On Progressive Intellectuals, Dystopia, and Anti-Communism

With Reflections on Siren Songs, Salaries, and Sinclair

“The Real Issue to be Faced”

"The black revolution,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his final essay, “is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws - racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.  It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced." 

Damn.

The system that needed to be overthrown, King knew quite well, was capitalism. The alternative to radical reconstruction – to revolution – King knew, was radical white supremacist reaction – a fascist police state.

King unfortunately left out patriarchy from his list of societal flaws, but how prophetic his words feel fifty-six years later! The capitalist-imperialist system long led by the United States has by its very nature conjured up four mutually reinforcing and reciprocally multiplying apocalyptic horsemen: Ecocide (led by runaway global warming), nuclear and therefore terminal inter-imperialist war (pitting the US against Russia and/or China, with North Korea in the mix), pandemicide, and a sickening new fascism within and beyond the world’s most dangerous nation (the United States).

Beneath and beyond the comparatively “superficial” (King) matters that capitalist media and politics culture regularly throw out to stupefy and dazzle the masses, the system itself is cancelling prospects for a decent human future at an ever-accelerating pace. It has brought us to the moment that (speaking of prophetic statements) Marx and Engels warned about one hundred and seventy-six years ago (a blink of the historical eye): either “the revolutionary reconstitution of society large” or “the common ruin of all.”

Historical Materialism 101

One telling embodiment of this grave moment is the nauseating “choice” the system has vomited up for  US-American voters in 2024.  In one deranged corner stands the re-ascendant and openly ecocidal malignant fascist and wannabe white-supremacist strongman-for-life Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump, who says he wants to be “dictator for a day” to enforce “Drill, Drill, Drill” (for oil).  In the other diseased corner stands (barely)  the doddering, blood-soaked warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden, who pretends to care about the climate catastrophe he deepens and the lives of the Gazan families he helps Israel butcher en masse.  Along the way he’s been lighting the fuse of World War III in Ukraine. Either way humanity is fucked. 

The Revcoms’ slogan is dead on point: No Fascist Trump, No Genocide Joe, the Whole Damn System’s Got to Go!

The slogan concentrates simultaneously moral and scientific truths.  The moral truth is that no decent person should tolerate a system, a “structure of society” (King), that exploits, sickens, alienates, represses, and oppresses billions of their fellow humans, bringing homo sapiens and countless other species to the brink of extinction (or perhaps something worse).  The scientific truth is that the reigning capitalist order is systemically wired by its very nature to give rise to the aforementioned apocalyptic horsemen. This is Historical Materialism 101.

Our Sheep-Dogging Progressive Intellectuals Know Better

But, of course, our “progressive intellectuals” – as the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian describes the American “left” intelligentsia –  know better than to say that “the whole system’s got to go.”   They have a nice, all-knowing list of reasons not to call for “the radical reconstruction of society itself”  (King, 1968) and “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (Marx and Engels, 1848).  They instruct us on the need to keep our sights low and “realistic,” seeking small and incremental victories, an occasional union election victory here and social-democratish city councilperson there. 

Many of our progressive intellectuals (OPIs) like to ritiually cite and identify with “the working class,” telling us that “democratic socialism” will someday emerge when that all-powerful segment of humanity in whose name they claim to speak develops the right amount of progressive sentiment (some of them even say “class consciousness”) under the tutelage of great leaders like the Biden backers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Occasion-Cortez. We’ll just have to bide(n) our time waiting for that great sleeping giant to wake up.

Some of OPIs seem to foolishly believe that the new Amerikaner fascism under Trump isn’t really all that big a deal.  A bigger number of OPIs seem to know much better than that (thankfully) but fail to call for a remotely adequate response.  They routinely try to sheep-herd (dare I say “Judas Goat”?) us into the paralyzing quicksand (Avakian’s excellent metaphor) of the nation’s savagely right-tilted US bourgeois electoral politics, where fascism is winning and no serious challenge to the underlying system is remotely possible.

Did any of OPIs call for mass protests to shut down the country (what Dr. King called for in response to “the Vietnam War” [the US Crucifixion of Southeast Asia] and the related destruction of the so-called and short-lived War on Poverty) when the Christian fascist US Supreme Court just recently made its epic Fascist Fuhrer ruling (Trump v United States), immunizing Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump from prosecution for trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy and giving US presidents the power to order the assassination of their political rivals without fear of legal penalty? Perhaps one or two did call for something like that; the rest were helping tune us all into the siren song (Avakian again) of “the Election Madness” (Howard Zinn, 2008), at high volume in the wake of Biden’s dithering debate debacle.

Worried About Dystopia?

OPIs tell us that revolutions end in “dystopias.”  Here they cite the undeniable repressive aspects of the 20^th Century socialist regimes in Russia and China but delete the very real liberatory accomplishments of those states and the dire circumstances – including above all imperial encirclement and counterrevolution – that ultimately limited and undid them, at no small cost to humanity.  

OPIs sometimes expose their anti-communist hand by calling Lenin “a counterrevolutionary” and lovingly citing the bourgeois democracy theorist (and Heidegger-rehabilitator) Hannah Arendt, who falsely and absurdly conflated the Nazi Third Reich with its blood enemy the Soviet Union (which lost more than 20 million lives fighting…um, the Nazi Third Reich!) and even considered the former a greater “totalitarian” evil than the former!

Worried about “dystopias”? Look at the many dystopias capitalism-imperialism is generating before our very eyes, combining the warnings of Jack London’s Iron Heel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, Phillip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, Edward Abbey’s Good News,  Robert Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (nonfiction) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and now Paul Lynch’s haunting new novel The Prophet’s Song an all too plausible depiction of fascist takeover (apologies to relevant dystopian novels and writers and films I don’t have time to list!).

“Communism Equals Stalin’s Dungeons and Can’t Take New and More Liberatory Forms”

It goes almost without saying that OPIs refuse with a tiny few exception to look at Avakian’s remarkable efforts to fashion a “new communism” that acknowledges the accomplishments but also the very real mistakes and crimes of the first socialist states. So what if Avakian’s new communism “involves,” in Avakian’s words, a “summation of serious problems and errors, in previous communist revolutions” and “places great emphasis on the importance of an atmosphere that encourages and supports intellectual and artistic ferment, critical thinking, scientific curiosity and the restless pursuit of the truth, wherever the truth leads”?

None of that matters to any but a few of our PIs.  They are  too firmly wedded to doctrinal Western anti-communism to entertain the notion that a communist thinker might have worked up a “new communism” that rejects the intellectual repression and violent revenge and other related problems that scarred previous socialist states’ and communists’ conduct and philosophy. No desirable “new communism” is possible in their minds. Communism equals Stalinist and North Korean dungeons, and there’s nothing mor to be said about it.

System “Goodies” More Deeply Understood

What’s it all about?  Having spent much of my life around OPIs, especially in their academic redoubts, I can attest to the accuracy of Avakian’s recent diagnosis of the problem:

“…whatever their ‘progressive’ pretensions, these intellectuals are ‘invested’ in this parasitic system of capitalism-imperialism, and the role of the U.S. as the top-dog imperialist power—feasting off the brutal exploitation and murderous oppression not just of masses of people in this country but literally billions of people around the world, including more than 150 million children. This parasitism is the basis for the ‘goodies’ this system makes available to these intellectuals. (By ‘goodies,’ I don’t mean just material benefits—which many of these intellectuals do have to varying degrees—but also the benefit of being able to engage in intellectual work and artistic expression, so long as this is in the service of, or at least does not seriously challenge or threaten, the interests of the ruling class of this system.)”

That’s a good match for my experience and observations over the many years during which I have at first earnestly and then ever more wryly asked academic and other liberal and progressive intellectuals what on Earth they think they are doing with their lives — and with the remarkable comparative intellectual freedoms they enjoy as parastic capitalism-imperialism drives humanity and other living things ever closer to collapse.  (“So, wait, you want to write a book about how unions make things a bit better for some people under capitalism? Really? In 2024?”)

“When His Salary Depends on Not Under Understanding”

Some leftes I know love the following widely circulated quote from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

It’s a clever statement but I think it gets three things wrong when it comes to understanding the deep and tepid conservativism of OPIs.

First, salary aside, Sinclair needed to factor in the wisdom of Marx’s 1845 observation that “the ruling ideas” of an era “are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” The capitalist mode of production requires, conditions, and otherwise shapes and selects an ideological superstructure that takes on a certain life of its own. Fear and loathing of real and actual revolution, communist-led socialist revolution, is part of the stultifying intellectual air that all thinking people breathe in a capitalist society. Pulling out from under that polluted atmosphere requires no small moral and scientific effort.  In any event, ideology matters, not just income.

Second, as Avakian notes, it isn’t just or even mainly about “the material benefits” (Avakian) – Sinclair’s “salary” and the goods and services that salaries buy.  It’s also and just as (if not more) importantly about the “goody” of having the time and position “to engage in intellectual work and artistic expression” – work and expression that is often quite rewarding and fun even as it is sadly crippled by the requirement that it not challenge the system that is ruining life on Earth. I’ll add here that progressive intellectuals are not in my experience generally driven primarily by pecuniary aims.  People with good intellectual skills who are motivated that way first and foremost go into professions like corporate law or business management.

Third, in some cases the problem often isn’t one of understanding but rather a matter of courage and willingness to openly express one’s understanding of something that matters – for example, the cold hard fact capitalism is hard-wired for Ecocide. A number of PIs I’ve engaged with over the years do understand critical realities like the basic and at once natural-scientific and social-scientific fact that livable ecology cannot and will not be saved under the reckless “growth”-addicted and profit-ruled anarchy that is the capitalist mode of production. They do in fact see (privately) beyond the parameters of the dominant ideology. The problem is that they often also understand all too well that going public with their understanding will put their “goodies” (deeply understood)  at risk. The false solution of reform – the promise to perhaps make things a little bit better for some people or other species for a while under the eco-cidal and imperialist system – provides a way to calm their conscience and, yes, keep the salary coming, no small matter in a capitalist society.