Shared Space and Difference Between Revolutionaries and Non-Revolutionaries

Three Examples

This is a good time, perhaps, to try to avert some confusion by digging into some critical differences between revolutionary and non- and anti-revolutionary approaches to issues on which revolutionaries might share some agreement with non- and anti-revolutionaries. Below I tackle three among many possible examples of what I mean.

The War in Ukraine: Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism v. White Nationalist Affection for Putin

Take US funding for the war against Russia in Ukraine. There is what one might call “Venn Diagram” overlap between a revolutionary communist (hereafter just “revolutionary”) position and a sharply anti-revolutionary Trumpist-Republifascist position on this issue: both sides oppose US support for the war.  But they do so for very different reasons. 

The revolutionary rejects the US-led NATO imperialism that provoked Russia’s invasion of its western neighbor Ukraine and then exploited that invasion by fueling a horrific conflict that has so far caused half a million casualties and destroyed much of Ukraine. The revolutionary has no love for the vicious proto-fascist and oligarchic Putin regime, but they entrust the job of weakening and overthrowing that regime to the Russian masses, not US-led Western imperialism.

The Trumpist-Republifascists, by contrast, oppose funding the Ukraine War not out of any serious opposition to US and Western imperialism (or to Ukrainian fascism) but because of their orange-hued Dear Leader’s curious attachment to Putin and the odious white nationalism and socio-cultural revanchism they share with the Russian strongman. Google up leading US fascist propagandist Tucker Carlson’s recent running lapdog trek to Russia to interview the great and glorious Putin. (Putin himself was irritated by Carlson’s failure to ask any sharp questions!)

The US-Israel Genocide in Gaza: Solidarity and Difference

Look at the ongoing US-Israeli Crucifixion of Gaza – the deeply racist, mass-murderous, and genocidal ethnic cleansing operation that Israel is conducting with full US support despite decrepit “Genocide Joe” Biden’s pathetic grumblings about Israel going “over the top” with its mass murder of Palestinian civilians – grumblings that hardly lead him to stop funding, equipping, and protecting the genocide (much less to order the US military to protect the people of Gaza).

Revolutionaries share the Palestinian solidarity movement’s passionate opposition to Judeofascist Israel’s horrific and US-backed crimes against the Palestinian people past and present. They stand in solidarity with the movement’s right to militantly protest those crimes within and beyond US campuses. They agree with the movement that the October 7th attack on Israel was a predictable (in fact predicted) outcome of racist Israeli occupation, apartheid, oppression, and provocation.

At the same time, they diverge from much of the movement in some critical respects.  They evince no (supposedly Fanonian) praise for arch-sexist, anti-Semitic, and Islamofascist Hamas and the horrific, criminal, and vengeful October 7 attack. They have no faith in the faded dream of a “two state solution,” arguing instead for a socialist people’s revolution in Israel and across all the land formerly known as Palestine.  They place far greater emphasis than many in the movement do on the determinative role and responsibility of US imperialism and on Israel’s status as a bloody arm of the American Empire within and beyond the Middle East.  They root the genocide ultimately in underlying contradictions of capitalism-imperialism and see the US-Israel crimes in Gaza as one among many reasons to call for the rise of new communist revolutionary movements within the US, the Middle East, and around the world.

The F'-Word Applied to Trump, Trumpism, and the Formerly republican Republi-fascist Party

Last but not least, take the problem of the fascist takeover of the Republican, now Republi-fascist, Party. A revolutionary communist/revolutionary is at one level glad to see a liberal or centrist MSNBC (“MSDNC”) talking head occasionally use the big scary “ F-word” – fascism – in connection with the formerly republican Republifascists.  It’s hard for serious political thinkers not to do that at least once in a while these days with the malignant narcissi-fascist Trump openly channeling Hitler’s rhetoric in ways that I have been documenting.  

Good for them when liberals and centrists say employ the F-word to describe Trump and the ex-Republicans.  The term fits. Refuse Fascism (RF), which had Trump and Trumpism properly diagnosed as fascist before Trump was first elected, notes that:

“Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Once in power, fascism’s defining feature is the essential elimination of the rule of law and democratic and civil rights. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Truth is obliterated and fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build their movement and consolidate power.”

The Trump and Trumpist MAGA project is strongly aligned with RF’s definition and with other parts of the fascist formula, including palingenetic ultra-nationalism and an obsessive hatred of socialism and communism.

But there are at least four key differences between how a revolutionary and how a liberal or centrist understands and approaches Trumpian Republi-fascism.

The first divergence is that the revolutionary now regularly uses the F-word to describe the rightmost of the nation’s two reigning capitalist-imperialist parties whereas liberals and centrists still use it all too sparingly.  This is no small distinction. Barely and rarely acknowledging something as enormously significant as one of the United States’ two dominant parties’ transition from previously and long normative bourgeois democracy to neofascism is not that far from flat out denialism.  The fascisation of the more structurally advantaged one of the two viable major parties in the world’s leading imperialist state is something that needs to be loudly and frequently called out, no? Failure to do that suggests a continuing naïve American exceptionalist belief that “it can’t [really] happen here” or a cynical or cowardly calculation that telling the truth about the grave peril to humanity does not serve one’s own personal, professional, and/or political interests.

Second, the revolutionary tends to define the F-word with a proper measure of analytical rigor while the liberals and Dems centrist typically (not always but usually) use the word with little specificity.  The RF definition quoted above is a  good example of what I mean by reasonable rigor.  When lib Dems and centrists say fascism (however sparingly), they typically make the mistake that RF’s definition calls out: seeing fascism as “just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies.”

Third, while revolutionaries and the liberal-centrist crowd tend to agree that Amerikaner fascism-Trumpism is rooted in white supremacism, patriarchy, and Christian fundamentalism, revolutionaries stress also the critical driving role of capitalism-imperialism, the dominant underlying US political-economic order. The establishment “left” And center are allegiant and captive to that order, unwilling to challenge it, even as many wealthy and powerful capitalists atop the imperial US capitalist regime are demonstrating a cold willingness to dispense (both passively and actively) with what’s left of previously normative US bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule of law democracy.   

Fourth, when Dem liberal and centrist commentators describe Trump and his allies and supporters as fascist they do so mainly to sheepdog and Judas Goat masses into the “bourgeois electoral bullshit” (the “BEB”) – up onto the movement-killing floor of the great de-radicalizing American biennial and quadrennial candidate-centered big money major party electoral extravaganza. They use the F and other words (like “illiberal,” “authoritarian,” “extremist,” etc.) to describe the rightmost/Reichmost major US party in order to motivate people to vote for Biden and the Democrats no matter how far to the right Biden and the Democrats have moved – no matter how many Ukrainians and Gazans Biden helps kill and maim, no matter how far Biden is willing to push the planet towards potential nuclear world war, no matter how far Biden is willing to go to shut the border door to Latin Americans seeking to flee misery created largely by US imperialism, and no matter how willing Biden is to appease a fossil fuel sector that is turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber  . 

The F-word as used by the liberal and centrist crowd as part of the dismal Weimar Dems’ get-out-the vote strategy. It’s a tool in their electoral agenda. It’s a weapon in their Lesser Evil propaganda – a way of telling voters fed up with the Dems’ capitalist and imperialist elitism and conservativism to “shut up and vote blue no matter who” — and no matter what — since “we and our presidential candidate aren’t as awful as the only other viable major party and presidential candidate.”  It’s a blank check for terrible and criminal policies like Biden’s approval of the eco-cidal Willow (drilling) Project (in a formerly pristine section of the Arctic), Biden’s provocation and fueling of the Ukraine War, Biden’s sickening embrace of Israel’s racist and genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and the Congressional Dems’ readiness to further close the southern US border to win Ukraine War funding.

Revolutionaries take a different approach. They consider the Democrats complicit enablers and conciliators of the Republifascists. They do not think the US fascism problem will be overcome through the plutocratic and right-tilted US electoral and policy system, a Minority Rule set-up that drastically overrepresents the most reactionary sections and people of the nation. Instead of telling folks to put their antifascist eggs in the moldy ballot basket and the lethally right-tilted US elections system, they counsel folks to build a revolutionary movement beneath and beyond the failing institutions, practices, and ideology of late bourgeois electoral democracy.

 They do not think the American fascism problem will be resolved in the electoral arena. They tell folks to dig seriously into and confront the underlying social and political conditions that give rise to fascism in the first place.  They call for the formation of a mass social and political movement that takes on the whole damn system and calls and plans for what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels rightly called the only alternative to the “common ruin”  of all – the “revolutionary reconstitution of society itself.”

The revolutionary considers the very real split between the two dominant US parities – the fascist Republicans and the late bourgeois-democratic Democrats – to be both symptomatic of the underlying anarchy of the system and an opening for revolutionary activism meant to take humanity beyond the lethal chaos of the capitalist-imperialist system, which breeds ecocide, pandemicide, war, and fascism while preserving, transforming, and exploiting white supremacism, patriarchy, and other revanchist forces.

2024 is shaping up to be a crisis of the US bourgeois order. A Biden win (too soon to rule out despite “Genocide Joe’s” terrible polling numbers) will certainly spark a mass Amerikaner fascist-Trumpist tantrum and likely new right-wing terrorism and putsch attempts. It will fuel the fires of white nationalist rage in an obscenely armed nation where fascism is already evident in a very underestimated way – the reasonable fear of violent retribution that is now felt by anyone who publicly criticizes and otherwise opposes the fascist Trump and his fascist party, base, and movement.  As David French writes in a recent New York Times column:

Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?... Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, ‘Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?’…He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.

Don’t think for a moment that this is unusual today. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith…The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.

Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family. Threats against members of Congress are pervasive, and there has been a shocking surge since Trump took office. Last year, Capitol Police opened more than 8,000 threat assessments, an eightfold increase since 2016.

Nor is the challenge confined to national politics. In 2021, Reuters published a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers. In 2022, it followed up with another report detailing threats against local school boards. In my own Tennessee community, doctors and nurses who advocated wearing masks in schools were targets of screaming, threatening right-wing activists, who told one man, ‘We know who you are’ and ‘We will find you.’

My own family has experienced terrifying nights and terrifying days over the last several years. We’ve faced death threats, a bomb scare, a clumsy swatting attempt and doxxing by white nationalists. People have shown up at our home. A man even came to my kids’ school.

I’ve been threatened with death and maiming by American fascistrs more than once online.

After Biden squeaks out a victory, look for January 6 on steroids, fueled among other things by new claims of election theft. Something along the lines of a civil war could well result. 

A Trump win, distinctly possible, will mark a distinct real time fascist threat to previously normative bourgeois democracy, civil society, and rule of law. Violent retribution will be the order of the day from Washington. National Guard units and perhaps federal troops will be deployed to repress big cities and round up immigrants. A Trump 47 presidency could mark the end of even moderately free and open elections in the US.  It too may raise the prospect of civil war as masses of Americans (myself included) refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of a second Trump administration.   

Another scenario might be political and even inter-jurisdictional violence breaking out on such an extreme scale prior to the election date that the November contest is suspended. Look at the open neofascist Nullification underway in Texas right now, backed by fully 25 “red” state governors, at least 12 of whom are sending their own National Guard units to help Texas’s fascist governor physically, indeed militarily resist the US Border Patrol for being what nativist border fascists think is insufficiently sadistic in response to rising immigration from the long US-tortured nations of Central and South America.

Clearly things are beyond what serious citizens can claim to solve by dutifully stepping into voting booths and taking three minutes once every four years to make marks next to the names of the least awful ruling class candidates on the binary multiple-choice test that is sold to Americans as “politics,” the only politics that matters.

Revolution anyone?