Rev-o-lution v. Rev-enge

Further Reflections on Left Pathology

At one point this year I did a three-part series here titled “The Lame Left – Seventeen Afflictions.”  It has subsequently been put together as a single document on my personal Website. Read the single document here.

If I were writing that piece against today, I would add four more pathologies:

#18: Beliefs in God, Supernatural Force, Destiny, andTeleological Laws of History are common on “the left” and stand in opposition to the basic scientific approach to natural, social, and historical reality that revolutionary theory and practice require. There is no “arc of history” bending to progress and liberation by divine will or any other notion of pre-ordained historical destiny. It’s hard to wrap your mind around and act on the real and ultimate problem — capitalism-imperialism — and the solution (socialist revolution on the path to the communist overthrow of all forms of exploitation and oppression) when you believe to any serious degree that history is the creation and/or plaything of supernatural forces beyond human comprehension and control. There are non-theistic versions of magical and religious belief on the left, to0 - the notion, for example, that socialism and communism are the inevitable, pre-ordained outcome of a teleological process that makes the proletariat a revolutionary class destined by historical law to overthrow capitalism.

Speaking of which, #19: Trotskyism, which clings to small and hyper-sectarian  margins of “the left.”  Real or wannabe Trots have a long record of rejecting revolutions and revolutionary movements in individual nations beyond the advanced industrial world. They cling to a curiously white First World-ism under the guise of internationalism.  They have a woefully outdated industrial proletarian fetish, adhering to an obsolete, by now antiquarian image of a latently revolutionary industrial working class and to a flawed theory of working-class hegemony over the revolutionary party.

#20: Tailing the Oppressed. Many left-identified people I’ve interacted with over the years insist on making oppressed people (and pretty much whatever oppressed people say and do) their guiding star.  This is sentimental and reactionary nonsense. This pathology is already implicit if not explicit in my “Lame Left” series’ critiques of the standpoint epistemology that cuts across left-identitarian Wokesterism and proletarian fetishism (“class truth”), but I think the phrase “tailing the oppressed” deserves its own stand-alone mention here.

“Center the oppressed,” a Palestine activist recently told me while begging me to make no mention of the crimes and reactionary nature of the arch-patriarchal Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas – as if Islamo-fascist Hamas was the authentic voice of the Palestinian population, as if properly denouncing Hamas makes one an ally of the US-sponsored Judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel, and as if Hamas’s reactionary positions and terrorist violence would be okay if they were supported by most Palestinians (they aren’t). And as if Islamic fundamentalism, US imperialism, Israel state terrorism, and global capitalism aren’t all bound up with each other in mutually reinforcing ways in the creation of Palestinian and broader Arab and Middle Eastern misery.

This (sleepy-)“woke” left tendency absurdly privileges the immediate and personal experience of those catching the worst Hell under the capitalist-imperialist system over the serious science-based intellectual and political work of deeply engaged radical thinkers and and activists not generally from the lower ranks of society. It essentially puts Manchester textile workers and US cotton slaves (who planted, tended, and picked the cotton for the English wage earner) ahead of “bourgeois” Karl Marx when it comes to understanding and developing alternatives to the capitalist mode of production; Congolese genocide victims ahead of Lenin and Mao when it comes to understanding and devising strategies to fight imperialism. 

The notion that those suffering the worst consequences of the underlying system are the best authorities on how to understand and struggle against the system is transparently absurd.  It ignores the terrible toll oppression in all forms takes on its victims’ capacities. It absurdly assumes that oppression somehow immunizes its victims from the poisonous ideological messages and politics of ruling class and other reactionary forces. It absurdly gives away the weapons of science and objectivity to rulers and oppressors and foolishly cancels revolutionary leaders of middle- and upper-class background.  

(I was recently verbally assaulted by an Iowa City prole-fetishist and class truth identitarian for having the gall to speak and write against class rule when I had committed the sin of not being born into a proletarian household. “You aren’t from the working class,” my accuser sneered as I waited for some Chinese takeout.  Indeed, what hypocrisy on my part! What was I thinking when I chose to be conceived by professional class parents in the summer of 1957?  Ironically enough, my accuser, scornfully and loudly proud of his working-class origins, spent decades in salaried white-collar employment while I spent much of my adulthood doing lower-end blue- and gray-collar jobs. I've met good radicals and socialists from every class background and reactionary revanchists from every class background. Here are some leaders of socialist revolution who came from non-proletarian backgrounds: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels [an actual bourgeois/capitalist!], Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara.  If being part of the working class made people into revolutionary socialists, we’d be in full communism by now.).

# 21: Revenge-ism, something very different from and indeed opposed to revolution. The revenge attitude is seen in many left-identified folks’ constant half-joking personal and online calls for the shaming, knee-capping, and even execution of the rich and “colonizers,” replete with pictures of guillotines and positive references to oppressed people “evening the score” with the ruling class and other oppressive actors.  It’s all about “payback” and “showing them what it’s like to hurt.”

Portside revenge-ism merges with religion when you hear left-identified folks define their notion of revolutionary change as the making of a world turned upside down where, to use the Christian language, “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

Inversion is Not Revolution

There are three key problems with a “left” revenge orientation. The first difficulty is that it does nothing to change the underlying system of oppression and exploitation.  You could kill off and/or incarcerate every last capitalist in the United States, redistribute their wealth, and open their mansions and gated enclaves to the poorest and most exploited among us. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t mean a revolutionary thing unless you replaced the underlying capitalist mode of production and its political and ideological superstructure with revolutionary socialism. Unless we rise up in the millions to take and wield state power to build a socialist system designed to put humanity on the path beyond class rule (to communism), we’ll just hatch new capitalist elites, owners, and rulers. What is “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” but an inversion of personnel within a system of exploitation and death?  Real revolutionaries fight for a world without firsts and lasts - a world beyond class rule, patriarchy, racism, nationalism, nativism, cultural chauvinism, and the like. 

Means and Ends

The second problem with the revenge orientation is a matter of means and ends.  If you take reprisal and settling scores as your vision you’re going to bring a lot of the old to the new, setting your revolution up for counterrevolution in no short order.  The radical transformation we should and must fight for seeks the emancipation of all humanity from  exploitation and oppression, not the vindictive punishment of one part of humanity by another. It’s not about inflicting pain, it’s about removing the unnecessary and destructive pain of exploitation, oppression, war, alienation, and ecological ruin.  

I’m not talking here about the pathological pacifism that pretends we could have a socialist society without any bloodshed and refuses to understand the role of force in making revolution.  I’m arguing for a proper understanding of how the means one undertakes impact the ends one desires.  The mindset of retribution degrades revolutionaries’ humanity in ways that morally and politically cripple their revolution.  It sinks to the ethical level of the masters, helping fuel the rise of a new capitalist class within the socialist revolution.  

The revolution we need isn’t about “getting even” and making the privileged pay. It’s about getting beyond oppression, privilege, exploitation, parasitism and alienation that are built into the capitalist-imperialist system and that scar and cripple the lives even of the privileged.

Bad Alliances and Apologies

A third problem with privileging revenge against oppressors over the revolutionary emancipation of humanity is that it makes for some very bad alliances and identifications that often come down to the bankrupt position that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I know people who are so full of an understandable desire to punish the dismal, dollar-drenched fake-progressive woke-imperialist Democratic Party that they end up in semi- or full-on collaboration with Trumpism-fascism and find themselves making excuses for the crimes of the far right at home and abroad.  I know folks who are so understandably angry at the criminal, mass-murderous US American Empire that they end up as friends and even de facto agents of despicable capitalist authoritarian oppressor states like the butcher Putin’s Russia, Xi Jingping’s arch-authoritarian state-capitalist China, the Hindu fascist Modi’s India, and the butcher Assad’s Syria.

Now we see a number of left-identified people so understandably angry at judeo-fascist Israel’s US-backed crimes that they conflate the Islamo-fascist “liberation” and “resistance” led by Hamas with all the Palestinian masses (the weak spot-on religion, [left pathology #18], hardly confined to Christianity, is  relevant here. I guess we can add the “Hamas-left” to the Trumpenleft and the Putin-left in the genealogy of “red-brown” (usually actually “pink-brown”) alliance and dalliance with deeply  reactionary forces.    

A number of left-identified folks have tragically traded in the internationalist project of socialist  revolution for a strange new geopolitical campism that celebrates the emergence of a more completely  multi-polar capitalist word, as if capitalism can ever really be globally unipolar and as if a capitalist world with more powerful competing centers is any less wired to unleash the four mutually reinforcing apocalyptic horsemen stalking the world today: ecocide, nuclear war, pandemicide, and fascism in its various forms. If anything, the more multi-polar version, properly reflecting the inherent underlying anarchy of capital in the world state system, is more conducive to these exterminist scourges.

A Hideous Example: the Party “for” Socialism and Liberation Digging the Mass Murder of Dancing “Hipsters”

Recently in New York City, a top member of the so-called Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) expressed snarky delight over the murder of "hipster" dancers by clever Islamist terrorists in southern Israel. Here are actual words that actually came out of past PSL vice presidential candidate Eugene Puryear’s mouth after Hamas’ criminal action: “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters (crowd: Woooooo!). But I'm sure they're doing very fine no matter despite what the New York Post says."

This is some heavy dark shit.  This “socialist leader’s”  heroes are revanchist, blood-drenched Islamo-fascist terrorists?  Puryear digs the slaughter and hostage of taking of noncombatants at a peace dance,  who he mocks as "hipsters”?

“I’m sure they’re doing fine.” Puryear actually F’ng said that. Unreal.

A Brilliant Critique from a Leading Revcom

As the revolutionary communist Lenny Wolf observed last week on the Revolutionary Communist Party’s weekly Revolution Nothing Less (RNL) Show:

“It is crucially important that people come together to oppose what America and Israel are doing in Gaza right now. But among those who have opposed US and Israeli oppression over the years, there has been another ugly and destructive trend. Let’s look at this example: Eugene Puryear, from the group calling itself the Party of Socialism and Liberation, speaking at a rally this past few days…[see above] Listen to the callousness and contempt that drips from [Puryear’s] voice in his dismissal and dehumanization of people who were killed and kidnapped by his heroes in Hamas. Haven’t we seen and heard that same kind of  curled lip contempt coming from oppressors and enforcers as they mouth their racist and sexist slurs and they hammer on masses of people?, Just look at what Puryear is describing and dismissing in this way [here the RNL Show showed clips of the bloody attack on dance party participants, with video of people being shot down and taken as hostages]. These people being shot [weren't] acting as soldiers or cops or fascists enforcing oppression. These are people dancing at a concert. Puryear can call himself anything he wants. We can’t do anything about that. But by the evidence, this group should more accurately be known as the Party Against Socialism and Liberation.”

“Be clear: people do have to fight against what imperialists are doing. And communists have to unite broadly in this fight. But as we do, we have to fight against the outlook we’re talking about here [of revenge as opposed to revolution]. And this kind of infection takes other forms. It ranges from acting as if it just never happened to the woke orthodoxy that people living in colonial countries must not criticize the colonized for any ways in which they fight. And for just plain old ‘what do you expect after what the oppressor has done?’ No that can’t be the terms that are set in the movement we need….Do we really want people to be forced to choose between the hypocritical brutality of US imperialism and its allies or the blatant revenge-seeking of Islamic fundamentalism.  Are you really okay with those being the alternatives in front of people?”

The USS Fallujah and Judeo-Fascist Israel’s US-Backed “Mighty Vengeance”

Revenge, payback, and retribution are the stock in trade of the American Empire and its client state Israel, whose genocidal fascist president responded to Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel by promising “mighty vengeance” that will be remembered through the ages.  

The United States Marine Corps has recently named a newly built amphibious assault ship the USS Fallujah.  The warship is named after the city that the US Marines pulverized twice in 2004 during the United States’ criminal and mass-murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq.  In 2004, the ill-fated city was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by the U.S. military in April and November. By one account, "Incoherent Empire," Michael Mann wrote:

“The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and November of 2004 ... [using] devastating firepower from a distance which minimizes U.S. casualties. In April ... military commanders claimed to have precisely targeted ... insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and the elderly... [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally. ... In November ... [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it. Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after Putin's Russian troops had razed it to the ground.”

The "global policeman's" deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects, leukemia and cancer there.

(The horrendous US attack on Fallujah was launched as payback for Islamist occupation resisters’ vengeful murder, burning, and display of four American private military contractors employed by Blackwater USA. The contractors were pulled from their cars, beaten, and set ablaze. Their charred corpses were then dragged through the streets and hung over a bridge.)

And now US military personnel are conveying the “lessons” of the sick imperialist Fallujah slaughter to Israel. The New York Times reported two days ago that “American military officers with vivid memories of the fights for Falluja in 2004—a six-week struggle against Iraqi insurgents that was some of the most intense urban combat of modern times—have been conveying the lessons of that battle … to their Israeli counterparts.”

So what are the “lessons” of the crucifixion of Fallujah that the criminal US empire wants to convey to its client Israel as the latter state conducts a vengeful and genocidal war on the people stuck in the already miserable giant concentration camp that is Gaza? As the Revolutionary Communist Party USA reports:

“Just to sketch out a few: The American ground assault came after U.S. troops had cut off all entry into and exit from Fallujah and poured in thousands of artillery rounds, hundreds of rockets, bombs, and missiles, and nearly 100,000 machine gun and cannon rounds into this densely populated city. Then came the armored bulldozers that tore up all the main streets of the city and troops that shot at anything that moved, going ‘house to house, room to room, raining death and destruction,’ according to one news report. As the assault was going on, then-U.S. President George W. Bush told a gathering of top military commanders: ‘Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!... We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!’”

Sound familiar?  It’s what Israel has already started doing in Gaza, replete with the use of criminal white phosphorous and US-supplied cluster munitions, the mass murder of noncombatants/civilians – all in the Orwellian name of “democracy.” And it is doing this with the full support of the United States, covered by crocodile tears of alleged US concern for innocents. Biden will shed some of those tears in an address to the US people tonight – an address in which he will call for “unprecedented” levels of new US military support for the judeo-fascist occupation, apartheid, terror and murder state of Israel.