Two Articles (or whatever) About Leftist Failure

 

Back in 2020, as the COVID pandemic was starting to take hold, Jacobin magazine featured an article by someone describing the state of the USA's working class as the worst in fifty years.  The mass unemployment caused by the need to quarantine might prove devastating to people with less resources to weather a storm than ever.

I couldn't resist a sneer for all the starry-eyed "progressives" and even "radicals" whose "activism" and "direct actions" and "victories" that they'd been mewling about since the 1990's was revealed as delusional nonsense.  The fact of the matter was their "fight-back" was imaginary.  I've detailed the uselessness of their strategy and tactics several times over the years.  I won't trouble to do so here.

This week, Jacobin featured a short essay by one Corey Robin entitled: "Recovering our Power": 

This is the predicament we find ourselves in today: not that there is no opposition or resistance, not that there is no message or narrative, not that the Right has all the power. It’s the sense that the Left lacks that lever it once wielded. The massive rallies and marches that once felt disruptive and threatening to a society customized to conformity and compliance, now just seem like another event in another city on another day.

...

We experience a frustration and sense of loss, the sense that once upon a time, in the sit-down strikes or the Greensboro sit-ins, in the consciousness-raising sessions or the Stonewall riots, it was we on the Left who had found those levers of power that could bring society to a stop. But now it is the other side that has those levers of power. Once upon a time, it was we who illegally barged our way into offices and factories, intruded upon meetings of experts, where we were not supposed to be; now it’s they who do that, with full impunity it seems.

But the thing about left politics, as Frances Fox Piven reminds us in her amazing book Challenging Authority, is what those levers of power are is not set in advance; we don’t know what it is that will prove a strike, what it is that will bring society to a halt, until we do it. Sometimes, we just stumble upon it. Often, we find it through trial and error. The important thing is to get organized, stay alert, start trying, and keep looking. But above all else, get organized. As Marx understood, social cooperation is the key to everything, in capitalism and beyond.

There's some truth in what Robin says there.  I'd say that we (by that I include myself) have grown too comfortable.  We're both afraid and comfortable.  We're clinging to what we have knowing that it will probably get worse and we don't want to really do anything beyond performative protest (if that) because it will mean serious disruption.  Serious resistance invites the possibility of serious repression.  Such as police brutality, incarceration, long-term unemployment and poverty.

Of course, it would be unfair not to credit the propaganda system that we're immersed in, altering our brains and our ability to think independently.  "Public Relations" is taught in universities.  It's an occupation dedicated to manipulating the public and they have been building their knowledge base and their skills for decades.

The conclusion of the Robin's essay though is more of the same "something will come along" that dispirted leftists have been starting to say as their peaceful rallies that are followed by nothing, and their sad devotion to parties like the US-American Democrats and Canada's Liberals, and their petitions and their peaceful chanting of "No Justice? No Peace!" continue to obtain zero results.

The other piece is from Znetwork.org by Corbin Trent: "The Right Builds Power. The Left Hosts Rallies. That's Why We Lose."  Trent starts off talking about how Bernie Sanders and AOC are hosting "anti-oligarchy" rallies and then explains that he was an activist for both of them and part of the movement to build a leftist opposition to the Democratic Party leadership:

I left my small business in 2015 to join Bernie’s first campaign. I traveled the country organizing volunteers, developing what became the “barnstorm” organizing model that fueled his movement. When Bernie lost, I co-founded Brand New Congress and later Justice Democrats, the group that recruited and helped elect AOC. I was in her campaign. I was in her office. I sat in the meetings where we had to decide:

Do we go to war with the Democratic Party? Or do we try to work with them?

We hesitated. And hesitation, in politics, is death.

That’s why I’m watching this new Bernie tour with something between frustration and dread. It looks like 2016. It looks like 2020. And it looks like it’s heading toward the same dead end.

...

They can name the villains. They can diagnose the problem. But they won’t build the machine we need to actually win.

That’s the difference between us and the right.

• The Federalist Society didn’t just whine about the Supreme Court. They built a pipeline to pack it with ideological soldiers.
• The Koch network didn’t just complain about taxes. They built a decades-long plan to rewrite policy at every level of government.
• ALEC literally drafts model legislation that Republicans pass into law state by state.
• AIPAC doesn’t just throw money around—they build political machines that destroy their enemies and protect their allies.

And what do we have?

Bernie out here holding town halls, talking about how AIPAC’s money is flooding campaigns—without building anything to counter it.

Where is our version of the Federalist Society? Where is our machine for recruiting and backing candidates? Where is the progressive institution that strikes fear into politicians who sell out?

It doesn’t exist. And that’s the problem.

Read the rest of it.  What Trent neglects to mention is that the right-wing has an advantage.  They have WAY more money.  They can provide post-political employment to their servants.  Also, when it comes to mobilizing the masses, our culture prefers fascism to socialism.  The news media will give much more coverage to right-wing groups (even if it's condescending) than to left-wing groups.  (Unless they find one or two completely crazy individuals to totally discredit us.)

Still and all though, we SHOULD try to build the things that the right-wing builds.  We SHOULD build a movement that infiltrates institutions to subvert or transform them, the way the right-wing does.

But we also have to realize that we will have to take personal risks to genuinely fight for what we believe in against an truly evil system.