The return of class struggle in America

Desperate times in New Jersey

A People's History of the United States (Wikipedia)

My freshman seminar is titled “Radicals and Rabble Rousers: Race, Class and Struggles for Justice in America.” Alongside Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, we read works by and about various radical movements and activists. If the mood of this crop of first-year students is anything to go by, I have to say that the future of student radicalism in New Jersey is looking a lot brighter than a year or two years ago.

Don’t get me wrong: they aren’t about to rush off and construct barricades anytime soon. But there’s something different about the sincerity and seriousness with which this group of students seem to be tackling the course material. Discussions about race and class, about “history from below,” about capitalism and slavery, social change and revolution, often elicit defensive reactions from first-year students who are more firmly tethered to ruling-class ideologies than they would like to admit. This time around, however, I’ve noticed among them a more pronounced openness to critical inquiry, and to questioning received ideas.

Call me a vulgar materialist if you will, but I think this openness has to do with the fact that New Jersey’s economy is fast disappearing down the toilet, and many students can see their jobs, their dreams, their futures being flushed down with it. When I asked how many of their families had been affected in some way by the economic crisis, a good three-quarters of the class raised their hands. Small wonder then, that the notion that we live in an unjust and unequal society doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to them.

How bad is it in New Jersey, and where are we headed? It is now nearly a year since Republican Chris Christie won the gubernatorial elections and some nine months since he took office and stepped up his predecessor’s efforts to balance the budget on the backs of working people. Christie’s unapologetic anti-union stance, his publicly professed determination to cut back on “entitlements” (read: union benefits), and his shameless attempts to divide public- and private-sector workers have, in these few short months, had a devastating impact not only on the livelihoods of thousands across the state but on the ideological climate as well.

Look who’s back!

Hello everyone. It’s been a long time since my last post. Nine months, in fact.

No, I haven’t been pregnant.

Well, hello at least to those of you who still bother to subscribe to this much-dormant RSS feed, for there’s no reason why this url would make its way into your browser otherwise!

Some of my readers know me well enough to know that these have been an interesting nine months, to say the least. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, I’m not saying much more on this question. Suffice it to say that I am back in the blogosphere for a few good reasons, although I’m not sure for just how long before I get sucked back into my other life!

So why the prolonged silence? Pre-tenure anxieties, followed by my struggle for tenure, stretched well into mid-summer, and ever since I won that fight, I’ve had percious little time to write a single post, let alone blog regularly. From the October 11 National Equality March in Washington D.C., to the rally for marriage equality in New Jersey, this has been a busy semester indeed. It has had its moments of relaxation too, so I’m not complaining.

It’s nearly the end of the year (the decade!), and I needed to do some political writing. There’s been more activism this semester than I’ve seen in some of my busiest years of organizing, and it’s been in turns exhilarating and frustrating, but mostly exhilarating. Case in point:

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I THINK IT’S  becoming clear to more and more people these days that our world is being flushed down the toilet in a hundred and one different ways. In the world’s richest country, which also claims to be the great champion of the world’s poor, millions of people cannot affort to get sick. And if the government has its way, they will now have to pay a penalty if they don’t purchase expensive health insurance from private insurers. So while the public are desparate for change, healthcare reform is being has been scuttled by the likes of “senatorial prostitute” Joe Lieberman, as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann put it.

Of course, the Democrats showed no spine, no heart, no principles, no nothing, except their clear, and in fact clearly articulated (Obama is indeed a good speaker!) ambition to restore the United States’ position of power in the world. Or rather, to repair its image abroad, while holding fast to its military gains in these two disastrous wars, while simultaneously shoring up the profitability of its banks, its insurance giants, and its corporate robber-barrons.

And then, of course, we’ve had the nearly absurdist irony of watching a warmongering President not only receive the Nobel Peace Prize (“Peace Prize or War Prize?” asks Howard Zinn), but also use the occasion to lecture the world on the justness of his wars, in a speech that would have made his predecessor, Henry Kissinger, proud.

Nowhere in the mainstream American media did we see how Obama’s surge was being viewed by anyone other than the talking heads and the pundits.

It is indeed Obama’s turn in the great game, and I wonder what mental gymnastics liberals will now ask us to play to keep supporting this bankrupt party.

And let’s not forget the equal-parts disaster and farce that is the Copenhagen Climate Summit (the summit that was designed to fail).

AND THE TURMOIL is not only at the top of society, but at the bottom as well. I’m thinking here not only of the 200,000 that marched in Washington, D.C. to demand full equality for LGBTI people “in all matters of civil law in all fifty states.” I’m also thinking of the University of California students, workers, and faculty who have decided to fight back against the cuts in education funding and against layoffs and union givebacks.

The left has produced some spectacular displays of solidarity, that in sheer numbers outnumbered even the Fox-News-inflated figures of the teabaggers, the birthers, the truthers and the like. But the growth of the far right in the U.S. can no longer be taken lightly. As the Democrats have betrayed the hopes of those who put them in office, the far right have mobilized their base, built on some of the most virulently racist, xenophobic, and reactionary ideas propagated  by right-wing windbags like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

SO IT’S BEEN a busy semester, a busy year, alright. And the spring promises to be even more hectic, with the struggle against budget cuts, and for LGBTI rights, more likely than not to escalate. Might we see rallies around healthcare? Who knows, we might even have mass, intercontinental mobilizations at the various “climate summits” to be held in Mexico and elsewhere throughout 2010. Hell, we might even see the re-emergence of an antiwar movement in the U.S. (I’ll have mine with a labor upsurge on the side, please.)

But now that the semester has ended, and I’m getting ready for my trip to India, I figured it would be a good time to dash off a blogpost or two.

THIS IS SUPPOSED to be a blog with a “desi focus,” but increasingly, it’s becoming impossible (if it ever were possible) to  extricate South Asian politics from what’s happening in the rest of the world. And I don’t think you’ll disagree when I say that that world is being flushed down the toilet in a zillion different ways by the people who are supposed to be “in charge,” by the “captains of industry,” and the great “leaders of the world.”

Thank goodness that at least one among them spares no rhetoric in his condemnation of this “band of warring brothers” (as Marx called the ruling classes of the various nations of the world).