Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Democrats Demobilized Their Base. A Movement Is Now Needed to Oppose Trump

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Amy Goodman , John Nichols 

November 7, 2024

Source: Democracy Now

Donald Trump’s performance in the 2024 election surpassed expectations, with the candidate winning the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and picking up larger shares of more diverse segments of the electorate, including Black and Latino male voters. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, says the blame lies squarely on the Harris campaign, which refused to differentiate itself from unpopular incumbent President Joe Biden. “The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party,” adds John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation. Nichols and Taylor discuss how Democrats “demobilized” young voters and grassroots organizers, to their electoral detriment. “Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to take horrific actions,” says Nichols. For those seeking to oppose him, says Taylor, “There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris and what it means for the country and the world, we are joined by three guests. John Nichols is The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent. He’s joining us from Madison, Wisconsin. Wisconsin voted for Trump. Rami Khouri is a Palestinian journalist, a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. And in Philadelphia, we’re joined by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Taylor is contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, let’s begin with you in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which has been decided. Pennsylvania has gone to Trump. Can you share your response to what has taken place?

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I have to say that on some level it’s shocking that someone like Trump could be back in this position, but it’s not really surprising. I’ve written about, really since the Democratic National Convention, that the Democratic Party was playing a dangerous game, that — essentially downplaying the base in order to reach for new centrist voters to try to appeal to Republicans. And we can see with some of the preliminary exit polls that that was an abject failure, that Republicans voted for Republicans. Democrats voted for Democrats.

But I think, overall, the Democratic Party really underestimated the extent to which lots of people in this country are in crisis. I think that they have insisted for months, from when Biden was running throughout, that the economy is good, that they had overcome the issues with inflation and that things were looking up. And those are the voters that they appealed to. But if you look at the exit polls, the at least preliminary exit polls, there was a total washout with working-class voters. People making between $30,000 and $50,000, people making under $100,000 went to Trump. And I think that there’s a rise in homelessness, historic rise — historically high rise in homelessness from 2023 to 2024, and on pace to exceed that this year. Rent is 20% higher today than it was in 2020. Hunger, hunger insecurity on the rise compared to even just a year ago. And for even when the extent to the crisis doesn’t express itself in that way, in the first quarter of this year, Americans took on $17 trillion in personal debt. And so, this is completely unstable.

And Kamala Harris had very little to say about that. She was running as an incumbent, trying to distance herself from those aspects of the Biden administration, but really unable to do so, really unwilling to chart a different course, to articulate how things would be different under her administration. And they are really — you know, we are seeing and dealing with the consequences of that today.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Keeanga, I wanted to ask you about the —

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — the male-female divide, especially with the communities of color. There was a lot of talk early on in the preelection polls about Latino and African American men gravitating more toward Trump. We don’t know yet the turnout levels in these communities, but it does appear that there was a major shift among African American men. According to the exit polls, about 20% of them went for Trump, whereas among African American women it was over 90 — I think 93% for Harris. And among Latinos, it was even more stark. According to these exit polls, a majority of Latino men voted for Trump, whereas two-thirds of Latina women voted for Harris. So there was major, major gender gap in the Black and Latino communities. I’m wondering your thoughts about that.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: I think that in terms of the extent of crisis that we see in this country, that can be measured by employment rates, that can be measured by poverty rates, that can be measured by a sense of the quality of one’s life, all of the barometers that we use to measure the mood of the country have really been in decline. And I think for men, for Black men, in particular, they have felt — they have felt the brunt of that. And I think that it has been largely dismissed. I think, you know, President — former President Barack Obama got lots of attention when he came out weeks ago and essentially dismissed those concerns as just sexism. And so, I think — you know, I’m sure that that is part of the mix, but to reduce all of the economic anxiety of Black men and Black communities to sexism is, again, really to fail to capture. It’s a failure to capture what is actually happening on the ground, that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty. But there is historically high sense of insecurity and a sense of not knowing what is actually going to come next. And I think that the Harris candidacy, that the Biden candidacy that preceded it, have really ignored the extent to which there has been continuity, whether we go back from the Obama administrations to the Trump administration to Biden’s administration, a continuity in insecurity, a continuity in uncertainty, a continuity in just not knowing what the future is going to hold, so much so that it builds a sense of cynicism that it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter how you vote.

And then, in another sense, I think that Trump satisfies something different, because, to be honest, you know, the Republicans don’t have any answers for that, either. And Trump’s policy proposals guarantee to make the situation worse for Black men, for Latino men. But what it does offer is an opportunity to give the finger, to thumb your nose at the status quo, at the condescension of someone like Obama, who just a week ago I saw an ad that popped up on Instagram, and he’s talking to a twenty-something young Latino man and saying to this young voter, who’s trying to decide who he should vote for, that “I know it looks like nothing has changed in your community, but you have to consider some woman was able to get her prescription. Someone else was able to get a bag of groceries.” And it’s like, what are we talking about? A prescription or a bag of groceries is not actually going to get it done. And so, the low expectations that they offer of what we should hold — what we should have for elected officials is part of the problem, because the attacks on people, on people’s incomes, the rising rate of rent, all of those things [inaudible] ability to respond to that in a substantive way is part of what is driving this. And so, the lower expectations doesn’t actually instill confidence that Democrats can get — can make a difference in people’s lives. And so, that, I think, is the larger context to understand the small but significant defection to Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, there’s an interesting —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring John Nichols into the conversation. John, I wanted to ask you particularly — during the campaign, President Trump focused a lot of attention on immigration and on his threats to begin the biggest, the most massive deportation of undocumented in the country’s history. Your sense of the results and what this will mean for the immigrant community and progressives, overall, in the coming weeks and months?

JOHN NICHOLS: Look, this is a devastating result. And I think people have to recognize it. Donald Trump won by, it looks like, a reasonably comfortable margin in the Electoral College, when all is done, although there’s still votes out, and I think we have to be a little careful about overassessing it. It is possible he’ll win the popular vote, although I still think there are a lot of West Coast votes out that will definitely make it closer. And it could even still tip it slightly against him.

But what we’ve ended up with now is a situation where Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to do — to take horrific actions, which, remember, in his first administration, he tried to do, as regards immigrants, refugees, working-class people, people who are in difficult situations across the board. And so, what we have to look at — and I think there’s two things that are really important here. First, there’s going to have to be a resistance to this. There’s no question of that. But that resistance has to have at least some, hopefully some, traction on Capitol Hill. And that’s where the results of the House and Senate races, that are still very much in play, become central to what we’re talking about.

The Senate is going to be Republican. It will have at least a 52-48 Republican majority, and that majority could well grow. There are still six seats that are undeclared. I think about four of them will go to the Democrats, maybe less. But I think there’s a good possibility two of them will go to the Republicans. If the Senate is that wide a Republican majority, Trump is going to get easy approval for a lot of what he’s doing. There may be some places where, as we talk about something like the immigration issue, there could be pushback. But to do that pushback, you would have to build a coalition, whatever Democrats are there, and to find at least some Republicans who wouldn’t vote for a Trump Cabinet pick or for a Trump initiative on, again, immigration, working-class issues in general, all sorts of things. The only way that’s going to happen is if there is tremendous organizing on the ground, beginning now, today, in states where you have Republicans who have in the past broken with Trump at least on some education and related issues, people like Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Susan Collins up in Maine.

But the real opposition, ultimately, is going to have to come in the House of Representatives. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the House. It is still very much up for grabs. There are 54 seats that are uncalled, much more than 10% of the House. If a majority of those seats, a good majority of those seats, goes to the Democrats, they’ve got the potential to be in a majority in the House of Representatives. It wouldn’t be big, but they do have that potential. And this is not, you know, a foolish prospect to entertain, because most of the undeclared seats are on the West Coast, in California, Washington, Oregon. A lot of them will go Democratic. So we don’t know where this is going to sort out, but this is the critical thing, Juan.

If you get to a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, then you have the next test, which is whether they feel beaten down and weakened, and they just don’t really want to fight, and they’re saying, “Oh, we’ll find ways to work with this new administration,” blah, blah, blah, things that they often say. Trump is going to take full advantage of that. And on the other hand, if they unite as a small but politically very powerful Democratic majority, that’s where you can stop a lot of Trump initiatives. Again, as regards the House of Representatives, you’ve got to have vital organizing on the ground beginning now, so that if Democrats take control, they know that there are going to be people pressing them to do the right thing, to effectively be the opposition.

And one final thing I’ll say is, and Jamie Raskin and others have talked about this, Donald Trump has talked during this campaign about using the presidency in incredibly aggressive ways, not working with Congress but just going on his own with executive orders and all sorts of other initiatives. This is something that has to be challenged in the courts and, to the extent possible, in Congress. I know people are deeply disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court. I certainly am. But it is absolutely vital that there be court challenges wherever possible, because there are places in the states and at the federal level where you might be able to push back on some of what’s going on. Bottom line, at this point, Republicans have a lot of power. Donald Trump has a lot of power. The only way to counter that is going to be organizing that is highly focused, that demands that those Democrats who are still in positions of some authority resist Donald Trump in a realistic and effective way. That’s possible, but that is, as we know from history, not certain.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, it’s been raised that President Trump could nominate Aileen Cannon, the judge who dismissed the case against him, to the Supreme Court. And if the Senate, as it is, goes Republican, he might succeed in making her a Supreme Court justice. But I wanted to ask you, John, when you talk about people organizing right now, about a point that was raised during the Obama years. In the last months of the Obama presidency, there was a call for him to pardon undocumented migrants before Trump was sworn in. Trump is now promising mass deportations. The question is: Could Biden preemptively pardon them? And what I mean by “pardon,” NYU Law Review, in the waning days of the Obama administration, with Trump’s crackdown promised, over a hundred advocacy organizations joined forces to urge President Obama to permanently protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation by pardoning their breaches of civilian immigration law. John Nichols?

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. Look, I am going to defer to the NYU Law Review and to legal experts who have worked on these issues for years and know much more than I do about the specifics of how you would mount such an initiative.

But what I can tell you is this, and this is the critical thing, I think, for progressives across this country to understand. The presidency is for four years. It is not for three years and 10 months or something like that. The last months of a presidency have to be used in smart and effective ways. And you have to look at all the powers of the presidency. What that means is that Joe Biden has several months left in which to do what is right morally and politically. And there has to be, again, I think, pressure there. We were just talking about, you know, organizing on the ground as regards to the Senate to put pressure on Republicans who might work with Democrats, organizing on the ground as regards to the House to put Democrats to actually be Democrats, what Paul Wellstone used to refer to as the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. But then, finally, there must be pressure on the ground and even toward Washington on Joe Biden, to make sure that he uses the last months of his presidency in a clear and effective, moral and politically smart way.

And so, what I would suggest to you is, folks who are deeply frustrated or overwhelmed by these results have a right to be so, and I won’t deny that. But I think that one important thing is to recognize that time matters in these struggles. And so, if you are going to lobby members of the Senate, members of the House and the president himself, you need to do that now, not wait months until January 20th or something like that. And again, what I would emphasize is, there’s a lot of organized groups across this country that are concerned about these issues. They have relationships with sitting members of Congress, with Republicans and Democrats. And they need to — you know, they need to open those conversations, to have those town hall meetings, to have those protests, to have those marches, to speak truth to power in a way that might yet be heard and might yet have an impact.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to bring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor back into the conversation. Keeanga, your sense of what the potential steps now are for the progressive and resistance movement to this incoming administration?

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think that we have a real problem. I mean, I appreciate the sentiment that John is expressing about the need to be mobilized and to resist now. But, you know, activism and social movements don’t often work like that. They’re not water faucets, where you just turn them off, and then, when you need them, you turn them back on. I think that the movement, movements that we have understood them to be over the previous decade, with something like the Black Lives Matter social movement, at its center, have been damaged and have been demobilized. I think in the last election, in 2020, that there was so much focus on getting Biden elected and then winning those Georgia Senate races a few months later, that the whole focus of external pressure on elected officials was dissipated, and to such an extent that Biden faced no protest, really, until the end of the twilight of his term, last spring, when the Palestinian solidarity movement exploded, in a way, because it couldn’t be coopted by the Democratic Party, in ways that these other social movements not necessarily coopted, but absorbed into the Democratic Party program, organizers convinced that they had access to the Biden administration, that they had the ear of the Biden administration. And so, I think that we actually have a lot of rebuilding to do. I don’t think we’re going to see the same initial response that we saw in 2017 with the Women’s March and the immediate reaction to Donald Trump. There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. She’s professor of African American studies there. Keeanga, I am looking at a Semafor article from May 29th, its headline, “’A dying empire led by bad people’: Poll finds young voters despairing over US politics.” And it starts off by saying, “Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor.” And I think it’s interesting that you raised the protests around Palestine. In a minute, we’re going to speak with the Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri. But the protests in the spring that, you know, the encampments across the country, and this feeling that young people have, if you could comment on it, “a dying empire led by bad people”?

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Look, there was a lot of focus on what would happen with Black voters, what would happen on other voters. Harris got wiped out on 18-to-29-year-olds relative to Biden in 2020. I think she was down 22 to 24 points among the youngest voters. These are people who really have this sense of what does the future behold, right? These are young people whose entire lives have been shaped by American wars, American empire, American occupation. Many of them are saddled with debt that they cannot repay, debt that there are no jobs available to them that would allow them to repay it. They are faced with exponentially rising rents, rents — laissez-faire housing market. And so, it’s a very dark, dystopic horizon for young people in this country.

And some of the things that provided a sense of hope, you think about the 2020 protests that brought tens of millions of especially young people into the streets, that gave them a sense of vitality, that gave them a sense that they could actually influence the direction of politics and the direction of this country through their own self-activity and organization, and the way that those protests were siphoned into the presidential campaigns of 2020 and the way that people were actively demobilized and told that the access to the Biden administration could produce the goods that they wanted. And even as that was falling apart, even as the Biden administration was unable to follow through on the promises it made, no response, no leadership, no direction. And so, that is something that is going to have to change, and that it’s going to have to come from those people, those young people, whose future looks very dark in the hands of others, but that they have the capacity to get organized, they have the capacity to be mobilized, and they have the capacity to change the direction of this country.

And so, this is a very grim, dark day. And I said before that I’m not — I am shocked that this happened, but I’m not surprised. We could see the trajectory of this happening for the last three months. But this does not have to be the final chapter. But in changing the — turning the page and changing the story, we have to rethink lots of what we are doing in terms of our relationship as progressives, as part of the left, our relationship to the Democratic Party, our inability to act independently, to be completely tied to the electoral ups and downs, the electoral cycle of the Democratic Party, when we look at the actual policies and practices that they’re pursuing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to bring John Nichols back into the conversation. John, the climate crisis, we have been faced — the entire world has been faced in recent years with constant hurricanes, floods, forest fires. And now we’re facing a Trump presidency where he is still using in his campaigns the slogan “Drill, baby, drill.” Your sense of what the climate — the movement to stem the climate crisis now faces in the United States?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, as my colleague says, this is a dystopian result. And where Donald Trump is coming from on these issues is not one of even a traditional Republican kind of tip and nod of the head to concerns about the climate, but then a decision to go where the fossil fuel companies tell you to go; this is a situation where Donald Trump has aggressively said and will make central to his agenda an effort to let fossil fuel companies do as they choose, to let the financiers who back them do as they choose. I mean, it really is devastating in this regard.

And if I can just build on this, one thing relating to what was just said about Gaza, it is very important to note that people in Congress who stood up on Gaza, who spoke out on it, and who made it through primaries where AIPAC tried to defeat them, did very, very well yesterday. Bernie Sanders won by two to one up in Vermont. Ilhan Omar won with more than 70%. Rashida Tlaib, who did not endorse Kamala Harris, won with more than 70%. Greg Casar in Texas won with almost 70%. Summer Lee, who’s in a much more competitive district than some of these other folks, she won with a percentage, you know, in the high 50s. And so, the bottom line is that taking a strong stand on Gaza in this general election, that didn’t hurt people. In fact, I think it may well have helped some candidates.

And the same thing is true with climate. It’s notable that everyone I just mentioned there who’s been outspoken on the issue of Gaza, and some other folks, too, who have been outspoken on Gaza, like AOC, have made climate very central to their service in Congress. And other people who did well also. The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party, because in this election, not only did they refuse to talk in any kind of consistent or effective way on the issue of Gaza, they also refused to talk in any consistent, effective way on climate. And, you know, they would say occasional good things, but it wasn’t as central as it needed to be.

And then, if we pause here and ask ourselves, “OK, well, when we look at polling, when we look at anecdotal evidence, what are the issues that young people care about?” Well, we hear about climate. We hear about Gaza. Certainly, we hear about racial justice. When you see that decline in support from young people, I think it’s not that hard to explain. I think an awful lot of young people in this country simply did not hear what they needed to hear from the Democratic Party. And if they continue to have that silence or that lack of outreach on those issues, then I think you’re in a situation where the Democratic Party is going to continue to struggle with what has been one of its most vital constituencies in recent years, and that’s young voters.

AMY GOODMAN: This update, just as the House is up for grabs, Republican Mike Lawler of New York — and it looks like New York and California will determine the balance of the Senate [sic]. Republican Mike Lawler has defeated Mondaire — will determine the balance of the House. The Senate has already been determined, and it is going to be a Republican majority. But in the House, Mike Lawler has defeated Mondaire Jones. I want to thank you both for being with us, John Nichols of The Nation and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Coming up, we’ll be joined by Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist. And then we’re going to look at referenda around the country and how they fared. Stay with us.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a co-founder of Hammer & Hope and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020.

 

Colin Ward’s school without walls

Oct

30

2024

comments

from The New Statesman by Ken Worpole, photo by The Estate of Colin Ward

The New Statesman columnist and anarchist was a proponent of radical social change that put the most vulnerable first.

We could say of Colin Ward, anarchist and former New Statesman columnist, what he said of his mentor WR Lethaby: “His ideas were too simple for people to understand them.” As the author of over 30 books on architecture, housing policy, play theory, environmental education and prison reform, Ward was a philosopher of the vernacular. Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy, a collection of essays on Ward edited by Andrew Kelly, was published by Five Leaves to commemorate the centenary of his birth in 1924. For Ward’s biographer, Sophie Scott-Brown, his “priority was to revitalise anarchy in the popular imagination by showing how its principles of self-reliance, cooperation and mutual aid were already part of our daily lives.”

Growing up in Wanstead in suburban Essex, and leaving school before taking exams, Ward started work as a trainee draughtsman. From an early age he espoused the anarchist cause as a fluent writer: first for the anarchist weekly Freedom from 1947 until 1960, then as editor of Anarchy between 1961 and 1970. In 1971 he took a full-time job as Education Officer at the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA), where he established an international reputation, becoming “one of the few anarchist writers to have a larger readership outside of anarchist circles than within them.”

At Anarchy, Ward pioneered a new kind of socially concerned journalism, commissioning articles from community activists, dissident academics, and voices from the social margins. These essays amounted to a vibrant re-description of contemporary British life as a patchwork of voluntary action, informal education and social endeavour, with a strong sense of locality. When the like-minded journal New Society arrived in 1962, “Ward was an instant fan,” writes Scott-Brown, though the first two editors were already fans of his.

He moved to the New Statesman in 1988, contributing over 400 weekly columns under the rubric “Fringe Benefits”. “If Ward was anything,” records Scott-Brown, “he was a columnist and a virtuoso one at that.” The NS literary editor Boyd Tonkin recalled Ward “championed the twilight world of allotment-diggers, unofficial smallholders, prefab dwellers, caravan habitués, rural squatters, estate children, multitasking traders, DIY artisans and housebuilders, most as remote from the trim land of planning applications as they were from tax demands.” While Ward was alert to inequality and injustice, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

The historian Raphael Samuel detected deeper undercurrents in Ward’s forays into everyday life. In his 1987 essay “Utopian Sociology”, Samuel celebrated Ward’s foresight in understanding the radical changes that had emerged in Britain in the 1960s: “Anarchy represented better than any other publication the cultural revolution of the 1960s; and it did so far earlier than anyone else, and more thoughtfully.” Ward’s optimism, he suggested, “drew strength from a whole new terrain of social politics in which local initiative counted for more than national direction,” provocatively contrasting Ward’s libertarianism with “born-again Marxism, of Maoist or neo-Trotskyism hue”, which seeks to replace “real-life self-assertion with make-believe bids for power.” Samuel saluted Ward’s “constructive antinomianism”, which took its energy from having “no articles of faith to subscribe to, no canonical texts to refer to, no gods or heroes to placate”.

Housing was Ward’s early political testing ground – encouraged by postwar squatting campaigns from ex-servicemen – and direct action a key tactic. Making one’s own “home in the world” was the abiding ideal. This explains the paradox by which a self-confessed anarchist enjoyed such esteem in international planning circles, as he did at the TCPA. When asked about this, he recalled that urban planning had its origins in the anarchist ideas and writings of Élisée Reclus, Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. At the TCPA he and Anthony Fyson launched the legendary Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE) handbook: sent to every school in England and Wales, this initiative kick-started a new movement in environmental studies.

For Ward and fellow anarchist John Turner (the global chronicler of self-build settlements), successful housing projects required three things: reasonable security of tenure, shelter appropriate to climate conditions, and location offering access to work and social life opportunities. Urban planning was as simple – or as difficult – as that. In an ideal world, individuals and communities ought to be able to create their own settlements, hence a preoccupation with the story of Britain’s plotlands, allotment colonies, houseboat communities, housing co-ops, foyers and homeless shelters (and more recently community land trusts and progressive retirement villages).

While such initiatives are often viewed as strategically marginal, their time has come again. Ward knew that radical innovation in housing was best realised in the independent, not-for-profit sector, an insight with lessons for the current crisis in residential social care. There is a desperate need to supply a fast-growing population of older people with well-designed homes or settlements, yet the care-home sector, now largely in the hands of private equity companies, is failing miserably. Ward would have welcomed the resurgence of the almshouse movement, now providing not only for the elderly but for young people, while the development of more community-minded retirement villages is growing. There are other imaginative models of community-based residential care coming to the fore – but they will need paying for.

Ward’s most influential book, however, examined concerns at the other end of the age range. Published in 1978, The Child in the City “can probably be credited with inspiring the entire international child-friendly city movement,” says Tim Gill, former director of the British Play Council. In putting the world of the child at the centre of “everyday anarchism”, Ward broke with the left’s privileging of the male industrial worker as the principal agent and subject of social change. Children come first, and if you plan for the most vulnerable you will be planning for everybody else.

That breakthrough stemmed from his work at the TCPA, where in 1973 he and Fyson published Streetwork: The Exploding School (the title possibly a quiet joke on the anarchist stereotype), a handbook on how to explore the neighbourhood. Pupils were to be sent out with notebooks and cameras, looking at where people lived, worked, where they went and how they enjoyed themselves; in short, how one part of the jigsaw puzzle of everyday life connected to others. Ward’s long-term vision was to create “schools without walls”, wholly immersed in the life of the community – inspired by Henry Morris’s village college movement in 1930s Cambridgeshire, with the very youngest encouraged to “climb out of the sandbox and into the city”.

Understanding the street primarily as a public space, in an age when the car was fast becoming the major determinant of urban planning and postwar reconstruction, owed much to Jane Jacobs’ influential study The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). In the UK, Jacobs’ arguments were reinforced by The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) and Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969) by the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie, who foregrounded the street and the playground as the formative terrain of sociability and a shared urban culture. By then, as Ward realised, in the battle between the child and the car for territorial control of the street, the car would win. Today this conflict is being revisited: strategies for LTNs (low-traffic neighbourhoods) and “15-minute cities” – intended to reduce car use and encourage walking – cycling and playing out are back on the urban agenda.

Finally, at the heart of Colin Ward’s anarchism was a profound disagreement with the assumption that “the social” and “the political” were one and the same thing. Reporting from the front line of community action in his New Statesman columns, Ward understood that the social was a larger, more inclusive, informally constructed and sustained world than the political – and less easily captured by vested interests: people make and unmake the social world each day, which is why it retained its flexibility and resilience.

I was lucky to know Colin and his wife, Harriet, for nearly 40 years. When young, while working on Freedom, he had known leading British and American writers and commentators such as Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald and Ethel Mannin. Harriet was the daughter of the redoubtable feminist Dora Russell and the Greenwich Village journalist Griffin Barry, who in his New York days was close to John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson and the poet Edna St Vincent Millay. Yet Colin and Harriet lived quietly in rural Suffolk during much of their long marriage. Formidably kind and generous with their time, modest in lifestyle, fond of music, they corresponded with friends and admirers across the world. Colin died in 2010, Harriet in June this year. They found the good life in fellowship and generosity to others, in a world in which people carried on learning and supporting each other until the music stopped.

Colin Ward and Revolutionary Anarchism

High-stakes vote decides Georgia's future path in Europe

Paul Kirby - Europe digital editor
Sat, October 26, 2024 

Pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili said she was confident the vote would bring about the future Georgians prayed for [BBC]

Georgians are going to the polls to decide whether to end 12 years of increasingly authoritarian rule, in an election that will decide their future path towards the European Union.

Georgia borders Russia and the governing Georgian Dream party is accused by the opposition of moving away from the West and back into Russia's orbit. The EU has frozen Georgia's EU bid because of "democratic backsliding".

"I voted for a new Georgia," said pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili.

Saturday's vote has been described as the most crucial since Georgians backed independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. There were reports of scuffles and vote violations as tempers flared at polling stations.

About 3.5 million Georgians are eligible to vote until 16:00 GMT in this high-stakes election that the opposition is calling a choice between Europe or Russia, but which the government frames as a matter of peace or war.

Georgian Dream is widely expected to come first, but four opposition groups believe they can combine forces to remove it from power and revive Georgia's EU process.

Four out of every five voters are said to back joining the EU in this South Caucasus state, which fought a five-day war with Russia in 2008.

It was only last December that the EU made Georgia a candidate. But that process was halted after the government passed a Russia-style law that requires groups to register as "pursuing the interests of a foreign power" if they receive 20% of funding from abroad.

Politics here has become increasingly bitterly polarised, as Georgian Dream, under the guiding force of Georgia's richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, seeks a fourth term of power.

The Mother of Georgia sculpture welcomes visitors with a bowl of wine, but holds a sword to symbolise Georgia's independence [Matthew Goddard/BBC]

If Ivanishvili's party wins a big enough majority, he has vowed to ban opposition parties, notably the biggest, the United National Movement.

Georgian Dream, known as GD, is set to win about a third of the vote according to opinion polls, although they are widely seen as unreliable. If GD is to be unseated, all four of the main opposition groups will have to win upwards of 5% of the vote to qualify for the 150-seat parliament.

Ivanishvili's rhetoric has become increasingly anti-Western and, after voting in Tbilisi, he told reporters that Georgians had a simple choice of either a government that served them, or an opposition of "foreign agents, who will carry out only the orders of a foreign country".

Bidzina Ivanishvili, the guiding force behind Georgia's governing party, says "foreign agents" are seeking to control his country [BBC]

President Zourabichvili has been outspoken in her backing for a broad opposition coalition government to end "one-party rule in Georgia". As she voted she said there would be people "who are victorious, but no-one will lose".

She has agreed a charter with the four big groups so that if they win, a technocrat government will fill the immediate vacuum. It would then reverse laws considered harmful to Georgia's path to the EU and move to snap elections.

Tina Bokuchava, who's chair of the biggest opposition party, United National Movement, insists all credible polls put the opposition ahead.

"What [Bidzina] Ivanishvili doesn't understand is that democracy is about choices. The cycle of political retribution has to end", Source: Tina Bokuchava, Source description: Chair of opposition United National Movement, Image: Tina BokuchavaMore

But while Georgian Dream tells voters they are still on course to join the EU, it has also warned them an opposition victory will trigger war with Russia.

Party billboards show split pictures of devastated cities in Ukraine alongside tranquil Georgia, with the slogan: "No to war! Choose peace."

GD claims the opposition will help the West open a new front in Russia's war in Ukraine, while Georgian Dream will keep the peace with its Russian neighbour, which still occupies 20% of its territory after the 2008 war.

Georgian Dream's national billboard campaign includes pictures showing devastation in Ukraine [Matthew Goddard/BBC]

Although the governing party's claim is unfounded and its billboards have been widely condemned, its message appears to have got through.

In Kaspi, an industrial town to the north-west of Tbilisi, one woman aged 41 told the BBC: "I don't like Georgian Dream, but I hate the [opposition United] National Movement - and at least we'll be at peace."

Another woman called Lali, 68, said the opposition might bring Europe closer, but they would bring war too.

Election observers have reported a number of violations at polling stations, including ballot stuffing and a physical attack on an opposition political figure in Marneuli, south of Tbilisi.

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy said observers had reported violations at 9.1% of polling stations. On the eve of the vote it said people's ID cards had been seized, and pointed to Russian-sponsored disinformation operations.

[BBC]

The BBC spoke to one voter, Aleksandre, in a village north-west of the capital who said he had been threatened by a local GD man with losing his job if he did not sign up to vote for Georgian Dream: "I'm a bit scared of his threat but what can I do?"

Georgian Dream maintains it has made elections more transparent, with a new electronic system for vote counting.

"For 12 years we have an opposition that questions the legitimacy of Georgia's government constantly. And that's absolutely not a normal situation," says Maka Bochorishvili, GD's head of the parliament's EU integration committee.

Maka Bochorishvili says once Georgian Dream wins a fourth term it will sit down with the EU and find a way forward [BBC]

Critics say in some places there is a genuine fear that the vote is not really secret.

"All this speculation about forcing people to vote for certain political parties - at the end of the day you're alone and casting your vote, and electronic machines are counting that vote," said Bochorishvili.

Not far from the centre of Tbilisi, Vano Chkhikvadze points to graffiti daubed in red on the walls and ground outside his office at the Civil Society Foundation.

After the "foreign influence" law was passed, in the face of mass protests in the centre of Tbilisi and other big cities, he says he was personally labelled by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze as a state traitor.

"We were getting phone calls in the middle of the night. Our kids even were getting phone calls. They were threatened."

Ahead of the vote, the EU warned that Georgian Dream's actions "signal a shift towards authoritarianism".

Whoever wins, the loser is unlikely to accept defeat easily.

High voter turnout in Georgia's pivotal parliamentary elections

Evelyn Ann-Marie Dom
Sat, October 26, 2024 


There are long queues at Georgia's polling stations and ballot boxes as the country votes in what could be its most pivotal parliamentary elections to date.

As the ruling Georgian Dream government faces off with the coalition of pro-European Union parties, the elections will decide if Georgia is bringing an end to 12 years of increasingly authoritarian rule and will head down a path towards joining the European Union, or if they are to face increased Russian influence.

The ruling Georgia Dream party faces four main opposition parties: United National Movement, Strong Georgia, Coalition for Change and Gakharia for Georgia.

The Georgian population will elect 150 members to parliament through a proportional representation system, of which only the political parties that surpass the 5 per cent election threshold will be represented in the legislative body.
High voter turnout

In total 3,508,294 Georgians who are registered to vote can cast their ballot at 3,111 polling stations. At 5PM local time (3PM CET), data by the Central Electoral Commission showed that Georgia's voter turnout stood at 50.6 per cent.

That is just over five per cent higher than in 2020, where the voter turnout stood at 45.8 per cent - but lower than the 53 per cent turnout during the landmark election in 2012 that brought the Georgian Dream to power. This data does not include expatriate voters.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili cast her ballot at the polling station in the #67 Public School of Tbilisi. She said she voted for "a new Georgia, for which I arrived in this country 22 years ago and my ancestors prayed for."

The leader of the United National Movement coalition Tina Bokuchava said she cast her vote for the European future of Georgia, and is convinced many will choose the same path.

Coalition for Change leader Nika Gvaramia echoed her, and predicted that the opposition would win the election.

Coalition Strong Georgia leader Mamuka Khazaradze said that “this is a crucial election for our country, I am sure that our country will make the right choice. This choice will be towards freedom, Europe, stable peace, and, most importantly, towards the real alternative."
Electronic scanners

It is the first time polling stations were equipped with electronic scanners at the ballot boxes, a new concept for many of them - and it resulted in some technical issues.

Georgian ruling party wins election, near-complete results show

Felix Light and Lucy Papachristou
Sun 27 October 2024





Georgia's Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze speaks after the announcement of exit poll results in Tbilisi

TBILISI (Reuters) - Georgia's ruling Georgian Dream party received more than 54% of the vote in a parliamentary election on Saturday, with more than 99% of precincts counted, the electoral commission said on Sunday.

The results is a blow to pro-Western Georgians, who had cast the election as a choice between a ruling party that has deepened ties with Russia, and an opposition that had hoped to fast-track integration with the European Union.

Several local and international monitoring organisations, including the Organisation for Scurity and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), are expected to comment on the results on Sunday.

Opposition parties said on Saturday that they do not recognise the results, with one opposition leader calling the results "a constitutional coup".

But Georgian Dream's reclusive billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had campaigned heavily on keeping Georgia out of the war in Ukraine, claimed success on Saturday night, with his party putting in its strongest performance since 2012 on the back of huge margins of up to 90% in some rural areas.

"It is a rare case in the world that the same party achieves such success in such a difficult situation - this is a good indicator of the talent of the Georgian people," Ivanishvili told cheering supporters on Saturday night.

Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream says it wants Georgia to join the European Union, though Brussels says the country's membership application is frozen over what it says is Georgian Dream's authoritarian tendencies.

One local monitoring organisation called for the results to be annulled, based on reports of voter intimidation and vote buying, but it did not immediately provide evidence of large-scale falsification.

Last week Moldova voted narrowly to approve its European Union accession in a vote that Moldovan officials said was marred by Russian interference.

(Reporting by Felix Light and Lucy Papachristou; Editing by David Goodman)


Georgia's ruling party wins election over pro-EU opposition

Sky News
Sun 27 October 2024 



Georgia's ruling party has won the country's general election, beating its pro-EU and pro-Western opposition.

The Central Election Commission (CEC) said the ruling Georgian Dream party, which has been in power for 12 years, had won 54% of the vote with more than 99% of precincts counted.

Both Georgian Dream and the opposition blocs trying to end its time in power portrayed the vote as an existential choice between moving towards the West - potentially by joining the European Union - or tightening ties with its regionally-dominant neighbour, Russia.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of Georgian Dream and a billionaire who made his fortune in Russia, has accused opposition parties of being "an agent of a foreign country that will only fulfil the tasks of a foreign country" - suggesting the West wants Georgia to go to war with Russia.

He also pledged to ban all pro-Western opposition groups if the party won a constitutional majority.

Mr Ivanishvili claimed victory almost immediately after polls closed, saying it was "rare in the world for the same party to achieve such success in such a difficult situation".

But the pro-Western Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, who has regularly criticised Georgian Dream, was among the opposition leaders who also claimed victory when competing exit polls were released, with some putting the opposition ahead.

Ms Zourabichvili earlier wrote on X that her bloc, European Georgia, had taken 52%, despite what she called "attempts to rigg (sic) elections".

Pictures were also published of opposition leaders celebrating, confirming their early confidence.

There were reports of voting irregularities and a video shared on social media on Saturday showed a man stuffing ballots into a box at a polling station in Marneuli.

Georgia's Interior Ministry said it launched an investigation and the CEC said a criminal case had been opened and that all results from the polling station would be declared invalid.

Sky News' international correspondent John Sparks, in the capital Tblisi, called it a "stunning result" and predicted many Georgians would find it "unbelievable", as after 12 years in power, a change of government had been widely expected.

The result spells a striking defeat for Ms Zourabichvili, a French emigre, who had made her number one priority "restarting talks with the European Union", Sparks said, while Mr Ivanishvili has moved his party "from being expressly pro-Western to an organisation that is more in line with Russia".

Brussels suspended the country's membership process after Georgian Dream passed laws restricting freedom of speech in the South Caucasus nation of 3.7 million people.

The biggest opposition party, United National Movement, said its headquarters came under attack on polling day.

Georgian media also reported two people were taken to hospital after being attacked outside polling stations, one in the city of Zugdidi, the other in Marneuli, a town south of Tbilisi.

Protests have been taking place across the country after the result, with leading opposition figures, including the country's president Salome Zourabishvili, calling on supporters to take to the streets.

Georgia’s ruling party wins pivotal election, early results show, as opposition parties cry foul

Reuters
Sat 26 October 2024

Georgia’s most powerful man won a parliamentary election on Saturday, according to early official results, a victory which opposition politicians refused to recognize, alleging “falsification.”

The ruling Georgian Dream party’s billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, the opposition, and foreign diplomats had cast the election as a watershed moment that would decide if Georgia moves closer to the West or leans back towards Russia amid the war in Ukraine.

If confirmed, Georgian Dream’s victory would prove a blow to those Georgians who hope for closer integration with Europe in a vote billed as a choice between the West and Russia.

Early official results with 70% of precincts counted, representing the majority of votes cast, showed the ruling party had won 53% of the vote, the electoral commission said. The results do not include most ballots cast by Georgians living overseas.

Opposition parties contested the election results at a news briefing held in the early hours of Sunday and said they would not accept them.

“This is a constitutional coup,” said Nika Gvaramia, leader of the Coalition for Change opposition party, according to the Interpress news agency.

“The Georgian people have cast a vote for the European future of this country, and therefore we will not accept these falsified results published by the CEC (Central Election Commission),” said Tina Bokuchava, leader of the opposition United National Movement.

“We Vote,” a Georgian coalition of electoral observers, said it believed the results “do not reflect the will of the citizens of Georgia,” citing multiple reports of voter intimidation and vote buying.

“We will continue to demand the annulment of the results,” it said.

Rival exit polls gave sharply different projections for the election: The Georgian Dream-supporting Imedi TV channel showed the ruling party winning 56%. Exit polls by the pro-opposition channels showed major gains for the opposition parties.

Ivanishvili, Georgian Dream’s reclusive billionaire founder and onetime prime minister, claimed victory and praised the Georgian people.

“It is a rare case in the world that the same party achieves such success in such a difficult situation – this is a good indicator of the talent of the Georgian people,” Ivanishvili told cheering supporters.

Though Georgian Dream lost out to the combined opposition in parts of the capital, Tbilisi, it won margins of up to 90% in some rural areas.

Supporters of the Georgian Dream party celebrate at the party's headquarters after the announcement of exit poll results in Tbilisi on October 26, 2024. - Irakli Gedenidze/Reuters

The Georgian opposition initially also celebrated victory and some monitors reported election violations. But a parallel count operated by one of the opposition parties showed Georgian Dream in a strong position to win a majority.

Party representatives told Reuters they would be analyzing the results in the coming hours, but stopped short for the moment of alleging any falsifications.

Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, came to power in 2012 advocating pro-Western views, alongside a pragmatic policy towards Russia.

He has since soured on the West, accusing a “Global War Party” of seeking to drag Georgia into war with Russia, even as he insists Georgia is on course to join the EU.

If victory for Ivanishvili’s party is confirmed, it would be a blow to the EU’s hopes of bringing more former Soviet republics into its orbit. Moldova on Oct. 20 voted by a very slim majority to support EU accession.

Russia had repeatedly signaled it wanted Georgian Dream to win, while accusing Western countries of undue interference in Georgian politics.

“The Georgians won. Well done!” said Margarita Simonyan, the editor of Russian state media outlet RT, which the United States has accused of trying to influence its own presidential election. There was no immediate comment from the EU.
Crucial vote

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili – a one-time ally of the ruling party turned fierce critic whose powers are mostly ceremonial – and independent domestic election monitors had alleged Georgian Dream was engaged in widespread vote-buying and other forms of electoral abuse in the lead-up to the vote.

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), an independent Georgian electoral monitoring group founded in 1995, said it had documented numerous violations and instances of violence outside multiple polling stations.

Members of an election commission count ballots at a polling station after the parliamentary election in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 26, 2024. - Kostya Manenkov/AP

Video circulated on social media showing a man stuffing multiple ballots into a voting box in Marneuli, a city of some 25,000 south of Tbilisi. The votes were later declared invalid, a Central Election Commission spokesperson said, according to the Interpress news agency.

Giorgi Kalandarishvili, the chairman of the electoral commission, said the vote was peaceful and free, and said the election had taken place in accordance with international standards.
Change

Some opposition-minded Georgians told Reuters they were disappointed by the results.

Voter Irakli Gotsiridze said: “I’m very disappointed that these are the results. I don’t want to believe it.”

Georgia was once one of the most pro-Western states to emerge from the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The road leading from Tbilisi’s airport is named after former U.S. President George W. Bush.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Tbilisi’s relations with the West have taken a sharp downward turn. Unlike many Western allies, Georgia declined to impose sanctions on Moscow, while Georgian Dream’s rhetoric has become increasingly pro-Russian.

Georgian Dream has drawn the ire of its Western allies for what they cast as its increasingly authoritarian bent. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban congratulated Georgian Dream for an “overwhelming victory.”

Georgian Dream had campaigned hard on keeping Georgia out of the war in Ukraine, with campaign billboards contrasting pristine Georgian cities with devastated Ukrainian ones.

Sandro Dvalishvili, a 23-year-old Georgian Dream activist, told Reuters last week that Georgia would face “danger” if his party of choice was defeated at the polls.

“If it turns out that we don’t win, for me that’ll be very bad. Because I don’t see another force that will bring peace and stability to our country,” he said.

Ruling party set to win Georgia election amid opposition protests

Irakli METREVELI
Sat 26 October 2024 

Brussels has warned that the election will determine European Union-candidate's chances of joining the bloc (Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE) (Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE/AFP/AFP)


Georgia's ruling party claimed victory in a legislative election Saturday that the pro-western opposition denounced as a "constitutional coup" and could deal a new blow to the Caucasus country's hopes of joining the European Union.

If the partial results confirm the victory of the Georgian Dream party, the country could be heading for closer ties with neighbouring Russia.

Brussels has harshly criticised the Georgian Dream's policies and said the election would play a decisive role in Georgia's chances of joining the EU.

With votes from more than 70 percent of precincts counted, the central election commission said Georgian Dream was leading with 53 percent, while the main opposition union was on 38 percent.

That would give Georgian Dream 89 seats in the 150-member parliament -- enough to govern but short of the absolute majority it wants to make sweeping constitutional changes. Final results were expected on Sunday.

"Georgian Dream has secured a solid majority", the party's executive secretary, Mamuka Mdinaradze, told reporters.

Tina Bokuchava, leader of the opposition United National Movement (UNM), which campaigned on a pro-European platform, said however the results were "falsified" and the election "stolen".

"This is an attempt to steal Georgia's future," she said, insisting that the UNM did not accept the results. "We hope that the opposition will be united in all calls for action that will be announced in the hours to come."

Nika Gvaramia, leader of the Akhali party, called it a "a constitutional coup" by the government. "Georgian Dream will not stay in power," he said.

The opposition has staged mass demonstrations in recent months against what it says are government attempts to curtail democratic freedoms and steer the country of four million off its pro-Western course.

Rival exit polls published after voting ended had shown the ruling party and the opposition ahead.

Pro-opposition Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili hailed a victory for "European Georgia" despite "attempts to rig" the vote after one exit poll said the opposition won.

After another showed a win for the government, Georgian Dream's billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili hailed the party's "success" at a post-election rally where he pumped his fist in celebration.

"I assure you, our country will achieve great success in the next four years. We will do a lot," he said.

Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is also friendly with Moscow, was quick to hail Georgian Dream's "overwhelming victory" on social media.

- Alleged voting violations -

Tbilisi voters had expressed diverging views over their country's future as they cast ballots.

"Of course, I have voted for Europe. Because I want to live in Europe, not in Russia. So, I voted for change," said Alexandre Guldani, an 18-year-old student.

But Giga Abuladze, who works in a kindergarten, said "We should be friends with Russia -- and Europe".

Opposition parties alleged incidents of ballot stuffing and intimidation during voting.

Zurabishvili said there had been "deeply troubling incidents of violence" at some polling stations.

One video circulated on social media showed a fight between dozens of men outside a polling station in suburban Tbilisi.

Another showed scuffles outside a Tbilisi campaign office of the UNM, whose founder ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili is in jail.

The were also videos of alleged ballot stuffing in the southeastern village of Sadakhlo.

- Anti-Western rhetoric -

In power since 2012, Georgian Dream initially pursued a liberal pro-Western policy agenda. But it has reversed course over the last two years.

Its campaign centred on a conspiracy theory about a "global war party" that controls Western institutions and is seeking to drag Georgia into the Russia-Ukraine war.

In a country scarred by Russia's 2008 invasion, the party has offered voters bogeyman stories about an imminent threat of war, which only Georgian Dream could prevent.

Russia still has military bases in two separatist regions.

Georgian Dream's controversial "foreign influence" law this year, targeting civil society, sparked weeks of street protests and was criticised as a Kremlin-style measure to silence dissent.

The move prompted Brussels to freeze Georgia's EU accession process, while Washington imposed sanctions on dozens of Georgian officials.

The ruling party has also mounted a campaign against sexual minorities. It has adopted measures that ban LGBTQ "propaganda", nullify same-sex marriages conducted abroad, and outlaw gender reassignment.

im/dt/tw/tym

Partial results show Georgia's ruling pro-Russian party ahead in crucial vote

NEWS WIRES
Fri 25 October 2024  

Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, is set to win Saturday’s parliamentary election, according to partial results, but pro-Western opposition parties said the results were "falsified" and the election "stolen".

Georgia's ruling party claimed victory in a legislative election Saturday that the pro-western opposition denounced as a "constitutional coup" and could deal a new blow to the Caucasus country's hopes of joining the European Union.

If the partial results confirm the victory of the Georgian Dream party, the country could be heading for closer ties with neighbouring Russia.

Brussels has harshly criticised the Georgian Dream's policies and said the election would play a decisive role in Georgia's chances of joining the EU.

With votes from more than 70 percent of precincts counted, the central election commission said Georgian Dream was leading with 53 percent, while the main opposition union was on 38 percent.

That would give Georgian Dream 89 seats in the 150-member parliament -- enough to govern but short of the absolute majority it wants to make sweeping constitutional changes. Final results were expected on Sunday.

"Georgian Dream has secured a solid majority", the party's executive secretary, Mamuka Mdinaradze, told reporters.

Tina Bokuchava, leader of the opposition United National Movement (UNM), which campaigned on a pro-European platform, said however the results were "falsified" and the election "stolen".

Rival exit polls published after voting ended had shown the ruling party and the opposition ahead.


Georgia’s ruling party celebrates victory but it's unclear who will form next government

Euronews
Sat 26 October 2024 


Georgia’s ruling party is leading the official results of Saturday’s parliamentary election, a crucial vote which could decide the country’s future in Europe.

The ruling Georgian Dream party's leaders and supporters began celebrations in Tbilisi late Saturday.

The Central Election Commission in the South Caucasus country says Georgian Dream won 52.99% of the vote.

The CEC said the announcement was preliminary with the majority of the vote counted. Not all paper ballots and votes cast by Georgians abroad have been counted.

If Georgian Dream wins a parliamentary majority, it will stoke fears about the country’s bid for EU membership which was put on hold earlier this year by Brussels after the ruling party passed laws cracking down on freedom of speech.

However, Georgia’s opposition disputed results of the vote.

"We do not accept these falsified election results," Georgian opposition leader Tina Bokuchava said Saturday.

Bokuchava is the leader of opposition party United National Movement, part of the Unity National Movement coalition.

Opposition disputed the results after officials said the ruling party led the crucial vote which could decide whether the country pivots to embrace the West or falls back into Russia's orbit.

Georgian Dream stood against four main opposition groups, which indicated they did not accept the results. The opposition initially declared victory shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. local time (1600 GMT).


Georgia's ruling party wins pivotal election, early results show

Reuters Videos

Updated Sat 26 October 2024 

STORY: Georgia's most powerful man claimed victory in an election on Saturday, according to early official results.

With 70% of precincts counted, those results showed the ruling Georgian Dream party had won 53% of the vote, the electoral commission said. The results do not include most ballots cast by Georgians living overseas.

The Georgian opposition initially also celebrated victory... and some monitors reported election violations.

But a parallel count operated by one of the opposition parties showed Georgian Dream in a strong position to win a majority.

Though it lost out to the combined opposition in parts of the capital, Tbilisi, it won margins of up to 90% in some rural areas.

However, opposition parties are contesting the results and said they would not accept them, with the leader of the Coalition for Change party calling it a, quote, "constitutional coup," according to the Interpress news agency.

Georgian Dream's billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, the opposition, and foreign diplomats had cast the election as a watershed moment that would decide if Georgia moves closer to the West... or leans back towards Russia.

Ivanishvili told a crowd in Tbilisi that, quote, "It is a rare case in the world that the same party achieves such success in such a difficult situation - this is a good indicator of the talent of the Georgian people."

Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, came to power in 2012 advocating pro-Western views, alongside a pragmatic policy towards Russia.

He's since soured on the West, accusing a "Global War Party" of seeking to drag Georgia into war with Russia, even as he insists Georgia is on course to join the EU.

If victory for Ivanishvili's Dream party is confirmed, it would be a blow to the EU's hopes of bringing more former Soviet republics into its orbit.

 NEITHER FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION

The logic of Trump versus the logic of Lenin

By Paul Le Blanc

Published 26 October, 2024

A version of this article is also available at Tempest.

Two realities frame this talk. One is that I have recently written a book, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. The other is that the 2024 presidential election in the United States, however it goes, inevitably advances an intense political crisis whose outcome is by no means clear.1 It occurred to me that it might be useful, at this historic moment, to compare the logic of Donald J Trump and the logic of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. As I will outline, the qualities inherent in the approaches of Trump and Lenin have quite different logics — moving toward different outcomes.

My remarks have four basic components. First, an examination of Trump and Trumpism. Second, how some Marxists have analysed fascism. Third, a suggestion of how this analysis could be applied to US realities. Fourth, a brief examination of Lenin and Leninism, with a concluding comment on how Trumpism is stronger than Leninism.

A trusted comrade who read earlier drafts of this presentation, noting what he felt were gaps and deficiencies, told me: “This is not your best work.” I think that is inevitably the case. What I say here is fragmentary and incomplete, in more than one way. My hope is that what I offer will be useful, nonetheless, for helping to advance a clarifying discussion. Perhaps that discussion will contribute to our thinking of what is what, and what is to be done.

Trump and Trumpism

Trump’s politics has been labelled by some as Trumpism. Before examining Trumpism, let us pause to consider the mediocrity with whose name this “ism” is identified.

The ABCs of Trump’s qualities certainly include arrogance, as well as the Three Bs: bigot, bully, and braggart. The bragging takes many forms: a self-promoting “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 with the aggressive assertion “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. His billionaire status adds lustre, resources and authority to all that is involved in the narcissistic self-construction of the person who is Trump. He is quintessentially, and very proudly, a capitalist, and there are thirty-four felony convictions which cause many to label him a crook.

Jumping forward in the alphabet, some critics insist Trump is a fascist. Others question whether he is consistent and coherent enough to play the role of a Benito Mussolini or an Adolf Hitler. The term fascist has certainly become a freely used insult applied to ideas, practices and people we detest. Trump himself uses it (jumbling it with words such as “Marxists”, “Communists”, “terrorists” and “very bad people”) to denounce enemies lurking in the courtroom, in the mainstream 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 favourably to a Winston Churchill or a Ronald 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 behaviour and levels of anger requiring others to try to keep him on track nearly every hour of the day.”2

It is instructive to consider the experience of Steve Bannon, one of the most focused far-right ideologues who served as a central advisor in the early phase of the 2016 Trump administration. Michael Wolff reported:

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.3

Bannon would become exasperated and disillusioned, realising 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’.”4

But what can be termed Trumpism transcends the dysfunctionality of this ageing individual. Several essential elements help define what 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, militant components of the Tea Party movement, latter-day partisans of the old Southern Confederacy, and various Nazi and white supremacist groups. US General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his January 2021 notebook, listed the groups 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 US 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.”5 These once-marginalised elements had come into the political mainstream, and had grown substantially, with the active encouragement of Trump and others around him. But this cunning, avaricious, profoundly limited individual and his acolytes were hardly capable of controlling them. Indeed, as a whole, the huge and diverse “Make America Great Again” movement cannot be understood as being under his control.6

Blended into segments of this pro-Trump constituency is something called “Christian nationalism,” which rejects the ideals of radical democracy enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and asserts that the US was founded (as one televangelist put it) “by Christians who wanted to build a Christian nation on the foundation of God’s will”, as defined by right-wing fundamentalists who see the notion of equal-rights democracy as a heresy incompatible with Christianity. Maverick neo-conservative Robert Kagan anxiously commented that “what Christian nationalists call ‘liberal totalitarianism’,” the signers of the Declaration of Independence called “freedom of conscience”. With or without this particular religious gloss, Kagan points out, such a deep strain of fundamental anti-democratic intolerance has been present throughout US history among substantial segments of the American people — reflecting bigoted attitudes on race, ethnicity, gender, and religion.7

Another essential element of Trumpism can be found in a quite different cluster of conservative entities and individuals, drawn together in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Founded in the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation has served as a centre for conservative academics, intellectuals, and policymakers since the Reagan presidency. Its newest effort is a 900-page, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which is meant to serve as a policy-making guide for a second Trump administration. According to its self-description: “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 centrepiece 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. The bottom line of this conservative manifesto is a defence of unrestrained capitalism. The primary goal of the US president, we are told, should be to unleash “the dynamic genius of free enterprise.” This dovetails with proposals to impose a centralised authoritarian regime to enforce a wide range of right-wing policies.8

With an eye to moderate voters, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025. But its proponents remain solidly in the Trumpist camp, including loyalists who served in his first presidential administration. Covert plans have been developed to implement the Project 2025 program as soon as a right-wing president assumes office. Researcher Gillian Kane notes that Project 2025 is not dependent on a Trump presidential victory, emphasising that “even if Trump loses in November, many core aspects of this Christian nationalist plan will be implemented; indeed, some recommendations are already underway.”9 Even when Trump is no longer on the scene, the program associated with Trumpism – the unleashing of unrestrained capitalism while systematically repressing human rights and democratic freedoms — will continue to confront us.

A key 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.10

Miller offers an insider’s view of a toxic 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. “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?11

Another ex-Republican operative, Stuart Stevens, insists it is a mistake to see Trump as having “hijacked” the Republican Party. Instead, Trump “is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty years or so, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party.”12

Liz 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: “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.” According to 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.”13

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. “Whatever happens to Trump,” journalist Joe Conason writes, “the fate of American conservatism and the Republican Party … already seems fixed,” destined “to grind on shamelessly, with or without him,” propagating a well-rehearsed ideology (as Conason puts it) of “falsehood and fraud.”14 The highly influential and stilted news and opinion operations of Fox News, the Breitbart News Network, and countless talk-radio outlets were well-established before Trump’s presidency.15 Regardless of what happens to Trump, the larger phenomenon of Trumpism will be with us for some time to come. “Trump is not the disease, he’s the symptom,” is how Chris Hedges described it. “Trump really built on a malaise that was already widely prevalent within the United States.”16

We must also be clear that this is a global phenomenon, as 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 US, and more. A combination of terms is used to describe what is happening — right-wing populism, authoritarian xenophobic ultra-nationalism, etc — all seeking to capture 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.”

What is fascism?

Fascism represents more than simply a murderous right-wing dictatorship, the sort imposed by monarchs, generals, and wealthy elites for centuries.17 One of the first Marxists to analyse fascism was German Communist (and Rosa Luxemburg’s longtime comrade) Clara Zetkin. One primary aspect of the fascist development, she noted, involved “the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois state.” Another involved the failed promises of reformist politics to defend and advance the well-being of the lower and middle classes, causing massive disillusionment and desperation amid disintegrating realities, especially when the reformists (in this case, those predominating in the German Social Democratic Party) showed themselves to be “in benevolent accord” with liberal capitalists. The third primary aspect, according to Zetkin, involved downwardly mobile middle classes that provided a disappointed mass base, “joined [she says] by large circles of the proletariat, of workers who have given up their faith not only in socialism, but also in their own class.” The result, Zetkin notes, is that “fascism has become a sort of refuge for the politically shelterless.”18

It was the promise of the left to solve the economic crisis through socialist transformation — and then its utter failure to do so — that brought into being the fascist alternative, uniting frightened capitalists and desperate, disappointed masses. This suggests 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 Leon Trotsky’s bald assertion that “fascism will come only if we fail.”19 In this scenario, the possibility of Trumpism morphing into fascism would be precluded. But this involves a serious misunderstanding of our history, which corresponds in a unique way to the developments described by Zetkin and Trotsky.

Aspects of US reality

The conservatives of the Heritage Foundation, among others, blur together the mildly liberal Democratic Party with rhetorical denunciations of “the left” and accusations of “socialism”. There is a craziness to this — but on a certain level, it makes sense. It is worth taking a few minutes to consider the history of the US left and see why it makes sense.

Over the past century, the organised left has had a powerful impact, influencing politics, laws, consciousness, and culture within the US. The labour movement, the waves of feminism, the anti-racist and civil rights movements, the struggles against the Vietnam war, the various student movements, and more, were all instrumental in bringing about far-reaching changes on the US scene over many decades. This would not have been nearly as effective (and might not have come into existence) without the essential organising efforts of left-wing activists.

This was accompanied by another development, however. Although a significant element of left-wing activists insisted on the need for political independence from 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 and those around him. More than this, the bulk of the organised left was absorbed into the New Deal coalition.20

Over half a century, six decisive pivots have made absorption of the organised 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 (the CIO), 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 US Communists into the Democratic Party coalition; (3) at the start of the Cold War, the bulk of the organised labour movement (along with most moderate socialists) embraced the Democratic Party’s anti-Communist and liberal capitalist agenda, leading to a broad “social compact” of business, labour, and government from the late ’40s and through the ’50s; (4) the civil rights coalition of the early ’60s became intimately entwined with the party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; (5) through the ’70s and ’80s, much of the 1960s “New Left” committed to the reform wing of the Democratic Party; and (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 Barack Obama in the White House.21

From the early twentieth century, the organised left had been a dynamic force of considerable significance in the US. Among workers and the oppressed, it had mobilised 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, it inspired fear and rage.22

By the end of the twentieth century, through the process we have traced, the organised 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, particularly in the context of the disintegration and decay of the capitalist economy.

That is why anti-Trump Republicans such as Liz Cheney, along with Democrats such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — entwined as they are in the disintegration and decay of the capitalist economy and with no real solutions to offer — are incapable of providing a durable alternative to Trumpism.

Noting that 30 million US workers have lost their jobs since 1996, Hedges points out this generated “a deep despair and even rage among people who have been betrayed largely by the Democratic Party … that pushed through NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]” and “that de-industrialized the country,” thereby making large chunks of what had been the Democratic Party’s working-class base open to the demagogic appeals of Trumpism.23

Indications are that the white working-class vote has been split. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden got 41% of the white vote while Trump got 58% — in each case, a majority of these were from working-class voters. (Related to this, 56% of union households went for Biden, and 40% went for Trump.) Political scientists Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes document that white working-class support for Trump has often been overstated. Only 30% of his supporters in 2016 were from this proletarian category, although they add that 60% of white working-class voters went for Trump in that year. Some studies indicate a decline in such support.24

Yet Harris consistently expresses her support for capitalism, considering herself “a pro-growth capitalist who wants a ‘forward-looking economy that helps everyone’.”25 The problem with this is that capitalist profits are often not consistent with “helping everyone.” Whenever push comes to shove, she can be expected to compromise working-class interests (as has the Democratic Party as a whole) to help maintain capitalist profitability, wreaking havoc on the working-class base, as it has in recent decades. Over the past two years we have seen Democratic politicians lining up with wealthy and powerful elites to deny exploited rail workers the right to strike, allow fossil fuel industries to assault the environment, and enable Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children in Gaza.26

In a London Review of Books report on the recent Democratic Party national convention, Christian Lorentzen noted “the alliance forged under Joe Biden between the party’s centrist establishment and its formerly insurgent left wing,” concluding “that the Democratic tent is big enough for firebrands who denounce billionaires as well the right sort of billionaires,” who support, fund, and help lead the Democratic Party. Even a moderate socialist such as Bernie Sanders — good as he is in some ways — is badly compromised to the extent that he consistently and systematically calls upon his supporters to remain within the framework of the staunchly pro-capitalist Democratic Party. Sanders ends his most recent book with the exhortation: “It’s time, finally, for the Democrats to recognize that good policy is good politics. It’s good for the party. It’s good for the country. It’s good for the world. Let’s do it!”27

Lenin and Leninism

In contrast to such compromising liberals and moderate socialists, and also to grotesque “super-capitalists” such as Trump, is the uncompromisingly anti-capitalist Lenin. The logic of Trump is to manipulate mass pressure, mass consciousness, and mass struggles to his advantage, for the enhancement of his position and power, but also to unleash the “dynamic genius” (and profits) of capitalism. The logic of Lenin (to use the old radical-labour slogan) is to “agitate, educate, and organise”. Draw together more and more of the working class, with a deepening sense of class consciousness, to struggle for immediate improvements in the condition of labouring people and the oppressed, and replace the power of the capitalists with the collective power of the working class. The result being a transformation of the economy to an economic democracy in which technologies and resources required to meet human needs are socially owned and used specifically to meet those needs.

Comparing the personality of Trump with that of Lenin is also instructive. One of Lenin’s most informed and critical biographers, anti-Communist journalist Isaac Don Levine, described him as:

… without arrogance, without any personal ambition, a ruler who shunned honors, Lenin was perhaps the first great leader in history who had no mania for glory, for authority, for pomp. His quest for power was not an egotistic passion but a duty imposed upon him by his [revolutionary socialist] faith, and he used it not to further his own selfish ends, but to promote his ideals.28

Levine emphasised the extreme modesty of Lenin’s living standards and his treatment of others. He quoted one of Lenin’s prominent Menshevik opponents, Raphael Abramovitch: “His home life and personal relations would merit the enthusiasm of any Baptist minister. It is difficult to conceive a simpler, kinder and more unpretentious person than Lenin at home. Making ends meet with difficulty, he was always shabbily dressed, and is not much different in that respect even now,” after the Bolshevik revolution. Abramovitch added “poverty worried him little, for his only interest in life lies in party affairs and politics.” Levine’s conclusion built up to an unrelenting political criticism, but also emphasised much that was positive: “Unselfish and irreproachable in his character, of a retiring disposition, almost ascetic in his habits, extremely modest and gentle in his direct contact with people, although peremptory and derisive in his treatment of political enemies, Lenin could be daring and provocative in his policies, inflexible in the execution of his principles, unscrupulous in his method of government and crafty and pitiless in his handling of men and affairs.”29

What Levine identifies in negative terms was seen by Lenin’s comrade, Anatoly Lunacharsky, as reflecting the single-mindedness which was “the dominating trait of his character, the feature which constituted half his make-up, [which] was his will: an extremely firm, extremely forceful will capable of concentrating itself on the most immediate task but which yet never strayed beyond the radius traced out by his powerful intellect and which assigned every individual problem its place as a link in a huge, world-wide political chain.”30

This suggests an intellectual coherence absent from Trump’s make up. One is highly cultured, and the other is not. While Trump boasted “I don’t read books,” Lenin immersed himself in the works of William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Anton Chekov, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Chernyshevksy and Maxim Gorky, among many others. More than this, he wrote many books, although these were entirely devoted to politically-focused prose.

While there was an openness to his evolving Marxist perspectives, there was also a remarkable consistency. In his polemic of the early 1890s, What the “Friends of the People” Are, Lenin emphasised themes that would be central to his thought, his writings, and his actions over the next three decades. It’s worth considering several key passages:

The worker cannot fail to see that he is oppressed by capital, that his struggle has to be waged against the bourgeois class. And this struggle, aimed at satisfying his immediate economic needs, at improving his material conditions, inevitably demands that the workers organise, and inevitably becomes a war not against individuals, but against a class, the class which oppresses and crushes the working people not only in the factories, but everywhere. …

When its advanced representatives have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread, and when stable organizations are formed among the workers to transform the workers’ present sporadic economic war into conscious class struggle — then the Russian worker rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian working class (side by side with the proletariat of all countries) along the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious communist revolution.31

The ways in which Lenin developed and applied these perspectives deserve to be elaborated and critically examined. In doing that, we find a commitment to what Georg Lukács called “the actuality of revolution,” or as Max Eastman put it, a rejection of those “who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it.” At the same time, we find a commitment to utilising Marxist theory dialectically; not as dogma, but as a guide to action, understanding that general theoretical perspectives must be modified through application to “the concrete economic and political conditions of each particular period of the historical process.” We find Lenin’s insistence that the revolutionary party must function as “a tribune of the people,” combining working-class struggles with systematic struggles against all forms of oppression, regardless of which class was affected. There is also an approach to the interplay of reform struggles with the longer-range revolutionary struggle, permeated by several qualities: (a) a refusal to bow to the oppressive and exploitative powers-that-be; (b) a refusal to submit to the transitory “realism” of mainstream politics; and (c) a measuring of all activity by how it helps build working-class consciousness, the mass workers’ movement, and the revolutionary organisation necessary to overturn capitalism.32

Those who share Lenin’s commitments have a responsibility to adapt his perspectives to what has unfolded over the past hundred years. In doing so, we must face a key aspect of Trumpism’s superiority as a global political force. The international working-class movement that was essential to the logic of Leninism is no longer the powerful force of a hundred years ago. There has been a dramatic decline and fragmentation of the working-class movement in the capitalist centres where it once flourished.33 Those of us who are in basic agreement with Lenin’s orientation have a responsibility to do what we can to reverse that process, and to help build the working-class movement and the revolutionary socialist strength and vigour capable of overcoming the problems of our time.

For now, Trumpism is far more powerful than the meagre and disparate forces currently drawn to the Leninist alternative. Yet the logic of Trumpism pulls toward the deepening disintegration, violence, and catastrophes of global capitalism. The logic of the alternative pulls toward economic democracy, expanding liberty, and justice for all. The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg noted long ago, is between socialism and barbarism.34

This is the annotated text of a presentation scheduled for the Marx Memorial Library on November 6, 2024.

• 1

  Portions of this presentation are derived and developed from Paul Le Blanc, “Trumpism, Fascism, and Political Realities in the United States,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 11 June 2024 https://links.org.au/trumpism-fascism-and-political-realities-united-states, and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023)

• 2

  Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), p. 429. Also see Editorial Board, “The Dangers of Donald Trump From Those Who Know Him,” New York Times, September 26, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/26/opinion/donald-trump-personality-history.html.

• 3

  Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018), pp. 115-116.

• 4

  Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2019), p. 29.

• 5

  Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021), pp. 273-274; Matt Prince, “What is President Trump’s Relationship with Far-Right and White Supremacist Groups?,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-09-30/la-na-pol-2020-trump-white-supremacy; Aram Roston, “The Proud Boys Are Back: How the Far-Right is Rebuilding to Rally Behind Trump,” Reuters, June 3, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/.

• 6

  Ezra Klein, “The MAGA Movement Has Become a Problem for Trump,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/opinion/project-2025-trump-election.html.

• 7

  Robert Kagan, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart – Again (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 2024), pp. 171, 176. Also see Robert P. Jones, “The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think,” Time, August 31, 2023, and Robert P. Jones, “Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America,” Time, September 10, 2024. Also see Sruthi Darbhamulla, “An Unsteady Alliance: Donald Trump and the Religious Right,” The Hindu, September 10, 2024, https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/an-unsteady-alliance-trump-and-the-religious-right/article68382345.ece. Quite different versions of Christianity exist. See, for example, Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 49-77, 222-27, and Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church (New York: Harper One, 2007). The revolutionary-democratic qualities of the founding document of the US are indicated in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).

• 8

  Spencer Chretien, “Project 2025,” The Heritage Foundation, Jan. 31, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025; Project 2025 - The Presidential Transition Project: Policy Agenda, including the text of Paul Dans and Steven Groves, ed., Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, https://www.project2025.org/policy/. For critical evaluations, see: E. Fletcher McClellan, “A Primer on the Chilling Far-Right Project 2025 Plan for 2nd Trump Presidency,” Lancasteronline, June 3, 2024, https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/a-primer-on-the-chilling-far-right-project-2025-plan-for-2nd-trump-presidency-column/article_ef88858e-1e9b-11ef-9e81-bf8485299455.html; Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “Project 2025: The Far-Right Playbook for American Extremism,” https://globalextremism.org/project-2025-the-far-right-playbook-for-american-authoritarianism/. The quotation describing who composed the Project 2025 document is in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 2-3.

• 9

  Centre for Climate Reporting, “Undercover in Project 2025,” climate-reporting.org; Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, “Hidden-camera video shows Project 2025 co-author discussing his secret work preparing for a second Trump term,” CNN, August 15, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/russ-vought-projeco0authct-2025-trump-secret-recording-invs/index.html; Amy Goodman and Lawrence Carter, “Project 2025 Co-author Lays Out ‘Radical Agenda’ for Next Trump Term in Undercover Video,” Democracy Now!, August 16, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQjdwsZhE_Q; Gillian Kane, “Project 2025 is Already Here,” In These Times, June 2024, p. 8. 

• 10

  Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (New York: Harper, 2022), p. xii.

• 11

  Miller, p. xx.

• 12

  Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), pp. xiii, 4.

• 13

  Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2023), pp. 2, 366. It should be noted that the Constitution — defining stabilising structures and rules for the US government — is hardly a democratic document. See Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), and Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

• 14

  Joe Conason, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024), pp. 271-272. Also see Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

• 15

  Pew Research Center, “Five Facts About Fox News,” https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/08/five-facts-about-fox-news; Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman,“Study: Breitbart-led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php; “The Divided Dial” series (November 15 - December 21, 2022), On the Media, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial. 

• 16

  Chris Hedges, “Harris vs Trump: The End of American Dominance?” Interview with Mohamed Hashem, Real Talk: Middle East Eye, 5 August 2024 

• 17

  For considerably more detail than is possible here, see: David Beetham, ed., Marxists in the Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism From the Inter-war Period (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019); F.L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism, Second Edition (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1982); Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). 

• 18

  Clara Zetkin, “Fascism” (August 1923), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/08/fascism.htm. Also see Clara Zetkin, Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, ed. by Mike Taber and John Riddell (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

• 19

  Leon Trotsky, “American Problems” (August 7, 1940), Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-1940 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 337. Italian socialist Ignazio Silone expressed this idea with a cynical twist: “Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place” – see The School for Dictators (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), p. 112.

• 20

  Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience, pp. 153-98; David Milton, The Politics of US Labor, From the Great Depression to the New Deal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982).

• 21

  This is explored in Paul Le Blanc, Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), as well as Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013). Also see: Manning Marable, “Jackson and the Rise of the Rainbow Coalition,” New Left Review, January-February, 1985; Sheila D. Collins, The Rainbow Challenge: The Jackson Campaign and the Future of US Politics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986); Steve Cobble, “Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition Created Today’s Democratic Politics,” The Nation, October 2, 2018; Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).

• 22

  See for example Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

• 23

  Hedges, “Harris vs Trump: The End of American Dominance?”

• 24

  Roper Center, “How Groups Voted in 2020,” https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2020; Kathryn Royster, “New Political Science Research Debunks Myths About White Working-Class Support for Trump,” Vanderbilt University, July 29, 2020, https://as.vanderbilt.edu/news/2020/07/29/political-science-research-debunks-myths-about-white-working-class-support-for-trump/; Martha McHardy, “Donald Trump’s Support Among White Working Class Has ‘Shrunk Significantly,’” Newsweek, August 14, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-white-working-class-voters-poll-1938946. 

  How to define the term “working class” is highly contested. Some assert that having a college education places a person outside of the working class (which consigns many small business owners to the working class, while teachers and many nurses are consigned to the so-called “middle class”). This contrasts with the Marxist definition of working class: those who sell their ability to work for a paycheck, regardless of educational level. Michael Zweig, in his Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2023, p. 96) presents 61.9% of the US labour force as working class, and 38.1% as “middle class”. But as Harry Braverman and others have indicated, some in this latter category are in occupations that have been proletarianised — see R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy, “Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class,” Monthly Review, Vol. 66, No. 5: October 2014. 

  It should be added that when one factors in African American, Hispanic, and Asian American workers, a clear majority of the US working class is not behind Trump.

• 25

  On Harris’s pro-capitalist orientation, see: “Who is Kamala Harris' father Donald Harris who Trump accused of being a Marxist in the debate,” The Economic Times, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/who-is-kamala-harris-father-donald-harris-who-trump-accused-of-being-a-marxist-in-the-debate/articleshow/113263386.cms; Amanda Gordon, “Doug Emhoff Pitches Harris’ Economic Vision as ‘Pro-Capitalism’ and ‘Helps Everyone,’” Time, August 27, 2024, https://time.com/7015029/doug-emhoff-kamala-harris-pro-capitalism-economic-agenda/; Nicholas Nehamas and Reid J. Epstein, “Harris Casts Herself as a Pro-Business Pragmatist in a Broad Economic Pitch,” New York Times, September 25, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/us/politics/harris-economic-speech-pro-business.html.

• 26

  David Shepardson and Nandita Bose, “Biden Signs Bill to Block US Railroad Strike,” Reuters, December 2, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/; Brian Dabbs, “Harris Embraces US Fossil Fuels in Showdown with Trump,” E & E News by Politico, September 11, 2024, https://www.eenews.net/articles/harris-embraces-us-fossil-fuels-in-showdown-with-trump/; Ilan Pappé, “The Genocide in Palestine,” The Palestine Chronicle, September 17, 2024, https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-genocide-in-palestine-how-to-prevent-the-next-stage-from-happening-ilan-pappe/. 

• 27

  Christian Lorentzen, “Not a Tough Crowd,” London Review of Books, 12 September, 2024, p. 31; Bernie Sanders, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism (New York: Crown, 2023), p. 293.

• 28

  Isaac Don Levine, The Man Lenin (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1924), p. 34.

• 29

  Levine, The Man Lenin, pp. 36, 193.

• 30

  Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,” Revolutionary Silhouettes, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lunachar/works/silhouet/lenin.htm.

• 31

  V. I. Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats,” Collected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), pp. 299, 300. That this orientation informs all of Lenin’s political thought can be seen in V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. by Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008), and also in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015). 

• 32

  Georg Lukács, Lenin, A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2009), p. 11; Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), pp. 150, 151; V. I. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics,” “What Is To Be Done,” and “Against Subordination to Liberals,” in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, pp. 259, 140, 143, 162-6.

• 33

  A massive narrative, focusing on Europe and indicating what once existed and what has been lost, can be found in Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002). In a different key but covering some of the same ground is Mike Davis’s brilliant volume Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso, 2018).

• 34

  See Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott, eds., Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Pluto Press, 2010), and Paul Le Blanc, “Rosa Luxemburg and the Final Conflict,” Spectre, April 24, 2020, https://spectrejournal.com/rosa-luxemburg-and-the-final-conflict/.