Blue Whales Don't Fly But Red Revolution Must and Could Advance

Radical Thoughts on the Next Few Months and Beyond

I recently published a piece on the need for masses of US Americans to rise up for revolution when and if – as seems likely though far from certain – the fascists (the Trump-era Republicans) take back the White House next year.  In that piece, I went into some detail on the horror that a second Trump presidency would represent:

‘A new and horrific level of Amerikaner Christian fascist and white nationalist consolidation will be underway. Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s re-ascendancy will mean a dramatically sharpened consolidation of Republi-fascist power in the United States.  The nation’s powerful executive branch will have fallen under nearly complete fascist control in a nation where the Reichmost of the two viable ruling class political parties already holds the powerful Supreme Court and possibly both houses of Congress, certainly including the powerful US Senate (thanks to the 2024 Senatorial election lineup). Half of the nation’s powerful fifty state governments are already under Republi-Nazi domination.  And this time, Donald “Retribution” Trump will preside over a party and executive branch far more united and determined to conduct the takeover and makeover of US government and society on Christian white nationalist grounds than in 2017-21…Donald “Project 2025” Trump’s victory and the heightened consolidation of fascist power will represent a stark existential threat to basic civil liberties, “democracy,” social justice and decency, and to truth and to life itself. Donald “Drill, Drill, Drill” Trump and his party are openly ecocidal and pandemicist in a time of escalating environmental catastrophe and epidemiological crisis. They are determined to create a white-supremacist, arch-patriarchal world in which might openly makes right and truth – the very notion of objective reality – is obliterated. The deranged, orange-brushed Dear Leader and his party are eliminationist agents of many-sided annihilation.

(Happy Halloween!)

I opined further on the need for mass resistance even in the event of an outwardly “clean”  Trump victory:

‘There is no such thing as a legitimate fascist government. Even if Donald “Crush the Enemy Within,” Trump returns to power in an outwardly “clean” fashion– by supposedly winning the Electoral College without help from vote manipulation/suppression/ cancellation and the intervention of the Trump High (Supreme) Court – it must be understood that there is no such thing as a legitimate fascist government. Never forget that Hitler rose to power in Germany through constitutional, legal, and bourgeois-electoral means and consistently strove to wrap his criminal fascist dictatorship in the cloaks of legalism.  For what it’s worth, an unpolluted/uncorrupted Trump victory is impossible given the Republifascists’ many coup plans and actions already underway and in place….The only appropriate response to a fascist government, however, it takes power, is mass resistance aiming to collapse that government and install a new and revolutionary one that will crush fascism and work to transform society in such a way that fascism can no longer emerge.’

I stand by all that but let me be clear about four possible misunderstandings some might draw from my argument two weeks ago.

The System is the Accelerationist

First, I am not an “accelerationist” who wants to see the fascist maniac Trump back in the White House because it will spark more militant mass and revolutionary action and consciousness than would a Kamala Harris victory. Even though he couldn’t bring himself to properly label the Hitler-channeling ogre Trump as a fascist, Noam Chomsky was right in January of 2020 to call the Republifascists’ Dear Leader “the most dangerous criminal in human history” – profoundly perilous not out of some mysterious superpower but because of Trump’s virulent combination of malignant pathology with a cult-like following and the enormous concentration of deadly power in the US executive branch.

I don’t want this real-life Halloween monster Adolph Trump anywhere near real power in this world, trust me. If he does make it back, however, I’ll try to help actual “radical leftists” and their allies take revolutionary advantage of the shock his return to power will inflict on millions.  But let’s be clear: the accelerationist will have been the US capitalist political system, not me.

Harris Could Win…

Second, I am aware that Harris could come out on top.  I think the odds are against her given the right-tilted Minority Rule insanity of the slaveowners’ 18^th Century Electoral College and the numerous highly detailed and potentially successful plans the Republifascists have worked up to prevent her from becoming POTUS: a flood of litigation; waves of disinformation; certification challenges at the country, state, and federal levels; Republican power in the US Congress and Supreme Court, where a close and highly challenged election could well be decided; physical voter and ballot counting intimidation; widespread racist and partisan disenfranchisement.  Still, a Trump victory is hardly guaranteed. I’ve got Harris with a one in three shot at gaining the presidency – not great chances but far from impossible.

…and Revolution is No Less Required if She Does

Third, I do not mean to suggest that mass and revolutionary action is any less required if Trump’s continuing coup stalls and Harris makes it past all the hurdles to the Oval Office.  As I wrote two weeks ago:

‘We do not oppose the contemporary US-American equivalent to the Nazis (the Republifascists) in order to back “the equivalent of the Weimar Republic in the U.S. today, the Democratic Party and the ‘Liberals.’” (Bob Avakian, 2005). The dismal, dollar-drenched and demobilizing Dems – leaders of the party that liberal left political scientist Sheldon Wolin aptly termed “the inauthentic opposition” in 2007 –  have long demonstrated their fascism-facilitating capitalist-imperialist and objectively white supremacist essence. Having engaged in the Weimar-like enablement, appeasement and conciliation of the other major capitalist-imperialist party after that party went full-on fascist, they are at the very least junior partners in the nation’s fascisation even as they are targeted for elimination by that fascist party.

The deadly Dems’ latest damning doings include the election and conduct of the decrepit war criminal “Genocide Joe” Biden. Joe “Re-Elect Adolf Trump” Biden as president has:

+ sparked a reckless imperialist proxy war with nuclear Russia – a war that has helped spike global prices while bringing the world closer to nuclear war than any time in recent memory.

+ funded, equipped, and militarily and diplomatically protected Israel’s vicious war (also inflationary) of live-streamed genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and Israel’s horrific attacks on Lebanon and Iran.

+ “overseen the largest cuts to social welfare ever coming out of the pandemic, e.g., [slashing] food stamps, Medicare, child tax credit” (Arun Gupta).

+ overseen a significant expansion of domestic oil and gas drilling amidst a climate catastrophe driven by the wildly excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

+ failed to use his power to preserve women’s right to an abortion in all fifty states

+ failed to promptly and properly prosecute the Republi-Nazi Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump despite abundant evidence of Trump’s criminal assault on the 2020 election and other high state crimes.

+ signed on to a right-wing border bill meant to steal the Republifascists’ white-nationalist and nativist thunder – a bill defeated in Congress only because the de facto House Speaker Donald “I Love Kyle Rittenhouse” Trump wanted to deny Biden a legislative victory on “border security.”

Even if Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris is able get past the Electoral College and the numerous steep legal and extra-legal obstacles she will face to taking the White House, the right-tilted US slaveowners’ Minority Rule regime will help prevent her from making herself and her party look like desirable and progressive alternatives to the Republi-Nazi party…Kamala “I’m Down with Planet-Cooking Fracking”Harris as president will continue each of the disastrous Biden policies mentioned in the previous paragraph along with the continued brazen US military encirclement and provocation of China.

Kamala “Don’t Try to Escape the Hell US Imperialism Made of Your Country” Harris ended her nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention by promising to keep the US military “the most lethal fighting [killing] force on the planet” – a promise of future epic US war crimes.

As is shown by Joe “Never Been Much on Women’s Right to Control Their Bodies” Biden’s massive expenditures on behalf of Ukraine and Judeo-fascist Israel while masses go without proper social protection in the US, the militantly imperialist Democrats care more about slaughtering people abroad than they do about helping distressed masses in their own country, among their own purported base.  They privilege backing Zionist ethnic cleansing and provoking nuclear Russia over “saving [bourgeois] democracy” in “the homeland.” They have shown themselves willing to alienate younger voters and decent people of all ages with their sickening “ironclad support” for the child-burning Judeo-fascist state of Israel’s sickening crimes against humanity…

It should be clear that voting and the Democrats didn’t and won’t stop Trumpism-fascism.  The Dems voted Trump out of the White House in 2020 and the Republifascist movement only grew stronger over the last four years.’

Furthermore, it’s not all or only about stopping fascism, which is one of four mutually reinforcing apocalyptic horsemen facing humanity courtesy of the capitalist-imperialist system. Twenty-first century fascism is a symptom of an ecocide-, pandemicide- and war-generating capitalist order that is actively canceling prospects for a decent future through environmental calamity, zoonotic disease, and/or the drift toward nuclear war.  This is no less true if bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy can stay intact to some significant degree in the US than if Republifascists score a Minority Rule trifecta in 2024-25: control of the executive branch and Congress (including both the badly gerrymandered US House and the absurdly powerful and mal-apportioned US Senate) along with their already-achieved hegemony in the Supreme Court.  With or without full fascist consolidation, the system faces humanity with a stark choice: either the “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin of all” (Marx and Engels, 1848). It’s not all or only about fighting fascism. The soulless anarchy of capitalism and its imperial order will bring us all down regardless of what form(s) of rule it permits atop its political system.

Blue Whales Don’t Fly

Fourth, my third point is not an argument for the Democrats to “be better.” The Democrats don’t back the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the rollback of immigrant rights, the cooking of the planet, the provocation of China, and corporate-financial plutocracy out of some mistaken attachment to ideas and policies they could trade in for “better and more progressive and social democratic ones.” The Democrats aren’t agents of the basic capitalist contradiction that Karl Marx described – “Accumulation of wealth at one pole of society is therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole” – out of some ill-advised attachment to “neoliberal” doctrine. They do all this and more terrible to mention out of iron historical necessity imposed by:

• US American capitalist-imperialism understood to include not just capitalist class rule and anarchic capitalist competition but intimately related oppression systems of race, gender, and nationality.

• the exigencies of global inter-imperialist competition.

• an archaic constitutional order of right-tilted Minority Rule inherited from the nation’s slave-based Founders – an order they can and will never break from.

It’s like the revolutionary communist Andy Zee recently said with me on the latest Refuse Fascism podcast, the Obama-Biden-Harris Democrats “mumble around most of the time” and inspire nobody because they “don’t have any answers” to the main current issues of our time, including fascism. And that’s because, as Zee notes, the answers are only found “outside the system” – a system the Democrats can’t and won’t oppose.  Expecting the dismal, demobilizing, Dems to find and act on those answers is like expecting Blue Whales to fly.

Radical Potential

This does not mean that the dismal Dems won’t fight back at all against their partisan adversary. Their recent decision to finally go public with their own and top former military officials’ accurate description of Trump and Trumpism as fascist is a significant departure, one that suggests they may be digging in and fighting for their bourgeois "democracy" and perhaps even their lives against Trump’s continued rolling fascist coup this and next year. Simple self-interest is no doubt a big part of the explanation for this new posture. Since Trump and the team and party around him really are full-on fascist and eliminationist, pursuing explicit authoritarian white nationalist rule now more powerfully than ever before, Democrats must worry about their own political survival and even physical safety under a Trump dictatorship (“for a day” – right). They are right to see Trump as an existential threat to their power and security. The Democratic whales are looking with fear at a potential near future where the bourgeois-democratic sea n which they have so long swum is all dried up. At the same time, many Democrats and some remaining “traditional” (non-fascist) Republicans from hold strong and sincere intellectual and emotional attachments to long-normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, such as they are. They also see Trump as an existential threat to US global power, to which they are deeply committed.  

And this holds revolutionary possibility for actual “radical Left” change.  The radical potential resides not in any possible transformation of the dismal dollar Dems into a leftist tribune of the people (again, that’s like expecting a Blue Whale to fly) but in the opening provided by a coming “red-blue” civil conflagration and even civil war. The nation’s ruling class and population is more polarized than any time since 1860-61 and the coming likely chaos resulting from that sharp division is part of why some of us actual Marxists and revolutionary communists out here see an opening for revolutionary organization and action in coming months.  The task here includes re-polarization from “red v. blue” to the people under the true red banner of socialism v. red, white, and blue capitalism-imperialism.

I do not pretend to be able fortune tell how soon this repolarization can occur and mobilize for revolution but I can say one thing with utmost certainty: if we don’t get our shit together and organize a powerful movement to overthrow this system quite soon, there’s going to absolute Hell to pay. It is doubtful that the livable ecology required for a decent human future can survive another decade of life on a planet ruled by the capitalist mode of production.  (Mother Nature is not waiting for Americans to stop insanely measuring their moments of mass political interest and engagement around the ruling class’s savagely time-staggered election cycles.)

At the same time, the leading imperial states and nuclear superpowers inch closer to global war every year. Political superstructures are shedding the outer shell of bourgeois democracy for outright fascist rule of men over law around the world and very possibly soon right here in the world’s most powerful and dangerous state.  New pandemics seem certain.  And all of these apocalyptic horsemen, generated at root by the anarchic and parasitic capitalist order mutually reinforce and indeed multiply each other. 

The coming political chaos in the belly of the imperial beast is a moment to act.  As the revolutionary communists say, the future is already radical. The only question now is, will it be radically and extremely terrible and ugly or will it be radically and extremely emancipating and beautiful? It will be either – to use Marx and Engels language in The Communist Manifesto – “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or the radically reactionary “common ruin of all.”