A Candid Conversation with the International Socialist Organization’s Sherry Wolf About the State of the American Left
GS: So are you doing a little tour of college campuses?
SW: I’m an organizer with the ISO as well as on the editorial board of their magazine, the International Socialist Review. So I kind of do a lot of public speaking on campuses and in communities around the country, particularly around the Midwest, and writing for the magazine.
GS: The real challenge to me right now is getting college age people to start thinking outside the box of the two-party duopoly that we are practically brainwashed to believe in. How does ISO work towards penetrating that?
SW: Actually I think the dirty little secret right now in this country is that there is a huge number of not only college age kids, but folks who are long out of school or never went to university who are thoroughly disgusted with not only the war, but with the economic priorities of not only the Bush administration but their, you know B-team of the Democratic Party that have effectively okey-dokeyed every single reactionary measure put forth. Whether it’s getting rid of late-term abortion, to voting with the Bushies on getting rid of the possibility of working-class people having access to bankruptcy, or all these things. Even the polls on the front page of the New York Times last week were showing that an overwhelming majority in this country oppose the war, oppose any kind of elimination or privatization of social security, and are for actually a lot of very progressive things, but there’s no large active mobilization of that majority at this point.
GS: We had a couple of people within the Democratic Party try to go that way in Dean and Kucinich, but the media did a real job on painting them as too liberal for the party to possibly follow them. Is there a chance that the Democratic Party can be reformed in a socialist direction or is that a hopeless dream?
SW: There is zero chance that the Democratic Party, which began as the party of the slaveholders and is now corporate America’s B-team party… that if they can’t screw over the working class explicitly through the front door, they do it through the back door with the Democrats, I think there’s zero possibility that it will ever act in any sort of consistent way in the interest of oppressed and exploited people in this country. It never has and it never will, and that’s the great myth – people don’t know that even Roosevelt, who was credited with being the great benefactor to ordinary people, was facing a mobilization of millions of working people who were engaged in no fewer than three successful general strikes in this country in the 1930s that forced things like social security and union rights. Nothing has ever been granted without a fight.
GS: Can that kind of movement happen now with the means that the current regime is using to try and crack down on the Left? Since Seattle and DC in 2000, they shunt everyone off to these protest zones where they’re not even anywhere near the people that they’re trying to protest against – how can a mass movement deal with that?
SW: Well I think that step one is for the broad left in this country – and by that I mean everyone who rejects the priorities of corporate America – to jettison the bankrupt strategy of attempting to make change through the Democratic Party. That’s the first step. And build alternatives outside of the Democrats that are based on politics, organization, and confrontation.
And I think what we found in the last election was not that this country is so right-wing, far from it. We found , what I conclude at least from the fact that Kerry could not even beat a man who can’t find his ass with both hands who was leading a disastrous war and a wholesale attack on the standard of living of working class Americans, is that surrender is not a strategy… and that was the strategy of the Democratic Party. They surrendered on the issue of the war, as a matter of fact they were even trying to prove that they were even more pro-war. Add 40,000 more troops, that was John Kerry’s call to action. They were pro Patriot Act, which is to say anti-immigrant; they were for the continued attacks on the standard of living for working people; opposed gay marriage just as the Republicans do, and on and on and on.
So, I think we have to understand that surrender is not a strategy. And so long as that’s our starting point, then we can move on in building active opposition. And on that front, I think the possibility is great, and the job is daunting… because you really need to have an understanding of how there is a radicalizing minority in this country that need to be talked to, not talked at.
We need to openly explain, not just the horror and the crimes of the war in Iraq but why it is that every time the U.S. goes abroad it is for empire building, and not for humanitarianism. The 82nd Airborne is not sometimes a humanitarian wing of the U.S. government and other times a repressive wing, it is always about spreading repression around the globe. And I think that we need to get involved in initiating struggles around the domestic features of this war, which is the gutting of whatever’s left of social services in this country. They’ve stolen hundred of billions of dollars from schools, healthcare, housing and other social services such as they were…
GS: To put it all into the war…
SW: To put it into the war. And have used the most noxious forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism in order to sell these attacks. They went for the low-hanging freak first – go after Muslims and Arabs – and now they’re beginning to turn their guns on the Left, via this so-called war on academic freedom. You know, against Ward Churchill, and the Middle Eastern professors at Columbia University, and trying to root out dissidents in the universities…
GS: There’s a bill in the Ohio legislature to try and do just that.
SW: There you go.
GS: It can all be quite disillusioning but I like a quote from Samuel Adams who wrote that, “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.” I think there’s a lot of people waiting to be woken up and given some hope and they’re just not sure where to find it, they’re so disillusioned by this system – the amount of young people that voted was still low…
SW: Well there’s nothing to vote for.
GS: Right, so where should they put their energy… what is the strategy? Is it still worth it to try and get as many people as possible to DC to protest at the World Bank/IMF meetings or is that not as productive now that we know they just ignore it and don’t seem to care?
SW: Well methinks they doth protest too much – every time they say. “we’re not paying any attention to your protest,” we know they are paying a lot of attention to our protest. So I think that’s a lot of hogwash. The fact is that the IMF/World Bank institutions are the economic arm of U.S. imperialism whereas the military are the more explicit guns of U.S. imperialism, and both are important for its success. So you know, what they can’t win at the negotiating tables or behind their desks with pens, they go out and attempt to win with F-16s, and that’s the way it’s always been.
And so I think that the first step for people who want to make change is to find like-minded people… whether it’s through petitioning against the military on campus, or through setting up discussion groups around political articles and newspapers, or whatever people find important. But find allies and then get out there and plot a strategy to act. Because really, I think that when you saw last month or so, a 1000 or so students at the Seattle community college that drove the military from their campus, it had an impact on students across the country. And then a few weeks later, folks in New Haven at the Southern Connecticut Community College had dozens of students do the same thing, and that whole movement of driving the military recruiters off campus is a tremendous spark that I think needs to be spread. Especially at a place like Kent, which is known around the world precisely because of the deadly activities of the military on campus.
And here we are at the 35th anniversary of the massacres at Kent State and it’s never been more important to actually go back to that real history. And part of the history is debunking the romanticism that people have, the romantic mythologies that dominate about the 1960s. It was not a decade in which every single day millions of people were marching through the streets calling for revolution. It was sometimes small pockets, handfuls of people meeting in classrooms to discuss what is U.S. imperialism? Why are poor people sent to fight rich men’s’ wars and on and on and on. And that’s how people began to get active. And very often people started trying to make small reforms and wound up becoming quite radicalized, and moving further to the Left. And that I think will happen again… if people are organizing.
GS: And how about internationally with what we’ve seen from people like (Venezuelan president Hugo) Chavez, can that be a key step in helping move the world in a more socialistic direction? If his programs are successful, can that eventually spread and help create reforms here?
SW: Well I think we have to say that Hugo Chavez has been demonized by the U.S. government because he dares to take some minimal amount of oil profit from Venezuela’s main industry, the oil industry, and put it toward aid for the poor and working class. That said, there are limitations to Chavez’ reforms and we saw that in 1973 in Chile under Allende… where attempting to challenge the priorities of capitalism from within capitalism has its limitations, and really, short of mobilizing working class people and democratic mass movements, we won’t see fundamental change. What we’ll see are reforms that are significant and should be defended, and any attempt by the U.S. government to try yet another third coup against Venezuela should be met with opposition by progressives in this country.
However, we shouldn’t have illusions that Chavez, Chavismo, will be the route towards fundamental transformation of that society or even Latin American politics at large. If anything, it raises larger questions about the limitations of reform. After all, he’s subject to the same capitalist priorities as any other government and it’s only because oil prices are so high right now that he’s able to continue to make good on a lot of his promises to the poor.
I also think by the way, just thinking about your question before, I think people, especially college students who look around them and see no mass struggle taking place in American society and have become very disgruntled, should remember a little bit of their history – that what preceded the upheavals of the 1930s was the deadly quiescence of the 1920s. And what preceded the massive explosions of the 1960s was perhaps the most conservative period in modern American history, which was the McCarthy-ite 1950s. And people have to understand that you can’t just take a snapshot of the moment and say this is what is for all time… that people are disgusted.
People don’t need to be taught to be disgusted – 45 million Americans in the richest country on the planet have no access to healthcare, they don’t need to be told why they’re pissed off. People work longer hours for less money under greater stress, and that is what accounts for the high levels of alcoholism, smoking, obsesity and all the rest of that. People are stressed out and pissed off. But what does not yet exist in a bold enough, visble enough, vocal enough way is a vehicle to express that discontent. That’s what needs to be built and that’s why I’m an organized socialist.
We need to build the vehicles for discontent via movements, via political parties, via debate. And that’s one of the weaknesses of the American Left over the last few decades, is the denigration of political debate. People are worried about the wrong thing – they think if the Left has open, express disagreements and debates, it will repel people? It’s completely the opposite – if people don’t debate out disagreements and ideas from within the Left about which way forward, what works, what are the lessons of struggles of the past, what has failed, then we will not be able to actually inspire people to move forward.
GS: Yeah, that’s why I actually found it very inspiring that Dennis Kucinich entered and stayed in the presidential race until the bitter end just to get that voice out there, which we really hadn’t seen from the Democratic Party for a long time.
SW: But I’ll be blunt with you, I think Kucinich is a bit of a snake-oil salesman. I mean, he said openly in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he saw his role as corralling the Left back into the Democratic Party, rather than allowing left wing ideas to express themselves through a third-party alternative. And people have to understand – it’s not going to be the Joe Liebermans of the Democratic Party that bring in progressive anti-war, anti-corporate voices. It’s going to be people who talk left and effectively act right, by defending a party that is a pro-war party, a pro-corporate party and a pro-status quo party. So in many ways, I find that Kucinich and Dean, who is now heading up the DNC and has come out openly and says we should not be the party of pro-choice, we shouldn’t be the pro-abortion party – why not by the way? How can we talk about equality for women if women don’t have control over their own bodies? It’s nonsense, it’s horse shit.
Or Hilary Clinton, who talks about making common ground with the right wing – fuck the right wing! These strategies are poison, they have been death. And they will lose again. And everybody talks about the handful of people who went this way or that way, who moved toward the Bushies in the last election. Why not talk about the 48 percent or 49 percent of Americans who are adults who don’t bother voting because they can’t determine any real difference between the two major parties? And they’re right! And now the Democrats are throwing off the last remaining political difference that anybody could really discern, their pro-choice position. I know they’re legacy is to be the party of the working class, but they certainly haven’t earned it… not in 70 years.
GS: That’s the danger, you can see the consolidation of the parties just continuing here… and coming to some kind of boiling point in the near future. This unsustainable system can only continue for so much further before it melts down and implodes upon itself…
SW: People keep thinking, many people on the Left feel that what we need to do right now is go out there and talk to the people who are for the war, or we need to go make amends or at least go appeal to people who are on the Right. No, we don’t. We need to consolidate the Left, we need to build an actual Left. Which by the way is still the majority, by every mainstream poll in America the majority of people oppose the war. Why don’t we talk about consolidating that? And giving it some substance, and giving it a backbone, not talking to the pro-war people…
And many of the pro-war people aren’t, it’s not like there’s two camps in America. Many of the same people, like the military families, speak out. Never before in American history, two years into a war, have there been thousands of people who are family members of people in the military who oppose the war. And are organized in opposition to the war. There’s about to be a protest at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, in the South. In the middle of the Old South, there’s going to be an anti-war protest right outside the gates of a major military base. And the people who are leading that mobilization are Iraq Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out. That is a tremendous development and a tremendous step forward, and it’s likely to be one of the biggest anti-war protests in the country on March 19. It will be thousands of people and it’s going to be led by people in the military.
GS: Okay, that’s great… Anything else you’d like to add?
SW: I encourage people to think for themselves. I think people need to read, to think for themselves, to challenge the dominant ideas out there and to not be so discouraged by what the atmosphere is right now. Because, frankly, it’s unsustainable. You cannot have a society built on the expectations that each generation will do better than the one before, and deliver shit to the children of the people that built this country and tell them that you’re only good enough to be cannon-fodder for the empire. And that is what is happening right now. And people have to distinguish between what is a rightward moving environment, which I don’t believe we’re in, as much as what is people’s confusion and disgust and, frankly, lack of confidence. That’s why I think we need to publicize the protests in Seattle that kicked military recruiters off campus, or the successful strike of professors at Northeastern Illinois University which won huge gains in Chicago a couple of months ago. We have to know about these successes because there are some, and we have to build on them. Not to be pollyannas, but because frankly the lessons are clear – when you organize around a clear set of politics and you get people mobilized, you can win. It’s not a guarantee, but is a guarantee that if you don’t fight, you will lose. That I think is for sure, that’s 100 percent.
