Time and Tactics Change

Against Quicksand, For Revolution

Time is an interesting concept and an even more fascinating reality. Websters’ online defines it as follows:

-        the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues : duration.

-        a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future

Things change over time. Processes unfold.  Old things fade and die.  New things are born.  Antitheses give way to new syntheses that breed new antitheses.  Continuity gives way to discontinuity and new continuities.

History seems to barely move at all and then it accelerates as quantity changes to quality and continuity gives way to discontinuity. “There are decades when nothing happens,” Lenin once remarked, “and there are weeks when decades happen.”

Pots simmer for long periods of time and then boil over in a short period of time.

In human affairs/history, it’s not always or even typically clear when, how, and why the pot boils over. Time/history is full of the unexpected events, actions, decisions, and contingencies that breed new conjunctures.

World War II or at least a war on the scale of WWII might have been averted if the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart had chosen not to appease Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, thereby activating a plot to assassinate Hitler in the upper ranks of the German military.

But for Hitler’s reckless and ill-planned invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, much of Europe might have stayed under the control of the Third Reich well past 1945.

But for the US Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ plot(s) to kill Fidel Castro and invade Cuba, Soviet missiles would not have been placed in the Caribbean island in 1962.

But for Soviet naval officer Vasily Arkhipov’s decision to block the launching of a tactical nuclear weapon from a Russian submarine in the Saragossa Sea, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have sparked World War III.   

But for the outbreak of Covid-19 and the video-recording of George Floyd’s murder in 2020,  we might well be in the middle of Donald “Clear Out Marxist Vermin” chilling Trump’s campaign for a third straight and ever more fully fascist administration. There was no iron law of history that said those things had to occur and help undermine Trump’s chances for a second term in the first half of 2020.  

Shit happens and things change as “events which succeed one another from past through present to future.”

Which brings me to the question of whether decent people – people of liberal and left persuasions – should vote for the imperialist Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024. 

“What Gives?”

I say no.  This has led liberals and progressives I know to recoil in horror and to claim hypocrisy.  “WTF Street,” critics say, “didn’t you follow the revolutionary communist thinker Bob Avakian in telling folks to vote ‘for’ Genocide Joe Biden to unseat the fascist Trump in 2020? And furthermore, Street, haven’t you yourself been showing that fascism is now far more consolidated across the Republican Party, Republican policy networks, the federal courts and the Trump team itself  than it was in 2016, when Trump was elected?  

“Yes,” I answer, “yes indeed to both questions.”

“So what gives, Street you crazy-ass communist? Explain yourself!”

The Essential Question

I’ll be happy to explain.  Understand two things.  First, the essential question in relation to any political matter (including a bourgeois election) is this: what is most conducive to the socialist revolution that humanity needs ever more desperately with each passing day/week/year, with the passage of time?  The problem is always to determine what course of thought and action is most consistent with the goal of sparking and growing a movement for the overthrow of a capitalist-imperialist system that is by its very historical-material nature destroying  decent life on Earth through the interrelated and mutually reinforcing/multiplying plagues of ecocide, war, pandemicide, and fascism?  

Objective Situations Change

Second, the objective situation within which we must steer this course commonly changes over time. The right route and progress of a medical treatment plan alters over changes over time depending on symptoms and progress of a conditions or disease.  It’s the same in terms of how to advance revolution over the literal and metaphorical cancer that is the world capitalist-imperialist system.

During the fascist Trump administration, it was essential to provoke a crisis of governance by forcing the Trump-Pence regime out of office and thereby preventing the consolidation of fascist rule in a second Trump term.  The best way to have done that by far was through a mass movement in the streets and public squares.  That’s what Refuse Fascism and the Revolutionary Communist Party (Revcoms) and their allies struggled mightily to bring about.  When a movement capable of that Herculean task didn’t arise, the secondary tactical tool of the vote presented itself and Avakian was right: revolutionary communists had no choice but to make the unprecedented step of playing along with the “bourgeois electoral bullshit (BEB)” in an effort to sustain some create “breathing space” for popular and revolutionary movements to survive and expand.

The phrase breathing space really resonated with me in 2020 thanks to George Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” and the covid epidemic that the pandemo-fascist Trump was  spreading across the nation. Trump’s response to the remarkable pandemic was part of what led me to make the unusual step of voting “for” a Democrat.

Here I should add that Refuse Fascism and Revcoms knew very well that the task of forcing Donald “Be Wild” Trump through mass pressure beyond the ballot box would continue after he lost the vote.  Consistent with his (sloppily but nonetheless genuinely) fascist essence, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” had made it clear that he would not accept removal merely through an election. And so the demand “Trump-Pence Out Now!” continued after the first Tuesday in November of 2020 and up through January 6.

Okay, so what about now? What’s changed? What’s different that says don’t vote Democratic this even as fascism has become more pronounced and pervasive in Trump’s rhetoric, Trump’s campaign, and Trump’s party in 2024?

Six things, all related to the reality of time.

A Onetime Secondary Tactic vs. a Principle

First, it’s one thing to pick an exceptional historical moment and say, “we must take the unprecedented step of breaking with our usual practice and engaged in the secondary task of voting ‘for’ a capitalist candidate this one time to get rid of a fascist president we and the masses failed to remove through mass rebellion.”  It’s another thing altogether to embrace the BEB a second time. Say “vote for the imperialist Democrat” a second time, Avakian notes, and you are making Lesser Evilist support for ruling class candidates a principle.

Doomsday Dems Re-Exposed

Second, it’s one thing to consent to mark a ballot – frankly out of desperation – for a capitalist-imperialist presidential ticket that’s out of executive branch power.  It’s something else altogether to make a ballot for a sitting presidential administration (and Kamala Harris is part of the current administration) that has taken its electoral victory and used it:

·       to provoke and fuel horrific and reckless inter-imperialist war on the nuclear power Russia’s repeatedly invaded long Southwestern border.

·       to pretend to care about the climate catastrophe while boasting about helping the US drill more oil than any country ever.  

·       to fund, equip, and politically and democratically protect a horrific genocide conducted by Israel in Gaza.

These first two actions have led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to push their Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than its ever been. The third action (backing genocide in Gaza) is part of the Doomsday mix: it  threatens to set off a wider regional war that could take on a global dimension involving Russia and China along with other nuclear states like Turkey, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and of course Israel, not to mention pre-nuclear Iran.

Fascism Marches On with Weimar Dems in the White House

Third, having the Democrats in the executive branch has not stopped and will not stop the forward/backward march of Amerikaner fascism.  The Biden-Harris administration has shown itself to be positively Weimar, bending far to the right (on immigration and other issues) to conciliate and accommodate Trumpism-fascism while failing to adequately protect women and immigrants from Christian and white nationalist assault.  It has egregiously failed to prosecute and incarcerate the fascist maniac Trump for trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule-of-law “democracy” in 2020-21  It almost seems like the dismal Dems want to keep the malignant orange menace alive and around to help them sell the Lesser Evil argument to the masses: “vote for our fake-progressive bourgeois bullshit or suffer something even worse under the return of Herr Donald and Project 2025!”

All the progressive-sounding campaign promises being made right now at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago are as usual neoliberal Dems’ using their mouths to write checks their donors and above all the underlying class rule system won’t let them cash. That spells continuing political potency for the rightmost/Reich-most major political party even if the Dems win the presidency. Now safely in charge of the Supreme Court and half the nation’s states and likely to take back the absurdly powerful and malapportioned Senate this time, the Republifascists will remain ready to pounce again with help from the “get things done” bipartisanship and “pragmatism” of the not-so leftmost major party, which needs their fascist opponent to stick around as the foil for its lame neoliberal abandonment and rejection of the working class majority.

Time’s Up

Fourth,  with every passing day, week, month, and year, humanity is running ever more perilously out of existential time for Americans to stay mired in the BEB. Time’s up, people! The window is closing on the crippling syndrome whose chief symptom is remaining stuck in the paralyzing quicksand of the US quadrennial election cycle.  Beyond capitalist control of the electoral process and society, the four-year time-frame of what passes for politics – “the only politics that matters” – in US is simply inadequate for addressing the pace at which the existential crises of capitalogenic climate change and the drift to global war is proceeding. Focusing people on yet one more corporate-crafted major media candidate-centered “quadrennial electoral extravaganza” (Noam Chomsky’s term)  is basically a self-destructive way of kicking the can of revolution down the road. 

As Dr. King noted in 1968, even before the environmental crisis led by the climate catastrophe had become full-blown, “the real issue to be faced” beneath and beyond “superficial” matters (like the race or gender of a president or news anchor)  is “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” Never has it been truer than in the present time that – as Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 – it’s either “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin of all...”

Let me be clear about this: livable ecology cannot survive ten more years of capitalism.  That’s a cold fact lodged at the intersection of natural and social science.

How long humanity can survive the anarchy of competition and conflict between spectacularly armed capitalist states including nuclear superpowers in the world imperial system is an ominous question as the US boldly escalates its provocation of Russia and China.

Neither of these core existential questions fade in the slightest with Democrats in the White House. If anything the imperialism problem seems to be even more menacing under Democrats.

Beyond the Horse Race: Folks Better Not “Leave it All on the [Electoral] Field”

Fifth,  it is irresponsible to focus masses of people on the presidential horse race when we are now in a period when one of the nation’s two major parties simply does not accept electoral defeat and has powerful forces in play both within and outside government. “Coach” Tim Walz last night at the DNC told people “to leave everything on the field” of Get Out the Vote for the election.  Bad advice! If Harris gets past numerous barriers to Democratic Party presidential re-election including mass right wing voter suppression, intimidation, and legal and procedural obstruction, the Republi-fascists are going to launch an ugly, many-sided coup campaign that will reach into next year – an effort that could jolt the hyper-polarized US into something like a civil war.

It's time to follow Avakian in thinking about potential post-election scenarios including stark civil conflict between “blue” (bourgeois-democratic) and “red” (Christian white nationalist Republi-fascist) forces or “blue” capitulation to a “red” (try brown for brownshirt) coup, both of which could provide openings for actually Radical Left forces who want to undertake Dr. King’s “radical reconstruction” and Marx and Engels’ “revolutionary reconstitution.”

“Rare Time”

Which brings me to my sixth and final point and here I’m going to quote Avakian at length on how we are in “a rare time” that shouldn’t be squandered – a time when revolution not only must but can arise as a possibility:

‘A revolution becomes possible, even in a powerful country like this, when three main factors have been brought into being:

·       (i) A crisis in society and government so deep and so disruptive of the “usual way of things,” that those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the “normal” way that people have been conditioned to accept.

·       (ii) A revolutionary people in the millions and millions, with their “allegiance” to this system broken, and their determination to fight for a more just society greater than their fear of the violent repression of this system.

·       (iii) An organized revolutionary force—made up of continually growing numbers of people, from among the most oppressed but also from many other parts of society—a force which is grounded in, and is working systematically to apply, the most scientific approach to building for and then carrying out revolution, and which is increasingly looked to by masses of people to lead them to bring about the radical change that is urgently needed.

These factors for revolution obviously do not exist right now, but this is one of the rare times when these factors for revolution could be brought into being.

A basic reason why this is true is that there are now very great divisions within the ruling class of the country, and in the country as a whole—and, more than that:  These divisions among the ruling powers, and in the larger society, cannot be resolved within the framework that has existed, and has held things together, for nearly 150 years, since shortly after the end of the Civil War which led to the abolition of slavery—they cannot be resolved on the basis of the capitalist “democracy” that has been the “normal” means of capitalist rule (dictatorship) for so long.

Something radically different is going to replace the framework that has existed for all this time—and the crisis and deep divisions in society now can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means or radically emancipating revolutionary means.’ [1]

This is about potential.  Avakian does not say that we are currently in a revolutionary situation.  He knows very well that prerequisites (ii) and (iii) are NOT in place.  But prerequisite (i) is significantly in place now and it is up to all of us who care about humanity to work to spark a positive dialectic between (iii) and (ii). 

Speaking of contingency and events over time, the Dems’ shift from tired old “Genocide Joe” to “Killer Kopmala” was not just about electoral calculation.  It was also about how the coming contest between Biden and Trump was fueling mass alienation from and anger against the whole American System and thereby sparking progress for factor (ii) in ways that was  providing moral and ideological ammunition for people struggling to expand factor (iii).  It was about an “Obama 2.0” re-branding the American capitalist Empire and readying masses for coming US aggression in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia.  And that’s why relentless radical criticism of the Harris phenomenon – full on exposure of her commitment to parasitic capitalist Empire and Inequality at home and abroad is critical right now.

Endnote

+1. Read the rest of this essay to see why Avakian thinks the extreme polarization of current historical period has emerged.