Seven Oaks Magazine.

I recently returned from a research trip to New York where I attended a conference at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island. The conference was organised by accomplished American Marxist economist Michael Zweig, author of The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. It sought to bring together academics, activists, and organisers to discuss public policy as it pertains in particular to our understandings of class inequity in American society. Conference plenaries were organised to give equal prominence to both academic and activist points of view, as well as positions that could be defined, ambiguously (or perhaps ambitiously) as both — purportedly bridging that ephemeral and age-old gap between the academy and what is really going on in the streets, in union halls, and in people’s homes.

Having recently completed my first year of graduate school, I have long been grappling with some of the strategic issues that were addressed at the conference — most notably, how progressives (both academic and organisers alike) can counteract the successful grassroots appeals that far-right neo-conservatives have made in recent decades to America’s (and North America’s) working class. Indeed, since the early 70s, the image of NASCAR-cheering dad’s wearing Budweiser shirts on weekends and hard hats to work, has added to the ranks of Reagan Democrats and paralleled the resurgence of a powerful xenophobic and chauvinist far-Right in American electoral politics. These developments have in turn ushered in an era of regressive public policy cutbacks that reek of white supremacy, corporate elitism, and general social degradation best exemplified by the Bush/Cheney (not to mention Iraq) quagmire. Joan Williams, professor of law from the American University in Washington, D.C., spoke at Stony Brook of a “politics of privilege,” that many Americans currently ascribe to, and that this largely explains the working class majority’s ostensible and pervasive support for right wing politics.

In Canada, we find a similarly insidious (although far more checked) right wing assault on the major public policy gains of the last century and a parallel appeal to “ordinary, everyday Canadians.” For instance, even Stephen Harper, the barbecuing slickster from Alberta, has to guard his demands for private health care behind a populist veneer of support for the public system while he trumpets Canada’s so-called “peacekeeping” sensibilities by acknowledging the overwhelming opposition of Canadians to engaging in Bush’s Iraq bloodletting. But as current polls would suggest, he may not need to be as bashful about his conservatism as originally thought.

As was conveyed at the conference in New York, this time of electoral polarisation represents a window of definite opportunity for progressives. But it also represents a period of potential doom, for the rug of social policy that enabled such positive developments as large-scale immigration during the mid-60s and 70s, and that ushered in publicly-funded healthcare is about to be pulled out from under many of us. The key questions that progressives, both academic and activist, need to be asking themselves at this time are wholly strategic in nature. Observing some of the detached political campaigns run by Canadian social democratic bureaucrats (who are admittedly far more scarce in America) and the seamless transition that many make from student and educational bureaucracy, academic postings, to party hacksterism makes me wonder how the “official” Left in this country will ever transcend its obsolescence. Observing young NDPers speak of green technologies and how many Noam Chomsky books they’ve read makes me question my own potential involvement in academia, which has regrettably fostered a decline in my own energy for significant grassroots organising.

But conferences, like the one I attended in Stony Brook, quite near to the proverbial belly of the capitalist beast, prove that academics don’t always have to have their noses stuck in books and don’t always have to be arguing about the correct definition of “civil society” or “collective agency” and the like. No — if anything, the ideal of activist/academic collusion at Stony Brook helped me see that scholarly pontificating should absolutely be brought down in public discourse to have equal footing with the views of political organisers who actually act on (and in so doing actually formulate) the ideas discussed in ivory tower settings. If parties like the NDP, and the often detached party ideologues that make up its leadership elements ever wish to influence the stock characters of Canadian politics — the immigrant worker wary of gay rights, the evangelical Prairie farmer, the small-business shopkeeper set to vote Conservative — then they must be willing to engage in the day-to-day hard work of meeting with disparate communities and organisations. Not through opportunist photo-ops two-weeks before election day, but through protracted concrete initiatives that promote grassroots democracy and political decision-making, and that are oriented to the goals of building progressive anti-racist, mass-based movements among broad segments of the population.

Pointing out the contradictions that voting right wing has for working Canadians of all backgrounds seems elementary, but the power of conservative populism is often underestimated. It is our duty as progressive thinkers to point out these contradictions, but not to do it exclusively in the hallowed halls of “knowledge production” where no one will really hear us — and where we can safely collect a nice middle-class salary. The contradictions of this strategy are obvious.