antisystemic

Racist Murder In America And The Bifurcation Of The Modern World System

Intro

Our society is a historical social system, meaning it is an overarching structure that operates according to certain rules and exists and has existed in time and space (historically). That historical social system is capitalism. Capitalism is a world economy predicated on the endless accumulation of capital (productive materials and goods used for the further acquisition of more of these things). This process is fed by a class struggle in which capital tries to squeeze more and more out of work forces and work forces resist this squeeze. Thus a division of labor has been created by the capitalist world economy that allots specific roles and rewards to hierarchically organized social groups. Among other social lines this division of labor has been organized along is “race”.

“Race” is a nonsense. It doesn't actually exist. Anthropologist Robert Sussman tells us that “race” is a cultural and ideological myth, there are no sub-species of humans, our evolutionary history has not allowed for even the slightest speciation to occur. Instead we have simply developed different cultures based on our group historical experiences.1 Race itself is simply a post-facto justification for a specific ethnic organization of the aforementioned division of labor. This division of labor is “white supremacy”, those socially designated as members of the “white race” are allotted better roles and rewards than those socially designated as members of other “races”. Let us keep this in mind as we introduce another key aspect of the story.

Social systems, like all systems, move toward and away from equilibrium. Once they establish themselves their rules of operation keep them going and drown out processes that are outside themselves so that those processes become “noise”. However, the contradictions inherent in the rules of operation for the system eventually lead away from equilibrium and the noise, in effect, becomes too loud to ignore. This creates “bifurcation” where multiple possibilities assert themselves creating real historical “choice”.

For reasons we will not go over here capitalism is now approaching it's point of bifurcation. Suffice it to say that capitalism has run up against it's political, cultural, and geographic limits. It's existed for 500 years and continual accumulation of capital can't continue forever. However, here we will explore how the recent uprisings against racist police brutality in America which have not failed to garner international solidarity are expressing empirically the fact of approaching bifurcation. Let us start with a consideration of the racial division of labor in the United States as it effects black people.

Evolving Anti-Black Racism In America

Of course the starting point for our discussion of anti-black racism in America will be chattel slavery of black people. Since America's founding oppressed social strata were exploited to build it's capitalist economy. First it was the labor of indentured servants and then it was the labor of enslaved black people. Racism, being the post-hoc rationalization for divisions of labor, was invoked to cast black people in the eyes of white American society as sub-human, naturally deserving of enslavement. When the civil war ended racism did not end with it. It's post-hoc nature allowed it to be ideologically recast.

Now, instead of black people as sub-human, black people were cast as predators, eternally criminal by nature. This went along nicely with penal justice, “criminal justice” based on taking a social group and casting them as fundamentally different, “other”, and deserving of punishment. So began the mass incarceration of black people, of course not because black people were generally more guilty of wrong doing, but only because they needed to be organized within the division of labor for the requirements of capital accumulation. This is borne out by the facts that black people were incarcerated for trivial or non-existent infractions (black codes made minor violations for white persons serious offenses for black persons) and that the incarcerated black people were simply put back in service to former slave holders through convict leasing by the state.

The racism of “fear” of the predator-criminal allowed the mass incarceration of black people to continue to this moment and constructed the war on drugs, nothing else but a way to incarcerate black populations. A “prison industrial complex” sprang up to put prisoners to work for a pittance. There is then the matter of the police forces in the United States.

Police in the United States supposedly exist to protect citizens using minimal force. In reality they have always been nothing other than the black patrol. Police forces in the United States were organized from slave patrols designed for catching runaway slaves and terrorizing black populations into submission in minority white, majority slave regions. The police allowed and perpetrated lynchings (another form of penal “justice” enacted by whites against black persons) as well as enforced Jim Crow and black codes. Today they enforce the war on drugs. The 4th amendment prohibiting unwarranted search and seizure of citizens and the Posse Comitatus Act criminalizing the making of the police into a military force have been systematically ignored and watered down to allow for the development of stop and frisk (the authority to stop and search anyone an officer can describe as “reasonably suspicious” as opposed to the stronger legal standard of probable cause) and Special Weapons and Tactics units (militarized police units). The former exist to use the war on drugs as an excuse to perpetually monitor black and latino people in public spaces, to dehumanizing extents, and the latter to use the war on drugs to conduct urban warfare against black people while they sleep in their homes (barging into households at night using military equipment to serve warrants). The role of the police as the black patrol has lead to countless and publicized murders and attacks of and on black people. Let us examine some high profile cases.

Trayvon Martin

Martin was a black teenager who was staying with his father in a gated community as his father hoped that time away would help put an end to adolescent troubles. George Zimmerman is a mixed race man who at the time of Trayvon's stay in The Retreat At Twin Lakes had organized a community watch for the area. The economic crises of 2008 lead to the migration of black persons from housing projects to the aforementioned community. The watch was a way for the community to control this population, control, as in suppress an enemy.

Zimmerman had shoved the watch down the community's throat (though it seems they were not unwilling to go along) and was growing increasingly paranoid at the mere existence of black people there, calling police regularly to report nothing more than incidence of existing while black. It was during one of these incidence that Zimmerman saw Trayvon walking home from the convenient store. On the phone he blurted out “these motherfuckers always get away” and proceeded to chase Martin even as the person on the other side of the line said “we don't need you to do that”. What we know is that a confrontation between the two then ensued leading Zimmerman to kill Trayvon with his gun.

The phone audio evidence suggests that Zimmerman was looking for confrontation despite claiming that Trayvon jumped out at him, as does the testimony of Trayvon's friend Rachel Jeantel who was on the phone with Martin during the incident, which was essentially made null when the prosecution failed to prepare her for being cross-examined in court by a defense lawyer that had interrogated her for an extended period of time. If the prosecution had used Zimmerman's calls to the police, the testimony of Jeantel, and Zimmerman's gusto as an aspiring police officer with fear of the black people around him as well as his own record of assaulting a police officer (what ultimately crushed his dreams of becoming a real member of the force), a strong murder case could have been made. However the prosecution dropped the ball on all items and it was ordered that race be left out of the case completely, despite the obvious hate crime connotations. The prosecution used this to carefully purge the potential black jurors from the proceedings during juror selection. Essentially, George Zimmerman is still free because the prosecuting attorneys failed to do their job and because his defense team made sure to purge the case of any racial connotations to the killing on his part while also subtly casting Trayvon in the aforementioned black predator light. There is also the stand your ground legislation that lobbied into being by the NRA in Florida. It essentially gave white people the authority to treat the world as their castle where anyone who tress passes, as in English common law, is legitimately subject to lethal force.

Michael Brown

Michael brown was a fresh high school graduate who had worked tirelessly to achieve this honor in a school system where drop out was the norm. When walking in the street with a friend he was confronted by officer Darren Wilson. Wilson shot brown 7 times delivering two head shots to kill the young man. All the physical evidence and legitimate eye witness testimony (which was thrown out in court in favor of testimony from someone who was not even in the area at the time) suggest beyond reasonable doubt that Wilson killed Michael in cold blood. This includes Wilson's own testimony which expects us to accept that a police officer could not handle a black adolescent without purposefully shooting him in the head from a distance. Wilson was never brought to court because the white police department and prosecutor essentially ignored the case. Wilson himself confirms that he was allowed to drive himself back to the station and tamper with evidence up to washing off Michael's blood. There was never even a real incident report.

Rodney King

Rodney king was a black man who got involved in a high speed chase with the police. Once apprehended officers, while being captured on video, beat king to the point of brain damage. The officers were acquitted. The biggest punishment meted out was 30 months in prison. According to a civil rights activist and lawyer interviewed by NPR, in LA at the time the police were nothing less than an occupying army and even affluent black persons including celebrities were subject to harassment.

George Floyd

George Floyd was a black man who was pinned to the ground in degrading fashion by his neck. He continually told officers that he could not breathe, but officer Derek Chauvin continued to press his knee directly on the back of Floyd's neck. Floyd's last moments of gasping for air and pleading for help were captured on video which has been seen around the country and no doubt around the globe. After major unrest in Minneapolis where Floyd was killed the officers involved were charged, Chauvin was charged with murder. He may still receive a large pension.

None of these cases are exceptional. Tamir Rice was killed for playing with a toy gun, Eric Garner was strangled to death for selling loose cigarettes (allegedly), Freddie Grey was either killed by criminal negligence, or murdered, for running at the site of police (I wonder why he would do that) and for possessing a legal knife falsely labeled a switchblade, and Breonna Taylor was killed for sleeping in her house. All victims of the black patrol.

Movements for Justice and Bifurcation

Technology has allowed the activities of the black patrol to be seen by the public. The first such case was King. After his abusers were acquitted LA erupted in violent unrest. In the twenty first century the delayed charging of and not guilty verdict for George Zimmerman sparked a massive protest movement across the country demanding justice and the slogan “Black Lives Matter”, used as a rallying cry for modern civil rights activism. In Baltimore Grey's death sparked riots. Michael Brown's murder lead to what could easily be described as a war between the Ferguson population and militarized police. Last, but not least, an ongoing protest movement exploded as a result of Floyd's murder. The Brown and Floyd protest movements garnered international solidarity.

What we have is a spontaneous chain of uprisings starting with the LA riots. Masses of people across decades of time and a whole nation of space have decided that they no longer want any part of the murderous division of labor they are ensnared in. Remember, when noise which a system could at one point block out gets too loud, that system approaches it's terminal crises. When a social system approaches bifurcation the real power of social movements increases as a result of decreasing stability. At that point we enter the time of trouble.

As a social system destabilizes society destabilizes. Civil conflict unfolds and state structures can no longer beat it out of existence. The Martin, Brown, and Floyd movements as well as the Baltimore and LA riots were massive social conflagrations that shook local governments to their core and in the case of the Floyd protests is shaking the US nation-state to it's core. The Martin protests forced the Sanford chief of police to step down and the state attorney to recuse. The LA riots caught the brutal and ever-present police force completely off guard and thus barely any effective response was mounted. In Ferguson protesters did open battle with militarized police forces on the street and in Baltimore an impoverished population rose up. Today president Trump is looking more and more desperate to rein in the ongoing protest movement. Even sending in troops wasn't enough and doing so quickly stained his image. Minneapolis has declared that it will dismantle it's police department. Trump had to hide in the Presidential bunker overnight while protests raged in DC.

Point being, it's getting louder in here...

1. The Myth of Race, Sussman, 2014

References

Democracy Now coverage of Floyd murder and protests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAII2ur3_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI5ahIDO1_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1_wCLkV_9c&t=292s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe3Ztxus8kM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pwvEfk5xYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v6ujCucFC4&t=186s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v6ujCucFC4&t=186s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCsJyENFcUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVqDVeksoT8

Racism and Police Brutality

War on Drugs Policing and Police Brutality, Hannah LF Cooper, 2015 Racial capitalism and punishment philosophy and practices: what really stands in the way of prison abolition, William Calathes, 2017

Documentaries covering the Martin and Brown cases

Stranger Fruit, Jason Pollock, 2017 Rest In Power: The Trayvon Martin Story, Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason, Lana Barkin, Chris Passig, 2018

Capitalism: It's Division of Labor and Bifurcation

Historical Capitalism, Wallerstein Capitalist Civilization, Wallerstein

King, Grey, and the riots

https://www.vox.com/2016/7/27/18089352/freddie-gray-baltimore-riots-police-violence https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots

Anarchist Centralism?

A major sticking point in the debate between Anarchists and Marxists has been the issue of centralism; that is to what degree specialized, hierarchical, concentrated divisions of labor are desirable. Typically the Anarchists have argued that maximal participation should replace such divisions of labor where as Marxists have seen them as a form of progress implemented by the capitalist mode of production and ultimately a step toward the social control of production. The battle lines have not always been clearly drawn, however. Lenin, perhaps the most important Marxist in history, vacillated between Paris Commune style people's democracy and arch centralism depending on the political climate he found himself in. In the early 20th century Anarcho-syndicalists debated the issue of centralism and some of them completely rejected the classical Anarchist Communist view of federated regional communes for an emphasis on preserving Fordist industrialism in a manner very reminiscent of the views held by the social democratic Marxists that expelled the forefathers of the Anarcho-syndicalists from their movement in 1896.

In this vein of heterodoxy an article was published on the C4ss website arguing for a balance between decentralization and centralism from an Anarchist point of view. According to the author Anarchists have been mistaken to view centralism as inherently wrong and thus failing to recognize it's practical use. The author maintains that the issue is one of organizational efficiency and not fundamental principles. Even further, the author denies that centralism has anything to do with hierarchy and asserts that it can function in a non-bureaucratic way. The article essentially sets out to outline a self-managed centralism, one with concentrated, specialized organization, without Lenin's Commissareaucracy. The author uses this idea to back up his assertion that Anarchists should accept a healthy dose of centralism. Does his argument have merit? If it does then Anarchists have surely had the wrong approach more often than not to this question historically. Do we need to rethink our analysis?

Definition

We need to start with definitions. Marxists like Lenin and Bukharin associated centralism with organizational coherence and scientific specialization and decentralization with parochial, handicraft isolation. To them centralism could never be critiqued by anyone who wasn't simply a wanna be merchant longing for the old village markets. This allowed them to ignore the real issue of the debate, i.e. to what degree participation is maximized. Thus the first major problem with this article becomes apparent. No summary definition of centralism, or decentralization, is even attempted. The author does describe what he thinks the characteristics of both are, but not in a coherent way that would allow us to grasp the full scope of his conception.

He starts out very strong, relating the issue directly to “decision-making power”, he will continue to operate on this relation later in the article. Unfortunately, he then, for some reason, defaults to the Leninist/Bukharinite analysis and starts using centralization and decentralization as synonyms for coherence and parochialism respectively.

Some level of decentralization is necessary in an organization so that its organizational processes can be carried out smoothly. Besides abuses of power, there are purely practical reasons to avoid excessive centralization. An organization in which decision-making is highly centralized increases the distance of decision-makers from conditions on the ground, increasing the likelihood of a bad decision being made because of the decision maker’s ignorance of changing local conditions.1 High centralization also can overwhelm decision-makers with minutiae that’s better off being dealt with locally, negatively impacting the rate at which projects are undertaken and completed – i.e. excessive centralization can generate bottlenecks that impede progress.

This does not mean, however, that centralization is more trouble than it’s ever worth. Similar practical problems are associated with decentralized schemes. The most notable problem with decentralization is the lack of coordination between fully autonomous organizational subunits. In a decentralized scheme, there may be no actual coordination whatsoever, and the movement and development of the organization could be thought of as complexity generated by the interactions of the organization’s subunits rather than conscious coordination, i.e. mutual readjustment of plans, as such.

So the issue has once again been obfuscated from the degree of participation in social structures and movements to how parochial, or coherent social structures and movements should be. People like Luigi Fabbri had already dealt with this when it came out of the mouth of Bukharin.

One would need to know, for instance, what structural inadequacies debar a small community from managing a large unit, and how free contracts or free exchanges and so on are necessary obstacles to that. Thus, state communists imagine that ANARCHISTS ARE FOR SMALL SCALE DECENTRALISED PRODUCTION. Why small scale?

The belief is probably that decentralization of functions always and everywhere means falling production and that large scale production, the existence of vast associations of producers, is impossible unless it is centrally managed from a single, central office, in accordance with a single plan of management. Now that is infantile!

He continues:

Anarchists are strenuously opposed to the authoritarian, centralist spirit of government parties and all statist political thinking, which is centralist by its very nature. So they picture future social life on the basis of federalism, from the individual to the municipality, to the commune, to the region, to the nation, to the international, on the basis of solidarity and free agreement. And it is natural that this ideal should be reflected also in the organisation of production, giving preference as far as possible, to a decentralised sort of organisation; but this does not take the form of an absolute rule to be applied everywhere in every instance. A libertarian order would in itse1f, on the other hand, rule out the possibility of imposing such a unilateral solution.

To be sure, anarchists do reject the marxists' utopian idea of production organised in a centralised way (according to preconceived, unilateral criteria regulated by an all-seeing central office whose judgment is infallible. But the fact that they do not accept this absurd marxist solution does not mean they go to the opposite extreme, to the unilateral preconception of “small communes which engage only in small scale production” attributed to them by the pens of “scientific” communism. Quite the opposite: from 1890 onwards Kropotkin took as his point of departure “...the present condition of industries, where everything is interwoven and mutually dependent, where each aspect of production makes use of all the others”; and pointed to some of the broadest national and international organisations of production, distribution, public services and culture, as instances (duly modified) of possible anarchist communist organisations.

Vadim Damier, in his scholarly history of 20th century Anarcho-syndicalism, described the typical Anarchist view as one which rejected the capitalist division of labor based on specialized managerial hierarchy and sought to replace it with freely associated groupings of producers collectively specialized and thus involved in multiple functions. This is one that is the best suited to a desirable society, not just from the point of view of creating egalitarian social structures, but also from the scientific vantage point. The authority of specialists is only relevant based on their “disinterest”. They must be reasonably non-invested in the results of their research so as to objectively evaluate those findings. In the construction of a social order, and thus for Anarchist purposes a socialist world-economy, their expertise is essentially worthless as a result. Nobody is disinterested in the world social order to any sufficient degree.

Macnair In Your Anarchism? More likely than you think..

The author of the article does not seem to draw any inspiration from him, but when reading the section of the article trying to detail a non-bureaucratic centralism one slogan from a certain Marxist legal scholar kept ringing in my head; “CONTROL THE BUREAUCRATS!”. The person I am referring to is one Mike Macnair, a legal scholar who writes on socialist politics. He wrote an article titled with the above slogan. His basic argument was that specialist managerial divisions of labor were necessary for revolutionary social structures, so the task was for the rank and file to control the administration; elect, pay, recall it, and more fundamentally regulate it's scope and functions.

M Black (the author of the article we are examining) differs from Macnair at least rhetorically. He is strident that we need to dispense with the bureaucrats to have a productive centralism, not merely “control” them. However, inspecting his specific proposal reveals that this difference is more rhetorical than substantive.

Consider a regional anarchist confederation as an example. The confederation may have a central body with discretion over the publication of a collective journal chronicling member organizations’ theoretical output and practical activities. Although effectively centralized, such a structure would not be usurping control over local issues from member organizations, nor would it be dictating anything to them. A flexible enough federation could define such centralized functions as it pleases, without necessarily endangering the autonomy of member organizations over their own processes and resources. The autonomy of member organizations enables them to mutually recognize the need for discretion to some centralized function – not every organization needs to concern itself with running its own journal – and thereby enable them to focus their attention on what really matters. This means that centralization can, in some instances, enable units to better manage the complexity generated by their own organizational processes and their interactions with other groupings. Now lets look at Macnair for comparison.

The consequence is that the workers’ movement needs to work out the institutional forms which will make a professional bureaucracy answerable to the lay members. It needs to work that out in the existing organisations of the working class. It needs to learn how to control power. It needs to develop institutions that go far beyond the thin, impoverished parties of today, which do not address different aspects of the cultural life of the class. Within this network or web of institutions under capitalism the proletariat needs to learn how to create its own power over its full-time apparatus. Both Black and Macnair are essentially putting forth the same program. Some functions need to be managed by specialists, but the democratic, participatory norms of the organization must define the boundaries of the functions the managers are allowed to control. If Macnair's slogan is “control the bureaucrats!”, Black's is “control the central bodies!”, two slogans that are identical in practice. What else could the center be besides the specialist managers? Black rightly defines bureaucracy as an administrative layer above the rank and file, but what else is a “central body with discretion over” a function such as a publication? It seems Anarcho-Macnarism has arrived, I never thought I'd see the day...

So..Anarchist Centralism?

To be completely fair Black is not an “Anarcho-Macnairist”, Macnair wasn't bringing anything new to the table. Marxists have always thought that specialist hierarchies, ironically those produced by capitalism, could be socially determined in a post-capitalist society. Instead of the managers facilitating the exploitation of labor they would facilitate the meeting of labor's needs. This is a pipe dream and the 19th century Anarchist Communists were right to call it out. All this does is graft industrialism on to a post-capitalist, supposedly socialist order. In reality there is no post-capitalist industrialism, industrial production is a feature of the capitalist world-economy. Thus, even if the Marxists could get their post-capitalist, specialist division of labor, it would carry with it none of the progressive characteristics of capitalist productive “revolutionizing”. In fact, it would likely be much more parochial and stagnant.

With the endless accumulation of capital no longer the raison d'etre of the social system the inegalitarian social structures, including specialist divisions of labor, would once again become based on estates and vassals; the peasants vs the aristocracy. There would be no “controlling the bureaucrats” and certainly no practical balance between centralization and decentralization. Ironically black points to Feudal arrangements as those which can be hierarchical even when decentralized. Feudalism can only be said to be “decentral” if what you mean by this is “parochial”, in the obfuscating Marxist tradition. There is much less than maximal participation in a system based on aristocrats exploiting the narod.

Credit should go to Black for having the guts apply analytical rigor to the sacred cows of his own movements. The end result, however, ended up not being so rigorous. Instead we got an appeal to moderation, insisting that there is a “just right” amount of centralism, when the reality is that centralist social structures are basically incompatible with any kind of egalitarian socialism. Perplexingly black never actually engages with the decentralist Anarchist view. He only addresses the “market Anarchists” who typically read and write C4ss content. There is simply no mention of the concept of federalism in Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Puente, or it's implementation during the Spanish Civil War. This proposal is excluded by mere omission.

So..Anarchist Centralism? Na, I'll pass.

Sources https://c4ss.org/content/53124?fbclid=IwAR2SPMffN9Bcz_zlPVO2PQfOkTekhcitqcKHguJFLTnxVArTPYv0Ve1Vyq0

https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/552/control-the-bureaucrats/

https://libcom.org/library/anarcho-syndicalism-20th-century-vadim-damier

https://www.amazon.com/Uncertainties-Knowledge-Politics-History-Social/dp/159213243X

https://libcom.org/library/anarchy-scientific-communism-2

https://libcom.org/library/anarchy-scientific-communism

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/dec/31.htm

LEViathan and The Strategic Value of Voting

It's election season in the United States, not long after this video is posted one of two things will occur. Either sitting president Donald Trump will be reelected for another 4 year term, or his opponent and former vice president Joe Biden will be elected for the first time. Naturally it is the assumption imparted to us from our most important institutions that who is elected president is very important. By voting for president we, as the regular people who don't hold political office, can have our voices heard. Given the past 4 years of Trumps far-right administration many are anxious to see him vacate the highest office. Many, as in 2016, put their hope in Vermont senator Bernie Sanders who ran both times on a platform of increased social services. Bernie has dropped out of the race and backed Joe Biden; dashing the hopes of his supporters in almost the exact same fashion he did so in 2016. With Bernie out and Biden the nominee many have resigned themselves to voting for “the lesser evil”. Biden maybe a spineless establishment democrat, but, so the reasoning goes, Trump is an ultra-conservative firebrand who will take any opportunity to launch more attacks on marginalized groups and the environment.

It is not at all hard to see why many people will go for the “anyone better than Trump” option. Donald Trump has attempted to ban people from a list of Muslim countries, has ramped up the use of ICE to capture and persecute for the crime of being a migrant and thereby all, but completely ended legal asylum in the United States. He ramped up geopolitical aggression against Iran including assassinating an important Iranian military leader with the result of the country, which by all accounts was complying with the pre-existing agreement preventing them from enriching uranium, beginning the process of enriching uranium. He embarked on a useless trade war with China, continued the post-Reagan legacy of tax cuts for the rich which has lead to dramatic increases in the political power of the wealthy and decreasing fortunes for the middle and lower strata economic groups, in addition to failing to deliver his election promise of bringing back jobs. He also set a historical precedent for gutting environmental protections during a time where extreme weather events originating from climate change are ravaging the earth and it's creatures. The way he has dealt with the global corona-virus pandemic has been to push as hard as possible for neglecting safety precautions for the sake of the economy (i.e. for the sake of US business interests). His response to ongoing protests against racist police repression has been to sanction extraordinary violence targeting not only the vilified “looters”, but also journalists and peaceful protestors. On twitter he issued the statement that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. On top of all of this his administration and the Republican/conservative ideologues that surround it have used typical Fascist dog whistles such as the defense of “western civilization” and demonization of the radical left.

To put it lightly the past 4 years of Trump have been grim, so it seems intuitive that we need to elect someone else that is at least a click to his left. Joe Biden, Obama's former vice President, seems like the man for the job, especially since the “progressive” option in Bernie Sanders is no longer viable. However, most progressives are aware of Biden's own pitfalls. Joe Biden made his political career in the historically racist US senate and today still brags about getting along with segregationists. He refuses to be pushed into a more proactive climate policy and in any case is backed by fossil fuel interests. He supports coercive drug war mechanisms over safe consumption sites which evidence suggests work much better. He has lagged behind Bernie Sanders Medicare for all position when anything but a universal system of healthcare coverage will leave us with our current counter-intuitive system where healthcare goes primarily to those who can pay for it. He has stated that he would shoot protestors in the leg, rather than in the head, and seemed to believe this was a groundbreaking concession. He verbatim promised a room full of rich associates that “nothing would fundamentally change”. In addition he is backed by union-busting law firms, not to speak of the accusation of sexual assault.

Despite all of this most progressives view him as the “lesser evil”. Anna Hiltner writing for the Princeton University student publication said:

“I believe that if our aim is to challenge the status quo, and especially if we live in a swing state, we need to take into account the consequences of our inaction. By voting strategically for Biden, we oppose a far right government that will hurt the most vulnerable segments of society far more than a Biden presidency would”

Ilya Somin explains the logic of lesser evil voting, or “LEV”, further in a 2016 Washington Post opinion piece:

“Imagine an election where the only options are Queen Cersei from Game of Thrones, and Sauron, the Dark Lord from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. If Cersei wins, she will kill many innocent people, and oppress others. But she will leave much of the population more or less alone (as long as they don’t openly oppose her or threaten her family in any way). If Sauron wins, he will kill far more innocent people, and make the survivors his slaves.

Under those circumstances, it seems clear that a person who ensures a Cersei victory has done a good deed. He or she will have saved large numbers of people from slavery or death, even though the Cersei regime would be a deeply unjust one.”

Activist intellectual Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT has been a persistent advocate of LEV. According to Chomsky Trump, especially with regard to climate change, represents an existential threat to the continued existence of the human species. Thus he maintains that establishment democrats like Hilary Clinton in 2016, or Biden in 2020, are the obvious choice for preventing possible colossal damage.

So, are they right? Should we bite the bullet and vote for the lesser evil? To answer this question we need to understand what voting is. To understand that we need to abandon, for a minute, the politics of the 2020 election and look at the longue duree of the capitalist world-system. The first major ideological debates among the elites of the capitalist world-system were those between the liberals and conservatives. The conservatives wanted no progressive social change and advocated the total entrenchment of the church, patriarchal, and monarchical hierarchies. The liberals disagreed. They thought that if no concessions were made the lower strata of the system then the result would be social destabilization, revolt, and the ultimate downfall of the world-system. This debate was effectively settled for the next century or so by the uprisings of 1848 which constituted revolutionary upheavals in all zones of the world-system. 1848 was part of the liberals' fears, revolt by the lower strata, come to life. This clear demonstration of the threat the Liberals pointed to caused the conservatives to concede to the liberals.

The new agenda of the world elites became incremental social change administered by technocrats to the benefit of a limited segment of the lower strata. This incremental change can be summed up in the dual concessions of social programs and civil liberties. At the same time welfare states were developed the right to vote, or “the franchise”, was extended to certain sectors of the population. This enshrined faith in the lower strata, of the pan-European world before the second world war, and after the second world war that of the rest of the world, that the state could meet their needs and thus bound them to the status quo.

At the opening of the 70s something shocking took place. There was a crises of overproduction for the capitalist world-economy. Production was developed so well that too much was produced seriously degrading the efficiency of industry. The political consequence of this crises was the destruction of the state's ability to doll out these limited concessions that bound the lower strata to the existing social order. The state had to become a blunt instrument for holding a crises ridden social order together and lost the finances for it's social programs. Since the structural crises that started way back then has only gotten worse over the subsequent decades so has this political aspect of the crises.

This all means that the state as a mechanism for meeting social needs has more, or less collapsed, and so has the ideological binding tethering the lower strata to the world-system, leading to political dillusionment. This is the general structural mapping of the longue duree of the issue we face on November Third. In the first place the vote, or franchise, while being a real concessions, always served more to bind the lower strata to the status quo than to allow them to carry out meaningful progressive change. In the period of structural crises we now find ourselves in the vote means even less since the capacity of every state to act as a mechanism for even limited progressive change has been greatly diminished.

Strategically; if the vote was attained through social upheaval then it stands to reason that replacing far-right Trumpism with progressive social change is a matter of organizing social movements, rather than electing someone slightly left of him, or even of electing someone well to his left ala Sanders. Here we should be as fair as possible. Even the advocates of LEV typically abridge their arguments with the disclaimer that broader social organizing will make the real difference. As Chomsky says:

“Finally, it should be understood that the reigning doctrinal system recognizes the role presidential elections perform in diverting the left from actions which have the potential to be effective in advancing its agenda. These include developing organizations committed to extra-political means, most notably street protest, but also competing for office in potentially winnable races. The left should devote the minimum of time necessary to exercise the LEV choice then immediately return to pursuing goals which are not timed to the national electoral cycle.”

However, this admission undermines the LEV framing of the issue all together. A crucial premise of LEV is that we are granted a limited number (two, speaking specifically about US POTUS elections) of potential options which are all bad with some/one being the least bad of those options. It is for this reason that in a podcast debate over LEV Chomsky repeatedly diverted from any and all broader points to insist that those issues will not come up on November 3rd. Honestly then, why should anyone care about November 3rd? If the broader issues don't come up on November 3rd then what even does come up on November 3rd?

The problem with LEV is that it is premised on the idea that the presidential elections present a fatalistically limited set of choices. This plainly is not the case when we realize what the LEV advocates themselves have conceded, that we have much more power to make progressive change through the building of social movements than hedging our bets on which reactionary politician will end up being least reactionary.

So..to vote, or not? As it happens this isn't even the correct question. The correct question is what tactical value voting has for the proliferation of progressive social change. The answer is that it has none. Does voting do any active harm? No, and for the same reason it has no tangible benefits. It's telling that when the fact that all the issues which are supposedly pressing us to vote, even for the lesser evil, are more robustly addressed by sustained on the ground activism, the only reply of people like Chomsky is “but that is not the question that arises on November third!”.

Sources https://www.democracynow.org/2018/2/1... https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/1... https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/9... https://www.latimes.com/business/stor... https://truthout.org/articles/latest-... https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/4... https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/1... https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y92d... https://antisystemic.blogspot.com/202... https://truthout.org/articles/biden-r... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama... https://truthout.org/articles/bidens-... https://truthout.org/articles/anti-un... https://truthout.org/articles/joe-bid... https://truthout.org/articles/bidens-... https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-... https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/3... https://www.jstor.org/stable/424718?s... https://www.dukeupress.edu/world-syst... https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/art... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/v... https://chomsky.info/an-eight-point-b... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vsrm...

Note: This article was made from the transcript of this video I uploaded to my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9kTfm01Fs&t=79s

Chomsky Promoting Bumper Sticker History

Noam Chomsky has been a very important figure in my political development. As a teenager just being acquainted with Anarchism he supplied an influential public voice that identified with the Anarchist tradition. Today Chomsky is important to me for what one might call negative reasons. As I have acquainted myself more with Anarchism and the reality of the modern world I have found Chomsky's voice increasingly influential in the wrong directions. Chomsky, for me, has ceased to be a voice for a radical alternative to the status quo and more and more become a voice for the status quo's preservation, it's loyal opposition. His rhetoric around the 2016 and 2020 election cycles have fallowed this trend.

In both cycles Chomsky has insisted that what matters is not the social structures that organize our lives and livelihoods, but instead who sits on the white house toilet seat. Chomsky can't be entirely blamed. The dominant narrative is one which exalts the importance of the temperament and decisions of the holder of the highest office. As someone who identifies with Anarchism, who has made a career off the proposition that really what controls our lives are the dominant social structures, rather than any one official we might vote for, Chomsky should certainly be expected to break with that dominant narrative. Yet, he fails on all accounts to accomplish this. He instead has joined the sad fatalist chorus of dejected progressives willing to accept the “lesser of two evils” and thus avoiding deep questioning of how the modern world works.

Unfortunately for Chomsky and his fellow sad sacks they got what they wanted. As Trump hopelessly flails to overturn the most important election result in the country Joe lesser evil Biden is sitting pretty as the presidential nominee. Why is this unfortunate for Chomsky and the backers of lesser evil? Simple. Not less than a year into Biden's administration it will become clear how “lesser” this evil really is. Going back to before Biden's win, however, Chomsky tried to invoke a little history to justify biting the bullet.

In an Intercept interview, when asked about progressives averse to voting for Biden after having their hopes for Bernie dashed for the second election in a row, Chomsky offered a reply based on the history of the German Communist Party (KPD). According to Chomsky, the rise of Hitler was the result of the KPD, acting under orders from the Soviets, to reject allying with the Social Democratic Party in order to stop National Socialism. This is what I like to call “bumper sticker history”. It takes a complex and important historical event and collapses it into a simple, but inaccurate argument for what should be done in the present.

Before WW1 the Marxist orthodoxy in the west was that of using electoral socialist parties to coast off concessions made to labor by capital. Most prominent among these parties was the SPD (German Social Democratic Party) which had taken it's coarse with the endorsement of Marx's closest colleague himself, Fredrich Engels. For Germany, however, the destruction wrought by the war overshadowed the concessions that were first implemented by Bismarck in the 19th century and so the population lashed back. The result was the German Revolution of 1918-19 where much like the Russian Revolution a year before the population chased off the monarch and organized self-governing workers' councils. This lead the Social Democratic Party to come to power resulting in the creation of the Weimar Republic. Stability was not to come, however. The rift between the left-wing of the Social Democrats who had formed a militant group known as the Spartacists and the Social Democratic Party lead to a failed uprising by the former and a resulting bloody assault on the Spartacists by the latter culminating in the murders of the two most prominent Spartacists, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

The KPD which was formed out of the Spartacists was driven underground and completely overhauled it's ideological disposition. Under the leadership of Luxemburg's old alley, Paul Levi, the organization ditched it's putschist disposition and oriented itself to the old Social Democratic policy of electoral influence. In 1923 the Republic faced more instability when under the pretext of failure to make reparation payments Belgium and France occupied the industrial Ruhr Valley. Inflation spun out of control and nation-wide strikes appeared. The head of the Comintern, the international coordinating body of communist parties emanating from Moscow, Grigory Zinoviev, ordered the KPD leadership to take advantage of the wave of unrest.

The KPD attempted to do so by appealing to the Social Democratic coalition in Saxony, but under pressure from the central government (backed up by troops) the Social Democrats refused to take part. In Hamburg fighting broke out between communists, local police, and right-wing militias. However, unions and other left groups stood by idly while the communists were put down. Skipping ahead to the end of the 20s Stalin and Bukharin had taken power in Soviet politics and deposed Zinoviev. In accordance with the militant fervor of Stalin's policies at home he crafted a new doctrine for the Comintern that was a complete break from it's past positions.

The new policy was that of the “third period”. The about face the Comintern did in adopting it is referred to as “the turn”. According to the turn communists could no longer ally with any social forces outside their camp. This was extended in the idea of “social fascism”, that the social democratic parties and their allies were in fact Fascists using a disguise to fool the workers. The KPD, which had gone through purges of it's membership and come under the iron rule of Ernst Thalmann, having been betrayed by the Social Democrats one too many times, was happy to abide by this doctrine. This lead it to enter into a kind of circumstantial soft alliance with the National Socialists in which the KPD continually mocked the failures of the SPD.

Once the KPD realized the threat posed by Nazism it was too late and Hitler made his ascent. Chomsky would like us to believe that if the KPD just joined an electoral coalition with the SPD and the two mutually put their differences aside Fascism could have been prevented, thus demonstrating the wisdom of lesser evil electoralism. For now we will ignore the bizarre nature of a comparison between a national election that was the culmination of the rise of Nazism, the crises of the Republic, and the struggle between the social democrats and communists, and a more, or less typical US election in which a Republican contests against a Democrat. If we take a look at the more complicated historical backdrop we can see how misleading Chomsky's version of history is.

It should firstly be remembered that by tapping into the frustrations of unemployed and unskilled workers the KPD had became the fourth most powerful electoral force. It certainly wasn't taking up a policy of abstention from bourgeois elections, it was only refusing to ally with it's long time rival. It had in fact achieved significant electoral success on it's own. Secondly, despite wide speculations of historians as to what might have gone differently had a coalition been established, this isn't even the actual issue. The real issue is that the “social fascism” doctrine of the communists lead them to ignore the real Fascists and concentrate on a bitter foe that, nevertheless, were not Fascists. Things would have turned out very differently if the communists had brought the fight to the Fascists, rather than the SPD, regardless of whether a coalition between the two was created, or not.

Let us go back to before the war and the formation of the KPD. The welfare state loving, organized labor based, SPD, despite it's obvious moderate political disposition, would certainly qualify as a lesser evil to people like Chomsky. A Chomsky may even completely embrace the SPD given his own affection for candidates like Sanders. However, the moderate SPD, as did the rest of the socialist movement, made a hard right turn. Defying the expectations of the International Socialist Bureau the SPD and other parties such as British Labour threw their support and base behind WW1, one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history. Despite Chomsky's own warnings about the need for lesser evil voting to prevent disasters such as climate change and nuclear conflict, a party (multiple in fact) well to the left of Biden and the Democrats signed off on a world-historic catastrophe.

Not only that, but this was the reason for the KPD's rivalry with the SPD in the first place. The KPD was formed by left social democrats who were disgusted, principally, by the party's choice of murderous patriotism over solidarity among the workers of the world. The SPD, the supposed lesser evil in Weimer Germany, made a horrendous choice which created their own misguided opposition. How differently would history have looked if the SPD never supported WW1 in the first place?

The moral of this story is that lesser evil electoralism, and frankly electoral politics in general, is blind to the long term structural phenomena of the modern world. Just as the horrific failures of a nominally progressive socialist party like the SPD were part of the same historical process that ultimately lead to the KPD's hardheaded dogmatism and Hitler's rise to power so were the horrific failures of the Democratic Party over the past several decades part of the same historical process that produced Trump. By the same token, after Trump won't be brunch. The horror show will march on and Biden can do nothing to save us. All we have is our collective agency as the oppressed and exploited of the modern world, with it, we can make actual change, but only if we break from the dominant illusions and common sacred cows.

Sources Vanguard of The Revolution, McAdams https://twitter.com/theintercept/status/1251225021118386177

White Nationalists Run On The Capitol: Implications For Trump and Protest Movements In The US

On the Wednesday preceding the publication of this article hundreds of Trump supporters attacked the US capital building during a ceremonial recognition of president elect Joe Biden's 2020 election victory. The immediate spur of the siege was a speech by president Donald Trump given at a rally urging his supporters to march on the capital. The President made this speech as a last ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election results after his legal team's attempts to do so by claiming mass election fraud have been completely stamped out in the courts.

The event seemed spontaneous, but the news media has reported far-right groups and even the president himself produced rather clear signs that something of this nature was going to take place. This has lead to talk of a “crises of security” where the local police have been scrutinized for seemingly putting up no opposition to the attempted sacking of a major political ceremony. The crises of security presented a stark contrast to the militarized police, national guard, and at times full blown military presence which bore down on crowds of peaceful protestors during the past months of black lives matter protests. The event was deeply traumatic for America's political elite as it constituted a semi-organized threat to their personal well-beings. The event has been condemned not only by Democrats, but also by what seems to be the entire Republican establishment.

So what does this event tell us about US politics and social movements? I believe it tells us three things:

1. Donald Trump is in a bad way.

2. The Trumpist genie can't be put back in the bottle.

3. US police forces are nothing more than the black patrol.

1

Almost since election night itself president Trump has mobilized as many resources as he could muscle to overturn the election results. Mr. Trump is clearly desperate to remain in power. Why is this? After all, it is not really a normal occurrence that an outgoing president refuses to leave. Many will posit that it is because Mr. Trump is a wanna be autocrat. He wants as much power for himself as possible and he can't stand to loose the US government as his personal plaything. This certainly isn't an incorrect assessment, but there is something maybe even more important to consider.

Donald Trump is facing multiple charges upon his departure from office. He has been accused of sexual assault and corrupt businesses practices. The state of New York is investigating him through the same office that was once held by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. He will not be able to pardon himself, nor will anyone else be able to pardon him. The only way he can avoid the path to possible jail time is a second presidential term. Time, however, has run out on this option.

Once this door closed on Mr. Trump's face he scrambled to achieve the impossible task of overturning a US presidential election. This was never going to work. His legal staff frantically grasped at straws like honing in on votes which wouldn't have moved the dial away from Biden's victory in the states in question anyway. His attempts have been rejected every which way and as a result even the fantasy of overturning the election is now completely up in smoke.

2

The dominant political ideology of the 19th and 20th centuries was centrist liberalism. Under this ideology governments dolled out limited civil rights and social programs in order to give the global lower strata some vested interest in the world-system. The 1970s saw a world-economic crises that put stress on governments so severe that they buckled and could no longer provide the limited civil liberties and social programs leading to “neoliberalism” where social programs were slashed and the state's control over things like organized labor increased.

During centrist liberalism's period of dominance it subordinated it's two competitors; radicalism and conservatism. It's collapse set them both free to pursue their independent agendas. Conservatism, the political ideology based on the defense of inequality and social hierarchy, reasserted itself in two forms. One was in the economic form, i.e. neoliberalism. The other was in the socio-cultural form, i.e. nationalism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, ect.

Part of the neoliberal program in the United States was Reagan era tax cuts that produced an unprecedented resurgence of inequality. This inequality has lead to a significant decline in the fortunes of those who used to be relatively privileged. White workers were in many ways brought down to the level that those below them suffered in for hundreds of years before. In 2016 this allowed Trump to use socio-cultural conservatism (anti-immigrant, America first rhetoric) to do what leaders like him have done all around the world; argue that to get rid of the miseries of economic insecurity one needs to close off society to those not considered true members of the nation. His strategy was successful as his victories in rust belt states (areas afflicted by the neoliberal policies) combined with his electoral college victory and the stubbornness of the Democratic Party delivered his insurgent campaign the win.

What the Capital siege shows us is that Trump was not the cause of the rise of right-wing movements, he was only the product of this development. Trump lost the election, yet a mob of people throwing up white power signs and erecting nooses stormed the capital building. What reason could anyone conceivably have to believe that these people are just going to go away even a year into the Biden administration?

3

The crises of security at the capital certainly provides ample cognitive dissonance. Why did police use force against peaceful protestors to clear a path for Trump to pose with a bible while police at the capital can be seen in videos moving barricades to allow the mob in? Police forces around the world serve a specific purpose. That purpose is not to protect members of the population from violence. That purpose is to enforce the designated roles of the world-division of labor.

Since the United States was founded on slavery the US police force litterally evolved out of militias that caught run away slaves. The global division of labor dictates that in US society black people need extreme amounts of policing. As those allotted some of the worst roles and rewards within the division of labor they need to be forcibly pigeonholed, where as white people need to be ensured the best roles and rewards. This is why peaceful demonstrators against police racism, even unarmed black people not part of any social upheaval, are more threatening to US police forces then a mob of white nationalists storming the capital.

It's not the job of US police forces to defend against violent white people. It's their job to DO VIOLENCE against black people. This has been the reality since there were police in America. The job description of any and all American cops is “use violence to control the black population”. This is the reason for our police brutality problem, not the racism of individual cops, not racist police chiefs, not lack of proper training, not poor representation of people of color in police departments, not lack of community control over police, but the social structure of the US police force itself.

Sources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zdv_-n5ME

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/we-will-never-concede-trump-baselessly-asserts-voter-fraud-speech-n1253011

https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/vision-emerges-of-police-moving-barricades-to-allow-rioters-into-us-capitol-taking-selfies/news-story/45a9be3adf9b447b53d23cf5536c5d02

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CFhhZhqy_U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rnb0j-bNmM

https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_6868.html

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-11-15/global-trumpism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH9RPu6YdLg&list=PL3wxiH0o_6WRno6Mow86qearAO6dmJWHa&index=11

https://www.jstor.org/stable/424718?seq=1

https://antisystemic.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-burning-kitchen-racist-murder-and.html

Successful Revolutions?

The internet left is a strange place. All kinds of strange arguments are advanced by strange adherents of tendencies morphed by internet culture. This includes internet “Marxist-Leninists” (read Stalinists) arguing that only “they” have had something called a “successful revolution”. What are “successful revolutions”? Well, according to internet Marxist-Leninists, the communist party controlled states of the 20th century are indications of the success of the tendency they subscribe to in fomenting social revolution, be it in the Russian, Chinese, or Cuban Revolutions. They are successful because they created long-lasting regimes out of the overthrow of the old authorities which provided for their populations through social programs and carried out development.

Since no other tendency of left radicalism has produced the kind of results produced by “Marxist-Leninists” in the 20th century along these lines, Marxism-Leninism is clearly objectively superior. This argument lays bare what “Marxism-Leninism” in the 21st century really is. Rather than being a living analytic and strategic approach to fomenting progressive social change in this century it is clinging to nostalgia for dear life. We will come back to this point, but first, let us examine the Marxist-Leninist claims to “success”.

After the repression of the 1848 revolutions, within the modern, global left, which had formed out of it's ashes, there was a debate over how this organized movement should go about changing society. Some of them argued that militant struggle should be used to create radical socio-cultural change and that the state, the main political institution of the modern world, should be completely opposed on account of it's elitist nature. Others argued that the movement, representing the oppressed strata, should take over the state and use it's power to crush conservative forces and carry out social change. Populations generally hoped that the latter section of the left was right. The states were the main political structures of the world and so using their centralized power to confront complex situations produced by the collision and accumulation of social forces seemed most expedient. The strategy adopted by the mainstream left thus became a two-step strategy; take state power and use it to change society.

At the very end of the 19th century the Marxist movement in the form of the national, socialist parties in Europe began to gain some success in Parliaments. Occasioned by the First World War the Marxist movement split between the “socialists” and “communists” after the Bolsheviks who split off from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party took power over the former Tsarist Empire in 1917 holding it out during a bloody civil war into the early 20s to create the Soviet Union. Thus the two-step strategists had achieved some success, but from a world perspective it was still negligible. This changed after WW2 when communists took power in states and national independence struggles replaced formal colonialism with new independent states, all around the world. Despite the collapse of the socialist international as a result of it's parties' support for WW1 socialist parties after WW2 were able to insert themselves into the revolving door of Parliament and elections.

The two-step strategists of the left had thus achieved the first step of their strategy, taking state power, all across the world. We could dwell on the fact that it was not just the communist “Marxist-Leninist” movements that achieved this, but also national liberation and electoral socialist movements, but for now, we will concede to the Marxist-Leninists that in the 20th century the tendency they subscribe to achieved major success across the world. The problem is that however big a success achieving the first step of the two-step strategy was, the second step was the important one. The communists now needed to use state power to change society.

Anyone who looks around at the world today can tell that the “success” in this department was little to none. The modern world is still a capitalist world, with a capitalist world-economy. Having taken power during a period of ascendance for this world-economy in the state structures which existed to facilitate that ascendance the communists (as well as national liberationists and socialists) had no choice, but concede to the dominant economic processes and their attendant geopolitical order. The communist states did this by using protectionism to give themselves advantages on the world-market and integrated their populations through social services (welfare states). This was in fact the policy of every other state in the capitalist world, in the west it was called “development”, in the communist states it was called “socialism”.

This “socialism” did nothing to fundamentally alter the inequality and polarization inherent to the capitalist world-system. This is because state socialism was not something outside that system, it was a set of states fallowing policies of state intervention into the capitalist world-market. This is what produced critiques of state communism as “state-capitalism”, but more importantly, led to the world revolution of 1968 that not only criticized the United States as the hegemonic power of the time, but also the establishment “old left” of the socialist/communist parties and national liberation movements. The 68 rebels criticized the old left, including the communist parties and states, for having become part of the world-order rather than changing it. This movement, along with a crises of overproduction in the world-economy, outmoded “development” as a way of integrating populations and intervening in the world-market. Development was replaced by neoliberalism and the Soviet Union collapsed.

Marxism-Leninism was indeed extraordinarily successful in the taking of state power across the world. It was completely unsuccessful in using that power to change society because the premise that it hoped was true, that state power could be used for social change, turned out to be untrue. It is true that the success of the Marxist-Leninists produced a world-redistribution of wealth which was used to integrate the lower strata into the social order (meaning pacify it with concessions). However, the Marxist-Leninists only accomplished this along with the cumulative efforts of other movements, both others that took state power in the 20th century and others that didn't. In addition, and more importantly, this redistribution did not constitute real social change, rather it was how capitalism adapted to and overcame the threat of rebellious populations. It is on this basis that Wallerstein makes the observation that state socialism contributed more than even today's multinational corporations to the world-development of the law of value; capitalism's primary accumulation mechanism.

When the Marxist-Leninists online call back to the historic “success” of Marxism-Leninism they are in reality trying to recast dismal failure as success. The collapse of the Soviet Union was demoralizing for the world left, even those critical of it. In an age of political disenfranchisement in which even the left movements that cropped up in response to neoliberalism and globalization have become divided over old debates and new problems it is no doubt extremely tempting to do what the Marxist-Leninists do. We can wipe away the complex obstacles facing a 21st century left project simply by recasting state communism as an enormous success because of the achievement of state power and developmentalist economic policies. All this is, however, is a recasting. Dressing up dismal failure as dizzying success, lying to oneself.

This would be strategically and analytically bereft even if state communism stood any chance of resurgence, but it clearly doesn't. State communism's biggest success story after the fall of the USSR has been China. It's strategy to avoid the kind of collapse faced by the Soviet Union was to introduce market liberalizations. In so doing it has become the world's factory and thus a world power. These same internet Marxist-Leninists have in large numbers latched on to China because of this. China is said to be the modern socialist powerhouse. It has carried out historic poverty reduction and has challenged the US geopolitically. It seems rather obvious, however, that supplying the world-market with commodities and becoming a haven for business is capitalism, not socialism, communist party in power, or not. Capitalism, as we know, comes with increasing polarization. Mark Blyth thus points out that while China's poverty reduction has been historic it has been a completely insignificant percentage when compared to global inequality.1

The fact that China, like the Soviet Union and every other communist state ever to exist, is nothing more, or less, than a nation-state of the capitalist world-economy means that it's fortunes are tied to that economy. As such when the global crises of 2008 busted the neoliberal bobble China lead the global recovery with it's “connectivity” approach emphasizing high tech facilitation of global supply chains. Until covid, this brought the country massive global success. Then, this past year, the corona virus spread at “internet speed” through the same channels of “connectivity”, such as increased air travel, that China had lead the way in constructing. The virus, in a testament to the capitalist world-system's period of decline, made mince meat of connectivity scarcely more than two decades after it was implemented. The Chinese dream is over.

Marxism-Leninism, socialism in one country, state communism, state socialism, state-capitalism, Stalinism, whatever you wish to call it, has in fact not had any success in it's most important aim, changing society. It was based on the false premises of the two-step strategy and thus could only fulfill the first step, taking state power. In reality taking state power meant becoming part of the social order the communists were trying to change. The communists did this and in so doing helped capitalism to achieve it's long wave of world ascendance, completely the opposite of sparking it's end. Dealing with the period of decline we face today requires being analytic in our thinking abut past efforts like Marxism-Leninism. None of these efforts have delivered results in terms of fundamental social change. Trying to special plead about “success” is thus only appropriate to the online world of pointless bickering.

Notes 1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGuaoARJYU0&t=42s Sources Antisystemic Movements, Arrighi, Wallerstein, Hopkins Marx, Marxism-Leninism, and Socialist Experiences In The Modern World-System, Wallerstein The Global Left: Past, Present, and Future, Wallerstein The Rise and Future Demise of The World Capitalist System, Wallerstein The Modern World-System After The Cold War, Wallerstein Vanguard of The Revolution, McAdams https://fpif.org/coronavirus-and-the-death-of-connectivity/