists seldom consider the possibility that the solutions they offer are rejected by people because they are unworkable, or might put current freedoms and rights at risk, or could even make things worse for the poorest and most marginalized people.

Contrary to the theorists of consciousness who explain away left failures, many studies in social psychology and sociology demonstrate that what people do makes sense in terms of the situation in which they find themselves. They may not understand all the details of the close working relationship between big business and government, or how and why markets currently work to the great advantage of capitalists, but they know full well they are being ripped off, and they fully believe that the circumstances they find themselves in are not fair. Numerous polls reveal that they would like to see a wide range of changes, including government guarantees of a job, a higher minimum wage, better health and safety provisions, and a government-supported health care system, all of which would "reduce the rate of exploitation," to borrow a term from Marxism.

Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up.

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It is these alternative issues, both positive and negative, rooted in their own lives and experiences, not a false consciousness created by the capitalists' ideological hegemony, that explain why most Americans don't rebel -- or even vote their pocketbook -- most of the time.

#2. Third Parties Are Not Structurally Viable
It is rare to find a leftist who does not advocate one or another third party. If it is not the Green Party, then it is the Labor Party, not to mention the perennial Marxist-Leninist third parties (usually inspired by Trotsky or Mao) backed for decades by highly visible leftists. But cross-national and historical studies of electoral systems show beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are clear structural reasons why third parties make absolutely no sense in the United States. A vote for a left party truly is a vote for the Republican Party because the United States has a single-member-district plurality system. Such systems lead inexorably to two pre-electoral coalitional parties wherever they exist, although there is an occasional regional or ethnically based third party that survives in some countries.

But the situation is even worse in the United States because of the tremendous pull of the presidential elections, which are a giant single-member-district plurality election based on the whole country. The power that goes with the presidency means that anyone serious about contending for power cannot afford to allow its rivals to win, and thus there is an even greater tendency to form pre-electoral coalitions. Third parties are therefore even smaller and more ephemeral in the United States than in countries with parliaments and electoral districts.

Furthermore, there is solid evidence that the Democratic Party now could be transformed into a nationwide liberal-labor-left party thanks to the increasing use of primaries and the successes of the civil rights movement in forcing the racist white Southern

#3. Create a Separate Identity Within the Party
If we listen to what leftists say about why they prefer a new third party to the Democrats, the issues seem to concern compromise and corruption. They point to the many examples of sordid bargains that liberal Democrats made in the past, such as those with Northern machine Democrats and racist Southern Democrats. They also inveigh against the caution of many current Democrats.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the key structural issues that shape the electoral system against third parties and at the same time make it possible to enter Democratic Party primaries. Instead, the objections to the Democrats have to do with being identified with lesser evils, which are in the realm of social psychology. We therefore turn to social psychology to see if it has an answer to this dilemma.

Social psychology suggests that individuals with strongly held values tend to see most people as trimmers, backsliders, and hypocrites, and to want as little to do with them as possible. Strong moralists therefore have a tendency to withdraw from mundane routines and to develop a physical space or organizational form of their own. Ironically, then, the great strength of egalitarian activists -- the energy they derive from their moral purpose -- may be a hindrance to taking the structure of the electoral system seriously. Strongly held egalitarian values may lead leftists to downplay or ignore the structural arguments, so they can have a place of their own. If this analysis is correct, then the need is to create a separate identity that allows leftists to live up to their ideals while at the same time operating -- but only when they are doing partisan politics -- within the Democratic Party. So what should egalitarian activists do in terms of future elections if and when the issues, circumstances, and candidates seem right? First, they should form Egalitarian Democratic Clubs. That gives them an organizational base as well as a distinctive new social identity within the structural pathway to government that is labeled "the Democratic Party." Forming such clubs makes it possible for activists to maintain their sense of separatism and purity while at the same time allowing them to compete within the Democratic Party.

This strategy of forging a separate social identity is one reason for the success of the right wing within the Republican Party. By joining organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, highly conservative people can define themselves as Christians who have to work out of necessity within the debased confines of the Republican Party. That is, they think of themselves as Christians first and Republicans second, and that is what egalitarians should do, identify themselves primarily as egalitarians and only secondarily as Democrats.


#4. Social Movements Yes, Property Destruction or Violence No
Leftists are not only distinguished by their strong egalitarian values, but by their commitment to social movements. Both the social sciences and 20th century American history support this commitment. Social movements are necessary to social change even when there are democratic elections. They get people out of their routines. They dramatize issues. They show that the powers-that-be can be challenged.

But not just any social movement accomplishes these goals. It has to use strategic nonviolence to be effective.

#5. Planning Through the Market, Not Non-Market Planning
Convincing leftists to adopt a combined electoral/social movement strategy that abandons third parties and the possible use of property destruction or other forms of physical attack would be a difficult task. Right now there are few leftists who are not for one or another of these self-defeating approaches.

But changing the left's key message probably will be even more difficult. It involves nothing less than facing the fact that non-market planning (which is what is usually meant by the term "socialism") does not work. Economics, sociology, and political science establish this point in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it is still too difficult if not impossible to collect all the information, and make the fast adjustments to changing preferences, that would be needed for central planning in a complex economy, no matter how community-based it was at its starting point. In addition, no one has yet devised methods for analyzing the inadequate information that can be gathered. Then there are all the problems of keeping a bureaucracy responsive, even one that held frequent meetings with neighborhood councils and work-site employee councils, as still nicely summarized in the old phrase, "who says organization says oligarchy."

The impossibility of centralized, non-market planning, even within a democratic society, I am asserting, means that it is necessary to abandon the economic plan that has been seen as the solution by most egalitarians for the past 150 years. It's the "s" word, socialism. Because no one mentions socialism any more, what with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with China taking the capitalist road, in the form of "Market-Leninism," it's hard to know just how many leftists still think socialism would work in a fully developed democratic economy. But it's my guess that many still hold out some hope, if only because there seems to be no other alternative. The problem is embodied in the label that many leftists now have adopted for themselves, "anti-capitalists." But what does "anti-capitalist" mean?

Many leftists will be skeptical, but a highly plausible new direction for bringing about greater economic equality and more access to common property is offered by planning through the market. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets.

There is thus no need for one big centralized planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets. In the past, egalitarians could not think of these interventions as planning tools for two reasons. First, they are currently used by the corporations that dominate the government for their own short-run interests. Second, most egalitarians couldn't see the possibilities for any kind of decentralized market-based planning because they thought of planning as central planning.

According to this way of thinking about planning, then, the big issue is winning political power from the corporate-conservative coalition, which is another reason why challenges in the electoral arena are such an important dimension of a full-scale egalitarian movement within a democratic society. That is, taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulations could be used by egalitarians to do planning through the market if they had enough power in the government. The economic issues are not all that arcane. The solutions are there. But the political power has been sorely lacking.

Nor is it necessary that corporations have all the rights of real persons they now enjoy under American law thanks to the governmental power their owners have exercised. They need not be able to enter into the political arena as if they were actual people. Their charters could be limited to the legal rights that are needed for them to buy, sell, and manage a workforce. They could be legally obligated to obtain licenses, based on rigorous standards, before they could market their products.

Furthermore, the government could own enterprises that compete in the market, perhaps replacing some large privately owned corporations. It is possibilities such as this that make corporate leaders despise even the slightest government involvement in the economy as a bad precedent. Call these government-owned enterprises "competitive public enterprises" to make them all the more congenial with "market ideology" and all the more upsetting to those who champion only "private enterprise."


The heresy suggested here is for egalitarians to admit that markets can have the virtue of being a decentralized form of coordination and control that does expand opportunity for most people. Yes, they also can make it possible for the owners of income-producing private property to gain the power to dominate government, as is currently the case in the United States. But by their very nature they leave open the possibility that government can limit the power and rewards of ownership through taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation if a strong left-oriented movement could win political power. Government also can create competitive public enterprises to compete with privately owned companies, and it can tax incomes and wealth far more than it is doing now without disturbing the functioning of the market.

On balance, then, markets are more useful than not, and can provide a starting point for developing many new egalitarian policies and programs that have only been touched upon briefly here. It therefore makes sense to talk about reconstructing the "market system" and figuring out ways to socialize and democratize it. It makes sense to think about Congress setting out general plans for key issues like energy conservation and health care, and to use current agencies to carry out these plans.

#6. Redefining Who Is Us and Who Is Them
Social scientists have done a great many studies documenting the inequalities and injustices of the class-based social structure of the United States. However, the evidence for class domination and extreme inequality doesn't mean that it makes good political sense to frame political conflict primarily in terms of one economic class against another in trying to bring about egalitarian social change. It tends to reduce political struggles to economic issues, and to create problems of defining who is us and who is them that have led to endless arguments about who is a worker, who is a petite bourgeois, and who is a capitalist.

If the problem is developing new policies and gaining political power, which it is, then the struggle should be framed from the start as a conflict over power and values, not as a struggle between social classes. The in-group should be all those who come to embrace the program of the egalitarian movement, and the out-group should be all those who oppose such changes. If the conflict is framed in this way, an egalitarian coalition has a chance to win over the moderates, neutrals, and independents who currently identify with capitalists, and who might be offended by blanket criticisms of them as a class. It may even attract dissident members of the capitalist class who transcend their class interests, and in the process become very valuable in legitimating the movement to those in the middle who are hesitant to climb on board.


In addition, a class framing is problematic because many egalitarians who agitate for social change do not come from the working class, however broadly it is defined, which makes them look like they are practicing a form of noblesse oblige. They often come from professional or wealthy families, obtain good educational credentials, and find work in or around university settings. Rather than claiming that they speak in the name of the working class, which rings hollow with most blue-collar and white-collar workers, they should put forth a program based on planning through the market that alters the class structure, and then try to develop a value-based coalition that includes everyone willing to support it.

Given the changing social composition of the Democratic Party, and the need to avoid a class framing of the in-group and the out-group, it is the "corporate-conservative coalition" and the Republican Party that should be the designated opponents of egalitarian activists. Indeed, they are the most clear, vocal, and organized opposition to any form of progressive social change, as evidenced by their economic and social policies since at least the 1970s. Framing the general conflict in terms of egalitarians versus corporate conservatives, and of Democrats versus Republicans in the political arena, has two distinct advantages in addition to avoiding a demonization of "the rich" or the capitalist class.


#7. Keeping Leaders Accountable
Courageous and farsighted leadership is as essential to an egalitarian social movement as any other collective human enterprise, but leaders can destroy the movement and undermine its goals in the process of building it if there are not mechanisms to hold them accountable from the start. On this score, leftists need to face another brutal fact. They too often end up with undemocratic organizations led by charismatic leaders who control just about everything. It is therefore absolutely necessary for left organizations to adopt from the outset the kind of organizational procedures that make it possible for members to keep leaders accountable and to replace them when members feel it is necessary.

Consider the case of Cesar Chavez, the inspiring nonviolent leader of the United Farm Workers, who gave organizers room to be creative and built a multi-ethnic coalition of farm workers. After a series of victories in the mid-1970s, and the election of a liberal Democratic governor who pushed for a California Farm Labor Board, it looked like the United Farm Workers were on the verge of major success. Contracts were signed with a few liberal growers, and some of the more conservative growers signaled that they might be willing to bargain after years of resistance.

But the union faltered badly between 1978 and 1983 for several reasons. Partly this is because it had to fight off an attempt by the Teamsters to move into parts of agriculture through arranging sweetheart contracts with growers. It also had to deal with a right wing Republican governor elected in 1982, who appointed a vicious agribusiness lawyer as the head of the farm labor board. However, the story of the failure is much more complicated and tragic than most activists imagine, and it began before the Teamsters and the Republicans created problems. In fact, Chavez himself played the major role in undermining the union's victories because he could not delegate and share power. He could not abandon his all-powerful leadership role to create a normally functioning organization in which many people playing specialized roles had significant decision-making power. He could not resist giving the best jobs to his friends and relatives.

Long-time co-workers were forced to take part in a form of encounter group called the "Synonon Game," in which they were unmercifully criticized and browbeaten. They found themselves fired and ordered out of the union's compound in a small mountain town at a moment's notice, sleeping in their cars for a few days until they recovered from the shock. Loyal legal aides who were trying to negotiate contracts were accused of disloyalty and asked to resign. The bargaining team fell apart, and most of the growers took advantage of this opportunity to return to an oppositional stance. As sociologist William Friedland put it as an expert on labor organizing who followed the whole history of the farm worker struggle: "Cesar Chavez created the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez destroyed the United Farm Workers."

Then there's the matter of how Students for a Democratic Society degenerated into a series of Marxist-Leninist sects. This story has been brilliantly told by political scientist Richard J. Ellis in The Dark Side of the Left, a book which makes for very painful but necessary reading. It shows that ideas about resorting to violence surfaced among some SDS leaders long before the 1966-1967 period, when many leftists grew discouraged about the apparent minimal influence of the anti-war movement. There's also the disgraceful case of how pro-violence Black Power advocates took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There are also examples of how allegedly leaderless and egalitarian feminist organizations developed hidden power structures due to the "tyranny of structurelessness."

To overcome these problems with undemocratic leadership, there has to be (1) a set of organizational rules that are ratified by the founding members; (2) an elected leadership council, and (3) the ability to replace the top leader or leaders by a vote of the membership. This is the "constitutionalism" emphasized by liberals and often ignored to their own peril by egalitarians.

In addition, the movement has to be made up of a network of organizations, not one big organization. This makes it less likely that a few top leaders will take over everything. It also gives individual activists more freedom because they can register their dissatisfaction by leaving one organization and joining another. This freedom helps to keep organizational leaders more responsive. In addition, a network of organizations is the best way to accommodate the multiple social identities that inevitably will be present in a movement based on a coalition of groups.

#8. Foreign Policy
For a complex set of reasons that begin with the fact that egalitarians naturally tend to be more internationalist than other Americans, foreign policy has been a real can of worms for leftists, dividing them among themselves and often leading to tensions with the more nationalistic Americans they are trying to reach. Historically, the basic stance of the American left has been to oppose every policy stance taken by the American government

Instead of starting with near-automatic opposition, an egalitarian foreign policy should be based on an attempt to realize egalitarian values to the greatest extent possible, independent of what the United States government is proposing. For the foreseeable future, this means human rights for everyone in every nation-state, the right to have and participate in a nation-state, and the greatest possible equality that can be achieved within a reconstructed market system based on planning through the market. Once egalitarians have staked out this position based on their own values and analysis, they then can support, modify, or reject American foreign policy initiatives, rather than simply opposing all of them as imperialistic.

The area of human rights is the best starting point to make the case for a more differentiated stance toward American foreign policy. Egalitarians believe that everyone should have the right to belong to the religion of their choice, to organize political parties, and to join trade unions. They believe there should be equality for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians. Although many of these values are also embodied in European and American ideals, that does not make it ethnocentric for Americans to advocate them for everyone. Nor does it imply that Europeans and Americans are somehow naturally more enlightened. After all, it took many hundreds of years of world wars, civil wars, religious persecution, ethnic conflicts, race riots, and civil rights movements for some degree of religious tolerance and democratic participation to emerge in Europe and the United States.

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Egalitarians have to oppose the American government on virtually all of its foreign economic policies, but not simply as anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, or opponents of the WTO. They have to challenge these policies through the advocacy of a reconstructed market system that can make use of relatively free trade among countries with developed economies, while providing aid, subsidies and protections for the economies in developing countries. Most importantly, they have to work to elect a congressional majority of egalitarian Democrats and at least a moderate Democrat to the White House. Under those circumstances, foreign economic policies would reflect the possibility of a more egalitarian market system. Otherwise, American foreign economic policy will continue to be an expression of the low-tax, anti-government policy regime that is also the Republican vision for the United States. The best thing that egalitarians could do to help the rest of the world is to be successful in domestic electoral politics.

#9. A More Open Stance on Religion
Just as Leftists tend to be more internationalist than most other people, they also tend to be more secular. They rightly note, with annoyance, that many members of fundamentalist Protestant churches are a key part of the Republican right. Some hold the belief that organized religion would whither away in a more egalitarian social structure, as most famously stated in Marx's comment that religion was the "opiate of the people," to which he also added, "the sigh of the oppressed heart."

Secular activists of course know that there are many religious progressives as well. Some of the major activists of the 19th century came from organized religion, with a strong emphasis on the Social Gospel in the case of many Protestants who took the Bible as literally as their conservative counterparts do today. In the 20th century, Quakers, religious Jews, and members of African-American churches in the South were among the leaders in the feminist, union, and civil rights movements. In addition, many of the recent anti-corporate activists, anti-war activists, and supporters of Central American refugees are from liberal Protestant denominations and parts of the Catholic Church.

Still, there often seems to be the presumption in leftist circles that religiously oriented progressives will become more secular over time, and that religion will decline in importance. The attitudes that follow from this implicit assumption make the religiously oriented people into second-class citizens within progressive movements.

But religion is not going to disappear because it is one key way in which many human beings search for two separate but overlapping goals: meaning and community. It is as old as the species and is likely to be around in one form or another until the species vanishes, even if a majority of people in some countries (as in parts of Western Europe today) lose interest in it. Religions offer answers to puzzling and painful questions relating to death, guilt, and the reasons for conscious self-awareness. In its modern forms, it also tries to reproduce the cooperation, intimacy, and common bonds that were the basis of the small hunting and gathering groups in which human beings lived for tens of thousands of years. It cannot be stressed enough that religious communities create an automatic in-group that is separate from the workplace and political arena -- a respite from competition, office politics, and bosses.




Conclusion
Transform the Democratic Party through the creation of Egalitarian Democratic Clubs. Build social movements that use strategic nonviolence in a creative fashion to win over neutrals, divide the opposition, discredit government authorities, and reassure police officers about their personal safety. Advocate extensive economic planning through a reconstructed market system that aims for greater economic equality, worker rights, and environmental protection. No one of these points is original or earthshaking. Taken together, however, they add up to a package that never has been tried. They unite the electoral and non-electoral. They by-pass the structural impossibilities of third parties and non-market central planning, and they eliminate the self-defeating resort to violence. They are the central pieces that would make it possible for a new egalitarian movement to create alliances with mainstream liberals and work with elected liberal politicians on some issues.

I have asserted more than I have argued, and I have only briefly summarized the evidence. Nor have I made use of the devastating conclusions that I think can be extracted from a comparison of the American left and the American right since the 1950s, which shows that the American left took all the wrong turns at key moments, while the American right in effect followed the social science lessons to the letter in its rise from the ashes.


Annotated Bibliography  on the original site.