Beware of the gravel being shoveled onto working class struggle

Karl Marx's Smiling Face
5 min readJan 30, 2021

Introducing Gravel

Recently there’s been an uptick in the popularity of YouTube videos produced by the Gravel Institute, explaining basic progressive points like capitalist exploitation and housing as a human right. These topics are packaged into neat animated videos accessible to the general audience. They invite non-controversial speakers such as Richard Wolff, which also helps with popularity.

The Gravel Institute is a progressive think tank, active on YouTube and Twitter. The institute aims to counteract American conservative think tanks, particularly PragerU, from a left-wing perspective. The institute is named for its founder Mike Gravel, a former United States Senator from Alaska and two-time U.S. presidential candidate.

Wikipedia

Mike Gravel showing a piece of paper saying “How you doing, fellow radicals”
Mike Gravel did a Reddit AMA

Criticism of their content as reactionary can understandably be misinterpreted as nitpicking: aren’t these videos useful? Don’t they serve the left?

It should be clear that this isn’t a revolutionary communist organization, but instead of using these labels, let’s explore a concrete example to make our points.

The video on public housing

This section is about “How Socialists Solved The Housing Crisis”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVuCZMLeWko

The setup can be summed up like this:

  • “American housing is in crisis.”
  • “In fact, housing has been in crisis for a very long time.”
  • “It’s because housing people IS NOT the primary goal of developers or landlords.”
  • “This is a TERRIBLE way to organize a housing market.”

You’ll agree that this is a good topic and a good framing of it. But listen really carefully to what their advice is:

  • “… in 1919 — at the first elections ever held in Austria where all adult citizens could vote — the Social Democratic Party swept into power at the municipal level [in Vienna]”
    The only historical event they mention is 1910s electoral politics in Austria. That is the event they chose from 1910s.
  • “If we want to end the housing crisis, the solution has to be moving toward the full DECOMMODIFICATION of housing.”
    That’s bold. What do they mean? Let’s see:
  • “… preventing landlords from increasing their rents too sharply, requiring that evictions be approved by a judge, and giving tenants a right to renew their lease.”
  • “But to go further, toward the Vienna model, we’ll have to go beyond the market.”
    Beyond the market? Not so fast:
  • “We can establish community land trusts to gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership.”
  • “We can give tenants a right of first refusal to buy out their landlords when buildings go for sale.”
  • “We won’t decommodify housing overnight. But we know what we have to do, and we have history to guide us.”
    Remember, the “guiding history” that allows us to “know what to do” is elections in Vienna. This is an introductory video on the topic of social housing, so they had the freedom and the responsibility to choose historical examples for the curious audience.

The useful side of the coin

Like the majority of the content produced by left-leaning Western liberals like Sanders and BreadTube, the videos from the Gravel Institute have a useful side: for workers only starting their political education, they can serve as an unintended stepping stone to serious working class politics. The only catch is that the audience has to see through the lies and inconsistencies.

We shall show why this minor point is overshadowed by the deliberate harmful effects of this type of media.

The harm

We’ve said these videos can be a “stepping stone to serious working class politics”. What are those class politics?

Class struggle is people struggling for the interests of their whole class, against the interests of a whole other class. That’s struggle not just in your personal life or at your workplace, but against all members of another class. So class struggle is necessarily political. Furthermore, the most important question of politics is not any particular list of laws but who makes and enforces them. Class struggle always evolves to the question of controlling the state. To be effective in class struggle, we should progress from spontaneous disconnected movements to joint struggle, guided with a scientific approach. Truly acting against the interests of the billionaires and landlords always results in assassinations, police brutality, and militant movements becoming illegal. The only form of joint struggle prepared for this, is forming a revolutionary political party.

Contrast this position with Gravel’s points.

Was he always talking about “socialist solutions”, “decommodification of housing” and so on? No. Mike Gravel is a Democrat who served in the US Senate for 12 years, and while he did oppose a variety of US imperialist foreign policies, his domestic policies were protecting oil pipelines, advocating against nuclear power, and trying to buy off Alaskans with oil dividends. The Gravel Institute was founded in September 2020 and is the first time his platform is used to say “decommodification of housing”.

This is how liberal propaganda works: watching for the most acute class issues of the day and twisting them into non-threatening liberal policies. Tens of millions of US citizens on the brink of eviction are advised to “gradually buy up housing on the private market”.

If possible, the question of class struggle is confined to economics: forming unions and collecting charity. If political struggle is unavoidable, it is confined to the local level. If the masses push their grievances to the national level, liberals attempt to limit the struggle to the most inconsequential forms: voluntary opt-in programs, vague “fighting for justice” with no deadlines and accountability.

This isn’t new. Here’s Lenin writing in 1913 (emphasis preserved):

It is not enough that the class struggle becomes real, consistent and developed only when it embraces the sphere of politics. In politics, too, it is possible to restrict oneself to minor matters, and it is possible to go deeper, to the very foundations. Marxism recognises a class struggle as fully developed, “nation-wide”, only if it does not merely embrace politics but takes in the most significant thing in politics-the organisation of state power.

On the other hand, the liberals, when the working-class movement has grown a little stronger, dare not deny the class struggle but attempt to narrow down, to curtail and emasculate the concept of class struggle. Liberals are prepared to recognise the class struggle in the sphere of politics, too, but on one condition — that the organisation of state power should not enter into that sphere. It is not hard to understand which of the bourgeoisie’s class interests give rise to the liberal distortion of the concept of class struggle.

Conclusion

Liberals always aim to blunt the sharp edge of class struggle, as Lenin said. They aim to be non-confrontational, presentable, “realistic”. Don’t be blinded by their propaganda being illuminating for those catching up with the “sharp edge”, always remember their real aim.

The working class is quite capable of producing basic propaganda for itself.

Expose liberalism whenever you see it. Sharpen the edge. Act in our common interests.

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