Anybody who has expertise haggling at a flea market has intuited the fundamentals of negotiating. If a vendor gives the merchandise you need at a fire-sale worth that you just’re unlikely to seek out elsewhere, smile, pay the asking worth and stroll away earlier than they alter their thoughts. If the requested worth is many instances greater than you’re keen to pay, simply stroll away. Stratospheric pricing just about eliminates the chances that you just’ll be capable to come to phrases. Your time is best spent haggling with a distinct vendor. In different circumstances, provide a lowball price and work towards center floor.
In politics, liberals have a tendency to barter in opposition to themselves. Relatively than pushing for radical change, Democrats start with an incremental method that elements of their conservative opponents’ counteroffer and begins from there. For the reason that Proper is aggressive, they push again to the purpose that the ensuing change is a smaller enchancment that, in lots of circumstances, is so tiny as to be a rounding error. Former President Barack Obama’s opening gambit within the well being care reform debate illustrates this phenomenon.
We all know what we wound up with: Obamacare, initially developed by the right-wing Heritage Basis, is a free-market scheme that prioritizes insurance coverage firm earnings, depends on economies of scale and assumes strong competitors will scale back prices. (In observe, the well being care enterprise is de facto monopolized to the extent that there’s little downward stress on costs. The business is disincentivized to take part within the public sector to the purpose that solely a small fraction of the well being plans out there individually and through personal employers might be bought within the Inexpensive Care Act’s on-line market.)
The purpose is how the ACA as we all know it got here to cross. Obama, wielding appreciable political capital at first of his first time period, determined to make well being care reform his first main legislative precedence. The general public, lengthy struggling beneath excessive prices for medical care and prescription prescribed drugs, was supportive throughout social gathering strains.
Proper out of the gate, Obama negotiated in opposition to himself. Although he had promised throughout this marketing campaign that the ACA would come with a “public possibility,” i.e. the best to affix what Sen. Bernie Sanders known as Medicare for All, he agreed to drop it from the invoice as a result of, Democrats defined, they have been brief one vote within the Senate. Joe Lieberman, a right-wing impartial senator from Connecticut, residence to lots of the nation’s main insurers, threatened to scuttle the measure through a filibuster parliamentary maneuver.
Relatively than drive Lieberman and his Republican allies to go on the report as having rejected a well-liked invoice on a significant difficulty, Obama dropped the general public possibility. Obama famous the general public possibility “has turn out to be a supply of ideological competition between the left and proper.” Anyway, he lied, “I didn’t marketing campaign on the general public possibility.” Excellent news: the ACA handed. However the lack of a public possibility was so unpopular (88% of Democrats wished one) that it was a big issue behind Sanders’ rebel marketing campaign in 2016. As a substitute of a towering achievement, Obamacare is extensively considered as a disappointment. The overwhelming majority of People say its failure left the issue unsolved.
Shortly earlier than he left workplace, Obama urged that Congress add a public choice to the ACA. That is what occurs while you negotiate in opposition to your self.
The 38% of People who oppose capitalism — socialists, communists, left-libertarians and others to the left of the Democratic Celebration — ought to take cautious observe of the Democrats’ repeated refusals to hunt large modifications and the next failures which have adopted consequently. In contrast to the Democrats, who negotiate in Congress in opposition to Republicans who share their fundamental political values and assumptions on the connection between staff and their labor, militarism and social priorities, we on the precise Left are preventing to overturn the system completely.
Our objective is Revolution. However we’re fully, in the intervening time, disorganized. There isn’t a viable leftist political social gathering with a revolutionary orientation, no well-funded, extremely distributed media outlet to disseminate information and opinion with our standpoint. We now have, even within the so-called progressive “Squad” within the Home of Representatives, zero elected representatives who search to abolish capitalism and prioritize the wants and wishes of the folks. Absent these fundamental organizational buildings or an as-yet-undeveloped internet-driven organizational technique that short-circuits conventional grassroots organizing and agitation methods, emancipation by revolution will proceed to elude us.
Within the meantime, we should lay the groundwork for revolutionary foment. We should, throughout the constructs and limitations of the present capitalist system, expose the true nature of a authorities that claims to be by and for the folks however is in fact nothing however a Ponzi scheme that extracts wealth from the poor and the working class upward to the tiny few on the prime level of the pyramid. We are able to and should accomplish this by exposing the system’s inside, self-evident contradictions.
This begins by asking why the powers that be repeatedly and repeatedly discover billions of {dollars} for all method of harmful nonsense — overseas wars, corrupt protection contractors, tax breaks to for-profit companies — repeatedly and repeatedly inform us that there’s by no means sufficient cash to fulfill fundamental human wants.
We all know, after we demand that everybody have sufficient to eat, that the political elites will refuse or ignore us. We count on, after we demand that everybody be housed, that we’ll be advised to stuff it. We perceive, after we demand {that a} day of labor needs to be paid pretty, that we’re asking for one thing that they may by no means conform to — certainly, that they can not as a result of it will destroy them and their self-perceived id within the energy construction.
We make calls for, not as a result of we imagine they are going to be achieved beneath this pretend parliamentary-style democracy, however as a result of they are going to be unreasonably refused, with out simply trigger. We would like folks to listen to us ask, and listen to them say no, time and again with a view to expose them and the elemental nature of their system.
We aren’t, due to this fact, negotiating. We’re demanding. Those that demand ought to seem cheap. However we should even be formidable. Our calls for needs to be aggressive sufficient that we’d genuinely be glad have been we to realize them and by no means so modest that there’s a probability the ruling lessons would ever critically contemplate them.
Nothing lower than an ideal world will do.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
