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Liberalism from Below
Liberalism in America has always been double-sided. Liberalism from Below has a powerful history in the U.S., including some moderate sections of the anti-slavery movement and the suffragettes, much of the labor union and civil rights leadership, and, most recently, both the Vietnam and Iraq antiwar movements.
Liberalism from Below has often developed a powerful critique of Liberalism from Above. Time and time again, the conflict between activists on the ground and their supposed champions in high places has led to inspiring political struggles. In the 1930s, union leaders seized on FDR's tepid recognition of the right to organize to launch a wave of strikes, but FDR's supposedly "pro-labor" officials repeatedly sided with the bosses.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" castigated mainstream liberals who argued that civil rights should "wait" until the powers that be felt ready to hand down legislation. King attacked this idea and argued that only mass action would force the politicians' hands. In essence, King had to threaten Liberalism from Above in order to force it to do what it said it would.
In 1964, Students for a Democratic Society adopted the slogan "Half the Way with LBJ," based on his promise not to escalate the war in Vietnam. When he did exactly that within weeks of his election, SDS had a choice--either support Liberalism from Above or organize a mass movement to stop it.
Of course, the tension between Liberalism from Above and Liberalism from Below isn't always this obvious. For instance, the AFL-CIO spent tens of millions of dollars and millions more volunteer hours to get Obama elected. And Obama repeatedly and forthrightly promised to push through the Employee Free Choice Act, which, if passed, could lead to an explosion of unionization.
If Obama keeps his word, the main enemy will be the Republicans and conservative Democrats and their friends at WalMart, who may try to block it. This could lead to a situation where Obama and the AFL-CIO are on the same side of a crucial fight, at least temporarily.
However, the depth of the economic crisis and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mean that the scale of reforms necessary to end the suffering go well beyond anything that Obama is prepared to endorse.
For instance, his plan to spend federal money to create (or retain) 2.5 million jobs is a welcome change, but it will fall far short of ending unemployment in the U.S. Today, there are at least 15 million people who are unemployed or can only find a crappy, part-time job when they need full-time work. Reducing this number by 15 percent is a welcome start, but it's hardly a solution.
There is a real potential for a struggle to develop in the coming years in the spaces between what Obama has offered, what his friends on Wall Street are prepared to support and the needs of the vast majority of the American working class.
In short, if Liberalism from Above is the response on the part of one section of the ruling class to the excesses of the system it supports, Liberalism from Below is the fight against the inadequacy of that response. However, politically, it is still a struggle that accepts that capitalism can be fixed--even if it must be done so against the will of some capitalists.
Organizationally, Liberalism from Below has developed union and movement structures that are far more durable and effective than mere electoral machines. The NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the AFL-CIO and so on have all mobilized large numbers of people in pursuit of their important goals.
However, most times, their leaderships have simultaneously accepted the idea that they must place their resources at the disposal of Liberalism from Above at election time. This devotion of resources and energy has often been misplaced and led, not to an increase in their power as social movements, but the opposite.
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Revolutionary Change and Socialism
Alongside Liberalism from Below, a more radical vision for society has struggled for influence throughout U.S. history.
From the Revolutionary War and the fight for independence, to the Civil War and the struggle to abolish slavery, there were revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Sojourner Truth who understood that Liberalism from Above would only begrudgingly pursue reform.
From the beginning of the 20th century, that revolutionary tradition has been embodied in the socialist movement, which included the IWW, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party and other socialist groups in the 1960s.
Why socialism? Two reasons.
The United Nations estimates that more than 2 billion people around the world live on less than $2 a day, while 6 million children starve to death or die from easily preventable diseases each year. That's another Holocaust, each and every year.
We have the absurd situation of lacking funds to develop sustainable energy technology, while the U.S. spends more than $100 billion a year to kill Iraqis for oil. We have the most advanced medical technology in the world, but 45 million people go without health care insurance.
Those absurdities--in short, the contradiction between the capacity to create and capitalism's inability to distribute to everyone--helped create the movement for socialism, with the aim of taking the power out of the hands of the private mega-rich who use their wealth for personal gain and putting it into the hands of the people who actually do the work.
Socialists believe that, not only do workers have the right to take over the economy and run it democratically, but that if they do not, the capitalists will continue down the path of war and ruin until they destroy the planet.
The other source of the socialist movement came from the experience of the limitations of Liberalism from Below and the question that has emerged time and again: Do you accept the limits imposed on the struggle, or do you go beyond them and question the whole system?
For instance, it was in the struggle to force FDR to keep to his promises that unionists finally decided they needed to organize a series of citywide general strikes in 1934 that set the stage for the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations union federation in 1935 and the mass sit-down strikes that followed.
The liberal union leaderships were afraid to launch these strikes because it would mean confronting the police and embarrassing FDR. It took socialists and communists to say, "If the choice is between FDR's friendship and winning a strike, we say strike."
Martin Luther King Jr. followed a similar path. He helped win the end of legalized Jim Crow, but he recognized that poverty and institutionalized discrimination remained, which led him to say, "You have to ask how people can go thirsty in a world that is two-thirds covered with water."
When you ask that question, it leads you in the direction of the socialist critique of capitalism.
And King had a decision to make about Vietnam. Liberalism from Above insisted that the cause of civil rights would be damaged by taking an antiwar position. In essence, LBJ offered civil rights in exchange for King's support for killing Vietnamese people. King could either accept that offer or move beyond it--which he courageously did in 1967 when he declared that "my government is the primary purveyor of violence" in the world.
http://socialistworker.org/2008/12/19/the-case-for-socialism