By Steven Johnson
Some forms of campaign finance reform might be a significant help, and should be pursued. But attempts at this will face stiff opposition from the capitalist ruling class, as shown by the case of Arizona (see this article), and they fail to address the root source of money’s current level of influence over politics.
I think that the best way to get money out of politics is for the great masses of people to embrace rational thinking / humane feeling, and thus to no longer be swayed by the ridiculous TV ads and media coverage that corporate money and ownership buy. But for that to happen, bottom-up social movements will have to emerge and multiply that go beyond merely “organizing” around particular immediate policy goals but that center around building relationships of justice and mutual caring, forging shared values in community, facilitating personal transformation in community, and developing ways of thinking and feeling and relating and acting in every area of life that are completely different from those which capitalist society has conditioned people to internalize.
The Sanders campaigns, which got surprisingly far on small donations, and the campaigns of similar progressive candidates who won in spite of being vastly outspent, were a step in this direction, I think. Because these campaigns went beyond a focus on personalities and centered around issues. But these efforts needed to, first, NOT STOP after the elections were over, and, second, grow roots further down from the levels of elections and personalities and issues into the deeper soil of relationships/community building/whole-life movement building.
This is easier said than done, of course, and I am not saying that I know exactly how to do this. Practically, this will require traveling uncharted paths that are to new to most or all of us to some extent. This kind of construction is already being done, on many levels, in ways that we know and in ways that we do not know, even as capitalism also continually works to destroy what has been built, undermining community functioning and even the very concept of community itself.
But I think maybe a step that those of us who are longing to see enduring and deep social changes should take at this juncture is to reconsider what kinds of objectives we are putting the bulk of our energies, money, etc. into pursuing:
If we, who are a small minority in society, invest everything we have in getting candidates elected and bills passed, we will succeed in electing very few candidates and passing very few bills. But if we focus on the much more difficult but greater long-term-yield-producing task of building WHOLE-LIFE movements and communities centered around values that are the opposite of imperial values, and patiently growing such movements/communities bigger and deeper, the growth that we may thereby achieve will produce voters whose opinions cannot be bought by PR firms and who can elect candidates without a lot of money. And it will produce long-term warriors who will not give up until the empire is defeated, dismantled, and replaced by the new ways that they have building at every stage of the struggle.
In theory, candidacies and issues can be occasions and catalysts for furthering this kind of deeper effort at building whole-life movements/communities. But I’m afraid that too often the latter is treated too much as hypothetical, or as an afterthought, rather than as the primary engine of change that could build our collective CAPACITY to carry out campaigns concerning candidates and issues and to succeed in them through the power of relationships rather than through money.
Capitalists have been very adept at finding ways to thwart efforts to limit the influence of their money over elections, as the case of Arizona shows. Maybe changing campaign finance laws, and changing the Supreme Court that strikes down reforms, might help to a degree, temporarily, if we were able to accomplish this. But only changing OURSELVES, together, can be an enduring solution.
The issues can’t wait. Ending the genocide in Gaza can’t wait. Stopping the next world war can’t wait. Mitigating climate change can’t wait. Adapting our individual and especially collective ways to live well using cleaner as well as MUCH LESS energy cannot wait. We must put our all into these. But, if we are to have any success, we must address these problems in ways that go beyond just throwing some emergency water and N-P-K fertilizer on the struggling plants of our causes, to building better soil for them to grow in.
The Practical Challenge, In Brief
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part I
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part II
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties: The Really, Really Short Version
Why We Should Expect Trump To Be Worse