- Does America Need a Left?An Introduction
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If America had a viable Left, we wouldn’t be witnessing the systematic dismantling of the advances of the New Deal, which sought to protect the poor, the working class, and the middle class from the worst consequences of the capitalist marketplace.
Ever since the decline of the social movements that surged up in the 1960s and early 1970s, America’s ruling elites have been engaged in an overt class war against the middle and working class of American society. Those elites have used the threat of moving their investments overseas to disempower the labor movement, scare voters into accepting reduced taxes on corporations and the rich, and curtail environmental protections. They have done so in the name of preserving jobs, even as manufacturing jobs have declined and workers have increasingly been forced into lower-income service sector jobs or into unemployment. Meanwhile, the two-party political system has increasingly been dominated by the wealthy, so that the Democratic Party of the second decade of the twenty-first century often embraces the economic agenda of Wall Street and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans (a recent example being the budget deal of December 2013 that cuts off unemployment benefits for over a million people and reduces food subsidies and other supports for the poor, including many who are working but underpaid).
The research of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health — which inspired the creation of Tikkun in 1986 — has shown that there are two major ways in which people in the United States are disempowered by the ideology of our economic system. First, we are caught in a pattern of self-blame due to the capitalist idea that we all can make it if we really try, and that we have no one to blame but ourselves if our lives do not feel fulfilling. Second, we have internalized the selfishness and materialism of the capitalist marketplace in a way that undermines our loving relationships and families. Whenever we express yearnings for a world of love, kindness, generosity, harmony, and peace, those yearnings are dismissed as utopian or unrealistic, leaving us feeling disempowered and unable to change the world we live in.
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So, of course America needs a Left.
But the kind of Left that America has had in the past decades is part of the problem. That Left has framed its critique through a narrow economic and political discourse of “rights,” while ignoring the deep psychological and spiritual pain that keeps so many Americans from even imagining the possibility of some larger social transformation. That’s why Tikkun and its readers developed the Network of Spiritual Progressives, with its call for a new bottom line of love, generosity, caring for each other, and caring for the earth.
Marxists have identified “the critical contradiction” of capitalism as its inability to satisfy material needs. We recognize this as one important dimension of what’s wrong with capitalism. Yet we believe that the critical contradiction lies elsewhere: in the way that capitalism undermines love, caring, generosity, and ethical consciousness, turning everything into a commodity for sale. Indeed capitalism has proved itself willing to destroy the life-support system of the earth for the sake of short-term economic growth, teaching us to see each other in narrow...