The onset of fascism makes us queasy and uncertain. Ready to question our working assumptions. This is a valuable time, an opportunity to shed illusions and gain fresh insights. It’s a time, I think, for renewed radicalism in thought and action.
Radicalism goes beyond the common emphasis on preserving our democracy as it exists, beyond calls to “unite the many; defeat the few.” There are good reasons for both of those strategies, but we shouldn’t limit ourselves to them.
By “radical,” I don’t mean strident or extreme. I mean far-reaching, thorough, “to the root.”
The following three touchstones indicate what I mean by “radical” thinking. They are not meant to be exclusive.
The first touchstone is the radical belief that all the wealth of society—that is, our collective infrastructure, possessions, and capabilities—are the product of society as a whole. All the value in the world was produced by the common and interconnected social effort of our forebears. The division of social wealth into private property is arbitrary and contingent. Private property came about via an historically specific process of appropriation—largely by force.
The second touchstone is that the world’s ills, including fraught relationships among nations, maldistribution of wealth and power, and crises of displacement and migration—that these ills arose from previous centuries of conquest, slavery, imperialism, and exploitation. To address the problems of humanity we must acknowledge this history and face up, morally and practically, to its present-day consequences.
The third touchstone is that society, at any and all scales, is ultimately created (and recreated daily) by human beings who have choices. At critical times in the past, people have chosen, collectively, to make radical changes in their way of social being. With that choice, change happens rapidly and inexorably.
By these touchstones, the order of the world is contingent, rather than necessary. The future is to be created, rather than endured. The response to fascism needn’t be limited to preserving the existing order, but can be aimed at bringing about a new one.
Fascist ideas, and fascists, are always with us. They gain currency, and power, when the existing order, and its institutions, seem unable to manage the process of change. Fascism’s claims are false—there is no immigration crisis, and crime is declining. However, underlying unease about the future is well-based and real. Big changes, radical changes, will be needed to cope with climate change, automation, and inequality.
Half measures seem inadequate, but half-measures have been the progressive consensus, as if to reassure ourselves that the real, acknowledged problems can be managed through existing institutions and processes—like Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and Inflation Reduction Act. That is, by expanding services and environmental protections, and increasing taxes on the rich to pay for them.
These common-sense half-measures would have added up to significant change over time, if they weren’t being reversed. However, the process of their adoption and implementation lacked the energy, vision, and disruptive influence that could make them feel radical—that would make them feel like collective action, make them feel like movement in the direction of a new order. And this lack of feeling, intention, movement, is what made it possible for Republicans to stop and reverse common-sense progress.
The idea among progressives seems to have been: Advance the policies, but pull your punches on expressing the ideology. Our policy proposals are mild, non-disruptive, common sense. Medicare for All. Universal Basic Income. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
I’m saying: We should own our intention to transform society, to change the basis of the economy, to achieve freedom and plenty universally and worldwide, to make human beings the creators of their destiny. Our policies are mild and common-sense, and they could be put forward as the first steps to something far larger.
