Click here to access article by Ashley Sanders from War Is a Crime.
The author obviously read Lawrence Goodwyn's book entitled, Democratic Promise, and was very much inspired by it. It is a book about the late 19th century American populists who really stirred up a lot of shit against the rising financial class. As you may have noticed, this book is on my recommended reading list on the right side of this blog.
The only fault I find with this essay is that she got a bit carried away with her inspiration and went into too much detail about ideas that the Populist movement inspired in her. Instead, I think it is more important to try to derive the important principles behind the success and failure of this movement that might apply to the current Occupy movement.
It seems to me that the achievements of the Populist movement were accomplished because of a growing awareness that they desperately needed to cooperate and collaborate if they as farmers were going to survive at all. These farmers were an eminently practical people who had to engage their creativity and their knowledge to survive as independent producers of crops. They brought these assets to their meetings, combined them in a spirit of one-for-all and all-for-one. It was a truly social consciousness informed by a sense that they had to be their brother's keeper. They realized that they had to come together and cooperate in order to survive in a class structured society. They learned from each other that a class of people called capitalists had enormous power over them because of the system that capitalists had created. The achievements of the Populist movement flowed from this consciousness. It provided the impetus to engage their creativity, their knowledge about organizing, and together they learned how to fight the political system.
The industrial-financial components of the capitalist ruling class of this period used every weapon in their arsenal to undermine the Populist movement. I'll not go into detail about them (read the book), but they are familiar to us: co-optation, some reforms that made minor improvements, divide and conquer tactics, various forms of attacks on Populist organizers ranging from economic to outright terrorism, and ideological attacks on Populism and promotion of individualistic values through capitalist control of mainstream media.
Today we are witnessing the endgame of capitalism: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very small segment of the world's population with devastating effects for the rest of us--lives filled with debt, limited employment and educational prospects, and poverty while witnessing ever worsening ecological deterioration. I think that we are now facing our last chance to save ourselves. We simply must get it right this time.
Getting it right means for me that we must totally embrace a social consciousness, one that is free of any form of class privilege, one that embraces life and nature in all its variety and acknowledges that humans are a part of this web of life, that we must protect the web of life which sustains all life including our lives.
Because capitalism is a total system that colors nearly all aspects of our lives, we must build a new society from the ground up. That means we must take control of our culture, our media, our values, the way we behave when we are with each other and change it all to serve all our needs.
Fortunately, we have a splendid amount of technology and knowledge that we have created to help us with this endeavor. Unfortunately, because of the rules of capitalism so much of it is "owned" and controlled by the One Percent. This we must change. We can do all of this, but it means that we must bring together our greatest assets--creativity, energy, patience, empathy, knowledge, skills, endurance, etc. and put them all together to create a new social consciousness to serve the legitimate needs of everyone--the 100%.
