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It was expected that local Black businessmen and professionals could play a profitable, if subordinate, role in this development. But naturally, these alliances could best be consolidated when Blacks held leading urban offices; electoralism and the alliance with big capital generally went hand in hand. The Black electoral effort has totally dominated Black politics in the 70s and early 80s. In , there were only 48 Black mayors across the country; today there are The new Black mayors nearly universally pursued the same strategy: a growing alliance with the corporations.
Black mayors see to it that the governments grant tax cuts, raise regressive sales taxes, grant subsidies to corporations including tax breaks, cheap loans, etc. Black mayors like Maynard Jackson, Coleman Young, Kenneth Gibson have, for at least a decade, been making corporate investment the keystone of their urban development strategies.
More left-talking politicos, like Richard Hatcher of Gary, have pursued essentially the same policies with a different rhetoric throughout the 70s. Unfortunately, there is no lack of statistical data demonstrating that no Black mayor has succeeded in slowing down even slightly the downward curve of economic development for Black workers and the poor throughout the 70s and early 80s. Still, the Black middle class does benefit from this approach. The professionals get supervisory and managerial jobs, and small businessmen get subcontracts from the giant corporations. The more candid and sober of the Black Democratic politicians do not make great claims for their strategy.
They point out that they are highly constrained in what they can accomplish by the cut-off of federal funds and the erosion of the urban tax base due to capital flight and the economic crisis. Surely they have a point. For without the sort of mass struggles which can compel concessions from the government and corporations at both the national and local levels, the cities will be hostage to the corporations and their requirements for profits.
Meanwhile, the Black mayors can adopt the words, though not the actions, of the 60s Black movements. Above all, they depict their entirely legalist voter registration drives and the push to elect Black Democrats like themselves as the extension of the old civil rights movements — neglecting to mention the mass mobilizations, illegality, and confrontational tactics which gave those movements their power as well as the fact that those were struggles for rights, not electoral contests.
We've got to develop technical militants out of those middle-class affluent Blacks who have received training, acquired good education, worked themselves into the mainstream of economic life. Jesse Jackson's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination represented the culmination of the electoralist strategy which the Black middle class has been implementing for more than a decade. Many of Jackson's leading supporters are advisors, such as Richard Hatcher of Gary and Harold Washington of Chicago, are reform-minded, left-talking Black mayors.
Indeed, Washington's dramatic campaign for mayor Chicago in was the immediate predecessor, and in many ways the model, for Jackson's own effort. Washington's Campaign As they would with Jackson's effort, many leftists insisted on calling Washington's campaign a mass social movement. The rallies were huge, the enthusiasm boundless, the rhetoric inspiring.
But the fact remains that Washington's election campaign was simply that. It did not come out of, nor was it accompanied by, significant oppositional struggles of any sort in the Black community. There were no demonstrations or demands by Chicago Housing Authority tenants for improvement in their conditions; there were no strikes by workers demanding wages, better conditions or benefits, or that plants not be shut down. Material conditions in the Chicago Black community have deteriorated rapidly in recent years, but the level of Black militancy and political organization has declined with equal speed.
In no sense did Washington ride to power on the crest of already existing movement of Blacks organizing themselves against employers or the government. Nor did the Washington campaign — which, like other electoral campaigns, remained solely concerned with electing the candidate — seek to bring such a movement into existence. On the contrary, as one observer put it: 'Everything stayed well within the bounds of traditional politics — though a remarkably boisterous and rowdy brand of traditional politics.
Everyone's hopes were in Harold Washington — no one had any hopes or expectations in themselves. What has happened since the election? Despite dealing a powerful blow to the old machine and bringing many Blacks and Latinos into important official positions, the Washington administration has functioned much like other liberal regimes in the crisis.
Immediately upon assuming office, Washington explicitly called for 'austerity' and pushed through a reduction in the city's workforce. He did support a bill for collective bargaining for city workers, but only after seeking to pass legislation which would have taken away the unions' right to strike. Shortly thereafter, Washington forced the Amalgamated Transit Union to accept a plan to defer the payment of 26 million dollars into their pension fund, threatening that if they refused, layoffs would follow.
Perhaps most important, Washington failed to give any support to the majority-Black teachers union in its bitter, unsuccessful, three week strike in October In fact, Washington's labor attorney, Richard Laner, helped the school board engineer the final settlement and defeat the union. Washington failed even to protest when U. Steel closed its Southside Southworks plant which only a few years ago employed some workers , despite massive concessions from the United Steel Workers Union.
Meanwhile, like Black mayors all over the country, Washington went about creating an economic development task force whose membership reads like a who's who of Chicago business — with top representatives from all the leading banks, manufacturing firms, and construction companies.
Washington has admittedly been badly hurt by the obstructive tactics of what remains of the old white machine. On the other hand, he has not lifted a finger to aid himself, the Black community, or working people in general by helping them to organize themselves to fight to improve their conditions.
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A traditional liberal politician, Washington led no mass social movement in his campaign; has, in office, been bound by social movement; and has done nothing to bring one into existence. Jackson's Campaign That Jesse Jackson was, intentionally and explicitly, carrying out the electoral strategy of the Black middle class and Black politicians to enhance their influence within the Democratic Party in particular and American society in general was made clear again and again throughout the campaign by his supporters and opponents alike.
Jackson's overriding goal was to get millions of unregistered Blacks signed up for the Democratic Party. With this newly-created electoral base, Jackson hoped use the primaries to amass the power to leverage the Democratic Party: Jackson and the Black politicians would deliver a much increased Black vote to the Democrats, if the latter would, in return, grant the Black politicos a greater role within the party and, more generally, make certain programmatic concessions. This is precisely the same strategy organized labor has followed for the past forty years, with progressively diminishing returns.
As should have been obvious to those who hoped the Jackson campaign would constitute an on-going mass movement for social reform, Jackson's strategy did not require building mass struggles or even constructing much of an electoral organization. The be-all and end-all was to get Blacks registered and voting in the primaries for Jackson.
It was headed by elite figures long influential in business and Black politics, who saw their goal as accomplishing certain clear-cut electoral tasks. There was no need to get feedback and input, let along to encourage mass self-activity required for actual social struggles. Jackson did, of course, hold massive demonstrations and marches, and made hundreds of speeches in local community churches. He is a magnetic personality, and generated an enormous amount of enthusiasm.
But despite the rhetorical verve, he did practically nothing to strengthen the existing grassroots organizations in the community, but, on the contrary, subordinated the already constituted organizations and their resources to the electoral effort. Nor could those former leftists who flooded into the local Rainbow Coalitions, as they had into the Washington campaign, significantly reverse the direction. It is doubtful, in most cases, they even tried. It was not that the official politicos exerted a stranglehold on the campaign organization and tactics — although this was a problem in some places, like Los Angeles.
It is hardly surprising that, only a few months following the elections, most local Rainbow Coalitions have been reduced to hollow shells, manned by leftists and liberals. No more the launching boards for new social struggles than they were before the campaign, most are looking to survive by finding new electoral efforts in which to immerse themselves. Precisely because he did not build a movement with the capacity to exercise power outside the Democratic Party and outside the polling booth, Jackson failed badly even in his own terms. When the Democratic Party, in an arrogant display of realpolitik , refused to grant a single one of Jackson's key programmatic planks, he was nonetheless forced, ignominiously, to call for unity at the national convention and to back Mondale.
Some leftists saw this as a sell-out, but Jackson had, in fact, no choice, since he had no basis for breaking from the Party and going off on his own. First of all, Jackson himself never had any intention of splitting and had not prepared his followers to do so. But, equally important, Jackson's campaign had emerged in the wake of the decline of mass struggles in the Black community and had itself done nothing to bring about the emergence of a movement in any way independent of Jackson's electoral effort, or indeed, of Jackson the personality.
This was why Jackson's more radical and impatient supporters were obliged to sit quietly by as Jackson capitulated at the convention. In the absence of already existing mass movements, a critical source of Jackson's attractiveness, not only to his backers among the politicians and the bourgeoisie, but to the Black community as whole, was his apparent ability to offer realistic strategy for reform. Consciously or unconsciously, the majority of Jackson's supporters saw in his plan to use primaries to leverage the Democratic Party a credible substitute for the self-organization which seemed, at that moment, off agenda.
Had Jackson sought at any point to build an electoral movement which claimed independence from the Democrat Party — and which had as its object a long term process of rebuilding the left — he would surely have lost the support of the Black middle class and, arguably, also the Black masses. As most Americans are aware, splinter parties have no hope winning practical gains, given the winner-take-all electoral system, unless they are extremely large — larger, that is, than any which have appeared on the political horizon for more than half a century.
The premise for a practical third party campaign would have to be the radical and massive transformation of the national political consciousness. This would depend, in turn, on enormous historical changes, not the least of which would be the rise of mass struggles of a magnitude not seen since the labor upsurge of the 30s. In the absence of such a transformation, any third party efforts will, of necessity, be confined to propaganda objectives — which is not to say they would be without value.
There were no demonstrations or demands by Chicago Housing Authority tenants for improvement in their conditions; there were no strikes by workers demanding wages, better conditions or benefits, or that plants not be shut down. A mixed economy depends above all on a strong democracy—one even stronger than the democracy that succumbed to the corrupting influence of economic elites and their neoliberal intellectual allies beginning half a century ago. The contemporary reemergence of communism, anarchism, and populism is symptomatic of the growing understanding that, even as democracy has lost the capacity to register a gap in the present, the unrealized emancipatory aspirations of the people continue to exert a pressure. There have been six rounds of this experiment, from the tax cuts sponsored by Jimmy Carter in to the immense Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by Donald Trump. But to imply, as Marable does, that the Black electoral movement led by the Black middle class constitutes a powerful force for reform is highly misleading.
Because the whole premise of the Jackson campaign was its claim to being practical, Jackson and his allies could not refuse to mobilize against Reagan after the convention, despite the Democrats' continuing failure to grant them the slightest concession. For, as the Democratic Party regulars realized, the Black leadership and the Black masses wanted to defeat Reagan more than did any other group in American society.
To refuse this effort in order to punish the Democratic Party would have been to cut off their nose to spite their face. It follows strictly from the logic of the electoralist strategy. What Marable means by this assertion is that Black politicians, virtually across the board, advocate social programs and give voice to ideas which are today far to the left of those in the white political mainstream.
There is no question that the political sentiments of the Black community as a whole are far to the left of those common in the rest of American society. Indeed, one reason Jesse Jackson could adopt his radical-sounding program was that his electoral strategy required focusing, almost exclusively, on the Black community and did not necessitate a broad appeal to the far more conservative white electorate.
But to imply, as Marable does, that the Black electoral movement led by the Black middle class constitutes a powerful force for reform is highly misleading. Even had the Democratic Party adopted significant sections of Jackson's radical program at the convention, it would not have made a stitch of difference: the party has adopted countless, quite radical, platforms in the past, but unless mass movements acted effectively to 'keep the Party honest,' these platforms have remained only on paper. Indeed, throughout the 70s, Democratic Party majorities with on-paper commitments to reform retained control of Congress to no discernable effect.
Witness all the cities with Black mayors, including left-talking ones like Richard Hatcher and Harold Washington. Of course, social democratic parties also have been in power in quite a few nations around the world during the late 70s and early 80s, but have delivered only cuts in services and rising unemployment to their working classes.
By conflating electoralism and program mongering with movement building, Marable perpetuates the myth that winning office is winning power, and that there is a shortcut the long, hard, and daunting task of rebuilding the movements. Throughout the 70s and early 80s, the official forces of reformism have become progressively more reluctant to combat capital.
They are aware that the slowdown of the economy is, in the last analysis, a crisis of profitability and that this has consequences for their own strategic perspectives. But it is also the case that international crisis has been accompanied by a long term relative decline in the growth of the productive forces and the accumulation of capital in the American sector, and this has had vast implications for working-class politics.
It is sufficient to note that over the long period between and , the rate of growth in productivity in U.