Michael Albert
The current crisis at
Pacifica was unleashed with recent firings of prominent and appreciated
employees leading to irate listeners and employees demonstrating their
opposition widely and militantly. Any progressive alternative institution has to
utilize people who have been socialized within existing society, has to navigate
rules imposed by mainstream institutions whose requirements subvert our values,
and has to operate with limited means under harsh pressures. Not surprisingly
problems often arise, ranging from budget deficits and personal disputes, to
shortages of resources, time, or energy, to structural inadequacies in changing
contexts. An alternative progressive institution will not always operate without
friction, and to have impossibly high standards can lead to improper
recrimination and depression. But these facts of life in the complex world that
progressive institutions inhabit do not justify their ignoring progressive
aspirations and aims. Three broad areas of our activities give rise to
opportunities for hypocritical backsliding then rationalized by improper claims
about what "has to be": race, gender, and class.
(1) Our institutions
are not yet racism free, but this doesn’t give a license to whites to
establish and celebrate a racist division of labor or a racist culture in
them.
(2) Our institutions
are not yet sexism free, but this doesn’t give a license to men to establish
and celebrate a sexist division of labor or a sexist culture in them.
(3) Our institutions
are not yet classism free, and this shouldn’t be a license for an elite
possessing capital or managerial prerogatives to establish and celebrate a
classist division of labor or a classist culture in them.
(1) and (2) above are
overwhelmingly established, as well they should be, but (3) is generally deemed
a juvenile or utopian excess. This failing with regard to class is devastating
to the morality and outreach capacities of our work.
In the case of racism
and sexism, due to the good work of anti-sexist and anti-racist activists, there
is very little confusion at least about the principles involved. For someone in
a progressive alternative institution or project to get up and say "we need
to have a racist or a sexist division of labor and a racist or a sexist
environment and culture in our institution" to do good work, would be
greeted with incredulity, derision and rejection.
On the other hand, in an
overwhelming majority of our progressive alternative institutions and projects,
it is the norm for those wielding most decision-making power (and often some
others as well) to openly assert that "we need to maintain a
corporate-style division of labor and environment and culture in our
institution," and their doing so is seen as a sign of maturity and
seriousness, rather than of hypocrisy and/or self serving ambition. This current
"class situation" is a storm waiting to explode, which, when it does,
will hopefully take our class complacency with it.
And now we come to
Pacifica, the single largest U.S. media institution progressives have any
positive relation to, much less any say over. Its future is critical. What is
happening at Pacifica is potentially much bigger than Pacifica itself because
what is happening there could not only positively alter Pacifica, it could also
impact more widely, just as the early efforts of movement women to challenge
movement men and of movement blacks to challenge movement whites spread far more
widely than its initial instances, and succeeded, at least to a considerable
extent, over the past few decades.
The problem at Pacifica
is not primarily that some leaders have become enchanted with their own
authority and oblivious to the stated norms and aspirations guiding the radio
network. It is not that some leaders have used their authority unwisely,
capriciously, and even vengefully. It is that Pacifica’s structure, like that of
most progressive alternative institutions, replicates the class relations of
typical corporate capitalist structures throughout our society, with
fund-raisers sometimes replacing owners, but with managers and other order
givers in their typical autocratic roles. When those taking orders comply such
structures appear stable and efficient, at least in some limited sense. But the
structures are never just and fulfilling for those who are disempowered, nor do
they promote internal and external anti-classist policies.
The crisis at Pacifica
is that the classist foundation of one of our largest institutions has run amuck
and thereby incited its listeners and workers alike into resistance, in turn
provoking repressive reaction, in turn awakening a wide array of aspirations,
not always perfectly expressed or manifested but rising to a pitch finally
polarizing the elites–as always–into the most autocratic and authoritarian
patterns imaginable in this context, likely even against their personal
dispositions.
The solution to all this
is not band-aid correction or a cooling off period or even a redress of
autocratic and wildly unwarranted decisions to fire various people, as positive
as such partial steps could be. The solution is to restructure Pacifica with a
clear understanding that this undertaking isn’t merely to solve a Pacifica
problem per se, but is instead an exemplary act, coerced by those occupying
disenfranchised class positions and aimed to provide a model for the entire
world of progressive and alternative institutions of how to treat class issues
with the same intensity and dignity and attention to progressive values as we
try to do regarding structural matters of race and gender.
This is an opportunity
to go to the heart of the class relations in our institutions and to embark on a
struggle to correct them, just as people have in the past undertaken the still
continuing struggle of going to the heart of the race and gender relations in
our institutions and correcting them.
To be radical is to get
the bottom of things rather than being satisfied for what is at best superficial
and temporary. We hope that in the Pacifica crisis some radical righteousness
prevails.
