People must have a channel through which they can express themselves if there is to be any hope that they will transcend the sense of powerlessness and apathy encouraged by our dominant ideological myths. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition has come closest in recent times to serving as this kind of channel. One could see a glimmer of the possibilities for the future, watching the young people who were Jesse Jackson delegates at the Democratic conventions in 1984 and 1988. Many had never participated in any political movement before, and you could see how the Jackson campaign had opened things up for them and gave a whole new dimension to their lives. The Rainbow Coalition has had its share of internal problems, but it has been far more successful than any of the more explicitly ideological groups on the Left in teaching people to give an affirmative answer to the old Biblical question, "Am I my brothers [and sisters] keeper?" One keeps oneself only by keeping others. That means we have to learn to look upon the societies of this world as things which have been created by humans and which are therefore subject to being changed for the better by humans. (p 254)
American politician (1914–2006)
Dorothy Ray Healey September 22, 1914 – August 6, 2006) was a long-time activist in the Communist Party USA, from the late 1920s to the 1970s, and later became a national vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. In the 1930s, she was one of the first union leaders to advocate for the rights of Chicanos and blacks as factory and field workers.
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you have to look at the differences that exist among women and figure out how to organize to diminish the differences, to transcend the differences, to have policies that overcome them. That's very difficult, it means constant thinking, and studied awareness of what the realities are. It's not a short-term struggle, it's not meant for people who are going to fight today and run away and do something else tomorrow. It's a long-term struggle that requires tenacity and courage.
It seems to be that Lincoln's definition of democracy, "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people," is as good a summary as any of an essential element of the kind of socialism I would like to see established in the United States. Socialist democracy means democracy in the economic as well as in the political sphere.
Daytime meetings and the demand for child care facilities would open enormous doors for women. Again, we have to judge how many unions are really on the cutting edge of such issues-not how much lip service they can give-but how many issues they really make into significant contractual questions in collective bargaining.
Hitler's triumph made terribly clear the danger of our earlier notions, as well as the very stark differences between a fascist regime and "bourgeois democracy" as represented by someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By the mid-1930s the issue of anti-fascism permeated all our mass work. In countries like France and Spain where big socialist movements existed, Communists sought to unite the Left into antifascist united fronts. In the United States we sought to work with the socialists, and we also began to reevaluate our earlier, highly critical assessment of the New Deal.
(Today labor is often looked at as merely an arbiter for wages and benefits. Do you think labor leaders today have defined the mission of the labor movement too narrowly?) That is not new, that was started under Samuel Gompers who said that the purpose of the labor movement was "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." But you can't separate the worker and the community. I think it is a survival question. The labor movement must awaken in its ranks and leadership a broader awareness. Workers need to understand what causes the export of jobs so they can unite to prohibit the export of jobs to places that do not allow workers to organize to get decent working conditions. The leadership must recognize that without that, the labor movement is cutting its own throat. It's not a question of abstract protectionism-it's a question of protecting both the foreign worker and the American worker. Even the United Auto Workers (UAW) has recognized there has to be a global approach to the problems of the automobile industry, that it can't be solved country by country. Workers have to be organized because the corporate interests are already organized-multinationals are far more class-conscious than the workers have been.
The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (In the Party we tended to use the term "white chauvinism" instead of racism.) The campaign was initiated by Pettis Perry and Betty Gannett in 1949. [...] However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. [...] In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (pp.125ff)
my loyalties are to a vision of socialism, not to a particular organization. There's a phrase I've always liked in the revolutionary anthem "The International." It goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." As Communists we argued that the survival of capitalism depended on the false consciousness of the majority of the people who weren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives. Ironically, the Communists also found themselves bound by "tradition's chains," and substituted a false consciousness for a real understanding of the world around them. The challenge that faces the Left in the future-if it is to have a future-is to base itself on the knowledge of what collective action by human beings can mean, rather than on faith in the infallibility of either its dogma or its leaders. If I were allowed just one piece of advice to give a new generation as to how to sustain a life-long commitment, I would suggest the cultivation of those two essential virtues of a good revolutionary, patience and irony. (p 254)
Socialist politics should mean more not less debate; socialist democracy will involve an ongoing debate over all the important issues confronting the nation. Genuine democratic debate requires a genuinely free press. My travels to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union convinced me of the necessity for the independence of the mass media from state and Party control. Most people did not believe what they read in the official press or saw or heard on radio or television. Their daily lives belied the "official" facts. A socialist America should not only ensure a free press, it should guarantee as well something that does not exist today under capitalism, and that is the widest possible access to popular communication for individuals and groups. Real democracy is impossible unless people know the facts behind proposed policies, unless they hear all the relevant arguments pro and con-which is something that our own corporate-dominated media has almost as little interest in promoting as the Party-dominated media in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union. (p 252)
I won't see socialism in my lifetime; I don't know if my son will see it in his, or even my grandchildren in theirs. There is no way to foretell what kind of political developments and issues will galvanize a future generation to turn towards socialism. The model I embraced in my youth, the vision of a vanguard party of the working class seizing power in the midst of a great social and political crisis like the one that had overtaken Russia in 1917, is no longer relevant. But I still believe that working people must be at the center of any real movement for socialism, for they are the majority for whose well-being that government "of, by, and for the people" should be concerned. Ultimately I have faith that people, given the understanding of how they can help bring it about, want to live in a better world. People can change the world, but they can't do it as individuals alone. They have to join with others to do it. One thing I have not changed my views on over the years is the belief that organization is the key to winning victories for social change. That's why it was such a tragedy that so little in the way of organized radicalism survived the collapse of the New Left. (p 252)