The Lame US Left: Seventeen Afflictions

Part 1: Afflictions 1 to 4

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 conservaive 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 my last 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: sheep-dogging electoralism and parliamentary cretinism; economism and trade unionism; hyper-identitarianism; dependence on foundations; sentimental standpoint proletarianism; geopolitical neo-campism; neo-Strasserite Trumpenleftism; conspiratorialism; anarchism; mutual-aid-ism, localism, single-issue-ism; pacifism; academicism; pessimism; retreat to self-ism; (and last but not least) anti-communism.  Many of these afflictions overlap and mutually reinforce each other, making up a kind of simultaneous equations system of defeat and surrender.

Today’s installment tackles the first four of these left afflictions.  

1. Sheep-Dogging Left Electoralism, Parliamentary Cretinism, and Mass Demoralization

One symptomatic feature of US left failure is the remarkably durable symptom of left electoralism and  --- to  to use an on old but still-relevant Bolshevik term ---  parliamentary cretinism. Even now, nearly half a century into the full “neoliberal” capitalist takeover of US politics and policy, this pathology is embraced and advanced by people with self-declared progressive and “democratic socialist” values who seem incapable of understanding the need for radical and revolutionary movements beneath and beyond the killing confines of the nation’s rigidly time-staggered big money candidate-centered major party ruling class electoral politics. This left tendency functions as a sheep dog or Judas Goat for the capitalists, herding masses into the US electoral slaughterhouse – a right-tilted minority rule regime that violates the elementary democratic principle of one person, one vote on multiple levels (here is one of my many primers on the deadening nothingness of constitutional bourgeois democracy, US-American-style).  Never mind the US-American system’s openly anti-democratic presidential Electoral College, its absurdly powerful and lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, its brazenly plutocratic campaign finance rules and corporate media, its rampant voter suppression and racist disenfranchisement, its extensive gerrymandering of legislative districts, its ridiculously powerful and lethally malapportioned US Senate (which vastly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and states), and its deeply reactionary states’ rights tradition.  

This Dem-captive left politics can be quite shameless. The nation’s leading “democratic socialist” journal, Jacobin – named after 18^th Century bourgeois French revolutionaries (wouldn’t a socialist journal be named Communard or at least Sans Culotte?) – argues that “the Left” won last November’s mid-term elections, during which the Republi-fascist Party took back majority control of the US House of Representatives after surpassing the Democrats by three million votes in the national popular House vote. Jacobin applauds as left triumphs the mid-term victories of Democratic candidates who support fracking, increased imperial war spending, and increased funding of the nation’s massive racist police state. Many if not most Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters refused to denounce the Biden Democrats’ collaboration with the Republicans in blocking a recently threatened and overdue strike by badly overworked rail workers seeking paid time off to recover a measure of mental and physical health. Why stoop so low? Because the purported  project of building “socialism” (milquetoast semi-social democracy at “left”-most) within the dismal, dollar-drenched, and demobilizing Democratic Party requires lowering peoples’ sights very far downward.

And the more “progressives” try to make the corporate Democratic Party become like them, the more they themselves become like the corporate Democrats.  It’s an old story.

The perverse idiosyncrasies of US American elections, party and governance system (still tethered an 18^th Century slaveowners’ Constitution, remarkably enough) aside, serious radicals take an unflinching look at the harsh class-rule limits of electoral democracy under really existing capitalism – what Marxists have long called bourgeois democracy. As the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in the introduction to his magisterial volume, The Age of Capital, “the global triumph of capitalism” meant “the triumph of a society” based not at at all on popular sovereignty but rather on “buying everything (including labor) in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest.” The social and political formations joined to that kind of soulless society — one in which every noble sentiment and impulse is “drowned in the icy waters of egotistical calculation” (Marx and Engels, 1848) — was (and remains) a society where (in Hobsbawm’s words) “participation in politics [on the part] of the common people” takes place only “within such limits as would guarantee the bourgeois social order and avoid the risk of its overthrow” (emphasis added).

One consequence of the longtime Judas-Goating habit of leftish groups like Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and DSA is the demoralization of the masses that follow the elections that leftists sold to them as great opportunities for progressive change.  The money-soaked elections and their predctably dismal outcomes become regular discouraging rituals of popular fecklessness.  They turn out to be depressing and demobilizing proof — like the Bill Clinton and Obama “Hope” and “Change” campaigns and presidencies — that  “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” that “everything is f*#ked” since “money talks and bullshit walks.” This is one of the hazards of buying strongly — as many left-identified folk do (one especially dogged and by now sad examples is the great progressive filmmaker Michael Moore) — into the masters’ definition of the quadrennial and biennial big money, corporate-crafted mass-marketed, big media, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky’s term) as “politics,” the only politics that matters.  Nothing could be further from the truth: the biggest progressive changes won by popular forces in the US have always been about mass social movements – about who’s sitting in the streets, workplaces, schools, and public squares, not just who’s sitting in the White House and other elective offices.       

The left  electoralist affliction – morbid attachment to the “coffin of class consciousness” ( historian Alan Dawley’s phrase) that is the US ballot box – is not limited to those who sheepdog and Judas Goat for the Democrats. US Green Party and other third- or fourth-party left activists often place absurd levels of undue emphasis on what one does or doesn’t do in the voting booth, as if participation in the capitalist-imperialist US electoral regime (which renders third parties powerless beyond occasional spoiler roles) is the focal point of popular struggle. They may not herd sheep for the Dems but they are still dogging for the bourgeois  “Election Madness.”

2. Economistic and Trade Unionist Revisionism

Another venerable and remarkably durable left nonrevolutionary and revisionist symptom is economistic class reductionist revisionism and trade unionism, focused on winning small wage, salary, job, and benefit victories that briefly get some ordinary working people a bit more of the imperialist system’s spoils. Revisionist “socialists” in the trade unionist tradition display little if any elementarily radical interest in confronting the soulless and exterminist capitalist-imperialist system that is ruining (and perhaps ending) life on Earth. “Progressives” mired in an economistic collective bargaining mode seem to have the radical “change we need” confused with occasional union representation and labor contract triumphs for small pockets of employees. They often combine this economism with national chauvinism and a class reductionist politics that fails to grant proper seriousness to problems of racism, sexism, nativism, imperialism, eco-cide and fascism, much less the related destructive anarchy of capitalism, which recurrently eliminates the very jobs US organized labor tries to extract dues from.

This “left” embodies what Lenin rightly criticized as the narrow mindset of the “trade union secretary,” who fights for material crumbs at the masters’ table instead of for the revolutionary overturning of that table. As Lenin argued, the proper goal of principled socialist activism regarding the working class isn’t merely the attainment of more for some sections the proletariat under capitalism-imperialism but rather the radical enlistment of the working class as “tribunes of the people” — all the people — in the many-sided struggle against all oppression: women’s oppression, racist oppression, religious oppression, imperial oppression, and capitalist exploitation and parasitism, deeply and globally understood.

There’s considerable ironic overlap between the first two left afflictions, leading to the spectacle of trade-unionist “democratic socialists” lining up behind a president and party (Joe “Sleeping Car” Biden and the Democrats) who recently and predictably joined with Republicans in pre-emptively breaking an overdue national rail strike and in slashing benefits for the working poor – this while the two capitalist parties signed off on a giant, record-setting “defense” (military Empire) budget that steals from the working class to provide public welfare for high-tech war-production firms raking in profits from the inter-imperialist US-Russia war in Ukraine.

Of course it’s better to work in a union shop than a non-union one, but US collective bargaining agreements and organized labor have long tended to attach workers and union officials to the parasitic and disastrous capitalist-imperialist order while helping employers codify existing hierarchical job and wage and structures.  They also tend to focus union members only on what can be won for themselves in their jobs and industries instead of what needs to be won for the proletariat as a whole – health care for a certain group of autoworkers (for example) instead of socialized medicine and health care as a human right for all.  

“It Feels Like a [Right-Wing] Op”: Hyper-Identitarian Wokester Call-Out Culture

More specifically symptomatic of the neoliberal era than the two previous afflictions (but not without ancient foundtions, to bs rue) is the prodoundly anti-revolutionary left pathology of wokester left identitarianism. An army of hyper- “woke” lefties are plagued by the crippling mental affliction of “standpoint epistemology.” Acting something like the reverse negative image of the white Christian nationalist neofascists with whom “the Trumpenleft” (to be discussed in my next installment) has perversely bedded down, they bestow highly exaggerated and even outrageous intellectual and political privilege on one’s skin color and/or gender and/or sexual identity and/or ethnicity over and against basic scientific investigation and rigor. Left wokesters’ left-ness is all about who you are, with the who being all about your race and/or gender and/or sexual identity instead of what intellectual and political work you’ve done and how you propose to work with others to liberate humanity from oppression.

Left woketarians are invested in cancel culture, which is a real and obstructionist thing even if the neofascist white Christian nationalist right exploits and distorts the meaning of that pathology for revanchist purposes.  Confusing victimization with moral and intellectual attainment and political vision, the hyper-identitarian left promotes an “Oppression Olympics” mindset that seeks to determine who are the most truly oppressed people of all instead of how to build a movement against to defeat all oppression. Left identitarian wokesters are often plagued by an extreme individualism so obsessively focused on their own (or their designated victim groups’) oppression that they lose all sight of the broader historical and societal contexts of class rule and empire and of racism and sexism deeply understood in relation to capitalism-imperialism.

A long report by Ryan Grim in the Intercept last June showed how the nation’s liberal and progressive nonprofit/NGO sector had over recent years become so crippled by constant internal identitarian call-outs and cultural wars as to be incapable of meaningful activism on their issues: abortion rights, civil liberties, livable ecology, and more. By Grim’s grim account:

“[An NGO] leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. ‘I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,’ said another longtime organization head. ‘Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.’” (emphasis added).

The bitter “me, me, mine and my identity” sniping is so extreme and widespread that Bernie Sanders had to tell his lieutenants not to hire any “activists” for his 2020 presidential campaign.  Sanders knew he couldn’t trust people from the non-profit “activist” world not to turn his campaign’s organization away from its external political goal of winning the Democratic presidential nomination and into endless internal factionalism over real and alleged incidents of racial, gender, ethnic, generational, and sexual orientation bias.

The hyper-woke bourgeois-identitarian call-out culture is a remarkably nasty affliction which the present writer has seen rear its paralyzing head again and again in left movements (and also in higher education).  Left activists are reluctant to confront it head-on for fear of being reflexively accused of embracing vicious right-wing narratives.  (Here I am of course looking at the problem not from the racist-sexist-LGBT-bashing right but rather from a revolutionary Marxist perspective that opposes all forms of oppression including sexism, racism, nativism, homophobia and trans-hate – a perspective that takes very seriously racial, gender, and sexual oppression while pointing out that none of those and other oppressions will ever be overcome under the class dictatorship of capital.)

Left wokesters are often played by bourgeois electoral identity politics. They get co-opted into the inadequate US major party candidate-centered election madness and incremental reformism by the placement of bourgeois non-white, female, and gay “faces in high places” – elite politicos who help the nation’s predominantly white and male ruling class deceptively re-brand their capitalist-imperialist order as “diverse,” “tolerant,” and “multi-cultural.”  Barack Obama (Black with a Muslim-sounding name), Hillary Clinton (female), Kamala Harris (Black and female), Pete Buttigieg (gay), Nancy Pelosi (female), and Tammy Baldwin (female and gay) are some of the neoliberal figures left identitarians have been excessively prone to applaud simply because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. It’s sad to watch left-identified people recurrently grant support to ruling class politicians and officials on the basis of the politicos’ skin color, gender, and/or sexual identity (as well as their partisan/Democratic status). Pelosi, Butiggieg, Harris, Obama, Amy Klobuchar, and a vast swath of non-male, nonwhite and (in some cases) non-straight Democratic “leaders” are dedicated agents of and believers in the system that is literally ending life on Earth: capitalism-imperialism.

Foundation Dependence

The US-American nonprofit/NGO “activist” left is also and relatedly crippled by its dependence on bourgeois foundations. Much of what passes for a left here gets critical and core funding from corporate foundations who, as Grim writes, “aren’t accountable to the public for failing to accomplish anything, as long as the foundation flows continue.” Big foundations and grant-funded nonprofits don’t have to report to the people whose interests they claim to represent. They report to people with a ton of money. 

Gosh, what could go wrong with that – a left answerable not to the masses it claims to serve but rather to concentrated wealth in the savagely unequal United States? Grim’s investigation discovered that foundations often function as powerful promoters of the hyper-identitarian bourgeois call-out culture that renders so many NGOs ineffective in the face of right-wing onslaught.

My next instalment will appear next Monday. It will tackle four more left afflictions, three of which have chilling overlaps with the country’s growing far-right.