The Paul Street Report, January 26-March 2, 2023

Call me an American revolutionary Marxist, socialist, and/ or communist. Just  don’t tell me I’m “on the [US-American] left.”

Part of the problem here is that the dominant US media politics culture has let the neo-McCarthyite right dilute the term “the left” so far as to mean anything from hot yoga and wind farms to Madonna, drag queen story times, M&M mascots without high heels, organic vegetables, academia, the Brookings Institution, the AFL-CIO, and the dismal, dollar-drenched corporate-imperialist Democratic Party. The term has been watered down almost beyond recognition.

At the same time and more to the central point of this multi-part essay, which will continue through at least next week,  most of what can legitimately be said to constitute “the left” in the United States today is hopelessly and depressingly dysfunctional. Thanks to two intimately related deficits — the lack of any serious notion of a revolutionary societal alternative to capitalism-imperialism and the absence of a properly scientific, evidence-based theory of how to understand and change history in a desirable fashion — the US-American left(s) is(are) stuck in a disastrous cycle of failure reflecting a doomed project: trying to achieve meaningful human liberation through their country’s dominant,  deeply conservative social and political institutions, falling far short of what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels knew to be the proper socialist goal: “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large.”
The alternative to such truly radical change, Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, was “the common ruin of all.”  Those words feel haunting 175 years later, in a time when it is now clear that we must — as I argued in my last Paul Street Report — overthrow and transcend capitalism and radically replace it with socialism before it tips humanity into a terminal environmental catastrophe and/or nuclear war.

Part One, The Paul Street Report (TPSR), 1.26.2023

In this and the next four Paul Street Reports I will go through 17 different pathologies on the US left, such as it is: sheep-dogging electoralism and parliamentary cretinism; revisionist economism and trade unionism; “woke” hyper-identitarianism; dependence on foundations; sentimental standpoint proletarianism; geopolitical neo-campism; neo-Strasserite “pink-brown” Trumpenleftism; deranged conspiratorialism; anarchism; mutual-aid-ism/direct-service-ism, localism, single-issue-ism; pacifism; academicism; pessimism; retreat to self-ism; (and last but not least) anti-communism.  Many of these afflictions overlap and mutually reinforce each other, making up a cumulative simultaneous equations system of defeat and surrender.

1. Sheep-Dogging Left Electoralism, Parliamentary Cretinism, and Mass Demoralization

One symptomatic feature of US left failure is the remarkably durable symptom of left electoralism and  —  to use an on old but still-relevant Bolshevik term —  parliamentary cretinism. Even now, nearly half a century into the full “neoliberal” capitalist takeover of US politics and policy, this pathology is embraced and advanced by self-declared progressives and “democratic socialists”  who seem incapable of understanding the need for radical and revolutionary movements beneath and beyond the killing confines of the nation’s rigidly time-staggered big money candidate-centered major ruling class party electoral politics. This left tendency functions as a sheep dog or Judas Goat for the capitalists, herding masses into the US electoral slaughterhouse – a right-tilted minority rule regime that violates the elementary democratic principle of one person, one vote on multiple levels (here is one of my many primers on the deadening nothingness of constitutional bourgeois democracy, US-American-style).  Never mind the US-American system’s openly anti-democratic presidential Electoral College, its absurdly powerful and lifetime-appointed Supreme Court, its brazenly plutocratic campaign finance rules and corporate media, its rampant voter suppression and racist disenfranchisement, its pervasive and revanchist gerrymandering of legislative districts, its ridiculously powerful and lethally malapportioned US Senate (which vastly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and states), and its deeply reactionary states’ rights tradition.

This Dem-captive left politics can be quite shameless. The nation’s leading “democratic socialist” journal, Jacobin – named after 18th Century bourgeois French revolutionaries (wouldn’t a socialist journal be named Communard or at least Sans Culotte?) – argues that “the Left” won last November’s mid-term elections, during which the Republi-fascist Party took back majority control of the US House of Representatives after surpassing the Democrats by three million votes in the national popular House vote. Jacobin applauds as left triumphs the mid-term victories of Democratic candidates who support fracking, increased imperial war spending, and increased funding of the nation’s massive racist police state. Many if not most Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters refused to denounce the Biden Democrats’ collaboration with the Republicans in blocking a recently threatened and overdue strike by badly overworked rail workers seeking paid time off to recover a measure of mental and physical health.

Why stoop so low? Because the purported  project of building “socialism” (milquetoast semi-social democracy at “left”-most) within the dismal, dollar-drenched, and demobilizing Democratic Party requires lowering peoples’ sights very far downward. It’s pathetic. The more “progressives” try to make the corporate Democratic Party become like them, the more they themselves become like the corporate Democrats.  It’s an old story.

The perverse idiosyncrasies of US American elections, party and governance system (still tethered an 18th Century slaveowners’ Constitution, remarkably enough) aside, serious radicals take an unflinching look at the harsh class-rule limits of electoral democracy under really existing capitalism – what Marxists have long called bourgeois democracy. As the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm noted in his magisterial volume, The Age of Capital, “the global triumph of capitalism” meant “the triumph of a society” based not at all on popular sovereignty but rather on “buying everything (including labor) in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest.” The social and political formations joined to that kind of soulless society — one in which every noble sentiment and impulse is “drowned in the icy waters of egotistical calculation” (Marx and Engels, 1848) — was (and remains) a society where (in Hobsbawm’s words) “participation in politics [on the part] of the common people” takes place only “within such limits as would guarantee the bourgeois social order and avoid the risk of its overthrow.”

One consequence of the longtime Judas-Goating habit of leftish groups like Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and DSA is the demoralization of the masses that follow the elections that leftists sold to them as great opportunities for progressive change.  The money-soaked elections and their predctably dismal outcomes become regular discouraging rituals of popular fecklessness. This is one of the underestimated hazards of buying strongly — as many left-identified folk do (one especially dogged and sad example is progressive filmmaker Michael Moore) — into the masters’ definition of the quadrennial and biennial big money, corporate-crafted mass-marketed, big media, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky’s term) as democratic “politics,” the only democratic politics that matter.  This pitifully constricted definition of relevant political engagement deletes a critical historical fact: the biggest progressive changes won by popular forces in the US have always been about mass social movements – about who’s sitting in the streets, workplaces, schools, and public squares, not just who’s sitting in the White House and other elective offices.

The ballot-fetishizing left electoralist affliction – morbid attachment to the “coffin of class consciousness” (the late Marxist historian Alan Dawley’s phrase) that is the US ballot box – is not limited to those who sheepdog and Judas Goat for the Democrats. US Green Party and other third- or fourth-party left activists often place absurd levels of undue emphasis on what one does or doesn’t do in the voting booth, as if participation in the capitalist-imperialist US electoral regime (which renders third parties powerless beyond occasional spoiler roles) is the focal point of popular struggle. They may not herd sheep for the Dems but they are still dogging for the bourgeois  “Election Madness.”

2. Economistic and Trade Unionist Revisionism

Another venerable and remarkably durable non- and anti-revolutionary/revisionist left symptom is economistic class reductionist trade unionism, focused on winning small wage, salary, job, and benefit victories that briefly get some ordinary working people a bit more of the imperialist system’s spoils. Revisionist “socialists” in the trade unionist tradition display little if any elementarily radical interest in confronting and replacing the soulless and exterminist capitalist-imperialist system that is ruining (and perhaps ending) life on Earth. “Progressives” mired in an economistic collective bargaining mode seem to have the radical “change we need” confused with occasional union representation and labor contract triumphs for small pockets of employees. They typically combine this narrow and conservative economism with national chauvinism and a class reductionist politics that fails to grant proper seriousness to problems of racism, sexism, nativism, imperialism, eco-cide and fascism, much less the related catastrophic chaos and anarchy of capitalism, which is actively cancelling livable ecology (and thus a decent human future) and regularly eliminates the very jobs from which organized labor tries to extract the membership dues that pay for its deeply conservative “leadership’s” salaries.

This “left” embodies what Lenin rightly criticized as the narrow mindset of the “trade union secretary,” who fights for material crumbs at the masters’ table instead of for the revolutionary overturning of that table. As Lenin argued, the proper goal of principled socialist activism regarding the working class isn’t merely the attainment of more for some sections the proletariat under capitalism-imperialism but rather the radical enlistment of the working class as “tribunes of the people” — all the people — in the many-sided struggle against all oppression: women’s oppression, racist oppression, religious oppression, imperial oppression, and capitalist exploitation and parasitism, deeply and globally understood.

There’s considerable ironic overlap between the first two left afflictions, leading to the spectacle of trade-unionist “democratic socialists” lining up behind a president and party (Joe “Sleeping Car” Biden and the Democrats) who recently and predictably joined with Republicans in pre-emptively breaking an overdue national rail strike and in slashing benefits for the working poor – this while the two capitalist parties signed off on a giant, record-setting “defense” (Empire) budget that steals from the working class to provide lethal corporate welfare for high-tech war-production firms that are raking in super-profits from the inter-imperialist US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine.

Of course it’s better to work in a union shop than a non-union one, but US collective bargaining agreements and organized labor have long tended to attach workers and union officials to the parasitic and catastrophic capitalist-imperialist order while helping employers codify existing hierarchical job and wage and structures resulting from the alienating, oppressive, and exploitative capitalist division of labor.  They also tend to focus union members only on what can be won for themselves in their jobs and industries instead of what needs to be won for the proletariat as a whole – health care for a certain group of autoworkers (for example) instead of socialized medicine and health care as a human right for all.

3. “It Feels Like a [Right-Wing] Op”: Hyper-Identitarian Wokester Call-Out Culture

More specifically symptomatic of the neoliberal era than the two previous afflictions (but not without ancient foundations, to be sure) is the profoundly anti-revolutionary left pathology of wokester left identitarianism. An army of hyper-“woke” lefties are plagued by the crippling mental affliction of “standpoint epistemology.” Acting something like the reverse negative image of the white Christian nationalist neofascists with whom “the Trumpenleft” (to be discussed in my next installment) has perversely bedded down, they bestow highly exaggerated and even outrageous intellectual and political privilege on one’s skin color and/or gender and/or sexual identity and/or ethnicity over and against basic scientific investigation and rigor. Left wokesters’ left-ness is all about who you are, with the who being all about your race and/or gender and/or sexual identity instead of what intellectual and political work you’ve done and how you propose to work with others to liberate humanity from oppression. They come from the subjective and experiential standpoint of identity defined these ways rather than from the standpoint of science and objectivity. Their “standpoint” is one of subjective identity and experience rather than objective reality and evidence.

Left woketarians are invested in cancel culture, which is a real and obstructionist thing even if the neofascist white Christian nationalist right exploits and distorts that pathology for revanchist purposes.  Confusing victimization with moral and intellectual attainment and political vision, the hyper-identitarian left also promotes an “Oppression Olympics” mindset that seeks to determine who are the most truly oppressed people of all instead of how to build a movement against to defeat all oppression. Amd left identitarian wokesters are often plagued by an extreme individualism so obsessively focused on their own (or their designated victim groups’) oppression and personal and small groups experience that they lose all sight of the broader historical and societal contexts of class rule and empire and of racism and sexism and LGBT-bashing deeply understood in relation to the underlying madness, menace, and modes of capitalism-imperialism.

A long report by Ryan Grim in the Intercept last June showed how the nation’s liberal and progressive nonprofit/NGO sector had over recent years become so crippled by constant, self-cancelling identitarian “call-outs” and cultural wars as to be incapable of meaningful activism on their issues: abortion rights, civil liberties, livable ecology, and more. By Grim’s grim account:

“[An NGO] leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. ‘I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,’ said another longtime organization head. ‘Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.’” (emphasis added).

The bitter “me, me, mine and my identity” sniping is so extreme and widespread that Bernie Sanders had to tell his lieutenants not to hire any “activists” for his 2020 presidential campaign.  Sanders knew he couldn’t trust people from the non-profit “activist” world not to turn his campaign’s organization away from its external political goal of winning the Democratic presidential nomination and into endless internal factionalism over real and alleged incidents of racial, gender, ethnic, generational, and sexual orientation bias.

The hyper-woke bourgeois-identitarian call-out culture is a remarkably nasty affliction which the present writer has seen rear its paralyzing head again and again in left movements (and also in higher education).  Actually radical activists are reluctant to confront it head-on for fear of being reflexively accused of embracing vicious right-wing narratives.  (Here I am looking at the problem not from the racist-sexist-LGBT-bashing right but rather from a revolutionary Marxist perspective that opposes all forms of oppression including sexism, racism, nativism, homophobia and trans-hate – a perspective that takes very seriously racial, gender, and sexual oppression while pointing out that none of those and other oppressions will ever be overcome under the class dictatorship of capital, that is under capitalism-imperialism.)

Left wokesters are often played by bourgeois electoral identity politics. They get all too easily co-opted into the US major capitalist party candidate-centered election madness and all too easily soothed by the narcotic of incremental reformism (parliamentary cretinism) by the strategic placement of bourgeois non-white, female, and gay “faces in high places” – elite politicos who help the nation’s predominantly white and male ruling class deceptively re-brand their capitalist-imperialist order as “diverse,” “tolerant,” and “multi-cultural.”  Barack Obama (Black with a Muslim-sounding name), Hillary Clinton (female), Kamala Harris (Black and female), Pete Buttigieg (gay), Nancy Pelosi (female), and Tammy Baldwin (female and gay) are some of the neoliberal figures left identitarians have been excessively prone to applaud simply because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. It’s sad to watch left-identified people recurrently grant support to ruling class politicians and officials on the basis of the politicos’ skin color, gender, and/or sexual identity (as well as their partisan/Democratic status). Pelosi, Butiggieg, Harris, Obama, Amy Klobuchar, and a vast swath of non-male, nonwhite and (in some cases) non-straight Democratic “leaders” are dedicated agents of and believers in the system that is literally ending life on Earth: capitalism-imperialism.

4. Foundation Dependence

The US-American nonprofit/NGO “activist” left is also and relatedly crippled by its dependence on bourgeois foundations. Much of what passes for a left here gets critical and core funding from corporate foundations who, as Grim writes, “aren’t accountable to the public for failing to accomplish anything, as long as the foundation flows continue.” Big foundations and grant-funded nonprofits don’t have to report to the people whose interests they claim to represent. They report to people with a ton of money. Gosh, what could go wrong with that – a left answerable not to the masses it claims to serve but rather to concentrated wealth in the savagely unequal United States? And Grim’s investigation discovered that foundations often function as powerful promoters of the hyper-identitarian bourgeois call-out culture that renders so many NGOs ineffective in the face of right-wing onslaught.

Part Two, 2.2.2023: Geopolitical Neo-Campists and “Proletarianists”

5.  Proletarian Standpoint

There’s a workerite version of the standpoint and identitarian affliction among some left-identified folk. Call it proletarianism. It is spread by people who talk endlessly on supposed behalf of “the working class.” In proletarianists’ chatter, “the working class” wants this and “the working class” thinks that, this is “good for the working class,” and that is “bad for the working class,” and so on, on and on. One’s leftness is all about the extent of one’s alignment with “the working class”/“the proletariat.”

Sentimentalist proletarianists like to make snide comments against radicals not born into working-class households, as if someone can’t seriously champion socialism if her father is a heart surgeon or her mother a professor. It’s a different, more traditionally left way of believing in what Bertrand Russell once mockingly called “the superior virtue of the oppressed.” So much for Karl Marx (son of a successful lawyer), Frederick Engels (son of a wealthy German and British industrialist), Lenin (the son of a schoolteacher and school inspector), Leon Trotsky (son of a wealthy Jewish family in Ukraine), Che Guevara (the son of an upper class Argentine family), Fidel Castro (the son of a prosperous Cuban sugar cane farmer),  Mao (the son of an affluent farmer and grain dealer), and Lin Biao (son of a prosperous merchant family).  Each of those great revolutionaries matched Marx and Engels’1848 observation that “Just as, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie [here we might add petit-bourgeoisie and professional class – P.S.] goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.”)

Left proletarian romanticizers often exaggerate their own proletarian credentials. If they’ve ever actually been employed for any considerable period alongside real world proletarians in a mine, mill, cannery, or factory or in transport or as custodians (I’ve got wage-labor background in four of those categories and narrowly escaped major injury if not death in two of them – hooray for me!), they might be less prone to proletarian sentimentality.

Champions of proletarian identity and standpoint often talk about the American working class in woefully outdated terms, as if:  the working class today is the giant industrial mass production workforce projected in classiic socialist thought; the working class today doesn’t contain numerous severe internal segmentations (see this essay I published years ago on [among other things] working-class fragmentation in the neoliberal age); US capital didn’t start exporting production to low-wage regions and nations across the savagely unequal and parasitic world capitalist system many decades ago.

Whatever their true class background, standpoint proletarianists do the masses no favor by trying to deprive them of input and activism from people whose relative privilege has given them time and other resources to develop revolutionary understandings rooted in a scientific approach to history and society. Extreme positional and standpoint obsession with “the working class” gets in the way of understanding socialist revolution as something required for the liberation of all humanity, both within and outside the proletariat – and as something that requires the participation of people from all class backgrounds.  What makes the proletariat a potentially revolutionary class is not some special wisdom inherent in the experiential and subjective positionality of proletarians but rather the wage-earning’s population’s objective position as the critical, natural, and exploited, historical-material source of capitalist surplus value and (thus) profit. Socialist revolutionaries of any and all class backgrounds work to enlist and inspire proletarians to use their strategic relationships to production and value creation to free homo sapiens from all oppression – wage labor most certainly included – and from the broader many sided and eco-cidal anarchy of capital within and beyond the workplace.

6. Geopolitical neo-Campism

The Putin Left, Absurd as that Should Sound

In the long and tragic absence of revolutionary socialist states and relevant national and international communist movements nearly half a century after the capitalist road was taken in formerly Maoist China, some left USAers  have grasped at the noxious straws of geopolitical neo-campism. A strange and poisonous left attachment to the at once neoliberal and neo-fascist regime atop post-Soviet Russia is promoted by left-identified  people who confuse and/or cynically conflate opposition to the arch-criminal US-American Empire with embrace and defense of the imperialist butcher and authoritarian, anti-Marxist tyrant Vladimir Putin. This  tendency’s adherents either actually think or cynically claim to believe that there is only one blood-soaked imperialist power on the planet – the United States. Making Orwell blush, they back the blood-soaked criminal Putin’s mass-murderous and openly imperial war on Ukraine in the name of anti-imperialism and “anti-war” politics.  Unwittingly, perhaps (though certainly not in all cases), they embrace the Russian imperialism that was explicitly articulated in the February 2022 speech in which Putin announced his “special military operation” – an address in which he attacked the great Russian revolutionary anti-imperialist Vladimir Lenin for supporting Ukrainians’ right to national self-determination.

As the brutal anti-communist gay- and trans-bashing uber-oligarch Putin sends tens of thousands of disproportionately poor Russian conscripts to horrible deaths like so much cannon fodder in Ukraine, as he locks up untold thousands of peaceful Russian antiwar protesters, the fake antiwar Putin left doesn’t call for a new Russian socialist and anti-imperialist revolution. It doesn’t reach out to antiwar groups and people in Russia. No, pseudo-radical Kremlin cheerleaders at places like Grayzone, Mint Press, and Consortium News (to mention just three of the most decrepit outlets of this “left” cancer) double and triple down on the Putin lie that Ukraine is a “Nazi” regime – curious justification for Russian forces’ Nazi-like slaughter, torture, and rape of ordinary Ukrainians.

The gangster Putin currently has masses of propagandized Russians preposterously believing that Ukraine started the war by attacking Russia with “LGBT ideology.” He will soon sign (or has already signed) a measure granting Russian soldiers, mercenaries, and allies full immunity for any crimes they commit in carrying out the Russian imperialist assault on Ukraine. The Putin left is okay with all this even if it sometimes pretends otherwise.  Bring up Putin’s criminality in Ukraine (and elsewhere) from a revolutionary socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist perspective – a perspective that is witheringly and thoroughly critical of US/NATO imperialism and provocation within and beyond Eastern Europe – and the Putin left will reflexively and absurdly accuse you of supporting US/NATO imperialism and of unhinged “Russophobia.” Masters of deflective what about-ism, they pretend to justify Russian violations of international and human rights law (when they are not busy denying those crimes) by bringing up something that every serious radical already knows – that the criminal US Empire has long evaded and trashed the very same law. Their response to radical internationalists (and others) who denounce Russia’s  war crimes has commonly been to literally deny those epic transgressions (for example, to claim that the hideous Bucha massacre was Western “fake news”) or to claim that Russian offenses are somehow justified by Washington’s long and horrific criminal record. When you question this childish and reflexive what-about-ism, the Putin left accuses you of being allied with US-NATO imperialism, no matter how radically  critical you have always been and still are regarding US-NATO imperialism (please see these two publications of mine, just a small portion of my publications on and very much against US, NATO, and Western imperialism: Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power [2010]; Paul Street, “the World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,” Common Dreams,  February 22, 2018. )

Moronically enough, the Putin left seems to have the fascistic uber-oligarch, nuke-mongering war criminal Putin and the imperial butchery of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group confused with Ho Chi Minh and the National Liberation Front. Worse, it appears to have  dropped or never understood elementary revolutionary socialist internationalism and class analysis. It has opted instead for geopolitical and “multi-polar” neo-campist alliance with any state on the wrong side of Washington’s imperial agenda.

Caveat: F-Zelensky Too, or Fight Capitalism, Not its Wars 

Revolutionary Marxist criticism of the ridiculous and dodgy Putin left should not be taken to mean support for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Left-identified folks who are jubilant over the recent German and US decision to send more advanced tanks to Zelensky’s military are engaging in their own variant of heedless tankie-ness.  There’s no call for jumping in bed with Western imperialism here. While Putin’s invasion is unjustified, it was not unprovoked by the US led-West. It could perhaps have been avoided had Washington said clearly that it had no intention of incorporating Ukraine into NATO.  The invasion has clearly been welcomed by the Biden administration as an opportunity to weaken a leading geopolitical rival – Russia – by saddling Moscow with a “Vietnam” on its own borders (the same sentiment was behind US provocation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s). The war in Ukraine is a great profit-making windfall for US arms-makers and oil and gas exporters. Uncle Sam, whose blood-soaked Empire (replete with more than 800 bases in more than 80 countries and accounting to 40 percent of global military spending) and crimes (No Gun Ri, Operation Tiger Force, “many My Lais,” the Highway of Death, Fallujah, Nissour Square, Guantanamo Boy, Bagram Air Force base, the destruction of Libya, Bola Boluk,  the direct and indirect invasion, domination, and torture of dozens of Third World countries…the list gone on and on and on) dwarf those of Russia, has been crying about Ukraine all the way to the bank.  Biden has no more regard for Ukrainian lives than the psychopath in the Kremlin.

Biden and his commanders are perfectly content to see masses of ordinary Ukrainians die in a prolonged war. As combined Ukrainian and Russian civilian and soldier deaths run into the many tens of thousands if not past a hundred thousand by now, Washington and US media sell the Ukraine War as a grand historic battle between “democracy,” represented by Ukraine, and “autocracy,” represented by Russia.  This is absurd. The notoriously corrupt Zelensky government represents oligarchs and suppresses trade unions and left parties. The US itself is an open corporate and financial plutocracy wrapped in the deceptive flag of unmentionably bourgeois democracy – a late bourgeois republic still suffering under an 18th Century slaveowners’ charter and now teetering on the edge of authoritarian/fascist consolidation. The United States has long supported and still supports despotic regimes — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, all US client states, are good examples today —  that  it considers to be on its economic and geopolitical side in the world capitalist system.

To make the Ukraine War even more problematic, to say the least, it raises the specter of World War III.  The conflict dramatically elevates the very real threat of thermonuclear war, with Putin repeatedly declaring his willingness to use nuclear weapons in existential defense of Mother Russia while the US and its partners send ever more lethal weaponry into battlefields located on Russia’s vast, repeatedly West-invaded southwestern underbelly. Imagine an imperial reversal, with Russian and Chinese weapons being used by soldiers fighting the US in Canada and/or Mexico. Would Washington be brandishing nuclear weapons in such a situation? Do bears defecate in forested areas?.

Gosh, whatever could go wrong?

Thanks to how the Ukraine War has jacked up the menace of global Nuclear Winter while accelerating the eco-exterminist extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently placed its Doomsday Clock at the most extreme level of peril in history: 90 seconds to Midnight.

Hello? Those parts of the left who have gone all in with Zelensky – this includes some self-described radical socialists (surprisingly enough to this writer) along with the standard cruise-missile Democratic Party liberals and progressives – are playing with fire, putting 8 billion human beings at risk for the sake (they seem to think) of 44 million Ukrainians.

The war in the Ukraine is a lethal nightmare that must be ended as soon as possible, something that requires some undeserved concessions to the monstrous Putin. Meanwhile hundreds of millions of people across the global South deserve and require assistance in the struggle for liberation from oppression. When do we arm the Palestinians? Any US military support coming for the masses fighting a right-wing coup in Peru and living under dictatorships and autocracy in Egypt and the Saudi kingdom? Of course not: the US remains aligned with reactionary forces in these nations and around much of the world, no small part of why it has not found much support for its embrace of the Zelensky government in the global South? When do we the people take over the US Empire and use it to liberate the imperially super-exploited peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, where US and European imperialism has provided openings for Chinese and Russian imperialism?

An old socialist slogan seems relevant here: Fight the rich, not their wars. It’s up to the Russian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It’s up to the US-American people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country. It up to the Ukrainian people to organize to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering rulers of their own country.  It’s up to the people of the world to organize, with as much international coordination as possible (socialist revolutions typically take place in one nation at a time — the all-at-once dreams of 1917-1919 are a Trotskyist fantasy that Lenin understandably but only briefly shared ) to overthrow the parasitic, exploitative, racist, sexist, eco-cidal and war-mongering world capitalist system.

China Syndrome

Also stupid and/or cynical is some US leftists’ neo-campist identification with the fake-communist state-capitalist post-Mao Chinese state. Sharing the Putin left’s mistake of thinking – or pretending to think – that there is only one relevant capitalist-imperialist power on Earth (the United States), they absurdly portray the  counterrevolutionary Deng Xiao Ping – Xi Jinping regime (1976-present) as an example of anti-imperialist “industrial socialism” (actual language from the Marxist geopolitics guru Michael Hudson).  Some of these China-touting leftists should apply for jobs in China’s sprawling industrial hinterland, where workers driven to despair and suicide by their alienating and exploited work lives.  Post-Mao China is so “socialist” that these viciously oppressed workers are repressively policed by a hyper-authoritarian state tasked with keeping the Chinese proletariat producing oceans of surplus value for national and global corporations for whom the Chinese revolution has been ironically turned into an historically unprecedented pooling of cheap labor power — a disastrous and remarkable windfall for the eco-cidal world capitalist system. The restoration of capitalist social and production relations in post-Mao China — insidiously “justified” by supposedly communist state officials under the bourgeois counterrevolutionary Deng Xiaoping’s insipid pronunciation that “to get rich is glorious” — has of course fueled skyrocketing class inequality inside “communist” China over the last four decades

Raise the absurdity of calling contemporary China a model of anti-imperialist socialism and left China campists will accuse you of supporting US imperialism – this no matter how witheringly critical you are of US imperialism. How dare you suggest that noxious, authoritarian and eco-cidal, labor-exploiting capitalism-imperialism can be found anywhere but in the United States?

Left Campism Was Bad Enough Before Capitalism Was Fully Restored in Russia and China – Now It’s Truly Insane

Western left campism was problematic when it was over-attached to Joe Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s (genuinely revolutionary-communist) China, the Third World nationalist Hanoi government, and the Soviet-aligned Castro regime. Far too many post-1917 Western leftists came to badly over-identify the cause of socialist revolution with a supine posture towards the Soviet Union (such cringing subordination helped create the almost comically anti-revolutionary revisionism practiced by the US “Communist” Party, which once absurdly claimed that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism”).  Certain formerly Maoist intellectuals and activists couldn’t break their attachment to the line from Beijing even after Chinese capitalist-road counterrevolutionaries overthrew Maoism and reintegrated China into the world capitalist nightmare, with disastrous consequences.

Still, previous officially socialist and Marxist state recipients of often excessive Western left love and obedience often had legitimate anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist credentials and accomplishments. It is beyond bizarre and quite disturbing to see the campist affliction extended to a fascistic and war-criminalized capitalist oligarchy like Putin’s Russia and to a chilling state-capitalist, arch-authoritarian, and counter-revolutionary behemoth like the so-called People’s Republic of China.

Putin is arguably the leading hero and agent of the resurgent fascist right in the world today. It’s not for nothing that white supremacist neofascists across Europe and the United States identify with him.

Leftists in this strange post-Cold War neo-tankie space (left-identified folks oddly attached to Russia and China long after both countries transitioned to capitalism-imperialism and with the former state helping leading global fascism) garner faux-radical street cred with some US lefties because they have aligned themselves with official state enemies and rivals of the US Empire.  That might seem “badass” and bold, radical even, but it is actually a deeply conservative and anti-revolutionary surrender to bourgeois rule and the nightmare of capitalism-imperialism, with all its attendant oppressions.  The dream of a unipolar global Pax Americana was always just that – a dream, an unachievable dream lodged in the power-mad minds of Washington planners. A more multi-polar world capitalist system is still very much a world system wired to destroy life on Earth via environmental ruin, war, pandemicide and authoritarianism/fascism.  Never confuse the anarchies of capital and the capitalist world state system with the forward march of socialism.

Part Three, TPSR, 2.9.2023: The Pink-Brown Left and the Paranoid Portside

7. “A Blanket Pass” to the Right: The Pink-Brown Jimmy Dore-Trumpen-Tucker-Taylor-Green/e/wald Left (JD3TGL)

Also specific to the neoliberal and post-Soviet era (like the Putin Left and the hyper-identitarian wokester Left) and also (like the Putin Left) predominantly white and male is the curious rise within the USA of a pink-brown Trumpenleft, heavily overlapped with the Putin left and containing an indeterminate number of mostly white and male ex-Bernie Sandernistas (from pathologies 1 and 2). This bizarre, weirdly soft neo-Strasser-ite tendency (Gregor and Otto Strasser tried to uphold a workerist and socialist tendency within the capitalist fascist German Nazi Party) is linked to a reptilian handful of grifters including (in descending IQ order) frequent Tucker “Goebbels” Carlson Fatherland News guest Glenn Greenwald; Krystal Ball (it may be unfair to include her and my apologies if so); Max Blumenthal; Caitlin Johnstone; the late Diana Johnstone (who once wrote me that climate change has nothing to do with capitalism and likens Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Front to the Vietnamese national liberation movement); the comical Boogaloo Bois fan and Carlson friend  Jimmy Dore; People’s Party activist Nick Brana.

I first coined the term “Trumpenleft” (adapted from the brilliant CounterPuncher Eric Draitser’s mocking phrases “Trump Left” and “Trumpenproletariat”) in (I think) 2018. The term was meant as a politico-nomenclatural jest  to capture the Orwellian idiocy of the remarkable number of vaguely left-identified people who were reacting with bitterness and anger against my elementarily accurate observations that the Republican Party had gone neofascist under Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump and Steve “All Hell’s Gonna to Break Loose” Bannon.  It turned out to be more than word play. My most recent book, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (2021), includes a chapter on fascism denial containing 8 pages refuting 18 false narratives advanced by a surprisingly widespread cast of, well, Trumpenleftists during the Trump presidency. I list these narratives in an appendix (below) but you’ve got to get the book to seen them fully critiqued.

This mostly white and male cohort includes ex-“Berners” whose response to the corporate-Democratic quashing of the Bernie Sanders movement has (sadly) been not a “leftward” turn to revolutionary socialism/Marxism/communism but rather a look for imagined proletarian, populist, and anti-elite comrades on the “populist” (fascist) right. Seeming to want a Lenin (or Chomsky) Prize for having figured out something that every seriously radical Left thinker knows – that the Democrats are a corrupt capitalist and imperialist party beholden to corporate and imperialist elites – these odd fellows absurdly accuse principled revolutionary Marxists who oppose Amerikaner neofascism of alliance with the neoliberal Democrats.  They align themselves with the neofascism and white nationalism of the Trump-era Republican Party (and of European politicos like Le Pen and Gert Wilders)  in the name of a “left-right populism.”

Here is an I think useful online reflection sent to me by the clever and insightful Dutch socialist Pepijn Uitterhoeve:

“It took me a while to getting around to [write] this because Glenn Greenwald is so distasteful, but there’s kind of a coherent political project he’s engaged in, and you can see this reflected in the politics of Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Revolutionary Blackout Network and to some extent Krystal Ball – and I try to be maximally charitable here, staying away from accusations that they’re grifters [I grant no such charity – P.S.]. Their position is that it’s key to unite as many people as possible against The Elites. They’re not explicitly anti-capitalist. They’re not interested in traditional left-wing values like anti-racism, feminism and the like. They’re not interested in any critique whatsoever of right-wing hobby horses. They’re willing to give right-wingers a blanket pass on all their horrifying bullshit as long as they would please please please help in the fight against the people in power. They want to say to the Right: we don’t care about your obsession with the nuclear family, your disregard for women’s rights, your preoccupation with sexuality, orientation, or gender roles. We can look past your naked racism towards migrants and various minorities, your support for police brutality and your science denialism. We want you to help us take down these people who start wars, deny you healthcare, make everyone impoverished, curtail your rights and treat you like useful but disposable pawns in an empty, irrelevant, meaningless fight between corrupt interchangeable ruling parties. In short, they reject the Left-liberal coalition that Sanders was trying to build. They want to instead build a ‘populist’ Left-Right coalition. And they explicitly prioritize the Democrats as a target, because after all that’s the cheapest ticket to getting the ear of a reactionary….What I find interesting [about the JD3TL] is the degree to which right-wing positions are adopted and amplified. It’s a really weird situation where it’s all give and no take. The Tucker Carlson right-wing that’s being courted gives zero concessions. They’ll go along with anti-war positions, because anti-war positions have traditionally had some currency among some of the Right. But you don’t see right-wingers anywhere making passionate arguments for things like Medicare for All, which Dore knobs want…”

Bulls-eye!

The Trumpenleft insists that there’s no real difference between the two US major parties and even that the Democrats are every bit as fascist as the Republicans.  These is false in numerous ways, including this: the Democrats retain a commitment to the values and procedures of bourgeois constitutional democracy and rule of law, such as they are; the Republicans, now the Republi-fascists, do not. Criticizing this false equivalence hardly makes one an apologist for the Weimar Dems. It  just means that one isn’t a mentally and/or morally deficient jackass who is either incapable of or cynically opposed to grasping obvious divisions within the US capitalist ruling class and differences between its two reigning political organizations.

The disproportionately white and male Trumpenleft is grossly tolerant and/or sickeningly approving of Trumpism-fascism’s white supremacism, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, fundamentalism, trans-bashing, conspiratorialism, authoritarianism, and eco-cidalism. It engages in related empirically false neo-Strasserite fantasies about Trumpism-fascism’s supposedly proletarian (and potentially socialist) base. Consistent with the Trumpenleft’s race-gender demographics, some Trumpenlefties have purveyed the notion that the problems of racism/white supremacism, sexism/patriarchy, nativism, homophobia and trans-bashing are nothing more than ruling class diversions, even “scams” (to use the language of the leading Facebook Trumpenleftist and thankfully retired political scientist Gary Olson) concocted with help from “PMC” (professional managerial or middle class) liberals to divide the proletariat.

There is considerable overlap between this left category and the Putin left.  It’s been remarkable to witness how often left-identified folks who have (absurdly) told me that (a) the bourgeois-democratic Democrats are “as fascist” or even “more fascist” than the Republi-fascist party, (b) racism and sexism are fake and diversionary issues (“scams”!) that matter only to bourgeois identity politicos, and (c) Trumpism’s base isn’t really all that bad (it’s the [um, white] working class don’t you know?) are the same left folks who back thoroughly non- and anti-Marxist monsters like Putin and Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Aleppo. Many of these Trumpenlefties really dig Moscow’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. Like the Putin left, they seem incapable of, or cynically opposed to grasping the difference between the anti-racism and anti-sexism of revolutionary Marxists on one hand and the bourgeois identity and politics of “liberal” Democrats and identitarian Wokesters on the other hand. (This matches the false conflation of Marxists and liberals that is part of the fascist ideology with which these dodgy pink-brown Caitlin Johnstone, Jimmy “How ‘Bout Those Proletarian Boogaloo Boys?”  Dore and Glenn “Tucker Carlson’s Mouthpiece” Greenwald fans play faux-populist footsie.)

The tenth child of a South Side Chicago Irish cop, Dore has recently informed his predominantly right-wing audience that the Q-curious Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene is a “left-wing” champion of the working class.  Dore’s more gifted and affluent friend Greenwald has also recently embraced the openly neofascist maniac Taylor-Greene.

The Trumpenlet shares the noxious habit of reflexive what-about-ism with the Putin left. Any reference to the fascist menace posed by the Republican-Amerikaner Right elicits automatic reference to the undeniable sins of the dismal and imperialist Dems, as if Trumpist neofascism is somehow justified by Clinton-Obama-Bidenite neoliberalism – and as if a serious radical like the present writer don’t regularly and radically criticize both political wings of the US capitalist-imperialist order.

I almost hesitate to include Greenwald in the “Trumpenleft.” Despite his many pre-Trump alliances with pinkish leftism, Greenwald entered the public eye as the nasty and dedicated lawyer for the Illinois Nazi leader Matt Hale. It strikes me that his frequent appearances on the nightly fascist Hate Hour conducted by Tucker Carlson, the Joseph Goebbels of US neofascism, is richly consistent with his origins. Perhaps he is just returning to form. Last I looked, this money-hungry and far-from-stupid (unlike Dore) “journalist” has left  Substack for Rumble, which is highly popular among far-right Web-users.

I considered adding the supposedly progressive Democrat-turned “conservative” Trumpian nationalist Tulsi Gabbard to the acronym and label but her past “left” identification seems too shallow to merit inclusion. The ex-Congressperson, Hindu-nationalist, and possible Krishna cultist Gabbard is associated also with the Putin left, with whom she shares a creepy alignment with the Syrian butcher Assad.

8. The Conspiratorial Left

Now we turn to the depressing malady of left conspiratorialism, a natural and indeed classic outcome of the absence of a scientific approach to history and politics. The right-wing has no monopoly on this disorder, which renders its victims incapable of grasping the historical and social-structural taproots of oppression.  Almost anything that involves the making and enacting of decisions atop structures of concentrated wealth and power (like US capitalism-imperialism) becomes a dastardly conspiracy in the “paranoid-style” mind.  Rather than confront the underlying and interlocking oppression systems (of class, race, empire and gender) that  produce terrible outcomes, rather than scientifically investigating and critiquing the society they inhabit, conspiratorialists concoct elaborate and shadowy detective stories, fanciful who-done-its seeking to identify small cabals and perfidious individuals to blame.

Take the 9/11 jetliner attacks and how they were exploited by the George W. Bush administration.  Left conspiracy nuts put their JFK obsession aside long enough to devise elaborate and unsubstantiated narratives on how 9/11 was an  “inside job” perpetrated by the Bush43-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz puppet masters and their CIA and Pentagon agents in the search for “a new Pearl Harbor” (the language of the Project for a New American Century’s retrospectively haunting pre-9/11 call for a US military ramp up and invasion of Iraq and Iran) to justify imperial war and terror abroad and repression at home.  In reality, the attacks were thoroughly predictable and significantly predicted Islamo-terrorist “blowback” (a venerable CIA phrase popularized on the left by the historian Chalmers Johnson) resulting from the United States’ long petro-imperialist intervention in the internal politics of the super-strategic-because oil-rich Middle East. Among the many US provocations in that region that led many observers (the present writer included) to expect significant terrorist “blowback “on US soil (I was thinking suitcase bomb, not hijacked airplanes, to be sure) by the late 1990s: “the immense slaughter of Iraqi civilians during the Gulf War; the devastation of Iraq by U.S.-instigated sanctions throughout the [1990s], the U.S.’s crucial role in supporting Israel’s 35-year occupation of Palestinian territories, its support for brutal dictatorships throughout the Middle East that repress the local populations, and on and on.” (Peter Mitchell and John Schoefell, “A Note on the Events of September 11, 2001,” p. xiii in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky [New York: New Press, 2002]).

The 9/11 attacks were  naturally and predictably exploited (as Chomsky and others including myself foresaw the minute the planes hit) by the petro-imperialist neoconservatives atop the messianic-militarist Bush43-Cheney regime as, yes, “a new Pearl Harbor,” leading to the horrors of the US War of (“on) Terror and the criminal, mass-murderous US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, all in line with the long provocative and opportunist history of US capitalism-imperialism. This was not a mysterious conspiracy atop the US government.  It was US imperialism, imperial “blowback,” and standard US-imperial exploitation of that “blowback,” aided and abetted by the majority of the nation’s ruling political and media classes. The record of Orwellian deception and criminality is available to anyone who bothers to investigate.

Or take the Covid-19 pandemic, the predictable and to no small extent predicted outcome of global capitalism’s relentless, systemically inherent accumulation-/“growth”-addicted assault on previously existing boundaries between homo sapiens and multiple and ever-mutating zoonotic viruses that transmit between species.  Unable or unwilling to follow the science on this grave problem, unsolvable under the world capitalist system (like the related climate catastrophe), a depressing number of  left- and formerly left-identified folks have fallen for conspiracy “theories” that make wild and unsubstantiated, Internet-fed claims about a Big Pharma plot to reap super-profits by manufacturing viruses in weaponized biolabs in order to turn us all into “vaccine slaves”!  This is how your former “socialist” friend became a Ron DeSantis cheerleader and RFK, Jr, fan who thinks that “Anthony Fauci is a Nazi” and that January 6th wasn’t really “all that big a deal” compared to the “real fascism” of Covid 19 vaccination and masking.  It’s all part of the globalist “Great Re-Set,” don’t you know? It’s not that big a leap from this kind of “theory” to neo-fascist Great Replacement Theory, blood-libel neo-Nazi QAnon claims that George Soros and his friends atop the Democratic Party dine on human children, and science-denialist eco-fascist claims that global warming is a “radical Left hoax” meant to suppress humanity’s holy right to burn every last fossil on the planet.

The US ruling classes have nothing to fear from the conspiratorial left, which focuses not on structures, institutions, and ideologies of class rule, empire, and oppression but rather on an endless series of imagined elaborate schemes attributed to nefarious and shadowy elites, the untangling of which sends people down long black holes of bias-confirming “research” on the World Wide Web. I am reminded of something Noam Chomsky said in one of many public discussions he engaged in during the 1990s and that are captured in the previously cited book Understanding Power.  In a sub-section of that volume book titled “Self-Destruction of the U.S. Left,” he says that “there’s a huge amount of frittering away of energy on real absurdities.  There are parts of [the left]…where huge amounts of energy go into things like trying to figure out exactly which Mafia figure might have been involved in killing John F. Kennedy, or something – as if anybody should care.  The energy and the passion that goes into things like that is really extraordinary, and it’s very self-destructive.”

In my experience, for what it’s worth, conspiratorialists are among the most menacing bunch one confronts on the left.  Their taste for dark and mysterious conspiracies and their weakness on institutional, historical, and social-structural analysis predisposes them for collaboration with like-minded sorts on the heavily conspiratorialist right, with whom they share the paranoid mindset. I know currently and formerly left-identified people who have fallen hook, line, and sinker for numerous wild conspiracies shared with the far right, from Covid-19 as the product of a US-Chinese bioweapon research to the notion that the global elites are poisoning us with chemtrail poisons planted in airplane fuel. It all has something to do with Hunter Biden’s lap(top) and the FBI-ANTIFA assault on the US Capitol on January 6.

(I do not mean to suggest that bona fide conspiracies never exist. Of course they do. I, for one, have never really believed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and will be somewhat  unsurprised if conclusive evidence ever shows that James Earl Ray had collaborators in the imperial police state. But when conspiratorialism becomes a substitute for radical thought and all one’s energies are poured into unravelling elaborate mysteries, the ruling class wins.)

Appendix to Part Three: Eighteen False Trumpenleft Narratives, 2017-2021*

1. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist aligned one with both the Democratic Party and the capitalist and imperial American system that the Democrats have long supported.

2. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist affiliated one with a deceptive narrative that had long been trumpeted by the Democrats and the liberal media with the intent of distracting the populace from the capitalist-imperialist system and the Democrats’ captivity to that system.

3. Left anti-Trump/-fascism activists failed to grasp that “the Democrats are fascists too.” The Democrats and the Republicans are the same, there’s no real difference between them.

4. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist reflects a failure to see that fascism only happens when the state commands the economy under a corporatist scheme directed by a maximal leader atop a one-party dictatorship.

5.  Beneath all his racist and sexist strongman bravado, Trump was really just another neoliberal capitalist president.

6. Identification of Trump and Trumpism as fascist misunderstood and betrayed the proletarian, “white working-class,” base of Trump’s “populist” support, alienating people the Left need to “reach out to” and thereby failing to advance the working-class unity required to fight capitalism and neoliberalism.

7. Identification of Trump as a fascist is invalidated by the (supposed) anti-imperialism of Trump.

8. Identification of Trump as a fascist was contradicted by Trump’s response to COVID-19, which, “if Trump had been a fascist” would have involved “draconian” crackdowns in pursuit of authoritarian rule.

9. Fascism only holds relevance when there exists a revolutionary socialist Left and working class that the ruling capitalist class wants violently smashed.

10. Antifascists in the Trump years were plagued by “Trump derangement syndrome” (TDS), an obsession with Trump himself and his evil, which (supposedly) no longer held relevance once Trump was removed from office.

11. Fears of Trump’s fascism were overblown because Trump never won the allegiance of all but a small fraction of the nation’s corporate and financial ruling class, which turned decisively against him[i] after the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.

12. “Trump is too much of an undisciplined clown and a buffoon to be taken seriously as a fascist.”.

13. “Trump can’t be a fascist since he never said he was a fascist.”

14. “January 6th wasn’t that big a deal, it was just more of Trump’s feckless ‘antics.’”

15. People concerned about Trumpism-fascism failed to see that “Trump’s open white supremacism was preferable to the Democrats’ more cloaked white supremacism” (in the social media words of the Green Party’s 2016 vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka) because the former produces mass protest while the latter “puts the people to sleep and keeps them off the streets.”

16. Calling Trump and his supporters fascist invites repression of the Left.

17. Calling Trump and his movement fascist was symptomatic of leftists’ habit of overusing the “F-word” to the “the point that it has been stripped of much of any meaning” and became an “empty signifier that, at most, means ‘really bad person on the right.’”

18. People who called Trump and his supporters and allies fascist failed to understand that Trump posed two greater menaces than fascism.

* To see my full and richly annotated critique of these narratives you must get This Happened Here and read the concluding section of its fourth chapter.

Part Four, TPSR 2.16.2023

+9. The “Eternal No” of Anarchism/Oxymoronic “Libertarian Socialism”

Like economism, trade unionism, electoralism, parliamentary cretinism, and standpoint proletarianism, anarchism and “libertarian socialism” have long histories predating the neoliberal era and the late 20th Century collapse of the international communist movement. Left radicals in this strand advocate workers’ and people’s revolution without serious understanding of how to make and keep a desirable one.  A troubling lack of weightiness is reflected in the “anti-authoritarian” resistance to acknowledging the needs for a radical vanguard party and the seizure and use of state power to implement a people’s government that could model and spread proletarian revolution. There’s no real revolution to be made, kept, and spread without such a party and without taking and using state power to create a radically restructured social order. Class and other forms of oppression do not magically disappear overnight after a country or region goes socialist and neither does the need for state power  – for a peoples’ state that will retain certain coercive aspects even while it is more substantially liberating than bourgeois democracy at its best.

The present writer was recently criticized by a self-declared anarchist whose social media banner proclaims that “all governments are criminal organizations.” Right there this “libertarian socialist” gives the game away: if the proletariat and its party/parties had a revolution and created a workers’ government to crush counterrevolution, fight back against imperialist incursions, and model proletarian and people’s power for other nations, it would be “a criminal organization” (because “all governments are criminal”).

Leftists who think we can magically skip past Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” to post-capitalist “workers’ control” without first acquiring and exercising state power are living in a dream world. To be sure, any serious and genuine socialist revolution – one aiming to transcend class disparity and class rule and move humanity on the path to communism – will take up the struggle against the capitalist division of labor. Revolutionary Marxists look forward to and fight for “the reign of the associated producers” prophesied near the end of the third volume of Marx’s Capital.  But the long and hard work of making and keeping a people’s revolution and a socialist state will have to come first. And Lenin had it right in State and Revolution, written as the Bolshevik leader was audaciously planning to lead – imagine – an actual proletarian revolution: “the proletariat needs the state as a special form of organization of violence against the bourgeoisie” (please make sure to see point 13 below if Lenin’s reference to violence upsets you).

Of all the tendencies criticized in this series, this is the one with which the present writer has had most past identification and for which he feels the most lingering comradeship. A serious revolutionary socialist will include and work with genuinely anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist (and anti-racist/-sexist/-fascist/-homophobic/-trans-bashing/-fundementalist theocratic) anarchists/“libertarian socialists”  — and indeed with anyone else who wants to join – in struggling to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist state. Serious left anarchists genuinely want a radical society-wide revolution even if they tend to cancel their wish by rejecting (supposedly inherently evil and authoritarian) vanguard parties and the taking and use of state power. In the process of making a revolution, moreover, many of these “anti-authoritarians” will grasp the existential  necessity of both vanguard formation and taking/using state power for putting humanity on the path to the end of class rule – indeed of class – and other forms of oppression.

10. Direct Service-ism is an affliction of folks who identify the people’s cause with providing goods and services to the oppressed. “When I give food to the poor,” Dom Helder Câmara famously said, “they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Revolutionary Marxists/socialists/communists ask “why they are poor,” answer that it is because of capitalism-imperialism and its related and allied oppression structures. and show that that the solution is socialist revolution to overthrow the system that mires masses in poverty while making parasitic elites filthy rich, crushing livable ecology,  spreading disease, fomenting alienation, and generating endless war. Actual radicals may support and participate in food pantries, shelter houses, crisis centers, and the like but they do not confuse such things with a revolutionary socialist movement any more than they would a collective bargaining agreement, a bottle recycling bill, the installation of an electric car-charging station, or a reduction in public transportation charges.

Christian capitalist “personal responsibility” shamers love to quote the following proverb: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Revolutionary communists counter as follows: “if you give a victim of capitalist-imposed poverty a coat, you help clothe them for the winter. Do so if you can, of course, because you are a caring human being. But if you put folks in contact with the theory and practice of socialist revolution, you help them learn how to join with others in liberating themselves and all humanity from poverty-generating class rule and other and related forms of oppression.”

Six weeks ago, the New York Times Sunday Magazine recently ran a practically worshipful cover story about a brilliant, quasi-messianic Boston doctor who has spent decades working as a wonderfully caring physician for his city’s homeless population. Reflecting on American capitalist society’s failure to provide adequate affordable housing,  the doctor said this to Times writer Tracy Kidder: “This is what we do while we’re waiting for the world to change….I don’t get despairing, but it’s much easier to just go take care of people” – easier than trying to change society, that is.  It’s an understandable sentiment, but we have an even greater duty to ask the “communist” question and give the revolutionary socialist answer: there must not be hungry and homeless people in the first place. It is a fundamental requirement of capitalism that people do not enjoy basic rights to adequate food and shelter.  That is a system that must be overthrown and radically replaced by a socialism that puts humanity on the path to communism.

To be sure, left-anarchist mutual aid advocates try to combine “strategies and resources to meet each other’s needs, such as food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief” with “organizing against the [capitalist] system that created the shortages in the first place.” A noble endeavor, certainly, but the tasks of “meet[ing mass] needs” for “food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief” – needs that escalate with each day humanity is cursed to live under the rapacious and eco-cidal profits system – are far beyond the resources of any groups on “the left.” These and many other tasks can be meaningfully taken up only by a people’s revolutionary  government, the achievement of which must be the primary radical focus. It’s neither the job nor within the capacity of radical movements to feed, clothe, heal and otherwise materially sustain the masses thrown into poverty and misery by the capitalist system. Besides stealing energy and resources from essential political tasks, putting a primary or even major emphasis on the fanciful effort to meet basic mass needs under capitalism opens mutual aid-ism up to easy cooptation by bourgeois-neoliberal liberal “good citizen” initiatives, self-help activism, and charity.

11. Localism

Localism is the common left habit of over-focusing on local politics and struggle. All during the Trump years, as a fascist lunatic  – accurately described by the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (this even on the eve of Covid-19 and Trump’s insane pandemo-fascist response to the virus) – sat in the executive branch of the world’s most destructive and dangerous nation (the United States, accurately described by Bob Avakian as “the world’s leading oppressor state”), filling the Supreme Court and lower federal courts with Christian fascist women-haters and leading a nationwide ruling class party that had crossed over into eliminationist neofascism, droves of liberals, leftists, and progressives remained sadly mired in local matters, like trying to get their local mayors and city to declare a climate emergency or advancing the doomed and chimeric goals (under capitalism) of “de-funding” the police. They would sometimes became irritated at Refuse Fascism and revolutionary communist activists who challenged them to understand and confront  problems like institutional racism, climate catastrophe and, well, fascism on a national and global, system-wide basis. Capitalism-imperialism, its offspring fascism, and the related oppression structures of race, class, and gender operate on a vast extra-local scale and require militant and organized popular resistance beyond the town, city, metropolitan, county, and state levels.  This might seem so obvious as to hardly merit mention but the notion that “everything is local” (and the related pessimistic idea that nothing decent can be accomplished beyond the local level) is depressingly widespread among many who identify as left. Like “libertarian socialism,” the post 1970s environmentalist phrase “Think globally, act locally” is self-canceling. National and indeed global popular action and coordination is required to stop the four apocalyptic horsemen currently stalking planet-wide humanity and the broader web of life on Earth courtesy of the world capitalist economic and state system: ecocide, potentially nuclear war, pandemicide, and authoritarianism/fascism.

12. Single Issue-ism. Then there’s the single-issue malady. Much of what is called and considers itself part of “the left” is tied to one and only one issue – mental health resources, gun control, racist policing, trans rights, climate change, racist mass incarceration, ex-offender employment, voting rights, wildlife restoration, abortion funds, job training, affordable housing, union recognition and collective bargaining (for one small section of the multiply oppressed populace), and… the list goes on and on. Any serious revolutionary socialist knows that the various grave problems of life under capitalism-imperialism are interwoven with each other in a many-sided simultaneous equations system of inequality, exploitation, expansion, and oppression. Picking just one or two parts of the system to work on (generally in very limited ways) easily becomes surrender to the overall whack-a-mole madness of the bourgeois order, which is tipping humanity into mutually reinforcing crises of ecocide and pandemicide while bringing us closer to terminal thermonuclear war than we’ve ever been. Like direct service-ism, the single-issue affliction is often tied to dependence on corporate foundations, for whom the point is service and/or narrow policy advocacy on behalf of one designated group of society’s victims rather than militant and mass confrontation with the underlying system that victimizes all humanity and generates an endless roster of variously categorized and overlapping crises.

I will never forget a big Iowa City meeting a local anarchist friend told me to attend shortly after Trump’s 2016 election.  Just a week or so before, I had joined at least 100 mostly young citizens in a march that shut-down the eastbound lanes of Interstate-80, chanting “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!” It was with no small anticipation that I attended the meeting at the University of Iowa campus’s venerable Old Brick church to learn about the coming plans for a new anti-fascist movement pushing for the collapse of the coming vicious Trump-Pence regime that the dismal neoliberal, corporate, and imperialist Hillary Clinton campaign and the anti-democratic Electoral College had helped create. The gathering was dystopian. One local and regional NGO after another came up to the podium to make a pitch for money and volunteers to help them deliver goods, services, and policy advocacy around the one narrow issue area that concerned them. The broad and national political situation was hardly mentioned. Nobody said a single word about building on the momentum of the I-80 shutdown – the stoppage of traffic on The Main Street of America – to join with others across the rest of the country to prevent and defeat the coming living nighmare of a fascist US presidency – a nighamre detailed at length in many books including my own This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. (I guess this anecdote also belongs under afflication 11, localism.)

13.  Pathological Pacifism. Also problematic is the extreme pacifism and related “comfort zone”-seeking (some might say cowardice) that paralyzes some, perhaps many on the left. Let there be no misunderstanding here: serious revolutionary socialists and communists naturally abhor violence and regularly advocate mass nonviolent protest. But they harbor no illusions about ruling classes and reactionaries peacefully giving up power and systems of oppression. They refuse to stand down from popular and revolutionary activism because it might elicit a violent reaction and conflict. They understand that there are legitimate roles for armed force in the defense and advance of progressive and revolutionary movements and change.

At one point during the great nationwide George Floyd Rebellion in Iowa City, I witnessed three young white men outside a parked pick-up truck arguing, one of them expressing his desire to use his rifle to shoot down protesters. The hothead lost the argument, thankfully. What if he hadn’t? Would it then have been wrong for some leftist to have been armed and trained (I am neither) in such a way as to be able to effectively neutralize the fascist with the threat or actual use of force before he could slaughter an untold number of civil rights marchers?  Should the armed Black Deacons of Defense not have guarded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was himself heavily armed in his home during the late 1950s) against white supremacist violence during the Civil Rights Movement? Should the armed left group Redneck Rebellion not have protected Cornel West and other civil rights counter-protesters from white-supremacist violence during the fascist Unite the Right really in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017?  Was it wrong for the Black Panthers to arm themselves in self- and community-defense against racist white cops who murdered Black people with impunity during the late 1960s? Should US citizens and Black ex-slaves not have enlisted in the Union Army to fight a bloody war against Black chattel slavery (explicitly so after the Emancipation Proclamation) in the 1860s? Should the Soviet Union, England, and the United States and other united nations not have fought the global war against German-led fascism between 1939 and 1945? Would a socialist government not protect its elected officials from violent fascist mobs with armed force if necessary? Would it allow future Ashli Babbitts and her demented ilk into the people’s assembly to take government officials hostage and murder them?  On a smaller scale, woudln’t it have been good if one of the onlookers had tried to physically intervene to knock the killer Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin’s knee off George Floyd’s neck on May 25, 2020?

Ward Churchill’s important book Pacificism as Pathology offers an important if unsettling critique of the North American left’s exaggerated faith in the effectiveness of Gahndian protest. It challenges liberal-left “magical thinking that somehow if we are merely good and nice enough people, the state will stop using its violence to exploit us all” (Derrick Jensen).  Gosh, that would be nice.

“How,” one of Churchill’s reviewers (Margo Stiles) writes, do pacifists “propose to [defeat] …the most heavily armed, cynical, and ruthless class privilege system in history without some form of real confrontation? With 2-hour candlelight vigils and some symbolic arrests which, by the way, may or may not be reported by the corporate-owned media? If that was all that was required to get rid of an immoral, deeply rooted capitalist system, a Nazi terror regime, a vicious landowning oligarchy as in Salvador, and so on, humanity would have moved past these filthy horrors decades if not centuries ago. As Churchill points out, Nazi Germany was defeated by the massive application of force; the racist American South was similarly …defeated in the 1860s by massive military force, by organized all-out violence…There is not a single case in history where a deeply entrenched system of class or racial exploitation was overthrown by moral suasion and symbolic protests…If real change came about it was because force was being applied somewhere else alongside the nonviolent tracks… It’s a discomfiting point, but I’m afraid it is a true fact. Social change does not come cheap.”

Revolutionary socialists never celebrate violence. They have no toleration for gratuitous acts of physical retaliation, revenge, and humiliation. They seek the end of oppression, the seedbed of violent conflict. They agitate with capitalist state gendarmes, beseeching them to cease and desist from the use of force against the people. But they do not oppose the use of force and even (not the same thing) violence under any and circumstances. They do not give up on revolutionary movements because “people could get hurt.”  They do not turn their basic human aversion to bloodshed into a rationale for surrendering the streets and public squares and the halls of power to the ruling class and its agents. They do not fantasize about bloodless revolution, and they do not take the threat and even likelihood of violent conflict to mean that revolutions are not worth organizing and fighting for. They do not shrink either from appropriate armed self-defense or from the proper “application of force” to defeat oppressive regimes and systems. They do not grant ruling classes a permanent monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They preserve the right of the state to employ coercion under socialist rule (understood openly and properly as “the dictatorship of the proletariat”) while looking forward to and struggling for a world beyond class rule and other forms of oppression, which are the taproots of violent conflict.

Part Five, TPSR, March 2, 2023

14. Academicism

Let us dispense from the outset with the wild-eyed Republikaner notion that US academia is under the control of “the radical Marxist Left.” This narrative is every bit as laughable as the claim that the Democratic Party (with whom most academics in the liberal arts and social sciences are affiliated) is “socialist” and “communist.”  Would that the FOX News fantasy of colleges and universities crawling with “Marxist professors” trying to “indoctrinate the nation’s youth” remotely reflected reality!

The preponderant majority of US academic discourse and conduct takes place within the dull and depressing framework of bourgeois and imperial ideology. This is a nice match for material reality in the nation’s ever more absurdly expensive, class-exclusionary colleges and universities, where escalating tuition has not prevented academic authorities from handing an ever rising share of the teaching to poorly paid adjuncts and other non-tenure track instructors who can be thrown back into the reserve army of academic labor at the slightest hint of serious radicalism

Radical and non-armchair socialists and communists (and left anarchists) are far and few between in the nation’s neoliberal era classrooms, lecture halls, seminar rooms, and faculty offices. US-American so-called higher education is packed with all-knowing professors who have never understood or seriously engaged with Marx and Marxist thought and writing but who nevertheless hold forth on why Marx and Marxists were/are supposedly wrong – this as current events now demonstrate to any truly educated person that Marx and Engels had it right in 1848: its “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin” of all.

To make matter worse, much of what passes for “radical left” academic thought is indecipherable to all but the doctorate-possessing soothsayers themselves, if even to them. As Chomsky observed in a reflection on the “Self-Destruction of the US Left” two decades ago:

“the academic left…[is] mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed post-modernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people who are involved in it – but it’s really good for careers and that sort of thing.  [Like conspiracy theories, – P.S.], that pulls a ton of energy into activities that have the great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world, so therefore they’re very useful for the institutions to support and to tolerate and to encourage people to get involved with.”

Far too few left thinkers within and beyond the incestuous academic bubble have taken seriously Chomsky’s sage counsel on “the moral responsibility of intellectuals:” talk to and write for ordinary citizens in terms they can understand about things that matter and that they can and must do something about (my paraphrase and elaboration). When the academics are not too busy talking to themselves – their main audience – to don the cloak of  “public intellectuals,” they typically address themselves to the ruling classes, not the popular masses. (There are exceptions, of course: I think especially of the people’s historian Howard Zinn, held at arm’s length by the US history profession because of his insistence on writing for the populace and social movements.)

Myself the possessor of a doctorate in US history, I  never miss the academic world, with its insufferable elitism, absurd over-specialization, incestuous discourse, power-serving cowardice, cynicism. moral and intellectual laziness, arrogance, condescension, comic self-importance, pomposity, and shameless exploitation of graduate students and adjunct instructors[1].  It’s an often toxic, deeply conservative (in a “liberal” sort of way), corrupt, unprincipled and notoriously backbiting world about as far removed from “radical Marxist” politics and activism as one might imagine. One reason to not go too far in bemoaning “the fall of the ivory tower” in the current period of insanely high class-exclusivist tuition and vicious neo-fascist assaults on mythically “radical left” academia – assaults that further academics’ timidity, atomization, and spinelessness – is the possibility that more young thinkers who would previously have been channeled into mind- and soul-numbing toil in the capitalist-imperialist university will apply their intellectual faculties to the existentially urgent tasks of making people’s socialist revolution.

15. Pessimism

All the left pathology discussed in this series takes place within a political culture wherein most people are less able and/or willing to conceive the transcendence of the exterminist profits system than they are to envision the end of human existence.  “We live at a time,” Henry Giroux wrote two decades ago, paraphrasing the cultural theorist Frederic Jameson (whose prose I tried to decipher without success at age 19) “when it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For the left,” Giroux observed, “the militant hope of socialism appears to have collapsed into a century of disastrous betrayals of revolutionary dreams, mass murder, and an endless series of self-deceptions about the promise of a future in which human beings realize their full potential…(emphasis added).” The end of capitalism vs the end of life: a chilling dichotomy to contemplate when one considers the fact that capitalism is wired to end life itself.  

In intellectual circles, this suicidal collapse of imagination and hope for a world beyond the rule of capitalism-imperialism is often cloaked as “realism” and “pragmatism.” It’s no small problem. “The need to overcome a debilitating pessimism,” Giroux  wrote in Public Spaces, Private Lives, “is one of ‘the most important questions that anyone seriously interested in social change must confront.” The “greatest dangers facing the twenty-first century,” Giroux warned, “come from the wish to refrain from thinking of alternatives to the present – allowing intellectual pessimism to become complicit with the status quo by degenerating into indifference and quietism.”

Many left folks of my acquaintance, generally with academic backgrounds, have dropped and perhaps never really embraced the idea of socialist revolution. They roll their eyes and turn away at the mere mention of the “r word.” They either naively think that the critical main dilemmas of our times can be meaningfully tackled and overcome under the capitalist system or believe – in the name of “realism” – that we have no option but to try to solve them under capitalism since Marx and Engels’ “dream” of the “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (The Communist Manifesto) is simply (sometimes said to be “sadly”) off the historical table – a “God That Failed.”

The first idea is mistaken. Beyond the important fact the “four apocalyptic horsemen,” to use Chomsky’s language, of the 21st Century – ecocide, pandemicide, the escalating threat of terminal war, and fascism – are caused by capitalism, the more relevant point is that none of those cataclysmic mneances  – or patriarchy (please note the gender of “horsemen”) or racism – can be meaningfully overcome under capitalism. This is quite clearly the case true in regard to the climate crisis, the biggest issue of our or any time since there’s no democracy, social justice, freedom, love, and beauty on a dead planet. To say, as Chomsky has, that we don’t have time for revolutionary transformation beyond capitalism before solving the climate crisis is to say that humanity is doomed. “Anthropogenic” (really capitalogenic) global warming will only worsen in a world still locked into what the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) leader Bob Avakian calls “the killing confines of capitalism.”

True realism says that the young German philosophers of scientific socialism and proletarian revolution were right: it’s “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (and down to its material base) or  “common ruin.” Sorry to repeat the quote but it’s important: the goal really needs to be “revolution, nothing less,” to use the name of the RCP’s weekly Thursday night YouTube broadcast.  As Che Guevara (who admittedly died in an arguably un-Marxist adventure in Bolivia) once said, “it’s not my fault that reality is Marxist.”

The second idea – that revolution is simply off the historical table – is simply surrender to the bourgeois revocation of a decent future.  Call it class rule cancel culture. If I am right (and of course I am) that there are no meaningful solutions under the continuing reign of (sorry to use such an “old timey” phrase but it still fits) “the bourgeoisie” (that is, under capitalism), then we have no choice but to figure out how to birth a socialist revolution and then do so. It’s an existential duty. In that key sense, “pessimism” and “optimism” are really besides the point. It’s not about the crystal ball. (Can we please dispense with Antonio Gramsci’s self-cancelling maxim “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will?” Let’s put that up on the shelf with other self-destructive left axioms like “speak truth to power.”)

16.  Retreat to Self-ism

A related part of the surrender that I have noted among many left-identified folks are the beliefs that the structure and purpose of society are now so far beyond their and others’ sphere of influence that it is now “dysfunctional” and useless to work for popular and revolutionary political struggle.  The real path to liberation, many such apolitical or ex-political left people seem to think, is individual, internal, and even spiritual: self-transformation. In the world view of such folks, many of whom rightly view capitalism-imperialism and its related oppression structures with disdain, the path to a better world is all through individual healing.

The kernel of truth in this conclusion is that people who are in poor personal shape (physical and/or mental) are rarely in a state to contribute positively to the enlightenment, inspiration, organization, and liberation of others. In an airplane that loses pressure in the cabin you must first put on your own oxygen mask and breathe before you can help your seatmates do the same.  People strung out on opiates and whose homes are so jammed with junk that they can barely walk three feet without knocking shit over are going to have a difficult time getting it together to lead or even join a revolutionary movement. So, yes, all who aspire to engage in the necessary tasks of socialist revolution would do well to take basic care of themselves through basic things like adequate exercise and time outdoors, healthy food, a proper sleep regime, meditation/mindfulness, de-cluttering, and play.  But one must always balance “the micro” with an even bigger dose of “the macro”: the necessary task of societal transformation/revolution remains since there’s really no sustainably healthy and balanced life to be had for the masses in the apocalyptic world that capitalism-imperialism has made.

17. Left Anti-Communism Characterized by Reflexive and Arrogant Disdain for the 20th Century Socialist Sates in Russia and China

Another and related problem, especially common among left intellectuals is a kind of reflexive anti-communism characterized by almost automatic and sneering disdain for the 20th Century socialist revolutions and states in Russia and China and for Revolutionary Communist thinkers today.

Whence the “collapse” of “the militant hope of socialism” into “a century of disastrous betrayals of revolutionary dreams, mass murder, and an endless series of self-deceptions about the promise of a future in which human beings realize their full potential” (Giroux)?  Part of it has to do with the intellectual left’s all too easy surrender to Western-imperial Cold War narratives on those  revolutions and states. Most left thinkers view the 20th Century Russian and Chinese socialist regimes with contempt for various reasons: defensive fear of red-baiting (which is being chillingly revised and updated by the Trumpist-DeSantisite FOX News right); social-democratic and/or anarchist/left libertarian/”anti-authoritarian” hostility to vanguard parties and state power;  over-attachment to formal bourgeois democracy; the mistaken notion that socialism means the overnight abolition of class and state coercion; false conflation and even (ala Timothy Snyder and under the over-broad Cold War rubric of “totalitarianism”) merger of the socialist state power that arose in Russia and China with the fascist state power that arose in Italy and Germany during the last century. Whatever the specific mix behind its  contempt, the anti-communist left intelligentsia’s commonly nee-jerk denunciation of the actual revolutionary socialist regimes that arose in Soviet Russia and Maoist China capitulates to the dominant Western-bourgeois notion that the difficulties and collapse these socialist states faced and the failures they suffered prove that communist-led socialist revolution is nothing more than a recipe for disaster and tyranny.

The anti-communist narrative to which most of the intellectual left has surrendered deletes both  the real and remarkable accomplishments achieved by Soviet and Chinese socialism– giant leaps forward in living conditions, lifespan, literacy, and more for millions outside and against the world capitalist system – and the terrible consequences (beyond as well as within the former socialist states and blocs) of the overthrow of really existing socialism (with all its flaws) in Russia and China. Also critically omitted is how unsurprising the failures experienced by the Russian and Chinese socialist states were in light of the enormous challenges those states faced: internal counterrevolution, mass inertia, ideological and cultural lag, and above all, imperial encirclement, provocation, and invasion. As Avakian wrote in his 2004 book Phony Communism is Dead…Long Live Real Communism:

“in China, as well as in the Soviet Union, …the danger of capitalist restoration was rooted in the underlying contradictions marking socialism as a transition from capitalism to communism, and the triumph of the capitalist-roaders was the outcome of the class struggle, both within the socialist countries and internationally….the loud proclamations these days about the ‘failure’ of communism [fail to] recogniz[e] that what has happened in the Soviet Union and China represents, in its essence, defeats inflicted on the international proletariat by the international bourgeoisie, and that the mistakes were secondary and mainly mistakes made in dealing with the very real problems and dangers caused primarily by imperialism, particularly in the early stages of the conflict between proletarian revolution and bourgeois counterrevolution: the point is to learn from such defeats – to learn the lessons – in order to turn temporary setbacks into new breakthroughs.”

Soviet socialism was always a “system under siege,” to use the prolific Marxist analyst Michael Parenti’s phrase. The same goes for Chinese socialism, with the unfortunate proviso that the Soviets were among those laying siege to Mao’s China. Without the external hostility and the assistance imperial encirclement and provocation gave to internal counterrevolution and with instead sympathetic socialist revolutions in other nations, the leading mperial ones especially(!), things would certainly have gone quite differently in Russia, China, and the world during the last and the present century, during which now largely unchallenged global capitalist rule has brought humanity to the very cliff of annihilation. The accomplishments of the Russian and Chinese revolutions would have been immeasurably greater. The mistakes and indeed the crimes committed in the name of socialism in the Soviet Union, the Soviet empire and socialist China would have been much slighter. Soviet and Chinese socialism might not have only survived but thrived in ways that would have inspired socialist revolutions in yet more other countries, putting humanity on the path to a world beyond the soulless and eco-cidal anarchy and oppression of capitalist class dictatorship. (Much the same can be said, I think, for socialist Cuba, whose accomplishments have been quite remarkable considering the presence of the world’ leading imperialist aggressor state just 90 miles north.)

The intellectual left often seems to assume that revolutionary Marxists who think more positively than reigning Western doctrine permits about the Soviet Union and Maoist China – radicals who do not automatically identify those states with “red fascist tyranny” and “seventy years of barbaric rule” (New Yorker editor David Remnick, in his 1997 book on Russia’s supposed Resurrection under the drunken and corrupt “populist” Boris Yeltsin) – have  no substantive criticisms of how those states and their leaders responded to the challenges they encountered. This is false.  In his book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (2001), Parenti – long touted by some as “the communist alternative to the anarchist Chomsky” and naturally shunned by “radical Left” (bourgeois-neoliberal) academia – combined defense of the Soviet Union’s considerable socialist accomplishments and dennciation of the post-Cold War “free market’s” s catastrophic impact on Russians, Eastern Europeans and the world with forthright (if rather narrow) criticism of the Soviet Union’s internal managerial and political failures. The Mao-inspired Revolutionary Commuist Party (RCP) has long combined appreciation of the accomplishments of socialist Russia and Mao-led China with significant critiques of mistakes made not just by the criminal Stalin (whose transgressions reach far beyond the category of “mistakes” in my view) and his “revisionist” successors (from Khrushchev through Brezhnev and Gorbachev) but also by Lenin and Mao[2].

Denying the real achivements of socialist Russia and China and failing to understand the international and historical context within which their failures, crimes, and mistakes occurred means an all too easy surrender to the hegemonic bourgeois notion that the call for socialist revolution is nothing but an invitation to “totalitarian” nightmare.  Meanwhile, the horrific socioeconomic, political, and environmental  consequences of the overthrow of socialism in Russia and China have been ricocheting around the world for decades – and the now not-so “new” post-Soviet and post-Mao era has seen the anarchy of global capitalism bring the world arguably closer to terminal war than the Cold War standoff ever did.

As expected, this series has been far less popular than my usual fare of reporting and commentary on the mutually reinforcing/multiplying crimes of US capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, fascism, and ecocide for the simple reason that most of my readers prefer to focus on what’s being done to them by the oppressors than on why they/we aren’t properly fighting back to overthrow the oppressors and (above all) the oppressors’ system.  It is possible that I will pen a follow-up to this now-concluded five-part series in which I might do two things:  tease out a number of overlaps and shared spaces tying together many of the 17  US left afflictions I have examined across the series; detail some of my own past engagements and involvements both inside and against these afflictions.  It is possible also that I will forego such commentary given the onrush of horrific current events brought to us on regular basis courtesy of capitalism-imperialism. As Donald Trump likes to say, “we’ll see what happens.”

Endnotes for Part Five

+1. Among the professoriate’s many problems, the cowardice stands out – something of which I have too many examples to recount here.  During my year as a ridiculously overworked visiting professor at a formerly and openly Left/Marxist history department in 2005-06, I was shocked at the reluctance of even nominally progressive academics to speak out against the US occupation of Iraq or much of anything else in George W. Bush’s America. (The professoriate there was already naturally and foolishly in love with the next president – the neoliberal imperialist Barack Obama, who I was already calling “the empire’s new clothes.”) In more recent years, I have been depressed but unsurprised by the refusal of all but a small handful of academics to rise up against the many-sided neofascist menace that stalks the land, taking special aim at supposedly radical higher education (see the fourth chapter of my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America for a darkly amusing discussion of the different head-in-the-sand narratives US academics and political commentators concocted [here I must sadly include the normally astute Chomsky] to absurdly deny that fascism that had taken up residence in the White House on January 20, 2017)  When I asked an urban studies professor last year what she and other tenured professors at a major state university intended to do about their state’s passage of a law making it illegal to tell the truth about the roles that racism and sexism have played in American history and society, she said this: “I’m just going to try to stay under the radar.” I’m not sure there’s a single open Marxist (or left anarchist) left in her university – something that would hardly stop Tucker Carlson or Ron DeSantis from calling that university an outpost of “radical Left indoctrination.”

+2. For two among many examples, see RCP leader Bob Avakian’s 1981 lecture “Conquer the World; The International Proletariat Must and Will” and Avakian’s aforementioned volume Phony Communism is Dead…Long Live Real Communism. Amusingly enough, getting US left intellectuals to read something by Avakian is a bit like trying to get a child to take unsweetened medicine. Reflexive anti-communism, fear of association with actual revolutionaries, and over-attachment to professional class discourse leads many left intellectuals to automatically dismiss the longtime RCP theoretician. In my experience the mere mention of Avakian’s name to left intellectuals revealingly leads to instant scorn whose intensity is usually matched only by the degree of their total ignorance of anything Avakian has ever said or written. How curiously anti-intellectual.