Where Have All Good Socialists Gone?
Image by Lian Lianna Begett.
What Small Numbers Can Accomplish
In a system of winner-take-all (except in Maine and Nebraska) to decide the delegates for the electoral college, 270 of which is necessary to win the presidency, and in a tight race as it is, a small number of votes, this way or that way, can make a huge difference in the society we will face come January 2025.
Meanwhile, no matter what happens in the elections, the socialist left will have a limited amount of time to get its act together and start behaving like socialists and not just commentators.
As Marx famously noted in his Theses on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The American socialist left, for the past forty-fifty years, has acted mostly as ‘philosophers’, or, as it counts in today’s world, commentators. (In the old days people looked to philosophers for answers, these days they look to commentators.)
All Societies Have Reactionary Social Layers
All former socio-economic formations came with their dominant ideologies. However, as Marx observed, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and to paraphrase, simply because those socio-economic formations have disappeared, it does not follow that those ideologies have gone away with them.
In the United States, those ideologies are basically racist ones, bestowing supremacy to the white European colonizers. Up until the mid-1960s, those people had privileges that don’t exist in law anymore. They still do have certain privileges (like not ending up dead due to a blown taillight) that people of color don’t enjoy; that’s a given. But the laws have changed, and open discrimination is not allowed. Again, not that the laws are applied consistently, but they still exist.
Now … ‘Up until the mid-1960s’ is not a long time ago. There are tens of millions of people in this country whose parents and grandparents enjoyed those whites-only privileges. Millions of them have also been subjected to the neo-liberalism that has driven the economic policies of both Democrats and Republicans for the past (at least) forty years. They have experienced repeated recessions and job losses, lesser access to jobs that pay a living wage, precarity of the jobs they do have, lack of meaningful healthcare, erosion of their public school’s ability to educated them. Social pressures are crushing them.
In the past nine years or so, that old-yet-not-lost feeling of privilege has been reanimated back to life in the form of a nationwide movement. The people in that movement have tasted the power given them, and they like the taste. That movement is not going anywhere. It is funded by billionaires. It has a multitude of deep organizational capabilities, and it is determined to take total power. It is only a matter of time before it does.
“But we have all these institutions in the U.S., built exactly to prevent such things happening here,” you might object. Those institutions are as flimsy as the twigs on a dying plant. With the U.S. Supreme Court as it is right now, those institutions are up for grabs.
Why Some Voters Are Fearful
So, in this election cycle, tens of millions of voters are fearful of what a second Trump administration would mean for them. Especially if those voters are members of the diaspora from the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan).
Members of that diaspora are doctors, nurses, engineers, educators, business owners, journalists, artists, playwrights, directors, musicians, others are technical workers, and some grow crops and restore wilderness habitats, yet others are manual workers in various industries, or gig workers driving Uber or Lyft to make a living.
They have mostly escaped fascistic regimes.
Some Marxist (or otherwise leftist) academicians or activists may object to the word ‘fascist’ or ‘fascism’ for what the rightwing extremists could bring about in this country. But it’s really not that complicated. One-person rule is pretty much what it is!
So, it is natural that Middle Eastern diaspora can perceive Project 2025 as a threat, and they don’t wish to live under another fascistic regime with tons more power and tons more surveillance capabilities, super charged with a Supreme Court too friendly to the idea of an all-powerful presidency with no limitations. They have seen it all before.
They are rightly disgusted by the Democrats’ allowing a genocide in Gaza (as I do) but may consider the fact that a difference of just a few thousand votes can clear the way for a presidency that will be even worse for their communities back in the Middle East, and for themselves and their children here in the U.S.
They may also feel some reticence about voting for the Green Party candidate. Those members of the diaspora may believe that Jill Stein is playing with their lives when her 1% can bring back their worst nightmares.
Their fear may have some basis in reality. After all, Jill Stein has stated that she wants to ‘teach the Democrats a lesson’. Which can only mean defeating Harris, which in turn can only mean handing the presidency to Trump.
They may also question Jill Stein’s character, based on her previous actions. For example, they may ask, “Who would sit at the same dinner table (in 2015) with Michael Flynn, the staunchest Trump ally, and Vladimir Putin? Putin the butcher of Grozny, the co-destroyer of Syria, the co-mass-murderer of half a million Muslim Arabs in Syria. Hundred thousand Palestinian refugees were dispossessed and displaced again in that civil war, yet again driven to another refugee camp in another country.”
So, they may even question the truth of her caring for the Palestinian people.
Progressive-minded voters may also question her ‘progressive’ credentials. They may ask, since she is the leader of the Green Party, “When did she hold fundraising events to provide resources and help the residents of the Cancer Alley in Louisiana? Or any other community suffering from environmental injustice.”
Since Green Party claims to be a friend of the labor, progressive-minded voters may ask, “When was the last time, under the leadership of Jill Stein, Greens held fundraising events to contribute to strike funds for teachers on strike, hotel workers on strike, fast food workers or auto workers on strike, or ANY workers on strike?”
So, they may wonder why, to ‘teach Democrats a lesson’, Greens would hand the presidency to anyone who would do away with environmental regulations altogether! They may bear in mind that the Supreme Court has set the precedent to deny regulatory agencies the power to regulate as needed.
The same voters may wonder if she is OK with paving the path to the White House for someone who will attack Middle Easterners (whom she claims to be fighting for) on a daily basis? They have not forgotten the ‘Muslim Ban’!
They may wonder if the Greens are OK with millions of undocumented immigrants being rounded up and put in concentration camps, in order to cleanse the gene pool.
For millions of those voters, they fear that Greens may be playing with their lives without realizing it.
Where Have Socialists Been
Finally, where have all good socialists been?
Since American socialists have been mostly absent from myriad social movements that have come and gone in the past few decades, they have hidden behind commentating about those horrible Democrats, and how they’ve sold out the people again and again.
Well … That’s what Dems do! It’s not a startling revelation! It’s stating the observable obvious, over and over again, for decades. Commentating.
But what have socialists been doing? Unlike socialists in the underworld, living under fascist-type state formations, where mere utterances can have them killed, American socialists have been operating openly, protected legally.
They openly publish newspapers, magazines, websites, and they organize national conventions and conferences without the security forces busting those meetings. Their websites are not blocked by the government. Marx and Engels collected works are available in their public libraries, along with hundreds of other Marxist writers, theoreticians, literary and cultural critics, and so on. Their members are not hunted down, thrown in prison and tortured to death. Their women’s rights activists are not imprisoned, along with their lawyers. Their workers’ rights activists are not jailed for years. Their artists, writers, musicians, journalists, film and documentary producers are not jailed for no reason other than doing their work, daring to disagree with the powers that be.
People may wonder what American socialists’ excuses are for having done little to stop things from getting so bad that voters have to depend on corrupt neo-liberals to protect them from attacks by the most reactionary social forces in the U.S.
When was the last time American socialist organizations got together to raise funds to support and provide resources to, and not just preach at, workers and community organizers they interacted with? When was the last time they were at a rally not just to sell newspapers and talk at the participants?
In 2018-2019, did American socialist organizations get together to organize fundraising events to raise money for strike funds for teachers on strike in Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina? Or, this year, for hotel workers on strike? Or in 2012 for fast food workers on strike in New York City, a strike that spread to Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City and Memphis? Or for auto workers attempting to unionize in Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Alabama or Mississippi?
Did American socialists ever raise money for people facing evictions by greedy landlords? Or help homeless people get some food? Or help pay for lunch money for poor kids whose schools don’t provide free lunch in Mississippi, Alabama, or Kentucky, or other former slave states? Are these things too petty for their revolutionary vision?
In 2006, a huge movement of undocumented immigrants hit the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles, and on May 1st of that year more than two million people marched in support of that movement across the U.S. Did American socialist organizations get together to raise funds to provide resources to that movement? Or did they just show up at the marches and rallies to sell papers and preach at the participants?
Some voters may say, “You American socialists can dump on Democrats all you want, but, tragically, Dems are the last resort precisely because you have failed to be real socialists for too long.”
Some American socialists, many Marxists even, are failing to see the moment for what it is. Maybe they suffer from their own form of exceptionalism, thinking ‘it’ cannot happen to them. Maybe they are too privileged. It takes a well-privileged person to assume that no major changes in their lives would ensue no matter who’s the president, or who controls the legislature.
But it does make a great deal of difference for tens of millions of less privileged people. Voters may be right to observe that it does make a difference for undocumented immigrants, or even for documented ones, or for the health of their environment, or for workers’ ability to organize, or for Trans kids. You definitely cannot fool Middle Eastern diaspora voters about whose presidency would come with more open racist attacks against their communities.
People may think that if American socialists are indifferent to those considerations, and many more, they are not really socialists. Not even true liberals.
I am not here to tell anybody who to vote for, or to vote at all. I write this as a friendly reminder to the American socialists:
Not matter who you vote for, or if you vote at all, the real choice for socialists is simple: You can either bide your time or keep dumping on Dems for all our social ills …
Or you can become real socialists while you still can, before you’re wiped out for a whole generation.
You only have a few months, or a few years, to get your act together.
