The Lame Left

Part 4

Dear Readers: My multi-part series on the “lame” US left’s seventeen worst afflictions will resume below. I paste in the series’ introduction in italics before each installment so you may want to skip that going forward. Please note a change: I have replaced “mutual-aid-ism” with “direct-service-ism” as the name of affliction #10.

The Lame Left, Part 4

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)  pink-brown Trumpenleftism; (8) conspiratorialism; (9) anarchism; (10) direct service-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.

Part 4

The first installment (Part 1), published three Thursdays ago, tackled the first four of these left afflictions. The second installment (Part 2), published two Thursdays ago, looked at pathologies 5 and 6. Part 3, last Thursday, dealt with afflictions 7 and 8. Today’s installment digs into afflictions 9 through 13. The series will conclude with Part 5 next Thursday.

+9. The “Eternal No” of Anarchism/Oxymoronic “Libertarian Socialism”

Like economism, trade unionism, electoralism, parliamentary cretinism, and standpoint proletarianism, anarchism and “libertarian socialism” have long histories predating the neoliberal era and the late 20^th Century collapse of the international communist movement. Left radicals in this strand advocate workers’ and people’s revolution without serious understanding of how to make and keep a desirable one.  A troubling lack of weightiness is reflected in the “anti-authoritarian” resistance to acknowledging the needs for a radical vanguard party and the seizure and use of state power to implement a people’s government that could model and spread proletarian revolution. There’s no real revolution to be made, kept, and spread without such a party and without taking and using state power to create a radically restructured social order. Class and other forms of oppression do not magically disappear overnight after a country or region goes socialist and neither does the need for state power  – for a peoples’ state that will retain certain coercive aspects even while it is more substantially liberating than bourgeois democracy at its best. 

The present writer was recently criticized by a self-declared anarchist whose social media banner proclaims that “all governments are criminal organizations.” Right there this “libertarian socialist” says it: if the proletariat and its party/parties had a revolution and created a workers’ government to crush counterrevolution, fight back against imperialist incursions, and model proletarian and people’s power for other nations, it would be “a criminal organization” (because “all governments are criminal”).

Leftists who think we can magically skip past Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” to post-capitalist “workers’ control” without first acquiring and exercising state power are living in a dream world. To be sure, any serious and genuine socialist revolution – one aiming to transcend class disparity and class rule and move humanity on the path to communism – will take up the struggle against the capitalist division of labor. Revolutionary Marxists look forward to and fight for “the reign of the associated producers” prophesied near the end of the third volume of Marx’s Capital.  But the long and hard work of making and keeping a people’s revolution and a socialist state will have to come first. And Lenin had it right in State and Revolution, written as the Bolshevik leader was audaciously planning to lead – imagine – an actual proletarian revolution: “the proletariat needs the state as a special form of organization of violence against the bourgeoisie” (please make sure to see point 13 below if Lenin’s reference to violence upsets you).

Of all the tendencies criticized in this series, this is the one with which the present writer has had most past identification and for which he feels the most comradeship. A serious revolutionary socialist will include and work with genuinely anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist (and anti-racist/-sexist/-fascist/-homophobic/-trans-bashing/-fundementalist theocratic) anarchists/“libertarian socialists”  -- and indeed with anyone else who wants to join – in struggling to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist state.. Left anarchists and “libertarians” should be understood as valued allies in the making of a socialist revolution. Serious left anarchists genuinely want a radical society-wide revolution even if they tend to cancel their wish by rejecting (supposedly inherently evil and authoritarian) vanguard parties and the taking and use of state power. In the process of making a revolution, moreover, many of these “anti-authoritarians” will grasp the existential  necessity of both vanguard formation and taking/using state power for putting humanity on the path to the end of class rule – indeed of class – and other forms of oppression.

10. Direct Service-ism is an affliction of folks who identify the people’s cause with providing goods and services to the oppressed. “When I give food to the poor,” Dom Helder Câmara famously said, “they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." Revolutionary Marxists/socialists/communists, by contrast, ask “why they are poor,” answer that it is because of capitalism-imperialism and its related and allied oppression structures and show that that the solution is socialist revolution to overthrow the system that mires masses in poverty while making parasitic elites filthy rich, crushing livable ecology,  spreading disease, fomenting alienation, and generating endless war. Actual radicals may support and participate in food pantries, shelter houses, crisis centers, and the like but they do not confuse such things with a revolutionary socialist movement any more than they would a collective bargaining agreement, a bottle recycling bill, the installation of an electric car-charging station, or a reduction in public transportation charges.

Christian capitalist “personal responsibility” shamers love to quote the following supposedly Biblical proverb: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Revolutionary communists counter as follows: “if you give a victim of oppression a coat, you help clothe them for the winter. Do so if you can, of course, because you are a caring human being. But if you put folks in contact with the theory and practice of socialist revolution, you help them learn how to liberate themselves and all humanity from class rule, imperialism, ecocide, war, and other intimately related forms of oppression and misery for all time.”

Six weeks ago, the New York Times Sunday Magazine recently ran a practically worshipful cover story about a brilliant, quasi-messianic Boston doctor who has spent decades working as a wonderfully caring physician for his city’s homeless population. Reflecting on American capitalist society’s failure to provide adequate affordable housing to the poor, the doctor said this to Times writer Tracy Kidder: “This is what we do while we’re waiting for the world to change….I don’t get despairing, but it’s much easier to just go take care of people” – easier than trying to change society, that is.  It’s an understandable sentiment, but we have an even greater duty to ask the “communist” question and give the revolutionary socialist answer: there must not be hungry and homeless people in the first place. It is a fundamental requirement of capitalism that people do not enjoy basic rights to adequate food and shelter.  That is a system that must be overthrown.

To be sure, left-anarchist mutual aid advocates try to combine “strategies and resources to meet each other's needs, such as food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief” with “organizing against the [capitalist] system that created the shortages in the first place.” A noble endeavor, certainly, but the tasks of “meet[ing mass] needs” for “food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief” – needs that escalate with each day humanity is cursed to live under the rapacious and eco-cidal profits system – are far beyond the resources of any groups on “the left.” These and many other tasks can be meaningfully taken up only by a people’s revolutionary  government, the achievement of which must be the primary radical focus. It’s neither the job nor within the capacity of radical movements to feed, clothe, heal and otherwise materially sustain the masses thrown into poverty and misery by the capitalist system. Besides stealing energy and resources from essential political tasks, putting a primary or even major emphasis on the fanciful effort to meet basic mass needs under capitalism opens mutual aid-ism up to easy cooptation by bourgeois-neoliberal liberal ‘good citizen’ initiatives, self-help activism, and charity.

11. Localism

Localism is the common left habit of over-focusing on local politics and struggle. All during the Trump years, as a fascist lunatic sat – accurately described by the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (this even on the eve of Covid-19 and Trump’s insane pandemo-fascist response to the virus) – in the executive branch of the world’s most destructive and dangerous nation (the United States, accurately described by Bob Avakian as “the world’s leading oppressor state”), filling the Supreme Court and lower federal courts with Christian fascist women-haters and leading a nationwide ruling class party that had crossed over into eliminationist neofascism, droves of liberals, leftists, and progressives remained sadly mired in local matters, like trying to get their local mayors and city to declare a climate emergency or advancing the doomed and chimeric goals (under capitalism) of “de-funding” the police. They would sometimes became irritated at Refuse Fascism and revolutionary communist activists who politely challenged them to understand and confront  problems like institutional racism, climate catastrophe and, well, fascism on a national and global, system-wide basis. Capitalism-imperialism, its offspring fascism, and the related oppression structures of race, class, and gender operate on a vast extra-local scale and require militant and organized popular resistance beyond the town, city, metropolitan, county, and state levels.  This might seem so obvious as to hardly merit mention but the notion that “everything is local” (and the related pessimistic idea that nothing decent can be accomplished beyond the local level) is depressingly widespread among many who identify as left. 

Like “libertarian socialism,” the post 1970s environmentalist phrase "Think globally, act locally" is self-canceling. National and indeed global popular action and coordination is required to stop the four apocalyptic horsemen currently stalking planet-wide humanity and the broader web of life on Earth courtesy of the world capitalist economic and state system: ecocide, potentially nuclear war, pandemicide, and authoritarianism/fascism.

12. Single Issue-ism. Then there’s the single-issue malady. Much of what is called and considers itself part of “the left” is tied to one and only one issue – mental health resources, gun control, racist policing, trans rights, climate change, racist mass incarceration, ex-offender employment, voting rights, wildlife restoration, abortion funds, job training, affordable housing, union recognition and collective bargaining (for one small section of the multiply oppressed populace), and... the list goes on and on. Any serious revolutionary socialist knows that the various grave problems of life under capitalism-imperialism are interwoven with each other in a many-sided simultaneous equations system of inequality and oppression. Picking just one or two parts of the system to work on (generally in very limited ways) easily becomes surrender to the overall whack-a-mole madness of the bourgeois order, which is tipping into mutually reinforcing crises of ecocide and pandemicide while bringing us closer to terminal thermonuclear war than we’ve been in half a century.  Like direct service-ism, the single-issue affliction is often tied to dependence on corporate foundations, for whom the point is service and/or narrow policy advocacy on behalf of one designated group of society’s victims rather than militant and mass confrontation with the underlying system that victimizes all humanity and generates an endless roster of variously categorized and often overlapping problems.

I will never forget a big Iowa City meeting a local anarchist friend told me to attend shortly after Trump’s 2016 election.  Just a week or so before, I had joined at least 100 mostly young citizens in a march that shut-down the eastbound lanes of Interstate-80, chanting “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!” It was with no small anticipation that I attended the meeting at the University of Iowa campus’s venerable Old Brick church to learn about the coming plans for a new anti-fascist movement pushing for the collapse of the coming vicious Trump-Pence regime that the dismal neoliberal, corporate, and imperialist Hillary Clinton campaign and the anti-democratic Electoral College had helped create. The gathering was dystopian. One local and regional NGO after another came up to the podium to make a pitch for money and volunteers to help them deliver goods, services, and policy advocacy around the one anrrow problem that concerned them. The broad and national political situation was hardly mentioned. Nobody said a single word about building on the momentum of the I-80 shutdown – the stoppage of traffic on The Main Street of America – to join with others across the rest of the country to prevent and defeat the coming living nighmare of a fascist US presidency - a nighamre detaailed at length in many books including my own This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. (I guess this anecdote also belongs under afflication 11, localism.)

13.  Pathological Pacifism. Also problematic is the extreme pacifism and related “comfort zone”-seeking (some might say cowardice) that paralyzes some, perhaps many on the left. Let there be no misunderstanding here: serious revolutionary socialists and communists naturally abhor violence and regularly advocate mass nonviolent protest. But they harbor no illusions about ruling classes and reactionaries peacefully giving up power and systems of oppression. They refuse to stand down from popular and revolutionary activism because it might elicit a violent reaction and conflict. They understand that there are legitimate roles for armed force in the defense and advance of progressive and revolutionary movements and change.

At one point during the great nationwide George Floyd Rebellion in Iowa City, I witnessed three young white men outside a parked pick-up truck arguing, one of them expressing his desire to use his rifle to shoot down protesters. The hothead lost the argument, thankfully. What if he hadn’t? Would it then have been wrong for some leftist to have been armed and trained (I am neither) in such a way as to be able to effectively neutralize the fascist with the threat or actual use of force before he could slaughter an untold number of civil rights marchers?  Should the armed Black Deacons of Defense not have guarded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was himself heavily armed in his home during the late 1950s) against white supremacist violence during the Civil Rights Movement? Should the armed left group Redneck Rebellion not have protected Cornel West and other civil rights counter-protesters from white-supremacist violence during the fascist Unite the Right really in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017?  Was it wrong for the Black Panthers to arm themselves in self- and community-defense against racist white cops who murdered Black people with impunity during the late 1960s? Should US citizens and Black ex-slaves not have enlisted in the Union Army to fight a bloody war against Black chattel slavery (explicitly so after the Emancipation Proclamation) in the 1860s? Should the Soviet Union, England, and the United States and other united nations not have fought the global war against German-led fascism between 1939 and 1945? Would a socialist government not protect its elected officials from violent fascist mobs with armed force if necessary? Would it allow future Ashli Babbitts and her demented ilk into the people’s assembly to take government officials hostage and murder them?  On a smaller scale, woudln’t it have been good if one of the onlookers had tried to physically intervene to knock the killer Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin’s knee off George Floyd’s neck on May 25, 2020?

Ward Churchill’s important book Pacificism as Pathology offers an important if unsettling critique of the North American left’s exaggerated faith in the effectiveness of Gahndian protest. It challenges liberal-left “magical thinking that somehow if we are merely good and nice enough people, the state will stop using its violence to exploit us all” (Derrick Jensen).  Gosh, that would be nice.

“How,” one Churchill’s reviewers (Margo Stiles) writes, do pacifists “propose to [defeat] …the most heavily armed, cynical, and ruthless class privilege system in history without some form of real confrontation? With 2-hour candlelight vigils and some symbolic arrests which, by the way, may or may not be reported by the corporate-owned media? If that was all that was required to get rid of an immoral, deeply rooted capitalist system, a Nazi terror regime, a vicious landowning oligarchy as in Salvador, and so on, humanity would have moved past these filthy horrors decades if not centuries ago. As Churchill points out, Nazi Germany was defeated by the massive application of force; the racist American South was similarly …defeated in the 1860s by massive military force, by organized all-out violence...There is not a single case in history where a deeply entrenched system of class or racial exploitation was overthrown by moral suasion and symbolic protests...If real change came about it was because force was being applied somewhere else alongside the nonviolent tracks... It's a discomfiting point, but I'm afraid it is a true fact. Social change does not come cheap.”

Revolutionary socialists never celebrate violence. They have no toleration for gratuitous acts of physical retaliation, revenge, and humiliation. They seek the end of oppression, the seedbed of violent conflict. They agitate with capitalist state gendarmes, beseeching them to cease and desist from the use of force against the people. But they do not oppose the use of force and even (not the same thing) violence under any and circumstances. They do not give up on revolutionary movements because “people could get hurt.”  They do not turn their basic human aversion to bloodshed into a rationale for surrendering the streets and public squares and the halls of power to the ruling class and its agents. They do not fantasize about bloodless revolution, and they do not take the threat and even likelihood of violent conflict to mean that revolutions are not worth organizing and fighting for. They do not shrink either from appropriate armed self-defense or from the proper “application of force” to defeat oppressive regimes and systems. They do not grant ruling classes a permanent monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They preserve the right of the state to employ coercion under socialist rule (understood openly as “the dictatorship of the proletariat”) while looking forward to and struggling for a world beyond class rule and other forms of oppression, which are the taproots of violent conflict.