The Lame Left

Part 2: Geopolitical Neo-Campists and "Proletarianists"

Checkiing now to see if this was mis-posted for paid subscribers only (2/10/2023 12:15 pm cst) ….

Dear Readers: My multi-part series on the “lame” US left’s seventeen worst afflictions will resume below. I will paste in the series’ introduction in italics before each installment so you may want to skip that going forward. I have written a follow up to last Monday’s Paul Street Report – a further reflection on US racist police violence and the killing of Tyre Nichols.  It will appear on CounterPunch tomorrow and I will put that new piece up here over the weekend.  

A housekeeping matter: please contact me at streetbook17@gmail.com if you have tried and failed to become a paid subscriber.  I got into my STRIPE account (through which Substack handles writer payments) the other day and found a 8 or so examples of failed attempts in that regard (no small matter). It’s usually about an error in entering credit card or bank info or the bank refusing the transaction. Unfortunately I am not permitted to see who underwent failure but if you write me we can probably figure it out and I can tell you what went wrong.

The Lame Left, Part 2

Intro (repeated)…Call me an American revolutionary Marxist, socialist, and/ or communist. Just  don’t tell me I’m “on the [US-American] left.” Part of the problem here is that the dominant US media politics culture has let the neo-McCarthyite right dilute the term “the left” so far as to mean anything from hot yoga and wind farms to Madonna, drag queen story times, M&M mascots without high heels, organic vegetables, academia, the Brookings Institution, the AFL-CIO, and the dismal, dollar-drenched corporate-imperialist Democratic Party. The term has been watered down almost beyond recognition. At the same time and more to the central point of this multi-part essay, which will continue through at least next week,  most of what can legitimately be said to constitute “the left” in the United States today is hopelessly and depressingly dysfunctional. Thanks to two intimately related deficits — the lack of any serious notion of a revolutionary societal alternative to capitalism-imperialism and the absence of a properly scientific, evidence-based theory of how to understand and change history in a desirable fashion — the US-American left(s) is(are) stuck in a self-defeating cycle of failed efforts reflecting a doomed project: trying to achieve meaningful human liberation through their country’s nation’s dominant deeply conservative institutions, short of what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels knew to be the proper socialist goal: “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (imagine!).

The alternative to such truly radical change, Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, was “the common ruin of all.”  Those words feel haunting 175 years later, in a time when it is now clear as day that we must — as I argued in a recent Paul Street Report — kill (overthrow and transcend) capitalism before it tips humanity into an epic and potentially terminal environmental catastrophe.

In this and the next two or more Paul Street Reports I will go through 17 different pathologies on the US “left,” such as it is: (1) sheep-dogging electoralism and parliamentary cretinism; (2) economism and trade unionism; (3) hyper-identitarianism; (4) dependence on foundations; (5) sentimental standpoint proletarianism; (6) geopolitical neo-campism; (7) neo-Strasserite Trumpenleftism; (8) conspiratorialism; (9) anarchism; (10) mutual-aid-ism;  (11) localism,; (12) single-issue-ism; (13) pacifism; (14) academicism; (15) pessimism; (16) retreat to self-ism; (and last but not least); (17) anti-communism.  Many of these afflictions overlap and mutually reinforce each other, making up a kind of simultaneous equations system of defeat and surrender.

The first installment, published last Thursday, tackled the first four of these left afflictions. Today’s installment looks at pathologies 5 and 6.

+5.  Proletarian Standpoint

There’s a workerite version of the standpoint and identitarian affliction among some left-identified folk. Call it proletarianism. It is spread by people who talk endlessly on supposed behalf of “the working class.” In proletarianists’ chatter, “the working class” wants this and “the working class” thinks that, this is “good for the working class,” and that is “bad for the working class,” and so on, on and on. One’s leftness is all about the extent of one’s alignment with “the working class”/“the proletariat.” 

Sentimentalist proletarianists like to make snide comments against radicals not born into working-class households, as if someone can’t seriously champion socialism if her father is a heart surgeon or her mother a professor. It’s a different, more traditionally left way of believing in what Bertrand Russell once mockingly called “the superior virtue of the oppressed.” So much for Karl Marx (son of a successful lawyer), elitis Frederick Engels (son of a wealthy German and British industrialist), Lenin (the son of a schoolteacher and school inspector), Leon Trotsky (son of a wealthy Jewish family in Ukraine), Che Guevara (the son of an upper class Argentine family), Fidel Castro (the son of a prosperous Cuban sugar cane farmer),  Mao (the son of an affluent farmer and grain dealer), and Lin Biao (son of a prosperous merchant family).  Each of those great revolutionaries matched Marx and Engels’1848 observation that “Just as, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie [here we might add petit-bourgeoisie and professional class – P.S.] goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.”) 

Left proletarian romanticizers often exaggerate their own proletarian credentials. If they’d ever actually been employed for any considerable period alongside real world proletarians in a mine, mill, cannery, or factory or in transport or as custodians (I’ve got wage-labor background in four of those categories and narrowly escaped major injury if not death in two of them – hooray for me!), they might be less prone to proletarian sentimentality.

Champions of proletarian identity and standpoint often talk about the American working class in woefully outdated terms, as if:  the working class today is the giant industrial mass production workforce imagined in mid-19^th Century European socialist thought; the working class today doesn’t contain numerous severe internal segmentations (see this essay I published years ago on [among other things] working-class fragmentation in the neoliberal age); US capital didn’t start exporting production to low-wage regions and nations across the savagely unequal and parasitic world capitalist system many decades ago. 

Whatever their true class background, standpoint proletarianists do the masses no favor by trying to deprive them of input and activism from people whose relative privilege has given them time and other resources to develop revolutionary understandings rooted in a scientific approach to history and society. Extreme positional and standpoint obsession with “the working class” gets in the way of understanding socialist revolution as something required for the liberation of all humanity, both within and outside the proletariat – and as something that requires the participation of people from all class backgrounds.  What makes the proletariat a potentially revolutionary class is not some special wisdom inherent in the experiential and subjective positionality of proletarians but rather the wage-earning’s population’s objective position as the critical, natural, and exploited, historical-material source of capitalist surplus value and (thus) profit. Socialist revolutionaries of any and all class backgrounds work to enlist and inspire proletarians to use their strategic relationships to production and value creation to free homo sapiens from all oppression – wage labor most certainly included – and from the broader many sided and eco-cidal anarchy of capital within and beyond the workplace.  

6. Geopolitical neo-Campism

The Putin Left, Absurd as that Should Sound

In the long and tragic absence of revolutionary socialist states and relevant national and international communist movements nearly half a century after the capitalist road was taken in formerly Maoist China, many left USAers  have grasped at the noxious straws of geopolitical neo-campism. A strange and poisonous left attachment to the at once neoliberal and neo-fascist regime atop post-Soviet Russia is promoted by left-identified  people who confuse and/or cynically conflate opposition to the arch-criminal US-American Empire with embrace and defense of the imperialist butcher and authoritarian, anti-Marxist tyrant Vladimir Putin. This  tendency’s adherents either actually think or cynically claim to believe that there is only one blood-soaked imperialist power on the planet – the United States. Making Orwell blush, they back the blood-soaked criminal Putin’s mass-murderous and openly imperial war on Ukraine in the name of anti-imperialism and “anti-war” politics.  Unwittingly, perhaps (though certainly not in all cases), they embrace the Great Russian imperialism that was explicitly articulated in the February 2022 speech in which Putin announced his “special military operation” – an address in which he attacked the great Russian revolutionary anti-imperialist Vladimir Lenin for supporting Ukrainians’ right to national self-determination.

As the brutal anti-communist gay- and trans-bashing uber-oligarch Putin sends tens of thousands of disproportionately poor Russian conscripts to horrible deaths like so much cannon fodder in Ukraine, as he locks up untold thousands of peaceful Russian antiwar protesters, the fake antiwar Putin left doesn’t call for a new Russian socialist and anti-imperialist revolution. It doesn’t reach out to antiwar groups and people in Russia. No, pseudo-radical Kremlin cheerleaders at places like Grayzone, Mint Press, and Consortium News (to mention just three of the most decrepit outlets of this “left” cancer) double and triple down on the Putin lie that Ukraine is a “Nazi” regime – curious justification for Russian forces’ Nazi-like slaughter, torture, and rape of ordinary Ukrainians.

The gangster Putin currently has masses of propagandized Russians preposterously believing that Ukraine started the war by attacking Russia with “LGBT ideology.” He will soon sign (or has already signed) a measure granting Russian soldiers, mercenaries, and allies full immunity for any crimes they commit in carrying out the Russian imperialist assault on Ukraine. The Putin left is okay with all this even if it sometimes pretends otherwise.  Bring up Putin’s criminality in Ukraine (and elsewhere) from a revolutionary socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist perspective – a perspective that is witheringly and thoroughly critical of US/NATO imperialism and provocation within and beyond Eastern Europe – and the Putin left will reflexively and absurdly accuse you of supporting US/NATO imperialism and of unhinged “Russophobia.” Masters of deflective what about-ism, they pretend to justify Russian violations of international and human rights law (when they are not busy denying those crimes) by bringing up something that every serious radical already knows – that the criminal US Empire has long evaded and trashed the very same law. Their response to radical internationalists (and others) who denounce Russia’s monumental war crimes has commonly been to literally deny those epic transgressions (for example, to claim that the hideous Bucha massacre was Western “fake news”) or to claim that Russian offenses are somehow justified by Washington’s long and horrific criminal record. When you question this childish and reflexive what-about-ism, the Putin left accuses you of being allied with US-NATO imperialism, no matter how witheringly critical you have always been and still are regarding US-NATO imperialism (please see these two publications of mine, just a small portion of my publications on and very much against US, NATO, and Western imperialism: Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power [2010]; Paul Street, “the World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,” Common Dreams,  February 22, 2018. )

Weirdly and creepily enough, the Putin left seems to have the fascistic uber-oligarch, nuke-mongering war criminal Putin and the imperial butchery of the Wagner Group confused with Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front. Worse, it appears to have  dropped or never understood elementary revolutionary socialist internationalism and class analysis. It has opted instead for geopolitical and “multi-polar” neo-campist alliance with any state on the wrong side of Washington’s imperial agenda.

Caveat: F-Zelensky Too, or Fight the Rich, Not Their Wars

Revolutionary Marxist criticism of the ridiculousand dodgy Putin left should not be taken to mean support for the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine. Left-identified folks who are jubilant over the recent German and US decision to send more advanced tanks to Zelensky’s military are engaging in their own variant of heedless tankie-ness.  There’s no call for jumping in bed with Western imperialism here. While Putin’s invasion is unjustified, it was not unprovoked by the US led-West. It could perhaps have been avoided had Washington said clearly that it had no intention of incorporating Ukraine into NATO.  Maybe not, but the invasion has clearly been welcomed by the Biden administration as an opportunity to weaken a leading geopolitical rival – Russia – by saddling Moscow with a “Vietnam” on its own borders (the same sentiment was behind US provocation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s). The war in Ukraine is a great profit-making windfall for US arms-makers and oil and gas exporters. Uncle Sam, whose blood-soaked Empire (replete with more than 800 bases in more than 80 countries and accounting to 40 percent of global military spending) and crimes (No Gun Ri, Operation Tiger Force, “many My Lais,” the Highway of Death, Fallujah, Nissour Square, Guantanamo Boy, Bagram Air Force base, the destruction of Libya, Bola Boluk,  the direct and indirect invasion, domination, and torture of dozens of Third World countries…the list gone on and on and on) dwarf those of  Russia, has been crying about Ukraine all the way to the bank.  Biden has no more regard for Ukrainian lives than the psychopath in the Kremlin.

Biden and his commanders are happy to see untold more masses of ordinary Ukrainians die in a prolonged war. As combined Ukrainian and Russian civilian and soldier deaths run into the many tens of thousands if not past a hundred thousand by now, Washington and US media sell the Ukraine War as a grand historic battle between “democracy,” represented by Ukraine, and “autocracy,” represented by Russia.  This is absurd. The notoriously corrupt Zelensky government represents oligarchs and suppresses trade unions and left parties. The US itself is an open corporate and financial plutocracy wrapped in the deceptive flag of unmentionably bourgeois democracy – a late bourgeois republic still suffering under an 18^th Century slaveowners’ charter and now teetering on the edge of authoritarian/fascist consolidation.

To make the Ukraine War even more problematic, to say the least, it raises the specter of World War III.  The conflict dramatically elevates the very real threat of thermonuclear war, with the butcher Putin repeatedly declaring his willingness to use nuclear weapons in existential defense of Mother Russia while the US and its partners send ever more lethal weaponry into battlefields located on Russia’s vast, repeatedly West-invaded southwestern underbelly. Imagine an imperial reversal, with Russian and Chinese weapons being used by soldiers fighting the US in Canada and/or Mexico. Would Washington be brandishing nuclear weapons in such a situation? Do bears defecate in forested areas?.

Gosh, whatever could go wrong?

Thanks to how the Ukraine War has jacked up the menace of global Nuclear Winter while accelerating the eco-exterminist extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently placed its Doomsday Clock at the most extreme level of peril in history: 90 seconds to Midnight. Hello? Those parts of “the left” who have gone all in with Zelensky – this includes some self-described radical socialists (surprisingly enough to this writer) along with the standard cruise-missile Democratic Party liberals and progressives – are playing with fire, putting 8 billion human beings at risk for the sake (they seem to think) of 44 million Ukrainians.

The war in the Ukraine is a lethal nightmare that must be ended as soon as possible, something that requires some undeserved concessions to the sub-imperialist neofascist pig Putin. Meanwhile hundreds of millions of people across the global South deserve and require assistance in the struggle for liberation from oppression. When do we arm the Palestinians? Any US military support coming for the masses fighting a right-wing coup in Peru and living under dictatorships and autocracy in Egypt and the Saudi kingdom? Of course not: the US remains aligned with reactionary forces in these nations and around much of the world, no small part of why it has not found much support for its embrace of the Zelenesky government in the global South? When do we the people take over the US Empire and use it to liberate the imperially super-exploited peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elswhere in Africa, where US and European imperialism has provided openings for Chinese and Russain imperialism?

An old socialist slogan seems relevant here: Fight the rich, not their wars. It’s up to the Russian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It’s up to the US-American people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It up to the Ukrainian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country.  It’s up to the people of the world to organize, with as much international coordination as possible (socialist revolutions typically take place in one nation at a time — the all-at-once dreams of 1917-1919 are a Trotskyist fantasy that Lenin understandably but only briefly shared ) to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering world capitalist system.

China Syndrome

Also stupid and/or cynical is some US leftists’ neo-campist identification with the fake-communist state-capitalist post-Mao Chinese state. Sharing the Putin left’s mistake of thinking – or pretending to think – that there is only one relevant capitalist-imperialist power on Earth (the United States), they absurdly portray the  counterrevolutionary Deng Xiao Ping - Xi Jinping regime (1976-present) as an example of anti-imperialist “industrial socialism” (actual language from the Marxist geopolitics guru Michael Hudson).  Some of these China-touting leftists should apply for jobs in China’s sprawling industrial hinterland, where workers driven to despair and suicide by their alienating and exploited work lives.  Post-Mao China is so “socialist” that these viciously oppressed workers are repressively policed by a hyper-authoritarian state tasked with keeping the Chinese proletariat producing oceans of surplus value for national and global corporations for whom the Chinese revolution has been ironically turned into an historically unprecedented pooling of cheap labor power — a disastrous and remarkable windfall for the eco-cidal world capitalist system. The restoration of capitalist social and production relations in post-Mao China — insidiously “justified” by supposedly communist state officials under the bourgeois counterrevolutionary Deng Xiaoping’s insipid pronunciation that “to get rich is glorious” — has of course fueled skyrocketing class inequality inside “communist” China over the last four decades

Raise the absurdity of calling contemporary China a model of anti-imperialist socialism and left China campists will accuse you of supporting US imperialism – this no matter how witheringly critical you are of US imperialism. How dare you suggest that noxious, authoritarian and eco-cidal, labor-exploiting capitalism-imperialism can be found anywhere but in the United States?

Left Campism Was Bad Enough Before Capitalism Was Fully Restored in Russia and China – Now It’s Truly Insane

Western left campism was problematic when it was over-attached to Joe Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (genuinely revolutionary-communist) China, the Third World nationalist Hanoi government, and the Soviet-aligned Castro regime. Far too many post-1917 Western leftists came to badly over-identify the cause of socialist revolution with a supine posture towards the Soviet Union (such cringing subordination helped create the almost comically anti-revolutionary trade unionist revisionism practiced by the US “Communist” Party, which once absurdly claimed that “Communism is 20^th Century Americanism”).  Certain formerly Maoist intellectuals and activists couldn’t break their attachment to the line from Beijing even after the Chinese capitalist-road counterrevolutionaries overthrew Maoism and reintegrated China into the world capitalist nightmare, with disastrous consequences.

Still, previous officially socialist and Marxist state recipients of excessive Western left love and obedience often had legitimate anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist credentials and accomplishments. It is beyond bizarre and quite disturbing to see the campist affliction extended to a fascistic and war-criminalized capitalist oligarchy like Putin’s Russia and to a chilling state-capitalist and arch-authoritarian, counter-revolutionary behemoth like the so-called People’s Republic of China. 

Putin is arguably the leading hero and agent of the resurgent fascist right in the world today. It’s not for nothing that white supremacist neofascists across Europe and the United States identify with him.

Leftists in this srange post-Cold War neo-tankie space (left-identified folks oddly attached to Russia and China long after both countries transitioned to capitalism-imperialism and with the former state helping leading global fascism) garner (among some ideologically immature progresives) faux-radical street cred because they have aligned themselves with official state enemies and rivals of the US Empire.  That might seem “badass” and bold, radical even, but it is actually a deeply conservative and anti-revolutionary surrender to bourgeois rule and the nightmare of capitalism-imperialism, with all its attendant oppressions.  The dream of a unipolar global Pax Americana was always just that – a dream, an unachievable  dream in the minds of Washington planners. A more multi-polar world capitalist system is still very much a world system wired to destroy life on Earth via environmental ruin, war, pandemicide and authoritarianism/fascism.  Never confuse the related anarchies of capital and the capitalist world state system with the forward march of socialism.