To Die, Survive, Or Thrive
December 1, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Credit: Dall-E
Are you like me? Has getting out of bed become a serious challenge? Has getting back in bed become a beckoning distraction? Do you intermittently see a mountain on one side and a cliff that plummets to hell on the other side?
To borrow from Dylan, do your eyes “collide with stuffed graveyards?” Are you ill that “Maggie’s Farm,” which itself deserved revolutionary transformation, is now instead morphing into Trump’s concentration camp? With four more years of Trump being Trump, do you fear that everything now worthwhile will die? Is your succinct summary of Trump’s 900-page Project 2025, “kill, destroy, eradicate all that Trump targets?” So, do you, like me, feel that surrender is a luxury we cannot afford? Okay, but what does no surrender mean? What are we to do?
I re-read the above and I think to myself, what are these apocalyptic words that I offer without detailed data? Shouldn’t I talk tariffs, deportations, enfeebled health care, books banned, and education eradicated? Isn’t to react to circumstances without offering details emotional but not informative? Shouldn’t I analyze every last data point?
But then I think, why should I do all that? Facts are now piled high in hundreds of places. Analyses are abundant. Endless lies and their manipulations obscure truth, sure, but many truths and their explanations are nonetheless readily available. Hell, liberals, sometimes even conservatives, are warning of Fascism.
I suppose I could mull over the dynamics of tariffs to come up with some seeming slant or subtlety that someone, somewhere might not have already heard and could not easily find to read with a five minute search. But is to repeat what is already known, even with a tiny twist, a contribution? Would that help anyone find ways to resist?
Okay, here is an observation that might not be widespread and might help a little. The ignorance of Trump’s voters about what is bearing down on them is sort of like how you or I reflexively dismiss conspiracy theories. Relevant conspiracy information is everywhere. It takes minutes to search it out. We could become aware and even expert in conspiracists’ claims but we find giving time to conspiracies an infuriating, fruitless pursuit. We therefore reflexively reject conspiracist’s claims.
I believe millions of Trump’s voters see our claims about Trump’s policies like we see conspiracy claims. Our information is easy to find and consider. But millions believe that our anti-Trump claims are rantings of crazy, malevolent, duped people who hate whoever disagrees with them, so they reflexively reject our truths. For them, lies dominate. Truth is not even in their basement. And so an anti-vax Cabinet prepares to cleanse hospitals. A racist Cabinet prepares to deport immigrants. A moneybags Cabinet prepares to tariff imports and derivatively the whole economy, even as it transfers funds from poor to rich on every front. A fascist Cabinet prepares to reconfigure the government to Trump’s specifications. Yet half the country believes everything is going to get better. They believe Trump is on their side.
This isn’t even Alice in Wonderland absurdity. Kafka wouldn’t believe it. Give Trump free rein and here comes hell. And not just for America but for the whole world since our biggest export is cultural lies and delusions, distorted hate and greed, and yes, if you don’t welcome all that, extortion and bombs.
Give it all a name. How about Fascism? Its foundation is profit plus lies, hate, and fear. So, sure, Trump himself might thrive, though even that is dubious. Repression,
denial, denigration, and especially high water and hard rain everywhere, each steadily escalating, will not facilitate thriving for many. So what now? Back to bed? More Netflix? School daze? Or perhaps we must face some easily demonstrable facts.
Fact 1: Whatever else we believe in, desire, and pursue, Trumpist fascistic social and environmental collapse must be stopped. Yes, I know that it is ridiculous that this disgusting degenerate blowhard occupies such a world-spanning position as to absolutely require endless attention, but like it or not that is our situation. To ignore him, with head in the ground denial won’t help.
Fact 2: Perhaps it is not an exhaustive list but there are at least three possibilities for how to stop Trump. First, Trump destroys himself and his own agenda, or he at least helps us to do so by his overreach, hubris, insanity, and we can only hope total and complete personal physical and mental dissolution. Second, Trump and his minions lose the Senate and House of Representatives and then the White House in two and four years respectively. And third, Trump is removed from office by corporate monsters in gray flannel suits barely more moral than himself but who for their own selfish reasons dump him—soon.
Those three possibilities are all that my mind conjures because as much as I would give anything to help it happen, in the next four years I don’t foresee a well organized fifty or more million strong revolutionary movement taking over government and workplaces to then implement compelling, workable, shared and participatory plans ironically called Participatory Project 2029.
Fact 3: Regarding the three possible paths away from Trumpism becoming full-on Fascism, I offer three observations together as one third fact. First, there is nothing much that we can do about the devolution possibility. Maybe Trump will be dumber and wilder than would be wise for him to fulfill his agenda—or maybe not. Either way, he must be stopped.
Second, the election possibility will be pursued by many but how does the possibility of election losses for Trump actualize? If we assume contested fair elections which is not a hundred percent certain, either Trump and his Republican agents lose many supporters and attract few replacements or whoever runs against Trumpism attracts many new voters and loses few that offset those gains. But even if this electoral path works, note that while Trump would be gone we would arrive back at the status quo before Trump with the Democratic Party victors celebrating their tremendous accomplishment even though their preferred status quo had earlier helped produce Trumpism, and given sufficient time would likely do so again.
The third “you’re fired” possibility arises from a whole different direction and causal calculus. At some point, and the sooner the better, a few corporate emissaries visit Donald, and inform him that it is time to hand in his papers and retire to one of his waiting mansions. He can blame health or whatever else he might like as his explanation, but he must vacate.
So what can a serious leftist who rejects the whole damn system and who wants fundamentally new political, economic, and social institutions and relations do? Since we have agreed that surrender is not an option, it seems we have to work on option one, two, or three.
How do we decide, and then how do we act on our decision? I don’t see how we leftists can induce Trump to blow himself up. We could of course work on the electoral option, but not wanting to go right back to the status quo before Trump we would presumably prefer an agenda that makes Trump-removing electoral results more likely, but that also aims to attain better than prior business as usual. For that, perhaps there is a better option than subordinating to Democratic Party plans. And what about getting the slightly less despicable monsters to remove Trump? At this point, to propose a possible decision, I need to move from facts to conjecture, but I think to a rather sensible conjecture.
Hypothesis: If Trump implements step after step of his agenda even just a bit at a time much less in massive doses, and if he claims contrary to evidence that his wins are wonderful for the public and horrible for the public’s enemies, and claims that all the simultaneous pains are products of enemies he hasn’t yet but will deal with, and if media behaves subserviently or even just non dismissively, then Trump’s support will actually grow as he appears validated and unstoppable. Get on the train or get run over by it. And each new Trump-celebrated step will accelerate further larger steps. He will seem to many an omniscient servant of God. To others, a genius.
Yes, I know it is a horrifying hypothesis, but, it is also, I think, a quite reasonable hypothesis. Stopping a repeatedly triumphalist Trump would become steadily more difficult. On the other hand, if Trump-2’s early plans are disrupted and blocked and if media is successfully pressed to report even somewhat accurately and fully, Trump’s support will diminish.
Conclusion: Early effective opposition will impede Trump’s plans, diminish the damage he inflicts, and derivatively diminish his support. In those ways it will make every path to Trump’s elimination more likely. So it turns out that not signing up to electoral campaigns that are two and four years down the road but instead opening fronts of activist resistance to Trump’s early policy efforts at deportations, tariffs, and departmental cuts can not only aid future election prospects but also, looking further down the road, retain independence from the Democratic Party and even develop organizational tools and popular desires to pursue aims beyond prior business as usual.
So I find myself believing a simple argument that leads to a simple proposition. To best stop Trump and thereby best reduce Trumpian damage while we also propel electoral prospects against him but avoid Democratic Party diversions and prepare the way for movements against the next Democratic Congress and administration, leftist resistance should reach out to ever wider constituencies to actively block Trumpian policies with whatever methods immediately work—for example, teach-ins, talks, sanctuaries, encampments, marches, demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and diverse civil disobedience—all directed both at Trump’s policies and structural plans and, when need be, at media pr other complicit institutions to pressure them as well.
But what about the morally decrepit grey flannel corporate invaders who we hope fire Donald along the way? Why might they do that? When the UAW strikes against auto companies, and actually when any movement seeks any demand, how do they win? It is not rocket science. They do not win by convincing elites that the moral thing to do is to make the changes. That is like trying to convince a tree to fly. Movements win, instead, by creating a social situation that protested elites so fear that they decide to defensively give in to prevent the movements’ further growth.
So in the current case, the resistance to Trumpism and fascism wants first to make Trump back off various policies, and then to make corrupt immoral corporate power fire Trump. To do so elites need to see the resistance continually growing, diversifying, and ultimately threatening not just what it nominally focusses on, Trump’s policies, but also the elites and their favored institutions more broadly. So if Trump soon tries to implement deportations, tariffs, and some other initial aims, the resistance focuses on all that to stop Trump from having wins to celebrate, even as we also seek to develop in a way that says we are going to keep growing. Repression and not implementing our demands won’t beat us but will instead grow and intensify us. That is how a movement to stop Trumpist policies wins, even as it also prepares to continue beyond Trump.
Who composes this threatening resistance? It will have to welcome and retain not just seasoned activists but also many many Harris and even Trump voters, frightened and angered so much by Trump’s actuality, that they want to and become connected to ways to fight back.
So the bottom line is we now face the horror of Israeli and Eastern European warfare, the suicidal pursuit of militarist war production and fossil fuel use, the danger of world wide economic chaos, the harm and mayhem of anti immigrant madness, and the possible complete dissolution of even partially democratic structures and the parallel further centralization and regimentation of mass and even independent media. In short we face knife-edge times. The worst threatens all of us. To vigorously collectively pursue the best that can emerge is our only alternative.
So no surrender. No submission. Business as usual, school as usual, even personal life as usual aren’t sensible options. To ignore encroaching fascism for months or a year, will forfeit everything usual, much less better, for many many subsequent years. This would be a world-bendingly poor choice for friends, family, and others. Whatever form of resistance available to you that may suit you, however modest or profound it may be, do it as best you can.
Does this sound over dramatic? Am I urging too much? I think not, but if these words are a little too dramatic, that seems better to me than to foster any doubts about what’s now at stake.
Free Palestine. Free ourselves. Free the planet.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Michael Albert
Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.
Credit: Dall-E
Are you like me? Has getting out of bed become a serious challenge? Has getting back in bed become a beckoning distraction? Do you intermittently see a mountain on one side and a cliff that plummets to hell on the other side?
To borrow from Dylan, do your eyes “collide with stuffed graveyards?” Are you ill that “Maggie’s Farm,” which itself deserved revolutionary transformation, is now instead morphing into Trump’s concentration camp? With four more years of Trump being Trump, do you fear that everything now worthwhile will die? Is your succinct summary of Trump’s 900-page Project 2025, “kill, destroy, eradicate all that Trump targets?” So, do you, like me, feel that surrender is a luxury we cannot afford? Okay, but what does no surrender mean? What are we to do?
I re-read the above and I think to myself, what are these apocalyptic words that I offer without detailed data? Shouldn’t I talk tariffs, deportations, enfeebled health care, books banned, and education eradicated? Isn’t to react to circumstances without offering details emotional but not informative? Shouldn’t I analyze every last data point?
But then I think, why should I do all that? Facts are now piled high in hundreds of places. Analyses are abundant. Endless lies and their manipulations obscure truth, sure, but many truths and their explanations are nonetheless readily available. Hell, liberals, sometimes even conservatives, are warning of Fascism.
I suppose I could mull over the dynamics of tariffs to come up with some seeming slant or subtlety that someone, somewhere might not have already heard and could not easily find to read with a five minute search. But is to repeat what is already known, even with a tiny twist, a contribution? Would that help anyone find ways to resist?
Okay, here is an observation that might not be widespread and might help a little. The ignorance of Trump’s voters about what is bearing down on them is sort of like how you or I reflexively dismiss conspiracy theories. Relevant conspiracy information is everywhere. It takes minutes to search it out. We could become aware and even expert in conspiracists’ claims but we find giving time to conspiracies an infuriating, fruitless pursuit. We therefore reflexively reject conspiracist’s claims.
I believe millions of Trump’s voters see our claims about Trump’s policies like we see conspiracy claims. Our information is easy to find and consider. But millions believe that our anti-Trump claims are rantings of crazy, malevolent, duped people who hate whoever disagrees with them, so they reflexively reject our truths. For them, lies dominate. Truth is not even in their basement. And so an anti-vax Cabinet prepares to cleanse hospitals. A racist Cabinet prepares to deport immigrants. A moneybags Cabinet prepares to tariff imports and derivatively the whole economy, even as it transfers funds from poor to rich on every front. A fascist Cabinet prepares to reconfigure the government to Trump’s specifications. Yet half the country believes everything is going to get better. They believe Trump is on their side.
This isn’t even Alice in Wonderland absurdity. Kafka wouldn’t believe it. Give Trump free rein and here comes hell. And not just for America but for the whole world since our biggest export is cultural lies and delusions, distorted hate and greed, and yes, if you don’t welcome all that, extortion and bombs.
Give it all a name. How about Fascism? Its foundation is profit plus lies, hate, and fear. So, sure, Trump himself might thrive, though even that is dubious. Repression,
denial, denigration, and especially high water and hard rain everywhere, each steadily escalating, will not facilitate thriving for many. So what now? Back to bed? More Netflix? School daze? Or perhaps we must face some easily demonstrable facts.
Fact 1: Whatever else we believe in, desire, and pursue, Trumpist fascistic social and environmental collapse must be stopped. Yes, I know that it is ridiculous that this disgusting degenerate blowhard occupies such a world-spanning position as to absolutely require endless attention, but like it or not that is our situation. To ignore him, with head in the ground denial won’t help.
Fact 2: Perhaps it is not an exhaustive list but there are at least three possibilities for how to stop Trump. First, Trump destroys himself and his own agenda, or he at least helps us to do so by his overreach, hubris, insanity, and we can only hope total and complete personal physical and mental dissolution. Second, Trump and his minions lose the Senate and House of Representatives and then the White House in two and four years respectively. And third, Trump is removed from office by corporate monsters in gray flannel suits barely more moral than himself but who for their own selfish reasons dump him—soon.
Those three possibilities are all that my mind conjures because as much as I would give anything to help it happen, in the next four years I don’t foresee a well organized fifty or more million strong revolutionary movement taking over government and workplaces to then implement compelling, workable, shared and participatory plans ironically called Participatory Project 2029.
Fact 3: Regarding the three possible paths away from Trumpism becoming full-on Fascism, I offer three observations together as one third fact. First, there is nothing much that we can do about the devolution possibility. Maybe Trump will be dumber and wilder than would be wise for him to fulfill his agenda—or maybe not. Either way, he must be stopped.
Second, the election possibility will be pursued by many but how does the possibility of election losses for Trump actualize? If we assume contested fair elections which is not a hundred percent certain, either Trump and his Republican agents lose many supporters and attract few replacements or whoever runs against Trumpism attracts many new voters and loses few that offset those gains. But even if this electoral path works, note that while Trump would be gone we would arrive back at the status quo before Trump with the Democratic Party victors celebrating their tremendous accomplishment even though their preferred status quo had earlier helped produce Trumpism, and given sufficient time would likely do so again.
The third “you’re fired” possibility arises from a whole different direction and causal calculus. At some point, and the sooner the better, a few corporate emissaries visit Donald, and inform him that it is time to hand in his papers and retire to one of his waiting mansions. He can blame health or whatever else he might like as his explanation, but he must vacate.
So what can a serious leftist who rejects the whole damn system and who wants fundamentally new political, economic, and social institutions and relations do? Since we have agreed that surrender is not an option, it seems we have to work on option one, two, or three.
How do we decide, and then how do we act on our decision? I don’t see how we leftists can induce Trump to blow himself up. We could of course work on the electoral option, but not wanting to go right back to the status quo before Trump we would presumably prefer an agenda that makes Trump-removing electoral results more likely, but that also aims to attain better than prior business as usual. For that, perhaps there is a better option than subordinating to Democratic Party plans. And what about getting the slightly less despicable monsters to remove Trump? At this point, to propose a possible decision, I need to move from facts to conjecture, but I think to a rather sensible conjecture.
Hypothesis: If Trump implements step after step of his agenda even just a bit at a time much less in massive doses, and if he claims contrary to evidence that his wins are wonderful for the public and horrible for the public’s enemies, and claims that all the simultaneous pains are products of enemies he hasn’t yet but will deal with, and if media behaves subserviently or even just non dismissively, then Trump’s support will actually grow as he appears validated and unstoppable. Get on the train or get run over by it. And each new Trump-celebrated step will accelerate further larger steps. He will seem to many an omniscient servant of God. To others, a genius.
Yes, I know it is a horrifying hypothesis, but, it is also, I think, a quite reasonable hypothesis. Stopping a repeatedly triumphalist Trump would become steadily more difficult. On the other hand, if Trump-2’s early plans are disrupted and blocked and if media is successfully pressed to report even somewhat accurately and fully, Trump’s support will diminish.
Conclusion: Early effective opposition will impede Trump’s plans, diminish the damage he inflicts, and derivatively diminish his support. In those ways it will make every path to Trump’s elimination more likely. So it turns out that not signing up to electoral campaigns that are two and four years down the road but instead opening fronts of activist resistance to Trump’s early policy efforts at deportations, tariffs, and departmental cuts can not only aid future election prospects but also, looking further down the road, retain independence from the Democratic Party and even develop organizational tools and popular desires to pursue aims beyond prior business as usual.
So I find myself believing a simple argument that leads to a simple proposition. To best stop Trump and thereby best reduce Trumpian damage while we also propel electoral prospects against him but avoid Democratic Party diversions and prepare the way for movements against the next Democratic Congress and administration, leftist resistance should reach out to ever wider constituencies to actively block Trumpian policies with whatever methods immediately work—for example, teach-ins, talks, sanctuaries, encampments, marches, demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and diverse civil disobedience—all directed both at Trump’s policies and structural plans and, when need be, at media pr other complicit institutions to pressure them as well.
But what about the morally decrepit grey flannel corporate invaders who we hope fire Donald along the way? Why might they do that? When the UAW strikes against auto companies, and actually when any movement seeks any demand, how do they win? It is not rocket science. They do not win by convincing elites that the moral thing to do is to make the changes. That is like trying to convince a tree to fly. Movements win, instead, by creating a social situation that protested elites so fear that they decide to defensively give in to prevent the movements’ further growth.
So in the current case, the resistance to Trumpism and fascism wants first to make Trump back off various policies, and then to make corrupt immoral corporate power fire Trump. To do so elites need to see the resistance continually growing, diversifying, and ultimately threatening not just what it nominally focusses on, Trump’s policies, but also the elites and their favored institutions more broadly. So if Trump soon tries to implement deportations, tariffs, and some other initial aims, the resistance focuses on all that to stop Trump from having wins to celebrate, even as we also seek to develop in a way that says we are going to keep growing. Repression and not implementing our demands won’t beat us but will instead grow and intensify us. That is how a movement to stop Trumpist policies wins, even as it also prepares to continue beyond Trump.
Who composes this threatening resistance? It will have to welcome and retain not just seasoned activists but also many many Harris and even Trump voters, frightened and angered so much by Trump’s actuality, that they want to and become connected to ways to fight back.
So the bottom line is we now face the horror of Israeli and Eastern European warfare, the suicidal pursuit of militarist war production and fossil fuel use, the danger of world wide economic chaos, the harm and mayhem of anti immigrant madness, and the possible complete dissolution of even partially democratic structures and the parallel further centralization and regimentation of mass and even independent media. In short we face knife-edge times. The worst threatens all of us. To vigorously collectively pursue the best that can emerge is our only alternative.
So no surrender. No submission. Business as usual, school as usual, even personal life as usual aren’t sensible options. To ignore encroaching fascism for months or a year, will forfeit everything usual, much less better, for many many subsequent years. This would be a world-bendingly poor choice for friends, family, and others. Whatever form of resistance available to you that may suit you, however modest or profound it may be, do it as best you can.
Does this sound over dramatic? Am I urging too much? I think not, but if these words are a little too dramatic, that seems better to me than to foster any doubts about what’s now at stake.
Free Palestine. Free ourselves. Free the planet.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. Donate
Michael Albert
Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.
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