Continued from Part III: Trumpism and the present moment of capitalism
Along with the growing resistance, there is an undercurrent of questioning why the massive resistance eight years ago did not prevent Trump’s return. There is some questioning of the foundations of this decaying society, linked to a search for an alternative, and therefore an opening for a movement toward tearing up the system by its roots and laying the foundations for a new, truly human society.
The “resistance,” both eight years ago and now, appears to be a mixture of spontaneous action and activities planned by organizations ranging from local immigrant protection groups to trade unions, and from the Women’s March NGO to the Democratic Party. In the case of the spontaneous outpourings, we should recall what Andy Phillips wrote about the Coal Miners’ General Strike of 1949-50: “The spontaneity of the miners flowed from their own repeated collective thought and action that preceded their ‘spontaneous’ activity.”
In any case, spontaneous or not, most of the activities so far—other than separate actions by individuals, or those stage-managed by politicians who try to keep tight limits on the thought involved—contain various clashing ideas, often inchoate. There is quite a bit of pressure to keep a lid on the internal battles of ideas in the name of unity. But clarification of ideas is crucial.
In the first place, it is crucial to be clear that defense of what democracy remains is urgent, and at the same time to be clear that it is only temporary and the need to abolish capitalism must not be set aside. This is not only a question of the inevitability of capitalism once again throwing itself into crisis and giving birth to yet another new form of fascism even if this one is defeated.
It is also a question of just how deep the crisis is, and how late the hour is, in terms of the climate and ecological crisis as well as the other ways in which society is crumbling, let alone the possibility of nuclear war. Revolution may not appear imminent, but putting off the question of what happens after revolution only impedes its emergence and enables its transformation into opposite.
The need of the resistance to allow the free flow of ideas points also to the need to take stock of the Left and its relationship to the resistance. Here we find a multitude of problems.
THE ‘LEFT’ THAT HAS TURNED RIGHT
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Some even call Trump a “peacemaker,” much as Hitler was called one before he started World War II. Image: p. klashorst, CC BY 2.0
First, a fair amount of the “Left” has gone over to the Right. This became painfully obvious when prominent Left figures sided with Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal assault on the Syrian Revolution over the past 14 years, and in many cases openly cozied up to right-wing figures who also attacked the revolution from an Islamophobic perspective. Tulsi Gabbard was adored by much of the Left as an “anti-war” figure who amiably met with Assad. Even after she joined the Republican Party, endorsed Trump, and became his Director of National Intelligence, some of the Left still regards her as an anti-war figure. Some even call Trump a “peacemaker,” much as Hitler was called one before he started World War II.
In that period, the same elements of the Left were increasingly drawn into Putin’s propaganda echo chamber—and so was much of the Right. This always goes hand in hand with unreason, with arguments that are as irrational as the nonsense coming from cultish Trumpists. Putin, along with Trump, is one of the global far Right’s leaders. These parts of the Left and Right ended up repeating the propaganda, including taking Russia’s side against Ukraine. A 2015 dinner hosted by Putin to celebrate his propaganda outlet RT is representative of the Red-Brown convergence (referring to Hitler’s brownshirts), where Trump’s fascist minion Michael Flynn was a guest of honor sitting next to Putin, and Green Party leader Jill Stein sat at the same table. We must oppose Missouri’s prosecution of Stein for protesting in support of Palestinians, without papering over the serious contradictions in the Left, including her Putin attachment.[1] Julian Assange, another darling of the Left, attended by video link.
Sahra Wagenknecht shows the same trajectory in Germany. She broke off from the far left of The Left (Die Linke) party, which descended from the Communist Party, to form the Sahra Wagenknecht Party. It tried to merge a Left aura with anti-immigrant “populist” politics.
Red-Brown does not characterize the entire Left but it is dangerously influential, especially because all too much of the rest of the Left accepts them as legitimate and participates in the rallies, conferences, and media they set up. This is certainly one of the main causes of the Left’s weakness, which prompts a certain level of desperation for Left unity to counter the weakness.
V.I. Lenin. Author: Thespoondragon, CC BY-SA 4.0
All of this raises the question of what “Left” really means today. No meaningful Left unity can be built without being based on a sharp and decisive break with the Red-Brown and other reactionary parts of the Left. Unity with those parts is self-defeating, and it would be better if we could establish a new understanding of “the Left” that explicitly excludes them.
Our situation somewhat resembles the beginning of World War I, when a big part of the socialist, Marxist Left in the Second International sided with their own capitalist rulers in the imperialist war, and the mushy “center” mildly disagreed but did not want to break with those others who had capitulated. The really revolutionary left (Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Zetkin, Mehring, Trotsky, etc.) started organizing but it took even them years before they decided they agreed with Lenin that a whole new International was needed.
Just as the collapse of the Second International called for a new break within the socialist Left, a clear break is of the essence today, and it is only on the basis of such a break that any meaningful Left unity can be established. Furthermore, such a break helps make clear that what is more important than unity of the small revolutionary Left is the unity of the movement from theory with the movement from practice.
A second part of the Left is dependent on the Democrats, strategizing for them on how they should “win back the working class” or demanding that they impeach Trump or sue to overturn the 2024 election. Some say that the Democrats have to get it together as if there is no alternative to them. In part this is out of desperation for a shortcut. The fact remains that the Democrats are trying to play by the rules of the bourgeois Constitutional system even as the Trumpists are busy turning it into opposite. Yes, Democrats should be pressured—with whips and kicks—to fight Trump and to oppose anti-labor, racist, sexist, anti-Queer, and anti-immigrant policies. But the Left is nothing if it does not at the same time clearly articulate its independence and a revolutionary opposition to the whole rotting capitalist system.
Third, the desperation of the situation creates a strong pull toward indiscriminate unity of the Left, which tends to deaden the battle of ideas and push aside the role of a philosophy of revolution.
NEEDED: UNITY OF THEORY AND PRACTICE
In place of social revolution, some have named the fight for “expanded democracy” as the paramount project for the Left. This is a retrogression without self-awareness. There are many variations of this theme, such as the call for a leftwing network of resistance that implicitly subordinates the full projection of Marx’s philosophy of revolution in permanence to unity of the Left, or the non-campist part of it. There is a need for a network of resistance, and in fact one is already loosely forming. But the bulk of it comes from below, from the movement from practice, and can neither be limited to nor defined by “the Left.”
More important than the unity of the Left is the unity of the movement from theory and the movement from practice.
The movement from theory must always strive to comprehend the movement from practice and the ways in which it acts as a form of theory itself, and at the same time the movement from theory has a crucial responsibility to work out how the full philosophy of revolution relates to that movement from practice and how to project it concretely—that is, to make sure that the power of the Idea and the power of the masses in motion are united, so that resistance does not stop at opposing what is but moves toward the establishment of a totally new society on truly human foundations. And to make that happen, both the Idea and the masses in motion need organizations for their own self-determination.
Marx touched on this point when he issued his Critique of the Gotha Program. He wrote to Wilhelm Bracke that his German party should not compromise its principles in the name of unity. Marx felt that a “period of common activity” was all that the party should agree to, and that activity should not be separate from the battle of ideas but precisely what would prepare for development of “principles.”
Continues with Part V: Our tasks
[1] For more on Red-Brown politics, see Stand with Ukraine: Debunking the Propaganda, edited by Jeffrey David Everhard (Bastille Press, 2023), especially Part II, “The Puppetmasters: Putin & Dugin,” Part III, “Useful Idiots,” and Part V, “Multipolar Ideology.” Stein is taken up in chapter 9, “Chris Hedges’ Misbegotten Rage,” by Frank Rogaczewski.