real utopias

"To counter this increasing authoritarianism and attacks on democratic rights, progressive politics in the U.S. require that popular forces somehow maneuver between the contradictory positions of having to defend traditional bourgeois democracy and democratic rights while simultaneously advocating and organizing to go beyond its limitations and structures. Why? Because it is absolutely necessary to maintain whatever democratic space still exists while struggling to expand those spaces and rights.

Countering the anti-democratic elite agenda requires the building of broad-based alternative social blocs representing and grounded in labor, women’s groups, environmental organizations, radical hip-hop, immigrant rights, LGBTQ communities, black liberation tendencies, indigenous sovereignty movements and other historically marginalized communities, on the basis of people(s)-centered human rights, social solidarity and justice and participatory democracy in all aspects of life, including economic.

The struggle for democracy and democratic rights is becoming increasingly difficult with decisions like McCutcheon that have politically solidified the open collaboration between big capital and the State and narrowed the options for “normal” democratic oppositional forms of struggle. That collaboration reveals in graphic terms – more so today than before Citizens United, McCutcheon and all of the attacks on democracy – the true nature of what passes for democracy in the U.S. and the interests aligned to subvert it. In its arrogance, the oligarchy is exposing the class character of the state and providing left forces a potent weapon for building oppositional consciousness.

Building on those contradictions, the fight for democratic reforms and demands for authentic democracy with mass participation and popular sovereignty in all areas of life could potentially serve as one aspect of a basic left program that provides strategic points of unity for concentrating areas of left oppositional politics."