New Approaches are Not Defeatism

 We must always base our approach on facts. Although revolutionary optimism is important, as is avoiding defeatism, there is a difference between defeatism and a sober analysis of objective conditions. The US state is unresponsive to the needs and policy preferences of its citizens and has been for decades. Is this defeatism or is it a fact? It is a fact. Large parts of the US working class are politically disengaged. Is this defeatism or is it a fact? It is a fact. What we choose to do in response, how we organize ourselves, and how we approach the problem can be defeatist; acknowledging the fact is not. Likewise, the left/progressive strategy of unprincipled voting for Democrats to ‘stop the right’ has largely failed in its objective over the past four decades. Is this defeatism, or is it a fact? It is a fact. Indeed, we hear little else from the promoters of this strategy (and if we are being specific, I will name the CCDS as an exemplar of this) than endless warnings about the growing strength of the right. If I and others are sick of hearing the same strategy put forward over and over no matter how objective conditions change, that is completely understandable. The present moment is characterized by a rapidly shifting balance of forces, both internationally and within the US, fraught with both danger and opportunity; the old gradualist strategies of the 1980s and 90s will no longer serve us. We must explore new approaches, new tactics, new ways of engaging in electoral and organizing work. The final measure of the correctness of practice is objective results.

Against Defeatism

"We were extremely marginalized, and there was a lot of prejudice. The biggest problem, however, was that the party wasn’t rooted among the population. There was nothing objectionable about its program — it stood for the same goals as it does today. But we hadn’t yet understood that we couldn’t just console people with hopes of a better world. We thought we had to explain the whole world to people. It is surely important to make connections: Why is there so much conflict in the world? How do wars start? But, above all, you have to be in touch with how others live and work if you are going to be a useful party for people. You have to acquire the skills to help people with their small, everyday problems."---Elke Kahr, the recently elected Communist mayor of Graz, Austria

Defeatism on the U.S. Left comes in many colors and flavors. There is the defeatism and nihilism that comes with acknowledging pending environmental and political disasters and not building or seeing an alternative or acknowledging that people can and will have to work very hard to overcome ecological destruction. Lying is defeatism, and we're lying to people if we're telling them that the future will be easy and that everyone will have more "after the revolution." There is the defeatism of making arguments and demands grounded in what a writer or a speaker wants rather than what exists in reality. Consider the times when you have been at a rally or read an article that says "I'm tired of ____!" as if one person's particular exhaustion is the problem. There is the defeatism of always being the critic, of never meeting a union contract or a legislative change or a movement or politician that measures up to your standards. There is the defeatism of making criticisms of ideas or movements in print but not naming who exactly is being criticized and leaving readers to wonder what is really being said. There is the defeatism of looking overseas for inspiration and ideas but not engaging with ideas and movements here. There is the defeatism of holding on to a set of demands that are essentially moral positions and stating these as measuring sticks for others, regardless of whether they are practical now or not.

Calling for "education" has been a form of liberal defeatism for more than a century that now appears on the Left, the implication being that people have a set of mistaken ideas that need to be replaced with the truth and that if people just went to the right websites or read the right books change will follow. You know that a meeting is going nowhere when people start talking about the websites they go to. The liberal call to vote for this or that candidate and not to maintain a movement to pressure that person when they are elected is another example of liberal defeatism, but this is mirrored by those on the Left who counterpose electoral activity to organizing for change and/or who talk about "working-class self-activity" as if this is somehow at odds with electoral activity and unionism. There is the defeatism and dead-ends of what often gets called "class-struggle elections" and "breaking with the Democrats" and the idea that every and any group has to rely primarily upon itself and not build a practice of extending solidarity with others as struggles around specific issues deepen.

There is the defeatism of replacing movement-building with non-profits and there is the defeatism of Labor's top-down approach to most struggles. There is the defeatism of thinking that we're in a massive strike wave now and there is defeatism in thinking that strikes are doomed to fail so long as union leadership exists. There is the defeatism of thinking that a particular sect or union or non-profit matters more to people than the issues they deal with and making every conversation about sects, unions or non-profits. There is the defeatism of "allyship" and what has become known as "identity politics" and anti-racism and privilege theory and the defeatism of talking about an economy or a country "that works for working people." There is the defeatism of "movementism," thinking that the movement is everything or enough and that political organization is less important or not important. There is the defeatism of thinking that political organization is important but not joining a political organization and helping to craft its line and practice. There is the defeatism of mansplaining.

There is the defeatism of long articles in Left publications dealing with the end of the world written in language that only academics and a in-crowd gets. There is the defeatism of having shelves of books and not offering them to new people looking to the Left. There is the defeatism of Left groups electing people to leadership positions before they are well-prepared and the defeatism of people showing up at meetings and taking the floor and making criticisms, and sometimes taking on tasks, and never showing up again. There is the defeatism of insisting that everyone must be a pacifist and the defeatism of thinking of liberals and the political center and union leaders and Democrats as our primary enemies.

There is the defeatism of taking a union staff job or a job in a non-profit and becoming the representative of the workers or the people and not moving them forward to take your place, being the swashbuckler, the burnout, the 24/7 organizer, the one-person service representative. There is defeatism in being the retiree who tells everyone what they should do and/or who tells battle stories and history subjectively.  

There is defeatism in living in a Leftist parallel universe where everything that you want to happen comes to fruition the way that you want it to, and when that doesn't happen you get to blame others and walk away without consequences.

Alright. Enough.

There is lots of great work being done out there. If you're not actively engaging with a project or organizing, I'm not sure that you have space to be defeatist. But the background drone of defeatism that you're adding to is, well, helping lead to defeats. Here are some of the most important projects out there:

Organizing Upgrade hits it most every time. They're almost always ahead of the curve.

The Communist Party USA has a section on the classes the Party gives. Sometimes they miss the mark, but more often this is a great starting place.

The Online University of the Left and the Marxist Internet Archive get you to the classics and to better understanding current issues. If you think that the problem is a lack of learning resources, think again. The problem is that we don't ask people to do long-term study groups and expand these to include others. Why is this so? The Better World Book Club in Ohio figured out how to do good popular education on Facebook and Organizing Upgrade works this out well, so we know that it can be done. Look at Liberation Road's Revolutionary Book Club. What holds our defeatists back from picking this up?

Democratic Socialists of America has lots of educational and activist materials out there, many of them so-so, but some local DSA chapters and commissions do great work. The Portland DSA chapter does exemplary labor work, for instance. What stops us from doing the same? And how is it that many people on the Left who have talked for years about the need for a socialist movement have disengaged from that movement as it has taken shape? 

There are probably more Labor-oriented publications, blogs, radio broadcasts and podcasts than ever before. There is no reason to say that Labor isn't moving. The question is not whether Labor is moving or not, or even in what direction we're going, but where you stand in relation to that movement. You can (wrongly) deny the radical importance of Labor, think (wrongly) that the primary contradiction for workers is between union leadership and union members, or you can engage through your union or organize a union where you work or get behind groups like the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and others. The United Electrical Workers models how to build unionism, labor alliances, and Labor-Left alliances. The main problems in the labor movement will be solved by new organizing and by winning whatever makes that easier and by establishing strong unions from the beginning. Every grievance and complaint is an opportunity to effectively win or renegotiate a contract.    

This is not intended to cheer you up or sound like Pollyanna. If you see yourself in this---and I certainly see myself in this---then I think that you're either obligated to make some changes or step aside. 

I mentioned up above some forms of defeatism. In fairness to them, and because I criticized folks who make criticisms without being specific, here are some examples of what I think demonstrates defeatism:  https://www.tempestmag.org, https://www.cpusa.org/article/the-curious-rise-of-white-left-nationalism/, https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/site_area/perspectives, and https://cpiusa.org/ to list a few.                     

Another Plea for Progressive Strategic Voting

 

Since 2014, even mainstream political science acknowledges that the US state is profoundly unresponsive to the needs of its ordinary citizens. The views and preferences of mass organizations and ordinary people have no effect at all upon policy outcomes. None. Meanwhile, elite organizations and the views of the owning classes are enormously influential. Any state that ignores the will of its citizens so consistently and brazenly cannot be termed a republic or a democracy. The United States, whatever it may have been in the past, is a plutocratic oligarchy. Seen in this light, it is no wonder that progressives rarely hold office and, even when they do, struggle to enact even the most tepid policies. The electorate, for its part, has understood this for decades: the single universal predictor of regular voting is higher income. A plurality of working class people, and a majority of poor working class people, do not vote at all.

The widening gap between the needs of the masses and the policies enacted by the government has potentially serious consequences. We must remember that fascism does not arise merely from reactionary politics, but from a crisis in the established bourgeois order. The unresponsiveness of the state to the people’s needs provides a catalyst for such a crisis, and let us be clear: this unresponsiveness is bipartisan, as is the fascist threat. We see the signs in the sad state of cities around the country, in the hopelessly corrupt response to the pandemic, in the growing desperation of a population that has turned to opioid abuse and suicide to find some relief from their circumstances, in rising censorship and political violence, in hysterical war propaganda against Russia and China, and in the stark image of a Presidential inauguration conducted behind concrete barricades and a ring of soldiers. Under these conditions, there is a very real possibility that the country could become ungovernable.

In all this, the main progressive and left organizations provide the same answer to the masses that they always have, an answer that has had the same basic form for the past four decades: “We must stop ____”. Whether the blank is filled by Reagan or Bush or Trump makes no difference. The status quo, however bad, must be defended against the greater evil. Once that is done, we are told, our needs may be met. But they never are. In fact, it is precisely the status quo that prevents progressive policies being enacted and leads inexorably to crisis, of which the election of unscrupulous huckster Donald Trump is only one expression. To repeat: the election of right wing Democrats creates the very conditions which produced the faux-populist Trump in the first place. Moreover, if supporting rightist Democrats is “strategic” as its defenders have stubbornly argued, should we not have seen some measurable policy result in forty years? Today, the prescription to support the Democrats without question or criticism reaches even more absurd heights, as organizations like the moribund old CCDS and CPUSA enjoin leftists to unite with the military, the state security apparatus, and Bush-era war criminals to oppose Trump. If ever there was a ‘red-brown alliance’, this is it.

One might imagine, after reading the preceding paragraphs, that they might be followed by a vague call to organize the masses directly or to build a labor party out of thin air. Not at all. In fact, what I propose should be acceptable to even the most yellow-bellied reformist: strategic voting. Progressive votes should be given only to those candidates who demonstrate tangible effort in support of progressive policies. Failure to show such effort would result in a coordinated withdrawal of votes. Either progressives can continue on the path of political cowardice and watch the country sink further and further into apathetic misery or we can adopt a new strategy that acknowledges the basic principles of electoral organizing.