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It probably isn’t good practice to write an entire article responding to a nonviral tweet. But here goes. On August 31st, the Twitter user Jjule85 Azzuro posted the following meme decrying the repeal of the Smith-Mundt Act.  The meme contains factual inaccuracies. For one, Barack Obama signed the H.R. 4310 in 2013 — not 2012. Nor, unsurprisingly, does the quote “purposely lie to the American people” appear anywhere in the legislation. Googling that phrase just yields myriad links to the meme itself. Mainstream fact-checks had a field day. Politifact and the Associated Press rated the meme false and just generally insisted there was nothing to see here. But the signing of H.R. 4310 was significant. It eased restrictions on the ability of state programming like Voice of America and Radio Free to reach Americans. These programs are Cold War relics whose sole founding purpose was destabilizing leftist governments the world over. Even Foreign Policy magazine conceded that this amounted to “repeal[ing] a propaganda ban.” So the meme holds a lot of truth. But its general thrust is wrong. The meme implies that H.R. 4310 is what melted American public discourse into its current puddle of shameless lies. Of course, the federal government had no issue purposely lying before 2013. The whole charade surrounding weapons of mass destruction happened a decade earlier. Blaming everything on H.R. 4310 is akin to liberals and progressives pinning America’s economic demise on the Reagan era. Sure, Ronald Reagan was terrible. His track record included slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and making social security subject to income taxation. But Reagan was not even the first fiercely capitalist president. Calvin Coolidge and others preceded him. It wasn’t one president, bill, or even congressional session that corrupted America. Since 1776, we’ve seen a slow but steady erosion of the revolutionary spirit that birthed this nation. The task ahead is to reclaim the former glory of one of the most radical democratic experiments of its time. America is broken. But we can fix it with socialism — the ultimate distillation of populist politics. Radical Tradition The American revolution was imperfect but hardly contemptible. It’s easy to look at the framers as plutocrats. Many gleefully participated in this country’s original sin of slavery. James Madison, the Constitution’s primary writer, even said government should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Yet that doesn’t change the fact that the revolution embodied certain radical principles. For one, it was undeniably anti-colonial. Revolutionaries rejected the British empire, which ruled them across an ocean with insufficient accountability. This rejection was grounded in democratic principles. It emphasized self-governance, and recognized rule from afar as inevitably leading to indifference toward the concerns of ordinary people. The crown only wanted the colonies to facilitate the growth of British capital. So the American revolution was a precondition for any protection of working-class interests. It therefore did more than just cultivate fairer political processes. The revolution also led to more fairness on the economic front. England kept America backward. Under their rule, the colonies remained largely feudal despite capitalist development being well underway elsewhere. Capitalism is a wretched system that inexorably concentrates wealth and power, and runs on exploitation of the masses. But, as Karl Marx best explained, it is a big and necessary improvement over feudalism. England prevented that transition from happening. The revolution made sure it did. This might be surprising given the class character of the framers. At least 42 of the 55 delegates to the constitutional convention were literal capitalists, ranging from merchants to plantation owners. They were uniformly white and wealthy. Some, like George Washington and Robert Morris, ranked among the richest people in the new nation. But those who wrote America’s founding documents are just one part of its revolutionary story. As historians Marie and Ray Raphael explain, the revolution was “a sweeping, widespread, town-by-town popular uprising.” Its leftist critics often miss that “this was really a bottom-up revolt.” Over 90% of Massachusettsans, for example, backed the revolution. Defiance came mostly from the landed gentry whose fates, through patronage and business, were tied to the crown. The framers were not the progenitors of the revolution, but late adopters. Immense populist momentum is why they eventually embraced the cause. Progressives throughout American history understood this, and championed the promise of the founding. Frederick Douglass and his abolitionist peers spoke of fully realizing the revolution’s emancipatory vision in their fight against slavery. Radical feminists in the mid-19th century saw themselves as continuing the work of the Continental Congress. Even the universally beloved Martin Luther King Jr. lavishly praised the revolution, and felt indebted to its ideals. Leftists abroad saw things similarly. Vladimir Lenin commended the “American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery.” Ho Chi Minh modeled Vietnam’s declaration of independence off of the American one. And Mao Zedong celebrated the revolution as a successful revolt against “British exploitation and oppression.” But the Chinese statesman and political theorist regretfully acknowledged that America had since fallen from its former glory. In his view, the country’s revolutionary ideals unraveled as “the people” increasingly lost power to “monopoly capitalists.” Fall From Grace Mao was right. Today’s America is ruled by finance capital and multinational corporations. Naturally, most Americans recognize that their political system is rigged. Trust in everything from Congress to mainstream media is at record lows. Henchmen of capital continue to insist that everything will be fine if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But even conservative pundits like Charlie Kirk admit that Wall Street greed is keeping hard-working Americans from owning homes. Investment giants like BlackRock and Vanguard are buying single-family units en masse, leading to alarming price hikes. This is especially worrying as home ownership is the top driver of individual wealth. How did we get here? The American Dream has become a nightmare. And foundational values like freedom and democracy seem like bigger and bigger jokes by the day. Our current reality is the natural result of capitalist control over America’s governing institutions, and most of its news media. This arrangement protects the interests of big business at the expense of workers, whose political power is almost nonexistent. Even studies from the highest echelons of academia confirm that contemporary America essentially functions like an oligarchy. The influence of the United States capitalist class is so overwhelming that it dictates not just domestic but foreign policy. Wars for oil, trade routes, and just to sell more weapons are commonplace. It’s easy to assume everyday Americans are indifferent to these gangster crimes. But that is wrong. Americans aren’t apathetic. They’re exhausted and jaded, feeling disempowered by a political system that never listens. When Sahelians launched a series of progressive coups, the State Department sent Islamist shock troops to destabilize those gains. No one in Middle America ever consented to this. And they almost certainly would not have had anyone asked. But no one did. That is the problem. Similarly, the United States continues to aid and abet Israel’s Gaza genocide. The offensive is historically unpopular, and most Americans want a ceasefire. Public opinion be damned, United States support for this atrocity continues apace. The regime’s cadre of workers, who staff the papers of record, rush to manufacture consent. Israel has “a right to defend itself,” they claim. Presumably that right extends to Palestinian babies yet to see their first year. The noble among us might seek an education to hopefully rise through the ranks and influence society positively. But there are more than a few problems with this. For one, the United States is home to the most expensive higher education in the world. Needless to say, tuition and board costs are often prohibitive. Even when they aren’t, universities — especially elite ones — are propaganda mills. They engrain cynicism and strip students of their highest ideals. Coursework promotes accepting — not challenging — the status quo. Talk of revolution is all but forbidden. And that makes sense. The people don’t run universities. Elites do. And they seek to legitimize and validate the brutal world they’ve built. This explains why humanities and social science courses so often instill in students an almost instinctual fear of communism. In the academy, the ideology’s many achievements never see the light of day. That wasn’t always the case. As recently as the late 1950s, the Communist Party was a considerable force in American politics. It boasted over 75,000 members at its peak in a country with well under half the current population. The party’s labor leaders organized literally millions of workers, and mobilized Americans of all stripes to protest lynching and segregation. Communists even won seats on the New York City Council. As Michael Goldfield explains, the Communist Party was “the preeminent left group in the country… with no significant rivals.” Even those well to their right proposed things that would be all but inconceivable in today’s political climate. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a Democrat with an extremely checkered record — proposed an economic bill of rights in 1944. It would’ve guaranteed essentials like food, clothing, healthcare, housing, and even employment to all Americans. Fifty years earlier, a popular backlash to the unprecedented economic inequality of the Gilded Age swept the nation. This culminated in the rise of the Populist Party, which championed progressive taxation and a shorter workweek. American proletarians loved this platform and, in 1896, the Populists came shockingly close to capturing the presidency. Their candidate William Jennings Bryan won an impressive 22 of 45 states and claimed nearly 47% of the popular vote. That would be unthinkable nowadays. Bernie Sanders never came terribly close to escaping the Democratic primary — let alone becoming president. Despite Sanders being more moderate than his leftist supporters would like to believe, establishment Democrats did everything to thwart him. And they succeeded. Moreover, unlike Bryan, Sanders’s underwhelming performance in 2020 suggests he may have never had a truly mass movement behind him. It seems more likely that his unexpectedly strong 2016 run largely rode a wave of anti-Clinton and perhaps misogynist sentiment. When Sanders had to run against a white man with name recognition and similar politics to Hillary Clinton, he faltered. After this loss, Berniecrats pinned their hopes on Sanders’s proteges: The Squad. But the most prominent of them, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now appears thoroughly co-opted by the regime. And Zionist organs of the Democratic Party unseated Cori Bush — among the Squad’s most radical members — after just two terms. They did the same to Jamaal Bowman, another Black Squad member who dared to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza. Next congressional session, excluding the co-opted Ocasio-Cortez, The Squad will be down to — at most — seven members. Surely some of them will be next on the chopping block. This is despite the fact that members of The Squad are often quick to spread imperialist lies — specifically against China. In other words, what remains of American progressivism is weak both in ideology and manpower. Unlike in years past, hope for a better United States is scant. Outside the halls of power, the outlook is not much rosier. America is in the midst of a historic unaffordability crisis. Unionization rates are lower than ever, and wealth inequality is at all-time highs. The crisis is deep and deepening. Piecemeal reforms will not pull us out of this hole. Radical solutions are needed but hard to find. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is one potential antidote to this malaise. It is the largest socialist organization in the United States — perhaps ever — with nearly 100,000 dues-paying members. And it is undoubtedly home to many energetic, principled leftists hungry for a better world. But the organization ultimately engenders little optimism. It is notoriously cozy with the Democratic Party to the point of celebrating faux progressive and ardent Zionist Tim Walz. Many DSAers seek a clean break from the Democrats, and want to establish their own leftist party. But they’ve made little progress to that end. While organizing a working-class force to challenge the duopoly is hard, members of the American Communist Party are doing it. Led by prominent online leftists like Jackson Hinkle, the party has 13 chapters in the United States and Canada. It has not begun fielding candidates. But members do important community service including food drives and neighborhood cleanups. It’s commendable work. And the party’s trajectory is promising given that it only began in July. But whether the American Communist Party will become a veritable political force is unknown. Leftist projects have gained early momentum before, only to stagnate or even outright disappear shortly thereafter. The DSA is itself one example. While membership swelled during each of Sanders’s presidential runs, the organization’s rolls haven’t grown in years — much to leaders’ dismay. That leftist groups are either stagnant or in their early building phases needn’t be a reason to despair. It’s a reason to get organized. Find a decent institution you support and dedicate your time to it. Sitting on the couch instead might seem tempting. As does justifying that laziness, as many leftists — like J. Sakai and Bradley Blankenship — do, by insisting America is irredeemable But it isn’t, and its revolutionary tradition shows that. Yet that radical promise won’t fulfill itself. Building a better America will take work. Everything counts, and it’ll all be worth it if — no, when — we win. What Went Wrong? When did the United States swing toward reaction? Some insist the American project was doomed from its very inception — the moment white skin touched the East Coast. J. Sakai — a shadowy figure, self-proclaimed “revolutionary intellectual,” and former activist — argues as much in his cult classic Settlers. The book is an extensive and, at times, impressive retelling of history. Its main contention is that America’s settler-colonial past casts a neverending shadow, forever condemning it to a rightist political order. “Once a settler colony, always one,” says Sakai. And settlers, Sakai claims, are not just those radical Europeans centuries ago who conquered the land through genocide and enslavement. Rather, all whites — and even some minorities — in America today are settlers too. That assertion forms the foundation for Sakai’s contention that, in the United States, there simply is no white working class. It’s a bold claim, and one that flagrantly violates basic ironclad rules of materialist analysis. Simply, those who sell their labor to survive are workers. And that describes the vast majority of America’s adult population. This is good and bad news. It’s bad because it means millions of Americans bear the brunt of capitalist exploitation. But it’s good news because of the fundamental Marxist idea that, where there’s a proletariat, there’s hope. The United States isn’t stuck in a grinding malaise because most of its people are settlers. In fairness, settler colonialism is a useful framework to understand how Native Americans lost their land and sovereignty. However, using it to assign intergenerational blame and deny a Starbucks barista’s proletarian status is not just inaccurate but outright counterproductive. Settlers posits that the American majority lacks any revolutionary potential. Yet that cannot account for the country’s progressive tradition, which mostly occurred when it was far whiter than today. This leaves Sakai with no choice but to minimize that tradition, which he does constantly. His minimization takes many forms, including attributing to famous labor leaders views opposite to those they actually held. It’s easy to accuse Sakai of intentional fraud. Maybe this was just an especially bad case of confirmation bias, or even something more innocent. Regardless, if your theory relies heavily on mistruths and selective emphasis, it’s probably not the right one. The current political order isn’t corrupt because of the caucasian majority’s supposedly inevitable tendency toward reaction. America isn’t captured by an inseparable brotherhood of white nationalists. It’s captured by financial and business interests. Gangster capitalists have regrettably always enjoyed high status in the United States. But only in the late 19th century did their influence begin to completely eclipse that of labor. For roughly a century following the revolution, America expanded westward. Most of what became the western United States was Mexican territory until the 1840s. With its burgeoning industrial economy, America had the productive capacity to conquer any indigenous or state actor between them and the Pacific. Incrementally, the United States annexed more land as the government encouraged further settlement to expand the American economy. Expansion served as a pressure-release mechanism for class conflict. While extremely dangerous and often not individually profitable, “going to the frontier” was an invaluable tool for the capitalist class. Urban laborers toiled in horrific conditions. But the theoretical option to establish a homestead for cheap and get rich perpetuated the lie that capitalism is fair. When the frontier finally closed, the owning class faced a predicament. Absent new lands to be incorporated, building national wealth required developing industry and exploiting domestic natural resources. Crucially, for this approach to generate massive profits, investing in both capital and workers themselves was a must. Only then could America’s productive forces add maximum value to raw materials during the manufacturing process. Economic nationalism was the only path to stability and prosperity. The United States had the resources to make such a transition. But if so, the power of capital would inevitably decline relative to labor. And the elites couldn’t have that. So, rather than invest in domestic productive forces, they reopened the frontier. This explains why the United States continued its imperial ventures after conquering the West. In 1898, it fought and won the Spanish-American War — gaining control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Add to that the conquest of Hawaii five years earlier, and the character of the United States had utterly transformed. In 1850, America was not even a contender for global hegemony. The British empire was still firmly dominant on the world stage — the captain of capitalism, if you will. By 1900, however, the United States had unambiguously established itself as an emerging imperialist power. Then came World War I, which the Brits entered still the global superpower. By the end of it, there was a new paradigm. The Brits had borrowed so much money to win the war that they became deeply indebted to J.P. Morgan & Co. Britain’s accumulation of non-sovereign debt was the grease that allowed preeminence to slip through its fingers. Other European powers were in a similar position, owing vast sums to American financiers. Unlike the strategic inter-imperialist alliances of the past, the United States refused to forgive the huge loans it provided the Allies. Contrast this with the French monarchy’s decisive aid to American revolutionaries against the British, for which they demanded no repayment on nearly $700,000,000 in direct military backing. It was a deliberate strategy. United States elites outwitted their counterparts across the Atlantic. They sowed the seeds of European imperial decline, giving them the entire colonized world to rape and pillage. In the aftermath of World War I, American elites — through historic dirty dealings — solved the frontier predicament. By re-expanding the field of conquest, they were able to continue generating profits without resorting to economic nationalism. This undoubtedly stunted the United States’ development — especially from a working-class perspective, which is the one that matters most. Economic nationalism is a more effective strategy for delivering widespread prosperity. We see this in contemporary China. For the last 40 years, its Communist Party has steered industry and utilized natural resources to raise living standards broadly. Private industry is at the mercy of careful state planning, which has empowered Chinese workers in unprecedented ways. The results have been downright remarkable. Even capitalist media can’t deny them. Over 850 million Chinese have escaped poverty since 1980. China has now had the world’s largest economy for nearly a decade. But that development model was only possible because of Mao Zedong, who kneecapped the capitalist class. As the late Marxist luminary Domenico Losurdo explained, not all of the productive forces in Mao’s China were publicly owned. A “significant private economy” remained. Yet it followed state planning because Chairman Mao believed strongly in, above all, expropriating the political capital of the bourgeoisie. And he governed successfully to that end. This set the stage for the incredible progress we see today. By the time Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978, the capitalists were already sufficiently weak. This enabled public control of the economy and the modern arrangements known collectively as Socialism with Chinese characteristics. China, in other words, had a head start thanks to its timeless chairman. America was not so lucky. Despite its revolutionary founding, British colonialism entrenched a system of elite domination that proved difficult to shake. The United States thus developed in the colonial legacy of the world’s preeminent capitalist power — capitalism’s progenitor, in fact. Building socialism in that context is no small feat, and akin to swimming against the tide. Consequently, for all of American history, elites have directed the economy, constantly taking steps to further consolidate their power. That certainly makes liberation harder — but not impossible. Many states have shed their colonial pasts and embraced a leftist social order that empowers ordinary people. China itself is one example. In the 1800s, imperialism ravaged the Middle Kingdom. British forces occupied and annexed Hong Kong. They invaded mainland China and didn’t just steal its most valuable resources but hooked the population on opioids. British colonialism created generations of addicts and instigated broad and unprecedented social instability. Yet China overcame. America can too. Embrace the founding’s radical tradition. No socialist movement has ever seized power on a platform of national shame. Fight for a politics of the 99%. Believe in the possibility of a better tomorrow. America is redeemable if we try. AuthorYouhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism. You can contact him at [email protected]. Archives September 2024
1 Comment
steven t johnson
9/18/2024 08:54:28 am
"For the last 40 years, its Communist Party has steered industry and utilized natural resources to raise living standards broadly." I'm reluctant to agree with this rejection of Mao. I Leave a Reply. |
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