The Alliance Movement
by Ronnie Dugger
"The Alliance"-a national, grassroots movement-started
as a suggestion in "Real Populists Please Stand Up" by Ronnie
Dugger in the The Nation, August 14/21, 1995. The following comentary by
Ronnie Dugger is taken from his interview on Jerry Brown's We The People
radio program.
The counter-revolution of capital against the American Revolution started
in 1886 with that Supreme Court decision, Southern Pacific vs. Santa Clara
County. The corporate lawyers working on the Supreme Court declared that
corporations are persons. A manifest absurdity! That was the bugle that
started the counter-revolution against democracy in the United States.
The merchants and financiers in the northeast were squeezing the farmers
with their freight rates. In order to get their crops financed, the farmers
had to go to local furnishing merchants, which were simply the local bankers,
and go into hock. They were becoming "weight slaves." They then
began organizing. Seven people met in a farmhouse in Texas, and started
a farmers movement about 1882-83. They started forming alliances and farm
co-ops. When they brought their crops in from the field, they put them into
a system which they wanted to become the banking system and got scrip for
their crops. So they immediately abolished the need for financing.
They started raising all kinds of hell with the Democratic Party. They ran
candidates in 1892 as the People's Party. They were developing very effective
statewide farm co-ops, but they needed capital to continue running them,
and the banks refused the capital, seeing, of course a buildup of a rival
system with people's money.
The second thing they did was fuse with the Democratic Party in 1896 and
that was the end of the Populist movement.
There were two million people in the Populist alliances. They had 35,000
traveling lecturers. It was a mass movement based on challenging the proposition
that corporations have the right to run our lives, our work, and our economy
in a democracy. They had newspapers and magazines. It was fundamentally
volunteer work out of concern for each other, short-circuiting not only
the mass media but the whole society, the whole banking system.
Along comes progressivism. Some of the bank lawyers and railroad lawyers
consciously went for regulation because they knew they could control the
regulators in due course. And they did. Along comes liberalism. Along comes
the New Deal. Nothing ever again in the 20th century raises the fundamental
question: Where is the source of the democratic legitimacy of corporate
power over our payroll, over whether we have a job full-time or halftime,
over whether we have pensions, over whether we have homes? Where do they
get the power to decide what the workers in a community will be producing?
They took the power! The workers had their money put into pension funds
and then the managers of capital put those pension funds to work in their
various enterprises. The same thing with mutual savings insurance policies.
The owners of mutual policies owned the mutual companies, but they had nothing
to do with running them, so there's been this enormous historical alienation
that as a progressive, as a liberal working down in Texas 40 years, I bought
into.
I used to say I knew the corporations were legitimate subjects of criticism,
but one afternoon, Richard Grossman- the co-director of the Program on Corporations,
Law & Democracy-put together in my mind the question: Where in a self-governing
country does a corporation get to rule the country? Once you ask that question,
you've stopped playing the shadow game of politics-choosing among lesser
evils like we're going to have to do again this year. So I wrote this piece
in The Nation saying why in hell don't people get together again? I've written
thousands of articles in major enterprises, major magazines, and never gotten
more than 30 answers in my life. But over a period of about 3 months, I
got 1,700 letters, faxes and e.mails to this article, saying let's do it,
send us some more information.
Instead of the third party route, which gets you caught in the two-party
track where you're electing your enemy, we need a movement. The only responsible
and respectable source for such a movement in the United States is populism.
We are starting with the proposition that the issues aren't the issue-the
system is the issue because we can't get any fundamental change passed through
a political system and a congress that are essentially polluted by the problem.
Starting with that, we fundamentally seek to end corporate rule and replace
it with self-government, not just in politics, but also in our economic
and work life. We start simply by organizing alliances. We organized one
on Cape Cod and now have 24. We have about 8 or 10 up and down the California
coast. We have one in Seattle. We're forming one in Boston. We've got one
in the suburbs west of Boston, Chicago, Birmingham, Denver -a whole list.
We're proceeding on the principle not of vertical communication from a center,
but a horizontal communication among alliances and among individuals. We
have to engage in horizontal communication because we have to teach each
other what each of us learns and knows and the mistakes we make. That's
what's been lacking-communication. We have to provide it to each other through
these local alliances.
We're trying to proceed democratically. We meet in circles in many of the
alliances, so that there's not (usually) a male speaker dominating the group.
We have the full circle rule: in a formal conversation on any one subject,
nobody speaks twice until everybody has spoken once. Only the group decides
how long you meet, how long you give to each subject, what the agenda is,
and most important, how long each person can speak on each subject.
The first thing to do is an inventory of at least two institutions in your
own area. One is the major corporations, international or national, and
the other is the alleged member-owned and run co-ops which are in fact not
member-owned and run, which have become essentially models of the corporate
life.
We are committed to nonviolence and the democratic process, and you do it
by a democratic chartering process that charters and then can be de-chartered.
Without that you'd actually lose control of the three essential elements.
One is taking away the power, the divine right of the king, that has been
replaced by the divine right of CEOs. Another agenda idea is self-help.
Another is creating alternative economic ways of living. For example, the
skill banks, the time dollar idea, where people exchange their skills. A
mechanic, a doctor, somebody who does lawns, start exchanging skills and
getting credit in a time bank, so you're essentially short-circuiting the
over-organized economy. With reference to local utilities there's no reason
why a community can't set up an active, interactive governing structure
to run its own local utilities.
This is not a political party. I t's a political and social and cultural
movement. For example, one of the ideas is that whenever there's a strike
in your area, go to the strikers and ask how you can help. A guy from Tennessee
said, Why don't you start building bridges across suburban and urban lines?
Jonathan Fine in Boston said, Why don't we create a dialogue among the poor
in the cities and the people in the suburbs who care?
We're not playing into the two-party trap. We're saying, Let's take a five-
or a ten-year rational run at this. We've got 24 alliances formed in a couple
of months. We've got five or six forming in the next three weeks. Maybe
by the end of the year, we'll have three hundred or five hundred alliances,
all of them communicating horizontally, all of them having an Internet representative,
all of them faxing each other, having regional meetings like Wade Hudson
and the East Bay-San Francisco alliances have arranged here.
We understand how difficult it's going to be to replace corporate power
with democratic power. We don't underestimate the difficulty or the danger
of the undertaking. Intellectually it's the most serious subject in our
discussion. We're taking it slow, and we're open to civil disobedience,
mass demonstrations, whatever methods might present themselves as applicable,
guerrilla media tactics, but after every cycle, as Jonathan Fine says, we
want to study, we want an action and reflection cycle, so that we're not
letting any few crazies who might be attracted here getting ahead of the
whole movement and ruining it.
The corporations have abandoned and destroyed the social contract, so we're
going to have to start again. When ATT fired 40,000 people in one day, that's
a recision of the social contract. There was a time, especially after the
war, when corporations and the labor unions had a fairly mutually respecting
enterprise, but that was destroyed by the breaking of the union. So essentially
we have to start again and come back together in various forms and act together
against these corporate usurpers.
The Alliance's national telephone number is 617-491-4221. Our EMail is inalliance@aol.com.
