10/30/2024
A real world friend texted me this morning with this message:
Heard this rationale to guide progressive voting; “vote for the candidate that you think you can successfully organize against after the election”.
My response:
What is meant by “successful organizing” from that perspective? Winning concessions and impacting policy or turning out large crowds for protests?
I think a better way to frame the question is whose election is more likely to create conditions under which organizing might bring about improved conditions or constrain bad policies.
Pick an area. Climate change, voting rights, LGBT rights, equal rights for women, a demilitarized foreign policy, improved wages and benefits for working people, etc.
If we are asked whose election is more likely to incite protests, then elect the only unambiguous fascist. If we ask who we are more likely to wring concessions from, pick the centrist.
AFTERTHOUGHTS:
The original formulation reflects the perspective of the "accelerationist" perspective, which can be defined as the belief that if the government gets worse, more brutal, creating intolerable conditions, that will generate more widespread opposition, leading to a revolution that will allow the deep, structural changes needed to really solve our problems.
At its core, that perspective shares a romantic anarchist notion that without government imposing current, unhealthy structures, people will naturally adopt more cooperative, sharing forms of dealing with each other, producing food, goods and services and, of course, will have no reason to go to war.
Such a view might have been excusable prior to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany. In many ways, German society was very advanced, politically and culturally sophisticated. Its socialist and communist parties were very large and strong.
But when the society went into crisis, partly through an economic crisis, but also partly forced upon them by deliberate provocations by both the rising N***s and the communists, as the Weimar republic collapsed, fascism emerged as the strongest force, NOT some sort of democratic socialism.
And fascism became triumphant not just because some German industrialists financed the N***s, but because large numbers of working class Germans rallied to the reactionary, nationalist and "populist" appeals, rather to calls for a Bolshevik style revolution or a more gentile social democracy.
The communists at this time were guided by a strategic orientation that saw the liberals and the social democrats as the "main enemy," while viewing the N***s as too foolish to be able to take power themselves. In practice, this meant a tactical alliance with the N***s against the democratic state. This was based upon a crude vision of history that capitalism was inherently doomed and socialism would inevitably come to replace it.
Ooops.
This ultra-left stage was called the "Third Period" of the Communist International. That strategic orientation was dumped, due to pressures from communist activists struggling in the field in favor of what became known as the "United Front Against Fascism." The United Front formulation, along with a somewhat different "Popular Front" approach, identified fascism as the main enemy and called for building a broad coalition of all who could be united to oppose fascism.
The current crop of activists who think the Democrats are the main enemy, misleading the working class and, once exposed/defeated, the working class and all other decent people will rally behind the Green Party, or the Workers World Party or perhaps a faction of DSA, probably do not subscribe to a Marxist theory (except for some of the DSA comrades) but they are still replicating the semi-anarchist ultra-leftism of the Third Period.
I once read an essay (book?) with a title something like, "The American as Anarchist." I forget if the author said this approvingly or was just diagnosing the problem. But as best I remember, his theses was that American culture, with its liberal individualism, can easily adopt anarchist beliefs. I would suggest that has some merit, although I suggest the American culture also can be drawn towards racist, imperialist, misogynistic and toxic masculinity tendencies that can coalesce as an American form of fascism.
I admit to bering less optimistic that Americans can be attracted to another, very American tradition of progressive populism and deep democracy, though THAT is the job organizers need to take on.
