Needed Now: A Real and Radical Left
by
Paul Street
From Truthdig
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in 2016. (Marc Nozell / CC BY 2.0)
It's "socialism or barbarism." So wrote the brilliant German Marxist
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in 1915. The 20th and 21st centuries have borne
her out. The list of barbarian horrors that have disfigured the human record
under the class rule of capital across the last century is daunting indeed.
Now, however, we have to say that Luxemburg put things too gently. Marx and
Engels got closer to our contemporary reality in 1848. They wrote in "The
Communist Manifesto" about how the long-standing class struggle between
producers and appropriators always ends "either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes."
It's socialism or barbarism if we're lucky. To be more precise, its
eco-socialism or annihilation as capital turns the planet into a giant
greenhouse gas chamber. The earth science is perfectly clear. The "common
ruin" of all is precisely where humanity is headed after half a millennium
under the rule of a system that relies on permanent unsustainable expansion
to avert collapse. "The rich," the French ecological writer Herve Kempf
observed 11 years ago, "are destroying the Earth." Well, not the earth
itself, just the chances for a decent and organized human future.
The 21st-century global bourgeoisie isn't doing this because it is loaded
with malevolent ecological Scrooges who need to be visited by ghosts of the
environmental Christmas past, present and future. Capitalists are driven to
pillage and poison and rape the common good, including the ecological
commons, by systemic imperatives compelling them to relentlessly commodify
everything under the sun and to drive infinite growth on a finite planet.
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For Marx, and I think for any authentic left today, the moral predisposition
of bourgeois "elites" was and is of little concern. It's not about speaking
truth to wealth and power. Beseeching our capitalist masters to be nicer and
smarter for the common good of all is a fool's errand. We're not trying to
write a Charles Dickens novel in which rich Mr. Brownlow saves the day for
poor Oliver Twist or the bad capitalist Scrooge becomes the good capitalist
Scrooge. We know there's no appealing to capitalist chieftains' better
angels where money and profit are concerned.
Real leftists know that five people owning as much wealth as the bottom half
of the species while millions starve and lack adequate health care and half
the U.S. population is poor or near-poor is capitalism working.
We know that giant corporations buying up every last family farm, tapping
every new reserve of cheap global labor, raping the Congo's raw materials in
alliance with warlords, purchasing the votes of nearly every elected
official, extracting every last fossil fuel and driving the planet past the
limits of environmental sustainability is capitalism working.
We know that a giant military-industrial complex, generating vast fortunes
for the owners and managers of high-tech "defense" (war and empire) firms
while schools and public parks and infrastructure and social safety nets are
underfunded-we know that that too is capitalism working.
I could go on.
The only solution, a real left would know, along with Marx, is for workers
and citizens to organize collectively to overthrow the amoral profits system
and take control of what they produce and how society is organized.
Power to the people. Power to the workers. And power to the commons, whose
enclosure was and remains among other things the making of modern capitalism
and its wage-enslaved working class.
That is what I have always understood to be the basic irreducible
bottom-line perspective of anything that deserves since the time of Marx to
be called "the left."
I'm always amused when I hear mainstream U.S. media reporters, talking heads
or pundits refer to "the left" in statements like "the left won't like
Trump's tax plan" or "the left is gearing up for the 2018 midterms." What
left are they talking about?
In the reigning U.S. media-politics culture, "the left" refers first and
foremost to the Democratic Party and its many allies at places like The New
York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, most
of academia and a host of other elite sectors and actors. But for anyone who
knows anything about the history and meaning of radical movements, calling
the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats and their many media allies "the left"
is like calling the National Pork Producers Association vegan. As the
multimillionaire House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a young
CNN town hall questioner last year, "We're capitalist and that's just the
way it is."
The Robert Rubin-approved and Goldman Sachs- and Citigroup-backed
presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote and spoke with gushing praise for
the lords of capital and their supposedly glorious profits system, which he
called the source of a "prosperity that's unmatched in human history." His
policy record as a militantly pro-Wall Street and arch-neoliberal president
consistently matched his words. He did more for the nation's leading
financial institutions and corporations than any Republican president could
have in the wake of the Great Recession, caused by concentrated wealth.
And he was proud of it. "People call me a socialist sometimes," Obama told
some top corporate executives at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council with a
laugh in late 2013. "But no," the arch-neoliberal president, TransPacific
Partnership advocate and drone war champion said, eliciting chuckles from
his ruling-class friends, "you've got to meet the real socialists. You'll
have a sense of what a socialist is. I'm talking about lowering the
corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private
marketplace." The CEOs in attendance got a big chuckle out of what
CounterPunch called that "tender ruling class moment."
"Socialists"? The "lying neoliberal warmonger" and arch-corporatist Hillary
Clinton recently added those nasty socialists in the Democratic Party to the
list of people other than herself and her Wall Street bankrollers that she
blames for her defeat in 2016. If socialists in the Iowa Democratic caucuses
had properly understood and respected her commitment to what top Democrats
oxymoronically called "inclusive capitalism," Hillary thinks, Trump would
not be president.
Leftish liberals call for the supposed "party of the people" to abandon its
"corporate and cultural elitism" and "return" to its purported grand mission
of "fighting for social justice and ensuring that workers get a fair deal."
When, the plaintive progressive cry goes, will they learn how to win? But
for the dismal Dems it isn't about winning; it's about serving corporate
masters. As William Kaufman told Barbara Ehrenreich on Facebook last year,
"The Democrats aren't feckless, inept, or stupid, unable to 'learn' what it
takes to win. They are corrupt. They do not want to win with an
authentically progressive program because it would threaten the economic
interests of their main corporate donor base. . The Democrats know exactly
what they're doing. They have a business model: sub-serving the interests of
the corporate elite."
The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a
proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-apocalyptic right, than lose to
the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their
own party. So what if Bernie Sanders, running (imagine!) in accord with
majority progressive opinion would have been considerably more likely to
defeat Trump than the incredibly unpopular and transparently elitist Hillary
Clinton in the general election in 2016? The Democrats preferred handing the
presidency and Congress to the Insane Clown President and the ever more
radical right over letting a leftish neo-New Dealer into the White House.
That was the "Inauthentic Opposition"-as the late Sheldon Wolin called the
Democrats in 2008-doing its job.
Among other things, Russiagate is the Inauthentic Opposition following its
business model and doing its job, working to cover its tracks by throwing
the debacle of its corporatist politics down George Orwell's memory hole and
attributing their largely self-made defeat to Russia's allegedly powerful
interference in our supposed democracy. Russiagate is meant to provide
corporate Democrats cover not only for 2016 but also for 2018 and 2020. It
is meant to create a narrative that lets the Fake Resistance Party continue
nominating corporate captive neoliberal shills and imperialists who pretend
to be progressive while they are owned by the nation's own homegrown
oligarchs, the real masters of America's oxymoronic "capitalist democracy."
This year's crop of Democratic congressional candidates is disturbingly
loaded with military and intelligence veterans, a reflection of the
Democrats' determination to run as the true party of empire.
As Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano write in their book "The Russians are
Coming, Again," "The scapegoat of Russia functions as a distraction for a
ruling class that has lost its legitimacy."
What is the Democrats' leading cry? That the terrible Trump is truly
terrible. And, of course, that is all too terribly true. But after you've
bemoaned the terribleness of the beastly, orange-tinted Trump for the
10,000th time, are you ready to get serious about the systemic and richly
bipartisan, oligarchic context within which he has emerged? "The Trump
administration," my fellow Truthdigger Chris Hedges reminds us:
"
"did not rise . like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the
result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a
product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that
we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations
around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the
next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not
Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the
mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don't count."
Corporate Democrats could well re-elect Trump in 2020. The smart money now
is on their running the tepid neoliberal centrist Kamala Harris. Part of
what could make her irresistible to the corporate and professional-class
know-it-alls atop the party is that she would be a "progressive
neoliberal"-bourgeois identity politics double whammy when it comes to
keeping their own party's portside wing at bay. With Obama as their standard
bearer, the corporate-war Democrats got to call their progressive critics
racists. With Hillary as their candidate, the corporate-war Democrats got to
call their progressive critics sexists. With Kamala Harris atop the ticket
they could call their disobedient left racists and sexists if progressives
dare to publicly notice her captivity to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the
Council on Foreign Relations and the military-industrial complex.
Not that Sanders, who was the Democrats' best chance to defeat Trump, is all
that "left." Bernie "F-35" Sanders' occasional and carefully hedged claims
to be a "democratic socialist" were contradicted by his dutiful if quiet
embrace of the mass-murderous U.S. military empire. It takes real chutzpah
to repeatedly mention Scandinavia as his social-democratic role model
without once noting that Sweden, Denmark and Norway spend comparatively tiny
percentages of their national budgets on militarism. Failure to tackle the
giant U.S. war budget (a vast mechanism of upward wealth transfer) means
that you can't pay for poverty-ending progressive transformation at home.
Sanders has never seriously criticized capitalism, the profits system or
modern class rule. He has never questioned the underlying and foundational
institutional despotism of capital over labor and the commons that makes a
mockery of the West's democratic pretense while placing human life itself at
grave peril. Along the way, Sanders has sustained progressives' deadly
attachment to the nation's narrow and strictly time-staggered election- and
candidate-centered politics. "The really critical thing," the great American
radical historian Howard Zinn once sagely wrote, "isn't who's sitting in the
White House, but who is sitting in-in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the
halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying
offices and demonstrating-those are the things that determine what happens."
"The only thing that's going to ever bring about any meaningful change,"
Noam Chomsky told Abby Martin in the fall of 2015, "is ongoing, dedicated,
popular movements that don't pay attention to the election cycle." Sanders
was and remains about the masters' election cycle, which is dedicated to the
delusional notion that we the people get meaningful democratic input into
policy by spending three minutes in a voting booth choosing from among a
handful of candidates selected in advance for us by the nation's unelected
dictatorship of money once every two years.
The Democrats know that lots of citizens think like Zinn. That's why they
set up Astroturf outfits like Indivisible and Move On and the Town Hall
Project. These fake resistance groups masquerade as extra-electoral
grass-roots movements, but they're all about channeling everything into a
big get-out-the-vote campaign for candidates affiliated with the
not-so-left-most of the two reigning corporate parties.
A number of Sanders supporters have migrated into DSA, the Democratic
Socialists of America, whose popular online "Thanks Capitalism" video
defines "socialism" as little more than collective bargaining and civil
rights. It says nothing about capitalism's destruction of livable ecology or
about its evil twin, imperialism, whose vast military budgets cancels out
social democracy in the "homeland." The video says nothing about Marx's and
other authentic leftists' long-standing understanding of socialism as
workers' control.
A panoply of outwardly and sometimes substantively progressive advocacy,
policy and service organizations can be found across the U.S. But as Les
Leopold has noted, they are badly crippled by single-issue-ism, related to
do their budgetary dependence on private foundations. "For the last
generation," Leopold wrote last year, "progressives have organized
themselves into issue silos, each with its own agenda. Survival depends on
fundraising (largely from private foundations) based on the uniqueness of
one's own silo. The net result of this Darwinian struggle is a fractured
landscape of activity. The creativity, talent and skill are there in
abundance, but the coherence and common purpose among groups is not."
There are multi-issue nonpartisan progressive policy, lobbying and protest
groups in the Citizen Action tradition across the nation. Their 501c3
(nonprofit) status prevents them from openly identifying as Democratic
Party-affiliated groups, but that is what they are. Real authentic
root-and-branch radicals who want to keep their jobs know to tread carefully
and watch their backs when they work in the "progressive" nonprofit sector.
It's the same in "higher education" and the so-called labor movement.
There are a number of groups that call themselves Marxist in the U.S.-an
alphabet soup whose various names and sectarian tendencies can be reviewed
on Wikipedia. None of them have anything close to a large membership. Many
of them spend more time tearing each other apart in sectarian squabbling
than in organizing or inspiring anyone to fight the many manifest evils of
capital.
Left anarchism seems as fragmented, marginal and sectarian as the Marxist
left.
We've seen hopeful seeds of rank-and-file people's organizing over the years
with developments like the Wisconsin Rebellion before it was electorally
co-opted, Occupy, the Fight for $15, the Chicago and subsequent statewide
teacher strikes, the Verizon strike, rebellions and the movement against
racist police killings-a movement bigger than just the Ford
Foundation-funded and Borealis Foundation-coordinated Black Lives Matter
brand. There's been the Malcom X Grassroots Movement, We Charge Genocide,
the remarkable Standing Rock moment, the broader struggle against the Dakota
Access pipeline, the successful struggle against the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, and the remarkable alternative economy political developments
led by black radicals in Jackson, Miss., something that strikes me as the
most potentially radical and remarkable development of all so far.
Now we have the Poor People's Campaign, just underway, under the leadership
of the Rev. William Barber, who has criticized U.S. militarism and kept
Democratic Party politicos off his speaking platforms. Perhaps the PPC can
develop in ways that will help us build an authentic radical left-not just
another leftish moment that gets folded into a Get Out the Vote for
Democrats campaign. To do so, it will need to open its platforms to serious
left anti-capitalists. It will have to step further away from the not-so
left-most party of capital, the Democrats. It will need to speak less in
terms of the immorality of poverty and more in terms of how poverty is
rooted in the profits system of class rule and the racism and imperialism
that go with capitalism "like white on rice."
"For whatever reason," a PPC supporter writes me from Pennsylvania, the
campaign is "unwilling or unable to name the disease, capitalism. In the
absence of this diagnosis," he says, "I worry that the PPC might be nothing
more than a sheepdog for the Democrats in 2018."
For now-and this must change-"the [U.S.] left" is still far too scattered,
excessively siloed, overdependent on corporate foundations, overly
identity-politicized, excessively episodic, excessively metropolitan and
bicoastal, excessively professional and middle-class, insufficiently
radical, insufficiently working-class, insufficiently anti-capitalist and
insufficiently distanced from the dismal, demobilizing, depressing and
dollar-drenched Democratic Party.
Noam Chomsky's judgment five years ago remains all too accurate today:
"There is no real left now" in the United States, Chomsky told David
Barsamian. "If you are just counting heads," Chomsky elaborated, "there are
probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they . don't coalesce
into a movement that can really do things. We're not supposed to say it," he
continued, "but the Communist Party was an organized and persistent element.
It didn't show up for a demonstration and then scatter so somebody else had
to start something new. It was always there and it was there for the long
haul. . That mentality is basically missing [now]. And it was during the
1960s, too," Chomsky said.
The absence of a real, dedicated, persistent and serious, adult left is
profoundly dangerous. People who are getting shafted and who know it are
going to get behind militant and angry politicos seeking to channel their
understandable rage. If there's no effective, durable, organized,
intelligent and durable through-thick-and-thin anti-capitalist left around,
the job of channeling that popular anger falls by default to the white
nationalist racist, nativist and sexist right-the Hitlers, Goebbels, Marine
Le Pens, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salivinis, Nigel Farages, David Dukes, Steve
Kings, Donald Trumps and Steve Bannons of the world. Resentment abhors a
vacuum.
At the same time, without a functioning left able to fight and do things for
ordinary working and poor people, we will have nothing to defend and sustain
our households, families and communities when the next big capitalist
meltdown comes-an event that is due in the very near future. Before the
coming collapse, Hedges tell us, "We must invest our energy in building
parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against
power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development
organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food
cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town."
Hedges' list of institutions for parallel people's power should be expanded
to cooperative production, under the participatory and self-managed
ownership, control and design of the "associated producers" themselves in
harmony rather than at war with the natural environment.
It's no small matter, given what we know now to be the essentially ecocidal
nature of modern capitalism. "If there is not future for a radical mass
movement in our time," Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 15 years ago, "there
can be no future for humanity itself."
