It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, June 17, 2024
US student socialists assess ‘explosive’ Gaza solidarity encampment movement
16 June, 2024
In the month and a half since the first student Palestine solidarity encampment was set up, more than 140 encampments have been established across the United States and internationally.
To get an update on the situation, Isaac Nellist, Chloe DS and Jacob Andrewartha spoke to Cyn Huang (University of California Berkeley), Daniil Sapunkov (The City University of New York) and Amey (San Francisco State University). Huang and Sapunkov are also members of Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and the Bread & Roses caucus with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The three also discuss how the student movement in solidarity with Palestine plans to progress over the summer break and its impact on labour struggles, the left and the 2024 presidential elections. This is a follow-up interview to one that was conducted about a month ago and can be viewed here.
It has been about a month and a half since the first encampments were set up. Could you talk us through some of the major developments over this period and where the movement is at currently?
Cyn: Last we talked we were in the most explosive period of the movement, within the first two weeks or so. Since then more than 140 encampments have been set up, not just in the United States but in Britain, Canada, Brazil, France and, of course, Australia.
We have seen divergent responses from university administrations. At the start of the movement the major headline was the immense repression seen at schools, particularly on the East Coast. It has ranged from that to radio silence from schools hoping that the protest movement would fizzle out.
In some places there have been negotiations, often not approached in good faith by the administration. The administration’s strategy has been to channel the energy of the activists into backdoor meetings, where they hope to confuse and demobilise us. But other negotiations have taken place that have won more potent concessions and empowering terms that don’t necessarily require students to demobilise or give up their right to free speech and protest. It really depends on the local context.
One obstacle that people anticipated early on was the end of semester. We have hit that for most schools. People were uncertain about the longevity of the movement and had different analyses about how to approach the end of the semester. For example, do we have enough power to risk a sweep and stand up to the police?
Some people felt that major wins around divestment had to be won before the end of the semester or the movement would fizzle out. This encouraged people to have final confrontational battles with the police and the administration. We can debate whether we had enough power to do that or whether the student movement has to go through multiple iterations before we win divestment demands and how we relate to things in the long term.
Around the end of the semester there were actions related to Commencement or Graduation ceremonies, ranging from individual acts of resistance to more coordinated actions like banner drops and mass walkouts.
The People’s Conference for Palestine was also held over May 24–26 organised by the Palestinian Youth Movement and sponsored by many other organisations. It was the first attempt to bring together Palestine solidarity activists from across the country, including students who participated in the encampments, into one room to debate how the movement should progress. It was very impressive and heartening and got the ball rolling by making connections between activists and creating more focus on upcoming strategy.
Now that the encampment upsurge has for the most part ended, the task is to consolidate all the amazing activists we have met and who have been activated by this process and encourage them to get involved in more permanent organisation. We need to clarify what victories we have had and what lessons we have learned and make plans for the next semester.
Daniil: So much has happened since we last spoke: there have been many victories and losses and different outcomes on different campuses. It has been heartening to see comrades across the country winning divestment, disclosure and pressuring university boards and administrations, showing the power of students and turning them into organisers and activists in real time. There have been inspiring wins at San Francisco State University, the University of Oregon, Brown University and many others. The biggest question is how these student protesters can turn the wheels of the labour movement and spark different political dynamics beyond campuses.
Something that was very exciting was the levels of political discussion we were able to have as it was happening and now that we are past the peak of the movement. But this is not over, the atrocities in Rafah and Gaza are still ongoing, so we need to discuss what else we can do. This discussion has been really productive within YDSA and the Bread & Roses caucus. We can then share what comes out of these discussions in the broader movement: things like internal democracy, mass movement orientation and class struggle. Our biggest task is to keep the energy going and motivate the newly activated layer of politicised students to continue.
Here in Australia, students have won disclosure agreements at some campuses. What are some examples of wins achieved by the encampments in the US? Have any campuses won full divestment?
Cyn: We have already seen significant movement towards disclosure and divestment at many universities. Other wins have been scholarships for Palestinian students and commitments to stop anti-Palestinian racism on campuses. A lot of these universities [where gains have been made] have a rich history of organising around Palestine.
The California State University (CSU) system in particular is really interesting because it is a large university system and the strategy of the administration has been to pursue campus-level negotiations and picking off camps one-by-one. They know campus-level negotiations can’t impact the investment portfolio as much because the campus administration can claim they are sympathetic to the students but also say they can’t do much about the issue because it ultimately rests with the regional board.
Mostly where there have been negotiations, however, things have been more in the middle. The administrations have attempted to corner students into a backroom where they can make things more legalistic and confusing, or they will set-up a taskforce or a committee to delay meaningful change. Most schools that have entered negotiations are in this grey area where some deals are more empowering and some more demobilising.
In addition to the victories and progress around the main demands of the movement we have also had immense internal organisational and political victories for the movement in relation to the politicisation and organisation. One example is at SFSU, where students demanded and won the practice of open bargaining, which is historically the practice of some of the most powerful and democratic labour unions.
The idea behind open bargaining is that every member of the movement and the broader community should be engaged in the bargaining process. Not just because it is morally good, but because it is strategic for building power. Open bargaining allows people to witness negotiations, but also crucially having meetings beforehand, caucus meetings during negotiations and debrief meetings to develop a strategy so that the bargaining team doesn’t get cornered. It allows people to make decisions themselves about the best way to handle the negotiations and carry the movement forward.
This has been important because a lot of the challenges we have seen could be mitigated by open bargaining. For example, at some of the camps which don’t have open bargaining, political disagreements become super personalised. People who don’t get to see the negotiations will just start blaming their camp leaders and creating vitriol in the movement instead of directing the anger towards the administration. Open bargaining helps build unity in the ranks and, crucially, democracy is power. The more people you can engage in critical thinking and expose these processes too, the more ideas will be generated.
Amey: SFSU won open bargaining early in the process, which allowed us to put a lot of pressure on the campus administration. The fact that it is all happening in public means that our campus president was held accountable in front of everyone, not just people involved in the Palestine solidarity movement. That affected our strategy a lot and through open bargaining we were able to get the university to listen to us.
We have won three of our four demands; those being disclose, divest and defend. The fourth one — our demand for the campus to declare what is happening in Gaza a genocide — we have not been able to achieve at this point.
Now we are focussed on making sure the campus administration follows through. This means creating a website disclosing what investments and deals the university has that are connected to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Divesting directly follows that. The ‘defend’ demand is specifically about defending the Arab and Muslim student body from Islamophobia, hate and anti-Palestinian vitriol on campus. It is up to us to ensure that the administration follows up on what they have promised.
After the success SFSU had with open bargaining, other campuses across the country engaged in open bargaining with their administrations.
Daniil: Observing from the East Coast, SFSU has been a trailblazing model for all of us in the student movement. The situation in New York City in comparison seems very grim and dire with a lot of police violence, brutality and repression. We have not been able to pursue open bargaining and open organising models, and have been forced to resort to a more secretive culture and a lack of democracy in the movement. Decisions are made by a shadow leadership who are not accountable to the movement and bargaining has been done behind closed doors.
We are trying to reconvene our strengths and learn lessons from other parts of the country.
More than 2900 students have been arrested or detained for taking a stand at their universities against Israel’s genocidal assault, many others have experienced police harassment or violence. How has this impacted the movement?
Cyn: The repression was the factor that made the movement explode initially and helped it gain space in public consciousness. Obviously it is a tiny fraction of the violence Palestinians have been facing for decades but we would be wrong to discount how potent it has been for people’s radicalisation. For better or for worse, seeing your friends, other students or even yourself get brutalised can have uniquely radicalising effects.
The repression has forced many people to question the supposedly liberal institutions and ask why they are going to such great lengths to clamp down on free speech and suppress the pro-Palestine movement. That leads to looking at the material interests that are at play, including the Zionist lobby, US imperialism and the donor class that stands behind the university administrations.
Social media has also played a really influential role. Many commentators have called this the first “livestreamed genocide”. Capitalists control most of the world's media apparatus but through social media platforms the spread of dissident opinions has never been easier. Many social conscious and curious college students probably find it impossible to avoid sympathetic coverage of the movement. For many of us, the first thing we see in the morning is this repression. Social media has closed the distance between the institutions we interact with on a day-to-day basis and their effects out in the world.
A lot of people have been comparing this movement with movements of the past, such as the anti-Vietnam War movement, and asking “Why is this movement so powerful and so radicalising when we are not directly implicated in a draft”. I think social media and the intense repression has a lot to do with that. When you see images of mutilated bodies every day, hospitals and schools bombed to oblivion, every kind of mass suffering possible, these consequences are not as abstract anymore. We are seeing what our university administrations fund, what the liberal media and political elites are running cover for.
The repression has also brought a lot of strategic complications. On the one hand, we don’t want to be silenced or give the impression that we are embarrassed or intimidated from speaking up. But if you look at most of the encampments, we haven’t saturated or built a majority on campus. We aren’t sure if we can withstand police assaults and have to work out whether we fight them head on, disperse and regroup or pack up and come back tomorrow.
This is why we need to look at strategic questions and have a concrete analysis of our power right now and our ability to win demands such as divestment. Without clarity on these questions it makes it hard to decide how we deal with police repression.
Daniil: In New York, the encampment movement ended in a very violent, yet cathartic and radicalising moment for many. At the time it seemed like the “strategicness” of the encampments wasn’t even in question, it felt like a movement across the country that then sparked an international movement, both in solidarity but also with specific demands at different universities.
Now, in this “post-encampment” period, we need to think about other ways to use this relatively quiet moment through the summer break to reassess where our power lies and think of strategic focal points to organise around. We need to assess the economic power we have as students, who contribute to the university through tuition and labour in many instances, but also academically through academic boycotts, etc. Preferably it won’t syphon itself to individual campus campaigns, but maintain the mass movement character which was one of the strengths of the movement.
In New York City it feels like more autonomous groups are throwing themselves into action in an attempt to keep up the pressure. For example some are attempting occupations, replicating elements of the encampments on a smaller scale. But we also need to think about what is strategic and what pinpoints we can press.
We also need to organise more students into the movement and yield even more power. Building the numbers and strength of the movement will allow it to become more open and more democratic because it will be able to hold its own, and concerns about security and secrecy will become less relevant. YDSA are using this period to train people on how to lodge freedom of information requests, how to research divestment, how to analyse power on campuses and other practical skills.
We have seen some inspiring union action supporting students, including your union Cyn, the United Auto Workers Local 4811. What actions have unions taken and what was the effect?
Cyn: UAW 4811, which represents academic workers at the University of California system, is waging a political strike for Palestine and free speech. It is a huge learning curve, as it is the first time that many people in my generation are waging a political strike on such a large scale. We know the challenges that come with that. Taking stances on social justice issues affects other aspects of union work, for example, how do we start relating to our co-workers on this basis? We have the benefit of operating in a more politicised union but this is not necessarily the case across the country.
The other significance is that, depending on the level of collaboration of workers and student campers, it can be one of the most meaningful demonstrations of the combined force of the student and labour movements in US history.
The specific actions that UAW 4811 are taking is striking both teaching and grading labour. We have taken cues from the UAW “stand up” strike strategy waged by autoworkers last year, which means workers at certain campuses are called to withhold their labour while other campuses are not. This means universities don’t know who is going to be hit first, but it is also a way for us to plan around the uneven organisation of our union.
One challenge has been developing coordination. This was already a challenge in the encampments themselves: we work in a huge university system and these camps were often operating on the campus level and we needed to develop coordination between all the different camps.
Then there is the added factor of building coordination between the camps and the union. One example of this was when one campus was given what they were told was their final offer a couple of days before we knew the results of the strike authorisation vote. There was a high possibility that they were going to get raided, and students and workers had to decide whether they withstand that and risk getting swept, hurt and demoralised, or pack up and come back when the strike is authorised. These are the kinds of questions that people are facing. But it is a privilege to face them because no other camp has been able to escalate alongside the prospect of a strike.
These decisions should be coordinated between the camps and the union. A lot of coordination is happening at an individual level, but by and large the student and labour movements are operating autonomously from one another at this stage.
Other examples of union actions include day-long “sick-outs” and walk-outs, including at the University of Austin, in Texas, where there have been professors and other workers forming human pickets around the camps. These represent both individual union members taking action and formal union actions.
Daniil: There was a clear connection between labour and student movements from the get-go because faculty and staff, including unionised professors, adjunct, full-time, part-time workers were in the encampment. They represented a more radical layer of rank-and-file union members and leftist academics, as well as mobilising broader layers of workers and union members. We are seeing the fruits of previous reform efforts to make the union more militant and democratic. Rank-and-file organising and socialist and leftist activists taking jobs in these strategic industries is a core part of that reform.
However at City College and CUNY, where the union is more stagnant and less militant, we see an organised core of members butting heads with the leadership because the leadership didn’t want to endorse the encampment movement. We have strived to make connections between labour and the encampment movement but the union leadership rejected that, not denouncing it openly but not standing with the movement.
This meant they failed to meet a political moment that would have clearly benefited the labour movement. This speaks to how much more union reform is needed and how far there is to go for the labour movement in the US. But the UAW 4811 strike gives us hope that our strategy of entrenching ourselves in the labour movement is working and will pay off.
Cyn: We have to recognise that the strike is possible because our union has a more politicised base. When we look at the membership of left and socialist organisations in the country, it largely reflects grad workers and other professional workers and not necessarily blue collar workers. It is important to recognise our distance from these sectors because they are largely more central to the process in many ways.
None of this discounts the importance of an academic strike — the UAW strike has been immensely inspiring and politicising. But if you want to have a more direct role in stopping the genocide, we have to target those logistics and shipping companies. The workers who deliver the arms have to be unionised too, and that is not a process that is going to happen overnight.
The left has to develop a more sophisticated plan around that, which is why many socialist organisations are pursuing the rank-and-file strategy, including radicals joining these strategic sectors. You can’t stand from the outside and tell workers to withhold their labour around certain issues — you have to build trust for your ideas.
What impact has this moment had on student organising going forward, and what role is the organised left playing?
Amey: At SFSU, there is a long history of the student left organising around key issues such as civil rights, anti-war movements and others. That student organising has continued but plateaued several decades ago and haven’t been able to grow further. There are a range of student organisations at our campus organising around LGBTIQ issues and anti-racism.
However, during and after the encampment started here, more explicitly political student organisations started popping up. Palestine has rapidly politicised people in a way I haven’t seen before. The severity of the issue, and how easy it is to see what is happening, has made people aware and driven them to take action.
Cyn: The influence of this process on students is hard to overstate. It has been so impactful on so many different angles. Firstly, it is much more diverse than any other movement I have been involved in. It is also a movement that is very distrustful of politics as it exists and the two-party status quo; it is very distrustful of the Democrats and Republicans.
It is still a live debate what the orientation of this movement is towards the state, but it is very positive that a lot of people have the instinct that we are not going to get what we want by playing nice, asking nicely or lobbying. A lot of people are thinking we need to overhaul the system, even if they haven’t participated in socialist politics before.
This movement also has almost zero mainstream political representation. We have a champion in [Palestinian American Democratic congressperson] Rashida Tlaib and to a lesser extent other people in “the Squad”. But this is going to require more than a handful of these individuals or personalities, we need a party.
This is the movement that has been most politicised in that direction in my lifetime. The quality of political experiences people are having is also unparalleled. We are starting from a low baseline. In the last interview I talked about how certain recent developments have transformed the left and the student movement, but the fact of the matter is that most people in society and on our campuses have very little experience in taking collective action. Even those who have been involved in political organising haven’t worked in a movement that is as ideologically broad and dynamic as this one.
Most encampments involved a huge array of organisations and so many people with varying levels of political experiences and ideas about how the world works and how to change it. Working with these people, debating with them and figuring out next steps has been an immensely rich process. The rhythm of these protest movements is different from the labour or electoral campaigns that a lot of us have had experience with before. The organising principles may be the same but there is no definitive election date or deadline to build up to.
Many of the tactics we are using are really novel. For the first time a lot of us have confronted questions about how to build movement democracy with so many elements at play. Democracy within an organisation like YDSA is easier to build because you are in a room of people who already agree with you to a very large extent. But now we are in this movement with people who don’t agree with you and these are exactly the people we need to win over to socialist politics. We are thinking about questions like how do we make certain interventions make sense to people with no organisational background whatsoever.
There is a long list of challenges, but the most important thing is that this movement has provided us a real meaningful context to grapple with these challenges instead of just abstractly.
Daniil: One lesson is that we need to reject sectarianism and security culture. There have been bizarre cases at some of the encampments where people have been unable to use their real names or there were hidden secret structures that brought down many encampments.
But this movement is not something we have done before and we need to dare to struggle and dare to win. It is OK to fail and we learn just as much from mistakes as we learn from victories. We need to be open minded and experimental.
In the past, we would have a YDSA chapter at a campus and they would run a campaign called “YDSA for issue X”. Through that we would talk to students, do some coalition building and work with other student clubs. It remained housed within YDSA and we aimed to bring people into the organisation.
But through the encampments something changed and we are really opening up and working with other groups who don’t always agree with us. I think we need to move towards building bigger movements of organised students that incorporates many other groups and clubs and gives the movement a mass character.
Our role as the organised left at this time is to be movement builders who are entrenched in the struggle, that talk to people, get to know people, utilise organisational skills learnt from the labour movement and really put in the work. Sometimes that means doing an extra shift at the security tent or spending time organising inventory, just like anyone else; that’s what makes you a trusted leader and allows you to explain your political ideas more efficiently.
We also need to think about recruiting people, sharing our politics and not shying away from our political vision. How do we take this moment and funnel it into the labour movement? How do we take these student activists who have been radicalised by this moment and want to change the system and prevent them from being funnelled into the world of NGOs or ceding them to the Democratic Party? How can we turn these student activists into lifelong socialist organisers who wield real structural power within the labour movement? How do we transform society out of this movement in the coming years?
We can be bold and we can be aspirational.
Is President Joe Biden feeling the pressure of the Palestine solidarity movement? What impact will Israel’s genocide in Gaza have on the 2024 presidential election?
Amey: I have voted “blue” in the past, particularly during the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I am not alone in seeing the Democratic Party as completely alienating and distant from the principles I hold dear, particularly in relation to Palestine. Biden has supported the genocide, he has materially and politically supported Israel and should be held responsible. That has really impacted people on the left. Even people who are more liberal-minded are feeling quite disillusioned and disagree with the US’s position on Palestine.
However, I do feel if Donald Trump wins the election and becomes president it would be worse for the Palestinian people, both within the US and in Palestine. He has been extremely pro-Israel, including during his previous term when he moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He has claimed he would expel pro-Palestine protesters from the country.
It feels disingenuous to tell people to vote one way or the other. Particularly as people’s basic freedoms are at risk in the US: for example, in some states people are losing their reproductive rights because of Republican-stacked courts, so it is understandable that they would vote for Biden despite his position on Palestine. But the level of dissent towards Biden is stratospheric and is only going to get worse as the genocide continues.
Daniil: A lot of the left, including the DSA, have been pushing voters to vote “uncommitted” as a show of anger and dissent against the establishment support for Israel’s genocide. However I would not be surprised if a lot of the less politicised general public do come out and vote for Biden.
There has been clear disillusionment on the left. Before the encampment movement, people had a clear analysis of Biden’s complicity in the ongoing genocide, but still feared Trump’s re-election, his proto-fascist agenda, the impact on labour, issues of bodily autonomy, trans rights and education. But after the encampments — and the clear violence against students — it has become a more defined “no” to Biden. It was a shocking wake up call and has made the situation for the Democrats much much worse.
It brings up the need for an independent party. We need to continue to fight for electoral reform and other ways to push for an independent identity away from the Democrats, even if we may still have to run under the Democratic ticket for the time being, as we do in NYC. This independent identity is critical for the left’s success on the electoral front. However this is more of a question for local campaigns than presidential campaigns at the moment.
There is a need for a new independent voice that must come out of DSA and the labour movement to become a fighting alternative and real representation for the working class.
Cyn: The movement for Palestine has become a decisive factor in the upcoming election, though not decisive enough to stop the genocide, which is very unfortunate. We have seen very damning results from the “Uncommitted” movement, which is a campaign to fill out your ballot saying “I am not committed to vote for Joe Biden” or simply write “uncommitted”, which, especially in Michigan, blew past its goals.
Then there is the encampment movement. While we have not won a majority on campus, we have flipped a lot of staunch Democrat supporters, which will make a difference. There are people who have always voted blue but are now refusing to because Democratic mayors stuck the police on their children.
There are many examples of how the Palestine movement has drawn out the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party, but the more interesting question is what do we do about it? I will lay out some considerations for you. There are short term considerations which are in contradiction with long term, and medium-term goals.
The first is that we recognise the dangers of a Trump presidency, especially on the ability of workers to organise and defend our rights. Meanwhile in the medium to long term, this huge movement has a base in young radicals, many of them people of colour — exactly the type of people we want to be bringing into socialist organisation — and most of them don’t want to touch Biden with a 1 million foot pole. Endorsing Biden, even on a tactical level, even with a hundred qualifications or statements saying we do not endorse his foreign policy, would be non-negotiable for a lot of activists, which is valid.
So how do we bring this new layer into organisation but also thwart the prospect of a Trump presidency. In my mind there is not a satisfying way to “square the circle”. Moreover, even if we did have a program that could harmonise both these goals, the left is not a decisive factor in national politics and is still quite marginal.
This marginality is coming out in interesting ways in discussion of who to endorse and what conditions we should hold. We have to think about how people like [federal Democratic representative and DSA member] Jamaal Bowman and other federal-level elected representatives are not disciplined to our organisations and are actually more accountable to liberal and contradictory political groups. On the other hand, they are the best known tribunes of the broad left and progressives.
Some people say we just have to endorse them, hold our nose and gain a base. But that might come at the expense of politics and principles and these people might — and have in the past — vote for regressive policies such as more Iron Dome funding. Others say we should set our principles and expectations and not endorse them unless they are committed to upholding them. I am sympathetic to this view but, at the same time, we are still very marginal and might lose an opportunity to reach more people.
The bigger question is how to break out of this cycle. One thing we have been debating is how to build a broader political organisation. Coming out of this movement it is clear we need some political representation or broader catch-all movement organisations. It is clear that not everyone is ready to enter socialist organisations, as our goals and politics might seem lofty or disconnected. For example we have reading groups about historical topics such as the Russian Revolution, but some people just want to focus on Palestine or other current issues.
There has to be a way for people to commit to these politics long term and we need to find an organisational form for that and a political program for that. This Palestine movement has been a really great place to start figuring out how that might look.
Partido Lakas ng Masa (The Philippines): Enough false climate solutions, it’s time for an ecosocialist alternative!
Partido Lakas ng Masa 8 June, 2024 [Editor’s note: Aaron Pedrosa, from the Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM), will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2024, June 28–30, Boorloo/Perth, Australia. For more information on the conference visit ecosocialism.org.au.]
On June 5, Partido Lakas ng Masa (Party of the Labouring Masses, PLM) joined climate justice advocacy groups and other people’s organizations in mobilizing against the Asian Development Bank (ADB)’s Asian Clean Energy Forum (ACEF) being held from June 3-7, to raise the alarm on the need for immediate action on the ongoing climate crisis, as well as putting public pressure for a more rapid, equitable, and just transition into renewable energy (RE) in the Philippines and Asia more broadly.
At first glance, the forum’s intentions seem progressive in its emphasis on increased financing for renewable energy projects in partner countries participating in the ACEF. However, this “green” forum remains stuck within the trappings of neoliberal private sector technocrats and fossil fuel industry magnates disguising themselves as “champions” of renewable energy.
PLM believes that the path towards a rapid, equitable, and just transition to renewable energy cannot be found in the false solutions promoted by domestic and foreign capitalists from the fossil fuels industry. Only people’s movements and the grassroots can hold the ACEF partner countries accountable to their purported mission statement.
Furthermore, as long as the current Philippine government remains in the hands of a dynastic and oligarchic elite ruling class, it will remain too deeply invested into neoliberal false solutions that are in reality mere “greenwashing” that undermine communities’ climate resilience by perpetuating prolonged reliance on dirty energy sources, such as coal and other fossil fuels.
PLM asserts that only a Gobyerno ng Masa composed of workers, farmers, youth, women, and other basic sectors at the forefront of combatting the worst effects of the climate crisis at the grassroots level is capable of exercising the political will necessary to pave the way towards a full transition to renewable energy.
For our ruling classes, the climate crisis is spoken of in future tense, as if it were a mere theoretical distant threat. But for the broad masses of the Filipino people, the climate crisis has long been a visceral reality for many years, through such frequent tragedies as the Typhoons Ondoy in 2009, Yolanda in 2013, Rolly in 2020, seasonal droughts during El Niño and the record-breaking heat waves just this summer. This reality will only intensify further as the years pass by, destroying communities, undermining our local agriculture, and risking the lives of millions of citizens living in the most vulnerable and far-flung areas of the nation.
The more than three centuries old capitalist system has wrought unparalleled destruction of the environment since its inception. Ever since the First Industrial Revolution in the 18th century; up to the period of colonial exploitation in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and finally the present stage of capitalist imperialism that began in the 20th century and continues on into the 21st century, the ruling classes that dominate the present political-economic order have polluted rivers, the air we breathe, melted glaciers, created deadly heatwaves and droughts, brought monstrous seasonal typhoons, decimated our wildlife, destroyed our communities, and have profoundly alienated humankind from the natural world itself in pursuit of endless profits and growth for growth’s sake.
PLM believes it is high time for progressives, anti-imperialists, and climate justice advocates to forward a vision of a more socially just and ecologically sound political-economic system. An ecosocialist alternative is the only possible answer for the Filipino toiling masses and the world’s working classes and oppressed peoples to combat the climate crisis and the moribund capitalist-imperialist system.
Trumpism, fascism, and political realities in the United States
Donald Trump represents a kind of politics that has powerfully transformed political realities in the United States, a kind of politics labeled by some as Trumpism. This useful label helps us understand that regardless of what happens to Donald Trump – whether he finally goes to prison or once again takes command of the U.S. Presidency, whether he lives for another decade or dies tomorrow – Trumpism will be with us for a long time. Before examining Trumpism, let us pause to consider the person with whose name this “ism” is identified.
One approach to this task might involve working our way through the alphabet. Beginning with the letter “a” – and setting aside rude and insulting expletives – we come upon the word “arrogant,” which certainly fits, although this quality is, sadly, not unique to Trump.
The qualities of Donald Trump certainly include dynamics reflecting The Three Bs – bigot, bully, and braggart. His bigotry reflects deep currents within the culture, the attitudes, and the psychological make-up of millions of people in the United States. He has shown that, when it suits him, he can assume a bullying stance and tone, whipping many into submission – intimidating some, delighting others. The bragging takes many forms: a “go-getter” who compulsively highlights his achievements but also claims to have gone further and gotten more than is actually the case; an ignorant man who glorifies his ignorance (“I don’t read books!”) while claiming to know far more than he knows; someone who exaggerates the esteem in which people hold him and takes credit for accomplishments that are not his own. One should add a fourth “b” – billionaire, adding luster and resources and authority to all that is involved in the narcissistic self-construction of the person who is Donald Trump.
Starting with the next letter of the alphabet, we can note that Trump is quintessentially, and very proudly, a capitalist, and there are thirty-four felony convictions which cause many to label him a crook. Trump and Trumpism
Jumping ahead to another letter in the alphabet, there are many who insist that he is a fascist. Others question whether he is consistent and coherent enough to play the role of a Mussolini or a Hitler, insisting that the term is not useful in defining Trump. Some add that the term “fascist” has largely become a meaningless epithet – a freely-used insult applied to ideas and practices and people we find oppressive. Trump himself uses it (jumbling it with such words as “Marxists” and “Communists” and “terrorists” and “very bad people”) to denounce enemies lurking in the courtroom, in the mainstream news media, in the government, and in the Democratic Party.
How disciplined and single-minded is Trump as a political leader? He could hardly be compared favorably to a Churchill or a Reagan, let alone to a Mussolini or a Hitler. “By the spring of 2020,” according to New York Times chronicler Maggie Haberman, “it had become clear to many of his top advisors that Trump’s impulse to undermine existing systems and bend institutions to suit his purposes was accompanied by erratic behavior and levels of anger requiring others to try to keep him on track nearly every hour of the day.”1
It is instructive to consider the experience of Steve Bannon, one of the most focused far-right ideologues serving as a central advisor in the early phase of the Trump administration, as reported by Michael Wolff:
Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru – or inscrutable God.2
Over time, Bannon would become exasperated and disillusioned, realizing that the details of the right-wing “populist” agenda he envisioned “were entirely captive to Trump’s inattention and wild mood swings. Trump, Bannon had long ago learned, ‘doesn’t give a fuck about the agenda – he doesn’t know what the agenda is.’”3
One is struck by reports from Trump’s so-called press conference of May 31, 2024, after his felony convictions. Far from a defiant right-wing or fascist clarion call, “the thing was kind of a slog,” according to A.O. Scott of the New York Times. Scott adds: “Mr. Trump has never been an orderly orator or a methodical builder of arguments; he riffs and extemporizes, free-associates and repeats himself, straying from whatever script may be at hand.” Scott reports that “his manner was subdued” and “curiously flat: a rehash of the trial, with a few gestures toward the larger political stakes.” Rex Huppke of USA Today was less charitable, describing it as “a rambling, incoherent mess,” with Trump claiming that witnesses in his trial were “literally crucified,” that President Joe Biden wants to “stop you from having cars,” and that the judge who will sentence him on July 11 is “really a devil.” Hafiz Rashid of the New Republic commented: “At times, his words were hard to follow, as the first convicted felon former president went off on tangents with sentences with no clear end.”4
But what can be termed Trumpism transcends the personal limitations and dysfunctionality of this aging individual. Three essential elements hold together this broad entity that we are labelling Trumpism.
One element is armed and dangerous – the forces that came together to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which included the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, some of the more militant components of the Tea Party movement, latter-day partisans of the old Southern Confederacy, various Nazi and white supremacist groups. U.S. General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed the groups in a January 2021 notebook, with the comment, “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.” According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: “Some were the new Brown Shirts, a U.S. version, Milley concluded, of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party that supported Hitler. It was a planned revolution. Steve Bannon’s vision coming to life. Bring it all down, blow it up, burn it, and emerge with power.” These once-marginalized elements had come into the political mainstream, and had grown substantially, with the active encouragement of Donald Trump and others around him. But this cunning, avaricious, profoundly limited individual and his acolytes were hardly capable of controlling them.5
A second element essential to Trumpism’s make-up can be found in a quite different cluster of conservative entities and individuals drawn together in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 –The Presidential Transition Project. Founded in the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation has served as a center for conservative academics, intellectuals, and policy-makers since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Its newest effort is a volume of 900 pages, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, meant to serve as a policy-making guide for a second Trump administration. “This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.” It is worth noting that Trump is by no means the centerpiece of this document – rather, reference is made to “the next conservative President.” Trump is mentioned frequently and very respectfully, but the Heritage Foundation, its collaborators, and its program are framed as entities transcending this individual.6
(Also worth noting are a few odd wrinkles in this “Conservative Promise,” including a seeming overestimation of “the Left,” combined with an apparent borrowing of left-wing ideas – to be discussed in the final section of this analysis.)
The third essential element in Trumpism is today’s Republican Party. Leading figures and staffers of that party – as was the case with the conservative mainstream as a whole – did not begin as Trump supporters. One knowledgeable Republican operative, Tim Miller, describes what happened this way:
When the Trump Troubles began there wasn’t a single one in our ranks who would ever have said they were in his corner. To a person we found him gauche, repellent, and beneath the dignity of the public service we bestowed with bumptious regard. We didn’t take him seriously. … And you wouldn’t have caught us dead in one of those gaudy red baseball caps.
But, at first gradually and then suddenly, nearly all of us decided to go along. The same people who roasted Donald Trump as an incompetent menace in private served his rancid baloney in public when convenient. They continued to do so even after the mob he summoned stained the party and our ideals and the halls of the Capitol with their shit.7
Miller offers an insider’s view of a terrible cynicism permeating the Republican Party leadership, which contributed to Trump’s triumph within its ranks. Seeing the political arena as “a big game” through which – by winning – they “awarded themselves the status of public service, the Republican ruling class dismissed the plight of those we were manipulating, growing increasingly comfortable using tactics that inflamed them, turning them against their fellow man.” Miller and other operatives “advanced arguments that none of us believed” and “made people feel aggrieved about issues we had no intent or ability to solve.” He confesses that a quiet and unacknowledged racism was often employed. And “these tactics became not just unchecked but supercharged by a right-wing media ecosystem that we were in bed with and that had its own nefarious incentives, sucking in clicks and views through rage hustling without any intention of delivering something that might bring value to ordinary people’s lives.” Miller concludes:
Should it have come as a surprise that a charlatan who had spent decades duping the masses into joining his pyramid schemes and buying his shitty products would excel in such an environment? Someone who had a media platform of his own and a reptilian instinct for manipulation? Someone who didn’t hesitate to say the quiet part aloud?8
“Donald Trump cannot succeed alone,” mused Liz Cheney. “He depends upon enablers and collaborators.” Cheney, a lifelong conservative Republican and former Congressperson from Wyoming who resisted – more doggedly than most – Trump’s efforts to bully the Republican Party into supporting him, ended up lamenting that “we have now learned that most Republicans currently in Congress will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is. … I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our Republic.”9
Tim Miller identifies psychological reasons for this in discussing one of his friends. “Caroline has been sucked in by the cult,” he concludes. “She is obsessed with Trump and adores him, as incommodious as that may seem.” He sees a very dark dimension in this: “She’s the masochistic follower who feels a compulsion to be tested, abused and forced to prove they are deserving of the leader’s love over and over and over again.”10
Adam Kinzinger, former Republican Congressman from Illinois, reflects on the psychology of some of his colleagues, commenting: “More than they fear death, they fear being kicked out of a tribe, and they fear losing an identity.” The tribe is the Republican Party, and as for the identity: “You’re going to lose your identity as a member of Congress.”11According to Liz Cheney: “So strong is the love of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump.”12
Of course, the Republican Party has a long and complex history. Just as in the case of the other essential elements of Trumpism, it did not begin with Trump and will not end with him. He can be credited with playing the important role of helping to bring these elements together – but regardless of what happens to Trump, the larger phenomenon of “Trumpism” will be with us for some time to come. Fascism of the past … and fascism in the making
One thing more. We are dealing with a global phenomenon noted by many different observers – involving powerful movements and, sometimes, governments in a diverse range of countries (Argentina, Brazil, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and more). A combination of terms describes what is happening – right-wing populism, authoritarian xenophobic ultra-nationalism, etc. – indicating its complex content. Sometimes the word “fascism” is applied, but the term quasi-fascism seems more apt. The prefix quasi- means “resembling” and “having some, but not all of the features of.” The term quasi-fascism, in the present moment, can be understood as “fascism in the making.”
Fascism has been much analyzed and debated – among scholars as well as among left-wing theorists and activists. Here we will restrict ourselves to touching, first, on one of the earliest explorations in 1923 by Clara Zetkin (a close comrade of Rosa Luxemburg and a pioneer of German Communism), followed by 1940 comments of Leon Trotsky.
The global quality of this development was captured in the opening sentence of Zetkin’s 1923 analysis: “Fascism is the concentrated expression of the general offensive undertaken by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat.”13It should be recalled that this particular “concentrated expression” was not embraced by the entire capitalist class – larger sections of the British bourgeoisie preferred support to Neville Chamberlin or Winston Churchill rather than Oswald Mosley, for example, and in the United States some elements from the capitalist class helped craft the New Deal program advanced by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But we cannot understand the realities of that time, and of our own, unless we engage with the global dimension stressed by Zetkin.
This global dimension is inseparable from another aspect of the reality that Zetkin identifies as a primary root of the fascist development, “the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois State.” She adds that “symptoms of this decay of capitalism were observed even before the [First World] War.” But the catastrophic war “shattered capitalist economy to its foundation.” The result was “not only … the colossal impoverishment of the proletariat, but also … deep misery for the petty bourgeoisie, the small peasantry and the intellectuals.” As Zetkin notes, “all these elements had been promised that the war would bring about an amelioration of their material conditions. But the very opposite has happened,” with not only the devastation of war, but also a sudden, massive proletarianization, combined with mass unemployment, among “the former middle classes.” She observes: “It was among these elements that Fascism recruited quite a considerable contingent.”14
According to Zetkin, “the second root of Fascism lies in the retarding of the world revolution by the treacherous attitude of the reformist leaders.” She is referring here to the massive Social Democratic parties and unions. It is worth considering at length what she describes:
Large numbers of the petty bourgeoisie, including even the middle classes, had discarded their war-time psychology for a certain sympathy with reformist socialism, hoping that the latter would bring about a reformation of society along democratic lines. They were disappointed in their hopes. They can now see that the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie, and the worst of it is that these masses have now lost their faith not only in the reformist leaders, but in socialism as a whole. These masses of disappointed socialist sympathisers are joined by large circles of the proletariat, of workers who have given up their faith not only in socialism, but also in their own class. Fascism has become a sort of refuge for the politically shelterless.15
This provides the analytical framework for Zetkin’s understanding of fascism. She makes a major point of distinguishing fascism from authoritarian right-wing violence such as that employed by forces around the reactionary military leader Miklós Horthy, savagely repressing Socialist and Communist workers in Hungary in 1919, replacing an abortive workers’ government with a right-wing dictatorship.
Zetkin insisted that this was not fascism: “Although the methods of both are similar, in essence they are different.” She explained: “The Horthy Terror was established after the victorious, although short-lived, revolution of the proletariat had been suppressed, and was the expression of vengeance of the bourgeoisie. The ringleaders of the White Terror were a quite small clique of former officers.” In contrast, fascism “is not the revenge of the bourgeoisie in retaliation for proletarian aggression against the bourgeoisie, but it is a punishment of the proletariat for failing to carry on the [socialist] revolution begun in Russia. The Fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wide elements of the population.”16
Zetkin offers a complex and expansive understanding of fascism’s meaning:
The bourgeoisie wants to reconstruct capitalist economy. Under the present circumstances reconstruction of bourgeois class domination can be brought about only at the cost of increased exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is quite aware that the soft-speaking reformist socialists are fast losing their hold on the proletariat, and that there will be nothing for the bourgeoisie but to resort to violence against the proletariat. But the means of violence of the bourgeois States are beginning to fail. They therefore need a new organisation of violence, and this is offered to them by the hodge-podge conglomeration of Fascism. For this reason the bourgeoisie offers all the force at its command in the service of Fascism. Fascism has diverse characteristics in different countries. Nevertheless it has two distinguishing features in all countries, namely, the pretence of a revolutionary programme, which is cleverly adapted to the interests and demands of the large masses, and, on the other hand, the application of the most brutal violence.17
Zetkin’s analysis became influential within the early Communist International, although it was gradually adulterated, dogmatized, and diluted in the years stretching from 1923 to the Comintern’s 1943 dissolution. But it is clearly evident in Leon Trotsky’s end-of-life effort to summarize the essentials in his 1940 discussion of political perspectives in the United States. The bottom-line for revolutionaries – which constituted a headline of this section of the document – adds up to eight words: “Fascism Will Come Only If We Fail.” But, of course, Trotsky has much more to say. Two excerpts, however, will be sufficient. Here is the first:
In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses; of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted – but there was no party capable of taking the power; as a reaction came fascism.18
Here is the second excerpt:
We must not identify war dictatorship – the dictatorship of the military machine, of the staff, of finance capital – with fascist dictatorship. For the latter there is first necessary a feeling of desperation of large masses of the people. When the revolutionary parties betray them, when the vanguard of workers shows its incapacity to lead the people to victory, then the farmers, the small businessmen, the unemployed, the soldiers, etc. become capable of supporting a fascist movement, but only then.19
The fascism described by Zetkin and Trotsky has not crystallized in the United States, but a plausible argument could be made that the converging elements of Trumpism represent fascism in the making. The power, failure and future of the U.S. left
There are riddles to be solved. One involves precisely how the perspectives of Zetkin and Trotsky apply to the realities of the United States. Another involves the earlier mentioned “few odd wrinkles” in the Heritage Foundation’s “Conservative Promise” document of 2025. In solving these riddles, we will – hopefully – get a better sense of political realities in the United States, as well as the power, the failure, and the possible future of the U.S. Left.
We have already noted the global dimensions – no less the case now than was true in the time of Zetkin and Trotsky – of the issue we are dealing with. More than this, we are also seeing, in our time as in theirs, a decades-long crisis of capitalism which has generated capitalist policies detrimental to the living standards and to the quality of life for the laboring millions in multiple countries, including our own – the decades’ long restructuring of the economy associated with “globalization.” Catastrophic impacts of global environmental degradation, as well as imperialist violence on multiple fronts, are also in evidence.
On the other hand, at least superficially, the organized Left (whether headed by socialist or communist parties, militant trade unions, or whatever) is far from posing any revolutionary threat or even maintaining a credible presence – at least in Donald Trump’s homeland, the United States of America. This makes the Heritage Foundation’s “Conservative Promise” document seem an absurd, scare-mongering, slanderous exercise when (in the same breath as its complaints about the Democratic Party) it raises a hullabaloo about “the Left” and “the Marxists.”
Trotsky’s apparent promise was that we on the Left will have a shot at making a revolution before the threat of fascism becomes serious. This is how many of us understood the bald assertion that “Fascism Will Come Only If We Fail.” The possibility of Trumpism morphing into fascism would thereby be precluded. But this involves a serious misunderstanding of our history, which in a unique way does correspond to the development described by Zetkin and Trotsky. In an important sense, the scare-mongering conservatives of the Heritage Foundation have a point.
Over the past century, the organized Left has had powerful impact, influencing politics, laws, consciousness and culture within the United States. The labor movement, the waves of feminism, the anti-racist and civil rights movements, the struggles against the Vietnam war, the various student movements, and more – instrumental in bringing about far-reaching changes on the American scene over many decades – would not have been nearly as effective (and might not have come into existence) without the essential organizing efforts of left-wing activists.
This was accompanied by another development, however. Although a significant element among the left-wing activists insisted on the need for political independence from the pro-capitalist political parties, this was largely overpowered by a deep adaptationist trend. In the Red Decade of the 1930s, convergence between socialist-minded forces and a somewhat expansive social liberalism was especially accelerated, as the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) “stole” many reform components of the socialist program. This was done, as FDR insisted, to save capitalism during the angry Depression years – but also to ensure the continuing popularity and election of FDR. More than this, the bulk of the organized Left was absorbed into the New Deal coalition.20
Over half a century, six decisive pivots have made absorption of the organized Left into the Democratic Party almost complete. (1) The trade union movement of the 1930s – particularly the dynamically left-leaning new Congress of Industrial Organizations – formed a firm alliance with FDR’s New Deal Democrats. (2) A 1935 decision by the Communist International under Joseph Stalin to form a “People’s Front” alliance with liberal capitalists such as FDR, brought the dynamic U.S. Communists into the Democratic Party coalition. (3) At the start of the Cold War, the bulk of the organized labor movement (along with most moderate socialists) embraced the Democratic Party’s anti-Communist and liberal capitalist agenda, leading to a broad liberal capitalist “social compact” and consensus, from the late 1940s through the 1950s. (4) The civil rights coalition of the early 1960s became intimately entwined with the party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. (5) Through the 1970s and 1980s, much of the 1960s “new left” would commit to the reform wing of the Democratic Party. (6) As the twenty-first century began to unfold, new waves of young activists joined with older layers – amid radical-sounding promises and soaring hopes – to put Barak Obama in the White House.
From the early twentieth century, the organized Left had been a dynamic force of considerable significance in the United States. Among workers and the oppressed, it had mobilized effective struggles that won genuine victories. It inspired hopes for further effective struggles that would advance human rights, improve the lives of the working-class majority, and bring to birth a better world. Among the wealthy and powerful, of course, it inspired fear and rage.
By the end of the century, through the process we have traced, the organized Left had largely evaporated. Some of its rhetoric, many of its values, and much of its reform agenda (often in diluted form) could be found in the Democratic Party. Yet a sincere and practical commitment to replace the economic dictatorship of capitalism with the economic democracy of socialism was no longer on the table. Nonetheless, among the wealthy and powerful there were those who still felt fear and rage, and also a deep determination to recover lost ground.21
The analyses of Zetkin and Trotsky can be adapted to this quite different context. “Soft-speaking reformist socialists are fast losing their hold on the proletariat,” according to Zetkin in the 1920s, particularly because “the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie.” A hundred years later, in the United States, a highly compromised “working-class vanguard” in the trade unions (AFL-CIO) and in the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party had, arguably, shown “its incapacity to lead the people to victory,” particularly as the global capitalist economy entered an extended period of crisis. The reformists’ capitalist partners – initially so generous – felt compelled to restructure the economy at the expense of the working class, and the reformists felt able to do little more than adapt. As “too big to fail” corporations crashed the economy in 2008-2009, the newly elected radical-reformer, Barak Obama, hurried to bail out the corporate elite at the expense of the working-class majority. In such a situation – as security, stability, and the quality of life give way to social and economic catastrophe – masses of people who were disillusioned with this variant of the so-called “Left” were inclined, inevitably, to look for alternatives among right-wing demagogues.
The demagogues can be as crude as Trump, but they can be as polished as the Heritage Foundation. This brings us to another odd wrinkle in the “Conservative Promise” document. We have seen the logic of its “overestimation” of the Left. But more than once, it sounds a seemingly left-wing note, as in this radically flourished description of the American Revolution:
The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.” It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.22
The seemingly left-wing note is sounded again and again. “Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them,” we are told. “They centralize power up and away from the American people.” The Conservative Promise adopts the tone of many a left-wing agitator: “America’s corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated – self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty. They certainly do not trust the American people, and they disdain the Constitution’s restrictions on their ambitions.” Taking advantage of the fact that so much of the so-called “Left” has unified with the Democratic Party elite’s pro-capitalist liberalism, the document announces that “socialists … are almost always well-to-do,” insisting that “the Left does not believe that all men are created equal – they think they are special,” adding: “Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions, our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a step closer to disappearing.”23
Despite the radical-democratic flourishes of The Conservative Promise, however, the bottom line is a defense of unrestrained capitalism. The primary goal of the President of the United States, we are told, should be to unleash “the dynamic genius of free enterprise,” because in countries where there is “a high degree of economic freedom, elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge.” According to The Conservative Promise, the elitism, corruption, greed, and contempt for ordinary people prevalent in the political sphere is miraculously absent in the economic sphere. Capitalist “free enterprise” is very wonderful indeed: “People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens.”24
From certain things The Conservative Promise says, and from what it fails to say, one can only assume that the document’s authors would welcome whatever support can be rendered to the realization of this glowing vision by forces that mobilized on January 6, 2021 to keep Donald Trump in office – Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, right-wing militias, white nationalist contingents, etc.
There is definitely a fascist potential in the current situation – some of the elements appear to have been crystallizing before our eyes. Whether or not this crystallization is completed, it seems clear that a different pathway is required for the Left than that of being trapped in an accommodation with capitalism, especially in this extended period of capitalist crisis and catastrophe. Revolutionaries will do what they can to rebuild and renew an orientation, a set of struggles, a movement and organization, consistent with the insights of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, and of the many others who recognized that we face the fateful choice of genuine socialism or horrific barbarism.
Underlying crises, deep-felt oppressions, and repressed rage have periodically resulted in amazing activist explosions – such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Black Lives Matter upsurges, tilting political realities qualitatively leftward. This energizes and expands the numbers of those on the activist Left. Of course, such developments inevitably also deepen the fear and increase the determination of those on the Right – there’s no stopping that. Partisans of Trumpism will always use such things for their own purposes.
The problem is that the mass leftward rage and energies – which cannot be sustained indefinitely – presently have nowhere to go, once the dust settles, except in one of two directions: either apathetic quiescence or reformist channels. Those channels are compromised by corporate liberalism and have proved incapable of transcending the economic system that generates the crises, oppressions, and rage. The creation of something better and more effective than that appears to be on the agenda.251
Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), p. 429. 2
Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018), pp. 115-116. 3
Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2019), p. 29. 4
Details and documentation on the Red Decade can be found in Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 153-198, with aspects of subsequent years touched on in pp. 221-258. 21
This is traced in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton 2009), summarized in Paul Le Blanc, “The Triumphant Arc of US Conservatism,” Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 179-186. 22
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 14. 23
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 8, 10, 15, 16 24
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 14, 15 25
For efforts to define possibilities, see: Paul Le Blanc, “The Third American Revolution: How Socialism Can Come to the United States,” in Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith, eds., Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 249-261; Paul Le Blanc, “Pathways for Building a Revolutionary Party,” International Socialism, issue 164, 17 October 2019, https://isj.org.uk/pathways-for-building-a-revolutionary-party/; Paul Le Blanc, “Bernie Sanders, US Politics, and Socialism Today,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, August 13, 2019, https://links.org.au/paul-le-blanc-bernie-sanders-us-politics-socialism-today; Paul Le Blanc, “The Rise, Fall, and Aftermath of the Sander Challenge,” Irish Marxist Review, Volume 9, Number 27, 2020; Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023), pp. 177-186.
Ian Angus’s ‘The War Against the Commons’: A vital new history of the bloody rise of capitalism
In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Occurring at different times in different regions around the world, primitive accumulation is the stage of history during which the ruling class took wealth from the lower classes — unjustly, usually by force or by theft — in order to accumulate the capital they would need to become the capitalist class.
The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is an excellent new book on this history from Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus. It is a beautifully written examination of the rise of capitalism and the destruction of peasant livelihoods as the centuries-old social relations of feudalism were abandoned for a new mode of production. Though it largely focuses on the transformation of feudalism into capitalism in England and Scotland, it has many implications for socialist organizing and for environmentalism today.
Angus’s book is especially valuable for the way it sharply refutes the reactionary thesis of “the tragedy of the commons.” It also provides substantial clarity on Marx’s views of, as he put it, “so-called primitive accumulation.” The rise of capitalism required the war on the commons
In The War Against the Commons, Angus argues that for hundreds of years, peasants had successfully managed common land to the benefit of all. They democratically decided on its use and did not over-exploit it as the reactionary thesis contends. Often peasants repartitioned the private strips of land around the common area to give every family enough land to survive.
Of course this was not some agrarian utopia. Under feudalism, landlords ruthlessly exploited the masses of peasantry, either as serfs, who were kept in bondage, or as free farmers who were still very much tied to the land. Peasants paid rent or performed service on the lord’s demesne (the lord’s private land, attached to their manor), or both. Peasants’ rights were limited and were at the whim of the lord when it came to justice. During times of war they might be called on to fight and die for the lord’s material interests.
But in return for that exploitation, peasants were allowed the collective use of common areas. The commons were absolutely essential to the livelihoods of the peasants.
Beginning with the rise of the market economy in the 15th century, landlords were under more pressure to raise revenue. As Angus writes, “Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”
There were several related strategies employed by the landlords during this period of primitive accumulation: raising rents, enclosing the commons and adding it to their demesnes, consolidating farms into larger units, and replacing farming with sheep raising. The latter required less labor and created higher profits. Overt time, the economic differentiation of the peasantry — some peasants growing more wealthy while others slipped further into poverty — aided the landlords’ efforts.
The peasant class did not just go along with these land grabs and forcible changes to the previous social arrangement. They continually resisted these attacks that denied their livelihood, and peasant revolts broke out from time to time throughout this entire process.
These revolts peaked at particular times, sometimes culminating in revolutionary situations, such as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381. More often they involved re-taking common lands by tearing down fences and hedgerows. In the 1640s, these peasant revolts intersected with the English Revolution and Civil War.
According to Angus, the peasant revolts did not fuel either side of the Civil War exclusively. Though the Parliamentarians at first seemed to take the side of the peasants against the Royalists, in the end the consolidation of power by Parliament furthered the accumulation of land in the hands of the landlords.
The most radical elements during this period were the Diggers, who tried to extend communal ownership of land both physically and through political organizing.
At the beginning of the war against the commons, the English Crown tried to restrain enclosures. They feared depopulation that would deny the needed soldiers for war; and they also feared social unrest.
Thus, the Crown passed laws to slow down the enclosure process. But landlords, who often controlled the local justices of the peace, prevented effective enforcement of these laws. Over time, Crown resistance to land consolidation and enclosure waned as the new capitalist relations dominated the economy more and more.
Angus also examines the role of the “commonwealth men” who were theoretically against capitalist development, but also opposed peasant resistance to the rising power of capitalism. They were similar to the “feudal socialists” whom Marx and Engels denounced in the Communist Manifesto — the aristocrats who railed against the exploitation of the new capitalist order and attempted to sway the proletariat to their side, while still holding deeply reactionary views. “What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat,” they wrote, “as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.”
Despite the peasant revolts, the dominant trend was toward enclosure and consolidation as rural residents were expelled from the land. Many became vagabonds who tried to survive by begging and stealing. Over time, the peasants who were kicked off the land became the basis of the working class that capitalism needed in industry. Thus, primitive accumulation created the proletarian class even as it destroyed feudalism.
During this era, rural people with small cottages entered the capitalist system directly by working for capitalists as weavers or in other trades under the “putting-out system.” Under this system, merchants would sell raw materials to cottagers who would work it up into products. Merchants would then buy the finished product back at a fixed rate, rather than pay a wage.
Marx called this the “formal subsumption” of labor to capital as opposed to the “real subsumption” of wage labor. Wage labor was the last resort
When peasants were expelled from the land, wage labor was the last resort for survival. Thus, people saw wage labor as another form of slavery. As Marx wrote in Capital:
A new class of wage-laborers was born in England when great masses of men were suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.
Under feudalism, they had largely controlled their own labor. The work day was governed by the weather, seasons, and other natural conditions. Under capitalism, labor was controlled by the clock and working hours were longer.
To enforce wage labor, the state now dominated by capitalism used draconian methods, including actual slavery. “Poaching” was outlawed for the poor who needed food, but hunting was allowed for the rich who did not need it. For a period, England enforced the death penalty for hundreds of offenses, including poaching and petty theft, and also made regular use of transportation to the colonies in Australia and elsewhere.
The destruction of the old rural economy unleashed more people than the rising capitalist economy could absorb. Even if there was not enough wage work available, vagabonds were punished for not working for a master. The creation of capitalism was based on the horrific oppression of ordinary people.
This process of consolidating capitalism in England took hundreds of years, from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The practice of enclosure persisted well into the 19th century in England. In Scotland, it happened much faster after the English conquest; the results were equally bloody but much more condensed in time.
Apologists for capitalism contend that it made agriculture much more efficient. Angus thoroughly refutes this, showing that many of these improvements arose during the period of peasant management of the commons.
Angus also shows that caloric intake declined as capitalism rose. “Most industrial workers and agricultural laborers were malnourished,” he writes.
“They were less healthy and died younger than their ancestors a century earlier.” According to Angus, “The expansion of the capitalist world system caused a dramatic and prolonged process of impoverishment on a scale unprecedented in recorded history.” The destructive birth of capitalism
Importantly, Angus explains Marx’s critical views of the war against the commons. Too many would-be Marxists stress the progressive nature of the rise of capitalism. Marx, on the other hand, saw it as a destructive process, even though it ultimately developed the productive forces that would allow the working class to take power and establish communism. As Marx famously put it, “Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
Marx preferred to discuss the war against the commons as “original expropriation” rather than primitive accumulation. Marx ultimately felt that “primitive accumulation” was too neutral a term — which is why he often qualified the phrase as so-called primitive accumulation.
Too many people miss Marx’s sarcasm when discussing this issue. Marx made it clear that capitalists stole their wealth from others rather than amassing it through hard work or intelligence, as the capitalist myth would have it. When workers no longer have access to the means of production, they end up having to work for those who stole it from them.
A large part of this original theft came from colonization. Angus explains the process of wealth seizure in the colonies as a further basis for the accumulation of capital in England. The effects on the native population of the Western Hemisphere and on enslaved Africans are well-known. As Marx wrote in Capital: “The veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”
He goes on:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent , the beginnings of the conquest and looting of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
Thus the issues raised by this history are directly relevant to anticolonial and antiracist struggles today. Debates on the left and the ongoing relevance of the history of accumulation
According to Angus, the war against the commons continues to this day. He believes Marx saw expropriation as a continual basis of capitalism, not just a contained process occurring at its dawn. Though capitalism now dominates the world economy, the dispossession of the world’s peasantry continues. Capital still accumulates through expropriation.
This bears on current political controversies on the left. David Harvey, for example, focuses in his writings on current “accumulation by dispossession.” Harvey seems to downplay the importance of the basic process of mature capitalism: accumulation by exploitation — in other words, not paying workers the full value of what they produce. Angus does not explicitly endorse Harvey’s position but does argue the importance of the continuation of expropriation of peasant land.
This is an important emphasis which solidifies our understanding: “Since the late 1900s, capital’s continuing war against the commons has dispossessed millions of peasant families in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”
Modern-day peasant resistance to being forced off their land is certainly a struggle that the left should support. Peasants can be allies with workers in the war against capitalism — Marx agreed with this approach. Angus notes the positive attitude Marx had toward the peasant communes in Russia. He thought they could become the basis of a transformation to communism — but importantly only if connected to the international working-class revolution. Marx rejected a utopian view of the peasant commune.
Nor does Marx’s attitude mean that Marxists support the preservation of peasant property even after the working-class revolution. The goal is still collective control of the whole economy, including land, by the population as a whole.
In spite of the need for Marxists to defend the remaining commons, the current context is important. In the period that Angus focuses on in early modern England, capitalism was still forming. Most of the world was pre-capitalist. The seizure of the commons was absolutely essential to the rise of capitalism.
Today, the situation has been transformed. The world economy is now universally capitalist. Even the remaining peasant agriculture is largely commercial and integrated into the capitalist market. Subsistence agriculture, which was the essence of agriculture during the rise of capitalism, is now more marginal.
Over the last 141 years since Marx’s death, much of the common land has been taken by capitalists. The expropriation of peasant land today is a transfer of wealth among participants in the capitalist system. It is no longer the destruction of a pre-capitalist mode of production to make way for capitalism. Today, expropriation is an important supplement to exploitation, but only a supplement.
Contra Harvey, the main emphasis of anticapitalists today needs to be resistance against the exploitation of workers, and opposition to the oppression that divides workers. The form of a worker-peasant alliance will differ from country to country, but defense of peasants should be integrated into the working-class revolution rather than being seen as a separate struggle.
Angus argues that Marx and Engels were more flexible and less dogmatic than later Marxists are. He discusses how Engels was reluctant to give advice to Russian activists because of ignorance of Russian politics. Angus also says that Marx and Engels supported assassination as a political strategy in Russia even while opposing it in Britain.
This attitude is an important corrective to dogmatism. Marxists need to understand the political and economic situation before pronouncing on it. We must learn before we can teach! However, the world has transformed in the last 140 years. The spread of the capitalist system across the world means that Marx’s strategies for the capitalist countries in the 1880s are more applicable across the world today than they were in his time. Although we need to understand the specifics of each situation, the broad contours of the focus on working-class struggle are applicable everywhere. The Communist Manifesto’s famous conclusion, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains,” is even truer today than when Marx and Engels wrote it.
This shift is shown by the changing strategy of Russian Marxists, including the Bolsheviks, before the Revolution. As capitalism developed in Russia in the early 20th century, they moved away from Marx’s positive attitude to the Narodniks, who were oriented to the peasantry. Instead, they focused on organizing the industrial working class.
Finally, Angus raises the very important issue of overcoming the division between the town and country. Marx and Engels were very clear on the importance of spreading the population rather than having it concentrated in cities. They saw this as similar to the abolition of class division. In The Housing Question (1878), Engels wrote, “The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers.”
The War Against the Commons is a brilliant examination of the rise of capitalism. It smashes some of the bases of capitalist ideology, and vindicates the possibility of democratic control of the earth. It makes a valuable contribution to current debates on the left, connecting anticapitalism to defense of the environment. It shows that capitalism has always been opposed to ecological sanity — for example demonstrating the direct connection between capitalism and fossil fuels, especially coal.
For all these reasons, it is a must-read for socialists and for all who care about the future of humanity and the planet.
Steve Leigh (he/him) is a founding member of Firebrand and the Seattle Revolutionary Socialists. He has been an active Marxist since 1971 and was a founding member of the International Socialist Organization. He was a shop steward in SEIU for 35 years and is a member of the retirees chapter of SEIU 925. Read more from Steve on his blog.
