Keeping the pressure on: what now for the anti-bailout activists? by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC

There is, I fear, a sense of bewilderment abroad among working people now that the bailout has passed and as the economic crisis deepens. What coherent counter-narratives are available for those who are beginning to lose faith in the standard ones provided by capitalist politicians and media? What possibilities exist for radical grass-roots economic justice movements in the current context? What, exactly, should we be demanding?
In my last essay, I argued that the best response to those who defended the bailout on the grounds that it was necessary to prevent disaster on Wall Street that would inevitably hit jobs, pensions, and so on was to broaden the question and ask why it is that we have a system that places so much power in the hands of investors. Why should we have pensions depend on the stock market, and why should the moods of investors have such significance?
If we are to find a just and rational way out of this crisis, or rather a way to recover from it, a thorough and profound debate about these questions is essential. Sadly, only a small minority of non-mainstream, that is non-corporate, media outlets have moved beyond reporting the dizzying swings of the Dow or FTSE and, on occasion, giving a superficial account of the controversy over the bailout.
It has been heartening to see so many working people take to the streets in protest at the bailout. Many of the protests have been organized by small, ad-hoc groups and have been publicized through grass-roots networks. I'm reminded of Hannah Arendt's claim that revolutions are carried out not by established "revolutionary" parties or organizations, but by spontaneously-constituted groups of people who, quite simply, have had enough of the system (note, not just the particular rulers) in place. I wonder, however, whether these protests will lose steam as the immediate, relatively concrete issue of the $700 billion bailout fades somewhat from the headlines and generalized economic crisis takes its place. The answer depends on the kinds of analysis available to the protesters and their supporters (and potential supporters).
One obvious thing to do in seeking the understand the prospects for such a movement is to look at the last economic crisis of this scale: the Great Depression. It was the spontaneous, grassroots-led, radical struggle of workers during that period that gave them their greatest gains and caused the greatest alarm in the capitalist class. The consolidation of the "mainstream" labor unions-- the AFL and CIO-- and their co-operation with the new National Labor Relations Board came as something of a relief to big business, since it offered the prospect of industrial "peace" and stability after the militant strikes of the 1930s. We should bear in mind, though, that these workers lived in a culture where worker struggles were always fresh in the community's memory, and where many writers and groups openly advocated various forms of socialism. They would have remembered Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, who ran for President several times, finally in 1920, winning 900,000 votes. Debs himself had first been radicalized during the long Depression that followed the economic crisis of 1893. Radical movements-- of workers, the unemployed, veterans-- were brutally repressed time and time again and yet, their spirit survived and was taken up by new activists. System-saving reform and the outbreak of the Second World War blunted their edge, but it was really McCarthyism that did what mere beatings, killings, and imprisonments could not: it demonized them and made their own natural constituency hostile to them. (Needless to say, Stalinism's perversion of socialism/ communism helped this process greatly.) Even the tumult of the 1960s did not seriously revive this tradition.
What now, then? For the first time in many years, we can see the possibility of a great moment of clarity: the system's true nature and the interests of the different groups within it are becoming visible to a great many people for the first time. The bailout has shown that those in power in this system-- the capitalist class, including CEOs and Senators-- will do whatever it takes to save capitalists, and little or nothing to save anyone else, when there is trouble. It's not necessarily that the individual CEOs and Senators are cruel or greedy, although many are; it is not about personal qualities of individuals at all. It's about the dynamics of the system. It's simple: their interests are not your interests. If you're stranded on a New Orleans rooftop, bankrupted by medical costs, or facing foreclosure, you will not be bailed out; if you own an investment bank that has run into trouble, you will. That's just how it works. The appropriate demand, I think, is not just the rollback of the bailout and a New Deal re-enactment; the system-- capitalism-- that makes it "necessary" to bail out the bankers, not the workers, should itself be replaced by a system that organizes its priorities differently. As I suggested in my last post, this requires us to think about what economies are for: profit or people?
In short, the situation requires a radical anticapitalist movement with a radical anticapitalist analysis showing what is wrong with the system as a whole and how we can do better. For this reason, it is perhaps better that the anti-bailout and anti-eviction activism we are seeing is not led by "mainstream" groups such as the less radical unions. However, it is hard to create such movements and analyses in a vaccuum. Existing unions, political parties, and other organizations face a decision: will they step into the street or stay in their office suites?