Ten immodest commandments

JVL Introduction

Scholar and activist Mike Davis, who died recently (see an obit here), was asked in 2011 if he had any lessons to pass on to the Occupy movement.

Here is what he offered, reluctantly – a guide, a framework for thinking, his own personal Ten Commandments.

Some of his language is dated, relating to the situation at the time, but everything he suggested has resonances for us still.

In particular, he urged activists to put their theory books aside for a moment and “dust off a copy of FDR’s 1944 campaign platform: an Economic Bill of Rights” Roosevelt’s reformist programme which, for all its limitations from a socialist point of view was, says Davis, “the most advanced progressive position ever espoused by a major political party or U.S. president”.

It was, expressed in popular language, “a clarion call to social citizenship and a declaration of inalienable rights to employment, housing, healthcare, and a happy life”.

Would that Starmer’s Labour Party should offer anything half as radical today. It is surely time to occupy “the terrain of fundamental needs, not of short-term political ‘realism’”. That’s what Corbynism offered and to which we must, in some form or other, return.

This article was originally published by The Rag Blog on Tue 1 Nov 2011. Read the original here.