From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Post-Election Reckoning: New Hypotheses for the Road Ahead
Date November 10, 2020 1:05 AM
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[ The politics of this race do not make any sense unless one
factors in racism and revanchism, the seeking of revenge. ]
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POST-ELECTION RECKONING: NEW HYPOTHESES FOR THE ROAD AHEAD  
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Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher, Jr.
November 7, 2020
Organizing Upgrade
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_ The politics of this race do not make any sense unless one factors
in racism and revanchism, the seeking of revenge. _

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HYPOTHESIS NO. 1. ONE CANNOT UNDERSTAND THIS ELECTION UNLESS ONE
BEGINS WITH A RECOGNITION OF VOTER SUPPRESSION:  Since 2008, the
Republican strategy has increasingly focused on voter suppression. 
The weakening, if not evisceration, of the Voting Rights Act was one
significant piece of that. In the lead up to 2020 the Republicans,
under Trump, have pushed this further by undermining the basic right
to vote; making it more difficult; encouraging intimidation;
undermining the U.S. Postal Service, long voting lines, fewer polls in
Black neighborhoods, and so on.

 1.1 THUS THIS ELECTION WAS ABOUT RACISM AND REVANCHISM:  The
politics of this race do not make any sense unless one factors in
racism and revanchism, the seeking of revenge. The Trump message of
allegedly keeping America great, was a message against traditionally
marginalized populations, including but not limited to African
Americans, non-immigrant Latin@s, women, and immigrants from the
global South.  Trump continued to stoke fear among whites, while also
playing to “colonial mentality” among some populations of color.
His message to Latin@ immigrants seemed to imply that a vote for him
was a vote for them having the chance of becoming ‘white.’ But the
election was about a broader sense of revanchism. There was
anti-communism aimed at Cuba and Venezuela.  It was also a revanchism
aimed at shifting gender roles.

THERE IS A RIGHT WING MOVEMENT

HYPOTHESIS NO. 2. THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THERE IS A RIGHT-WING MASS
MOVEMENT:  Much of the U.S. Left has attempted to deny or equivocate
on the existence and strength of the _right-wing populist_ movement. 
One can no longer debate this. This movement exists and it has an
armed wing. Along with overtly fascist groups in its core. It is a
movement against the 20th century victories of progress. The fact that
anyone could be convinced that Biden was a socialist not only
illustrates the irrationality of the movement, but also should remind
us that Sanders would not have had it any easier had he been the
nominee. The right-wing movement sees any progressive reforms as
equaling socialism. While many on the Left have fallen into the trap
of thinking or wishing that were true, we must be in touch with
reality and recognize that reforms under democratic capitalism do not
equal socialism.

2.1 THE TRUMP VOTE WAS A VOTE AGAINST REALITY:  This is one of the
most difficult conclusions from this election. In the face of the
worst global pandemic since 1918-1919; one in which the total
incompetence of the Trump administration has been on display, millions
were willing to live in absolute denial, many of them continuing to
believe that COVID-19 is nothing more than a bad flu. This rejection
of reality translates into other areas including, but not limited to,
racial relations, foreign policy, and the environmental catastrophe.
This is a movement whose slogan really should be the closing line of
the comedian George Wallace who would say:  “That’s the way I see
it, and that’s the way that it ought to be.”

2.2 EVERY VOTE MUST BE COUNTED: In the context of massive voter
suppression, every vote must be counted, whether the vote was offered
in person, through the mail or in drop-boxes. There is no
Constitutional reason that a vote count should be stopped.

2.3 THERE IS NO MONOLITHIC LATIN@ VOTE; there are Latin@ voters: The
election results illustrate that there is no cohesive Latin@ vote. The
Puerto Rican vote in Florida, for instance, bore absolutely no
resemblance to the Cuban or Venezuelan vote. The reasons that various
populations have come to the U.S.A. and the class character of many of
those who have arrived here, have helped to shape their politics.
Trump played to the fear among many Floridian Latin@ immigrants
regarding socialism and communism. That did not work so well with
Puerto Ricans. They also played to social conservatism among Chican@
voters in Texas. Though this was shrewd politics on Trump’s part, we
on the Left must not fall into the trap of believing that there is a
monolithic population out there. That said, the Democrats made a
significant error in their work in Florida and Texas in not putting
greater resources into reaching and mobilizing Latin@ voters.

ASSESSING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CAMPAIGN

HYPOTHESIS NO. 3. THE MAIN PROBLEM IN THIS ELECTION WAS NOT THE
DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADERSHIP; the strategic situation has become far
more complicated:  There are already those on the Left who believe
that the main problem in this election was the leadership by the
Democratic Party establishment. While there were many errors made,
including the matter of polling (which needs to be studied in order to
understand the errors), and insufficient support and vetting of
statehouse candidates, (no gains were made) to a broader array of mass
initiatives, the explanation for why there were not greater victories
in the election cannot be dropped simply on the D.P. The factors noted
above are far more significant, especially the power of right-wing
populism at the base.  That said, there must be major changes made,
including a DP rural organizing project, continuous outreach, stronger
organization at the county level, and support of electoral efforts
among traditionally marginalized groups (including but not limited to
African Americans and Latin@s). Though the D.P. platform was probably
among the most progressive in D.P. history, _the party must champion a
progressive, populist message that is both anti-neo-liberal but also
anti-right-wing populist_. This is a critical fight to wage within the
D.P., and it’s one that will strengthen the Bernie-inspired forces
at the base over the Third Wave centrists.

3.1 THIS IS A MOMENT WHERE WE MUST INITIATE A MASS CAMPAIGN OF “ONE
PERSON, ONE VOTE”:  The Electoral College was created in order to
support the slave-owning states and to limit the strength of the
nation-state. It is an archaic institution that must be brought to an
end. In almost any other country on this planet, the person who
receives the most votes wins…period. Our reliance on the Electoral
College means that, in effect, only certain states really matter. The
struggle for “one person, one vote” needs to be a national
campaign for the expansion of democracy. This includes alternative
methods for allocating votes, e.g., proportional delegates rather than
a state committing all of its delegates to the top vote getter, as
well as new and concrete efforts to undermine voter suppression.

“MOVEMENT BUILDING”?

HYPOTHESIS NO. 4. WE NEED TO THINK THROUGH THIS ELECTION IN A WIDER
CONTEXT OF IDEAS RELATED TO STRATEGY AND TACTICS. WE CAN START WITH
‘MOVEMENT-BUILDING.’

4.1 ‘BUILDING A MOVEMENT’ IS A FLAWED CONCEPT. But you can find it
at the end of nearly every article or speech. It appears so often that
it has more uses than aspirin as a cure for our ills. But we need to
set it aside, or get a deeper understanding. Why? Because we don’t
build them. _Mass movements are largely built by capitalist outrages
inflicted upon us_, and capitalism will continue to do so, whether
it’s another police murder, and invasion abroad, or a poisoning of a
city water system. At most, we can fan the flames, which is fine but
secondary. Our real task is to build organizations and campaigns
within mass movements.

4.2 BUT WE NEED TO KNOW THE TERRAIN. The ground of the current
conjuncture is in motion. Like everything else in the universe, social
movements move in waves. They flow and they ebb. You can count on it.
What’s important is to know when to cast our nets out, making wide
alliances and broad agitation when they are flowing, and when to pull
our nets in, gathering new recruits and doing deeper education as they
start to ebb. This way, with each wave, riding from the peak of one to
the next, we grow stronger or stronger as an organization, gaining
many new friends, until we shift the balance of forces for victories.

4.3 ‘TAKING TO THE STREETS’ HAS SERIOUS LIMITATIONS. We love
street heat tactically. But as strategy it sucks. Why? Because its
hidden subtext has one of two flaws. First, it has the aim of mass
pressure on liberals in government to do the right thing. This often
works, but as strategy, liberals approve of it. Why? Because it avoids
the tasks of taking political power for ourselves, of replacing
liberals in government with socialists of the AOC and her ‘squad’
variety. Moreover ‘street heat’ is often advocated as an
alternative to electoral strategy, rather than a vital part of it. In
short, it becomes a variety of militant liberalism.

Second, if ‘street heat’ is held up as strategy, it then becomes
what can be called ‘_the street syndicalist deviation._’ Its
projected means of taking power is mainly through the mass political
strike or general strike. It seeks to avoid exhausting existing
parliamentary means by bypassing them with embryonic instruments of
dual power that will draw the masses away from elections and into
local mass assemblies. If the current conjuncture were one of being on
the cusp of armed insurrection, this would be useful. But most often,
it’s not, and in these conditions, it’s simply the myth of the
general strike as a cover to skip the organization of the means to
take power in government. Gaining government seats, in and of
themselves, are likewise limited. But holding them enables us to
sharpen contradictions and wage battles on a much higher level.

4.4 NEITHER MOVEMENT-BUILDING NOR STREET HEAT ARE MINOR MATTERS. THEY
HAVE BEEN _THE DEFAULT POSITION_ OF THE LEFT AND WIDER PROGRESSIVE
FORCES FOR AT LEAST 50 YEARS. One major reason is the tax code,
allowing exemptions to 501C3-designated groups. The catch is they are
not allowed to tell people to vote for this or that candidate, or this
or that piece of legislation. They have to pull their punches to the
‘education but no endorsement’ boundary. This amounts to a
back-handed federal subsidy to the street-syndicalist deviation,
keeping people in their separate silo and always short of forming and
instrument that can win elections and place socialists and their close
allies in seats of power. We can still form and work with 501C3 group,
but we have to escape the cul-de-sac they can keep us without
alternative forms of organizations.

WHO ARE OUR FRIENDS? WHO ARE OUR ADVERSARIES?

HYPOTHESIS NO. 5. THE KEY QUESTION OF STRATEGY, ‘WHO ARE OUR
FRIENDS, WHO ARE OUR ADVERSARIES,’ WHEN READ CLOSELY, DEMANDS THREE
ANSWERS. The one often overlooked is ‘Who’ is ‘the We’ implied
by ‘Our’? Is it simply the revolutionary party? The left more
widely? The working class? It can be all of these, but a workable
answer is ‘the forces demanding change and a new order.’ Then we
divide it into two, _the critical force_ and _the main force_.

5.1 THE CRITICAL FORCE IS A MILITANT MINORITY, usually young, that
takes a radical action, often disruptive, against an injustice, and
holds a mirror up to society, stating ‘this is what you have become.
Is this what you want to uphold? Or take down?’ Think of the
original Woolworth sit-ins, or John Lewis on the bridge, or Vietnam
vets taking over the Statue of Liberty, or throwing their medals back
at Congress. They can be a powerful expression, even a spectacle that
spans the globe.

5.2 BUT WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE, THE MILITANT MINORITY IS NOT YET
THE MAIN FORCE, the millions of the all the oppressed, alongside the
workers and their close allies. Step by step, these come to form an
insurgent and awakening _progressive majority_, one that ceases to be
the object of history and begins to find their agency, to make
history. They start with less drama, mainly going to meetings,
debating, and voting in elections. But they begin to be protagonists.
The critical force that unites with them will thrive. If they can’t,
they will be trapped in a cul-de-sac and fade away.

5.3 NOW, LET’S TURN TO THE TWO OBVIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT ADVERSARIES
AND FRIENDS. Our adversary is usually defined as capitalism in its
neoliberal mode. This is fine, but it’s at a very high level of
abstraction. It’s useful to analyze capitalism at various levels of
abstraction, as Marx does with genius in _Capital_. But we’re doing
something different. We want to overthrow a particular capitalism as
rooted in our country and as its current forms hold us down today
where we are. There are a variety of capitalisms in our world, and
while they have much in common, they vary from place to place. Our
capitalism in the U.S. started as a _racialized capitalism_ from the
start, and one that spent at least half its life growing from a
_settler-colonial slave republic_ into today’s hybrid of racialized
neoliberal capitalism with both global and national dimensions.

5.4 BUT HOW DOES THAT BREAK DOWN ON THE TERRAIN TODAY? One certainty
is we do not want to fight all our adversaries at once. Where to make
the first cut? One prominent feature of our last 40 years and its
miseries is the vast expansion of the financial sector, where
capitalism often ‘makes money’ while not creating new wealth.
Think of financial capital as a globalized cannibal devouring other
sectors and as a vampire feasting of the blood of the wealth creators,
the working classes, here and elsewhere. So we make the first cut
between finance capital and productive capital.

5.5 PRODUCTIVE CAPITAL ALSO DIVIDES INTO TWO, HIGH ROAD AND LOW ROAD.
Low-road capital is familiar to us as an adversary. They are the ones
who brought us the Rust Belt, exported jobs, the climate crisis,
unions at less than 10 percent of the workforce, and flat wages for
forty years. High road capital is less familiar but it exists. They
want to make money from a stable, skilled and unionized workforce.
They don’t mind protecting the environment, and will even try to
find ways to make money doing it through green innovation. But they
still will drive a hard bargain with their workers for their own
profits. What begins to take shape as our key adversary, then, is
_racialized finance capital and its low road partners_ here and around
the globe. High road capital in many instances – creating jobs for a
Green New Deal – can be a tactical ally. Likewise, in the financial
sector, a recent ‘Green Bloc’ has taken shape that thinks a green
industrial revolution is a wise bet for future long-term investors.
Even if most of their kind are wrapped up in the day-trading casinos
of pure speculation without investment, they are willing to explore a
new venture. To take on the climate change emergencies quickly, they
will have to be part of the solution.

5.6 SO WHY DOES ‘RACIALIZED’ MATTER? It’s not simply that
capitalism on this continent started with the expropriation of African
labor and natives’ lands, alongside the exploitation of indentured
European laborers. It’s that every feature of capitalist production
was shaped by ‘race’ – chain gangs for ‘vagrants’ after the
defeat of reconstruction, debt peonage for Black and Mexicans and
Chicanos, Chinese ‘coolie’ labor on the railroads followed by
exclusion, resource confiscation from Native lands, and Jim Crow
extending up to the 1960s and beyond. Abstractly, there is only one
working class here. But in daily life, racialized hierarchies existed
and still exist in major industries and workplaces, not to mention
neighborhoods and schools. It’s not the distant past, but the past
persisting in various ways, old and new, well into the present day.

THE ‘WHITE RACE’

HYPOTHESIS NO. 6. OUR ADVERSARIES, AS GRAMSCI HAS TAUGHT US, DON’T
LIKE TO RULE BY FORCE ALONE. They aim to combine coercion with
consent, using persuasion, direct and hidden. In our racialized
capitalism, the primary way was through the ‘invention’ or social
construction of ‘the white race’ along with all the subaltern
‘color races’ that partnered with it. By ceding undue advantages
to European laborers early on, making them ‘white’ as something
they shared with the upper crust, the colonial elite was able to form
a white united front with labor in the white-skin. So as long as you
could maintain the ‘common sense’ that there was such a thing as
the ‘white race’ and those with pale European skin were members of
it, the ruling elites had a form of social control. They had a form of
consent, conscious or unconscious, that could divide the whites from
the rest, and even the ‘red’, ‘yellow’, and ‘brown’
against each other as well. The ‘common sense’ of the white race
enabled African slavery and Native dispersal to grow and thrive. Even
after the 13th Amendment partially abolishing slavery, the ‘white
race’ continued its grip in the conflicted consciousness of the
masses, and allowed the reformation of slavery in other forms and
names up to the present.

6.1 IF WE ABOLISH THE ‘WHITE RACE,’ DON’T WE ABOLISH THE
‘BLACK RACE’ TOO? It’s a fruitful question often asked. The
straightforward answer is ‘yes.’ The descendants of Africans here
are no more a ‘race’ than the descendants of Europeans.
Biologically speaking, there is only one race, the human. But this
opens an important question. What are African Americans? Due to their
conditions of bondage and oppression in the Deep South, Africans
brought here from diverse tribes, languages, and religions developed
into a new and distinct people with their own culture, language,
economic stations, and religion. They have been variously called
Colored, Negro, Black, and now African American. But just as
Irish-Americans are no longer much like their Irish ancestors, the
same is true of Blacks and Chicanos. They are all components of the
demographic of the United States of America, but they are also
distinct nationalities within a multi-national country. Original
national ancestry, from here or elsewhere, is not a ‘race.’ And
the sooner we can get rid of this old order category in our thinking,
the easier a more democratic class and national consciousness can
emerge from what Marx called ‘all the old muck.’

_Carl Davidson is a national committee member of Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Left Roots Compa and a
member of Steel Valley DSA. He edits LeftLinks and founded the Online
University of the Left, [link removed] [[link removed]] He lives
in Beaver County, Western PA, and is also a member of the United Steel
Workers activist local for retirees. _
 
_Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the executive editor of
globalafricanworker.com, a past president of TransAfrica Forum, and a
long-time leftist and trade unionist._
 
 

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