Bernie Sanders, the Occupy Movement, and Cultural Revolution, by Jeff Diteman
“Literacy is one of the most powerful motors of political awareness”
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In the autumn of 2011, when a coalition of activists, punks and hobos took over city parks in New York, Oakland, Portland, and many other cities across America, the energy of change felt inevitable. People were working directly with each other, making decisions together, maintaining a presence in the parks to send a message to the world that they stood against global capital and the culture of greed and exploitation, and were willing to disrupt the status quo to achieve social and economic justice.
One day that September, as I walked around the tent city of Occupy Portland, I saw two men who looked quite out of place: muttering through the park in business suits, they incarnated the drab palette of gray and white emblematic of everything Occupy stood against. As they passed two hippy girls with dreadlocks, one of the girls addressed them defiantly, saying, “Enjoy your jobs while you have them, gentlemen.”
I continued my journey through the park, feeling excited and confused.
A few weeks later, as part of a nationally coordinated strategy, the police evicted the protesters from the park. In Portland, several thousand citizens showed up on eviction night to try to prevent the police from carrying out their task and to document any cases of police brutality. The cops wore full riot gear and tried without success to disperse the crowd with horses. They did not resort to tear gas as the police in Oakland had. The standoff lasted for hours. However, around dawn, the citizens’ numbers started to dwindle. I myself succumbed to exhaustion and went home. By nine a.m. all that was left of Occupy Portland was a drunken teenager being manhandled by the cops while another drunken teenager shouted over and over, “Grow food!”
Now it is five years later. Something tells me that those teenagers still have their anger, the hippy girls are now hippy women, and the businessmen still have their jobs.
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As we enter the thick of the 2016 primaries, the establishments of both major parties have seen major challenges from populist insurgencies. The cryptofascist candidacy of Donald Trump has captured the hearts of millions of closet white supremacists and former junior high school bullies. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has gained enormous momentum by speaking to the concerns of the youthful and radical end of the leftist spectrum.
For those of us who have felt politically alienated for years, who have been shaking our heads as America elected centrist Democrats and extreme right-wing Republicans, the Sanders campaign feels like a breath of fresh air. Finally, a candidate with the guts of Jello Biafra and the wits of Howard Zinn. Finally someone who will articulate on the national stage those sentiments that brought us together at Occupy rallies, climate marches, and war protests.
While this expression, this hope, is quite needed, we must at this key moment proceed not merely with enthusiasm, but also with forethought. Bernie Sanders currently spearheads a political revolution. He has been quite clear in his speeches that he cannot do it alone. The ambitious reforms that he proposes can only succeed if the political revolution is accompanied by a cultural revolution.
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Cultural Revolution in the 21st Century
The polarization we are seeing today in the United States is not about who does or doesn’t want gay marriage, abortion or recreational drugs to be legal. Trump the ideological clown does not galvanize his base by appealing to their piety, but to their bitterness. A vote for Trump is not so much a vote for any particular set of ideas, but rather a vote against certain groups of people. The logic of the Sanders candidacy also emerges from opposition: a vote for Sanders is a vote against our corporate overlords. This is why, in an interview, Sanders said that he would very much enjoy running against Trump in the general election. That would give Sanders a chance to do what he does best, which is castigate the rich and powerful for their thoughtless greed and indifference to the struggles of the less fortunate.
This word, struggle, corresponds to a powerful concept. It is quite unfortunate that we have allowed the discourse of war to contaminate our conception of civil society. Right-wing pundits constantly accuse Obama of fomenting class war; we should respond that what Obama actually represents is that he is the first president since Jimmy Carter with an informed notion of class struggle. War is a conflict between two armies; wars are winner-take-all battles to the death. Class struggle is the competition between capital and labor for political power. The resuscitation of the concept of class struggle is an integral part of the currently needed cultural revolution.
Furthermore, in addition to renewing awareness of the concept of class struggle, the cultural revolution will also benefit from a broader and more nuanced understanding of social struggle in general. This is to say that any political revolution aiming to re-democratize our society needs to take into account the variety of different modes of struggle among different groups. White male Bernie supporters would do well to develop a sense of curiosity about feminist issues and the problems faced by ethnic minorities. Any white voters who support Bernie Sanders but who also now support a boycott of Béyoncé are probably suffering from an empathy deficit. It is to be hoped that the more we listen to our sisters and brothers from different backgrounds, the more we will overcome the fear that pervades and divides society. Here is a reading list about racism. Here is a feminist reading list.
Another key point in cultural revolution has to do with our habits of awareness. Literacy is one of the most powerful motors of political awareness. When the idealistic leftists of Republican Spain had their brief shot at governance, they faced the enormous challenge of disseminating information in a country with a general illiteracy rate of 30%, most of it concentrated among the poor and working classes. This kind of situation makes it difficult to spread cultural awareness and build consensus around reforms.
In the United States in 2016, we do not suffer from high levels of illiteracy, but we are plagued by its insidious cousin, aliteracy. This is when people can read, but choose not to. The contemporary manifestation of aliteracy is that people are reading all the time—reading text messages, reading headlines, reading tweets and Facebook posts—but they are rarely reading anything longer than a few hundred words. A well-thought-out, reasoned argument takes many pages to develop. Developing real empathy for others means having the patience to hear their thoughts and stories all the way through. Therefore, one powerful way to engage in cultural revolution is to take back your attention span. I personally feel my attention span being eroded every day, and it is a constant struggle to maintain it, to preserve the precious ability to think long and deeply about a problem.
So there are three strategies for engaging the cultural revolution that we need today to accompany a meaningful leftist political revolution: renew the notion of class struggle, extend the notion of class struggle to include the particular struggles of all oppressed and exploited people, and resist the plague of mental laziness and short attention that is rampant in mainstream culture. These ideas might seem trite or obvious, but sometimes we fail to do the most obvious tasks.
There are thousands of other ways to manifest emancipation. What do you think?
If Bernie Sanders secures the Democratic nomination, he will need a massive base of highly motivated citizens to win the presidency. If he wins the presidency, he will also need a robust leftist congress that will overturn Citizens United, end corporate welfare, strengthen our schools, promote international pacifism, and protect the environment. This is how a coalition of activists, punks and hobos will return American politics to the American people.
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If you enjoyed this piece, consider reading another great op/ed article by Jeff Diteman, entitled: "Exemplary Injustice in Spain," here.
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