[Craic] Fwd: The Left Is Remaking the World

[Allan Baker]

Here’s an interesting article from the NY Times that was sent to me by a Mennonite friend.

>> Part of the article states:
> The call to defund the police is often accompanied by a call to shift 
> resources elsewhere, to education, housing and health care. The pandemic 
> has put on display the spectacular contradiction such appeals reveal. We 
> have no guaranteed health care, wages, housing or food; we can’t even 
> provide personal protective equipment. These failures have devastated 
> Black communities in particular.
> 
> But then, in response to Black Lives Matter protests, the police show up 
> in high-tech gear and military-style vehicles to arrest, gas and 
> bludgeon protesters, demonstrating where our tax dollars have gone 
> instead. The demand for defunding shifts power and our imaginations away 
> from the police and toward a society rooted in collective care for 
> ordinary people. It brings into sharp relief who we have allowed 
> ourselves to become and offers a vision for who we could be.

For your reading pleasure;
Allan

>> NY Times Op-Ed, July 11, 2020
>> 
>> 
>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
>> From: Darrel Furlotte <darrel.furlotte at gmail.com <mailto:darrel.furlotte at gmail.com>>
>> Date: Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 1:46 PM
>> Subject: The Left Is Remaking the World
>> To: 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> NY Times Op-Ed, July 11, 2020
>> The Left Is Remaking the World
>> “Defund the police” and “cancel rent” aren’t reforms, but paths to 
>> revolution.
>> By Amna A. Akbar
>> 
>> Ms. Akbar is a law professor who studies leftist social movements.
>> 
>> The uprisings in response to the killing of George Floyd are far 
>> different from anything that has come before. Not just because they may 
>> be the largest in our history, or that seven weeks in, people are still 
>> in the streets (even if the news media has largely moved on). But also 
>> because, for the last few years, organizers have been thinking boldly.
>> 
>> They have been pushing demands — from “defund the police” to “cancel 
>> rent” to “pass the Green New Deal” — that would upend the status quo and 
>> redistribute power from elites to the working class. And now ordinary 
>> people are, too; social movements have helped spread these demands to a 
>> public mobilized by the pandemic and the protests.
>> 
>> These movements are in conversation with one another, cross-endorsing 
>> demands as they expand their grass-roots bases. Cancel the rent 
>> campaigns have joined the call to defund the police. This month, racial, 
>> climate and economic justice organizations are hosting a four-day crash 
>> course on defunding the police.
>> 
>> Each demand demonstrates a new attitude among leftist social movements. 
>> They don’t want to reduce police violence, or sidestep our 
>> environmentally unsustainable global supply chain, or create grace 
>> periods for late rent. These are the responses of reformers and policy 
>> elites.
>> 
>> Instead, the people making these demands want a new society. They want a 
>> break from prisons and the police, from carbon and rent. They want 
>> counselors in place of cops, housing for all and a jobs guarantee. While 
>> many may find this naïve, polls, participation in protests and growing 
>> membership in social movement organizations show these demands are 
>> drawing larger and larger parts of the public toward a fundamental 
>> critique of the status quo and a radical vision for the future.
>> 
>> Consider the appeal to defund and dismantle the police, championed by 
>> almost every major social movement organization on the left, from the 
>> Black Visions Collective to Mijente to the Sunrise Movement, and echoed 
>> on the streets.
>> 
>> Defunding, part of a strategy to eventually abolish the police, 
>> challenges the prevailing logic of police reform: the idea that police 
>> brutality is caused by individual bad apples acting without sufficient 
>> oversight and training. This idea undergirds the familiar panoply of 
>> reforms: body cameras, community policing, implicit bias workshops. If 
>> officers are properly equipped and controlled, there will be less 
>> violence, its proponents argue — despite no significant evidence to back 
>> that up.
>> 
>> Defunding suggests the problem is not isolated, nor is it a result of a 
>> few officers’ attitudes. It challenges the power, the resources and the 
>> enormous scope of the police. Whether they are responding to a mental 
>> health emergency or deployed to a protest, their training and tools are 
>> geared toward violence.
>> 
>> The demand for defunding suggests, as the police and prison abolitionist 
>> Rachel Herzing often says, that the only way to reduce police violence 
>> is to reduce police officers’ opportunities for contact with the public. 
>> The protests have forced us to rethink state-sanctioned violence as our 
>> default response to social problems, to reconsider the hundreds of 
>> billions of dollars we have spent on prisons and the salaries of more 
>> than 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers.
>> 
>> The uprisings have also expanded the space for a reckoning with the 
>> failures of liberal reforms and with the possibility of doing things in 
>> radically different ways. Tinkering and training cannot fix our reliance 
>> on police officers to deal with routine social problems through violence 
>> and the threat of it.
>> 
>> The demand for defunding calls into question the fundamental premise of 
>> policing: that it produces safety. It urges us to take collective 
>> responsibility for collective care, repair and redress. It shifts our 
>> vantage point on persistent problems: for example, to guarantee housing 
>> for all rather than to continue to arrest and cage this country’s more 
>> than 567,000 homeless people.
>> 
>> The call to defund the police is often accompanied by a call to shift 
>> resources elsewhere, to education, housing and health care. The pandemic 
>> has put on display the spectacular contradiction such appeals reveal. We 
>> have no guaranteed health care, wages, housing or food; we can’t even 
>> provide personal protective equipment. These failures have devastated 
>> Black communities in particular.
>> 
>> But then, in response to Black Lives Matter protests, the police show up 
>> in high-tech gear and military-style vehicles to arrest, gas and 
>> bludgeon protesters, demonstrating where our tax dollars have gone 
>> instead. The demand for defunding shifts power and our imaginations away 
>> from the police and toward a society rooted in collective care for 
>> ordinary people. It brings into sharp relief who we have allowed 
>> ourselves to become and offers a vision for who we could be.
>> 
>> Taking money away from the police is not the sole demand. Consider the 
>> push to cancel rent. It asks the state to abolish tenants’ obligations 
>> to pay their landlords each month. But rent is the product of a private 
>> contract about private property: the foundation of our social, economic 
>> and political order.
>> 
>> So when organizers make the demand to cancel rent, they are conjuring up 
>> a state whose primary allegiance is to people’s needs instead of profit. 
>> The demand raises the possibility of a world where housing is an 
>> entitlement rather than a commodity. It aims to shift power from 
>> landlords to tenants, in the service of visions of housing for all.
>> 
>> Or consider the environment. The Green New Deal does not merely call for 
>> less pollution. It requires that we restructure our economy so we can 
>> move to clean, renewable energy sources and net-zero greenhouse gas 
>> emissions.
>> 
>> To get there, the Green New Deal calls for enormous investments in 
>> public transit, universal health care, free public college tuition and 
>> millions of high-wage green jobs. It emphasizes that everyone ought to 
>> carry out its projects, with a central role for working-class people of 
>> color. The bill’s vision is so counter to the actual practices of the 
>> state, and to the talking points of the Democratic and Republican 
>> Parties, you have to stretch your imagination to understand it. And that 
>> is the point.
>> 
>> Organizers often call these demands “non-reformist reforms,” a term 
>> coined in the 1960s by the French socialist André Gorz. Reform on its 
>> own is a tired continuation of liberal politics and legalism, 
>> expert-driven and elite-centered. Even now, policing experts are 
>> grasping to turn the energy around ‘defund’ toward the same old reforms, 
>> and mayors are endorsing superficial budget cuts, diluting the bold demands.
>> 
>> The way to respond is to stay focused on building mass movements of 
>> ordinary people who are serious about restoring and redistributing 
>> social wealth, as the Red Nation’s Red Deal puts it, to those who 
>> created it: “workers, the poor, Indigenous peoples, the global South, 
>> women, migrants, caretakers of the land, and the land itself.” Here, 
>> too, you see the connections — among Indigenous resistance, 
>> environmental justice and more.
>> 
>> Leftist movements today see our crises as intersectional. Police 
>> violence, global warming and unaffordable housing are not disconnected, 
>> discrete problems; instead, they emerge from colonialism and capitalism. 
>> Organizers recall these histories, and tell stories of freedom struggles.
>> 
>> And whatever you think of their demands, you have to be in awe of how 
>> they inaugurate a new political moment, as the left offers not just a 
>> searing critique, but practical ladders to radical visions. These 
>> capacious demands create the grounds for multiracial mass movements, our 
>> only hope for a more just future.
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 

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