Waskow continues the debate provoked by Richard Flacks' "Reflections on Strategy in a Dark Time"

Arthur Waskow

Richard Flacks, in his "Reflections on Strategy in a Dark Time," (Boston Review, Dec./Jan. 95-96) has done progressives an important service by reexamining programs and strategies. He has, correctly, mentioned full employment as a serious goal and shortening the hours of work as one means toward that end. I think that this approach needs to be looked at even more carefully as a key strategic demand and as a gateway to organizing. The issue of work hours, unlike other approaches to full employment, also raises the question of time for "leisure" -- that is, time for volunteer and participatory involvement in the family, neighborhood, schools, unions, churches and synagogues, and local political action.

At first glance, the appeal of the Buchanan candidacy to fears of unemployment might cast new doubts on those progressives (like Michael Lerner and his politics of meaning) who argue that cultural, communal, familial, and spiritual hungers are at the heart of the rightward rush of American politics.

But I want to argue that economic fears both create and are created by cultural/spiritual hungers, that both economic and cultural/spiritual needs gnaw in the bellies of more and more people. An effective progressive politics requires a correspondingly intertwined response: The only complete healing is a healing of both body and soul.

How does economic fear create spiritual emptiness? By dividing America into the unemployed and the overworked -- neither of which has the time or energy to nurture families, neighborhoods, or civic groups carrying on the deeds of citizenship.

Great numbers of workers are fired from well-paying jobs, and can find only menial and ill-paid work or none at all. Others are working harder, longer, with less control over their jobs and under greater strain.

And few people dogged by fear, despair, and exhaustion can be decent and loving spouses, life-partners, parents, neighbors, church members, or volunteer activists for the PTA, the local political party, the local labor union, or any other face-to-face context for love, community, or citizen involvement.

Denied worthwhile work, economic security, and loving community, people become enraged, scapegoating becomes easy, and anger turns into support for right-wing solutions: Put women back in their place, bash gay people, and dismantle the public schools. And -- dismantle all aspects of government except the military, police, and prisons, because government is far away, culturally alien, and demands taxes that pay for benefits to the lazy and criminal classes. Meanwhile, those who lose their jobs become hopeless or homeless or violent, drugged on crack or alcohol -- indeed, they become good hard reasons for strengthening police and prisons. So spiritual emptiness perpetuates economic despair.

There is a similar dynamic between economic fears and environmental concerns. As economic pressures increase, it becomes easier to wave the banner of short-run jobs and business profits against long-range concern for the earth. Businesses that, in a buoyant economy, could with little trouble shoulder regulations to protect worker and consumer and global health and safety vigorously oppose such regulations.

This affects human beings. Environmentally rooted diseases multiply. The earth itself is defined as separate from and hostile to human beings. "Owls" are pitted against "workers," and both lose.

What political program would address these social needs, and what kind of organizing would bring people together with the mixture of passion, joy, and perseverance necessary to win?

The basic program must be that everyone is entitled to work, and everyone is entitled to rest.

Everyone is entitled to a job doing worthy work at a living wage. Everybody. That requires a social decision to pay for work that needs doing: teaching and nursing and midwifing, building mass transit and bike paths and school buildings and sewers, cleaning up poison dumps. It also means paying for communal restfulness.

The "family/community leisure" component makes this approach quite different from conventional progressive approaches. If we were to reduce the work week (as a number of European labor unions have demanded and achieved) with no reduction in income, that would simultaneously provide jobs for the unemployed and more free time for the overworked. It would allow workers the time to strengthen their families and do volunteer work for their communities.

But reducing formal work time is not enough to create community and restfulness. To encourage the use of leisure time to enhance community, we might at set times -- say, the week of July Fourth -- shut down all enterprises (even highways, airlines, and TV) except for emergency services, to reserve the time for neighborhood festivals and face-to-face town meetings. How do we begin? It is exactly the "civic sector," in neighborhoods and families, that will benefit most from this program; so it should begin there, with churches and synagogues.

Why start with religious congregations? Because if the tradition that both work and rest are sacred survives anywhere, it is there. The Bible teaches that all the landless, without exception, are entitled to glean in the corners of the fields. And our religious traditions have also long taught the need for a rhythm of restfulness, the need for a Sabbath. This program and this strategy would extend times of restfulness to the society as a whole, without religious discrimination.

The religious traditions also teach that the earth is entitled to rest. Not only the Sabbath of the seventh day, but the sabbatical year when the land lies fallow is necessary to both humanity and earth.

As the Bible warns and ecologists today repeat, if the earth is denied its rest it will rest anyway -- on our heads. It will rest through drought, famine, catastrophe, and exile. We need a political and economic vision that affirms and embodies a rhythm of both worthy work and reflective rest for every adam and all of adamah.

How to organize? Start by remembering that it was not pork barrel, patronage-ridden, party-hack politics -- and not even good-government reformers or tough-fisted labor organizing -- that transformed the South in the last generation, but fervent Black churches that carried their prayers and songs into the streets, entering precinct-level party politics as well as sit-in politics.

Precisely because the political "means" always in fact become the real political "ends," creating such local centers of personal, communal, and political healing in the present can also help reshape the future of society. For there is certainly some truth to the conservative complaint, now echoed by millions, that bureaucratic governments can become totally divorced from the needs of the people they are intended to serve. The demand for localism and decentralization is fakery when it multiplies the military and leaves giant corporations "free" to poison the earth, disemploy workers, and impose work speedups on the whole society. But there is a real need for locally rooted power that can both meet human needs on a face-to-face basis and challenge any institution -- theoretically "public" government or theoretically "private" corporations -- that becomes oppressive.

For an effective organizing base, therefore, we need local centers that are rooted in community-neighborhood-family-spiritual-ethical values and realities, that can work in nuts-and-bolts electoral and non-electoral politics at the local level just as the religious right has, and can also meet people's own needs in a practical way.

Think of the Black Southern churches and ministers of the 1960s. What would it mean to create synagogues, churches, mosques and priests, ministers, imams, rabbis like that -- congregations that meet the spiritual and practical and political needs of the community? And clergy who are community organizers?

Many Left folk will feel tightened throats as they wonder why God has to go along with all of this. I had this tightened throat myself, but it began to give way in mid-adulthood as I absorbed the example of the Black churches. It changed much more when I discovered I could myself take part in changing not only the images of that formerly constrictive God -- who turned out to be an idol after all -- but also the practices that my religious community celebrates.

It changed when we started talking not about Divine commands from an upstairs Commander, but about connection-making as a process that both reaffirmed and recreated the truth of unity, the truth of intertwinedness; when we discovered that sexuality could be sacred or unsacred inside marriage, and could be sacred or unsacred outside marriage -- between a man and woman, or between two men or two women; when we realized there were holy ways to consume, not only food but coal and oil and wood and paper; that there were ways to pray from the heart, not from a book, and that the word "God" did not have to appear for prayer to happen and for the real God (who doesn't have a name and is willing to be called by many names) to be fully present.

Those on the Left who have never thought seriously about such possibilities might look into their own life experience, their own moments of sacred joy, and see whether the next generation of American progressivism might grow from the roots of such moments.

Without an initiative along these lines by religiously rooted progressives in a number of traditions and communities, I think we are likely to see the continued erosion of a sense of American civic spirit and community, with even deeper divisions of our society between those exhausted in despair, those consumed by rage, and those embittered by fear and frustration.

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