They Expect Us To Eat Shit
Posted by Mike E on October 28, 2010
by Nando Sims
The Democrats have zero argument. They are the party of Guantanamo now. They are the party that escalates the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Their jets and navies back up a murderous order in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Their diplomats, Israeli allies and war-planners target Iran.
They coldly send murder drones and assassination squads all over the world.
Their response to the oil spill was to put BP in charge of cleanup — and to shield the oil companies and future drilling because of capitalist logic.
They have given a trillion dollar blank check to vampire banks, a debt that will bankrupt social security and tattered social nets. “Too big to fail”? While none of the people are too small to stomp.
They have escalated the heartless deportations of immigrants — in widespread communities, in factories, at the border.
The Democrats’ only hope is to point hysterically to the country’s ugliest fringe, the Tea Party, and proclaim “We are your protection against them.”
Fuck off.
Let’s be blunt: It doesn’t matter to our hopes which corrupt clique of criminals and oppressors runs Congress. It does not matter if this imperial state is “divided” or not. Divided or undivided, they will not solve our problems — if the “we” here is the people of the world.
This country has always had a 20% that is rabid white racists and dizzy wackjobs. Millions of us know them, and hate them, and will one day settle accounts. But do you seriously think we will spend our political lives so scared that we back this empire’s liberal technocrats?
We have no dog in that fight. None. Let them squabble and tear at each other’s flesh. Let the mutual exposure fill the airwaves — let this system’s hypnotic daily buzz get disrupted.
Those who mobilize people to enter the inner warfare of these imperialists often argue for slavishness, cowardice and the pettiest self-interest. They invent this or that narrow momentary advantage will (supposedly) emerge by backing the Democratic candidates.
Screw the world, but hope that this President might prop up your teachers union. Forget those who have been rounded up, but pray that a still-Democratic Senate may give immigrants amnesty. Forget any future radical rupture, but put your sights on keeping Teaparty wackjobs out of the apparatus of oppressors.
Should we hate Rand Paul and Christine O’Donnell more than Andrew Cuomo and Robert Gates?
Really?
Haggard, Lame and Flailing
Warning: don't go there
What can be more threadbare or shameless than this cynical fear-talk?
Do we really need to document the contrast to the raving hype of these same people only two years ago? Do they think we have forgotten?
Those who promoted Obama as change now ask us to embrace the impossibility of real change. They expect us to eat shit.
People Experience, As Traffickers Panic
There were countless ordinary people who deeply believed Obama would bring change — that it would mean that the Black and immigrant would from now on be seen differently, as equal human beings. Their hopes were sincere, and perhaps understandable. They are now learning (as people often learn) from real life.
But there are others who now tell us , over and over, “We knew he was an imperialist. We had no illusions. If you feel betrayed, that’s your disillusionment. We wanted you to rally behind a lesser evil oppressor, and we want you to do it again. And again.”
Forever.
They wave images of those belligerent and racist Tea partiers at us. Thinking it will makes us tremble. Hoping that millions will cower in the shadow of the same government that unleashes ICE pigs in a hundred factories.
No.
The answer to the Tea Party and this empire’s bloodsoaked Liberals is an unapologetic, creative unveiling of modern socialist visions. It is struggle against whoever tramples us. It is to hope for a shattering of the Democratic stranglehold, in the course of the rude destruction of empire and ecocide.
Humanity need something new — something utterly different. And if we, the radical ones, don’t fight for it, if we don’t make visible, it will never happen.
If we, the radical ones, answer calls from the Democrats, we would make ourselves part of the problem. And we should not be part of that problem.
We must embody a radical negation and help gather the core for a radical solution. We must be conscious.
Alastair Reith said
Fantastic post.
tellnolies said
To paraphrase the KPD: After Palin, us. Except we don’t have anything like what the KPD had to offer and that slogan still didn’t pan out. The KPD promised to “settle accounts” with the Nazis too.
There is much that I agree with in Nando’s rant, but I’d feel a lot more righteous in denouncing others abdication of internationalism if I could offer people something more robust in the way of an alternative than “come participate in our blog.” Which is not to say that I don’t think the blog is important.
I’m as disgusted by the Dems get out the vote pleading as anybody and I was as underwhelmed by Bill Fletcher‘s piece as everybody else.
If I drag myself to a voting booth on Tuesday it will be to vote for Charles Barron and whatever other left third party candidates also happen to be on the ballot. But Tuesday’s are busy for me, so there’s a good chance I won’t vote at all, which is fine.
But I’m not going to pretend to be indifferent to whether or not the Tea Party brownshirt wannabes constitute a caucus in the next congress. Rand Paul publicly opposes the main provisions of the Civil Rights Act. I won’t cite the countless other examples, but the open and unapologetic racism of the Tea Party is not a joke and their ascent spells real terror for immigrants, Muslims, queer folks, and people of color in general.
The “rabid white racists and dizzy wackjobs” who in other moments were more marginalized are feeling freshly empowered, are well financed and on the march.
Pretending that it doesn’t make a difference won’t save a single Pakistani victim from Obama’s drones or make the closure of Guantanamo any more imminent.
The Tea Party is riding a wave of real popular discontent and we aren’t.
Perhaps Fletcher did something to encourage the “magical thinking” about Obama he now denounces. Certainly others did. But exposing such slipperiness isn’t a substitute for an alternative course of action in the here and now.
nando said
Don’t think (or imply) I’m arguing “After Palin, us.” Don’t think i’m unaware of our radical weakness. Don’t imply we have nothing to offer but blog space. Don’t imply that anyone suffers from indifference to long-term fascist dangers.
But what would be the impact of having Rand Paul or a few other brownshirts in Congress? Do we know? Is it really so shattering or scary to have those new pigs among those old ones? Is he really the first Senator who resents the 1965 Civil Rights Act? Why be panicked or strategically diverted over such things?
You think it is knowable who it rallies or where it pushes events? Should we assume that only the liberals can answer them, or that only the Right can gain from the escalating fragmentation of the center? Or that radical voices have no potential say in the outcome?
There is a semi-permanent fascist right in this country that will rise and fall and rise again. In fact, there will be no serious radical opening in our future that does not include the parallel and entrwined rise of a real, powerful, enraged Right. If our habit is to throw away our own banners and stampede behind the center at the sight of a few popular fascists, well then there is literally no prospect of any positive change.
We need to build a revolutionary movement. From scratch. A little focus would be good. Not dispersal for tactical reasons with every new breeze.
The first step to any advance is not to throw away what we have. Why act like “having a little” is the equivalent of “having nothing”? We have what we have. A voice, an idea, a will, an initial audience, and some glimmer of potent forbidden truths. And handled well that can be a lot.
We have on our side the communism of a few, and (potentially) the discontent of the many. If we don’t even start, we don’t ever arrive.
Let’s raise our heads.
RW Harvey said
Righteous, Nando… righteous!
David_D said
In many ways, the Bush era was “better” for the Left than Obama, there is no doubt. Though I recognize the danger posed by the fascist-like “Tea Party,” I do not think it is a fundamental threat to the existing social contract, as was Hitler fascism. Furthermore, I’d venture to say that the “Third Way” liberals are the biggest threat to the emergence of a truly progressive alternative. Many people thought they were getting that with Obama, but not so.
land said
Yes. “We have on our side the communism of a few and the discontent of many”
And that means something.
And we have this all over the world.
And that means something.
Great article.
Dave Palmer said
Using words like “shit” and “fuck” in political writing stopped being provocative and edgy in about 1969. Now it just makes you look like you have nothing to say.
Nando really hasn’t answered Tellnolies’ question about what he is promoting as an alternative other than “come participate in our blog.” “Don’t imply we have nothing to offer but blog space” is not really an answer unless you explain what you do have to offer. And is there really any more content in a phrase like “let’s raise our heads” than there is in one like “yes we can?”
I am voting for the Democrats, not out of any misplaced hope in them, nor because I am “cowering” in fear of anyone — but simply because, given the opportunity to express my preference between a set of generally poor options, I will do so. I don’t believe that doing so compromises me in any way. Why should it?
I don’t believe that one can reasonably argue one one hand that voting “doesn’t matter,” and on the other that voting makes you “part of the problem.” Either something is important or it is unimportant. If it is unimportant, then how can doing it make you “part of the problem”?
The idea that the act of voting somehow legitimates the system is pure fetishism. It’s the sort of claim one would expect the starry-eyed idealist proponents of bourgeois democracy to make (i.e. by voting you are participating in the great tradition of American democracy, granting the consent of the governed on which our republic is based, etc.) — not its clear-minded materialist opponents.
By all means let’s “build a revolutionary movement.” But how about a little less “righteous” anger and a little more “focus” — which is, after all, what you say we need?
Jim T said
This is the kind of indignation we need to be expressing about the system, Democrats included. And right now, the widespread disillusionment with the Obama administration might provide a wider audience for such sentiments.
As dangerous as the radical right is, the biggest threats to people in the US remain incarceration, deportations, foreclosures, police brutality, and other structural oppressions the Democrats simply cannot ameliorate based on their dependence on capitalist imperialism. We all know this, but this message gets lost in struggles for reforms that have increasingly diminishing returns. Much of the radical left has very narrow horizons of what is possible, which causes it to swallow one of its greatest assets–righteous indignation against the brutalities of capitalism and white supremacy–in favor of chasing (on the national level) a gutted EFCA, an inadequate health care bill, and potentially devastating immigration reforms. All of this is excused by claiming, “something is better than nothing”–and usually we get nothing anyway.
We can’t ignore the struggle for peoples’ immediate needs, but going about this by offering critical support to the Democrats is not only diluting our message and analysis, but it’s *not working*. We don’t have the forces necessary to unite with the left wing of the Dems and retain our autonomy–and I remain unconvinced that the progressive wing of the Dems has much power anyway.
Tellnolies’ point that we need to be proposing alternatives is well taken. Uncompromisingly radical electoral campaigns on the local level seem to be useful strategies. Temporary, tactical alliances with liberal forces against the Tea Party will be necessary. There’s a lot of exploration to be done.
Alistair said
Dave: Voting legitimises the system because it allows the capitalist parties to pretend that they do have the ‘consent of the governed’. It allows Obama to pretend that extending the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, increasing funding for Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and attempting to silence those who speak out against those acts is ‘enacting the will of the American people’.
Stephanie McMillan said
Nando, great piece.
Someone pointed me to another essay making similar excellent points (Obama’s Finest Hour: Killing Innocent People For “Made-Up Crap”):
http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/2035-obamas-finest-hour-killing-innocent-people-fo
Excerpts:
“Friends, it’s very simple: if you support Barack Obama and the Democrats — even if reluctantly, even if you’re just being all sophisticatedly super-savvy and blogospherically strategic about it, playing the “long game” or eleven-dimensional chess or what have you — you are supporting the outright murder of innocent people who have never done anything against you or yours.”
. . .
“”But oh my gosh, oh my lord, we have to support Obama! What if those Tea Party Republicans get into power? What would happen then?” What would happen? The same goddamned thing that’s happening right now, that’s what. More and more war, more and more murder, more and more domination by a militarist kleptocracy.”
. . .
“I’m not going to spend my brief time here on earth standing with blood-soaked killers, no matter what factional name they give themselves, or what loyalties they might claim on our myth-clouded memories of the past. I’m not going to teach my children that all we can do is to grovel before one child-murdering maniac or another, to keep quiet, to never speak the truth, to sell their votes, their dignity and their souls to murderers who would pervert every good instinct — and every bad instinct — every worthy hope and every nasty fear, to keep themselves in power.”
PatrickSMcNally said
“After Palin, Hillary!” And maybe even “After Hillary, Condie!” In any event, that type of hypothesis is more in line with the shape of real politics today. People who relentlessly hype the Teabaggers as a new “fascist force” are simply forgetting an old lesson which was appreciated by Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler (albeit from different ideological perspectives): the need for an independent party.
There have been a lot of stories produced about the connection of the Koch brothers to financing Teabagging. Those stories are interesting in themselves, but the central lesson is often lost. The Teabaggers are a ramshackle network of mostly angry white men who the Kochs and other traditional backers of the Republican Party decided to start funding as a way of generating diversions from the 8 years of Bush. As such, the Teabaggers do not represent an incipient movement towards a truly new Right-wing.
The reason why the National Socialist German Workers Party started small was because they arose in rivalry to the traditional German conservative parties. Hitler could have tried hiring himself out to some larger conservative organizations, but he felt the need for a new party with its own independent agenda. In this respect Hitler was mirroring Lenin’s arguments about the need for the revolutionary to stand independently apart from the others.
If some new leader emerges who declares a decided break from the Republican Party and sets out to build a new white nationalist party from the ground up, then that will call for special notice. But without such an independent party born among the Right-wing, there can be no white nationalist surge which changes the direction of things.
That direction of the Republican Party was set a long time ago by people like Nelson Rockefeller who acted as Governor of New York State to prohibit discrimination in jobs and housing. At the same time, he pushed for tougher drug laws and took a hard-line towards the Attica uprising. Nelson Rockefeller was a conservative reformer who treated the Jim Crow laws as an embarrassment left over from feudalism, to be replaced by a more appropriate capitalism.
In the 1970s, with stagflation, there was a shift to the Right which led to some attacks on policies which Rockefeller Republicans had advocated. But that shift to the Right went in the direction of Milton Friedman, not Strom Thurmond. It involved attacks on Affirmative Action (which the Republican Richard Nixon had signed into law) from a Friedmanesque perspective, not a white nationalist one. If anything the last 3 decades since the Reagan victory of 1980 have just reaffirmed the basic direction away from the Thurmondesque perspective. Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, these were all high level appointments made under Republican administrations.
If there were to be a real resurgence of white nationalist politics then an absolute break from the Republican Party would have to be the first order of business. It is not possible to build such a movement while depending upon the purse-strings of the Republican-oriented Koch brothers. That fact is important not just to white nationalists who may dream of restoring Jim Crow, but to any opponents who wish to measure the likely impact of the Teabaggers on real world politics.
In the present state, the only point of significance to the Teabaggers is that they represent a stalking horse for the Republican Party at a time when 8 years of Bush have been a general embarrassment. But Teabaggers do not represent an actual shift away from the directions set for the Republican Party by influential figures such as David & Nelson Rockefeller, Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Pipes and others like them. To be able to set such a new direction for the Right-wing the Teabaggers would have to build a new party, and they aren’t doing that at present.
Something which a very large percentage of US Leftists need to be more wary of is the point made by Marx about how people have a tendency to dress up modern battles in outfits from antiquity. I’ve seen a fair share of Leftists who talk as if they’re just waiting for the moment when the crisis of capitalism forces the ruling class to seek to return to the days of Jefferson Davis, Robert Lee, Strom Thurmond, & George Wallace, and maybe then the class battles will finally become clear to everyone. It won’t happen, and a Leftist strategy which acts as if it expects this can only be diversionary.
tellnolies said
Online indignation is cheap. What makes Kasama so valuable is that it is a place where ideas — theory, strategy, analysis — get argued out in a more serious way than elsewhere on the left, that it demands more of revolutionaries than indignation.
I agree with the view that our task is to take the little we have and to use it to build a revolutionary movement. I am in agreement that we can’t allow bi-annual election cycles and the attendant panics about their results to distract us from this critical task.
Of course none of us know how any particular result from this election will play out. I agree that the rise of a revolutionary left is likely to be accompanied by a resurgence of the racist right. It does not follow however that the resurgence of the racist right will generate a revival of revolutionary forces. And thats why the suggestion that it doesn’t matter sounds hollow to people. Tea Party victories will mean more SB1070s and the like. Might that spark a counter-offensive? Sure, but most likely in the form of a re-energized push to elect Dems in 2012. And round and round we go.
There is an element here of know-nothingism in relation to what happens in the electoral arena that is frankly maddening. The “mutual exposure filling the airwaves” is not going to disrupt “this system’s hypnotic daily buzz.” Rather it is part of the buzz. If we want exposure, we need to do it and not in a half-cocked way. Rants about the criminality of the imperialist Dems are not serious exposure. They get a rise from the already convinced and an eye-roll from the rest. They are in this sense not qualitatively different from the waving of the Tea Party voodoo doll in our faces. They are just as trapped in an exhausted discourse as Fletcher’s piece, even if they tell a couple additional truths.
What we need is a serious revolutionary analysis of what the rise of the Tea Party actually represents, how it changes the terrain and what that means for those of us looking for a solution outside this system. To suggest that its rise is just part of the ebb and flow of normal politics in the U.S. is to abdicate this responsibility.
This system is in serious trouble. The financial crisis has not been resolved. The exposure of wholesale fraud in the mortgage industry threatens to push the whole thing back off the cliff. The climate crisis is deepening. The war in Afghanistan is going south for the US. Obama was elected in large part because the system needed him to shore up its legitimacy among huge sections of the populace that were becoming potentially restive. He has in many respects accomplished this, at least domestically, at least so far.
There is a sense in which Fletcher is correct that the real failure has not been of Obama but of the popular social forces that rallied to elect him to remain mobilzed after the elections. Of course Obama’s mission from day one was precisely to prevent that from occurring, to lower the expectations that he raised and to convince people to be content with the symbolic dimensions and occasional minor reforms. In this sense Obama’s presidency has been a big success.
What is maddening in Fletcher’s piece is the complete lack of any sense that this “failure of social forces” is connected to their lack of political independence and the strategic implications of that.
What is maddening in Nando’s piece is that it doesn’t really propose anything to achieve that independence either.
Our tired arguments over electoralism are driven by the power that the system derives from the electoral process. And until we confront this power seriously, by which I mean seriously analyze and not just denounce, our efforts to build a revolutionary movement will remain impotent.
Alistair writes: “Voting legitimises the system because it allows the capitalist parties to pretend that they do have the ‘consent of the governed’.”
This sounds right, but it is really wrong. There is no “pretending” about it. They do have the consent of the vast majority of the governed. And the elections legitimize the system whether we choose to vote or not. The assumption here is that abstaining from the electoral process somehow delegitimizes the system. There are moments in which this might be true, say when the electoral process has been thoroughly discredited and a radical mass movement that had previously participated in the lections instead calls for a boycott, but that is not the present situation and denouncing people who vote for legitimizing the system in the present context is not much different from denouncing people who fail to buy organic milk.
We need to fight the view that the only serious politics are those that happen within the electoral framework of the existing system, but at the same time understand that no serious revolutionary politics can ignore what is happening in that arena either.
There can be no serious revolutionary movement in the US without a rupture within the Democratic Party. I’ve argued elsewhere that this will require organized activity within the Democratic Party to constitute an explicitly radical anti-capitalist pole and to sharpen always present contradictions between the leadership and the base of the party, as well as outside it. Whether we have the capacity to meaningfully undertake such work right now is a legitimate question, but what we do have the capacity to do at least in a primitive manner, is to seriously analyze what is happening in the electoral arena, not from the essentially liberal perspective that many folks like Fletcher have taken, but from a revolutionary one. The difference between these I maintain is NOT mainly one of whether they justify voting or not, but rather how they draw links between the processes taking place now and the possibilities for revolution.
TigerL said
To Mike and the others, I haven’t been posting much but have been following the blog.
A few things I have been meaning to say…
I think tell no lies and Dave have both made a valid point that I think many other are also thinking. Nando is correct in his assertion that we need something different to emerge, but what is that. I am curious at what kasama is doing other than running a blog.
I will also say that without the posts from this site and a few others of similar shades, I would have literally nowhere to turn on the internet for radical news. That said, The blog could also be used as an organizing tool for local initiatives. I.e. Meet here in person, lets do this… Lets get some camera’s together and go harass police while they target youth in the city… lets meet at such and such intersection near such and such prison and voice our opposition in public view to jails and detention centers.
These things will always start small, but thousands of people feel the same way. And if you are positioned in the public way, your chances of linking up with other like minded people goes from 0 on the internet, to greater than 0 in public.
Again to reiterate, I find Kasama to be a very valuable radical news source and discussion site. But we can all agree that it presents no real challenge oppressive systems and institutions.
What do others think…
Radical Eyes said
I want to thank Nando for this provocative post (which I plan to “share” via facebook, in a moment). Not only does it make a number of crucial points in an incisive and bold way, but it has stimulated some excellent discussion.
I have a couple of disparate points to make:
1) Tiger L glad to see you jumping into the discussion! Welcome! I think that the point you raise about coming up with additional, alternative, practice-oriented use of this blog is an important one. Perhaps if you were to come up with a developed proposal, or a model for what such work might entail, the site might post it, for discussion, or perhaps for actual experimentation…There is no shortage of issues to pick from for concerted action…For instance, there has recently been a videotaped beating of a 16 year old youth in Boston where I reside (it happened on the campus of Roxbury Community College), I wonder how many people in Boston are reading Kasama and could be brought together by a meet-up addressing this issue in a radical way (and also how many people could be brought into these discussions through such an action)…? Or, alternatively, even at this late date, we might coordinate some sort of election-day (or day after election day) action that is aimed at exposing the system and its (new) representatives…Or that perhaps takes that “Vote Every Day, Not When They Tell You Too” line to the streets with a Kasama leaflet. I am really just brainstorming here…But I want to encourage us all to take Tiger L’s point seriously.
2) I too, think that Dave D and Tell No Lies raise some important points and questions. In fact I think that–*moderator note!*–that some version of Tell No Lies’s last post (#11) deserves to be reposted as its own article.
TNL, the only place where I am not with you is in your closing call for establishing a radical pole WITHIN the democratic party…Can you or have you elaborated what this strategy would look like concretely? And can Nando or others offer their critiques of said strategy (or point us to where you already have)?
3) To Nando: You raise a great agitational point when you write, “Those who promoted Obama as change now ask us to embrace the impossibility of real change. They expect us to eat shit.”…To which I would only suggest adding: “AND LIKE IT!”
Jim T said
Tellnolies wrote:
Agreed. It shouldn’t remain online, nor did I mean to suggest that it is in any way sufficient on its own. I suppose I had such a strong positive response to Nando’s post because these pointed expressions of frustration with a view of the Democrats that is pervasive, even hegemonic, in some radical circles aren’t being aired frequently enough.
This indignation and the lines of demarcation that it draws can serve as a catalyst for further analysis (and seems to have done so, given the barrage of thoughtful responses it has prompted).
Also, agreed, and I think it would be worthwhile for Kasama to periodically revisit some of the valuable theoretical and analytic contributions offered on the site. Sometimes these get lost in the shuffle.
RW Harvey said
THe most important thing about elections under bourgeois democracy in 21st century America is that it is IDEOLOGICAL poison, and the more you use it the more the poison spreads.
You cannot understand why this American system continues to hold legitimacy wihtout looking at the ideological stranglehold democracy has on all of us, to one degree or another — including on peop0les around the world who want to model America where they are or come here to live.
This is the mother’s milk we were all raised on; to even think for one minute we are not affected by this suckling is to completely misunderstand the role of consciousness (and the unconscious as well) in making revolutionary transformation.
This is how, for example, voting can be not important (in altering the system in any meaningful ways) and vitally important (as an ideological shackle mitigating against revolution.
THe fact that there are still those who know themselves to be revolutionaries and communists, who can honestly imagine voting as being other than poison, demonstrates the potency of this corrosive ideology. Yes, what happens within elections is part of what we need to analyize, to agitate around, to expose, expose, expose… but not participate in nor rally peopleto be the same.
tellnolies said
Radical Eyes,
Re: your question on building a pole within the Democratic Party, there ave been several exchanges here where I’ve tried to spell out my thinking. And to be clear my thinking on all this is still very much in flux. I don’t think there is an obvious solution to our problems and I’m trying to think through what it would entail. But ultimately I think it will require some small scale initiatives to test possibilities.
My argument is based on several assumptions:
First, no serious potential for a revolutionary seizure of power will emerge without the broad masses of people collectively experiencing the exhaustion of the electoral system. The electoral system is a profoundly stabilizing force for capitalism and until its limits are revealed through practical experience by a large fraction of the population, there will not be a sufficiently braod base from which to actually make revolution.
Second, the Democratic Party is not really a coherent party in the way that more ideologically defined parties in parliamentary systems are. It is rather a constantly shifting electoral coalition of diverse forces but under the leadership of a fraction of the US ruling class. It gathers under that leadership most of the politically conscious and active members of the oppressed groups and progressive minded people that would need to be part of any serious mass revolutionary movement in the U.S..
Third, the first-past-the-post system in the U.S. makes it effectively impossible to build an electorally viable third party without a fracturing of one of the two major parties. The last time this happened was with the shattering of the Whigs and the rise of the Republicans leading to the U.S. Civil War.
What I think all this suggests is the need to build not simply the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as many on the left have been attempting for as long as I’ve been alive with little to show for it, but rather a disciplined explicitly radical anti-capitalist “party within a party” that will contest with the liberal and conservative leaders of the Democratic Party for the allegiance of its more progressive rank and file with the objective of repolarizing politics in the country by shattering the alliance with the liberal wing of imperialism and constituting an alliance of oppressed people under explicitly radical anti-capitalist leadership.
There are a number of different ways I see such a strategy playing out and according to different timetables, but I am convinced that shattering the Democratic Party as presently configured is a precondition for the emeregence of a radical alternative with a real shot at power and the for such a shattering to take place along lines favorable to revolutionaries they must be “inside” the Democratic Party as well as outside it, at least in the sense of running radical anti-capitalist candidates in Democratic Party primaries.
I’ll also be the first to admit that the historical experience of leftists ging in to the Democartic Party has not been a good one and that even with all the caveats implied by the idea of a “party within the party” that it is fraught with dangers and will require a truly disciplined leadership and core to avoid the powerful pull of opportunism.
louisproyect said
TNL writes:
The same thing was true in the 19th century when the Whigs had Abraham Lincoln as a candidate. But serious opponents of slavery had no business in the Whigs. Their place was in the Free Soil Party and other abolitionist formations. In fact we have more leverage by forming radical parties with a clear and uncompromising message. Of course, our job is more difficult given the fact that we don’t have the class forces at our disposal that the incipient Republican Party had in the 1850s. But then again, once those class forces start going into motion, they will be an irresistible force unlike the Republicans who eventually betrayed Reconstruction.
RW Harvey said
TNL writes:
Yes, exactly right. By going into this Party, and elections more generally, we cement the cracks and fissures rather than amplifying the shattering.
Experience-to-exhaustion with bourgeois democracy does not necessarily imply leading people into the election booth and then summing up afterwards how that sucked. By exposing every single broken election promise, every single move of empire against the masses of people here and internationally… that is one way to undermine and prepare American democracy for shattering.
Radical Eyes said
TNL: Thanks for the elaboration.
So as I understand your position of struggling within (to split) the Democratic party (through an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist “party within a party”) this strategy is predicated on FIRST establishing a strong and well-organized radical-communist core, one that is OUTSIDE the DParty and totally politically independent of it. Thus, your position seems to me more of a “future possibility after reconception/regroupment of a new core” rather than a strategic plan for the near-future. The kind of gathering and strengthening of a communist core that Nando is calling for remains the first and crucial task of the moment….Do you agree with this characterization?
As you yourself write, “that even with all the caveats implied by the idea of a “party within the party” that it is fraught with dangers and will require a truly disciplined leadership and core to avoid the powerful pull of opportunism.” …We are a long while from having “a truly disciplined leadership and core” at this point, right?
Also, you write: “…no serious potential for a revolutionary seizure of power will emerge without the broad masses of people collectively experiencing the exhaustion of the electoral system. The electoral system is a profoundly stabilizing force for capitalism and until its limits are revealed through practical experience by a large fraction of the population, there will not be a sufficiently braod base from which to actually make revolution.”
This passage rasies important questions. It seems to me that I can hear the influence of the Nepali Maobadi in your approach here, right? Interesting. But one question would be: How much ‘collective experience’ of exhaustion do people really need to have the true nature of the electoral system “revealed” to them? Certainly the recent experience of the Bush-to-Obama “change” is rich with potential for revealing the limits of the electoral system (and capitalist-imperialist system more generally), already, no? Those who thought (naively) that Obama’s election would bring some sort of fundemental positive change to their lives and the issues that matter to them should be/are reeling. How much more “collective experience of electoral exhaustion” is necessary?
Don’t we have to think about what exactly the relationship between “experience” and “revelation” is here? Obviously, no amount of “experience” of failure and frustration will lead to radical revelations unless that experience is properly mediated through certain kinds of ideas and analysis, right? This brings us back to previous discussions about the mass line, methinks. On the other hand, radical anti-system “exposures” that don’t take people’s present consciousness and aspirations as well as their recent experiences seriously run the risk
of sounding sectarian and never being taken seriously themselves.
*****
On a very different note: I have been noting the recurring analogies to the 19th century and the shattering of the Whig Party, which appears to have been both the result of and condition of a re-polarization of American politics over the question of slavery. Along these lines, I keep wondering: What would be the 21st century equivalent of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry? I wonder what Badiou and company would make of this historical event? And what we can learn from it– from the way it rippled through its particular situation, how various groups related to it, made the most of it, or were rendered marginal by the waves that were soon to follow…
Mike E said
David writes:
I don’t see where anyone has argued that voting makes an individual complicit in the crimes of society.
What was said in this post is that if we (the radical ones) spend our time urging people to fixate on defending the Democrats (who are in power, waging wars, rounding up immigrants), than our project will have become part of the problem (part of the machinery of both lies and oppression).
I don’t care if you vote, it literally doesn’t matter. Though every vote IS a confession of faith — that it DOES matter.
But I do care if you organize radicals to get the broad population to believe in the talking points of Democrats.
Radical Eyes said
I thought it might be worth bringing Badiou into this discussion of participation in electoral poltics.
Here is one quote I dug up on the topic:
Ajagbe said
well said
Mike E said
TNL is always an antidote to facile thinking. And I went back to read again what he wrote above.
What I draw from his thought is that it is perhaps only an easy first step to expose the hype of the pro-Obama forces, and it does not solve what is (for us) one of our main problems: “an alternative course of action” and an alternative politics that, in particular, brings us into connection, alliance and dialogue with significant numbers of people.
One-way manifestos (or rants) may be sound in their argument and satisfying in their tone. But, I hear TNL reminding us, that isn’t yet politics.
I even understand the tone of fatigue and frustration in what he writes. Starting over is not a great place to be, especially when the starting itself really still needs to start.
I was sympathetic to the argument (during the presidential election) that there was an element of “plebicite on white supremacy” involved. And whether we voted or not (I didn’t), and whether we endorsed or not (I didn’t) it was something that needed to be understood, and acknowledged, and respected — whenever we spoke about that election and the enthusiasm of many people.
But can we agree that this new election is (even if it is a “referendum on Obama”) no longer a “plebicite on white supremacy”? Certainly the code and bitterness of the Republican right is soaked in old and familiar racism — we see it, and we see them. And combating that racism remain (and will remain) something we need to join in exposing and repudiating. But this election (for Congress and Governors) is not some special moment — despite the desire of Democrats and socialdemocrats to make every election a plebicite on the “ultraright.” Right?
I’m both wary and understanding of the unspoken slogan “to the masses.” We need to define ourselves and make a connection. But not every avenue (not every “road to the proletariat”) is equally conducive to a revolutionary movement. I think part of the debate here is whether some arenas would (on the contrary) more likely serve to disperse and de-revolutionise us.
There is a whole international political current (the trotskyist movement that emerged in Liverpool around the “Militant Caucus”) whose unifying theme is “entrism” into the Labor and Socialdemocratic parties of Europe. There experience is worth noting: since you can always get in, of course, but you can’t conduct a radical organized politics in that arena. The tactic constantly pulls their politics to the right, just as the Socialdemocratic parties easily push their cadre back out.
Carl’s politics are revealing in this regard, since (whatever else) he probably has a canny sense of what is possible within the Democrats — and clearly the end product is anything but a revolutionary or socialist politics carried out in one of the mainstream parties.
It is hard to build a movement of sharp struggle in the U.S. that doesn’t (at election time) at least temporarily have many participants spin off into electoral activity. And that doesn’t constantly deal with the pressure to craft its demands to intersect with the “possible” within mainstream politics. The pulls in other words, are not just in electoral politics but in the very nature of making demands within a society that has a stable and seemingly-permanent political structure of policy-making and representation.
But there seem to be some places where (historically) revolutionary politics have had more of a corner to take hold in. I believe it happens in those places where specific demands are cherished by the people, but where those demands are (for various reasons) anathema to most of the whole political establishment. This was true for the Vietnam war in the 1968 election — which had such a radicalizing impact. It was true for the demand for real social equality in the late 60s and early 70s — because real equality (not just legal equality) quickly implied questioning the confinement of most Black people to the bottom of the working class, and it involved questioning the very existence and conditions of such a bottom.
And I suspect that the demand for amnesty and equality may be such a place in the U.S. We have not analyzed the rude rejection of the Dream Act (which was too compromised for many radicals to support) — but it does suggest that there are demands here that the people cherish, and that the establishment cannot give respect. And there, in such unclaimed political spaces, revolutionaries may speak with influence as revolutionaries, precisely because the people are acting in ways forbidden in the mainstream electoral process.
(Why were we able to lead tens of thousands in illegal strikes in West Virginia during the 1970s? Because no one with any position of authority would touch that movement, and because all kinds of people could step from nowhere into leadership.)
These days anti-war work has its own possibility — since the wars go badly and the elite is unwilling to discuss real withdrawal from either front. And because new outrages may be planned for Iran. I think we should talk about why existing antiwar activity has remained so weak, and whether there are ways to turn that around. I personally don’t think the approach that some take (of romanticizing Iran’s theocrats, or the “Iraqi resistance” or portraying conservative Islamist movements as anti-imperialist) is helpful at all. And it is not helpful to use of the term self-determination as a way of sidestepping the reality that the anti-U.S. forces in these wars are (themselves) often repulsive. And there is (in typical American style) the possibility that war fatigue will now raise its head (not because of American casualties as in Vietnam or the draft but because the cost of this war intersects with a mass concern for government cost). That would be a strange basis for opposing unjust wars, but the inner-bourgeois conflict over these wars might affect the larger climate we operate within.
At bottom, I think two things: We should nourish the “thisness” of a coming new revolutionary movement — we should give it real distinctness of voice and purpose. And second, we should “look for our Mississippi” — for a faultline we can act upon — with some thought and patience.
We need to spend time participating in a gathering of co-thinkers — and strategizing where to dig in together. And that makes me wary of plans that may blur our purpose and disperse our forces (and for me, elections are exactly an arena that, at this stage, would do both.)
Radical Eyes said
On the John Brown / 19th century Whig Party splitting analogy, one more time:
I think it is worth reflecting on the escalating of anti-immigrant laws, raids, and deportations as in some ways akin to the passage and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This was an act which radicalized a whole bunch of abolitionist sentiment, and pushed many people from a position of passive resistance (many were advocating for the Northern states to leave the union to cut themselves off from the slave south) into one of more active resistance, and even in some cases a willingness to engage in or to support the use of defensive or offensive violence to protect escaped slaves in Northern cities, (or in John Brown’s case to free slaves and organize them to topple the very slave system). I am not sure exactly how this act–and the reactions to it–affected the Whig Party but I am sure there was a dramatic impact there as well.
It seems to me that we should be anticipating that in the days ahead we might see something like the militant reactions against the Fugitive Slave Act…A John Brown type “act” here might entail, someone or some group out there organizing counter-raids vs. ICE deportation squads, engaging in a militant illegal violent fightback against the new age slave recaptors. I am not saying that we should be organizing such counter-raid actions ourselves…But we might think about how we can be organizing and orienting ourselves and others so that when actions like this take place we are positioned to relate to them, and the ripples they produce, in productive ways.
Mike E said
I wrote about this in the essay/history “I’ll Fly Away.”
The underground movement (which John Brown was a part) is an example of a revolutionary project conceived at distance from the state (and from the various highly compromised politics that were concentrated around the state).
These actions were both revolutionary and direct. They were shocking and controversial, and their very nature was an obvious challenge to the whole established order, and its claims of legitimacy. And the claims of its legality to define what was moral.
land said
I’ll Fly Away by Mike Ely is an important pamphlet for today. I had someone ask me for a copy of it for a program he is planning on resistance against slavery for Black History Month.
Another Kasama pamphlet that I use is Where’s Our Mississippi? by John Steele. Here is the ending:
(end of the end of Where’s Our Mississippi?
Today I think the Kasama debates and the emphasis on new theory are getting us ready for our Mississippi. We won’t just wake up and see it. It won’t be announced. We may have to fight to recognize it.
I think the Mudslide article is important.
ET Spoon said
What a bunch of childish shit.
So let me see, don’t vote Democrat because they’re just like the Repugs. And in two years…four years…six years…eight years…ten years…er…well sometime in the not too distant future the American working class will pull its collective head out its collective ass and vote socialist or Green or whatever.
Of course whenever I make the above statement you radicals immediately call me a centrist, a sell-out, but how many of you radicals ever had a union card? how many of you ever worked with union members who voted Republican because “Clinton’s lust for women is going to bring ruin to the nation;” “I’m voting for Boosh ’cause he’s for the death penalty;” “the death tax the working man’s enemy” and so on and so forth. This was some of the working class “wisdom” I heard from fellow workers at the US Postal Service. Yes, the United States Postal Service the oldest socialist civilian function of the United States government.
And how many of you radicals ever had a beer with your buddies at the bar just a few blocks down from the local Bridgestone-Firestone tire plant where a ersatz Confederate flag is prominently on display and the “N” word is bantered about in all its original racist glory?
And how many of you radicals ever delivered food stamps to a poor, white family with yard signs for some of the most virulent reactionary Republican candidates for public office because they love babies and abortion and homosexuality is a sin?
And I’ll bet plenty of you have stood a military base gates with your anti-war signs as truckloads of soldiers and marines are sent off on deployment and death in senseless, pointless wars. And those poor deluded, brainwashed assholes are pointing and laughing at you radicals and some wag in uniform says, “We fight and die so you dummies can act like fools.”
That’s the thanks you get from the fine, upstanding members of the All Volunteer Force.
And whenever I broach the subject, [snip of inappropriate comments] you “radicals” always tell me, “No, no, no, we don’t do violence.”
So go on, don’t vote, vote for some long-shot, spoiler Green or socialist. Your shit don’t stink. Go on, sell out the good guys like Dennis Kucinich or a Russ Feingold. That’ll teach those Democrats a lesson.
And if in the near future you know of a friend or family member who loses his/her job or who loses his/her house to foreclosure tell ‘em, tell ‘em you voted Green or socialist or didn’t vote at all because you’re not a sell-out and your shit don’t stink.
redflags said
I’m not sure what you mean, ET. I worked for a major union during the last election campaign which used tremendous resources to work for the Obama. The issue that motivated the members? Card check and the (effective) legalization of forming new unions. After the election, but before he took office, Obama’s intermediaries let it be known that card check wasn’t coming, and neither was peace.
No, an electorate formed by participation in profoundly circumscribed elections will NEVER turn out to vote for some radical (left) third party. That’s part of why American elections are not legitimate. Illegitimacy doesn’t mean irrelevant.
The people are not the electorate. We shouldn’t conflate elections with politics.
Subways said
I really appreciated this post. The cusswords really spoke to me, I have to say. I am extremely pissed off. I don’t know if I have an analysis, I just have raw hatred for the Democrats right now. I think that they are just there to sometimes raise people’s hopes and then channel them back into the system and then do the exact same thing the Republicans do, somehow persuading many many people that all of this horror is inevitable.
I guess my analysis is that anger is sometimes useful. It was good to read something that brought my anger to the surface. It will fuel me to work hard in everything I do.
haj ahmar said
90% in agreement. the 10% i don’t agree with is “their diplomats, Israeli allies and war-planners target Iran”. Iran’s Mullah’s are America’s best partner in the Middle East. look beyound the rheatoric and see what is actually happening on the ground in occupied iraq and afghanestan: Iran is providing tremendous services to the occupation through its militias. In fact, it is a complete partner to this occupation. Of the 1.5 Million iraquis murdered since the invasion, 1 Million were murdered during Maliki’s tenure who is jopintly an american and an iranian stooge (more so an iranian).
phillyworkersvoice said
“I would rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what I don’t want and get it.”
Eugene V. Debs
Folks, If you go vote today, think!
Is either party going to serve the interests of working people? Will they stop the wars, create living wage jobs or do /anything/ to stop the cutbacks, the ICE raids? If possible, vote socialist. Write them in if you have to. It’s time for the so-called left and the unions to stop tailing the Democrats and build a working class party http://www.socialistaction.org/pollack43.htm
That said, our real power is in the streets and not at the ballot box. I have no illusions that voting will change a thing.
Nando’s post is right on, but where do we as a left go from here? Thanks for speaking the truth and for facing reality.