Pacifica, Pacifica!

But these facts of life do not justify ignoring progressive aspirations and aims. Three broad areas of our activities give rise to opportunities for hypocritical backsliding that are then rationalized by improper claims about what “has to be”: race, gender, and class.

(1) Our institutions are not yet racism free, but this doesn't give whites license to establish and celebrate a racist division of labor or a racist culture in them.

(2) Our institutions are not yet sexism free, but this doesn't give men license to establish and celebrate a sexist division of labor or a sexist culture in them.

(3) Our institutions are not yet classism free, and this shouldn't be a license for an elite possessing capital or managerial prerogatives to establish and celebrate a classist division of labor or a classist culture in them.

(1) and (2) above are overwhelmingly established, as well they should be, but (3) is generally deemed a juvenile or utopian excess.

In the case of racism and sexism, due to the good work of activists, there is very little confusion at least about the principles involved. For someone in a progressive institution/project to say, “We need to have a racist/ sexist division of labor and a racist/sexist environment and culture in our institution” to do good work, would be greeted with incredulity, derision, and rejection.

On the other hand, in an overwhelming majority of our progressive alternative institutions and projects, it is the norm for those wielding most decision-making power (and often others as well) to openly assert that “we need to maintain a corporate-style division of labor and environment and culture in our institution,” and their doing so is seen as a sign of maturity and seriousness, rather than of hypocrisy and self serving ambition. This current “class situation” is a storm waiting to explode.

Now we come to Pacifica, the single largest U.S. media institution progressives have any positive relation to, much less any say over. Its future is critical.

The problem at Pacifica is not so much that some leaders have become enchanted with their own authority and oblivious to the goals of the radio network. It is not that some leaders have used their authority unwisely, capriciously, even vengefully. It is that Pacifica's structure, like that of many progressive institutions, replicates the class relations of typical corporate capitalist structures throughout our society, with large funders sometimes replacing owners, but with managers and other order givers in typical autocratic roles. When those taking orders comply such structures appear stable and efficient, at least in some limited sense. But the structures are never just and fulfilling for those who are disempowered, nor do they promote internal and external anti-classist policies.

The crisis at Pacifica is that the classist foundation of one of our largest institutions has run amuck and thereby incited its listeners and workers into resistance, in turn provoking repressive reaction, in turn awakening a wide array of aspirations, not always perfectly expressed or manifested, but rising to a pitch finally polarizing the elites—as always—into the most autocratic and authoritarian patterns imaginable in this context, likely even against their personal dispositions.

The solution to all this is not band-aid corrections or a cooling off period or even a redress of autocratic decisions to fire various people, as positive as such partial steps could be. The solution is to restructure Pacifica with a clear understanding that this undertaking  is an exemplary act, coerced by the disenfranchised and aimed at providing a model for other progressive institutions and attention to progressive values as we try to do regarding structural matters of race and gender.

This is an opportunity to go to the heart of the class relations in our institutions and to embark on a struggle to correct them. To be radical is to get the bottom of things. We hope that in the Pacifica crisis some radical righteousness prevails.                 Z