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Michael Walzer Dissent Fall 2015

Given the radical diversity of American society today, is it still possible to imagine
large-scale popular insurgencies? In recent years, the politically significant and
effective insurgencies in the United States have all been particularist in character,
reflecting the politics of difference: the key examples are the civil rights movement,
the feminist movement, and the movement for gay rights. Each of these has been
victoriousor, better, each of them has been a partial success, like all our
successes. They leave a lot of work still to be done, but, still, we have won important
battles on behalf of women and black and gay Americans. And the United States has
become, with regard to each of these groups, a more egalitarian society than it once
was. At the same time, however, with regard to the overall population of the country,
we have become less egalitarian, more radically hierarchical. Inequality has grown in
the very years in which we were winning greater equality for particular groups of
Americansand despite the fact that these are very large groups. Significant
numbers of women and black and gay Americans have moved up the social
hierarchy, but the hierarchy has gotten steeper.
The same kind of particularist politics is visible in many places. All these political
struggles are important and even urgent, but I think it is fair to say that all of them can
be won without overcoming the existing social and economic hierarchies. Some of us
imagined that the sum of all the particular victories would be a society of equals, but
that no longer looks likely. Nor is there any sign of these different movements coming
together.
In fact, these fragmentary and particularist victories may actually serve to legitimate
the growing inequality. Lichtenstein wrote corporations and even some elements of
the GOP court these new social movements, realizing, I think, that accommodating
them, and opening opportunities for (some of) the people they serve, makes the
established order look better; economic inequality seems more acceptable insofar as
it is disconnected, even only a little bit, from race, gender, and sexuality. And some of
these movements shift to the center as they are accommodated. Their members
benefit in ways that we all have to welcome, but there is no halt and no real
challenge to the inegalitarian drift of our society.
It is this disturbing fact that has led to a revival of Marxism. Marxists were wrong
when they argued against the particularist struggles. They told the feminists, they told
all of us, that we should focus our energies on the working class revolution, because
that revolution would take care of everyones problems all at once. Women, black
and gay Americans, indigenous peoples, immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities,
and all the rest of us, would be liberated together. But none of these groups wanted
to wait. Waiting for the revolution seemed like waiting for the messiah. Each of the
particular movements was founded by people who felt the urgency of their own
oppressionand demanded change in their own name, for themselves. And they

were right. The particularist movements were and still are necessary and important.
Their victories will make life better for people who need, right now, a better life. But,
again, their victories will not produce an egalitarian society.
It is time to think about class. The insurgencies we most need today are the
insurgencies of large numbers. And these people are not distinguished by their
gender, or their nationality, or their religion, not even by their race. They are, so to
speak, naturally diverse.
They are so diverse that they dont, right now, constitute a social class in the Marxist
sense; they have nothing like the cohesion produced by nineteenth-century factories
and slums. Thats why the militants of Occupy didnt talk the language of class. The
idea of the one percent and the 99 percent is not an example of Marxist analysis. It is
a populist appeal, and it may be politically useful, but we should always be wary of
populism, for it isnt a sustainable politics, it doesnt change the world, and it is
available to the right as much as to the left. The work of building a movement has got
to be more focused. It has to be the work of people who are beginning to recognize
that the economic threats they live under and their everyday economic difficulties are
not theirs alone but are widely shared. If that recognition doesnt develop, if there is
no class in formation, we wont get the insurgencies we need.
Right now, it doesnt look as if we are going to get the insurgencies we need. It ought
to be the labor movement, the existing unions, that reach out to the kinds of people I
have just described, and more and more union leaders and members recognize that
task as their own. They have moved to the left. But its not clear that the people who
need to be organizedunemployed men and women, part-time workers, highly
vulnerable workers with no protection against the arbitrary power of the companies
they work forcan be organized in the same way that, say, auto workers were
organized years ago. Organizing in the traditional sense has become nearly
impossible. Campaigns at the margins, like Justice for Janitors, are heartening, but
they dont mobilize a lot of people. Raising the minimum wage is a good thing to do,
and the series of city-wide campaigns are, again, heartening, but what happens once
the raise is won? What kind of organizations will be left behind that can bring workers
together and hold them together for other, more difficult, campaigns?
If there is to be a new worker insurgency, there has to be first, I think, a new New
Deal, a new Wagner Act, a radically reformed National Labor Relations Board. I once
thought that action from below necessarily precedes state actionthats what
Marxism taught. But the men and women below these days are more radically
disorganized and more radically deprived of political power than anytime in my
lifetimeand the union movement is at its lowest ebb. The same corporations and
politicians who are prepared to accommodate, say, gay rights, are determined to
destroy unions, and they have been given the legal power to do that by right-wing
political victories, especially at the state level, and by the decisions of right-wing
judges appointed by triumphant right-wing politicians.

Until those political victories are reversed, I dont see how there can be an
insurgency from belowat least nothing of a sufficiently large-scale to make a
difference. The required jolt has to come from somewhere else, from political
campaigns and legislative enactments. Some Democratic politician has to catch on to
the fact (I think it is a fact) that there is a new majority waiting to be born. It wont be
the 99 percent but it could be well over 50 percent: Americans in trouble or too close
to trouble for comfort. Elections can be won if these people are drawn into the
electorate. And the way to draw them in is to establish a legal framework that makes
their mobilization possible.
But how does this imaginary Democrat win an election before the legal framework is
established and the majority mobilized? I dont think that there is a Marxist answer to
that question. But in America today, it is probably easier to organize for political
power than for economic power, easier to win a national election than a union
election. So thats the victory we have to figure out some way to win. There are many
politicians today who are more than willing to represent the ruling class; we need a
few politicians brave enough to represent Americans in troublethe working class in
itself, but not yet for itself.