What Would it Take for You to Become a Revolutionary?

What If...

What if…?

My fellow US-Americans, what would it take for you to commit to overthrowing the dominant United States social and political order (DUSSPO) under which you live, resolving to join others in building for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called near the end of his life “the real issue to be faced…the radical reconstruction of society itself”? What would spark you to embrace and fight for what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels rightly called in The Communist Manifesto the only alternative to the “common ruin” of all: “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large”?

Exploitation, Inequality, Boss Rule, and Alienation

What if:

·        The DUSSPO generated by its nature domestic inequality so extreme that the top tenth of its upper One Percent possessed as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent — this while millions of its children lived below its notoriously inadequate poverty line?

·        Most of the DUSSPO’s working population fell short of a minimally adequate household income even with full-time employment and most of its working-class majority lived from paycheck to paycheck, facing disaster every time the DUSSPO’s anarchic economy went into one of its recurrent downswings?

·        Most people’s ability to obtain the money need to purchase commodities required for survival under the DUSSPO depended on them renting out a critical part of their human essence – their labor power – to an employer class that only hires people and keeps them on payrolls as long as they calculate that they can make a profit off their workers?

·        This parasitic capitalist employer class treated workers as disposable, surplus people once their employment was no longer deemed profitable (no longer seen to be as producing or transferring more value to the boss than the cost of the workers’ commodified labor power) by the employer class?

·        Employment involved not just the transfer of surplus value/profit to capitalist employers but abject subordination to commonly despotic boss authority during most of one’s waking hours, spent in the “hidden abode” of the workplace?

·        Employer control over workers extended beyond the job to include chilliong power over what workers say, write. and do in their “free time” off the job?

·        The DUSSPO imposed a strictly hierarchical and morbidly alienating division of labor that consigned most working people to stupefying, repetitive, stressful, and otherwise noxious tasks inimical to mental and physical health, commonly executed for no higher goal than the enrichment and competitive advantage of parasitic capitalists?

·        Masses living under the DUSSPO had to forgo their natural and wondrous artistic, poetic, romantic, and spiritual instincts, passions, skills, and dreams in a mad daily scramble to keep their heads above water, in a soulless rat race driven by the endless quest for money?   

·        The DUSSPO kept social safety nets weak and minimal to maintain a large “reserve army of labor” full of people compelled to sell their labor power to capitalists at a low price?

·        The DUSSPO’s reigning bourgeois ideology absurdly blamed the misery and poverty of the people at the bottom of its steep socioeconomic pyramids on those oppressed masses’ alleged and made-up personal and cultural failures?

·        The DUSSPO systematically dehumanized masses of people, turning critical aspects of their species-being, including their remarkable capacity for highly organized and large-scale social production, into little more than instruments of soulless and parasitic private accumulation?  

Racism, Sexism, and Identitarian Division

What if:

·        The DUSSPO cultivated, exacerbated, exploited, and depended upon the destructive fracturing of humanity along lines not just of class but also of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, culture, and more?

·        The DUSSPO treated women and girls as secondary and subordinate people, as sex objects for and handmaids to men, targets of chronic physical and mental violence, unworthy of equal pay, expected to work harder and smarter than males, with the right to control their own reproductive lives under vicious patriarchal assault, subject to the female enslavement of forced motherhood in many of its jurisdictions?

·        The DUSSPO consigned tens of millions of its citizens to hyper-segregated and deeply impoverished, opportunity-bereft ghettoes, schools, jails, and prisons thanks to the color of their skin and the mutually reinforcing impacts of racism and classism?  

·        The DUSSPO accounted for a wildly disproportionate share of the world’s prisoners thanks to its creation of a giant mass incarceration state whose jails and prisons are disproportionately filled by Black and other people of color specially targeted for arrest by a colossal racist and militarized police state – this while calling itself “the land of the free”?

·        The DUSSPO marked tens of millions of its Black people with the permanent and multiply crippling barrier of a felony record, the “new Jim Crow,” a steep barrier to Black equality and advancement?

·        Many of the DUSSPO’s jurisdictions made it a crime for teachers to tell children and young adults the truth about the nation’s savage and ongoing histories of racial oppression (including two and a half a centuries of Black chattel slavery), genocide, imperialism, and patriarchy?

·        The DUSSPO’s police forces continued to kill Black and other nonwhite citizens at a terrible pace despite recurrent mass street protests against racist police violence?

·        The DUSSPO was so bound up with racism and sexism that neither of those evils could be overcome without the overthrow of the DUSSPO itself?

·        The DUSSPO’s many-sided ideological superstructure induced masses of people to focus their concerns only on themselves and their small circles and identity tribes, discouraging the mutualism and solidarity required for the liberation of all humanity from all forms of oppression and exploitation?

Armed Madhouse

What if:

·        The DUSSPO became a literal Armed Madhouse, lethally saturated with firearms, 125 for every one of its 100 people, including tens of millions of assault weapons, military weapons of war commonly used in an ongoing barbarian epidemic of mass shootings?

·        The DUSSPO had become a shooting gallery thanks largely to the power of a fascist gun lobby that not-so subtly threatened to assassinate public personalities who called for even slight measure of gun control?  

·        Gun violence and mass shootings, including even the recurrent massacre of schoolchildren, became so commonplace as to be essentially normalized under the DUSSPO?

·        The DUSSPO’s powerful multi-platformed mass for-profit media promoted and even celebrated sadistic violence and cruelty?

Plutocracy and Minority Rule

What if:

·        The DUSSPO’s political system was ruled by just two reigning and rotten political parties, both captive and allegiant to the wealthy capitalist Few?

·        Public opinion was practically irrelevant to the making of policy on one key issue after another, under the DUSSPO?  

·        The DUSSPO’s constant claim to be a “one person one vote democracy” and even “the greatest democracy the world has ever seen” was repeatedly mocked by basic empirical studies showing that majority sentiments were consistently trumped by concentrated wealth and power under its reign?

·        The DUSSPO’s democracy claims were contradicted also by its continued adherence to an ancient 18th century slaveowners’ Constitution that vastly overrepresented its most reactionary and hateful elements – a charter and structure that massively inflated the power of revanchist interests determined to roll back every basic civil, human, social, and environmental right won through mass popular struggle in modern times?

·        One of the DUSSPO’s two reigning capitalist parties crossed over to Christian white-nationalist fascism, rejecting previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law and determined to impose the openly authoritarian rule of men seeking to enforce traditional social hierarchies of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and culture by any and all means including sheer political and state violence?

·        That right-wing major party constructed a Dear Leader cult of personality and a vast revanchist policy network around an openly demented malignant narcissist, putschist, eco-cidalist, rapist, and wannabe fascist strongman who tried to stage a physical fascist coup after he was voted out of that DUSSPO’s top job in its last presidential election?   

·        That party re-nominated that lethal fascist maniac to run for the presidency in the DUSSPO’s next quadrennial election, this even as this menacing lunatic: called for the construction of giant concentration camps; accused nonwhite immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country;” advocated the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters; threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the US military on the streets on the day of his next inauguration; threatened to invade Mexico; promised to eliminate US leftists he described in Nazi-like language as “vermin;” accused his “radical Left” political enemies (in classic fascist terms) of undermining the nation from within.

·        That dangerous fascist monster stood a strong chance of winning back the presidency under the DUSSPO’s absurdly archaic and undemocratic elections system – this even as his new campaign and the times promised a presidency far more dangerously and fully fascist than his last one?    

·        The DUSSPO birthed tens of millions of deranged people who believed every insane and vindictive word from this malignant fascist’s mouth and social media feed, including his multiply disproven and Hitlerian claim that the last presidential election was “stolen” from him?

·        The “leftmost” of the DUSSPO’s two reigning ruling class parties consistently and cynically betrayed its manipulative and disingenuous progressive-sounding campaign promises on one key policy issue after another?  

·        That (not-so) “leftmost” major party functioned as a Weimar Party of appeasement, consistently enabling, conciliating, and collaborating with the major party that had gone full-on fascist?  

·        The DUSSPO’s reigning media-politics culture normalized the rightmost major party’s lurch to the far right, continuing for the most part to portray it as “conservative,” “populist” and “working class” well after that party’s embrace of radical, arch-capitalist fascism?

·        The great binary “democratic choice” offered to the people in the DUSSPO’s next quadrennial presidential electoral spectacle pitted the aforementioned fascist-putschist-rapist against a demented eco-cidal corporate imperialist who embraced and enthusiastically helped fund and equip an ongoing racist genocide being carried out by one of the DUSSPO’s allied regimes in the Middle East (see below)?  

Imperialism and War

What if:

·        The DUSSPO granted well more than half of its national government’s discretionary spending to the maintenance of world history’s most murderous and dangerous empire, the leading aggressor state in the world by far?

·        The DUSSPO’s empire accounted for 40% of the world’s military spending while maintaining more than 750 military bases across more than 80 countries? 

·        That empire slaughtered millions upon millions of people directly and indirectly over the past thirteen decades – this while propping up numerous authoritarian and mass-murderous regimes, undertaking repeated criminal invasions, and toppling dozens of governments around the world since 1945?

·        The DUSSPO’s empire operated on the assumption that it essentially owned the world, complaining about its own supposed victimization by foreign aggression when other nations dared to bolster and defend themselves against its military and proxy forces on those nations’ borders, far from US shores?!

·        The DUSSPO, headed by the only government to ever murder human beings with nuclear weapons, provoked ominous global conflicts with very real potential to set off a planetary nuclear war?

·        The DUSSPO’s economic base and military empire fueled a rising drift towards inter-imperial global war while developing, manufacturing, stockpiling, and positioning for launch thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying life on Earth many times over? 

·        The DUSSPO’s empire was the main enforcer of a world imperial system and division of labor so savagely unequal that half of humanity struggled to get by on less than $6.85 a day and 648 million people (8% of humanity) lived on less than $2.15 a day – a world where millions of women and girls were thrown into the sex trade and where super-exploited proletarians (including children) worked long hours in dangerous mines, mills, farms, and sweatshops so that US and other “First World” people could purchase goods at relatively low cost while thousands capitalist parasites possessed billionaire fortunes.

·        The DUSSPO’s leaders absurdly/circularly claimed that everything it did on the global stage is good because… it was good, advancing what a leading communist thinker called “the GTF— the Great Tautological Fallacy”: “the notion that America is a force for good in the world, and therefore whatever it does is good (or at least done with ‘good intentions’), even if the same thing when done by other forces, especially forces opposed to ‘us, is bad, is evil—because... because America is a force for good in the world.”

Backing a Genocidal and Racist Ethno-State Enlisted in Service to the Empire

What if:

·        The DUSSPO rushed to defend a racist-fascist apartheid and occupation ethno-state as that state conducted an openly mass-murderous, even genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against more than two million people trapped in an open-air concentration camp it had created?

·        The DUSSPO was that loathsome and fascistic ethno-state’s critical top bankroller, military equipper, and political protector, having long enlisted that state in the spread and enforcement of Third World Fascism across the periphery of a world imperialist system designed to distribute wealth from poor nations and regions to a small handful of wealthy nations headed by the DUSSPO?

·        The DUSSPO continued to back and defend that genocidal state even as that state openly murdered many thousands of children?

Ecocide and Disease

What if:

·        The DUSSPO’s underlying economic base required constant, cancer-like growth, thereby placing livable ecology at grave risk, raising the near-term specter of human extinction?

·        The DUSSPO’s mode of production and political and ideological superstructure were actively turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber?

·        The DUSSPO was the leading cause of a planet-wide climate catastrophe about which a leading science journal concluded that “Earth is under siege” in a period when “time is up” to stop “profoundly distressing scenes of suffering…no one has ever witnessed in the history of humanity”?

·        The DUSSPO set new oil and gas production records even as earth scientists made the most urgent and dire calls yet to be issued for keeping fossil fuels in the ground?

·        The DUSSPO was the main obstacle to ending the climate catastrophe, the main planetary force blocking a full transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources?

·        The many dire consequences of the climate crisis led by the DUSSPO included the generation of deadly diseases, including deadly new zoonotic pandemics that spread rapidly around the world?

·        The DUSSPO’s profit-based addiction to constant growth drained critical aquifers, cancelling critical water supplies for future generations?

·        The DUSSPO’s economic system poisoned soil, water, and air with toxic chemicals, contributing to a horrific worldwide cancer epidemic?

·        That rapacious system of constant commodification and Earth enclosure led by the DUSSPO produced mass extinction of other species and menaced the overall web of life on which humanity depends?  

·         The DUSSPO’s profit-based perversion of the food industry caused rampant obesity, diabetes, cancer, and other debilitating diseases and conditions at home and abroad? 

·       All this and more (see below) fed chronic trauma, fueling disease and despair among masses of people at home and abroad?

·        What if the DUSSPO cultivated and spread numerous deadly addictions rooted in the understandable desire of millions to at least fleetingly seem to escape the misery and alienation produced by its many soul-deadening horrors and oppressions?

Frankenstein Technologies, Vengeful Gods, Mass Stupidity, Collective Amnesia, Magical Thinking, and Intellectual Cowardice

What if:  

·        The DUSSPO’s economic/profits system hatched ominous Artificial Intelligence technologies with real potential to escape human control and bring about the destruction of the species?

·        The DUSSPO encouraged and promoted mass belief in a fundamentalist religion upholding a holy text that justified and even acclaimed genocide, slavery, endless war, rape, female bondage, and apocalypse in the name of a supposedly wise and benevolent God?

·        The DUSSPO turned millions of its citizens into paranoid conspiratorialists, diverting them from serious and scientific understandings of the historical, material, and systemic basis for their oppression?

·        The DUSSPO mired many on both its right and its left in subjectivist, anti-scientific, and tribal, me-first identity politics, rendering masses incapable of grasping the real systemic and historical-material bases of their shared oppression and revolutionary paths to liberation? 

·        The DUSSPO promoted ignorance, stupidity, and mental illness on a mass scale, rendering millions incapable of understanding and acting against the leading, grave, and mutually multiplying problems of their time, led by the following four apocalyptic horsemen, so to speak: climate catastrophe, pandemicide, nuclear war, and fascism?

·        The DUSSPO wiped out much of its populace’s memory of history, robbing people of critical lessons from past human experience?

·        The DUSSPO turned most of its intellectuals, teachers, journalists, pundits, authors and academics into cowards and sycophants, servants of its economic and imperial ruling class?

Dead Left

What if:  

·        The DUSSPO channeled the energy, anger, idealism, and activism of its more decent, caring, humanist, liberal, and progressive (“left”) people into one narrow reform channel and political dead end after another, leaving the underlying exterminist system wholly intact while selling absurdly time-staggered and narrow-spectrum candidate-centered bourgeois electoral extravaganzas as the only relevant form of popular political engagement – this despite the capture of the DUSSPO’s electoral and policy systems by capital, and despite the continuing death grip of an archaic Minority Rule constitutional electoral and governance order tilted (by design) to the advantage of the right-wing major party —- this with with no serious corrections even as that party had crossed over into full- on eco-cidal and genocidal fascism?

·        The DUSSPO’s supposedly radical “left” became deeply complicit in this mass mindfuck, dedicated to the pursuit of dead-end reformism (DER) and the sorry sheep-dogging of millions into the lethal gaslighting idiocy of “bourgeois electoral bullshit” (BEB) and toxic identitarian nothingness.

·        The DUSSPO’s “left” had become thoroughly lame, crippled by a large number of deadly afflictions.

An Actually Revolutionary Party

And what if:  

·        All of this could be shown to be scientifically and historically unnecessary, subject to abolition and transcendence on the path to a whole new and liberating way of living through communist-led socialist revolution?

·        There existed an actually revolutionary communist party based in USA — a party that resisted DER, BEB, identitarian nonsense, individualism, magical thinking, defeatism, subjectivist absurdism/postmodernism, academicism, opportunism, cynicism, accommodation-ism, indifference, localism, anarchism, denialism, anti communism and other deadly habits of highly ineffective and anti-revolutionary leftism.

·        That party’s leading thinker had worked up a sophisticated, science-based new communism building upon both the accomplishments and the mistakes (and other limits) of previous socialist revolutions and drafted a national revolutionary communist Constitution for an entirely different way of organizing life, politics, and society?

·        That party had offices in three major US cities, a regularly available and up to date theory-, fact-, and news-filled Website, a regular presence at demonstrations, an unparalleled penchant for effective agitation, a regular flow of up-to-date print and online commentary, skilled and knowledgeable activists ready to engage and a regular weekly news and commentary television show with brilliant hosts and commentators steeped in the theory and practice of the new communism?

As I’m sure all of my readers know, there’s no “what if” required for any of this. My “DUSSPO” is capitalism-imperialism, understood as both an underlying bourgeois, class-ruled mode of production and a political-ideological superstructure matched to and conditioned by that mode of production. The fascist major party mentioned above is the Republican Party and its fascist-putschist Hitler-admiring Dear Leader is the monstrous psychopath Donald Trump.  The not-so “leftmost” major and “Weimar” Party is the Democratic Party and its vile corporate-imperialist presidential candidate/incumbent is of course the decrepit warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden. “The Empire” that thinks it “owns the world” is of course the US Pax Americana. The “holy text” mentioned in this essay is the Christian Holy Bible. The vicious racist-fascist ethno-state mentioned above is of course the US imperial pit bull outpost Israel, currently carrying out a horrendous genocide against the Palestinian people with full US backing. See this recent New York Times report on US gas and oil production, going full blast despite the recent horrific climate reports.  

The revolutionary party mentioned at the end of this essay is the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, Revcoms for short. The party leader and top thinker is Bob Avakian, the author of dozen of books and many hundreds of essays, comments, and pamphlets articulating the theory and practice of what he and the RCP call “the new communism.”  The party’s website can be found here.  The party’s weekly television show, co-hosted by leading Revcoms Andy Zee and Sunsara Taylor, can be viewed every Thursday night here.   

My next commentary will elaborate on precisely what I mean when I say that the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” generated by the US-led capitalist-imperialist system mutually multiply each other.  After that I am going to pen some quick reflections on the frankly shameful way in which much of the US “left” responds to Avakian and his followers.

Two acronymized phrases I have used above – “bourgeois electoral bullshit (BEB)” and “GTF- the Great Tautological Fallacy” – are taken straight from Avakian, who is the “leading communist thinker” quoted above.

I am prone to acronymization myself.  “DUSSPO” and “DER” are my own. Whether they are keepers is not at all clea!. I’m not real excited about them but they were the best I could come up with for this essay. 😂