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WORDS AND HISTORY: THE TROUBLE WITH “GENOCIDE JOE”  
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Fred Glass
April 14, 2024
Stansbury Forum
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_ Ascribing personal responsibility to Biden for the carnage in Gaza
takes our eyes off the prize, which is the structure of imperialist
oppression, on the one hand, and building the broadest possible
movement to fight it, on the other. _

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"History is more or less bunk.” This quaint expression, uttered by
Henry Ford in 1921, reveals that words, like history, can mean more
than meets the eye. Taken out of context his comment can signify
almost anything, like the classic Sam Cooke song lyric, “Don’t
know much about history”. Ford’s actual remark came in reference
to railroad labor struggles, with the billionaire apparently
expressing his displeasure with workers remembering past battles
between labor and capital. 

It’s my hope that people engaged in the righteous struggle to stop
the genocidal Zionist war machine in Gaza, contra Ford, will remember
some relevant context and history when they consider the coming
presidential election. 

I am troubled every time I hear someone referring to Joe Biden as
“Genocide Joe.” Ascribing personal responsibility to the president
for the carnage in Gaza is not entirely wrong.  But it is, in fact,
mostly wrong: the personalization takes our eyes off the prize, which
is the structure of imperialist oppression, on the one hand, and
building the broadest possible movement to fight it, on the other.

The president of the United States is a two-headed beast, as noted in
an earlier column
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the imperialist-in-chief on the international front, regardless of
wearing a donkey or elephant pin. As such, his support for the Israeli
apartheid regime, planted for three quarters of a century next to the
largest oil fields in the world, is reflexive. Joe Biden, the person,
is irrelevant to this function of the presidency. Should we pressure
him to pull US aid to Israel? Of course. But we’d have to do that no
matter who’s in the White House.

United States domestic policy is a different story.  For instance,
the president appoints judges. We are today living with the
consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments in the form of
the evisceration of women’s right to control their own bodies, among
other tragedies. Trump’s misogynist base was fortunate he occupied
the presidency when vacancies arose, and all the rest of us were
unfortunate that a Democratic president wasn’t doing the appointing
instead.

The president also appoints the heads of powerful federal agencies,
like the National Labor Relations Board.  In an unprecedented move,
on Biden’s first day in office, he fired Trump’s NLRB chair, a
viciously anti-union lawyer, and replaced him with pro-labor attorney
Jennifer Abruzzo. Without Abruzzo and Biden’s NLRB majority there
would have been, for instance, no Starbucks Workers United successes
on the scale they have occurred. Under a Trump administration the
baristas’ organizing would have been greatly slowed and probably
stopped dead through lengthy procedural delays and adverse Board
decisions. Who is president matters for the American working class and
its ability to act collectively on its own behalf. 

A singular focus on the international scene, shorn of accounting for
the dual role of the presidency, means that the legitimate desire to
stop the genocide in Palestine—if it leads to sitting out the 2024
election—can quite possibly prevent us from creating the conditions
for stopping future events like it. Such conditions almost always
require a strong, militant progressive movement, with labor playing a
big role. Note that this is precisely what has occurred over the past
several months, as a powerful anti-war movement has shifted public
opinion and the center of gravity within the Democratic Party and
organized labor. Note too, that this has transpired within the
political space overseen by a Democratic administration.

Compare and contrast with the onset of the second Iraq war in 2003,
where a massive but brief anti-war movement crashed and burned against
the brick wall of the right-wing Bush administration.  

What the performative enunciation of “Genocide Joe” misses, in its
virtue signaling, is the practical consequence that will follow a
defeat of Joe Biden in November. Throughout the long reign of
capitalism as world system it has assumed a number of political forms.
It has demonstrated on any number of occasions that it can easily shed
a democratic skin and replace it with an authoritarian one.  Trump
is very clear:  this is his plan. When the next Gaza arises—and
given American imperialism, it will—the space for a mass movement to
oppose it will be tightly constrained and likely violently crushed by
the repressive force of a police state under far-right Republican
control.

BUILDING SOCIALISM IS ALWAYS NOW

At a recent meeting of my East Bay DSA chapter the comrades narrowly
defeated a resolution that sought to make opposition to Trump official
DSA policy.  Since there is no chance that DSA will be endorsing
Trump, the vote foreclosed the possibility of the chapter officially
working on behalf of Biden.  Two of the people arguing against
opposing Trump used the term “Genocide Joe.” One seemed to make
the phrase itself his main argument, repeating it several times.

The derogatory “Genocide Joe” enunciation plays in the same
sandbox as Trump, who loves elementary schoolyard level nicknames for
his opponents. Referring to Biden this way—or anyone else—corrodes
reasoned political discourse and tends to end, not engage, rational
discussion of the issues.

Part of building a socialist movement is the modeling of socialist
human relations, to the extent that that is possible within a
capitalist culture.  In the late twentieth century we called such
modeling “prefigurative politics.” It was a new twist that
socialist feminists placed on the concept the Industrial Workers of
the World had already promulgated a century ago when it called for
“building a new society within the shell of the old”.

WORDS HAVE MEANING, AND SO DOES HISTORY

Is history predictive? Sometimes. Marx’s idea that history repeats
itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, isn’t the
way it always works, although it happened to in the situation he
described. Closer might be Mark Twain’s “History doesn’t repeat
itself, but it does rhyme”. At the very least we might agree that
while history doesn’t necessarily provide a guide to the future, we
ignore it at our peril. 

It would be in this spirit of informed suggestion, rather than
certainty, that we might ask:  what do events in 1933, 1968, and
2021 tell us about the coming election and its likely outcomes?

FIRST, in reverse order, January 6, 2021 is an easy one.  Trump has
repeatedly told us that he won’t accept any outcome except victory.
We can expect a more organized insurrection this time around if he
loses. He and his lieutenants have had four years to ponder what went
wrong, to plan differently, and stoke the resentments and grievances
that fueled an attempted coup once before. Although we can’t know
how that will turn out—presumably public security forces have also
learned from January 6—what Trump will do if he wins is not in
question.  If he has his way, the democratic experiment called
“the United States” will become a memory, and Trump will do his
best to distort and extinguish the memory itself.

SECOND, for someone my age who lived through 1968 as a more or less
sentient being, I find it remarkable that some people today think that
installing Trump in power, with the accompanying repression of
democratic liberties, will awaken the masses and hasten the coming of
socialism. Consider the repetition or rhyme: a slice of the anti-war
left in 1968, disgusted with Democratic presidential nominee Hubert
Humphrey’s support of the Viet Nam War, tried hard to believe a
Nixon presidency would bring on the revolution.  How did that work
out? 

Marx’s tragedy repeating as farce? Sure, except a Trump presidency
will be no joke, and Trump in power a second time will make Nixon in
retrospect look like Eugene V. Debs.  

History isn’t inevitable until it has already happened. We still
have time—although not much—to prevent a fascist America. But we
have to make the right choices based on all the factors in play, not
just one elevated above all the rest. Hitler’s rise to power
depended on the split between the KPD (Communist Party) and SPD
(Social Democratic Party). Together the two left parties held more
seats and polled more votes than the Nazis; that numerical superiority
was short-circuited by the Communists’ suicidal belief that the
Social Democrats were as bad or worse than the Nazis. Calling the SPD
“social-fascists”, the Communists refused any overtures to work
together.  

What did this lead to?  Six million Jewish dead, _which became the
ideological justification for the Zionist state_; fifty million World
War II dead in all; and the German Communists were the first to be
rounded up for the concentration camps. Divide and conquer tactics
work best when enthusiastically embraced by the divided parties
themselves.

“Genocide Joe” is a contemporary linguistic rhyme for
“social-fascists”—an insult that divides people who need to be
united and obscures the bigger picture
with _schadenfreude_ masquerading as politics. It’s tempting, I
know. But please don’t. There’s too much at stake.

_Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: "A History of
the California Labor Movement" (University of California Press, 2016).
He is a member of the state committee of California DSA, and the
former communications director of the California Federation of
Teachers._

* Joe Biden
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* Donald Trump
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* presidential elections
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* Palestine
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* mass movements
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