Coronavirus Has Given the Left a Historic Opportunity. Can They Seize It?
by Sam Adler-Bell- reposted from The Intercept April 14, 2020
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The coronavirus pandemic is a conundrum for the left. It has ignited a widespread need and willingness to help and fight for each other — while foreclosing many of the ways we typically imagine left movements taking shape.
With unemployment ballooning and maps of virus transmission and fatalities revealing the cruel geography of class and race in America, the pandemic has vindicated left critiques, revealing an American economy organized to enable the comfort and safety of the few at the expense of the suffering and sacrifice of the many.
“It’s a trigger event, the largest one of my lifetime,” said Paul Engler, organizer and co-author of “This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century.” Yet as major corporations work their will on Capitol Hill, extracting bailouts and reshaping the structure of the economy, no countervailing social movement has found footing to pushback or even articulate clear demands from Congress. That’s despite extraordinary leverage held by Democrats, who control the House of Representatives and, from a political perspective, have far less of a political need than President Donald Trump for economic relief packages.
Trigger events, Engler said, create tremendous opportunities for mass movements to form, coalesce existing social forces and organizations, and change the architecture of society. But the bailouts are happening now, before any of that has formed. Even if it had coalesced, most of the traditional tactics of left organizing — marches, rallies, occupations, picket lines — could endanger public health, and the risks of engaging in civil disobedience have risen, as jails have become petri dishes for the virus. That leaves corporate power effectively unopposed in Congress amid the most aggressive rewriting of the social contract in a generation, while workers spend their energy instead helping each other stay alive.