Partial Readings: Left Forum Edition
Partial Readings: Left Forum Edition
This weekend, Dissent will sponsor four panels at Left Forum at Pace University in New York City. We will address environmentalism, the pursuit of a universal basic income, strategies for a feminist labor movement, and Occupy and the future of the Left. Here we bring you a special Left Forum edition of our weekend “Partial Readings” roundup. Summaries of the issues to be discussed at Left Forum follow, with links to some of our panelists’ writing and other relevant articles from Dissent and elsewhere. If you attend Left Forum, please pay us a visit in the exhibition hall, or stop by a panel discussion.
In the past decade, we have begun to accept as normal environmental catastrophes—droughts, floods, and tropical storms. Dissent’s first panel debates Left environmentalism in anticipation of our special issue on the politics of climate change, out July 1. Panelist Alyssa Battistoni examines the potential of these environmental crises to serve as rallying points for grassroots action and as opportunities for “disaster capitalism” or right-wing populism. The anti-immigrant nativism we have seen in places such as Arizona in recent years, explains Andrew Ross, is in many ways related to the changing relations between human societies and their environments. The dangers for today’s environmentalism, however, do not solely lie on the far right. Mark Engler, for example, warns against the anti-democratic tendencies of liberal technocrats, insisting instead on an environmentalism rooted in collective politics. In this spirit, panelist Charles Callaway will discuss how in New York City, community-based organizations such as West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) aim to mobilize communities most affected by environmental degradation. In 2013, as the effects of climate change and other environmental ills are becoming salient as never before, such a turn toward politics, and away from lifestyle choice or technological innovation alone, may be gaining force.
In the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, the focus of our second panel, the Left as a whole is rethinking its vision of social change. The Occupy movement has drawn criticism from those skeptical of its emphasis on decentralized organizing structures and lack of a clear political platform, but as Dissent’s Sarah Leonard writes, Occupy succeeded in reminding millions of Americans that their economic suffering and lack of political voice were political problems, rather than personal. As Joseph Schwartz argues, Occupy showed that neoliberalism not only affects the poor in the Global South or the inner city, but the entirety of the “99%.” Thus, among the several strands of political action have emerged from Occupy, as Yates McKee explains, organized resistance to student and other forms of debt have shown some of the strongest potential. However, despite Occupy’s emphasis on newly salient categories like student debt, Bhaskar Sunkara insists that Occupy Wall Street represents a class struggle in a way that might seem old-fashioned to many of its participants. Ties to labor, anti-racist, and feminist struggles cannot be ignored. The movement’s lack of clear defining principles may at times obscure its grounding in class dynamics, but on the other hand, as Frances Fox-Piven observes, it also makes it possible for broad coalitions united against austerity and inequality.
In the wake of Occupy Wall Street, a new generation of political actors are revisiting dusty Left programs and making them new. The subject of our third panel, the universal basic income, is a prime example. In the 1960s, proposals such as that of Frances Fox-Piven and Richard Cloward—which outlined a strategy for pursuing a guaranteed income for all citizens, regardless of employment status—were given serious attention. In the decades since, as austerity has become the dominant policy project in capitalist countries, the idea of divorcing subsistence from work fell by the wayside. In Asia and Latin America, however, particularly under left-wing leaders such as Brazil’s Luíz Ignacio Lula da Silva, several basic income programs have been pioneered with some success, as Lena Lavinas has documented in her research. In recent years, however, basic income has re-entered the political discussion in the Global North. Writers including socialist feminist Kathi Weeks, economist Guy Standing, Jacobin’s Peter Frase, and liberal blogger Mike Konczal have all, for varying reasons, endorsed the idea, and institutions such as the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, on whose coordinating committee panelist Almaz Zelleke serves, have formed to advocate for it. In a political context in which radical thought is back on the agenda, people are once again considering alternate forms of relations between work, leisure, time, and distribution of the means of subsistence. The basic income proposal, though seen by many as mere reform, has the potential to play a role in disrupting these relations as they stand today.
Dissent’s last panel will focus on the reality and prospects of a feminist labor movement. Much of mainstream feminist discourse in recent years has focused solely on the struggles of white-collar women to break the glass ceiling and avoid the glass cliff. Meanwhile, working class women (the majority of whom find nothing new or novel in the conflict between the commitment to work and home life) have disproportionately suffered the effects of the recession, as panel chair Sarah Jaffe has written for Dissent’s special section on feminism. Many sectors where women predominantly work have historically been subject to severe legalized inequalities. For example, panelist Jennifer Klein observes that domestic care workers in the United States are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, an example of how “women’s work” is not considered “real work,” and is compensated accordingly—and have borne the brunt of layoffs and wage decreases after the 2008 financial crisis. It is clear that feminism needs a connection to labor struggles in order to address gender equality. Panelists Olivia Leirer and Nastaran Mohit are engaged in community- and workplace-centered movements, bringing feminist issues to the forefront of New York Communities for Change and the NYS Nurses Association, respectively. Too often, those involved in struggles for social justice have perceived a conflict between “women’s issues” and “labor issues,” but today, a renewed leftist perspective stands to put equality of work at the center of the struggle for gender equality, and vice-versa.
Further Reading:
Kate Losse, a former Facebook insider, responds to Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate-feminist manifesto Lean In.
Mike Konczal and Seth Ackerman discuss the utopianism of the basic income idea.
André Gorz writing in Dissent in 1987 on the distinction between the leftist basic income proposal and that of libertarians and conservatives.
