Issue Based Change VS Systemic Change

As I discuss possibilities for social change with various people in my life, I am continuing to circle back on and re-reflect upon ideas already discussed in this blog. I hope that this is not merely repetitive, and that my upcoming posts go beyond what I have already written... in some way or another.

I have talked quite a bit about my frustrations with reformism (see, for example, this post). In general, energies and wills get divided and dispersed. First, people are divided into separate interest groups based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on. Then, attention is pin-pointed to very specific issues that are supposedly of greatest concern for these (internally undifferentiated) groups. When this happens, there is no common enemy. Everyone has their own personal issues.

I have discussed Michelle Alexander’s problems with civil rights movements focusing so exclusively on issues like affirmative action (people see illusions of progress – token black people who are successful – and are blinded to enduring realities of racial caste). I even contended that Alexander’s concern about the drug war is still too narrow. No single policy or institution encompasses the broad economic and ideological foundations of racial caste.

I have also taken on, to some extent, the preoccupation with abortion within the women’s rights movement. In general, women’s rights tend to center around: abortion, birth control, and rape. Not that any of these are unimportant. However, this collection of issues defines women’s rights exclusively in terms of reproduction, obscures the way in which different women experience oppression differently, and does not expose or challenge the ideological framework that constructs gender.

The gay rights movement has pivoted primarily around two issues: repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and marriage equality. Neither of these battles addresses the real structural roots of homophobia. If anything, they strengthen and support capitalist institutions: those of the military and the traditional, nuclear family. (And really, what does the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell prove other than that the military is stretched too thin and really desperate for bodies?) Furthermore, the so-called “gay culture” (a combination of externally imposed stereotypes and practices born internally out of resistance) that the movement attempts to normalize reinforces the materialistic, superficial behaviors and attitudes that serve to benefit the capitalist system (for example, the obsession with fashion).

If everyone realized their common interests and could sustain a meaningful dialogue regarding both the positive and negative social implications of capitalism as it really exists (not as it should be in some hypothetical universe) – what kind of real social progress might be possible then? Even more, if a critical mass of people were willing to critically analyze and question modern institutions – the law, science, democracy, the family (in short, everything that fills us with such blind pride and faith) – together with all of the ideologies that sustain and are simultaneously produced by these institutions, how might we be able to re-imagine our world and the possibilities for social cooperation, for the better?

Our inability to ask the really difficult questions, and to think critically about the foundations of our society paralyzes any attempt at improving the lot of the poor, oppressed, exploited, and stigmatized masses.