Summer Reflections

Beyond the Sick Horse Race...Goodbye Willie Mays

“The Whole Damn System’s Got to Go”

What kind of country holds a "presidential debate" with Donald "Take Down the Metal Detectors" Trump three and a half years after January 6?!  Jesus Fascist Christ!

You don’t F’ng debate fascists, you eliminate them.

How noir is this deranged horse race, with its absurd pretense of civilized and substantive argument and deliberation between two atrocious criminals – the orange sack of fascist shit and Genocide Joe, butcher of Ukraine, Gaza, and asylum rights?

A system that gives you the choice between a demented fascist capitalist-imperialist monster like Trump and a demented neoliberal capitalist-imperialist monster like Biden is a system long past its overthrow date.

The Revcoms’ slogan is dead-on perfect: “No Fascist Trump/No Genocide Joe/The Whole Damn System’s Got to Go!”

“Warts and All”

How’s the Presidential Derby shaping on its own terms…in terms of who is going to win? I don’t know. Here is a DC-based insider’s conclusion on the likely 2024 election outcome:

'if 2016 is any guide, in a race to the bottom against an unctuous Democrat, Trump, warts and all, is still the betting favorite. Biden’s net approval rating has reached an all-time low – about 4 points lower than Trump’s, which has actually improved of late. Biden desperately needs a “reset” of some kind before November – a possible debate “win,” a breakthrough on foreign policy or economic good news that can be spun to voters as “progress”. Any one of these might help, but unless Biden can maintain a substantial ground game advantage – and right now, that appears to be slipping, as Trump’s novel operation surges – he can probably kiss his re-election prospects goodbye.' (Stewart Lawrence is a long-time Washington, DC-based policy consultant.)

I guess. Who knows? Someone just sent me a poll showing Biden up by 2 points after having won a 9-point swing from “independent.” But they sent nothing on what’s happening in the small number of states that absurdly determine US presidential outcomes under the preposterous and archaice Electoral College system.

The two-nag race looks fluid and hard to predict. What doesn’t feel hard to predict is that a mass of neofascist Amerikaners are going to be on the march with guns this and next year.

"Warts and all" is one Hell of an understatement for the fascist fiend Trump (I say with no love for Biden), but I somewhat share Stewart Lawrence's sense that Trump is the likely victor this fall.

Biden is “unctuous”? Here’s Merriam-Webster’s online definition of that curious word: “having, revealing, or marked by a smug, ingratiating, and false earnestness or spirituality; fatty, oil; mooth and greasy in texture or appearance.” I guess that fits.

Good Kids

Even with the flat out fascist shit that Trump says and represents, senior libs and progressives are finding that their Lesser Evil lectures aren't working on masses of young folks, not with the shit Biden has pulled. The kids aren’t having it, not with the images of Palestinian families buried in the rubble of US bombs, not with an executive order rolling back asylum rights worse than Trump's, not with the collapse of livable ecology that Joe “Drill, Drill” Biden isn’t doing shit really to address, not with lack of serious executive branch defense of abortion rights, not with the funding of mass death in Ukraine,  not with Biden playing along with the neo-McCarthyite Christian fascist demonization of anti-genocide student protesters as “antisemitic,” not with the lack of serious student debt relief, not with ...fill in the blank. Good for them.  There have to be red lines that can’t be crossed. Genocide is a good red line.

Note to Iowa City Residents: What is Your City’s Public Safety Plan for November and Thereafter?

Note to friends in Iowa City: you are delusional if you are pouring energy into the Biden campaign. Iowa isn't even a contested state anymore; it's full-on “red.” It’s not in Electoral College play. You should go down to Iowa City’s City Hall and ask local authorities if they have any serious plans to protect public safety in the bright blue LGBT campus town of IC after the election, whichever ways it turns out.  Cuz the bump stock boys will be jacked up either way and their pickup engines will be roaring.

(By the way and for what’s worth, I personally witnessed two good old boys talk a third one out of bringing an assault rifle out of his pickup truck to shoot George Floyd protesters on DuBuque Street in Iowa City in May of 2020. A memorable statement from a state trooper protecting Interstate-80 from mostly white University of Iowa students that night: “we’re not afraid to put you all in body bags.” )

The Pessimism of Abby’s Mind Trump’s the Optimism of Abby’s Will

The standard online quadrennial contempt is coming in to me from electoralist folks who can’t stand my communist take on the vicious and illegitimate nightmare that is US electoral politics.

I just got this from a resigned Lesser Evil voter I’ll call Abby:

“This revolution stuff is going nowhere. That sort of preaching is theoretically interesting, but there ain't gonna be any socialist ‘revolution’ anytime soon.  You know that. Why bother preaching it? Or advocating it? The electorate is too lazy and dumb for that. They prefer or enjoy having their fears and apprehensions manipulated by Trumpistas. Robert Reich points that out in the video above…You need to advise common people how to handle this election PRACTICALLY. NOT IDEALISTICALLY. It is NOT a flip of the coin situation, as you seem to imply. And those third parties are definitely major spoilers, done by people who have no chance whatsoever to get more than a few percentage points for themselves-- to prove nothing at all, but whose resultant outcome could be a disaster for the whole world. Ralph Nader, for example, will never take any responsibility at all for ruining the 2000 election--and the consequences of that fiasco have been profound. You need to help the everyday voter instead of shitting on everything and demeaning everyone.”

“Shitting on eveything and demeaning everyone” seems a little extreme!

Abby seems to have me confused with third party electoral fetishists. I was very clear that I am not into that stuff in my most recent audio.  

I’m quite familiar  with the "give up on revolution" mentality that is common among older white lefties and progressives.  There are droves of fatalistic and mean-spirited “left”-identified Abbys out there. I know their depressing world view very well.  I have been hearing from them for many years. I think they are shitting on and demeaning themselves, their legacy to future generations, and…well, “everyone.” 

Note that Abby feels compelled to put quote marks around the word revolution.  Abby’s scare quotes mean that for her revolution is not a serious subject worth discussing. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. disagreed. He wrote near the end of his life that the “the real issue to be faced beyond superficial matters… is the radical reconstruction of society itself.”)

This is common on the US “left.”  I wrote the following on “social” media the other day:

‘The main block I'm seeing from a ton of left-identified folks my rough age and older is this incredibly stubborn pessimism. Nobody demeans and hates belief in and calls for socialist revolution more than these older white lefties. It's pathetic. I can tell from their communications that revolution was never more than an intellectual abstraction for them. Its all academic, so to speak. They are above it all. They know better. They are "realistic" and "pragmatic." They identify the notion of radical transformation with the naivete of youth The pessimism of their minds has trumped the optimism of their will. They have disassociated and become surprisingly big parts of the problem…In my experience, nobody hates the word and concept of revolution more than older white US lefties.  Ain’t that some shit?’

Did I say “pessimism of their minds”? This just in from Abby:

‘What you say [about the need for revolution] may be true. But there will not in our lifetimes be any universal movement to create a socialist society. … no such experiment anywhere in the world has ever worked in a practical manner no matter what the wishes of its "inventors" or "pioneers" or "innovators" were. Every such experiment has degraded over time to produce just as much suffering and misery and economic depression and oppression/exploitation as whatever came before it. Government is the thing that people "do" the worst of all. There has never been a lasting, great one; they are subject to constant, worsening turnovers, and there never will exist such a "thing" unless imposed by some extraterrestrial civilization ala "The Day the Earth Stood Still." All such efforts develop, over time, all the seeds of their own destruction, an ever increasing number of fatal flaws, all doomed from the beginning because that's who/what human beings are. Paraphrasing the words of that great comedian George Carlin: We are just another failed, biological experiment, an evolutionary cul-de-sac. We will vanish, be long gone, and earth will still be here, so pack your shit, folks.’

I hear this alot. People have the right to give up and fade away, of course, but I wish they’d keep it to themselves.

Here’s a much better take on the first socialist revolutions in Russia and China: https://revcom.us/en/a/323/you-dont-know-what-you-think-you-know-en.html

It’s Not About the Crystal Ball

There’s something even “crazier” than calling for a revolution – NOT calling for one!  It is clear as day that capitalism-imperialism is pushing humanity over the cliffs of sheer catastrophe  ---  capitalogenic ecocide, global and potentially nuclear war are the top imminent ways in which bourgeois class rule is pushing the Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it’s ever been.  And this is true whichever form of governance prevails atop capitalism’s  political superstructure.

I happen to think that socialist revolution is quite possible in coming years. But it’s not really about the crystal ball. I know for a scientific fact that socialist revolution is necessary in one form or another if humanity wants to retain any serious prospects for a decent and liberating future. Capitalism is simply wired to cancel decent life on Earth. It’s a mode of production that is diametrically opposed to livable ecology, peace, community, social justice, security and the common good. It’s the “revolutionary re-constitution or society at large” or “the common ruin of all,” to quote Marx and Engels in 1848.  The at once natural-scientific and social-scentific truth of that judgement is now abundantly clear.  

The Dumbest Book Title Ever

Abby is a fan of the liberal economist Robert Reich.  Reich was very good on the early detection of Trump and Trumpism as fascist but wrote a book with the single most idiotic and oxymoronic title in the history of book titles: Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the Few. Good grief! A tendency towards the ever-greater concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the Few is part of capitalism’s dictionary definition, with good reason.

“If You Were in Any Way Decent”

And now for some words from a third party electoralist. “Timi” wrote me as follows: “If you were in any way decent, you would have been supporting Jill Stein all these past months.  Take me off you subscriber list.  I never signed on anyway.”

If I was “in any way decent”!

This virulence is common among left-identified ballot fetishists and candidate obsessives. If you are not out advocating yet another Jill Stein candidacy you are not “in any way decent.”  Jesus! Instead of fighting for an actual revolution, Timi pisses around with what the revolutionary communist leaders Bob Avakian rightly calls “the bourgeois electoral bullshit [BEB].”

Timi and Cat would cut each other to pieces but they have both sadly fallen for the siren song of US electoral politics and fallen into the quicksand of the latest quadrennial electoral extravaganza. 

I owe the “siren song” and “quicksand”analogies/metaphors to Avakian. “Quadrennial electoral extravaganza” belongs to Noam Chomsky).

Timi can figure out how to unsubscribe.

Getting Biblical

Some “red” state news: Louisiana’s Christian Fascist governor has signed a bill requiring the ancient Ten Commandments to be posted in all public-school classrooms from K to PhD. He looks forward to signing legislation calling for the slaughter of all women shown not to have been virgins on their wedding night.  

Ever See or Study a Revolution?

Speaking of The Holy Bible, here’s a classic false dichotomy: either (a) the legendary left libertarian linguist and critic and chronicler of US imperial crimes Chomsky died or (b) he is still alive.  Umm, what about (c): he died and was resurrected?

Reading people using Chomsky's recent imagined/exaggerated death to write cultish anti-communist horseshit helped me trim my “social” media "friends" list the last two days.  Sorry but no, Lenin was not a “counterrevolutionary” for Chrissakes.  Some smart reflections from Frederick Engels in 1872:

"The anti-authoritarians...Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? …Either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."

On a positive note, I trust that a decent number of left anarchists will have a “come to Jesus” movement when they realize that the revolution over capitalism and imperialism they participate in will have been “fought in vain” if they don’t align with the new socialist state.

The GOAT: Willie Mays

I love Noam and have learned a great deal from him but have not joined in the chorus that calls him “our greatest radical intellectual.” He is a philosophical “anarchist” who has been a de facto social democrat in recent decades. I have found him quite conservative and off-base in recent years.

Which reminds me: someone who actually was the greatest in their field really did just die — the great Willie Mays.  What set Mays apart was his longtime excellence in all aspects of the game: hitting for average, hitting with power, fielding, throwing, and base running,  The best hitter of all time was Ted Williams, Josh Gibson, or Babe Ruth. The best pitchers were Satchel Paige, Sandy Koufax, Warren Spahn, and Bob Gibson. The best all-around player we’ve ever seen was Mays.