[News] Build and Fight: Beyond Trump and the Limitations of the United Front

[Anti-Imperialist News]

    January 23, 2017

http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/2017/01/build-and-fight-beyond-trump-and.html


      Build and Fight: Beyond Trump and the Limitations of the United Front

*Kali Akuno and Doug Norberg*
*
*
On Inauguration Day, we note the considerable range of the opposition to 
Trump, from traditional activists to very mainstream folks. In many 
respects the opposition mounted was unprecedented, on a day where 
patriotic and jingoistic hyperbole is typically concentrated and loudly 
broadcast more than at any other time, and when, traditionally, new 
Presidents make appeals to the heart and to democratic unity while all 
who know how false the claims are, bite their lips, party, and hope for 
the best. The opposition struggling to find expression is broad and 
deep. But, nearly all expressions of opposition are resorting to 
traditional methods of reformist oriented protest while millions of 
people throughout the United States and the world are discussing and 
debating how they are going to survive and resist the emerging 
Presidential regime of Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing populism 
and a resurgent “America first” white nationalism.

Given the nature of Trump’s politics and how he came to power, 
comparisons abound between him and Hitler. Some of these comparisons are 
compelling; several are strategically and tactically instructive for our 
present predicament. But, while most activists focus on how and why 
Trump captured the Presidency, or the nature of an ascending 
neo-Confederacy, most do not address the crisis itself. Nor what the 
crisis practically implies, and when, where, and how the Left and the 
people’s movements can and must intervene to produce desired outcomes.

The crisis in question is the crisis of the capitalist world-system, 
which has entered a profound state of economic and ecological imbalance, 
social instability, inter-imperialist infighting, mass displacement, 
increased suffering and rampant carnage not experienced on this scale at 
a global level since the 1930’s. The crisis is rooted in the inherent 
contradictions of the capitalist system, such as the tendency of the 
rate of profit to fall, the need for constant expansion, uneven 
development within and between socio-political units, and ecological 
externalization, to name a few. The “Great Depression” of the 1930’s led 
to the second great inter-imperialist war, more commonly known as World 
War II, which lasted from1936 through 1945. The process of “creative 
destruction”, which war under capitalism facilities, ended the 
depression and ushered in a new era in the imperialist system, the era 
of U.S. hegemony.

The first 20 years of U.S. global domination was perhaps the greatest 
period of sustained capital realization in the 400 plus year history of 
the inhumane capitalist system. This exceptional period, from the 
mid-1940’s through the mid-1960’s, was the product of successfully 
implementing world-system regulating instruments crafted by U.S. 
imperialism to structure the process of capital accumulation on a global 
scale, mediate inter-imperialist rivalry, suppress and corrupt the 
national liberation and communist movements, and contain the Socialist 
countries within the Cold War framework. The primary instruments crafted 
by U.S. imperialism on the economic side were the Bretton Woods 
institutions, consisting of the World Bank, the International Monetary 
Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on Tariff’s and Trade (GATT), and its 
successor the World Trade Organization (WTO).And grand recapitalization 
initiatives like the Marshall Plan (which rebuilt the economies of 
Western Europe after second Inter-Imperialist War).On the political side 
the primary instruments crafted by U.S. imperialism were the United 
Nations (UN), the European Union, and a host of regional instruments 
like the Organization of American States (OAS), and all enforced by the 
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Beginning in the 1970’s in the effort to restore profitability, capital 
slowly rejected the Keynesian strategy of capital accumulation adopted 
in the 1930’s, and gradually adopted a cannibalistic strategy that 
focused on privatizing public assets, destroying workers organizations 
and social solidarity, commodifying as many social processes, 
interactions and exchanges as could be monetized, and the evisceration 
of the symbolic and false trappings of western bourgeois democracy. This 
new strategy of capital accumulation is typically called 
“neo-liberalism”. Neo-liberalism was first adopted wholesale by the 
murderous Pinochet regime in Chile in the 1970’s. It was forced 
wholesale upon the world once it became the official strategy, 
ideological framework, and statecraft of the Reagan regime in the 
1980’s. It was instituted domestically through the Volcker Shock at the 
Federal Reserve and the policies of Reaganomics. And internationally, it 
was primarily instituted through the IMF and World Bank that imposed 
neo-liberal “structural adjustment programs” on all the nations that 
suffered through the debt crisis of the 1980’s.

As we know from history, nothing remains static. The neo-liberal 
strategy of capital accumulation and class restoration began to lose 
both economic momentum and political coherence in the late 1990’s. The 
fragmentation started with the Asian Financial Crisis and the Dot.com 
bubble implosion of the late 1990’s. Despite the enormous amount of 
profit the neo-liberal corrective was rendering to the trans-national 
capitalist class, all it was delivering to the working class on a 
universal basis was shock, awe, and misery. From the late 1990’s on, 
fewer and fewer of the social and political promises advanced by the 
prophets of neo-liberalism could be met as the costs of maintaining the 
Bretton Woods/UN/NATO system increasingly became a hindrance to capital 
accumulation. Working class populations the world over were becoming 
poorer and poorer as the race to the bottom being pursued by the 
trans-national capitalist class kept tightening the screws trying 
desperately to realize a profit and maximum rates of return on 
investment. This stimulated the development of several breakaway 
political movements, like the anti-globalization movement, and state 
reform efforts in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua to name a few.

And then there was U.S. imperial overstretch to tip the scales. The 
invasions and subsequent occupations of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq 
(2003) strained the resources of the U.S. government, weakened its 
military capacity, and soured the credibility of the U.S. It also 
weakened financial markets around the world, which resorted to ever 
larger and deeper extortion measures, like the financial runs on 
Argentina, Uruguay, and Myanmar, and the eventual cannibalization of 
international financial institutions during the collapse of the housing 
bubble in 2007 – 2008, like Countrywide Financial, Northern Rock, Bear 
Sterns, Wachovia and many others. The housing bubble burst caught the 
U.S. government and the forces of trans-national capital flatfooted, 
resulting in the so-called “Great Recession” and the fictitious recovery 
we are living through now.

By every measure the world-system is set for another major global 
calamity, but with even higher stakes, given the depth of the climate 
and ecological crisis produced by the exploit and plunder, expand-or-die 
capitalist mode of production. The result?Given the present balance of 
forces throughout the world, we are either facing another great 
inter-imperialist war that will result in massive destruction and the 
likely creation of a new “pecking order” of the capitalist world system 
as occurred in the 1940’s. Or the global war will produce no imperialist 
winners, but only result in dystopian barbarism, the collapse of 
“civilization”, and the likely fulfillment of the 6^th great extinction 
event that many are coming to see as virtually inevitable.

We have to ask ourselves, are there other options? Other possibilities? 
And if there are, what must we do to bring these into being?

We have to start with a clear understanding that the “liberal” center of 
the world-system is exhausted, bankrupt, and cannot hold. Resistance is 
growing and is just beginning to develop a revolutionary imagination, 
and address the imperative need for revolutionary organization and 
strategic focus. The relatively spontaneous, reactive, and largely 
reform-minded movements we see in North America and Europe, from the 
center-left (liberals and social democrats) and the right, against the 
predominant neo-liberal order reveals that there is tremendous potential 
for change. However, the change will only be substantive and beneficial 
to humanity if what replaces our present unethical and inequitable world 
is truly emancipatory. Spontaneity will not get us there, nor will the 
liberals, centrists, or the resurgent forces of the right. A 
revolutionary force is needed, one that is not yet born.

We argue, that the salvation of the human family is up to us – the 
revolutionary left and the people’s movements. We must find a way to 
align and unite our fragmented forces, and form a revolutionary, 
counter-hegemonic force.

Some of the fundamental questions confronting emergent revolutionary 
forces are how will the developing anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist 
struggle be unified? How will the revolutionary political forces develop 
and struggle? And where should and will they aim their strategic focus? 
As these forces develop and struggle for political and strategic 
clarity, they will have to confront and overcome the demons that have 
weakened revolutionary forces over the last several hundred years – 
internal democracy, hierarchy, sexism, patriarchy, heterosexism, 
Eurocentrism and settler-colonialism, white supremacy, xenophobia, the 
mental/manual division of labor, electoral fixations, economism, 
revisionism, and reformism. While all of these issues are of equal 
weight, the last three issues are of particular short-term concern in 
the U.S. context, because if the struggle against them mishandled, it 
will result in the emerging resistance movement being subject to the 
forces and agenda of liberal faction of U.S. imperialism, the Democratic 
Party.

So, the question, how do we play a leading role in facilitating and 
directing the current motion of resistance and transform it into a 
revolutionary movement is paramount. The orthodox left urging in times 
and conditions similar to these are to organize “popular”, “united”, or 
“national” fronts to unite all who can be united in the struggle against 
fascism. But these calls rarely take into account the inequality or lack 
of political parity of the “uniting” forces, and have usually blurred or 
ignored the difference between the fundamental unity required in 
strategic alliances, and the temporary or limited unity of tactical 
alliances. United fronts (in which all parties agree to subordinate or 
postpone their “secondary issues”) are necessary to mount massive 
campaigns of resistance against right-wing dictatorships and/or fascist 
regimes; but they have proven woefully inadequate as vehicles of 
revolutionary social transformation. They are therefore necessary 
tactically for defense, but insufficient for the purposes of 
strategically advancing a revolutionary program.

At best, “united fronts” are instruments for restoring the status quo 
ante, which in our case is the neo-liberal capitalist-imperialist order 
that has dominated U.S. political economy since the 1980’s. The failure 
of this order created the political vacuum that produced Trump and the 
resurgence of white nationalism and neo-fascism. Restoring the failed 
neo-liberal order is no solution. Nor is the attempt to campaign for the 
restoration of the welfare or social democratic state a solution, as it 
to was (and is) a strategy to maximize profits and pacify and disempower 
the working class, not social liberation.

Many of the current liberal, progressive, and left-leaning discussions 
about how to resist Trump and the neo-Confederates reflect the 
limitations of this “united front” approach. Some, like Sanders and 
Nader, project a combination left-right unity for economic collaboration 
with the emerging neo-fascist regime.Others, like Nancy Pelosi, says 
“the country can withstand the election of Donald Trump,” why it's 
important to take a breath and why she says Democrats are doing the 
Lord's work.

Other democratic pundits strike a laissez-faire “populist” tone, 
exemplified by the “Wait for the Government to Collapse and then your in 
Power” article in Politico, saying “the most likely outcome of this 
Republican government is probably failure, which is a horrible thing for 
the country but actually a very convenient one for the Democratic Party. 
So follow that strategy, disassociate yourself from the outcomes, wait 
for the government to collapse and then you’re in power again.”It’s the 
old mad illusion of democratic pendulum swings, but with a caveat:“this 
is bad for the country and the way things go badly might result in 
horrific tragedies, so that’s a grim prospect, but if you’re simply 
analyzing the political calculation, that’s available to the Democrats…. 
at times they’re going to have to balance their political interests 
against policy outcomes. So if you have a chance to bargain with the 
Trump regime, in a way that averts humanitarian catastrophe, you could 
trade away some of your political leverage to do so, to negotiate minor 
details on Obamacare so that you can avoid subjecting millions of people 
to hardship, then that’s probably worth doing. Climate would be another 
area where that kind of bargain is worth doing—giving them bipartisan 
cover in order to mitigate the damage of the policy agenda. But 
otherwise, if you’re just analyzing what’s in the political best 
interest, it’s almost never to cooperate.”

Such arguments are promoted by liberal Democratic figures and echoed by 
reform-careerists, in order to hold more privileged “middle-class” folks 
to a loyalist agenda, and in order to silence more radical and demanding 
activists and critics.In other words, Democrats should ride the 
discontent and direct it toward non-involvement with Trump initiatives, 
so the pendulum will swing back mechanically to the Democratic Party 
retaking power.Many will, (unfortunately in this view) be thrown under 
the bus -- "for the common good."

This argument appeals to the reform left who, long accustomed to playing 
the single-issue reformist game a la “NGOism”, who will fit right in and 
help throw radicals and all manner of anti-system activists – like those 
struggling against the police, prisons, poor education, inadequate 
health and childcare, substandard and unaffordable housing, 
gentrification, domestic violence, anti-surveillance, whistleblower, 
animal rights, transphobia, climate justice, Islamophobia, BDS, 
anti-fascism, etc. – under the bus for "the greater good", so as not to 
spoil the "strategic deal” of a projected pendulum reversal.

But the views of the millions "thrown under the bus" historically and 
today are not unknown, though routinely denied, dismissed, deemed 
divisive, and often outright criminalized. Many activists are easily 
swayed by such arguments, in part because of decades of single-issue 
reformism, and also the utility of commonplace appeals to “united 
fronts” historically, which have not been critically examined. In times 
of great capitalist crisis, severe systemic repressions combined with 
age-old oppressions throw many people on the defensive, and often move 
many to be dismissive of attempts at revolutionary challenges to the 
system. In such a time it’s crucial to examine these illusory 
“pragmatic” maneuvers (surrenders) against the reality, from the 
perspective of those who have been, and will be, thrown under the bus – 
the unmentionables and untouchables throughout the US political arenas.

We have to counter the narrowness of the standard “united front” 
approach and build a political force and a social movement that aims for 
social and economic emancipation, and not just a restoration of the 
“good ole bad days” of the Obama era or the 1950’s and 60’s. This force 
must be built by the broad totality of the working class in all of its 
(ethnic, racial, national, spiritual, and gender) diversity, serve its 
broad interests, and be self-organized and self-directed. By working 
class, we do not mean a narrow, monolithic subject of the AFL-CIO trade 
union ideal--the old, idealized, white, heterosexual, male-bodied, 
industrial worker. The working class encompasses all those who are 
structurally dispossessed from owning and controlling the means of 
production, and whom are dependent upon selling their labor, labor 
power, or their bodies and reproductive capacity in order to survive. 
This includes everyone from computer programmers to sex workers, from 
teachers and waged-slaved doctors (both traditional and alternative) to 
farm workers, from prisoners to the structurally unemployed, and to the 
vast numbers of unrecognized “gray market” workers in household, 
caregiving, home and auto maintenance, food preparers, and others. Given 
the increasing automation of production, this force must call for and 
organize a liberatory program based on the decolonization of land and 
knowledge systems, the democratization of the productive forces, the 
full automation of the productive forces, the decarbonization of the 
economy, the full democratization of markets and the processes value 
exchange, and a regenerative social order based on zero-waste the 
restoration of the biosphere.

This is not a vision and a program that can be led and advanced by a 
narrowly focused “united” or “popular” front and the convoluted 
class-interests that such unequal alliances represent. Given the urgency 
of the situation, particularly from an ecological perspective, the 
universal interests of the working class cannot be entrusted to and 
constricted by liberal bourgeois forces of privilege, whom historically 
tend to dominate popular and united fronts with their positionality and 
resources, and who often intentionally work to dilute and obscure the 
politics of struggle for social (class, national, racial, sexual, and 
gender) liberation in order to sustain their position and preserve the 
bourgeois order.

The key to understanding and acting in a revolutionary manner in a 
period of profound social instability and upheaval is to recognize and 
rally forces to the strategic emancipatory opportunity, even while 
uniting broadly for defense against the serious threats and attacks. The 
fragmentation of power, of social hegemony, means that there is space 
for revolutionary interjection, intervention, and innovation from 
subaltern class forces. What we lack is the organization, resources, and 
initiative to intervene in sustained and determined manner. But, these 
are not normal times, and the opportunities to create the means of 
seizing the initiative can be found and created. Capitalism is driving 
humanity and all complex life on earth to the brink of extinction. 
Trump, the Tea-Party neo-Confederates, and the rising neo-Fascist forces 
throughout the world are just a reflection of this dynamic of collapse. 
The situation demands that we, the Left and the People’s Movements, rise 
to the occasion. Although profoundly difficult, history says we can. Let 
us make this era the most luminous period in human history.

We can.
We must.
We will.
-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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