The Bankruptcy of the American
Left
There will be no economic or
political justice for the poor, people of color, women or workers within the
framework of global, corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism, which
uses identity
politics, multiculturalism and
racial justice to masquerade as politics, will never halt the rising social
inequality, unchecked militarism, evisceration of civil liberties and
omnipotence of the organs of security and surveillance. Corporate capitalism
cannot be reformed, despite its continually rebranding itself. The longer the
self-identified left and liberal class seek to work within a system that the
political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted
totalitarianism,” the more the noose will be tightened around our necks. If
we do not rise up to bring government and financial systems under public
control—which includes nationalizing banks, the fossil fuel industry and the
arms industry—we will continue to be victims.
Corporate capitalism is supranational.
It owes no loyalty to any nation-state. It uses the projection of military
power by the United States to protect and advance its economic interests but at
the same time cannibalizes the U.S., dismantling its democratic institutions,
allowing its infrastructure to decay and deindustrializing its factory centers
to ship manufacturing abroad to regions where workers are treated as serfs.
Resistance to this global
cabal of corporate oligarchs must also be supranational. It must build
alliances with workers around the globe. It must defy the liberal institutions,
including the Democratic Party, which betray workers. It is this betrayal that
has given rise to fascist and protofascist movements in Europe and other
countries. Donald Trump would never have been elected but for this betrayal. We
will build a global movement powerful enough to bring down corporate capitalism
or witness the rise of a new, supranational totalitarianism.
The left, seduced by the
culture wars and identity politics, largely ignores the primacy of capitalism
and the class struggle. As long as unregulated capitalism reigns supreme, all
social, economic, cultural and political change will be cosmetic. Capitalism,
at its core, is about the commodification
of human beings and the natural world for exploitation and profit. To
increase profit, it constantly seeks to reduce the cost of labor and demolish
the regulations and laws that protect the common good. But as capitalism
ravages the social fabric, it damages, like any parasite, the host that allows
it to exist. It unleashes dark, uncontrollable yearnings among an enraged
population that threaten capitalism itself.
“This is a crisis of global
dimensions,” David North,
the national chairman of the Socialist
Equality Party in the United States, told me when we spoke in New
York. “It is a crisis that dominates every element of American politics. The
response that we’re seeing, the astonishing changes in the state of the
government, in the decay of political life, the astonishingly low level of
political and intellectual discourse, is in a certain sense an expression of
the bewilderment of the ruling elite to what it’s going through.”
“We can expect a monumental
explosion of class struggle in the United States,” he said. “I think this
country is a social powder keg. There is an anger that exists over working
conditions and social inequality. However [much] they may be confused on many
questions, workers in this country have a deep belief in democratic rights. We
totally reject the narrative that the working class is racist. I think this has
been the narrative pushed by the pseudo-left, middle-class groups who are drunk
on identity politics, which have a vested interest in constantly distracting
people from the essential class differences that exist in the society. Dividing
everyone up on the basis of race, gender, sexual preference fails to address
the major problem.”
North argues, correctly, that
capitalism by its nature lurches from crisis to crisis. This makes our current
predicament similar to past crises.
“All the unanswered questions
of the 20th century—the basic problem of the nation-state system, the
reactionary character of private ownership with the means of production,
corporate power, all of these issues which led to the first and Second world
wars—are with us again, and add to that fascism,” he said.
“We live in a global economy,
highly interconnected,” North went on. “A globalized process of production,
financial system. The ruling class has an international policy. They organize
themselves on an international scale. The labor movement has remained organized
on a national basis. It has been completely incapable of answering this
[ruling-class policy]. Therefore, it falls behind various national
protectionist programs. The trade unions support Trump.”
The sociologist Charles Derber, whom
I also spoke with in New York, agrees.
“We don’t really have a left
because we don’t have conversations about capitalism,” Derber said. “How many
times can you turn on a mainstream news like CNN and expect to hear the word
‘capitalism’ discussed? Bernie [Sanders] did one thing. He called
himself a democratic socialist, which was a bit transformational simply in
terms of rhetoric. He’s saying there’s something other than capitalism that we
ought to be talking about.”
“As the [capitalist] system
universalizes and becomes more and more intersectional, we need intersectional
resistance,” Derber said. “At the end of the 1960s, when I was getting my own
political education, the universalizing dimensions of the left, which was
growing in the ’60s, fell apart. The women began to feel their issues were not
being addressed. They were treated badly by white males, student leaders.
Blacks, Panthers, began to feel the whites could not speak for race issues.
They developed separate organizations. The upshot was the left lost its
universalizing character. It no longer dealt with the intersection of all these
issues within the context of a militarized, capitalist, hegemonic American
empire. It treated politics as siloed group identity problems. Women had glass
ceilings. Same with blacks. Same with gays.”
The loss of this
intersectionality was deadly. Instead of focusing on the plight of all of the
oppressed, oppressed groups began to seek representation for their own members
within capitalist structures.
“Let’s take a modern version
of this,” Derber said. “Sheryl Sandberg,
the COO of Facebook, she did a third-wave feminism thing. She said ‘lean in.’
It captures this identity politics that has become toxic on the left. What does
‘lean in’ mean? It means women should lean in and go as far as they can in the
corporation. They should become, as she has, a major, wealthy executive of a
leading corporation. When feminism was turned into that kind of leaning in, it
created an identity politics that legitimizes the very system that needs to be
critiqued. The early feminists were overtly socialists. As was [Martin Luther]
King. But all that got erased.”
“The left became a kind of
grab bag of discrete, siloed identity
movements,” Derber said. “This is very connected to moral purity. You’re
concerned about your advancement within the existing system. You’re competing
against others within the existing system. Everyone else has privilege. You’re
just concerned about getting your fair share.”
“People in movements are
products of the system they’re fighting,” he continued. “We’re all raised in a
capitalistic, individualistic, egoistic culture, so it’s not surprising. And it
has to be consciously recognized and struggled against. Everybody in movements
has been brought up in systems they’re repulsed by. This has created a
structural transformation of the left. The left offers no broad critique of the
political economy of capitalism. It’s largely an identity-politics party. It
focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn’t offer a
contextual analysis within capitalism.”
Derber, like North, argues
that the left’s myopic, siloed politics paved the way for right-wing, nativist,
protofascist movements around the globe as well as the ascendancy of Trump.
“When you bring politics down
to simply about helping your group get a piece of the pie, you lose that
systemic analysis,” he said. “You’re fragmented. You don’t have natural connections
or solidarity with other groups. You don’t see the larger systemic context. By
saying I want, as a gay person, to fight in the military, in a funny way you’re
legitimating the American empire. If you were living in Nazi Germany, would you
say I want the right of a gay person to fight in combat with the Nazi
soldiers?”
“I don’t want to say we should
eliminate all identity politics,” he said. “But any identity politics has to be
done within the framework of understanding the larger political economy. That’s
been stripped away and erased. Even on the left, you cannot find a deep
conversation about capitalism and militarized capitalism. It’s just been
erased. That’s why Trump came in. He unified a kind of very powerful right-wing
identity politics built around nationalism, militarism and the exceptionalism
of the American empire.”
“Identity politics is to a
large degree a right-wing discourse,” Derber said. “It focuses on tribalism
tied in modern times to nationalism, which is always militaristic. When you
break the left into these siloed identity politics, which are not
contextualized, you easily get into this dogmatic fundamentalism. The identity
politics of the left reproduces the worse sociopathic features of the system as
a whole. It’s scary.”
“How much of the left,” he
asked, “is reproducing what we are seeing in the society that we’re fighting?”
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