Re-Polarize, Expand Your Mind, Reject False Dualities

and Get with the Revolution: Nine False Choices

v.

The word of the day is ….neither.  Neither, as in “no to door number one, and no to door number two.” Let’s NOT make a deal. Neither, as in “I reject your binary choices, your narrow parameters and your false dualisms.”  

Here are my curent top 9 false choices facing us in the current historical conjuncture in the USA:

+1. Either Democrats or Republicans. No, neither.  Both parties are firmly dedicated to the preservation and ceaseless advance of the capitalist-imperialist system that is ending prospects for a decent human future. Does this mean they are identical? No, not at all. They have different bases/demographics, geographies, policy agendas and ideological perspectives. The Republicans have gone full-on Christian white nationalist and indeed fascist in ways that I have documented for many years now. The Democrats have not. They cling to what’s left of bourgeois democracy and rule of law in the US imperial homeland.  But the Democrats collaborate with and conciliate the Republi-Nazi Party while defanging and misdirecting the oppressed populace with endless “bourgeois-electoral bullshit” (the “BEB,” as the Revolutionary Communist Party USA [the “Revcoms”] calls the modern electoral affliction [see point 2]). They are deeply complicit with the Republicans in the fascisation of US politics. And they are the more effectively imperialist of the nation’s two dominant parties, with the highest overseas body count by far.

+2. Either Vote or Withdraw from Political Life, No, neither. This false dichotomy is embedded in the idiotic American saying that “you can’t complain if you didn’t vote.” The notion that voting is the sine qua non of meaningful political engagement is a great ruse.  “Election Madness,” Howard Zinn wrote 15 years ago, “seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple-choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.” As Zinn pointed out, popular sociopolitical movements beneath and beyond what his friend Noam Chomsky calls “the quadrennial electoral extravaganzas” have proven vastly more significant than voting in winning victories for the people. “It isn’t  about who’s sitting in the White House it’s about who’s sitting in the streets.” Humanity now clearly needs a revolutionary movement designed to get past the system that is ruining life on Earth at an accelerating pace – to abolish capitalism and replace it with revolutionary socialism. That is about building a mass-based people’s socialist-communist struggle day in and day out, which has little to do with marking ballots next to the names of candidates for two minutes once every two or four years. Does this mean don’t vote? No, it doesn’t, it means (a) don’t fall for all the endless noxious BEB and (b0 that voting (or not voting) doesn’t mean shit compared to the real revolutionary movement and change we need.

+3.  Either Liberal-Left identitarian Wokeness or Christian White Nationalist/Fascist Wokeness.  Sorry, neither. The “left” standpoint epistemological variant of Wokeness (epitomized by Robin d’Angelo and her ilk) captures some initially progressive sentiments, but both versions of Wokeness are anti-scientific and anti-revolutionary. They both privilege subjective identity and experience and reality-denying “safe spaces” above science and evidence, tying one’s knowledge, authority, politics and legitimate leadership to who one is in society’s various “postmodern” identity categories (race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion/irreligion, nationality, and more) instead of to the intellectual and political work one has done. They both cancel revolutionary Marxist communist activism and theory. They are caught up with each other in a mutually reinforcing downward spiral of zero-sum, me-first victim-claiming that drags masses away from the need for the radical socialist transformation humanity needs.  Align with one side of this false dichotomy and you strengthen the other.Ban the great American novel Huckleberry Finn (the reading of which was fundamental to my own late adolescent development as a Marxist, for what that’s worth) from “from the left” because it contains the N-word, or ban Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States from the right because it’s “too radical” (it isn’t actually all that radical) – either way you are feeding the zero sum cancel culture war. Both versions of Woke function within the narrow parameters of the reigning oppression and exploitation system. Both seek a better deal for their chosen identity team/tribe under the existing system. Both work to repress and cancel those with the radical and revolutionary vision required to avert the exterminist catastrophes imposed by capitalism-imperialism (see my conclusion to this essay).

4. Either Race or Class. I have watched “left” intellectuals argue themselves until they are blue in the face over which of these two inequality systems deserve primacy in our understanding of contemporary oppression. The class-race “debate” pits critical race-privileging theories against class reductionist arguments – a circular dispute (one that I myself grappled with in my 2007 book Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History). At a pure science/historical-materialist level, I give “independent variable” primacy to class – deeply understood in terms of who owns and profits from the underlying capitalist mode of production – in the first and last instance.  But, of course, we don’t live and struggle in the first and last historical instance. We live in the present moment. And in this time and place, you cannot understand and overcome class oppression without  understanding and overcoming racial oppression. Conversely, you cannot understand and overcome contemporary racial oppression without understanding and overcoming contemporary class oppression. Real/actual revolutionaries oppose all forms of oppression and exploitation, which are bound up with each other in overlapping and mutually reinforcing ways under the capitalist-imperialist system.  It’s not either-or; it’s both-and in the lived world of struggle on the path to a world where the material productive basis of exploitation has been abolished – as it must be if humanity is going to have any chance for a decent and even glorious future.

5. Either Gender or Class (or Race):  Basically point 4 all over again, substituting the word “gender” where appropriate (and then then the same vis-a-vis race).

6. Either a Racist-Classist Police and Prison State or “Defund the Police.”  Sorry, neither. Of course we must reject the fascistic racist police and mass incarceration regime that scars the United States. F Atlanta’s racist and eco-fascist Cop City and whole contemporary overgrown, militarized blue-fascist US surveillance, policing, imprisonment and felony-branding regime. But “defunding the police” is not really a thing under capitalism-imperialism. Given the widespread insecurity, poverty, inequality, wealth concentration, alienation, parasitism, acquisitiveness, weaponry, and overall socio-pathological insanity that the anarchic bourgeois system constantly generates, the notion of a capitalist society shedding its police forces is preposterous. Police and prison abolitionism under capitalism is a left libertarian fantasy. Dogs, cats, and pigs are not about to become bi-pedal. There’s no de-funding the police under this system.  At the same time, as the revcom leader Bob Avakian has long and rightly pointed out, the police will not be abolished under revolutionary socialism. They will, however, be transformed.  The police in a proletarian state would have a genuine egalitarian public safety mission and would no longer be enlisted in the murderous and authoritarian oppression of the masses and in the violent protection and enforcement of capitalist and white supremacist rule. In a similar vein, the military will not be abolished under revolutionary socialism but will be transformed from an imperialist arm of the capitalist system into a force of revolutionary protection at home and revolutionary advance abroad. (The state and its inherent coercive aspects will not disappear until communism, if ever, long past the lifespan of anyone reading this.)

7. Either Israel or Hamas (to mention a dichotomy currently dominaing the news cycle).  No, neither.  Of course we don’t think for a second that Hamas is a force for evil remotely on par with the massively armed Zionist occupation and apartheid state of Israel, which is equipped and protected by the world’s most powerful imperial state, the USA. We must and do fiercely oppose US-backed Zionist-fascist Israel, which is a blood-drenched outpost of mass-murderous US imperialism. As I recently wrote to a backer of Israel’s current deepening genocidal war on the Palestinian people of Gaza, home to Hamas:  

“Yes, Israel apologist, your side is 'barbaric.' The 10-7 total body count [from the vicious terrorist October 7, 2023, Hamas attack in southern Israel] was 1400. Last I heard the US-backed Zionist apartheid and occupation state has already killed well more than 3000 Palestinian kids in Gaza since 10-7. IDF snipers are picking off stone-throwing teens in the West Bank (as usual). Barbaric? Oh, indeed. Very much so. Collective punishment was quite a Nazi thing. Gaza itself is a giant Israel-imposed concentration camp that Hitler would admire. When will your bloodlust be slaked? 5000 Gazan kids? 10,000? More? Ok, go ahead and explain that it's really Hamas (for whom I hold no brief at all) is the real killer of Gazans...."

The genocidal ethnic-cleanser Israel, backed to the hilt by the most powerful and lethal empire in history, is by far and away the main perpetrator in Israel-Palestine. It and not Hamas is the proper equivalent to the Nazi Third Reich there.

“For a Better Deal Within That System”

But Hamas, like its theocratic sponsor Iran, is no entity that any serious radical champion of human liberation should embrace. After detailing Israel’s dark historical role in the creation and maintenance of Hamas’s power in tortured Gaza, the revolutionary communist Alan Goodman recently explained how Hamas is a reactionary organization:

“Hamas’s outlook and vision is exactly an ‘extreme version of traditional relations and traditional values and culture.’ That includes misogyny, and endless, vengeful, religious war. ..Hamas’s founding and defining document, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, defines the role of women as an Islamic fundamentalist version of the Handmaids Tale, declaring, ‘She is the maker of men. Her role in guiding and educating the new generations is great. The enemies have realized the importance of her role. They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up the way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle.’ As for those enemies of the enslavement of women, the Covenant declares, ‘The day Islam is in control of guiding the affairs of life, these organizations, hostile to humanity and Islam, will be obliterated.’…In opposition to educating the masses in the nature of capitalism-imperialism, and how Israel and Zionism serve as enforcers of a world of exploitation and oppression, and the need and basis for all of oppressed humanity to unite and struggle for real revolution, Hamas’s Covenant demands that schools and teachers ‘instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.’…The Covenant is virulently anti-Semitic with genocidal aspirations. For example, it cites Islamic scriptures as saying, ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla [servant of god], there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’ [Some Anti-Zionist Israelis died at the hands of Hamas fighters informed by such beliefs in southern Irael on October 7, 2023 – PS]….Nowhere in its Covenant does Hamas pose a challenge to the imperialist system of economic and political domination of the oppressed nations of the world, including Palestine. They are, at most, fighting for a better deal within the confines of that system [kind of like US trade unions and other reformist organizations.]... And in the social relations they promote and enforce, they maintain backward and reactionary relations of even older, more archaic forms of oppression…The strategic objectives of the October 7 attacks in terms of Hamas’s goals are not clear, but what is clear is that they have nothing to do with liberating the Palestinian people, or bringing an end to exploitation and oppression…What is needed, everywhere, is a radically different way, a pathway that breaks out of the clashing and reinforcing poles of western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.”

(Sorry, not sorry for the long quote: this passage deserves careful reading.)

 8. Either Russia or the USA. No, neither. Please see my critique of “Left Geopolitical Neo-Campism” here (point #6, subsection titled “The Putin Left, Absurd as That Should Sound”). Of course we must oppose US imperialism’s aggression against Russia within and beyond Ukraine. But anyone who thinks they are somehow advancing the cause of socialism and revolution by backing the capitalist-imperialist Russian state and applauding the rise of a more multipolar world capitalist system is living in an objectively reactionary fantasy world.    

9. Either China or the USA.  No, neither. Please see my critique of “Left Geopolitical Neo-Campism” here (point #6, subsection titled “China Syndrome”). Of course we must oppose US imperialism’s aggression against Russia within and beyond East Asia. But anyone who thinks they are somehow advancing the cause of socialist revolution by backing the capitalist-imperialist Chinese state and applauding the rise of a more multipolar world capitalist system is living in an objectively reactionary fantasy world.

I could go on adding other false choices to be resisted and rejected by revolutionaries with this critical admonition in mind: align with one side and you strengthen the other.

Let’s NOT make a deal. Let’s overthrow the capitalist-imperialist deal.  The whole damn deal is poison.

It’s time to repolarize (the Revcoms’ appropriate language, again) around the following dichotomy: humanity and all living things versus capitalism-imperialism, the system that has – as I recently argued – brought to the fore 4 key interrelated and mutually reinforcing and mutually multiplying apocalyptic horsemen: ecocide, potentially global nuclear war, pandemicide, and fascism/authoritarianism. Such re-polarization, necessary for decent human survival, requires giant popular revolutionary movements led by vanguard communist parties committed to taking and wielding state power for the radical replacement of the capitalist system by a radical socialism steeled to defeat counterrevolution and prepared to guide humanity on a path beyond class rule and all forms of vicious and unnecessary exploitation and oppression.

I know, it sounds “nuts” to many folks even, perhaps  especially on “the left” (in my experience, nobody is more passionately and doggedly opposed to the notion of an actual socialist revolution than the US “left’ in all its many lame variants).  But the only thing “crazier” than advocating this is not advocating this given what we now know about what the capitalist mode of production and its political and ideological superstructure mean for life on Earth: mass suffering, normalized mass death, epic species extinction, and civilizational collapse.  At the same time, as the revcoms and their leading thinker Bob Avakian  – regularly and absurdly (and revealingly) denounced (COINTELPRO-style) as a “cult” figure on “the left” – point out, radical socialist revolution could in fact happen during this current period of growing global capitalist anarchy, environmental crisis, inter-imperial conflict, “left”-right polarization,  and bourgeois-democratic dissolution…this ever more rapidly unfolding time of interrelated, overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises that lay bare the underlying contradictions, absurdity and illegitimacy of “the whole damn system.”  I’d add that it’s not really about the odds. A radical socialist transformation has to happen.  It’s like Marx and Engels said in 1848: it’s either “the revolutionary  reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin of all…” As Istvan Meszaros wrote 21 years ago,  “The uncomfortable truth is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.” This is not my fault, or yours, dear reader.  It’s where we are, courtesy of capitalism.