Obama needs a protest movement

Obama needs a protest movement

by Frances Fox Piven

The Nation - 11/15/08
this article appears in the Dec. 01, 2008 issue

https://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/piven

The astonishing election of 2008 is over. Whatever else
the future holds, the unchallenged domination of
American national government by big business and the
political right has been broken. Even more amazing,
Americans have elected an African-American as
president. These facts alone are rightful cause for
jubilation.

Naturally, people are making lists of what the new
administration should do to begin to reverse the
decades-long trends toward rising inequality,
unrestrained corporate plunder, ecological disaster,
military adventurism and constricted democracy. But if
naming our favored policies is the main thing we do, we
are headed for a terrible letdown. Let's face it:
Barack Obama is not a visionary or even a movement
leader. He became the nominee of the Democratic Party,
and then went on to win the general election, because
he is a skillful politician. That means he will
calculate whom he has to conciliate and whom he can
ignore in realms dominated by big-money contributors
from Wall Street, powerful business lobbyists and a
Congress that includes conservative Blue Dog and Wall
Street-oriented Democrats. I don't say this to
disparage Obama. It is simply the way it is, and if
Obama was not the centrist and conciliator he is, he
would not have come this far this fast, and he would
not be the president-elect.

Still, the conditions that influence politicians can
change. The promises and hopes generated by election
campaigns sometimes help to raise hopes and set
democratic forces in motion that break the grip of
politics as usual. I don't mean that the Obama campaign
operation is likely to be transformed into a continuing
movement for reform. A campaign mobilization is almost
surely too flimsy and too dependent on the candidate to
generate the weighty pressures that can hold
politicians accountable. Still, the soaring rhetoric of
the campaign; the slogans like "We are the ones we have
been waiting for"; the huge, young and enthusiastic
crowds--all this generates hope, and hope fuels
activism among people who otherwise accept politics as
usual.

Sometimes, encouraged by electoral shifts and campaign
promises, the ordinary people who are typically given
short shrift in political calculation become volatile
and unruly, impatient with the same old promises and
ruses, and they refuse to cooperate in the
institutional routines that depend on their
cooperation. When that happens, their issues acquire a
white-hot urgency, and politicians have to respond,
because they are politicians. In other words, the
disorder, stoppages and institutional breakdowns
generated by this sort of collective action threaten
politicians. These periods of mass defiance are
unnerving, and many authoritative voices are even now
pointing to the dangers of pushing the Obama
administration too hard and too far. Yet these are also
the moments when ordinary people enter into the
political life of the country and authentic bottom-up
reform becomes possible.

The parallels between the election of 2008 and the
election of 1932 are often invoked, with good reason.
It is not just that Obama's oratory is reminiscent of
FDR's oratory, or that both men were brought into
office as a result of big electoral shifts, or that
both took power at a moment of economic catastrophe.
All this is true, of course. But I want to make a
different point: FDR became a great president because
the mass protests among the unemployed, the aged,
farmers and workers forced him to make choices he would
otherwise have avoided. He did not set out to initiate
big new policies. The Democratic platform of 1932 was
not much different from that of 1924 or 1928. But the
rise of protest movements forced the new president and
the Democratic Congress to become bold reformers.

The movements of the 1930s were often set in motion by
radical agitators--Communists, Socialists, Musteites--
but they were fueled by desperation and economic
calamity. Unemployment demonstrations, usually (and
often not without reason) labeled riots by the press,
began in 1929 and 1930, as crowds assembled, raised
demands for "bread or wages," and then marched on City
Hall or local relief offices. In some places, "bread
riots" broke out as crowds of the unemployed marched on
storekeepers to demand food, or simply to take it.

In the big cities, mobs used strong-arm tactics to
resist the rising numbers of evictions. In Harlem and
on the Lower East Side, crowds numbering in the
thousands gathered to restore evicted families to their
homes. In Chicago, small groups of black activists
marched through the streets of the ghetto to mobilize
the large crowds that would reinstall evicted families.
A rent riot there left three people dead and three
policemen injured in August 1931, but Mayor Anton
Cermak ordered a moratorium on evictions, and some of
the rioters got work relief. Later, in the summer of
1932, Cermak told a House committee that if the federal
government didn't send $150 million for relief
immediately, it should be prepared to send troops
later. Even in Mississippi, Governor Theodore Bilbo
told an interviewer, "Folks are restless. Communism is
gaining a foothold. Right here in Mississippi, some
people are about ready to lead a mob. In fact, I'm
getting a little pink myself." Meanwhile, also in the
summer of 1932, farmers across the country armed
themselves with pitchforks and clubs to prevent the
delivery of farm products to markets where the price
paid frequently did not cover the cost of production.

Notwithstanding the traditional and conservative
platform of the Democratic Party, FDR's campaign in
1932 registered these disturbances in new promises to
"build from the bottom up and not from the top down,
that put...faith once more in the forgotten man at the
bottom of the economic pyramid." Economic conditions
worsened in the interim between the election and the
inauguration, and the clamor for federal action became
more strident. Within weeks, Roosevelt had submitted
legislation to Congress for public works spending,
massive emergency relief to be implemented by states
and localities, agricultural assistance and an
(ultimately unsuccessful) scheme for industrial
recovery.

The unruly protests continued, and in many places they
were crucial in pressuring reluctant state and local
officials to implement the federally initiated aid
programs. Then, beginning in 1933, industrial workers
inspired by the rhetorical promises of the new
administration began to demand the right to organize.
By the mid-1930s, mass strikes were a threat to
economic recovery and to the Democratic voting
majorities that had put FDR in office. A pro-union
labor policy was far from Roosevelt's mind when he took
office in 1933. But by 1935, with strikes escalating
and the election of 1936 approaching, he was ready to
sign the National Labor Relations Act.

Obama's campaign speeches emphasized the theme of a
unified America where divisions bred by race or party
are no longer important. But America is, in fact,
divided: by race, by party, by class. And these
divisions will matter greatly as we grapple with the
whirlwind of financial and economic crises, of
prospective ecological calamity, of generational and
political change, of widening fissures in the American
empire. I, for one, do not have a blueprint for the
future. Maybe we are truly on the cusp of a new world
order, and maybe it will be a better, more humane
order. In the meantime, however, our government will
move on particular policies to confront the immediate
crisis. Whether most Americans will have an effective
voice in these policies will depend on whether we tap
our usually hidden source of power, our ability to
refuse to cooperate on the terms imposed from above.

Copyright c 2008 The Nation

[Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. She is the
author, most recently, of Challenging Authority: How
Ordinary People Change America ].

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