Guest Entry: Susan Ikenberry

 

Blog 1:  End of the “Modern Agenda”?

I am a long–time supporter of AFSC, a member of New Garden Friends Meeting in Greensboro, NC, and have been active in the Occupy Greensboro community.  Here are a few of my reasons…

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          There was a time (actually the current time) when the argument was made that, if we ended U.S. involvement in wars, if we reduced the military budget, then more of our tax dollars would shift to the public sector – to improving education, healthcare, and green energy and to putting people back to work.

As a peace studies major in college I participated in an “economics of peace” research seminar that aimed at making a financial argument against war.  We students first determined how many tax dollars that originated in each of Indiana’s major cities were used by the U.S. government to support the military and war.  Each of us was then assigned one of these cities to live in for a month.  We interviewed city planners, educators, health care people, community groups, businesses… to develop a plan of how the amount citizens paid in war taxes could be instead spent on local needs.  The research was then used in publicized to illustrate what we could be doing for the civic good if we were not involved in military build–ups and in fighting wars like Vietnam.

In retrospect I see now that this project reflected the prevailing belief that the role of our nation–state was to promote and defend the civic or common good.  We expected that if those wars were ended, urgent community needs (health care, education, infrastructure…) would be addressed by the state with our tax dollars.  This expectation that the state is all about promoting the civic good is sometimes referred to as the “modern agenda” – to mobilize “productivity and technology to raise living standards and use progressive taxation, public regulation, central banking and financial reform to distribute wealth fairly and make societies more equal.”[i]  Perhaps the height of the modern agenda followed World War II, e.g. the 1960s’ Great Society reforms that intervened at local, state, and national levels to promote social, economic, and educational equality and to protect constitutional rights.

The current consensus, however, seems to be that the “modern agenda” is over.[ii]  The logic of the state has changed radically since that economics of peace project several decades ago.  Underneath the decades of jostling back and forth between Republican and Democratic parties was a more fundamental shift to a government beholden to and run by financial interests.  I recall when Republican leaders began talking about “freedom” instead of “democracy.”  Clearly this was a linguistic adjustment reflecting the change in our national agenda:

–from a state whose purpose was to promote fair and equal treatment and to protect the common/civic good,

–to a state whose purpose is to protect the advantage of the most wealthy in their pursuit of the highest profits – and then to distribute the costs (but not the wealth) among the rest of us.

So, let’s return to the original question concerning war and its domestic cost... We must end our country’s sponsorship of and protractive role in war and military conflicts that are resulting in tremendous suffering, loss of life, disruptions of whole societies’ access to livelihoods and a future, and a generation of children whose initial view of the world is through the visage of war.  Ending war is a first step in building a more peaceful world, one that recognizes our equal value and interdependence.

But, what about the argument that ending war would shift resources to urgently needed domestic civic purposes?  Given the new finance and free market logic of the state, if military spending is decreased or military conflicts ended, would that automatically translate into solving domestic problems such as the growing numbers who are homeless, lacking adequate healthcare, hungry, angry and depressed, internalizing or misdirecting blame for their job loss, desperate about how they will care for the ones they love, calculating and recalculating what else to cut out and what to pay, or peering out at a future without promise?  In the current finance–governing system, it seems unlikely.

It also seems unlikely that we will make adequate headway ending wars over resources and markets without also addressing the cooptation of our governing systems for the accumulation of wealth for the few.

Given that this market–driven system is wreaking havoc in the lives of the 99% all around the world, it is more urgent than ever to link with people in all parts of the globe in order to redirect our social, political, and economic systems.  It is also more possible.  We have already seen how people have creatively applied new developments in technology to unanticipated ends – to connect and organize social movements (through the movement of ideas, not arms in the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement), and to document and watchdog violations of civic rights.  Our global 99% has endless potential for innovation, problem–solving, and for imagining and fashioning a new Modern Agenda.

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[i] Hudson, Michael.  “The Financial Road to Serfdom – How Bankers Use the Debt Crisis to Roll Back the Progressive Era.”  Global Research. 13 June 2011.  http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=25250.

[ii] Hudson, op. cit.