I continue to insist on stepping back from the endless and exhausting barrage of horrific Trump news long enough to discuss some key aspects of revolutionary Marxist/communist politics, whose possibilities I refuse — unlike most of “the left” in my lifetime — to abandon and write off.
For my latest take on the 2024 election, please see my piece in CounterPunch today: Paul Street, “Ten True Things Regarding the Election and America,” CounterPunch, September 20-22, 2024.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I am way past merely sick and tired of saying “I told you all so” with regard to the fascist menace posed by Trump and Trumpism. The gross racist terror that Dear Leader Donald and Herr Vance are inflicting on Haitian Americans and others in Springfield, Ohio right now is just straight out of the fascist playbook that I and others have been screaming about as the essence of Trumpism for more than eight years (neofascists have been marching in Springfield in recent days, by the way). So are his recent anti-Semitic comments that are getting a lot of cable news attention today. I notice that the cable news talking heads continue to find it painfully difficult to utter “the F-word” — fascism — even now. How pathetic.
I also had an “I told/warmed you so” experience with the Obama presidency, by the way. I was on the radical Obama critique beat early on from my Chicago and Illinois (1990-2006) and then Iowa (2007-8 presidential caucus and general election campaign) vantage points and produced a whole book and many essays (on ZNet and at Black Agenda Report) trying to warn folks off the Obama Kool Aid between 2004 and 2008. Then I spent a bit of time over the next eight years documenting and denouncing Obama’s service to capitalism, imperialism, and (ironically enough) white supremacism as president just as I spent much of 2017-21 documenting and denouncing Trump’s crimes as president. I warned about Biden well before his presidency and have documented and denounced many of his crimes and failures as president over the last three years and nine months.
Little anecdote from back in the day: after Trump won in 2016 the local Iowa City/Johnson County Dems had a big speak out in the downtown Iowa City Ped Mall. I got up and made a case for mass social movement action in the streets, reminding folks that bourgeois electoral politics was NOT the only or main politics that matters. I got down and walked right up to the local Clintonite Dem establishment and said "congratulations, you just put a fucking fascist in the White House." There was a march up Dubuque Street to shut down Interstate-80 (“the main street of America”) a bit after that.
“I/We Told You So” feels kind of cool for a while but the buzz wears off pretty soon.
Sources mentioned here:
Noam Chomsky, “The Disconnect in US Democracy” (2004) —- read it here.
I said the Howard Zinn “Election Madness” essay went up in 2004. Wrong, I meant to say 2008. Read it here.
Bob Avakian’s draft constitution for a DSR here (please recall that I have created an acronym for “desirable socialist revolution”: “DSR”).
Revolution, Part 4