Leftist Groundhog Day(?): 50 Years Of Failure…

I was trying to get in contact with someone I ran into during Occupy Wall Street Boston. For those who weren’t alive then, or were too young, OWS was a mess, only lasted 59 days, and the post-mortem on it has only been partially resolved in recent years by recognition—from some—that it was never meant to bring a lasting solution. Furthermore, it could not possibly serve as a template for future movements any more than the October Revolution could.

However, I did find this particular person’s answer to a question on Quora on why they believe OWS failed. This was their response:

“Answering about the Occupy Movement in general and from my experience visiting Occupy Boston a few times…

• To put the Occupy Movement in context, it was mostly a Leftist movement as opposed to liberal. America has a very small Leftist contingent, and that small contingent is very fragmented, with a collection of Marxist-inspired groups, some left labor, and some anarchists. Mainstream liberals, Democrats like Obama and H. Clinton, for example, want to distance themselves from the Left. Liberals want to reform the system, Leftists want to replace it; key difference.
• One of the signs at Occupy Boston was: We have no leaders. Which seemed to be the case, it was an experiment in the small-d democratic process. I believe that social movements need leaders, since no movement without leaders has survived. Some members of the Left criticize and dismiss calls for leadership as “vanguardism.” (Lenin was the theorist behind the need for a vanguard, but the risk is you end up with a Stalin.)
• Beyond the lack of leaders, the process at Occupy Boston was quirky, which I imagine comes with ultra democracy. Councils for everything, the human mic — repeating what speakers would say — funny hand signals, and so on. Fine with me, but I could see some people being uncomfortable and even freaked out by it all.
• The message was difficult and confusing, criticizing the system, but light on concrete suggestions for replacement of the system. Obviously the canned Marxist stuff about proles arising makes little sense today, but on my view, the Left has not come up with a new game plan.”

As someone who was at both OWS NY and Boston, this rings mostly true. The person who wrote this was not a Marxist (to my knowledge) but more like a “healthcare for all” Bernie Sanders kind of guy (?).

In observing the university protests over Palestine that have begun to spread like wildfire across the country, I don’t want to come across as someone who is “against” them per se. Discouraging the youth is never my goal. Many have already told me I am a reactionary and a fascist sympathizer (despite writing endless posts about the history of American fascism). Before there was a “conservative Communism,” I was a considered “rightwing” for the simple reason that I think Communist strategy is bankrupt, and therefore refuse to sign-off on what I know will end in failure. Being someone who was part of such a failure—Occupy Wall Street—I think I have some knowledge of when I know something will fizzle out, affecting precisely zero change (but will live in the minds of those who participated as an achievement of some kind, perpetuating the noxious cycle of mass movements that come into being, go nowhere, and learn nothing from them).

***

Some might stop me right here and point to the South African apartheid movements of the 80s—which was, in part, led by college students as part of a similar divestment scheme—but I think this just goes to my point of what constitutes a lasting solution in the context of fascism (as well as the ever-evolving landscape which renders politics itself more and more ineffective). What’s more, I’m not fully convinced those movements—which many are paralleling because of Columbia’s involvement in both—had as much impact as we would like to believe they did.

In a rather interesting paper from Yale University (“SANCTIONS ON SOUTH AFRICA: WHAT DID THEY DO?“), the author Philip Levy makes the case that the pressure to end apartheid actually came from factors that had more to do with a.) the fall of the Soviet Union b.) apartheid itself was becoming inefficient and costly and c.) the growing internal pressures from the black majority within South Africa and the growth of their own “political effectiveness.” This is a different conclusion than was reached in Free South Africa: The Columbia University Divestment Movement: A Personal Perspective, where the author suggests there was a successful four-stage plan that could possibly even serve as a model for today:

1. Raising Awareness (October 11, 1981 – March 24, 1983)
2. University Senate Resolution and Aftermath
   (March 25, 1982 – April 3, 1985)
3. Blockade (April 4 —- 25, 1985)
4. Divestment (October 7, 1985)

And by all metrics of their intended purpose—to get Columbia to stop investing in South Africa—they won:

I do not in any way wish to demean their accomplishment. But it should be noted that there were other circumstances that were far more historically and materially relevant and, more importantly, this movement had all the missteps that would carry over to the 21st century.

But how could that be? They got what they wanted, after all.

Yes. But the enemy is not Columbia. It is not Harvard. It is not UT Austin. Or USC. Or MIT…etc. It was not even South Africa!

Much like the enemy in 2011-12 was not the Lehman Brothers, or Goldman Sachs, or Bear Sterns, or any of the other banking conglomerates. Nor is it today BlackRock or even the seemingly “rogue” Federal Reserve.

These are all downstream of the fascist State and its management of the global economy (i.e., hegemony). As much as Leftists would love to believe that people sitting on a board of trustees or Jerome Powell have any actual power. The truth is that their focus on the middlemen is in some way instructive about why their movements have not had any macro potency towards transforming society.

***

(As an aside, many years ago, Nick Land called out these kinds of tactics as a useless byproduct of days-gone-by:

99.9% of Leftists will read this and think “Oh, so you support cops now, eh?” No. I support actions that have a chance of actually working. I don’t support the seagulls or crabs when turtle hatchlings are trying to make it to the sea either. But I do account for selection pressures. Land is mostly correct on “mob politics” (and remember, he’s mostly critiquing NRx here): cyberspace has been the terrain in which the fascist State has made the most inroads. In-person is now a treadmill, a rusty hamster wheel for Leftist activity. Protests were the first—and most enduring—way to “hack” society. Once the microelectronic revolution occurs, the State immediately sets its aims to take control over this space. We saw this during the pandemic. And only later did we get first-hand confirmation that the State throttles or boosts whatever algo-driven narrative it wishes (see: the Twitter Files). That is to say, we are now more than a decade behind the State in warfare, strategy, and how we can conceive of organization. For example, I came across this thread which, compared to Land’s suggestion from seven years ago, seems woefully anachronistic:

She makes a compelling argument that appears to echo what Nick Land is saying: the landscape has changed and so has State force (who’ve co-opted technology, AI, and Silicon Valley altogether). It seems to contradict Land in certain circumstances, since this poster is saying that using the internet is just another dragnet for the militarized police to accrue more information, feed it through machine-learning systems, and progressively update their own tactics. But she misses a critical point: the fascist State is allowing the live protests precisely because they are ineffective! (they are a kind of mob-rule that don’t quite fit into the earlier archetypes of the 60s, and certainly to do not rise to the level of “revolutionary” action). She does ask a relevant question of “what would you be willing to lose?” To which I think its applied poorly in her argument. As I will mention later on, I do not think students en masse are prepared to give up their “futures” or the privilege of higher learning. This is why Land is important to insert within this conversation. The “veil” that this poster is alluding to—which they believe has been removed—is one of several that all generations believe is “the” veil that will lead to some pithy conclusion about the grim state of social reality. Alas, this has never been the case. It is a classic generational trope whereby the students, protestors, or whomever, react to what is immediately in front of them (the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, environmental issues, etc.), analyze it as a false reality (much like the Great Recession did for “the American Dream” or any pretense that the State was in service of human needs), only to be outwitted when behind the veil was but another system of control awaiting them. The fascist State had been several steps ahead all along. Which begs the question: if the “meat-space” (Land) is for “chimps” (lower life forms and lesser praxeology) and the online space is already dominated by the federal government as a prophylactic measure…what’s left?)

***

In the back of everyone’s minds, communist or not, is then that burning question of “what is to do be done?” My answer has not changed in twenty years: to reduce hours of labor—or better yet, impose it on the State. Protesting, “mob rule,” and cyber warfare cannot accomplish this in its present iteration (not even as precursors to enacting). From what I can surmise, both the Left and the Right (however you wish to define this) are going through an unnecessary process of elimination in attempting to arrive at this conclusion. For the Left (as seen above), they are only now understanding that there is something lacking in how they concentrate their energy, what they get back in return, and that perhaps it is not the end-all be-all like it was 60 years ago. For the Right, they are only now understanding that whomever they assign to Speaker of the House will ultimately betray them. Both are struggling—i.e., completely losing—to win an “information war.” They will literally try anything than forcibly reducing hours of labor on the U.S. government. What probably frustrates everyone is that “what is to be done?” was determined for us after 1971. The answer is so singular in nature that people automatically dismiss it as a “silver bullet” rather than activating a chain-reaction that lay dormant in fascism— “…to blow this foundation sky–high.” Ironically, the alleged “slacktivism” (but kited from Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”) “Do Nothing” phrase from Logo Daedalus is a better starting point and ethos than the Left has ever come up with:

Still. This is the difference between Land and everyone else, as well. He accepts fascism and everyone else resists it—even if he says otherwise by declaring that fascism is “anti-capitalist,” when it is of course the penultimate political-economy to communism and the State’s forestalling of it. Thus, his proposals for “corporate governance” misses the point, and yet, he does stumble on to the right conclusion that 90 years of fascism has already delimited the scope of the masses: “There is no longer any need for residents [clients] to take any interest in politics whatsoever” [i.e., anti-politics].

Eventually, something has to give!).

***

With that, I want to use the list of reasons why OWS failed from above to tease-out how they’re playing themselves out again and what could be done to course-correct. It’s not meant to be a complete battleplan. Nor is it meant to be defeatist by asserting that real-world activism and online activism are no longer viable. On the contrary, we’ve wasted so much goddamn energy trying to outwit capital and its proxy in the form of the State, that any and all planning has been reduced to mere “opposition” to capital (or its various personifications) and, according to Land’s “controversial” stance, all activity that does not work with capital—or, rather, make it work for us—is just as much a menace (terror?) as the “fetishization” of these actions and associations as somehow virtuous. Just as Robespierre himself once thought.

Land will re-appear later in his post. For now, I wish to focus on the four problems that were identified and expound upon them further…

***

1.) “To put the Occupy Movement in context, it was mostly a Leftist movement as opposed to liberal. America has a very small Leftist contingent, and that small contingent is very fragmented, with a collection of Marxist-inspired groups, some left labor, and some anarchists. Mainstream liberals, Democrats like Obama and H. Clinton, for example, want to distance themselves from the Left. Liberals want to reform the system, Leftists want to replace it; key difference.”

Beyond the fact that I think Leftism is a dead-end in and of itself. This person is correct insofar as Leftists only make up a small portion of the population. Occupy was comprised of various strains of “anti-establishment” ideologies but was predominantly “Leftist” in its tendencies. When I was at OWS New York, this was highly problematic. The Left dominated the entirety of the discourse and, regardless of whether it was doomed to failure, the preoccupation with the Left’s values came before making it an actually “inclusive” movement. People who did not agree with them ideologically on certain cultural issues were eschewed or outright banished, for example. As if on cue, this occurred at Emory University not too long ago:

There were defectors even within the Left. It was not good enough that people agreed with you on the main issue. They had to agree with you on everything else as well. We’re seeing this today with the students’ reluctance to reach out to MAGA.

Now. Is this naivety on my part? I’m not sure. But MAGA fucking hates the Ivy League and most Universities, since they already believe they’re breeding grounds for Leftism and communism (and subsequently believe are interchangeable). But what if Columbia students, for example, were to reach out to the trucker’s boycott of New York? What if they reached out to the construction unions in New York that are now pro-Trump? If such a coalition could be established just once, it could serve as a template for other universities to broaden their numbers and increase their pressure on the State by way of putting a strain on “the economy.”

The selling point would have to be this: rather than go after divestment from Israel, you go after full divestment of the State itself. This would include the end of federal aid to “private” universities, massive public sector layoffs. You could even drag the Libertarians into this who know full well of Rothbard’s famous passage on Columbia and its reliance on federal dollars:

Rather than making the protests a boring exercise on property rights. The students could come to an agreement with Libertarians to join them in taking down monopolization of the State over higher education. I think this would be the most difficult sell to the students. Why? For the same reason all my “comrades” voted for fucking Obama in 2012: their self-interest (employment, the promise of “free” healthcare, and a renaissance of re-distributionism) won out. Today’s students aren’t that much different (though, I’m willing to be wrong). Odds are, they are not mentally prepared to claw back their futures from the State which has already sold most it off.

Which is perplexing to me.

The pro-Gaza Left wants to defund Israel via their respective universities, plus the war machine, and MAGA wants to defund…the rest of it. Seems like a match made in heaven to me! If you get the labor unions involved, you have your ability to actually make demands. Since college students are, for the most part, not workers, they’ve nothing to bargain with against the actual State (they can an only work within the “bylaws” laid out by their institutions). And yet, the transportation industry alone could shut down the country in 24-48 hours. Hyperbole? No. According to one website (What Would Happen If Truck Drivers Went on Strike? | Best Yet Express (bestyetexpresstrucking.com), the sequence would go something like this:

• Day 1: IF TRUCK DRIVERS WENT ON STRIKE, PROBLEMS WOULD START WITHIN 24 HOUR
  • Once truck drivers quit, it wouldn’t take long to start noticing the effects. Within one day, gas shortages would start. The most popular fuel stations need gas deliveries multiple times a day. They’d run out in just a few hours, leading to traffic-stopping lines at any station still stocked.
  • Hospitals, nursing homes, and any other facilities that rely on medical supplies to function would be in immediate trouble. 
  • The manufacturing industry would also fly into a panic. 
• DAY 2: AFTER JUST A DAY, PROBLEMS WOULD ESCALATE
  • Gas shortages would get even worse after 24 hours. The prices would skyrocket and become unaffordable for most.
  • Companies would be forced to cease operations, and panic over potential layoffs would ensue. 
• BY DAY THREE, GAS WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND
  • After a week, railways, planes, and container ships would cease operations.
• A MONTH AFTER TRUCK DRIVERS WENT ON STRIKE, SOCIETY WOULD CRUMBLE
  • Without fresh water, people would have to choose between dehydration and drinking potentially contaminated water.

Of course, I don’t think it would lead to a Mad Max-style scenario. Because when they say “society” they mean the economy. The State is part of that. Also, the transportation industry would be forced to automate much of its workforce and the remainder of its supply-chain infrastructure. The point is that this is not within the Leftist purview of strategy because Leftist dogma says we need the State to abet our aims as much as it presently abets Israel. Not one communist thinks the State can immediately be converted into free-time and increased consumption for all without society collapsing into some Hobbesian dystopia.

***

2.) “One of the signs at Occupy Boston was: We have no leaders. Which seemed to be the case, it was an experiment in the small-d democratic process. I believe that social movements need leaders, since no movement without leaders has survived. Some members of the Left criticize and dismiss calls for leadership as ‘vanguardism.’ (Lenin was the theorist behind the need for a vanguard, but the risk is you end up with a Stalin).”

At the time, I was also not a Leninist. Thus, it was interesting to talk to this guy (who also wasn’t a Leninist) about Lenin and how vanguardism wasn’t essential to the movement itself. My attempt to explain this to him was not to say that leadership wasn’t necessary. Why? Because the State was already an object—even indirectly—to those protesting at OWS. Bernanke, Paulson, Greenspan and Timothy Geithner had become household names by then. A vanguard presupposes the need for the proletariat to know “advanced revolutionary theory” and for there to then be a prioritization of “revolutionary action,” based on this theory, to achieve a social aim. The risk is not some bullshit anxiety that this will all lead to Stalinism (I suppose, in this person’s view, “authoritarianism”). The risk is that Communists will believe they themselves possess this theory. For Communists, the proletarians are just pieces on the chessboard in their minds. In no way do they wish to earn the proletariat’s trust nor have the movement not be called a “Left-wing” one or a “communist” one. They completely dismiss the inherent communist consciousness of the proletariat (as I will explain in the final part of this extremely long post). The alternative is not tailgating (and nor should it be). It’s for Communists to immerse themselves into this movement which is already self-becoming. A small cohort of students cannot possibly believe they are capable of the kind of fortitude (even if they are themselves proletariat) required to launch a full-on assault against the State. This could not be clearer than when Columbia’s student communications rep for the CUAD (Columbia University Apartheid Divest) demanded free food and water for those who occupied Hamilton Hall. These folks are the embodiment of “still living in their parents’ basement” and will go home in about a month—to all different parts of the country (if not the world). Location is not why this movement will fail, however. The interesting thing about the State is it is as ubiquitous as capital, both in time and space. Thus, it can be attacked from many places (within the U.S., that is). But the most effective attack would be concentrated on Washington. So, for example, the January 6th protesters didn’t actually need to be in Washington. I must give them credit though for at least understanding that this is their true enemy—and not their local statehouse. Leadership is fine. But vanguardism—to me, at least—would only serve the same divisive purposes the Left already engages in by thumbing their noses at those who understand, say, aspects of the economic impacts a construction or transportation shutdown would have on the State (and what’s more, the technical aspects of how to achieve this). Unions and MAGA already have their leaders. It is the students’ jobs to figure out how to work with them. Not lord over them their precious theory and virtues. I do not agree with everything Harry Haywood believed, naturally, but in his work, “For A Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question,” he does not chide the American South nor dismiss them. Rather, he framed their successes in advancing the so-called Negro cause on these terms:

“What they refuse to see is that our militancy, our orientation upon the South as the fountainhead of Negro oppression, and our ability to rally the white workers in defense of Negro rights was based upon our placing of the Negro question as a revolutionary question, vital to the interests of the entire working class.”

Leftism—besides being regressive—has never once connected to the “entire working class.” It is not a matter of following a particular Marxist line (here, as will I discuss in the next section, is where I diverge completely from Haywood, since he still insisted on the old Marxist-Leninist line of vanguardism). The students are following a line that is similar in its logical misstep of assuming the working class needs theoretical clarification to understand what is immediately affecting their lives. Under fascism, this is inflation, overwork, the hollowing-out of democracy. Do they know that it is because “necessary labor” isn’t necessary at all or that the expansion of the State is an expression of something fundamentally corrupted deep within the realization of value (and thus money and their wages?). Probably not. So what? They know enough to start a conversation:

Imagine how much more traction there would be if these students focused their energies on joining this protest:

***

3.) “Beyond the lack of leaders, the process at Occupy Boston was quirky, which I imagine comes with ultra democracy. Councils for everything, the human mic — repeating what speakers would say — funny hand signals, and so on. Fine with me, but I could see some people being uncomfortable and even freaked out by it all.”

This was indeed the case. Leftists created their own little closed system (which I have accused even the “anti-Leftists” Communists of emulating all the same), which was both off-putting and, in respects to the movement being merely “anti-capitalist” or “anti-greed”, was still too niche. This is not to say that they should have engaged in populism. Rather, their focus could not adequately be transformed into a movement with any real teeth. In other words, direct-action stalled at the point of the inherent limitations of these esoteric, hermetic practices. I’m not sure the relevance of “symbolic” action. But it was prevalent enough for people to take notice (more crucially, they noticed it didn’t amount to anything). One can “do” all they want. If the environment does not respond—except in the typical ways we’re familiar with (arrests, police brutality, etc.)—then maybe all hitherto direct-action must be reassessed. I don’t think Graeber’s summation of direct-action is adequate, for example (from The Democracy Project):

“Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”

The reason I object to this is the same reason I object to most strategies: you cannot assume agency in a world that is molded by social and production relations that put restrictions on power itself (even if they are the reasons this power exists in the first place). Direct-action, in some capacity, must navigate and be consonant with those relations. Take, for instance, the far-right “race realists” who focus exclusively on attempting to personify finance capital as “the Jew”. Communists, oddly, are not much different in their approach. Instead of the Jew (which they only care about to the degree they feel the need to defend against claims of “Judeo-Bolshevism”), they’ve their own personifications with George Soros, Biden, Trump, the Clintons, the Gateses, the Rockefellers, the Fords, members of the WEF, the IDF, OPEC, the police, now, the universities, etc. etc. Their track record on this matter is poor (as was the case with OWS’s struggle against the “1%” or today’s battle against “the elites”), and so, because they refuse to accept a defeat the proletariat suffered 50 years—which put to rest class struggle as that of “capitalist vs. worker”—there has been a parallel in the insufficiency to formulate new strategies because they are mired in their own personifications of now global capital (“The Left sees capital elude its clutches– and it sees something real when it does so. By far the most significant agent of Exit is capital itself”—Nick Land, Capital Escapes). This leads to a faulty model of domination whereby capital does not dominate the very people or organizations they say are dominating us, or stripping us of sovereignty, yada yada (to which the only response has thus far been, again, according to Land: “It’s escaping…Let’s punish it”).

What I’d rather emphasize though, is the missed opportunity to conjoin with the Tea Party movement of that time. In The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, And The Great Recession (2018), the authors made a rather interesting insight (one that I don’t even think they understood the implications of):

“The following subsection explains how ‘Barack Obama’ as the symbol of dangerous ambivalences is so evocative for the fears that define the negative horizon of the TP’s core constituency’s orienting frame: As the USA’s first African-American president, he blurs the difference between the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ of the social hierarchy, but also between the national ‘inside’ and the foreign ‘outside’”

One is of course tempted to focus on the seemingly “racial animosity” of the Tea Party (and later, MAGA) as the primary focus (as if it is a novel insight to observe that parts of the working class are racist or sexist or classist, etc.), while overlooking the “negative horizon.” In other words, the demands of the Tea Party were, ironically, more communistic than their Occupy counterparts. The communist movement is inherently negative, does put forth a positive program nor want anything from the State (other than for it to go away). While there was no doubt racism in the Tea Party. The Tea Party’s overall tendency was to blame Obama’s ascendency, his inevitability, on the very thing Communists have never once focused on getting rid of—the welfare-state; the New Deal; “progressivism.” We must remember that the Tea Partys’ grievances were against massive spending packages, federal debt, taxes, and what was then the topic du jour, the ACA (Obamacare). Long before OWS, the Tea Party was having rallies in the belly of the beast. According to a spokesperson from FreedomWorks, in an interview from one such rally in Washington (from 2010):

“Today we are gathering to remind Congress and the president that we are fed up with their big-government policies…They have ignored independent voters and have continued to spend our tax dollars in a wasteful and inefficient way. Because the bailouts and the growth of the federal government have continued, we are now more determined then [sic] ever to replace those in power with leaders that will put an end to the failed economic policies of the current Congress.”

While comedians took potshots at those few who engaged in the cosplay of the Tea Party (tri-corner hats and colonial apparel), there was nothing “quirky” about their demands. Was the Tea Party still full of incoherence like MAGA? Absolutely. How else would you explain this (?):

What was insulting then—and still is today—is that the Tea Party (or MAGA) had to somehow be “brainwashed” into hating the government. Even so-called “MAGACommunists” do not give them their due. Much like Leftists who said the Koch Bros. were the ones astroturfing and leading them astray from “their real material interests” (that is, the welfare-state), this supposed “anti-Left” movement says it is DeSantis, various rightwing media personalities, dark money and RINOS that are deceiving them. I give MAGA more credit than all that.

This is not to say that the Left is somehow brainwashed either. It is somewhat curious that they’re trying to put out fires as they go along—from OWS to Ferguson to the “Muslim ban” to Floyd to Palestine—rather than going directly to the arsonist. In this way, they continually create these ephemeral ecosystems with their own phraseologies/slogans, many times succumbing to influence from their predecessors (“Liberated Zones” and CHAZ), clashes with local (or federal) authorities with the most unfounded hopes that the government will go more lenient (or that they could evolve faster than the fascist State), or have more sympathy for them, this time around (adapting only in the last instance of wearing masks to protect their identities or creating bail funds as opposed to the more practical fund for a protracted general strike). And much like the Floyd protests that began in May of 2020 and effectively died off by summer’s end (aside from the occasional memorializing of, say, his birthday), the tactics remained isolated to an event (as opposed to the general material conditions that affects everyone) and, despite Chauvin going to jail, police budgets, overall, went up (especially in New York and L.A.—where students are presently being haunted by the failure of those movements in the form of riot gear, tear gas, and qualified immunity).

The students who are protesting right now do not seem to have plans but to repeat the same pattern of putting forth tremendous amounts of momentum into a happening they’ve disconnected entirely from Washington’s growth as a necessity to the survival of capital and thus its “foreign policy.” They will claim there is systemic global oppression and yet they lack systemic reach to the general populace, lack an approach which gets to the root of this systematization, and even rely on the system—or its peripheral actors and gladhanders—to do PR work on their behalf (AOC, Jill Stein, Sanders, Cornel West, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, John Cusack, Norman Finklestein, “influencers,” agents of the State, etc.—a continuance of the slew of the glitterati who did fuckall to make BLM accessible and comprehensible to those who hate the government but don’t hate America). If I were a student, I would tell them all to go fuck themselves. The Hollywood vultures descended upon OWS all around the country…and disappeared just as quickly when it no longer raised their social coinage. Danny Glover (of Lethal Weapon fame) was quoted saying:

“We don’t need weekend warriors, we need 24/7 warriors, that’s what you have to become.”

Do Leftists realize how ridiculous and out of touch they come off when their “politics” align with these folks? What does it say when Salon magazine is using Guy Debord as a theorist to decode the meaning of events like Occupy Wall Street?:

“The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme—a very powerful idea—and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.

1968 was more of a cultural kind of revolution. This time I think it’s much more serious. We’re in an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, living in a sort of apocalyptic world, and the young people realize they don’t really have a viable future to look forward to.”

Esoterica and banality! That piece was written for my generation. And it perpetuates a horrid flaw in communist dogma: we must wait for a crisis, as opposed to bringing one to capital’s (~the State’s) doorstep!

The only thing revolutionary about 1968 was that the world fell into a chronic dollar currency crisis. Again, capital did all the heavy lifting to bring about this “disaster.”

With each memetic moment that passes, all the signifiers ever achieve are taking on a new form—empty as they may be.

Even the “Accelerationist Manifesto” by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek—which was written shortly after Occupy Wall Street, did critique the provinciality of it:

“The new social movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorization over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of globalized capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy.”

At the same time, they opposed the very removal of the guardrails that would actually streamline accelerationism: austerity, privatization (which gets capital out of the hands of the State), and even “unemployment” and “stagnating wages.” The disconnect of this is application of these to the public sector. Despite mentioning Keynes and his prediction of the shorter workweek (“All of us want to work less. It is an intriguing question as to why it was that the world’s leading economist of the post-war era believed that an enlightened capitalism inevitably progressed towards a radical reduction of working hours. In ‘The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren’ [written in 1930], Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would have their work reduced to three hours a day. What has instead occurred is the progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory”), they don’t even ask why this never came to pass, why Marx himself didn’t predict this, and thus their bullshit claim about “Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces” rings as hollow as “Free Palestine Now!” without putting pressure on capital (and profits, surplus-value) in the bluntest way possible: ridding the United States of its capacity to absorb and expand superfluous labor-time and a drastic reduction in hours of labor in the sector of the economy which produces zilch.

That is to say, the leader—whether Communists like it or not—is, ultimately, capital. It alone creates the conditions for communism. Not Communists.

***

4.) “The message was difficult and confusing, criticizing the system, but light on concrete suggestions for replacement of the system. Obviously, the canned Marxist stuff about proles arising makes little sense today, but on my view, the Left has not come up with a new game plan.”

What more needs to be said? It is a perfect summary of the Left’s death-spiral into obscurity and their inability to let go of the past—be it “anti-imperialism,” “anti-colonialism,” “class struggle,” “armed revolution,” “awareness campaigns,” etc., as burnt-out vehicles for praxis-without-a-subject.

Occupy Wall Street’s list of demands was utilization of already-existing fascism that doesn’t get rid of fascism (much like the multipolarists’ prescriptions would not complete—breakup— unipolarity):

Notice that there was not one mention of the national deficit. Even more egregious is the call for regulation upon regulation, giving the State further control over how they could respond to the next economic issue (say, a global pandemic?), all whilst railing against “globalism” with their call to end free-trade.

What everyone misses is that the proletariats’ potential towards “arising” does not hinge on the convulsions of the capitalist system nor putting restrictions on exploitation. Because existing society is recognized as constantly revolutionizing itself (“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade“), this necessarily includes the capitalist class. Indeed, they have already been rendered superfluous. The proletariat are “el ultimo hombre” of capitalist society. Marx and Engels viewed them as contiguous—and domestic—to the environ formed by the development of capital. Engels’s assessment of Marx’s position on free trade elaborates on this:

“To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created—for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.”

The actual material and technical requirements for this have already been satisfied by capital:

• The capitalist class and workers emerge to form a new kind of social wealth
• The capitalist class and workers, along with the form of social wealth, become anachronistic to material wealth and existing production
• After the boom/bust cycle, a permanent depression inhibits the productive forces from development
• A revolution does occur, but it is a fascist one, the Keynesian Revolution
• This, too, does not do away with the need for a social revolution to replace the “antiquated social order.” It only changes the focus to the downsizing the State apparatus as one in the same as reducing hours of labor in which to accomplish this feat co-temporaneously.

Thus, the “new game plan” must begin and end with the fundamental assumption that neither capital nor labor are “socially necessary” in any way to material production. I’ve seen some calls for a “general strike” in addition to what is occurring on campuses:

…But even this does not go far enough. Even if it did succeed, and many universities divested and funding was cut to Israel, say, this person would just go back to work once it was over. The purpose of a general strike when labor has become superfluous is to never return until the crisis is resolved through complete transformation of society and rapid development (i.e., without the State to intervene and “ameliorate” this chronic depression, capital is forced to act as capital again in attempt to raise the rate of profit, rather than being unproductively consumed).

The demands are simplified precisely because of the position of the proletariat find themselves in—a position that is both lamented by Communists (“the poor proletariat!”) and venerated (“the mighty working class!”). That position is just a relation to capital, one which, yes, consigns the proletariat as subaltern to it. However, this only means we can’t detach our consciousness from capital any more than we can detach our course of action. Much like the capitalist class that enjoys an immense amount of disposable time—because this is what capital does (“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour time“)—the proletariat wish to merely realize this spare time for the entirety of society. It is not to obtain more wages (“their fair share”) or convert excess capital into various State programs (“UBI”, “Medicare for all,” or mimicking the BRI in China, for example.).

The reason is obvious: the consumption of this spare time puts so much downward pressure on profits, that capital must increase productivity of the dwindling labor-power now at its disposal. Thus, when I claim, “The actual material and technical requirements for this [communism] have already been satisfied by capital,” it is implied from as early as vol. I that there already exists superfluous labor:

“The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand, enforcing economy in each individual business, on the other hand, begets, by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous.”

Labor in its necessary form gradually becomes wholly determined by this waste. Up until a certain development within the mode of production, where capital and labor stand idle, potential for spare time remains exactly that. Reducing hours of labor thus increases the above tendency in such a way that the contradiction between this movement continues to advance the development of the productive forces, on the one hand, but begins to ease the competition between the working-class itself, on the other, as this freed-up, no-longer-latent, time is viciously imposed on capital instead.

Now, let us return to the murky world of demands. Here are the ones by the University of Chicago:

I’m not going to go through each demand. The totality of them miss the point of the argument put forth by Marx and Engels about the proletariat and on Marx’s analysis of the ramifications of capital on the work-day. In the chapter I’m quoting from, “Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value,” Marx begins by assuming:

“(1) that commodities are sold at their value; (2) that the price of labour-power rises occasionally above its value, but never sinks below it.”

He adds:

“On this assumption we have seen that the relative magnitudes of surplus-value and of price of labour-power are determined by three circumstances; (1) the length of the working-day, or the extensive magnitude of labour; (2) the normal intensity of labour, its intensive magnitude, whereby a given quantity of labour is expended in a given time; (3) the productiveness of labour, whereby the same quantum of labour yields, in a given time, a greater or less quantum of product, dependent on the degree of development in the conditions of production.”

By vol. III, these assumptions are violated entirely. Money, which, serves “…as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time” now becomes a hindrance to how labor-time manifests itself as exchange-value, owing to absolute overproduction of capital (that is, again, to the degree which capital can function as capital).

Without going too far into this (as I’ve written about this before), the underlying crises that begins with the Great Depression results in a growing mass of “socially necessary labor-time” that no longer assumes the form of money/exchange-value. What no one wants to admit—be it bourgeois economists, Marxist “theorists,” or heterodoxic bullshit artists (like Hudson or Kelton)—is that this was unprecedented in its implications that other previous crises did not result in. In short, it was world-historical. Every single goddamn country had to abandon commodity-money. This itself was a social movement that obeyed the Law of Value.

The solution to this was fiat. But it did not resolve the problem: a growing mass of “socially necessary labor-time” would indeed be expended as such, but so did the growing mass of social product that contained no value whatsoever.

Capital was abolishing value. Not the Soviet Union. Not Communists. Capital.

The application of this to labor-power and wages becomes clearer when the assumption of Marx in vol. I is taken into consideration:

• It is not just that commodities themselves would sell below their value(s)—or go unsold entirely. It is that labor-power would not exchange at its value (and therefore the totality of it would have to be sold below said value). Some extra-economic entity would have to make it profitable to purchase this essential capitalist commodity.
• Marx alludes to this in the very chapter I reference:
  • “A shortening of the working-day under the conditions given above, leaves the value of labour-power, and with it, the necessary labour time, unaltered. It reduces the surplus-labour and surplus-value. Along with the absolute magnitude of the latter, its relative magnitude also falls, i.e., its magnitude relatively to the value of labour-power whose magnitude remains unaltered. Only by lowering the price of labour-power below its value could the capitalist save himself harmless.”
  • He then refers to what must be done to prevent the falling rate of profit in lieu of a reduction in labor hours: “Depression of wages below the value of labor-power.”
• The “relative magnitudes of surplus-value and of price of labour-power” begin to diverge, and this divergence expresses the fundamental antagonism of two processes that lead to the fall in the rate, and mass, of profit in the first place: the labor-time “squeezed” from the workers and the labor-time realized in commodities by capital in its surplus form.
• Taken together, this forms the basis for a crude understanding of the drive (by capital, the State) to expand unpaid labor-time (as necessary labor-time), thus, accelerating this divergence of the two masses of labor-times.

How best to summarize this section?

I think there is immense aversion to globalization and free-trade as a protectionist measure for the working-class in general. From the side of the Leftists and Communists, they believe globality only benefits the hegemon (which, to be sure, as the most advanced capital and owner of the world-reserve currency, it certainly does). When you factor in that hegemony is a relation between various capitals struggling to “overcome” this unresolvable imbalance between labor-times through the dollar—the same dollar that is increasing the unpaid labor-time of the masses, making us work increasingly longer (despite it producing absolutely no value whatsoever)—then you realize all other demands that do not begin and end with the United States killing off these capitals, imposing the dollar (or forcing other countries’ dollar reserves holdings to circulate), and a concerted effort to reduce hours of labor—starting with the public sector—then what you have is what we’ve been doing for almost 100 years: movements that have only lead to further dead-ends because their starting points for their movements could not reconcile themselves with the movement all the emergent fascist nations undertook with the management of the crisis, long before the string of failures by Leftist and Communists.

It is thus not our responsibility to manage the crisis on behalf of a class. It is our responsibility to end the crisis in such a way that does not ignore the historical reality that the fastest way to now do so is through the hegemonic role of the United States has acquired.

I’m not suggesting we be better as fascism than the fascists. I’m suggesting we be better at communization than capital.

Our demands can’t be divorced from what has already transpired under fascism, under globalization, nor the world-historical importance of the dollar. This means, above all, to stop moralizing about these conditions and exacerbating them until inflation is combated by its opposite. They cannot remain local and resistant to what capital naturally and materially accomplishes (such as creation of the very world-market we wish to turn into a global commune through a singular aperture).

Any demands that do not address the concurrent problem of the lingering depression the State can only “resolve” through waging warfare against its own citizens in the form of inflation are demands that are only in service of this warfare, since they do not extend to the masses inflicted and exploited by the State.

From this perspective, every single movement has failed to bring us closer to communism except fascism.

***

If you’ve read any of this, I suppose your first instinct would be to present me with this rebuttal:

However, I am not so sure that this claim is even true. In all my years of being involved in this bullshit, and watching replay after replay of the same exact strategies fall flat—and all that youthful exuberance end in doomerism and retreats until the next “event” arises—it is not upon me to believe you have anything else in the chamber.

This irrelevant blogger is calling your bluff.

I mostly agree with comrade Haz about the issue, for example:

We just disagree on how to go about advancing because, in very simple terms, I see the State as something that can be discarded in toto as a means to communism…and he does not. It’s not much more complicated than that, unfortunately.

Either way, we’re seeing an attempt to bridge superficial differences from non-Communists as well:

This summarizes the entire problem far better than the bullshit I just wrote.

But if you need a reminder of how to go beyond the divestment schemes, this is what I would suggest:

• Connect with the “America First” masses who despise the State—deep or otherwise. This allows for not only a far broader coalition but protects both from accusations of astroturfing and being “paid” agents.
• By doing so, you are forming alliances with people who can actually bring down the State via bringing the economy—domestic and global—to its knees. For all the shit Milei is getting in Argentina (“he’s ruining the economy!”), that is precisely what our aims should be. It’s not our economy! All the advances in technology and sum total of knowledge do not go away because “the economy” does. College students cannot pretend at this point in history, with the division of labor as fragmented and specialized as it is, that they somehow can see the entirety of the playing field. As comrade Haz pointed out, the people who “work for a living” also possess knowledge about the economy that Marxists are far removed from. Going even further than this, if you’ve no labor-power to sell, your demands can only go as far as your parents’ labor-power (i.e., those paying your tuition, room and board, etc.). Thus, the scope of your demands is limited to higher education.
• In terms of demands, the most pressing issues are cost of living and inflation. These can be addressed by reducing hours of labor at the level of government and taking this burden off the working-class of having to pay for something that is entirely unproductive to the material production of use-values and whose expansion—not “price gouging” nor “money-printing”—is the sole, leading cause of inflation. If Communists can explain the role of reduction of hours of labor in, say, the same parlance as Ramaswamy does when he proposed to reduce the Federal government by 75%, but also, how this is an “American First” initiative because it would ease tensions between the working-class (i.e., it would tackle unemployment from the demand-side of capital and not the policy-side of Washington), would also make politics itself less relevant (again, making us less reliant on the State to manage every single aspect of society, giving it less control and ability to engage in fascist economics through deprivation of its go-to source: fiscal policy), and it would indeed make us a technological power-house in the world-market with other advanced nations forced to adjust to whatever the prevailing standard of productivity and efficiency of the total capital employed was (“The rate of profit does not sink because the labourer is exploited any less, but because generally less labour is employed in proportion to the employed capital”…yada yada…). This would lead to the demise of many businesses. And yet, I think MAGA would be fine with this. If they truly believed in the free-market, then the rug pulls of federal dollars keeping public and “private” entities afloat would be welcomed. It would also lead to the demise of many client states that are dependent on our treasury markets and the viability of our debt. This includes Israel. It would not guarantee Palestine gets statehood. But it would deny Israel further means to expand their own (?).
• Shorter hours is something everyone would have to get accustomed to over time—especially as everyone realizes our consumption doesn’t go down just because our workweek does. After all, this certainly isn’t true for the bourgeoisie. Their consumption only goes up with the increase of unpaid labor-time that falls to them as a share of the total social product. Contrary to the Weberian sociologists, America does not have some puritanical work ethic. Our country is so fucking new that we didn’t gain emancipation from England until 1783—right in the thick of the First Industrial Revolution. Our Founders might have had a work ethic. But they also had a fuckton of free-time. And for some odd reason, only the Republican Party has ever truly embraced shorter work hours (until it was abandoned by Nixon’s administration, obviously). That could be a point of focus: helping the Right reconnect to a lost era where free-time was seen by conservatives as a positive—welcomed, even.
• Focusing on key areas of industry—transportation, energy, manufacturing, etc.—are crucial to unifying opposition against the State. This is not a new tactic. The coal mining unions were constantly threatening Truman’s administration to shut down the entire economy by reducing their own hours of labor. While we just know this as a strike, and while unions are not necessarily in favor with conservatives, many conservatives are in unions (though, this skews younger). As was already pointed out, there has been some murmurs about a protest against inflation. This is not a protest against any corporate entity. It is a direct protest against the State. Students and Communists should look into joining them, working with them, and seeing how far these folks are willing to go to address inflation.
• Lastly—but not exhaustively—Leftists must accept that Leftism has been an abject failure. It has succeeded only in ensuring the continual survival of capital by posing no threat to the State’s overall growth, deficits, or its incremental appetite in consuming larger portions of the economy (real material wealth). Until Leftists fully grasp just how aligned, in the very last instance, they are with the State’s objectives, then their protests will indeed peter out, fade into obscurity, and all attempts to expand upon them will also stall because Leftism is “inclusive” only to a point. MAGA, for example, is persona non grata because, somehow, they are more fascist than the police beating their fucking heads in right now. MAGA is more fascist than Pelosi and Schumer who have ensured they spend their lives paying for the public sectors’ lunches until they die. Until they realize that not only are their fellow Americans not the enemy, but that communism can only emanate from America, they will remain a tribute band.

***

Postscript:

Some stray observations I just remembered. Maybe they can serve as a rule of thumb.

Taking on the State shouldn’t look like an even weirder Woodstock. The encampments are a horrid idea. You can’t occupy capital. Resistance is actually futile when it comes to its logic.

Focusing on other countries besides the United States is also a turnoff to the people you would benefit from trying to merge with. American Firsters don’t want to hear how great China or Russia is. They don’t want to hear something as ridiculous as “the freedom of America is dependent on the freedom of Palestine.” To a conservative, this sounds ridiculous. To a centrist, it just sounds antisemitic, and plays right into the trope that Jews control the U.S. and not the other way around.

In relationship to this notion, Communists better get used to the idea that there is no such power greater than the dollar and residing in the United States. For all intents and purposes, every other country doesn’t matter. Their states don’t matter. There is no international movement because the United States has subsumed internationality altogether. Hegemony doesn’t engage in parity nor is there any other way to measure other nations with the hegemon. You might as well just view the United States as the entire fucking world, since it expresses global capital, attracts it in record volumes, and is perfectly aligned with what we know about concentration and centralization of capital. If not, Marx and Engels got it wrong.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a better moment to take down the State than now. For decades, the discourse was about “the role the government should play in people’s lives.” That has changed. Reagan looks like a goddamn New Dealer compared to MAGA. But MAGA still has its flaws. It is still attempting to make the government function by attempting to fill it with MAGA candidates. That’s just too long of a process only to find out that it wouldn’t matter either way—they will betray them. Just like Biden betrayed all you youngsters who voted for him out of fear of Trump, now you know the State is entirely indifferent to you. Almost robotically, it carries on its objectives, no matter what polling says, no matter the needs of humans, and regardless of whether their actions are actively injuring those they’re “representing.” There will be future opportunities but there will also be those on both sides that will attempt to stop a broad coalition because of ideological differences (even though we all suffer under a common menace).

Good luck to you and I hope you guys don’t wind up like the burnouts from OWS. I have not participated in anything since then. I am reluctant to say that I have hope in Gen Z, because there does seem to be a lineage of failure that is passed on through dusty tomes and oral tradition that make it all seem rather noble to get absolutely demolished. Don’t let it happen to your generation. Don’t let losers infect your movements.

Postscript 2:

Just remember: it’s not illegal to not go to work. It may be illegal to prevent others (as in the case of clogging up highways). But if you want a movement that doesn’t get you arrested, demonized, and appeals to the anti-State dissidents, your best bet is to organize a perms-strike with the explicit aim of downsizing government. No one can force you to go to work, folks. That’s slavery.