Boots Riley talking:
I believe that since the beginning of the New Left, progressives and radicals have turned more to spectacle and gone away from actually organizing at the actual point of contradiction in capitalism, which is the exploitation of labor, which is also where the working class has its power. And we’ve gone in favor of demonstrations, that don’t necessarily have teeth, but they show where our head is at. And I feel like we have to put—give these demonstrations more teeth, by being able to affect the bottom line and say, you know—and say, “You can make no money today, or you can make less money and give us what we want.”
we might know something, like we’ll hear that piece of information. But we hear that piece of information—what can we do with it? Right? And we are like, “OK, that’s something I can’t do anything about.” And we file it away. And it’s not apathy. You know, it’s the fact that we don’t have the movements that are able to—we don’t have them big enough yet, the movements that are able to address this, movements that are actually confronting capital by withholding labor. Those are the things that we need.
And for too long, the left has gone away from class struggle. Right? We’ve gone away from class struggle in favor of spectacle, and hidden in the arts and academia. So, a lot of our biggest fights are sometimes about not what we’re saying, but how we’re saying it. And I agree how we’re saying things are important. It means, though, that we have to look at how the working class is talking and what they really mean, as opposed to just trying to adjust how people are talking, and making a movement around things that we can do something about, because then people have a real choice of what they want to get involved in. You know, it’s not that people don’t hear that story, for instance, and think it’s ridiculous, but, even me, I’m sitting here like, “OK, how do I—is this something I can do? Let me move on from this. Like, what”—you know, throwing up my hands.
And so, I think that it’s—people are looking for new ways to do things. And I think that it’s time for us to have new—and I’ve been on this show saying this before, so—new, radical, militant, in the sense that they keep out scabs, radical and militant in the sense that they break the existing labor laws, and have these new, radical and militant labor movements. And, you know, that doesn’t necessarily mean the existing unions, but if they want to come along and up the ante, that’s great, but there’s only 7 percent of—something like 7 percent of the U.S. workforce is unionized.
And some of that has to do with some of the laws that have been enacted since the ’40s, and also some of the anti-communist stuff. But, you know, the Taft-Hartley laws make it so you can’t do solidarity strikes. And the reason why they make it so you can’t do solidarity strikes is because they’re effective. And so, we need a labor movement that’s going to break those laws, because, as we see, the laws that are existing are going to make the current ways of organizing unions much harder. So, you know—and this is almost also a call out to folks that consider theirself radicals, like we’re willing to go to jail for statements sometimes, for demonstrations, and which is good, but maybe if we were part of leading this kind of new radical labor movement, we’d go to jail for breaking the laws that bring people hikes in wages, that then also make for a movement that could handle other social justice issues with strikes.
it’s never been my mission to create a separate, safer capitalist model, because that’s what it would be doing, you know, is like “Let’s create this other distribution network,” whatever, which, if you’re operating under capitalism, ends up being just a baby capitalist model that is maybe not as effective as the ones that exist. So, it is—I mean, I wasn’t there, but I believe how even The Communist Manifesto got out was that the books were distributed, that these books are sold. So, even Marx sold books, right? So, and it wasn’t because he was like, “I need to create something inside of capitalism that shows this model.” I mean we’ve been seeing that for a long time. I mean, the U.S. has had socialist communes since the 1800s. And as artists, too, we give ourselves that out, like, “I’m creating a model, you know, that other people can emulate.” And it’s really just a cop-out, because it’s harder to organize people and get them to get involved in a movement. It’s easier to find other people that already agree with you, and then do that thing.
the two biggest reforms under capitalism in the 20th century might be the New Deal and the civil rights bill, right? And how did we get either of them? Was it by electing the right person? Or was it by having a movement that was able to disrupt?
And let me be very clear about what I mean by “disrupt.” In the ’20s and ’30s in the United States, it’s been said that there were a million card-carrying communists. And at the same time, we had places like Alabama, Utah, Montana, Oklahoma, where there were, for instance, mining strikes, where—that were going on. And in places like Alabama, there were even like conflicts, armed conflicts, with the miners and private security. In the Midwest, at that same—during that same era, you had people occupying and shutting down factories. On the West Coast, during that same era, you had the longshoremen creating their union, and of a bunch of workers that were thought of as like lower skill than we think of fast-food workers right now, who fought against, you know, militias, state militias, in order to create their union. And that’s happening at the same time. During that same time, somewhat unrelated—I mean, pretty unrelated—there was a thing called the Bonus March, where World War I veterans marched on the White House for their bonus checks, in large numbers, and many thought to be carrying arms. Revolutions happening around the world. In that milieu is where we got the New Deal. It wasn’t because the radicals and progressives band together and were like, “We need to be putting all our energy into electing FDR.” They made that happen.
Now, so, that’s not to say don’t get somebody in office. But what that does do, though, when you’re doing that, it’s a question of where are we putting our resources, where are we putting our time, where we put—you know, what happens is movements get subverted, because, right now, there’s only so much time and energy, and the first people to act are going to be the ones that we need. And if everybody’s putting their time into the electoral side, we’re going to get caught in this loop, where you get an elected official in there, and they’re not able to do much, because there’s not the movement to do things. You need—you need to be—we need to get to the level where we can shut down industry, and that we can go straight to the puppet masters. Now, if we have that going on and somebody wants to get in office that can better aid those movements, but even the—any progressive or candidate out there will tell you that if you don’t have a movement going on, there’s not a lot they could do, you know? I mean, even on a low level like Oakland politics, you had like Dellums, Ron Dellums, get elected mayor. Great dude. I don’t—didn’t really do much at all. And what he kept saying was, “I can’t do anything if there’s not a movement that allows it to happen.”
And so, I think that electoral politics is the easy way out. And I think it’s because—and I think it’s part of—I think it’s part of the sidetracking that we’ve been having by not—the left has not been willing to engage in class struggle for a long time, and we’ve left it up to liberals. We’ve left union organizing up to liberals. And we’ve made—not just union organizers, but we’ve left—we’ve made our movements devoid of the analysis that says that—that shows where the power point in capitalism for us is. And so, for me, it’s not a matter of—it’s not a matter of can that work. Maybe it could, but it’s not going to work if we don’t have a real movement. And it’s going to get us sucked into the war of inches.
I mean, think about it like this. Really, you know, you end up talking about getting folks to vote. And right now, because of everything that we’ve gotten into, we get focused on the Trump era, and we’ve got the Democrats going way to the right, because of figuring out how do we get Trump out. So people are like supporting the CIA, supporting the FBI, and doing it fervently. Right? So, where does—and they’re like, “Well, that’s just because we need to get Trump out.” But then, where does that leave you afterward? And it’s just—it’s part of this game. It’s part of this thing. I mean, where we are with immigration—I mean, immigration rights activists were complaining way before Trump was in about the policies that the Obama administration put in.
They called him the “deporter-in-chief.” He deported millions and millions and millions or people.
where we are with Trump is part of just that—it’s another few steps on the staircase that has been being built the whole time by playing this game of inches. I think that things are so drastic right now that we got to—you know, we got to reset.
And, you know—and it’s only since the ’60s that, you know, radicals have been thinking about like elections as the way. And it’s very connected, you know, with the New Left stopping organizing labor and focusing on students. All the sudden in the ’60s, you heard the students are the revolution. It was not historically accurate. It’s not based on any other revolutions, except for maybe there was, at the same time, the Cultural Revolution in China. But other than that, wasn’t historically accurate. And it was a focus on students and spectacle that has led—and has led to like people not knowing what to do and basically saying, “Well, all I’m going to do is electoral politics.”
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Boots Riley
writer and director of the critically acclaimed film Sorry to Bother You. He is also a poet, rapper and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. He is the author of Boots Riley: Tell Homeland Security—We Are the Bomb.
— source democracynow.org