A Ten Point Program To Unite the Global Left

Neoliberal capitalism, and right-wing ideology justifying it (corporate liberal or authoritarian ethnonationalist), has dominated every society (and all people) in the world for over forty years. How can we turn this around? How can we build movements and wage struggles that challenge and change the unequal and unjust power relations everywhere? How can we build towards a world in which hopeful and progressive ideas predominate?

To answer those questions, we need to know what we are fighting for, not just what we are against. We need to have plausible and practical Solutions, not just insightful exposes of the Problems and of the ideologies that rationalize and perpetuate them. What is the positive Alternative Society that the Left stands for?

Seventy years ago the answer that most progressives gave to the question was simply (their version of) ‘Democracy and Socialism’. But the negative aspects of revolutionary socialist regimes, and the lesson learned that changing systemic class exploitation (through democratized public ownership) alone was not enough, means that this answer is not satisfactory. We need a new set of conceptions of the various systemic forms of oppression and exploitation, a new set of concrete analyses of social relations of unequal power. And we need a correspondingly new set of alternative social arrangements based on a new set of organizing principles.

What is the Left For? ‘Democracy and Socialism’ is an Insufficient Answer.

In this post, I propose a preliminary and tentative Ten Point Program for the Global Left. It is a set of goals for the left to fight for, a set of Organizing Principles for a Liberated Alternative Society, that I hope is a comprehensive summation of the principles that various specific movements to varying degrees can already agree with, hence a basis of unity of all left-led movements.

The program is a set of organizing principles, an ideology (i.e. both values and ideas), a Vision of an alternative future of systemic human relationships. It is my view that we need to unite the left on the level of the whole planet around a Vision that we work constantly to think through and spell out as a New Paradigm, a new multi-system social system. That is why I strongly support the newly created Progressive International which is explicitly trying to do exactly this.

Or rather, they (and I) are committed to working to unite and coordinate the left on two levels, global and local (where local can mean a whole country or even set of countries, or a region or a locality), and they want to unite us around both a Vision and a set of Applications of that vision, a set of possible Policy Solutions.

The Left Must Unite Both Globally and Locally. It Needs an Explicit Vision of an Alternative Society to Do So.

The relation between Global and Local levels, and between movements and struggles within both, is itself a complicated issue that we are barely at the beginning of working out. I will write a post soon about how Progressive International seems to be approaching this issue (here’s a hint – by seeking both international solidarity between local lefts and an organized transnational left that acts at the level of the whole globe).

I have proposed that the Left learn from the experience of the Hayekian neoliberals and the Billy Graham evangelicals (see Unite Around the Basics: Billy Graham’s Lesson for the Left ) and reorganize the left on two levels, global and local, in which the left everywhere (hence the global left) shares a Vision of an Alternative Society, while deliberately expecting a pluralism of Applications of this vision in different Local places and in different time periods.

Having said that, a vision is pointless, no matter how precisely it is refined and articulated, unless it is translated into actionable policies that can actually change societies and people’s lives. For that reason, I plan to (continue to) use the Ten Point Program as a guide for future posts that will both aim to clarify the ten principled goals (and how they tie together into something resembling a vision of an alternative society) and suggest ideas for actionable policies. My reading of the Progressive International site indicates that they also are urging the activists and thinkers contributing to their site to include both vision and policy application in their Blueprint researched essays.

Left Policies will be Different in Different Times and Places. But They Can Only Be Coherent If They Are Applications of a Common Vision.

Policies are always time and place (i.e. conjuncture or situation) specific. For that reason alone, the policies will be different wherever they are fought for and implemented. But it will be useful to develop a Globally-Shared Repertoire of Policy Ideas for local lefts to draw upon. Why wait for local lefts to invent policies out of nothing, and only then share ‘best practices’ after the fact? Developing modular policies as suggestions for how to apply our vision in practice can speed up the rise and spread of left movements everywhere. It is all part of making the left more visible and more comprehensible to regular people as a positive set of solutions and alternatives.

My current version of the ten organizing principles are the following: Liberty, Equality, Democracy, Post-Capitalism, Decolonization, Ecology, Non-Violence, Truths, Well-Being and Justice. This list of ten will likely change over time. The brief explanation of each will certainly evolve. If the ten principles have to be reduced to a slogan, I propose the first three (Liberty, Equality, Democracy) which of course is a variation on the classic slogan of the French Revolution.

A TEN POINT PROGRAM TO UNITE THE GLOBAL LEFT

(1) LIBERTY: Freedom of all individuals from the imposition of coercive or manipulative control by others, in either society or State, that results in unwarranted hurt.

The right of each individual to think or act according to their own conscience, to the extent that this does not result in the unwarranted hurting of others.

Freedom of speech and expression through all types of media.

The freedom of individuals to associate with others in order to articulate their ideas or interests, and to act to achieve them in an organized manner -- including the right to criticize and offer alternatives to the ideas and interests of those in power in society and/or State.

Liberty Means Freedom From Hurts Imposed by Others and the Right to Organize to Champion One’s Ideas and Interests.

(2) EQUALITY: Equality of basic material conditions of life, including a relatively high Guaranteed Basic Income and Social Services. Policies to redistribute wealth, land and income both locally and globally to achieve such equality.

Policies such as affirmative action that aim to achieve actual equality of results for people in all status groups.

A feminist and polysexual society that transforms all institutions that confer unequal status on one gender or one sexual orientation over the others.

A non-racist society that changes all institutions that give any ethnicity or racialized group differential and inferior treatment.

Equality of economic, social and political civil rights for all (adult) citizens regardless of their individual status characteristics.

Equality of opportunity for all individuals to achieve their potentials and to engage in activities that interest them and/or make life better for them and others.

Equality of Basic Material Conditions of Life is Crucial to Achieving Equality of Status and Opportunity for All Identities.

(3) DEMOCRACY: Final decision-making on important issues rests (according to various formulas that make common sense in the specific context) with all those citizens who are directly involved in the activities of, or significantly materially impacted by the outcomes of, any economic or cultural or political institution. Hence both democracy within each institution and processes that aim to reconcile the outcomes of those decisions with the general societal interest and with the interests and ideas of those most affected by them. Hence rule ‘of, by and for the people’.

The form and content of the democratic process will include many representative structures but will maximize direct and deliberative democracy. Deliberation means both dialogue and debate. Dialogue stresses learning to understand others in order to reconcile differences. Debate stresses respectful critique and constructive presentation of different facts and competing ideas.

The Capitalist System Must Be Replaced by a System that Lets Us Achieve Full Liberty, Equality and Democracy.

(4) POST-CAPITALISM: The capitalist economy and social system will be ended and replaced by one that better serves to realize liberty, equality, democracy and the other desired features of an alternative society.

This system will take as a starting point the principles of democratic socialism (or social democracy in the original sense), such as economic and workplace democracy and sharing the wealth. But the many negative features of the first efforts at building a democratic socialism in the Soviet Union, China and other countries (and to a lesser extent within mostly rich capitalist countries by parliamentary reformist socialists) make it clear that any future post-capitalist system will have to be considerably different. There is an urgent need to draw the lessons from that history and to come up with changes to the model.

The most obvious thing to do is to reject the one (vanguard) party State for a genuinely pluralist democracy. But this is easier said than done. After all, real existing liberal democracies may allow multiple parties but they operate within a very narrow pro-capitalist consensus, so in a sense they are also one-party states. And the people who end up in positions of rule are both predominantly drawn from the higher classes and serve their fundamental private property interests. And corporations may compete and thereby represent ‘plural’ interests but they are dictatorships of the shareholder owners that require absolute maximization of profit at the expense of their workers and the general interests of society. Their successes relative to socialist polities and economies depend on this, as well as on the superexploitation of an ever widening set of people in the ‘periphery’ to capitalist metropoles.

Can a Public and Cooperative Ownership Economy Emulate the Positives of a Capitalist Economy while Getting Rid of the Negatives?

There is a lot of thinking to do about the basics of a democratic socialist economy, including possible multiple forms of ownership, the autonomy of enterprises (to balance the self-interest of those in the enterprise and the interests of others in society), the authority of managers balanced against workers control, how wages and prices and enterprise profits get set, how it is possible to let new enterprises to form and to allow others to fail.

The centrally planned economies often achieved higher rates of growth and did a better job of redistributing wealth and opportunity than other still-capitalist and neo-colonized countries at a similar level in the hierarchy of economies in the extremely unequal world capitalist system. But all of them eventually hit a wall, especially with regard to their ability to improve their use of technology to increase labour productivity and to develop new products that were responsive to consumer preferences (if not necessarily their needs).

Is it possible to achieve the benefits of competition between enterprises making similar products in a non-capitalist economy where profits above a certain amount are shared by the whole society? Is it possible to allow for entrepreneurs to create new companies within an economy based predominantly upon various types of public and cooperative ownership (where the profits may go partly to the enterprise, but ultimately are accumulated by going back into a collectively shared pot to be drawn upon for new investments)? How can we achieve increases in labour productivity in ways other than worsening the process of work and the wages and benefits of workers? The first step is to pose these and many other questions by drawing lessons from the history of both socialist and capitalist economies.

Reversing the Results of (Neo)colonization Will Require a Global Welfare State that Redistributes Wealth, Power and Income.

(5) DECOLONIZATION: A reversal of the results of the long history of the conquest and (neo)colonization of peoples, countries and cultures, typically justified by the racialization of the conquered and by the institutionalization of racism. Domestic policies that contribute to a global redistribution of wealth, power and cultural valuation.

Opposition to all wars between countries and corporate economic blocs and hegemony-seeking cultures insofar as they are motivated by the goal of dominating over and exploiting others in the hierarchy of peoples, countries and cultures that is contemporary Imperialism, the capitalist world system.

Opposition to arms production and the arms trade.

Democratization of all International Government Organizations (IGOs) from the UN to the IMF so that decision-making is rep by pop.

The building up of a world Armed Forces, subject to the command of leaders appointed by a representative IGO, side by side with the drawing down of the armed forces of nation states and private corporate groups, and the progressive elimination of weapons of mass destruction. Then the gradual reduction of the world armed forces, as there is a further reduction of the localized state and private ones. This means that each state ends up with a level of weaponry and armed forces that corresponds only to their population size, as well as that the size of all militaries and amount of weapons held by all states and private actors are reduced.

Reduce Rich Country Imperial Wars with a Rep by Pop United Nations. Let it Oversee a Massive World Armed Forces Balanced by Nation State Armed Forces That are More Equal to One Another.

There will never be a reduction to zero, or anywhere near zero, because policing and coercion will always be necessary in human societies (the rule of law is not a situation where people get to choose whether to obey the law or not). Indeed, it is almost certain that human societies will always be marred by coercive crimes, more or less violent conflicts and some all-out wars. The main goal here is ending a situation where the people/countries with the most wealth and cultural and political power have the most military power, a necessary precondition to enactment of policies to redistribute wealth and power on a global level.

Policies on trade and immigration and other issues that aim at making different countries, peoples and cultures equal, hence the dismantling of the imperialist hierarchy of (under)development brick by brick.

(6) ECOLOGY: All governmental and non-governmental organizations must commit to a policy that balances so-called economic growth with achieving a flourishing of ‘Nature’, including such policies as rewilding and the preservation of non-human animal and plant species. We also need very different qualitative and quantitative measures of growth from the current GDP type ones, which are really measures of the amount of profit achieved from the sale of commodified goods and services.

Life on Earth is Under Threat from Many More Types of Poisoning and Pollution Than Those Due to Fossil Fuels.

Eliminate fossil fuels and replace with so-called green energy to slow global warming and save planet earth from that particular imminent threat. The proliferation of greenhouse gases is only a subcategory of a much bigger set of equally serious threats due to all sorts of pollution and poisoning, mostly as byproducts of economic production but also transport and communication and almost all consumer activities. Hence, the goal must be to reduce global poisoning due to the pollution that is a side effect of production, distribution and consumption activities.

(7) NON-VIOLENCE: When it comes to the issue of force and violence, we have to make a much greater separation between ends and means than in the other points, not because we want to do so, but because our State and reactionary private actor opponents will force us to do so. Having said that, we want to maximize non-violence both as a goal and as a means, as an organizing principle of a reformed society and as the organizational strategy and tactics of winning societal changes.

NON-VIOLENCE IN A LIBERATED SOCIETY

Our goal is a relatively non-violent society, for many reasons. All forms of inequality, injustice, oppression or exploitation rely significantly on both the threat and occasional use of coercive force, violence or punishment by both private and State actors. If the State and corporations and other private actors have their superior capacity for force and violence reduced, they are less able to maintain their domination and exploitation.

Hence, we seek the progressive reduction and equalization of arms and armed forces on a world level mentioned in the Decolonization point above.

We Want a Non-Violent Society Won by Non-Violent Means. But Those with Vested Interests Will Use State and Private Violence to Stop Us.

Hence, we also seek the defunding and demilitarization of police. But we will still need police. There will still need to be arrests for criminal and civil code violation behaviours. There will still be prisons and other institutions that detain people and fines and other types of punishment or redress that are involuntary. But the criminal and civil code laws, courts, policing agencies and detention institutions are strongly biased to uphold capitalist private property and deny the rights of those who challenge it. They are equally biased against racialized groups and various other categories of people. We need to reinvent the entire system of law and order.

The schools, media and all institutions in a liberated society will educate both children and adults in the ways of non-violence. They will operate as much as possible in ways that seek to reconcile differences peacefully and democratically.

NON-VIOLENCE AS A MEANS

Changing society on a systemic level, or even winning reforms which operate within existing systems, will inevitably involve some use of coercion and violence by progressive forces. After all, a non-violent sit-in at a Woolworths lunch counter for civil rights in the U.S. South in the 1950s and 1960s, or a legal strike today with only peaceful picketing that does not even try to block strikebreakers, are uses of coercive force to the extent that they interfere with the capitalist owner’s use of his private property and business. Any pressure tactic is somewhere on a scale of deployment of force and (threat of) violence.

All Pressure Tactics Lie Somewhere on a Gradient of Coercive Force.

Keeping the level of force and violence by both sides as low as possible is usually what progressives want. They can ‘outviolent’ us by a ratio of something like 40 to 1 (a typical ratio of deaths by rich country and poor country soldiers and civilians in today’s neocolonial wars) because they have most of the means to ‘do it and get away with it’ with (apparent) public support. They have far superior means of ‘enforcement’ in the law, courts, police, armed forces, prisons etc. They have far greater means of legitimation through support-for-the-system institutions, like the upper class owned mainstream media, and like the simple statements and supportive actions of other organizations and people in top positions everywhere that orchestrate and maintain dominant ideologies as perceived common sense. High levels of violence distract public understanding of the protest action away from the injustices and on to the violence, and the alleged consequence of a destabilized society. And potential participants may be discouraged from coming out to the next protest by news of violence and arrests (although some will be aroused to participate).

That is why the authorities and private reactionary actors so frequently up the level of violence and arrests (and, in between activist events, carry out some mix of defamation, surveillance, intimidation, harrassment, torture, roundups and sometimes murderous hurt). But the slogan No Justice, No Peace expresses the simple fact that we have to weigh the consequences of inaction against the possibilities of change, due to action that is a deployment of force or violence, in the level of coercion and violence against people who are routinely oppressed and exploited, not to mention the level of brutal repression of activists and people who oppose the injustices of the rulers.

No Justice No Peace. We Have to Weigh the Consequences of Inaction Against the Level of Often Violent Repression That We Will Endure to Win a Given Level of Gains.

Even if there are no protests or strikes or other pressure tactic collective actions, even just the election of a left-wing government like the Allende government in Chile in 1970 will be enough to threaten vested interests to the point that some of those interests will use their leverage to increase the level of violent repression to whatever level necessary to seize back control. An ABC about liberal democracy: it mostly applies only to a small part of the overall State apparatus. And there is always a struggle to get the non-elected part of the State to carry out the wishes of the elected. This is especially true if a left-wing government is democratic in the most baseline sense of acting to protect the people from the private power structure and the non-elected State apparatus, let alone if they go further and adopt policies that actually counter their power and interests.

Revolutions are almost always last resorts, when all other relatively peaceful avenues have been blocked, and too many peaceful activists have been arrested, tortured and killed (see all the countries in the Arab Spring and since).

All that progressives can do is be realistic: always seek to reduce the level of violence to as low a level as possible, but prepare to protect people from the provocations and the violent repression if the movement starts to be effective (that will include hiding [the identity of] many activists and activities from the surveillance of State and reactionary forces).

Everyone Should Be Enabled to Pursue Their Truths. As Long as They Do Not Impose It on Others.

(8) TRUTHS: Freedom for everyone to pursue their artistic or scientific or secular moral or spiritual/religious truths, as long as this does not impose these truths on others in ways that constrain their own freedom.

Universal access to education and training and the tools and technology needed to pursue and widely share truths, and to develop an individual’s potentials so that the wider society can develop its potentials too.

Universal access to media of all kinds, and to other means of production and dissemination of factual knowledge and interpretative truths, through various types of public or cooperatively owned organizations.

(9) WELL-BEING: A liberated alternative society will seek to enable its citizens to above all achieve a high quality of life, a life where people are able to live well, to openly express and sometimes realize their desires, to simply have fun and to play as well as being enabled to work and produce.

A Liberated Society Enables Everyone to be Healthy, to Have Fun and to Live Well.

Policies and institutions that foster mental and physical health both proactively and in caring treatments, and universal access to both. Well-being should be fostered as a culture and goal of social structures, not just as activities and treatments aimed at achieving a more narrowly conceived and targeted health in individuals.

Opportunities for people to have fun by participating in play and games and hobbies and to enjoy the playful (e.g. sports) activities and art and public sharing of knowledge and craft skills of others.

(10) JUSTICE: There will still be a need for institutions and policies that achieve Law and Order, but based on different laws and a differently achieved order, where order mostly means the security of persons from (the threat of) hurt by others who behave badly.

Equal prosecution, and availability of an equally resourced and rule-enabled defence (hence defence and prosecutors share equal, or much closer to equal than now, powers over a case) in all courts.

Policies to foster the equal laying of charges and prosecution and ‘punishment’ of all types of crime carried out by persons at all levels of society. Hence more done about white collar crimes, not just street crimes.

We Still Need Law and Order. But with Different Laws Applied to Achieve a Different Order.

Defunding of police in order to greatly expand other agencies and interventions that both deal with crime non-violently and deal with the causes of crime.

Demilitarization of both public and private police and other groups able to use force and violence. This must include extensive policies to disarm and demilitarize all citizens and all civil society groups too. As with achieving decolonization, this will necessarily mean balancing the level of capacity to use force of a higher level centralized agency of (en)force(ment) and the capacity of local police and the capacity of citizens to deploy force, and working to ratchet the back and forth balancing down without ever reaching anywhere close to zero possession of the means of force and violence.

The achievement of a non-violent and just society, where most people act justly towards others most of the time, can only be the result of building a society that provides the basic conditions of material life, and the incremental building of a culture, that are jointly conducive to living justly and non-violently.

This Ten Point Program Aims to Stimulate Debate About What the Global Left’s Shared Vision for an Alternate Society Could and Should Be.

Okay, that is my first draft of a Ten Point Program for the Global Left. There will be lots of reworkings plus a much shorter version. It will guide my choices in what to research and write about in my posts. And go to the Progressive International website to read some of the Blueprint essays.