Fight the war, fuck the norm / Now I got no patience / Sick of complacence … Yes, I know my enemies / They’re the teachers who taught me to fight me / Compromise, conformity / Assimilation, submission / Ignorance, hypocrisy / Brutality, the elite / All of which are American dreams – Rage Against the Machine, ‘Know Your Enemy’
The escalation of the NATO proxy war against Russia and the ultimate goal of the United States to use a “liberated” Russian territory as a springboard for war against China, the U.S.’s main economic competitor, has been accompanied by the cultivation of far-right forces by the establishment and deep state. To date very little has been done to prosecute the government insiders who facilitated the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which one must consider as not simply a pathetic show of force by a disorganized mob, however deadly and whatever the outcome may have been, but as a recruitment advertisement for anyone who is frustrated with the state of things and understands enough about politics to know that the game is rigged in the interest of the billionaires but who lacks the class consciousness to look to anything other than god or country and question the rightward drift of politics. The despair felt by Americans comes immediately after the mishandled COVID pandemic, the failure to do anything significant about crumbling infrastructure, the ongoing tragedy of police murders and mass shootings, the rising cost of living demanded by an inflation strategy designed to suppress wages, and the threat of a major conflagration with at least one nuclear power. While the Joe Biden administration does nothing to steer the ship in the direction of reforms, the Democratic Party gives lip service to workers so that the wealthy can have the compliant work force it requires to carry on with its militarism and surplus accumulation.
One unfortunate development of this situation is the presumption that politics can be defined in moral terms as a medieval peasants versus feudal lords type of populism, as opposed to modern left, right and centre thinking. A symptom of this failure of socialist class consciousness is the call by some for a “Rage Against the War Machine” rally, scheduled for February 19 in Washington D.C. At the outset, one is reminded of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” gathering that took place on the National Mall on October 30, 2010. In this case the rally seeks to restore peace in Ukraine through left and/or right political agendas. The main organizers of the rally are the right-wing Libertarian Party and the populist People’s Party. Speakers at the rally include extreme right wingers like Jackson Hinkle, Ron Paul and Angela McArdle, disoriented social critics like Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal and Tulsi Gabbard, celebrity activists like Chris Hedges and Roger Waters, and progressive politicians like Jill Stein and Dennis Kucinich. The event is sponsored by several anti-war groups, libertarian groups, student unions and NGO activist organizations. While it has been rejected by the high profile Veterans for Peace and Code Pink, this populist red and libertarian brown alliance has been defended by people like Hedges in the name of “mass” politics. Taking a page from discourse theory, an article by Hedges against criticism of the rally displaces Marxism and emancipatory universality in favour of a one-size-fits-all notion of power. Historically, the brunt of demagogic appeals to anti-elitism – if one accepts that this right and left anti-war event constitutes populist demagogy against the powers that be in the U.S. state, which I argue it does – have been borne by scapegoats who are targeted as threats to the volk because they are deemed unlike the rest of us, from bankers to foreigners to ethnic minorities, as well as the poor, weak and vulnerable, like those who must be sacrificed to COVID so that the strong within the herd can survive. The problem with populism is not only that it is not socialism, but that, as demagogy, it is more suited to the political right than the left.
When confronted with top-down oppression, Americans have often been encouraged by the ruling class to fight one another. It may seem that this is not the case when it comes to this event. The argument that is being made is that many working-class people have conservative and right-wing views, and so, if a challenge to American imperialism is to be mounted, leftists should make common cause with right-wing libertarians whose views resemble those of the fascist right. The obvious point to make is that there is nothing socialist about such views. Fascism and the libertarian right serve power, not the working class. However, while some leftists argue with good reason that there is no such thing as right-wing populism, because right-wing populists do not have the interests of the working majority at heart, there nevertheless exists such a thing as right-wing demagogy. The link to the far right is the appeal to “the people” as an organic, usually nationalist and patriotic constituency. One rejects wars abroad not because imperialist plunder is wrong – as with for example Hillary Clinton’s boast “we came, we saw, he died” or Donald Trump’s “we have the oil” – but because it is costing the average taxpayer too much money. The human lives that are at stake in imperialist ambitions and illegal wars are less important than parochial considerations, on the one hand, or, to the extent that such populism is also anti-war, without going so far as to threaten the capitalist system, which for many is preferable to socialism. This, generally speaking, is a problem with all single-issue, affinity and NGO politics.
Populist ideas have gained traction on the left with the view among radical democrats and left populists that working-class politics is essentialist and unable to address the needs and interests of the different demographic constituencies that populate new social movements. This event adds right-wing libertarian groups to the NSM logic of affinity, hashtag and horizontalist citizenism that has already weakened the labour left to a considerable extent. The success of this postmodern approach to socialist demobilization has come home to roost with progressive populists now promoting a Molotov-Ribbentrop event – not a pact since this has no obligations attached – adjusted to the multitudes era of assemblage and assembly. The desperation of this strategy that can only fail follows the more basic contours of contemporary American politics: mobilize the far right to bring the left in line with the interests of the status quo. Some of the tactics used in that plan revolve around identity issues. For example, we now understand that the Democrats never ratified Roe vs Wade because it works effectively as a fear factor with which to garner election votes, support and donations. The majority of African Americans vote for the Democratic Party on the basis of its “progressive” social agenda. Try to convince people of this in Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan or Yemen.
On the whole, the American left, those people to whom one might look to for not only a critique of conservative Republicans, corporate America and the military-industrial complex, but of the neo-liberal class that for two generations has opposed all meaningful reforms, have kept politics nestled in the middle liberal and capitalist zone. Since the McCarthy era, most of the American left, including its countercultural and identity movements, has been anti-socialist and anti-communist. With Scandinavian social democracy as their ideal, the progressives in the professions ignore what is happening in those places and direct the working class in the direction of bourgeois imperialist parties. With brownshirts now on hand, this Never Left, as Ellen Meiksins Wood once referred to it, is trying to look serious by sharing power with some of the same forces it has spent decades warning us against. Since nothing good can come of a red and brown alliance, or purple and taupe, the only correct position on the Rage Against the War Machine rally is to oppose it. I would not suggest that we oppose the individuals who have accepted this desperate compromise, but I do criticize an event that can function to recruit people to the far-right movements that only pose as anti-war. These rightist movements rather support the politics of greed that make wars happen. Criticism of this rally is warranted.
A person who believes in the Christian God would never suggest a pact with the devil. However, someone who fears Armageddon times might be so determined as to extend a hand to the “common man,” viewed in elitist, picturesque and paternalistic terms as someone who is confused about the groups they have allied with. It was sad this week to see Katie Halper and Aaron Maté softball their interview with Hedges on this issue. One imagines that Maté is too closely connected to Blumenthal, who has done some valuable work, to question the latter’s flirtations with the political right on COVID public health measures and on the right-wing lab leak conspiracy. Populism is nevertheless not a socialist politics. Now that Congress has defined socialism along the same lines as the Black Book of Communism, it makes some sense that even people on the left might seek to camouflage their political views, perhaps even to themselves. In his recent critique of “woke imperialism,” Hedges criticizes contemporary identity politics for being devoid of class consciousness. He rails against white supremacy and corporate capitalism, concluding his article with the statement: “Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.” Does he think that libertarian right-wing forces can serve the oppressed?
Neoliberal capitalism has learned to use feminism and anti-racism for its own purposes. It could do this for many reasons, but one of them is the abandonment of emancipatory universality in postmodern academia and in activist circles. The same processes have decimated class consciousness and the resources of the socialist left. On what may seem to many as the ashes of the Marxist project, many new-fangled agendas have emerged, many of them confusing the distinctions between what it means to be oppressed and what it means to be exploited. Many who champion anti-oppression are often unconcerned about those who are exploited. The 2016 Trump victory caused many liberals to mistakenly blame the “white working class” as a group comprised of racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic deplorables. Going 180 degrees in the opposite direction, the attitude here seems to be that progressive liberals were too hard on this constituency – the product of liberal fantasy and paranoia – and should reach out to the only group that is large enough to help them rebuild the middle class. Certainly, they would prefer that to an educated and organized communist movement that wants to tear down the rotten system from both the ground up and the top down. These are the disavowed stakes of this event.
The radical left has always been and must continue to be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-austerity, anti-oppression and anti-fascist all at once. It is not that the left is simply anti-everything, but that its vision is not based on what currently exists. Nothing about climate catastrophe, billionaire oligarchy and militarism changes this basic fact. Once the American left has again understood itself as a left, it will be better able to align with socialist forces outside the U.S. This is what the Wall Street establishment fears more than anything else, if only because, aside from great power competition, the organized working class is the only threat to its engineering of windfall profits. Socialism is the answer to most of the pressing problems on the domestic scene in the U.S. It is also a better answer to American imperialism than deregulation, pay cuts, anti-Semitism or abolishing the minimum wage. Now is not the time to lose the insight into what it is that sparked a mass movement around Occupy Wall Street, the expansion of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Sanders campaigns: namely, the idea of socialism. This insight must be strengthened through alliances across the left, against every form of right-wing politics and with an eye to moving beyond the limits of the capitalist system of social relations based on profit accumulation, private property and exploitation. A left that rejects right-wing politics and maintains its integrity, which alone can inspire mass participation over the long term, can find better company with which to rally against the WWIII that G.I. Joe and the trash in government are so eager to perpetrate.
references
Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Chris Hedges, “There Are No Permanent Allies, Only Permanent Power,” The Chris Hedges Report (February 12, 2023), https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/there-are-no-permanent-allies-only.
Chris Hedges, “Woke Imperialism,” Scheerpost (February 5, 2023), https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/05/chris-hedges-woke-imperialism/.
Joseph Kishore, “‘Rage Against the War Machine’ rally promotes alliance between the ‘left’ and the extreme right,” World Socialist Web Site (February 16, 2023), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/16/pers-f16.html.
Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left Nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1983] 1986).
usefulidiots, “Chris Hedges Rallies for a Left-Right Coalition,” YouTube (February 17, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmcduy2Nq-o.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso, [1986] 1998).
Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” Critical Inquiry 32:3 (Spring 2006) 551-74.