American Radicalism, Self-Consumption
Starting in 2016, America experienced a political cycle the likes of which usually takes a country decades; it saw the rise of a democratic radicalism, one demanding social welfare and social justice, a slew of liberal reforms of the highest order. But just as quickly as this movement rose, so it quickly and ignominiously disappeared, its aims wholly unfulfilled, to give way to America’s standard reaction. The political left merged with the existing left, its radical slogans dissipating into rose-tinted smoke.
This movement had quietly brewed in the background under the Obama administration, but it only came to the forefront with the Sanders campaign. The American radicals, composed of the most ideologically wavering falsifiers, already well known for their radical words and liberal deeds, lined up behind a man who promised nothing more than the barest European welfare state to his constituents. Thus America’s erstwhile revolutionaries one by one revealed themselves to be little more than reformers and opportunists.
The Sanders campaign is still misconstrued as a movement of the working class, and it popularized the word “socialist” and it’s foremost exponents, the Democratic Socialists of America. This tragically by a movement that contained not a lick of real socialism - its demands for healthcare and education reform were nothing more than bourgeois cost-cutting measures, readily achieved by all other foremost exponents of imperialism. Its demands for union rights amounted to little more than a desire to promote the regime unions which had hemorrhaged members for decades. But, most importantly, it prostrated before small business, a reactionary stratum easily given to conservatism by its very nature, its most radical pretensions limited to workers self-management. Its basis could only be the democratic petty bourgeoisie and the racialized proletarians who had no choice but to side with them to protect themselves from the open racism of their opponents. Thus explains those undecided between Bernie or Trump, a phenomenon utterly incomprehensible to “Democratic Socialist” idiots.
When, inevitably, Sanders was defeated and gave his endorsement to the Democratic party, when that party in its hubris fell on the electoral sword and saw itself beaten by the arch-reactionary Trump, the radicals who had endorsed him suddenly rediscovered their revolutionary slogans. They did not do so in service of revolutionary ends, but of “anti-fascism,” an age-old excuse for refusing to oppose fascism in the only way it can be opposed – with revolutionary communism. Instead it defended to its dying breath the sophisms of liberty, democracy, and human rights.
From the beginning, this farcical movement’s true goal had been to hold political office, and soon enough it had exactly that - the upset victories of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and the rest of this so-called Squad took to the halls of congress to demand their petty-bourgeois reforms. Their supporters had not expected the inevitable- that these politicians would become politicians, and advocate for the simplest interest of the bourgeoisie, first on foreign policy, caving to support Israel and American sanctions on Venezuela, and finally, long past their prime, to sign off on the banning of a major railroad strike. Reformism transformed, as it always does, into bare-faced reaction.
This political left jerked around, disunited and incoherent, throughout the Trump administration, but nevertheless expanded. Thus, by the time of the Pandemic, it was ready to hoist its arms. It did so in a second, even less successful Sanders campaign, then in capitulation to the Biden campaign. It promoted the occasional street action and strike, always under its moronic slogans of democracy. But this time, there was brewing real outrage among the working class, despite the efforts of the left. This took became apparent when, following the highly publicized murder of George Floyd, thousands of black proletarians and lumpenproletarians took to the streets of Minneapolis in a disorganized but glorious uprising.
This was the highest and lowest point of the American left. From the beginning there were two movements, a dichotomy that shown in France in 1968 and Gwangju in 1980 - the Left movement, a liberal democratic movement of militant yet pacifist reformers, comprised of white students, labor aristocrats, and small business owners, and the real movement, a movement of predominantly working class black people, without a definite program yet expressing the all-consuming rage of a class condemned to misery. As the Left waved signs about the corners of well-to-do neighborhoods, proletarians rioted, indiscriminately taking those goods brutally hoarded by the city’s bourgeoisie, igniting police stations, seizing and re-purposing hotels into shelters, and briefly overtaking the city government. This expression of proletarian anger inspired similar risings across America, all chanting a utopian slogan of rage against the state: Abolish the Police!
But it was not to last. The police and National Guard stormed the city, drowning the nascent offensive in blood. Its shattered remnants had little choice but to join the liberals’ small clique of professional protesters, who inscribed on the banner of the brief class struggle a purely racial one. The left now had its time to shine. Abolition became defunding became reform - riots became childish window-breaking, storming of police stations gave way to pointless street battles, and class struggle gave way to cries to support black businesses, the very beneficiaries of black oppression. A weakened working class was drowned in an ocean of empty-headed white students eager to fight for the most liberal reforms. This culminated in the CHAZ, a perfectly written comedy in which mobs of well-off whites proclaimed an autonomous zone in a single neighborhood for about a month, refusing to make an offensive, shooting a black teenager and submitting to its own dissolution by the city government. The achievements of this movement were a slew of minor reforms to be enforced by the very same police that had murdered Floyd over a twenty dollar bill. The American Left had done what black bags and white vans never could: it infiltrated and destroyed a working class social movement.
This would remain the American Left’s sole lasting achievement. With the election of Biden, the anti-fascist energies that had fueled it vaporized. Even the banning of abortion and the insistence by the Democratic party on all but abandoning this goal could hardly serve to bring it back from its inglorious death. The workers’ rising in Kazakhstan showed once more how the “anti-imperialist” Left would respond to a real movement (by denunciation), and the outbreak of the war in Ukraine saw the movement permanently severed in two, between a Pro-Russia conservative half and a Pro-NATO, progressive, western chauvinist half, thus writing in proletarian blood its last will and testament: that neither here nor there would it ever stand with the workers.
The democratic petty-bourgeoisie would turn en masse to the anti-transgender panic of the American right. With this, the death of the left was solidified. This has allowed space for a genuinely proletarian movement to emerge, which is growing rapidly in Pittsburgh and Portland, and has a correct understanding of socialism - not a program of public ownership, as the Stalinists and Trotskyists assure us, nor one of “worker’s co-operatives” (hardly different from employee stock options), as the Anarchists and Democrats would say, but a demand for the abolition of commodity production.
