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Socialism on the Ropes

 

 

Glenn Greenwald, a free speech crusader with oscillating political commitments, made an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show on August 31, offering his wisdom to the right-wing host concerning the disagreement between Cornel West and Bernie Sanders on West’s decision to run for President of the United States on a third-party platform. The interview came after West appeared on Charlamagne tha God’s Breakfast Club programme, where he accused Sanders of lying to people about the possibility that a second Biden administration would implement any meaningful social reforms. Shortly after this appearance, Sanders counter-appeared on CNN to basically agree with West that he supports Joe Biden because he believes that the Republican assault on democracy is the most serious existential threat facing the nation. Sanders calls on Biden to bring the entire progressive community together to defeat Donald Trump or whoever will be the Republican nominee. Incidentally, this is merely the latest failed effort to compare Biden to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this time as the American leader of a Popular Front against fascism. This is a hard sell for a president who works behind the scenes to curtail labour struggles, allows corporation to price gouge citizens and threatens humanity with nuclear annihilation. Shortly after this, on the programme Rising, West said that Sanders, AOC and the Squad understand that the Democratic Party has no intention of speaking to the needs of poor working people and that this left flank of the party has been reduced to window dressing for one of the two players in the corporate duopoly.

Concerning all of this, Greenwald stated: “Cornel West has always been a critic of the Democratic Party. He’s never liked the Democratic Party, but he’s maintained one foot inside of it. … One major problem for the Democrats is that he is a very respected black intellectual – very popular among black voters on whom Democrats rely in every election to win, but he’s also I think somebody people are going to start to see who has this ability to speak to working-class people in a way that makes them feel like they’re not hearing stale left-wing dogma. He’s exciting, he’s charismatic, he’s funny, he’s very human, he produces music, he sings, he’ll break into song in the middle of interviews … And I think he poses a huge threat to the Democratic Party because even if he takes only two or three percent from Joe Biden, obviously it could make a difference in the way our elections are run.”1

All of this is true, for the most part. It is true that Cornel West does not ascribe to left-wing dogma. He is better known to navigate the middle zone between tendencies in the name of Christian love rather than Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. For West, this explains his commitment to the black prophetic tradition that bears witness to human suffering, rejects callous indifference and stands among those who struggle for a better world. With West there is a high degree of moral criticism that one does not necessarily find in the work of Marxist, socialist and communist leaders. The more recent left-wing leaders in the United States, people like Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders, have had to demonstrate their American belonging by combining populism, pragmatism, a connection to the grassroots, or something that says to the public: don’t worry, I’m not a crazy communist. Beyond that, West is an unusually compassionate individual, especially for someone with academic bona fides worthy of the country’s thought leaders, a public intellectual with an agenda that is as impressive as Bob Dylan’s, and a self-professed jazzman who has an ear for the complexity that makes a composition worth playing.

It is not that communist leaders and intellectuals have not possessed similar qualities, it is just that Greenwald has no interest in knowing about them. This is a political choice, and it is one that has characterized American politics since the Cold War. Almost like W.E.B. Du Bois’ colour line, it is a dividing line that intersects everything in the U.S., from the colours of the flag to the colour of the red trunks that the fictional Rocky Balboa was given in his first match as a designated fall guy. Since at least the 1960s, the role that the colour line has played in the U.S. has followed this Cold War script. One of the more confusing elements in all of this, after the decline and eradication of socialism in the McCarthy era, is the appearance of revolutionary black militancy, which retained some aspects of the prophetic tradition but combined this with revolutionary Marxism and anti-colonialism. This glitch in the image of imperial American capitalism is something that West understands first hand, but West also understands it as a Christian commitment to everyday people rather than a Marxist commitment to the mode of production, not unlike a Walter Benjamin with a predisposition for soul music. And so we hear at least three chords in West’s playing: the black prophetic tradition, American anti-communism and a race-oriented revolutionary ideology. No doubt there are more elements than this, but these are the ones that stand out to me.    

In relation to the race and class issue, or identity and class, it was most interesting to hear Cornel West being interviewed on September 7 on The Jimmy Dore Show. It was a terrible interview, but it was also instructive. Dore began the segment with condescending reassurances that whatever criticisms he has made of West’s campaign to date, he has made these with the hope that they will help his campaign. Dore challenged West to educate people about what is happening. West responded that it is important to lift every voice, which here again, is not the usual communist programme since it has no strategic applicability. It mostly makes sense as oratory and rhetoric. It is nevertheless as close as you can get to the elementary political principles of revolutionary bourgeois ideology: freedom, equality, solidarity. Dore agrees with West that Sanders has sold out his supporters by asking them to endorse Biden but disagrees with him about giving any conciliatory words towards Sanders, which Dore suggests encourages voting for a lesser evil. “You’re shooting yourself in the dick right from the start,” the shock jock asserts.2 This point is one of several stratagems used by Dore to make West seem foolish and make himself seem like a shrewder player. Dore could do this easily enough because he could count on the fact that West likes to lift every voice – even the voice of a populist who straddles both sides of the left-right spectrum – and play along for a while to see where the conversation will lead them.

Citing Russiagate and the current threat of nuclear exchange with Russia or China, Dore excoriated Biden and some of the other failings of the Democratic Party, like mass incarceration. West argued in not so many words that Dore was attacking Biden from the right, making Trump seem like the lesser of two evils. One of Dore’s strongest planks in this interview is the way in which the Democratic Party has limited progressive reform to diversity and identity politics. This is perhaps true for the average Democratic Party supporter, but it can hardly be said to be true for the party itself, which only uses anti-discrimination to advance a neoliberal agenda. This incongruence is then made into a line of attack through which Dore assails the woke agenda in a manner that is indistinguishable from right-wing attacks on wokeism. In a style that is worthy of Father Coughlin, Dore accuses Biden of being an enemy of the worker and a stooge of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. What West should be doing, he argues, is bringing together disaffected Republican voters, independents and others who feel alienated by the political system. Dore is here promoting a populist alliance of the alienated, which has nothing to do with socialism, and is using class as his ballast. Dore’s political disorientation becomes more obvious as he then baits West about the attention given to identity, race and sexuality issues, with gay, lesbian and trans rights a sticking point for Dore.

For Dore, the Democrats long ago abandoned the working class in favour of cultural issues “and now,” he says, “that’s all the Democrats have to run on.” On this point he makes one of many equivocations: the Democrats run on trans rights and on calling Trump a fascist. This collage aesthetic, which by itself makes about as much sense as the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, is rejected by West as a means to bypass deep reflection and analysis. The strategy is nevertheless effective as an alt-right provocation and West failed to some extent to fight Dore’s snotty punk fire with a prophetic jazz response. Dore then lays it on: “The role of a third party is to focus not on the identity politics that divide us, but on the core economic issues that unite along class lines, like Christian Smalls did at Staten Island. Do you think that he led with LGBTQ trans rights and white supremacy? Or do you think he organized around class lines?”  

Now, any podcast pundit, including the Rational National David Dole and the gossip queens at The Vanguard and Serf Times, understands what a softball pitch this is for West. All that one has to do is reject class reductionism and the game is won, like Sabby Sabs did by responding that “race is class and class is race.”3 Wow. Of course, West is not playing for a farm league but is a veteran player. He thanked Dore for his candour – in other words, for saying the quiet parts out loud. This means two things: 1) from the left, touching on the core of the problem, 2) from the right, evading the problem through discriminatory diversion.

West argued that when he speaks of white supremacy, he is not making a utilitarian calculation, but rather that he is coming from a tradition and a people who have been traumatized by white elites. This is perhaps acceptable as a response to point 2, but it is inadequate as a response to point 1. Thinkers like Adolph Reed or Cedric Johnson would have handled the question very differently, and more adequately, but West is an intellectual who fights and loves from a black perspective first and foremost. One problem is that the critique of white supremacy, like the critique of patriarchy and heterosexism, is in fact a utilitarian calculation on the part of most people who today advance these kinds of arguments, which is why it is so easily adduced to the concerns and strategies of the professional-managerial class and to petty-bourgeois politics. But West did not want to get into that discussion, and this is why he prefers Christian moralism, which is a winner every time, even when you are burning at the stake. West assures Dore that class issues are “crucial” and “fundamental,” but that class does not imply the tolerance of white supremacy. No leftist would disagree with that statement. However, West goes one further, saying: “one of the problems is that you get too many folk who want to talk about class, class, class, and can’t say a mumbling word about white supremacy, police brutality … or when they do say it, you call it identity politics, as if it’s not connected to class politics.” West answers Dore that he is hitting all of these head on but that he will never be silent regarding the treatment of black people, Indigenous people, gay brothers, lesbian sisters and trans. “It’s not an either-or,” he says, “and that’s where you and I have a deep, profound disappointment [sic: disagreement].” Who and what does Dore imply when he speaks of the common interest, West asks. Is Dore only referring to the majority? Dore responds that in his reply, West sounds like every other Democrat. I would add that this suspicion of universality as cover for particular interests is not worthy of someone who considers himself a Christian universalist. In these terms, humans are little more than the playthings of an unloving creator. This is why the socialist version of this problem is not that socialists want benefits for workers, but that socialists want humanity to progress beyond the capitalist system. But then, as sinners, or as consumers, we all have our dark sides, and so on and so forth.  

West is correct to point out that he is not like every other Democrat because his platform is far to the left of the Democratic Party, but Dore is correct that West’s handling of the race and class issue, the both-and option that is counterposed to the either-or option, is inadequate and ideologically useful to Democrats, who certainly have no intention of making good on the class aspect of the equation. However, what neither of them discusses, because that is not in the nature of these kinds of interviews, is the fallout of decades of postmodern theory and at least eight years of the race and class debate in the U.S., especially after the election of Trump in 2016. West’s handling of this issue is rather inept if all he has to do is emphasize pain and suffering at the hands of white supremacy. As we all know, anti-racism can be used to support different political agendas. There is no doubt that West’s agenda is a social democratic, or democratic socialist agenda, but there is also a racialist dimension in his approach that has a floating quality that Dore is seeking to pin down. Dore fails to appreciate that for socialists, class is central but not absolute. But West failed to explain that identity politics is not coterminous with radicalism, but has to be incorporated in a radical approach.

In the several years since OWS, the progressive agenda has been monopolized by trends like privilege theory, whiteness studies, intersectionality, decoloniality, Afro-pessimism, and the like. This has been accompanied by a hard return to postmodernism by activists on the new social movement left, which competes with more conventional approaches to emancipatory socialist universalism, which as a Christian, West is also affiliated with. However, West contributed to this postmodern orientation in the 1980s, with for example his work on the “cultural politics of difference,” which was at one time a mainstay in Cultural Studies. If West refers to a black prophetic tradition that arguably reaches back as far as Moses and the ancient Israelites, it is rather this more recent history of postwar theory that defines him as an intellectual and that coincides with many other strands of New Left theory that locate the source of radicalism in agencies other than the working class. It is therefore not for no reason that West did not say a mumbling word about how difference politics has weakened the radical left and served as intellectual handmaiden to the neoliberalization of everything. Anti-oppression difference politics are now used by the above tendencies to reject universality, Enlightenment, liberalism and socialism – all of them denounced as Eurocentric.

In this interview, West did not need to go into the politics of racialism vis-à-vis the politics of universalism because Dore is obviously flirting with fascism, attacking Biden from the right, being equivocal about Trump’s crimes and Stop Cop City protests, baiting West with trans issues, and patronizing the working class in the manner of a right-wing demagogue. Dore’s correct points were therefore muddled in demagoguery and jockeying for prepotency. I tend to agree with Dore nevertheless that if West is to run as president, he needs to be more focused on a universalist approach to policy. Dore confronted West with the fact that the GPUS black caucus in the Green Party said no to mask mandates and obligatory vaccination. West replied that if he had another chance, he would lean more with the GPUS and would call for a truth commission to find out what really happened with COVID-19 and see what voices were marginalized. Here is one of countless instances where lifting all voices makes little to no sense. In the first two years of COVID-19, close to one million Americans died from the disease and today nearly 20 million Americans confront the potential problems that result from having Long COVID. In China, where mandates and measures were followed on the basis of medical science, only 5000 or more people died from the disease in the first two years and before the vaccine rollout was completed. The current commissions on COVID-19 that are underway in the U.S. include McCarthyite interrogations of scientists who have been pushed around by neoliberal and right-wing politicians, many of whom continue to pander deep state propaganda about the origins of the disease emerging from a lab in Wuhan.

Government propaganda does not die when candidates like West act in conciliatory ways towards populist demagogues like Dore. And this is where Christian universalism reaches political limits. A high percentage of back businesses failed during the lockdowns, as Dore mentions, for two reasons: 1) because Americans do not invest in public policy – not because the U.S. is racist and does not want to help poor blacks, but because the U.S. is the most rabidly capitalist nation in the world, enforcing the same policies on people of all races; 2) because small black businesses in poor neighbourhoods fail as a matter of course, this being a matter of social policy in which both racism and anti-racism are used to perpetuate capitalist relations.

The problem here is not infighting on the left, as the hosts of Due Dissidence suggested, it is a matter of knowing what genuine socialism is and what it is not. On the left there are anarchists, social democrats and communists. In the U.S., being “not Republican” is sometimes enough to quality as left, but in most cases, what you have is one version or another of liberalism, which may as well include most of today’s postmodernists, radical democrats, populists and pragmatists. The struggle against oppression is an essential part of the left agenda. Racialism and the kind of race first thinking that Dore tried to push West into is not part of the left agenda.

In addition to this there are problems that have to do with media. The problem with media interviews, and debate more generally, which is why communists are not parliamentarians, is that someone can only present as many ideas as the structure of speech and dialogue allows. Whereas knowledge is comprehensive, dialogue takes place in a piecemeal fashion, which does not allow someone like West to say everything he knows all at once, but it does allow someone like Dore to pose as radical and make dialogue into a form of competition. If we are not to be satisfied that God knows the ultimate truth, we have to rely on social mediation. That is the meaning of the word politics. But what about culture? Everyone, even racists, understands that the U.S. has a vicious legacy of white supremacy that informs contemporary life. The real question is what to do about it. How do you lead? What policies and reforms will be most effective and comprehensive? West’s platform is probably his best answer to Dore’s provocations, but it was not given enough attention. In the same context, Sanders would have droned on with his policy positions and dull talking points. And these would have been enough to get him elected had the party establishment not orchestrated a coup against the Sanders campaign. That dull and dogmatic octogenarian from Vermont led the most exciting campaign in recent memory. 

If issues around race, gender and sexuality are to be an effective part of a movement of the left, they need to be understood and framed in leftist terms. This means reckoning with postmodernism and with contemporary academia. This also means understanding the critical importance of socialism and the labour movement to the Civil Rights legacy. The Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued that culture is a moment in the flow of life, as is philosophy and even religion. As for those who talk only about “class, class, class,” I personally would like to know who they are since what I tend to see is a full-on assault by the petty bourgeoisie and the professional-managerial class on the legacy of the socialist left, which can rarely be mentioned by name in the U.S. except as something foreign or as a historical referent. Not so much something on the order of utopian prophecy as on the order of heresy.

 

Notes

1. Megyn Kelly, “Can Cornel West Play Spoiler in 2024… While Bernie Sanders is Attacking Him? With Glenn Greenwald,” YouTube (August 31, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pFFkBAUoTA.

2. The Jimmy Dore Show, “Cornel West Does 45 Minute Commercial FOR JOE BIDEN!” YouTube (September 7, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeTe9Z7Zkjk.

3. Sabby Sabs, “Jimmy Dore & Cornel West DISAPPOINTING Interview (clip),” YouTube (September 8, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXfb8S8-LkY.

 

 

AN ONLINE VERSION OF MY BOOK LAUNCH IS AVAILABLE AT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEYh9z8NTsU