Thoughts on Revolution vs. "The Election Madness"

Engaging Zinn Sixteen Years Later

A system that gives you the choice between Genocide Joe and Fascist Don is a system long past its overthrow date.

“The Election Frenzy”

Here is a long but noteworthy quote from an essay titled “The Election Madness” that Howard Zinn published at the height of Obamamania in the spring of the election year of 2008:

“A few nights [ago],” Zinn wrote, “CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones. Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.”

“This [election frenzy],” Zinn continued, “seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple-choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students…Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections? The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés…

Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.

No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death. I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.”

There’s one part of this passage that I disagree with, one part that I think needs elaboration, one part that I think does not translate very well across the current presidential election, and five parts or aspects of the passage that I think hold real wisdom and meaning in 2024 and beyond.

No, We Need Revolution

The part I disagree with is the notion that the point of movement-building and action beneath and beyond is to influence national policy.  No, we live under a cancerous capitalist-imperialist system that is literally destroying life on earth, pushing the world into environmental and epidemiological collapse, nuclear war, and fascism. The point of movement building today must be to overthrow that system and radically replace it root and branch with revolutionary socialism.  

We are way past “shaking” the establishment as the goal. It’s like Marx and Engels said in 1848: it’s either “the radical re-constitution of society at large” or “the common ruin of all…” F “speak truth to power.”  We need to take power and wield it for a whole new way of living. Here in the imperialist homeland that funds, equips, and protects genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian slogan is dead on: “there is only one solution, Intifada Revolution.”.

No Blank Checks

The part that needs elaboration is “yes, I would support one candidate against another.” There are times when a lesser evil vote is morally and tactically justifiable.  But usually both major party candidates are simply too terrible to warrant even that minimal level of “support.”  Granting either of them your vote no matter what they do or say because you see them as the lesser evil encourages endless criminality on the part of both major parties.   

Two Epic Criminals

The part that doesn’t translate very well in 2024 is the description of the only two viable presidential candidates as “two mediocrities.” That seems a decent fit for then Senator Barack Obama vs. then Senator John McCain in 2008, two centrist neoliberal imperialists, neither of whom had yet served as commander- in-chief of the arch-criminal US Empire.  But this election year features two epic villains who have already wielded the imperial US presidency in horrific ways. “Mediocrity” doesn’t do justice to the evil both have already displayed.  The sick “choice” between  warmongering “Genocide Joe,” a bloody-jawed butcher in Ukraine and Gaza, and the open Hitler-channeling putschist, climate-denier, pandemicist, and fascist Trump is arguably worse than anything we’ve seen so far in modern US presidential politics.  

Now to the five things Zinn wrote in 2008 that I think translate well and offer wise counsel across the sixteen years.

“Already Chosen”

First: yes to the two presidential candidates being “already chosen for us.” Zinn might have elaborated on who and what does the choosing –  agents of the underlying capitalist-imperialist system  – but the language I just italicized and boldfaced is appropriate for almost every major US  election.  It is especially well-suited to the current presidential election. Masses of US-Americans are aghast at the horrific election choice between the doddering imperialist Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden and the malignant Republi-Nazi Donald “Retribution” Trump. Much if not most of the US citizenry does not want this dark “democratic” selection shit up by “deep state” capitalist elites behind the surface spectacle of US politics.

“The Minor Candidates…Our System Won’t Allow Them In”

Second, a thumbs-up to Zinn’s sarcastic reference to how “everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow…the minor candidates in” Well, not everyone: I hear from left third- and fourth-party activists who claim to honestly think their candidates have a real chance of winning the presidency and seats in Congress.  They are dreaming.  The US elections system is a winner-take-all and “first past the post” two-party regime titled well to the right.  Under that system, it’s just a cold fact understood by most informed observers that the only serious candidate “choices” are the binary options presented by the two reigning capitalist-imperialist parties and that “left” third- and fourth-party votes have the potential to help the rightmost of the two dominant political organizations.   

The Bourgeois Ballot Fetish/Religion

Third, yes to  “we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls…”  Maybe not “all,”  but certainly most US-Americans have been influenced by this ballot-fetishizing belief. It’s a national religion.  The “bourgeois electoral bullshit” (the BEB), as the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian calls it, tells us to restrict our sense of “politics” — the only politics that matters — to going into voting booths for two minutes once every years to make marks next to the names of candidates “already chosen for us” by capitalist-imperialist elites. It’s a crippling narrative perfectly designed to keep us docile, off the streets and out of the public squares, where we should be shutting this system down and building for a new and revolutionary system.  

Dominating the News

Fourth, yes to Zinn’s 2008 critique of how the dominant US media-politics culture’s candidate-obsessed  and horse race-focused coverage tends to suck up all the air in the newsrooms and on the telescreens.  Numerous grave matters are pushed into the background as eyeballs are endlessly directed towards the big money-major party-corporate-crafted spectacle of Candidate A versus Candidate B.  The sordid details of how “neoliberal” capitalism is shredding what’s left of social welfare, human decency, rule of law and livable ecology are dropped even farther out of visible concern than usual as masses are induced to reduce political news to Biden’s latest gaffe, Trump’s latest outrage, etc.   

Before and After

Fifth, yes to “before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens…” Absolutely. Give me (a) somebody who takes two minutes to make a “lesser evil” vote for a Democratic candidate but who comes out of the ballot box to resume building people’s power beyond the latest US capitalist-imperialist electoral extravaganza over (b) some third-party ballot-fetishist who spends all their energy trying to sheepdog people into marking ballots for some “left” candidate who is inherently marginalized under the US elections system.

Got Any Plans Beyond and Besides the Election?

Some concluding questions for readers and my fellow US-Americans…

What political plans do you have before and after the holy two minute-once-every-1460-days moment in the presidential ballot box?

How sucked into the presidential electoral horse race are you going to get this year?

What are you going to do when the capitalist-imperialist system delivers a second and worse fascist Trump presidency (as seems distinctly possible no matter what you do or don’t do in a voting pew)? Laugh it off and continue normal daily life as the mass deportations begin and all environmental regulations are slashed? Leave the country? Keep your head down and go into internal exile or otherwise give up? Go nihilist and blow shit up, seeking revenge? Become a revolutionary and take to the streets and public squares with others determined to overthrow a system that produced such an atrocity?

How are you planning to respond to the Amerikaner Republi-fascist and paramilitary rebellion and lone wolf assaults that seem certain if “Genocide Joe” wins?

Assuming he can survive the ensuing proto-civil war, what will you do as a second term Biden and the dismal Dems continue to lead the world down the path towards potentially terminal and cerainly disastrous war(s) with Russia and/or China? (Fascism will march on, getting yet more toxic and armed in a second Biden term.)

How do you see yourself responding to Biden slipping further into full-on dementia (have you seen him try to give a coherent speech lately?) while pretending to care about the climate crisis as the US sets new energy use records in the name of growth and – to use one of Biden’s favorite phrases — “American competitiveness”? 

Go revolutionary and take to the streets and public squares and other spaces with others determined to overthrow a system that produced such madness and pathetic “choices”?

I am not an “accelerationist,” but I won’t back down from trying to turn the shock and horror of a second Trump victory into a revolution accelerator.  I don’t pretend to know which of the two presidential election outcomes is more favorable for the revolution we need. 

The real accelerationist it seems to me is the underlying capitalist-imperialist system, which is heating the planet up at the highest rate in history while menacing us with nuclear winter (war) like no time in recent memory. The natural and the social science is clear: ten more years of this imperialist class dictatorship (capitalism-imperialism) means GAME OVER  for humanity and countless other species.

In the absence of massively expanded revolutionary socialist and communist organization, the question of which election outcome is most favorable to revolution is moot. If you don’t have a disciplined and radical movement with a revolutionary vision and strategy in place, any opportunities for a new world will be lost.

In my opinion, the kernel of that movement exists right here in the belly of the capitalist-imperialist beast: the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA – the Revcoms.

Please watch this remarkable lecture by the leading Revcom activist and speaker Sunsara Taylor at UCLA last February: “Actually Revolution IS Possible and If This Revolution Isn't Made Soon, Humanity Is Thoroughly F*cked! A Talk and Q&A with Sunsara Taylor.” In this outstanding presentation, Taylor challenges those who reflexively (usually the case) or more substantively (rarely the case) reject the Revcoms’ radical, Avakian-led vision for revolution to advance a better one.

It’s a good and urgent challenge to throw down: the vacuum of serious revolutionary imagination on the US “left” is chilling! The lowered sights are jaw-dropping and frankly pathetic.

I say vote how you want or not at all – that’s your business[1]; it’s  a secret ballot. But how about spending this summer trying to build capacity for “the emancipation of humanity” (to use the Revcoms’ language) from a system that is killing us instead of obsessing over the vile horse race that our capitalist-imperialist masters want us to see as “politics,” the only politics that matters.

Endnote

[1] Just to be clear, I'm NOT telling anyone NOT to vote "for" Biden in a contested state or anywhere else. I'm saying that "a system that gives you the choice between Genocide Joe and Fascist Don is a system long past its overthrow date." The slogan says what it says. It's a call for revolutionary mobilization, not for or against any particular electoral or anti-electoral behavior.