Is This Our Last Chance?

How did we get here and how do we get out?

Donald Trump at his inauguration

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term two days ago as of this writing. This election he saw a sweep of all 7 swing states and a win of the popular vote not accomplished by any Republican since 2004. Many are wondering, how could this have possibly happened? To understand this historic loss, you need only look at Biden’s tenure. Biden’s term began with a signature bill that would’ve made public colleges free, mandated paid sick leave, created a climate corps, and invested billions in infrastructure. In true Democrat fashion this bill - that would’ve built out a robust welfare state - was scuttled by a year of capitulation to Republicans in the name of a long since dead bipartisanship, and then killed entirely at the whims of two Democratic Senators who played their roles as villain well, naturally protecting the interests of capital in the process. The American people then saw every half-decent bill for the rest of Biden’s term fail to pass due to the filibuster - a Senate rule that could be revoked with a simple majority - that Democrats showed more allegiance to than their own constituents. After a disappointing first two years, the second two became about foreign policy, namely Israel. After the Palestinian resistance waged a strike against Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel responded with overwhelming force on the innocent people of Gaza, dropping the equivalent of 4 nuclear bombs on the area over the course of 14 months while Americans who protested got beaten by cops, smeared by politicians antisemitic, and lied to over and over again by the State Department. Wave after wave of bills passed the House and Senate (who couldn’t ever seem to manage to pass anything for the American people) regarding antisemitism and Israel. Legislation attempting to classify any criticism of Israel as antisemitism, allowing agencies to strip funding of groups who criticize Israel, allowing schools to target individuals who criticize Israel, became the single-minded priority of our “public servants” while our social media feeds were bombarded with images of dismembered children that were blown apart by the bombs our tax dollars pay for.

While inflation skyrocketed at home and grocery prices increased 30% or more, rent reached the highest levels in American history, the prices of new and used cars went up enormously, billions upon billions of dollars was shipped to Israel and Ukraine as Democrats made “you aren’t really struggling, you don’t even know how good you have it” their mantra. This was the backdrop of this election and played no small part in the outcome. Add to that Biden’s signs of aging and incoherence becoming increasingly obvious, to the point that it resulted in a late withdrawal from the presidential race (far too late to democratically choose a successor) and a replacement to the role in Kamala Harris.

When Harris was announced as the nominee in August, the enthusiasm by the average liberal was palpable. Yet only a few weeks later, after many, many unforced errors, that enthusiasm waned as Harris made it clear that she would do nothing different with regards to Gaza, that she didn’t have a vision for the future, and that she didn’t really believe in anything at all. All of this converged to create the perfect conditions to bring an aging charlatan, fake populist like Donald Trump back to the White House.

So why did so many people choose to vote for a man who promised mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, and invading Mexico and Canada? Why did so many liberals stay home? To understand this you must understand how liberalism ultimately always trends towards this outcome when there is no countervailing force. The Democratic party in particular has spent the last 40 years implementing a program of neoliberal austerity on the working class, the unions, the poor, that used to be their base. With the influence of big money in politics and unlimited spending in elections, Democrats have become a party of, by, and for the ruling class. Since Carter, Democrats have repeatedly sided with bosses and refused to create a robust welfare state that would materially help the working class. The only bills that manage to get passed in Congress are bills to fund the war machine, or to further the upward transfer of wealth - now at $50 Trillion from the bottom to the top, in the last several decades. While Democrats have failed to offer a program to the working class, the Republican party has become a party of demagogues, taking the deteriorating material conditions they and the Democrats are responsible for and using them to direct that anger towards a convenient scapegoat. Immigrants, trans people, the villain du jour, the GOP is nothing if not successful in harnessing the righteous anger of working people and directing it at other portions of the exploited instead of their true enemies.

“Fascism, with all its forcefulness in the prosecution of its violent deeds, is indeed nothing else but the expression of the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois State.” - Clara Zetkin, Fascism

While basic necessities become more and more unaffordable, home ownership is out of reach, and retirement becomes a pipe dream, the resentment of the working class becomes more pronounced. Since liberalism is incapable of providing a redistributive program to counteract this, people become more and more captivated by someone, anyone, offering them any answer at all. Liberals in Congress have chosen time and time again to side with neofascist policies - on Israel, on immigration, on trans rights - instead of adopting a program that would threaten capital in any way. Because liberalism is now incapable of making a credible case to the working class, the only side who is even pretending they will fight for workers is winning out. Even our supposed leaders on the left, Bernie Sanders, and “the squad” have left much to be desired in this moment and have shown us that they are not capable of leading the type of movement that will get us out of this mess. Truly, they don’t seem to know what to do any more than we do.

“They can now see that the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie, and the worst of it is that these masses have now lost their faith not only in the reformist leaders, but in socialism as a whole.[…]Fascism has become a sort of refuge for the politically shelterless” - Clara Zetkin, Fascism

We now find ourselves at a point where the contradictions of bourgeois democracy have reached a fever pitch, and the electorate has chosen to smash the system that is smashing them to pieces instead of upholding it. “Trump might be a piece of shit, but he’s my piece of shit” they think. When the other party has no program except “We love Republicans, but they are a threat, but we’re just like them, but not as bad” is it any wonder that people have abandoned Democrats? The working class has been left to ping-pong between two parties that ultimately serve the same masters and do not care if they live or die. The center could not hold. This break has meant that we now enter a long, dark night in our country. A time where the richest man in the world gives a Nazi salute during the presidential inauguration, where a sweeping list of Executive Orders remove the personhood of trans people, empower CBP to conduct immigrant raids across the country, and invest billions in the climate catastrophic scam of AI, and increase drilling while wild fires destroy entire cities and tropical climates get hit with blizzards. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that we find ourselves here. The nothingness of the Democratic party could only hold for so long. But now we have to figure out how to fight. The era of resistance liberalism is well and truly dead, and frankly never did anything remotely useful to challenge this neofascism. The only effective counterweight to what we are facing can be found in a people’s movement.

“Without a doubt the proletariat should and must use, in its struggle against fascism, the contradictions and the struggles that have developed within the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie. But without direct action fascism can never be brought down.” - Gramsci, Neither Fascism nor Liberalism: Sovietism!

There has been much debate among the left over the last 8 years about what strategy is correct to repair this country - inside or outside. Can you reform the democratic party? Can you take it over and make it better? Or do you need to run a third party? I firmly say that neither of these approaches are correct. For the inside strategy, even if it were possible to replace 200 or so members of Congress (which it clearly is not), you would still have to contend with the undemocratic structure of the Senate, with the fact that the Supreme Court is filled with theocratic ideologues, and fundamentally that our constitution was created to grant power to the wealthy, landed classes and not the rest of us. This is the same problem you would hit with a third party that still ran within the confines of this broken system. We do not want to, as Gramsci says, “but change the mask of the […] bourgeoisie”, we want to make something entirely different. For the crises we face, and for the time we have left, we must think bigger. We must create a mass of workers who have class consciousness and want to overthrow the old order. Certainly this is no small task, but the process of unfucking the world after 200 years of United States hegemony was always going to be an enormous undertaking. Yet it is what we must do if we are to win.

The socialist program in this moment should not be to recreate the old structures with their old problems but forge something new. The way to do this is by having the most advanced sections of the working class, socialists and communists, organized in cadres in as many cities as possible, ready at a moment’s notice to respond during a crisis: show up with buckets during a flood, hand out blankets before a blizzard, show up to every protest and speak to those people and invite them to educational events to sharpen their understanding, bringing them into your program. Evangelize about a different future, one they may have never considered before, where the fruits of their labor are their own, where there isn’t a boot on their neck at every moment. Creating bonds with communities and then using those bonds to advance class consciousness among the working class is the only way we can truly fight this if we want to win.

It is clear we are in a moment of crisis, one that is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Instead of giving into despair or repeating the same failed strategies that have borne us no fruit we must look in a new direction. We must have the faith that we can eventually break free of our chains, that we aren’t here for no reason. Most of all we must have faith in each other. Instead of being at the throats of other exploited people, we must keep our eyes firmly fixed on those who are pillaging the world. A world that is only theirs right now by virtue of our tacit permission, that can be seized back whenever enough of us see the light. The future can be ours, if we have the courage to reach out and take it.