December 8, 2021
When we take to the streets as we must to protest the illegitimate Trump-stacked high court’s sickening negation of Roe v. Wade next year, let us make our protest about more than the (very) important single issue of abortion and the dysfunctional goal of “speaking truth to power.” Our demonstrations should be about more than the frankly juvenile aim of trying to make our “leaders” (owners and masters) decent. Howard Zinn’s critique of the quadrennial “election madness” that millions of US-Americans have been taught to conflate with democracy always merits qualified respect. As Zinn wrote in more hopeful but ultimately delusional times, the Obama spring of 2008:
[The election madness] seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple- choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students…No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
The proper response to Zinn’s argument here is “yes and no.” Yes to a militant people’s politics and movements beneath and beyond the quadrennial ruling class electoral extravaganzas that are sold us as the only politics that matter. Yes to the bigger point being not what we do (or don’t do) in a ballot box once every four years but what we do before and after the brief, officially holy electoral moments. But no to trying merely to “shake” our masters and governance order into making decent and humane policy. That’s not radical enough. We need to evict and expropriate our owners and rulers and to construct an alternative people’s socialist governance system. We need to go beyond resistance and rebellion to revolution.
As “capital’s metabolic social order” literally squeezes the life out of our only planet, we have no choice but to move rapidly from “tax the rich” to “expropriate the expropriators.” As Che Guevera once said, “it’s not my fault that reality is Marxist.” It’s “socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” (Istvan Meszaros). That this very basic radical statement is considered wacky, extreme, and over the top even by much of what passes for a Left in the US speaks volumes about how badly beaten down and tragically removed from reality much of the “Marxist” intellectual class is today. (As the lunatic Trump might Tweet if he still could: “Sad!”)
We don’t actually have another generation to waste on the pipe dream of trying – even through militant, in-the-streets means – to make what’s left of bourgeois democracy work for “We the People.” We need to be done with “patience” for the “messy” (a bit of an understatement in a time of accelerating environmental catastrophe and ascendant neofascism) “workings” of “our” (their) paralyzing and cleverly-elite-crafted fake democracy, which was thoroughly inadequate even before one of “our” (their) two major parties (the more structurally empowered of those two parties) went all Cancel Culture against “normal” if oxymoronic capitalist democracy. The “American experiment” was undemocratic by design long before the Nazified Trump-Gosar-Taylor-Greene-DeSantis Republicans embraced open, undisguised and violent white supremacy, pandemicide, patriarchy, and autocracy. Let us hit the streets determined to transcend our long-outdated 18th Century slaveowners’ charter and the underlying material base class rule system whose savagely racist, nativist, imperial, genocidal and patriarchal expansion (please see Chapter 6, titled “America Was Never Great: On ‘The Soul of This Nation,’” in my new book This Happened Here) that parchment protected and underwrote.
We are running out of time to think and fight big, beyond single-issue and reformist silos. There are no non-radical resolutions for the current, many-sided social, political, and environmental crisis, of which the undoing of Roe – the reimposition of the female slavery of forced full pregnancy – is one albeit big and important symptom. The only question will be if the coming radical resolution will be (a) barbarian, fascist, unequal, hierarchical, ecocidal, arch- reactionary, terminal, and pro-death or (b) popular, democratic, egalitarian, eco-socialist, revolutionary, pro-life (differently understood!), and a prologue to real human liberation.
And here the ball is significantly in the court of the big soft liberal and progressive center. “The best lack all conviction,” the British poet William Butler Yeats once wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I spend a lot of printer ink and some vocal energy on the “worst” (the Republifascist right), but I strongly suspect that “the best” — with all their fatalism, resignation, individualism, and withdrawal — are actually the bigger and more determinant problem. How to get “the best” over and out of themselves, up from their (understandable) couches and ghettoes of despair, and out from their internal exile? Anybody who has the magic formula, please share. It would be a game changer.