I. What Is and What Never Should Be
It can be very easy, living where and how we live, to lose sight of what we refer to, and even then in quotes ironic or otherwise, as reality. We are, as people, overburdened by the needs of commerce, and are thus inundated with advertising nearly every waking moment. The individualism of a pioneer society produces a situation where anyone can claim to be anything, no matter how distant the idealized conception is from the disappointing reality. Our most celebrated and well-known citizens are artists, politicians, religious figures, salesmen, and others for whom self-aggrandizement and myth-making is an intrinsic part of their success. By its very nature, we exist under a number of shared beliefs that many of us will defend with a deep-rooted passion despite their being demonstrably untrue: that our citizens are all equal under the law, that we do not have any kind of class system, that we are uniquely free among nations, that we are an exceptional people immune from the flaws and bad behaviors of other peoples, and, of course, that we are a democracy, where those who hold power are ultimately responsive to those they rule.
I have already written ad nauseam, in this space and elsewhere, of how crucial it is for anyone who is serious about the political future of our country, and indeed about the entire project of human life, to adapt a material analysis of the world, its economy and politics, and the way historical forces shape its fate. This is more true now than ever, as most of what is generated by our business leaders, political figures, and other people of note retreats ever farther from a discernible view of the real world and ever closer to a complete fantasy, a world in which the emperor’s new clothes are more splendid than ever and the voice of anyone who fails to see their majesty is drowned out as fatalistic, motivated by envy or hatred, and at the very least spoilsport behavior that only wants to ruin things for everybody. We have chosen the image over reality, faith over proof, and public relations over everything.
This is already extremely dangerous, because it is the condition of a society that is asleep — and not just asleep, but afraid of waking and sliding slowly towards comatose. We must learn to be particularly alert when we are told things by our economic and political leaders, and when those things are interpreted for us by our media; these are the falsehoods and distortions that can mean war instead of peace, ruin instead of comfort, and death instead of life. Especially at a time when we have confused editorializing and punditry with reporting, it is crucial to disdain what a company or organization or political party says it believes in and focus intently on what it actually does. We can none of us live in someone else’s good intentions, and as the things we need to live and thrive begin to disappear, we must look at what the world shows us and not to those who ask us to disregard our lying eyes.
II. The Duck Test
There is a concept that comes to us from machine theory: POSIWID, meaning, “the purpose of a system is what it does”. It is only about twenty years old, but it recalls other pragmatic cautions handed to us from older and less technologically inclined milieus. It is a variant of what has come to be called ‘the duck test’ — the idea that if something looks, sounds, and acts like a duck, it is reasonable to assume that it is, in fact, a duck. Even further back in history, we have the baker’s wisdom that the proof (that is to say, the test) of a pudding is in the eating, that the surest way to tell if the food you have prepared is sufficient to the task of feeding someone is to eat it. If it tastes good, is made properly, and provides nutrition and pleasure, it is a pudding. If not, it is…something else.
Understood in the context of our current moment, and especially as applied to party politics, it is a way of saying that a system is what it produces. Regardless of the intent of its creation, the grand statements of its operators, and the high-minded rhetoric used to defend it, a political system is what it does. If even a flawed and difficult process results in a population that is happy, that has its needs provided for, and is in the main free of fear, want, and bloodshed, then it is a good system. If even a righteous and well-meaning process results in a population that is unhappy, that does not get what it needs to thrive, and is largely overwhelmed with uncertainty, deprivation, and violence, then it is a bad system. It may make the owners of gambling operations, for example, displeased to hear their product described as a machine that takes in other peoples’ money and spits out addiction, desperation, and ruin, but anyone who pays any attention to the facts of the matter would be obliged to use that description rather than whatever one was favored by the operations’ marketing departments.
It is, of course, true that systems can be perverted in ways that do not hold the system to blame. Political systems, in particular, are hard to judge accurately, because external and internal forces bring them into constant conflict. Their directions can be sabotaged by opposition, incompetence, lack of access to resources, and any other number of factors. But, particularly when it is an older system that has had plentiful opportunities to demonstrate that its basic principles and assumptions are correct, it is fair to ask questions about why, exactly, it is not delivering the outcomes that it promised. If, to choose a relevant example, a politician insists that he must be elected to office in order to prevent the far crueler ascent of another politician, and the electorate takes this claim seriously and elects him, it is entirely appropriate for them to ask, years later, why the cruel interloper is still on the threshold of power, why nothing was done in the intervening time to lessen threat, and why we must elect him again to solve the same exact problem. If a system repeatedly creates chaos in the same ways, then it is no slander to say that creating chaos is what that system is for. It is what it produces.
III. Immortal Science
Anyone who is reading this likely already knows that I like my politics left and my Marxism flaming. So I don’t want to spend what is already going to be a painfully long essay recapitulating why I believe communism is superior to capitalism, why Marxist analysis is so consistently accurate, and why dialectical materialism is such an essential tool for understanding the world and navigating how it should be organized. But those are facts, and it will do no good to continue with writing this if I neglect to mention why so much of our current situation can be laid at the feet of capitalism and why it can only be properly interpreted, and thus changed, with an understanding of Marxist principles. It is important to re-emphasize them, because they account for many of the destructive forces exerting themselves on our lives today, and because it will not be possible to alleviate or eliminate those forces when the only political alternatives are two parties of capital.
Capitalism, by its essential nature, creates crises. It does this in cycles, one after another, nearly as predictable as the tides. In order to satisfy the needs of shareholders for ever-increasing profit, capital must constantly expand its markets, finding new people to sell things to; in order to ensure that this profit goes to those shareholders rather than to the workers who produce value, labor must be forever deprecated and made more precarious and cheap; and in order to fulfill the demand for ever more product, resources must be plundered, hoarded, and monopolized. In more recent years, as the supply-and-demand logic of markets is subsumed to a post-scarcity economy where most basic needs are if not actually met at least capable of being met, capitalism has moved away from making products that it sells to people in open markets to meet specific demands, and becomes what is known as rentier capitalism, where value and thus profit is extracted by more arcane means, such as complex financial instruments, intellectual property constraints, and licensing. Money stops being made by the sale of goods and services and starts being made by rent-seeking behaviors such as credentialing, subscriptions (that is, perpetually charging people for what they once would have owned), and the creation of artificial privileges.
Because there are inherent limits to this cycle, crises, such as many of the ones we face now, will periodically arise under capitalism. Markets dry up, requiring imperialist intervention to create new ones, leading to political instability. Resource extraction, intended to promote immediate profit rather than long-term stability, will cause environmental disaster, poisoning land, air, and water. The endless need for cheap labor impoverishes the working class, making them unable to afford the necessities of life and requiring capitalists to rely on an ever-shrinking number of wealthy and middle-class buyers to spend money on luxuries. Immigrant labor is needed to busy the population of refugees created by imperialist conflict or ecological damage. Over-reliance on diminishing energy resources stalls innovation, and stalled innovation necessitates unproductive and destructive novelties like AI and crypto. New technologies idle workers, but no provision is made for them to keep making a living; all the realized cost savings are diverted to the ruling class. Social control replaces production efficiencies in the workplace, and new class hierarchies must be invented. All of this leads to seemingly intractable conflict. There is no breaking this cycle; it is built into capitalism. Socialism can fulfill the needs of capitalism more efficiently and humanely, but capitalism cannot solve the problems of its own creation. No government that relies on capitalist modes of production can respond to the crises of capital beyond simply throwing bodies at them.
IV. Revolutions
As the great science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin famously put it, the ubiquity of capitalism is so all-consuming that its might can seem unconquerable. But, she added, so did the divine right of kings, an idea that, even as the masters of mankind attempt to drive us back to barbarism, seems absurd to us today. This is also true of the American form of government. We are often presented with, in response to a menu of dysfunctional aspects of our system (the electoral college, the general absence of any form of direct democracy, the weakness and corruption of officials, the increasingly blatant partisanship of the Supreme Court, mass disenfranchisement and gerrymandering, the difficulty of mounting any kind of opposition to the two dominant parties, the inability or unwillingness to contend with the rapacious nature of private wealth, etc.), with the claim that this is the system that we have, and that we have to face that ‘reality’ and work only within the narrow confines of the choices it provides. This is complete nonsense.
The history of the world, as old Karl taught us, is the history of class struggle — and it is the history of revolution. There is not a nation on Earth today that has not undergone a change of government; indeed, that we have nations at all is because rulership has changed. Tribalism, feudalism, monarchy, imperialism, colonialism, socialism, theocracy, military dictatorship, and many others have had their moments; some have been better, and some have been worse, but none have proven eternal. The European aristocracy survived almost fully intact until a century ago, and some remnants of it still exist. Africa broke free of empire only after the Second World War. There have been countless coups, revolutions, and less violent changes of government. The British Empire, once so vast and powerful that it defied nightfall, is in ruins. In the 20th century alone, enormous numbers of people in China, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazil — amongst the most populous nations on Earth — saw their governments change more than once, and many of their citizens participated in that change. In America alone (a country, lest we forget in the selfsame week that we celebrate its anniversary, that was established through violent revolution), slavery was once an immutable fact; now it is gone. We have extended the franchise to the non-propertied, to women, to those under 21. Our black population began as slaves, were freed, were bound once again by Jim Crow laws, and were liberated by civil rights legislation; they still suffer under discrimination in many insidious forms — many of them imposed by capitalism — but their status under the law has certainly changed repeatedly, as have those of women, children, other nonwhite people, queer people, the disabled, and any number of other human beings in any number of categories.
At every turn of the wheel, there were those who said change was impossible. Kings could not even imagine an end to their power, extending as it did from the will of God Himself; those who challenged it were though of as mad, or as vermin fit only to be exterminated. The rule of the feudal aristocracy seemed self-evidently preordained; why would they have so much wealth and influence if that were not the natural state of human affairs? Those who questioned it were dangerous radicals, not to be suffered lightly. Abolitionists were told that slavery was simply the way of things in America (even though many other countries had already abolished it), and were scolded by every legitimate authority to give up their unrealistic fantasy of a country without it and choose either full or partial enslavement of the black race, the only realistic options. This country would never tolerate women liberated from their husbands, immigrants stealing our jobs, gay people doing their disgusting business in public. These were not the minority opinion of a handful of reactionaries; they were bipartisan assumptions, believed by conservatives and liberals alike. Anyone who thought otherwise was simply delusional. As it was then, so it is now; we have allowed that it is both possible and (if you are of a more liberal bent) necessary that we further expand our understanding of who is worthy of human rights, but we will still not accept that our basic form of government is as tenuous as the rule of King George III proved to be.
V. The Definition of Insanity
If we are to accept that our government can be changed — if we are to even hope that it will turn away from its current lean into fascism, Christian nationalism, and a corporate death drive — then we must also accept, even if we do not favor its replacement with some form of socialism, that such a change will take place under the current system. The record of people in power relinquishing that power voluntarily is pretty abysmal. So, too, must we reject the idea that the change we desire (which, plainly speaking, means the treatment of all people as human beings with rights, the abandonment of minority rule, a move away from white supremacy and economic imperialism, some form of participatory governance, and the ability of the state to administer to the basic needs of the entire population) will come from the options we are allowed by that system. We will not, in short, be able to vote our way out of this.
Why? For one thing, America has never truly been a democracy. Its history is in many ways the history of a country begrudgingly allowing one group after another to participate in the show of electoral politics, if not in the rights and protections of full citizenship. The kind of disenfranchisement and gerrymandering practiced by both parties continues to the present day. The electoral college, a remnant of a much smaller population living in a largely agrarian slave state, makes no sense whatsoever in our present situation; neither does the system of representational apportionment; and yet no one in government seriously advocates for their replacement, despite a string of disastrous results over the last few decades. Elected officials spend far more time thwarting the will of the people than they do obeying it. The government is awash with money that distorts and corrupts it beyond recognition. The very notion of an unelected, unanswerable Supreme Court with immense power and a lifetime appointment is undemocratic on its very face, and yet even as the incumbent president decries its partisanship and tolls a doom bell at the practically inevitable results of its decisions, he says he will do nothing to change its makeup. Most people are quite aware that they have no political power whatsoever and that their government is unresponsive to their needs, and voter turnout shrinks every year as a result.
For another, we are simply not allowed to vote on many of the issues that effect our lives in the most serious ways. We have never been allowed to vote, one way or another, on any of America’s wars of imperialism. Almost nowhere in America is there such a thing as democracy in the workplace, ensuring that the place we spend most of our time is governed entirely by people we cannot elect, recall, or reject. It is a truism that the rich will never let us vote away their wealth. Most of the ‘progressive’ legislation of the last century, whether popular or not, has been accomplished by judicial fiat rather than any kind of election. The barrier for making a change to the constitution is almost insurmountably high, and even if it is accomplished against the odds, it is subject to revocation at any time by six reactionaries on a single court. It is such a hurdle that most of our leaders don’t even bother; there has not been an amendment to the constitution in 53 years, the second-longest gap in American history. It is impossible to the point of being a national joke to break the stranglehold of the two-party system; together, the Democrats and the Republicans have arranged the law so that one or the other of them will be in power at any given time in perpetuity. That’s the way they want it, and that’s the way they like it; the only dissent that has manifested of late is that the G.O.P. clearly thinks that two parties is one too many, and the Democrats have largely reacted to this by deciding that it’s not that big a deal as long as they can keep fundraising and act as a sort of job placement service for graduates of the better schools.
VI. Red vs. Blue
If you are a leftist in America, first of all, congratulations and solidarity, comrade! You have found your way to a sane and decent political position despite the accumulated power and propaganda of the richest nation in the history of the world trying to steer you away from it. Keep up the fight! Second, you have almost certainly been asked why you are harsher on Democrats than you are on Republicans. It is the understanding of the liberal (though not of the left, who tend to have a deeper understanding of the political alignment of other countries) that they and leftists are natural allies, if there is even any difference between the two at all. Leftists tend to be more circumspect; they know they will need liberals to win, but depending on their experience and inclination, they are likely to view them as either uncomfortable allies who need an awful lot of political education or, recalling the way liberals have historically turned on the left and embraced fascism in times of crisis, outright enemies.
Look: Let’s put our cards on the table. Obviously, from a moral perspective and in terms of desired outcome, liberals are easier allies than conservatives. The conservative project in America is reactionary at best and openly fascist at worst. It is inextricably racist, white supremacist, authoritarian, theocratic, and anticommunist. Every aspect of its political project has been to elevate ruling elites, crush dissent, apply unequal treatment under the law, and reinstitute slavery in all but name. It is bloodthirsty, dominionist, and murderous. But, critically, aside from minor shadings of tone for publicity’s sake, they do not pretend to be otherwise. Their rhetoric is nakedly in favor of an unequal, brutal, and tyrannical rule by a cadre of white billionaires, with no concern for human rights, the common good, or social or economic justice, and that’s at the best of times — at the worst of times, like now, their language is indistinguishable from that of openly fascist parties.
Liberals, on the other hand, purport to want what the left wants, at least in terms of social justice: equal rights for all, an end to racism, equality between the sexes, peace, and prosperity. And if they differ from the left in the belief that a capitalist system can deliver those outcomes, well, what’s a little disagreement among friends? But again, we need only look at history to see the lie for what it is. In every nation and every situation, when a reactionary movement has been on the ascent, liberals have sacrificed the left and embraced the right. Even now, as neo-fascist parties gain ground in Europe, liberal and centrist parties turn against immigrants and embrace the eliminationist language of the right, just as they do in America. The Democrats today warn against the unimaginable horrors of a second Trump administration even as they move to embrace Trumpian policies on immigration, step up their support of genocide against the Palestinians, and throw trans rights under the bus. As they did with Vietnam, with civil rights, with gay marriage, and with a hundred other issues, they abandoned inherently conservative positions only when they became politically harmful. And all of this to ‘compromise’ (better to say ‘appease’) a rightist movement that will never reward them for their craven sacrifices! Just as so many blacks who moved north during the Great Migration discovered that it was often easier to contend with whites who were openly racist against them than those who pretended to support them while quietly undermining them at every turn, leftists have learned that it is easier to fight the honest villainy of Republicans than the false allyship of Democrats.
VII. You Can’t Win ‘Em All
The reluctance of liberal Democrats to demand, or even expect, change from the party that they support with near blind fervor is particularly perplexing when you consider that most of the criticisms the left levels at the party are ones that they themselves share. While there are those who are merely engaging in a sort of political fandom, like those who embrace bog-standard conservative ideologues like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney if they make the right kind of frustrated noises at the rise of a Donald Trump, and those who simply don’t understand how politics work, like the ones who express shock when a candidate doesn’t win the White House despite a victory in the popular vote even though the electoral college has been the law of the land since its founding, most are equally frustrated by the direction of the party.
There are innumerable liberals who recognize that Joe Biden is a weak candidate who is betting the future of the country on his own ambition and determination to collect on the promise of being leader of the free worlds. There are plenty who are stymied by incoherent nominating processes, who can’t understand the party’s failure to support progressive candidates, who oppose the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. They are just as likely as anyone else to be infuriated by the unwillingness of the Democratic leadership — a gerontocracy so decrepit that most of its higher-ups are two or even three decades older than the sclerotic Soviets we once mocked — to relinquish power, step down, and let a newer (and more popular) generation of electeds take over the party. Blinkered as they may be, they aren’t stupid; they see as well as we do that there is no future in a party that allows itself to stagnate at the altar of its elders’ ego and vanity.
The problem arises in how they choose to deal with it. For many liberals, especially the more comfortable ones, politics is an occasional duty and not the very stuff of life. Voting is the option offered to them by the state, and it is all the politics they care to engage in. Occasionally one will be driven enough to make phone calls, write letters, or canvas, or write a check if they can afford it, but that’s about the extent of it for most voters. They agree that there should be electoral reform, that the leadership needs to clean house, that more exciting candidates with better views on the issues should be put forth — but that is for the party to do, not for them. It is someone else’s job. And who can blame them? It’s not as if they have any say in the internal policies of the party beyond their vote. Neither major party in the U.S. operates on internal democracy. So, when the time comes, they insist that the time to fix these problems is later, and that all that can be done now is to hold your nose, vote for the current office-holder no matter how noxious their policies, and hope for a win, because a win is always better than a loss. All that other stuff can wait until tomorrow, but, of course, tomorrow never comes. This means their only ‘strategy’, if you can call it that, is to hope for the impossible: a Democratic Party that never loses, and indeed expands its wins, without ever doing anything different. Thus it is that, like capitalism, liberalism falls victim to a crisis of its own making.
VIII. Crops without Plowing
All of this points to a common flaw in the approach, not just of liberals within the Democratic Party of the United States, but in the entire liberal philosophy of governance. Liberalism — as commonly understood outside of America as a economic and political philosophy — grew out of several strains of European thought: Enlightenment theories of human nature, rationalism, a growing anti-clerical and anti-monarchist sentiment, and a bourgeoning humanism. Most germanely, it believed in the perfectibility of human nature, and believed that there was no place for violence in the affairs of mankind. Force, coercion, the state’s monopoly on violent behavior: These were all relics of the barbarous past, and there was no problem that could not be solved through the ordinary workings of the systems of governance. This was all very noble and admirable, but it assumed a universality of good intention that simply did not exist, and was incapable of addressing the problem of what to do if one’s political opponents did not not share one’s reluctance to engage in ruthless behavior. (It was also, in the main, insincere, as it abstracted the violence wrought by capitalism, and exempted the lives of those outside our borders whose lives were ended by imperialist murder.)
So it was that liberalism in America developed an allergy to the mere possibility of revolution, and to even the possibility of answering the eventual assaults on their precious social consensus by reactionaries in kind. This was when the cracks in the structure began to show, and the so-called paradox of tolerance began to form; right-wing elements who had no respect for the values of decency, fairness, and equality under the law hid behind toleration and respect for the system while subverting and degrading it, and liberals found themselves unwilling to fight back, lest they violate the very norms their opponents did not believe in and intended to eradicate. It was a textbook example of the kind of material dialectic that Marxism was based on, but liberals and conservatives alike were united in their fear and hatred of communism, so the lesson was unread and unlearned. Eventually, by the time a genuine threat to American democracy appeared in the form of Trumpism, the liberal consensus found itself unable to respond to it in any meaningful way. What should we do?, came the question, and, like Hamlet, our leaders answered: Why, anything, but to the purpose.
And now, we find ourselves at the precipice of despair. A man who seems intent on overthrowing democracy and the rule of law is poised to win control of the government, and he has found himself in that position despite democracy and the rule of law, neither of which he respects. But his opponent, flailing and directionless, refuses to violate those same norms to fight back against the threat, even though he — and all of those who support him — agree that it is dire and existential in nature. Instead of fighting fire with fire, or even with water, they fight it with air, which only serves to fuel it. They want the soothing rain of democracy, civil rights, and liberation, but they cannot stand to hear the thunder and lightning of the revolutionary change this will require. Rather than contemplate a rejection of capital and empire, or even minor changes to the mechanics of governance such as the electoral college or the makeup of the Supreme Court, they, like liberals have always done historically, attempt to appease the right by meeting them halfway on anti-immigrant policy, transphobia, rejection of the left, and aggressive militarism. This is how we come to a pass where we are happy to materially support a genocide rather than do what needs to be done to smother an emerging fascist movement. Watching the Biden administration continue to abet the mass slaughter in Gaza, then turn to the American people and firmly declare his intention to do nothing about the Supreme Court’s decision to throw him (and the entire system of American government) to the wolves, is one of the most shameful spectacles imaginable; but the liberal consensus is that we must continue to support this disgraceful cowardice at all costs.
IX. Why We Fight
What happens if Trump wins? This question is at the heart of every argument made by liberal Democrats today. It is the answer to any questions, however legitimate, about our political choices. Are you concerned that Joe Biden lacks the capacity to govern the country? Drive that concern from your mind, because if you don’t vote for him Trump will win. Do you find Biden’s role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine distasteful? Get over it, because if you make it your line in the sand, Trump will win. Has it become apparent to you that our political system is corrupted beyond repair? Don’t worry about it, because if it keeps you out of the voting booth in November, Trump will win. It is simply a fact, we are told: No matter how deep your distaste for the system, no matter how plentiful are the injustices under its shadow, no matter how betrayed you feel at Joe Biden’s performance as a national leader, just swallow hard and punch that (D) slot on your ballot, because otherwise Trump will win. That’s just a fact.
But it is here that we see the value in distinguishing facts from truth. It is, indeed, a fact that if Biden doesn’t get enough votes, Trump will win; it is equally a fact that this is a situation that has been developing for quite some time, and that the Democrats did practically nothing to prevent it. Joe Biden’s weakness as a candidate is his fault, not ours. The left has urged systemic changes for decades, and our warnings about what ignoring those changes would mean were met with scorn and mockery. Now that the consequences we predicted have arrived, liberals have inexplicably decided that they are our fault. Every missed opportunity, every failure to seize the moment, every denial and delay in fixing the holes in the system have suddenly become our cross to bear, and it is now our responsibility to return to office a leader who we never supported, who holds us in contempt, and who, after begging us to elect him in the first place to end the threat of Donald Trump, stands before us four years later, having done absolutely nothing to slow that threat, and again insists that we must elect him to end the threat of Donald Trump. But the threat of Donald Trump is not going away. Project 2025, the current framework for permanent reactionary rule in America, will not end with his defeat, because the forces behind it still exist and operate unchallenged. So yes, Trump will very likely win, an outcome we may place at the feet of many actors: Trump, Biden himself, reactionaries, and liberals. But…so what if he does?
A Trump victory will, without question, bring pain and suffering to many. But a Biden win does not represent a cessation to that pain and suffering; it only represents a lessening in degree, a diversion to people far away that we can safely ignore. It was the Democrats who foreclosed on the possibility of eliminating Trump as a threat; it was they who elevated his candidacy in the arrogant belief that he would be easy to defeat, and it was they who hardened his position by throwing some of the weakest and most widely disliked alternatives into the ring against him. As we have also discussed here, it is by no means certain that a Trump win would necessarily mean an irrevocable plunge into fascism, but if it does, what of it? To hear the Democrats talk, it is the end of the American experiment, the death of democracy forever, the shutting out the lights in the abandoned edifice of human decency once and for all. It is hard to know how to respond to this sort of defeatist attitude, particularly when it is those on the left being accused of nihilistic ‘doomerism’ when we point out the futility of salvaging a broken system. The abolitionists did not throw up their hands in defeat when another slave state was admitted into the union; they kept on fighting. The people of Europe — at least the ones we remember with fondness — did not decide it was all over when Hitler steamrolled into their countries; they kept on fighting. If Trump wins, and he truly is Hitler 2.0, then nothing is over; it is merely time to fight again, and more seriously. Would it be preferable to not have to fight, to not have such a deep threat in the heart of our nation? Of course! But it was the Democrats who foreclosed on that possibility, not us.
X. Naming the Enemy
If a Trump victory is guaranteed, then we must be ready to fight against his reign. But if, by some miracle, Trump loses — to Biden, or to whatever ambitious replacement the party manages to put forward — we must still be prepared to fight. This is one of the most important lessons of the moment. Until we are rid of capitalism, until we can put forth a unified and coherent workers party with a legitimate chance at victory, we must view any winning party of capitalism as our opposition. It was not Trump who invented drone strikes and used them indiscriminately against women and children; indeed, the first challenge of the century to the president’s immunity from prosecution for high crimes was leveled against Obama. (They ruled in his favor.) It was not Trump who built the detention centers near the border, not Trump who injected billions in military steroids into local police departments across the country, not Trump who gave Israel the green light to massacre thousands of innocent children. Trump did not respond to COVID in the most half-assed way imaginable and then pretend it wasn’t even happening, leading to the needless death of uncountable numbers of people.
We need not look very far at history to see that no party in the U.S. has a monopoly on bad policy, authoritarian rule, or corruption. We don’t even have to look at history! Bob Menendez is still in office, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema have only recently left, and the number of embarrassing reactionaries who hold political office under the Democratic banner is enormous. We insist on a red state/blue state divide, but Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has proven herself to be in the pocket of donors who quail at even the prospect of alleviating the harm done by our addiction to fossil fuels, and Governor Gavin Newsom of California has been as great a disappointment for his state as Hochul has for hers. These are the two most populous states in America, and some of their worst decisions have come from areas in which Democrats have complete legislative control. Big-city Democratic mayors have also been disastrous, from mild disappointment (Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Dallas’ Eric Johnson) to complete failures (San Francisco’s London Breed, New York’s Eric Adams). All over America, for decades, Democrats have supported imperialist wars, aided and abetted police brutality, facilitated our addiction to coal and oil, and taken huge sums of money from any wealthy corporations or individuals who care to offer it.
It is our duty to fight this, as well. It is our duty to call it what it is, and what it is is morally unacceptable. Would Trump be worse? Almost certainly. But bad and worse should not be our only options. Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil, and a system that only ever presents us with a choice between an openly sociopathic party of capitalism that promotes brutality and violence at home and a more conventionally corrupt party that favors the outsourcing of brutality and violence overseas cannot in any recognizable sense of the word be called a democracy. If this is a choice, it is the choice offered by the extortionist: pay me, or your house will burn down. It matters little to the victim if it’s the extortionist personally burning down their house or simply allowing someone else to do it. If the ‘good’ party refuses to align itself with the common values of humanity, if it will not force out its octogenarian placeholders, if it continues to insist that political corruption is bad generally but acceptable personally, then we must no longer allow them that choice. We must make it for them.
XI. Opting Out
How do we do that? The first step is refusing to vote in the upcoming election. Here I do not mean refusing to vote unless the Democrats make this or that promise about COVID or Gaza or student loan debt or whatever other issue you care about; the time for that is past. Nor do I mean refusing to vote altogether; while I am not much of an electoralist, I have worked with socialist candidates at a micro-local level and I have seen the good that can come of voting for even the most minor of positions, such as alderperson or school board member. What I mean is: do not lend your support to either party. Refuse the entire charade. Leave a blank spot where your choice of president would otherwise be. Make a statement in the only way that is ever offered to you: your ballot. Use it to deliver a statement that you will not support either the party of domestic fascism or the party that offers you genocide and indifference as an ‘alternative’. Do not participate in this false choice.
There are those who will attack you for this. They will call it lazy, stupid, or self-defeating. They will call you a ‘quitter’, as if the President of the United States has not already given up on his far more important duties. They will say you are abandoning your duties as a citizen, rather than simply responding to your government abandoning its duties to you. They will say you have chosen to do nothing, when, as we will see, you have actually chosen to do far more than they will ever do. If anyone is abdicating their responsibilities as a citizen, it is the people who think it is enough simply to punch a button A or B every four years and then respond with a shrug to everything that happen in between, before doing the same thing again four years later. It is difficult to imagine anything lazier and less interested in the vital everyday business of politics than someone who claims that we only ever have one choice, and must pick only those options that are presented to us and, the rest of the time, simply accept as inevitable the fact that those options get worse and worse every time.
Boycotts matter. Refusals echo and amplify. Opting out of a bad system is important. We are only now coming to terms with the fact that over half the voting-age population — a majority of whom are people of color — correctly understand that the government is doing nothing to help them or protect them or act in their interests and so simply decline to participate in what is, for them, a meaningless spectacle. The party will never admit it, but the Uncommitted movement — with a mandate to write in’ uncommitted’ on Democratic primary ballots, organized in swing states by socialists — made a much bigger impact than anyone thought possible, with hundreds of thousands of people signaling to Biden that he no longer has the confidence of voters because of his actions in Gaza. Governments, no matter how violent and corrupt, always find themselves in peril when they lose the support of their people. A regime without a base cannot long survive. In a time when very few things we can actually do make any difference, it makes a difference.
XII. No Shortcuts
A refusal to participate in a bad system, though, is only the beginning. You can quit a toxic workplace, but you still have to make a living. This is where liberals and centrists tend to ask the question: What are you doing? We get that you don’t want to vote for either party, but what’s the alternative? (This is inevitably followed by a litany of reasons why whatever your answer is simply won’t work.) The answer is difficult. It requires us to march beyond our borders, perhaps even off the map entirely. It demands much, from all of us, working together. It is a gamble on a future that we may not live to see — and that may never come to pass at all. The forces arrayed against the socialist future are immense and powerful; they have spent the last century and a half piling high the bodies of anyone who attempted to realize it, or even advocated for it. This hostility, fear, and violence is likely only to increase as environmental destruction encroaches on every nation and the wealthy hoard even more money and resources to maintain their extravagance.
But it is not impossible. Socialism has been realized in dozens of countries, big and small. It is not an impossible dream. We have seen it happen. Has it been flawed? Of course. Has it often involved violence and oppression? Certainly. Has it failed, has it been failed, has it been made to fail? All true. But all of these things are true of capitalism in spades. It has failed to provide the most basic needs of the vast majority of humanity; it has snuffed out uncountable millions of lives through poverty, disease, deprivation, disaster, and outright murder; it has destroyed entire cultures through imperialism and colonialism and white terror. It has created an untouchable, unanswerable elite of men and women rich beyond the wildest dreams of Croesus and Mansa Musa. And yet we do not hear that capitalism is impossible, or unrealizable, or a madman’s fever dream.
The reason that so many people fear and disparage the replacement of our doomed system with communism is because it will require them to work at politics. Gone will be the days when all that is required of them is marking a few spots on a ballot and popping it in the mailbox, and going back to living their lives as always, pausing only occasionally to mock the aspirations of their inferiors. Socialism requires one thing over all: solidarity. We must join together, even with those we dislike for whatever reason; we must work together, and the work will be hard, because its aim will be to repair the vast damage to our society and our planet wrought by capitalism, not just to amass personal wealth and privilege. In time, it will result in more leisure, more comfort, and more security for more people than capital has ever offered, but to arrive there, it will require sacrifice and dedication. It will forge bonds of comradeship between people who would likely never otherwise meet, but until then, it will mean putting aside individualism, petty resentment, and the finicky, neurotic narcissism that keeps us away from one another. Most of all, it will require an understanding and an acceptance that politics is not something that happens every once in a long while and is taken care of by people you will never meet, like sending one’s laundry out to be cleaned. It will force us to see that politics is something that everyone does, every day, as part of their role as citizens of a free nation. It has happened before; people in their millions in every corner of the world have come together to build a future that would not exclude or marginalize them. It can happen here.
XIII. The Way Out
If there is one thing that liberals are right about, it’s that this is a moment of great import. It is not the end; it is never the end. But crises are piling up one after the other, the contradictions have been heightened to a spear point, and the forces of reaction and savagery are no longer bothering to conceal their intentions. We are beyond the tipping point for all manner of social, economic, and environmental problems. Humanity will likely survive the coming storms, but many individual humans will not. There is precious little road to kick the can down anymore. It has always been socialism or barbarism, but the barbarism is no longer remote and hard to see. The barbarians are not at the gate, they are already inside the walls and are in the process of looting the throne room. To fail to act now is to tell the slave in the South that she must accept a life of misery and servitude; to tell the worker that he must wreck his body and sacrifice his future to dig out the coal until his body and his future are all used up; to tell the Jew that whatever she is experiencing, it is a matter for Germany to sort out.
So what can we do about it? There are many things, but they all require certain commonalities: education, organization, and solidarity. Education means learning about capitalism, understanding the flaws in liberalism, taking the threat of fascism seriously, and cultivating a clear vision of the world you want as well as the one you want to leave behind. Organizing means building structures, educating others, creating alternative systems, and developing strategies and tactics that will both whittle away at the flawed world we have inherited and leaving enough raw materials to crave out a new one. And solidarity means overcoming your reluctance, working alongside people you do not know or do not like, finding ways that you can contribute to the cause even if they are small or unglamorous, and rejecting the ego-driven individualism that destroys unity. All of them require commitments of time and effort. All of them can be dangerous and may place you at risk in any number of ways. All of them are necessary, all of them require effort, and all of them require courage, a quality sorely lacking anywhere in our country today. But all of them will yield rewards beyond imagining, and give you a sense of satisfaction that you have likely never felt before.
One of the great organizers of the 21st century made it plain: There are no shortcuts to this goal. Organizing against power can be incredibly tedious, frustrating, annoying, and risky. You will plant the seeds of trees you will not survive to see grow. It is not a path to riches or glory. You will have to make choices that lead you far afield from the life that was set before you. You will not be a Lenin; you will be a happy soldier in the Red Army, a humble toiler in the factories. But you will be building something greater than yourself, for people who you will never meet; you will be creating a newer, better, future. The first step, as I will always argue, is to join the Democratic Socialists of America, this country’s largest socialist organization and the only one that, unlike the Democrats and Republicans and even many unions, other leftist parties, and activist non-profits, practices full democracy. Get as involved as you can. But that is only the first step. It will lead you down a road that branches in a thousand different directions. Nothing, ultimately, is certain but this: there is nothing more left to us but to organize and fight.