The Center Has Collapsed: What Now?

Who brought down the center? We the left, of course! Hey, Hurray! We the virtuous. We showed those Dems. Kicked those hypocrites where it hurts. Three Hurray’s!

Well … WE didn’t do any such thing.

The Arab American voters in Michigan, Palestinian American voters all over, Muslim-Americans all over, all kinds of decent people with good hearts who despise genocide, workers with precarious living conditions, environmentalists disgusted with super-charged oil and gas production outputs under the supposedly environmental Biden administration, and the list goes on … WE did not cause the pathetic loss the Dems suffered. We simply, and rightfully, expressed our disgust and outrage, mostly by abstaining or casting a protest vote.

But … a huge salute to the university students who have led a good fight on campuses all over the country over the genocide in Gaza! May their movement grow, thrive and become something bigger!

The Democratic party, out of its fealty to billionaire money and decades of pushing neoliberal misery on working people, and finally hauling water for a genocidal Netanyahu to make the mix even more toxic, lost it all by itself.

A single regret is that we didn’t get enough time to get our act together.

In full disclosure, I did urge voting for Dems in the 2024 general elections, especially down ballot for legislative seats. NOT because I think Dems are a wonderful political entity. Not because I think they somehow, and despite themselves, present an answer to the oncoming train of far-right reactionaries bent on taking our rights away.

No. I saw that tactical vote just as a way to buy time.

I, like everybody with socialist understanding, recognized that the total takeover by the far right was inevitable. A matter of time. So, if we had more time, we could have prepared a more robust defense.

Enough of Stating the Obvious

The center has collapsed. It is now us against the most reactionary social forces in the U.S.

The far-right will move faster and more competently this time around. So let’s not get bogged down with “Is it fascism or not?” questions. Whatever you want to call the incoming administration of billionaire thugs, the point is they’re about to take away as many of our rights as they can and make it even easier for the billionaire class to milk us dry.

The Democratic Party, as usual in full denial mode, is in something of a politely hushed civil war over who or what to blame for their total collapse. Guess who they will blame!

Hopes of the Green Party teaching Dems a lesson have proven to have been as full of illusions now as when Jill Stein decided to come out of her political sabbatical of eight years to raise her political profile on the backs of dead Palestinians.

So, we can ask the Greens: Will you now put as much effort and resources into defending the undocumented immigrants who are about to get rounded up? What will the Greens do to protect the Palestine Solidarity movement? Trump 2.0 will target the activists of that movement and the Arab American and Muslim-American communities. He will give Netanyahu the green light to annex (parts, if not all of) West Bank and resettle the Gaza Strip. Are the Greens resourceful enough to do anything about any of that?

Let’s stop dumping on Dems. We all know Democratic Party sells people out. The real left, the socialist left, has known this for far too many decades. Do we need to keep repeating the same facts, the obvious, in every ‘analysis’ we present, without looking in the mirror to see where we have failed ourselves?

Do we need to keep repeating gravity is what stops us from floating off into outer space?

Dems sell people out? Well, what else is a capitalistic representative body supposed to do? Guess what they’ll do next: raise even more money to assure us they’re the only ones saving us. As they’re drowning!

It is way past time that we took a good look at our own failings.

Anything Good Happening?

On the more positive side, this is a good time to think about how to peel away the left wing of the Democratic Party: the unions and community organizers, racial justice organizers, Poor People’s Campaign activists, activists against environmental racism, teachers unions, hotel and hospitality workers unions, healthcare workers unions, fast food workers unions, environmentalists, activists for LGBTQ+ rights, and bring them all into a larger coalition of real opposition.

But for that to happen, socialist organizations need to come together, and organizations such as DSA need to lose any illusions about ‘infiltrating’ Democratic Party and magically turning it into its opposite. A political party that enabled a genocide should surely not be a formation progressives of any color would want to have anything to do with, but one to be shunned and left to its own rot to be exposed even further. Enough of pretending they didn’t just do what they really did!

The center has collapsed for the moment, and good riddance! But peeling away the Democratic Party’s left-wing won’t be done by persuasive articles or appeals to regrets and what-ifs. It won’t happen through ad hoc conferences issuing resolutions unlikely to do anything to change our social reality. It won’t happen by committee.

More analysis is necessary. But, of a different kind and with a different point of focus. The real ‘committee’ takes shape on the streets. Real change can only happen in the streets, in communities, in union halls, and so on: through persistent direct action, organizing and mobilizing, and bringing resources to ongoing struggles.

The incoming administration of billionaires actually makes it easier to organize; a reanimated gigantic caricature of a joker, smiling from ear to ear, salivating with greed, will be the face of Trump administration’s real intentions. The H-1B visa issue has already shown to even MAGA’s working class base who Trump really stands with; if he goes through with it, of course, and allows for cheap immigrant tech workers to ‘take away Merican jobs’, to help out his billionaire buddy Elon and his cohorts.

Socialist Journalism or Socialist Analysis?

As its history of five hundred years has demonstrated consistently, capitalism throws various kinds of miseries at working people on a regular basis. Naturally, social movements arise on a regular basis to protest against those miseries and to force a change for better.

Most of the current socialist commentaries on those ongoing social struggles evaluate them from an outsider’s point of view. The outlook of the commentary is similar to a college professor examining a student paper: the analysis nitpicks at ongoing social movements to detect (and report on) parts that are antithetical to a ‘true socialist’ movement. We are talented at finding any and all faults that provide us some cover for not participating in those movements!

Our participation, at best, is in the form of showing up at protests (which is great), to preach, or to sell our publications.

Left activism needs an analysis that directs our actions by a logic that points to where socialists can materially engage with ongoing social struggles. ONGOING struggles. Not struggles that we, in our socialist high-mindedness, regard as ‘socialist enough’, or not, and worthy of our attention or not.

Granted, that ‘outsider’ reportage is a few rungs above mainstream journalism. Its higher value is that it declares its class sympathy. Unlike the lie of ‘objectivity’ of establishment journalism of the mainstream media, socialist journalism defends its political persuasion in its reporting on events and movements and social struggles. That’s honest.

But it’s still journalism. Its writings do not reflect any engagements and interactions with those movements. That is because the socialists are not bringing resources and energy into those movements and analyzing the effects of those engagements. It’s just reporting on them as they happen in the world outside socialist circles. That means any further developments (growth, degeneration or demise) of those movements are not affected by the socialist left. So the socialist left learns nothing new.

Socialist organizations need to pool their resources and bring those resources to the actually existing social movements that are ongoing. Those organizations as well as well-meaning members of left organizations such as the Green Party and DSA need to come together to form a large-based coalition of organizations dedicated to defending the communities that will come under attack by the incoming Trump administration. By bringing resources to those communities. By helping them. By, for example, securing safe housing for Trans kids in friendly states if needed. By creating a latter-day Underground Railroad for the undocumented immigrants if necessary.

Socialist organizations of all stripes need to realize what this moment demands.

What Can Socialists Do?

Socialists are supposed to apply their knowledge to the CURRENT situation. Enough of the esoteric, and by now totally academic, arguments about Lenin v. Kautsky, Bukharin v. Trotsky, NEP V. all-out collectivization, and on and on.

Here’s an analogy: today’s mechanical engineers in the auto industry do not endlessly debate which of the late 19^th century mechanical engineers, Wilhelm Maybach or Gottlieb Daimler, was the better mechanical engineer. Mechanical engineers today need not even know that both worked to improve Nikolaus Otto’s four-stroke cycle engine to produce an improved internal combustion engine. It is simply an interesting historical fact that both Maybach and Daimler used their knowledge to solve a problem. And today’s mechanical engineers do the same thing. They use the latest knowledge to solve current problems.

American socialists of today need to apply that mentality to the historical tasks they’ve been handed. When will they use their immense knowledge to actually solve any of the problems the various social movements are currently facing? Problems that can only be solved by physically engaging with actually existing movements, and intervening in the myriad social struggles ongoing in the American society?

The task of analyzing the current situation, as a matter of socio-historical luck, has been simplified because the center has collapsed. It is now the extremely well-organized and gigantically funded far-right wing of the capitalist class v. … well, versus everybody else!

What will the socialists do now? If socialists and progressive organizations are to build any credibility, they must do things that their creed calls for, they must follow their statements of support by actions of solidarity and real support. Not just by dumping on Democrats.

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