Sixteen True Things About the Electoral Horror Show

And the Pressing Need for an Actual Revolution - A Talk at Chicago's Venerable College of Complexes

Sixteen True Things About the Electoral Horror Show and the Pressing Need for an Actual Revolution

College of Complexes

http://www.collegeofcomplexes.org/

Chicago, October 4, 2024, 5 pm

The title of my talk is “Sixteen True Things About the 2024 Elections and the Pressing Need for a Socialist Revolution.”

I am grateful to the College of Complexes for mentioning my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. I don’t have time to say all that much about that volume except that it showed how the 2015 to 2021 Trump phenomenon and presidency were fundamentally fascist in nature, how January 6^th was the natural and predictable expression of that reality, how Trumpism was a natural historical outcome of American white supremacist and patriarchal capitalism going back to the United States’ genocidal and slavery-based origins, and how the dismal dollar drenched neoliberal Democrats helped create and sustain the monstrous beast of Trumpism-fascism. The book also has an interesting chapter on the creepy fascism-denial that was so prevalent in the US intellectual class during the first Trump presidency.

I’ll add for what it’s worth that the Trump movement and presidency were pretty much predicted in my earlier book-length critiques (see this and this) of the neoliberal Obama phenomenon and presidency. 

I’m getting tired of predicting terrible shit.

In what follows you will hear the perspective of someone who identifies as a Marxist and revolutionary communist. I endorse something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote near the end of his life. “The real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters, King wrote in a posthumously published essay titled “A Testament of Hope,” is “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” I agree with that and with something that Karl Marx and Fred Engels wrote in 1848.  Its either “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “or the common ruin of all.” 

Those words have never sounded more dead on to me than they do today when the bourgeois system has brought us to the literal material precipice of extinction by the flames and floods of capitalist climate catastrophe and/or by the radioactive ash and ice of nuclear Armageddon. .  Half a millennium of capitalism-capitalism has pushed The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than its ever been,

And here I’ll say something that will piss some of you off. Honoring Dr. King’s admonition and acting responsibly on Marx and Engels’ warning has for revolutionary communists nothing to do with voting in US elections. It means among other things standing back from the “siren song” of candidates – keeping clear from the quicksand of what the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian called calls the “BEB, the bourgeois electoral bullshit.”

That said, the current political situation is course all bound up with the latest US quadrennial electoral extravaganza.  We have no choice but to try to understand what’s going on with this big corporate crafted, major party, major-media, and candidate-centered spectacle and what it tells us about the objective situation within which we must strategize for revolution.

It’s with all that in mind that I want to dig into my 16 true things about the great Halloween horror show that is the 2024-25 presidential election.

True thing #1: The Election is too close to call cuz shit is too crazy. The election is very close and we have no crystal-clear idea of who is going to win other than it will be either the open fascist Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump or the lethal imperialist and mass incarcerator Kamala Harris. If someone forced me to predict, I’d say the most likely outcome is Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump losing the national popular vote but winning the White House thanks to the Electoral College and/or right-wing legal challenges, right-wing violence and the intervention of the corrupt Christian Fascist Supreme Court.  But there’s too much volatility and chance, there are too many balls in the air to feel strong about any definite prognostication. October is certain to bring big “surprises” at home and/or abroad.  Perhaps the main October surprise is already underway in the Middle East. (I haven’t even had time to look at the news yet today to learn about the US and Israel’s latest outrages in Gaza, the West Bank, and/or Lebanon.) Something big could happen off the coast of China, by Taiwan. Maybe we’ll look back and see that Hurricane Helene impacted the outcome in significant ways.

True thing #2 is that one of the nation’s two dominant capitalist parties, the Republican Party has gone full on fascist. This is not new. I documented this at length in the book This Happened Here and much more briefly in a book titled Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement. Now it’s clearer than ever. Donald “Haitians are Eating Our Pets” Trump and his team are making less effort than ever to hide their fascist world view and agenda. The whole Republican Party is now on board with their orange-brushed Hitler-channeling Dear Leader and his Big Election Lie. And this time Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump has an army of neofascist policy strategists who have worked up a comprehensive blood and soil Gilead agenda for the Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of US government and society. I am referring of course to Project 2025.

Saying that the two dominant parties are the same is at best a partial truth.  Yes, they are both capitalist and imperialist and objectively white supremacist.  But only of them is working tirelessly to stick the last nails in the coffin of previously normative bourgeois US electoral and rule of law democracy such as they are.

True Thing #3: You can’t defeat fascism through elections and you sure as Hell can’t defeat fascism if you don’t call it out by name. And this the Democrats refuse to do because doing so would mean acknowledging how incredibly bad the nation’s politics and society have become in supposedly free, democratic, glorious, and “exceptional” America. It would also mean confronting their ongoing history of enabling, conciliating, and collaborating with a fascist party.  And it could stir up masses of people beyond bourgeois electoral politics in ways the Democrats could not control. That’s why the dismal Dems prefer to call the Republicans “weird” and “un-American,” and “creepy” and “undemocratic” instead of fascist.

True thing # 4 is that contrary to all the mainstream malarkey about “American elections as democracy in action,” we do NOT live in a democracy. I’ll say that again: we do NOT live in a democracy. This is true in the traditional Marxist sense that private ownership of the means of production constitute an underlying material reality of capitalist class dictatorship that conditions, cripples and constrains the overlying political and ideological superstructure. But you can put the Marxist critique aside for a moment. We have an open right-tilted Minority Rule system in the US.  “Our” governance and elections systems do not pass the elementary Western  bourgeois-democratic smell test of one person, one vote. I am referring here of course to the Electoral College but also  to “our” absurdly powerful and mal-apportioned US Senate, to “our” absurdly lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, to states’ rights, to gerrymandering, and to more.  (Someone should ask me to elaborate on this in the Q & A. It all goes back to slavery). 

True thing #5: This election is an abject moral atrocity symptomatic of a sick society that needs to radically reconstructed.  Any system that gives you the supposedly democratic choice between a malignant fascist sociopath like Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump and a mass incarcerator and imperialist genocide apologist like Kamala Harris is a regime long past its overthrow date. Even if  Trump doesn’t prevail, it is evidence of what an appalling nightmare state the United States has become that he has a real shot at bringing his hate-mongering horror show back to the most powerful and dangerous office on Earth.

Did I say sick society? As Bob Avakian said a few years ago, “America, your City on a Hill is full of fascists.” A good 20 perce4nt of this nation’s adults would like to see a Christian Fascist dictatorship in the US today.   At least 75 million US Americans are about to vote yet again for a Hitler-channeling malignant narcissist who Noam Chomsky has described as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.”   

 True thing #6 is that mass political violence is coming in the wake of the election if not before and on election day itself. Considerable, possibly major civil conflagration will follow the election regardless of its outcome. The most obvious scenarios for political violence involve a Harris victory, which will spark right-wing violence well beyond the immediate aftermath. Let’s be clear: as a fascist party now, the Republicans no longer accept defeat in elections – or for that matter in jury verdicts. An initial Harris win will set off a firestorm of right-wing rage seeking to reverse the outcome “by all means necessary.” The means will include paramilitary attacks, collaboration between fascist police and militias, and lone-wolf attacks in a nation saturated with guns including 15-18 million military assault rifles.

A Trump victory  will also bring violence starting with the promised Trump repression of those who rise up in understandable refusal to accept a second Trump administration. Trump says he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act on the day of his inauguration; he means it. The repression he seeks will combine the violence of state gendarmes with the violence of far-right extra-state actors, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and the like. And then comes Trump’s promised enlistment of the military in a giant mass deportation program and a draconian campaign to “end urban crime in one day.” Extra-state paramilitary actors will join those campaigns. Just five or so days ago, Trump essentially advocated giving the police one hour to carry out a wave of extrajudicial executions across the country.

The political scientist Barbara F. Walter, the world’s leading student of post-election violence, which is quite common in many countries.  She has recently argued in The New Yorker that the United States today exhibits each of the three main factors that predict such violence around the world: winner-take-all presidential election systems; strong racial, ethnic, and regional differences between competing parties with one or both sides fearing demographic decline relative to other groups; widespread lack of faith in the fairness of elections.

True thing #7:  There’s little decent in the way of policy to be hoped for from a Kamala Harris presidency. Even if  Harris wins, even if she gets past the Electoral College, the post-election violence, the legal challenges, the Supreme Court and all the rest…even if she survives all that, she will be unable to do much to make her and her party seem like progressive alternatives to the Republi-Nazi party – assuming she even cares to try to do that. She will be gridlocked by the US minority rule system.  The Republifascists now have the lifetime-appointed Supreme Court and will regain majority, agenda-setting control of the absurdly powerful and malapportioned US Senate thanks to an election line up that puts far more Democratic than Republican incumbent Senators up for re-election.

Even if the Democrats somehow maintain a slim margin in the Senate,  Harris’s promises to sign decent bills favored by most Americans will not be fulfilled. It takes 60 of 100 votes for a bill even to be heard in the Senate. As a veteran of the Senate, Harris knows this very well, which means that she is just blowing smoke up our asses with all  her happy talk liberal and progressive bills she’s going to sign.

At the same time, Harris as president will continue five disastrous US policies inherited from “Genocide Joe”: (i) “iron clad” US support of the Judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid state of Israel’s genocidal war of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and of Israel’s escalated wars on the West Bank and Lebanon and across the Middle East; (ii) the heedless provocation of  nuclear Russia through proxy war in Ukraine; (iii) the reckless US military encirclement and provocation of nuclear superpower China; (iv) ecocidal levels of US oil and gas drilling; (v) draconian border nativism. Never forget her Democratic National Convention promise to keep the United States “the most lethal fighting force on the planet.”  That is a promise of mass slaughter around the world.

True thing # 8: in the US as in other countries past and present, the underlying capitalist-imperialist system is the seedbed, the taproot the societal basis, for fascism. It is the capitalist system that repeatedly exposes as inauthentic the democratic promises of bourgeois politicians and thereby makes democracy illegitimate and pointless in the eyes of millions of people.  This opens the door for masses to accept fascist understandings of and “solutions” to the endless crisis and chaos that the anarchy of capitalism constantly generates.

True thing #9. As terrible as fascism is in all its forms, times, and places, the capitalist order is wired to cancel all prospects for a decent human future with or without fascism atop its political superstructure. Even if bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy can stay intact to some degree in the US, the profits regime is bringing us to the edge of extinction through environmental disaster, nuclear war, and/or pandemicide.

Which brings us to True thing #10: We have run out of ecological and nuclear war time to keep measuring out our moments of meaningful mass political engagement in four-year election cycles. The grave existential threats that capitalism-imperialism poses to humanity are moving too fast for that now. It is doubtful that livable ecology can survive another ten or even five years of anarchic, growth- and profit-addicted global capitalism. 

Let’s be crystal clear and coldly candid about this. Mother Nature doesn’t care about our savagely time-staggered political seasons. Mother Nature isn’t kindly waiting for us to pull ourselves up out of the electoral quicksand.  The environment doesn’t care if were stuck in the quadrennial muck with Kamala Harris or Donald Trump or whoever the libertarians and the Greens are running for president.  She’s kicking ass right now all over the world, including the USA.  Ask the people of North Carolina, Glorida, Georgia, and Tennessee. And she’s only getting started.

In the face of the accelerating climate crisis and the related US-led onrush of conflicts between nuclear superpowers, it is insanity for us to mark out our political schedules in four-year increments: 2020, 2024, 2028, 2032, 2036 and on and on. We’re out of time for that shit, people!  

True thing #11. There’s only one way out of this mess: revolution, nothing less. And when I say revolution I don’t mean marching around saying things like “the people united will never be defeated” and “this is what democracy looks like” and “speak truth to power.” I mean a communist-led mass move that takes state power and wields it in unapologetic fashion to radically replace capitalism with a new socialist order built and led in such a way as to movement humanity towards the end of all oppression and exploitation (including but not  limited to class exploitation and oppression) --- to a world where the reigning maxim is from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs and where no part of humanity exploits and oppresses any other part of humanity. If we don’t do that the people will be defeated, trust me. And by the way the leading goals of this revolution we need are neither democracy nor equality, shocking as that may sound to some of you.  Ask me what I mean.  I’ll be happy to explain.

True thing #12: It’s Not About Running for President. This revolution we need has nothing with running people for president. It’s like Bob  Avakian says in a recent social media post titled “Why I Am NOT Running for President”:

“I am not running, because I don’t want to be a vicious exploiter, and murderous oppressor of masses of people; I don’t want to be a massive destroyer of the environment; and I don’t want to drag humanity to the brink of destruction through the danger of a nuclear war—all for the purpose of maintaining the USA as the world’s dominant capitalist-imperialist power and the number one plunderer of people as well as the environment…That is the actual ‘job description’ of President of this country—head of this American empire of exploitation, degradation, oppression, and massive destruction. This cannot be ‘reformed away,’ and it cannot be changed by changing the people who rule in this system…By running for president,” “I would only contribute to reinforcing the illusion that all this could, somehow, be ‘reformed away’ or ‘changed by changing the people who rule in this system.’ NO, This can only be changed with a revolution—to overthrow and abolish this system, and replace it with a fundamentally different and much better system,”

True thing #13: The revolutionary project requires the communist-led Repolarization of this country. The US capitalist-imperialist political order has sharply polarized the nation along the partisan and related regional and social lines of fascist “red” versus bourgeois-democratic “blue.” Red America versus Blue America.  In reality, “red” America, Trump Amerika, should be understood as brown, the shirt color of Hitler’s early paramilitaries.  And we must work to re-polarize this nation.  We need to repolarize it between decent, oppressed, and truth-seeking people under the real red banner of revolutionary socialism on one hand and the American red, white and blue capitalist system on the other hand.  .

True Thing# 14: believe it or not, Avakian and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, have already done a remarkable amount of work of what an actual socialist revolution would look like in 21^st Century North America. It’s what they call The New Communism (TNC), which builds (among other things) on a thoroughgoing critique as well as an appreciation of past communist movements and states. Getting into the details of that is a whole new talk in an of itself.

Truth thing# 15: In coming months and years, we are moving into a potentially revolutionary moment, as Avakian has been saying for the last few years. The divisions that have emerged within the ruling class, with rising force during and since Obama, the life or death conflict pitting a rising new Christian Fascist white nationalist wing of the capitalist rulers against those parts of the imperialist ruling class who are still clinging to what’s left of bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy --- this division promises anarchic chaos and confusion at the top of the Empire and radiating down into the whole society. That chaos, reflecting a crisis of governance and ruling ideology, is an opening for radicals to advance a whole new and different way of living and organizing society.  The divisions we can and must exploit extend to the US military, whose better and more decent elements must be recruited to the cause of revolution.

True Thing #16: The future is already radical. The only question now is will it be radically terrible or will it be radically emancipating. It can be the revolutionary socialist reconstitution of society at large  or it can be the radically reactionary “common ruin of all.” Five hundred years of capitalism has brought us to this choice. If we stay stuck in fatalism and denial, if we remain mired in the quicksand of bourgeois electoral politics, seduced by the siren songs of candidates, then we contribute to “the common ruin.” If we get organized to take advantage of the coming chaos and undertake what Dr King called “the real issue to be faced,” if we get our shit together to make an actual revolution, we will earn the respect and love of future generations of liberated humanity.   The future is up to us.