Archive for category: Strategy

Left political strategies have traditionally divided between social democratic parliamentarism and the Leninist idea of “smashing the state.” Nicos Poulantzas argued that neither strategy was adequate and developed his own vision of “revolutionary reformism.”

The Petrograd Soviet in 1917. (Wikimedia Commons)

The publication of Nicos Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes (1968) and Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) initiated a return to the question of the state in political science and sociology after a long hiatus during which mainstream social scientists had discarded the concept. Since that time, there has been an ongoing preoccupation with theories of the capitalist state among scholars. Meanwhile, the return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.

Tactics comprise immediate actions, or methods of conduct, that are carefully planned for the purpose of reaching a clearly defined goal. However, most contemporary Marxists often fail to distinguish between strategy (long-term goals) and tactics (immediate actions). What should be the long-term goal of left political tactics, and does a theory of the capitalist state provide any answer to that question beyond abstract calls for a transition to socialism?

Road Signs

When Poulantzas published his last book, State, Power, Socialism, in 1978, he did so partly because he was intrigued by the question of democratic socialism in the context of the rise of Eurocommunism in Italy, Spain, and France. This development raised the question of the role of the state in the transition to socialism. The reemergence of democratic socialism thus required political theorists and political activists to rethink the question of socialist strategy.

The return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.

Poulantzas argued that a theory of the capitalist state could provide important insights into the role of the state during the transition to socialism. However, he observed that one could not deduce political strategy from such a theory, which could

never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guides to action, but at the very most in the manner of road signs. A “model” of the State of transition to socialism cannot be drawn up: not as a universal model capable of being concretized in given cases, nor even as an infallible, theoretically guaranteed recipe for one or several countries.

Poulantzas emphasized that there was “always a structural distance between theory and practice, between theory and the real.” This was a gap that could only be bridged by strategic decisions made by those engaged in the real class struggle.

With that said, what guides to action and road signs do Poulantzas’s theory of the capitalist state suggest for democratic socialism and socialist strategy today?

Winning the Battle

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined the long-term strategic goal of socialist tactics in The Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” Marx and Engels argued that “the first step in the revolution by the working class” was “to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”

Marx and Engels argued that ‘the first step in the revolution by the working class’ was ‘to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.’

Every important Marxist political theorist of the twentieth century embraced this strategic principle. Eduard Bernstein argued that “democracy is a condition of socialism” and his contemporary Karl Kautsky claimed that “socialism without democracy is unthinkable.” Similarly, in her critique of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg declared that “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution.”

Even Lenin himself had earlier endorsed a tactical resolution adopted by the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which proclaimed that

the direct interests of the proletariat and the interests of its struggle for the final aims of socialism require the fullest possible measure of political liberty and, consequently, the replacement of the autocratic form of government by a democratic republic.

Unfortunately, a century later, we are far from having won the battle for democracy. If anything, we are now faced with the prospect of its demise throughout the world, including the Western liberal democracies.

At a time when Nicos Poulantzas was also concerned about the rise of authoritarian statism, he pointed out that it was not enough to assert that we want democratic socialism. It was necessary, he insisted, to clearly formulate strategic demands about what a democratic socialist form of societal self-governance would entail as an institutional form, i.e., a transitional democratic socialist state.

Two Strategies

In some of his earliest writings as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx embraced “bourgeois democracy” as a political advance for the working class. He considered it an essential political shell for the further development of the proletariat as a class.

The most basic foundation for “democracy” was universal suffrage. However, in writings such as The Communist Manifesto, the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1849), and the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx advocated an expansive program of social and economic democracy that rested upon a heavily graduated income tax (fiscal policy), a strong central bank (monetary policy), and public investment in industry, transportation, communications, and agriculture (industrial and employment policy).

At the same time, he called for a variety of programs and policies. These included free public education for all, free legal services, the abolition of consumption taxes, a strong social safety net (unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, housing, health care, etc.), and the complete separation of church and state.

Marx concluded that the Paris Commune ‘was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class.’

In 1872, Marx speculated that in mature liberal democracies, such as the United States, Britain, and Holland, it might be possible for workers to “achieve their aims by peaceful means.” For more than a century, this complex of policies and electoral tactics has largely defined the political program we call social democracy.

However, Marx and Engels changed their thinking about the conquest of political power as a result of the Paris Commune in 1871. Marx concluded that the Commune “was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.” What was different about the Parisian experiment, according to Engels, was that the working class had created a non-state political form of self-governance, while in 1848 it had been “a power in the [capitalist] state” as a result of newly granted universal male suffrage.

What Marx saw in the Commune, as compared to 1848, was a new political form that “breaks the modern state power.” He stressed the need for the proletariat to “transform the traditional working machinery” of the state and “destroy it as an instrument of class rule”:

The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.

Thus, since the late nineteenth century, the Marxist debate on socialist strategy has largely been a contest between the proponents of parliamentary socialism, articulated in works like Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1899), and revolutionaries who insisted on the need to smash the state, as exemplified by Lenin’s pamphlet State and Revolution (1917).

Democratic Roads to Socialism

There is no question that in most of his writings, Poulantzas advocated a strategy in line with the second school of thought. In 1975, for instance, he made the following argument:

The transition to socialism cannot take place by a simple shift in state power (the working class and its allies replacing the bourgeoisie); this transition requires the state apparatuses to be smashed, i.e., it is not just a question of replacing the heads of these apparatuses, but of a radical transformation in their actual organizational structure.

However, in State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position:

There is no longer a place for what has traditionally been called smashing or destroying that [state] apparatus . . . the term smashing, which Marx too used for indicative purposes, came in the end to designate a very precise historical phenomenon: namely, the eradication of any kind of representative democracy or “formal” liberties in favour purely of direct, rank-and-file democracy and so-called real liberties . . . if we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents, then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick.

At the same time, Poulantzas still included the following warning:

It would be an error fraught with serious political consequences to conclude from the presence of the popular classes in the State that they can ever lastingly hold power without a radical transformation of the State . . . the action of the popular masses within the State is a necessary condition of its transformation, but is not itself a sufficient condition.

In his final book, Poulantzas thus defined a strategy of democratic socialism that would incorporate the electoral politics of parliamentary socialism while simultaneously going beyond it to embrace forms of direct democracy. Instead of smashing the state, Poulantzas now envisioned what he called a “radical transformation of the State.”

In his final work, State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position.

That transformation would embrace innovations such as workers’ ownership and self-management, as well as limited forms of “council communism” based on organs of mass democracy (the original meaning of “soviet” in the Russian context). However, Poulantzas believed that these innovations would serve to strengthen, broaden, and deepen the democratic component of a modern democratic republic, instead of challenging and displacing it through a strategy of “dual power,” as occurred during the Russian Revolution.

Discussing the Russian case, Poulantzas argued that by abolishing the newly elected Constituent Assembly at the beginning of 1918, the Bolsheviks had left the state apparatus unsupervised and unregulated in the name of an “all power to the soviets” strategy. This set the stage for a socialist form of authoritarian statism, namely Stalinism, as the decentralized soviets lacked either the political capacity or the technical expertise to direct the day-to-day-activity of a complex modern society on a national scale. He concluded that during a transition to socialism, the institutions of representative democracy should be viewed “not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.”

Democratic Socialism

Poulantzas concluded that democratic socialism was a two-pronged strategy consisting of policy and politics. On the one hand, it entailed a set of policies and programs designed to promote a more egalitarian society based on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This strategy might begin with basic social democratic policies, but it required a radical transformation of what Poulantzas calls the “economic apparatus” — central banks, tax systems, employment and wage policies, trade policies, social insurance — and ultimately would have to result in public and/or workers’ ownership of the means of production.

However, Poulantzas argued that the path toward reaching these goals also necessitated a political strategy — a radical transformation of the State — that would combine a transformed form of representative democracy with direct rank-and-file democracy:

The essential problem of the democratic road to socialism, of democratic socialism, must be posed in a different way: how is it possible radically to transform the State in such a manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy (which were also a conquest of the popular masses) are combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies?

For Poulantzas, this meant that the democratic road to socialism would be a long process that involved “the spreading, development, reinforcement, coordination and direction of those diffuse centers of resistance which the masses always possess within the state networks, in such a way that they become the real centres of power on the strategic terrain of the State.”

In place of the demand for “all power to the soviets,” Poulantzas argued that a left-wing government should immediately begin to integrate popular forms of direct democracy and workers’ self-management into the state. Rather than a situation of dual power with a contest between direct democracy and representative democracy, a single workers’ state should bring the two forms of democracy together.

Consequently, Poulantzas called for a struggle “to modify the relationship of forces with the State, as opposed to a frontal, dual power type of strategy,” which would mean “a sweeping transformation of the state apparatus.” He reiterated his earlier admonition against “building ‘models’ of any kind whatsoever,” emphasizing once again that a theory of the capitalist state could be at best “a set of signposts” for strategic decision-making, but not a road map.

Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform.

These observations from Poulantzas left several questions open. What exactly would it mean to combine a transformed democratic republic with workers’ ownership, self-management, and other forms of direct democracy? However, these observations nonetheless identified a political strategy of constitutional reform which could draw on the insights of state theory, while directing political tactics toward long-term goals beyond mere disruption and protest.

Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform aimed at realigning the structural relationship of the state to the working classes. There can be no socialism without a reinvigorated and more expansive democracy.

Read more

Left political strategies have traditionally divided between social democratic parliamentarism and the Leninist idea of “smashing the state.” Nicos Poulantzas argued that neither strategy was adequate and developed his own vision of “revolutionary reformism.”

The Petrograd Soviet in 1917. (Wikimedia Commons)

The publication of Nicos Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes (1968) and Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) initiated a return to the question of the state in political science and sociology after a long hiatus during which mainstream social scientists had discarded the concept. Since that time, there has been an ongoing preoccupation with theories of the capitalist state among scholars. Meanwhile, the return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.

Tactics comprise immediate actions, or methods of conduct, that are carefully planned for the purpose of reaching a clearly defined goal. However, most contemporary Marxists often fail to distinguish between strategy (long-term goals) and tactics (immediate actions). What should be the long-term goal of left political tactics, and does a theory of the capitalist state provide any answer to that question beyond abstract calls for a transition to socialism?

Road Signs

When Poulantzas published his last book, State, Power, Socialism, in 1978, he did so partly because he was intrigued by the question of democratic socialism in the context of the rise of Eurocommunism in Italy, Spain, and France. This development raised the question of the role of the state in the transition to socialism. The reemergence of democratic socialism thus required political theorists and political activists to rethink the question of socialist strategy.

The return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.

Poulantzas argued that a theory of the capitalist state could provide important insights into the role of the state during the transition to socialism. However, he observed that one could not deduce political strategy from such a theory, which could

never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guides to action, but at the very most in the manner of road signs. A “model” of the State of transition to socialism cannot be drawn up: not as a universal model capable of being concretized in given cases, nor even as an infallible, theoretically guaranteed recipe for one or several countries.

Poulantzas emphasized that there was “always a structural distance between theory and practice, between theory and the real.” This was a gap that could only be bridged by strategic decisions made by those engaged in the real class struggle.

With that said, what guides to action and road signs do Poulantzas’s theory of the capitalist state suggest for democratic socialism and socialist strategy today?

Winning the Battle

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined the long-term strategic goal of socialist tactics in The Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” Marx and Engels argued that “the first step in the revolution by the working class” was “to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”

Marx and Engels argued that ‘the first step in the revolution by the working class’ was ‘to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.’

Every important Marxist political theorist of the twentieth century embraced this strategic principle. Eduard Bernstein argued that “democracy is a condition of socialism” and his contemporary Karl Kautsky claimed that “socialism without democracy is unthinkable.” Similarly, in her critique of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg declared that “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution.”

Even Lenin himself had earlier endorsed a tactical resolution adopted by the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which proclaimed that

the direct interests of the proletariat and the interests of its struggle for the final aims of socialism require the fullest possible measure of political liberty and, consequently, the replacement of the autocratic form of government by a democratic republic.

Unfortunately, a century later, we are far from having won the battle for democracy. If anything, we are now faced with the prospect of its demise throughout the world, including the Western liberal democracies.

At a time when Nicos Poulantzas was also concerned about the rise of authoritarian statism, he pointed out that it was not enough to assert that we want democratic socialism. It was necessary, he insisted, to clearly formulate strategic demands about what a democratic socialist form of societal self-governance would entail as an institutional form, i.e., a transitional democratic socialist state.

Two Strategies

In some of his earliest writings as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx embraced “bourgeois democracy” as a political advance for the working class. He considered it an essential political shell for the further development of the proletariat as a class.

The most basic foundation for “democracy” was universal suffrage. However, in writings such as The Communist Manifesto, the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1849), and the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx advocated an expansive program of social and economic democracy that rested upon a heavily graduated income tax (fiscal policy), a strong central bank (monetary policy), and public investment in industry, transportation, communications, and agriculture (industrial and employment policy).

At the same time, he called for a variety of programs and policies. These included free public education for all, free legal services, the abolition of consumption taxes, a strong social safety net (unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, housing, health care, etc.), and the complete separation of church and state.

Marx concluded that the Paris Commune ‘was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class.’

In 1872, Marx speculated that in mature liberal democracies, such as the United States, Britain, and Holland, it might be possible for workers to “achieve their aims by peaceful means.” For more than a century, this complex of policies and electoral tactics has largely defined the political program we call social democracy.

However, Marx and Engels changed their thinking about the conquest of political power as a result of the Paris Commune in 1871. Marx concluded that the Commune “was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.” What was different about the Parisian experiment, according to Engels, was that the working class had created a non-state political form of self-governance, while in 1848 it had been “a power in the [capitalist] state” as a result of newly granted universal male suffrage.

What Marx saw in the Commune, as compared to 1848, was a new political form that “breaks the modern state power.” He stressed the need for the proletariat to “transform the traditional working machinery” of the state and “destroy it as an instrument of class rule”:

The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.

Thus, since the late nineteenth century, the Marxist debate on socialist strategy has largely been a contest between the proponents of parliamentary socialism, articulated in works like Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1899), and revolutionaries who insisted on the need to smash the state, as exemplified by Lenin’s pamphlet State and Revolution (1917).

Democratic Roads to Socialism

There is no question that in most of his writings, Poulantzas advocated a strategy in line with the second school of thought. In 1975, for instance, he made the following argument:

The transition to socialism cannot take place by a simple shift in state power (the working class and its allies replacing the bourgeoisie); this transition requires the state apparatuses to be smashed, i.e., it is not just a question of replacing the heads of these apparatuses, but of a radical transformation in their actual organizational structure.

However, in State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position:

There is no longer a place for what has traditionally been called smashing or destroying that [state] apparatus . . . the term smashing, which Marx too used for indicative purposes, came in the end to designate a very precise historical phenomenon: namely, the eradication of any kind of representative democracy or “formal” liberties in favour purely of direct, rank-and-file democracy and so-called real liberties . . . if we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents, then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick.

At the same time, Poulantzas still included the following warning:

It would be an error fraught with serious political consequences to conclude from the presence of the popular classes in the State that they can ever lastingly hold power without a radical transformation of the State . . . the action of the popular masses within the State is a necessary condition of its transformation, but is not itself a sufficient condition.

In his final book, Poulantzas thus defined a strategy of democratic socialism that would incorporate the electoral politics of parliamentary socialism while simultaneously going beyond it to embrace forms of direct democracy. Instead of smashing the state, Poulantzas now envisioned what he called a “radical transformation of the State.”

In his final work, State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position.

That transformation would embrace innovations such as workers’ ownership and self-management, as well as limited forms of “council communism” based on organs of mass democracy (the original meaning of “soviet” in the Russian context). However, Poulantzas believed that these innovations would serve to strengthen, broaden, and deepen the democratic component of a modern democratic republic, instead of challenging and displacing it through a strategy of “dual power,” as occurred during the Russian Revolution.

Discussing the Russian case, Poulantzas argued that by abolishing the newly elected Constituent Assembly at the beginning of 1918, the Bolsheviks had left the state apparatus unsupervised and unregulated in the name of an “all power to the soviets” strategy. This set the stage for a socialist form of authoritarian statism, namely Stalinism, as the decentralized soviets lacked either the political capacity or the technical expertise to direct the day-to-day-activity of a complex modern society on a national scale. He concluded that during a transition to socialism, the institutions of representative democracy should be viewed “not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.”

Democratic Socialism

Poulantzas concluded that democratic socialism was a two-pronged strategy consisting of policy and politics. On the one hand, it entailed a set of policies and programs designed to promote a more egalitarian society based on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This strategy might begin with basic social democratic policies, but it required a radical transformation of what Poulantzas calls the “economic apparatus” — central banks, tax systems, employment and wage policies, trade policies, social insurance — and ultimately would have to result in public and/or workers’ ownership of the means of production.

However, Poulantzas argued that the path toward reaching these goals also necessitated a political strategy — a radical transformation of the State — that would combine a transformed form of representative democracy with direct rank-and-file democracy:

The essential problem of the democratic road to socialism, of democratic socialism, must be posed in a different way: how is it possible radically to transform the State in such a manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy (which were also a conquest of the popular masses) are combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies?

For Poulantzas, this meant that the democratic road to socialism would be a long process that involved “the spreading, development, reinforcement, coordination and direction of those diffuse centers of resistance which the masses always possess within the state networks, in such a way that they become the real centres of power on the strategic terrain of the State.”

In place of the demand for “all power to the soviets,” Poulantzas argued that a left-wing government should immediately begin to integrate popular forms of direct democracy and workers’ self-management into the state. Rather than a situation of dual power with a contest between direct democracy and representative democracy, a single workers’ state should bring the two forms of democracy together.

Consequently, Poulantzas called for a struggle “to modify the relationship of forces with the State, as opposed to a frontal, dual power type of strategy,” which would mean “a sweeping transformation of the state apparatus.” He reiterated his earlier admonition against “building ‘models’ of any kind whatsoever,” emphasizing once again that a theory of the capitalist state could be at best “a set of signposts” for strategic decision-making, but not a road map.

Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform.

These observations from Poulantzas left several questions open. What exactly would it mean to combine a transformed democratic republic with workers’ ownership, self-management, and other forms of direct democracy? However, these observations nonetheless identified a political strategy of constitutional reform which could draw on the insights of state theory, while directing political tactics toward long-term goals beyond mere disruption and protest.

Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform aimed at realigning the structural relationship of the state to the working classes. There can be no socialism without a reinvigorated and more expansive democracy.

Read more

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If there’s one word I never want to hear in a major news story ever again, it’s “antifa.” Part of this is because of the massive conspiracy infrastructure the right has built around it. It has created a new incarnation of an earlier Cold War panic blaming just about every social ill on balaclava-adorned opponents disrupting Proud Boy rallies. But it’s also because of the endless parade of “explainer” articles and op-eds reducing antifascism to the lowest common denominator, usually inspired by the laudable goal of insulating activists from spurious claims lobbed by conservatives looking to defend the white nationalists in their base.

Part of why this has become a somewhat tired affair is that it has flattened all antifascism to a singular image: young anarchists (usually white), dressed for the black bloc, discharging some neo-Nazi leader with a punch, the utility of which must be defended. This is not without reality. There is a long and effective history of what we could fairly call “militant antifascist” groups (the more correct definition of the term antifa), and it traces back decades as a staple inside of the trans-national radical left. From white nationalist groups like Volksfront, various Klan revivals, the Creativity Movement and the alt-right, antifa has arguably done exactly what it said it would do: It severely hindered white nationalists by disrupting their ability to function, recruit and reproduce. 

There are also complicated critiques of the different tactics antifascists have used, and counter-strategies that people have employed such as street theater, community preparedness training and counter-messaging. Antifascism is far from a monolith; it is a growing social movement with different branches, approaches and internal critiques, and it includes people who are desperately trying to break new strategic ground. Activists have spent the last few years adapting to the threat posed by the far-right. And today, looking back at those experiences, there are powerful reflections about what the future of antifascism could look like.

It’s not the celebration of militant antifascism that is the problem, but that this singular portrayal inherently limits our view of the movement’s possibilities. Antifascism is not composed only of these well-trained, insular radical crews, but includes expansive and overlapping coalitions, often adding weight to the direct action component or multiplying the number of available strategies. Antifascism has been a necessary and permanent piece of the left since World War II, when the horrors of fascism were answered by the refrain “never again,” and the ways these various forms of antifascism emerged are just as diverse and varied as the communities that created them.

The goal of my recent anthology book “No Pasaran: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis” was to capture a small sliver of that diversity and to open up what is called antifascism, which will hopefully give us a bit of a vision for what comes next as we move past Trumpism, the alt-right and the white nationalism of decades past. In doing this, the hope was to empower underrepresented voices so that we could get a “people’s history of antifascism,” which is a mission that a lot of histories of radical movements aim for yet fail to achieve. By staking out a clear picture of what needed to be captured in this book we tried to provide a blueprint for what elements can make a social movement history more dynamic, one that makes an intentional effort to welcome new voices and to rethink the very assumptions of how we characterize activism.

In doing so, a few key strategies for writing movement histories emerged. They hopefully provide lessons beyond simply telling the story of antifascism. Instead, they are a glimpse of how to chronicle accessible and dependable movement histories, ones that are embedded in the struggles they wish to document and see this kind of journalism and scholarship as a piece of the movement itself.

1. Don’t just include diverse voices, find a way to get them in the book. Many people who are organizers do not spend their time in scholarly research or as professional journalists, so writing might not be something they have as much of a background with. Most working-class people are also without the free time that many tenured university faculty have, so their availability may be sparse. All of this is to say that simply asking someone to write a chapter or provide extensive research may be impractical, and so you need to work with them to find a way to get their voices into the book. Unless you find a way to support diverse writers in your book, you are not actually doing the work of empowering diverse writers. 

Several of the organizers we wanted to feature in “No Pasaran” had work, family and health commitments that were taking their time, so we shifted their chapters to being interviews that I worked with them on as editors. You can turn chapters into roundtables, record discussions and turn them into essays, use a mix of existing and primary sources, and other creative ways of getting a piece of writing that carries the voice of the people you want the book to be built around.

2. Listen to what contributors and affected people actually want to write about. If I impose my solitary vision of antifascism on this history then it would have an inherently limited viewpoint. To avoid that, we had each contributor write “whatever they wanted,” basically saying that they should contribute what they feel like needs to be said, what they felt empowered to do, and have influence over how the process progressed. This created an organic system that allowed those involved to drive the direction of the project as a whole. Because of that we have chapters that grew out of lived experiences rather than reproducing a singular narrative projected onto multiple contributors.

3. Antifascism is not just antifascism. No social movement exists in isolation, and you have to ask how other social movements exist in relationship to the one you’re covering. Antifascism depends on mutual aid to support itself for social reproduction. Its coalitions are built around organized labor, tenants unions, local antiracist groups, church and faith organizations and more, so you need your history to reflect those movements as well. The space around antifascism is part of how to expand the story of what that term means and to provide a more compelling vision of the future, so you need to start pushing past the boundaries you place on the movement you claim to be representing. We looked at how antifascism relates to police and prison abolition, art and music, and other social movements, all of which reveals that no social movement is cut off from all others. Everything is connected.

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4. Allow for disagreement. I don’t agree with everything in every chapter in “No Pasaran,” and some opinions run in total contrast to one another. Just like in a meeting room where activists plan a protest, a diverse and representative collection of voices are going to express near constant disagreement with each other. Such is the reality of direct democracy. This should not just be accommodated, it needs to be actively sought out, and it is what elevates the project to a real documentary movement history.

5. Pay people. This may seem obvious, but in radical publishing it is not. For most people publishing books with radical presses, book advances are small when they are available at all. There certainly is not enough money available to pay contributors to a large anthology (we have nearly 30 people in this book), so you need to think outside of the existing publishing model to figure this out. 

We used a moderate crowdfunding campaign supported by the Institute for Anarchist Studies, which raised enough for small stipends for all contributors. They were not significant amounts of money, but they were a start, and they are what people often need to take time away from the rest of their lives to contribute to building histories. 

So think about how you can build a financial infrastructure, however modest, that will support this kind of work. This is a two-way road: We also need to start contributing to projects like these as donors as well, otherwise we cannot expect that these media projects will attract anything other than those with the financial privilege to participate.

6. Drop the academic tone. It’s great to have movement scholarship with really biting analysis, research and dependable claims. But you should not have simply one type of contribution because that limits both who can contribute and who can read it. Try to include stories, interviews, conversations, poems, fiction, art, comics and anything that authentically reveals the perspective of the people you want to see reflected in its pages. For our part, we tried to open this up as much as possible and have a lot of contributions that feel far outside what you normally find in academic-adjacent works that focus on names and dates often at the expense of people’s hearts. It’s important to simply mix it up, so don’t just strive for demographic diversity, but diversity in style.

7. Consider how your history can be used in movement building. When putting this book together, we preferred contributions that could actually give real world tools to organizers doing the work. We have thought about how book events can also be movement spaces, and how we can connect on-the-ground struggles with this volume. Consider a strategy for the history you are creating itself and figure out how it can be a support to the organizing your text reflects, and keep your book in conversation with those people doing the work day in and day out.

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Some things should go without saying, like including diverse experiences and identities, letting marginalized voices speak first, and focusing on the experiences of those facing oppression rather than simply uncritically reproducing the opinions of their oppressors. By focusing on antifascism, you actually do tell the story of white nationalism itself, but you do it from the standpoint of resistance. So part of what we do when we tell a “people’s history” is we talk about the entire history of our community, but we preference our own experiences and our quest to make our communities a more liberated space. By “taking our own side” we tell an authentically emotive story that destroys the popular narratives, usually written from the perspective of the powerful, and we put it back into the hands of the people who actually make that history: the everyday people who choose to resist and to make a better world for all of us. 

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CHAPTER SIX THE PARIS COMMUNE ILLUMINATES AND DEEPENS THE CONTENT OF CAPITAL 1) The Despotic Plan of Capital vs. the Cooperation of Freely Associated Labor Marx had begun his analysis of capitalism some three decades before the establishment of the…


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Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

By Matthew N Lyons |  Tuesday, July 19, 2022

How do we assert reproductive autonomy when far rightists are on the offensive and liberals have failed to stop them?

As we noted two months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision repealing Roe v. Wade marks a historic victory for the Christian right and specifically its fascist, theocratic wing. Defending access to abortion is an antifascist struggle, but that doesn’t mean the focus should be only, or even primarily, on combating the far right. What’s needed is a struggle on two fronts: against the various forces of the authoritarian right but also against their centrist enablers—the politicians and institutions that have long claimed to be defending abortion access while weakening opposition to the far right and giving ground to it step by step by step. These are different kinds of struggle and they call for different approaches.

This is what three way fight politics is all about: a recognition that the fascistic far right is interconnected with but distinct from the oppressive status quo, and combating them both requires interconnected but distinct strategies.

In the wake of Roe’s repeal, I’ve seen several excellent essays that use this kind of two-front framework to guide liberatory strategy. I’d like to focus here on three of these essays, to highlight what they share and also how their different perspectives broaden and enrich an ongoing discussion that’s vitally needed.

Reading these essays, I see three overarching themes—three key things that each of them calls on us to do: highlight interconnections between different groups or rights under attack, confront liberal NGOs and the Democratic Party, and develop a clear and militant strategy. Let’s look at each of these themes in turn.

Highlight interconnections

Both Elise Hendrick and Noah Zazanis frame access to abortion as a key form of bodily autonomy, and both specifically emphasize connections between criminalizing abortion and criminalizing trans people as two prongs of a larger right-wing strategy. Zazanis writes, “The surface logic of parental consent laws [for getting an abortion] is similar to the logic barring childhood transition: abortion is a serious, irreversible medical procedure for which youth under 18 are too young to give informed consent.” Hendrick denounces a recent New York Times column that tries to stake out a position that’s pro-abortion rights yet trans-exclusionary as a blatant example of divide-and-rule tactics.

Zazanis also emphasizes the ties between defending bodily autonomy and building a strong working class:

“Our fights for healthcare, and against criminalization, are inseparable from the labor rights of healthcare workers, and of the nonprofit workers doing unpaid overtime in the wake of the Dobbs ruling. More than ever, we must build strong, independent unions willing to defend workers who refuse to enforce these bans… It is no coincidence that the workers on the frontline of criminalization are in fields dominated by women, fields where queer workers are overrepresented and underpaid.”

Hendrick and CrimethInc. both highlight a further connection: between the fight for abortion access and the fight against police violence and repression. CrimethInc. urges abortion rights advocates to learn from the George Floyd uprising and writes, “Yes, there are fundamental differences between the movement for reproductive freedom and the movement for Black lives—but those who will be most impacted by the criminalization of abortion overlap considerably with those who are most impacted by racist policing.” Hendrick calls out implications for movement security, noting that criminalization of abortion means “the full weight of the surveillance state is coming down on millions of people who have previously been largely exempt from it…. That means making clear the importance of not talking to the police, not coordinating with police, protecting our identities, and…not posting unedited video of people doing illegal things on social media.”

In summary, drawing the connections between anti-oppression struggles helps us to understand the right’s larger agenda, build and strengthen coalitions, make our movements smarter, and honor the multiple and complex ways that people are affected by institutional violence.

Confront NGOs and the Democrats

All three of our featured essays sharply criticize the Democratic Party’s role as supposed defender of abortion access. Zazanis notes that “For decades, Democratic leadership has treated abortion as a cudgel for electoral gains” (and more recently has done the same with so-called “LGBT issues”). Hendrick adds that this approach has repeatedly meant whitewashing the shameful anti-abortion positions of some Democratic candidates, such as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate Tim Kaine. CrimethInc. describes the effect of such opportunism as “the workings of the political ratchet, in which Republicans continuously push state institutions towards more oppressive agendas while Democrats continuously give ground, keeping those who are suffering invested in the state itself in hopes that it might one day be reformed.” As I’ve argued elsewhere, this dynamic doesn’t result from Democratic leaders’ subjective “weakness”—it reflects the party’s structural role as a vehicle to divert liberatory initiatives into support for an oppressive, capitalist order.

Zazanis and Hendrick are similarly critical of liberal NGOs for being structurally and financially tied to a “respectability politics” that weakens—or simply betrays—liberatory struggle. Hendrick warns that “Liberal non-profits will try to narrow the focus of this movement, to divide bodily autonomy into specific niches… and channel our energy and our anger into avenues that don’t make the ruling class nervous. They will resist any attempt to defy these laws and the cops who enforce them outright, and they will try to prevent any kind of solidarity and cross-pollination” between political struggles. Zazanis gets more specific, calling out Reproaction for trying to police the boundaries of acceptable “direct action” and Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute, and the National Center for Transgender Equality for union-busting and abusive management practices. Even smaller, more independent NGOs engaged in vitally important support for self-managed medication abortion have “effectively ignored the question of who runs the clinics and how they operate, or how to defy those who seek to close them.”

Hendrick sums up part of the lesson with regard to both NGOs and the Democratic Party: “Only by maintaining our independence from these institutions can we exert the sort of pressure that is necessary in order to force them to do the right thing.” 

Develop clear, militant strategy

To varying degrees, all three essays offer suggestions on what’s needed to protect abortion access and bodily autonomy more broadly. Zazanis advocates breaking with respectability politics, recognizing that effective direct action “makes oppressors feel victimized,” and forming independent networks both to help criminalized people survive and to lay a foundation for more comprehensive institutional change in the future.

Hendrick elaborates on Zazanis’s point about direct action:

“If we want the ruling class to even consider restoring our right to bodily autonomy, we need to put the hurt on them. We need an or else.

“Historically, the movements that have extracted meaningful concessions from unwilling ruling classes have been those that attack the two major pressure points of capitalist society: profitability, which is the point of the entire system, and governability, which calls the system’s very existence into question.”

As reference points, she cites two recent large-scale militant initiatives: in Poland in 2016, mass protests and a strike (an attack on profitability) that forced the government to walk back a proposed total abortion ban, and in the U.S. in 2020, widespread militant attacks on both police stations and big box retail stores (governability and profitability) following the police murder of George Floyd. Hendrick argues that calls to abolish the police have not succeeded because they threaten capitalist society on a deep level, but that U.S. capitalists are not committed to banning abortion and would restore abortion access “if we make it clear that they can’t afford not to.”

CrimethInc., too, argues for a militant approach, but they are particularly concerned with how militancy is targeted:

“if your goal is to exert leverage, you have to identify a group you can actually exert leverage on—a group that is likely to change course as a consequence of your intervention…. You have to make sure that the target of your efforts has a choice—then make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

They cite two counter-examples. On one hand, many abortion rights proponents have joined public rallies that help to boost participants’ morale but have no specific target. On the other, a number of anonymous groups, operating under the name Jane’s Revenge, have vandalized anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” The latter actions “may inspire people to take action on their own, but do not offer a participatory space in which to build collective momentum.” In addition, although the vandalism actions have a specific focus, “in targeting anti-abortion centers, they are taking on the most intransigent opponents of abortion…” CrimethInc. continues, “If it is possible to exert leverage on anyone who is complicit in criminalizing abortion, it is probably not far-right religious cult members, but their centrist accomplices”—in other words, liberal and moderate politicians who could be persuaded to defend abortion access if the cost of not doing so is high enough.

Here, too, the movement against racist police violence offers a useful reference point:

“At the high point of the George Floyd uprising, when millions of people had ceased to accept the legitimacy of the police and were acting accordingly, we saw terrified liberals like the mayor of Minneapolis suddenly take the demands of the movement very seriously, promising to take steps towards police abolition… Later, when the politicians had reestablished control, they betrayed those promises—showing that our effectiveness hinges on keeping our social movements lively and strong, not on winning concessions.”

Exerting leverage in this way is very different from allying with liberals against the far right, or with, say, the federal government against state governments. As CrimethInc. puts it, “compelling one [state] institution to limit the power of another can be strategic, provided it does not contribute to legitimizing any of the institutions involved. It must be clear to everyone that the power that drives social change derives from grassroots organizing, not from state institutions…”

Concluding thoughts

How do we go about asserting reproductive autonomy in the face of a major defeat, when far rightists are on the offensive and the forces of liberal respectability have failed to stop them? The three essays I’ve examined here grapple with this question in related ways. That doesn’t mean that their authors necessarily agree on every point, but it’s striking to me how much their arguments complement each other, and I do think the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. At the least, there’s a lot here that can inform and inspire further discussion and strategizing.

I started this discussion by invoking three way fight politics as a framework for strategy. None of the three essays uses that terminology, but at least two of them make points closely related to it. CrimethInc. notes that the far right are not defenders of the established order but rather advocates of social change (increased repression and oppression) and have used sustained pressure campaigns and a range of tactics, including bombings and murder, to bring it about. Hendrick emphasizes that those who advocate banning abortion are “a minority of bigots who are useful to capital, but far from essential to it,” and it is precisely this gap that opens strategic space for advocates of liberatory politics. These three essays insist that we have choices beyond surrendering to fascism on one hand and subordinating radical possibility to liberal holding actions on the other.

Photo credits

1. By Frypie, 10 May 2022 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Image has been cropped.
2. By Matt Hrkac, 9 July 2022 (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Back to Matthew N. Lyon’s Author Page

The post Strategies to defend abortion access: three essays appeared first on PM Press.

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A grassroots movement in Dane County WI, just won immediate protections for abortion rights – in direct defiance of Wisconsin’s 173 year-old abortion ban and the state’s GOP-dominated government. The abortion sanctuary legislation, which the Dane County Board passed 29-5-1 on September 22, came out of a campaign led by Socialist Alternative.  This victory came […]

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One of this new coalition’s first tasks, and as difficult as it appears to be, is to find a way to end, or at least weaken, the tribalism that has left our country so divided.

I believe that for all the reasons I cite below, and more, we will likely lose what little is left of our democracy and find ourselves, as early as 2024, living in an Orwellian autocracy, or worse. And while this prospect is much discussed and written about, I see no evidence that, as of now, pro-democracy forces in America are preparing to organize a new coalition of forces that is sufficiently broad enough and powerful enough to prevent this slide into the political abyss. I firmly believe that unless we begin the process of creating such a coalition, a coalition for American democracy, it will be too late to turn the political tide in a new direction.

Before addressing how the kind of mass-movement oriented pro-democracy coalition that I think is essential could be organized and operate if we are to save what is left of our democracy, let me first cite some of the evidence for my dire prediction. But note: I will not in this piece, in any detail, address the decisive role that our capitalist system plays in creating the reasons for my alarm.

First, the recent Axios-Ipsos Two Americas Index public opinion poll of September 1-2, found that 

  • 33% of Americans would prefer a strong, unelected leader to a weak elected one; 
  • 35% believe Presidents should be able to remove judges whose decisions go against the “national interest”; 
  • 38% believe the government should side with the majority over ethnic/religious minority rights; and, 
  • roughly 33% believe the federal government should be able to prosecute members of the media who make offensive or unpatriotic statements. 

And the numbers vary little between registered Democrats and registered Republicans. A September 16th NPR/Ipsos poll found that 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing,” yet an Article in September’s The Atlantic, cites a recent study that shows that less than 4% of voters will turn against a candidate whose policies they prefer, or who takes undemocratic actions, or makes undemocratic speeches.

Then there is the evidence provided by the growing nativism, and the tribalism it has spawned. The American people are more divided today than they’ve been since the Civil War. Red states are at political war with blue states. And isn’t it interesting, and depressing, that the same racism that played a central role in our Civil War is doing the same with respect to today’s ugly divide?

Nationalism and tribalism in the United States have advanced to such a degree that political and societal differences once settled in peaceful disputes, or at the ballot box, are now the excuse for violent confrontations. It’s a tribalism between those who understand and welcome the demographic changes flowing from the effects of globalization, and those who see these demographic changes as an existential assault on their so-called “traditional way of life.” Hence, the “replacement theory’s” emergence in the public debate; the fact that millions have been drawn to the ignorant insanity of “Q” with its warnings of Democratic Party pedophilia and Jewish aliens; the steady and well-organized growth of the already huge Christian nationalist, “ReAwaken America” movement, of which Gen. Flynn is a major proponent and star; the majority of Republican Party voters who still believe Trump, not Biden, was elected president again in 2020; and the millions of those who are supportive of the January 6th insurrection who now believe it is appropriate to use violence to preserve their “traditional way of life” in America. 

All of this, and more represents the coming together of an extremely large and well-funded radical right movement with complete disdain for any form of governance that allows the on-going immigration of non-white, non-Christians into America, or lets laws be passed that challenge its belief in the subservient place of women in society, or that benefit the rights of the poor and people of color, most particularly their voting rights.

Yes, Christian white privilege, racism and sexism, the fear of immigrants of color and Jews and Muslims, have created a tribalism, a political and cultural division in America, that has reached levels not seen since the days of our Civil War. As a result, many historians and political thinkers are warning that we may soon find ourselves in a new civil war, such is the depth of out and out hatred between the sides in this tribal war. As Max Fisher states in the article, “Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungry and Turkey” (New York Times, September 12, 2022), “The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding. First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust.” And he adds, “very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.”

Already the world ranking of democracies finds that of the United States sinking lower, now rating us only 26th in the list of world’s democracies; and, listing us as only a “partial democracy.” This should not surprise us, given that we were not born as a truly democratic nation in the first place, and given how the impact of big money in elections, gerrymandering, the reduction of days to vote and places to vote, new voting ID requirements, and the influence of giant media companies, have combined to now make America an ever more limited democracy.

Further, ever since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision throwing out significant portions of the Voting Rights Act, election laws in a goodly number of states have quite openly set the stage for a stolen 2024 presidential election. They are aided by a number of Supreme Court rulings that show support for a bizarre new right-wing legal theory, the “independent State legislature theory.” This theory argues that state legislatures have unfettered authority over federal elections! And the new right-wing advocacy organization, Marble Freedom Trust, has just received $1.6 billion to advance this and other anti-democratic theories. Already Supreme Court Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and to a lesser extent Roberts, have evidenced support for this irrational “states’ rights” theory.

Make no mistake: our already limited democracy is hanging on by a thread. For I fully believe that given the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Voting Rights Act case, given the number of states that have already passed undemocratic election laws, and elected Trumpian candidates to the state offices controlling elections and the certification of presidential electors, we now face the very real likelihood that no matter which presidential candidate actually wins the popular vote in the 2024 presidential election, it is the Republican Party candidate that will be declared the winner, thus marking the official end of our flawed democracy.

If the many historians and political thinkers are right in their dire warnings, and I do believe they are, then, as always, the obvious question is the age-old one, “what is to be done?” I have given my answer to that question in the very first paragraph of this article: nothing short of the formation of a broad-based, pro-democracy, mass-action coalition, uniting our various existing progressive coalitions/movements, can save the day. And “yes,” I am fully aware of just hard it will be to put such a coalition together and shape it so as to employ the right strategies and tactics. But in considering the matter of the difficulty in putting such a coalition together, I would urge the leaders and members of current progressive coalitions to contemplate how poorly their causes will fare if America becomes governed by anti-progressive authoritarianism.

Surely, we have no time to lose. I urge the leaders of today’s various progressive movements to start the process of coming together now; coming together in unity because this is the only way we can organize a pro-democracy movement coalition powerful enough to defeat the authoritarian forces on the ascendancy in America; the only hope we have of saving our democracy, limited as it is.

One of this new coalition’s first tasks, and as difficult as it appears to be, is to find a way to end, or at least weaken, the tribalism that has left our country so divided. We’ve got to stop thinking of everyone who sharply disagrees with us as stupid, or immoral racists, and as the “enemy.” For truth be told, in some rather critical ways the “other side” is, like us, simply the victims of an economic system that has left so many of us in America struggling to get all of our human needs met. They are people who have been purposely mis-educated, mis-led and frightened into adopting an ugly nationalism, and who are now scared to death about their place in modern America.

To end this tribalism, we’ve got to talk to those on the other side of this tribal war. Reach out to them, listen to them, sympathize with those of their fears that are legitimate, while pointing out that what is really threatening their living standards is not the “other,” but the economic system we live under; a system that only works when there are winners and losers. In short, to help them understand that it is in the nature of the corporate capitalists and billionaires running this country to profit from keeping the people divided and distrustful of the immigrant or person of color who just moved in down the block; to explain that the only “other” they need to fear is the corporate oligarchy that now rules America. And why it is in their true interests to join us as we fight to save democracy.

Yes, first we’ve got to listen to each other…and then having listened, talk through our differences. For if we would do this, I am convinced that we would find there is more common ground between ourselves than we currently suspect. If we will do this, I believe we will find that “the other side” has some grievances and worries that are justified, even if they are blaming the wrong reasons and the wrong people for those grievances. Even if we can do no more than marginally reduce today’s tribalism in this way, it will be a boon to our pro-democracy movement.

And here are a few other things we should do. Our new coalition must promote the idea of doing what the right-wing has done for decades now and get involved in local school boards so as to have an impact on what America’s children are learning and reading in school. Today, America’s public schools are failing to adequately teach an honest history of America, or why democracy is essential to a free people, and how it should operate. Last year, at least 50 different right-wing groups pushed campaigns to ban certain books in schools, according to a report released by PEN America on September 19th. PEN said that across the country, restrictions occurred in 138 school districts, which included 5,000 individual schools and enrolled nearly 4 million students. 

Only if progressives get far more involved in the curriculum of public education, by securing their place on local school boards, can we hope to have a school system that honestly and fully produces adults who understand what good government is, who understand the changing nature of America, who understand today’s problems have nothing to do with the race, nationality or religious beliefs of their brother and sister Americans. For as Amartya Sen has argued, good primary schools contribute as much to democracy as strong political parties do.

Other measures should be promoted and fought for as well, such as getting more and more states to adopt ranked-choice-voting and non-partisan primary elections. In the few places where this has been instituted, the results have produced far fewer extreme winners of elections. And city and county and state elections should be taken more seriously than they are currently, since so much of what is decided by such governing entities impact us greatly. Yes, the fight for abortion rights, against racism, for fair union organizing laws, for economic justice, and an end to America’s imperial militarism, must be understood as a fight to save our democracy at all levels of government. In these battles this new coalition must be as dogged and determined as are our neo-fascist foes. (Of course, in many cases the only way to win these rights will require the election of non-capitalist third parties, or by leaving the Democratic Party no choice but to vote the enlightened way. How to build such a party, such an electoral coalition, I must leave for another day.)

It is for these and other reasons, that I am urging the creation of a popular, broad-based coalition to undertake the kinds of actions I’ve suggested in this talk, and a hell-of-a-lot more. A pro-democracy movement coalition that is broad enough and powerful enough to regularly take to the streets in protest with our demands. A movement coalition so powerful that it cannot, if we stick to it until our demands are met, be defeated. A movement coalition like that of the labor, civil rights, anti-war and women’s rights movement coalitions of the past. It must be prepared to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets on behalf of the coalition’s demands, or whenever an unfair and undemocratic effort is underway to further disenfranchise millions of our sisters and brothers. Happily, the majority of America’s youth and millions of adults are with us, and in many separate ways are already leading the fight back effort.

Well, am I right? Is America already far, far down the road that ends in authoritarianism, or worse? And am I right about what I believe is the only way to prevent this journey into the abyss? I’m now old enough to freely admit that I have been wrong many times before in my life and might be wrong again. So, I would like to know what you, the readers think. Perhaps you agree with me about the danger of losing our already shrunken, skeletal, democracy, but disagree on how best to prevent such a loss. To let me know what you think, send your comments to the LA Progressive.

What is absolutely essential, as we undertake this historic imperative, is to remember this: that we’ve overcome great historic evils and divisions in our country in the past. The evil of slavery. The evil that tore apart America during the Civil War. The evil of children sent to work in factories. The rights of women. The anti-communist “witch hunts.” Earlier Jim Crow laws. The Vietnam War. All of our past victories over such evils demonstrate that history itself has been on our side when we’ve fought our battles with a strong people-powered movement. 

And so, remembering that so much of history is on our side, let us vow today to start now to build a united, mass-movement coalition of pro-democratic forces in America. If we do not do this, then we will have failed to answer this new call of history; a call of history facing our country and the entire world today; a call to fight like hell to stop America’s ever accelerating devolution into authoritarianism. For I truly believe that if we acknowledge just how dangerous this moment is, remember how we won great victories over long odds in the past, and get about the necessary business of organizing the only kind of movement that can bring us victory, our day will come!

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Capitalist measures to fix the climate have not worked, as two recent books show, so the key is to link working-class and ecological movements, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

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“Today’s ruling shows that Hubbard County cannot repress Native people for the benefit of Enbridge by circumventing the law,” said Indigenous water protector Winona LaDuke.
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