https://socialistaction.org/2017/08/03/march-on-washington-for-medicare-for-all/
March on Washington for Medicare for all!
/ 1 day ago
Aug. 2017 Health 3By JOHN LESLIE
I read with great interest Dustin Guastella’s article in Jacobin, We
Need a Medicare for All March on Washington (MoW). I agree with Dustin,
a member of Democratic Socialists of America, on the main points.
Building a national mass mobilization would afford the left and broader
social sectors an opportunity to turn our current defensive fight to
preserve access to health care into an offensive struggle for a concrete
gain for working people.
This health-care struggle won’t be won easily. I believe it will take
years of social movement organizing to win the fight. By doing so, we
can decisively shift the balance of forces in favor of the working class.
Despite the recent impressive increase in size of the Democratic
Socialists of America, I don’t think the DSA alone has the resources or
social weight to carry this issue forward on its own. That said, the DSA
does have the political authority, right now, to call for the building
of a mass movement.
A united front coalition that includes the unions, women’s groups,
community organizations, students, and, yes, socialists is necessary for
long-term victory. The united front is a concept that goes back as far
as the early years of the Communist International and allows for unity
in action between organizations around a limited program. The
constituent organizations retain their independence and right to
criticize, publish and organize.
A necessary debate
Dustin’s article has sparked a necessary debate, for which he should be
commended. The objections to the MoW raised in Jacobin by Michael
Kinnucan, Don’t March, Organize for Power, reflect an unnecessary
counterposition of “organizing” and “mobilizing.” Both are activities
that I believe, based on my experience in the antiwar and Central
American solidarity movements, should not be seen as isolated from each
other. Organizing and mobilizing both take place in the context of
on-the-ground work at the local level and of building national
organizations and coalitions.
According to Kinnucan, rather than “squander” resources on organizing
for health care, which the Democrats are already doing, the DSA should
concentrate on housing issues. Kinnucan’s political horizon is set on
2020, when the Democrats will magically enact single payer. But the
Democrats’ current desperate plea for “compromise” and a “bipartisan”
solution show which side they are really on.
Labor organizer Jane McAlevey’s “organizing model,” which Kinnucan
places a lot of confidence in, seems to have real limitations. McAlevey
is critical of the lack of an organized base for movements like Black
Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, since these mobilization-based
movements lack what she calls “actual power.” McAlevey has a pessimistic
view of protest movements and instead proposes a form of long-term
base-building organizing that leaves little room for the self-activity
of workers and the oppressed. Perhaps McAlevey’s top-down organizing
model can be used in trade-union campaigns, but it hinders the building
of vibrant social movements.
Beyond social media
We were all inspired by the Women’s March on Jan. 21 and the airport
protests against Trump’s travel ban. The problem I perceive with these
and other social-media-driven mass actions is not in the mobilizations
themselves. Rather, the problem is that these sorts of demonstrations
create no structures for democratic decision-making or accountability.
In her book, “Twitter and Tear Gas,” Zeynep Tufekci writes: This “allows
for the organization, for example, of big protests or major online
campaigns with minimal effort and advance-work, but this empowerment can
come along with a seemingly paradoxical weakness. I find that many such
movements lose out on network internalities or the gains in resilience
and collective decision-making and acting capacity that emerge from the
long-term work of negotiation and interaction required to maintain the
networks as functioning and durable social and political structures.
“In the past, this was more organic to the process of taking care of
tasks and preparation for acts of protest, from rallies to marches to
producing dissident media—there was no other way to do it quickly or
on-the-fly. Taking care of such tasks through adhocratic methods leads
to many significant consequences, ranging from inverted movement
trajectories (protest first, organize later, unlike the past where a
large protest was the culmination of long-term work.) to complex
frailties including tactical freeze, where movements cannot quickly
respond to changing conditions and have an inability to negotiate and
delegate when necessary—since they have no strong means of collectively
making decision and adapting to new circumstances” (Zeynep Tufekci,
“Twitter and Tear Gas,” pp. 269-270).
In other words, by building protest movements through reliance on
social-media-driven mobilizations, we create “movements” that are a mile
wide and an inch deep. Without the long-term and patient work of
building movements, forging coalitions, etc., we are not creating
movements that let the working class and oppressed learn their own
potential power. What is needed are a mass social movement, coalition
building, democratic movement structures, and political independence
from the bosses’ parties.
From Vietnam to Fight for $15
A notable use of the united-front mass-action strategy was during the
U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam. The Vietnam antiwar movement mobilized
millions of people and helped shift public perception of the imperialist
war. Socialist activists worked day and night to forge broad, democratic
and inclusive coalitions. While socialists were some of the main
organizers, the movement included unionists, religious organizations,
and students. This unity in action didn’t come easily.
In his book, Out Now!, Fred Halstead describes the process of coalition
building: “Beyond their agreement in opposing the war, the initiators of
the movement held discordant views on many matters and advocated
different, and even conflicting, methods. At every point along the road
they had to thrash out their principled strategic and tactical
differences in order to arrive at a unified and concerted action. This
was rarely easy and not always possible. … In the beginning, the
movement came to grips with three internal policy problems that were
interconnected: red baiting, nonexclusion, and democratic decision
making” (Fred Halstead, “Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the
Movement In The U.S. Against The Vietnam War,” pp. 954-955).
A far different form of organizing can be seen in the campaign for a $15
per hour minimum wage. Fight for $15, organized by the SEIU, has been an
on-again, off-again, bureaucratic affair. The fast food worker strikes
were an inspiration that pointed to the potential for a mass action
strategy to win victory.
However, instead of a unified mass movement, organized by the AFL-CIO,
the campaign has been, at times, starved of resources and demobilized.
The Democrats tried to sabotage the movement in favor of an increase in
the minimum wage by embracing the embarrassing $10.10 per hour wage,
with union bureaucrats like Rich Trumka as accomplices. In places where
$15 per hour has been “won,” the Democrats succeeded in having it phased
in over a space of years and have placed certain exceptions and
exemptions in the bills.
The unions could have made an increased minimum wage into a nationwide
crusade that would lift the living standards of millions of working
people who live on the edge of financial ruin. Instead, they let their
ties to Democratic Party politicians blunt the effectiveness of the
movement.
Unreliable “allies”
Kinnucan’s and Guastella’s shared faith in the Democrats’ capacity to
carry this fight forward is, I think, misplaced. The Democrats’ supposed
embrace of single payer doesn’t line up with the reality. When the issue
came up recently in California, it was Democrats who sabotaged the effort.
The Democrats have made it clear that they are wedded to the neo-liberal
health-care plan called the ACA, begging the GOP to compromise to save
this bailout for insurance companies. Of course, some progressive
Democrats will “support” single payer in words now and then cite
“reality” as the reason they can’t vote for it later. It’s a pattern
that goes back decades. The Democrats promise a reform when out of power
and fail to push it forward when they have the votes.
Kinnucan’s and Guastella’s view comes from a common misapprehension
about the possibility of reforming the Democratic Party.
Well-intentioned people mistake the existence of a “progressive” wing of
the Democrats as proof that the party can be fundamentally reformed.
They draw a false distinction between a supposed Democratic
“establishment” and the rest of the party. Progressive Democrats have
traditionally played the role of keeping workers and the oppressed
inside the party by feeding illusions in the Democrats’ goals and policies.
The truth is that the Democratic Party as an institution is inextricably
linked to Wall Street and dependent on the capitalist class for its
funding. The structures of the Democratic Party will resist tooth and
nail any progressive effort within the confines of that party. Just look
at the way the DNC sabotaged the moderate liberal Sanders campaign.
While we want to work in coalitions with progressive Democrats to win
reforms, we have to understand that the Democratic Party is not a viable
arena of struggle for socialists. Rather, our task as socialists has to
be to break the subordination of our unions and social movements to the
Democrats.
No electoral solutions
The fight for health care for all won’t be won at the ballot box. It can
only be won in the streets. The question of working-class political
independence is a fundamental difference between the DSA and the
revolutionary socialist left. While class independence is a principled
issue for us, it’s not a sectarian stance. We oppose work in the
Democratic Party and other bourgeois parties because these parties will
always put the interests of workers and oppressed people behind those of
their paymasters on Wall Street.
If our friends in the DSA truly want to build an effective socialist
movement, they have to make a clean break with the bosses’ parties.
There can be no halfway measures in this. The notion that we can run
socialists in Democratic primaries or “inside-outside” strategies are
doomed to fail because the Democrats as an institution won’t let their
party be captured by left forces. The best a Democratic Party left can
hope for is the role of a housebroken and token opposition.
For a united front, mass action orientation
Movement building isn’t just about winning this or that reform. It is
also about preparing the working class and oppressed for the struggle
for power, for their self-emancipation. In that sense we must
necessarily see our task as socialists as moving beyond Medicare for All
to a national health-care system entirely under democratic workers’
control and run in the interests of the majority.
There are no shortcuts in movement building. I want to lend my voice in
support of Dustin Guastella’s proposed March on Washington. I would
propose that the DSA, in conjunction with other forces—unions, socialist
organizations, women’s groups, Black and Latinx organizations—organize a
national conference in the fall to call a National March on Washington
for Medicare for All in April. This national conference should be
democratic, non-exclusionary, and open to all. The conference should be
used as a springboard to launch local and regional coalitions capable of
building the movement at the grassroots. Such a movement would be open
to participation of rank-and-file Democrats but must maintain its
independence from Democratic Party politicians.
MOW, Dustin G:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/medicare-for-all-single-payer-health-care-march-nurses-unions
Don’t march organize for power:
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/march-single-payer-medicare-health-care-democratic-socialists-of-america-unions
Long March, Dustin G:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/medicare-for-all-health-care-nurses-union-march-single-payer
Limits of organizing model:
https://publicautonomy.org/2017/06/11/the-limits-of-the-organizing-model/
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August 3, 2017 in Health care.
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