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Everyday forms of popular resistance
Monthly Review, Nov, 1988 by Don Nonini
In many spheres of American society, even where workers, blacks and other minorities, women, professionals, students, and many segments of the petty bourgeoisie are not actively resisting or evading policies and programs of the capitalist state, they show little enthusiasm for them. This is particularly true of foreign military intervention. A vast majority of people surveyed oppose military intervention in Nicaragua, and there is evidence that this lack of support has acted as a major obstacle to its implementation and provided the need for a new "low intensity conflict" strategy. Most working-class people correctly sense that Nicaragua and any supposed Communist threat it might pose are remote from their day-to-day interests and concerns. In any case, the generals of the Pentagon are opposed to intervention under these conditions because they know that an invasion of Nicaragua cannot be another "victory" like that of Grenada. When the body bags start returning home, public lack of commitment to the administration's invasion would turn to active hostility similar to what occurred during the Vietnam war. A military victory cannot be won in such a situation. Despite the intense animosity of the administration toward the Sandinistas and its attempts to whip up antiCommunist and xenophobic feelings against them, these attempts have so far failed, and the generals, realizing this, have acted as a brake on the more adventurist military plans of the administration. Even the "low intensity conflict" strategy of' support for the contras as U.S. surrogates has led to widespread opposition among certain segments of the American population, particularly among church groups, which have organized the sanctuary movement and Central American solidarity campaigns. Unsung Nonheroic Popular Resistance
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To summarize, workers don't have to have read Marx to know that "the boss is the boss" or that the state is the capitalist state, or to conclude that both are too often hostile to their interests. Nor, secondly,do workers, people of color, women, and other subordinate groups need to have read the classics of the radical tradition before being able to resist or evade the power of large-scale capital and the state. Still, they are only able to resist and evade within the set of material and symbolic constraints on their class condition which limit effective political action. During the last decade these constraints have been especially severe.
One of the implications of these everyday forms of resistance for progressive programs in the post-Reagan era is that there is a need to return in a critical and reflexive way to "bread and butter" issues without condemning them a priori as "reformist," "trade unionist," or "cooptational." The fact that the basic necessities of life for a large majority of working people, of both sexes, of all ages, of different ethnic groups, in different regions of the United States, are not being met, and have become even more neglected under Reagan, should not be underemphasized. Few of us in principle do so, but we have perhaps not given this fact the full weight it deserves. Nor have we sought to integrate it sufficiently either into our- theories of social transformation or our concrete strategies. Any movement that genuinely upholds or returns to earlier progressive demands for full employment, for universal, subsidized health care, for the provision of housing for all, for an end to Selective Service registration, for full retirement benefits, etc., will not be disappointed by the response of U.S. working people.
