Convergence: The Common Vision

by Harris Gruman

A Presentation at the Autumn Convergence, November 24, 2013, Boston

• If I’m asked to look for a common vision, I guess I’d have to start with the one that truly launched our age of historical action, the pamphlet of 1789 that asks: Quest-que c’est le Troisieme Etat?   What is the Third Estate?
• What IS the 3^rd Estate?  What slogan recently revived it in numerical form? (We are the 99%)
• And the pamphlet answered the question very powerfully: Hitherto, NOTHING; In the Future, EVERYTHING!
• And the 99% heard the call:
  • Poverty-stricken women stormed the Bastille and Versailles
  • African slaves overthrew their masters in Haiti
  • Munitions workers in Amiens struck for living wages
• Race, Class and Gender equality – that’s the Democratic Revolution.
• Ever since 1789, the people, the 99% HAVE been something, though sometimes less, and sometimes more.
• So we continue to work to further the Democratic Revolution.
• But in 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev spoke before the United Nations and threw down a challenge to people like me.
• He said that between our current world of inequality and a just future lay two urgent threats to human survival itself: militarism and ecological disaster (“climate change” was not yet the term of art). 
• That’s why we’re here today . . .  how will we address justice and survival.
• On January 1^st 2005, at the height of Bush’s world of Big Oil, tax cuts for the rich, and war on terror, Jared Diamond, author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, called “The Ends of the World as We Know Them,” where he looked at why some societies collapsed into barbarism while others found sustainable solutions.
• He found most societal collapses involved environmental devastation and military conflict, but the deeper lesson he learned was that “a society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite [the one percent] insulates itself from the consequences of its actions,” an attitude he compared to the gated communities of Los Angeles.  Societies that survived crisis were crucially democratic at the level of “We’re all in this together.” 
• I think of a One-Percenter like Franklin Roosevelt deciding in 1935 to save capitalism from itself by agreeing to a 94% wealth tax to put ten million unemployed to work at union wages, and launching the organizing of ten million more low wage workers through the Wagner Act. 
• So Diamond sees an essential link between the Democratic Revolution and the solution to Gorbachev’s global threats of militarism and ecological disaster.
• But here lies the conundrum: IF we need a strong democratic impulse to solve such problems, and that impulse is at its lowest ebb in our lifetimes, with inequality soaring and wealth and power getting redistributed upwards, THEN we first need to save our democracy – organizing workers, raising the minimum wage, increasing progressive taxes to fund urban schools and housing  . . .
• BUT WAIT, here comes Gorbachev, now disguised as Bill McKibben, saying we’re way over his “350 threshold,” and every kind of weapon of mass destruction is still on trigger alert, if not in someone’s suitcase.  WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION, FOLKS.
• The only answer to this chicken-and-egg problem is to somehow advance justice, peace and sustainability together.  So why aren’t they already one movement?
• I’m reminded of an earlier historical contradiction (and one still strongly with us): why do labor-saving technologies lead to mass lay-offs instead of a “four-hour day with no cut in pay”?
• Because the economic system we live in rewards the owners, not the producers, of wealth.   We’re NOT all in this together.
• I know, we’re a long way off from the Cooperative Commonwealth, but let me suggest that our united fight for justice, peace and sustainability will only gain ground when every step to reduce carbon or militarism is part of a plan to protect and increase the third estate’s ability to put food on the table, not decrease it.  Ever been chastised that our urgency on those issues is a threat to jobs at Raytheon or Exxon? 
• It’s ironic that it’s easier to unite for democracy than for societal survival, but that’s what happens when working people feel increasingly excluded from that society.  Perhaps if our efforts to reduce the threats of military and environmental destruction were always couched in terms of expanding social and economic democracy – think of Jobs with Peace, Green Jobs – we could build a movement of the Third Estate for the 21^st Centurty.

Building a Movement

• A powerful political movement combines the two things Americans already love most: religion and sport.
• Religion because it’s about morality – the values that hold the community together.
• Sport, because there are winners and losers, and the winner played the game best.
• Our biggest problem getting the religion part right is our tendency to base our approach on issues and facts more than values and community, on policies more than vision.
• Our biggest problem with the sport part is we forget that we can’t just be right, we have to win the game!
• When we strike the right balance between religion and sport, each is a corrective to the other. 
• Let me illustrate a bit with a tale of two campaigns that many of you participated in at some level:
  • the Campaign for Our Communities to increase progressive taxes to fund programs; and
  • Raise Up Massachusetts to increase the minimum wage and win earned sick time for low-wage workers.
• The Campaign for our Communities:
  • was implicitly values-driven, but too often ended up in the weeds of tax policy and statistics;
  • it was for communities, but too often not OF them – there simply were not clear enough ways for individual activists and organizational members to get involved and know what was going on; and
  • the game was lost on both strategy and tactics:
    • the times were not really with us,
    • the coalition was fractured over future uses of the revenue, and
    • the key leaders in the legislature were insulated from our pressure tactics. 
    • The result this April was the worst defeat our economic justice coalition has had in 15 years.
• Raise Up Massachusetts is still in an earlier phase, but:
  • it has a clear values-driven focus on improving the lives of working people;
  • the broadest possible community of volunteers has already had meaningful participation in building the campaign’s leverage through a statewide signature drive;
  • the times are more with us, since people recognize the unacceptable levels of income inequality we have;
  • the coalition is unified on concrete final goals that will benefit a million workers and their families; and
  • we have the leverage to pressure House and Senate leadership.
  • We’ve already qualified for the ballot AND won a Senate vote!
• But even if Raise Up is a great model for strengthening our movement for social and economic justice, issues of militarism and climate change are much harder to directly impact at the state level. One key way to have an impact is to elect people with our outlook to Beacon Hill and Washington. Candidate work is also a great way to build a movement out of groups with different priorities. We can become equally excited about the same candidates because they support all our priorities.  At the state level, we have used Mass Alliance to build a unified program for assessing candidates for endorsement even though the organizations at the table differ greatly in their missions.  The movement-building value of working together on elections is the way it builds a sense of solidarity between those organizations that transcends their specific issues and constituencies:
  • Developing questionnaires and doing joint interviews leads to a recognition of broader shared values;
  • The collaborative process strengthens collegiality and community; and
  • Working together on elections builds teamwork and yields shared victories.
• Let me end with a note on technology.  I have often said that the last technology needed for politics was shoe leather, but that’s not true.  The thoughtful use of open-sourced documents, voter files, and social media CAN greatly enhance movement building if it furthers real participation, transparency and accountability.  Too often internet technology becomes a substitute for action and community, but the best practices I’ve seen in the last two years are highly encouraging for using online systems to build unity and movement.

Harris Gruman is Massachusetts Political Director for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).