Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, and welcome to talking strategy making history. This is Duraka Laramore hall. And with me, as always, is the esteemed Professor Dick Flax. How are you doing today?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: I'm feeling very esteemed now that you mention it. Greetings, Duraka. And we'll be mentioning later that there's a lot happening in your life that you will share later. We'll keep people tantalized with that. And I wanted to introduce Declan Griffin. Declan's, let's call you an intern, although that sounds strange, but that's the simplest way to describe it. Declan stepped up to help us spread the word about Talking Strategy Making History, about the podcast. Tell us what you did, which some people who might be listening have already experienced. Yeah.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: So I guess I've been working primarily with Dick on getting the word out, about talking, strategy, making history. And one of the things about being on the leftist political struggle side of things, you seem to amass large amounts of emails for email lists. So we felt like that was a good route to be the primary sort of notification system for whenever there's new content coming out. But the mailing list also seeks to work as a couple of different functions. I mean, we're also looking for people to subscribe to the Talking Strategy Making History patreon so that we can keep this project rolling and maybe even to a higher degree.
But then also we want to get more in touch with the listeners in the audience. So in those emailing newsletter, there will also be a link for feedback, for if you guys have tips on anything or advice or you want to hear these two guys talk about a certain topic, we warmly welcome the feedback. And I guess for the time being, if you want to join onto this emailing list, I think the best way to do it is just go to the Talking Strategy Making History Facebook page and just drop us a message and we'll get you linked into that email newsletter.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: And I wanted to say that we promised if people became members and gave a little contribution monthly that they'd have more bonus things to experience from us. And now there are some bonus things. They're playbacks of radio programs that I did, and some of people might know that I do a show called Culture of Protest on local campus radio KCSB, and it's a music show. So these bonuses are musical delights, and you can get them if you subscribe. So thank you, Declan, for being with us and for doing this. It's your idea to do a newsletter, and it sounds like a great thing to get us going on even higher level of expression than we've been able to do so far.
Duraka, this is our final broadcast of this season, season two. So why don't you take the lead here? Well, yeah.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: So welcome, Declan. Thanks a lot for your work and really appreciate you. I appreciate having you on board and yeah, we're going to just dive into what we'd hoped to be a little conclusion and recap for season two, socialism and Its Discontents, and a little preview and some discussion and live real time planning and thought for our next season, season three. And so, yeah, we've spent the past several months and a lot of personal things have intervened to make it a kind of extra long season in terms of the calendar year. But we've been talking about socialism and the socialist tradition and how it has become more relevant in American politics, less marginalized as a set of ideas and why that's a good thing. And we also wanted to bring in some different perspectives. People who are very active or even professionals in socialist organizing, in building socialist organizations and institutions, particularly DSA, which is the one that Dick and I both belong to, have belonged to for a long time and also just folks who are doing good political work out in the world whether that's analysis and news or direct organizing and talking about how socialist ideas might influence their strategy, their thinking, their analysis of policy, et cetera. And we didn't talk that much about the labor movement, which is a little bit strange for a season on socialism. We did have a really good interview sort of at the end of the season with Bill Fletcher where we got an update on his perspective of where the labor movement is in the United States at this time and what kinds of strategic choices they'll need to make to well, to be able to have the power to implement anything we would reasonably call socialist politics and socialist policy. And we had some lively discussions that I think were really good and insightful on all sides about the legacy and enduring impact of nondemocratic forms of socialism, of the authoritarian strain, the authoritarian line in the socialist tradition. And that even got us denounced as counterrevolutionary thugs by some Stalinists in what is now disappointingly an online newspaper for the good old days when I'd be sold my own denunciation for a quarter or dollar or whatever in front of a protest. That's great. And so, Dick, what are three takeaways or like, distillations bullet points that you think listeners should walk away with in terms of our discussion of socialism and modern American politics?
[00:06:02] Speaker B: That's a great question. I like this idea of figuring out three. There are probably quite a few that we could call from what we've done.
But to me, the big takeaway, which I knew before, but I felt reinforced by some of our conversation, is the intertwining, I would say, between socialism and democracy. That socialism as a moral force and as a transformative vision can't be meaningful without it being understood to mean part of what we mean by democracy is what we mean by socialism and vice versa. Socialism as a vision includes what has come to be called economic democracy and social democracy as well as the political democracy that grew up with at least some of the capitalist societies.
I make that point because in sort of mainstream conventional political science used to be said, maybe still said, that capitalism democracy depends on some kind of free market or open market society. And in that formulation, democracy simply means the right to vote and make choices through the ballot of who's going to run the government. Economic and social democracy referred to much more far reaching participatory vision of democracy in which people are able, through their means of living, to be full citizens, to feel a sense of participation fully in garnering the results of their labor, in the sense of economic democracy, to be able to participate in decisions in the economy that affect them. So these are ideas that are not new to socialists. But I think I was reinforced in some of our conversation with various people about the need to keep that intertwining alive and to keep it foregrounded. Sometimes I think sometimes that emphasis on democracy has not been central to people's definitions of socialism or explanations of why they're socialist. The second thing that I gleaned from the conversation was how the emergence of the Bernie Sanders campaigns and also of Elizabeth Warren's campaign in 2020, even though she didn't call herself a socialist, was that ideas of social democracy and economic democracy are actually very widely appealing to American voters. Both of these candidates made a big impact with some of their particular proposals. Bernie's multiple ideas, whether it was having to do with health care or free public education, tuition or raising the minimum wage, warren's ideas about worker representation on boards of directors. These are ideas that I think now are getting to be understood to be or examples of ideas that come from the social democracy traditions of Europe come from arguments for economic democracy and their campaigns showed that they had a lot of support. These two are among the most popular politicians still in this country.
Unfortunately, they are not running our government. But nevertheless and the third idea that is kind of interesting, sort of the flip side of number one is that socialist organizations and parties here and in Europe are dealing in one way or another with an authoritarian threat. In the European case, which you were able to explore quite a bit because you were in Sweden, came back to report on that, but also on other European countries. We did two sessions on what's going on in Sweden and there the rise of anti immigrant based authoritarianism and in Italy of actually a proto fascist party taking power in the government. There showed the weakening of the popularity or the majority popularity of the socialist parties in those European countries.
In this country we wrestled with authoritarianism internal to organization like DSA Democratic Socialists.
We had a whole episode based on the problem of authoritarian attitudes or factions or caucuses within a DSA that really were not democratic socialists, but were able to operate within the organization on a different agenda. And one that you alluded to when you started the conversation today, namely the idea that somehow socialism was going to be imposed by an elite vanguard or top down forceful social change. And that idea is not new in the socialist movement. I'm surprised after the whole experience of the 20th century that it still has support and still operates significantly among people who live within an organization like DSA. And I have to say that part of what I concluded from that conversation was that really to simplify things and I wonder what you think of this as a useful simplification. Duraka is that, on the one hand, in an organization like DSA you have people who are out in the world, in the labor movement, in the community organizing seeing the need to create organization at the grassroots of the country. And that's their main work and their main preoccupation. And then you have people in the same organization who think their main politics is internal to the organization and it matters deeply to them what resolutions get adopted and what ideological positions get voiced and who controls what in the organization.
And those two attitudes or those two ways of being members, to me, are quite contradictory.
And I think that differences are probably represented even in different chapters. Some are more outgoing and outward looking and some are fighting for control within the organization. I wonder whether that analysis makes any sense to you as a way of kind of understanding what's going on there.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: I think it certainly makes sense sociologically. I think we've both and lots of listeners have been in organizations where there are members or activists who also have other constituencies that they're responsible to or informed by their political strategy is very much informed by the interests. Of real people, of a real group of people versus folks who don't have that kind of connection or tie tiny group NR and whose focus politically is on the rhetoric or the bylaws or something seemingly arcane and not very practical or rooted in the day to day interests or lives of average people. And I think any organization has a range of those archetypes and people that are both or go back and forth. I'm not sure that I want to totally say that that's like a description of what's happening in DSA. I mean, our episode in which we interviewed folks from DSA was published, the text of it was published in one of their internal journals, discussion journals, and got some discussion, which was really great. And exactly the kind of thing we want to do with this podcast is have conversations that are useful for people out doing things. And I think that was in part because it was in the lead up. It was very close to an important convention for DSA in which my understanding is the sort of more pragmatic reformist elements, caucuses and leadership and so forth were defeated, more or less, at least in terms of representation on the national board. And folks that friends of ours refer to as ultras have a majority now and are sort of running the show, I just would assume just call them Communists rather than ultras.
That's like a football hooligan term to me. But the point being like, just being clear about what it is about their ideas that are really not democratic socialist ideas. And it's like a problem, I think, that they're around, so I tend to see it.
I think that we should have a socialist organization and that a socialist organization should have both a practical mission in politics and also just a very broad ecumenical voice for advocating socialist ideas and values and approaches to politics rather than anything kind of like super doctrinaire or highly disciplined. The DSA we joined essentially back in the day, I think that's still necessary and I think could play a really important role. And that needs people to be active in it and it needs people to care about what it says. And especially when there are people who are trying to pass resolutions to say know any member of Congress who is a DSA member will be expelled if they are campaigning for or along with neoliberal. Know other members of their party. In other words, if that's happening, then you have to have people that are engaged in the organization to fight it back. So you got to have people that take that seriously and that that's a priority for them. If it's just the kind of folks in the outside of the Donut, as we used to say, the people that work full time for a union or really most of their political work in the neighborhood organizing, and then they also spend a couple of hours a month in DSA, those people are going to get rolled. They're just going to get steamrolled by any group of communists.
That's what it is.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Well, there's another the way I look at this, and by the way, you remember when I said I joined DSA and liked it in its early days because it didn't ask me to do anything? And what it was was a framework of some discussion of it wasn't very clear what its function as a small organization was, but it maintained a certain if you join DSA, then you have this identity. You are a socialist by definition, but that's about all. Well, that's not much. Maybe not enough at all. It's a better situation now that it's much realer as an organization. So here's the thing. There's chapters that have been very, relatively, very effective in electoral politics, while at the same time you have these other people, as you mentioned, who want to expel elected officials because they're operating in the real world of parliamentary activity.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Sometimes those are the same people you think, yeah. I mean, I think, again, it's a range, and I'm not in it enough to be able to say that there's a clear distinction between people who are building effective chapters and that have become electorally significant. Like that there's that wing versus the ultras because I think that there are people who are avowed communists that are DSA members, to use that funny old phrase, but I don't know what else to say. Who work for DSA? Elected officials in it's.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: Well, that is weirder. Yeah, it's very weird. Well, predictably, if the history of the left means anything, left organizations is the more sectarian or an authoritarian. The perspectives that dominate DSA, are they're going to lose membership? And that would be very unfortunate, of course, be better off as a much more decentralized group in which national policies were not really the main concern, but support of activism, left wing activism was what everyone was agreed on doing with experiment and recognizing divergencies as necessary in a complicated world that we live in. That's my view.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: I agree to like 80% of that. I mean, I agree that a socialist organization post Soviet Union collapse is just completely off its rocker. If it thinks that it's going to have a line, national political line that then it's going to enforce that's, like both theoretically pure and good and based in Marx or something and highly intellectual and a practical strategy for building political power for the left or even for the organization or for its platform or policy goals. It's just outrageously delusional to think that that's going to happen.
It has to be pluralistic. You have to agree to disagree about the big theoretical things and find projects to work on. And I agree that that's most likely to happen at a local level. And I think that's where you're seeing the best and most interesting things happen around DSA, right, is in cities and states where people are getting people elected to office and they're shaking up crusty old networks and machines and all of that. It's wonderful. But I think that there is the unwillingness to settle some of these questions is part of the problem. In other words, what I gathered from sort of talking to folks and what David was saying on the podcast was there's like an agreement to disagree about really important things like what's going to be our strategic orientation or actual practical orientation to the Democratic Party, like a very, very important thing about this 900 pound donkey in the room. That's part of the reality of politics, but a real need to make sure that there's ideological unanimity on the Israel Palestine conflict, for example. And that is backwards. And that's where I think we agree that there's like a part of socialist politics where it doesn't have to be settled. I don't know, does that sound similar to what you're saying?
[00:22:02] Speaker B: I mean, I'm deliberately looser than that. And this has been my view based on my long almost ancient experience now is that there can't be one path for people to find themselves on the left, that there have to be multiple paths. And they may seem to some degree in tension with each other at ODS, with each other, but nevertheless they all probably have truth and they all have their deficiencies. And so making social change is a constant experimental effort. And so the best attitude is to keep learning from what we do, rather than insisting that we are on the right path versus that path, but rather let's learn, let's exchange, let's mutually criticize, but realize the pluralism is the central serious thing that is not a problem, it's a resource to be pluralistic. That's my point. I definitely agree with that. And an organization that can embrace that and doesn't insist on single strategic or ideological perspectives is the one that works nowadays, in my opinion. In fact, there's a way in which the left is organized, but it's not organized centrally. It's organized through networks and in very strange ways that have not really been well codified. We don't really understand that well. And yet it's interesting to me. All these years we've lived without a left wing party. Remember up until the 60s there was one or another left wing party. In the old days, in the early part of the century, it was the Socialist party and then the Communist party. And then by the time of Stalinism and the end of World War II, the left was really dying because the parties, all of them, were shrinking and feeling oppressed. And then the 60s happened and you had groups like SNCC and SDS that really were leading movements at that time but weren't as dominant as parties were. And then since we've now had what, 50 more or more years without a party guiding the left, and I would say a lot has been accomplished in that time. And I know that's not we don't have time today to really argue that maybe we'll eventually get to that point in our ongoing dialogue with each other and with other people, but in any way, I would just put that forward as trying to understand how the last 50 years have actually been organized and where were the points of failure because of lack of organization. Might be a good project for someone to do. I don't want to dwell too much on that.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: But I do have one thing about DSA, which is about its self conception, and it gets to this question of pluralism, that Harringtonism was a very humble kind of approach. In some ways very confident. You read his writing and the things that DSA was saying in the into the early ninety s, it was like confident in its analysis, confident that the world was going to be socialized in one direction or another and either be democratically by the left or undemocratically by corporations. And I think that was pretty solid analysis. And it was like what we're seeing the consequences of 20 years of that kind of neoliberal reorganization. And so it was confident on the one hand, but very humble and agnostic in terms of what its role could be or the role of a socialist organization could be and definitely never thought of that it would be the vehicle for a radical transformation. It hoped to be a socialist voice, maybe the socialist voice, qua socialist voice per se, in a coalition, in a movement in a broad constellation of organizations and efforts and uprisings and policy networks and so forth. And what we floundered around in the 90s was like trying to figure out some kind of role in place there. After the DSOC strategy of being really explicitly a group in democratic party organizing and in democratic party organizations, we were just sort of like floating around a good analysis, good politics with no real strategy. And that's where I'm very sympathetic to David's generation and the people that called the question on that kind of just stasis, floundering stasis. And that laid the groundwork for becoming an electoral power. And that's not something that anybody really thought was possible by DSA directly. And that's cool and that's a surprise and I'm happy to be like proven wrong. But the question still remains then what is the role? Even if you're electing people with your brand, it's still not a party, and it still was never meant to be. And shouldn't try to play the role of a party either, in the Leninist sense of some kind of fucking vanguard cult or in the sense of that the Democratic Party is a party of being like the electoral entity that then is connected to the group in the legislature that holds one another accountable and so forth. So that's to me still, the problem is that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater and this humility and thinking of DSA as part of something was lost and needs to come back. And it probably will as the sort of like bubble bursts and membership wanes and so forth, maybe that will come to its head, but it's just like so possible that it will all be hollowed out by just communist lunacy and there'll be nothing left.
Which I have to be the jerk who says is what happened to SDS and SNCC?
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Well, yes. And the only thing I would add to that is that if we can recognize that not audience, the committed numbers of people in this country who are for the kinds of social change defined by groups like DSA is much wider than the membership of the organizations. And how to construct relationships and maintain relationships and how they actually work now would be a good thing to understand.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: And how socialism can sort of punch above its weight in a way. Right? Because there's a much bigger pool of people who are interested in the policies and even the political framing of it the arguments that come from social that are ever going to be in an organization, let alone, as you point out, like sitting through nine hour meetings about how to expel people over Syria.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: It just occurred to me we're doing this podcast and we have some numbers of people who are regulars and that's an example of what I mean by a kind of organization that exists through this medium. And when we think about it that way, we realize, well, there are many other technologies of communication that people are latched into and that are part of what keeps people together and enables people to make certain kinds of collective decisions about what to do next and so forth. Maybe I'm overly complacent, I probably am, but I kind of think that's what we have to work with, basically. So we should just maximize the benefits of that. Let me piggyback on what I just said by something I've been wanting to say since we started today, which is we did this whole season of podcasts and they're still worth listening to. They took a long period of time to get through the whole season, but they're because they do have if you're listening today, but you haven't heard some of the past ones, just go to Spotify or go to Patreon and some of the other sites and pick and choose what you want to listen to. But I think I'm kind of proud of what we've done in terms of and I say that because of the feedback that I do get and that we get from people that say, these are pretty good, these are very informative. I learned a lot. That's very helpful to know always. And we get good feedback.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Appreciate it very much.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: So let's move on, maybe talk a little bit about next season, our ideas for next season, which flows directly from this question of what do we actually do and if this season we've been talking about ideas and the role of ideas, the importance of ideas and the socialist idea or ideal. I think next season we want to talk a lot more about what are the practical changes that we think folks should be organizing around, that we see other people organizing around, that we see governments implementing or testing and so forth, and what kinds of changes to the economy, to society, to governance do we want, do we support? And thinking about that also, again, as always, with an eye towards strategy, towards things, the how of actually getting them done, but also how they might fit together with how policy fits together, with organizing, with electoral politics, with public opinion, et cetera, in order to keep gaining power and opportunities to move a progressive agenda. So the word that keeps coming to mind that I tried to avoid maybe awkwardly just now, the word that comes to mind is reform. But it seems like reform along with incrementalism have gotten really bad raps lately, like the terms I see reform and reformist and basically used as epithets quite a bit. And that's strange to me personally because to me reform is the broad description of what differentiates our part of the left, you could say, from people who are purely interested in symbolic or culturally expressive aspects of left life and left activity. Right like the reformist left is those of us who want to change shit. So we had a little argument, a little discussion before this about the name, or we're going to name this season about reform, the third season. Our argument was sort of around the meaning or lack thereof, maybe of a slogan I keep seeing, or a cliche, a phrase I keep seeing a lot on the internet, which is capitalism cannot be reformed, which I have thoughts about that. What are your thoughts about that?
[00:33:32] Speaker B: I believe that when you're really in the struggle, you're always working for something that can be called a reform. You're working for some more or less definable goal that can be achieved through struggle, through collective action. And this is not by no means an original statement. There are reforms that make the going system, if that's a good way to look at it, work better. But there are other reforms that move toward more transformative outcomes that open the door for some breakthrough in human freedom, in democracy, in well being, for large numbers of people that the going system is not geared to provide. So you might say that just take randomly women's suffrage. That was a reform right to get the right to vote for women, but it was a transformative reform. It opened doors for millions upon millions of people and opportunity for fulfillment, if you will, through simply the suffrage was not all that was involved in even that struggle. And I would say all of the big movements in this history, from below in our country's history have been reformist in the sense that the civil rights movement, it was simply trying to say the constitution needs to be enforced in the south. That's a very reformist way of looking at it. Or integration. African Americans should be full participants in the wider society.
These seems like just making the system work better and that's one way to look at it. But in fact they were transformative because the going system was not geared to provide that kind of equality, that kind of liberation, that kind of fullness of being that the movement was actually aiming for and to some great extent did begin to open the door to I like the idea of non reformist reform. It's a strange way of talking in a way, and needs to be explained, but that's our job here on the podcast is to try to put meaning behind a phrase like that.
We're interested in reforms that make life better in the here and now. But that also open the door to going beyond.
What we have, what the system is now geared to enabling people to live by and live with and thrive with. And democracy to me is the measure of that. Easiest way to measure it. The more people have a direct to have a voice in what the rules and resources and decisions that affect them, how they are made, how they are applied, how they are distributed the more that is opened up, the more the system is being transformed because the going system doesn't really provide many of those kinds of opportunities without determined struggle. I don't know if I'm making sense, but that's what I'm aiming at. So what you'd like to do is call the next season something like can capitalism be reformed? Or something like that. And I'm willing to do that if we recognize that there's ways to reform capitalism that would make capitalism much less a central feature of reality than it has been up to now. Maybe. In other words, that's what to me non reformist reform means you actually are reforming the system, but in such a way that it's no longer what it was. It's a qualitative, transformative thing. And this is not something to reach for, it's something that our history, I think, has already we've had those moments.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: What does it mean to not be a reformist?
What is the non reformist? I like the politics of non reformist reforms and remember when I first sort of heard that phrase? But it's a silly phrase, right? And it's a silly phrase in a way well, it's just on its face, it's a self contradiction because take a.
[00:38:07] Speaker B: Topic that we hopefully will get into in the next season, which be example would be housing. So in our current system, there's very little provision for housing that is not based on housing as a marketable commodity. In other words, your ability to have housing depends on how much income you have, how much wealth you have. And there's marginal provisions in terms of public programs for lower income people that are very inadequate in their face of it. But there are some provisions for that. And this contradiction between the need for housing and the ability of the system as we know it, let's call it the capitalist system, to provide housing to meet that need is now that contradiction is so evident it's become, and pretty quickly become evident in so many parts of the country of the world.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: The housing cris.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: Yes.
And so a non reformist reform would be to simply take a path, not simply complicatedly, take a path which has come to be called social housing, which means housing produced because people need it, not because it is profitable. Not that profit would be necessarily omitted from the housing production of society. But social housing means that the first priority would be to make sure that housing, which is a basic human need, is actually available for people. That the price of housing would not make it a barrier for people to have housing that they need something like that. Now, social housing means something more. It also means that nonprofit organizations, whether it be governmental or co ops or other kinds of organizations that are not in the business of making money from housing, would be producing housing. And that's a common thing that happens even in our society, but particularly in European countries. So if you had housing done that way, that in itself doesn't transform the whole society. But it means there's a whole area of economic activity that is not simply based solely on market considerations. That's not simply based on private property determinations or rules that's produced in different ways and for human need purposes. We do that. We have this with education. Public education is not a market based even if it's maybe poisoned sometimes by being so or parks. Public parks are for some reason there's not an admission charge for public parks. People can even live in the parks and sleep in the parks as well as use them for their recreation when they can, when they can, when they're allowed to, when they're not. Well, that's what I'm just saying, that they're publicly available in ways that if they were private property in any way or commodified, they would not be so available.
[00:41:26] Speaker A: But I go back to the question these are all reforms. Everything you're saying are yeah, they are reform. What makes them not reformist? And what does it mean to be not a reformist?
[00:41:36] Speaker B: Well, because they're not simply making capitalism work better. They are somehow transcending that. And I'm of the school, if there is a school of historians, I'm not a historian, but I'm willing to believe that say that the system that we call capitalism, if it's a system grew out of feudalism, it didn't come by abolishing feudalism and establishing capitalism. It came and it's still in most real world capitalist countries, there are elements know, you might say pre capitalist society still have know. In England, most obviously the monarchy is an example of that and the whole aristocracy, however hollowed out it is. So the same is true. I think if we're looking beyond capitalism, socialism, we can imagine a fully socialized society, but that isn't what we are actually working for in the real world at any given time. We're working for developing the elements beyond capitalism, beyond the boundaries that capitalism puts on human action, on human aspiration, on democratic participation. We're looking beyond those in particular ways, though. So that's what makes it a non reformist reform. It doesn't reform capitalism. It moves the society beyond it in that way. And maybe at some point people come to think, hey, we're not even capitalists anymore.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Yeah, that's reformism is what you just described.
[00:43:17] Speaker B: Well that's reformism in a socialist context. Yeah, if that's what you mean by reformism.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: What I mean is that okay, here's what I think. I think that the term non reformist. Reform is a historical artifact from a part of the left feeling like it needed to justify itself because of attacks from people who don't believe in using democracy or participating in elections or governing in good faith and believe that the only way that you get from capitalism to socialism is through some kind of revolutionary rupture. And so people who agreed with that were revolutionaries, and people who didn't agree with that were reformists. And so at a certain point, the critique of reformists, you haven't abolished capitalism, you've just raised wages. You've only done this, you've only done that. The response was, no. Look, some of the kinds of reforms that get done, not all of them, obviously, some of them actually change the balance of power between workers and capital. Some of them actually take things out of the market, as you described, with, like, housing. Right? And so it was pointing those things out, and it was like an ironic, yeah, but defensive move to be like, I mean, these are reforms, but they're not reformist reforms. They're non reform because a reformist is someone who's happy to just be stuck in capitalism. But the fact is that's just not true of the reformists, the people who actually built the changes to the economy and society and so forth, that now any socialist talks about wanting to expand and build on those people were reformists and not revolutionaries. That's what I'm trying to get at, is that to me, it's a thought ending cliche that capitalism can't be reformed because, of course, capitalism is reformed all the time. It's different. It changes. It's a very different world to live under capitalism with unions and without unions. It's a very different world to live in a capitalism where there's a few people in unions or 80% of the people in unions. Those are differences. And they're, as you say, like part of a spectrum of economic systems from capitalist to socialist rather than thinking about it as some bright line. And this notion that there has to be ultimately reform can only go so far, and then there has to be like, some rupture, some break, some other thing I think is an incredibly stupefying and dangerous mythology. That again. Keeps us from focusing on pushing for understanding that pushing for expanding democracy into the economy or pushing for structurally changing the power of workers is the game. That's what we're doing. It's not the pregame.
That's how I want to frame the season. Yeah.
[00:46:28] Speaker B: And we totally agree on this. So one of the reasons I love doing this with you is because I learn from your seemingly obsessive focus on some topic like this.
And now I've seen what you're assigned to say. In a way, non reformist, reform, as a phrase, blocks a kind of more rational, deeper understanding of what it's all about, what we all really need to be about. But the problem, though, is that reform can means fixing something that needs a little bit of repair rather than what you were alluding to, which is fundamental. Some kind of significant change in power relations toward democracy and away. From?
[00:47:15] Speaker A: Well, I think of the term reform as fairly neutral in this sense by now because there's so many right wing movements that also refer to themselves as reform. To me reform is about but what it is about is about changing the shape, changing the structure, like altering something, reforming it not something deeper than just like twisting the dials on it. So it's not a reform to increase unemployment benefits. It's a reform to put in unemployment benefits or expand access to it and so forth. That's how I think about it.
You can have reforms that don't lead to something better than capitalism. You can have reforms that lead to something worse. You can have reforms that lead to something sideways. But I'm a reformist in that that is the mechanism, the strategy, the technique that I think we should use and need to use to make society more democratic and more socialist and more feminist and better. Right? Yeah.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: So let's talk a little about what we can think that we'll be trying to put together for the next season. And I can start by I'll just repeat that housing seems to be one area that we really need to spend at least one episode, maybe more. We've got local struggles that we can talk about and maybe beyond the local. Some people that we want to call upon to talk about the concept of social housing and what kind of breakthroughs in the provision of housing on the scale that people can need it and benefit from it. So that would be one and the other most obvious in terms of pressing urgency has to do with what on the left is called the Green New Deal. But the whole idea of creating a really concerted set of social policies that hopefully can rescue the planet and we might start with the biden infrastructure programs that are oriented that way that in the world of magazines like the American Prospect is being defined as industrial policy. Industrial policy I think is a phrase that comes from European social democratic circles.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: Liberal, just mid century liberal circles too. Yes, we used to have it used to be a thing that well, you get drilled on. We just were like no.
[00:49:52] Speaker B: One of the things I think we've already got some hope for is that our local neighbor and friend Nelson Liechtenstein has just written a book called The Fabulous Failure about the Clinton administration. And what that book is about is how the Clinton folks started with the intention of industrial policy as the centerpiece of their reformist administration and how they then Clinton and his part of his administration shifted toward neoliberalism, abandoned the industrial policy program.
So Nelson Lichtenstein can talk about his book and also about because he's very expert on the labor movement. He's a labor historian par excellence with particular attention to the UAW, and I think he's got some thoughts about what the UAW strike, which is going on as we are talking here right now, and similar things mean. So that would be one thing I can promise that we will get him on. He's eager to do it and that will be beneficial. And any other examples that you'd like to bring up about what we should really focus on?
[00:51:11] Speaker A: Well, a couple of things come to mind, and one is labor relations sort of wonky term, but union power, labor power, how has the power of working people's organizations to shape the economy waned over the last several decades and how can it be strengthened? And what are different strategic and policy efforts to do that? There's definitely a lot of interesting things happening in California along those lines, even though in the United States at federal level, we're hugely stalled for broad private sector labor reform. There's a bunch of interesting things that the state legislatures have been doing that I'd love to dive into and also put that into a context of the way that the Green New Deal is an attempt to address climate change in a socially just way and an economically productive way. By the way, we also have the giant crisis of social crisis of economic inequality and persistent structural poverty. And that is another set of problems that I don't think can be solved through capitalism. I think you need other mechanisms to go in and actually take certain things out of market relations and strengthen workers power to frankly disrupt capitalism, disrupt how it's supposed to work, quote unquote. So that's another interface to me where having a criticism of capitalism and having some kind of vision and openness to something else is really important for having the kind of independence of thought to give workers a real shot at having some power in an economy that's just so fundamentally rigged against them.
[00:53:12] Speaker B: So this sounds exciting. We can pursue a number of these between you and me. We both have the ability to talk endlessly as we're demonstrating right now, but with our numbers of people, we're going to reach out to try to corral into this. But you have some more things you want to share about?
[00:53:32] Speaker A: Yeah, to wrap up, keep an eye out for our next full episode, which will be the beginning of season three, something about reform and capitalism TBA to be finalized and definitely like and subscribe wherever you're listening to this. And as always, you can help us cover our expenses by subscribing to our patreon. Also, just wanted to announce for listeners who don't already know that my wife and I are be welcoming a baby in just a couple of weeks, few weeks from whenever this drops, which is very exciting and may add some cute or possibly horrifying background noises for my end of the recordings. And the other announcement I have is that, as Dick knows, I've been intermittently for many years working on a book on a monograph, and I've also been wanting to sharpen my writing skills and focus beyond ungodly long Facebook rants. So with both of those goals in mind, I'm going to be launching a substac newsletter and subscription. It's going to feature both like book fragments and drafts that people can comment on and yeah, poo poo. And you can disagree with my book well before publication and be very cool, as well as essays on political topics, cultural topics, including things that we cover here on talking, strategy, making, history. And so hopefully I'll have it launched and finalized and all the T's crossed and I's dotted in time to send it out with this episode. If not, it'll go out to our listeners shortly afterwards. So anyway, thank you very much for listening and for joining us on.
[00:55:23] Speaker B: The next time we see each other in this framework, you will be a parent, a father, and that this is true, exciting. And I think that's very strange.
No, you'll love it.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: It's going to make me all conservative. I'm going to start worrying conservative. Yes, buying a house and my housing could well be property values.
[00:55:49] Speaker B: At least. Worrying about the future of the planet might also for sure. Yeah. All right, folks, as we mentioned at the outset, hope you get our newsletter, pay attention to it, and stay with us. And we'd love to hear from you if you have thoughts, comments, critiques at any point. So thanks for being here with us. If you're listening, audios rock about baby.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: On the treetop when the wind blows, the cradle will rot.
