Many social movement activists came from middle- or working-class backgrounds and possessed the courage and skill to organize others, risking great personal sacrifice and danger. Mainstream political parties often ignored social movement activists who engaged in public education and took to the streets to demand justice and political equality.
Through direct action campaigns and political organizing they asked other Americans to join their cause as a matter of conscience and duty to their fellow human beings. As Martin Luther King Jr.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable net- work of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. The relationship between political progressivism—as expressed in the platforms and actions of political parties and leaders—and social movements has not always been harmonious or cooperative.
Social movements, by definition, arise from a committed minority of citizens working together to shape larger public consciousness about particular injustices in addition to working for concrete political change. Social movements have invariably advanced moral and political causes surrounding gender, racial, and class equality with much greater force and consistency than those in mainstream politics.
The ideas of social movements, such as expanded suffrage and civil rights protections, often become uncontested parts of mainstream politics after prolonged struggles. Progressive leaders themselves learned from the principled activism of social movements.
Many mainstream progressive political leaders in the past were reactionary on issues of race and gender. At the same time, the seeds of the great civil rights triumphs of the 20th century came from within progressivism itself. The collective efforts of these movements eventually helped to turn progressivism itself into a stronger vehicle for human equality, social tolerance, and political rights for all people.
Progressive social movements are divided into two main categories for the purposes of this essay: movements for equality and individual rights, and movements for economic justice. This division presents two questions: What, if anything, ties these movements together, and how do they fit within the larger intellectual and political tradition of progressivism?
The relationship between social movements and progressivism is ultimately one of shared learning and activism in pursuit of common values. These brief summaries are not meant to be exhaustive accounts of all the major players or all the landmark events of the various movements, but rather to provide an illustrative sampling of a rich tradition that continues to shape progressivism today.
Other important social movements including environmentalism, consumer protection and antiwar activism will be explored in future essays. With the rise of the contemporary progressive movement and the election of President Barack Obama in , there is extensive public interest in better understanding the origins, values, and intellectual strands of progressivism.
Who were the original progressive thinkers and activists? Where did their ideas come from and what motivated their beliefs and actions? What were their main goals for society and government? How did their ideas influence or diverge from alternative social doctrines? How do their ideas and beliefs relate to contemporary progressivism?
The new Progressive Tradition Series from the Center for American Progress traces the development of progressivism as a social and political tradition stretching from the late 19th century reform efforts to the current day.
The series is designed primarily for educational and leadership development purposes to help students and activists better understand the foundations of progressive thought and its relationship to politics and social movements.
Although the Progressive Studies Program has its own views about the relative merit of the various values, ideas, and actors discussed within the progressive tradition, the essays included in the series are descriptive and analytical rather than opinion based. We envision the essays serving as primers for exploring progressivism and liberalism in more depth through core texts—and in contrast to the conservative intellectual tradition and canon.
We hope that these papers will promote ongoing discourse about the proper role of the state and individual in society, the relationship between empirical evidence and policymaking, and how progressives today might approach specific issues involving the economy, health care, energy-climate change, education, financial regulation, social and cultural affairs, and international relations and national security.
Part one examines the philosophical and theoretical development of progressivism as a response to the rise of industrial capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Read part one ». Part two examines the politics of national progressivism from the agrarian populists to the Great Society. The economy appeared to expand in the second half of the s, according to official growth statistics. While this period of growth was attributed to the reforms, authoritative economists like Yevgeny Yasin have explained that the spurt was stoked by latent inflationary pressures.
The minimal degree of freedom that the state had begun to provide pushed businesses to diversify their offerings and to increase prices. This freeze stripped the reforms of any real momentum. The failure of the reforms was already evident by early , when Izvestia published the results of a poll of factory workers at Luhanskteplovoz, a locomotive manufacturer in eastern Ukraine.
The concept of perestroika has deep historical roots. Nearly everyone, including the party nomenklatura , was hungry for change, even if no one quite knew what sort of change they wanted. One of the most important results of perestroika was the institutionalization of elections as a democratic tool and shared value. For the first time in the history of Soviet Russia, the perestroika-era elites and general public could honestly consider themselves to be a source of constitutional power—which is why the actions of the coup leaders of August the State Committee on the State of Emergency, or GKChP were widely seen as illegitimate.
Moreover, the so-called new thinking in Soviet foreign policy was largely prompted by the desire to be more open to the world, primarily the Western world. This nascent unity seemed at the time to indicate that some values were universally beneficial, that governments everywhere were becoming more humane, and that societies were being unshackled.
The architects of perestroika dubbed it a revolution. They sought to stimulate positive associations by linking it to the legacy of the October Revolution. At the same time, the changes that occurred really were revolutionary. By that point, not only Russia but also several other Soviet republics, as well as the countries of Eastern Europe, had been reunited with the West, giving the revolution of values a truly international character.
Perestroika was also a revolution of expectations. Quite a lot of these expectations were met, which explains why the general public accepted democratic values on the whole by the end of the s.
It will not work otherwise. Does Mikhail Sergeevich understand this? Gorbachev and his constituents had great chemistry, and this was precisely why many expected magic from him.
Perhaps they thought they would not need to work, or that the floors of shops would creak under the weight of new merchandise. It did not work out like this, and people were called on to work extremely hard to adapt to new realities. To this day, many cannot forgive Gorbachev for this, just as many cannot forgive Yeltsin for having promised them abundance and stability by the end of While the architects of perestroika saw it as revolutionary, they never expected to dispense with socialism.
Instead, they hoped to marry Leninism to market-oriented democracy. This connection between things that cannot be connected never happened, but the convergence of Russian and Western values held. In , these shared values were enshrined in several parts of the Russian constitution. Today, no one denies these values in theory. But in practice, Russia has seen a total reevaluation of the heritage of perestroika and the various reforms it inspired.
Radical liberal reforms in post-Soviet Russia were compromised from the outset by the fact that the Soviet government had dragged its feet on a range of unavoidable measures such as price liberalization. Economic reforms, including privatization, had to take place concurrently with the task of laying the institutional foundations of the new state. Some described this process as making an egg from an omelet—that is, attempting to create a market-driven economic order on the ruins of the Soviet system.
The price of reform was enormous for the average citizen, and it was compounded by the psychological trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Certain things such as the Russian adoption of the shock-therapy model turned out to be unavoidable. Maybe there were alternatives. Ideas for reforms were conceived within communities of young economists from Leningrad the Anatoly Chubais group and Moscow the Yegor Gaidar group who later formed the core of the so-called Moscow-Leningrad economic school.
At a series of seminars, the best known of which was the conference held at Zmeinaya Gorka near Leningrad in August and September , they developed a reform agenda and decided who would be on their core team of reformers.
However, the reform process was hobbled by various disputes and compromises, including the decision to opt for voucher privatization—the result of a deal with labor collectives and industry leaders. One of the highlights in that struggle was the standoff between the parliament and Boris Yeltsin in October , which ended with army tanks shelling the Russian White House. The high price that the public paid for reforms cost the reformers their popularity, while natural and man-made barriers often prevented reforms from being fully implemented.
Budget deficits, the social impact of the more unsavory aspects of wild capitalism, and the search for political support even as war raged in Chechnya all spurred the government to collaborate with a budding class of oligarchs.
By the mids, the government and top business figures had created a form of oligarchical capitalism that became firmly established after the election. Yet by and large, events unfolded according to a sad, objective logic. That was a danger that could not be written off, he argued, and the Russian reformers took it into consideration.
Reformers in the Czech Republic, Poland, and other Central European countries did not have to face such a dramatic choice, as Balcerowicz put it.
Reforms, in the strictest sense of the word, were only partly implemented. At the early stages, the actions of the reformers were reminiscent of panicked attempts to defibrillate the destroyed economic mechanisms of the former empire amid failed state management, hyperinflation, and the threat of mass hunger.
There were half-hearted efforts at economic liberalization, privatization, and financial stabilization—the crown jewel of which was the 11 percent annual inflation rate of However, there was a critical dearth of political resources and public support for deep structural reforms.
Yegor Gaidar outlined these in his book Russia: A Long View —reducing state interference in the economy; reforming social security, including the pension system; overhauling the education and healthcare systems; and reforming the military.
The economic crisis of marked the end of the liberal reform era. The project was organized by Sergey Vorobiev, head of the executive search firm Ward Howell, and Vladimir Preobrazhensky, currently head of research at the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management. This exercise was ambitious in scope. The overriding idea behind the project was to break out of the reforms-counterreforms dichotomy and meet the future head-on.
Passionate and thoughtful members of the entrepreneurial class who were not themselves oligarchs were signaling that they were prepared to share responsibility for the direction of the country with politicians. It is telling that when Herman Gref, the future minister of economic development, was recruited in to prepare a strategic plan for the future president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, he met with Club This was likely because, at the time, no one else was thinking about the future of Russia in the same way.
Moreover, Club was the first group to create a vision of an ideal future for Russia. The Poisoned Rake scenario, which described the appearance of a Putin-like autocratic leader, was frighteningly prescient. At the time, such political and social factors were typically not reflected in similar scenarios prepared by financial and economic research outfits obliged to operate within the political restrictions of that era. Russian realities turned out, of course, to be very conducive to the authoritarian trends that were taking shape at the time of the crisis.
After all, when this pessimistic scenario was outlined, Putin was only approaching the apex of his power and was still an unknown quantity. Responsibility for how things unfolded in Russia should be borne collectively, shared to varying degrees among the political elite, the entrepreneurial elite, and the general population. Russia is used to developing along an inertial trajectory—moving neither forward nor backward.
The pessimistic scenario springs directly from this level of inertia. It describes a moment of social upheaval at least among the urbanized middle class and a demand for participatory democracy. The events of — proved that this scenario was not a utopian fantasy but an entirely possible trajectory of development.
In , a group of economists gathered in the Moscow suburb of Vatutinki to draft a new plan for the development of the Russian economy, which soon became known as the Gref Program. Thanks to the annexation of Crimea, Russia has now lapsed back into an era of counterreforms.
And then there will be a long and hard decline, quite possibly behind an iron curtain held up at both sides of the borders, internally by the government and externally by the international community.
The debts incurred by post-Soviet countries for the energy that Russia provides are compensated by the EU and the United States in the form of new investments. The reform-modernization agenda of the Medvedev presidency — was largely designed by the Institute of Contemporary Development INSOR , an organization created specifically for this task and headed by Igor Yurgens. Now, Russian society and its leaders must make a choice: how do we see ourselves, our country, and our government in the future?
Russia cannot allow itself yet another period of stagnation. Indeed, it is arguably the only pathway by which Russia can continue in its development without falling into political, psychological, or economic backwardness.
By generalizing from Russian historical trends, modern Russian history, or even current events, we can create a detailed list of the qualities of reforms that have persisted in Russia over the past few decades and centuries. These are:. It is also important to note that in each case, reform actually becomes inevitable at a certain stage of development. This holds true in the context of stagnation or of pushback against reforms.
The trigger for reform is always the same: the situation in the country has become unsustainable and the elites, if they want to preserve their power, have to respond in some form to the challenges facing them. This response often involves increased repression, but does not necessarily exclude the possibility of a later return to the ideas of reform. However, this initial period of repression and stagnation can last for decades. At this point, the elites also have the option of taking a modernization approach in order to lessen the likelihood of trouble for themselves.
Reforms are initiated by the elites because modernization can only be initiated by those with power. At the same time, the development programs prepared, supported, and spearheaded by these coalitions for modernization are not focused on small groups of elites or the population at large, but strive to satisfy the interests of society as a whole.
In a perfect world, of course, the ultimate goal of reform is to benefit everyone. Some researchers argue that reforms are most likely to be effective during times of crisis, when a government is just taking office or beginning a new term, or under a strong regime a presidential system, for example.
Still, it was precisely according to this formula that the radical reforms of the s began. At that point, citizens were seeing the birth of a new state, the Russian Federation, meaning that there was a fourth factor facilitating reforms—the sense of a fresh start, albeit with tremendous amounts of baggage left over from the USSR.
Limits to reform, which can take the form of political, ideological, or governmental constraints, are the constant companions of Russian reform. During perestroika, the line that the government feared to cross was challenging the existence of the socialist system itself. During the times of Alexander I and Mikhail Speransky, these limits were serfdom and the absolute power of the monarch. Moreover, the objective factor of resistance to reform should not be discounted.
Of course, he was far from the only leader to consciously avoid change and modernization. For example, Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I resisted the industrialization of his country in part because he saw workers as potential revolutionaries even before Marx popularized the concept.
When the plan to construct a railroad was laid before the emperor, he claimed that it would lead to revolution. Russian reforms can best be described as much needed but painful. Any serious Russian reforms entail way too much dislocation and sacrifice to easily sail through the process. This reality poses yet another obstacle to their successful completion, and it helps explain why the implementation of reform usually falls into a familiar rut far short of the intended target.
After the failed attempt at reform in the period of —, economic reform was deferred for the time being. But the longer reform was put off, the higher the price of reform became, and the more severe it would have to be when it did come.
In the end, this led to a crisis of the system and demanded its complete reformulation. In a perfect world, reform should benefit everyone. Yet reform obviously has its flag-bearers and beneficiaries. Will they be able to realize their needs, figure out effective ways to fight for them, and overcome mutual preconceived notions? The progressive groups mentioned by Gaidar almost twenty years ago could have become the core of the coalition for reform, had they demonstrated a demand for modernization.
However, in modern Russia, it is rare to see coalitions for reform based on class or profession. The mechanics of these processes are probably now more complex. Besides, in modern Russia, at a time when patriotic enthusiasm is coupled with social apathy and an economic crisis, there is no one willing to supply reform from the top, nor is there a clearly defined demand for it from the bottom.
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